Not quite, but that day is coming soon. Below is an opinion piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times last year, just before the total hit 1,000. For various reasons it was never published, but it is still relevant today as far as I am concerned.


FORT ORD, CALIFORNIA—It was like walking through a ghost town. The derelict brown and green barracks at this former U.S. Army base, which during the 1960s and 1970s were home to tens of thousands of soldiers training to fight in Vietnam, were abandoned a decade ago. The narrow street where I, a basic trainee in the class of 1969, once stood for Reveille in the bitter morning cold, is now buckled and cracked by the weeds that push through the gray asphalt. In 1994, the 7th Infantry Division, which once occupied this scenic 45 square miles on the Monterey Peninsula, was partly deactivated and partly relocated to other forts. Under the auspices of the Fort Ord Reuse Authority, the sand dunes where we practiced marksmanship with our M-16 rifles have been turned into a public beach, while a sizeable parcel of the fort’s inland real estate is being subdivided into a mix of residential and commercial properties. Another large section is now occupied by California State University Monterey Bay. The inland forests, where we once held war games and camped out under the stars, will be left in their natural state.

I easily found my old outfit, even though the company logos had been removed and all the barracks looked pretty much the same. All I had to do was stand with my back to the boarded up Doughboy Theater, where we flocked to see movies on Friday nights, and walk up four rows of barracks to find the mess hall where I worked as a cook. Nearly all of the G.I.’s who subsisted on my cuisine (the Army cookbook had an excellent apple pie recipe to feed 100) later shipped out to Vietnam. Many died there, in a war that millions of Americans had already concluded was morally and politically wrong.

In fact, my own reason for being at Fort Ord was to help build this growing anti-war movement right on the base. As a student activist at UCLA, I belonged to a wing of the radical Students for a Democratic Society which advocated joining the Army to organize the G.I.’s. In those days, the U.S. military filled most of its swelling ranks with the draft, from which students were generally exempt. I turned in my student deferment to my local draft board, which promptly accomodated me with an induction notice. On a rainy day in November 1969, I kissed my girlfriend goodbye in front of the Los Angeles induction center and boarded a bus full of nervous draftees bound for Fort Ord.
Over the 17 months I was stationed here, I found that the great majority of soldiers were not only receptive to my anti-war message but had begun questioning on their own why they were being sent to Vietnam. The rationales given by the Johnson and Nixon administrations for the Vietnam War seemed increasingly flimsy; and as we now know from the publication of the Pentagon Papers and many similar sources, they were based on a thin tissue of lies. Those G.I.’s who did resist my arguments seldom did so on the basis of contrary facts. The Army did not rely on facts to get them to fight. It relied heavily on racism, on exhortations to go over there and kill the “gooks.” It also counted on patriotism. We were also told that we were fighting for “freedom,” although exactly whose freedom was not always clear. As murky as the rationale seemed to be, some soldiers found it hard to believe that the government would send them to Vietnam to fight and possibly die unless it had a very good reason—or would it?

Before long I was just one among several leaders of a growing anti-war group on the base. The Army tolerated our activities for some time, possibly because they did not want anyone to think you could get out of the military just by passing out leaflets. Yet when we staged a demonstration of 100 uniformed G.I.’s at Monterey’s Fisherman’s Wharf one Saturday afternoon, the brass decided enough was enough. Our group was broken up and we were scattered to new posts as far-flung as Texas, Alaska, and Vietnam. A couple of us, including myself, were discharged “for the good of the Army.”

Another time, another war. Back then, we were supposedly fighting the War on Communism. Now we are fighting the War on Terrorism. Once again young American men, this time joined by young American women, are being sent to die in Iraq. And once again, nearly everything our government has told us about this war has turned out to be, at best, factually incorrect. Many critics would go so far as to say that we have been lied to again. This time, we don’t need to wait for secret documents to judge whether or not that is the case. We already know from numerous sources, including the administration’s own former Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, that President George W. Bush and other members of his cabinet began planning to attack Iraq from their very first days in office, many months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And as the interviews with G.I.’s in Michael Moore’s new film “Fahrenheit 9/11” demonstrate, our soldiers are once again questioning why they are being put in harm’s way.
Just as in Vietnam, American soldiers are being used as cannon fodder in a war launched on false pretenses and justified by dishonest arguments. And just as in Vietnam, the government is relying on the patriotism and good faith of our nation’s young people—their natural willingness to defend their country and their reluctance to believe that they would be sent off to die for no good reason—to carry out the no longer very hidden agenda of a small group of government officials.

By the time the Vietnam War ended, more than 50,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Vietnamese had been killed. When the dead reach this order of magnitude, we can perhaps be excused if we no longer see their individual faces. Nevertheless, I remember the faces of many of the soldiers I fed at Ford Ord, and I can read some of their names etched in marble when I visit the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. The U.S. military does not count the thousands of Iraqi deaths—neither civilian nor military--and so they too remain largely faceless to us. Meanwhile, the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq is now approaching 900, a large number, but not so large that they have become anonymous. Those leaders who have squandered the lives of these men and women and left their families devastated with grief, those who have demonstrated how cheaply they value the life of an American soldier, must be stopped, and stopped now.