New Book by Vietnam Veteran John Ketwig Warns: American Voters Must Act to Gain Back Democracy From Those in the War Business

ROANOKE, Va., July 31, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- John Ketwig shipped out to Vietnam in September, 1967. Today as then, veteran Ketwig worries that America is losing or "wasting" a veteran to suicide at the rate of 20 or more every day.

"There are 58,417 names on the Vietnam Memorial but more than 200,000 Vietnam Vets have taken their own lives, experts estimate," said Ketwig.

And yet the American Way of Waging War continues.

"We know the incidence of suicide among active duty military is at epidemic proportions. The Pentagon no longer releases those numbers because it's bad for recruiting efforts," he said.

He said Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should never have been taken to task over for questioning why $21 trillion in taxpayer dollars was missing from the Pentagon financial records.

"In chapter 21 of Vietnam Reconsidered, I take a close look at the costs of militarism, including the first-ever audit of the Pentagon that failed miserably due to the culture of waste and fraud, stonewalling and concealment," he said. "Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense and Richard Cheney, Vice President under President George W. Bush stated that 'according to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions' by the Department of Defense, which had a total budget of $313 billion that year. America's adversary, Rumsfeld said, was not China or Russia, but 'the Pentagon bureaucracy.' Unfortunately, those observations were then obscured by the tragic events of 9/11."

"Young people today tell me they know Vietnam is important, but they don't know why. My book gives a context to the Vietnam war in terms of the social and technological advances of our generation, the corruption and profiteering in the U.S. from that and subsequent wars, and the terrible damage we have done to peoples around the world," said Mr. Ketwig.
Mr. Ketwig, whose first book about his experiences as a solider became a best-selling Book of the Month and gained praise from peaceniks like Phillip Berrigan, and veterans like Ron Kovic and Bobby Muller, founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America, writes in his new book an analysis of America's modern war policies, and a plea to abolish the country's increasingly ingrained militarism and war for corporate profits.

"I challenge the reader to reconsider today's acceptance of militarism as the solution to America's economic and social problems," said Ketwig. "The failed strategies of the Vietnam Era are still in use in Afghanistan and the Mid-East today."

Ketwig retired from a long automotive service and parts career, including factory representative and management positions for Toyota, Rolls-Royce/Bentley, Ford, and Hyundai. His views are now from the vantage point of a husband, father, and grandfather concerned about the country his offspring will inherit. He still suffers from the horrors of his Vietnam experience.

"I felt the splatter of someone's loss of life as it exploded across my face and no matter how many times I have washed my face over the past 47 years I cannot wash away that horrible stain," writes Ketwig.

Thus he fights to remind people today, as when he returned and became an anti-war veteran in 1969, that fighting is not about freedom and democracy and doing good for the world's downtrodden, but about "profits and power, authority and career advancement," as well as "corporate profits and garish stripes sewn onto a sleeve, about genocide and the screwed up notion that you can make a total stranger's existence better by killing or maiming him."

VIETNAM RECONSIDERED: The War, the Times and Why They Matter takes the events of the 1960s and 70s into the heart of today's politics.

"When the government of the United States finds it necessary to cut the budgets for education and repairs to our infrastructure in favor of funding new weapons systems that the Pentagon doesn't even need or want, and carrying on perpetual unwinnable wars while VA benefits are cut or misappropriated and propaganda supplants truth in our children's educations, I have to protest," he said.

SOURCE John Ketwig