And it's five, six, seven
Open up the pearly gates
Well there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we're all gonna die
~ Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag, Country Joe McDonald (1965)
There are 58,320 names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall, accumulated over twenty years of butchery. Today, in exactly two months, that number of American fatalities has been exceeded by a viral pandemic being mismanaged by the government worse than that war was mismanaged over a half century ago.
Ironically, some of the same people who survived that war have now died of the virus. Men in their 20’s during the Vietnam War are in their 70s and 80s today and make up nearly half of all the deaths by the coronavirus.