Naked on the Battlefield

How many of you have actually read a book about the Vietnam War, fiction or non-fiction? Very few, I’ll bet. Well, I’ve read plenty. On my bookshelf alone, I have seven:

• Bloods by Wallace Terry


• Chickenhawk by Robert Mason


• Citadel by Dale A Dye


• Nam by Mark Baker


• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien


• The 13th Valley by John M Del Vecchio


• The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold and John Penycate

But before you go pick up one of these books, be warned - it can be a shocking experience. Here’s a sample from the book The 13th Valley:

“Shee-it, Egan,” a voice boomed out. “I don’t know how you kin smoke them gook cigarettes. They smell like they come outa the asshole of a dyin gook whore.”

And another:

“All right,” Egan boomed from over beside the dead soldier, “who’s got the mothafucker’s ear? You fucken pig.” Egan charged toward Denhardt. “You mothafucker. You low life cunt fuck. Put that ear back on that man’s head.” Denhardt tried to protest. Egan raged more furiously. “BULLSHIT!” He yelled. “Either you put that fucken ear back on that fucken dink’s head or I’m gonna cut yers off en nail em on him. You fucken savage.” Egan spat. He grabbed Denhardt by the shoulders of his shirt, yanked him forward and threw him toward the body. “Bury that fucker before the stench makes me vomit in your mouth.”

In case you didn’t know, a “gook” or a “dink” is slang for anyone racially Asian.

This is from the book Citadel:

‘This man was hit by three rounds of an AK burst at close range. One round apparently got under his helmet and took the top of his skull off causing massive brain damage.’

Corpsman pulled back the battle dressing covering the top of the grunt’s head. Brain was a pulsing, red-tinged mass, spurting frothy blood where cranial arteries had ruptured. Entire top of his skull had been taken off by the enemy round. More diagnosis.

‘A second round entered the chest area under one arm and exited here.’ Doc pulled another battle dressing away from the left side of the man’s heaving chest. Heart and lung, both bravely pumping through a churned and torn mass of rib bone and gristle. As he inhaled, a putrid foam spurted from the exit wound. Corpsman replaced the battle dressing to keep him from losing any more blood.

‘Finally, the third round caught him almost full in the navel. Look at this shit.’ Peeled away a large bandage covering the grunt’s lower abdomen. Shiny intestine surged up like bloated blood sausage through a huge rent in the man’s belly. Nauseating smell. Similar to human shit but much stronger. Smell of waste, decay. Smell of violent death.

Take a look at the following pictures of American soldiers in East Asian wars. Look into the eyes. Do you see something eerily familiar in all of them?

Pacific Campaign, Second World War

Korean War


















Korean War





















Vietnam War

























Vietnam War

A bit like looking into the eyes of insanity, no? The soldiers appear to be stunned by the ferocity of the fighting. Yet the warmongers in Washington DC just keep on sending these boys out to die on foreign soil.

My experience in Australia (see previous blog entry) distorted my perception of the white man (and woman) and it took me a while before I could accept him for what he truly is - a mere human being with fears, insecurities, weaknesses, irrationalities, etc, -just like everyone else. In the war zone, I saw the white man stripped of aura, bravado, pretense, nicety, hype and hubris, often confused, bewildered and helpless, sometimes in great pain, sorrow or terror. In short, I began to empathise with him. I could see through his eyes. I could think like him without being like him. We could connect at a totally different level.

Racism

Once in a while, I come across some white boy in China complaining that the Chinese are racist because he is forbidden to date someone's pretty daughter. I thought if all you have in your horny little head is sex, sex and more sex, I'm not letting you near my daughter either!

Amazing what gets labeled as racism these days. In contrast, here is something I experienced back in my university days in Sydney.

I used to live very near the University of New South Wales and one night, a friend and I were cycling home after some Christian fellowship activity. It was very close to midnight and the streets in the Eastern Suburbs were fairly empty. My friend is a Chinese Malaysian, just like me. As we rounded a corner, we encountered a car full of skinheads. If you don't know what a skinhead is, the photo (from the Aussie movie Romper Stomper) will give you a good idea. They trailed our bicycles, screaming and hurling abuse and hate at us all the way. The main university gates were locked but fortunately we found one of those little pedestrian entrances that our bicycles could get through and we managed to slip into campus.

Whatever the skinheads set out to do, they achieved it. I was truly traumatized. I was in shock for a week and didn’t want to step out of the house. (Fortunately, it was the holidays and I didn’t have to.)

I don’t know if I was in Oz at the wrong time, but that was even before Pauline Hanson came along. Already there was hate graffiti all over the place: ASIAN INVASION! TWO WONGS DON’T MAKE A WRIGHT! People tell me Australia is such a nice friendly country. Sad to say, I didn’t leave with such a rosy impression.

In fact, I have never experienced anything remotely similar in Malaysia even though I’ve lived most of my life here. The Malays really are a generous people by nature and I am grateful for that. I say that even though my dad came close to dying in a race riot back in 1969.

To me, racism is when someone tries to harm you or deliberately cause you to fall because you are of a different culture, race or religion. So be careful who you call a racist.

[From young lady in Zhangjiagang (14 Apr 2009):

Just read ur latest entry. I totally agree with what you've said. I was fortunate though that i didn't have a similar experience to yours when i was in Oz. Ppl in Melbourne are generally nice and more accepting. And you know, I've never been in a more race/culture-tolerant country than Malaysia, and I'm grateful, proud even, to be a Malaysian. Even more so now that I've been to other countries and seen more of the world.

I wish I had more time to blog. Been bz lately. Well, do keep blogging. Your posts are always thought-provoking. I like your writing. You really should try and get yourself published. As for me, I'm still struggling to get just one piece of short story together. Wish I had your flair for writing.]

[From a young man in Fuzhou (16 Apr 2009):

I had quick look at your blog "Racism". That impressed me a lot, let me say this: I will feel safe in China, because I stay in an place that I belong to. If I want to live in America, I will be judged as invader because I may hurt or take off their interest, I mean something about culture, economy, politics, religion or something else. I beleive that when God creat human being, we are destined to be called a family that each human being need to recognize this point. We learn to respect each lives on the earth.. Racism will make human being ruined from this earth. In my personal opinion, love make peace, hatred cause war. when this world come to being full of hatred, we won't feel safe. each country has its nuclear weapon aimed at another countries, each people point gun to another people. We will call the time the end of the world, wouldn't we?]

The Goldilocks Enigma

A lot of people in the "rational" West will have you believe that only dumb people accept the existence of God. I want to demonstrate that one can argue for God and do it well - ie rationally, logically, reasonably and even scientifically. So don't let pseudo-scientists bully you into thinking they have a monopoly on knowledge or brains. They don't.

You will notice that all my arguments are based on information sourced from science books and magazines. I don't read religious literature. I'm a Deist. I don't have religion.

Back in 2007, physicist Paul Davies came out with a book called The Goldilocks Enigma. Remember the story of Goldilocks and the 3 bears? That little blond kid found Father Bear's porridge too hot and Mother Bear's too cold. Baby Bear's was just right. The Goldilocks Enigma simply asks "Why is the universe just right for life?"

This is something from The Australian about the book:

It deals with this deeply intriguing circumstance: "If almost any of the basic features of the universe, from the properties of atoms to the distribution of galaxies, were different, life would very probably be impossible." Like Goldilocks's porridge, the universe is just right. Our existence hangs by a thread.

According to Davies, there are more than 30 known examples in physics and cosmology of extraordinarily precise fine-tuning. For instance, the ratio of the mass of the neutron to that of the proton is 1.00137841870. Without that slight deviation in weight (the neutron is about 0.1 per cent heavier), there would be no atoms, no chemistry, no life.

Davies details several other mind-boggling examples. The "biggest fix" of all, he contends, relates to so-called dark energy, the anti-gravity force that permeates space. That force is almost but not completely counteracted by negative dark energy: the cancellation effect is complete to one part in 120 powers of 10. Life would not be possible if the net force were different by a single power of 10. The odds of the right value having arisen by chance is the same as tossing heads 400 times in a row.

The scientists will try to explain it all away, but the indisputable fact remains that for some uncanny unsettling reason, everything in the universe came together precisely for life to exist.

[Graphic from kinderisfun.com]

Closed Systems

Here's something for the atheists to chew (or choke) on. :-)

Know what's sterilisation? According to Wikipedia, it's any process that effectively kills or eliminates transmissible agents (such as fungi, bacteria, viruses, spore forms, etc.) from a surface, equipment, article of food or medication, or biological culture medium.

Why do people bother to sterilise food, drinks, surgical instruments, etc? So that bad organisms don't get into your body and harm you.

Once upon a time, people (including some scientists) believed in spontaneous generation, which basically means living things popping up automatically from non-living things.

That was until sterilisation was discovered. It has been proven conclusively that once something is dead, it doesn't come back to life. So when you open a can from the supermarket, you don't expect it to be full of germs (or worms).

The food is in a closed system, ie the aluminium can. Life cannot form in a closed system, as anybody in the food industry will be happy to assure you.

So - if spontaneous generation has been debunked - how can life originate on the planet earth, which was ... wait for it ... a closed system?

I'd love to see the "scientists" twist themselves into a knot, trying to explain this one! :-)