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