University of Virginia Library

David Giltinan

6,000,000,000 Burgers
And The War Goes On

Bored with the Vietnam War?
You've just been reading the wrong
statistics.

For example, the Government
recently admitted to shooting up
150,000 South Vietnamese civilians
last year alone, of whom 35,000
died.

Chickenfeed. 35,000 is the population
of Muskogee Oklahoma,
which is puny stuff indeed here in
America, Land of Billions.

Just suppose, however, that we
murdered those civilians for some
pragmatic end...food, for instance.
We find that 35,000 dead civilians
(at one hundred pounds each) make
some twenty-eight million hamburger
patties (two ozs, each.)
(That's bones, toenails and all)

Burger Eats

Things are looking up, statewise.

MacDonald's Inc., presently
building at Barracks Road, veritably
dwarfs those figures with
their claim to have sold over
6,000,000,000 (six billion!) cheap
hamburgers in their career. If MacDonald's
has spend twenty years
reaching this figure, then they
could theoretically be expected to
go through a YEAR's supply of
dead Vietnamese civilians every
MONTH.

Nor is that all, for MacDonald's
is but one corporation. The addition
of Burger-Boy, Burger-Rama,
Burger-Chef, and Burger-King (not
to mention Food Services) boggles
the imagination.

This is not to imply that MacDonald's
serves dead Vietnamese,
(or even toenails) since it costs,
after all, about $1000 per pound to
kill people in Vietnam. The purpose
here is only to point that America
is a big, busy country, and has more
important things to worry with
then the fate of a paltry 35,000
innocent people.

Bloodbathing

The Army, one notes, is a bigger
outfit then all the hamburger dives
combined, yet is content to spare
the vast majority of South Vietnam's
population, for which kindness
survivors frequently shoot us
in the back; a palpable outrage
when one considers that the total
life's blood of 35,000 Vietnamese
(at two gallons each) wouldn't even
fill our boy's Olympic swimming
pool at Long Binh Army Post.

To the South Vietnamese, who
number only 18,000,000 in the
first place, (with 3,500,000 of those
refugees, 1,000,000 more in the
armed forces and yet another million
missing or dead since the war
began) America's terrifying use of
firepower is cause for considerable
bitterness. This is reflected in a
recent public opinion poll regarding
America where two-thirds of the
people we are defending asked us to
leave, and most of the rest declined
to give an opinion.

It remains the lot of the Vietnamese,
as it has for three thousand
or more proud years, to endure.
America cannot be expelled. America
can kill forever while her President
prattles nonsense ("we'll
withdrawal after you guys admit
we've won") and her people watch
the World Series.

Booming

America's economy, for all of
the rhetoric about 'strain', remains
forty times larger then her war
budget, even after underwriting Saigon's
economy.

Yet the war can be stopped. It
can be stopped regardless of the
helplessness of the Vietnamese, it
can be stopped no matter how
badly Nixon wants to keep murdering
for honor, it can be stopped
without worrying over which liars
will replace what fools in November.

Consider our second aggregation
of statistics.

The war requires about 1500
fresh combat troops weekly. Perhaps
3% of the national volunteers
request combat, some 200 men per
week. The other 1000+ spots have
got to be filled by draftees.

Incongruous

At present, 88% of the combat
riflemen in South Vietnam are draftees.
A staggering one in every four
draftees is wounded in action and
the draftee fatality rate is twice
that for volunteers, who spend their
hitch swimming at Long Binh.
None of this information bodes
well for Selective Service.

The draft is deteriorating, all by
itself, with induction refusals in
Buffalo, Oakland, Chicago, and
Northern Alabama swamping local
prosecutors. In Oakland, where fully
half of the inductees never show
up, the Government is resorting to
mass prosecutions-up to 40 people
at once.

In January, Charlottesville Draft
Resistance activated a 'time bomb'
resistance tactic which may annihilate
Selective Service by New Year's
Day, a possibility admitted indirectly
by Curtis Tarr, National
S.S.Director, in a secret memo over
the summer.

Pledges

The device is a pledge card,
obligating the slgnee to do nothing
at all until 100,000 identical pledges
have been collected, at which
point a block of men equal to
nearly half America's state and federal
prisoners would go on an unconditional
strike against Selective
Service, returning draft cards, renouncing
deferments, and daring
the Justice Department to prosecute
or capitulate.

25,000 pledges have been accounted
for so far. They are being
circulated by the National Student
Association, the Union for National
Draft Opposition, the War Resister's
League, and over 1000 contacts
nationwide.

The final statistic, then, is
75,000 more pledge cards.

This we balance against 56,000
promotion hungry career officers,
jostling mightily for a shot at Charly
before The Big Show fizzles
out...the three million pounds of
charred, shattered Vietnamese hamburger
those officers will leave behind...the
concrete and barbed wire
'futures' of the next million or two
South Vietnamese whose ancestral
homes are to disappear beneath
American bulldozers and napalm...the
mile long 'tracks' left by
B-52's over Vietnam and Laos, consisting
of 120 craters, forty feet
across, good only for breeding disease...and
the next five thousand
Americans due to die.