The Wall. 2009.

Among all the many people at The Wall in Washington, D.C., I saw Chuck (right). He was paying respects to 26 friends who had lost their lives in Vietnam. The Wall, as it’s called, is the Vietnam Memorial. It contains the names of 58,195 American service men and women who lost their lives in the war that ended in 1975.

I recall making eight trips to cover the war during my years at CBS News. Each time, I did my best to be objective despite witnessing the obscenity of the military industrial complex that was making a fortune from the war. What waste, I observed first-hand … especially of lives … and, for what purpose?

What’s changed in all those years, aside from the fact that Chuck and I and others have gotten older? The scene has shifted to the Middle East. The media is still referring to “front lines” in wars that never had front lines. The military industrial complex has grown even larger, and is making hundreds of billions of dollars now.

As the Vietnam war ended up empowering communist rule in Vietnam, the “war on terrorists” has only resulted in more terrorists … just as the war on drugs only resulted in a larger, and more out-of-control drug trade globally.

What are we learning … other than the well-pressed and impeccably quaffed members of the media cannot resist still to naively refer to front lines, and over-fed Washington lobbyists still find ways to extract staggering sums of taxpayer dollars from greedy politicians and the federal government to give to special interests groups, whose only business is prospering on war.

What are we learning? That nothing has changed … except much of the rest of the world.

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