Things That Make you go HMMMMMM 🤔

Dr Hal Kushner served with the 1st Squadron, 9th US Cavalry, 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam. He was captured today in 1967 just west of Tam Ky. The Viet Cong returned him home 6 years later to his wife and children in a prisoner exchange. He remained in the Army until 1986 when he retired at the rank of Colonel.

“We prisoners endured unspeakable horror, brutality and deprivation, and saw and experienced things no human should ever witness. Our mortality rate was almost 60%.

I cradled 20 dying men in my arms as they breathed their last and spoke of home and family; then we buried them in crude graves, marked with stones and bamboo, and eulogized them with words of sunshine and hope, country and family. The eulogies were for the survivors of course; they always are.

At my release in Hanoi six years later, I was shocked by the hair and dress of the reporters. Once home, I saw television and movies with frank profanity and sex. When I first deployed, Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds. I left Ozzie and Harriet and returned to Taxi Driver. What happened to my country? Why did we suffer and sacrifice?

When my helicopter crashed in 1967, I collided with one planet and returned to another. The Vietnam War, which was about one-fifth of the casualties of World War II but had lasted three times as long, had changed the country as much as the greatest cataclysm in world history. It had changed forever the way we think of government and ourselves. The country had lost its innocence - and, for a time, its confidence.
This war, which had such a great impact on my life, is a dim memory today. There are over 58,000 names on that wall, and it rates but a few pages in a high school history book.” - Hal Kushner, 1/9 USC, 1st Cav Div, Hanoi Hilton survivor.