I have a woman friend who's husband is an ex Viet Nam war vet. He has a peculiar form of PTSD. Fifty years after the fact he still rants and raves about how solders were required to lose a hundred me taking a hill, withdraw, then two weeks lose another hundred men retaling the same hill. The loss of close to 70 thousand men makes no sense to him. He ist't muich fun to be around. He just explodes periodically obsessed by memories of something that makes no sense and he doesn't understand. I've decided to work with him. I've given him a copy of William Colby's book "Lost Victory" with the following introductory comments by myself:
This is by William Colby. Colby was the real thing. During WWII he was parachuted behind German lines to help organize the French resistance. He later became involved in the Viet Nam war effort. He wrote a series of books, of which this is the first, increasingly leading toward his reluctant conclusion that the war sabotaged at home by home leadership. Some believe he paid for his steady, and increasingly vocal, march toward that conclusion with his life. He was fond of kyacking on the Potomac river. He was found dead under mysterious circumstances at the river that made no sense. He was really beginning to threaten the wrong people.
The most complete examination of the Viet Nam situation was written by myself and given as part of an online course in political psychology some years ago. It is 250 pages in length. If, after reading Colby’s book, you are interested , I’ll print out a copy of the course material for you.
The crux of my contention was, and still is, that McNamara was a man obsessed with proving his megalomaniacal mental superiority. By affecting an unyielding know-it-all intimidating aggressive frightening appearance and doctoring it up with a bit of statistical jargon, he created an intimidating theatrical persona that allowed him to transfix and manipulate two presidents that were good stump-speech politicians but were too mentally childish and ideologically inadequate to do their job or deal with better actors than they were. In their stupidity, they were easily impressed and taken over by McNamara’s act.
The clever con man demonstrates his superiority over victims by being able to talk them into an obviously self- destructive situation. McNamara demonstrated his mental superiority by manipulating two presidents, and thus the entire system, into a suicidal situation. The American military was sent there to lose as a demonstration of his superiority and micromanagement. In so doing, McNamara won the greatest victory possible for an actor. He brought an entire country to its knees groveling before his austere flawlessly presented subversive theatrical performance while tens of thousands of men were killed. The results of this perverse theater, both at home and abroad, were then handed to a hamstrung helpless Richard Nixon who is still blamed, by many, as the source of the problem.
Repetition of the success of various forms of McNamara’s subversive con game has become a national sport among the untalented in this country in which people announce themselves as representing intellectual superiority by developing and selling arguments contesting basic observable reality. Megalomaniacal subversion has made substantial inroads within this nation as a consequence.
