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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (May 1, 2005)
P A G E 12 OLD WARS NEVER DIE ANTHONY D'ADAMO BY MICHAEL McCUSKER 'W e cannot ever again allow ourselves to be misinformed, manipulated and misled into disastrous foreign adventures. In Vietnam we finally have reached the end o f the tunnel — and there is no light there." -WALTER CRON KITE CBS Evening News, April 29,1975 On the day tfie war ended I telephoned a friend who had shared a small part of it with me. He was angry and bitter. The wrong side had won the war and its victory made a mockery of the deaths of 58,000 Americans, he said; a few of them had been our friends. I argued that millions more Southeast Asians had been killed and that finally after a generation of incessant war the survivors could get on with their histories in relative peace without interference. I did not anticipate the boat people from Vietnam, the wars with China or the murders of two-thirds of the people of Cambodia by its new leaders. My friend and I have not spoken since that last day in April thirty years ago. The North Vietnamese Army had just marched into Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City after Vietnam’s "George Washington," who died six years earlier. For them three decades of bitter civil war were over. They had also fought and defeated two Western powers that attempted to dominate them. My friend and I were only briefly involved. We spent not much more than a year in Vietnam and our friendship did not last beyond it. We thought our experience there would bind us for life but our separate opinions made us adversaries instead. He supported the war. I was against it. He thought I was a traitor of the worst sort, that I betrayed the men we fought alongside, especially those who died or were crippled from wounds. I thought nobody else should be killed, which meant protesting the war in order to end it. We had been U S. Marines, adolescent gods of thunder who crawled earth in pursuit of death. We were anachronisms, infantry in the Nuclear Age, and though we killed with modern weapons we warred no differently than the ancients who hurled spears. We were parts of a machine, each of us reduced to a specific function in a common mush, hammered and smashed around like a piece of rock until it takes the shape of a weapon. From the beginning it seemed as if we had done nothing else in our lives but kill and die under a hot sun or in mud and rain. We attacked and smashed small villages with rifles, artillery and bombs. We fought through sudden wildly violent ambushes and were constantly plagued by snipers, landmines and booby- traps. We exacted savage revenge for every death or wound. We murdered the vulnerable because we seldom could find or identify the phantoms who shot at us or blew our bodies apart with concealed explosives. In the villages we beat poor peasants or allowed our Vietnamese allies to torture them. We tied old men and boys (sometimes women and girls) to trees and set our dogs at them. We attached electrical wires to their genitals or nostrils and cranked the switches. We threw them out of helicopters. We were murderous armed children who sympathized with nothing except our chances for survival. We wished for nothing more than to leave Vietnam, although it has never left us. Everything that happened to us there seemed beyond reason or moral speculation. A kaleidoscope of terrible sounds and bleeding flesh bound by distant voices on military radios and by helicopters that flew in food, ammunition and replacements in exchange for the wounded and dead they removed like disposable rubbish. Artillery rounds and jet bombers shrieked over our heads and annihilated villages, paddies and jungles and left us alone with tom or burnt bodies of humans and animals strewn in fields or among the ruins of homes. Helicopters carried us like deadly viruses to remote mountains and valleys whose only contact with Western Civilization were the bombs and napalm dropped by the jets that preceded us. We hacked through jungles, walked through oceans of wet rice fields, crawled and ran toward burning villages shooting rifles and machinguns at everyone in them. Everywhere we went we destroyed almost everything. We had come several thousand miles, several hundred thousand of us, generally ignorant of why we should. Officers with charts and pointers explained that the future of Western Civilization demanded our presence in Vietnam: here we would stop godless communism and reverse the domino theory. We fought because the Vietnamese asked for our help, the officers said; then contradicted themselves by warning that we would surely lose our lives or limbs by trusting a single Vietnamese. Old grandmothers planted mines and boobytraps. Children sold soft drinks filled with shards of broken glass and blew them- OUR VILLAGE This is what the war ended up being about: we would find a VC village, and if we could not capture it or clear it of Cong, we called for jets. The jets would come in, low and terrible, sweeping down, and screaming, in their first pass over the village. Then they would return, dropping their first bombs that flattened the huts to rubble and debris to dust and ashes. And then the jets would come back once again, in a last pass, this time to drop napalm that burned the dust and ashes to just nothing. Then the village that was not a village anymore was our village. -B R Y A N A LE C FLO Y D I selves up with explosives in crowds of American soldiers. Young women were whores and artfully concealed razor blades in their vaginas. Farmers and their sons and daughters were enemy Viet Cong guerrillas at night. We in the lesser ranks understood the riddle but most of us did not care. It was implicit that even the lowliest of us represented a superior civilization, and as had the French who were there before us, our attitude toward the Vietnamese was that they were inferior to us. Finally back home I was tormented by what I experien ced in Vietnam. At some point in the war I was unable to accept the brutal racism, the fear and loathing of Americans toward Vietnamese I had never seen a people so determined to survive with so little to recommend it. They fought relentlessly against foreign invaders, and no matter how well we deceived ourselves about the war, the Vietnamese were not deceived. Though I never accepted their cause I learned to respect the uncomprom ising manner in which they fought for it. The indiscriminate war we fought against them made their success inevitable. I became involved in the American antiwar movement as an early member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I wrote articles, gave speeches and took part in protest rallies and demonstrations all over the country. I was gassed, maced, clubbed and arrested, which seemed a form of retribution for my part in Vietnam. I threw my war medals at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. in April 1971 with a thousand other Vietnam veterans and a week later was one of 20 vets who dumped large amounts of fresh chicken skat on the front steps of the Pentagon. We might have used explosives instead of a substance one of us when arrested said was "fowl defecation distribution." (We called ourselves in the patois of the era, ’The Chickenshit 20".) Our message was that Frankenstein's monster was bringing the war home. I was often called a traitor as my friend accused me. My feelings were the opposite. I felt I betrayed the ideals of my country when I fought in Vietnam. At home I was obsessed with unearthing the rot underlying history; the agreed upon fictions that create cultural and racial myths and sanction conquest and empire. Vietnam removed my trust in government and I learned to regard patriotism as a narrow and cynical appeal for prejudice, injustice and murder. We learn from history that we learn nothing from it, George Bernard Shaw (et al) said. Vietnam was a cynical war of attrition designed by men who knew little of history but thought they could impose their will upon it simply because it was their will to do so. The United States replaced the French in Vietnam in exactly the manner that led to their defeat, but our arrogance was that we were Americans and we confidently committed the same errors as if we could reverse them by the force of who we were. We razed Vietnamese culture and slaughtered its people as if it was our historical prerogative. We imposed a hated government and enforced its control with our bombers and battalions. We dropped perhaps as many bombs on Vietnam as during all of World War 2, and poisoned its fields and population with herbicides sprayed from the sky. We invented the body count as an index and declared every peasant we killed an enemy which was proved by their deaths. We removed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese from their ancestral farms and villages to prevent them from assisting the guerrillas we were never able to destroy and abandoned them to filthy overcrowded refugee camps or to beg and starve or whore in the cities. We hired death squads to liquidate political opposition and partici pated in the opium trade to pay mercenaries. At one point, although the killing did not stop, the Vietnam War was officially declared over. The last American soldiers came home. One wrote on a wall at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport: "Will the last American to leave please turn out the light at the end of the tunnel." There never was a light, only a long dark tunnel into which millions disappeared, among them almost sixty thousand dead Americans. Of the half million American wounded, thousands returned home without legs, arms or genitals. Thousands more were paralyzed physically or psychologically. The wounded overflowed U.S. military hospitals in Asia and Europe, the most critically injured eventually flown to stateside hospitals near their homes if possible, but more likely they wound up in VA hospitals too poorly funded and under staffed to adequately care for them. The dead were also returned and invisibly crossed the country in railroad mail cars or jetliner baggage compartments. Five Presidents tried to keep the Vietnam War from upsetting the citizenry. They promised guns and butter while sacrificing the nation's sons and money. Night after night the public was numbed to the war by the artifice of television news yet few ever saw any of the American dead — the mention or sight of dead or wounded GIs was considered bad for morale. American deaths were edited out of the war at the same time the war’s measure of success was a grossly exaggerated body count of enemy dead. After the euphoria of the initial buildup of troops forty years ago, after Operation Starlight and the la Drang Valley, after Tet'68 and Khe Sanh, after Hue and My Lai, after Nixon sent the Army into Cambodia and it returned with heroin, the American public became dismayed with its soldier sons and daughters. Something solid was expected of soldiers, but the Vietnam generation was beginning to change — and into what? The soldiers wore peace medallions into combat, smoked
