Yes, the insanity of "body counts' was just one more of the lies told in those days. They were among many such lies told and accepted as real by those who were not there. The reasons for those lies were simple, however. Each lie served to bolster the misshappen, warped needs of the liars and those who accepted or challenged those lies. Each side was trying to position itself for the future lies it would tell and call "accurate historical records."

Tomorrow I will celebrate survival for yet another year. In a few weeks I will mark the second anniversary of a doctor telling me that my future could only be counted in months - no more than a year. Once again, I have managed to outlive the predictions of my impending demise. During all those years I have lived through events that are now for most only notations in text books of history.

When I made my living as a reporter for various news organizations, including a stint with an international wire service, I was also eyewitness to many events that captured the public's attention however briefly. Often I was astounded to see and hear how others saw the same events I had just witnessed. The inaccuracies and agenda-oriented coverage of those events often made the coverage of an event I had witnessed far removed from the actual events that had taken place. It served to make me have a very jaundiced view of journalism and the machinations of so-called "newsmakers" and falsely proclaimed "unbiased" reporters of those events. That cynicism has only grown stronger over the years as I watch the blatant misrepresentation of supposed "facts" being presented by people unworthy of the title "journalist." They no longer even bother trying to hide their perversions of truth. The national broadcast networks and "influential" print media are among the worse offenders in this practice.

You are exactly right, my friend. One day you will be asked about some of these things. We who have lived this history owe it to those future seekers of knowledge nothing less than a truthful accounting of the events of our time. I hope that something I have said here will help you relate to that future prober some of the truths that are now mostly forgotten, perverted or blatantly misstated.

I am a fan of the History Channel because it goes into great detail on some of the events I lived or witnessed. There, for the most part, one may get some inkling of the hidden truths that exist but many are still often glossed over or misreported for the sociological purposes and desires of the producers of those programs. The problem that I see is that those of us who lived those times and events are dying off. One day there will be no one left to correct the record, even on a one-on-one scale. Our educational institutions no longer seek truth. They churn out uneducated and uneducable robots who no longer possess the intellectual skills or capabilities to question and probe for the real truths. They blithely accept the remaining "recorded" history and ignore the eyewitness accounts of those who know better for we were there and took part in those events.

I watched a purported professor of history from USC at Berkeley on the O'Reilly Factor last night. This man was so far removed from the realities as to be frightening. What frightens me more is that he is responsible for inbuing young men and women of today with knowledge. What chance have they of knowing anything when the people who are supposed to be impartial reviewers of truth have such disdain for truth if it doesn't fit their preconceived notions of what the truth ought to be?

An ancient sage once opined that those who ignore history are doomed to relive it. When one repeats the same action over and over that results in failure time after time while holding onto hope for a different outcome, they are called "insane" by society unless the root of those repeated failed efforts is social engineering of our society and its infrastructure. In that circumstance, they are most often called "liberals" by those who know better and "progressive" by their fellow believers and travellers. When they deny the facts that are a part of the situation they repeat, they condemn future generations to endure and suffer more Hitlers, Pol Potts, Lan Nols, Mussolinis, Stalins, Hos, Giaps, Husseins, bin Ladens and Matas with aircraft filled with innocents used to slaughter more thousands on innocents engaged in simply trying to live their lives.

When they obfuscate and play mindless charades with facts that dispute their pipe dreams, they sentence future generations to educational systems that do not educate but do indoctrinate and turn out mindless, compliant automatons who will mindlessly accept the perversions of reality that are impose on them and generations to come.

Keep asking, Z-dr... as should everyone else here, but don't stop there. Continue to correct the lies, however well-intentioned they may be, as best you can on whatever limited scale you may and on evey occasion that presents itself to you. It is a debt we each owe to those who went before us and those who are yet to come behind us. It is a moral obligation to those of our contemporaries who also lived those days and times. But, we owe them the complete and unadulterated truth, not our own perverted by partisanship views of those events. We must tell the good with the bad and we owe them, our forebears and our contemporaries nothing less than the full truth however unpleasant or discomforting those truths may be to us personally. We must be willing to admit our own errors and set the record straight if our living those times is to have any real meaning.

We must acknowledge that FDR played a shell game with our government, creating false hopes with horrific consequeces that would impact generations to come. We have to tell them how Woodrow Wilson's pipe dream world gave us the failed League of Nations. We are obligated to tellthem how Harry Truman was one of the last true statesmen to hold the Presidency and how LBJ waged a media War on Poverty that Povery won. We have to acknowledge, however berudgingly that historical realities and results proved Ronald Reagan to be our last principled President who held the course against all arguments to the contrary. We have to sheepishly admit that our nation, to its inexcusable shame, twice elected a sleazy, corrupt, moralless, unethical, perjurous, sexual predator to our highest office and watched as even less principled elected representatives allowed him to get away with it.

My days in Uncle Sam's Southeast Asian Playground for the Homicidally Inclined represented but a small fraction of all my years on this earth, yet they too represent more than half of my lifetime's nightmares since then. Each of the men I knew personally who was killed there and all of them in total represent only a small percentage of all the men and women I have known or met in my lifetime. They each occupy a space in my memories and troubled dreams much larger than their numerical relationship can ever explain. I cannot and will not permit their value to be diminished through the misrepresenatation of factual recounted history by those intent on making up into down and black into white.

We who were in southeast Asia have a somewhat mixed set of emotions about those times and events. We went because our fellow citizens required it of us, yet when we returned, those same neighbors treated us as criminals for having gone. Agenda bound social muggers try now to make untruths into acceptable "truths" because they wish those false facts to support their perverted views.

One of the lies that is consistently repeated even today bothers me greatly. We have a nation in which approximately 12% of the population believes that their segment of the population represented a greater percentage of those who served in those front line positons. Disppasionate studies prove irrefutably that to be an outright lie. Blacks never represented more than 12% of the common soldiers serving in combat units in those days. That is documentable and undeniable truth. Let's see you find that data accurately reported anywhere these days. The acceptance of this lie as truthful lie has been a part and parcel of the disintegration of the relationship between blacks and the rest of our society since those days. See how truth unserved can have long term, far reaching effects on our futures? That lie, repeated over and over again as truth serves only to foment hatred and bitterness between the races, and to what purpose?

That is but one example, one I have seen and heard put forth as unchallenged truth repeatedly in the years that followed my firsthand knowledge of its total disregard for reality. There are many more such lies and opposing realities that should be and ought to be exposed. I hope I have helped someone who visits here know better so that they can help educate another in the years ahead.