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Delivering Death Like Mail: Confessions of a REMF
By Horace Coleman
[Printer-Friendly Version] Recently I saw an interesting e-mail on the VVAW list. Someone
was doing a dissertation and wondered if anyone would comment
on the correlation between the "brutalization" of basic
training and atrocities in 'Nam. I told her why I thought atrocities
happen:
- Defense / expansion of "the American way of life"
- Desire to accomplish the mission
- Desire to create and maintain a positive image with peers, and
to meet norms and the expectations of superiors
- Education / interpretation of history & recent events
- Emotional coarsening and the deadening of feelings
- Fear
- Frustration
- Ideology
- Ignorance
- Individual and group psychopathology
- Patriotism (chauvinism) / indoctrination
- Professionalism (military type)
- Rabid anti-communism (even if you didn't really know what that
was or that it might actually and temporarily be better then what
someone currently had)
- Racism
- Religion
- Revenge
- Self-preservation; exaggerated definition of threats to personal
and national security
- Xenophobia
Of course the basic reason is lack of control, and insufficient
leadership and character. After all, you're supposed to "kill
clean"; that's the moral, mentally efficient and professional
thing to do. . . .
The very existence of war is an atrocity. "Brutalization"
begins with childhood acculturation into society.
Whatever reasons and justifications a society has for using
physical force are expanded and amplified in wartime. Violence
is only lastly physical, though. Mental preparation comes first.
Ignorance fuels abstraction. Fear, xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism,
the desire to avenge fallen buddies, not letting "the other
guys" down and "keeping the faith" cause terrible
things. Young men in groups, with or without weapons and official
authorization, are capable of terrible things anyway. Think skinheads,
soccer hooligans, and the NYC groups that harassed young women
at a street fair.
Aircraft temporarily under my "control" as an intercept
director / air traffic controller routinely used napalm, .50 caliber
machine guns, the notorious cluster bomb units (CBUs) and high
explosive bombs. Irony: many American servicemen are alive because
of the authorized and unauthorized air strikes (ad hoc missions
not ordered by the chain of command) I coordinated. Many VC died
- along with countless Vietnamese civilians who weren't engaged
in acts of war but were simply in the wrong place at the wrong
time.
There's a photograph I took way down in the Delta. In it you
can see an intense young Vietnamese man, an infant (his son),
and a US army doctor. The child had been given penicillin for
an infection. No one knows it but he is allergic to the drug.
He will die shortly. You can't see that his father is missing
an arm above the elbow.
He lost it in combat. He used to be a soldier in the ARVN (the
Army of the Republic of Vietnam). You can't see that the amputee
is a widower. The family rice paddy was in a "free fire zone."
Anyone found there could be killed on sight. His wife was working
there when killed by fire from an American helicopter. Xin loi.
I don't know exactly who I helped kill. The citation accompanying
the low-ranking Bronze Star medal I received (Meritorious Service)
says I'm credited with 99 aircraft saves and rescues. That's not
right.
There were more. Hanna Arendt was right, though - evil is banal.
And very human. Israeli troops and settlers gunning down Arab
rock-throwers or Arab suicide bombers, Africans hacking off the
lips or arms of people from "enemy tribes," Boston Irish
mobsters "taking out" someone for $$$, Latino gang-bangers
killing for the right to sell dope on certain corners, Crips and
Bloods "putting in work" or cops "fearing for"
their lives all have something in common. Some drunken yahoo decides
to drag someone to death behind a pick-up truck. Any excuse will
do. Maybe that's why the phrase "wasting" someone came
about.
We've evolved into using "better" tools, but we haven't
evolved much morally. Leaving work the other day, some smartass
saw me closing my backpack.
"You don't have a gun in there do you?" he said in
a smarmy tone.
"Not today," I said.
The fool kept at it. "Oh, too scared to use one?"
"Nope: too smart to."
I didn't tell him what I really thought, which was: Some people
aren't worth the trouble to kill them.
Horace Coleman is a veteran,
poet and writer living in California.
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