Opinion/Editorial
THE VALLEY OF NO RETURN
In the three-book war series, the publisher wrote about his time in the A Shau Valley in Vietnam during that war, he discussed, since he was commanding a Marine Corps Company in daily and nightly combat, that the valley was called the either the Valley of the Shadow of Death or the Valley of No Return. That series is called Thirty Days Has September, denoting his thirty days down inside there and his return home hospitalizations mental and physical have been detailed chapter by chapter in the continuing issues of this newspaper. Chapter XVIII is in this issue of Book V of that series called The Cowardly Lion. This article is about the valley of no return as it pertains to what the future is going to hold and is already beginning to hold for the United States of America to whatever follows in history for this country, or what’s left of this country, after the current leadership either quits, is terminated or simply manages to survive for the full four-year term.
The lieutenant was commanding the company, which called for a captain, one of which was not available at the battalion, and his next in command was an aging gunnery sergeant who was serving in his last of three wars. The gunnery sergeant is the one who told the lieutenant about the designations since the 212 Marines in the unit were suffering losses of ten to fifteen either dead or badly wounded and evacuated casualties every twenty-four hours. When asked about those designations for the charnel house of a valley. Since nobody much survived the first phrase applied but the lieutenant countered him concerning the ‘no return’ phrase.
“You were in this valley previously and now you’re back,” he stated more than asked the gunny.
The gunny laughed. “This isn’t me. That me is long dead. I have no idea what this current me is but it sure as hell isn’t anything of what I was before and what’s more, in a very few days you’ll understand. You’ll remember that former person, but you won’t be able to recognize him as you anymore. You’ll go forth if alive more alien than any of those aliens you might have seen in Hollywood movies.”
One day, months later, inside the confines of a U.S. Naval Hospital, the lieutenant woke up and stared at the ceiling. He could remember his past. Going to college, was raised in a Coast Guard family, lived in Hawaii, got married and had a baby daughter, but he could not remember those things happening to him. He could only view those memories from a distance away as if those things had happened to someone else. He closed his eyes and called for a morphine shot. He wasn’t in physical pain that needed relief. He was in mental pain and sought any relief. He remembered what the gunny had told him and agonized over the fact that everyone else in the company had died…but so had he.
Today that returned ‘alien’ publisher puts out this very newspaper. He’s lost thirty-six pounds since the last national election in November. He’s lost the weight without drugs or intent. He’s lost weight because he feels the deep and growing gravitational pull of the valley calling him back.
Since the 20th of January in the year of 2024, the United States has been in trouble. The exact direction of where that definable but not predictable trouble is going to go or to what extent the casualties taken as they become more and more manifest is impossible to predict, but the trouble itself, as this article is written, is easy to see before the country and all of us who reside within its boundaries. Canada is preparing to stop trading with the USA and fortify its borders against American intervention and military attack France is asking for the Statue of Liberty back because the French are coming to believe that the USA no longer stands for the things the French built and sent to statue over to illustrate. Denmark is afraid the USA will attack Greenland, and Panama fears an attack as well. Trade of all kinds is suffering tariff attacks and then tariff retaliations while Europe is bringing back the military draft…not to defend against Russia but to defend against a much better-armed USA. Inside the USA vaccinations are being cut back or off, weather centers disbanded, the FAA weakened regarding aircraft and flight safety while even the Voice of America abroad, consistent in informing foreign countries about the USA is being shut down. Newspapers and all of the mass media on television, the Internet, and radio are being pursued criminally for saying anything opposed to the leadership (and this tiny newspaper will get the same treatment soon). The leadership of the country is scoffing at and disobeying the very tenets that embody the United States Constitution. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Veteran’s care and benefits are slowly being brought out and placed on a financial chopping block.
The United States is going down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and there appears no way to stop that slide. The United States will not be coming back. The entity and geography that all the people reading this article have come to know as the United States will still be here when this ‘war’ is over, but it will never again resemble what you may have come to find it to be in your current existence. You are not losing weight because you have not been down in the valley, so you have no real fear. When and if you defined as what being you were when this all happened, comes back then you’ll be like me. or as Robert Heinlein termed it, “A Stranger in a Strange Land.” What happened? Try lead pipes, still 15 million of them around the nation, feeding children lead-poisoned water. Try thirty million kids a year for a hundred years! The nation still is not rushing to replace these pipes. Lead poisoning in children causes, as its main symptom if the poisoning is survived, a steep decline in intellectual development (for life…there’s no fixing what happened to our nation).
