Darrell Castle talks about the insanity of warfare as a foreign policy strategy against people who have not harmed the United States.

Transcription / Notes

THE AGE OF INSANITY

Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday, May 31, 2019, the last Friday of May, and on this report I will be talking about what I call insanity, because it makes no sense to me. It should make no sense to anyone but to those whose brains are wired to a certain end, I suppose that ripping apart the fabric of civilization in the pursuit of raw political power makes some degree of sense.

May is the 50th anniversary of the Battle for Hamburger Hill and my local newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, did a special report on that battle.

 “As Americans this weekend memorialize the casualties of our war dead, a small band of U.S. soldiers of the 101st airborne division will recall in their collective memories that they were comrades’ in-arms of a famous battle during the Vietnam War. The Battle of Hamburger Hill, fought 50 years ago this month, is seared into the memories of its participants; a struggle in the heavily contested A Shau Valley. Fought over a specific mountain, known as Hill 937, denoted for its height in meters (approximately 3000 feet), it was also called Dong Ap Bia by the North Vietnamese, which translates into “Mountain of the Crouching Beast.”

The airborne battalion of the 101st suffered 71 dead and 372 wounded, a casualty rate equal to more than 70% per cent of the battalion. This report goes on to say that they spent their last breath in a hellish place so remember them. Nothing I say in this Report is intended as a criticism of those who fought and died there or in any other place our military is committed. I was one of them almost 50 years ago and today I criticize only those who sent us and who still send us. Wasting one of the best battalions in the United States Army by sending it up that hill seems like either a monumental mistake or the height of insanity, but perhaps hindsight is 20/20.

The problem lies with a foreign policy that puts people in positions of fighting wars that don’t need to be fought and frankly should not be an American concern. The United States had many opportunities to avoid what happened in Vietnam in 1945, in 1954, in 1958, and in 1963. The leadership could have chosen different paths, but instead they chose the paths with all the traps and in they went.

I know that during my years as a Marine Officer almost 50 years ago, I and the other young officers with me didn’t spend a lot of time pondering these things, at least not openly. Open criticism of overall strategy by the officer corps and/or the civilian leadership would have seemed disloyal and would never have happened. We just assumed that the people we were supposed to fight needed to be fought so that’s what we did.

I have had many opportunities to think about it in the intervening years, however, and I have tried to take advantage and think. It has occurred to me that when we go abroad to kill foreigners, the people we are killing, and who are trying as hard as they can to kill us, should be a direct threat to the United States to at least some degree. The people we fought in Vietnam had zero ability to harm the United States in any way whatsoever. If our enemy is not a direct threat, and in fact, is totally incapable of harming the United States then what’s the point. We fought them and they killed almost 60,000 of us and we killed God only knows how many of them, perhaps a couple of million and yet they could not have directly harmed us if we had remained as far away from there as possible.

The other thing that has occurred to me over the years is that the United States has actual enemies fully capable of helping to crack apart our entire civilization sitting in the halls of Congress and the Senate. It requires a strange leap of insanity to allow that to happen,