Rejoice, O young man in thy youth...(Ecclesiastes 11;9) More than 55,000 American soldiers, average age, 19-years-old were killed in the Vietnam War.
'I'm glad you have a one-day peace in Vietnam because of Christmas. I hope that you could have peace there all the time,' Larry Jacobs, 6-years-old wrote in 1972.
For the children of war, hunger, fear and death are as regular as the seasons. To see children of war, is to seek peace. The Vietnam War is not unique in its sacrifice of the young, think of all the children who died in World War I and World War II.
Think of all the children who died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen during World War II, The Atomic Bomb that killed very young kids in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yes, think. Betty Jean Lifton & Thomas C. Fox wrote in their 1972 book, "Children Of Vietnam."
On Aug, 5, 1945, the U.S. dropped the uranium A-bomb on Hiroshima. The U.S. dropped the same bomb on Nagasaki just four days later that same year. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/24/secondworldwar.japan
The two bombings killed well over a 125,000 innocent people. The A-bomb raised the surface temperature to 4,000-degrees Celsius, and the intense and ferocious heat vaporized its victims, including children whose internal organs boiled and their bones were charred into brittle charcoal, yet the insanity of humanity allows wars to carry on.
"We do not ask to be rich. We ask only that our family gather together at night and sleep together in peace," a Vietnamese woman with a husband and children said. A quote from the the book, "Children of Vietnam."
In the 1960s and early 70s, it was common for Vietnamese children to lose their arms and legs to American bombings, to be shot in the cross-fire of brain washed soldiers, seen two or three to a hospital bed with burned skin from Napalm, while other children stepped on exploding land mines.
'If only the children could have had the stars, the flowers and the butterflies, instead of the war,' Phuong Trieu wrote in "The School On the Front Line."
Freaks and geeks, we futility fantasize about a world without wars, but the harsh reality of the very rich profiting endlessly from wars will never end, greed rules, sad to say.
"Humanity is mad! What a massacre...Hell cannot be so terrible, men are mad!" a French officer from World War I said.
The poor across the universe need to stop feeding into the lies our sadistic world leaders tell the media, and cease fighting in the trench laden battle fields, and end all bombings. My dreams are old, but I'll always prefer flowers and sunshine over war, and wish that every child in the world could be safe.
"It's utter craziness and so frustrating to watch our leaders operate with so little regard to human life," Jesse Ventura said in his 2010 book, "American Conspiracies."
