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N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , MA Y/JUNE 2005
marijuana (also opium and heroin), killed their superiors and
sabotaged weapons and equipment, and rebelled against the
military by the thousands. No one but the soldiers understood
that the rebellion was a desperate yet rational response to the
war and the inequities of the military system and its callous
disregard for the lives of its lower ranks. The ratio of approxi
mately 14 noncombatants to one combat man, the racial
tensions that threatened to engulf every military installation at
home, in Europe and Asia; the draft that provided escape for the
upper classes but hardly any for the poor or nonwhite were some
of the factors that heightened dissatisfaction in the ranks. But it
was the intensifying doubts about the purpose and morality of
the war itself that were the most unsettling. For many soldiers,
perhaps most, there was no other fight in the war other than self-
preservation mixed with grim awareness they were being badly
used. They were brutal, murderous and insensitive. They were
also terrified, anguished and spiritually desolate.
On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War finally ended, ten
years after American Marines landed in Da Nang and three
years aftermost U.S. forces had been withdrawn. The United
States spent a generation attempting to dominate Southeast
Asia yet the war was lost long before it committed its armies.
We knew little and cared less for the cultures and peoples that
lived there and our genocidal hubris ultimately caused our
defeat. We failed in our attempt to impose the rules of chess
in the land of Go.
The loss of the war in Vietnam shocked the people of
the United States. It might have been different if the war had
been won. The people might not have been so ashamed or
divided. Victory is its own therapeutic morality: if the war had
been won the cause would naturally have been considered just.
The men who designed the war blamed its loss on the
men and women who survived it. We were made its scapegoats
and shunned as lepers and losers. Our friends and families were
ashamed of us. We had been the nation's agents in a dirty,
unpopular and unsuccessful war and were as a result treated as
if we were also dirt. We were expected to pick up our lives as if
we had not been changed in the pitiless crucible of combat. War
pared us to the raw edge of perception but we were implored
to reaccept our culture's illusions and vanities and conform to a
perspective of history our experience repudiated.
We were pariahs not entirely because we rankled the
public memory: the war left us with irreversible knowledge about
ourselves that people usually wish to avoid. We learned that only
human beings commit inhuman acts and that the most cherished
and humane values serve as warcries to commit horror. We
learned that concepts about the worth of life are worthless as
arguments to preserve it. We discovered it is absurdly easy to kill
and that it is common to feel relief and satisfaction at the anguish
of someone else. We learned how to reduce flesh and blood to
abstract contempt to facilitate our reduction of it to dust.
The price of survival has been high. Many disorders
which are still evident years afterward had their origin in the
terror directed at us and the terror we repaid it with. The saddest
irony is that so many who fought like beasts to live through the
war have suicided since returning home. The poisons we
sprayed upon the Vietnamese are killing us now although the
government stonewalls the claims of veterans that they are
sick or dying from the chemicals. Jails were for a long time filled
with Vietnam veterans. We are alcoholics and heavy drug users.
We are unpredictably violent. All sorts of syndromes have been
attributed to us or invented to describe us. Studies are routinely
commissioned to define or find solutions to our social depravity.
We formed rap groups to assist each other but these often
served to intensify our maladjustment or alienation. A number
of veterans retreated from civilization and lived isolated in forests
and deserts. The nightmares that seldom leave us even so many
years later — exacerbated by more recent wars — retain an
incompleteness that reflects our fragmented experience in the
war. For most of the decade of massive escalation hundreds of
thousands of us went to war and returned daily almost without
notice. We passed each other going and coming to and from
Vietnam.
The war never entirely slides out of my thoughts.
Sometimes it lies quietly on the far side of my mind like a
sleeping dog but eventually something triggers its loop to
the closer circuit and almost everything I do, see or think
about has its parallel and its substance rooted in Vietnam.
I spent only a year in combat but it shines through the murk of
subsequent years with a clarity missing from the rest. To survive
I cut off sensitivities I believe are irrecoverably lost. I continue to
feel that every day is extra and I will never comprehend why or
adequately use to justify. I believe I was measurably responsible
for the deaths of Vietnamese whose lives were worth more
than my own, and that friends who died would have been more
useful alive than I am. I remain haunted by the dead. Everyone
who has endured combat is drawn ever afterward toward death,
grimly aware escape has only been temporary. Dead friends
vex survivors with sorrow and guilt and beckon for us to rejoin
their company.
I was at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D C.,
when it was dedicated in 1982, looking for names of a few dead
friends I last saw wrapped in bloody ponchos and tossed aboard
outgoing helicopters. I felt smothered by flags and military bands
and thought the ceremony had little to do with reconciliation but
was staged instead to revive a war fever Vietnam had cooled.
Yet our presence must have been an intense embarrassment,
a tattered and crippled spectre of a lost war. I felt disconnected
much the same as I might have felt at a school or scout troop
reunion. I had forgotten names I thought I would always
remember. Names of the dead occupy the black marble wall
of the Vietnam Memorial chronologically by the days of their
deaths, arranged in daily sequence in alphabetical order so that
they will forever remain together, sculptor Maya Lin said. I ran
my fingers in the carved grooves of names I remembered. They
had been dead a long time by then and I felt slightly indifferent. I
realized names that should have been on the Wall were missing,
some of our own who had not been initially included for petty
reasons, such as those who died of wounds later, and no
women; but also the names of dead allies and enemies, and
especially millions of ordinary people who were shot or bombed
because it was their bad luck to be in the way. (They continue
to die from landmines planted everywhere in Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia, from malaria caused by millions of bomb and shell
holes that breed mosquitoes, and by the effects of biocides such
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as Agent Orange.) I thought there should be a separate wall with
the names of the murdered dead of My Lai and Hue to serve as
a warning that the only enemy is the malevolence we humans
display toward each other.
Nearly unnoticed against the Vietnam Wall among
flowers, war medals and photographs of dead young soldiers,
sailors, pilots and Marines was a handlettered square of card
board with the names of four war dead who had not been nor
are yet included. They were killed in early May 1970, just after
American troops invaded Cambodia — the four students shot
down by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State College.
WINTER SOLDIERS
The unequivocal purpose of Vietnam Veterans Against
the War was to end the Vietnam War and bring U.S. troops
home from overseas. To that end, W A W held two war crimes
inquiries to publicly make clear the war’s deception, amorality
and decimation of Vietnamese as a people and culture, but also
the threat to American values the war was allegedly being fought
to protect. The testimonies, named Winter Soldier Investigations
(in contrast to “Sunshine Patriots") were in Washington, D C. in
December 1970 and Detroit, Michigan in February 1971.
Winter Soldier was a response to the slaughter of
Vietnamese civilians at My Lai village in 1968 but only publicly
revealed the previous year. The veterans hoped to show that
although an Army platoon had killed more people in a single
place, the attitude toward Vietnamese generated by fear, racism
and revenge that led to My Lai was universal throughout Vietnam
and the war.
By the mandate of Nuremberg, military men and women
are required to speak out against war crimes and other forms of
injustice and wrongdoing within the military. It is usually next to
impossible to do so without isolation and punishment while in
uniform, and the great majority of those in W A W waited until
they were free of the military; many in uniform were heartened
by W A W as a result and took a chance to speak out against
Vietnam despite the risks.
For most of the veterans who testified it was the first
time they had recounted their experiences in Vietnam, and for
nearly all of them it was the first opportunity they had to listen
to the experiences of others who had done virtually the same
things over a decade of war — the most important factor was
the redundancy, the same genocidal pattern linked by men
whose service in Vietnam spanned the period of American
involvement. It was the first time the whole puzzle pieced itself
together for each one of them, most of whom had spent not
much more than a single year in country.
They testified for three days, more than a hundred vets
speaking as though possessed with devils bursting past their
shaky voices. They told of genocide, psychological and physical,
of forced urbanization of peasants from villages, of burning
and pillaging hundreds upon hundreds of villages, of wholesale
defoliation of jungles and fields, of indiscriminate bombing with
napalm and high fragmentation bombs, of harassment and
interdiction fire by artillery every night with no particular targets,
just shooting up the countryside to instill fear and carnage; and
they told of free-fire zones where everything that moved was fair
game to be killed no questions asked.
Even as men broke down and cried while testifying
or listening, Winter Soldier emerged as a terse elaboration of
American policy in Vietnam through the combined narratives
of the soldiers who carried it out.
But no one seemed to listen The news media for the
most part embargoed their testimony; what coverage they
received was vicarious and quietly sensational, calling them
“alleged" veterans, though all of them presented their documents
of legitimacy. Detractors who attended the hearings called them
phonies, cowards and traitors The Pentagon denied their
accusations and put the burden of proof as well as guilt as
specific war criminals upon the vets.
Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield defied criticism and had
the testimonies inserted into the Congressional Record
BACK ON THE BLOCK 2 DOORS DOWN
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I left D C. with friends from Oregon. We drove through
Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho
and Oregon, reaching home in Cannon Beach on the north
Oregon coast five days later. We stopped every night at motels
or the homes of friends or relatives, and each day we made
several stops for food, gas and just to get out and stretch. On
the back window of our small truck was a 'Vietnam Veterans of
America' sticker, the group that built and dedicated the Vietnam
War Memorial. Everywhere we stopped people noticed the
sticker and almost everyone was related to or knew someone
killed in Vietnam.
Everywhere we stopped I opened a book I purchased
at the Memorial. It was the size of a small city's phone directory
and contained the names engraved on the Wall and where each
was located. I looked up names people wished to see and many
touched the letters in the book as so many have embraced the
names on the Wall with their fingers. By the time we reached
the Pacific Coast the 'American Book of the Dead' was as well
thumbed as a phone book in a public booth. Until then I had not
really understood the personal impact of Vietnam on America's
heart. Each time I opened the book and looked for a name I felt
I was performing a ritual of immense unrecognized grief.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Vietnam War
and a major reason the government would wish to suppress it
from public memory or attention is that a significant number of
Americans were against it. When they were rebuffed by the
government they went out into the streets and risked injury and
arrest. Thousands of young men chose exile or jail over service
in Vietnam. Other thousands who were in the military rebelled
against it. Although a reconstructed myth portrays dissenters
as irresponsible students, antisocial hippies and various other
types of misfits and malcontents, the largest number of antiwar
activists were from the mainstream, and in the spring of 1971
the mainstream peaked when 500,000 of them — the official
body count of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the height of the war’s
escalation — marched through the streets of Washington, D.C.,
to demand an end to the war. Seldom mentioned and disparaged
when it is, the American people ultimately forced its government
to abandon its discredited ambitions in Southeast Asia. It is that
which disturbs our leaders most and which they would have us
forget: that we can and must if necessary curb our government's
misuse of power.
Underneath the spectacle of pageantry and deceit
of patriotism, the disturbing presence of Vietnam veterans
demonstrates with the subtlety of a clenched fist that war is
death and horror; it is murder and depravity and sickens the
souls and minds of its executioners. Vietnam veterans give war
a bad name.
Michael McCusker served in Vietnam in 1966-67 as a
USMC Combat Correspondent attached to infantry and recon
naissance units and was a charter member of Vietnam Veterans
Against the War.
N O R T H COAST
TIM ES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON
757 27TH STREET 97103
MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
-MICHAEL McCUSKER
(NCTE, May/June 2004)
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