By Mike Hastie
Since the end of World War II, the U.S.
Government has bombed 28 countries.
These countries have become an ammo belt
going into an M-60 machine gun.
Short bursts over time, so it doesn’t
look like the U.S. is trying to take over
the world over night.
You don’t want to pull the trigger non-stop,
because that would give away America’s cover.
So, here we go again, with another country that
America has deemed as a threat to our national
security, our corporate interests, and the American
way of life.
If we don’t stop ISIS in Syria, they will land on the
Oregon Coast.

When the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001,
approximately 3,000 citizens died.
Americans were absolutely shocked, and the following
month the U.S. Military started bombing Afghanistan.
In March 2003, the U.S. Military started bombing Iraq
again.
Remember what Madeleine Albright said to Leslie Stahl
about civilian deaths of Iraqi children on 60 Minutes on
May 12, 1996?

Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq ~ John Pilger

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Government conservatively
murdered 3,000 innocent Vietnamese civilians every week.
That’s 12,000 every month.
That’s 144,000 every year.
That’s 1,152,000 civilians for the war,
if we say the war lasted eight years.
That is a very conservative estimate.
Many people would triple that number.
Many people would go beyond that.

When I left Vietnam in 1971,
American soldiers in my unit
were shooting heroin, they
were shooting fellow soldiers
with their M-16s, and they were
shooting themselves.
Unzip a body bag and you see
the madness.

Mike Hastie
Army Medic Vietnam
September 13, 2014

Phillip Jones Griffiths, a famous combat photographer
who covered the Vietnam War, had this to say about
the discrepancy of Vietnamese killed versus Americans:
” The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
is 150 yards long. It has the names of 58,000 American
soldiers who were killed. If the same memorial was built
for the Vietnamese that were killed, it would be 9 miles
long.”

Photograph of a little girl at the ” Wall ” in Washington, D.C.
Taken in September 1986 by Mike Hastie. Poetry by a close
friend from Seattle, Washington.