Beguiled aviation buffs, bend your deaf ears.
In Vietnam, the sound of a helicopter usually
meant death—-swift, sinister, yet anything but
silent. While over 58,000 American servicemen
died fighting in Vietnam, more than 2.1 million
Vietnamese died on native soil. That’s a ratio
of 35:1. Proportional to respective populaces,
1959-75, the difference is astronomical (171:1).
If the war occurred here, we would have lost
almost 10 million people (today, 16.4 million).
Yet Americans rarely think about that, or face
the fact that the war was not only immoral but
genocidal—as were the “incursions” into Laos,
Cambodia, and all of the undeclared wars fought
since then, not for liberty but for pecuniary gain.
You want helicopter music? Stockhausen is too
cerebral, and wastes far too much precious fuel.
Try Wagner–it worked for Francis Ford Coppola.
Poetry? Forget “America the Beautiful.” Read
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Dien Cai Dau” (Wesleyan U.
Press, 1988), a first-person account in verse by
a U.S. soldier who endured endless horrors in
Southeast Asia, and lived to tell the cautionary
tale, blades and all (pp. 26, 31, 47, 49, 51).
The title means “crazy in the head,” which fits
the mentality of armed conflict, and those who
profit from it at the expense of those who risk
their lives to make the world safe for oligarchy.
The whir of a helicopter is more ominous than
the screech of a Soviet missile striking a U-2
spy plane, or so Francis Gary Powers must have
felt taking a last breath amid the smog of death.
The evil that genius does still haunts its shades.
What would Leonardo make of Igor Sikorsky, or
any of his successors? What started out as an
egg beater with rotary blades (ornithopter sketch,
1485) became a way to make omelets by breaking
heads, only to send medevac units to gather the
human shells and transport them to their graves.
What’s next? Veterans Day should be a national
rite of atonement, not of mutual back-slapping;
a day devoted to remembrance of sins past, not
bloated with sentiment and nostalgic worship of
technological idols. Stop applauding America and
start demystifying it, before it’s too late for tears.
The false choppers you rescue may be your own.