The Devastation We Inflict
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As long as we occupy Iraq in some fashion, that Vietnam = Iraq analogy will simply never go away, however much it may be argued about and however many writers (including this one) point out the obvious, glaring differences between the two wars and the two moments. But none of this matters. Something deep and essential and American remains familiarly unsettling across the two eras, no more so, it seems, than for those who actually fought in Vietnam. When it comes to Vietnam veterans, the Vietnam analogy naturally comes alive in a special way -- as in the case of a spate of letters that arrived in the Tomdispatch email box after the site posted a piece by Michael Schwartz entitled A Formula for Slaughter, The American Rules of Engagement from the Air. Schwartz focused on an incident in Baiji, a small town about 150 miles north of Baghdad. The cameras on an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flying over the town spotted three men who might have been planting a roadside explosive. The men seem to flee into a nearby house. Navy F-14s were then called in to strafe the house with cannon fire and drop a "precision guided munition," presumably a 500-pound bomb on it. The attack, according to reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post, left 12-14 members of a single Iraqi family, who happened to be living there, dead. Schwartz went on to examine the nature of the brutal American "rules of engagement" under which this attack was allowed and, in that context, considered the Bush administration's draw-down strategy in Iraq which involves relying on the ever escalating use of airpower. Schwartz concluded: "The new American strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, is actually a formula for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians."
As it happened, this piece spurred powerful memories in a number of Vietnam veterans who wrote vivid e-responses -- striking enough to me that I chose two of them to post below. Wade Kane, once a helicopter door gunner and crew chief, wrote in from Crescent City, Florida, as did George Hoffman, a former medic, from Lorain, Ohio, which he describes as being "thirty miles west of Cleveland, in the heart of the industrial rust belt, and my apartment has a scenic view of the smokestacks and the steel mill." Both in their accounts give the Vietnam analogy painful meaning.
The Devastation We Inflict
Two Letters from Vietnam Vets on "Collateral Damage" in IraqWade Kane writes:
Dear Tom,
Although I'm sure we occasionally execute some innocent person after years on Death Row, we as a nation go to great lengths not to execute any innocents. Only the worst of murderers seem to reach death row. So it seems quite ironic that we accept seeing some men apparently planting a bomb on the side of a road in Iraq via a video from a Predator drone and, using that information, decide to drop a 500-pound bomb on a house where they might be hiding, a house where we don't have a clue if there are other people.
Killing innocent women and children is okay, "just" collateral damage? If this is "okay," then why wasn't what Lt. Calley did in Vietnam okay? Similarly, why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki okay, but My Lai wasn't? Somehow, when our soldiers shoot innocents at close range we are appalled, but when it is done via bombs or artillery it's "okay."
At about the same time My Lai occurred, I was flying as a crew chief/gunner on a Chinook [helicopter]. Passing a small village I thought I heard a single shot directed at my helicopter. Or maybe it was just "blade pop." Looking into the village, I could see women and children in the streets in what I'd call a "pastoral scene." I elected not to "return fire," though by my unit's rules of engagement I could have done so. About an hour later we happened to fly past that village again. There was no one in sight, but there were numerous bomb craters in the rice paddies and where homes had been. My guess is that someone else received fire, or thought they received fire, returned fire, and the pilots called for an air strike. I doubt any of the people in the village had time to flee from the attack. Never ever have I heard anything about that event, just My Lai...
I'm not guiltless. At about the same time, flying low level -- like 20 feet AGL [Above Ground Level] at 140 mph -- we passed a family tending a tapioca field. As we came by, a young boy of 12 or so picked up his hoe and pointed it at us like a weapon. I tried to swing my M-60 around and shoot him, but we were going too fast. At the time, I would have felt it was a good shoot as he was "practicing" shooting us down. Now, with young sons of my own, I'm appalled I could have been so callous.
People here got really worried about a flashlight at a Starbucks (which might have been a bomb). Had it been a bomb, which it wasn't, it would have weighed about 1/500th of what we routinely drop in residential neighborhoods in Iraq. It's like most people don't seem to realize what devastation we inflict there on a frequent basis. Today, for example, someone I know sent me some "feel good pictures" about our troops in Iraq. You know: old ladies holding up "Thanks, Mr. Bush" signs, smiling kids. Pictures she said that "just don't make the news." For "don't make the news," how about some pictures of kids that our bombs have eviscerated? Pictures of the sort that are found in Where War Lives, a Photographic Journal of Vietnam by Dick Durrance (intro by Ron Kovic).
We should be the bright light to the world, spending our tax monies on cures for malaria, not on killing innocents.
Have we no shame?
From the bottom of my heart I wish to thank those who, like yourself, are trying to bring an end to this war madness.
Wade Kane
Comments:
The War was a mistake from the get go. But, the United States as well as other nations has always looked over into their neighbors yard like in the case of the Cherokee and Navajo Nation and decided I want what you got the mighty dollar is tied into this war. When Our Nations leaders have forgotten one thing The Middle East put the "W"in the word War. We are fighting a people who know what fighting is and just because we have the greatest technology does not mean where the Superior- the Inferior as always shown their Superiority to their masters.Posted by:Julius CaesarNovember 20, 2007 2:11:45 PMRespond ^