To: 
From: "Vern Humphrey" 
Reply-To: r_catholic-l{at}yahoogroups.com

To: goffscalif{at}aol.com [mailto:goffscalif{at}aol.com]
>
> > We live in a society that never sees death -- except a
> sanitized version.
> > Most cannot imagine how brutal and bloody the world can be.
>
> And in consequence people panic at what are in fact extremely light
> casualties, as we saw during the Gulf War and during the recent
> campaigns in
> Afghanistan and Iraq.  It wasn't the NVA and the VC who caused us
> to lose the Vietnam
> War (we defeated them in every major engagement) - it was people
> who couldn't
> handle seeing casualties (with the aid, of course, of Communist
> agents and their
> "useful idiots").  During the Civil War people understood that
> casualties are
> part of war, and so for four years they continued in wholesale numbers.
> During 'Nam people didn't, and refused to understand it, and
> would scream and
> holler if one GI got killed.

And all that screaming and hollering got more people killed.

When I first arrived in Northern I Corps, the NVA would move mortars and
artillery into the Demilitarized Zone and shell us.  So we would go up
there and clean them out.

Protests resulted, and soon we were prohibited from going in there.  The
enemy was given sanctuary, and could shell us from that sanctuary.  When I
turned over my company, my successor, Bob Gallagher was killed within a day
by a mortar shell fired from inside the Demilitarized zone.
>
> Which is not, of course, to say that it's okay to spend men like they're
> nothing - quite the contrary is true.  But until the world is
> perfect, it will be
> necessary to do painful things to preserve that which we hold
> dear, and those
> who can't grasp that fact are one of the major obstacles to that
> preservation.
>
> More generally on the subject of death, I have noted - and been
> appalled by -
> the societal unwillingness to even speak of it frankly.  No one
> dies anymore
> - they "pass away," or "pass on," or we "lose
them."  One lady I
> knew a few
> years back would say that someone "expired."  We need to face the
> simple reality
> that whether someone dies in combat, or in a wreck, or because of
> cancer, or
> as a result of simple old age, that person has *died*.
>
It is the sight, sound, and smell of death that is so rare in our society
-- so we must cloak the reality with euphemisms.
>


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