April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia

Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the United States were sending forces into Cambodia.

South Vietnamese M113 Armored Personnel Carries in Cambodia in 1970.

Recalled now most as the "U.S. entering the Parrot's Beak" region of Cambodia, in fact events had been building in this direction for weeks, months and years.

Cambodia was part of French Indochina, along with Vietnam and Laos, coming into French control due to a long struggle between Thailand and Vietnam for control of the country, which left it in Vietnamese hands at the time that Vietnam was colonized by the French.  Like Loas, it became an independent kingdom with the collapse of the French regime, achieving that status in 1953 prior to the French departure from Vietnam.  The establishment of the independent kingdom demonstrated  to a degree how the French envisioned post colonial Indochina, with it being made up of French aligned independent states with a government of a highly traditional model.  Indeed, the installed regent, Prince Sihanouk, was a French choice and installed much like the last Vietnamese emperor was in neighboring South Vietnam.  In Sihanouk, however, the French had chosen a much stronger personality who soon demonstrated that he could not be controlled.

Indeed King Sihanouk resigned his position in 1955 to become a politician in the newly independent kingdom, which made his father the king.  However, upon his father's 1960 death, he resumed the position of monarch, but limited his title to Prince. 

Right from the onset Cambodia, like the other regions of Indochina, contained left wing radicals who had come up during the colonial period, something that isn't really surprising in light of the fact that France also had left wing radicals itself.  And as with South Vietnam, the established government was not sympathetic to democratic elements.  Differing from Vietnam, however, Cambodia's monarchy survived its early independence and went on to form the government, whereas a similar effort in the Republic of Vietnam had left to a rapid downfall of the monarch.  Sihanouk had no small role in navigating this course.

Things were always accordingly troubled in the country but the ongoing wars in its Indochinese neighbors made things particularly difficult for Cambodia.  Prince Sihanouk attempted to place the country in the nonaligned camp, which was understandable under the circumstances but frankly naive given the enormous nature of the local conflict and the overarching global one.  

U.S. Air Force UH-1 helicopters over Cambodia.

On the other hand, the Prince correctly believed that the Communists would ultimately prevail in the Vietnamese War and believed that he had to be capable of dealing with that reality if Cambodia was to remain an independent state.  Perhaps realistically assessing the strength of his own armed forces as too weak to oppose the North Vietnamese, his government allowed the NVA to establish sanctuaries within the country starting in the mid 1960s, although as early as 1967 he commented to an American reporter that he would not oppose American air strikes in the country as long as they did not hard Cambodians, which of course was an impossible limitation.

In contrast right wing elements in the country increasingly wanted to take it in the opposite direction and found the Vietnamese presence humiliating.  Cambodia had its own culture and ethnicity and had long suffered from Vietnamese incursions into the country.  Indeed, large number of ethnic Cambodians lived in the Mekong are of Vietnam which itself was a sore point to the Cambodians that would continue right on into the Communist Pol Pot era.

  

In 1967 things changed for the worst when a spontaneous Communist rebellion took place in a region of the country which was followed by a more planned one in 1968.  In the same year Sihanouk openly revoked his prior comments about allowing US air strikes in the country, which given the increasing deterioration of his government's situation was probably a logical position for him to take.  By that time, however, the war in Vietnam was now highly developed.

With Richard Nixon's election in 1968 the US began to increasingly look towards action in Cambodia aimed at North Vietnamese enclaves there, something comparable to other frontier battles of other eras in which the US sought to address safe harbors across a border.  Following the Tet Offensive and Nixon's election, moreover, the US began to look for ways to withdraw from Vietnam which ironically meant occasional increases in the level of violence in the war.  In January 1969 Prince Sihanouk indicated to the US that Cambodia would not oppose ARVN and US forces that entered Cambodia in "hot pursuit" of retreating NVA forces provided that no Cambodians were harmed.  The US went one step further however and started targeting B-52 air strikes on NVA enclaves in the country, something the US later claimed that Sihanouk agreed to but which he most likely did not.  The events demonstrated the impossibility of the Cambodian position, however, as an allowance of one thing is practically an allowance of another, in war, and at the same time it was becoming increasingly impossible for the US to abstain from action in Cambodia.

In March, 1970 Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup which was supported by most of the educated urban population.  The kingdom was brought to an end and the Khmer Republic established.  A massacre of Vietnamese residents of Cambodia ensued in which thousands lost their lives and which was condemned by both North and South Vietnam.  By that time there were 40, 000 North Vietnamese troops in the country.  The new republican regime demanded that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong withdraw but instead they commenced attacks on the Cambodian state.  Prince Sihanouk, moreover, would not give up and encouraged his supporters to restore him to power. All of this fueled the native communist insurgency and the situation degraded into a civil war.  During the same period the NVA attacks became a full scale invasion and the NVA began to overrun and defeat Cambodian army positions.  Not really well known into the 1990s, the North Vietnamese in the period sound to completely overrun the country, which likely was regarded by them as a strategic necessity.  They scored significant successes in the early months of 1970 in attempting this but, remarkably, the Khmer government did not completely collapse and in fact its armed opposition to the NVA and the Khmer Rouge continued throughout the period, although they were losing ground.

The South Vietnamese and American incursion of 1970 was designed to defeat the North Vietnamese in their safe harbor.  South Vietnamese preparatory actions commenced on April 14.  Perhaps ironically President Nixon announced the withdrawal of 150,000 U.S. troops from South Vietnam on April 20.  Nonetheless plans for the action continued, and indeed they may be seen as related to some degree.  On April 30 the South Vietnamese invasion began in earnest and President Nixon announced to the nation that U.S. troops would be entering Cambodia on a temporary basis, which they commenced to do the following day, May 1.

U.S. M48s in Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese were surprised by the invasion and proved to be incapable of resisting it. They nonetheless proved adept at avoiding having their forces destroyed.  American leadership regarded the invasion as a success and US and ARVN forces would withdraw from the eastern portions of the country they occupied in July.  The expansion of the war at the very time that the Administration was committed to withdrawing, while not actually strategically inconsistent, appeared to be and it increased opposition to the war in the United States.  The Cambodian government, in contrast, welcomed the incursion and hoped that US forces would remain in the country, an act which they believed would have helped them combat the native Khmer Rouge insurgency and which they also hoped would lead to the permanent expulsion of the North Vietnamese Army from the country.  Indeed, a remaining American presence was practically a necessity for the Khmer Republic's survival.

Newspaper reading American soldier in Cambodia.

To some degree the action is a tribute to the late Vietnam War American Army and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  The ARVN were much more fully formed and combat ready by this point in the war than they had been earlier, although they'd also become completely dependant upon American air support, which was enormous in the invasion.  The American Army, in contrast, was severely strained and suffering gigantic moral and discipline problems by this point, so the fact that they were able to effectively rally for a major offensive action is impressive.  It's also impressive, however, that the North Vietnamese were able to react to the invasion and avoid complete destruction.

There are those who want to attribute the ultimate collapse of the Khmer Republic, followed by the horror of Communist Pol Pot's regime, to this series of 1970s events, but the claim is frankly strained.  As noted, the Cambodian government of the time was becoming increasingly right wing and hostile to Communism inside the country and it was actively seeking to destroy it, albeit unsuccessfully.  A more realistic assessment would be that the results in neighboring South Vietnam were always set to dictate what happened in the smaller Indochinese neighbor.  The same political forces that had existed in South Vietnam since 1954 were present in Cambodia since 1953 except, ironically, right wing elements that wished to actively oppose Communism were significantly stronger in Cambodia.

Cambodian civilians dividing captured North Vietnamese Army rice.

At any rate, the Cambodian tragedy, in some ways, has always been strongly linked to being a small country between two larger neighbors.  Vietnam's civil war had spilled into it and now it was raging within its borders.  It's fate would now follow a strongly parallel, but more tragic and bloody course.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt. What happened, why it matters, and why the press dropped the ball.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt is not a cruise ship.

The ship with its complimentary ships left San Diego on January 17, 2020. At the time, COVID 19 tests basically didn't exist in any sort of quantity in the United States and the Pandemic hadn't yet become that.  It was, at that time, a Chinese epidemic.  There would have, therefore, been no reason to include test kits in its medical supplies and it's very unlikely that the disease was present among the 4,865 sailors on board ship.

On January 20, the first reported case of COVID 19 surfaced in the US in Washington States.

It arrived in Guam for a port visit on February 7. By that time, the Pandemic was rolling and was known to be in the U.S. and Italy, but it still wasn't regarded as a pandemic yet and still wasn't appreciated. The Italian cases had only surfaced on January 31.

On February 26 Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered combat commanders to inform him before they made Coronavirus related protection decisions in order to keep the military from being scene to contract President Trump's declaration that the number of COVID 19 cases, fifteen, would "be close to zero" "within a couple of days."  Two days later Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly stated that the 7th Fleet, of which the USS Roosevelt was part, would be spend fourteen days between port visits in order to slow the virus, however.

On March 5 the Roosevelt put in at Danang, Vietnam.  Vietnam had already reported sixteen cases but it also reported them all as having been resolved.  Crew from the ship were allowed liberty in Vietnam, but were also screened for COVID symptoms upon returning to the ship.  We now know, of course, that not everyone who picks up the virus exhibits symptoms.  Three days later new cases of COVID 19 are reported in Vietnam, including in two British tourists in Danang.   The Roosevelt leaves Vietnam the next day, although not because of that.

The Roosevelt is an aircraft carrier, of course, and flying missions, some of which leave the ship and return to it, keep on keeping on.

On March 15 sailors based in San Diego begin to report with the disease. 

On March 22, the first sailor on board the Roosevelt is diagnosed with it.  Two more are the following day. All re medicated off the ship, but reports keep coming in. 

On March 26, the entire ship's crew starts getting tested.  The Acting Navy Secretary reports that the ship will put in at Guam in a scheduled stop but the crew will not be allowed to leave the pier other than those who are to be evacuated for medical treatment there.  It puts in on the following day and eight sailors are removed for treatment.

On March 29, the Navy Secretary asks his chief of staff to contact the commander of the vessel and the two exchange emails. The commander and his officers were struggling with what to do.  They senior officers of the ship were joined by two Admirals who were senior to the commander, Cpt. Crozier, in regular fleet roles.  They favored smaller mitigation efforts than Cpt. Crozier as they did not want the Roosevelt removed from action as a surface asset.

Let's repeat that, they didn't want the Roosevelt removed as a surface asset in the Pacific. This is a critical pint.

The following day the deputy spoke to Crozier who complained that his superiors were not reacting to the ships situation properly.

Later that day, March 30, Crozier sent a four page unclassified memorandum via email to at least twenty Navy personnel including his staff and individuals inside and outside of his chain of command that asked for urgent help in executing all but 10% of his crew from the ship least sailors "die unnecessarily".  Crozier's commander, Rear Adm. Baker, learned of the email when he boarded the ship later that day.  Following that the Acting Secretary held a conference call regarding the situation.  Following that, Corzier posted to the ship's Facebook page (yes, it has a Facebook page) that “The TR Team is working with the great folks at Naval Base Guam to get Sailors off the ship and into facilities on base to help spread the crew out.”

The next day Crozier's letter hits the San Francisco Chronicle.  Sailors begin to be evacuated.

By the following day, April 1, up to 1,273 sailors have been tested, of whom 93 have tested positive, of which 7 were asymptomatic.  593 tested negative.  A plan to leave a skeleton crew onboard the ship, which carriers nuclear weapons, is developed.  Later in the day, according to the Secretary, the Secretary begins to receive communications from sailors on board the ship contesting Crozier's descriptions of the level of the emergency.  The Secretary and the Department of the Navy publicly supports Crozier but Moldy indicates privately that he's now inclined to relieve Crozier.

By April 2, 114 of the ship's crew have tested positive.  On that day Moldy states he's reached a conclusion about Crozier, that being;

“Captain Crozier had allowed the complexity of his challenge with the COVID breakout on the ship to overwhelm his ability to act professionally when acting professionally was what was needed most at the time. We do and we should expect more from the commanding officer of our aircraft carriers…It unnecessarily raised alarms with the families of our sailors and Marines with no plan to address those concerns. It raised concerns about the operational capabilities and operational security of that ship that could have emboldened our adversaries to seek advantage. And it undermined the chain of command, who had been moving and adjusting as rapidly as possible to get him the help he needed"

He later announced publicly that he'd decided to relieve Crozier of command.

By the following day, 137 of the ship's crew is positive for COVID 19, 95 of them whom are symptomatic.  Crozier leaves the vessel to the cheers of its sailors.  The number would keep climbing, and would include Crozier, but as of the current date, it does not exceed 300.  It does climb, however, every day.

On Monday, April 6, Secretary Moldy addressed the ship's crew and stated:

If [Crozier] didn’t think that information was going to get out into the public, in this information age that we live in, then he was A, too naive or too stupid to be the commanding officer of a ship like this. The alternative is that he did this on purpose. And that’s a serious violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which you are all familiar with.

This goes on, with back comments from the crew in support of their commander.

So, the net results is that in a relatively short amount of time it appears around 300 sailors (guessing) from the USS Roosevelt came down with COVID 19.  Had the ship remained at sea on deployment, which actually was never exactly what was being pondered, the numbers would have grown catastrophic.  The Navy, however, after becoming aware of the problem, did develop a plan, but it was likely not an adequate one under the circumstances.  It likely was a plan, however, that comported with the evidence at the time.  Cpt. Crozier didn't agree with the plan, went around his commanders for help, and caused a situation that necessitated another result.  He's been relieved and now the Acting Secretary of the Navy has resigned.

Which leaves us with these questions?

• How did this whole thing happen in a time of pandemic?
• Was the Acting Secretary right to relieve Crozier?
• Was the firing, which is more or less what it was, of Secretary Moldy the right thing to do?
• Should anyone else be disciplined, and if so, how?

The answer to all of these, save for the first one that can't be answered yes or no, is an absolutely clear yes.

Let's break it down.

How did this whole thing happen in a time of pandemic?

The short answer to this would be realpolitik, which is often pretty ugly and aggravating.

We should likely assume that the Roosevelt left the United States with no COVID 19 on board, although we don't really know that. The timelines would suggest that, however.  It appears pretty clear that the disease was picked up in Vietnam.

But why was the ship putting in at Danang in the first place, and why now of all times.

Starting with the first question first, the U.S. Navy has started to put in at Danang as the Vietnamese Communist fear the Chinese Communist more than they do anyone else, and for good reason.  The People's Republic of China may have aided North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, as it very much did, even supplying 100,000 troops to man air defense artillery in the North during the war, but under their respective Marxism, the Chinese remain Chinese and the Vietnamese remain Vietnamese, and they do not like each other.  The Vietnamese fear the Chinese for the same reasons that many (maybe all) of China's neighbors do; the big country is territoriality aggressive.

Japan, Taiwan (itself a Chinese nation), the former European colonies on mainland China, and just about everyone else who is near China, worries about it. And for a long time the PRC has been getting pushy in a 19th Century colonial expansion sort of way.  There's good reason to worry about China, if you are near it. And Vietnam has a longer history of being invaded by China than it does for being invaded by anyone else.

So the US, the late Vietnam War aside, is a good pal to have if you live on the same block as China.

And like China, Vietnam's modern Communist state is still Communist, sort of, or not, or just hard to figure out, economy wise.  It's not a democracy, but Karl "I'd rather be a sitting on my arse in the British Library than working" Marx wouldn't recognize it as a Marxist country if he stepped out of a Tardis in Ho Chi Minh City and looked for the library.  He'd probably not make it past the Victoria's Secret before busting into tears.  Indeed, the only nation in the world that old Karl would probably feel happy about is the unhappy land of North Korea, a real Communist state.

None of which makes Vietnam a Jeffersonian democracy.

But 's sort of the reason that we put in there.  We're trying to block the Chinese and the Vietnamese need some blocking.  Besides, as both we and the Chinese know, Vietnam is a tenacious combatant when adequately supplied and that's handy if something bad occurs.

None of which is a good reason to put into Danang is an epidemic.

Granted, the Vietnamese were reporting that they had COVID 19 eradicated at the time. Still, when you put in, in a port, sailors go ashore on liberty, and if there's anything circulating in a society, they're going to get it.

And hence the first mistake.  The USS Roosevelt should not have put in, in Danang. An excuse could have been made.

And that's the product of the first real error, which we've set out above:

On February 26 Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered combat commanders to inform him before they made Coronavirus related protection decisions in order to keep the military from being scene to contract President Trump's declaration that the number of COVID 19 cases, fifteen, would "be close to zero" "within a couple of days."  Two days later Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly stated that the 7th Fleet, of which the USS Roosevelt was part, would be spend fourteen days between port visits in order to slow the virus, however.

The President isn't an epidemiologist.   The military can't openly say "whoa there. . . we don't agree with that", but it can take reasonable steps to address a situation.  On February 26 the Roosevelt had already been to Guam.  It can be argued that it really shouldn't have put in there, but that would be asking a bit much.  On February 26, the better call would have been for the Navy to ban port calls in Asia, which it easily could have done, and a pretext for it could have been found.

Heck, North Korea always provides a pretext for a redeployment.  That could have been used.

A "heads shall roll" type of mistake?  Maybe.

So we can't really fault the commander of the Roosevelt for putting into Danang, although I've seen a back channel comment that does just that.  It was a pre scheduled port call.  The decision to go there was a bad one, and the decision to route all sorts of stuff so as to not contradict the Administration could have been done differently.

So that's how COVID 19 boarded the USS Roosevelt.

But what then?

Was the Acting Secretary right to relieve Crozier?

What happened then is that  the disease, which is serious, became known on the ship and the commander either; 1) freaked out, or 2) purposely took an action that he knew would end up in his being relieved. We don't know which really occurred. What is clear is that he was massively insubordinate and had to be relieved.

Looking at it long term, it's clear that Crozier understood the threat better than his immediate superiors did, both of whom were on the vessel at various times during the early stages of the crisis.  Crozier would have stripped the ship of all but a skeleton crew and made due.  That may not have worked, quite frankly, but if something was going to arrest the spread of the disease, that would have. That was probably the only thing that would have by the time the infection was detected.

But that would have also taken a major combat asset in a tense part of the globe, one equipped with nuclear weapons and one which is a major deterrent to North Korea and China, pretty much off the table.

And there's real reasons not to do that, if you can avoid it.

China is brutal enough that it welded the doors shut of apartments where COVID 19 was present.  It's quarantine was effective, if it was, because of its extreme and brutal nature.  An extreme and brutal regime, it is a smart one, and there's no reason to think that China would take advantage of a pandemic to strike its neighbors, but it's not impossible.  If it did so, it would likely be in the guise of a humanitarian action, and quite limited, probably directed at Hong Kong, with which it was having a great deal of trouble just prior to the epidemic.  If it did occupy Hong Kong that would be unlikely to result in a larger conflict with anyone, but it's not impossible.

Indeed, if there was a larger event, it would likely be directed at North Korea, which is a pain for everyone. But there's every reason to believe that the Coronavirus Pandemic is probably a royal mess in North Korea and the Chinese would not want to bother with that.  Being cynical by policy and nature, it'd probably let hundreds of thousands of North Koreans die before it stepped in with a "humanitarian mission".

Which takes us to North Korea.

If a Chinese strike against anyone in this context is unlikely, a North Korean one is not.

North Korea has close and continual contact with China and COVID 19 is there for sure.  And the nation, other than its capacity for sheer brutality, has no real ability to deal with anything of this type.

Given that, the infection is probably severe and is probably basically unaddressed.  It's also undoubtedly in its army.

The leadership of North Korea is not only brutal, its paranoid.  The nation is weak to start with and more isolated every day.  If it could seize South Korea, it'd massively boost its economic position, briefly, and it'd boost its strategic position, sort of.  And seizing South Korea wold prevent South Korea from seizing it.  South Korean isn't going to try that, but North Korean no doubt fears that it will.

With an army ravished by COVID 19 and with a paranoid leadership, why not try to strike while you still have an army and with the United States completely distracted? 

The military has to plan for contingencies like that. And that is a real one.  And that's why the Navy doesn't announce "gosh, we need to take the Roosevelt off the map" any more than it would state "gosh, the 2nd Infantry Division is at 50% strength due to COVID 19".  It won't do it, it can't, and it shouldn't.

But that's basically what Crozier did.

Now, Crozier disagreed with his superiors and there's every reason now to believe he was right in his assessment.  Btu announcing that in the clear created a global strategic problem for the Navy that was contrary to the desires and expressed views of his superiors.  Going around them is so far off the Navy chain of command map that it was completely improper.  Crozier had to know that.

Which leads me to believe that he knew that he'd have to resign.

Which leads to this.  He should have resigned first.

It's the old Napoleonic maxim that an officer who disagrees with an order has two choices; 1) follow them, or 2) resign.  Going around the chain of command is almost never proper and it wasn't here. 

It's that which required Crozier to be relieved, not anything else.  A military can't tolerate officers doing this.

It can't tolerate enlisted men doing it either, which we will get to in a moment.

But was Crozier right?

He may have been.

That sounds like we're talking cross purposes, but since all of this occured one sailor had died and it's perfectly reasonable to believe that more would have.  Crozier may have been 100% correct in his actions and felt the safety of his crew mattered more than his carrier.

There is precedent for things like this.  Theodore Roosevelt, for example, went over the heads of his superiors in 1898 when the members of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry began to come down with malaria at a disastrous rate in Cuba.  Now, of course, Roosevelt wasn't a career officer, but the move wasn't without its risks and it probably did help keep him from being considered for a command during World War One, although that wasn't the only reason, to be sure.

The point is, in some circumstances, a person  must follow the dictates of their conscience even in a military organization knowing that it's going to go badly for you personally.  Crozier likely did just that.

Was the firing, which is more or less what it was, of Secretary Moldy the right thing to do?

A democratic government also doesn't put itself in a situation in which its leaders get into an open spat in public with a military leader.

Truman didn't do that with MacArthur.  He simply relieved him.  He didn't fly to his last command and call MacArthur a dangerous wackadoodle in his declining years in public.  People were mad at Truman but he just endured it.

Secretary Moldy going to the Roosevelt to address the crew was completely improper.  He made a bad situation worse, and his "resignation" was completely appropriate.

Should anyone else be disciplined, and if so, how?

Yes, top and low.

 Moldy's actions at the Roosevelt provoked an exchange with the sailors.  This is unprecedented.

There are instances of relieved commanders being cheered by troops, but not in such a  public manner.  The last I can think of involved the relief of Gen. Terry Allen and Gen. Theodore Roosevelt in Italy in World War Two. They were beloved by their men and were lauded upon their being relieved.  But neither was relieved for a disciplinary reasons (and both came back into later service during the war). 

The crewmen of the Roosevelt cheering their CO was perhaps inappropriate but Crozier should have known that an enlisted celebration of insubordination shouldn't occur and would likely lead to bad results for those who did it.  He should have tried to stop them. Simply calling them into attention likely would have worked, maybe.

Moldy going to the vessel was simply delusional.  But Navy enlisted men arguing and commenting with him is completely inappropriate in the military system and an act of rank insubordination.

Things like this are really rare in the US military, but generally when they occur they are career enders for those involved.  The discipline tends to be disguised and in the form of rank reductions and dead end assignments.  As it can't really be known how many men were involved, it simply becomes a disciplinary sanction on all of them. And that should occur here. The Roosevelt is in port and most of the men are off. They should be reassigned to command individually once cleared and it made known why this is occuring. Those assignments should make it clear that they aren't wanted and that they should leave as soon as possible. 

Random Takeaways from the Coronavirus Pandemic

In no particular order.

1.  The Human Factor

Human instinct doesn't want to quite accept that there is a pandemic or, if there is, that it isn't somebody's fault somehow.

On the first, I'll admit a lot of skepticism early on about the seriousness of it myself, but the stats are now large enough to make things undeniable.  Included in those things that are undeniable  is the fact that the disease is mostly a killer to the elderly, but it also kills in younger demographics.

So, yup, it's a genuine big problem from everyone's perspective.

Part of that is grasping statistics, which people don't like doing and generally don't do well.  The death rate is heavily weighted towards the elderly, this is quite true, but the overall statistics are really alarming.  Even if the death toll remains at the overall "low" rate, the infection attack rate is what makes it so deadly.

There have been a lot of comparisons to the flu.  But the problem with those comparisons is that they compare only one statistic, the infection death rate, and not the attack rate.  The flu has a much, much lower attack rate. . .normally.  The 18-19 flu was deadly not only because of its death rate, but it's attack rate.

The attack rate is the number of people the virus successfully infects.  Estimates really vary, but one estimate is that 30% of Americans will get Covid-19.  Nobody estimates that 30% of Americans will get the flu this year or the common cold.  So, even if we take the 3.5% overall death rate and think, gosh, that's not that bad (unless you are one of the 3.5%), it actually is as that translates into about 3,750,000 dead in the United States.

Angela Merkel predicts that 60% of the German population will come down with Covid 19.  I haven't kept up with it, but that would mean something like 900,000 Germans dying.  If that same attack rate applies to the U.S., the death toll will be around 8,000,000 or so.

I'm not saying that will happen, but it could happen.  Still, wrapping that attack rate and death rate around people's minds is hard to do.  A comparison might be made to AIDS, which was transmitted in an entirely different fashion and had a very low, accordingly, attack rate.  It couldn't attack most people. But it's death rate was 100% at first.  People only grasped the death rate on it, with the attack rate being harder to conceive of.

In spite of all of that, dying from a small unseen virus is something that's really difficult to grasp.  Therefore, people either assume that the attack rate is like the death rate and panic, or they grasp the mortality rate and assume they aren't at risk. And of course the inevitable "conspiracy" theories begin to circulate as nobody wants to believe that they might die due to a shear random event like picking up the virus at work, school, or at the grocery store.

2.  Modern Conditions Suit Infections. . . and if this one doesn't get a bunch of us there's one that will.

We might beat Covid-19 yet this season and we'll beat it sooner or later, but there's something out there that we won't be so lucky with.

There may come a day when we can beat any virus, but we're not there. Some had theorized that AIDS would bring that day to us, with so much research going into beating the virus, but it hasn't.  And we are likely a long ways from that day.

That means that a virus will evolve, or we'll run into it, that is a super killer, like the Black Plague, or AIDS, that has a high attack rate and lots of people will die.  It's not if, it's when.

And part of that when is controlled not only by simple inevitability. . . i.e., it's happened before and it'll happen again, but also by our having built an economy that we not only don't like, it just isn't good for us. This is one more way that it isn't good for us.

Packing people into closed buildings to live and work is putting them in a petri dish.  People don't like it, but viruses do.  Why are we doing that?

Now, make no mistake, there were plenty of nasty diseases that were around in more primitive and agrarian days.  The plague was a killer in an agrarian era.  Smallpox was too.  But with the exception of the plague, outbreaks tended to be very regional.  In the modern era with the absolute triumph of industrialization and capitalism, we've boxed up most people and set ourselves up.

We don't have to keep heading in that direction.

3.  Culture matters, and is hard to beat.

These diseases get their start in Asia for cultural reasons, which nobody wishes to admit.  Asian markets feature the living hosts of everything necessary to cause diseases to break from one species into another.  Until that's stopped, and nobody is really making an effort to stop it, annual outbreaks of new nasty diseases are inevitable.

Put more bluntly, COVID-19 is a virus that cycled through bats first, and on to us through a market munchy contact, or through pangolins, an endangered ant eating species that are smuggled into China in spite of their rarity due to the common and absurd belief in China that darned near every endangered species on Earth has some medicinal quality.  Scientists aren't sure which it is, although looking at the data, I'd guess bats.

People hate it when something like this is said, but year after year Asia is the point of origin for some horrible infection and year after year its caused by the same thing, living cheek to jowl with your food and barely cooking it (as in the case of flu that routinely jumps through pigs and ducks to humans) or by eating things that probably are really, really on the edge of things as food.  China, which has massive social control, as well as Vietnam for that matter, could do the world a huge favor by getting people to knock this off.  But as its a cultural thing, they're not going to do so.  The Chinese are essentially more comfortable with epidemics than they are with telling people "don't eat nearly raw bats". 

Asian governments are also largely authoritarian and a concept of personal freedom has never existed there. For that reason, ironically, Asia is able to more easily handle something like this than western nations are. By their very nature western nations loath restrictions and by the time any are imposed, it's probably rather late in the day.

This is particularly true of the United States, which abhors restrictions.  Even normal restrictions in normal times cause Americans to howl.  Things like controlling our borders are regarded as grave offenses against human rights.  We allow dimwits to avoid vaccinating their children and only try to argue them out of it.  Our culture isn't well suited for the development of these sorts of infectious diseases, the 1918-19 flu notwithstanding, but it's ideally suited for them to spread.

Freedom of information is also a Western value and so misinformation is widely circulated as well.  We see all sorts of examples of that being done here, including that the Chinese cooked up COVID-1 as a man made virus.  No, they didn't.  But another Western value of recent years, which is not to thrown stones at any culture other than our own, plays into this as well, that one being that Western nations are penetrating into the jungles and exposing the world to novel viruses.  Nope, that's not even close to true as we're largely not doing that and in the West the world is experiencing "re wilding".  Moreover, these viruses are new as in new this year as they exist in Asian conditions that allow for their spread and development, but most Western peoples aren't going to tell China that they need to get a grip on this.

Medieval market (public domain due to age).  The Great Plague is an example of a disease spread by conditions, in that case the incredibly dirty and densely packed nature of European cities of that period.

4.  Even those who grasp the stats tend to ignore them, particularly by age, habit and occupation.

This is related to the above, but an odd fact of our problem is that its almost impossible to get people to cease some conduct.

This has always been true.

No matter how the risks are appreciated, it's going to be very difficult to convince young people that they're sufficiently at risk to not congregate, particularly as time moves on.  For those who have a distinct social habit, no matter what it is, not engaging in it will prove to be difficult over time.  People who go to the bar after work, for example, will be doing that soon, assuming they're open. Indeed, the example of illicit and illegal businesses and occupations associated with really horrific diseases shows that it's difficult to stop some activities in spite of the risks associated with them.  And for some occupations, closing is just not going to be on the map, particularly occupations that are professional and service related.  Personal economies and the nature of their occupations won't allow for it.

The longer this goes on, the more this is true.  People staying home for a few days is difficult enough, for weeks, if it came to that, is extremely difficult.

And frankly, while nobody wants to talk about it (but we will below) some occupations actually can't close in our society.  That's simply a fact.

5.  Quarantines don't work the way that people think they do.

In spite of the way the press would have it, the President of the United States can't really  close things up by simple executive order.

Indeed, the ability of the US to do this is remarkably limited.  Powers to impose quarantines are limited to areas that laws address it and are allowed under the Constitution.  The only clear Constitutional authority to issue quarantines of any kind appear under the war powers section of the U.S. Constitution and actually pertain to rebellion and invasion.  In those instances, the US can suspend Habeas Corpus which is generally regarded as being equivalent to declaring martial law.

Having said that, the US has long imposed limited quarantines under the Commerce Clause, which makes sense.  As the U.S. has traditionally been regarded as having very broad power to control its borders, at least up until very recently, that's been taken to mean that  people and things entering the country can be quarantined at ports of entry, no matter how those are defined, or kept out entirely.  

States actually have broader powers than the Federal government to impose quarantines as its traditionally been regarded as a power reserved under Article 10.  

Every state has laws regarding this topic and almost all of them are really old.  Wyoming's statutory provision clearly is, as it still speaks of railroads as being the primary means of transportation.  It states:

35-4-103. Investigation of diseases; quarantine; regulation of travel; employment of police officers to enforce quarantine; report of county health officer; supplies and expenses. 

The department of health shall, immediately after the receipt of information that there is any smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, diphtheria or other infectious or contagious disease, which is a menace to the public health, in any portion of this state, order the county health officer to immediately investigate the case and report to the state health officer the results of the investigation. The state health officer shall, subject to W.S. 35-4-112 and if in his judgment the occasion requires, direct the county health officer to declare the infected place to be in quarantine. The county health officer shall place any restrictions upon ingress and egress at this location as in his judgment or in the judgment of the state health officer are necessary to prevent the spread of the disease from the infected locality. The county health officer shall upon declaring any city, town or other place to be in quarantine, control the population of the city, town or other place as in his judgment best protects the people and at the same time prevents the spread of the disease. If necessary for the protection of the public health and subject to W.S. 35-4-112, the state health officer shall establish and maintain a state quarantine and shall enforce practical regulations regarding railroads or other lines of travel into and out of the state of Wyoming as necessary for the protection of the public health. The expenses incurred in maintaining the state quarantine shall be paid out of the funds of the state treasury appropriated for this purpose and in the manner in which other expenses of the department are audited and paid. The county health officer or the department may employ a sufficient number of police officers who shall be under the control of the county health officer, to enforce and carry out any quarantine regulations the department may prescribe. The regulations shall be made public in the most practicable manner in the several counties, cities, towns or other places where the quarantine is established. If the quarantine is established by the county health officer, he shall immediately report his actions to the state health officer. The county health officer shall furnish all supplies and other resources necessary for maintaining the quarantine. Upon certificate of the county health officer approved by the director of the state department of health, the county commissioners of any county where a quarantine has been established shall issue warrants to the proper parties for the payment of all expenses, together with the expense of employing sufficient police force, to maintain and enforce the quarantine. For purposes of this act, "state health officer" means as defined in W.S. 9-2-103(e).

Prior to this event, I frankly never would have guessed that there was a law which allowed the county health officer to issue a quarantine order and hire police to enforce it.

The point is that contrary to what people seem to think, the President of the United States cannot really order the whole country on lock down. That people would think this isn't surprising, as people believe the President has all sorts of powers he doesn't, and in fact modern Presidents have gotten away with a lot of stuff that's flat out illegal as they lack the power to do them.

States, surprisingly can act quite broadly, as this is a reserved power under Article 10 of the Constitution.  Not specifically, but just by reference.

Here, however, is a rare example of a panic creating acceptance.  Hardly anyone questions what the states may now do, and under the old interpretation of the law the can do a lot.  Having said that, but for a period of crisis, it's really difficult to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court of the 60s through the 80s not smugly smacking such powers down.  They wouldn't now, but only recently has there been a trend recognizing the more traditional arrangements of the law.

Child Quarantine, Trenton New Jersey, 1916.

6.  There is no "American health care system", but there is.

This is related to the item immediately above.

The press keeps talking about "the health care system" as if there is one.  But all year we've been told by campaigning Democratic contenders that there isn't one.  And noted Democratic columnist Robert Reich just wrote an interesting article simply proclaiming there isn't one, which can be read here:

America Doesn’t Have a Public Health System

What we don't have is a national comprehensive system that provides personal care from prenatal to death but a series of private arrangements augmented, in some instances, by government payments that takes care of individuals.

Americans have been extremely resistant to a personal national health care system and by and large the examples of other countries suggest that they really only come in during a time of crisis.  Whether this crisis causes that to be the case for the United States is yet to be seen, but that tends to be the way they work.  The British national healthy care system, for example, was really a byproduct of World War Two.  The German one was a byproduct of World War One.

This isn't to say that there's no "public health" at all, but it covers limited areas and some of them very comprehensively in spite of what people might believe. The US has a large network of government laboratories that work on tests for infectious disease and have been working on this epidemic since prior to its breakout into the United States.  We heard very little about this, as they work in the background, and in this instance they ran into a testing glitch that unfortunately put them a critical two weeks behind, at which point they took the rare step of authorizing private laboratories, of which there are an enormous number, to work on tests independently.  Normally that isn't done.

And the US does have an effective Center for Disease Control that's part of all of this.

All that does put the US in a good position for learning of diseases and providing tests for them and coordinating a response.  It doesn't mean that we have, however, a system that provides treatment for everyone on down, although something of that nature somewhat exists to some degree.

That really started coming in during the progressive era nad was limited to really rural areas.  It received a boost during the Great Depression, but even then it never covered a majority of Americans.  Since that time, it's existed basically as a public assistance program and oddly enough as a uniformed service of the United States that has a very limited role.

It's large enough that its a reserve of the Navy, showing how it was originally conceived of at the time of its founding, but it isn't capable of really doing a coordinated national response to a health emergency on a rapid basis.

The Public Health Service is active, but it's not as if it's going to field a bunch of doctors and nurses into a hot zone, let alone as series of hot zones.  Indeed, in a bit of a reversal of its wartime organizational structure, if hospital beds, doctors and nurses are really needed in numbers on an emergency basis, they're going to come from the military with both active and reserve components responding to that call.  The Navy is already deploying hospital ships in connection with this and its undoubtedly the case that if you are in a Reserve or Guard medical unit you must be getting a pile of warning orders right now.

That might be enough, frankly.  But we lack a direct treatment system in the fashion that other countries do.

Having said that, Italy does have a system, and it can't be said that theirs really worked all that well.

Which gets to the next point.

People complaining about the lack of supplies, or the lack of response, particularly in the Press don't seem to realize that nobody has responded adequately.   That's because there's really no ability anywhere to respond.

Even the most spectacular response, that of the Chinese, didn't keep the pandemic from spreading. And the Chinese are capable of responding in a manner we are not.  It isn't as if the Italian National Healthcare Service kept it from spreading, now is it?  Nor did the much vaunted British National Health Service either.

Truth be known, no nation stockpiles medical supplies for infections on this rate.  But the US is capable of producing them and that will occur rapidly.

7.  Some people aren't going to grasp the risks no matter what.

There are those that in spite of everything are really not going to ever grasp the risk.

I'd absolutely guarantee you that if you work in any sizable office that, within a couple of weeks, some parent is going to come in and report how they were awake all night with a sick kid, or how they just visited their sick parent or friend and they'll have no idea whatsoever that they're exposing somebody to something.  Even more likely, some mother or father is going to come in with a kid who's running snot from his shoelaces to his nose and you'll hear how it's a shame that little Johnny just wasn't accepted at the day care today.  Likewise, plenty of people in the "boss" category are going to come into work deathly ill and simply say "don't get near me" and expect that their position justifies their self made exceptions to the rules.

I guarantee it.

8.  Some people are going to overestimate the risk no matter what.

By the same token, there's going to be those who insist that it's pretty much the end of the world, either because they're prone to panic anyhow or they enjoy them.

That may sound odd, but it's true in both cases.  People who particularly  have no deep foundation in anything panic.  If all you have is your thin self and that's it, anything that threatens it is pretty scary.  I suppose that's why people who  are deeply the opposite, such as the Orthodox Priest we discussed the other day, are seemingly not afraid.

As noted, there's also a lot of people in the US who have enjoyed planning for a self imagined end of the world now for about a decade or so.  It's really odd.  "Preppers" have been enjoying the heck out of imagining surviving in their very own Mad Max movie or whatever for some time now, and something like this, because of the press coverage, is really firing them up. 

And then most people just don't grasp risks or statistics anyhow.  With a national press that also doesn't, and a televised news media that is focusing on nothing else, it's pretty easy to get a panic rolling.

9.  There's something really messed up in the economy and in our social behavior that impacts children

One of the things a big crisis does is expose where we aren't doing well, where we've failed to do well, or where we have major issues we need to address.  This has done that in regard to several things, and one of them is the massive decline in attention to children that has taken place over the past fifty years.

More than one school district has had to wring their hands in agony over shutting down as those districts contain large numbers of children who eat breakfast and lunch at schools.  That they have to depend upon that is absolutely criminal.

It's the responsibility of parents, or at least it should be, to feed, cloathe and rear their children.  But over a fifty year period we've attacked that as a society and have made schools wards of children in a plethora of ways that should not have occured, should not be occurring, and should cease as soon as they humanely can.

This started, in a way, with an entire series of events that were well meaning, demonstrating in brutal form the maxim that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."  Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" series of programs instituted a massive public involvement with providing for children with the concept that this would life them up out of the poor families they were born into, into the middle class.  At the same time divorce laws were reformed to make it increasingly easier for married couples, including ones, with children, to divorce.  The introduction of the pill, combined with the polluted influence of Playboy, also arrived more or less at the same time such that sex outside of marriage went from universally disapproved of, even if it occured, to approved of for men, to simply approved of.

The combined effect of all of this was to create a situation in which at first children with divorced parents became common, to one in which fathers simply abandoned children entirely.  Current its not at all common for young women to have children with the father completely out of the picture, and most particularly out of the picture economically.

As this was occuring, the societal programs we noted above operated such that there was a move to help feed, not feed but help feed, children who came to school hungry. That's an admirable goal but it wasn't really asked why they were coming to school hungry.  Since 1945 American wealth has increased massively overall, so it makes no sense whatsoever that children should be in that state. They are, largely, as their mother is left with a low paying job and the father isn't supporting his offspring at all.

Combined with that, the evolution in employment from 1945 on went such that by the 1980s women working in the workplace went from an option to a necessity.  Even now there's a lot of absolute blather about women and careers built on the previous blather about men and careers.  Most people find to their ultimate disappointment that careers turn out to be jobs and there's been a real loss of sense about what that was all about.  The entire "career" emphasis that applied to men early on was really aimed at first at trying to convince them to maximize their economic potential as breadwinners for their anticipated families, and even as recently as 20 or so years ago you would still hear the urging that you should "get a good career so you can support a family".  Right about the same time as women having careers went from an option to mandatory that changed to the nonsensical line that you should get a good career to "fulfill yourself", even though, with rare exception, that just won't be happening. At the end of the day, it's going to be a job.

What this has brought about is a perfect storm of a situation in which women with children must almost always work and there are a lot of single mothers left to rear children on their own with jobs that don't pay enough to get by on.  That in turn has depressed the wage market in general at its bottom end so that none of those jobs pay well enough to get by on and even couples that are married in which husband and wife are both so employed often can't get by, so the state has stepped in, in the form of school districts, to pick up the slack, which in turn ironically perpetuates the system and which converts it from essentially being emergency relief to being a societal norm.

All that is pretty bad for children and pretty bad for the adults they become later in a variety of ways, but it can't be immediately discontinued.  Indeed, threats to the system even in normal times usually bring howls of protests from individuals who now conceive of what amounts to assistance as a right, not all of whom are benefactors of the system by any means.

The point here is that an economic system, or a society, in which a governmental entity, which is what a school system is, is providing one of the most basic elements of life, food, for years and years for children has had something go pretty amiss.

10.  We really can't shut everything down very long.

As grim as it is to ponder, the way our economy works and our society works, we can't really shut everything down for long. Some things have to keep on keeping on.

And added to that, we can't shut most or even a lot of things down without hugely damaging the economy and we can't ignore that and have no way to adjust for it.

Even right now, it's clear that grocery stores have to remain open, making grocery store workers like infantrymen in the front line of the trenches.  But how long can anything really remain this shut down?

My guess isn't very long or it'll create a national economic disaster of epic proportions.  But then, at that point, you are balancing lives against the economy in some ways.  Nonetheless, huge sections of the economy can't really be closed forever.

Indeed, one thing that those comparing this against the 1918-19 Flu just don't get is that the 18-19 flu came about due to, and during, World War One. And World War One just kept on keeping on.

That made the economic impact of the 18-19 flu muted at best.  There was already a gigantic labor shortage caused by the war and the needs of the military in every sense, from troops to equipment, didn't pause one bit due to the war.  Indeed, at the height of the epidemic Gen. Pershing was informed that the government wished to stop troop transport to Europe due to the epidemic and Pershing refused the request.  Troops were loaded on board ships knowing that a lot of them would be sick by the time they got to Europe. Some would die. That didn't stop anything.

Factories kept running.  Oil refineries kept refining.  Sure, restaurants were closed and churches shut down for weeks at a time, but there was no shortage of employment.  If you were laid off from your job at the bar, there was one waiting for you at the arms plant.  If a worker got sick on the factory floor, he was sent home, but another one was put on the lathe in his place.

All that's grim, but it also means that the entire world simply kept rolling on in the 18-19 flu.  If that meant people died, and it did, they just did.  Lots of people were dying at the time in other ways that were deemed to take precedence.

That's not the case now. 

Indeed, we haven't had a global pandemic that took people out of work like this one since the Great Plague, but that's not analogous in any fashion.  For one thing, the mortality rate of that was gigantic.  Truth be known, simple viruses in the same era undoubtedly killed as many people as COVID 19 and no note was taken of them.  That was regular life (and truth be known, it was probably regular life in that fashion for much longer in most places than we realize).  Additionally, Europe had a feudal agrarian economy in which those who survived the plague simply returned to their prior occupations when they could with things unabated.  In other words, if your occupation is plowing Lord Ungaforth's field, a job you share with Ethelred, when you come back, even if Ethelred doesn't, things haven't really changed in any fashion.  It'd be a human tragedy, but not an economic one.

Things are obviously different now.



11.  Custom is really hard to break.

I really hate shaking hands and I always have.  But in my line of work, I'm finding, I'm highly acclimated to it.

I had learned, when young, that shaking hands originated as a means of demonstrating to another person  that you weren't armed, but it turns out that the tradition is of uncertain origin and amazingly widespread.  Numerous cultures around the globe do it and even ancient Greek pieces of art show it being done.  There are some cultures that don't do it, but they are distinct for that reason. The Japanese, for example, don't do it and they don't like it.  That's somewhat unique to them, however.

Be that as it may, as I'm not Japanese, I do it, because I have to.  I frankly have never liked handshaking.  But it's such a custom that now that we're not supposed to, I find that a lot of people keep on heading towards it or even doing it.

There are a lot of things in this category, and that's going to be a real problem.

Just as the Chinese can't apparently imagine not having a heaping bowl of bat soup, it's hard to stop shaking hands.  And beyond that, other things that we're really accustomed to, such as even simply going to work, are really hard to stop doing depending upon how acclimated we are to them.  That may prove to be the biggest single reason for "self isolating".  You aren't tempted, unless what tempts you is not self isolating.

The Vietnam War: Every Fortnight

On Vietnam Veterans Day

Today is Vietnam Veterans Day.

The reason for that is that it was on this day, in 1973, that the last American combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam.

As we now know, they were withdrawn under an agreement, the Paris Peace Accords, that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed would fail.  That Nixon believed that was cynically assumed, and it turns out correctly assumed, by the first historians of the war, who uniformly regarded the war as an ill though out American disaster. 

Starting about a decade ago, or so, however, revisionist histories, some fairly good and not so much, took the opposite approach.  A statistical analysis of the war conducted by a Marine veteran and expatriate living in Australia fairly convincingly argued that the war had been effectively won by 1968 and that the process of Vietnamization conducted by the Nixon Administration thereafter simply reflected that.  Two books on the early portion of the war when Diem was still the living autocrat in charge in the Republic of Vietnam took charitable views towards the pre 1965 American build up and argued that the war could have been won but for mistakes in that phase.

Then came Ken Burns groundbreaking recent documentary, followed by Max Hasting's new book on the war, which I'm only now just reading. 

Both make clear what the earlier books already had suggested.  The United States failed to appreciate the real situation in Vietnam from the onset, even while the French remained there, and the following intervention was beset by mistakes from the very first.  Worse yet, in some ways, Richard Nixon basically set out to betray the South Vietnam by extracting the United States dishonestly, believing that the North would ultimately prevail.  All that was needed, in his view, was some breathing room to make the departure decent.

Unfortunately for history, Nixon's other activities removed him from the Oval Office so that he was not present to bear the brunt of the impact of his decisions, which came in 1975 with the northern invasion.  The Army of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed in the face of that offensive, but in no small part due to a lack of effective air power.  Having been trained since at least the early 1960s to rely on massive American supplied firepower, without it, it really couldn't fight, and its troops rapidly lost spirit, to the extent they ever had any, and effectively quit.  Thousand and ultimately millions paid the price.

So are the pundits right, that the United States should have never gone in, in the first place?  I'm still not sure.  I find it hard to see a way that the U.S. could have avoided Vietnam, save perhaps for having denied the French any assistance in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  That would have been the approach, to the extent that we can discern one, that Franklin Roosevelt would have taken, as he was universally opposed to colonialism and seems to have been fairly comfortable with independence movements that were heavily communist.  Of course, had Vietnam become a communist state in 1946, it's hard not to imagine that being the case all the way to at least Thailand.

Which is perhaps the point.  Earlier in this blog I posed the suggestion that the Vietnam War ought not to be looked at in a vacuum, but rather as a campaign, and not wholly successful one, in the Cold War.  And that still seems correct to me.

But one fought at great cost that the country has never really gotten over in some ways. 

Making this a good day to remember its veterans.

Sure, it's the first day of Spring, but it's also International Francophonie Day

Flag of the Organisation International de la Francophonie.

And that's not a typo.  It's Fraconphonie.

Roughly speaking, that the countries and cultures that speak French, and this is their international organization's day.  There are 88 entities in the organization, reflecting the heritage from the day when the lingua franca really was the language of the Francs. 

Some of the members are surprising, not because the French weren't there and left their language, but because the post World War Two history of French departure from their colonial lands wasn't really a very happy one.  People must have gotten over it, however, as, for example, Vietnam is a member.  Most of France's former colonies are.  Algeria, however, is not.

Greece is, which would suggest that membership may be a bit broader than language alone.

Well, tres bien.

There is something indescribably odd about a summit between the leaders of North Korea and the United States in Vietnam

Who won the Vietnam War?  Can of Saigon Gold Limited Edition Premium Lager brewed by Vietnam's largest brewery, owned by Thai ThaiBev.  This is from their Vietnamese language website, using English language, and some sort of stylized Oriental dragon.  At some point you have to suspect that the NVA really cashed in their chips at the American party favor table.  Maybe Donald Trump, who never had  the chance to try this breweries 1960s big item, "33 Beer", but if he wants to, it's still offered as "333 Beer".

Indeed, a lot of it is weird.

First of all, there's the odd budding friendship between the U.S. and Vietnam, and by Vietnam, we partially mean the government of Vietnam which we had hoped to keep coming to power in the first place and which we fought against for well over a decade.

And then we only got involved in Vietnam in the first place when the North Korean invasion of South Korea suddenly sparked out interests in trying to make sure that the French didn't go down the tubes in Indochina.

And the meeting is in Hanoi, which has been the seat of the Communist government of Vietnam since the French departed, but which now has a Victoria's Secret, which suggests that while we may have lost the war, we're winning the peace there.

Heck, Coca Cola Vietnam was recently voted one of the two most sustainable, i.e,. green, companies in Vietnam.  Coca Cola Vietnam?

Well, heck, what can we say about that.  The Communist government privatized its largest beer producer which was bought by ThaiBev.  It's big brand, among several, is Saigon Beer.  Not Ho Chi Minh City beer.

Anyhow, North Vietnam received more aid from Communist China than it did from the Soviet Union during the war, and up to 100,000 Chinese troops were in the north during the war, but immediately after the war the two Communist countries had a falling out and they've reverted to their default not liking each other at all, even though both are evolving away from real Communism into some sort of weird corporate capitalism pretty quickly.

And then there's Donald Trump, who had a deferment during the war after having attended a military prep school, now ending up in Vietnam, to meet Kim Jong-un, the Communist monarch of North Korea, who has never been in anyone's military but who attended private school in Switzerland, which is about as non Communist as you can get.

Kim Jong-un has gotten over his exposure to the West, apparently, even though in Stalinist Russia that would have resulted in a prison sentence, only to become the dictator of an inherited Stalinist theme park.  This is so much the case that he's going to the summit, or rather to the Vietnamese border, on an armored train.  Armored trains are something that haven't been real military technology since at least World War Two and are really something out of the Russian Civil War. They're absurd, but everything about North Korea is absurd.