Legacy of European Colonialism Liberating Women With Bombs and Bags of Cash

By John Grant

It was the summer of 1981. I was working on an ambulance in Philadelphia, transporting a cancer patient to a hospital for radiation treatments. The man was in his sixties, and I felt he knew his days were numbered.

In my conversations with the man, it came up that I was a Vietnam veteran. He told me he was in the CIA in Saigon in the early 1970s.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I delivered bags of money. That’s pretty much all I did in the end. I was a bagman. I’d get an order to carry a bag of money to some character somewhere in Saigon. And that’s what I did.”

We both smiled grimly, as if to say, our war had turned out to be a moral debacle.

So it was a case of déjà-vu when I read in The New York Times that the CIA has for some time been delivering “bags of money” to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. You can be sure they were also delivering bags of money to a host of other nefarious actors in the corrupt mix of people loyal to our cause in Afghanistan. Afghan writer Qais Akbar Omar calls it "ghost money" and writes, "If ghost money were going to the people who needed it, Afghanistan would have a lot fewer ghosts."

My dying, ex-CIA friend, it seems, was one in a long tradition of bagmen in US imperial history. Now, of course, we must also have bagwomen to provide the strategic sugar to accompany the salt of our bombing campaigns.

When I returned from Vietnam I began reading a lot of history, from Bernard Fall’s great books on the French Indochina War to Robert J. Lifton’s early work on PTSD, Home From The War. I had been a 19-year-old radio direction finder in the mountains west of Pleiku locating Vietnamese radio operators so our forces could kill them and all the men and women in their units with artillery, aerial bombardments or infantry search & destroy missions. I have their blood on my hands, indirectly.

From my reading, I realized too late I was the “bad guy” in Vietnam and that the Vietnamese had never done anything to me or, more important, to my country. In fact, the Viet Minh were our ally and critical in helping us fight the Japanese toward the end of World War Two. After the war, like the Indians, the Indonesians and others colonized by European powers, they had had enough of colonialism and wanted to control their own destiny...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBehappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to:www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1738