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Twenty-Year-Old Destroyerman
By "Somerset" Meece
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Suppose you're stationed on a warship in the United States Navy, and your ship is ordered to go halfway around the world to anchor offshore of a sovereign nation and shoot five-inch diameter explosive bullets at people hiding under the trees. In that case, there's nothing you can do or say about that. You have to go with it. If you're stationed on a destroyer, you're expected to destroy on demand. You're not supposed to care about the background of victims you don't know and against whom you don't have the slightest resentment.
If you dare to ask, "Why are we killing those people and ruining their stuff," you'll only get the propaganda lie, "Because they're ruthless, monolithic commies and they want our stuff and our women too."
So they want our sex partners? As a twenty-year-old, I didn't like that. Damn those commies. They deserve what we give 'em.
"It's your job, you signed-up for it. You should'a known."
"How was I supposed to get good information? The newspapers all said that this was a grand show and just a low-energy, military conflict. This feels like wholesale slaughter."
If you were a recent teenager from a down-state Illinois farm county, you had never learned that big shots secretly own politicians who carry out their imbecilic instructions in the public forum. No way you could have found out that the Vietnam-American War was killing peasants just for better business. You were a peasant yourself. It took all your time to earn corporate chump change so you could look better, get a car, and get dates with attractive members of the opposite sex. Just because you were young.
Mostly, you wanted to get the hell out of down-state Illinois. You wanted to see the world and learn a trade so you could make a living when you finished your required four-year enlistment in the Navy. In 1962, if you didn't enlist in the military, you got drafted by the Army for two years and shot people in the jungle. If you lasted that long, you had to dwell in a combat zone for a year. You didn't have to serve for four years like us enlistees.
So I signed up for Fleet Sonar School and in 1964, found myself anchored offshore of a fishing village in Vietnam, which had thatched huts and outrigger canoes on the beach. High hills, covered in the dark green rainforest, rose behind the beach. So there I was anyway, shooting at people in the jungle. But this was safer than doing it in the Army.
My destroyer was providing "gunfire support" for ground forces who were killing sovereign Vietnamese people who did not want a surrogate of the previous French commercial power telling them what empire to serve.
It felt shameful and un-American. It was not John Wayne movie material. We were powerful invaders. They offered no threat to me or my ship. Those "commies" had no artillery fighter jets nor destroyers that could reach us that far out. We blasted shots at them every fifteen minutes, night and day, to kill and to harass their sleep. We had clean sheets and delicious meals from our shiny shipboard galley. We didn't sleep too well with five-inch guns banging the steel hull like two-ton sledge hammers all night long, but we got used to it.
It was shameful, so we ignored it. We did not say a word about this horrendous action in which we participated. Even if we were not Gunner's Mates who fired the long guns at people too far away to see, we crewed the ship that shot them.
Just as I state in the foreword to my Vietnam naval novel, Tin Can, we knew that the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (Injustice, is what we called it), Article 94, said that a person found guilty of sedition "shall be punished by death..." We dared not say that invasive long-range killing was stupid and immoral. Talking like that would be sedition. Who voices negative opinions under a Damoclean sword? We did our duty and stuffed our guilt down deep.
Article 85 of the aforementioned illustrious UCMJ states that if you can't stand some atrocity that your outfit is committing with full military vigor, you cannot excuse yourself and depart the scene because that would be a mutiny, and "Any person who commits mutiny in time of war shall be..." Guess what? "...punished by death." Yep, there they go again, waving that good old military "justice" around like a cat o' nine tails.
Wait a minute; democratic America isn't that fascistic, surely. But, as some Veterans have been heard to say, "We were defending democracy, not practicing it."
A sailor could indeed go over his commander's head and lodge a complaint with a bigger boss. However, the Commander In Chief (Lyndon B. Johnson was the Top Dog then, the President of the whole country) wanted those atrocities to be committed. Thus, any complaint got sunk before it left the Division, and the complainer would be persecuted to hell for the rest of their military term and probably kicked out with a deplorable Dishonorable Discharge. (They may have deserved a Peace Medal. The Hippies were right. It was an unjust war.)
When I got out, I had an alcohol dependence, as have many others with war experience. It caused me to impose shameful experiences upon myself many times and long ago. Shame begat shame in a backlash for what I'd done to others in wartime. Luckily, I kicked that bad habit three decades ago and now enjoy doing good things, like advising young men not to go to war unless an invader comes here and barges over our shoreline. Offense is the worst kind of defense. Defense means staying at home and only fighting invaders. We were invaders.
Looking back, I regret my youthful naivety, but even if naivety makes one vulnerable for a while, it's still fine to be an innocent good guy. A great institution like the US Navy must not exploit innocence. I wasn't asked like they do in the movies if I wanted to "volunteer" to kill people for their political situations. I wasn't allowed to claim a "conscientious objector" status because I wasn't a member of any religious sect that was officially recognized as being anti-killing to the cores of their souls like the Quakers are known to be. I am a peace-and-life-lover now just by being a casual Christian.
I now love those who went to prison or to another country to avoid killing for the wrong reasons. Killing hurts the killer more. They have to live with what they've done while their victims are fine in heaven, pointing down at them, smiling, and shaking their heads.
It takes what it takes to learn that peace is a bliss that everyone deserves and in which great things and good living are possible and probable.
Somerset Meece, Sonar Technician Third Class, served on the USS Edwards, DD950 from 1964 to 1966. His novel "Tin Can," about his destroyer's Tonkin Gulf Incident, is at Amazon.com
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