RIPPLE SALVO… #299… PEACE ON EARTH AND GOODWILL TOWARD MEN…
Merry Christmas: Christmas Day and the TWO HUNDRED NINETY-NINTH day of a remembrance of the air war over North Vietnam…
25 DECEMBER 1966… NEW YORK TIMES…. “CHRISTMAS in VIETNAM”…
“There is a particularly poignancy about the death of the young–most of all the death in combat, where man’s age-old inhumanity to man exacts its most awful toll. War knows no age groups, of course, but it has always robbed the nation of the bravest and the best–their hope for tomorrow.
“In other wars, in other eras, poets have sung the threnodies of whole generations dead in battle, voiced the courage, the fear, the conviction, the defiance that immortalises, humanizes the terrible statistic “K.I.A.”– Killed in Action.
“There is no Rupert Brooks, or Robert Graves for Vietnam–that war is in a far away place where the humid heat blankets the soldiers from across the sea. Vietnam and it’s frustrations–a war that tries men’s souls–has inspired no great literature, developed no soldier poets.
“Yet the men who have served there–most of them in quiet anonymity–deserve their need of pride and honor, their monument to duty well performed. More than 6,400 Americans have died in the rice paddies and jungles and rain forests of Vietnam; 36,000 have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands of others are enduring this Christmas a variety of dangers, hardships or discomfort–among them a sense of emptiness that separation at Christmas time from home and family entails.
“The American soldier has, of course, a peculiar propensity for adaptation; he will create a wreath out of jungle growth, and concoct a feast out of C-rations. But to him there is no substitute for home and friends. And to families riddled by war–sons or husbands or brothers killed or maimed or absent–this Christmas will be hard to face–a view upon a blank wall.
“To all of these at Christmas time the heart of America reaches out in warm sympathy. Those who are at war, those who have suffered, those who have died–and yet dying, live–do not stand alone.”
Operation Rolling Thunder on Christmas 1966…Truce… There were no downed aircraft in Southeast Asia; there was a little bit of Peace…
Praise and adore Christ the Lord, it is Christmas…
Lest we forget….. Bear -30-