Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel Learned To Hate War In The Jungles Of Vietnam!

 

 

 

Brothers Thomas and Chuck Hagel in Vietnam

President Obama won another victory this week by simply out waiting those who would hold up the appointment of a dog catcher if it came from Obama. Former Republican United States Senator Chuck Hagel was confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense. In taking the post this week, he becomes the first 'grunt' ever to hold that position.

The new Secretary volunteered to join his peers in going to Vietnam. The Secretary fought side by side with his brother Thomas. He was wounded twice and received two purple hearts and seven other medals. He was in the jungles of Vietnam when there was the most intense fighting of that War.

The experience left him forever a skeptic when it came to committing America's sons and daughters to foreign adventures.

Hagel said in TIME Magazine that "War is not an abstraction. I know. I have been to war."

ForeignPolicy.com has an article by Charlyne Berens that examines Hagel's innate hostility to sending troops into unnecessary wars. She writes.

"Hagel said he will never forget Dec. 4, 1967, the day his troop transport landed at Ton Son Hut air base. "It was oppressive heat like I'd never known -- and the humidity and stench.… I was physically sick to my stomach." And, like his comrades in arms, he was scared.

After a few weeks of jungle school, his unit was moved to the Mekong Delta, and Hagel was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry, Bravo Company. Most of the soldiers' orders were for search-and-destroy missions. Based on intelligence, the officers would know the Viet Cong were in certain areas, and the squad would be sent out to find the VC. And destroy them.

Sometimes Hagel and his squad patrolled bridges or roads. Sometimes they would do night outpost work. "They would be almost suicide missions," Hagel said. "If anything happened, the base would never hear from you again."

A group of three soldiers would be sent into the jungle to establish a listening post, trying to discover any major enemy troop movement and to alert the company if an attack was on the way. The outposts had to maintain radio silence, so they communicated with the base camp by simply pushing a button on the radio.

In the pitch dark, all the troops at the outpost could do was listen. Any detection the squad would do was by sound, not sight. "In the jungle at night," Hagel said, "you cannot see your hand in front of your face."

One of those night outpost assignments, Hagel said, became an encounter that frightened him more than anything before or since.

Following standard operating procedure, one of the three soldiers stood watch while the other two slept on their tarps. Early one morning when Hagel was standing watch, he heard a clang. At first, he thought it was a cow bell. Then he realized what he was hearing was no herd of cows but a large group of Viet Cong, moving equipment right in front him. He actually heard whispered conversation in Vietnamese.

"It was so close you could almost reach out and touch them," he said.

He woke his two squad members, covering their mouths with his hands so they wouldn't cry out.

"Grab your rifle; grab my boot and crawl," he whispered.

The three soldiers slithered out in a human chain, Hagel leading the way. "We knew the VC were coming right on top of us, getting closer and closer."

Hagel had the radio with him, and once the squad was well away from the Viet Cong, he called the base camp to report what had happened. They were ordered to stay outside the base camp that night, in case they were being followed.

When it was daylight, they went back to try to retrieve what they had left behind a few hours earlier. Everything was gone. "The VC had been there and had picked it all up," Hagel said. The story was still frightening when Hagel told it decades later. But that encounter didn't end in injury the way two others did."

Chuck Hagel In Vietnam

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In March 1968, the brothers were walking an ambush patrol when the soldiers at the front of the column tripped a booby trap, and mines full of shrapnel, planted in trees, exploded all around the troops. That time Tom saved Chuck's life, wrapping cloths around Chuck's chest to stop extensive bleeding. The former senator still has some of that shrapnel in his chest.

A month later, after the brothers had recovered in an Army hospital, they were riding in a personnel carrier when a land mine exploded under the vehicle. Chuck thought Tom, the turret gunner, had been killed by the blast. He started pulling Tom and others from the carrier, trying to get everyone out before the ammunition in the carrier blew up. But he was still too close when the inevitable explosion came and set him on fire, burning his face severely. Tom survived, but, again, the Hagel boys were on their way to the hospital together.

Chuck Hagel remembers it well, lying in a medevac helicopter, waiting to be airlifted out of the jungle and listening to Linda Ronstadt singing on the radio: "You and I travel to the beat of a different drum." And Hagel remembers saying to himself, "If I ever get out, and if I ever can influence anything, I will do all I can to prevent war."

Almost 40 years later, the memory was still fresh. "Not that I'm a pacifist," he said. "I'm a hard-edged realist. I understand the world as it is. But war is a terrible thing. There's no glory, only suffering."

Some things are worth fighting and dying for, Hagel said, but going to war should be a last resort."

Afghanistan: Faces of War

 

 

 

For the first time since I have started Faces of War there were no deaths last week. The war in Iraq has ended and we are rapidly pulling down our troops in Afghanistan. We currently have fallen below the 60,000 figure!. Thank you President Obama.

VIDEO: National Geographic Explains Mali Crisis In Just Six Minutes

 

 

The newspapers have been filled with the crisis in Northern Africa both in the hostage situation in Algeria and the civil war in Mali. Over the last years, DavidMixner.com has written often about the dangers of the failed nation states and terrorism. The geographic boundaries created by colonists have guaranteed the current tribal, ethnic and religious battles that are raging in Africa.

The focus in on Northern Africa currently but civil war rages in Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Syria, the Congo and Chad. In addition, increasing violence is taking place in Nigeria which has the potential to be the largest nation in the world to fail as a nation state. This is a good start for you all to start learning about this hotbed of activity.

DavidMixner.com promises to continue its coverage of Africa, failed nation states and terrorism both for ideological and economical reasons.  For some reasons, having problems with embedded code, so sorry, please cut and paste here to see this outstanding video

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/culture-places-news/mali-crisis-gwin2-vin/

Foreign Policy Picks This Years Top 100 Global Thinkers

 

 

Foreign Policy has picked the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2012. These are the people that greatly enhanced the marketplace of ideas. They challenged us to look at the world differently and made remarkable change on this planet as a result. Here are the top five of the 100 picked by Foreign Policy and you can find all 100 by clicking here.

1. Aung San Suu Kyi (Member of Parliament in Burma):

Fittingly, Aung San Suu Kyi finally was able to accept her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in June. She used the occasion to remind the world of those like her, who struggle in the most forlorn places: "To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity." It is a sentiment still felt from Aleppo to Havana, Pyongyang to Tehran, but also, as Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein have shown, one that doesn't need to be permanent.

2. President Moncef Marzouki (Tunisia):

As the spirit of 2011 has faded this year amid religious violence in Egypt and Libya and the bloody sectarian civil war in Syria, Tunisia remains the Arab Spring's most promising success story, with a contentious but robust political system and an economy that is growing again.

Much of the credit goes to President Moncef Marzouki, who has provided vision and wisdom since taking office in December 2011. At the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September, the doctor-turned-democracy-activistcalled on the United Nations to declare dictatorship a "disease" and launch an official campaign against autocratic rulers, including the establishment of an international court to arbitrate elections and government legitimacy so as to prevent dictators from taking power in the first place. "It behooves us to implement an ambitious, bold program to eliminate dictatorship in the same way in which we got rid of polio and smallpox," Marzouki said.

3. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Love them or hate them, America's ultimate power couple are also its most effective advocates for liberal internationalism: a vision that government can build prosperity at home and promote democracy and development abroad without demonizing the successful or needlessly antagonizing other countries. It's a different kind of American exceptionalism, based on more than just firepower. And in a U.S. election year that often felt like Randian revanchism vs. opportunistic populism on economics and chest-thumping aggression vs. coldhearted realism on foreign policy, it's no wonder that America is in the grips of a serious case of Clinton nostalgia

4. Computer Scientist Sebastain Thrun (Palo Alto)

Not since Henry Ford's Model T brought driving to the American masses at the turn of the 20th century has a motor vehicle so promised to revolutionize global transportation. Hydrogen and electric cars once seemed poised to fill that void, but their costs and upkeep have proved prohibitive. Enter the driverless car, the brainchild of Google fellow and Stanford University computer scientist Sebastian Thrun -- and now street-legal.

5. Bill and Melinda Gates

By 2020, she announced this year, the Gates Foundation will invest $560 million in improving access to birth control, and it plans to raise roughly $4 billion from outside donors. Most will be spent in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where access to contraceptives is not widespread and maternal and infant mortality rates are devastatingly high. Contraceptive use already prevents 272,000 maternal deaths per year, but millions of women around the world still lack access to modern family planning -- precisely the void Gates has taken bold steps to fill.

PHOTOJOURNALISM: A Day In The Life Of A Belarusian Soldier

 

 

BuisinessInsider.com recently ran a photography essay on the life of young recruits who must serve in the Belarusian military Belarus is a dictatorship that is sandwiched between Russia and Poland. When the Soviet Empire broke up it remained one of the most Stalinist of all the former Soviet nations.

Young conscripts must serve at least twelve months a year. Here is a glimpse not only into an unknown area but the life of a young soldier in a repressive society.

Chris Geidner: State Department Warns Uganda On "Kill The Gays" Legislation

 

 

Assistant Secretary of State For African Affairs Johnnie Carson

Top notch journalist Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed.com has a breaking story about the emergence of the United States Department of State into frenzy surrounding the horrific proposed "Kill The Gays" legislation in Uganda. Powerful Assistant Secretary of State Of African Affairs Johnnie Carson (photograph above) was personally in Uganda this past weekend.

From a briefing conducted by Department spokeswomen Victoria Nuland, BuzzFeed.com published the following questions and answers. Geidner writes:

QUESTION: Yeah, I have a question on Uganda, actually. There’s an anti-homosexuality bill that’s making its way through the legislature right there. What is the State Department’s current assessment of where that bill is and if that’s going to be headed toward a vote anytime soon?

MS. NULAND: Again, Assistant Secretary Carson was also in Uganda over the weekend. He had a chance to raise again our concerns about this issue, which we’ve been very vocal about. Our understanding is that a version of the bill has now passed a committee in Uganda. As we have regularly said, we call on the parliament in Uganda to look very carefully at this, because Uganda’s own human rights council has made clear that if this were to pass, it would put the country out of compliance with its own international human rights obligations. And so Assistant Secretary Carson had a chance to make that point again and our strong opposition to this, to the president, to the parliament, and to key decision makers in Uganda.

QUESTION: And there was – and once the bill had a provision that would institute the death penalty for homosexual acts. As far as the State Department knows, has that provision been removed or is it still in the bill?

MS. NULAND: Again, I don’t know that we have actually seen the version that passed committee. They’ve been a little bit close hold about this, partly because there’s been so much controversy in the international community. So our concern is about any criminalization of homosexuality, obviously.

QUESTION: And one last question. Some countries, Britain and Sweden, have threatened to cut foreign aid to Uganda if this bill becomes law. Is there any consideration in the U.S. Administration to cut foreign aid to Uganda if that bill becomes law?

MS. NULAND: Again, I’m not going to get into any hypothetical situations. Our focus now is on raising awareness of the concerns within Uganda about this bill so that we don’t get to that stage.

* * *

QUESTION: On this, Toria. Did Secretary Carson meet with the speaker of the parliament?

MS. NULAND: My understanding is he did see the speaker of the parliament, whether it was in a larger group or whether it was a distinct meeting that he did, yes.

QUESTION: But he – so he made that point directly to her?

MS. NULAND: Yes, he did.

"ECONOMIST: 'Hecho en Mexico' "

 

 

 

For many (including myself) the last couple of years have made us wonder if Mexico was on the verge of becoming a failed nation state. The violence and horror of the drug wars have darken and kept hidden the fact that Mexico's economy is booming. In fact, "Hecho en Mexico" will soon replace "Made in China".

The Economist has issued a really encouraging economic report on Mexico. Here is an excerpt from their editorial.

"The White House does not spend much time looking south. During six hours of televised campaign debates this year, neither Mr Obama nor his vice-president mentioned Mexico directly. That is extraordinary. One in ten Mexican citizens lives in the United States. Include their American-born descendants and you have about 33m people (or around a tenth of America’s population). And Mexico itself is more than the bloody appendix of American imaginations. In terms of GDP it ranks just ahead of South Korea. In 2011 the Mexican economy grew faster than Brazil’s—and will do so again in 2012.

Yet Americans are gloomy about Mexico, and so is their government: three years ago Pentagon analysts warned that Mexico risked becoming a “failed state”. As our special report in this issue explains, that is wildly wrong. In fact, Mexico’s economy and society are doing pretty well. Even the violence, concentrated in a few areas, looks as if it is starting to abate.

Mañana in Mexico

The first place where Americans will notice these changes is in their shopping malls. China (with more than 60 mentions in the presidential debates) is by far the biggest source of America’s imports. But wages in Chinese factories have quintupled in the past ten years and the oil price has trebled, inducing manufacturers focused on the American market to set up closer to home. Mexico is already the world’s biggest exporter of flat-screen televisions, BlackBerrys and fridge-freezers, and is climbing up the rankings in cars, aerospace and more. On present trends, by 2018 America will import more from Mexico than from any other country. “Made in China” is giving way to “Hecho en México”.

The doorway for those imports is a 2,000-mile border, the world’s busiest. Yet some American politicians are doing their best to block it, out of fear of being swamped by immigrants. They could hardly be more wrong. Fewer Mexicans now move to the United States than come back south. America’s fragile economy (with an unemployment rate nearly twice as high as Mexico’s) has dampened arrivals and hastened departures. Meanwhile, the make-up of Mexican migration is changing. North of the border, legal Mexican residents probably now outnumber undocumented ones. The human tide may turn along with the American economy, but the supply of potential border-hoppers has plunged: whereas in the 1960s the average Mexican woman had seven children, she now has two. Within a decade Mexico’s fertility rate will fall below America’s. Undervaluing trade and overestimating immigration has led to bad policies. Since September 11th 2001, crossing the border has taken hours where it once took minutes, raising costs for Mexican manufacturers (and thus for American consumers). Daytrips have fallen by almost half. More crossing-points and fewer onerous checks would speed things up on the American side; pre-clearance of containers and passengers could be improved if Mexico were less touchy about having American officers on its soil (something which Canada does not mind). After an election in which 70% of Latinos voted for Mr Obama, even America’s “wetback”-bashing Republicans should now see the need for immigration-law reform."

Top Ten Countries With Most Women In Parliament!

 

 

In the recent elections here in America, the results in New Hampshire created history. For the first time in American history women held the Governorship, both U.S. Senators and every Congressional seats!

In this session of Congress, women made up about 17% of the seats both in the House and the Senate. With this year's elections, the numbers will increase. However, this nation has a long way to go to catch-up with other nations around the world.

Here is a list of the top ten nations with the most women in their national legislatures. The figure following the country is the percentage of women serving .

1. Rwanda (49%)
2. Sweden (45%)
3. Denmark (38%)
4. Finland (38%)
5. Netherlands (37%)
6. Norway (36%)
7. Cuba (36%)
8. Belgium (35%)
9. Costa Rica (35%)
10. Austria (34%)

Meet China's New First Lady - Peng Liyuan

 

 

 

For the first time since Madame Mao, the notorious wife of Mao Zedong, China will have a visible and well known First Lady. She is the wife of China's new President Xi Jinping and she is famous in her own right. Peng Liyuan is a famous singer of traditional Chinese and Party folk tunes. Britian's Independent newspaper writes:

Known to hundreds of millions of Chinese for her career as a singer of stirring folk tunes, Peng Liyuan's fame has long eclipsed that of her husband, China's next president, Xi Jinping – which may be one reason the pop star has been keeping a low profile.

Ms Peng, 49, a civilian member of the army's musical troupe and charity worker, is not China's typical first lady, as anyone who has seen her sing during the annual Chinese New Year special on state television can attest. This is one of the world's most-watched TV programmes.

"If this were the West, one would say [Ms Peng] has the perfect requirements for being a leader's wife: beauty, stage presence, public approval," one party intellectual told The Washington Post. "But things are different in China."

While a Western spin doctor might be chomping at the bit to get Ms Peng on to the world stage, her fame presents the leadership with the challenge of how to marshal her skills and fame, without allowing her to gain more public influence than is comfortable for China's political elite.

Here is a video of her singing and she enters at about the one minute mark.

The War And Horror In The African Nation Of Mali

 

 

In March of this year, the African nation of Mali suffered a military coup that left the nation void of leadership. After a very short period three militant Islamic groups seized control of the northern sector of the country which has led to widespread horror. Al Qaeda, Ansar Dine and Islamic Maghreb has implemented their extreme interpretation of Sharia law in the north and begun the process of severe repression and destruction of historic sites.

The Tuareg people has long envision a greater nation that would include portions of a number of countries. The long term Tuareg has been infiltrated and taken over by Islamic terrorists.

Many of the insurgents fled Libya after the toppling of the Gaddafi regime. They served as his personal army of terror within that nation. Fears exist in bordering African nations that the situation in Mali could put their stability at stake. Already Nigeria is extremely concerned about the increasing violence in its eleven Islamic states in its northern sector. Chad, Algeria, Libya, Mauritania and other nations along the boundary of the Sahara Desert also have had increasing problems with presence of Islamic extremist groups stirring unrest.

The United Nations Security Council has voted to take measures to force out the extremists from northern Mali. American drones have been involved but will not be sending troops. France is leading the charge for action against the rebels but also not be committing military personnel. The UN will most likely support a mostly African Union mission of 10,000 to 13,000 troops to assist the Mali army of taking back the lost territory.

The rebels strongholds are in the historically rich cities of Timbuktu and Gao. Over 300,000 people have fled the northern regions attempting to escape the brutality of the terrorist forces.

The area is home to some of the world's greatest monuments. Timbuktu has the famous building left from its age of enlightenment in the 1400's. The Great Mosque (photograph) was rebuilt in 1907. Similar to the Buddhist Statures in Afghanistan, the terrorist are in the process of destroying it and other buildings.

Salone.com writes of the horror:

"...... for the last six months has imposed a nightmare of public whippings, beatings, amputations and stonings on a helpless local population. The Islamists have drawn up ominous lists of unmarried pregnant women to be punished, the United Nations said; enforced marriages are being carried out; and children are being recruited to plant improvised explosive devices. "

Relief organizations estimate that a prolonged war in Mali could put over a half million people at risk of starvation and inability to have access to water in the arid region.