Casey Austin Sheehan: May 29, 1979 - April 04, 2004

f we didn't learn the lessons of Vietnam until it was too late, let's learn one while we still can: America will eventually pull out of Iraq, let's pull our fighting troops out now and I am convinced that lives on both sides will be saved if we do. If we don't pull out soon, who knows where else the sickly cancer of American empire will spread and how many more innocent people like Casey will die.

Also, one lesson that we should have learned from Vietnam is that there is always a war and an enemy in the offing. The neocon war machine is planning the new "ist" and "ism" for us to fear next when the "ism" du jour fails to sufficiently frighten us. We must stay on our guards against this.

Buddhists say that a person dies twice. Once when his/her physical body dies and once when the last person to remember him/her dies. We should never forget the lesson of Casey and his untimely death on the altar of the war machine. We should never have forgotten the lessons of the millions dead in Vietnam who were sacrificed on that same altar.


Full story here.