NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, JU LY 2006
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monsters, what were the rest of us who had committed similar
atrocities against Vietnamese but not at that large a scale; also
monsters?
It is difficult to chronicle when each of us changed. Some
of us began our slow metamorphoses in the midst of war, others
when the immediacy of death and fear were behind us and the
questions of what we had done could no longer be avoided.
Each had changed in his own time and for his own reasons.
By the time My Lai was disclosed we had already formed
Vietnam Veterans Against the War. My Lai sparked us to counter
the singularity it was claimed to be — and that only a few “bad
apples" were responsible, which continues to be the mantra for
Abu Graib prison and Hidatha. We held testimonies based on
Bertram Russell’s war crimes tribunals held earlier in England,
first in December 1970 in Washington, D C. (“Citizens Inquiry
into U.S. War Crimes") and the “Winter Soldier Investigations"
in Detroit, Michigan in February 1971. The three days in D C.
involved 40 Vietnam veterans, Detroit had more than 100, but
we knew from personal experience that bodycounts were absurd
(although the war revolved around them as also in Iraq however
much it is denied), the platoon of dissident veterans had grown
to company-strength, a small army in its own right of former
soldiers finally moving past individual breast-beating confessions
to an angry political activist demand for the destruction of the war
machine and the corrupt system it symbiotically supported.
We did not lay out the crimes we had committed in the
name of America for forgiveness. Our purpose was not to wallow
in guilt. That was the best thing that resulted from Detroit: we felt
we were worth more than the extent of our guilt. We testified for
three days, sitting at long tables shoved against one another,
longhairs, liberals and hecklers in front of us, one elderly woman
waving an American flag while shrieking that we were cowards,
communists and queers.
We told of genocide, psychological and physical, of
forced urbanization (removing farmers and their families from
their ancestral villages and leaving them to starve in the cities),
of wholesale defoliation of jungles and fields, of burning and
pillaging hundreds upon hundreds of villages, of indiscriminate
bombing with high-fragmentation bombs and fiery napalm, of
harassment-and-interdiction artillery fire nearly every night with
no particular targets, just shooting up the countryside, and we
told of ‘free fire zones’ where everything that moved was fair
game to be killed, no questions asked.
We pieced our individual roles together like parts of a
puzzle, stringing the years of the war together, and we built a
web of premeditated policy from the highest levels of the U.S.
government dedicated to the systematic obliteration of an entire
culture through the genocide of war, of economic domination, of
propaganda designed to disguise the war's true nature, leaving
few alternatives for Vietnamese except death or torture.
We were talking to ourselves and we knew it, but it
strengthened the unity between us. We told each other who we
were and where we had been.
We were a gathering of freaks who used to be death
machines: ex-Marines, soldiers, sailors, pilots; machinegunners,
prisoner of war interrogators, past POWs of the National Liber
ation Front (Viet Cong) who had escaped or were released, past
prisoners of U.S. military stockades or brigs, helicopter gunners,
fighter/bomber pilots, military advisors to the South Vietnamese
armed forces, former military intelligence operatives, Agent
Orange loaders and deliverers — and infantrymen, the grunts’
who lived it every moment of every day, subsisting in mud and
rain and blistering sun, snipers picking them off singly, ambush
es wiping out whole outfits in seconds or hours, these survivors
testifying to war crimes alive while so many died or lost pieces
of their bodies such as arms and legs to mortars, rockets or land
mines and booby traps: and some of those shaggy bearded
freaks in Detroit were crippled from the war, stumping along on
aluminum legs, holding cigarettes in steel clamps: and among us
blacks, Asians, Latinos and American Indians, America’s minor
ities swept up to be out front to kill or die.
But we were masturbating and we knew it. Hardly
anyone listened to us, and many of those called us phonies,
cowards and traitors. The media ignored us for the most part;
what coverage we received was vicarious and ingenuously
sensational, generally referring to us as “alleged veterans"
although each of us presented our documents of legitimacy.
The Pentagon, as it usually does, denied our accusations while
attempting to put the double onus of proof and guilt upon us
instead of itself.
TONYAUTH
The lesson of our testimonies and the slaughter at
My Lai which inspired them was that the institution of war and
its corollary militarism must be the accused, not a handpicked
few of its instruments. The extermination of Vietnamese who
died at how many uncounted My Lais (and in Iraq the however
many unreported Hidathas) must be blamed upon the great
hungry war machine we have built, not upon its lowly lieutenants,
sergeants and privates, whose major crimes (aside from murder)
are that they were caught at something they were directly or
obliquely ordered to do.
The Vietnam War had its beginnings long before the
inquisitions of the late Middle Ages', down through the exter
mination of the so-called American Indian, the blacks and
Mexicans, through the Hawaiians, the Filipinos, the gunboat
suppression of Chinese, the Banana Wars’ of the Caribbean
and Central America, the overtly race war with Japan and later
with Korea (and Chinese). The war in Iraq can be said to have
the same ancestry, which would include the Vietnam War and
the first Gulf War.
The American military, for all its puffed-up pretensions,
is American society stripped of its pretenses. Virtually everything
leading to the birth and formation of our society, and everything
to maintain and expand it, have been drenched in human blood.
War takes little imagination, however complex the battle plans
and sophisticated the weaponry once it is begun. We are a
warlike nation to our very core and self-concept (as well as
deceit), heir of Imperial Rome, restlessly savage Vikings, and
Nazi Germany.
Just as the war in Vietnam cannot be taken out of the
context of all our wars, neither can the massacres at My Lai and
Hidatha be taken out of context of all such massacres past and
present. The guilt also belongs to the most sensitive and most
altruistic, such as draft evaders who would not fight in Vietnam
because they did not wish to kill or die, or the pacifists who fled
the country or went to jail to avoid service in war — either Viet
nam then and Iraq now. However moral or humane the intent
of these acts, others are forced to fill the vacancies left by the
idealistic and just-plain scared; draftees from lesser classes
to the combat ranks in Vietnam, National Guards to Iraq.
Among soldiers there are those more excessively brutal
and those more compassionate than the average, although each
is capable of both, however negative the theater for their acts
and feelings. For the more brutal, whatever the origin of brutality,
war is relief for hatreds and fears: racial bigotry and ignorance
so finely honed by society. But for the compassionate,whatever
the accident of compassion, war is agony, especially wars like
Iraq and Vietnam where the masses of people are indistinguish
able from combatants (and might also be combatants as well).
The sensitive soldier begins to realize he(she) is fighting
a people in their own homeland, who resist what he(she) repre
sents. He (or she) might think of themselves as counterparts to
stormtroopers of every age who violently invade, on whatever
rationale, the homelands of other peoples. The sorely tried
compassion, even if genuine, is at the least suspect to his(her)
victims and to him(her)self, and at most, spiritually wretched
because he or she will most likely not throw down their rifles and
go against all they have known, no matter how piercingly they
see through the hypocrisy he and she have been indoctrinated
to believe since birth, for, after all, it is all each knows and can
return to.
In wars such as Iraq and Vietnam, where every single
Iraqi and Vietnamese is (or was) the “enemy" and a threat to the
existence of soldiers sent to “liberate" them from dictators or
ideologies, the savagery rapidly escalates between opposing
combatants until the only recognized law of war is to kill before
being killed.
A young Army Lieutenant, leader of the platoon that
slaughtered the citizens of My Lai, was held primarily respon
sible. His name was William ¿alley. He was a small man
for a country to hold accountable for its war crimes. And that
was what the My Lai trial was really about. If Calley was to
be found guilty of the murder of a lesser amount of civilians
(reduced from 500 claimed by My Lai survivors to 102), he
would be the only guilty party, not the rest of us for whom his
punishment absolves us of any guilt. And if he were absolved,
we would all be absolved, soldiers and citizens alike.
And Calley, certainly no Dreyfus for he was indisting
uishable from his government’s purpose, claimed in his defense
that the murdered innocents at My Lai were those he was told to
kill, that he had been told by senior officers they were “Viet Cong
sympathizers," and so must die to validate the deceit of Ameri
can manifest destiny.
He was found guilty but not severely punished. He was
no Jesus either.
DO DEAD SOLDIERS HAVE SOULS?
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NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON
757 27TH STREET 97103
MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
The war in Iraq is as much about democracy as it is
about oil and empire simply because the soldiers who are
fighting the war believe it is, however manipulated and deceived
they are into that belief.
The same can be said about any war. The U.S. Civil War
was about slavery because that was the essential reason the
soldiers on both sides fought it, for and against. World War 1
was to put an end to war because the soldiers who endured the
worst hell on earth — which they created for themselves —
slaughtered each other by the millions for that fervent hope
(which might have been a not so subjective basis for the fierce
obliteration). World War 2 is eulogized as history’s most titanic
struggle between freedom (“democracy") and totalitarianism
(“fascism”); each claimed history on its side — the Germans,
however conscripted, believed in the rightness of a thousand
year Reich despite their detestation of Nazism; and the Japan
ese despised white colonial rule in Asia although theirs was as
arrogantly cruel.
The wars in Korea and Vietnam were more subjective
than their predecessors, so-called “brushfire wars" to promote
or prevent the spread of Cold War ideologies and to skirt nuclear
obliteration while simultaneously risking it. As a result, both wars
were inconclusive; yet at the heart of each, the combatants
fought for beliefs latently instilled in them or fiercely demanded
of them.
So Iraq The grunts on the ground most likely cling to
a tenacious faith that they have liberated the Iraqi people from
a monstrous dictator and now defend against a resurrection of
his regime At the very least they hope their great personal risks
are for the exalted principles that are claimed, that their leaders
are literally keeping the faith with them Yet every day the
Americans and their allies face equal tenacity by a hardcore
resistance determined to oust the invaders whom they regard as
infidel imperialists as pernicious as the earlier medieval Christian
crusaders of the previous millennium.
Soldiers have been lied to throughout history. They have
always been coerced in one manner or another to commit and
suffer humanity’s most hideous acts, generally in the names of
its most sanctified beliefs That has not changed: the Americans
who are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are as
deceived as to the underlying purposes of the war as were
their predecessors of wars immemorial, and the rewards for
such guileless intrepidity are as always unequal and usually
disproportionate to the fervid sacrifice for them.
The only purpose for armies is the destruction of other
human beings. Soldiering is big business, the first order of every
empire as it has been since ancient times, but soldiers are them
selves little more than expendable pawns, readily discarded
Without soldiers there would be no wars. No Caesars,
no Napoleons, no Hitlers. Soldiers kill, rape, pillage, burn, and
if they are unlucky, stupid or badly led, they die
Support for the soldiers acts contrarily as a relentless
goad that pushes troops into irreversible horror at the same time
the cheering warcries crush any who would conscientiously
object. The soldiers feel compelled to carry out what they
perceive as public mandate, and in the belief that any personal
doubts would be met with disapproval, they do their duty at
whatever cost.
Yet the soldiers we are exhorted to uncritically support
can be turned against us, ordered to suppress dissent and round
up political activists In times like these such repressive use of
soldiers could have wide support
Quite a few people think dissent is improper once a war
has started and refuse to believe it is more necessary than ever
— their point is that dissent succors an enemy and betrays
American troops fighting the war.
The war parties always attempt to capture patriotism as
their own, and portray dissent against their wars as sedition and
disloyalty But dissent is the true act of patriotism and a more
sensible way to support the troops that dispatching them into
horror.
As realized by the Vietnam War, dissent is the only way
to stop questionable wars. Dissenters are not responsible for the
misuse of the lives of the soldiers The people who start wars
are
-M ICHAEL McCUSKER
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