Download PDF of this full issue: v30n2.pdf (11.8 MB)From Vietnam Veterans Against the War, http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=125&hilite=
| Download PDF of this full issue: v30n2.pdf (11.8 MB) |
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:
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.