After
the Second World War, France found it difficult
to maintain control over Indo-China.
America supplied $1.2 billion of military aid to the French forces
but in 1954, after a serious defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu
the French Government decided to withdraw from Vietnam. At the Geneva
Conference it was agreed that elections would be held within two years
and that in the meantime Vietnam would be divided into two halves
with North Vietnam under the control of the communist, Ho Chi Minh.
These elections did not take place and the USA continued to supply
military aid and advisers to help protect South Vietnam from communist
guerrillas (National Liberation Front)
On August 2nd, 1964, North
Vietnamese torpedo-boats attacked the US destroyer Maddox. The USA
retaliated by bombing North Vietnamese naval bases and oil refineries.
In March 1965, President Lyndon
B. Johnson
started sending troops to
South Vietnam to protect a government that appeared to be in danger
of falling to the National Liberation Front.
By the end of 1966 the
USA had 400,000 men on active duty in South Vietnam.
The bombing campaign was intensified and it has been estimated that
it involved dropping "over 70 tons of bombs for every square
mile of Vietnam .
. . about 500 pounds of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam".
Protest against the war mounted in the USA and in 1968, President
Richard
Nixon announced
plans to withdraw troops and to encourage the South Vietnamese
to do the bulk of the fighting.
A cease-fire was signed
in Paris on 27th January, 1973 and the last American combat troops
left soon afterwards. United States advisers remained in South Vietnam
until the National Liberation Front won control of
the country in April 1975.
(1)
Vietminh directives (1948)
(1) Not to do what is likely to damage the land and crops or spoil
the houses and belongings
of the people.
(2) Not to insist on buying
or borrowing what the people are not willing to sell or lend.
(3) Never to break our
word.
(4) Not to do or speak
what is likely to make people believe that we hold them in contempt.
(5) To help them in their
daily work (harvesting, fetching firewood carrying water, sewing,
etc.)
(6) In spare time, to
tell amusing, simple, and short stories useful to the Resistance,
but not to betray secrets.
(7) Whenever possible
to buy commodities for those who live far from the market.
(8) To teach the population
the national script and elementary hygiene.
(2)
President
Dwight
Eisenhower, Mandate for Change,
(1963)
It was generally conceded that had an election been held, Ho Chi Minh
would have been elected
Premier ... I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable
in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held
as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population
would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.
(3)
United States Government
White Paper (February 1965)
In Vietnam a Communist government has set out deliberately to conquer
a sovereign people in a neighbouring state. The evidence shows that
the hard core of the Communist forces attacking South Vietnam were
trained in the North and ordered into the South by Hanoi. It shows
that the key leadership of the Vietcong (VC), the officers and much
of the cadre many at the technicians, political organizers, and propagandists
have come from.
(4)
David Halberstam, New York Times
(11th September, 1963)
Then, on June 11, an aged Buddhist priest, Thich Quang Due, sat down
at a major intersection, poured gasoline on himself, took the cross-legged
'Buddha' posture and struck a match. He burned to death without moving
and without saying a word. Thich Quang Due became a hero to the Buddhists
in Vietnam, and he dramatized their cause for the rest of the world.
(5)
President Lyndon
B. Johnson,
speech (July 28,1965)
Its goal is to conquer the south, to defeat American power and to
extend the Asiatic domination of Communism ... Our power, therefore,
is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Vietnam,
then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American
promise or protection . . We did not choose to be the guardians at
the gate, but there is no one else.
(6)
Senator Wayne
Morse, speech (6th September,1963)
The policy of our Government to continue to support military dictatorship
is costing us heavily in prestige around the world, because the policy
proves us to be hypocritical ... So long as Diem is the head of the
Government of South Vietnam, we continue to support a tyrant, we continue
to support a police-state dictator . . . On the basis of the present
policies that prevail there, South Vietnam is not worth the life of
a single American boy.
(7)
New York Herald Tribune (25th
April,1965)
Other techniques, usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to
talk, involve cutting
off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner.
Sometimes a string of ears, decorates the wall of a government military
installation. Two Viet Cong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane
flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was
thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered
all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out.
(8)
Townsend Hoopes, Under Secretary of the US Air Force
memorandum
(March 1968)
We believe the enemy can be forced to be 'reasonable', i.e. to compromise
or even capitulate,
because we assume he wants to avoid pain, death, and material
destruction. We assume that if these are inflicted on him with increasing
severity, then at some point in the process he will want to stop the
suffering.
(9)
Felix Greene, Vietnam! Vietnam! (1966)
The mounting fury of the
richest and most powerful country is today being directed against
one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world. The average
income of the people of Vietnam is about $50 a year - what the average
American earns in a single week. The war today is costing the United
States three million dollars an hour. What could not the Vietnamese
do for their country with what we spend in one day fighting them!
It is costing the United States $400,000 to kill one guerrilla - enough
to pay the annual income of 8,000 Vietnamese. The United States can
burn and devastate; it can annihilate the Vietnamese; but it cannot
conquer them.
(10)
Eqbal Ahmad, The Nation (30th August,1965)
I prefer the term 'maternalism'
for American policy in countries like Vietnam, because it reminds
me of the story of an elephant who, as she strolled benignly in the
jungle, stepped on a mother partridge and killed her. When she noticed
the orphaned siblings, tears filled the kind elephant's eyes. 'Ah,
I too have maternal instincts,' she said, turning to the orphans,
and sat on them.
(11)
Nguyen Thi Anh was a member of the National
Liberation Front. In
this
passage she explains what happened to her when she was captured by
the South Vietnamese army.
They tried to force me
to confess that I was a member of the Vietcong. I refused to make
such a statement and so they stuck needles under the tips of my ten
fingers saying that if I did not write down what they wanted and admit
to being a member of the Vietcong, they would continue to torture
me. I was determined to say nothing. I was extremely angry at the
enemy and I loved my country so much. This was because every day bombs
and shells were falling and the blood and the bones of my people appeared
before my eyes... I was extremely outraged and would never come out
with any information. They tied my nipples to an electric wire and
they gave me electric shocks, knocking me to the floor every time
that they did so. They said that if they did not get the necessary
information they would continue with the torture. Two American advisers
were always standing on either side of me.
(12)
In 1967, the journalist Martha
Gellhorn visited Vietnam.
Her reports were published in the Ladies'
Home Journal.
In the children's ward
of the Qui Nhon province hospital I saw for the first time what Napalm
does. A child of seven, the size of our four-year-olds, lay in the
cot by the door. Napalm had burned his face and back and one hand.
The burned skin looked like swollen red meat; the fingers on his hand
were stretched out, burned rigid. A scrap of cheesecloth covered him,
for weight is intolerable, but so too is air.
(13)
A housewife from New Jersey, the mother of six, decided to go to Vietnam
and adopt three Vietnamese children. While she
was there she visited several hospitals.
I had heard and read that
napalm melts the flesh, and I thought that's nonsense, because I can
put a roast in the oven and the fat will melt but the meat stays there.
Well, I went and saw these children burned by napalm, and it's absolutely
true. The chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh, and
the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chests and it sits
there and grows there... These children can't turn their heads, they
were so thick with flesh... And when gangrene sets in, they cut off
their hands or fingers or their feet.
(14)
Richard West was In Vietnam
after U.S. combat troops left the country in
1973. In an article that appeared in New
Statesman in April 1975, he described
some of the problems that existed in Saigon before the National
Liberation Front victory.
A few days ago I heard
a girl weeping because her sister, a prostitute, had died of VD at
the age of 19. She was one of the hundreds of thousands of drug addicts
in Saigon who have grown still more desperate since the heroin ran
out and who have to find £4 or £5 a day to 'shoot up'
boiled opium seed or sleeping pills... one sees countless young people,
army deserters and crippled veterans wearing injection scabs on their
wrists or ankles; the limbless 'shoot up' through a vein at the side
of the head... the epidemics of VD and drugs are largely attributable
not to the Saigon regime but to the
Americans who departed two years ago, leaving their grisly souvenirs.
(15)
Joseph Buttinger attempted to document the effect that the war had
on the people of Vietnam
in his book A Dragon Defiant (1972).
The total tonnage of bombs
dropped between 1964 and the end of 1971 was 6.2 million. This means
that the US has dropped 300 pounds of bombs for every man, woman,
and child in Indochina, and 22 tons of bombs for every square mile.
Enormous craters dot the landscape in many regions covering dozens
of square miles. Hundreds of villages were totally destroyed by bombs
and napalm, forests over vast areas defoliated, making the land infertile
for years, and crops destroyed, with little or no consideration for
the needs of the people, merely on suspicion that some of the crop
might benefit the enemy... The total number of people made refugees
is more than 5 million... The rise of the refugee population in South
Vietnam was partly due also to the past American policy of removing
from countless villages, for strategic reasons, the entire population,
and of putting these unfortunate people in what were called refugee
camps or relocation centres.
(16)
Stanley Karnov first visited Vietnam
as a reporter for Time
Magazine in 1959. He has written several books on South-East
Asia and is acknowledged as having a deep understanding of the subject.
His book, Vietnam, was published in 1983.
The use of drugs was so
widespread that, according to an official estimate made in 1971, nearly
one third of the troops were addicted to opium or heroin, and marijuana
smoking had become routine.
The average age of the
American soldier in Vietnam was nineteen, seven years younger than
his father had been in World War II, which made him more vulnerable
to the psychological strains of the struggle - strains that were aggravated
by the special tension of Vietnam, where every peasant might be a
Vietcong terrorist.
A Veterans Administration
psychiatrist, Dr. Jack Ewart, estimates that some seven hundred thousand
veterans suffer from various forms of "post-traumatic stress
disorder," the modern term for "shell shock" in World
War I and "battle fatigue" in World War II. Vietnam caused
many more cases than those conflicts, however. Its symptoms, which
can occur ten or fifteen years later, range from panic and rage to
anxiety, depression, and emotional paralysis. Crime, suicide, alcoholism,
narcotics addiction, divorce, and unemployment among Vietnam veterans
far outstrip the norm.
(17)
Thomas Powers, The War at Home (1973)
The Harlem riot in the
summer of 1964 had been followed a year later by the far larger and
more serious uprising in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Serious
disturbances occurred in several midwestem cities in the summer of
1966, but nothing had prepared the country for the size and violence
of the urban riots which began in Newark on Thursday, July 13, and
in Detroit ten days later.
During the five days of
rioting in Newark, 26 people were killed 1,200 were injured, and 1,300
were arrested. More than $10 million worth of damage was reported...
Overcrowded schools, decrepit housing, hospitals with beds in the
hallways, a lack of jobs all made Newark a classic example of what
would soon be called a crisis of the cities... Part of the bitter,
reckless mood was the failure of Johnson's war on poverty, the readiest
explanation of which was the cost of the war in Vietnam.
(18)
Steve volunteered for the United
States Army at 16. After serving
two terms
in Vietnam
he suffered
a mental breakdown. While recuperating at home he had a fit and in
the process nearly murdered his mother. Since then he has lived on
his own in a tent in the forests of the Washington Olympic Peninsula.
It has been estimated that over a thousand Vietnam Veterans unable
to adapt to normal society live like this in these remote forests.
He was interviewed about his experiences for the BBC Television Documentary,
Haunted Heroes.
I went through an army
training course. On this course were Japanese and Chinese American
military wearing communist uniforms with red stars and carrying communist
built weapons. They would capture you and they beat you, took your
clothes off and hit you with rifle butts... They hung me up with my
wrists for over an hour. Then they cut me down and tied my hands behind
my back... Three men came in - you have to remember that this was
after a week of going without food, you've been beat up ten or fifteen
times, you've had no sleep and they have been constantly hammering
at you trying to find out where your unit's at. These three men brought
out guns and fired blanks at me. Only at the time I did not know they
were blanks... being forced to stand in certain positions, being kicked,
slapped, questioned the whole time having to crawl through garbage
and human faeces... Chinese music and North Vietnam music being played
all the time. Ho Chi Minh's speeches would come on. So by the time
I finished four of these camps... When I got to go into action. When
I went to Vietnam. The only thing that was going through my mind was
exactly what was planned. That was to kill communists. I became a
machine. A very effective machine. I was very good at what I did.
I survived.
There was a point when
I think I enjoyed killing. I came through that. Then there was a time
when I did not want to kill anything again... I cracked under pressure
after twenty-two months. They put me in a straight jacket. They kept
me doped up and after twenty-four hours I was back in the United States.
Part of it is the guilt.
It's having to leave wounded comrades which had nothing to do with
what I grew up with. John Wayne, Audie Murphy, none of them left their
comrades. They all got medals... They never left comrades to be hacked
up into small pieces.
I would like to live a
productive life. I would like to go to sleep at night without waking
up in a cold sweat. I would like to have a loving relationship that
does not involve fear, that does not involve all the things that has
been a gift from the government. They failed to turn me back to the
person I used to be. They failed to turn me back to the guy from down
the block.
(19)
Tim O'Brien served in the Vietnam
War as an infantryman. In this passage
he describes the dangers of going out on patrol. Over 10,000 US soldiers
lost limbs during the war, a considerable number of these injuries
were caused by National
Liberation Front mines.
The most feared mine was the Bouncing Betty. It was conical shaped,
three prongs jutting out of the soil. When your foot hit the prong,
a charge went off that shot the mine into the air, a yard high, showering
shrapnel everywhere. It's a mine that goes after the lower torso:
a terrible mine... On one occasion after my company had encamped and
sent out patrols there was a large explosion only 200 yards away...
We raced out there and only two men were living out of a patrol of
eight or so. Just a mess. It was like a stew, full of meat and flesh
and red tissue and white bone.
(20)
In her book, Winners and Losers, Gloria Emerson told the story
of John Young who was ambushed
by the National
Liberation Front when
leading a patrol in 1968.
Young was trying to get to a clump of trees when he was hit twice
by an AK-47 rifle... He was still lying on his stomach in the gully
when he felt the bayonets in his back. It was about nine o'clock in
the morning. He had not even noticed how much he was bleeding or the
pieces of bone that had been pushed through his skin and were sticking
out of his leg like huge toothpicks... North Vietnamese officers interrogated
him. He would tell them nothing except his name, rank, serial number,
date of birth. They yanked his leg and hit him with the butt of a
weapon on the head and in the back. He does not think he screamed
when the Vietnamese twisted and bent his shattered leg. He hated them
too much. Young said, to do that, so he stayed silent and let the
pain shine.
(21)
Colonel Robinson Risner spent seven and a half years in a prison in
Hanoi. He was one of the 600 members of the US airforce who was shot
down and captured by the North Vietnamese. Colonel Risner was
released from captivity after the cease-fire agreement in 1973.
When I got out of my plane I found myself looking right down a gun
bore... I had to make a decision. Was I going to make a fight of it.
I already had a gun aimed right at my head. And I changed my mind.
I remember telling the guys that I would never be captured but I changed
my mind.
My wrists and arms were
tied behind my back. The two arms were close together which pulled
my shoulders out of joint. They did some similar things to my legs...
During the night I heard someone screaming in the distance. I thought
they were torturing another prisoner. And I felt so sorry for him.
And then I came more closely to consciousness and found out it was
me. I was the one who was doing the screaming. They tortured me all
night and by daylight they had reduced me to such a state I gave them
more than my name, rank and date of birth... I tried to endure the
pain knowing that an American military man should endure torture until
he dies. I tried my best but my best was not good enough... I found
I was not as strong as I thought I was. I found I could not be tortured
to death. My will would give before my heart stopped
beating. It was very disconcerting. I lived in abject misery for the
rest of the time I was
a prisoner in Vietnam.
(22)
Bruce joined the United
States Navy at seventeen.
He was trained for secret undercover work in Vietnam. He now lives
on his own in a house in the forests of the Washington Olympic Peninsula.
I had to destroy villages, kill everybody there and then leave communist
arms there. I realised what we were doing. It made sense then... You
don't take a person's life and not have guilt feelings about it. Anyone
who says they can and not feel guilty about it is lying.
One chap got a chest wound,
we had to go into the bush. The Vietcong were there. The chap with
the chest wound was making a hell of a noise. I did away with him
myself. I had to to save me and the other fellow... I did not want
to die... Every means that I had to survive I used. The gun played
a real big part in that. A man with a gun can do anything. Anything.
Its the awesome power that you have in your hands. It's a real feeling
of power. I love it. These guns are my life, they really are.
When I first got back
I spent time in the penitentiary in California. I killed a man right
here in the United States... I do not trust anyone now. I would rather
trust a dog than a person. A person is a vicious animal. I'm not normal
by any means. A normal person can handle society. I can't. I do not
like people... I'll be pleased when its done. When death comes I think
I'll welcome it.
(23)
Jeff Needle was a Vietnam Veteran who protested against the war. When
he returned to the United States he published
and distributed a booklet called Please Read This.
A very sad thing happened while we were there - to everyone. It
happened slowly and gradually so no one noticed when it happened.
We began slowly with each death and every casualty until there were
so many deaths and so many wounded, we started to treat death and
loss of limbs with
callousness, and it happens because the human mind
can't hold that much suffering and survive.
(24)
After the Vietnam
War was over some American soldiers
admitted acts of atrocities against the Vietnamese people. In the
book Prevent the Crime of Silence, a former American intelligence
officer described what happened to people suspected of being members
of the National
Liberation Front.
I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever
lived through an interrogation... and that included quite a number
of individuals... They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment
of the fact that any of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating
with the Vietcong, but they all died and the majority were either
tortured to death or things like thrown from helicopters.
(25)
In villages where the population was suspected of helping the National
Liberation Front, torture
and executions of civilians sometimes took place. On 16 March, 1968,
American troops killed more than 500 people from the village of My
Lai. A young helicopter gunner, Ronald
Ridenhour who saw the massacre wrote to President Nixon about the
incident. Attempts by the army to cover-up what had taken place were
undermined by the journalist, Seymour Hersh, who managed to persuade
several soldiers involved in the massacre to talk about what taken
place at My Lai.
Some of Calley's men thought it was breakfast time as they walked
in; a few families were gathered in front of their homes cooking rice
over a small fire. Without a direct order, the first platoon also
began rounding up the villagers... Sledge remembered thinking that
"if there were VC around, they had plenty of time to leave before
we came in. We didn't tiptoe in there."
The killings began without
warning... Stanley saw "some old women and some little children
- fifteen or twenty of them - in a group around a temple where some
incense was burning. They were kneeling and crying and praying, and
various soldiers... walked by and executed these women and children
by shooting them in the head with their rifles.
There were few physical
protests from the people; about eighty of them were taken quietly
from their homes and herded together in the plaza area. A few hollered
out, "No VC, No VC,"... Women were huddled against children,
vainly trying to save them. Some continued to chant, "No VC."
Others simply said, "No. No. No."
Carter recalled that some
GIs were shouting and yelling during the massacre: "The boys
enjoyed it. When someone laughs and jokes about what they're doing,
they have to be enjoying it." A GI said, "Hey, I got me
another one." Another said, "Chalk up one for me."
Even Captain Medina was having a good time. Carter thought: "You
can tell when someone enjoys their work." Few members of Charlie
Company protested that day. For the most part, those who didn't like
what was going on kept their thoughts to themselves.
By nightfall the Viet
Cong were back in My Lai, helping the survivors bury the dead. It
took five days. Most of the funeral speeches were made by the Communist
guerrillas. Nguyen Bat was not a communist at the time of the massacre,
but the incident changed his mind. "After the shooting,"
he said, "all the villagers became Communists."
(26)
Philip Caputo volunteered for the United
States Marines after hearing
a speech by President John
F. Kennedy on the dangers of communism.
After serving a year in Vietnam he was court-martialled for the murder
of two Vietnamese civilians. He was found not guilty but received
a reprimand for making false statements to his senior officers. In
his book, A Rumour of War, Caputo attempts to explain how the
Vietnam
War turned some US soldiers into
people who could commit atrocities.
The war was mostly a matter of enduring weeks of expectant waiting
and, at random intervals, of conducting vicious manhunts through jungles
and swamps where snipers harassed us constantly and booby traps cut
us down one by one... At times, the comradeship that was the war's
only redeeeming quality caused some of the worst crimes - acts of
retribution for friends who had been killed. Some men could not withstand
the stress of guerrilla-fighting: the hair-
trigger alertness constantly demanded of them, the feeling that the
enemy was everywhere, the inability to distinguish civilians from
combatants created emotional pressures which built to such a point
that a trivial provocation could make these men explode and the blind
destructiveness of a mortar shell... I felt sorry for those children
(soldiers arriving in Vietnam for the first time) knowing that they
would all grow old in the land of endless dying. I pitied them, knowing
that out of every ten, one would die, two would be maimed for life,
another two would be less seriously wounded and sent out to fight
again, and all the rest would be wounded in other, more hidden ways.
(27)
Colonel Robert HeinI spent 27 years in the United
States Marines and
has written several books on military matters. In the early 1970s
he investigated the morale of the armed forces involved in the Vietnam
War.
The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces
are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time
in this century and possibly in the history of the United States...
In 1970, the Army had 65,643 deserters, or roughly the equivalent
of four infantry divisions. This desertion rate (52.3 soldiers per
thousand) is well over twice the peak-rate for Korea (22.5 per thousand).
"Frag incidents"
or just "fragging" is current soldier slang in Vietnam for
the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive
officers and NCOs... the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings
in 1970 (209) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96)...Bounties,
raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50
to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom
the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.
In 1966, the Navy discharged
170 drug offenders. Three years later (1969), 3,800 were discharged.
Last year in 1970, the total jumped to over 5,000... In April, for
example, members of a Congressional investigating subcommittee reported
that 10 to 15 per cent of our troops in Vietnam are now using high-grade
heroin, and that drug addiction there is "of epidemic proportions."
(28)
The popularity of films like Uncommon Valor, Missing in
Action and Rambo have helped support the idea that there
are many soldiers still in Vietnamese prisons. Marvin Gentleman wrote
a book, Vietnam and America, about this issue.
Although only 1,830 Americans are still listed as missing in action
in Vietnam, plus 560 in Laos and 100 in Cambodia - a far smaller percentage
than after the Civil War, World War I, or World War II - heavily financed
campaigns, aided by the government, seek to exploit the emotions of
their loved ones by promulgating the preposterous myth, contrary to
all evidence and common sense, that the Vietnamese and Laotians are
still holding many of these men as prisoners... Meanwhile, there are
indeed many tens of thousands of imprisoned Vietnam veterans, but
these are not the subject of popular entertainment and jingoist propaganda.
In 1978, the Government Accounting Office estimated that there were
then 125,000 Vietnam veterans (over twice the total of those reported
killed) not in Laotian or Vietnamese but in American prisons.
(29)
Michael Parris, The American Film Industry and the Vietnam War
(1987)
The American film industry can hardly be accused of ignoring the Vietnam
War. But what it has ignored are some of the more unpleasant aspects
of that conflict. No film has yet presented any real justification
for Americans going to South East Asia other than in the most vague
terms such as "treaty obligations". No American feature
has dealt with the end of the war, the withdrawal of American troops
in 1973 or the subsequent fall of Saigon in 1975. It appears that
Americans have yet to come to terms with defeat and it seems fashionable
to soften the truth with phrases like "the war that nobody won"...
All of which diverts attention from the harsh reality - that America
suffered a costly military defeat. Other aspects of the war have also
been ignored in the cinema's view of events. There has been no mention
of the defoliation programmes or reference to other chemical weapons;
nor of the massive bombing campaigns against North Vietnam or Laos.
The most recent features
have dealt with commando raids into present-day Vietnam to release
prisoners-of-war still held by the communists. Uncommon Valor
(1983), Missing in Action (1984) and the phenomenally successful
Rambo have all shown that the communists can be beaten and have attempted
to restore military self-respect.
(30)
Jeff Needle, Please Read This (1970)
A very sad thing happened while we were there - to everyone. It happened
slowly and gradually so no one noticed when it happened. We began
slowly with each
death and every casualty until there were so many deaths and so many
wounded, we started to treat death and loss of limbs with callousness,
and it happens because the human mind can't hold that much suffering
and survive . . . And when they came out of My Lai, I heard the stories
they came back with. I didn't know whether they were true because
I wasn't there. If
they were true, it meant my company had murdered people
... it meant because of lies I had been told I was sitting in the
middle of a useless
war, it meant if I died in Vietnam my life would have been used and
wasted ... It meant if I decided not to do my job anymore I would
be sent to jail and
court-martialed. It meant a lot of people would think I was a traitor
to my country because I didn't believe in the war anymore ... It meant
a lot of bad things I didn't want to think about, based on stories
I wasn't sure were
true. So I decided to forget about it.
(31)
In 1982 four war veterans returned to Vietnam. This group included
Bob
Muller, a former lieutenant in the Marines who is paralysed from the
waist down after being shot through the spine in Vietnam in 1969.
When they returned home they called for the United States government
to pay compensation to the Vietnamese people.
In Ho Chi Minh City we
visited two hospitals which house the deformed children thought to
be victims of Agent Orange. Since the dumping on Vietnam of some 11
million gallons of Agent Orange there has been a huge increase in
the frequency of genetic malfunctions. Children have been born without
eyes, with twisted, mangled limbs, even without brains. In the main
hospital in Tay Ninh, a quarter of all births are miscarriages...
Hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, is thought to be one of the
many malformations attributable to Agent Orange. At the Tu Do Hospital,
doctors need to perform some 100 operations a year on hydrocephalic
babies. The operation required is a relatively simple one, frequently
performed in the West, using a special silicone tube. But the Vietnamese
doctors cannot carry out the operations because they have no silicone
tubes... The tubes are manufactured in the US and America has imposed
a complete embargo on exports to Vietnam.
(32)
John Kerry, a naval officer who was awarded several medals for his
efforts in Vietnam became active in the 'Vietnam Veterans Against
the War' organisation in the late 1960s. On 22nd April, 1971, Kerry
gave evidence to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Several months ago in Detroit
we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and
many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed
in South-East Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed
on a day to day basis with a full awareness of officers at all levels
of command.
They told stories that
at times they had personally raped, cut-off ears, cutoff heads, taped
wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the
power, cutoff limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,
razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle
and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the
countryside of South Vietnam...
I would like to talk to
you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men
carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't
know it yet but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of
millions of men who have been taught to deal and trade in violence.
(33)
In his book, To Heal a Nation, Joel Swerdlow wrote about the
building of the 'Vietnam Veterans' Memorial' in Washington. The memorial
contains the names of the 58,000 who died in the Vietnam War or are
still missing.
With more than 150,000 people in town for the dedication, Washington's
hotels, restaurants, and streets filled with vets. It was, said one
happy ex-GI, "one helluva party." After many beers, a veteran
said he had won the Medal of Honour but was afraid of how people would
react. To the cheers of a crowded bar, he opened his suitcase, took
out the medal with its blue ribbon, and put it on for the first time.
A man in a wheelchair
slowly pushed through another bar that was filled to capacity. At
first no one noticed him. Slowly, the noise faded, and then people
reached out to touch him.
A former medic sat in
a comer, crying. He pushed away all who tried to console him. "I
should have saved more, " he kept saying. "I should have
saved more."
On Saturday, November
13, Vietnam veterans marched down Constitution Avenue to the memorial
in one of the largest
processions the nation's capital had seen since John F. Kennedy's
funeral.
Following speeches by
dignitaries, the crowd sang "God Bless America," and paused
for a moment of silence. "Ladies and gentlemen," Jan Scruggs
said, "the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now dedicated."
The tightly packed mass
surged forward, crushing fences erected for crowd control. As thousands
of hands strained to touch names, a lone GI climbed to the top of
the wall, put a bugle to his lips and played.
All afternoon, all night,
the next day and the next and the next for an unbroken stream of months
and years; millions of Americans have come and experienced that frozen
moment.
The names have a power,
a life, all of their own. Even on the coldest days, sunlight makes
them warm to the touch... Perhaps by touching, people renew their
faith in love and in life, or perhaps they better understand sacrifice
and sorrow.
"We're with you,"
they say. "We will never forget."
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