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May 27, 1996 - Bill Cooper
59:26
Memorial Day
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The End
The End I'm William Cooper.
Once again, you're listening to the Hour of the Time.
I'm William Cooper.
Ladies and gentlemen, today is Memorial Day.
I trust you all had a nice weekend.
I I know that for most people Memorial Day is nothing more than just another three-day weekend, another holiday, chance to go to the lake or to the beach, to the river, to the mountains, to the park, or just stay home, sit on the couch, watch television, maybe have a barbecue in the backyard and have some neighbors over.
But that's not what Memorial Day was meant to be.
One of the problems that we have in waking the sheeple is that they have become so complacent, so apathetic, and so basically ignorant of how it happened that they came to have so much, so many opportunities
The highest standard of living in the world, bar none, or at least used to be.
Some say still is.
Many would question that.
We have become complacent.
We have been so lucky, so left alone in this country by the rest of the world, That the general feeling amongst most Americans is that nothing is going to happen here.
Nothing is going to happen to us.
Nothing is going to happen to me.
Nobody will ever attack us.
Our government will protect us from everything.
If I lose my job, don't even give me another one, or train me, or give me money.
I mean, we've got it made here.
So when you talk about sacrifice and when you talk about remembering those who gave their lives so that we can have what we have and so many other people in other nations around the world whom we have set free, whom we have brought out from under the yoke of some dictatorship or oppressor or
Or because we sent our young men and women into battle, they were able to come out of a war much sooner than they would have.
Americans don't think of these things, nor do they understand the real nature of war.
Nor do they understand, really, that when we send our young men off to fight in some place like Vietnam or Haiti, they are not They are not serving their government.
If they die, they did not die for old glory or for our freedoms.
They died for other reasons, thinking and believing in their hearts all the while that their sacrifice was a noble one and was in the service of their country.
Very few, myself included, when I was a young man and went off to fight a war in Vietnam, ever think about what we are doing, why we are doing it, what are the consequences going to be.
No.
Rather we remember, or at least I did, and all of those that I knew, We remembered the movies with John Wayne.
We remembered the heroes of World War II and Korea.
Many of them were our fathers, uncles, grandfathers, great-uncles, sometimes aunts, mothers, who served also.
And we remember the Veterans Day parades and the VFW and the American Legion.
And we remember the great speeches on television given by members of Congress commemorating those brave heroes who went off to fight the war.
And we wanted to be just like them.
We wanted to be just like them.
We wanted to stand tall and look handsome in our uniforms.
We wanted to go off and fight our war.
We wanted to prove that we were men.
That we could be heroes.
We wanted to have the adulation of our mothers and sisters and girlfriends.
We wanted someone to make movies about us.
I have to tell you that that was all done in the greatest of innocence And yes, even stupidity.
We were ignorant.
We had been fed a lot of lies about the glory of war and the wonderful rewards of sacrifice and service to our country.
I was reared in a military family, ladies and gentlemen, and I had bought the story I couldn't wait to leave home.
In fact, I almost enlisted in the Army in Japan at a place called Camp Drake when I was sixteen years old.
We were living at Grand Heights then, which was a military housing center, and I went to Naramasu High School.
And a friend and I decided we were going to join the Army.
We ran away from home, spent the night at a girlfriend's house at Momodi Village.
The next day we headed to Camp Dirk, where the guard at the gate directed us to this wooden building outside of which were these strangely, and I mean strangely, dressed young men, just a little older than we were.
But no hair on their heads, this ashen white look on their face, and these incredibly baggy clothes, walking around with these little buckets, picking up cigarette butts and pieces of trash.
And if we were smart, we would have taken one look at them and gone back home, but we didn't.
We went inside, where we met this giant, and I mean giant, overweight, Ugly.
Had to be the ugliest man I've ever met in my life.
With half his teeth missing.
Was an old sergeant who'd fought probably in two or three wars.
Chest covered with metals and stripes and hash marks and everything else that you could possibly think of.
And when we told him what we wanted, he started laughing and I don't think he stopped for about ten minutes.
Yes, our parents knew what we were doing.
Of course, we were honest.
We told him no.
We had to tell him the truth anyway, because we were sixteen, and we weren't sure that they would take us at sixteen, and of course they wouldn't.
We had to have signatures.
So he gave us all the necessary paperwork after giving us a great dressing down and telling us what fools we were.
And we should have known just by looking at him and looking at those young men outside who were very busy doing nothing, looking for all the world like prisoners from some strange movie.
Prisoners of war, in fact.
But they weren't.
They were our young men who had just come from boot camp and been assigned to Camp Drake.
And would soon find themselves rotated to Korea, probably, after some training and indoctrination.
Well, we took those papers and went back to our girlfriend's house and sat down at the coffee table and tried to figure out how to sign our parents' names without drawing any suspicion to the fact that they really weren't their signatures, And no matter how hard we tried, we could not make that work.
So ultimately, after three or four days, we ended up going home.
And my father was curious.
My mother was a little on the hysterical side.
Nothing really happened, and that was the strangest thing of all.
My father thought it was very funny that I wanted to go into the Army.
He asked me if I really knew what I was doing, and I told him I thought I did.
And at that time, I thought I knew everything.
Of course, I didn't.
I didn't know anything.
And so I missed going into the service at 16, and boy am I glad today, for I got my high school diploma, as I should have.
And went on to what I thought were bigger and better things.
Tonight, we're going to try to remember all of those, ladies and gentlemen, who, whether they actually were giving their lives for their country and for freedom or not, honestly believed that they were, and went off all the while
With this noble feeling in their heart that they were doing something good for this country, for their family, and all of those whom they loved, and for freedom.
All of them, each and every one of them, also believing in their heart that they would not be the one who got killed or wounded or maimed.
And that they would come back and would march in those parades and would marry Susie, the cheerleader, and have two and a half kids and live happily ever after.
Reaching the American dream, owning their own home, having a nice cushy job down at the factory.
Reaching the American dream, owning their own home, having a nice job down at the factory.
Reaching the American dream, owning their own home, having owning their own home, having a nice job down at the factory. having a nice job down
Reaching the American dream, owning their own home, having a nice job down at the factory. having a nice job down at the factory.
And before we get into war and what it's like, and remembering those who fought in war, and don't get me wrong folks, many of them actually did die in the service of their country and many of them actually did die in the service of their country
Unfortunately, just as many or more died in wars and for purposes other than any benefit for this country, or for the American people, or for that matter, freedom.
Sometimes it worked in the benefit of others, or foreign countries.
And for rich men who sit on Wall Street and engineer these types of things in order to sell munitions and clothing and boats and weapons systems and many other things.
From the time a person leaves its mother's womb, as every effort, ladies and gentlemen, is directed toward building, maintaining, And withdrawing into artificial wombs various sorts of substitute protective devices or shells.
If you examine your own life, you will see that this is true.
We seek an area of comfort, stability, safety, and security.
The objective is to provide a stable environment for both stable and unstable activity.
To provide a shelter for the evolutionary processes of growth and maturity.
In effect, survival.
To provide security for freedom and to provide defensive protection for offensive activity.
This is equally true, ladies and gentlemen, of both the general public and the elite, the rulers.
There is a definite difference in the way each of these classes go about the solution of problems.
The primary reason why the individual citizens of a country create a political structure is a subconscious wish or desire to perpetuate their own dependency relationship of childhood.
Bet you never thought of it that way, but it's true.
Simply put, they want a human god To eliminate all risk from their life, pat them on the head, kiss their bruises, put a chicken on every dinner table, clothe their bodies, tuck them into bed at night, and tell them that everything is going to be alright when they wake up in the morning.
Now, this public demand, ladies and gentlemen, is incredible.
It cannot be fulfilled.
Nevertheless, it is demanded.
And so the human god, the politician, meets incredibility with incredibility by promising the world and delivering nothing.
By learning very quickly the demands placed upon them, and the unwillingness of the public to sacrifice in order to meet those demands, the politician learns to fill his own pockets, to make his own way, to ensure his own re-election, by promising the world, by lying and saying that he will do everything for everybody, and then delivering nothing.
So who, who, ladies and gentlemen, is the bigger liar?
The public or the politician?
The neighborhood mafioso or the godfather?
This public behavior is surrender, born of fear, laziness, and expediency It is the basis of the welfare state as a strategic weapon, useful against a disgusting public.
It is a method of euphemistic slavery, addicting a whole economic class of people to dependency upon Big Brother.
And how does the action and offense come into play?
Well, - No.
Most people, ladies and gentlemen, including you listening, would like to be able to subdue and or even kill other human beings which disturb their daily lives.
But they do not want to have to cope with the moral and religious issues which such an overt act on their part might raise.
Therefore, they assign the dirty work to others.
Including their own children, so as to keep the blood off their own hands.
They rave about the humane treatment of animals, and then sit down to a delicious hamburger from a whitewashed slaughterhouse down the street, and out of sight, out of mind.
But even more hypocritical, they pay taxes to finance a professional association of hitmen, collectively called politicians.
And then noisily complained about corruption in government.
But again, most people want to be free to do things, to explore, etc.
But they are afraid, ladies and gentlemen, to fail.
The fear of failure exists.
is manifested in irresponsibility, and especially in delegating those personal responsibilities to others where success is uncertain or carries possible or created liabilities, which the person is not prepared to accept.
They want authority.
The root word is but they will not accept responsibility or liability, so they hire politicians to face reality for them.
People hire politicians so that people can obtain security without having to manage it, obtain action without having to think about it, inflict theft, injury, and death upon others inflict theft, injury, and death upon others without having to contemplate either life or death.
Thank you.
Thank you.
To avoid responsibility for their own intentions.
To obtain the benefits of reality and science without exerting themselves in the discipline of facing or learning either of these things.
They give the politicians the power to create and manage a war machine in order to provide for the survival of the nation womb, for the nation becomes the womb for most of the citizens within the nation.
Regardless of the type of government.
And to prevent encroachment of anything upon the nation womb.
To destroy the enemy who threatens the nation womb.
To destroy those citizens of their own country who do not conform for the sake of stability of the nation womb.
And that is why it is so easy to vilify and demonize People who are considered to be politically incorrect, or do not toe the party line.
Politicians, ladies and gentlemen, hold many crazy military jobs, the lowest being the police, which are soldiers.
The attorneys and the CPAs next are spies and saboteurs, licensed And the judges who shout the orders and run the closed Union military shop for whatever the market will bear.
The generals are industrialists.
The presidential level of commander-in-chief is shared by the international bankers.
The people know that they have created this force and financed it with their own taxes, by their own consent, but they would rather knuckle under than be the hypocrite and admit it.
Ever admit they are wrong.
or ever have been wrong, or ever will be wrong, or ever can or could be wrong.
That's why so many people who know exactly what is happening will not admit it, will not stand up and say a word, but will echo the vilification and demonization of those who have the courage and the guts and who will and who do.
Thus a nation becomes divided into two very distinct parts.
For the most part, a docile sub-nation, which is the great silent majority, and a political sub-nation.
The political sub-nation remains attached to the docile sub-nation, tolerates it, and leeches its substance until it grows strong enough to detach itself and then devour its parent.
And that is in the process of happening right now.
In order to make meaningful decisions about war, which is the primary economic flywheel, it is necessary to assign concrete logistical values to each element of the war structure, personnel and material alike.
The process, ladies and gentlemen, begins with a clear and candid description of the subsystems of such a structure.
When I was a young man, it was the draft.
Now we have the all-volunteer force, which is a paid mercenary military machine, which has nothing to do with the nation-state, but with everything to do with the New World Order.
But how did we get to that state?
We got there Partly through the draft.
You see, few efforts of human behavior modification are more remarkable or more effective than that of the socio-military institution known as the draft.
The primary purpose of a draft, or other such institution, is to instill, by intimidation, In the young males of a society, the uncritical conviction that the government is omnipotent.
The truth, of course, is just the opposite, as government exists only with the consent of the people.
But young men are brainwashed in a country that uses the draft, and most people in this country, if they did not go into military service voluntarily, were drafted.
The young man is soon taught that a prayer is slow to reverse what a bullet can do in an instant.
Oh.
Thus a man trained in a religious environment for eighteen years of his life can, by this instrument of the government, be broken down, be purged of his fantasies and delusions in a matter of mere months.
And once that conviction is instilled, all else becomes easy to instill.
Even more interesting is the process by which a young man's parents, who purportedly love him, can be induced to send him off to war to his death.
Although the scope of this broadcast will not allow this matter to be expanded in full detail, nevertheless, a course overview is possible and can serve To reveal those factors which must be included in some numerical form in a computer analysis of social and war systems.
And these systems are engineered, and these models are constructed, and patterns emerge from which the elite can determine how next to manipulate a population.
Let's begin with a The draft, called Selective Service, etc., is an institution, ladies and gentlemen, of compulsory collective sacrifice and slavery, devised by the middle-aged and the elderly for the purpose of pressing the young into doing the public dirty work.
And let me tell you that the draft could be reinstituted overnight And your children could be called into service tomorrow morning.
That is a fact.
The draft further serves to make the youth as guilty as the elders, thus making criticism of the elders by the youth less likely It's a generational stabilizer.
It is marketed and sold to the public under the label of patriotic equals national service.
Once a candid economic definition of the draft is achieved, that definition is used to outline the boundaries of a structure called a human values system.
This, in turn, is translated into the terms of game theory.
The value of such a slave laborer is given in a table of human values, a table broken down into categories by intellect, experience, post, service, job, demand, etc.
And these tables are used to evaluate the tests and place a recruit into a certain category of military service from which he can never escape.
Some of these categories are ordinary and can be tentatively evaluated in terms of the value of certain jobs for which a known fee exists.
Some jobs are harder to value because they are unique to the demands of social subversion.
For an extreme example...
The value of a mother's instruction to her daughter, causing that daughter to put certain behavioral demands upon a future husband ten or fifteen years hence, thus by suppressing his resistance to a perversion of a government, making it easier for a banking cartel to buy the state of New York in, say, twenty years.
And I know that's over the heads of some of you, but nevertheless, persist and listen, My drift.
At least I hope that you will.
Such a problem leans heavily upon the observations and data of wartime espionage and many types of psychological testing.
But crude mathematical models, algorithms, etc., can be devised.
if not to predict, at least to predetermine these events with maximum certainty.
What does not exist by natural cooperation is thus enhanced by calculated compulsion.
Thank you.
You see, human beings are machines.
Levers which may be grasped and turned.
And there is little real difference between automating a society and automating a shoe factory.
Music by Ben Thede
These derived values, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, are variable.
The It is necessary to use a current table of human values for computer analysis.
Of course, if you don't have those tables It's difficult for you to understand what those values could even be.
But they are given in true measure rather than U.S.
dollars, since the latter is unstable, being presently inflated beyond the production of national goods and services so as to give the economy a false kinetic energy, or paper inductance.
The silver value is stable, it being possible to buy the same amount with a gram of silver today as could be bought in 1920.
As in every social system approach, stability is achieved only by understanding and accounting for human nature, action-reaction patterns.
technology, and no more.
As in every social system approach, stability is achieved only by understanding and accounting for human nature, action-reaction patterns.
A failure to do so can be, and usually is, disastrous.
As in other human social schemes, one form or another of intimidation or incentive is essential to the success of the draft.
Physical principles of action and reaction must be applied to both internal and external subsystems.
To secure the draft, individual brainwashing Programming in both the family unit and the peer group must be engaged and brought under complete control.
And in this country, that has been very easy since the very beginning.
The father is the man of the household, and he must be housebroken to ensure that Junior will grow up with the right social training and attitudes.
the advertising media, etc.
are engaged to see to it that father-to-be is sex whipped before or by the time he is married.
He is taught that he either conforms to the social notch cut out for him, or his sex life will be hobbled and his tender companionship will be zero.
He is made to see that women demand security more than logical principles or honorable behavior.
And by the time his son must go to war, Father, with jelly for a backbone, will slam a gun into Junior's hand before Father will risk the censure of his peers or make a hypocrite of himself by crossing the investment he has in his own personal opinion or self-esteem.
And Junior will go to war.
Our father will be embarrassed.
So Junior will go to war.
Rest assured.
The true purpose notwithstanding.
The mother, the female element of human society is ruled by emotion first and logic second.
In the battle between logic and imagination, imagination always wins.
Fantasy prevails.
Maternal instinct dominates so that the child comes first and the future comes second.
A woman with a newborn baby is too starry-eyed to see a wealthy man's cannon fodder or a cheap source of slave labor.
A woman must, however, be conditioned to accept the transition to reality when it comes, or sooner.
And as the transition becomes more difficult to manage, the family unit must be carefully disintegrated, and state-controlled public education and state-operated child care centers must become more common and legally enforced so as to begin the detachment of the child from the mother and father at an earlier age.
And the more those of us like me educate you into the true reality of the world, the quicker they must make this happen or you will stand up and smack them down and stomp them into the dust.
Inoculation of behavioral drugs such as Ritalin can speed the transition for the child and is mandatory in many schools.
But there is a word of caution here.
A woman's impulsive anger can override her fear.
An irate woman's power must never be underestimated, and her power over a sex-whipped husband must likewise never, ever be underestimated.
In fact, that is exactly what got women the vote in 1920.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't have had it.
I'm just telling you how they got it.
Junior.
Little Bill Cooper, for example.
When I was that age, I fit right into this pattern, just like a hand in a glove that perfectly fits.
The emotional pressure for self-preservation during time of war, and the self-serving attitude of the common herd that have an option to avoid the battlefield If Junior can be persuaded to go, is all of the pressure finally necessary to propel Johnny off to war?
All of these are the reasons you really sent your sons and daughters to fight in Desert Storm have nothing to do with rescuing Kuwait or the evil demon Saddam Hussein or Iraq or George Bush or anything else.
What I'm giving you tonight is reality.
It is the truth.
It is the real reason you patted your sons and daughters on the ass and sent them off to die in the godforsaken desert of the Middle East, which had nothing to do with this country. which had nothing to do with this country.
All of your quiet blackmailings of little Junior are the threats.
No sacrifices, no friends, no glory, no girlfriends.
Don't disgrace me, because if you do, don't ever come home.
Am I right?
And little sister?
What about Junior's little sister?
She is given all the good things of life by her father and taught to expect the same from her future husband regardless of the price.
And she is to demand from him what her mother demanded of her father, and so that it is passed on from father to son and mother to daughter for generation and generation and generation and generation.
But what does this tell you?
That those who will not use their brains are no better off than those who have no brains, and so this mindless school of jellyfish, father, mother, son and daughter, become useful beasts of burden, are trainers of the same.
All of this, ladies and gentlemen, was taken from chapter one of my book, Behold a Pale Horse.
I'm not trying to sell you a copy tonight.
Just as always, I give you the source of the information.
Chapter 1 is entitled, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.
You see, we are engaged in World War III at this moment.
But it is a silent war fought with quiet weapons.
And most of you do not even know that this war is being waged.
But it is.
Does that in any way belittle the sacrifice of those who have gone on to fight these countries' wars?
No, not at all.
For a deed done in innocence, ladies and gentlemen, in my estimation, is a deed done in fact.
And if a man honestly and truthfully believed that he was giving his life and sacrifice for the betterment of his country and for those that he loved, then in my mind, he did exactly that.
And the ultimate guilt of his death Or his non-sacrifice, as the case may be, rests upon those who lied and manipulated and deceived him into doing that, including his father and mother and sister and aunts and uncles and grandfathers, who all knew the truth and would not tell it to him or her.
And don't forget the many men and women who have died in the history of this country.
Fighting for this country.
Fighting for freedom.
Fighting for our opportunities.
For our standard of living.
So that we can have all of the things that we have had.
So that we can be the freest country that has ever lived upon the face of this earth.
The men and women who fought and died in the Revolutionary War are true heroes.
Now many of you have never fought in a war.
You've never seen a war except on television.
And it is so far removed from the actuality, the reality, the terrible degradation and the misery and the pain and suffering that I'm telling you right now, no matter how well you may think you understand war, you do not, will not, and cannot ever understand it until you find yourself in the middle of one.
There's nothing noble or great about war, and there are no heroes.
I can assure you of that.
When it gets down to the lowest common denominator in a war, that of the individual civilian trying to survive in the heat of a battle, or a soldier participating in that battle, no matter which side that soldier may find him or herself on, it gets down no matter which side that soldier may find him or herself on, it gets down to the very
And friendship.
here And when the bombs are bursting all around, and when bullets are whizzing past your ears, and you hear the cries of the wounded, and see the dead bodies scattered and torn and ripped apart and blood everywhere, No one, and I mean no one, thinks about a flag or a country.
No one is fighting for freedom.
No.
No one is thinking noble thoughts.
They are fighting for their own survival and the survival of their immediate friends around them and for nothing else.
And that, for those who have fought any war and have lived through it as I have and understand it, is the most sobering part of it all.
People react and they do what they have to do to survive and to help their friends survive.
for without their friends they cannot.
not War is a terrible thing.
Many start off to fight a war hoping to become a hero and do great noble things.
And some actually manage to do that in the heat of battle, not even understanding what happened or how it happened or why.
But all of a sudden they find themselves with a medal on their chest, and in every single case that I've ever spoken to anyone who has ever been considered to be a hero, they can tell you quite honestly they don't even know what the fuss is all about.
They did what they had to do in the heat of the moment to survive and to save those whom they loved.
And when I say that, I don't I'm not just throwing something off.
When you train with other men or women, and you find out that you can do things you never dreamed that you could ever do in your entire life, and you're all stripped of your personality and identity and your head is shaved and you have to live together in close quarters, you form friendships, and you learn to love other human beings
Like you've never ever had a friendship or loved another human being before in your entire life.
Women can speak of this easily.
Men find it very difficult.
Well, for some reason, I got over that a long time ago.
And where you might fight to the death.
Over a woman or a bottle of whiskey, you'll give your last drop of water and you'll give even your life to save your friend in the heat of combat.
And if your friend is wounded seriously or dies, you will sit down and you will cry alligator tears and you don't care who's watching because, to tell you quite frankly, you don't even really understand that it's happening.
All you know is somebody has wrenched something out of you that was precious and now it's gone.
Men who have fought in wars, women who have experienced war have fought in wars, and yes, some women have fought just as hard and have sacrificed just as much as any man ever has.
In the Civil War, at a very famous battle, A cannoneer was struck down and killed.
His pregnant wife of eight months grabbed up his equipment and served that cannon and finished fighting the battle in his stead.
So, don't fool yourselves.
It's not just men who march off to war, and it's not just men who perform great deeds In the eyes of those who perceive it from the outside.
You see, I'm sure she didn't think that she was a hero.
She was trying to fulfill her husband's promise.
She was trying to make up in some way for his loss.
I'm sure she didn't even really give it a whole lot of thought.
She just did it.
because it needed to be done.
The music that I'm using tonight, you've heard before.
In fact, you've heard many times before.
It's from the excellent movie about the combat experience and the wounding and recovery of a man named Ron Kovic.
The name of the movie is Born on the Fourth of July and starred Tom Cruise.
Many of you may have seen it.
And I know that most of you don't understand the connection between me and this music.
And if I didn't tell you, you never would.
i was attached to a unit in vietnam called the dongha river security and we were
We were stationed at a little place at the mouth of the Tocon River where it met the Gulf of Tonkin, called Coivet.
Ron Kovic was a United States Marine, also stationed at Coivet.
I knew Ron Kovic.
Every night we would go on patrol.
I was a patrol boat captain.
Each boat had a marine unit assigned to it.
And they were under the command of the boat captain.
I would generally insert my marine recon team at a place along the riverbank where I suspected enemy traffic to serve as an LP, which is a listening post.
or in some cases when I thought it was warranted, when I thought the risk would be minimal to my men, as an ambush.
One night I had a Marine recon team and started a place called Whiskey 1-2, which was a little island.
Thank you.
Not too far from another place called Whiskey Nine, which was forested, had a thick tree line, grave mounds, a rocky ridge that went way back away from the river toward the DMZ.
Ron Kovick's unit was on that ridge somewhere behind that tree line.
And my recon team was placed at Whiskey One-Two as an LP.
And in the middle of the night, Kovec's unit—he was not the commanding officer of that unit, he was an enlisted man—but his unit was taken under fire, ambushed.
Several were killed.
he was severely wounded.
We provided a lot of cover fire.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We called in an artillery strike.
We stood by some of the boats, helped to evacuate some of those Marines from Whiskey Nine.
My boat was one of those.
We came under heavy fire.
I don't really know How Ron Covett got back to Quaviet, or which boat he was on, or whether he was on a boat, or whether he was medevacked by helicopter, I really don't know.
But I know I never saw him again, and I never knew what happened to him until this movie came out.
And the titles of one of these pieces of music that I play is called Quaviet River, Vietnam, 1968.
And so I'm sort of attached to this CD.
And when I play this music, I remember that river.
I remember those terribly dark and lonely nights and the flares and the tracer rounds flying off in the distance like some weird light show and the staccato stag
stutter of the .50 caliber machine guns and the rapid fire of the M60s and the hose of light from Puff the Magic Dragon.
And I remember Robert Barron, who was my first gunner's mate on a patrol boat in the Da Nang Harbor, who was killed.
When his patrol boat hit a mine on the Tocon River on the Tulema Patrol not far from Coivet.
And I wonder about his family and about his parents.
And I wonder about the other four men who were on that boat who all died instantly.
And I wonder and I think about all of the men who were wounded and disappeared.
I think of a bosun mate who, while we were playing a game of football on the beach in the sand, was severely wounded by was severely wounded by the shard of a mortar shell.
Which had been fired and detonated who knows how many months or years before that, but was wounded.
Lying just under the sand with its sharp edges and was driven deep into his belly when he was tackled during that football game.
He was one of the best men that I ever served with.
And he was wounded playing football.
I don't know whatever became of him.
I don't Remember the names of any of these people, ladies and gentlemen, until they come back to me by some other means, like the movie Born on the Fourth of July.
Or because he was the only one of my crew members who ever was killed, Robert Barron.
Or because he was an unmitigated coward And when I took him on patrol with me, he laid down on the deck and refused to get up the entire night and disgraced himself in front of his men, our commanding officer, Lieutenant Smith.
But all of the others are like wisps in my mind.
I can see their faces.
I can remember every moment that I ever spent with them.
But try as I might, I cannot remember their names.
Because that is a defense mechanism that we all had.
And when we left, we didn't want to remember.
And we didn't want to know.
And now that all these years have passed, I spend most of my time trying to remember and trying to know.
And I know that for most of them, I never will.
I hope that I've given you all some new sense of what war is all about.
And what it means to march off as a young man or a young woman with this incredible spirit in your heart, wanting to serve and sacrifice and be what your fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers were.
And then to experience the total and utter and terrible reality of it all.
Many of you out there are looking for a war right now.
And I'm telling you that if you ever get it, you will wish you had never even heard the word.
Good night, ladies and gentlemen.
Good night.
Remember all of those who have sacrificed, no matter the consequence.
For in their heart it was real and it was noble.
God bless you all.
God bless you all.
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