Cover for 1950s comic book titled HEROIC

I have my own view on heroism and heroes.

Early on, my hero was Siegfried, a Norse mythological figure who was fearless to the point of recklessness, slayed a dragon, walked through fire and died stabbed in the back by an evil betrayer.

Later, during WWII, my heroes were the comic book variety and Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy. The comic book variety were never disappointing and soldiered on from episode to episode unscathed.

Audie, however, resisted efforts to glorify his actions, to be made a hero. That seems to be a common factor amongst those singled out for that definition of behavior. They really don’t feel exceptional and I don’t believe it’s a matter of false modesty.

Audie was moderately successful in movies, but he suffered from PTSD and was addicted to sleeping pills. His experience, though, brought public attention to PTSD for the first time. A good outcome to a bad scene.

I went to war because I thought that was what one did; especially if one wanted to be a hero. I turned eighteen the day before the Korean War broke out. (Sorry, the Korean Police Action.) I was never in hot combat, (except in bars) but I did do night patrols in contested territory with a dog, and took some sniper fire. Nervous activity at least.

During that time, my notions of heroism began to modify. I didn’t know anyone I would call a hero over there. We all did what we were supposed to do and if we didn’t we were punished; by demotions or stockade time or dishonorable discharges.

I heard about people who were called heroes for rescuing comrades under fire, going forward under fire and taking difficult positions; that sort of thing. But these were actions I knew were dictated by the nature of the people and the circumstances they found themselves in. The decisions, I suspect, were instantaneous and relatively easy for these guys. They were the kinds of guys who might become policemen or firement and be cool and deliberative under all sorts of difficult circumstances. They wouldn’t call themselves heroes

Then there are those who are called heroes because they won’t fight, they take the difficult path of pacifism. Those are hard decisions, probably not instantaneously taken. But again, they are decisions consistent with the nature of those people and the circumstances that call upon them to act. And, again, commendable for those reasons.

Ad for Capital One's veteran hiring plan; and, at right, a real silver star on a soldier's chest

When I looked up heroism, I found there were no accurate synonyms. Instead they offered such words as bravery, courageousness, daring, gallantry, guts … Is that to say that a man exhibiting bravery (daring, gallantry, guts) in the process of a despicable act of betrayal could be called a hero? No. The word really stands alone and begs a definition

In looking at how the word is used, and by whom, I suspect the concept to be a glorifying construction useful to politicians and those who are in the business of persuading people to engage in dangerous enterprises. Hell. It worked with me. It got me to fight a war I knew absolutely nothing about, other than it was an opportunity to be a hero.

As for the young man who died in training; he wanted to be a chef, but became a Marine because a door was closed. He was about to get out, without having a chance to be a hero, when opportunity struck and he got 2200 flags along the route to his grave.

Comes now Nick Turse, forty years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, with Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, a compendious retelling of the horrors once inflicted by the United States of America against a tiny South East Asian adversary and its entire population.  As a foundation for this grisly retrospective the author has assembled hundreds of sources, virtually all of which date from the time of the original telling, and to which he has joined the testimony of veterans and veteran observers along with the voices of Vietnamese victims unavailable for interview until long after the war had ended.

The impulse to resurrect en masse the record of this dirty war, what Turse characterizes as its “hidden history,” resulted from an epiphany the author experienced in 2001 at the National Archives.  As a graduate student “researching post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans,” Turse confides that he “stumbled upon… the yellowing records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group… more than 300 allegations of… atrocities that were substantiated by army investigators.”  The files, Turse says, were “long hidden away and almost forgotten.”

Well, yes and no.  A decade earlier, these same files had been scanned and duly cited by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, whose Four Hours in My Lai was motivated by a similar premise, that the notorious massacre of March 16, 1968 had suffered from “twenty years of cover-up and willed forgetfulness.”  Nick Turse, quite rightly, goes much farther in applying his indictment of  “forgetfulness” to the entire Vietnam conflict, where, in the once familiar mantra of antiwar veterans who had witnessed these horrors first hand, and then publically condemned them, My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg.  But by now, Turse laments, “the other atrocities perpetrated by U.S. soldiers have essentially vanished from popular memory.”

Come to think of it, what hasn’t?  “Popular memory,” assuming the concept isn’t completely spurious, is at best a labile thing.  Moreover, what can one expect the popular memory to retain?  We might with some charity assign a collective D- to the powers of retention of historical detail – informed or otherwise – by our fellow Americans.  The comic genius Groucho Marx devilishly exhibited this national deficiency on his television quiz show in the Fifties.  When a pair of contestants failed to answer a single question correctly on some current or historical topic, Groucho offered them a consolation prize if they could tell him who was buried in Grant’s Tomb, or what was the color of Washington’s white horse; sometimes they couldn’t.

The example may seem trivial, but the point still holds.  Can Vietnam hope to fare any better if we are to depend on popular memory to remind us of its truths?  What if anything beyond the most abbreviated commonplaces does popular memory recall of our prior “Vietnams” – the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War in Cuba and the Philippines, Central America for over a century – our dark tradition of turning superior fire power against weaker nations we target for the sake of our destiny to dominate and pillage?  As for Iraq and Afghanistan, the public didn’t even catch them the first time around.

A fellow Vietnam veteran and memoirist John Ketwig relays an anecdote that illustrates the problem sharply.  Ketwig wrote me recently of “a long ago conference at Gettysburg College [where] … the audience and presenters consisted of professional soldiers from the nearby Army War College at Carlisle, PA.”  During the morning session Ketwig “along with W.D. Ehrhart and other prominent Vietnam [War] authors” served up the by-then familiar inconvenient truths about the criminal nature of the war they’d recently been fighting.  After which, Ketwig recalls, “an old lifer Sergeant Major spoke, pointed to us and very specifically stated, ‘These whining, complaining Vietnam veterans will die off.  I want to assure you, we have written the history of the Vietnam war your grandchildren will read.’”

If the Old Lifer imagined he was addressing History-with-a-capital- H, clearly his prediction was overwrought by wishful thinking.  The bibliographic catalog is well stacked against the diehard apologists, not least the self-justifying screeds by those who cheered and managed the debacle and their revisionist disciples who have followed.  The real whining would come, of course, from the likes of Robert J. McNamara.  No amount of breast beating about dangers born of Cold War tensions has made what lies beneath the My Lai iceberg suddenly vanish from the historical record, to which Kill Anything That Moves now provides a striking addendum.

Obviously Nick Turse’s ambition for this book ranges far beyond serving scholarly mills,  or reaching whatever limited market this subject still commands among its core readers.  Turse intends Kill Anything That Moves as mass-shock treatment to override the public’s amnesia, aggressively demanding that we re-examine Vietnam’s horrors with even greater intensity today than we did forty to fifty years ago.  But how does this agenda square with the public mood?   That query returns us to the chilling side of that Old Lifer’s prophesy, because the views on the Vietnam War our millennials are forming today suggest strongly that the indoctrination he boasted of is well underway.

Citing a recent Gallop poll, journalist Robert Sheer reports that “a majority of Americans ages 18-29 believe sending U.S. troops to Vietnam was not a mistake… the young now approve of an irrational war in which 3.4 million Indochinese and 58,000 Americans died…”  Holding steady across the age divide, “70% of those 50 or older… with contemporary knowledge…” retain their beliefs in the war’s essential wrongness.  This leaves Nick Turse addressing an aging choir that already knows the hymnal by rote, while among his own peers, not to mention Sheer’s “18-29 year olds,” his thunder confronts a formidable headwind.

When Kill Anything That Moves was launched in such a promising whirl of enthusiasm from the more respectable corridors of the Left media ghetto, it fleetingly appeared as if Turse might indeed have re-set the historical clock.  But the dust stirred by that initial thrust settled quickly.  And the sound of silence greeting Turse’s book from the elite opinion-making heavyweights, whose reviews and news stories are essential for gaining the kind of national recognition the author and his sponsors had clearly hoped for, has been deafening.

Perhaps because so much of what Turse has reassembled already appeared – if not in every specific, certainly in kind – within its pages while the war was in progress, The New York Times, for example, may judge Kill Anything That Moves as twice-warmed news.  Such thinking would provide the paper’s managers all the sanctimonious cover they’d need to help stymie any genuinely healthy re-examination of American crimes against humanity in Vietnam, oft reported, but never officially acknowledged, much less repented.  But why would the Times and the other great organs and outlets of bounded propaganda, whatever else divides them, want to re-air the real history of Vietnam today?   The last thing the elite political class wants is to reconnect Vietnam to the present, certainly not in the direction that Nick Turse has failed to provoke them.  They know Vietnam was not a mistake; it’s a template.

To jump start a renewed public conversation about Vietnam that aims at eliminating that template as a future military option – presumably Turse’s more elusive and essentially unpainted target – apparently demands a bigger boost than one explosive charge dredged from the archives can deliver.  This assumes that the Vietnam template isn’t already losing favor among national security managers.  In which case, asks W.D. Ehrhart, still in the conversation long after that conference at Gettysburg, what particular end is Turse’s so-called “hidden history” meant to serve beyond exhibiting “a randomly presented litany of mayhem?”

Bill Ehrhart has spent decades since being wounded during the Battle of Hue bringing to literature, classroom and public forums – in consort with a large community of like-minded veterans – compelling eyewitness accounts of the systematic nature of atrocities committed by the U.S. military throughout Indochina.  In a recent email, having read my essay criticizing Jonathan Shell’s breathless review of Kill Anything That Moves, Ehrhart expressed the opinion that “Schell’s reaction to Turse’s book is ridiculous.”  What Schell gushes over as novelty, Ehrhart calls “old news.”  And, after examining the book,  he dismisses it with a terseness both unsparing and poetic: “disjointed, disorganized, without direction.”

But that’s hardly the worst of it, and these next sentiments of Ehrhart’s deeply echo my own.  “If Turse were a true journalist and scholar, he would be shouting, ‘Why didn’t anyone listen to veterans who told these stories forty years ago?’  He ripped off our history shouting – Look what I discovered! – and presented the case as if it’s being told for the first time.”

Turse’s claims to originality are slippery enough, but the “rip off” exceedingly worse.  Regarding the former we are told that, as the author’s research deepened over the years, he “began to get a sense of the ubiquity of atrocity during the American War,” a hip way of showing he knows how the Vietnamese refer to the same conflict.  And elsewhere, “…I came to see the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese non-combatants… was neither accidental nor unforeseeable.”

We might overlook this silly pretense were it not at the expense of a consciously organized veterans’ resistance which arose following the belated revelation of My Lai, and operated within the larger antiwar movement where the narrative of Vietnam genocide had been long evolving.  In the very language and political formulations that Turse now appropriates, often literally, a veritable legion of veterans loudly proclaimed those very revelations that the author wishes to showcase as novel insights.  Moreover, we based our evidence for the ubiquity of American war crimes on our actual wartime experiences, as we helped sway the public to finally reject the war we ourselves had been fighting in.  These are the unique historical episodes that Turse completely ignores.

In his account antiwar veterans appear, not as a movement making history, but as a handful of individual “whistle-blowers within the ranks or recently out of the army…” whose denunciations were “marginalized and ignored.”  For the rest, Turse buries our unprecedented story in a thicket of footnotes, devoid of their original contexts, and where only a disciplined scholar might be able to reassemble them into anything approximating what actually occurred.  A reader may judge for herself, if the public testimonies on U.S. war crimes policies in Vietnam delivered by antiwar veterans during the final years of the conflict were, as Turse suggests, “marginalized and ignored.”  She might discover that the veterans were being heard at the time, if not listened to, much more than Turse is today.

Nick Turse’s decision to airbrush from the record the provenance of the Vietnam war crimes narrative, and the roles of veterans within it, defies explanation.  As already noted, the scope of research under display in his copious list of sources makes evident that he knew this story well.  My own emails with the author, who had seen my pre-published version of this history while still in dissertation form – thick and unwieldy as he rightly chided me – date from 2007.  And while it touches me less personally, though only slightly, Turse’s use of similar methods for downgrading the stature and significance of the American antiwar movement is equally perplexing.

No old Movement hand intimately familiar with those times could fail to notice how Turse prunes the most powerful unarmed force of domestic resistance to governing authority in U.S. history to the status of a sideshow.  Here’s one particularly ham fisted sample of his distorting style.   He characterizes as pitiful Movement efforts to reveal the true nature of the war through “pamphlets, small press books and underground newspapers,” that, if even glancingly noticed by empowered insiders, were dismissed as “leftist kookery.”

When one turns to the footnote for this passage to scan the names of these presumably obscure “pamphlets, small press books and underground newspapers,” one finds instead that the printed matter antiwar forces produced to advance their war crimes accusations was packaged by the very titans of American trade and newspaper publishing: Random House, Simon and Schuster, Holt Rinehart, Vintage -  the quality paperback imprint, Avon – the mass paperback imprint of the Hearst Corporation, a couple of smaller but respected houses like Beacon and Pilgrim Press, two or three international publishers, their reputations unknown to me, and The New York Times.

I understand that many of the interested parties who may see this essay will simply react to the issues I have raised here with a resounding, “So what?”  Maybe Turse got some of the story wrong, they might admit, even in ways that make him appear amateurish, if not perverse.  But he nails the big picture bearing on the carnage and destruction, to a large degree intentionally orchestrated by the U.S. during its aggressive war against Vietnam.  But I would take issue even with that.  On the thin narrative thru-line where Turse strings the graphically descriptive details of one atrocity after another, he seems to weigh the vile handywork of individual GIs operating in the field on a par with the far more deadly toll that sprang from cold hearted policies of mass murder designed by high level commanders, political bureaucrats and academics: the indiscriminate use of artillery and air power to remove and disrupt populations, and which caused the overwhelming number of deaths and casualties among the South Vietnamese.

Turse certainly reports on, and strongly denounces, pacification’s deadly harvest of non-combatants.  But by placing so much emphasis on the 300 Pentagon investigations that originally ignited his zeal for this subject, the statistical significance of his soldier-initiated atrocities pales before the ranks of two and a half million draft aged men who’d served in Vietnam during the war.  Let’s assume those 300 cases of substantiated atrocities are actually representative of  thousands of unreported heinous incidents committed by thousands of individual soldiers – which I firmly believe was the case.  That still would leave a substantial body of other veterans with clean hands, to the degree any soldier at war can make such a claim.  Let’s just say they weren’t involved in rape, torture, mutilation, pre-meditated murder or manslaughter, or willful destruction of livestock or property.

A very large number of veterans therefore might feel unfairly tarred by Turse’s sweeping brush, assuming they ever became aware of his book in the first place.  I sense this would matter very little to Nick Turse.  As he makes no effort to conceal in a recent essay, “Who Did You Rape in the War, Daddy”, Turse seems to harbor a truly bizarre resentment toward war veterans, notably the many he has interviewed over the years and now accuses of not coming clean to him about the things they’d seen or done.  Reading that, it occurred to me that Turse had learned very little about veterans when his research was initially focused on PTSD.  He seemed to have missed the fact that deep issues of trust determine who veterans will talk to about war, and as is commonly understood, that they generally talk only with each other.

But now Turse is pissed, and he engages in a bit of shadow boxing with veterans as ghostly adversaries.  “I know a lot about war without fighting in one,” he defiantly lectures some unidentified veteran other.   And, it has cost him.   But he expresses pride because this “just isn’t the sort of knowledge that’s easy to come by,” and who said it was?   Anyway, this could be one digression too many, so read his essay cited above and judge for yourself.   My own take is that Turse is suffering from the equivalent of penis envy in having been denied firsthand experience with warfare.  He has had to find compensation, but his vicarious knowledge of war is made harder to come by because veterans are deceitful, and won’t “come clean.”   Turse ‘s judgment here is clouded by his temper tantrum.

Turse’s other signal observation is that accounts of Vietnamese viewpoints and victimhood are largely absent from the 30,000 volumes covering the American representations of the war.  This is hardly surprising since the opportunities for serious research and interviewing in Vietnam are relatively recent.  By the time mass tourism had blossomed there, returning veterans have typically expressed astonishment that the recovered Vietnam they find today is totally unrecognizable from the country they had once fought in. This is the Vietnam in which the kind of research Turse brags about is finally possible.  Long before that, veterans established humanitarian projects in Vietnam and have for decades been in the forefront of campaigns to raise public awareness of the human suffering still afflicting so many Vietnamese who survived the war, not least the toll in human lives from herbicide poisoning and unexploded ordinance, all reaching now into the third and fourth post-war generations.

Neither Bill Ehrhart nor I, among thousands of others – veterans and non-veterans alike – have ever abandoned through our writing and political action, and in classrooms where we have taught or been invited to speak, our commitments to keep the flame of truth about the real American war in Vietnam from being extinguished.  To that protracted struggle, Nick Turse has added his flawed and impassioned contribution.  But the impulse that will lead, if ever, to the cleansing of our butchery in Vietnam from the national conscience, is unlikely to come from collective, much less individual, efforts of the progressive camp.

It is an odd fact of our culture that, when controversial topics are avoided or suppressed, they can sneak back in as entertainment.  Who knows if Vietnam won’t suddenly slip into the popular media slot that’s been vacated by the Greatest Generation?   It’s a fair bet.  But when, and in what form, it’s impossible to predict.  Will  the space be dynamic enough to air the most damning facts, and here Turse’s indictment could be included when the papers are served.   How much energy remains in the aging antiwar crowd to re-fight these old battles?   Is the Old Lifer bound to win, or will the young break the propaganda spell?  And, if our side won, what would that look like?  It’s something to think about.  We’re not waiting for the Rapture.  Some of us are already preparing for the opening, if and when it comes. Here’s a previous essay by me and one by John Grant from In The Mind Field responding to the Pentagon’s Vietnam War Commemoration Project.

           While accusations that the U.S. was engaged in “genocide” against the population of South Vietnam were expressed early and often by the antiwar movement from the war’s outset, the overwhelming majority of the articles cited here appeared in big city mass circulation daily newspapers.  They are contained in a clipping file I maintained while working with the Citizens Commission of Inquiry which organized public forums for veterans to testify about war crimes they had witnessed or participated in while serving in Vietnam.

             We conscientiously gathered the press accounts of CCI’s organizing track record, fortunate to have had access to an out-of-town newspaper stand available in Times Square, New York City.  At the same time CCI never engaged a clipping service, which I am certain would have increased many fold the citations I have presented here.  In some cases there are multiple accounts generated by a single press event, cited here to demonstrated how widely we were able to get the war crimes message out within the U.S. media during the course of CCI’s brief existence. 

            Some of the most respected reporters and war correspondents of their generation covered these stories to include Richard Dudman, Neil Sheehan, Nat Hentoff, Nicholas von Hoffman, Homer Bigart, and Jules Witcover.  Some annotation has been added where I felt it would be useful.

             1.  “New Anti-War Group Writes GIs,” William Serrin.  Detroit Free Press, May 21, 1967.  A veterans group in Detroit, Veterans Against War, held war crimes at Wayne State University.  The reporter describes them as “carbons of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal.”  One veteran activist from that group, Nick Medvecky, remains active with VVAW.

             2.  “Letter From a Vietnam Veteran,” Major Gordon Livingston, M.D.  Saturday Review, September 20, 1969.  A West Point graduate and regimental surgeon with the 11^th Armored Cavalry under Col. George S. Patton, III.  One of the most eloquent antiwar statements ever written by a veteran of the war, Livingston with considerable understatement concludes, “that Americans simply do not care about the Vietnamese.”

              3.  “Vietnam Genocide,” a special supplement published by the Guardian, December 8, 1969.  Among several articles on the massacre at Song My (My Lai), including one titled, “One tragic village among thousands,” is an article by Ralph Schoenman, “War crimes follow ‘Standard Operating Procedures.”  Schoenman had recently completed several years of work with the Russell Tribunal, which had been publicizing the accounts of war crimes provided by the North Vietnamese, which had been dismissed as propaganda in the western media.  There’s also an article by former Green Beret Don Duncan, “What makes an atrocity,” and an article on chemical defoliation in Vietnam.

             4.  ”Peace Group to Set Up Panels on Atrocity Charges,” New York Times, November 30, 1969.  The article reports “the formation of citizen’s commissions…where former soldiers would provide first-hand evidence of war crimes… including electric torture and killing of prisoners [as] part of an American policy in South Vietnam… carried out on orders from those higher up.”

              5.  “Viet Atrocities Hearings Set for 11 Cities,” Timothy Ferris.  New York Post, February 14, 1970.  Jeremy Rifkin of CCI announces hearing in the U.S. for Annapolis, MD, saying that “the committee will examine whether specific U.S. military policy in Vietnam now in effect are in fact war crimes.”  CCI quickly abandoned this posture of an open-ended inquiry.

              6. “Viet Cong scalps were GI souvenirs US deserters say,” Toronto Daily Star.  March 5, 1970.  CCI’s first press event actually took place in Toronto.  Dr. Gordon Livingston participated, as did two American military resisters who had deserted their units for Canadian exile.  Thereafter, CCI would only permit vets with honorable discharges to testify, not from lack of solidarity with the exiled GI resisters, but to enhance the credibility of the veterans’ eye witness testimony in the eyes of the U.S. media.  Within two years, Tod Ensign and I would form the Safe Return committee to work specifically on the campaign to win amnesty for military resisters living in exile and underground in the U.S.

              7.  “Anti-War Group Plans Meeting in Annapolis,” The Evening Star [Washington, D.C.], Mar. 6, 1970.  While Tod was in Toronto, Jeremy was in D.C. to drum up media interest in our next event.

              8.  “War crimes unit stages Vietnam horror showing,” by Don Frese.  Evening Capital [Annapolis, MD], March 12, 1970.  “Photographs, motion pictures and slides of dead and maimed children were used to convey the horror of the Vietnamese War… The inquiry… is intended to show how war crimes fit into our overall war policy.”  And in one paragraph, the reporter writes that an “ex-soldier told of his involvement I widespread bombing of villages and defoliation of the land.  ‘We were told to kill everything that moved.’”   

             9.  “Eyewitness report on U.S.-Viet horrors.”  The Baltimore Afro-American, march 17, 1970.

             10.   “Rebel Officer Cite My Lai,” Cy Egan.  New York Post, March 17, 1970.  Lt. Louis Font, a West Point graduate attending Harvard grad school, announces he will refuse orders to Vietnam, in an act of ‘selective’ conscientious objection.  Font will go on to help found the Concerned Officers Movement, and to work closely with CCI.

             11.  ”War Crimes in Vietnam,” a flyer announcing a Teach-in at New York University, March 17, 1970.  The meeting, featuring the Citizens Commission of Inquiry, “will document the truth about genocidal massacre of the civilian population of South Vietnam.”  This was a big moment for me personally; I met Jan (Barry) Crumb and joined VVAW, and soon began to work full time with CCI.

             12.  ”U.S. Army Veteran Alleges Vietnamese Civilians Slain,” the Springfield Union [Springfield, MA], April 7, 1970.  West Point graduate and former Infantry Captain, Robert Bowie Johnson, quoted in the article, said, “‘irrational acts’ of servicemen in Vietnam are traceable to the ‘irrational policy of the United States in Vietnam.’”

             13.  “Group Tells ‘True Nature’ of War: New massacre claim probed,” Adam Fisher.  Springfield Daily News, April 6, 1970.

             14. U.S.Army Veteran Alleges Vietnamese Civilians Slain.”  The Springfield Union, April 7, 1970

             15.  “Ex-Pilot Alleges Civilian Slayings,” Douglas Robinson.  The New York Times, April 7, 1970.

             16.  “Army Opens Probe of New ‘Atrocity.”  The Miami Herald, April 8, 1970.  This, and a similar article by UPI, reported that the Army intended to investigate the charges we had made at the Springfield press conference.

             17. “Army Probes New Charge of Viet Deaths.”  The Evening Star [UPI], April 8, 1970.

             18.  “3 Viet Vets Charge ‘Routine’ Use of Torture by U.S. Troops,” by Timothy Ferris.  New York Post, April 13, 1970.  Here CCI is quoted on precisely what Jonathan Schell says he learned from Nick Turse’s book only in 2013, that “The U.S. military machine was [a]… system in which torture was standard procedure and extrajudicial executions common.”

             19.  “They’d Probe Pentagon on ‘Atrocities,” New York Daily News, April 14, 1970.  At this press conference, where I gave an account of torture I had witnessed personally, CCI called for an “investigation of the Pentagon by some independent agency.  It’s absurd for the Pentagon to investigate itself for war crimes.”

             20.   Ex-GIs Charge Viet Prisoners Were Tortures,” Jim Stinglet.  Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1970.  CCI had held simultaneous press conferences in LA and NY, featuring the eyewitness testimony on torture by six war veterans.

             21.  “GIs reveal new atrocities,” Guardian, April 18, 1970.   By this time coverage of CCI’s work in left newspapers was rare.

             22.  “Two ex-GIs say troops torture prisoners in Vietnam,” by Douglas Crocket.  The Boston Globe, May 8, 1970.”  Larry Rottmann and I were were joined in this press conference by Noam Chomsky, who revealed information on the secret war in Laos, which the media essentially ignored.

             23.  “‘67 Yank forays in Cambodia,” Chicago Sun Times.  May 8, 1970.  This UPI story did, however, pick up on Rottmann’s testimony on having participated in covert operations in Cambodia, the other “secret” war that had just become widely known with the official U.S. invasion of that country.

             24.  “Ex-Intelligence Officers List War Crimes Witnessed,” Dave O’Brien.  Boston Record American, May 8, 1970.

             25.  “Torture Techniques Reported,” The Militant, May 8, 1970.  The only coverage we ever received in the SWP organ as far as I can recall.

             26.   “‘Unofficial’ atrocities attributed to Pentagon,” Richard W. McManus.  The Christian Science Monitor, May 8, 1970.  Jeremy Rifkin is quoted saying, “Individual soldiers should not be made scapegoats for Defense Department policy.”

             27.  “Parallel News,” Nat Hentoff.  The Village Voice, May 14, 1970.  Hentoff got hold of and reprinted here the article by a New York Times reporter about CCI’s April 14^th news conference on torture that the paper had apparently killed.  The Times failure to run this story was also the subject of a letter to the paper’s editor, April 21, 1970, signed by the Princeton International Law expert, Richard Falk and several other sponsors of CCI.

             28.  “Badges Given by U.S. Unit for Killing Enemy: Ears Accepted As Evidence,” Tom Nugent.  Detroit Free Press, June 10, 1970.

             29.  “Pacifists Offer My Lai Defense,” Timothy Ferris.  New York Post, July 7, 1970.  CCI charged that only enlisted men and low ranking officers were being tried for their roles in the My Lai massacre, “scapegoating a handful of GI for military strategies and policies conceived at the highest levels of government.”

             30..“Ex-GIs Tell of Torturing Prisoners,” by William Greider.  The Washington Post, July 19, 1970.  The big news for me in this article was that Bill Greider was able to corroborate my allegations of torture through an interview with the Interrogation Officer in my 11^th Infantry unit.

             31.  “Ex-GIs Describe Electric Torture of Viet Civilians,” William Greider. The Des Moines Register, July 20, 1970.

            32.  “Ex-GIs Recall U.S. Brutality.” The Providence Journal, July 20, 1970.

            33.  “Viet Veterans Hit ‘Torture’ by U.S. Units,” The Evening Star [UPI], July 20, 1970.

            34. “Vietnam Veterans story: GI Torture of Prisoners.”  San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 1970.

            35.  “LIer Charges US Tortured Vietnamese.”  Long Island Press, July 20, 1970.

            36.  “Atrocities in Vietnam Said, ‘a Way of Life,” Carl Shires.  The Richmond News Leader, August 18, 1970.  “We were told the only good gook was a dead gook,” testified former marine and admiral’s son, T. Griffits Ellison.

            37.  “Veterans Say They Saw U.S. Atrocities in War.  The Washington Post, August 18, 1970.

            38.  “Torture of Viet Cong described by ex-GI,” The Detroit News, August 18, 1970.

            39.  “Veterans Tell of War Crimes.”  St. Louis Post Dispatch [UPI], August, 18, 1970.

            40.  “Ex-Officer says Cong tortured on his orders.”  The Minneapolis Star, August 18, 1970.

            41.  “Tales of War Cruelty.” S.F. Examiner, August 18, 1970.

            42.  “Electric Shocks Get Viet Cong to Talk.”  Wheeling News Register,  August 18, 1970.

            43.  “Veterans Describe U.S. War Crimes.” Winston-Salem Journal, August 19, 1970.

            44.  “Vets Report on Brutality.”  The Richmond Evening News, August 19, 1970.

            45.  “Vietnam Vets: Yanks Commit Atrocities Daily.” St. Paul Pioneer Press,  September  26, 1970.  A CCI hearing in Minneapolis followed that in Richmond.  Our purpose, we explained, was to place “responsibility for the war crimes… on the joint chiefs, the administration and board members and stockholders of large defense corporations.”  And,“to explain the real nature of the war and put pressure on them to stop.”

            46.  “5 Vets Charge Murder,” Joseph H. Trachman.  The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 1970.  I told the assembled media that CCI’s purpose was to “enlist public sentiment for the convening of an international tribunal, similar to Nuremberg…”

            47.  There is an article in the Swedish newspaper, Afton Bladet, October 25, 1970, reporting on the testimony I had given before a meeting of the International Enquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam several days later.

            48.  “War Atrocities Termed Commonplace,” by James Long.  Oregon Journal, October 28, 1970.  A CCI coordinator is quoted saying, “The My Lai massacre is a logical outgrowth of policies set at the highest level – individual soldiers do not account for genocide.”

            49.  “Jane Fonda’s newest cause: probing US ‘war crimes,’ by Evelyn Keene.  Boston Sunday Globe, November 1, 1970.  There was definitely a put-down tone in this article toward Jane, but it announced our plans for the Winter Soldier Investigation.

             50.  “City to Hear of Vietnam ‘Crimes,” Peter Benjaminson.  Detroit Free Press, November 3, 1970. Jeremy Rifkin announces the upcoming Winter Soldier Investigation to the Detroit media.

             51.  Detroit Police Department Inter-office Memorandum.  November 7, 1970.  This 4 page memo was generated after the cops received a phone call from Lee I. Schulte, manager of the Detroit Veterans Memorial Building, which had been engaged by Tod Ensign, “Coordinator-Counsel “for the Winter Soldier Investigation.  It reports on “a discreet confidential check with forces at Wayne State University regarding a Tod Ensign who… was a student” there in 1965.  The memo noted that “Detroit and Windsor will be the scene of an unusual early December denunciation of “American War Crimes” in Vietnam, if the ambitious plans of two national antiwar groups [CCI and VVAW] bear fruit.”

             52.  Articles became to appear prominently throughout the U.S. on the beginning of the trial of 1Lt. William L. (Rusty) Calley for his role in the My Lai massacre.  For example, “U.S. Details Case Against Calley,” Homer Bigart.  The New York Times, November 18, 1970; “Witnesses Back My Lai Sergeant,” Douglas Robinson.  The New York Times, November 18, 1970.          

             53.  “War Foes Blame U.S. Commanders for Viet Atrocities,” by Richard Maynard.  The Washington Post, November 24, 1970.  This announced CCI’s National Veterans Inquiry, to begin in Washington the following week.

             54.  “Nuremberg III,” by Nat Hentoff.  The Village Voice, November 26, 1970.  Hentoff here essentially challenges the rest of the media to pay attention to CCI’s upcoming National Veterans Inquiry.

             55.  “Slaughter not unusual: ex-GI,” William McGaffin.  Chicago Daily News, Nov. 28-19, 1970.

             56.  “Viet Vets Telling of Atrocities.” New York Post, December 1, 1970.  The article begins, “Twenty honorably discharged Vietnam war veterans presented eye-witness accounts today of incidents in which Viet-women and children were tortured, mutilates and even massacred by U.S. and allied ground forces.”

             57.  “Antiwar Group Hears of ‘Crimes.’  The New York Times, December 1, 1970.

             58.  “Vietnam atrocities told: Military intelligence involves systematic use of electric torture and beatings,” Jerry Oppenheimer.  The Washington Daily News, December 2, 1970.

             59.  “Ex-CIA man speaks of Vietnam killings.”  The Times [London], December 2, 1970.

             60.  “Veterans Tell of Atrocities,” Richard Dudman.  St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 2, 1970.

             61.  “Viet Veterans Tell of GI Atrocities,” Powell Lindsay.  The Pittsburgh Press, December 2, 1970.

             62.  “City Ex-GI Tells of Shelling Peasants.” The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, December 2, 1970.

             63.  “Billings Veteran to Testify At ‘War Crimes Inquiry.”  Billings Gazette [Montana], December 3, 1970.

             64.  “We could hear them screaming,” Jerry Oppenheimer.  The Washington Daily News, December 3, 1970.

             65.  “A Tale of Torture and Murder.”  The Daily Freeman (Kingston, N.Y.), December 3, 1970.

             66.  “Viet Veterans Recall War Crimes.”  The Charlotte Observer, December 3, 1970.

             67.  “Ex-GI Says He Saw Americans Commit Executions, Atrocities.”  The Florida Times-Union, December 3, 1970.

             68.  “Yanks tortured Red prisoners, two GIs testify.” Chicago Daily News, December 3, 1970.

             69.  “Torture was policy, Viet war vets say.”  The Cleveland Press.  December 3, 1970.

             70.  “Red POWs Pushed Off Copter, Witness Says.”  Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1970.

             71.  “GI’s threw 2 Viets to death, agent says.”  The Detroit News,  December 3, 1970.

             72.  “Psychological Slavery: A Commentary,” Nicholas von Hoffman.  The Washington Post, December 4, 1970.

             73.  ‘War Crimes’ Inquiry Hears of Bombing.”  San Francisco Chronicle,  December 4, 1970.

             74.  “Veterans Ask Inquiry Into Alleged Atrocities,” Jules Witcover.  Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1970.

             75.  “War Veterans at Inquiry Feel ‘Atrocities’ Are Result of Policy.”  The New York Times, December 4, 1970.  The Times wrap-up on the three-day National Veteran Inquiry.

             76.  “New Vietnam Atrocity Charges Little Noticed; War Veterans Make Allegations of Bizarre Tortures, Crucifixion of Enemy Soldiers,” Jules Witcover.  Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1970.  Witcover commented: “One of the major handicaps facing both Congress and reporters through the years in trying to learn what has happened in the Vietnam war has been that too often there has been only one source of information – the U.S. government.”

             77.  “‘We can’t sleep man,’ Veterans Inquiry into War Crimes,” Lucien K. Truscott IV.  The Village Voice, December 10, 1970.

             78.  “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Nat Hentoff.  The Village Voice, December 31, 1970.

             79.  “Taylor Says by Nuremberg Rules Westmoreland May Be Guilty,” by Neil Sheehan.  The New York Times, January 9, 1971.  This may have been the CCI’s biggest publicity coup.

             80.  “Five Officers Say They Seek Formal War Crimes Inquiries,” by Neil Sheehan.  The New York Times, January 13, 1971.  This was the second article that week by Neil Sheehan on CCI’s work.  Shortly thereafter, Sheehan broke the Pentagon Papers story in the Times.  He already had them from Ellsberg well before the articles ran on CCI, or so I was told by the late John Simon, former editor of the Times Book Review who had commissioned the omnibus review of the mounting literature coving topics specifically or generally related to the war crimes issue, which would run in March 1971.

             81.  “4 Officers Challenge To Brass on Policies in South Vietnam,” Lee Dye.  Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1971.  This was the second of back-to-back press conference that CCI organized for member of the Concerned Officers Movement, who sought to bring war crimes charges against their commanders under provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

             82.  “For a War Crimes Inquiry,” Editorial.  Newsday [Long Island, and New York City], March 22, 1971.  Newsday, under the helm of Bill Moyers then as Publisher, I believe, may have been the only mainstream newspaper in the country to editorialize on behalf of a war crimes inquiry.

             83.  ”Should We Have War Crimes Trials?” by Neil Sheehan.  The New York Times Book Review,” March 28, 1971.  An omnibus review of the contemporary literature on the war crimes issue, in which Sheehan comes down hardest on the American air war in Vietnam.

             84.  Between the National Veterans Inquiry and the Dellums Hearings on War Crimes, both of which were organized by CCI, the Winter Soldier Investigation was held in Detroit between January 31 – February 2, 1970.  The event, as Jeremy Rifkin had predicted, did not receive much attention in the mainstream media, owing to its location in Detroit.  But WSI was covered extensively in the antiwar press at the time, and received a major publicity boost a year later when the film Winter Soldier premiered at Cannes and at the Whitney Museum in New York.  The rest is history.

             A funding proposal circulated in March 1971 by Winter Film, which would produce the documentary, tells the story: “The Winter Soldier Investigation received no national radio or television coverage.  Outside of minimal Detroit coverage the only media has been WBAI (New York).”  To the extent the war crimes organizing effort among Vietnam veterans is remembered today, however, it is because of the Winter Soldier Investigation.

             News of Lt. Calley’s conviction on March 29, 1971 engendered a divergence of opinion in the liberal and antiwar communities, where some found themselves uncomfortably in agreement with the hawks, but for very different reasons.

            85.  “My Lai Verdict is Denounced; Calley Lawyer, Congressman Agree.”  The Providence Journal, March 30, 1971.  The Congressman was California antiwar Democrat Ron Dellums, who was quoted saying, “I think it’s a mistake to make one man the scapegoat for national policy.”  The Calley verdict, he said, “makes imperative congressional action on the war crimes issue.” Dellums then promised that if the House failed to take action, he would hold hearings on his own.

             86.  “Liberals Seek War Crimes Inquiry, John W. Finny.  The New York Times, March 31, 1971.  Dellums’ threat to hold hearings was vehemently opposed by the then chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Edward Hibert, Democrat of Alabama.

             The Dellums Hearings, organized by CCI, took place at the end of April, and were widely covered; citations for some of that coverage follows here:

             87.  “House Panel To hear Of Alleged Torture-Murder Policy in Viet,” The Baltimore Sun, April 28, 1971.

             88.  “Ex-GI Alleges 30 Slayings Near Mylai,” by Richard Halloran.  The New York Times, April 28, 1971.  CCI witness Danny Notley made public the Truong Khanh massacre at the Dellums Hearings.  The massacre was soon confirmed.

             89.  “5 S. Viets Back Ex-GI on Atrocity.”  Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1971.  An enterprising UPI reporter based in Saigon, tracked down residents of the village where the massacre had taken place, and was able to provide corroboration of Notley’s testimony.

            90.  “Charges U.S. Coverup on New My Lai,” Emile Milne.  New York Post, Monday 10, 1971.

            91.  “Another My Lai; U.S. Command Drags Heels,” Lynn Newland.  New York Post, May 10, 1971.

             92.  “Notley Urges Inquiry on War Tactics,” Michael Gelter.  The Washington Post, May 11, 1971.  As in so many cases when similar allegations were made by veterans in this period, the Pentagon attempted to shift attention from the atrocity with the counter-charge that the veterans were remiss in not reporting the incident at the time of its occurrence, or that they refused – as Notley did – to provide the names of those who had been responsible.  It was CCI policy to never “name names,” not even those of the officers (except those of high rank) who may have been in command at the time the atrocity was committed, because doing so would involve “drawing attention away from civilian and military higher-ups responsible for the overall strategies.”

             93. “War crimes’ precedents discussed at Harvard forum,” Joe Pilati.  Boston Globe, May (?) 1971.  CCI’s Tod Ensign, who was also Danny Notley’s attorney, attended this forum on behalf of our group.

             94.  “General, Ex-Aide Accused of Murdering Vietnamese,” William Beecher.  The New York Times, June 3, 1971.  I was particularly gratified by this development since I had served in the 11^th Light Infantry Brigade under then Colonel John Donaldson, known to many there as a “gook hunter” who flew around dropping fragmentation grenades on unarmed peasants at work in their rice paddies.  Even though the accusation had come from his own pilot, the charges were eventually dropped, since Donaldson claimed those he shot were Viet Cong soldier fleeing from American forces.

             95.  “House Unit Disclosed Civilian Killings in U.S. Backed Program,” Felix Belair, Jr.  The New York Times, July 16, 1971.  An obscure Congressional sub-committee on House Government Operations launched what was perhaps the only official government investigation on U.S. war crimes, focused on a particularly draconian military policy aimed at the assassination of Viet Cong cadres called the Phoenix Program.

             96.  “U.S. Aide Defends Pacification Program in Vietnam Despite Killings of Civilians,” Felix Belair, Jr.  The New York Times, July 20, 1971.  The “aide” in question, William E. Colby, an intelligence operative who supervised the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, was soon to be appointed Director of the CIA.  During his appearance before the House Government Operation subcommittee, “Two Republican representatives… charged that Operation Phoenix had been responsible for ‘indiscriminate killings of civilians… in violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

             97.  “Phoenix Program Details: ‘Sterile, Depersonalized Murder’ Plan, by Mary McGrory.   The Washington Post, August 3, 1971.  The article reports on the testimony two veteran witnesses, Bart Osborne and I, presented under oath before the same House Government Operations Committee, to refute the testimony of William Colby.  As far as I have been able to determine, this was the first testimony by veterans under oath before an officially constituted committee in Congress on war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam.  My testimony was analytical and dry; Bart’s was sensational and got all the press.  Both can be seen here:  http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/phoenix-hcgo-19710802.html.

            98.  A similar article also appeared in The New York Times, “Ex-Soldiers Report Vietnam Slayings,” August 3, 1971.

             99.  “Pacification’s Deadly Price,’ Kevin Buckley.  Newsweek, June 19, 1972.  Buckley, who had spent four years reporting from Indochina, blew the whistle on Operation Speedy Express, the 1968 American offensive which claimed thousands of Vietcong killed, and produced an insignificant number of weapons, leading Buckley to conclude that majority of the casualties were civilians.  Buckley’s principal contention was that the so-called Pacification program had depending on heavy bombardment of rural villages and led to the indiscriminate killing of an essentially non-combatant population.

             *The bibliography on what the historian and Vietnam War apologist Guenter Lewy calls CCI and VVAW’s “war crimes industry” is limited.  It includes, Standard Operating Procedure, by James Simon Kunen, (Avon1971); The Dellums Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam, (Vintage 1972), and my own memoir, Vietnam Awakening (McFarland 2007).  There are also several titles devoted to The Winter Soldier Investigation.

Slavoj Zizek

Soldiers and veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and other wars are killing themselves, according to Sixty Minutes, at a rate of 22-a-day. For any fair-minded person whose mind is not locked into a dehumanized state of war-justifying numbness, that is both incredible and unacceptable.

The Sixty Minutes story focused on Clay Hunt, an otherwise strong and attractive 26-year-old Iraq/Afghan Marine veteran who shot himself. His devastated parents and his closest war-buddy were interviewed, each revealing great pain and the deepest of human bonds with the man. Agonizing self-blame was expressed along with the tears.

Clay Hunt and mourning soldiers in Iraq

The question hovering over the story was: Why did he do it? He had undertaken important humanitarian work in Haiti following the earthquake there; he was smart, physically healthy and beloved by women; he seemed a guy ready to grab the world by the tail and accomplish important things.

To everyone from the reporter to the relatives and friends it was a perplexing mystery. Why did he do it? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was appropriately mentioned; survival guilt was discussed. Video of Hunt in Haiti showed him saying that as a Marine he felt he had done a lot of good in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he added that he had seen and done “horrible” things.

“But that’s war,” he told the person filming him on a truck in Haiti. In Haiti, he said, he felt he could do good without being shot at or having to kill anyone.

The elephant in the room no one seemed willing to recognize was the idea of moral damage. Asking bright, strong young men like Hunt to fight wars like Iraq and Afghanistan — and Vietnam before that — can be like luring an unsuspecting animal into a trap. The bait is the powerful call to do something good for your country, to sacrifice for a larger purpose. The trap, of course, is the fact wars like Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are never what the drumbeat of homefront-oriented propaganda says they are.

For the Claude Rains character in Casablanca an expression of shock that there is gambling going on at Rick’s nightclub is an ironic joke on the French officer’s corruption. But for some young Americans, the discovery that there is dissimulation in the corridors of power in Washington — that the war he or she has been sent to sacrifice in is not what it was billed to be — is a true shock to the moral system they may be unable to accommodate or escape.

With powerful historical forces behind them, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon sent us into Vietnam and George W. Bush sent us into Iraq and Afghanistan. The first Tonkin Gulf speedboat incident was provoked by secret US aggression against Vietnam. The second one never happened at all. Yet, they were used to dishonestly justify a war resolution that fully unleashed the dogs of war for a decade. Twenty-nine years later, Congress and the Media laid down again for bogus reports of weapons of mass destruction and the delusion there were Iraqi connections to those who knocked down the twin towers. Both wars were rooted in flat-out lies and delusions.

In both cases, young Americans eagerly signed up to do their nation’s bidding. For the Vietnam War, the number of suicides far exceeds the number of names on the wall in Washington. Chuck Dean, in his book Nam Vet: Making Peace With Your past, puts the number at over 150,000, based on VA and Disabled American Veteran sources.

It’s hard to know exactly what complex of stressors causes an individual soldier to kill him- or herself. But the incredible rate of 22-a-day suggests a powerful causal link, to the point it seems a case of pro-military loyalty, squeamishness or outright denial not to raise the question of untenable moral damage. That is, do wars like Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam instill in some soldiers and veterans such deep moral damage of a nature no one wants to talk about that life for them becomes too painful to go on with?

I recall a panel of Vietnam veterans at a community college outside Philadelphia back in the early 1990s that debated the questions for or against war. The panel was evenly divided between pro-war, right-leaning Vietnam veterans and anti-war, left-leaning Vietnam veterans. At one point, several of the pro-war vets became very anxious and agitated, and it was the antiwar vets who calmly talked their brothers-in-arms down from their troubled state.

It was a powerful lesson. It seemed to me, a Vietnam vet, that the disturbed vets on stage were trying desperately to hold onto an inner belief that the Vietnam War they had participated in was an honorable enterprise. When confronted with fair questions about the nature of that enterprise, they began to boil over inside. Meanwhile, the vets who had by then long ago given up on their war as a morally defensible enterprise remained cool and detached.

I submit this sort of double bind plays a role in why so many soldiers and veterans are committing suicide at such an alarming rate. Trying to make one’s experience in a war zone accord with propaganda can be, for some, an excruciatingly painful task.

So it’s no accident the Pentagon is in the midst of a 13-year propaganda effort to clean up the war’s image. It’s called The Vietnam War Commemoration Project and it has been allocated $65 million over the next 13 years.

Charges of Stolen Valor

B.G. Burkett is a Vietnam veteran highly motivated by the idea that Vietnam veterans have not been given the honor they deserve. Driven by this, he painstakingly researched and wrote, with the help of Texas journalist Glenna Whitley, a 690 page book titled Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History. Burkett is also a political actor who was involved in the “swiftboating” of Vietnam veteran John Kerry when he ran for president.

B.G. Burkett and his book Stolen Valor

For anyone on the antiwar side of the Vietnam divide, it’s easy to dismiss such a work. So I spent a full day gleaning through the book, reading not every word but trying to understand its message. One central trope is the idea that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an illegitimate “epidemic” noted for veterans looking for a “tax-free living.” In the same vein, complaints concerning Agent Orange are more “myth” than reality. In Burkett’s view, those critical of the war tend to be either entirely phony vets or at least not all they claim to be. Thus, Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) come in for pretty damning analysis.

I know and work with many veterans from these organizations, so I don’t give the thrust of Burkett’s attack too much credibility. Yes, there have been cases of phony vets in the antiwar movement. I personally recall one when I worked with Iraq vets. Once his phoniness was understood, he was purged. The fact is, there have been just as many phony vets — maybe more — on the pro-war side. It seems to be a natural problem in a culture that so values military service.

In the 1980s, I worked with the homeless on the streets of Philadelphia and encountered a number of phony vets. Assuming a veteran status meant instant sympathy and respect for a man adrift on a sidewalk steam vent. There’s also the case of Richard Blumenthal, a man who liked to speak of his experiences as a Marine in Vietnam. Actually, he had been in the Marine Reserves and passed out Toys For Tots at Christmas. When outed as a phony, Blumenthal apologized. This did not prevent him being elected US senator from Connecticut in 2010.

Burkett’s research utilizing sources like the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis is, indeed, quite impressive. In a preface, Whitley says Burkett taught her “to be wary of the seduction of a ‘good story.’” Burkett emphasizes checking even the smallest detail. All assumptions are to be questioned. He claims to have ferreted out that there are 25 names on the wall in DC of men who are actually alive — plus one apparently fictitious name.

The problem is all his prodigious research is aimed at shutting out history. Nowhere in the book could I find any questioning of the necessity of the war or any possibility the decisions to undertake and prolong the war were anything but justified by the assumed evil of the enemy. For someone so devoted to questioning the most miniscule assumptions, Burkett allows the really huge historical assumptions to go unquestioned. Ho Chi Minh and his communist minions were simply evil and everything we did to the Vietnamese was therefore honorable and justified. For 690 pages, Burkett drills this idea home. And anyone who questions it, ipso-facto, lacks honor.

In what may be a counterpoint of sorts to Burkett’s book, Nick Turse has just published a controversial book called Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam that re-ignites revelations that the Vietnam War was, in fact, not an honorable affair at all, but one that devolved into a cruel and brutal “body count” war against the Vietnamese population.

“Matter-of-fact mass killing that dwarfed the slaughter at My Lai normally involved heavier firepower and command policies that allowed it to be unleashed with impunity,” Turse writes in his introduction.

At the end of his huge book, Burkett raises the question he says many ask him: “What do you want?” His answer: “I want an apology from America to every man and woman who served in Vietnam … for the indifference and disrespect heaped on Vietnam veterans, living or dead, after the war.”

This apology should come, he says, in the form of a “joint resolution of Congress” to be read by a US President at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. “It matters little if the president is a war hero or a draft dodger.”

This is essentially the actuality surrounding the Pentagon’s Vietnam War Commemoration Project, which very much echoes Burkett’s formula of emphasizing the honor of individual soldiers serving in Vietnam, focusing especially on those awarded medals for bravery. In appendixes, he lists the names of 232 Medal of Honor winners, 1,048 winners of the Distinguished Service Cross, 488 Navy Cross winners and 182 Air Force Cross winners. He also lists 665 POWs who returned home alive. It needs to be noted, here, no one that I know in the antiwar veteran movement would discount one bit the honor and bravery under fire such lists recognize.

Does History Matter?

The historian Howard Zinn published an essay in 1970 on the Vietnam War that still very much resonates today. He goes right to the molten core of the problem that induced America to invade Vietnam and, in cases like Burkett, still justifies the incredible brutality focused on the Vietnamese.

“We see every rebellion everywhere,” Zinn wrote in 1970, “as the result of some devilish plot concocted in Moscow or Peking, when what is really happening is that people everywhere want to eat and to be free.”

At this late stage in the game, the struggle over what the Vietnam War means may transcend the polarized debate between Burkett’s individual Honor on one side and Turse’s more institutional Shame on the other. It seems to me the real ore to be mined remains in the History of the affair and how that history reflects on current and future US foreign policy. The hurdle is that serious, responsible history is something leaders everywhere tend to want to shove aside or forget, since history can be very inconvenient to things political leaders want to do.

President Obama’s speech at the wall last Memorial Day officially kicked off the 50-year Commemoration of the war. This would seem to fulfill Burkett’s call for an apology, although in his speech Obama never actually employed the word. He did say this:

“[O]ne of the most painful chapters in our history was Vietnam — most particularly, how we treated our troops who served there. You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor. … You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that’s why here today we resolve that it will not happen again.”

It was very much a politician’s speech, an effort to have things both ways. So Obama also said this:

“Let’s resolve that in our democracy we can debate and disagree — even in a time of war. But let us never use patriotism as a political sword. Patriots can support a war; patriots can oppose a war.”

If a national politician really gave a damn, he or she might ask those on the other side of the Vietnam struggle — those “patriots” who oppose the war — “What do you want?” The answer would not be an apology but for the nation to confront its real history. That is: What “America” really needs to do is to recognize what it did to the Vietnamese people who only wanted “to eat and to be free” on their own terms and in their own manner.

Instead of a presidential speech, the call would be for a robust and constructive White House-endorsed national dialogue that would incorporate Vietnam veterans and the Vietnamese. Individual bravery would certainly be recognized. But the point would not be to emotionally focus on our pain and honor — or even our shame. The point would be to courageously and honestly engage with the history of what really happened — as Slavoj Zizek put it in the epigram at the top of this essay, not “the story we tell ourselves” but “what we do.”

Backyard Productions presents

COMMEMORATE THIS!

A short comedy on history and the Vietnam War

(To watch the film, click on the title above)

In 2008, Congress created a 13-year, $5-million-per-year propaganda project to clean up the image of the Vietnam War. It’s called The Vietnam War Commemoration Project and it focuses on issues of individual honor and bravery. It avoids the controversial historical and moral issues of the war. In response, a number of Vietnam veterans have created The Vietnam War Commemoration CORRECTION Project as a provocation to open discussion as to what the Vietnam War means to Americans. Was the war even necessary?  In 1945 did the US, in fact, betray its World War Two Vietnamese ally — the Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh — in order to support a continuation of French Colonialism in Vietnam?  Many Americans feel the Vietnam War was a tragic debacle that still divides Americans. A Pentagon “commemoration” of the war comes up way short of what is helpful for the future of America in a changing world. This short film is meant to raise questions about the truth of the Vietnam War.

To contact The Correction Project, email us at namcor@midcoast.com

EXTRA FEATURES:

1) The crack Backyard Productions team making the film Commemorate This!

2) Shameless self promotion

Michael Uhl who plays the Number One Thug, at right in the middle photo, above, is the author of a Vietnam War memoir called

VIETNAM AWAKENING: My Journey From Combat to the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam

(The film’s protagonist is holding a copy of the book in the middle photo.)

              “I have decided to henceforth say nothing that is not true,” said the student.

              “I’ll miss your voice,” replied the Zen master.

I discovered the writings of Jeff Knaebel a few years ago. He was a US citizen who left the country of his birth in the mid-1990s for a life of voluntary self-exile in India. His writings were online articles that were posted on Lew Rockwell.com. Knaebel wrote a lot about truth and the nature of truth. He equated finding truth to peeling back the layers of an onion. Truth was at the core of layer upon layer of lies. Reading Knaebel got me to thinking about truth and lies in my own life. How old was I when I heard and told my first lie?  What are those lies and how did they affect me? Is it even possible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Why it is so hard to find the truth? How many of us really want to find the truth?

In Knaebel’s case, his search and his great work ended tragically with him going crazy and self immolating himself.

MK Gandhi said that God is truth, and since no man can know the whole truth, God cannot be completely known. Lies and partial truths are all around us as the Zen masters words above point out. Friends, family, and lovers have lied to me. I have lied to them. Empires are built on a series of generational lies. Lies of Empires are particularly nasty because they almost always rely on violence and propaganda.

One lie of Empire concerns transportation, especially in the area of efficiency. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote about a neighboring farmer who urged him to get a horse to save time on his trips to Boston. Thoreau correctly calculated that he saved time and money by walking from Walden to Boston. The farmer spent half his workweek paying for upkeep on the horse. Thoreau spent about six hours a week walking to Boston. The same economics occurs today with a car, something I never learned to calculate properly until I was 40. The horse owned the farmer in the same way my car owns me.

Just like every small-town, 15-year-old American male, I could not wait to turn 16 so I could drive a car. When I got my first car, I had to pay for the maintenance, gas and insurance too. My parents thought owning a car developed a sense of responsibility. Instead, it encouraged wage slavery and addiction. I’m a gasoline addict.

Speaking from an evolutionary standpoint, humans travel — in harmony with nature — at a speed of about 3.5 miles an hour, or around 15 miles per day. Bicycles boost that to 10 to 15 mph or around 100 miles a day. Human-powered transportation consumes about 2000-3000 calories daily. Cars can never approach that efficiency!  Similarly, war costs are imbedded in non-human-powered transportation. In Iraq alone, thousands of people were killed, but the pump price of oil does not include that. Big oil has the American military to insure the oil keeps flowing. So military costs are socialized and the profits are privatized.

A specific lie of the Empire affected me personally in 1979 when I was 17. Iranian students took over the US Embassy in Tehran. Mark Bowden, the author of Guests of The Ayatollah, makes the case that it was wrong for the students to overtake the embassy. My mom and I agreed. Even though it is wrong to attack an embassy, what my mom and I did not know in 1979 was that the US had violated “neutral” territory first and had effectively lied to us and everybody else in the United States.

In 1953, the Brits were afraid the Iranians were about to nationalize the oil industry. CIA agents Kermit Roosevelt Jr. and Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. orchestrated a coup from the US embassy in Tehran. They installed the Shah. The Iranian people knew the coup was planned from the US Embassy. It was the American people who did not. You can draw a direct line from the CIA’s overthrow of a duly elected leader in 1953 to Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic revolution. Events like this are called “blowback” in CIA jargon. The CIA never seems to do a very good job planning to avoid this.

When I started college in 1980, my Mom recommended that I join the Army Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC), because she was worried there would be war with Iran. The Selective Service System was re-instituted as a response to the student uprising. As I see it, my Army service was a direct result of 50 years of US government lies related to Iran.

Empire and capitalism have never existed without lies and exploitation?. Today, American capitalism is kept afloat on the backs of Asian, Latin American and African wage-slaves using raw materials from those regions. Chris Hedges calls these places capitalist “sacrifice zones.” MK Gandhi said, “There is enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” The actions of addicts and capitalists are similar in at least one respect; neither can get enough. Capitalists don’t mind killing their customers if they can get new customers to replace them.

In several books and articles I read recently on the subject of happiness, one fact was common: There is no measurable increase in happiness in the USA above $40,000 annual income. Every major religion says that material wealth does not make you happy. It could be argued that the monetary system itself is the biggest lie of Empire. The economist and author John Kenneth Galbraith said, “The study of money, above all other fields of economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise or evade truth, not to reveal it.” Henry David Thoreau said, “Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.”

My personal search for the truth about money led me to the following four places:

1) There’s the book The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen.  It’s about Daniel Suelo who has lived without money in Moab, Utah since 2000. He’s what you call a renunciate, interesting people worth studying.

2) The website www.moneyasdebt.net. It totally opened my eyes.

3) The radio program, Unwelcome Guests.

4) The web archives of an independent radio program called Against the Grain (March 7^th edition) and listen to an interview with David Hawkes.

Here is an excerpt from the Hawkes interview:

“…I think Enlightenment certainly sees itself as sweeping away superstition and replacing it all with rationality… (However) It may be that what seems to be the disappearance of magic from the (western) world … is actually the result of the complete triumph of magic. It may be that there is nothing but magic in the world anymore. And the reason why we don’t see it is because we have no vantage point outside it from which we might view it.”

Another big lie of Empire is: “The US is a peaceful nation.” People don’t like to think of themselves as war-mongers. That is why Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech was so controversial. I once heard an interview with Joe Kline who was pitching a book of his. He said, “We’ve had 60 years of peace and prosperity.” I almost fell out of my chair.  Has any country had more conflicts than the US since 1945?  The US cannot call itself a peaceful nation. Yet, few within the Empire itself see it as violent. This is a triumph of lies and propaganda.

Sadly, I have contributed through my military service and my taxes to the war machine of the United States. I served the Empire for three years as an army paratrooper on foreign shores. I trained in Panama, Germany, Italy and Turkey. For that, I’m sorry. I was young and unaware of how my service was part of a violent Empire. I was fortunate to have never served a day in combat.

The first step to end our Empire non-violently is for its citizens to recognize the lies that hold the Empire together. We can see some evidence of change on the horizon. The Occupy movement proved there is an awareness that the Empire is built on lies and violence. The Republican strategist Frank Lunz says he feared the “One Percent” slogan the Occupy movement had coined. No one seems to have a plan for Occupy Part II. But it will come, and we have no idea what shape it will take.

The costs of maintaining the violence and the lies will become too great for the system to bear. Every other Empire has faded, and ours will fade as well.

Joey King served in the US Army and is a member of Veterans For Peace.