INFANTry
EPILOGUE: The Web (Essay)
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”(
)
- George Orwell
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 not much 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.
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 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 remain allied with us(). 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(
) (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), the alliance that “asked for our help in Vietnam”, had been created at the urging of our own government(
), 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(
)) and Guatemala (1954, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán(
)). 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(
).” 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(
), squadron commander of the A4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flying cover for the U.S. destroyers
Maddox and
C. Turner Joy() on that August 4
th, 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(
).
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(
). 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(
), though the United States denied any 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 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 immediately provably false. 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 vote of my life in a presidential election by absentee ballot from the deck of the
USS Cavalier in the waters of the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin(
). I voted for Barry Goldwater. I was a newly promoted Marine Corporal, I didn’t trust Lyndon Baines Johnson, and I was ready to go to war to protect my country and her ally from the Communists. Goldwater seemed the better choice: a warrior himself(
), and a straight talker. 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(
), 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 his friendship(
), he certainly became a formidable opponent. No 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 the 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(
).
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 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(
).
But governments always lie. Sure, that’s part of the picture. I spent a couple 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, as Muslims remember the crusades.
So studying the great lies of my time – of the Kennedys, the Dulles brothers, the Johnsons, the McNamaras, the Rostows, the Bundys, the Lodges, the Nixons and Kissingers - 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.”
