When will they ever learn?

by Kathie MM

I cannot even say those words (“When will they ever learn?”) without Pete Seeger’s ballad, “Where have all the flowers gone,” flooding my brain. We had such optimism in the sixties, despite the vile and catastrophic assassinations of JFK , MLK,, and RFK, such hope that people would study war no more.  But the current era is more bloodthirsty and terrifying than ever as the government, the people behind the government, the arms industry, the NRA, and other war profiteers promote and benefit from deadly weapons and the sacking of lands far from our shores.

As is typical of bullies, those responsible for sending our young men and women to kill civilians (that’s who almost all the victims are) refuse to take responsibility for their devastating assaults on human beings and environments.  If the power brokers learned any lessons from Vietnam, it was how better to cover up dirty deeds and blame their victims for the violence unleashed upon them.

The Sacking of Falujah: A People’s History by Ross Caputi (a frequent guest author on Engaging Peace), Richard Hil, and  Donna Mulhearn takes you behind the scenes of a more recent major bloodletting by the U.S. The book  is not only engrossing, but dares to speak truth to power, to describe events as experienced at Falujah not only by the three authors but by dozens of Iraqis who suffered from the second invasion of Iraq and its endlessly deadly aftermath.

Reading this book will not only provide you with hitherto unavailable information about the sacking of Falujah by the US and “Coalition Forces” but also about the events that led up to it—events that the US government is not eager to share or take responsibility for—and the role of that sacking and related events in the rise of ISIS. It will get you thinking about sociocide and urbacide, and information wars. It may also motivate you to think more about our government’s current rhetoric concerning “enemies” in other parts of the world and its threats regarding the selected enemies of today’s regime. You know who the current targets are. Can you ask your Congresspeople to resist complicity?

To view a video of my interview with Ross Caputi about The Sacking of Falujah, go to https://youtu.be/H7KatbFAI6U and send us your comments on this and all engaging peace posts.

The Things We Carry Still. Part I

by Stefan Schindler

To get to the truth of a war story, find the square root of an absolute, then multiply by maybe.  That’s Tim Obrien’s formula for guessing the veracity of any tale told by Rat Kiley.  Kiley was a platoon buddy during the Vietnam War.  O’Brien declares: “It wasn’t a question of deceit.  Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”  Admirable; and understandable.  “This isn’t civilization.  This is Nam,” says O’Brien.  “The thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.”

These are quotes from O’Brien’s celebrated memoir, The Things They Carried.  Here’s another: “The land was haunted.  We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science.”  And another: “I’d pulled enough night guard to know how the fear factor gets multiplied as you sit there hour after hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul.”

O’Brien has a way with words.  Like the best of writers, he makes writing seem easy, even though it’s not.  I recall a poet saying: “It’s easy to write.  Just stare at a blank sheet of paper until droplets of blood form on your forehead.”

As with T. S. Eliot’s mixture of memory and desire in “The Wasteland,” O’Brien’s stories heat to a sizzle, then reach from the page to scorch your eyes.  Sometimes I think he channels Dylan.  For example: “You’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.”

It’s been said that in war, the first casualty is truth.  But there is a truth that can be said.  It is this: War is the ultimate obscenity.  It ranks right up there with slavery and rape.

What too often goes unnoticed, though, is that soldiers are almost always slaves to the stories they’ve been told by the spin-meisters of profit and power.  Such soldiers rape – and slash, burn, maim and kill – because their capacity for reason and conscience has been sucked into a vortex of patriotic idolatry.  Unaware they’ll be brutalized by their own brutality, they are sent to the killing fields by what Eliot calls the “hollow men” who rule from the heights of hubris.

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.  His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

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?”

 

When the Absurd Speaks Truth, Part 1

by Stefan Schindler

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  Bob Dylan – “Visions of Johanna”

Dylan’s line is quoted in Dispatches, Michael Herr’s memoir of America’s Indochina Holocaust, euphemistically called “The Vietnam War” so as to keep the American public perpetually oblivious to Laos and Cambodia being sucked into the maelstrom like chickens caught in the vortex of Jeremiah’s “whirlwind,” except that Laotians and Cambodians, like the Vietnamese, were men and women, and, as Muhammad Ali observed in the unveiling of The Peace Abbey’s “Memorial Stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War,” nine out of ten casualties in modern warfare are children.

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  What does this mean?  Michael Herr offers a hint when he follows Dylan’s poetic genius with a line easily comprehensible: “I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good.”

Vietnam has all too often been called the first war that America lost.  People who say this fail to recognize that all of America’s wars are bloody stripes on the flag of “the greatest country in the world”–– a country that, with each war fought, lost her heart and crucified her soul.

The Vietnam War was a march of folly from the start, but that didn’t become clear until the Tet Offensive in late January 1968.  “Anyway,” says Herr, “you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along.”

Herr was a journalist whose many months in Nam were indeed a horror.  “Talk about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me.”  Marching, muddy, hungry, shot at.  Too often too scared for words, but not immune to the sound of screams.  And when not in the field?  No relief from the stench and the heat.  “Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower.”

I once interviewed a vet who’d been a medic in Nam.  It was late at night.  I asked him what it was really like.  He leaned across the kitchen table, beer in hand, stared at me with eyes like the twin barrels of a shotgun, then said: “One minute in Vietnam could be an eternity in hell.”

Herr was there.  He knew.  He spent a lot of time with the grunts, humping booby-trapped trails that put bamboo spikes through the soles of boots and blew soldiers into trees.  Herr wonders: “Where are they now?  (Where am I now?)  I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.”

Inhale.  Exhale.  “Waiting for release, for peace, any kind of peace that wasn’t just the absence of war.”

And the Vietnamese?  “We napalmed off their crops and flattened their villages, and then admired the restlessness in their spirit.”

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  What does this mean?  Dylan knew, and Herr offers a clue.  “The belief that one Marine was better than ten Slopes saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off.  That belief was undying, but the grunt was not, and the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.”

Note from Kathie MM: Please don’t think of the Vietnam War/Indochina Holcaust, as ancient history, better off forgotten. The machine that perpetrated it is constantly on the prowl for new fodder and very effective at convincing people that  war is the answer to the fears they’ve ignited.  If you want to know who benefits from war, follow the money, and check back later for Part 2 of this post.  And while you’re online, search out peace and social justice candidates for all political offices.