When the Absurd Speaks Truth, Part 2

by Stefan Schindler

American belief in American superiority was, and remains, such an elephantiastical delusion – “a cross-fertilization of ignorance” – that most of what politicians, the military and the mainstream media say to the American people about the purpose and process of American war-making was, and remains, “psychotic vaudeville.”

Michael Herr did not have to be in Vietnam from 1967 through 1968, but he chose to go; and his memoir, Dispatches, is a scorching dispatch from death. “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding.”

Bleary soldiers and sweat-stained reporters “were all studying the same thing, and if you got killed you couldn’t graduate.”

Combat soldiers in Vietnam, mostly drafted, uniformly thought that correspondents were crazy for choosing to be there. And yet, for the most part, there was enormous respect on both sides. Living and dying together, in the worst of all possible worlds, made for some mighty fine tenderness in between the horrors of combat, and often in the midst of it.

…………………………………………………………………………

“Oh man, you got to be kidding me. You guys asked to come here?”

“Sure”

“How long do you have to stay?”

“As long as we want.”

“Wish I could stay as long as I want,” the Marine called Love Child said. “I’d been home las’ March.”

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“Las’ March.”

…………………………………………………………………………

Robert “Blowtorch” Komer was chief of the rural pacification program. “If William Blake had ‘reported’ to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.”

“There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”

“Stay cool,” “good luck,” “right on,” “keep your shit together, motherfucker” – there were a thousand ways to say goodbye when parting, and it happened every time. Most muttered the words. Some just gave you the look. But it was always the same. “It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’”

1968.“The death of Martin Luther King intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done.” I’ll leave it to you to figure that one out. Just think race relations, then and now.

By the end of 1968, the lies and lunacy of the war fused so completely with heroin addiction and racial tension that one could not speak truthfully of an effective American fighting force. Despite President Nixon’s continuation of the war for another five years, the American army in Vietnam was disintegrating.

Nixon took credit for ending the war, but soldiers in revolt had already made that decision, no longer willing to fight and die for a parasitic nightmare conjured into being by men who thought themselves independent, invulnerable, god-like, better than the rest of us, and for whom now, even today, we must not cease to pray, in the hope that they will come down off of their throne, bring the troops home, leave others alone, and join the community of the sane and decent.

Note from KMM: What similarities do you see between circumstances in the US during the Vietnam/Indochina war and the US today? Do you get any inspiration from the glimpse Stefan has provided into America’s “Vietnam War” as seen through the eyes of Michael Herr? Do you think, as Stefan and others do, that America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute a Second Vietnam War (this time in the Middle East) — equally lie-launched, unjust, morally reprehensible, and self-defeating? For further edification, see Stefan’s short, illustrated, reader-friendly, paperback book: America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War and  Nick Turse’s book: Kill Anything that Moves. Also think about what drones and nuclear weapons can do today in the wrong hands–and think very, very carefully about who the wrong hands are if what we want is a world of peace, a world of social justice, a world. Finally, ask yourself this question: “What can I do in November to help end today’s and tomorrow’s Vietnam wars?”

 

Investing in Moral Repair, Part 1, by Ross Caputi*

I read Nancy Sherman’s book Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers (2015) as a veteran of the US-led occupation of Iraq and as a board-member of the Islah Reparations Project. The intuitive answer to my own moral injury was to bring reparations to the people I helped hurt, and that has been my life for the past decade. For that reason, Nancy Sherman’s notion of “moral repair”—“repair” being the root word in “reparations”—was immediately attractive to me.

Lieutenant General (Dr.) James M. Dubik notes in the foreword that one of this book’s most important contributions is an expansion of our understanding of the jus post bellum beyond discussions of ending war justly.

Drawing on her background in ancient philosophy, particularly the stoics, and her training in psychoanalysis, Sherman describes for us with impressive clarity the emotional worlds of veterans and all the what-ifs and should-haves that anguish them. She then makes a persuasive case for extending our notion of post war responsibility from being the task of government to the duty of individual citizens, assigning them an essential role in the healing process of our veterans.

Sherman advances two main arguments in this book: That civilians have a responsibility to veterans, a responsibility that is grounded in their causal contribution to starting and facilitating war—through voting, paying taxes, participating in public debate, and lobbying—and, hence, to sending our armed service members into harms way. And that moral injury is a poorly understood, under-treated condition that veterans suffer from upon returning home. The conclusion is that civilians have a responsibility to engage with veterans upon their return, because veterans need a sympathetic and dependable community to return to. Sherman sees her book as a convocation, as “a manifesto for how to engage in moral repair, one on one, with individual service members and veterans so that we can begin to build a new kind of integrated community” (19).

She believes that two main obstacles are preventing the sort of communion between civilians and veterans that she advocates. The first is the “gaping disconnect between those who wear the uniform and those who don’t” (18). And the second is shallow gratitude, which is expressed most clearly in the ritualistic “Thank you for your service.” The “military-civilian gap” refers to what active duty service members and veterans perceive as the relative normality of civilian life during war time, and the lack of understanding amongst the general population of what veterans have experienced abroad (29). However, there are several scholars who argue for the opposite, that civilian life is being increasingly militarized. One such argument comes from Nick Turse in his The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (2008). But Sherman takes it on assumption that there is in fact a military-civilian gap without arguing for it or addressing the arguments against it.

*This review by Engaging Peace Board member Ross Caputi is reprinted from the American Book Review, Volume 36, Number 5, July/August 2015.

Ross is currently on the Board of Directors of ISLAH. He is also a graduate student and a writer. In 2004, he was a US Marine in the US-led occupation of Iraq. His experience there, in particular his experience during the 2nd siege of Fallujah, compelled him to leave the US military and join the anti-war movement. His activism has focused on our society’s moral obligation to our victims in Iraq, and to the responsibility of veterans to renounce their hero status in America.