Today, a story about different paths.
More than three million American babies were born in 1946.
Among them were Donald Trump and Joseph Ewing Smith.
Trump was born and raised in suburban New York.
Joe grew up in Corsicana, Texas, a small town near Dallas of about 19,000.
Both graduated from high school in 1964.
Trump’s school was the New York Military Academy,
where reports say he was sent at age thirteen because he was a difficult child.
Joe graduated from Corsicana High School.
Both played high school football.
Trump had applied to USC, hoping to become a film producer,
but he wasn’t accepted there.
So, he spent the next two years at Fordham College.
In 1966, Trump’s brother contacted an admissions counselor at Penn
who had been an old friend and asked for a favor.
And Trump got admitted as a transfer student to Penn’s Wharton School.
In 1966, Joe enlisted in the Army and became a Green Beret combat medic.
Joe deployed to South Vietnam in April 1968.
Trump graduated from Wharton five weeks later,
having avoided military service with college and medical deferments,
and went to work in his father’s real estate business.
On September 5, 1968, Joe was on a combat mission near Châu Đốc,
a city in the Mekong Delta region of South Vietnam
near the Cambodian border.
US military officials were then expecting the North Vietnamese Army to
resume offensive operations after a recent lull.
So, they ordered US military units to engage in
‘reconnaissance-in-force’ operations along known enemy infiltration routes.1
While Joe was involved in one of these operations,
he stepped on a booby-trapped grenade
and suffered severe injuries.
Joe’s unit radioed for an evacuation helicopter,
but two hours passed before the helicopter arrived.
The helicopter got Joe to a military hospital near Saigon,
but they couldn’t save him.
He died of his wounds a few hours later.
On the day of Joe’s death, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon,
running as the ‘law and order’ candidate of the ‘silent majority,’
rode in a ticker-tape parade through Chicago which drew 400,000 spectators.
After Nixon became president in January 1969,
twenty thousand more Americans would die in Vietnam.
Scholars say this number could have been much less,
but Nixon delayed the American pull-out
to coincide with his 1972 reelection campaign.
And even with all that is now known about Nixon,
about a third of the nation still approves of him.
And with all that is now known about Trump,
more than seventy-seven million still voted for him.
***
America venerates the wrong guys
and I can’t figure out why.
******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
A ‘reconnaissance-in-force’ operation is a limited but intentional engagement with the enemy to gather information about their position, strength and potential vulnerabilities.
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