My War, by Fleabaggs

This is the most important story SLL will post this month, or maybe ever. It’s an honor to post it. Read it beginning to end and study the pictures. This is the story Americans don’t want to hear, and these are pictures from which they avert their eyes. From Fleabaggs, a Vietnam War veteran:

I have started to write this a hundred times in 49 years. I would like to have used Our War but don’t want to presume to speak for all us Nam Vets still alive who were really there for a year or more. Nor can I speak for all the families of Nam Vets and all the millions of Vietnamese whose major crime was living in Vietnam at the time.

I do presume to speak for myself and my dead buddies who told me their stories as we commiserated in a dark corner of a seedy gin mill where we had been banished. I do presume to speak for some of the families I knew and my mother and the civilians who had an impact on me while I was there. I’m going to show you a picture of a few whose story never made it to the U.S. It’s shocking so stop here if you want to remain comfortably absolved in your sweet fantasy of non-involvement. This is not about “ME,” it’s about us.

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