The Web
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
- George Orwell (27)
We need to look at how we look at things.
A few years ago, at the Fishtrap Writers’ Conference at Wallowa Lake, Oregon, I met a woman who had married a young man when she was fifteen and he was a couple of years older. She was pregnant. He joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. She had written that story and presented it to the assembled writers.
We were talking outside. “Dean,” she asked, “how do they do it? How do they get you guys to sign up for... this?” She spread her arms wide to include all that was going on that week in the conference: the theme was the Vietnam War.
27 From the essay “In Front of Your Nose” by George Orwell, first published in the London Tribune, March 22, 1946. Reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1968.
I opened my notebook to a clean page, wrote
INFANTry
and showed it to her. She turned pale: “I never noticed that.” Her husband had been a combat engineer in a
US Marine infantry division.
Merriam-Webster Online dates the origin of the word “infantry” to 1579, from both Middle French infanterie (modern French is the same; so is German) and Old Italian infanteria. (Spanish is infantería.) The citation continues:
‘from infante, boy, foot soldier, from Latin infant-, infans...Date: 1579’
I looked up infant, the root word of infantry. Merriam-Webster says:
Etymology: Middle English enfaunt, from Anglo-French enfant, from Latin infant-, infans, from infant-, infans, adjective, incapable of speech, from in- + fant-, fans, present participle of fari to speak....
Too young to speak, old enough to die for his country. As I was reading the dictionary entries, I recalled a story told to me at Chu Lai by my friend Sgt. Angelo Walters, who’s mentioned in some of the stories above. He told of being at the side of a mortally wounded buddy during the Korean War, who said to Joe with his last breath: “I’m not even old enough to buy a beer.”
My buddies and I – some of us – call our younger selves “young and stupid.”
There’s some of it: we were young. And if not stupid, then ignorant of the ways of the world, of what we were signing up for, of the reasons behind our reasons for enlisting, and behind the reasons our elders gave us for joining.
In the case of my war, we didn’t know that Ho Chi Minh and his top commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, had been our allies in World War II against the Japanese, and repeatedly asked President Truman to maintain that alliance(28). This fact and others about the war’s origins have caused me to believe strongly that we need never have fought the war that killed 58,000+ of us and 3 or 4 million Vietnamese.
We didn’t know that SEATO(29) (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), the alliance that “asked for our help in Vietnam”, had been created at the urging of our own government(30), in the person of President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a devout Christian and anticommunist - and an early supporter of Adolf Hitler. Dulles had been instrumental in overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran (1953, Mohammad Mossadegh(31)) and Guatemala (1954, Jacobo
29 But it was presented to us, aboard ship on the way to Vietnam, as the reason we were going. See above, pp. 117ff.
31 See Michael Streich, “Kermit Roosevelt and the Iranian Coup of 1953: How the CIA Toppled Mossadegh and Put the Shah in Power”: http//modern-us-history.suite101.com/article.cfm Kermit Roosevelt was a CIA officer, and Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson. On the coup, he worked closely with John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, along with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the general who led Allied reporter Stephen Kinzer.
Árbenz Guzmán(32)). In 1958, attending the inauguration of Mexico’s new president Adolfo López Mateos, Dulles was quoted as saying “The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests(33).” His brother Allen Dulles was head of the CIA during those years.
We didn’t know that the second “Tonkin Gulf incident” – the one that Lyndon Johnson told the American public took place on August 4, 1964, the one we went to war over, the one he used to stampede a nearly unanimous (533-2) Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving him virtually unfettered war powers and giving the
world ten years of war - did not even happen. This is according to James Stockdale(34), squadron commander of the A4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flying cover for the U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy(35) on that August
32 For an excellent book on the 1954 Guatemala coup, see Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer. Revised and Expanded Edition, Harvard University Press. Kinzer has been a hero of mine since I first read Bitter Fruit, then shortly afterward crossed journalism paths with him in northern Nicaragua in 1983. (We did not meet.) See above, p.347. Allen Dulles had been on the board of directors of United Fruit Company, the main beneficiary of the Guatemala coup staged by President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers.
33 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles
34 VADM James Stockdale and Sybil Stockdale, In Love and War. There are also two lengthy interviews with Stockdale, which I found very informative, available on the Internet: One is at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/stockdale; and there is a 9-part interview with Stockdale at academyofachievement.org.
35 On August 2, the Maddox was on a DeSoto Patrol just off the coast of Vietnam. Both the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were mentioned immediately by name to us on August 4 when word was passed hurriedly through our squad bay in the Philippines to get our gear
aboard ship: “We are going. Now. Some place called the Gulf of Tonkin....” Also see John Prados: “Essay: 40th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident”
4th, when my Naval Gunfire team of Marines was sent immediately into the area along with a battalion of infantry, a battery of artillery, and all the supporting units and supplies(36).
We also didn’t know that South Vietnamese naval personnel, using U.S. patrol boats, intelligence, and targeting, had been conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast since February of that year, carrying out a covert action program named OPLAN34A(37). The program was planned and directed by the CIA and the Pentagon, under close supervision by the White House. Nor did we know that the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were part of the DeSoto intelligence-gathering mission, one of the duties of which was to “electronically simulate
an air attack to draw North Vietnamese boats away from
the commandos” who were attacking the North
Vietnamese islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu as part of
OPLAN 34A(38), though the United States denied any
36 Jack Jennings, whose article is quoted in note 37 below, was “cargo officer on the USS Chemung (AO-30)...”, the oiler that refueled our troop transport USS Cavalier in the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin told me in an email (July 29, 2009) that “there must have been a couple hundred ships involved. They cleared Japanese ports as well as Subic Bay within a few minutes and all headed for the Tonkin Gulf.”
37 See Jack H. Jennings and Tran Do Cam, “Operation 34A and the Nasty Class PT Boats,” http://www.mrfa.org/Operation34A.htm. Both authors were officers in Oplan34A, Jennings with USNR and Do Cam with the South Vietnamese Navy. Both saw duty in PT boat units conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast. Jennings also points out here that Operation 34A grew out of covert PT boat actions against the North Vietnamese coast put in motion by President John F. Kennedy (a PT boat commander himself during WWII) before his assassination in 1963.
38 Prados, “Essay: 40th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,”
connection between the destroyers and the PT boats, or with the PT boats themselves, or between the United
States itself and the attacks against the Vietnamese coast.
All those claims were false.
They were false, but truth wasn’t part of their purpose. Their purpose was “plausible denial,” a phrase which I wouldn’t learn until years after the war was over, but the reality of which I would begin to be acquainted with during the course of the war. Plausible denial was/is the government’s practice of lying about its decisions and policies and practices. These lies were sometimes believable, in the absence of accurate information; or they were more or less transparent, but not provably false at the time. Thus they worked: the public spotlight was a fleeting thing, and by the time – often, after years had passed – some enterprising journalist or congressman dug up an uncomfortable truth and made it public, the public’s interest had moved on to a newer crisis. That was how the system worked. And it did work: the war went on. And on.
Perhaps the biggest void in our understanding of the causes of the situation we Marines and sailors were entering that fateful August of 1964 was in our awareness of election year politics in the United States.
I cast the first ballot of my young life in a Presidential election aboard a troop transport ship in the South China
Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin(39).
39 We were never completely sure. We’d been told as we left the Philippines that we were going to the Gulf of Tonkin, and some days later, I remember our ship traveling south from our original position off the beach of Vietnam, to arrive on station off Danang. Our superiors were never specific. A common expression of ours was “We’re mushrooms: they keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit.”
I voted for Barry Goldwater. He seemed the better
choice: a warrior himself(40), and a straight talker. I was a newly promoted Marine Corporal, I didn’t trust Lyndon Baines Johnson, and I was ready to go to war to defend my country and its ally against Communism.
Now, I doubt that a Goldwater victory would have made much difference: Goldwater, like Johnson, seemed blind to the fact that Ho Chi Minh was primarily a patriot. The opening sentence of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence which Ho had proclaimed to a crowd of 500,000 people in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, was this:
“All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The quotation marks are Ho’s; he was deliberately borrowing from his hero Thomas Jefferson(41), in our own Declaration. Ho
might have been a formidable ally to the U.S. in Southeast Asia, and on the evidence, quite sincerely wanted to be. When Truman repeatedly refused (or ignored) his friendship(42), Ho certainly became a formidable opponent. No
40 Goldwater had been a U.S. Army Air Force transport pilot during WWII, flying routes in much of the world, including the famous “hump,” crossing the Himalayas to resupply Allied forces in the China-Burma-India theater. He retired as a Major General in the Air Force Reserve. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater
42 In a letter to President Harry Truman dated February 16, 1945, Ho reminded Truman that his Viet Minh soldiers had fought on the side of the Allies against the Japanese, and pleaded for US support against the French colonizing. The letter (see note 15, above) was never answered.
Also http://www.ena.lu: In a telegram to Truman on February 28 (12 days later), Ho notified Truman of the return of French troops to Vietnam and of their intention to take back control from Ho and his provisional government. “I therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence....”
matter: he was a communist. Ho was a communist, and France, a United States ally during WWII, wanted her former colony Indochina – including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos - back. Truman sided with the colonialists instead of the small Asian nation seeking independence from its colonial master much as Americans had sought independence from England two centuries before.
American voters have traditionally rallied around any president who was able to claim, truthfully or not, that “they shot at our boys!”, or something of the sort. In 1964, those same voters had an innate distrust of Democrats as being “soft on communism” in times of crisis. Showing himself to be a firm-handed leader in the face of such a crisis, Johnson’s actions exactly now, in August 1964, and exactly here, in waters just off the Vietnamese coast, would win or lose the election against a tough-talking Republican whose mettle in dangerous situations was already a given.
In my opinion Johnson, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, was using a crisis of his own creation to get elected(43).
None of this was part of my tiny knowledge bank: Ours is not to reason why....
In any case, it is now well known that the chain of “secret” attacks against North Vietnamese installations on both the mainland and the offshore islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu were the real impetus that got us into a war that killed three or four million people, before you start counting Cambodians and Laotians. Both islands were
43 In their article on PT boats quoted in note (37) above, Jack Jennings and Tran Do Cam note that OPLAN34A grew out of an operation put in place by Kennedy in 1963, before his assassination on November 22. They also note that Kennedy himself was a WWII PT boat
commander.
shelled by Vietnamese-operated US gunboats as part of OPLAN34A on the nights of July 30 and 31, 1964. These attacks were almost certainly the reason for the rounds fired at the Maddox on August 2. That day one, or a few, small caliber rounds struck the destroyer. No crewmen were injured(44).
But governments always lie. Sure, that’s part of the picture. I spent a couple of decades of my life studying the lies of presidents and other politicians, especially concerning the mechanisms of our national security apparatus and the processes by which it leads us into armed conflicts.
Forty- plus years after I left Vietnam, and more than thirty years after that first NVA tank drove over the gate to the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, and our nation had lost the war that we were always bound to lose, that is still not okay with me. So much needless and wrongful death is never in the past. To put it in a larger context, Nanking is never in the past. Leningrad and Treblinka, even Sand Creek and Wounded Knee and My Lai, are never in the past. People remember - families remember - as Muslims remember the crusades.
So studying the great lies of my time – of the Kennedys, the Dulles brothers, Johnson, McNamara, the Rostows, the Bundys, the Lodges, Nixon, Kissinger - felt satisfying for a while, giving me someone to blame and avoiding the need to look in the mirror. But now I’m more interested in the rest of the picture, the part that’s “in front of our noses,” to paraphrase Orwell, but not really seen, because it’s so close. Having studied political thinkers from the I Ching to modern times, my favorite philosopher these days is Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo the Possum: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
44 Prados, “Essay: 40th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.”
STRUCTURE OF THE WEB
There is a web of male kinships and values and desires that determines how and why boys grow up to become warriors, when and how we go to war, what stories we tell and how we tell them when we return from war, how we age as men and warriors, and how old men come to the decision to send their sons, or the sons of others, to war. The structure and workings of this web are so simple, so obviously present before us, among us, and within us, that its importance eludes us. We stare in bafflement right past the most screamingly obvious and important reason why armies meet in war: that such armies, and the official bodies which raise, fund, and direct them, are made up predominantly of men.
This male web is of blood and spirit: father and son, brother and brother, uncle and nephew, boy and boy, man and man, coach and athlete, veteran and recruit, corporate executive and junior assistant, pastor and parishioner.
It is a web of values: be strong, be brave, be loyal, dominate, prevail, achieve, build, destroy, survive. These values are built around a certain covenant which exists among men at war.
The many versions of the covenant that existed between me and the other Marines during the firefight at the well in the village of Tho An, and among all fighting men in all wars, always, are the common threads of the most important stories that old men tell to young men, or tell among themselves as boys eavesdrop, from the corner of the room or from the next table in a small-town diner, with a kind of attention they never show in school.
That covenant is the web's highest value. It is also the core value of our nation.
The web is above all else a web of male desires: this is the man I want to be, this is how I want to be seen by other men, by women, by children, by history. These are the deeds which I want to be remembered alongside my name. This uniform is my badge of courage.
And the nation itself is a male entity. That is how patriotism got its name. Nations are founded by males, led by males who, at least until recently in the case of the United States, were elected as much because of their war records as their civil leadership abilities - or who, as in the cases of Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, must struggle mightily to overcome the taint of not having served, or of less than valorous service.
This male-centrism is also the animating force in our culture. It is the real story in any war movie, cowboy movie, TV-series cop show, adventure movie, "buddy" movie. Themes of national security, the fight against crime, good versus evil are rational overlays - in national political life and in cultural artifacts like movies or television shows - over the emotional core of men fighting for, dying for, seeking the approval of, the other men in their group. Next in importance comes the approval of women, children, parents - society at large.
SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB
Young men are the warriors. Young men populate the realm of interpersonal force in human affairs. It begins with simply possessing more muscular strength than other people, and combines with a natural male propensity to use that strength in play, in sports(45). But it is when this
natural exuberance becomes commingled with and
motivated by what I call “big ideas,” that young men become the masters of killing that they become.
Among “big ideas,” I include all politics, nationalisms, ideologies, and religions. Especially patriotism and religion.
Deadliest of all is the combination of patriotism and religion. That is how we slaughter our young.
And once a young man who is inspired by a big idea becomes armed with anything from a machete to a machine gun, and organized into groups who believe and act as units, then we have the bloodbath that is history as we know it.
My use of the etymology of the word “infantry” is neither accidental nor incidental. It screamed at me from my experience: growing up in the McCarthy years, being
raised an American boy in the Pacific Northwest, the
episode with my stepdad and the Marine recruiter in the
45 I audited a course in ancient Greek language in graduate school at University of California, Santa Cruz, so I could follow translations of some of the classics, especially Homer and Plato, in the original Greek. During the 10-year Trojan War, at least once when the warriors were taking a break from the fighting, they did so by having athletic contests, including boxing and wrestling. In the Greek, there was hardly a distinction between “warrior” and “athlete.” Soldiers have always come from among athletes. In Vietnam, we played football at my outfit in Chu Lai.
gun shop in Klamath Falls, Oregon; Marine Corps training
and service; the Vietnam War; journalism travels in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Costa Rica,
Honduras, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, Israel; my summer of study in Leningrad and Prague...: everywhere, I saw young men with weapons inspired by, or pushed by, or controlled by, “big ideas” fed to them - to us - by older men.
I have come to see this parade of young men and boys with weapons as being moved around like chess pieces – okay, pawns – because I was one of them. My experience in Vietnam, and the other places I’ve seen the face of war, forced me to see this eternal column of armed boys
and men as something abnormal, monstrous, insane. It is all the more insane because of its normalcy and frequency. In the early stages of my own involvement, I saw our silly, grotesque parade of boys and men burdened with our hardware of canvas and steel as being just another noble but tragic chapter in the march of human history, as I had seen it most intensely during the “Adeste Fidelis” march(46) in advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton in 1962.
YOUNG MEN, AND ... YOUNGER
War is the way our species eats our young. It’s been so at least since Homeric times – three thousand years, give or take - but probably much longer. The Iliad is considered by many to be the first great work of Western literature, and is, of course, a war story. But reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey turns up no mention of 8- or 12-year-old warriors. The warriors in the story were young men, not children. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Patroclus,
46 See above, “Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis,” p.84ff.
Odysseus, Paris, Greater and Lesser Ajax - they were all
fully grown – if not always grown up. By 1579, the practice of recruiting and conscripting adolescent boys into Europe’s armies had grown to the point that the word used to name groups of foot soldiers was Middle French/German infanterie, Old Italian infanteria, Spanish infantería.
Though combat has always been a young man’s game, the phenomenon of child soldiers has acquired a whole new meaning in recent decades. There are now an estimated 300,000 combatants in their early teen and pre
teen years(47) in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and, especially, in Africa(48). The youngest soldier I’ve read about was a combatant with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in Uganda. He was 5 years old. Not 15; he was 5(49). The AK47 is a bit heavier and more awkward than the M16, but even a young child can carry one. And anyone has the strength to pull a trigger.
So far, not many U.S. soldiers have been younger than
17(50); just the ones who lied about their ages. But our
48 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Pantheon, 2005. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, cites such references as UNICEF and Human Rights Watch reports, John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, etc.
49 ibid., p. 20.
50 The youngest U.S. soldier on record as having been killed in Vietnam was 15. His name was Dan Bullock. The Website for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“The Wall”) (http://thewall-usa.com) in Washington, D.C. says that 5 Americans aged 16 were killed there, and 12 aged 17. The same site says that more than 25,000 aged 20 or under were killed in that war.
soldiers have lately met children in combat. P.W. Singer
writes in his book on child soldiers: “U.S. Marines fighting
in the battle to retake Falluja [Iraq] in November 2004
reported numerous instances of being fired upon by ‘12 year old children with assault rifles’ and wrestled with the dilemmas it presented(51).”
Among the many instances of child soldiers cited by Singer is the Indonesian island of Ambon, where “thousands of Muslim and Christian boys have formed local paramilitary units that protect and raid against the other community.” He quotes an aid worker: “’They are so proud of their contribution. It’s a common thing for them to say they’ve killed. Since the government can’t seem to do anything, they all say they have an obligation to protect their families and their religion.’”
During the 1980’s contra war, with President Reagan leading the anti-communist crusade, re-institution of the draft was being widely debated. Because I had written articles in local newspapers about my own military experience and about my two trips to Nicaragua as a journalist, more than one young man of draft age asked me for advice about what he should do if the United States went to war in Nicaragua and the draft were reinstated. Part of my response was always that if they enlisted in, or were drafted into, the military, they should be prepared to be looking at 12 year old boys across their rifle sights, based on the ages of some of the kids I had seen under arms in Nicaragua and southern Honduras during the contra war.
It is this deadly mix of young men – or boys - and big ideas which I want to address. With us Marines it was
51 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Op. cit. University of California Press,2006; p.24.
Semper Fidelis: always faithful. It was “ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.”
I boarded the chopper with the Marine grunts bound for Tho An, having virtually begged to go on the mission, and joined the line of Headquarters Platoon, “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, as we approached the village. I already had my bayonet out of its scabbard and was sliding its ring over the flash suppressor on my M14 rifle to engage the bayonet lug when Captain Love, the “F” company commander, a few paces in front of me, turned around to check on the new guys who had been attached to his company for this operation, saw me fixing my bayonet, and said “That’s it, that’s what I like, gimme some steel on the end of it.”
I was there because of my faith: faith in that confusing entity variously known as God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; faith in my country; and faith in the United States Marine Corps. Sure, I was nervous and afraid. The firing had already begun in the village, not many paces in front of us. I had been a Marine for 3½ years, but that meant nothing if I did not perform as a Marine today, my first time directly under fire. I was ready to fight. I wanted to hold up my end of the Great Bargain.
The night before, I had prayed as I always did, with that truncated childhood prayer I used because it was the only prayer I knew: “...if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take....” It wasn’t much, but I hoped it would make up the difference between my own level of personal courage and whatever might be required of me this day. And of course to get me into heaven if I died. That was what prayers were for, right?
A few hours later, after the long moments with the screaming baby boy and the screaming mothers and the
silent old man with his stare of hatred and after the
firefight when I was ordered to move up(52) because I
carried the only automatic rifle in the group, and to stand alone in the open and cover the other Marines as they pulled back, that cloak of faith had already begun to slip from my shoulders. Not because of fear, but because my experiences were showing me that faith wasn’t working: it had no effect on events as they unfolded under fire.
The cloak of faith would continue to slip for the rest of my tour. The burst of rounds from an automatic weapon that snapped past my ears – they were close enough to hit one man standing nearby, and to puncture at least one of the canteens held by a Marine standing near me at the well – had contributed to my loss of faith. So, earlier in the year, had my failure to get a medevac chopper to the desperate platoon when my efforts had been met with an accusing “You’re too late,” meaning we had lost a man, and his buddy the radio operator blamed me.
My faith would take an especially big hit two months after Tho An during the night-long mutual slaughter between Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard’s 18 Recon Marines(53) and two battalions of NVA, a few kilometers from our base at Chu Lai. I had the midnight-0400 watch
52 I wasn’t directly ordered to move up. In those days before 1st MarDiv units in my area were issued M16s, one man from each infantry squad would be issued a selector for his M14 rifle, and be designated that squad’s automatic rifleman. As far as I knew, neither Captain Love nor the First Sergeant who had just now called for an automatic rifleman to move up knew that I, a stranger to their company as of that morning, had the selector on my rifle. Since the detail was a pickup group of Marines who had volunteered to return to the well for water, no provision had been made to include specific weapons in the group, because Tho An was considered secured. No matter. The order applied to me because I had a selector, and if nobody else present knew this, I did.
53 Actually there were 16 Marines including Howard, and two Navy Medical Corpsmen. That night, they were all Marines. See Wikipedia, “Jimmie E. Howard.”
in the DASC that June night. We helped coordinate helicopter and fixed wing air support for Howard’s men. When I went outside our radio shack shortly after four in the morning (dawn would bring reinforcements for the surviving Marines and the end of the fight for Nui Vu), I saw flares and tracers from the firefight off to the west, still at its height.
Two months before Nui Vu, one man standing near me at the well in Tho An had been hit; I had not. Some people find Jesus, or some other holy being, in similar situations. Others, even in the same group, have that connection violently and forever severed. I was among the latter. The 23-year-old who had prayed his final childhood prayer the night before looked around for his Christian God during the firing at the well and saw that such a being either did not exist or was very, very far away. This was because I was doing something which I suddenly saw to be wrenchingly, brutally wrong, while acting precisely on my values as a Christian, a patriot, and a United States Marine.
When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while I was guarding the women and children and the old man at the well in Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war, through some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in
construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death - that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned.
More importantly, because of what I unlearned.
Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.”
I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk.
I get itchy and edgy when anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons (54). I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American
Revolution, and of the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. (Yes, I too am painfully aware that that great document conveniently left out women, people of
54 Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.
males. What, and whom, it left out constitutes the task currently before us. That task is monumental. Many of us worry whether we’ll ever succeed.)
Every year on November 10th, I celebrate the Marine Corps Birthday with a few buddies, in person or by email.
Some of these guys I would die for, at the drop of a hat.
We often combine that day with the next, Veterans’ Day.
We thank entities from Jesus Christ to “shit-house luck” for the fact that we are still alive. We take a moment to remember those who are not. We raise a glass to them, and to the elk we are eating.
I, of course, am in the “shit-house luck” group. The guys all allow me that. Some agree with me and some disagree, with varying degrees of stridency, regarding questions of patriotism and religion. This is done with the same respect with which I allow some of them their continued belief in Jesus Christ, because we all came by, or solidified, our deepest beliefs under the gun.
In the presence of public patriotic celebrations, I get
uncomfortable if there is more than one flag, or if it’s deliberately oversized; if the speakers’ voices seem
overwrought with too much sincerity, or use too many over-generalized phrases that draw an ideological line in the sand between “us” and “them.”
And I become downright angry when a speaker, especially a public official or clergyman, extols faith as something to sustain our soldiers in combat.
Faith is what we use to take up the slack between what we know and what we hope for, or what we wish were the case. Or what we pray for. Of all the emotions along the spectrum from the most sincere to the patently phony, which constitute the fabric of human feelings and beliefs we use to send young men – and, now, young women – to war, faith is the killingest.
Having viewed what we humans do for 40 years now from outside religion, what I see when organized religion is at play is people telling one another what to do: what to believe, how to behave, whom to obey, whom to love and whom not to love, whom to hate, and whom to kill - all by claiming to speak for a higher power that is unimpeachable, yet at the same time non-specific. For me, religion became like a greased pig at a carnival: impossible to get ahold of.
Since no one, in my view, has ever seen the God who is the source of these commandments, it falls to God’s messengers to do the heavy lifting. To me, those people are nothing more than an ancient but ever-renewing parade of older males in long robes and funny hats who claim to have been sent by God, and to have been told by God how to instruct the lesser humans below them: do this, don’t do that. Pray. Obey. Do what I say, because God, or this or that Holy Book, told me to tell you to do so.
I don’t believe any of that. But what continues to astonish me is that so many people do believe it, in the face of so much evidence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the people we fight against - often for religious reasons - are inspired by, commanded by, driven by, ideas which are nearly interchangeable with ours. Not mine any longer, but still - ours.
Here I can’t help but note that Abraham, the religious patriarch featured in the Kierkegaard essay “Fear and Trembling”, is regarded as a prophet by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: the very people who are now killing one another with such conviction in the Middle East. Kierkegaard’s essay is the one which got me in such hot
water with Professor J. Glenn Gray(55), when I was so angered by Abraham’s being prepared to sacrifice his son because his God told him to, and by Professor Gray’s use of the word “sublime” to describe Abraham’s faith, even to the point that he was willing to murder his own son in order to follow the dictates dictates of that faith. I even wrote my own version of Genesis, Chapter 22, where God commanded Abraham to kill his son: “And Abraham raised both fists to the heavens, middle fingers extended, whence had come the voice of God, and screamed at the sky: ‘FU-UUUCK YOU! What kind of god would command a man to kill his own son? C’mon, Isaac. Let’s go home.”
I downloaded from the Web a photo of the belt buckle worn by Wehrmacht soldiers in WWII. It has an eagle perched on a swastika, and the by now well-known motto GOTT MIT UNS: GOD WITH US. Hitler’s soldiers, the perpetrators of the Siege of Leningrad, of Treblinka, of Sobibor, of Babii Yar, of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald – were praying to the same God our soldiers prayed to.
The same God I prayed to, the night before I entered Tho An with “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. The same God about whose loyalties Steve McLaughlin and I
had been so confused as we listened again and again to
Joan Baez sing Bob Dylan’s song “With God on Our Side.”(56)
We need to look at how we look at things.
By that I mean that there is now, among humans living on this sweet planet, an urgent need not only to look closely at how we live, but to look at HOW WE LOOK AT OURSELVES, and at how we live.
55 See above, pp. 271ff.
56 See above, pp. 98ff.
Especially: what are we willing to fight over? Is the
fight really about what we’re told it’s about? And: is it
worth the lives it will cost?
When we regard ourselves, our values, and the consequences of our actions, do we leave in place all the old assumptions - especially the assumptions about religious beliefs and political loyalties? Whatever assumptions we leave in place, is that what we should be doing? Is it in our own best interest? Or is it killing us?
Combat is specific. It is excruciatingly specific. But faith is nonspecific. The moment a bullet or an explosive device rends tissue and separates life from death in a young person is the moment when, in this so-common human event, the specific and the general diverge, and somebody dies.
The bullet is not aware. It has no faith. It is not directed or deflected by faith. It goes where it goes. The bullets that snapped past me on April 19th, 1966, did not know or care where they were going. I simply happened to be standing in a lucky, rather than unlucky, place. That’s all there is to it.
But faith is general: “The Lord will protect us.” “God’s will be done.” “Masha’allah (God has willed it)”. “There is a divine purpose....” Or that most general of all: “The Lord moves in mysterious ways.”
Well. Bullshit. All that means to this very lucky veteran is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, and we try to bridge the gap between reality and what we know of that reality with phrases that we cling to in desperate, willful ignorance, in the absence of knowing what we’re doing.
It happens with 23-year-olds - my age at Tho An - and now, in some armies, with 8-year-olds. And with squads, platoons, companies, nations, alliances. It is how humans have done business for these millenia.
It is how history has been built.
MEN AND WOMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS
In the earlier chapter “Lasa Tinghni(57),” from my trip
among Miskito and Sumo Indians in southern Honduras and northern Nicaragua in January 1985, I mentioned photographing “a striking-looking young Miskito mother, one child on her hip and another clinging to her filthy skirt, wearing an old T-shirt with the Playboy Bunny emblem on the front.” Though I spoke with other members of her group, this woman spoke neither English nor Spanish, so I didn’t speak with her. But I will never forget her face.
She was a young mother, and she was worried. She was worried to the point that it visibly affected her whole being: her face, her posture, the way she held her child, the way she looked about her.
She was worried in the way that millions of young mothers around the globe are worried, every day: How
can I feed my children? WHAT can I feed them? Not what
will we wear, not where will we live, not what will we do for money, not where will they go to school or how will we afford books for school, but How can I feed my children?
In the myriad wars currently in progress around the world, women and children usually suffer even more than the combatants. Increasingly, in fact, the combatants are children. This leads to some realities that are so awful to
57 See above, p. 396ff.
contemplate that most of us in the Western world deal with them in the only way we know how: we simply don’t think about them.
Though this has been true throughout recorded history, it is, if anything, becoming worse as we enter the 21st
century. Wars currently playing out across Africa and Asia,
and some in Latin America, gobble up males as young as 8 (and even younger), leaving women and girls to fend for themselves in a war-blasted world, often preyed upon by men and boys from the same social strata as those forced – or seduced - by war to leave them unprotected.
One thing this has meant in practice has been that young men and boys, cut adrift from home and family and community and thrust into war zones, bring their sexual appetites with them, even as the normal constraints on those appetites are left behind. Depending on relative levels of decency, apathy, and avarice among the leaders of military groups, this has come to mean that, as combatants have become younger and younger at an alarming rate, so have their victims.
So now we have children killing children, children
raping children(58), usually goaded by adult male leaders
58 I am particularly thinking of Democratic Republic of Congo, where a deadly stew of mineral wealth, tribal loyalties and intertribal hatreds,
rebel groups from Congo and from neighboring Rwanda, and the flourishing practice of voluntary and forced recruitment of child soldiers who at times are permitted, even encouraged, to rape; and the culture which stigmatizes women and girls who have been victims of rape, even if they are pregnant.
- sometimes in pursuit of political goals, sometimes by religious, nationalistic, or tribal loyalties; sometimes by simple greed. Greed is often mixed with the other motives.
There are also girls in the ranks of child soldiers. The Human Rights Watch report “You’ll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia” takes its title from this:
I had a friend, Juanita, who got into trouble for sleeping around. We had been friends in civilian life and we shared a tent together. The commander said it didn’t matter that she was my friend. She had committed an error and had to be killed. I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn’t hit her. So I shot again. The grave was
right nearby. I had to bury her and put dirt on top of her. The commander said, “You did very well. Even though you started to cry, you did well. You’ll have to do this again many more times, and you’ll have to learn not to cry.”(59)
Women, and their children with them, have always been lesser beings in human societies.
This is wrong.
Women are not the least of us; women are the best of us. A woman has carried in her body for most of a year, before we ever drew breath, every human being who ever lived. Most of our literature has dealt with the deeds, heroic and otherwise, of men, because it has been written mostly by men. But no noble sacrifice in battle, no crossing of formidable mountain ranges or uncharted oceans, matches the quiet (yet sometimes noisy!) heroism of what women do and have always done to give us life,
59 Human Rights Watch, copyright © 2003 http://www.hrw.org. p. 73. The report was written by Sebastian Brett, senior researcher in the Americas Division.
and to keep us alive.
I’ve come to this: if the world is destroyed, men – in their unceasing quest for power and/or wealth (which is
increasingly becoming the Greatest Power) - will destroy it.
If the world is saved, women will save it: women like Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi and Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, like Graça Machel and many others in Africa, like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Malalai Joya in Afghanistan, Arundhati Roy in India, like the Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, like ordinary women all over the world who simply struggle to keep their children alive in the face of men’s abandonment and depredations - will save it.
In her wonderful Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the Iranian professor of English literature Azar Nafisi writes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as conducting a “war against women....(60)” She also notes
that during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, Iran used child soldiers to clear minefields ahead of tanks by walking over them. P.W. Singer, in Children at War, quotes Khomeini as saying that the children’s sacrifice in that war was “helping Iran to achieve a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country(61).” Singer also notes that the young boys walking over mines wore keys around their necks “to signify their pending entrance into heaven.” A military history website lists the ages of those Iranian volunteers
60 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008, p.111
61 Singer, Children at War.Op. cit., p. 22.
who cleared minefields by walking over them as “from only nine to more than fifty(62).”
Divine country.
Just now I am remembering lines from the “Rifleman’s Prayer” we learned in boot camp:
To God and Country, Home and Corps
Let me be faithful evermore.
Amen(63)
It will anger some that I draw a parallel between U.S. soldiers and their Nazi enemies wearing GOTT MIT UNS
belt buckles. Or a similar parallel between us Marines being marched to chapel in boot camp to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” led by a chaplain with officer’s insignia
on one point of his shirt collar and a cross on the other, and Islamist extremists who call our soldiers “infidels” and “crusaders.”
But that’s my point. “Divine country” says it all:
Your country will send you to war. We will give you a reason. The reason may or may not be true, or it may be a mixture of some truths and some outright lies. But the truth or falsity of those reasons is not your concern. Your job is to do what you’re told, without question, attack the people we tell you to attack, and risk or give up your life as you do this. Your country thanks you for your sacrifice. If you do not come home alive, we will thank your mother. We will give her a folded flag and a prayer to replace you. [My words, not a quote; and offered without apology.]
63 From the Marines’ “Rifleman’s Prayer.” See above, p. 83.
In 1992 I decided I wanted to hunt again, after many years of not being around weapons. But the thought of firing a high powered rifle at a deer or elk still made me queasy. The local archery range was a wonderful system of trails through a forest of redwoods and manzanita brush a short distance from Santa Cruz. My friend Walter Smith and I spent long hours there, and my boyhood love of archery was rekindled.
That fall Larry Yien and I went for an archery elk hunt on a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. One morning we were out of our tents and in the woods before daylight, and split up to hunt separately. As the Eastern sky took its time going from starry dark to faint light, I crested a gradual rise and stopped to be quiet and listen and look.
As the light became lighter, the fir branches surrounding me visibly drooped with dewdrops. As the first orange sliver of sun pushed its tiny arc above the mountain to the East, a dewdrop in front of my nose caught that sunlight and became a rainbow that for a long moment occupied my entire vision. Awake now, and having just been taught by the world around me to notice such a thing, that world exploded quietly, with a patience that moved slowly yet wasted no instant, into a galaxy of rainbows refracted in dewdrops.
This stuff happens to me all the time; the world just flat knocks my socks off. And anything that birds do – especially flight – amazes me. Pelicans circling with one eye on the water, then diving for dinner in a collapse of wings, a comically ungainly splash and a struggling takeoff, or flying in V formation along the California coast, never fail to remind me of Robinson Jeffers’ line in his poem “Boats in a Fog” about watching a file of fishing boats bucking waves and wind offshore: “...a flight of pelicans/ is nothing lovelier to look at...” Or Canada geese, in Oregon where I live now. A few years ago Kit and Kim Phelps hired me to build a small addition to the old farmhouse on their place. One wintry evening I was working alone on the roof, trying to get the plywood sheathing in place before dark. It had been raining off and on all day. With the quick temperature changes we’re used to in that place, sometimes the surface of the plywood would turn icy as I was nailing it in place. Timm Turrentine, my friend and helper, was sick that day, but I was almost done. Just a couple more sheets...
In the last light of day, the western sky did what it often does there in the open spaces around Lostine: it burned. With the urgency of getting the roof covered before dark, and getting out of my freezing coveralls, I wasn’t in the mood to pay attention to the sky.
Neither was the sky in a mood to ignore me. Clouds in bulbous, tubular streams stretched from the southern to the northern horizon, then flamed pink, orange, red, purple, charcoal, against the azure-going-to-indigo sky. The scene gave me a shiver that was not from cold.
Then I heard them, coming out of the sunset: a V of Canada geese, forced close to the ground by low clouds, were headed straight for me, kneeling there on the roof. Okay, some things you can ignore, some you can’t. They barely cleared the ridge of the roof I was working on. As they passed a few feet above me I watched individual feathers on their wings move. I heard the sibilance of those feathers’ sliding across one another as they did the work of flight, against the very nearby symphony of their honking.
The violent wonderment in the way I saw and heard the sky and the geese was a direct result, 40 years on, of another moment in Tho An, a couple of hours after the moment of the screaming baby boy and the old man’s hateful stare that ended my religion and all the other Big Ideas that made up the fabric of my life before that April day in 1966. That was the infinite moment when the burst of automatic fire went between those of us standing around the well, and I saw in a blinding lapse of my habitual stupidity (as in “young and stupid”) how easy it is to die, how lucky I was to still be alive, and how precious life is, every moment of every day.
Religion was replaced, in that moment of my life, by a greater gift: a love of life as we have it, from rainbows in dewdrops to geese in flight to simply breathing, walking, kissing....
If you ask me, I traded up.
Since that change in the way I see things, Life is what matters: the blood and breath coursing through me, through other humans, through my dog and my friends’ horses and other creatures who live with us and by us. And just the living of it: working at something that serves life, such as providing food or shelter; playing music or playing with children, and of course loving. Not fighting. Loving.
I don’t believe in anything else: no ism, no ology, just... life. Any idea which I see as tending towards life, I support. Any idea which I see as trying to pull humans towards conflict – especially in the name of any ism or “national interest” (which usually means defending some sort of economic interest), I oppose. Any idea that wants to put a weapon in the hands of young men, or boys, or young women, or girls, and assigns a human target to that young armed person, I oppose. The way I see it, all those ideas lean towards, or march towards, or sprint towards, Death.
I take this stance as a warrior. I am not a pacifist. I would still fight – fiercely and well - to defend my wife, my friends, my neighbors. But our nation is now using wars in such a way as to increase the numbers of people who call us “the enemy,” along with the strength of their resolve to destroy us.
For anyone who has read Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old (give or take) The Art of War, or who has studied martial arts for twenty+ years as I have, our current politico-military posture in the world is just plain lousy military strategy. It robs us of our money, our blood, our youth, even of the vast reservoir of international good will which we (North) Americans owned after World War II.
As a warrior, I oppose it.
Recently I was re-reading “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders(64). The book's title is a phrase handwritten into the photo album of one Kurt Franz, from his days as deputy commandant, then commandant, of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka, Poland.
The book contains reproductions of a number of black and white photographs, from Treblinka and other camps and execution sites. Many are so grainy and badly focused as to show very little. Yet they show everything: Jewish women being forced to undress before the eyes of their
captors, trying to cover their nakedness with their hands, being shot, lying dead in crumpled piles as the few only wounded by the first volley are finished off by a soldier standing among them with a submachine gun.
As I turned the pages, one of the pictures stopped me.
64 Edited by Ernst Klee, et.al., Op.cit.
I shuddered. The shudder settled in my stomach and became a vague nausea, a physical feeling of dread. This photo shows a single soldier, his rifle slung underarm, guarding a cluster of Latvian Jews who have been gathered for execution. The photograph is too grainy to be sure, but the prisoners look to be all women and children.
That photo isn't nearly so horrible as some of the others in the book.
What caused the physical nausea in me was not so much the ill-focused image of the women who were seated on the ground, with their children, who would all be shot minutes after the picture was taken.
It was the angle at which the rifle of the soldier guarding them hung under his arm(65). It was the same as
the angle of my M14 rifle as I guarded the women and children and one old man near the village well at Tho An. The angle was the same for a simple reason: both of us soldiers had our rifles slung underarm with the muzzles down, which soldiers often do to keep the rifle’s action and trigger ready to hand; or when it’s raining, to keep rainwater out of the barrel.
It's especially convenient when we’re guarding people who are sitting, or kneeling, on the ground.
The awful click in my mind when I noticed the angle of that soldier's rifle (I don't know whether he was a Latvian policeman collaborating with the Nazis, or a German soldier), while it proves nothing, can point to a whole hidden universe, or at least did for me.
That hidden universe is the continuum of male violence. I've seen that continuum in things I've done and witnessed, from shooting the robin as a boy with my bow
65 ibid., p. 130.
and arrow, to my need to become adept with guns, to be
a hunter as the men I knew were hunters, to the fun-seeking scrappiness of the "townies" I nearly tangled with in Colorado Springs, to my readiness to "kill at least one” of them, to the spark of agreement that arced around our circle of Marines' faces at Chu Lai when one said, "I'd sure like to kill just one gook before I leave this fucking place," to the beatings by angry husbands and fathers of the women and children I met at the battered women's shelter where one little girl asked her sister if I was going to hit them, to the gleam in the eye of an American mercenary in Central America as he told his story of “reloading face to face,” to superpower-induced guerrilla warfare in Central America.
A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids the best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.
Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.
When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a
Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?
Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.
Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.
We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us.
The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.
The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.
Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other designated evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our own deepest beliefs.
These are the beliefs and ideas we are willing to fight over. They are the beliefs and ideas which inspire us to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters - to war. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle.
Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.
This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially that deadly nexus of religion and patriotism - is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.
END
