Letters to the Editor

Letter: RFK’s death ensured Vietnam horror would continue

The morning after Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, the news reached me in San Diego at Marine Corps boot camp. I was a draftee among volunteers who slept with the flag.

On that Sunday morning, during two hours of free time, I was sweating in the sun reading the L.A. Times. From beyond the acres of Quonset huts and over the fence, I heard planes coming and going from San Diego's airport. I was a fresh conscript, delivered to Lindbergh Field one month earlier to learn the art of war.
From the Times' reporting, I sought details in the black and white photograph of the busboy cradling Bobby's head on the kitchen floor — he later said Bobby asked if anyone else was hurt. The Tet offensive six months earlier had inflamed Lyndon Johnson's war in Southeast Asia. Each dead soldier was worth millions of dollars to Kellogg, Brown and Root, a legacy campaign donor that assures warmongers' reelection term after term.

With Bobby Kennedy eliminated, there was no stopping the conflagration. Years earlier, Pentagon planners outlined a 10-year war in Vietnam that killed 60,000 U.S. troops. How many names are on the Wall? How long did the war last? For such precision, generals receive medals and ribbons.

Although I escaped the odds of killing and dying for corporate profits, the cost to subsequent generations of young Americans remains cloaked in false flags and dark budgets. Fifty years on and we still lack the resolve to stand in front of the mirror and admit the obvious.
— Douglas Yates
Ester

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