Welcome home soldier

Relatives of U.S. Army Sgt. Keith Knezovich were so happy to have him back safe after a year in Iraq that they decorated a Christmas tree to welcome him home to Beallsville, Pa.

Follow this link to a photo of him and his mom Debbie.

Cambodia, looking back

At the close of the Vietnam War, Cambodia became caught in the violence of America’s long and bitter struggle in Southeast Asia. The Viet Cong had taken a stronghold in its jungles when then President Richard Nixon carried out secret bombing raids over the tiny country.
New York Times bureau chief Sydney Schanberg stayed behind in 1975 when helicopters evacuated the U.S. embassy in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh. The rest of the world was watching a similar scenario in neighboring South Vietnam when the U.S. abandoned Saigon. Few seemed to care about what was happening in Cambodia.
Schanberg’s gripping story about the slaughter of life that followed in Cambodia was told in the 1984 movie, “The Killing Fields,” starring Sam Waterston. It was based on the reporter’s book, “The Life and Death of Dith Pran,” a Cambodian journalist who worked as Schanberg’s assistant.
The story later inspired the novel of the same name as the movie. While the book’s pages have yellowed over time, it’s worth another read today, while America is “spreading Democracy” in a war that seems to have no end in sight in Iraq.
Schanberg’s dispatches to New York revealed how a tiny insurgent group led by the infamous Pol Pot had grown to include thousands of members following the 1973 bombings. The ruler’s Khmer Rouge party stormed Phnom Pehn in the spring of 1975, taking command of the country. It would become responsible for an estimated 1.5 million deaths.
It took several years for Vietnamese troops to quash the regime, only after Pol Pot’s army had littered the country with land mines. Today, Cambodia’s government majority is held by Communists. And its citizens are living a legacy from that conflict where just about every family has lost a member to land mines, or has a relative missing an arm, leg or eye to the devices.
It’s safe now to visit Cambodia, only after millions of dollars in foreign aid have been invested to sweep the landscape of mines.


(Land mine victims make music, above, at the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia)

War follows similar paths. Last month, former army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski spoke at California University of Pennsylvania about the need to pull out of a misguided war in Iraq. While serving there in 2004, she said many Iraqis who initially supported U.S. soldiers went on to join the insurgency in hopes of change. This is a war, too, where journalists of Schanberg’s breed are not given the opportunity to send home the full story.

Anti-Iraq war march

This is what Democracy looks like

Scott Beveridge
Observer-Reporter

Clean-cut parents in their 30s pushed baby strollers, marching beside female octogenarians wearing hot pink for solidarity last week at a massive anti-war rally in the nation’s capital.
Labor turned out in force, representing the United Steel Workers of America, teachers’ unions and Service Employees International Union. An 80-year-old gentleman took the subway from the suburbs, holding a homemade sign criticizing President Bush’s rhetoric. There also was a showing of young adults wearing dreadlocks, looking as if they were in need of a bath.
“This is what Democracy looks like,” protesters chanted in the well-orchestrated, peaceful march on the Capitol that bore little resemblance to the turbulent war demonstrations in the 1960s and 70s.
It was easy to put a face on the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era.
Many proud World War II veterans working in Pittsburgh steel mills called those activists long-haired, unpatriotic queers who were afraid to die for their country.
Actress Jane Fonda would go on to represent everything evil about the youth movement when she was photographed in Hanoi in 1973, adding her name to the enemy Communist propaganda. She was young and just as naive about foreign policy as the rest of the protesters, many believed then.
It would take nearly a decade for mainstream America to join the opposition to Vietnam. Television newsman Walter Cronkite, who brought the war into living rooms, would be given credit for turning the masses against the war.
It happened when, thinking he was off air, he questioned whether the White House had been telling the truth about who had the upper hand in Vietnam. “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war,” Cronkite said, reacting to the North Vietnamese army taking over nearly every U.S. stronghold during the surprise Tet offensive in 1968.
The first massive anti-war march would not occur in Washington, D.C., until 1969, when as many as 500,000 people turned out on the Mall separating the Capitol and Washington Monument. Still, it was a movement largely associated with drugs, hippies, peaceniks and college kids. It was five years after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the nation was misled into thinking a U.S. vessel had come under attack in North Vietnam in what became the smoking gun that brought U.S. troops to war.
The biggest difference between Vietnam and opposition to the war in Iraq is that it has taken much less time for the anti-war sentiment to galvanize. Large war protest rallies have been filling the streets in cities across the United States, since President Bush launched the war in Iraq March 19, 2003.
The 69-year-old Fonda made her first appearance at a war protest rally in 34 years last week in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of 1,300 anti-Iraq war groups across the nation.
This time, Fonda brought along her daughter and granddaughter. They were not alone among this diverse crowd that numbered in the tens of thousands, or nearly 500,000, depending on who did the estimating. Actors Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn were there. So were a mild-mannered priest, soft-spoken rabbi and non-violent rappers from across the country who call themselves the “Raging Grannies.”
However hard the war supporters try, it will be next to impossible for them to draw stereotypes about who belongs to this modern anti-war movement.

Please view the set of photos from the protest.