Last week, Marine veterans met at the Dole Institute of Politics to celebrate the Marine Corps birthday. However, the ceremony this year was more subdued with a different feeling, a somber mood, not celebratory as before. The veterans were aware at the very moment they were celebrating in Lawrence, other young Marines were fast becoming combat veterans and casualties in another war in a far off land, an extension of America’s political process.

Most notable was a particular uneasiness with Vietnam combat veterans like myself (Captain, USMC, Vietnam 1968). Vietnam is today ancient history, a war that was so unnecessary, such a needless waste of sacrificing 58,000 children on the altar of our national honor.

These deaths meant nothing. Despite our generation’s death and sacrifice, today’s world is no safer. Our government leaders incessantly clamor justification for their new war, bending questionable truths with alarm, warning against “terrorists,” “evil-doers,” “weapons of mass destruction,” stirring up hatred and fears against the unknown, hypothesizing disaster and calamity, emphasizing God is on our side and the necessity of “standing tall.” The administration has lost perspective and forgotten the lessons of wars past.

The legacy of Vietnam proved a small country that believes in self-determination and is willing to fight and die for it can never truly be conquered. The Vietnamese proved themselves willing to give up everything, including their lives to survive. They had no choice; they had no place else to go.

Today, in Iraq, our country is on the verge of repeating the Vietnam experience. Every day, a new body count; every night in the darkness, casualties are quietly flown in. There is a growing awareness of this unfolding tragedy in America, a feeling of vulnerability, helplessness and impotence to act or speak up against the constant bullying and pressure of our confrontational, aggressive government that doggedly insist this war is the only answer to their fears.

There is a picture taken by astronauts of an earthrise. A green-brown blue cloud-specked planet drifting through the vastness of deep space in quiet solitude. Our earth is a lonely entity without borders and countries, biases, prejudices or hate. It is without fear. There is no evidence of politics, religions, cultures or tribes of man. It is void of human allegories toward metaphorical gods. Earth is a small planet, our home, solitary floating through the deep cosmos as tiny, as fragile and as alone as its inhabitants.

Perhaps we inhabitants might try during our short span on Earth to just try to make the Earth a little better, to improve all of mankind’s condition, to strive to uplift the unfortunate, to simply live and let live, so all Earth’s children and their children’s children can someday live together in peace, not die together in war.

For we on this Earth are all in this together; we have no choice; we have no place else to go

Curtis Bennett lives in Lawrence.