by Michael T. Nola | Special to the Courier

Retired and bored silly during the first year of the COVID-19 lockdown, I went to our desktop and on to Google and decided to look for the A Shau Valley in Vietnam, the site of my last operation there, Operation Summerset Plain, one of the 101st Airborne’s several moves into that valley and central to the NVA supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Zooming in, past the first views showing the Pacific Ocean and the Asian continent, I saw something I could not believe: while the general geography was all too familiar, the features of human habitation told me it could not possibly be the same.

Back in July 1968, I was an artillery observer on Firebase Berchtesgaden for five weeks, about two of those weeks before the real move into the valley began. From our position on the east rim of the valley the only signs of human presence were an abandoned triangular shaped Special Forces camp that had been overrun back in 1966. Right where the valley narrowed as it went northerly, I could see a dirt runway that had served the camp, a dirt road that ran through the valley, an NVA underground facility from which I could see smoke coming out of vents, and unseen, but there, a tunnel of some sort from which NVA artillery shelled us, occasional firefights with the NVA, and, often as not, in the morning, our claymores turned around, and now facing us, courtesy of our NVA neighbors. The rest of the landscape, other than the triple canopy forest on the easterly side, was bomb crater after bomb crater, often bomb crater inside bomb crater and areas where the elephant grass, taller than any man, still grew.

In the two weeks or so before the main force went in, the valley was hit by multiple B-52 runs, the earth shaking miles from their impact, rounds I directed from our artillery and “Puff the Magic Dragon” gunships firing 6,000 .30 caliber rounds a minute, every fifth round a tracer, which, at night, made a solid red laser like line followed seconds later by a growling roar.

But now, in 2020, all I saw was homes and businesses throughout the valley. So I zoomed out, going easterly, and saw what I could not deny, Hue and the Perfume River.

Going back to the valley, I panned around and there, about four miles southwest from where our firebase had been, was a tourist attraction for Dong Ap Bia, Hamburger Hill, where in May of 1969 the 101st had lost 72 killed and 372 wounded taking that hill, only to leave it within days.

The American political elite of this country have a worldview shaped by our position in the world that was caused by the aberration of World War II, where the U.S. had 50% of the global gross domestic product and the other powerful nations of the world had been weakened. Today, our share of the global GDP is around 17% and shrinking, and other nations — notably the People’s Republic of China —  have eschewed wars and concentrated on real economic growth, not financial gimmicks that in the words of convicted Goldman Sachs derivatives trader Fabrice Toure, are “mental masturbation.”

This new reality is not accepted in D.C., where without fail they pursue a global military hegemony that we have no right to or ability to achieve, and find ways to deflect from the fact of our dismal military record since WWII by saying we weren’t allowed to win, or the military was too woke, or DEI, or the military wasn’t lethal enough, in Pete Hegseth’s words.

This is nonsense.

Other than the invasion Afghanistan in 2001 after 9/11, a war that should have lasted no more than four to six months, we have conducted wars of choice, often spurred by the blowback of earlier failures, and, other than Gulf War I where we faced a third rate Iraqi army positioned in open desert terrain with no air cover, the results have been dismal.

Many years ago, a Taliban official, while negotiating with Americans, gave us the answer when he said, “You have the watches, we have the time.” That is the lesson; never fight a war of choice against a foe who sees it as existential. If war is to be fought, the entire nation must sacrifice; taxes raised to pay for it by us, not future generations, and a national draft starting with the richest and going down the economic ladder as needed. And, by all means, not given tax cuts and told to go shopping.

Michael T. Nola, 78, is a Vietnam veteran of the 101st Airborne Division and a 34-year Claremont resident.