Is that your best response?

Editor’s Note: These will be the last letters that will be printed relating to this matter as the exchange between concerned parties are escalating beyond the purposes of this section, which is to provide a forum for people to exchange ideas and opinions related to current issues affecting the local community.

Is that your best response?

My, my, my, Mr. Del Rosario, is your latest response the best that you can dish out? Do you now have to revert to comments that not only criticizes me personally, but now involve countless other with your insulting accusations (killers of innocent people, causing death, hardship, and lifetime displacement in an undefined war that was never won in Vietnam)—all this considering that a Memorial Day ceremony had just recently been commemorated by your administration in honor of all veterans?

As for politics not being your calling, you couldn’t cut it or stand the pressure anyway, as earlier demonstrated by your insulting characterization of veterans who served our country proudly and with honor. As for being woefully disappointed with me during my bid for public office, I hate to burst your bubble but I never did give a hoot about acquiring electoral support from the likes of you.

The next time you choose to chop down a tree so as to demonstrate your self-proclaimed authority as a judge of character, be sure to choose a papaya tree because it’s easier to cut down than a coconut tree. Otherwise, you’d find yourself holding a very dull machete performing under less than adequate mentality.

Jack Terlaje Quitugua
Garapan, Saipan

ON VIETNAM AND SOLDIERING

The antidote to teaching the illiterate in Vietnam would have been the Peace Corps, not the Army, as asserted by Mr. Barry Hirshbein. But I’m not knocking out the good deeds of our men in uniform thrown into a situation where they had no say so whatsoever—an undefined war where victims include our very own. Too, there were the nationwide student demonstrations across colleges and universities protesting a senseless war.

I have done a feature on the My Lai Massacre while a journalism student in 1976. I read the entire report I secured from the U.S. Department of the Army spokesman of the Vietnam War. That article, though a feature, is fact-based. Then came the book and movie, The Killing Fields. Need we say anything further? Well, you had to do what you had to do as a citizen of our country, as so fittingly explained by Lawrence F. Camacho, Assistant Prof. of Military Science and Leadership, Georgia Institute of Technology.

But I am vividly reminded of the day I walked through a ward at the Guam Naval Hospital where the wounded moaned and groaned, some conscious and unconscious, who just returned from Vietnam. One had the picture of President Nixon next to his bed, remarking, “That’s the guy that forced the loss of my two legs.” What a vivid protest, riddled with the thought of having to live a hindered life because of the loss of vital limbs.

In 1974, I accompanied the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to Rongelap, Utirik and Bikiki in the Repubic of the Marshall Islands for the annual medical check-up of radiation-affected Marshallese. I saw first hand the life-long illnesses the local population had to endure, i.e., higher case of thyroid than the national average, among other illnesses. For sure, it will take thousands of years before normalcy returns to those islands, health-wise. No matter the millions of dollars paid the recipients, life has changed forever.

The war elsewhere, including discouraging the production of weapons of mass destruction by such rogue countries as Iran, is best approached by employing international rather kaboom diplomacy. The prevailing war against Muslim countries is made ever more difficult by the fact that we are not fighting a conventional war, but a war where we don’t even know our enemies. Sorry but I feel that my letter ended up being misunderstood from A-Z.

I’d still salute our veterans even if they were in a war for all the wrong reasons born by a political decision in what is often referred to as “in our national interest.” Yes, we have to have oil but need we violate the sovereign rights of oil-producing countries under the guise of imported democracy?

John S. DelRosario, Jr.
As Gonno