Bob Kerrey’s Atrocity, the Crime of Vietnam and the Historic Pattern of US Imperialism
S. Brian Willson
Mekong Delta, 1969
My US Air Force Combat Security unit was dispatched to Binh Thuy on 7 March 1969, to fortify a Vietnamese controlled airbase a few miles northwest of Can Tho City along the Bassac river. This was in Phong Dinh province, about 100 miles southwest of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. I was the First Lieutenant in charge of this unit of nearly forty men. Tet 1969, though far less intense than the devastating Tet offensive of 1968, had been launched by the Viet Cong (VC) less than two weeks earlier, on 23 February. Everybody was on edge. Two days later, on 25 February, then-Lieutenant and now ex-US senator Bob Kerrey and six other Navy Seals (Sea–Air–Land forces) under his command committed an atrocity at Thang Phong, where as many as twenty-four villagers were gunned down, at least half of whom were women and children (see also the Introduction to this volume). Thang Phong lies near the South China Sea in Kien Hoa province, about 50 miles directly east of Can Tho.
During Tet 1968, the Delta, like most of South Vietnam, had been hit hard. Thirteen of the sixteen provincial capitals had been seriously penetrated by the VC. Binh Thuy airbase had received eighteen different attacks in February and March 1968, far more than the other ten airbases in South Vietnam, with the exception of Tan Son Nhut in Saigon, which was also hit eighteen times. The US response had been furious, especially against VC operations in Can Tho City, and in My Tho and Ben Tre in Kien Hoa province to the east, not far from Thang Phong. At that time, the New York Times (6 February 1968) reported the infliction of at least 750 civilian casualties in My Tho, 350 in Can Tho, and 2,500 in Ben Tre. Ben Tre had been so pulverized by US firepower that a US major infamously explained, ‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.’
Some months later, in December 1968, Operation ‘Speedy Express,’ conducted primarily by the Ninth Infantry Division, had begun sweeping missions designed to finish off VC units in the Delta, especially in the provinces of Kien Hoa and Vinh Binh. This operation was in full swing when I arrived. According to military historian, retired Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr., when Speedy Express had concluded operations in May 1969, there were nearly 11,000 ‘enemy’ casualties.
As a combat security officer, I had to acquaint myself quickly with intelligence reports on ‘enemy’ activity, and locations and types of friendly resources. My job was, in essence, to protect airplanes in between their bombing missions. Since the villages they were bombing had been identified as being in a ‘free fire zone,’ it was easy to rationalize destroying everything. On occasion, through ground observations, I witnessed the horrific aftermath of these bombing missions – villages with bodies of mostly young women, many children, and a few elderly strewn on the ground. I never saw any weapons in these virtually defenseless villages. The bombing of civilian population centers, which at first I thought must be a mistake, I later concluded was deliberate and systematic.
I had been in Vietnam only a short time before I began to sense that virtually everybody, other than Vietnamese business, political, and military leaders, was at least secretly hostile to the US presence, and alternately sympathetic with the Vietnamese struggle for independence from any outside political/military force. Though at first I did not want to believe this, it was increasingly confirmed by other experiences: discussions with other US Air Force personnel and members of the Vietnamese military, interactions with members of the US Army’s Ninth Infantry Division, conversations with numerous Vietnamese in the area, examination of Seventh Air Force bombing reports that conflicted with my own personal knowledge of bombings, and the reading of a history of US intervention written by two Cornell University professors (Kahin and Lewis, 1967).
After Tet 1968, the CIA Phoenix program had begun intense efforts to eliminate perceived political and military leadership in the VC. US air and ground forces had become much more indiscriminate in killing Vietnamese civilians while glibly designating most of them as VC. I had been briefed that three-quarters of South Vietnam had been designated by the US military command and local Vietnamese officials as a ‘free fire zone,’ meaning that virtually any villager in that vast area could be killed without question. Nonetheless – or perhaps as a result – in my continued visits to various villages northwest and northeast of Can Tho, there seemed little real support among villagers for the US and our South Vietnamese political/military ally.
Bob Kerrey, as leader of a Navy Seal team, was likely participating in Operation Speedy Express and/or the Phoenix assassination program. Many Navy Seal units were identified as ‘hunter–killer’ teams, and were especially skilled at infiltrating areas by sea in small boats or as frogmen. Their rigorous training explicitly prepared them for just such missions.
1954–65: US thwarts 1954 Geneva Accords, defies Vietnamese sovereignty and conducts illegal covert war
We in the US knew little or nothing about the Vietnamese people, their history, or their authentic sentiments. The Vietnamese had a long history of successfully resisting outside forces, no matter the numbers of their own losses. They fought the Chinese for nearly a thousand years, and then the French for a hundred. After the end of World War II, the French suffered nearly 175,000 casualties in their effort to restore their prewar colony, while the Vietnamese suffered perhaps more than a million dead in defending their independence.
The unilateral US intervention began in 1954, immediately following the humiliating French defeat. Our ignorance as US Americans, along with our intrinsic cultural racism and historic sense of superiority, produced a lawless, brutal use of force that knew virtually no limits when it came to violent assaults against the Vietnamese people and their culture. We troopers were simply guinea pigs! We did not realize the Vietnamese were prepared to defend their sacred independence at any cost. We did not even believe that the Vietnamese had the right to their independence.
The 21 July 1954 Geneva Agreement concluded the French war against the Vietnamese and legally promised them a unifying election, mandated to be held in July 1956. The US government knew that fair elections, in effect, meant a victory for revered Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. This was unacceptable. Thus, in June 1954, prior to the signing of the historic Agreement, the US began CIA-directed internal sabotage operations against the Vietnamese, while setting up puppet Ngo Dinh Diem (brought over to Vietnam from the US) as ‘our’ political leader. No elections were ever held. This set the stage for yet another war for Vietnamese independence – this time from unwanted US forces and their South Vietnamese puppets.
The extent of the US government’s interference with independence movements in Asia should not be underestimated. US National Security Council documents from 1956 declared that our ‘national security … would be endangered by Communist domination of mainland Southeast Asia.’ Secret military plans stated that ‘nuclear weapons will be used in general war and in military operations short of general war.’ By March 1961, the Pentagon top brass recommended sending 60,000 soldiers to western Laos accompanied by air power that included, if necessary, use of nuclear weapons to ensure that the Royal Laotian government would prevail against the popular insurgency being waged against it.
The covert operations intended to destabilize the Vietnamese independence movement were in direct violation of the Geneva Agreements. They were also in violation of the United Nations Charter and other international laws. This covert war lasted nearly eleven years until the overt invasion by US forces commenced on 8 March 1965. This invasion was also in violation of international laws, as well as the US Constitution, which requires a declaration of war by Congress prior to initiating acts of war.
1965–75: US moves to illegal overt intervention
For the ten years 1965–75, the US continued its lawless behavior, un-leashing forces that caused (and continue to cause) incomprehensible devastation in Vietnam:
•Eight million tons of bombs (four times the amount dropped by the US in all World War II) destroyed an area the size of the State of Maine, if laid crater to crater.
•US forces utilized 8 million additional tons of other kinds of ordnance.
•Nearly 400,000 tons of napalm, a totally indiscriminate incendiary weapon, was dropped on human targets.
•The callous identification of as much as three-quarters of South Vietnam as a ‘free fire zone’ justified the murder of virtually anyone found in thousands of villages in those vast areas.
•A historically unprecedented level of chemical warfare was practiced in the indiscriminate spraying of nearly 20 million gallons on one-seventh the area of South Vietnam. The lingering effects of chemical warfare poisoning continue to plague the health of adult Vietnamese (and ex-GIs) while causing increased birth defects. Samples of soil, water, food, and body fat of Vietnamese continues to the present day to reveal dangerously elevated levels of dioxin.
•Today Vietnamese officials estimate the continued dangerous presence of 3.5 million landmines and 300,000 tons of unexploded ordnance, leftovers from the war. Tragically, these munitions continue to explode when farmers and children accidentally detonate them in their work and play activities, and kill or injure several thousand every year. The Vietnamese report 40,000 people killed since 1975 by landmines and buried bombs alone. That means that every day four or five Vietnamese are killed due to US ordnance. The war against the Vietnamese continues.
Examination of US conduct during the war indicates violation of the United Nations Charter prohibiting unilateral or bilateral military interventions not sanctioned by the UN, the US constitutional requirement of a declaration of war, and rules for war conduct as outlined in its own army field manuals (incorporating the Nuremberg Principles – see below). In addition, US conduct in the war regularly violated the 1907 Hague Convention in respect to land wars and bombardment by naval forces, the 1949 Geneva Convention relating to protection of civilians, prisoners of war, and the wounded and sick, and the Nuremberg Principles as formulated by the International Law Commission in 1950 proscribing war crimes and crimes against humanity. A massive number of civilian murders and destruction of civilian infrastructures were achieved through ground actions, indiscriminate bombings, chemical defoliation, use of incendiary weapons and napalm, scorched-earth campaigns, forced transfers of civilians, use of gas, and regular utilization of mutilation and torture, among other methods. This shameful litany of crimes violated virtually every rule of war ever formulated.
It is now believed that the US and its allies killed as many as 5 million Southeast Asian citizens during the active war years. The numbers of dead in Laos and Cambodia remain uncounted, but as of 1971 a Congressional Research Service report prepared for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicated that over 1 million Laotians had been killed, wounded, and turned into refugees, with the figure for Cambodia estimated at 2 million. More than half a million ‘secret’ US bombing missions to Laos, beginning in late 1964, devastated entire populations and decimated ancient cultures. Estimates indicate that around 230,000 tons of bombs were dropped over northern Laos in 1968 and 1969 alone. Increasing numbers of US military personnel were added on Laotian ground in 1961. Land invasions of Laos occurred for two months in early 1969, and again for a week in early 1971. ‘Secret’ bombing of Cambodia had begun in March 1969. An outright land invasion of the country occurred from late April 1970 through the end of June, causing thousands of casualties. And the raging US covert wars in these countries did not finally cease until 14 August 1973, inflicting countless additional casualties. When the bombing in Cambodia finally ceased, the US Air Force had officially recorded dropping nearly 260,000 tons of bombs there. The total tonnage of bombs dropped in Laos over eight-and-a-half years exceeded 2 million.
The consensus now is that more than 3 million Vietnamese were killed (Herman and Chomsky, 2002; Karnow, 1984), with 300,000 additional missing in action and presumed dead (Mydans, 2000; Faas and Page, 1997; Franklin, 2000). In the process, the US lost nearly 59,000 of her own men and women, with about 2,000 additional missing, while four of her allies lost over 6,000 more. South Vietnamese military forces counted nearly 225,000 dead. All this carnage was inflicted to destroy the basic rights and capacity of the Vietnamese to construct their own independent, sovereign society. None of these people deserved to die in war. Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and US military grunts were all victims. All of these corpses were created because of a ‘cause’ that had been concocted by white male plutocrats in Washington, many of whom possessed Ph.D.s from prestigious universities. These politicians and their appointees, along with profit-making arms makers/dealers, desired, as did most of their predecessors extending far back in US history, to ensure the destruction of people’s democratic movements that threatened US hegemony over markets and resources – in this case those located in East Asia – and the profits to be derived therefrom. But perhaps never did a small country suffer so much from an imperial nation as the Vietnamese did from the United States.
Comparison of casualties
To grasp the nearly incomprehensible consequences to the Vietnamese society, it is instructive to reflect that during the US war against the Vietnamese, nearly one in ten, or 10 percent of Vietnam’s population of approximately 35 million, was killed. In addition, vast areas of territory were devastated by bombing and chemical warfare, and Vietnam’s infrastructure was largely destroyed.
This contrasts with one in 3,300, or 0.03 per cent of the US population, who needlessly died in the lawless intervention. What would be the effects on US society if we had suffered losses of 20 million, or 10 per cent of our population, in a war? Furthermore, how would it have affected us if vast regions of our country had been bombed and chemically defoliated, simply because we insisted on the right to be free from a foreign power intending to dominate and control us?
Vietnam was not an aberration
An honest examination of United States history shows that, unfortunately, violent intervention such as in Vietnam is not an aberration. The defining and enabling experience of US civilization was the holocaust perpetrated against millions of original inhabitants of the land (see Ward Churchill’s and Peter Dale Scott’s chapters in this volume). Native peoples living in thousands of villages and hunting regions were ruthlessly uprooted from their land base across the hemisphere. That act was followed by the kidnapping and transporting of millions of mostly Africans to the Americas to provide ‘free’ labor for building our original agricultural and mercantile system. Two-thirds of those originally seized in Africa perished while resisting arrest or during the deplorable conditions of transport to the coastal ports or across the Atlantic Ocean. This amounted to the second holocaust that underlies the foundation of US American civilization. This is an intrinsic part of our cultural ethos and karma, and is equally applicable to the other emergent Eurocentric nation-states in the Americas.
The historic record also reveals that the US has intervened militarily more than 400 times in more than 100 nations (Blechman and Kaplan, 1978; Congressional Research Service, 1993; Blum, 2000: chs 11, 17) to expand our control over global resources and markets – that is, expansion of resources and markets at gunpoint. In only five of those interventions did the Congress declare war as required by its constitution. As the body of international law unfolded, virtually all of these military incursions contravened its prohibitions. None of them (besides World War II) was predicated on any genuine concept of self-defense.1 Additionally, it is now known that the US has covertly intervened in a variety of destabilizing actions at least 6,000 times in over 100 countries since the end of World War II alone.2 All of these were gross criminal actions that violated a multitude of laws, both national and international.
How can we ignore this record? One of the principles now better understood is the perennial influence of the past. In other words, the past is always with us in the present. Lessons inherent in the history and evolving ecology of life’s processes need to be honestly acknowledged and incorporated as part of today’s wisdom. To mistakenly ignore these lessons risks almost certain repetition of previous injurious behaviors, with ever more severe consequences. As cultural historian Lewis Mumford has concluded, ‘Without intuitions and memories, without ancient cultural landmarks, the intelligence is enfeebled’ (Mumford, 1970: 75).
Historical precedents of imperial behavior
Gruesome human behavior is not unique to US Americans. There are a number of historical precedents and cultural beliefs that have justified slavery and dehumanizing treatment of ‘unfortunates.’ The term ‘civilization’ first took form under kingship, which infused itself with divine power. Thus, centralized power became an end in itself, and emerged as the chief identifying mark of ‘civilization.’ Lewis Mumford has summarized its chief features as human sacrifice, war, arbitrary inequalities in wealth and privilege, and slavery and forced labor for industrial, agricultural and military purposes. Mesopotamia and Indus civilizations (4000–1800 BC), Egypt (3500–2180 BC), China (1700–1050 BC), Greece (750–400 BC) and Rome (500 BC-400 AD), all had slave economies to varying degrees. The Roman Empire required elaborate schemes of rationalized exploitation to maintain its grip over vast and distant territories. Notable Greek and Roman philosophers condoned the cataloguing of certain persons as inferior to others, in order to build a ‘good’ life. By the end of the 1400s, slavery was endemic in parts of medieval European, Islamic, and African societies. The Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish had well-established slave trades.
When Columbus stumbled into the populated Caribbean in October 1492, he launched what was to become perhaps the most egregious and systematic destruction of indigenous societies ever known. A handful of small ‘advanced’ nation-states at the western extremity of Eurasia in 400 years brought within their political control many of the diverse peoples of the earth across five continents. Though the western hemisphere became known as the ‘New World,’ the exploration, colonialization, and outright conquering of indigenous and emerging national societies touched virtually every region of the globe. The Europeans believed they were bringing ‘blessings’ – their Western science and Christian faith – to the ‘savages’ and ‘subhumans.’
One of the most significant historic alterations of local economies and cultures occurred in the late Victorian period, especially the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This period saw many of the non-European peasant societies involuntarily integrated into a world economy. Essentially, European colonizers force-marched many of the world’s indigenous into the emerging global capitalist economy. Widespread production and export of cash crops, and extraction and export of natural resources for the benefit of elites both domestic and foreign, replaced subsistence farming and decentralized village life. This marked the beginning of the ‘Third’ World, and an era in which dramatic income and wealth disparities (the ‘development gap’) created a deeply entrenched, nearly irrevocable division of humanity into classes. In effect, this was the foundation of the ‘structural adjustment’ program which today has become our political/economic religion, and the forerunner of what we now call globalization.3
The special intensity and reach of Western and US imperialism
There is something striking about Western man, and the role the United States has played in asserting this Eurocentric model throughout the world. Novelist and historian Hans Koning has declared, ‘What sets the West apart is its persistence, its capacity to stop at nothing’ (Koning, 1991: 116). As Lewis Mumford summarizes, ‘Wherever Western man went slavery, land robbery, lawlessness, culture-wrecking, and the outright extermination of both wild beasts and tame men went with him’ (Mumford, 1970: 9).
Reading the accounts of early Puritans and white (male) settlers, founding fathers, US military officers, and countless politicians provides an explicit idea of the racist and arrogant thinking that possessed the founders of our ‘civilization.’ Captain John Smith of the Virginia colony in the early 1600s referred to the original inhabitants as ‘subanimals’ and ‘beasts’ worthy only of ‘extermination’ (Drinnon, 1990: 52, 55). Puritan leader John Endecott of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regularly ordered ‘death’ to the Pequot Indians (34, 51). The US founding document, the Declaration of Independence, refers to the original inhabitants as ‘merciless savages,’ and George Washington termed them ‘beasts of prey’ to be ‘destroyed’ (65, 99, 331). European settlers regularly called them ‘brutes’ or ‘vermin’ to be ‘destroyed’ (200 Years, 1973: 65). General William Tecumseh Sherman in the 1870s ordered ‘extermination’ as the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Indian problem’ (Fellman, 1995: 260; Drinnon, 1990: 329). It is highly interesting to note that Hitler’s ideas of concentration camps and genocide were partly inspired by his study of the United States’ policy of extermination of its indigenous population (Toland, 1976: 802).
The United States emerged as a world imperial power at the end of the Victorian period. This marked the beginning of an empire that would ultimately exceed all predecessors in scope, reach, and impact. The ‘Spanish–American’ war launched the US as a force in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and parts of Asia. By this time, US agricultural and manufacturing production had begun seriously to exceed its capacity for domestic consumption. Maintenance of US capitalist profitability demanded identifying, then securing, overseas markets. The European powers had already established the model for colonization. The United States would refine and expand it.
In his message to Congress in 1904, President Roosevelt, after having seized Panama by force from Colombia in 1903 on the grounds of the latter being ‘incapable of keeping order on the Isthmus,’ maintained that in ‘flagrant cases of wrongdoing’ by Latin American republics, the US had the right to exercise an ‘international police power’ over them. This came to be known as the ‘Big Stick’ policy, and justified increased intervention into Latin American affairs. As a significant extension of the original Monroe Doctrine first declared in 1823, it also became known as the Roosevelt Corollary. All in all, the US sent in the Marines on more than a hundred occasions into twenty-three Latin American countries, starting as early as 1831, usually citing as justification the need ‘to protect US interests and property.’ The policy continues.
By the time the US entered World War I, ‘progressive’ President Wilson had Marines stationed in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. During his tenure, Marines landed in Mexico (eleven times), Cuba (1917), and Panama (1918). Furthermore, in 1918 Wilson sent 13,000 US troops to aid the ‘White’ side of the Russian civil war in seeking to overthrow the revolution. (Some say the Cold War really began at this point.) Wilson had earlier discussed the need for overseas expansion as the new frontier to replace the continent. He stressed the need for markets ‘to which diplomacy and if need be power must make an open way…. Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down’ (Williams, 1972: 72). The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had become a justification for belligerent US political, military and economic intervention as nations became increasingly economically dependent upon the United States and its profiteers.
With the advent of aerial bombings prior to and during World War I, the number of civilians murdered increased dramatically. The bombing of civilian targets is believed to have first ocurred with firebombs dropped by the Italians on Tripoli in 1911, where news accounts reported that ‘Noncombatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.’ This crime preceded similar, more systematic bombings by Italy in Ethiopia in 1936–37 and by Germany in Guernica, Spain, in 1937.
In September 1918, US Army Colonel William J. ‘Billy’ Mitchell led a mass bombing attack of some 1,500 aircraft employed in the first largescale close air support of ground operations. This ultimately gave birth to the US love of air power, which, by the post-World War II period, would know no equal. The policy of mass extermination of civilians from the air had begun, and the US became active in such campaigns following the First World War. It used aerial bombings to support Marine ground actions in Haiti, 1919–20, and in Nicaragua, 1927–33, in efforts to rout native people resisting US occupation forces. In the process, it murdered countless civilians, always disregarding the cries of the people for due recognition. In 1920, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) investigated US war crimes in Haiti and concluded that 3,000 Haitians had been killed by air power and Marines. A decade later, thousands of Nicaraguans were killed defending their country from an occupying force of 12,000 US Marines saved by the ‘miracle of Marine air.’
The stage was set for the massive indiscriminate bombings of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Serbia/Kosovo. Any genuine concern for civilians virtually disappeared by the end of World War II. The use of biological warfare in northern Korea and adjacent areas of China in 1952 (Endicott and Hagerman, 1998), and the unprecedented use of chemical warfare in Vietnam from 1962 to 1971, took a countless toll on civilian populations as well. (It is important to remind ourselves that a central provision of international law is clearly enshrined in the Geneva Conventions: ‘The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack.’)
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and consequent erosion of the serious ‘threat’ posed to capitalism by the socialist model, Pax Americana became a unipolar international order. Historic US racism and ethnocentrism were further entrenched. The United States, effectively a plutocracy under the guise of a constitutional democracy, now oversees the activities of the world’s political and economic ‘leaders’ and profiteers. The result: a global economy that enriches a few at the expense of the vast majority and the health of the planet itself.
Tragically, we now face threats more serious than existed during the Cold War. The United States, as the world’s only superpower, is virtually able to negate any effective power the United Nations might have to ensure compliance with its own Charter and other international laws. Thus, one bully, armed to the teeth, can pretty much do as its plutocrats dictate, with no effective checks from outside political forces or institutions designed to ensure compliance with international law.
The extent and depth of the horrendous record of US behavior and treatment toward foreign civilians remains unrecognized to this day. Perhaps this pattern differs little from that of previous empires or imperial wannabes, such as Great Britain, Japan, and Germany. However, the US record of marauding over the past century, in so many countries and against so many indigenous societies, distinguishes it from previous imperial nation-states. No one knows how many people have been murdered and maimed by these aggressive (and lawless) actions, but the figure is in multiples of millions – enough to constitute a third foundational holocaust for the modern global order. British playwright Harold Pinter describes US foreign policy with the phrase, ‘Kiss my ass or I’ll kick your head in’ (Pinter, 1998: 216). This is a harsh description, but after a careful examination of the historic record it cannot be dispensed with as just crackpot talk.
Addiction to the privileged American Way of Life (AWOL) motivates the exaction of heavy demands upon Mother Earth and her citizens. As a nation, the US has just 4.5 per cent of the world’s population, yet insists on consuming anywhere from 25 per cent to nearly half of the world’s resources, depending on which asset is examined. For example, the US consumes slightly more than 25 per cent of the world’s oil production, but higher percentages of other critical resources. The US has nearly 500 passenger cars per 1,000 people, nearly six times the rate for the entire world’s population, consuming high percentages of the globe’s steel and rubber resources. People in the US consume paper at seventeen times the rate of those in the ‘developing’ world, and nearly six times the rate of the total world population.
In order to maintain, even expand, the luxuries of AWOL, and the profits derived therefrom, the United States must continually rationalize hegemonic measures to assure control over the globe’s resources, markets, and pool of cheap labor. Thus, we espouse the religion of ‘neoliberal’ globalization, the goal of which is to extend unfettered capitalism to every nook and cranny of the earth, commodifying virtually every aspect of life, while privatizing and deregulating national economies, and threatening the skein of life as it has unfolded for millions of years.
Healing as an antidote to our ‘forever war’
An honest reckoning with the readily comprehensible, though deeply painful, lessons of Vietnam offers the American nation an opportunity to step back from its long imperial history. Vietnam is and will remain our ‘forever war’ – unless we choose to heed its lessons. It is important to recognize that our ‘civilization’ has been built on three holocausts, facilitated by racism and arrogant ethnocentrism. With powerful economic interests now located in every region of the world, and a military might that assures protection of the profits and resources necessary to maintain the privileged AWOL, it is virtually impossible for the US earnestly to seek peace. That would require commitment to a fair and just allocation of global resources. Such commitment can only be born out of a radically transformed consciousness, one that recognizes the sacred interconnectedness of all life and the need for respectful mutual aid. Yet when examined thoughtfully, this may be the only rational choice available to us.
The now unipolar, Pax Americana mindset, if not arrested soon, will almost certainly ensure the continued destruction of cultures, national sovereignties, and ecosystems. The rapid extinction of species that the world is now experiencing, unprecedented in recorded history, is likely a foreshadowing of our own extinction.
We veterans who understand this grotesquely unfair reality can courageously choose to take responsibility for our actions, especially since our cowardly government, which made the intervention decisions, is sadly unlikely to do so. Regularly forgotten, for example, is that the Paris Peace Accords signed by the United States and Vietnamese governments on 27 January 1973, complemented by the letter signed by President Nixon on 1 February, promised more than $4 billion for healing the wounds of war and postwar reconstruction. The US shamelessly reneged on this promise, and the aid was never provided.
The yearning for healing is so deeply felt that some veterans have returned to Southeast Asia, often in small groups, to participate in a variety of humanitarian missions, setting an example for our wider society. These missions range from building health clinics, orphanages, and schools, to the distribution of desperately needed materials and supplies, and removal of unexploded land mines and other ordnance. Atonement has been an important theme to these veterans, who now know that the war was wrong and our role in it was personally unfortunate, even if this can be ascribed to our ignorance. It has become important to assuage our pain and repair deep psychic wounds, and those of the Vietnamese as well, to feel whole once again. These acts of restoration help veterans experience a global citizenship, an antidote to the feeling of being an isolated ‘American.’ These individuals have chosen to avail themselves of the lessons of the Vietnam experience to salvage healthy lives through earnest truth-seeking and reconciliation. It is through healing that thinking and feelings undergo radical changes – changes that can give birth to alternative visions of a sustainable society, ecology, and polity. The alternatives may be so radically different as to be hardly recognizable when compared with today’s pathological structures.
Bob Kerrey and his men killed for a massive Lie. I herewith offer a healing prescription for Senator Kerrey; other US souls still haunted by participation in that criminal war (or other wars) might consider something similar:
•First, Mr Kerrey, publicly return the Bronze Star you received for the killing of the civilians at Thang Phong. The medal needs to be renounced as drenched in the blood of the innocent people of that village.
•Second, travel to the village of Thang Phong in the Province of Kien Hoa to express your personal sorrow for the consequences of your actions, asking those people for forgiveness.
•Third, create a reparations or atonement fund, in cooperation with the Vietnamese people in that area, as a concrete and meaningful effort to repair in some way the harm done.
•And fourth, Mr Kerrey – perhaps the most important act for your own healing and for the healing of our entire nation – begin publicly teaching the authentic history of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese people: how the US sabotaged the 1956 unifying elections mandated by the 1954 Geneva Agreements; how it fabricated a puppet government not supported by the vast majority of the Vietnamese people; how it maintained its imposture through a series of incredible lies that put Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and US men and women in harm’s way, causing the needless death and maiming of millions. Thus you can educate US American society as to why so many civilians were murdered in confusion about who was VC or not, as the vast majority of Vietnamese were simply defending their rights to be free of unwanted outside forces. We US citizens would do no less if our own country was invaded.
It is true that every privileged power structure, extending back several millennia, has expended a large amount of resources to maintain its status, resisting any inkling of revolutionary ambitions to alter the formula of power. Cultural historians such as Lewis Mumford, Kirkpatrick Sale and the humane Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin suggest that efforts at largescale change have tended to support, perhaps naively, the very system they challenge – since they standardly accept the ideological premisses of the prevailing power complex, no matter what its name. This merely transfers power from one ruling class to another, leaving the overall mechanism intact, with all its inherent defects.
It is my belief that humanity is on the verge of a new dynamic, where profound changes may arise from small groups and local communities that are able to withdraw from the traditional power complex and experiment with decentralized alternatives. What other power can effectively negate a bullying superpower, other than a transformation of heart and soul, from the very people throughout the hinterland whose complicity is required to sustain the bully? The alternative must be to create a new, decentralized society without repressive and impersonal manifestations of power. A new, empowering consciousness can liberate men and women from the official agencies of power, while resurrecting locally autonomous cultures and economies that adhere to the principles of sustainable bio-regions.
The Zapatista revolt that erupted in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994 articulated something similar to this revived indigenous model, in response to ‘neoliberalism.’ The anti-globalization movement may also be showing signs of evolving in this way, promoting empowered localization as the alternative to grinding globalization. Not seeking to seize control of the power complex, which is viewed as increasingly suspect and unaccountable, the nonviolent radical model experiments with withdrawal from that complex, while quietly undermining it through lack of support. It seeks to restore empowerment to its more ancient source, the authority in humble human personalities and their intimate interaction with small, face-to-face communities and local ecosystems. Once this model becomes widespread, then a bio-regional model of federated cooperatives can emerge – one that abides by a truly sustainable, non-growth dynamic, respectful of the carrying capacity of Mother Earth.
Conclusion
Veterans are in a unique position to initiate courageous leadership in a national healing process. This requires speaking the truth about what we know, including the fact that all people and the earth are intimately interconnected. Our souls, and the soul of our country, are at stake. Furthermore, the future of peace in the world may rest on a profound reckoning on the part of US Americans: one that acknowledges that our historical imperial policies have been deeply wrong, and that we now wish to make amends for our crimes, our arrogance, and our ignorance. I urge all citizens, especially veterans from Vietnam and other wars, to find the courage to reveal our own, and our country’s, dark side; to disclose the incredible lies that our government has inflicted upon us, leading to the murder of millions of innocent human beings; and to experiment with a vision for life-affirming models that nurture small-scale, ecologically sustainable, truly democratic communities. The future of humankind may hinge on the results.
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