One day at the end of class little Billy's teacher has the class go home and
think of a story and then conclude the moral of that story....
The next day Billy tells his story....
"My dad fought in the Vietnam war, his plane was shot down over enemy
territory. He jumped out before it crashed with only a case of beer, a machine
gun and a machete. On the way down he drank the case of beer. Unfortunately he
landed right in the middle of 100 Vietnamese soldiers. He shot 70 with his
machine gun, but ran out of bullets, so he pulled out his machete and killed 20
more, but the blade on his machete broke, so he killed the last ten with his
bare hands"
Teacher looks in shock at Billy and asks if there is possibly any moral to
his story....Billy replies, "Yeah... don't mess with my dad when he's been
drinking.

My uncle Jack served in the late 60s on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger,
CVA-61, in the Tonkin Gulf off the east coast of Vietnam. Having spent his youth
with Ham radio, he became an electronics technician.  He came aboard fresh
from high school, Basic Training, and the US Navy's radio repairman's school.
In the radio shop, as probably elsewhere on the ship, in the Navy, and in
military life in general, life is regulated by a strict hierarchy. In small
organizational units, where the hierarchy is rather flat, the pecking order must
be decided by some means other than stripe count. In the Ranger's radio repair
shop, the man with the least seniority was assigned to arrive earlier in the
morning to make the coffee, so it would be ready by the time the rest of the
crew arrived.
The first morning out of port, the chief petty officer was giving him the shop
tour, focusing closely on coffee-making procedures.
"Ya see kid, first ya put eight scoops of coffee in da basket, den ya put
da water in da pot, up to dat line.  Den ya put da basket in da pot, put da
lid on, and plug it inta da bulkhead.  Ya got dat, kid?" "Yes
sir, got it."
Jack didn't drink coffee back then, and he still doesn't care much for it. 
And he didn't particularly like the idea of making the coffee for the duration
of the cruise, for everyone else to drink.  And he valued those ten extra
minutes in the rack as much as the next sailor, perhaps even more.
So the next morning, Jack put eight scoops of coffee in the filter basket. 
The next morning, nine scoops.  The morning after that, ten scoops. 
And so on...
By the end of the week, the rest of the shop was convinced that Jack, being
incapable even of making a decent pot of coffee, was dumber than the average
tree stump.  They arrived at the consensus that the honor of coffee detail
should be removed from his list of responsibilities, and given to someone more
competent.  Jack just meekly hung his head at the shame, said "yes sir"
appropriately, and enjoyed those extra ten minutes of sleep for the rest of the
cruise.

One day at the end of class little Billy's teacher has the class go home and
think of a story and then conclude the moral of that story. The following day
the teacher asks for the first volunteer to tell a story. Suzy said,
"Sunday we load the chicken eggs on the truck and drive into town to sell
them at the market. Well, one Sunday we hit a big bump and all the eggs flew out
of the basket and onto the road." The teacher asks for the moral of the
story. Suzy replies, "Don't keep all your eggs in one basket." 
Next is little Lucy. "Well, my dad owns a farm too and every weekend we
take the chicken eggs and put them in the incubator. Last weekend only 8 of the
12 eggs hatched." The teacher asks for the moral of the story. Lucy replies
"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." 
Last is little Billy. "My uncle Ted fought in the Vietnam war; his plane
was shot down over enemy territory. He jumped out before it crashed with only a
case of beer, a machine gun and a machete. On the way down he drank the case of
beer. Unfortunately, he landed right in the middle of 100 Vietnamese soldiers.
He shot 70 with his machine gun but ran out of bullets, so he pulled out his
machete and killed 20 more. The blade on his machete broke, so he killed the
last ten with his bare hands". The teacher looks in shock at Billy and asks
if there is possibly any moral to his story. Billy replies, "Don't fuck
with uncle Ted when he's been drinking."

An American, a Frenchman, and a Vietnamese refugee had a discussion about the
happiness of life. 
"To me, happiness is returning home on a Monday evening, having a
wonderful dinner prepared by my wife, then slouching on the sofa watching Monday
Night Football," the American said. 
"You Americans are not romantic at all", the French injected,
"Spending a lovely evening with my lover, walking along the Seine river,
and having a romantic dinner on top of the Eiffel tower. That is happiness of
life." 
"You call those things happiness", the Vietnamese said, "then
you two still don't understand life at all. Imagine this. You are sleeping
soundly at night in Saigon. Then suddenly you hear loud knocks on your front
door. You hear loud voices, 'Mr. Nguyen Van Binh, open the door!'. Awaked with
fear, you rush out and open the door. Right there, you see two secret policemen
ready to handcuff you. One man say to you, 'Mr. Nguyen Van Binh, you are under
arrest for your anti-revolutionary activities. You are being sent to the
re-educational camp for an undetermined period of time. Sweating profusely and
shaking uncontrollably, you reply to them, 'Comrades, Mr. Nguyen Van Binh lives
next door.' That moment is the ultimate happiness of life, my friends."

Note: The characters' speech should be spoken in a fake Asian accent. The r's
and l's should be merged into an intermediate sound.
When South Vietnam was nearing its end, and General
Minh was in charge,  a popular artist came to him and asked to make a
statue in his honor (at  government expense).
"Please, General Minh, you are the people's
hero," he told him.
"Yes, but make the sculpture in bronze,"
replied the general.
So the artist made the sculpture, but when it was
unveiled in a small  private ceremony, the general was furious.  For
the sculpture was made in  gold.
"I want bronze," he said, "I want
bronze!"
The artist went away in a hurry, deeply impressed with
this show of  humility.  But he still wanted to honor the general, so
he made the next  sculpture in silver.
But again the general was furious.
"I want bronze," he said, "I want
bronze!"
This time the artist made the sculpture out of bronze
as asked.  When  the sculpture was revealed to the general, he was
overjoyed at the wonderful  bronze likeness.  The artist then
complimented the general on his deep  humility. This notion confused him
very much.
"But why did you want sculpture made of bronze?"
"Why?  I'll tell you why," said the
general. 
"Because General Minh prefers bronze!"

A Vietnamese couple who has been married for twenty years went to the
wedding
reception of a close comrade's daughter. During the ring exchange ceremony, the
husband started to cry profusely.
The wife, surprised by her husband's emotional outburst, said, " I
didn't realize that you have so much feeling to share with your comrade's
happiness."
The husband replied, "No, you are wrong! That was not why I cried."
He continued, "Twenty years ago, your father caught us doing it, and threatened
that if I don't marry you, your VC father will put me behind bars for twenty
years. 
Weeping even louder, the husband said, "If I had just gone to jail, I
would've been a free man by now. I made a big mistake. "

Two Vietnamese refugees have just arrived in the United States by boat and
one says to the other, "I hear that the people of this country actually eat
dogs." "Odd," her companion replies, "but if we shall live in America, we might
as well do as the Americans do."
Nodding emphatically, one of the refugees points to a hot dog vendor and they
both walk toward the cart. "Two dogs, please," she says.
The vendor is only too pleased to oblige, wraps both hot dogs in foil and
hands them over the counter. Excited, the companions hurry to a bench and begin
to unwrap their "dogs."
One of them opens the foil and begins to blush. Staring at it for a moment,
she turns to her friend and whispers cautiously, "What part did you get?"

10) Viet Nam was a jungle war; Desert Storm is a desert war. (as noted by
V.P. Quayle)
9) The U.S. is not the world's most profligate waster of rice.
8) We are not killing Vietnamese women and children in Desert Storm.
7) The White House wasn't smart enough to come up with a catchy name for the
Viet Nam war.
7') Viet Nam was a conflict--Desert Storm is an operation.
6) Some Americans actually believed that we were defending a democratic
government in Viet Nam.
5) The time difference from the U.S. to the middle east is better suited to
prime time live coverage of the festivities.
4) Nobody ever compared Ho Chi Minh to Adolf Hitler.
3) We hadn't been supplying weapons and intelligence to the North Vietnamese
until weeks before the war began.
2) The networks didn't have slick computer graphics with dramatic theme music
for the Viet Nam war.
and the number one reason why Operation Desert Storm is not like Viet Nam:
1) Since Viet Nam came first, we could claim that we didn't know any better.

MILWAUKEE (UPI)--Law enforcement officials report an ongoing investigation
into leads linking mass murder suspect Jeffrey Dahmer with dozens of unsolved
incidents in a score of countries and several historical periods.
"This case is turning into one of those Russian dolls that you just keep
finding more dolls inside," says Marshall Perkins, a Milwaukee Police
Department detective. "It's not just Wisconsin and Germany. Apparently
Dahmer really got around."
State Department officials visiting Vietnam in quest of information
concerning American MIAs confirm that Vietnamese authorities suspect Dahmer may
be the key to the whereabouts of dozens of missing servicemen. "Yes, of
course we had American prisoners in the 1970s," said Nguyen Gap, mayor of
the provincial town of Dong Hoi in northern Vietnam. "Then, about 1980, an
American with special papers came through, and we never saw the prisoners
again." But farmers outside Dong Hoi reported discovering human body parts
in rice fields during the months that followed. Army officials in Washington
would neither confirm nor deny rumors that Dahmer left Germany for Southeast
Asia on special assignment during his military service eleven years ago.
Cattle ranchers in Montana believe Dahmer may be the missing piece to the
bizarre jigsaw puzzle of livestock deaths that splashed across tabloid
newspapers in the early 1980s, when a number of steers were discovered dead on
the range, their throats slit and their bodies often mutilated. While ranchers
blamed everything from Satanists to space aliens, Milwaukee sources confirm that
Dahmer has admitted to murdering the steers during two summers he spent working
as a janitor in Yellowstone National Park. "He'd go off on the weekends in
his pickup and look for strays," said an informant from the District
Attorney's office. "He'd lure them with alfalfa, hit them with a
tranquilizer dart, and cut their throat with a Bowie knife."
Two co-workers at the Old Faithful Inn yesterday recalled finding several
bloody, hastily wrapped beef hearts in one of the kitchen refrigerators there.
"Dahmer told us he'd made a run to a butcher shop down in Jackson, but we
always kind of wondered," said Harry Strassen, 34. "Now we know."
Milwaukee officials have installed a special phone line to handle dozens of
inquiries pouring into City Hall from all over the globe. "It's
unbelievable. Voodoo killings in Haiti, necklacings in South Africa, crop
circles in England," says Patti Sherlock, 23, administrative assistant at
City Hall. "If there were a Nobel Prize for mass murder this guy would get
it."
"Actually," she mused, "I can kind of sleep easier now,
knowing that so much of all these scary things goes back to one guy. And he's
locked up. I hope they throw away the key."

Let's talk again about an all-too-familiar subject: Ho Chi Minh and his
ghastly credos. What follows is a series of remarks addressed to the readers of
this letter and to Minh himself. There are no two ways about it; I have a
tendency to report the more sensational things that he is up to, the more
shocking things, things like how he wants to put salacious thoughts in our
children's minds. And I realize the difficulty that the average person has in
coming to grips with that, but the baneful nature of his epithets is not just a
rumor. It is a fact to which I can testify. Far be it for me to force onto us
the degradation and ignominy that Minh is known to revel in. I apologize if what
I'm saying sounds painfully obvious, painfully self-evident. However, it is so
extremely important that I must definitely say it.
I indisputably believe that discrediting ideas by labeling them as perfidious
is an old tradition among his cronies. My views, of course, are not the issue
here. The issue is that if he is going to talk about higher standards, then he
needs to live by those higher standards. And what of it? Minh is careless with
data, makes all sorts of causal interpretations of things without any real
justification, has a way of combining disparate ideas that don't seem to hang
together, seems to show a sort of pride in his own biases, gets into all sorts
of rotten speculation, and then makes no effort to test out his speculations --
and that's just the short list! Why doesn't he point a critical finger at
himself? It may be soothing and pleasant for him to think that "the
norm" shouldn't have to worry about how the exceptions feel, but it may
seem difficult at first to set the record straight. It is. But in order to solve
the big problems with him, we must first understand these problems, and to
understand them, we must establish clear, justifiable definitions of
sectarianism and insurrectionism, so that you can defend a decision to take
action when his lackeys defuse or undermine incisive critiques of his obtuse
behavior by turning them into procedural arguments about mechanisms of
institutional restraint.
Don't give Minh's wheelings and dealings a credibility they don't deserve. In
any case, when I first became aware of Minh's covert invasion into our thought
processes, all I could think was how Minh intends to create a new social class.
Materialistic dipsomaniacs, unrestrained sociopaths, and juvenile unforgiving
amnesiacs will be given aristocratic status. The rest of us will be forced into
serving as their henchmen. A central fault line runs through each of his
wisecracks. Specifically, if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he
will proceed with his nativism-oriented tricks, considerably emboldened by our
lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so. Take
it from me: I would never take a job working for Minh. Given his unstable
editorials, who would want to? Everybody knows that he is a supporter of
everything that was trendy in America in the 1960s -- the marvelous effects of
LSD and other psychedelic drugs, pyramid power, various oriental religious
cults, transcendental meditation, UFOs and extraterrestrials, CIA conspiracies,
you name it -- but you should consider that at no time in the past did crotchety
cads shamble through the streets of cities, demanding rights they imagine some
supernatural power has bestowed upon them.
This is not the first time we've had trouble with the worst kinds of
unregenerate mob bosses I've ever seen, and it unquestionably won't be the last,
to put it mildly. Some will say I exaggerate, but, actually, I'm being quite
lenient. I didn't mention, for example, that Minh says it is within his legal
right to trick academics into abandoning the principles of scientific inquiry.
Whether or not he indeed has such a right, if, five years ago, I had described a
person like Minh to you and told you that in five years, he'd set up dissident
groups and individuals for conspiracy charges and then carry out searches and
seizures on flimsy pretexts, you'd have thought me infantile. You'd have laughed
at me and told me it couldn't happen. So it is useful now to note that, first,
it has happened and, second, to try to understand how it happened and how some
people are responsible and others are not. Minh falls into the category of
"not".
Nobody wants Minh to leach integrity and honor from our souls, but Minh
insists on doing it anyway. His zingers have kept us separated for too long from
the love, contributions, and challenges of our brothers and sisters in this
wonderful adventure we share together -- life! On a personal note, his
assistants' thinking is fenced in by many constraints. Their minds are not free
because they dare not be.
What Minh does in private is none of my business. But when he tries to
perpetuate the nonsense known technically as the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, I
object. It has been proven time and time again that he believes that he never
engages in disloyal, puerile, or jackbooted politics. That's just wrong. He
further believes that we should abandon the institutionalized and revered
concept of democracy. Wrong again! I have a soft spot for uncompromising
slimeballs: a bog not too far from here.
Minh appears to have a problem with common sense and logic. This implies that
Minh's politics are geared toward the continuation of social stratification
under the rubric of "tradition." Funny, that was the same term that
his helpers once used to turn once-flourishing neighborhoods into zones of
violence, decay, and moral disregard. Please don't misread my words here; he
refuses to come to terms with reality. Minh prefers instead to live in a fantasy
world of rationalization and hallucination. Maybe he has a reason for acting the
way he does, but I doubt it. From a public-policy perspective, if it weren't for
savage carousers, he would have no friends.
I had thought the world was free of ultra-imprudent discourteous fugitives.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Minh wants to shatter and
ultimately destroy our most precious possessions. To toss quaint concepts like
decency, fairness, and rational debate out the window is an injustice. His
toadies argue, against a steady accretion of facts of already mountainous
proportions, that we'd all be better off if they'd just sacrifice children on
the twin altars of boosterism and greed for a variety of reasons. For instance,
he wants nothing less than to manipulate everything and everybody, hence his
repeated, almost hypnotic, insistence on the importance of his ridiculous
opinions.
According to the laws of probability, I do not appreciate being labeled. No
one does. Nevertheless, most people want to be nice; they want to be polite;
they don't want to give offense. And because of this inherent politeness, they
step aside and let Minh shame my name. Well, sure; he should think for himself,
but that doesn't change reality. Minh's supporters tend to fall into the
mistaken belief that every word that leaves Minh's mouth is teeming with useful
information, mainly because they live inside a Minh-generated illusion-world and
talk only with each other. It's not necessarily the case that we stand to lose
far more than we'll ever gain if we don't reinforce notions of positive self
esteem. On the contrary, his press releases symbolize lawlessness, violence, and
misguided rebellion -- extreme liberty for a few, even if the rest of us lose
more than a little freedom.
No matter what Minh thinks, inasmuch as I disagree with his accusations and
find his ad hominem attacks offensive, I am happy to meet his speech with more
speech and, if necessary, continue this discussion until the truth shines. Let's
get reasonable; we should agree on definitions before saying anything further
about his crapulous writings. For starters, let's say that "particularism"
is "that which makes Minh yearn to engage in or goad others into engaging
in illegal acts." If he would abandon his name-calling and false
dichotomies, it would be much easier for me to hold out the prospect of societal
peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties. Believe you me,
if we are to punish Minh for his hypocritical quips, then we must be guided by a
healthy and progressive ideology, not by the slimy and cranky ideologies that
Minh promotes. The bottom line is that the trouble with such intrusive
duplicitous calumniators is that they intend to cause (or at least contribute
to) a variety of social ills.