Vietnam Vet Gives Heartfelt Testimonial

Writing March 25, 2009, Willow Creek, Montana, America:

It's really quite simple. The men who shot the government of their day and established the United States of America in a bloody revolution created a U.S. Constitution. That Constitution created the Federal government of the United States of America. (It is also proper to use lower-case "u" in the word "united" in that title, reading thusly: the united States of America.) The Constitution "united" the several sovereign States. The Federal government, thusly created and authorized as the representative form of government reflecting the will of the people of those several States, (the consent of the governed), then created the U.S. military.

That Constitution is the Federal government's "work order", defining the newly-created government's responsibilities and limitations. It is the foundation and framework for the U.S. Federal government. It defines how the U.S. military may be used by the Congress and the White House, and indicates "purposes". That Constitution authorized the creation of a military for obvious reasons, and the oath which all military personnel vow upon entry into the military service goes directly to the Constitution, above and beyond any allegiance sworn to any political party, any President, or any other power on earth, period. The oath is sworn to the Constitution, for its continued preservation, and the Constitution is the highest uncontested common law of this land. It is the highest law of the American people, and of the entity known as the United States of America, and it is the source of legitimacy for all subsequent laws, which the U.S. Supreme Court interprets individually to test and prove any new law's compliance with the U.S. Constitution.

In recent decades, many mis-informed or mis-guided politicians in Washington, D.C. have taken the stance that indicates that the Constitution is a dated, aged, and worn-out old document. They have created enough illegal laws and Executive Orders to have, in their minds, successfully found ways to go around the definite limitations placed upon the Federal government by its Constitution. They would dearly love to remove that oath each service person and law-enforcement officer vows, but they cannot get that oath removed from our military and our law enforcement communities, because of one reason - the American people will not tolerate its removal. This is the Achilles Heel of those who would subvert the Constitution in lieu of "modern needs for government to act outside the limits set forth upon it in its own founding document".

That is where our loyalty resides - in the founding legal document which created the United States of America. It is honorable to swear or vow an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution against "all enemies foreign and domestic." It is honorable for every civilian and military person to require of his/her government that that government obey its own laws as written in the U.S. Constitution. It is not honorable to help misguided or malicious leaders inside today's Federal government break the highest uncontested law of the land, the highest common law, the U.S. Constitution. That is how simple this is, at bottom line.

What makes things confusing for many is the great influx of reasoning employed by powerful men operating inside our governmental system to subvert the Constitution, and the deliberate "dumbing down" of several generations of Americans by suppressing actual truths from public scrutiny or awareness. The military itself strongly uses the available media outlets to further the interests of "American Power", as they show conclusively in their recent (September, 2008) document entitled: US Army Special Operations Forces FM 3-05.130. It is a Field Manual (FM) and its subject is "Unconventional Warfare".

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-05-130.pdf

We may ask ourselves why is it now necessary, in the minds of many American citizens, to remind our law enforcement and military personnel of the true nature of their oaths. There are numerous reasons "why", and those reasons cannot be properly treated and expressed in one article. However, a few high-point topics relative to that question should be listed here. For many active-duty personnel, and for many veterans who proudly served, newly-revealed history which has been previously hidden from public awareness reveals much trickery at the hands of trusted American political/governmental "leaders". Please bear with me as I introduce a couple or three important aspects of today's realities. Let's begin with a quotation from a Supreme Court Justice:

“In a government of laws, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipotent, teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. If government becomes a lawbreaker it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.”

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Can government become the law-breaker? Will a government seated in Washington D.C., having been subjected to the demands and leverages of the financial district on Wall Street, of Corporate America, and other special interests, knowingly deceive a generation of American service-men and women? Has it happened already? Let's consider some things of which many veterans and most active-duty military personnel have been deprived proper knowledge.

My two units in Viet Nam were Marine Air Support Squadron - 3 (MASS-3) and "C" Battery, 2nd Light Anti-Aircraft Missile Battalion, (2nd LAAM Bn), both units being under command of the Fleet Marine Force - Pacific. My time in-country in the Republic of South Viet Nam was from autumn 1966 through autumn 1967. (When I came home, we were still "winning".) I reached the rank of Corporal E-4, and did nothing "heroic". I was just another willing Marine who would make it back home to discover many years later that I had been deceived and my service to America had been perverted into the role of an armed mercenary fighting for Wall Street interests. That was driven home to me when President Clinton made a hoopla of getting communist Vietnam into the World Trade Organization, a gesture which cannot be mistaken - the U.S. government was obeying Wall Street demands for trade relations with the communist country which conquered South Viet Nam and merged the South with the North to create today's "Vietnam". That was, for every veteran of Vietnam, a betrayal by our government.

Today I know well that the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" was a fabrication, designed to be a "pretext" for involving U.S. uniformed troops (and the arms industry) in the Vietnamese conflict. And today I know well that the CIA had been operating a 36,000-man clandestine army in Southeast Asia for nine years before that Gulf of Tonkin incident was alleged to have occurred. (The CIA moved into Laos right after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. That is when the CIA created that 36,000-man guerrilla, clandestine army, which the CIA then directed for at least nine years prior to the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964.)

I also know today that the U.S. government had made a deal with Ho Chi Minh during World War II, in which Vietnamese sovereignty was promised to Ho Chi Minh if he would use his underground guerrilla army to help the U.S. fight the Japanese in Southeast Asia. Ho Chi Minh agreed, and the U.S. helped arm and supply his army as his guerrillas fought the Japanese for the U.S. After the Allies won WWII, the U.S. government refused to honor our deal with Ho Chi Minh, and instead gave Viet Nam back to the French, causing Ho Chi Minh to seek assistance for his fight to overthrow the occupying French by making deals with Peking and Moscow. Ho Chi Minh would, most-likely, not have gone "communist" after WWII had the U.S. government honored its word to him.

This knowledge, this "hidden history", is profound in its implications, and was not given me (or to the American people) at the time I enlisted, nor was any of it ever mentioned in Boot Camp at Parris Island, nor at ITR at Camp Lejeune, nor at El Toro air base, nor anywhere else I was stationed while in uniform. It began to surface when Daniel Ellsberg "leaked" the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times under the Nixon Administration. This information, and much more like it, remains suppressed because it would conflict with the propaganda which drives the military-industrial complex today. (See President Eisenhower's Farewell Speech on the military-industrial complex and the dangers to America that complex poses. You can read the whole speech here:

http://www.jeffersonrivercoalition.com/military_industrial_complex_speech.htm .

I mention this because there is good reason to question authority now, perhaps moreso than ever before.

As the Poet Laureate of the Vietnam Veterans of America, the late Steve Mason, aptly put it in one of his poems,

"Old soldiers with bad gums find out too late whom they really served."

Those words sum it up for many Vietnam vets who have, long after their time in war, awakened to the infestation of evil men inside our Federal government. My generation of American fighting men were willing to fight for America, but we confused "America" with America's created, man-made government. The Federal government of the United States of America is not "America". It is just that vehicle our Founders created that the people, as freeholders and sovereign individuals, might use that vehicle for the expression of their will. That is aptly portrayed in a very famous essay by Henry David Thoreau, which you may read in full here:

http://www.jeffersonrivercoalition.com/Thoreau_Civil_Disobedience.htm

From the opening paragraph of that essay:

"I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it." ~ Henry David Thoreau

That strikes to the root of pure Americanism, to the doctrine of individual liberty, to the doctrine of personal freedom. And that is at the heart of every soldier's service to America.

Can anyone reading today's headlines have any doubt that America is in very serious trouble as a nation? The bailouts, the Wall Street fraud, the Federal Reserve System, Inc., the anti-liberty laws which flooded the Clinton and Bush-43 Administrations, rising unemployment, increasing taxes, the exposure of CIA "renditions" and government-sanctioned torture of detainees, the existence of Special Operations which include Psychological Operations being, as we speak, carried out against dissent in the American public at large, the National ID card issue, the Kelo decision on imminent domain, attempts through Congress to further regulate private gun ownership in this nation, the nearly four-hundred million dollar contract with Halliburton to build FEMA camps on domestically-located U.S. military bases, the proposals for a global "carbon tax" to fund a world-government though the United Nations, the government's deception regarding the creation of a North American Union (see: http://www.spp.gov/ ), NAIS-government implanting of RFID-chips in all livestock and other means of tampering with America's food supply, the deliberate destruction of the American economy from within, the deliberate devaluation of the U.S. dollar amid much talk of going to an "international currency", the "out-sourcing" of America's manufacturing base, the influx of millions of illegal immigrants competing for American jobs, NSA spying on the communications of the American people, the Trans-Texas Corridor and its introduction of the Mexican trucking-industry into the continental U.S.A. (attacking directly the American truck driver, and at the same time implementing "fast-track" security clearances for Mexican trucks carrying Chinese products around west-coast Import controls), and on and on the list of woes runs. There is even now a Brigade under NORTHCOM on stand-by to represent Federal government mandates among the American people themselves. You may read about that one from the Army Times' own website, here:

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/

The legality of that move by the Federal government and Pentagon is highly questionable, and requires for its defense a series of equally-questionable "laws" and "Executive Orders". One thing must be appreciated here - any law which is not itself "constitutional" is null and void. Assigning a Brigade to domestic service inside America's borders runs precisely against the entire spirit and letter of the U.S. Constitution, as well as running against the 1878 law known as "Posse Comitatus". Again, for a proper and American traditional view of this travesty, we may hark back to 19th Century author Henry David Thoreau in his essay linked above -

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?" ~ Henry David Thoreau

The things I mentioned above, and many more, are now documented fully and are now on the record, and cannot be denied any longer. These are facts which every oathkeeper should know fully. But the military-industrial complex, complete with the Defense Contractor lobbies, now is alarmed that the Internet has opened "Pandora's Box" and the people are discovering the truth, which is now spreading among the people like wildfire at grass-roots levels. To combat this awakening of the American citizen in large numbers, and preserve a power structure which I call the "shadow government" which operates inside the seats and offices of our legitimate government, the U.S. Federal government now stands ready suppress public dissent over government policy.

The Federal government has established "Fusion Centers" around the country, linking Federal databases to local law enforcement, and a very serious document has just been issued by the Missouri Fusion Center, directed to law enforcement across the land, and emanating from the Department of Homeland Security. Please educate yourself on this breaking story -

http://www.augustreview.com/news_commentary/general/the_radical_polarization_of_law_enforcement_20090318113/

- and then ask yourself if you really want to be a part of that. By the time the Federal government directly states that a man with a Ron Paul bumper sticker on his car is reasonably suspected to be a threat to law enforcement in America, the Federal government has drawn a battle line in the sand against American freedom of speech, and worse. By the time dissenting political free speech can mark a U.S. citizen as a "potential terrorist" if that speech runs contrary to the official government stand on its illegal, unconstitutional laws and operations, America is truly in grave danger from evil forces sitting in Washington D.C. offices of the people's government. Our government has obviously been "hijacked" now, and the culprits are involved in destroying the American middle class, our national economy, our values and morals, and our liberty as free Americans. These things must be considered by all military and law-enforcement personnel now. The outcome of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials subsequent to the defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII was the universal understanding that "just following orders" is no legal defense against charges of war-crimes. U.S. service personnel are legally excused from obeying illegal or immoral orders. And I will take that knowledge yet one step further by stating my personal opinion - The individual soldier or law-enforcement officer has a duty to the American people to stand against unconstitutional or illegal orders, to preserve American freedom for each and every American citizen, and to thereby honor his oath.

What I have done during the past ten years is but the work of one old war veteran who had many questions about what is going on in Washington, D.C. and on Wall Street. I have researched volumes of factual, sourced information which has been deliberately withheld from the American public. And I've noticed that young people seldom have any motivation to question the official story of what is happening in America, and to America. But everything I have said is now undebatable, because I can show supporting evidence, ranging from U.S. Senate hearings, governmental laws passed, published statements by named individuals, governmental proclamations, Presidential speeches, and countless public records. Given time and space to do so, I can contribute to this website a long list of remarkable insights into how our present-day Federal government is operating illegally outside the parameters laid down in the U.S. Constitution - and all of that bears directly on "why" America is obviously in trouble as a nation today.

There are many historic guide-posts which may direct our thinking as we reflect on our present reality. One thing which active-duty service personnel are not encouraged to read is, ironically, the great gift of truth given us by a very famous four-star Marine Corps General, Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler. General Butler is tantamount to the legendary Chesty Puller, and the two together are unquestionably the most popular and most respected Generals in the history of the Marine Corps. General Butler wrote and published, in the 1930s, after his retirement, a damning little book entitled "War Is A Racket". Please read the good General's post-service observations, here:

http://www.jeffersonrivercoalition.com/War_Is_A_Racket_Smedley_Butler.htm

Therefore, the keeping of one's oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution is the singularly most revolutionary and morally-correct stand any enlisted or commissioned U.S. military person can take, and it is more important today than it has ever been in America's brief history. I want to thank each veteran, each active-duty service man/woman, each supporter of same, who is an "oathkeeper", for standing for what is right, for what is moral, for what is important to the future of America. Each "oathkeeper" is a blessing to the people of America, and to future generations of Americans. Each oathkeeper carries within his mind and heart the precious tradition of American freedom and justice, those values which made America great. Thank you for your service, and thank you for standing on your word, and thank you for honoring your oath to the U.S. Constitution!

Salute!

Elias