Call Me ‘Veruca Mercury’

When you’re a young adoptee, you take what you’re given.

When you get older, you learn to take what you deserve.

Transracial Adoption: ColorsNW February Story

Wise quote from Sarah Kim Randolph: I’ll have adoptive parents with young kids now say to me, “Things are really different than when you were growing up.” And, that’s true that things are very different. But, at the same time, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to have their own struggles.

The Rottweiler

We knew a couple who had bought a cute Rottweiler puppy, a couple months old, and named it Justice. We watched it gleefully run around the couple’s small backyard, going up to everyone and rolling over to be petted. It was the cutest thing, just a big ball of energy, all black and tan, looking like a purebred through and through.

One time it was running at full speed toward the patio, it tripped and smacked its little head into the concrete. It was dazed, but it wasn’t hurt. It picked up its head, sat up quickly and looked around with its beautiful black eyes, and then went over to its master for a reassuring belly rub.

A year after that get-together we hear that the couple didn’t have the Rottweiler anymore. It seems like ever since they had their first child, they couldn’t keep up with both a new baby and a young Rottweiler. So, they got rid of it. Either gave it up to the pound or, one can only hope, to another family.

The husband offered up this excuse: “What could we do? We didn’t know Rottweilers could get that big.”

Sheesh, freakin’ clueless. I mean, it was a damn Rottweiler. What did he think was gonna happen?

Nguoi Viet2 launches series on adoption from Vietnam

Recently, I replied to a post on an adult adoptee listserve concerning a series about adoption from Vietnam on the Nguoi Viet2 website.

A New Family

Here’s my reply:

So, I understand this to be a four-part series about adoption from Vietnam in this online journal. Have any adult Vietnamese adoptees been contacted by Nguoi Viet2 in order to give their stories, opinions or perspectives on adoption from Vietnam?

The first installment makes me uneasy for the simple fact that, yet again, the children are commodified and adoption is seen as an industry.

The article goes out of its way to highlight how fast and easy it is to get an “orphan” from Vietnam in comparison to other “third world” countries. I have seen this disturbing theme cropping up time and again in articles about international adoption. In my mind, it simplifies and degrades the adoptees to look like a bunch of beanie babies in a bargain bin at the local K-Mart.

To illustrate my point, here’s the quote from Hedy Lee of Dillon International: “Adoptions from Vietnam are gaining popularity again because they are faster and easier….Vietnamese adoptions offer boys and girls in about half the time.” Sounds like a well-oiled machine, huh?

Also, the article’s blithe treatment of the history of adoption from Vietnam and the recent charges of child trafficking in Vietnam is regrettable.

I do hope that Nguoi Viet2 digs deeper into the historical, political and social issues involving the continued practice of adopting children from Vietnam. Because, if Vietnam’s economy and society are progressing at such a rapid, Westernized pace, as many business journals and mass media will have us believe, then how come a lot of its children are being relinquished into foreign arms? When I consider this paradox, and ask more and more questions, the answers are not so black-and-white.

But, this is not all I wanted to say.

Below are additional things I wrote that I decided to excise and put here for your enjoyment:

“There are so many children already in the world, we thought we might as well give them a home,” Karen Calvert said.

Hm, that’s what a lot of people say about cats and dogs, too.

Robert and Dorothea Kalatschan of California also selected Vietnam to expand their household. However, their hearts specifically looked at the country because they were searching for a sibling for their Vietnamese American son, Thomas.

Again, I think of people I know who own pets and say almost the same exact thing when considering a playmate for their lonely doggy or kitty.

And, the coup de grace!

Robert Kalatschan: “I looked into the face of my own daughter and realized how lucky she was that we were rescuing her from a life of poverty and enormous need, unlike most of her orphan mates who may never have their basic medical, nutritional, educational and individualized attention needs met.”

Once again, the White-Man’s-Burden attitude shines through in this quote. Institutionalized ignorance knows no bounds.

Your Number is 73-05-12

I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside.

I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed

and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself.

I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside

and at this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Now, why would I know that?

How can I know that and not know who I am?

Study Tool #2

An excerpt from The Sacred Willow by Duong Van Mai Elliott: Of all the American bombs, Trung thought the huge Daisy Cutters, which contained 15,000 pounds of explosives each, were the most dangerous. Not only could they blow people to bits, but the shock waves they created could asphyxiate, or simply crush the life out of you. When Trung helped pick up victims for burial, he found the corpses completely limp, as though all their bones had been shattered. “The bodies felt like they were made of rubber,” he recalled in 1995.

Operation Linebacker II: 35th Anniversary

We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.


Good tidings we bring to you and your kin;
Good tidings for Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Oh, bring us a figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us a figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us a figgy pudding and a cup of good cheer

We won’t go until we get some;
We won’t go until we get some;
We won’t go until we get some, so bring some out here

We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas;
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Postscript:

From December 18-30, 1972, approximately 36,000 tons of bombs rained down in and around Hanoi and Haiphong. Nixon placed the order to bomb ostensibly to force the North Vietnam contingent back to the negotiating table in Paris to work out the details for an end to the war. But, this popularized rationale for the bombing is a tricky distortion of the truth. Once again, Henry Kissinger was working his [black] magic and speaking out both sides of his mouth, trying to get both the South and the North to agree to conditions that they hardly agreed to. Possibly knowing the inevitability of a takeover by the North, South Vietnam’s president, Thieu, scuttled the negotiations by heavily editing the agreement and demanding that the Demilitarized Zone become a permanent international border. To add insult to injury, Thieu broadcast part of the agreement to make it appear that the country was being railroaded by both the U.S. and North Vietnam. In turn, when the North Vietnamese heard that the South was balking and not going to sign the agreement, it launched its own tirade to the public and refused to set a date for its members to come back to the negotiating table. To show who’s boss, and impress President Thieu, the “Christmas bombings” commenced until the North Vietnam leadership agreed to come back to the negotiating table and sign the agreement.

Both the U.S. and North Vietnam declared “victory” after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. The U.S. claimed that the bombing met its objective of forcing the North Vietnamese to quit “stalling” and sign the agreement; the North Vietnamese claimed that it heroically withstood the might of the U.S. military and finally got the U.S. to leave, so it could finally reunite the country.

Declaring “victory” never sounded so hollow.

The Prophet Motive

No one can really foretell the future, no matter how much you pay him. But, a person can make an educated guess about what the future may hold based on accurate information, historical precedent and a clear understanding of the way the world works. The resulting predictions may prove strikingly accurate to those future generations looking back in hindsight. A feeling of redemption naturally occurs when a person’s evaluations, judgments and predictions are found to be entirely correct. It is with regret, though, when we read in the pages of history that this person’s alarming foresight was ignored in favor of bullheaded groupthink that made a bad situation worse by refusing to acknowledge fatal flaws in its own motives and logic.

I first came across George W. Ball’s (1909-1994) name while reading The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War, the Complete and Unabridged Series as Published by The New York Times. In 1961, he was made assistant secretary of state for economic affairs in the Kennedy administration and then appointed Undersecretary of State when Lyndon B. Johnson became president.

…Mr. Ball makes his first appearance in the Pentagon history as the Administration dissenter on Vietnam.

What? I said to myself. I thought everyone in the U.S. government supported the decisions and actions taken by the president. I investigated further. George Ball wasn’t only a dissenter on U.S. foreign policy toward Vietnam, he also had history on his side. In an interview done in 1971 for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Oral History Collection he equated the French experience in Vietnam with the (at that time) current U.S. efforts to pacify the country and turn the tide against the communists:

As a practicing lawyer, I had had among my clients various agencies of the French government when they went through the Indo-Chinese experience. I had heard everything before. I used to tell this to the President when McNamara was present, and it would just drive him up the wall. I’d say, “Look, Mr. President, everything that the Secretary of Defense has been telling you this morning, I used to listen to with my French friends. They talked about the body count. They talked the relative kill ratios. They talked about the fact that there was always a new plan, and with a little increment of effort, the Navarre Plan, the DeLattre de Tassigny Plan, and so on, that was going to win the day. And they believed it just as much as we’re believing it sitting around the table this morning. I can tell you, however, that in the end, there was a great disillusion. And there will be one.”

Perhaps it’s a futile exercise, but I can’t help but feel that if President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara had seriously considered and thought through George Ball’s warnings against war escalation and arguments for peace negotiations with North Vietnam, a less costly and senseless tragedy could have been averted. Ball also held many reservations about the U.S. government’s support for Ngo Dinh Diem and his regime because of the fact that it enjoyed scant public support in South Vietnam and was brazen with its contempt for the very people it desired to govern.

In Daniel Ellsberg’s book, Secret: A Memoir of Vietnam and The Pentagon Papers, he recounts a memo issued by Ball that countered the hawkish mindset that predominated policy discussions and decision-making in the Johnson administration and among the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The memo is a searing indictment of the administration’s White-Man’s-Burden arrogance and a dire warning of the horrors in store for the U.S. if the president chose to inject ground troops into the maelstrom of a civil war:

The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the Viet Cong. No one can assure you that we can beat the Viet Cong or even force them to conference table on our terms no matter how many hundred thousand white foreign (U.S.) troops we deploy.

No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win a guerilla war – which is at the same time a civil war between Asians – in jungle terrain in the midst of a population that refuses cooperation to the white forces (and the SVN) and thus provides a great intelligence advantage to the other side. …

[Such a war will be] almost certainly a protracted war involving an open-ended commitment of U.S. forces, mounting U.S. casualties, no assurance of a satisfactory solution, and a serious danger of escalation at the end of the road. …

The decision you face now, therefore, is crucial. Once large numbers of U.S. troops are committed to direct combat they will begin to take heavy casualties, no assurance of a satisfactory solution, and a serious danger of escalation at the end of the road. …

Once we suffer large casualties we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot – without national humiliation – stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives – even after we had paid terrible costs.

In the interview for the Oral History Collection, Ball mentions giving Bill Moyers, then special assistant to and press secretary for President Johnson, a copy of one of his marathon memoranda, which not only made Moyers reconsider his own assumptions about the role of the U.S. in the war, but also created a channel into the inner sanctum of the major decision-makers within the Johnson administration. The president read the memo and was extremely impressed with Ball’s non-conformist viewpoint. He invited Ball to attend Vietnam policy meetings in order to create the appearance of objectivity. Anyway you look at it, Ball was one lonely voice among the many strident calls for expansive bombing of North Vietnam and the installment of American ground forces to shore up the South Vietnamese government. Although Johnson confided in Ball that he wanted him present at the meetings in order to play his “devil’s advocate”, it would seem that it was all for naught when decisions were made with no consideration of Ball’s objections and informed arguments as to why the present course of increased bombing and deployment of troops to the region would create a situation from which America would find it more and more difficult to extricate itself without incurring more irretrievable losses on both sides.

And the President read it not once, but twice, so he told me, and he was very impressed, or shaken, by it. So he insisted that we sit down and start arguments. Well, that was the beginning of process I then employed, because then I wrote the President every few weeks setting forth, in effect, what I thought were quite serious reasoned memoranda which were difficult to do because, as I say, I had to do them all myself. But each one was addressed at some particular proposal for escalation, challenging the proposal and arguing that we were losing the war, that it was an unwinnable war, that the whole objective was an unattainable objective, that we could commit any number of – 500,000 I think was the figure I used at one point in a memorandum – and that we still would not win. All the reasons I’ve set forth. And each time I ended up, “Therefore we should cut our losses,” …

A true prophet is someone who has the uncanny ability to foresee the final results of the unfortunate decisions and actions pursued by people in the present who continue to remain ignorant of the past, but is generally rendered helpless due to those people’s incredulity. Such an individual has a well-developed conscience that commands him to caution his peers of the unintended consequences of making poor decisions. George Ball identified the short-sightedness inherent in U.S. foreign policy regarding Vietnam and foresaw the impending collision between fantasy and reality that blew up in so many people’s faces.

Let’s leave Mr. Ball with the last word:

Nobody was prepared to concede that any particular step would require any further step. This was kind of a standard assumption which I kept repeating again and again was a false assumption. The argument that I kept making through these memoranda… I remember quoting Emerson about “things are in the saddle” and “you’re losing control. You go forward with this further step, and you will substantially have lost control. Finally, you’re going to find the war is running you, and we’re not running the war.”

The Portrait

Uncle suffered for our sins.

Absorbed every grenade on his thinning scalp,
and still had time to do his daily exercises
out in the courtyard, hunger at his feet.

The cross he bore was unimaginably heavy:

Two bazookas tied together with a burning American flag.
Hill upon hill, the people cried and implored him
to heave the weight upon them; let them carry this burdensome load:

“Rest, Uncle, rest!!” they pleaded.
“No,” he wheezed. “Remember
that when you name this trail we have all become accustomed to,
up and down which countless rations have been carried,
under which we store all of our dread and fearfulness,
call it any other name but mine. I am not a thing and I am no savior.
I am part and parcel of a people on the verge of making history.”

Ghost World by Aimee Mann

Mann’s song Ghost World off her album Bachelor #2 is a favorite of mine to listen to when I’m writing. It brings me back to those days right after school closed for summer break.

If you have the time, take a listen:

Finals blew, I barely knew
my graduation speech
and with college out of reach
if I can’t find a job I’m left with Dad and Myrtle
Beach

So, I’m bailing this town–or
tearing it down–or
probably more like hanging around

Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool
they hang out by the pool
so I just read a lot and ride my bike around the
school