SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB

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(41). 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 

41 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 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(42) in advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton in 1962.


42 See earlier post, "Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis," in Archive.

STRUCTURE OF THE WEB

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.

GIRLS AND BOYS

                                                              GIRLS AND BOYS


    So now we have children killing children, children raping children(51), usually goaded by adult male leaders – 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. 

51 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. See Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/publication/9331, p.4; also Amnesty International USA: http://amnestyusa.org/children/child-soldiers/stories-from-children-associated-with-fighting-forces.

also http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/notes-from-a-young-american-in-congo-rape-continues/ by Amy Ernst

     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:

    Ángela, who joined the guerrillas at twelve, had a story that became disturbingly familiar as Human Rights Watch conducted its interviews:

  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.”(52)

52 Human Rights Watch, copyright © 2003 http://www.hrw.org. p. 73. The report was written by Sebastian Brett, senior researcher in the Americas Division.

     
     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, 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 – 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.

Paragraphs After the Wars 3 - TONKIN: WHAT WE DIDN'T KNOW

     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([1]). 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([2]) (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), the alliance that “asked for our help in Vietnam”, had been created at the urging of our own government([3]), in the person of President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles([4]), 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([5])) and Guatemala (1954, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán([6])). 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([7]).” 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([8]), squadron commander of the A4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flying cover for the U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy([9]) 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([10]).

     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([11]). 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([12]), 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([13]). 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([14]), 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([15]), 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([16]), 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.

---

[1] See http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history/bc_1964_prewar/first_indochinawar_1945_1954.htm1945.htm; also Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross; also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/series/pt_01.html

[2] It wasn’t just my outfit that was “taught” about SEATO. See my chapter "Mangbuk," in Archive.

[3] But it was presented to us, aboard ship on the way to Vietnam, as the reason we were going. See my chapter "Going Over," in Archive.

[4] http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/10126-SEATO.html; also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles

[5] 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 forces in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991. Also see All the Shah’s Men, John Wiley & Sons, 2003 by former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer.

[6] 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.403. 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.

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles

[8] 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.

[9] 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: 40^th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident”: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAAEBB132/essay.htm. Dr. Prados is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive, and has written more than a dozen books on national security and intelligence issues.

[10] Jack Jennings, whose article is quoted in note 12 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.”

[11] 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.

[12] Prados, “Essay: 40^th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” p. 3. See note 9, above.

[13] 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.”

[14] 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

[15] http://rationalrevolution.net/war/collection_of_letters_by_ho_chi-.htm

[16] 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 of the government 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....”

Paragraphs after the Wars 2: NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BUY A BEER

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

                 - George Orwell,  From the essay “In Front of Your Nose,”  first published in the London Tribune, March 22, 1946. Reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1968.

    

     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

                                            

INFANT ry

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.”

Paragraphs after the Wars

Paragraphs after the Wars (1)

     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 conveniently assigned evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest religious and political beliefs.

     These are the ones we are willing to fight over, the ones which inspire us the to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters--to war over. 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 religion and patriotism-is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END

AMMAN, JORDAN: MARCH 1991

     It was there, in that room on the outskirts of Amman, that we first heard about the Rodney King incident, where several Los Angeles cops had been videotaped beating King past the point of submission, just a day or two before. We had not been watching CNN, but the rest of the world had, including these angry Arab men.    

   

     It seemed to me that the men in business suits had been quietly deferring to the man in the brown Arab robe and white kafiyeh. He was fully as fluent in English as the others. Now, as he spoke, he first expressed amazement that we hadn’t heard of Rodney King. Then his voice rose to a shout and his finger pointed angrily across the room at me. I assumed that because I was a journalist and perhaps also because I was clearly the oldest male in our group, that somehow made me even more personally culpable for crimes against his people than the younger members of our group.

     He gave vent to his rage: “You! You have no respect for human beings other than yourselves… you don’t even respect your own! Your police beat this black man as if he were an animal… you fight a war against Arabs without even coming out on the field like men(26), you sit in an air-conditioned bubble and push buttons and kill Iraqis from a distance without even knowing who they are... but the whole world knows who YOU are, except you! You do not know who you are! You have no idea of the consequences of what you do in the world! What do we have to do to get your attention - blow up buildings in New York?”

(26)As he spoke, I remembered a brief flurry of news stories about a tidy method the U.S. had developed for overwhelming Iraqi soldiers sheltered against the Allied ground attack in trenches along the Saudi/Iraqi border.

     A helicopter gunship and a bulldozer worked together: the gunship pinned the Iraqi infantry down in the trench as the bulldozer came along and buried them, alive and dead. One U.S. official, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the helicopter’s gun camera tape, denied the request, saying “If that got out we’d never fight another war.” He seemed to think that was a bad idea.