CBS News Viet Nam Vets Reunited

Many of us lived through those horrible years of the Viet Nam War. In many ways, this country is still healing the decade of the sixties and the early 1970's. Perhaps this video clip from CBS News, will provide that hopeful feeling that perhaps, at last we can put the ghosts of Viet Nam to rest. Healing can happen when we least expect it.

In the end, we are all the same, want the same things and really, are the same people. When we can see each other this way, perhaps there will no longer be a need for war. Enjoy!

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5099152n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

The Karmic Savings and Loan, Chapter 283: Why There is War Part 5 Learning about the Team

So people join the military for a thousand different reasons, but in the end, what they really learn, is that there are all kinds of people out there, from all kinds of places and that if you don’t help each other, if you don’t pull together as a team, then everyone suffers. There are karmic lessons everywhere and you really see it in the military.

The military builds you up, fills you with a sense of pride and teaches you discipline. They teach you to be responsible for yourself and your fellow man. They teach you to care about your body, your finances and your family. They show you how to build community and they absolutely impress upon you the value of human life.

The value of human life is worth fighting for and this is why they go to so much trouble to make sure that they actually train you in your job, so that you do not hazard anyone else’s life.

It used to be that roughly 80% of all commercial pilots came from the US military. No one trains pilots like the military does. It teaches those pilots to be safe, how to work as a team and the absolute requirement to follow procedure to keep yourself, your ground crew and your passengers safe at all times. Today only 20% of pilots come from military sources. Who is doing this training? The military teaches you that what you do matters to someone and that the better you do your job, the better everyone will be.

The military is also a microcosm of society as a whole. As the ideas of society change, you readily see this reflected in military society as well. For example, the military had to integrate because it needed people and that happened in World War II. Today, the military is one of this country’s best equal opportunity employers. The military teaches every young man or woman that it doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is, your sex or your nationality, that your job is to incorporate that person as part of your team and to help them at all times.

The US Navy was the last bastion of maleness when they began to incorporate women in World War II. By the Viet Nam War, they were bringing in more and more women. Finally, women could see that it was possible to have the same pay, benefits and career options as men. It was utterly life changing for many women. The service academies finally were forced to open their doors and to offer the same free educations to women that men were offered and women are now on combatants, and have command at sea, all in the space of 20 years. This need to incorporate women has enabled the ‘All Volunteer Force’ to be successful because there aren’t enough men who ever join the military in these times.

The experience in managing and leading people that the military offers is tremendous. It is tremendous because not all experiences are great. There are some lousy leaders out there and they offer the opportunity to see clearly what leadership isn’t. Then you have people who really show you what good leadership and people management skills are. You have to see both.

The military rewards people in a thousand ways from letters of commendation to medals for outstanding performance and service. The military works hard to appreciate its people because you need your senior people. You cannot hire a lieutenant, a general, a Chief Petty Officer or a Master Sergeant. You have to grow those people from the day they enter. Once they leave, you have to start all over because you cannot ever go out on the civilian economy and hire that level of experience. You have to grow it from within. And they let you leave when your contract is up because you have free will.

The military is terribly flawed because human beings are terribly flawed. However, this organization is ever changing. It is never the same two days in a row and its views are ever broadening. Understanding that the military while it appears to be about war, is only about people who care about other people and want a chance to prove themselves. Once they do that, often they find that they don’t need a 20 year career, they only need a few of these experiences and then they move on to other civilian jobs, taking their precious experiences with them.

Can you be a spiritual person and be a military person all at the same time? Of course you can because if your goal is to help people on a day-to-day basis, to see karma in action continually, there are few schoolhouses that provide this like the military does. This is why they call it the service. Consider that in times of domestic crisis, it is the military that organizes resources and helps to create some order out of the chaos of a hurricane or earthquake. So, whether or not you love or hate the concept of a military, the internal workings of it are only about the service of people helping people and often that is a very positive place to be.

So, to return to the beginning, the reason there is war of some type is so that people can learn and grow. Perhaps when the people on this planet no longer need the experience of war and what it offers, there will be an end to all conflict at every level of humanity.

KS&L 282: Why There is War Part 4: Why do people join the Military?

Why do people join the military? Men and women join the military b ecause of the experience it offers. Even on questionnaires, there is the category for ‘Military Experience,’ as if that type of experience is an exceptionally unique category unto itself.

People join the military for the profound and unique experiences this type of life offers. On a day-to-day basis, military life is seldom about war and always about people. Yes, there are times when certain sectors of the military do prepare for and then actually ‘go to war’, but the vast majority of time is spent in training and preparing to maintain peace. However, if you were to ask someone who is in the military why they joined, perhaps these are some of the answers you would hear and it is important to hear these because perceptions of the military and military people are not always positive among the spiritual community:
I joined for the discipline and experience of being in the military and to use my education.
I wanted to assume more responsibility early and the military gives you responsibility much earlier than th e civilian sector.
I wanted an adventure and I felt that the mil itary would provide that.
I wanted to travel and I knew that the Navy would really enable me to see the world.
I wanted an education and I knew that the Air Force had a program where I could get my degree and at the same time learn a usable skill.
I wanted to see what I was really made of, so I picked the Marines. I have always respected what the Marines stand for and I want to be one of them.
I wanted to get out of the horrible family life I grew up in and have a different experience of order, discipline and the safety of knowing where my next meal would come from. The Army offered me that.
I love my home town, it is such a beautiful fishing village and I wanted to serve my friends and neighbors by being in the Coast Guard and protecting and helping them in times of crisis.
I want to be a doctor, or dentist and the Navy put me through school if I paid them back by giving them eight years of service.
I went to Law School and then couldn’t find a job. The Navy/Army/Air Force hired me immediately. The experience here has been priceless and they paid me for it!
I live in ‘Tornado Alley’ and I joined the Army Air National Guard because one, I love to fly airplanes and they trained me, but two, I really wanted to be able to help my friends and neighbors in times of tornado crisis.
I joined the Navy to find a husband, to be with people who care about and want to serve this country, to have adventures all around the world and to have a retirement.
I joined the Navy Seals because I thought it would be neat t o learn how to do all of those things.
I joined the SeaBees, or Army Corps of Engineers to understand the engineering aspects of moving troops, of building bridges anywhere in the world. The experience here is unlike anywhere else.
I joined to fly fighter jets, to get to play with the coolest toys man has ever made. Can you imagine the rush of aircraft carrier landings and takeoffs? Imagine flying a vertical lift Harrier jet!
The judge told me “either join the Army, son or go to jail.” I joined the Army and it was the best thing that ever happened to me!
I joined EOD [explosive ordinance demolition] so that I could help clear mine fields so small children would not be blown up.
I joined to prove to myself that I have what it takes to be a disciplined person. I joined to learn about myself and in the process I learned about other people.
There are a thousand more reasons, but for this study, you get the idea. In the last of the series, part 5, understanding the military a bit more.

KS&L 281: Why There is War Part 3 Are We Creating War?

We tell people to make love, not war, but we see people who supposedly love each other kill each other in their own homes. We make war on cancer, poverty, drugs, tobacco, and anything else we deem evil. We are, as a civilization, exceptionally hypocritical and profoundly violent.

We fight with our neighbors, our friends, co-workers and families. We are the microcosm of war on a day-to-day basis. Is it any wonder that governments struggle with the macrocosm of crazy leaders fighting other crazy leaders? We even fight each other politically, but blessedly, in the United States, without overt violence.

However, we do engage in ‘dirty tricks’ in national and business politics. The first casualty is always the truth. First we distort the truth, so that it looks like something else and then we pretty much finish it off, by making something that starts out as good into something horrible. We have so distorted the truth that we have no idea what to believe anymore.
Television networks, which condemn cries for vengeance in other countries, think nothing of airing shows, which promote vengeance among teenagers, business people and neighbors. It sells product because people love conflict. Are we teaching our young people that vengeance is an acceptable behavior?

We cry and demonstrate against military deaths, as if death were somehow surprising. People live and they eventually have to die of something. People look at numbers and are horrified, without realizing that in an average year, the entire United States military, all services combined, has roughly 2200 people die per year, when we are not at war. Contrast that statistic with the fact that over 6,000 young people die each year when they go to college: six thousand. In the last six years, 36,000 kids died in college where they were supposed to be safe. No one is upset about that statistic. Contrast this with the six years of the Iraq war, where four thousand people have died in that conflict. Horrible, heart wrenching as it is, in six years, that number is still dramatically lower than one year of deaths in college. It is chilling to consider that a young person statistically is safer in the military than in college, even when we are at war.

We loose 100,000 people to hospital mistakes every single year: one hundred thousand people. Where is the press coverage of this? And the list goes on. People live and they die all kinds of deaths. There has to be a way for people to leave when the experience they came for in this time and space is over. War, emotional, personal, national, neighborly war, is frequently a method of exit.

Another thought to ponder is that conflict offers each of us an opportunity to ‘stand up for something’ and to discover whether we ‘have what it takes’ to be a courageous person. Courage is action in the face of fear, difficulty and hardship. Well, to be able to show courage, you have to have fear, difficulty and hardship: back to polarity we go.

So, these are some of the reasons there is war, and it serves to remind us that we need to be very, very careful when we accuse someone else of ‘warmongering’ or being violent. Unless this planet undergoes some unimaginable spiritual transformation that takes the concepts of violence out of our emotional structure, there will continue to be ‘low intensity conflicts,’ as a minimum and major wars as a terrible potential.

We may also want to be circumspect in using negative words about the military. Most military people really want to make peace and actually want to avoid war at all costs.
For example, if you ask a US Navy Commander, how he feels about his job of being captain of a nuclear submarine carrying 24 nuclear missiles, that could pretty effectively destroy the entire world, he will immediately tell you that he feels he was successful at his job if he never fires a weapon in anger. That would be the definition of peace keeping. Yet, if you contrast that with a home-owner how owns a gun, he or she expects to use it to stop an intruder.

Military people intimately understand how terribly costly war is. Ultimately their goal is to be peacekeepers, not war makers. Actually, the military is really the only agency working to ensure that wars do not happen. Civilians in government make the decisions to ‘go to war’. Congress has to approve this, not the military. At the end of the day, how ironic is that?
Part 4 will discuss why people join the military. Sometimes it is good to understand this.

KS&L 280: Why There is War Part 2 Is War all around us?

There will always be some sort of conflict so that the polarity of the light and the dark can be felt. You have to have something that resists you, to enable you to feel your own strength. How do we know that this is true?

We know this is true, that people actually love to fight something because the genre of good and evil has been around a long time. The stories started out as legends of ‘great warriors’ fighting a great evil. There were wizards, white and black magicians and damsels terribly distressed by fearsome dragons. These became fairy tales and we read these to our children before they go to bed. Don’t forget pirates, those black-hearted cutthroat sailors of the bounding main who horrify us with their daring evil deeds. We make best selling movies about them and pay money to spend three hours watching people fight each other.

Little boys and girls read comic books where super heroes [Wonder Woman and Superman] fly through the air and save the world from domination by an evil villain. There were cowboys and Indians and of course the Indians were the bad guys, really scary ones too. Today’s violent video games are a billion dollar industry made financially successful by the demand for ever more, violent and complicated video games. These games are on millions of home computers. People come home at the end of the day and play these [often toxic] games for hours to ‘relax.’
Think about that: they relax by being violent. That is a chilling thought. It’s harmless they will tell you, but the game manufacturers need bad guys, so at times they are either Asian, Arab or Alien, but bad guys all the same. So, they go back to the office and work with all nationalities [hey, maybe some are alien as well . . .] and is it possible that a part of them is still fighting someone?

We go to the movies and watch spy movies, car chase, bad guy movies, ‘boy movies’ we call them where there is a protagonist to fight. Someone is a terminator and someone is an exterminator of evil. We pay billions of dollars a year to watch one person kill another on TV and at the movies. And we wonder why there is war?

Religions launch ‘holy wars’ against other religions and other peoples and they have done this through time. The Crusades, the Inquisition and Jihad are just a few of the long line of religious conflicts. Obviously each religion is on the correct side of God, otherwise, why would so many people be dying to convert other people into the conqueror’s way of thinking? Some religions condemn other religions as not pious enough and do spiritually violent things, like excommunication, banning someone or black balling them. You’re not one of us, so you must be a bad guy. You can be a very good guy or gal and still be condemned.

Very, very spiritual people watch these movies, play these games and read these stories of good and evil. They read them to their children as bedtime stories. Very spiritual people take their children to churches which teach separatism, fear of God and intolerance. We teach our young ones to fight from an early age. This isn’t good or bad. It is how life works.

We go to sports games and watch people literally fight it out on the field of play, whether it is wrestling, boxing [feels like old gladiators to some of us], football and soccer. We can feel the violence from these games. Isn’t this a type of sports war?

When the Cold War ended in 1989 and the Berlin Wall fell, authors, screenwriters, moviemakers, and military people no longer had the enemy they loved to hate. Who can we use now they wondered? The ‘peace dividend’ we thought we had was surely short lived. . . . . . to be continued in Part 3

KS&L 279: Why There is War Part 1

There are almost seven billion people on this planet. People have been living and dying on this planet in ever increasing numbers for millennia. We all know that we have lived before, that we just keep reincarnating here, over and over to acquire the lessons we are supposed to learn. Untold millions of us have died through war, disease, privation and conflict aftermath.
We know how to make peace. We psychologically, economically and sociologically understand what creates the seeds of war. We know. We know as a human species how to regulate situations so that war does not have to occur.

Yet, we still have war.

We, as a planet have lived through two supposedly World Wars, the War to end all War--- and yet we still have people going off to fight other people. People who, in any other scenario, could be hosting those same folks, as tourists are now fighting them. The troops get to see country, but not the way they would like.

Now, the wars are fewer, smaller, ‘Low Intensity Conflicts’ as the Pentagon refers to them, but they are wars nonetheless. Actually, there are fewer wars, with fewer deaths than at any other time on this planet, so perhaps we, as a species are getting a little better.

Why is there war? Perhaps a better question, is why is anyone still killing anyone else anywhere? People don’t just die in war, they die in far greater numbers, typically, statistically, and at the hands of people they know.

There is still war, because there are still people out there who want to oppress other people. While that certainly isn’t new, because we see it in families all the time, it is the primary reason that governments use to ‘liberate’ those oppressed people or fight an over zealous aggressor. Is this good or bad? It is neither. It just is. Actually, it goes back to basic human nature, and the polarity of life and death and the requirement for all human beings to have a life of experiences. In virtually every generation, there is some opportunity to go off to war, to have that experience. Well, if you need a war experience, then someone has to be a bad guy or the good guy and offer the oppressors, aggressor, and transgressor scenario. This is the concept of polarity. For polarity to be operative, you have to have a contrast, a polarity of good versus evil.

When you go to war, you have to feel good about the possibility that you could die there and it needs to be for a worthy cause: everyone wants to be the good guys.

Do human beings need the experiences that war offers? That is a very powerful question. Why do people join the military? Is it because every military volunteer in every country of the world wants to kill someone? Of course not, Military people want to keep the peace. War, international conflict is the macrocosm. Look at the microcosm: why are there police officers? Why is there a National Guard, a Drug Enforcement Agency, a Federal Bureau of Investigation or a Scotland Yard? Do all of these people want to kill someone else? Is that the experience they are seeking?

Of course not, people who join all of these local and national agencies, do so to keep the peace, to provide for the common welfare and safety of their fellow citizens. That is why they join. They want to serve their fellow men and women. These are the people who want to keep murderers, rapists, swindlers, robbers, home burglars and nut cases, off the streets so that not just their neighbors are safe, but that their own families are safe. War exists, even in the smallest places.

Consider in the tiniest, most basic microcosm this scenario: that for a police officer, the ‘war’ between a man and a woman, husband and a wife in a spousal abuse case is considered one of the most dangerous, if not ‘the’ most dangerous call to which any officer can respond. Normally sane parents will brutally murder each other in front of their children. Some of them will even murder their own children to punish their spouse. If you have the ability to stop this scenario and protect those children from having that happen in their lives, wouldn’t you do that?

So the premise is, if you can stop a crime, is it worth the effort? How big a crime is the effort to stop it worth? What determines when it is okay to ‘get involved’ and stop one person from killing another? The larger question is: Is war really all around us and we cannot see it? Part two will address this question in more detail.