The Dimensions of a Tragedy

 I can't remember where I dug this up, gentle reader, but it is illuminating.

Statistics can't effectively describe the full dimensions of a disaster, but they can attempt to measure it. Max Hastings described the war in Vietnam as "an epic tragedy", and when you read this collection of information, you can understand why he used those words.

Hastings, a writer who has authored many books about the conflicts of the last century, has well and truly hit the nail on the head.

Perhaps the most horrifying number on the list is the first one - the list of overall casualties. It doesn't specify that this is a figure which includes both military and civilian, but this is an assumption. I'd be happily corrected if a better source is available.

There is a line listing an estimate of 587,000 South Vietnamese killed. This seems a little dodgy. In the first place, what is the definition of a "South Vietnamese"? There was a lot of movement in both directions throughout the conflict, and many born in the north moved south either to fight or flee, and the opposite phenomenon also applied.

Are we to assume that if the number of the total of "South" Vietnamese killed together with the number of South Vietnamese Military personnel killed is subtracted from the list of overall casualties, that the figure of 4,965,833 derived is the number of "North" Vietnamese killed? If anyone has a better source, please let me know.

Paul Ham has published his own set of figures.*

To an ex-Nasho like me, the figures about national Servicemen are interesting. Note that 804,000 20-year-olds registered, but only 18,000 actually served in Vietnam. Of these 18,000 it is reasonable to assume that many of them were POGOs (Personnel on Garrison Operations), so it is clear that the actual number of individuals who shared my experience of extended periods outside the wire patrolling and ambushing is very small.

Forgetting about the details of postings, the proportion of Nashos who went to Vietnam of those who were conscripted is actually 28%. Of those who registered, but either weren't balloted, or weren't posted to units that served in Vietnam, it drops to 2.2%.

Those figures provide a telling insight into the level of political cynicism that drove the National Service Act. If you're in government, you can probably afford to lose the support of 2.2% of the population and survive politically, and this worked until about 1970, when the public mood began to change. It's also important to remember that for quite a long period into the Australian commitment of conscripts, that these same conscripts were too young to vote and have a say into their immediate future.

Other figures of note include those relating to exposure to combat, in comparison to the experience of those who served in World War 2. The average infantry soldier in Vietnam had 314 days in combat (as defined by being outside the wire, I assume), compared with 40 days in WW2. That is 12% of what was the norm in Vietnam.

No wonder many Vietnam vets, when told they hadn't experienced a "real war" by veterans of earlier conflicts became more than a little upset. This happened to me in 1975. I was more fortunate that many in that 2.2% because I was posted as a POGO in June of my tour, but I still had around 100 days as a rifleman outside the wire.

The extremely efficient Dustoff process gets a mention, as it should. It saved many lives. Mind you, it was excellent when it was implemented, but I was present when for reasons lost in the mists of time it wasn't, and a fellow digger died as a consequence.

When you consider the amount of ordnance expended (10,000 artillery rounds daily - and the total tonnage of bombs dropped of 6,727,084) and the chemicals sprayed (19,000,000 gallons of defoliants) you begin to appreciate another dimension of the tragedy.

As an American veteran of the war said to me in July 2018 when I chatted with him at the wall in Washington - "What a f***ing waste". 

The wall lists the names of the 57,000 American military personnel who died.

Paul Ham's numbers -

“The personal cost of the war, in terms of personal grief and moral degradation, is immeasurable. In our helplessness, we surrender to statistics. 520 Australian soldiers dead and 3000 wounded. 58193 Americans dead and about 300000 wounded. 220356 South Vietnamese troops dead or missing in action, and 1.17 million wounded. 660000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops dead, with the possibility that a third were civilians mistaken for enemy troops or deemed legitimate targets

* Paul Ham, Vietnam, the Australian War, Harper Collins, 2007, p 663

Bill Logan on our War Heritage.

This is the recording of a speech given by Bill Logan at the Australian War Memorial about our war heritage quite a few years ago.

It resonated for me when I remembered Long Tan. 

I have been there twice. The first time was when we set out on our second operation in country in April 1970 after forming up there prior to an overnight insertion into our AO.

The second time was when I travelled to Vietnam in 2006 with my two sons, and we visited the memorial with its simple stone cross.

Apart from that, Long Tan is significant for me because a bloke who was my friend at Downlands college in 1961-62, Francis Topp, was killed in the first few minutes of the battle.

You'll find it here - https://www.shrine.org.au/conserving-australias-overseas-war-heritage-professor-william-logan

Vietnam veterans may find it interesting.

Simply click on the pale green triangle.

A Talent for Disinformation

Image courtesy ec.europa.eu

This post is an exercise in fact-checking. I'm addressing the claims made (most recently by individuals such as Craig Kelly and Bob Katter) about Covid-19 vaccines and Ivermectin respectively.

These claims have been floated extensively on social media, although in the case of Kelly on Twitter only, as his Facebook account has been suspended because he was using it to peddle misinformation.

Let's start with Bob Katter. Media reports circulating say that he claimed in a speech on Sunday 21st November in Cairns that several of his staff had died or been made severely unwell as a result of Covid vaccine administration. They are based on audio in which he stated that there were "eight or nine people" in his office who "had died or had been badly affected" by the vaccine.

On questioning, his staff insisted that what Mr Katter had said was that there had been "eight or nine cases come into our office" and it was not people "in" his office - obviously a complete misunderstanding. One can assume that the electoral office would have been put out of commission if this had actually happened. I don't know how many people work there, but "eight or nine" sounds more than a little suss....

The actual audio of his speech indicates that he said "into" and not "in", but is sufficiently unclear to allow for both interpretations. Let's allow Bob the charitable interpretation that he meant the eight or nine cases were were constituents in his Federal electorate of Kennedy, which covers 567,377 square kilometres and had an enrolment of 107,644 in 2019.

Now let's assume Bob was indeed referring to Kennedy constituents and that his statement that eight or nine cases of adverse reactions had occurred is correct, (although he didn't furnish any proof), and look at figures for that electorate.

I couldn't find a breakdown of vaccination take-up for Kennedy, but if you average Cairns (85% first dose) and Charters Towers (73% first dose) you come up with a figure of 79%. The only other large population centre in the electorate is Mount Isa, which is pretty much a mine town. There was nothing on-line that I could find about vaccination rates in the Isa, but unless the culture has changed since I lived there in the nineties, you can bet your boots that both the mines and the various government agencies, both indigenous and otherwise, are vigorously pushing vaccinations.

That 79% of 107,644 gives you 85,038 vaccinated. So if Bob is referring to his constituents, that's an adverse reaction rate of 0.015835, or one adverse reaction in about a thousand, on the lower end of what is typical of reactions to most vaccines, as a visit to the Australian Immunisation Handbook website reveals. In the case of the Pertussis vaccination, administered routinely to Australian infants, the incidence of adverse local reactions is approximately 10%. That's about ten times the rate for Covid vaccines. Why isn't Bob Katter getting excited about Pertussis vaccination?

Image courtesy UN ilibrary

Then we look at Craig Kelly. He's made so many bizarre claims about Covid (relating both to treatments and vaccination) that it'd difficult to address them all, but how about this one -

"The vaccines are not sufficiently effective, and they're not sufficiently safe" which you can hear at about 1:30 seconds into an unsolicited video he sent me from a speech he made at a rally in Melbourne last weekend. (This is despite the fact that I have messaged him on a number of occasions requesting that he cease sending unsolicited texts to my phone and removing the number from the UAP database).

Let's look at the first of these two statements - the first one that the vaccines are not effective. (I'm not sure what "sufficiently" means in this context). There are any number of published studies around the issue of vaccine effectiveness, but this one is very recent, and very representative. It reports -

Findings

The highest VE estimates against new cases in >16 year-old individuals, for all outcomes, were reached at the 15-21 day period after the second dose, ranging between 97.7% for deaths and 98.6% for severe/critical disease. VE estimates of the 14-20 day period after the first dose ranged between 54.3% for infection and 77.3% for severe/critical disease.

Interpretation

The *BNT162 vaccine is highly effective in preventing new SARS-CoV-2 cases. Among >80 year-old individuals, high effectiveness develops more slowly. In breakthrough cases, vaccination reduces complications and death.

Kelly has been pushing Ivermectin as a treatment, and demonstrating outrage that it is not prescribed. (Being of a cynical mindset, I do wonder if that concern has anything to do with his patron buying up copious quantities of the drug - but I digress).

Here is just one summary from a recent trial of Ivermectin conducted in June and published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. There are many more studies which came to the same conclusion -

In a retrospective study, a single dose of 200 ug/kg of ivermectin was explored for its effect on patients with severe COVID-19. In congruence with this evidence, no improvement in microbiological and clinical outcomes was found in the ivermectin group compared with the control group.

Similarly, in another randomised, double-blind clinical trial, ivermectin (administered at a dose of 300 ug/kg of body weight per day for 5 days) compared with placebo did not significantly improve the time to resolution of symptoms among adults with mild COVID-19 infection. The evidence is of very low certainty for the effects of ivermectin in reducing mortality, need for hospitalisation, and reduction of time for clinical improvement in COVID-19 infection.

It's obvious, that when it comes to disinformation, both these politicians have talent.

It would be funny, if it wasn't dangerous. It kills people.

And Kelly's and Katter's claims - frankly bullshit...

*Pfizer

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Getting There...

(click to enlarge)

 Slowly but surely, I'm plugging away at my study.

The project is driven by two factors, the first is attempting to understand the motives and attitudes of national servicemen in regards to their service in Vietnam. That will comprise the research element once I complete all my course work. I'm in no hurry, enjoying the journey.

The second is the sheer excitement of discovery. There is so much material hidden away in archives, and so little time left to share the recollections of those of us who were personally involved. 

And, of course, there are myths to bust.

I was initially advised by the University to jump straight in at the deep end and begin to conduct the research. Apparently my memoir would have been sufficient to gain admission to a Ph D programme. This course of action would most probably have been a mistake, because my forty-year grasp of the conventions of academia is weak, and would have turned the enterprise into an exercise in frustration.

Entering at master's level means I can navigate my way through the minefield of referencing and the various academic conventions that, whilst they haven't really changed since I last studied in the late seventies, use very different tools from those I employed forty years ago. These tools are essentially digital, and whilst they facilitate research and save time, involve techniques that have to be learned. My fellow students (digital natives) don't have these issues. I have forty years of progress to catch up with.

The only downside has been the elimination of the face-to-face aspects of the course programme as a consequence of the pandemic. Covid has turned the physical presence of fellow students into a virtual experience. You will always learn as much from your peers as your supervisors, and that learning is a bit stilted via zoom.

Having said that, my supervisor is a veteran of Afghanistan, and has a very clear understanding of military culture, which is a distinct advantage.

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Out of the Mouths of Innocents

This family of musicians neatly nails the rubbish being promoted by those resisting vaccination.

It is, gentle reader, worth posting.

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That Black Foulness

Image courtesy Pinterest

Yesterday was Remembrance Day.

I paused for a minute or two in the middle of helping my son to move house to consider its meaning. I reflected on the fact that he is the first of three generations of my family not to be exposed to the black foulness of war.

And yet, the old orthodoxies glorifying the absurdity of making war persist, and these institutional commemorations often overwhelm the real significance of the day. 

All that is really required is a minute's silence. That silence speaks much more eloquently for those who died than brass bands, flag waving and bugle solos. Those we remember are, after all, forever silent.

Given that Remembrance Day commemorates casualties of over 40 million (twenty million deaths and twenty-one million wounded, including 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians), it is indeed a solemn occasion.

When you recall that grievances resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (signed on On 28 June 1919, not November 11th as is the common misperception) were a large component of what led to the Second World War, it becomes even more tragically significant.

Consider the waste of so many young lives (and many of them were boys, not yet men, who could have had no idea of what they were fighting for) and the deaths of so many innocent civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you begin to understand the depth of the catastrophe.

This was especially true in a  country with such a small population as Australia had at the time, where the impact of so many lost of one special generation was enormously significant.

And to acknowledge that twenty-one years later, Europe was once again tearing itself apart in another deadly conflict, is more cause for deep sadness. 

Wilfred Owen put the old lie starkly, a few short months before he was killed in France at age twenty-five, a week before the armistice.  

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The Transpacific Virus

Apart from Covid-19, there is another virus circulating at the moment.

It is just as dangerous as the Covid Pandemic, but it originated in the USA, not China. Its consequences are real, as can be observed by the chaotic state of US politics.

I'm referring, of course, to the epidemic of distrust of institutions and government across the Pacific since the Tea Party movement emerged towards the first ten years of the new millennium. That movement grew out a sense of grievance and entitlement precipitated by globalism, automation, and the GFC.

Political movements generated by national grievance rarely end well. Examples include Brexit, which is wreaking havoc on daily life in the UK right now, and the Tea Party itself, which has changed some Republicans from a credible conservative movement to a baying mob, despite the fact that it The Tea Party largely disappeared from the scene in its original form. National grievance was one of the major factors driving the rise of the NAZI movement in Germany in the thirties, and remains a large component of Chinese nationalism, used extremely effectively by the CCP under Xi Jinping.

Another component assisting the rise of grievance politics is the role of US corporate media, exemplified by Fox news, and these days, Newsmax. Gone are the days when the corporate media reported the public mood. These days they make a profit by exploiting that mood, monetising it, and then selling it back to the consumers of that same media. 

These same consumers are always prepared to pay for what they want to hear. They become opinion junkies, and this phenomenon leeches into social media. Recently, social media platforms have belatedly started to arrest the tide of misinformation and disinformation that feeds this sense of grievance. Facebook and Twitter have begun to do this, although with great reluctance, as it messes with their business model. It took an insurrection for Twitter to give Trump the shove. 

None of this would bother me very much, except that it is beginning to have an effect locally. One example of this is the imported outrage from the US about vaccine mandates and lockdowns.  Despite the fact that the Australian death rate from the virus per head of population is about 1/25 of what is it across the Pacific (67 per million vs 2297) there are voices here jumping on the culture wars bandwagon, and demanding an end to mandates and restrictions. They even use the same four word slogan.

 The most recent example is the introduction of legislation designed to require voters to present ID at the ballot box. It is designed to solve a problem which does not exist in this country, and has already been resolved in Queensland, where people on the electoral roll are posted an ID card to their address, and present that when they vote. I'm accumulating a collection.

A far greater problem than electoral fraud in this country is the rate of participation in state and federal elections - (91.9%) at the last federal poll. Despite the Electoral Commission seeing this as an achievement, we'd be doing better as a democracy if everybody got to vote.  How about the legislature take measures to ensure this disenfranchised 8.1% of the Australian electorate votes, rather than chasing the less than 0.001% of the electorate who allegedly tried to vote more than once at the last federal poll?

I won't hold my breath for an answer.

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