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For The Living: The Winter Soldier Investigation

By Lisa Gaye Dixon

As someone involved in the performing arts, I have come to an understanding of the power of language, both written and spoken. Although a person can also be moved by what is left unwritten or unsaid, sometimes the telling of a dangerous truth has more power than could ever be imagined. I have recently read the full text of the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI), on the Internet - all of it, beginning to end. This seemed to surprise some of my friends and acquaintances, that one would (or could) read the entire transcript, but I didn't really think about it at the time, not until much later. Then I thought: yes, this is an event, this telling, and it has power. And it has touched me.

I returned to live in my home town late last year, and have only recently become aware of the existence of VVAW and its members. Until my meeting and talking with Joe Miller and Barry Romo and Jeff Machota, and my reading of the WSI, I had been fairly ignorant of the role we played in Vietnam. I suppose I was one of those armchair protesters, who know more about an issue than 80% of the population, but are still sadly lacking in any real, in-depth understanding of it. I knew we were wrong to be in Vietnam. I knew we had fought a basically 'unwinnable' war for unreal reasons; I even knew about things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Agent Orange and My Lai and atrocities committed by the U.S. troops, but I was also (sadly) a child of the 80s. I grew up with Rambo and Superman and Let's Get Harry and God knows how many other whitewashing films that gave the lie to what we did in Vietnam. I thought about it all with a jaundiced, lazy eye, knowing something was not quite right, but unwilling to look further into it myself. I was, like the rest of the world, truly ignorant of what we did to others, and what we did to ourselves.

As I began to read the Winter Soldier Investigation, the first major impression I got was of looking into a time capsule. As the testimony is verbatim (for the most part), I heard the voices of young men speaking in the vernacular of the Sixties and Seventies: the time of AIM, the Black Panthers, the Chicano movement - people of color beginning to reclaim their own across the land. Having spent way too much time immersed in the cultural wasteland of the Eighties, this hearkened me back to my pre-teen days, when 'hippie' wasn't a bad word and calling someone 'brother' actually meant something. This alone was a re-learning experience.

Then, as I began to read further, as I read page after page after page of young men, often boys really, speaking about what they had done and what had been done to them, I began to feel two distinct things: The first was a deep, profound sadness. My God, what had we been doing? Everyone talks about how Vietnam was the first war brought into our homes because of the arrival of television, but no one ever, ever, EVER told me about the consistent, relentless burning of homes, free fire zones, mad minutes, dropping shackled prisoners from helicopters, torture as a matter of course. Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather had neglected to mention this. I was sad because, well, no one really wants to be proven right in their cynicism. I wanted the bad guys to be only at the top. I wanted to be able to blame the generals and the pentagon and the president yes, but not the boys who came from hometowns like mine, not the young men I might have known. Not everyone.

Even so, my sadness was laced with fear. Not of these men, these Winter Soldiers baring their souls, but of those who spread the terror of an unreal communist threat, of those who didn't really believe, but indoctrinated others to do so. Because throughout reading all the tales of immediate barbarity the same question kept creeping into the back of my mind: Where is the wellspring of this evil? Is it the young man who mistakenly believes he is fighting to save something, and too late realizes his duplicity? Is it the senator, the general, the congressman who sees dollar signs over the green hills of southeast Asia? And, is that not the true evil, to knowingly send men to kill and be killed, to brainwash them into believing in the subhumanity of others for profit? This is as chilling to me as any of the tales told by the Winter Soldiers.

On another level, I also began to feel a rising anger. We hadn't just tortured countless Vietnamese. We had acutely damaged an entire generation of American men. We had taken the souls of young men and twisted them to a dark intention, then discarded them like so much roadside garbage when they were no longer of use to us. I shivered as I read. I read and read, one account after another, each successive man piling his story of atrocity onto that one of brutality, either witnessed or participated in, and...well even now I cannot find the words to express exactly what I felt. But I knew I had to keep reading.

And strangely, I began to feel something else. Even on the page, I felt a courage that was far beyond what any of us experiences in our relatively safe lives on a day to day basis. I sensed the shock and anger of these men as they spoke, not just of actions taken against Vietnamese civilians, but against each other. They spoke of institutionalized and pervasive racism within the armed forces, from who walks point to who gets dishonorably discharged - lies, constant fear of the enemy and of each other. Of the betrayal of their bodies and their beliefs, And always, as they related their stories the shadow of their own deaths lay in the telling. Speaking the truth is sometimes difficult and often dangerous, and the truths told here - about their country and about themselves - the very telling alone was an assault on the powers that be.

There is something in the African-American community (and among other peoples as well) called 'bearing witness.' Bearing Witness means that you become a part of what you learn. You cannot ignore that which passes before your eyes, and though you might not have been an eyewitness or participant, through the giving and the taking in, you become one. You have a responsibility not to let that memory die, to pass the lesson on, to speak for those who are no longer able to do so. To tell the story, and tell it true, so that it will not be forgotten. Holocaust survivors do this for those who died in the camps, Black folks pass down legends from one generation to the next, stories that often reach from the middle passage through slavery down to the present. Most immigrant communities, Latino, Irish, Eastern European, etc., have a history rich with stories of brutality and triumph. While the stories of these men, the Winter Soldiers, came from a different set of circumstances, the crux of the need is still the same. As I read what these men had to say, I began to share something with them, to 'bear witness' to their experiences, and to a pain that I could in no way feel, but nonetheless must somehow come to understand. In reading, I had become a part of the telling, and now I had a responsibility. I was no longer an audience to be kept at a distance, uninvolved and 'clean.' As I read I learned, and as I learned, I had to do. By bearing witness, I join my voice with yours and I say, 'yes, you will be heard.'

So, what have I learned? I have learned that true courage has nothing to do with white-hatted heroes riding into the sunset. Rather, it is to do with everyday people facing inner demons and fire, acknowledging the truth of themselves and thereby reaffirming their own humanity. I cannot say why I feel as deeply as I do. Maybe it's because, as a black woman, living in a country that values neither my color nor my sex, it is a strange comfort to have met VVAW members who often intuitively understand what I feel: the experience of being a 'stranger in a strange land', in my own home country. Maybe it is simply that as a fellow human being I know that I cannot let the truth be lost. Yes, it is important for people to read and review and think about the Vietnam War. For the same reasons we must not forget the Holocaust, or Slavery or the Killing Fields of Cambodia, or the Gaza Strip. In doing this, in remembering, the telling is not done to assuage or absolve guilt, but to scrape away the lies and reveal the truth. Hopefully in doing so we can lessen the pain for those who remain, and begin to dismantle and disempower the status quo, and lend strength to those in struggle everywhere.

A luta continua....

Lisa Dixon is an 'alien in residence,' having returned to the cornfields after an extended absence. She sings, writes, acts, and works.