Rational rant about Bob Kerrey’s confession of war atrocities from Jorn’s friend Jeff Dorchen (This Is Hell):

“I really want all you listeners to look at what stories get told about the Vietnam war. Because they really concern us. If we allow the
Vietnam war to become story about a series of tragic accidents, I think we’ll really lose something. We’ll lose the vivid image of a war that
really was one of the purest of all wars. It’s an example not of war’s insanity, but of its rationality. Of the calculatedly vicious, violent,
unconscionable decisions of those who were the managers of the war. There was no separation from the dark and the light. There was no
heart of darkness here in the heart of the jungle, with civilization so many miles away from the madness of primal evil. Evil civilization was
supervising the madness, moving the pieces on the map below into each other for the purpose of creating hell.

If we don’t remember this key aspect of the war against Indochina we run the risk of slipping into the complacent stance that ‘all people
really just want to do what’s right– like in the Vietnam War, our good intentions just got totally out of hand, and it just kept snowballing into
this monster no one could stop.’ No, there are people who have no such desire to do what’s right, they’re perfectly happy to do what they
know to be so horrible that they’d rather kill innocent people than let it be discovered.”