Episode 012 - The Delta's lasting impression

Episode 012 - The Delta's lasting impression
This is episode twelve of the What's a Hero Podcast with me, Ken Frownfelter. Where does heart come from? And I don't mean the organ in your chest, nor do I mean the rock band. I'm also not talking about that red symbol that adorns store shelves or guy's shoulders encircled with the word "mom," or in a deck of cards. You know, that thing that's shot by a chubby baby with wings and a bow and arrow. I'm talking about the verb heart. Your mood, your feeling, your courage, your enthusiasm, your central or innermost vital part of your essence. That heart. That thing that makes you stand up for what you believe in and feel strongly towards. Where does that come from? Why do we feel things differently towards certain things, especially more than we feel for others for that fact? Why do we feel the way we feel differently than other people feel towards what they feel?
We go through our lives believing that what we have or what we do is the most important until we are shown a glimpse of those things outside of our bubble. And I say bubble because we are too often so inwardly focused or short-sighted that we often forget some of the things we have been introduced to in our lives. Once that motivation has failed or the inspiration has waned, we return to our lives of short-sightedness. And I'm guilty of this myself at times. What we often do is see ourselves as the good guy, the guy that has the best interest in mind. But sometimes that best interest becomes our best interest and not the best interest of all those involved. Who else is involved, you may ask? Your family, your friends, your coworkers, your classmates, random people you run into out on the public, strangers. We have to keep others in mind while simultaneously working to better our hearts and minds by working hard, eating right, working out, reading, producing, serving others.
With that in mind, it reminds me of the hearts and mind campaign. If you're not familiar with what the hearts and mind campaign was, it's basically, and I'll pull it up here, and I'm reading off of Wikipedia, its hearts and minds, as far as Vietnam was concerned, or winning the hearts and minds refers to the strategy and programs used by the governments of Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War. And this was to win popular support of the Vietnamese people and to help defeat the Viet Cong insurgency. Pacification is a more formal term for winning hearts and minds. And in this case, however, it was also defined as the process of countering the insurgency. Military, political, economic, and social means were used to attempt to establish or reestablish South Vietnamese government control over rural areas and people under the influence of the Viet Cong.
You know, and I asked that question, what is heart? Well, they work towards in Vietnam, they work towards winning those hearts, winning those minds, and that's how you do it. You don't do it by force. You don't do it by coercion. You don't do it by expectation. You do it by winning the hearts, by getting those people to see the good that you do and see that and say, hey, you know what? I want to be part of that. And that's what you do with your life. Vietnam was one of those things that it was hard to go through, especially those guys that went through it. People back home, yeah, they struggled to have to maintain it, but these, a lot of times, they were kids that go over there. Kids. And I mean, like, 18, 19, some 17, 20, 21 year old kids who are doing this just got out of high school. And sometimes they were going against their will. They got drafted and they got drug over there, and they got. They said, hey, you're going to do this? Kid never maybe shot a gun in his life, and now all of a sudden, he's having to take the life of somebody else. And that's the hard thing to consider.
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