The Plot to Kill King
Page 44
I said, “I’m more interested in how you responded.”
He said, “I told him that I was going to meet with you next week, and if we were convinced with what you had to say, we were going to publish—and give the President my best regards.”
Look decided to publish my work, but in the interim, Bill met with New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, and was shaken by Garrison’s evidence of the involvement of the CIA in the assassination of John Kennedy.
Right after the Garrison meeting, he called Bob Kennedy around 1:00 a.m., and Bob confirmed the conclusion, but said he would have to get to the White House in order to open up the case.
Bill Atwood had a heart attack about three hours later, around 4:00 a.m., and left Look.
Needless to say, neither my piece nor Garrison’s were published, and the associate editor, Chandler Brossard, who brought us to Atwood, was let go.
People with courage and independence like Atwood increasingly became rare in the corporate, mainstream media world, and now, nearly half a century later, are virtually nonexistent.
The Oligarchy’s media ascendency has been witness to Democracy’s demise.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
Chronological Notes of Historical Meetings
APPENDIX B
Ramparts Magazine—The Children of Vietnam
As human beings, we sometimes are confronted with experiences which render us substantively different individuals than we were prior to exposures.
Vietnam had this effect upon me. It was soul shattering—first, because of what was done to those innocents, and secondly because we, the American people and our tax dollars, caused it under the self-serving lies and greed which underlay the atrocities. Virtually every war crime imaginable was committed against this ancient people and their children.
These victims are embedded in my being. Dr. King wept when he was confronted with the images, but the history and its narrative, which moved him to oppose the war in 1967, should be remembered, and is without doubt, a part of his legacy.
Reprinted from the January Issue of RAMPARTS Magazine
Additional reprints available from RAMPARTS, 301 Broadway,
San Francisco, California 94133
Reprints: “Children of Vietnam”
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The
Children
of
Vietnam
Photographs and Text by William F. Pepper
Preface by Dr. Benjamin Spock
A MILLION CHILDREN have been killed or wounded or burned in the war America is carrying on in Vietnam, according to the estimate of William Pepper. Not many of them even get to hospitals, which are few and far between, but when they do, they may lie three in a bed or on newspapers on the floor. Flies are in the wounds. Even such simple equipment as cups and plates are in short supply. Materials for the adequate treatment of burns—gauze, ointments, antibiotics and plasma—are usually non-existent. This contrasts with the incredible speed and efficiency with which American troops napalmed by mistake are given elaborate first aid while being lifted out of the battlefield and then flown to a Texas hospital for treatment.
When Terre des Hommes, a Swiss humanitarian organization, asked for American government assistance in flying burned and wounded children to Europe for repair, our officials refused. With crocodile tears they explained children are unhappy when separated from their families. The fact is that a third of all Vietnamese children in institutions have already lost both parents or been abandoned.
Can America, which manufactures and delivers the efficient napalm that causes deep and deforming burns, deny all responsibility for their treatment?
Many American physicians are now volunteering to treat the children if they are brought to America. But citizens must be asked to pay the bill for transportation and hospitalization. They will also have to persuade our government to allow the children to be brought here.
[The Children of Vietnam]
WILLIAM F. PEPPER, executive director of the New Rochelle Commission on Human Rights, instructor in Political Science at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and director of that college’s Children’s Institute For Advanced Study and Research, spent between five and six weeks this spring (1966) in Vietnam as a freelance correspondent accredited by the Military Assistance Command in that country, and by the government of Vietnam.
During that period, in addition to traveling, he lived in Sancta Maria Orphanage in Gia Dinh Province and in the main “shelter area” in Qui Nhon, for a shorter period of time. His main interests were the effects of the war on women and children, the role of the American voluntary agencies there and the work of the military in civil action.
His visits took him to a number of orphanages—among them: An Lac, Go-Vap, Don Bosco, Hoi Duc Anh, Bac Ai—hospitals: Cho-Ray, Holy Family, Phu My, Saigon-Cholon (central hospital) and shelters in Saigon, Cholon, Qui Nhon and outer Binh Dinh.
Mr. Pepper interviewed, frequently, the following Cabinet ministers of South Vietnam: Dr. Nguyen Ba Kha, Minister of Health; Dr. Tran Ngoc Ninh, Minister of Education; Mr. Tran Ngoc Lieng, Minister of Social Welfare; Dr. Nguyen Thuc Que, High Commissioner for Refugees.
In addition, he conferred with the leaders of the Voluntary Agency Community and the USAID Coordinator for Refugee Affairs, Mr. Edward Marks, as well as the USAID child welfare specialist, Mr. Gardner Monroe, with Mademoiselle E. La Mer of UNICEF and Mr. Pierre Baesjous of UNESCO.
As Mr. Pepper makes clear, by far the majority of present refugees in South Vietnam have been rendered homeless by American military action, and by far the majority of hospital patients, especially children, are there due to injuries suffered from American military activities. The plight of these children and the huge burden they impose upon physical facilities has been almost totally ignored by the American people.
—From remarks before the Senate of the United States, August 22, 1966, by the Hon. Wayne Morse.
The
Children of
Vietnam
FOR COUNTLESS THOUSANDS OF CHILDREN in Vietnam, breathing is quickened by terror and pain, and tiny bodies learn more about death every day. These solemn, rarely smiling little ones have never known what it is to live without despair.
They indeed know death, for it walks with them by day and accompanies their sleep at night. It is as omnipresent as the napalm that falls from the skies with the frequency and impartiality of the monsoon rain.
The horror of what we are doing to the children of Vietnam—”we,” because napalm and white phosphorus are the weapons of America—is staggering, whether we examine the overall figures or look at a particular case like that of Doan Minh Luan.
Luan, age eight, was one of two children brought to Britain last summer through private philanthropy, for extensive treatment at the McIndoe Burns Center. He came off the plane with a muslin bag over what had been his face. His parents had been burned alive. His chin had “melted” into his throat, so that he could not close his mouth. He had no eyelids. After the injury, he had had no treatment at all—none whatever—for four months.
It will take years for Luan to be given a new face (“We are taking special care,” a hospital official told a Canadian reporter, “to make him look Vietnamese”). He needs at least 12 operations, which surgeons will perform for nothing; the wife of a grocery-chain millionaire is paying the hospital bill. Luan has already been given eyelids, and he can close his mouth now. He and the nine-year-old girl who came to Britain with him, shy and sensitive Tran Thi Thong, are among the very few lucky ones.
There is no one to provide such care for most of the other horribly maimed children of Vietnam; and despite growing efforts by American and South Vietnamese authorities to conceal th
e fact, it’s clear that there are hundreds of thousands of terribly injured children, with no hope for decent treatment on even a day-to-day basis, much less for the long months and years of restorative surgery needed to repair ten searing seconds of napalm.
When we hear about these burned children at all, they’re simply called “civilians,” and there’s no real way to tell how many of them are killed and injured every day. By putting together some of the figures that are available, however, we can get some idea of the shocking story.
Nearly two years ago, for instance—before the major escalation that began in early 1965—Hugh Campbell, former Canadian member of the International Control Commission in Vietnam, said that from 1961 through 1963, 160,000 Vietnamese civilians died in the war. This figure was borne out by officials in Saigon. According to conservative estimates, another 55,000 died during 1964 and 100,000 in each of the two escalated years since, or at least 415,000 civilians have been killed since 1961. But just who are these civilians?
In 1964, according to a UNESCO population study, 47.5 per cent of the people of Vietnam were under 16. Today, the figure is certainly over 50 per cent. Other United Nations statistics for Southeast Asia generally bear out this figure. Since the males over 16 are away fighting—on one side or the other—it’s clear that in the rural villages which bear the brunt of the napalm raids, at least 70 per cent and probably more of the residents are children.
In other words, at least a quarter of a million of the children of Vietnam have been killed in the war.
IF THERE ARE THAT MANY DEAD, using the military rule-of-thumb, there must be three times that many wounded—or at least a million child casualties since 1961. A look at just one hospital provides grim figures supporting these statistics: A medical student, who served for some time during the summer at Da Nang Surgical Hospital, reported that approximately a quarter of the 800 patients a month were burn cases (there are two burn wards at the hospital, but burned patients rarely receive surgical treatment, because more immediate surgical emergencies crowd them out). The student, David McLanahan of Temple University, also reported that between 60 and 70 per cent of the patients at Da Nang were under 12 years old.
What we are doing to the children of Vietnam may become clearer if the same percentages are applied to the American population. They mean that one out of every two American families with four children would be struck with having at least one child killed or maimed. There is a good chance, too, that the father would be dead as well. At the very least, he is probably far from home.
When Wisconsin Congressman Clement Zablocki returned from Vietnam early in 1966, he reported that “some recent search and destroy operations have resulted in six civilian casualties to one Viet Cong.” Though Secretary of Defense McNamara challenged the figure, Zablocki, relying on American sources in Saigon, stuck by them, and sticks by them today. What he didn’t say is that in any six “civilian casualties,” four are children.
McNamara, too, is sometimes more candid in private. A colleague of mine attended a private “defense seminar” at Harvard in mid-November, and heard the defense secretary admit, during a question period, that “we simply don’t have any idea” about either the number or the nature of civilian casualties in Vietnam.
Perhaps because we see them only one at a time, Americans seem not to have felt the impact of our own news stories about these “civilian casualties.” A URI story in August, 1965, for instance, described an assault at An Hoa:
“I got me a VC, man. I got at least two of them bastards.” The exultant cry followed a ten-second burst of automatic weapon fire yesterday, and the dull crump of a grenade exploding, underground. The Marines ordered a Vietnamese corporal to go down into the grenade-blasted hole to pull out their victims. The victims were three children between 11 and 14—two boys and a girl. Their bodies were riddled with bullets…. “Oh, my God,” a young Marine exclaimed. “They’re all kids …” Shortly before the Marines moved in, a helicopter had flown over the area warning the villagers to stay in their homes.
In a Delta province, New York Times correspondent Charles Mohr encountered a woman whose both arms had been burned off by napalm. Her eyelids were so badly burned that she could not close them, and when it was time to sleep, her family had to put a blanket over her head. Two of her children had been killed in the air strike that burned her. Five other children had also died.
“They’re all kids,” wrote Veteran Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, describing in September a battle at Lin Hoc. There, in a deep earth bunker below the fury of a fierce battle, a child was born. Within 24 hours the sleeping infant awakened—and choked on smoke seeping down into the bunker. According to Arnett, the GI’s had begun “systematically” to burn the houses to the ground, and were “amazed” as hundreds of women, children and old men “poured from the ground.” For the baby, how-ever, it was already too late.
Another Times correspondent, Neil Sheehan, described in June the hospital at Cantho, in the Delta region where fighting is relatively light. The civilians, he said,
come through the gates into the hospital compound in ones, twos and threes. The serious cases are slung in hammocks or blankets…. About 300 of the 500 casualties each month require major surgery. The gravely wounded, who might be saved by rapid evacuation, apparently never reach the hospital but die along the way.
A few months before, Dr. Malcom Phelps, field director of the American Medical Association Physician Volunteers for Vietnam, put the monthly figure for civilians treated at Cantho at about 800. That means at least 400 children, every month, in just that one hospital.
New Jersey doctor Wayne Hall, who worked at the Adventist Hospital in Saigon (he went at his own expense, as a substitute missionary surgeon), reported that over-crowding, even in this three-story Saigon institution, is a “chronic condition.” No one was ever turned down: “When there were no more beds and cots, they were put on benches; when there were no more benches, they were put on the floor. Some were lying on a stone slab in the scrub room—delivery cases.” Babies born on a stone slab. “Of course,” Dr. Hall added, “this is the extreme—but it’s a common extreme.”
AT THE OTHER END OF THE COUNTRY, in Northern I Corps, David McLanahan reported that during last summer, the 350-bed Da Nang Surgical Hospital never had fewer than 700 patients. McLanahan, one of five medical students in Vietnam on an intern program sponsored by USAID, said that Vietnamese patients frequently would not talk freely to him, but that they told Vietnamese doctors and medical students enough about how they got hurt so that it was possible to estimate that at least 80 per cent of the injuries were inflicted by American or South Vietnamese action.
My first patient [McLanahan said] was a lovely 28-year-old peasant woman who was lying on her back nursing a young child. The evening before, she had been sitting in her thatched hut when a piece of shrapnel tore through her back transecting the spinal cord. She was completely paralyzed below the nipple line. We could do nothing more for her than give antibiotics and find her a place to lie. A few mornings later she was dead, and was carried back to her hamlet by relatives. This was a particularly poignant case, but typical of the tragedy seen daily in our emergency room and, most likely, in all of the emergency rooms in Vietnam.
Most of McLanahan’s patients, he said, were “peasants brought in from the countryside by military trucks. It was rare that we got these patients less than 16 hours after injury. All transportation ceases after dark. A small percentage of war casualties are lucky enough to make it to the hospital.”
Cantho, Saigon, Da Nang, Quang Ngai—it is by putting together reports such as these that the reality of extrapolated figures becomes not only clear but plainly conservative. A quarter of a million children are dead; hundreds of thousands are seriously wounded. There must be tens of thousands of Doan Minh Luans.
Manufacturer Searle Spangler, American representative for the Swiss humanitarian agency Terre des Hommes, describes what his agency has found to be the patt
ern when children are injured in remote villages: “If he’s badly ill or injured, of course, he simply won’t survive. There is no medical care available. Adults are likely to run into the forest, and he sometimes may be left to die. If they do try to get him to a hospital, the trip is agony—overland on bad roads, flies, dirt, disease, and the constant threat of interdiction by armed forces.” McLanahan says that virtually every injury that reaches the hospital at Da Nang is already complicated by serious infection—and describes doctors forced to stop during emergency surgical operations to kill flies with their hands.
Torn flesh, splintered bones, screaming agony are bad enough. But perhaps most heart-rending of all are the tiny faces and bodies scorched and seared by fire.
Napalm, and its more horrible companion, white phosphorus, liquidize young flesh and carve it into grotesque forms. The little figures are afterward often scarcely human in appearance, and one cannot be confronted with the monstrous effects of the burning without being totally shaken. Perhaps it was due to a previous lack of direct contact with war, but I never left the tiny victims without losing composure. The initial urge to reach out and soothe the hurt was restrained by the fear that the ash-like skin would crumble in my fingers.
IN QUI NHON TWO LITTLE CHILDREN—introduced to me quietly by the interpreter as being probably “children of the Viet Cong”—told of how their hamlet was scorched by the “fire bombs.” Their words were soft and sadly hesitant in coming, but their badly burned and scarred bodies screamed the message. I was told later that they evinced no interest in returning to their home and to whatever might be left of their family.