Category: Book reviews

When the Absurd Speaks Truth, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm

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

Posted on by kathiemm

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.

The Things They Carry Still

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

There’s nothing ambiguous about ambiguity.

Tim O’Brien on the Tao of Truth: “Find the square root

of an Absolute, then multiply by maybe.” You think you know,

but you don’t. A combat soldier knows. Vietnam at night.

Spooky, man, spooky. The enemy? Gremlins and ghosts.

Shadows can kill you, and they will. “The land was haunted.

We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws

of twentieth-century science.” Uncertainty the only certainty.

“You’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.”

What is sound? What is sight? Insects and heat.

No moon. No breeze. An ethical wasteland. “This isn’t civilization.

This is Nam.” Kiowa said: “The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient.”

Yeah, man, but where’s the rain? Wounded, yeah, I can take the pain.

But not this night shit. Dead bodies. Dead buddies. The smell.

Sweat burning the eyes. And yet, there it is: the immutable inscrutable.

It waits. For one small slip. “The thing about remembering

is that you don’t forget.” I don’t know. You don’t know.

The combat soldier knows. Always the same: hurry up and wait.

“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.”

Note from Kathie MM: Perpetual thanks to Tim O’Brien for making the deadliness of war come alive, and thanks to Stefan Schindler for sharing some of O’Brien’s words so poetically.  Only you can end the cycle of endless war because you are the only ones who do not profit from it.  Beware the military industrial complex.  Check out political candidates to find out whose pockets they are in.  Register to vote if you have not done so already and help others register. Now is the hour.

I Pray Daily to Awaken from the Nightmare of History (James Joyce) Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm
Mark Twain. In the public domain.

by Stefan Schindler

During America’s conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: “America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”

More recently, Martin Luther King reminded us: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war – these four always go together.” To these four we should also add the pervasive presence of political sophistry, now culminating in the tragic triumph of the Reagan counter-revolution against The Spirit of The Sixties.

Masters of mind control, the puppeteers at the apex of world power continue to steer the planet toward economic collapse, ecological apocalypse, and nuclear holocaust. Decades ago, Noam Chomsky published an essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” to address these questions, thus echoing Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. In Orwell’s words: “History is more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

The reason we are now collectively sliding back toward medieval barbarism – supported by evangelical voters of whom Jesus is ashamed – is simple. In Michael Parenti’s words: “The rich are never satisfied. They want it all. If you know that, and nothing else, you still know more than all those people who know everything else, but not that.”

Recalling Plato’s cave parable, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Chomsky adds the Socratic twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” And the problem is exacerbated by the moral and intellectual cowardice of most teachers in American public, private, and higher education, dazed and confused by their own historical illiteracy, and unable to comprehend George Santayana’s prescient warning that “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

When perpetual kindness is met with constant and increasing cruelty, it’s time for some righteous ferocity. Even Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple; and he likely did it with a bull-whip, since he knew that merely saying “please” was utterly futile. Yes, peace begins with us; and peace and justice sometimes require a ferocious roar, like the late-life speeches of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

To paraphrase Michael Parenti: It is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

As Victor Wallis notes in his book Red-Green Revolution, the long overdue and most effective solution to our social and global crisis is the merger of resistance movements into a unified force, because this is what it will take to overcome the lunacy of those in power.

America desperately needs a news media no longer subservient to the dominant corporate elite; just as it desperately needs a civic discourse informed by informed citizens. Meanwhile, it is well to remember that individual innocence is no protection from collective responsibility.