The first site we visited was the Cu Chí tunnel complex in the countryside not far from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), formerly known as Saigon and the  capital of South Vietnam. The complex was used by the Viet Cong to hide from ARVN and U.S. troops during the day or for longer periods of time during intensive periods of search and destroy operations in the area. The far reaches of the complex come near to a major U. S. military installation. It was rumored to extend within the perimeters of the installation, but veterans on both sides say that that was not true.

Jaclyn in an entrance to the Cu Chí Tunnels

Jaclyn lowering the plug over the entrance

There were three levels to the complex, one at about three meters depth, a second at 5-6 meters, and a third at 8-10 meters. The layout was complex, with many pit traps set to catch intruders who might venture into the tunnels without knowing the layout. The its had bridges that could be lowered across them while the VC were moving in that part of the tunnel, then lifted to expose intruders to the dangers. Most of the pits were located at the bottom of down slopes where an intruder’s momentum would make it difficult to avoid falling into the pit and the various punji sticks or other destructive elements.

A mock-up of the tunnels showing the three levels. The blue at the bottom left is a well. The low spot to the left of the well is one of the pit traps.

There were a number of air vents built into the complex with the surface openings disguised as termite mounds or other natural jungle formations. Often the VC would plant wood on the constructed mound to attract termites during the rainy season so that, even if the mounds were not originally actual termite mounds, they soon were transformed into such, making it more difficult for suspicious troops to tell the difference.

An air vent disguised as a termite mound.

Kitchens, classrooms, and workshop areas were most often constructed as recessed bunkers with tunnel access built into the floor. Cooking fires were only permitted during the early morning and late afternoon periods when the smoke could be dismissed as surface fog if it had failed to completely dissipate into the surrounding forest. The chimneys for the fires would channel the smoke 100 to 150 meters from the kitchen and then filter it through vegetation to help it dissipate. If the chimney outlet were discovered, because of the distance, the VC in the kitchen had time to escape before the actual kitchen was discovered.

The tunnels themselves were small and very stuffy, even with the air vents built in. The complexes, such as Cu Chí were situated in the areas where the soil was mostly a heavy clay which compacted into almost rock-like walls. They also had to be in areas far enough away from the major rivers of the area to allow for the tunnels to be deep enough to provide protection from bombs and artillery without reaching into the water table. But they also had to be close enough to allow for wells to be dug as part of the complex.

Inside one of the tunnels.

The second major stop of the day was at the War Remnants Museum in HCMC. Since the museum was constructed by and is maintained by the winning government in the war, that of the communists under Ho Chi Minh, there are many references in the signs and documents offered that are strongly biased in their favor. VC and NVA fighters are almost always referred to as patriots and martyrs, for example. Almost all actions by the U.S. government in pursuing the aims of the war are described as war crimes. There is no direct reference to any actions by the patriotic fighters that might could be considered in the same light.

Waterboarding in Vietnam in 1968.

While the displays are clearly constructed for their propagandistic value and to glorify the actions against the United States and the government supported by it in South Vietnam, that does not mean that there is not truth in what is presented. The massacre at My Lai did happen. And it was only one of about 100 massacres of more than 100 people in the 1969-70 time period as documented by the Quakers. The multiple thousand tons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, all laced with dioxin, sprayed over huge swaths of Vietnam and Laos leave many hillsides still void of much vegetation. The documented illnesses and birth defects that showed up in the U.S. troops who handled the materials are a small fraction of those that occurred to the people who lived and farmed in the areas targeted for deforestation. Much of the countryside is still laced with mines spread and not recovered.

Examples of some of the mines dropped by U.S. troops in Vietnam.

The U.S. and ARVN troops were not the only ones to use mines in Vietnam, nor were all of the atrocities committed by soldiers on only one side of the war. The pictures here reflect what was presented in the museum in HCMC.

It was interesting to listen to the Army and Marine veterans that are part of our group. Their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan made them quick to dismiss almost everything presented because of the slant. I readily admit that I am not a veteran and have never been in an active war zone, let alone served in one as a combatant. I understand that if one is exposed to an environment where there are people shooting at you, trying to kill you and your comrades, that it probably makes sense to shoot them first. And it would probably take a pretty special person to not have the urge for revenge when one has been surrounded by the death of people with whom one has built relationships. It’s probably not natural to expect that within a large fighting force, no one will act on those impulses. And that’s really the bigger point.

During the Vietnam War era, there were T-shirts, key chains, and charms sold with a drawing of a flower surrounded by a saying, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” Violence always begets violence. Period. I am not personally quite to the point of claiming that war is never justified, but I am damn close. It should always be the very last resort, if used at all.

The personal part of me is heart-broken tonight because this is the three month anniversary of the end of a relationship that I thought was forever–one that I believed called me to live up to my highest ideals.  Obviously, for lots of reasons, it did not work out for the two of us.  And yet, that does not mean that either of us should cease to seek to live up to those ideals.

Sometime tomorrow, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on the, already passed, Senate version of Health Care reform.  The Senate bill is a lousy bill.  While one email I received today touts the vote as having worldwide historic implications, the truth is that this bill, and everything else considered in this debate, falls far short of bringing the United States into the realm of health care that every other industrial country in the world already enjoys.  Healthcare in this country costs more per person than in any other industrial country in the world with far fewer people covered and an overall outcome well below any other industrial country.  By almost any means, the passage of this bill should be considered a colossal failure.  And yet, in this time and place, the real failure would be that the bill does not pass.

We are together in this society and we have a responsibility to one another.  While this pass at Health Care Reform falls short of the ideal, it is a step towards our ideal that would be passed over at the expense of not making progress for at least a decade.

But what is more, the conditions in the country have reached the point where I feel I need to express myself once again. I have been doing some of this by Facebook posts, but found that many of my friends weren’t really interested in anything that heavy, at least in that forum.  So, starting today, I am returning to blogging on a regular basis–maybe not daily, but regularly.  I’ll comment on political issues, thoughts that arise from reflecting on the sermons at church, or anything else that I feel I have to share.  I don’t hold myself out as some all-knowledgeable wise man.  Quite the contrary.  But I do feel that there are things that demand discussion.  And this will be the place that I will attempt to add my little piece to the conversation.

Until the next post, I wish you peace.

It is 1:40 p.m. here in Denver–just over 6 hours before the polls close.  There is an air of quiet confidence throughout the AFL-CIO State Federation office here, where I am in charge of one of several phone banks calling people across this state to make sure that they have voted.  From the reports I am hearing from our satellite offices, and what I hear from my phoners, the great majority of people have already voted.  Reports from our poll watchers during the early morning rush said that there were only a couple of locations that had lines approaching an hour.  All of the other locations where we had people were reporting short lines and fairly light turnout through the first couple of hours.  That all fits the Secretary of State’s report that close to 50% of the eligible voters had voted prior to today, as well as our canvassers and leafleters reports of close to 85% of the people they were encountering saying that they had already voted.  And that kind of turnout generally bodes well for Democratic candidates.

It is an interesting feeling to be at this point where all of what I have been through in Colorado over the last five months, and all that all of us have been through over the past couple of years, is reaching its climax.  We are just hours away from crossing the finish line, and everything I see or hear tells me we are well out in front.  But now is not the time to let up.  If you have not yet voted, VOTE!  If you have already voted, call ten of your friends or family members and make sure that they have voted.  If you’ve done both of those, go to www.barackobama.com and follow the links to make more calls into battleground states to make sure those people have voted.

Finally, when the polls have finally closed tonight, take a deep breath, say a quick prayer, and head to a party to celebrate the beginning of turning our country around.  But, don’t party too much.  We have a big job ahead of us.  And it begins tomorrow morning.

On the other hand, my much repeated quote is still operative–”I don’t want to wake up on Wednesday, November 5, wondering what one more thing I could have done.”  With anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 of the votes already cast in Colorado (from what I have heard) there is not quite as much pressure on our Get Out The Vote effort as there might otherwise have been. But that is not slowing us down one bit in the effort to contact as many voters as possible to make sure that they have voted.  I can’t tell you complete numbers, but our release staff and volunteers have contacted 10′s of thousands of union and working-family supporting voters across the state in the last two days.  And we are just going to increase the effort and energy up until the polls close at 7 p.m. on Tuesday.  

It is pretty darned amazing to see the people who are coming in, both those from Colorado and from out of state, and the determination that they have to make sure that this election puts the people in office that will begin to turn this country around. Whether it is the people like Ron and Mick, who are giving their time and effort, even while trying to find work, or the young woman attorney who came in this evening to make phone calls for an hour, sheepishly admitting that she feels like she should have been doing more, sooner, the determination to make sure that this election does not slip through all of our fingers is palpable.  

There is much about my experience here in Denver that has been frustrating and even infuriating.  But at this point, none of that matters.  Tonight, tomorrow, and Tuesday is all about making sure that all of the work of so many people over the last months is not for naught.  

Wednesday morning we start building a new world.

The final ten days started on Sunday with a huge rally in downtown Denver for Barack Obama.  Almost our entire relief staff met at the Colorado Education Association’s headquarters at 8:30 in the morning to collect stickers and literature to pass out, encouraging the people at the rally to vote “No” on Amendments 54, 49, & 47.  Barbara Shailor, the AFL-CIO’s Director of International Affairs, and my partner in soliciting volunteers to work our final four days, and I thought that we might have a productive time signing up union member volunteers while they waited in line to enter the event.  With the line at over two miles long, it seems that we should have been right.  And I think, from what I saw at the rally in Pueblo about a month ago, we would have been right.  But, where the Pueblo rally was held in warm enough  weather that everyone was proudly wearing their union t-shirts, it was cold enough on Sunday in Denver, that everyone was well bundled up in coats and jackets–making it almost impossible to pick out union members in the line.  

While that was a disappointing set back to our plans, it was wonderful to see the crowds of people arrive. By shortly after the gates were scheduled to open at 10, the organizers were already telling people that there were 50,000 people inside the secure area and that no one else, beyond a certain point in line, would be able to get inside.  They were instead directed to the front lawn of the Capitol and the parts of Civic Center Park outside of the security fence.  Even while all of that was going on, there was a steady stream of people walking up from beyond the Capitol grounds.  It was amazing to see the size of the crowd gathering.  But, what was even more positive was the almost total lack of negativity.  There was one McCain supporter who drove past the gathering, yelling out his car window a bunch of hateful, right-wing-media-inspired comments.  But even that was met with laughter from the gathering crowd. The hope and positive energy surrounding the crowd that would grow to a reported “more than 100,000″ was amazing, powerful, and hopeful.

That uplifting experience was balanced, however, by my experience on Monday evening back at the AFL-CIO headquarters.  As my many volunteers arrived to work our phone bank, we started putting them on our computer-based dialer for the first time in a month.  Since we had not used those computers for phone banking for so long, headsets were missing and had to be found, some of the computers did not recognize the dialers or their software without quite a bit of trouble shooting, and others (being old and cantankerous pieces of sh*t) started failing as soon as we started making calls.  And, of course, they didn’t all fail either at the same time or evenly spaced over a long enough timeline to allow for them to be dealt with one at a time.  It was almost pure chaos.  It made for a long and frustrating evening.

Tuesday started on a much more positive note, as we gathered all of our satellite office leads and trainers to discuss the plans for our GOTV (Get Out The Vote) effort. Again, the positive energy I felt at the rally on Sunday permeated the air.  There were questions and concerns expressed.  But every one present was there to be part of a team that is going to do everything in its power to turn out our fellow union and Working America members to win this historic election.  We could feel it. We could taste it. And we could breathe in the positive energy of all of our colleagues. And, we know that none of us are going to let up one tiny bit until the polls are closed!

Then, the real positive energy for me came during the evening phone banks.  Once again, two volunteers in particular, showed me the soul of trade unionism in this state and country.

I mentioned one of them before. Mick is an out-of-work electrician who is spending a huge part of his time (while waiting for a call for a job from his union) working for the Obama campaign, the Udall campaign, and the Labor 2008 campaign.  he is not wallowing in self-pity over not having a job, though that would certainly be understandable.  He is giving all that he has to fight against those who have run the financial ship of this country into the ground and for those who will fight to even the playing field for hard-working people like him.  And, he is making sure that his kids understand what is going on and how they can help change the world.  What an inspiration!

The other was a first-time volunteer phone banker named Max.  He battled the software and the computer all night–not being the most computer literate person in the room–to make phone call after phone call, even trying to log back in after I had logged him out of the system because it was too late to make more calls.  Max was fighting for all of the good things that unions stand for.  He was calling people to make sure that they understand just how important it is to elect people who understand what it means to work long, hard hours to barely scrape by and be able to support yourself and a family.  We discussed how there has been, and is, a decades long war against the working class people in this country.  How, if someone points that out, they are accused of “class warfare” while the real class warfare has been going on for years–and the middle class is losing.  

The drive and desire to beat back these attacks and to make the system and the rules work for ALL of us once again is what I see in people like Mick and Max.  And it is that drive and desire that has made this past five months worthwhile to me.  

So, what drive and desire inspires you?  What drive and desire do you have to share with others in this battle?  What are you going to do over this last week to make sure that we win every battle we can?  And then, what are you going to do on November 5th, and beyond, to make sure that the people we elect do those things that we elected them to do?

We do come from different backgrounds, and for different reasons, to fight together for the same purpose–to better the lot of working families throughout this country, and the world. Between these three groups, as of the start of today, we had knocked on almost 200,000 doors in Colorado, hoping to educate our members, and the working classes in this state to the need to defeat amendments 47, 49, and 54, as well as to elect Barack Obama, Mark Udall, and Congressional Democrats. The middle class in this country, and the American Dream we were taught to pursue, are under attack. But we have the opportunity to beat back the attacks in this year’s elections. And, by pulling together, we are poised to do just that. And a night like tonight gives us the energy and enthusiasm to do just that.

We are battling for every man, woman, and child in this country who believes that the American dream means that an honest day’s work means that you will be paid an honest day’s wage. For those that believe that an increase in productivity means an increase in salary. And for those who understand that “greed” is not the central, unifying belief that rules this country.

For well over 50 years, we have been fed a line of crap that says that those who toil for a living are not the equals of those who finance that toil. And that to point that out is somehow to threaten to very system that this country was founded on. We have been told that government workers are all overpaid and underworked. That the private sector can do everything cheaper than the public sector–and that that is a good thing. We have seen, in the last six weeks, a candidate ridiculed for saying that paying your fair share of the cost of running and defending this country is our patriotic duty. As if the cost of financing these endless wars of aggression should be born only by those who are too stupid, or unaware, to demand that the costs are placed on another sector of our populace.

It is time to stand up to those who believe that they are above the rest of us–those who believe that they are above sharing in the costs of maintaining our way of life, even while screaming that the government must do everything it can to attack and control any country that might think about standing up for itself, against our self-interest. This election is about reclaiming that wealth, that commonality, that the purveyors of greed would have us give up. It is about restoring the opportunity that they claim is under attack by the efforts to rebuild that opportunity.

We have an historic chance to turn around America. We dare not let it go.

Early voting is already taking place in Colorado and Texas, as well as a number of other states. And the actual election day is less than two weeks away. It’s time to vote. And to encourage your friends and relatives to vote. It is time to tell those who would continue to give more and more of the wealth generated in this country to a smaller and smaller group of people that enough is enough. It is time to reclaim our heritage and our dreams. It is time to VOTE! for the change that we need and can believe in. It is time to elect Barack Obama as our next President, Mark Udall and Rick Noriega as our next US Senators, and as many other Progressive candidates as possible.

And then it is past time to realize and remember that November 4th is not the end. It is the beginning of the change that we must see in this country and this world!

There were two volunteers at our phone bank, last night, that I particularly want to mention. Ron and Mick are both members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 68, who have been out of work for a number of months. I have watched other people I know go through the difficulty, frustration, and questioning that comes with being an out-of-work bread-winner for their family. It is the kind of thing that can render one helpless. But these two men are taking the fight right back to the powers-that-be that have caused them to be in the economic situation in which they find themselves. Tonight, in the third and final debate of the 2008 Presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of engaging in class warfare. The truth of the matter is that class-warfare has been going on for a couple of decades–and the middle-class is loosing.

We can sit back and commiserate with one another, or we can run to the middle of the street and scream. Ron and Mick are in the street screaming to every union member they can find. It isn’t easy sometimes to spread this word to people, especially those who don’t see things from the same perspective. But, it is the only way we can begin to turn around this country. Today it looks like we are heading towards wins in every race in which we are participating. But nothing can be taken for granted. The race is not over ten yards from the finish line. The only poll that matters is the one that closes on election night. Ron and Mick are doing everything they can to make sure the outcome is the best it can be for people like them. What are YOU doing?