PINE NUTS: Operation Stairwell
I have this idea, let’s call it, “Operation Stairwell,” whereby a private in the United States Marine Corps breaks bread with a Seaman Recruit in the Iranian Navy. They carry on a 10-minute conversation, airing personal feelings about the lingering war…
The conversation is recorded in full, and a second conversation over another meal commences between a Private First Class in the Marine Corps and a Seaman Apprentice in the Iranian Navy…
And so it goes, up the chain of command, until we have accounts of the war from the very bottom to the very top. Statesmen can then begin brokering a ceasefire…
To prevent propaganda agents from meddling in this process, participants will be selected at random. I shall select them myself…
History tells us what the generals were thinking, though we seldom get to hear from the ground-pounders, so let’s put a stop to hearing patriotic comments for public consumption, and never hearing the whispers of private opinion.
Today’s chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, tells us that every problem is an engineering problem: Study inputs, study constraints, get outputs. Okay, let’s engineer this thing…
Of the 195 or so countries in the world today, not one harbors a majority of citizens whose desire it is to kill citizens of another country, yet we have two wars lingering, with no sign of abatement. While in the Marine Corps, serving in Vietnam, I didn’t want to kill anybody. I was told it was necessary for various nefarious reasons like the domino theory.
On one particular evening we were digging in for the night next to an old deserted French church. One wall of the church was still standing. and just as we started taking some incoming mortar fire, we sent up some night-illuminating flares that drifted slowly back to earth on little parachutes. As it happened, that solitary church wall was adorned with stained-glass windows that one after another were illuminated by our descending flares, creating a slideshow that told a story of Peace on Earth. Under the circumstances, that slideshow made me smile at the irony of it all…
I wrote a book about our year of fighting and trying to stay alive in Vietnam, and called it, How Audie Murphy Died in Vietnam. The intimation being that because we were not in it for the duration, as Audie Murphy was in WWII, our emotional condition was, well, let’s just say…dissimilar.
If we could have had an Operation Stairwell in 1966, I firmly believe we could have been out of Vietnam a year sooner. We need to hear from the grunts, and until we do, we will continue to let the politicians declare the wars, and order the young Turks to go fight them…
So let’s hear it from the bilges to the wheelhouses, and let the peace negotiations begin. It’s time for Operation Stairwell to unveil what war means to the warriors who are fighting it, and put a stop to the killing…
