On killing

by Unknown

  They were teenagers leading teenagers in a war of endless, small-unit operations, trapped together in a real-world reenactment of The Lord of the Flies with guns, and destined to internalize the horrors of combat during one of the most vulnerable and susceptible stages of life.

  The "Dirty" War

  Simultaneously everyone leveled his weapon at him and fired.

  "Jesus Christ!" somebody gasped behind me as we watched his body reverse course back toward the trees; chunks of meat and 266 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

  bone flew through the air and stuck to the huge boulders. One of our rounds detonated a grenade the soldier carried, and his body smashed to the ground beneath a shower of blood. . . .

  The young Viet Cong was a good soldier, even if he was a communist. He died for what he believed in. He was not a gunner for Hanoi, he was a VC. His country was not North Vietnam, he was South Vietnamese. His political beliefs did not coincide with those of the Saigon government, so he was labeled an enemy of the people. . . .

  A young Vietnamese girl appeared out of nowhere and sat down next to one of the dead VC. She just sat there staring at the pile of weapons, and slowly rocking herself back and forth. I couldn't tell if she was crying, because she never once looked over at us.

  She just sat there. A fly crawled along her cheek, but she paid no attention to it.

  She just sat there.

  She was the 7-year-old daughter of a Viet Cong soldier, and I wondered if she had been conditioned to accept death and war and sorrow. She was an orphan now, and I wondered if there were confusion in her mind, or sadness, or just an emptiness that no one could understand.

  I wanted to go over and comfort her, but I found myself walking down the hill with the others. I never looked back.

  — Nick Uhernik

  "Battle of Blood"

  At a Vietnam Vets Coalition meeting in Florida, one vet told me about his cousin, w h o was also a vet, w h o would only say: " T h e y trained me to kill. They sent me to Vietnam. They didn't tell me that I'd be fighting kids." For many, this is the distilled essence of the horror of what happened in Vietnam.

  The killing is always traumatic. But when you have to kill women and children, or when you have to kill men in their homes, in front of their wives and children, and when you have to do it W H A T H A V E W E D O N E T O O U R SOLDIERS? 267

  not from twenty thousand feet but up close where you can watch them die, the horror appears to transcend description or understanding.

  Much of the war in Vietnam was conducted against an insurgent force. Against men, women, and children w h o were often defending their own homes and w h o were dressed in civilian clothing.

  This resulted in a deterioration of traditional conventions and an increase in civilian casualties, atrocities, and resultant trauma.

  Neither the ideological reasons for the war, nor the target population, was the same as that associated with previous wars.

  T h e standard methods of on-the-scene rationalization fail when the enemy's child comes out to mourn over her father's body or when the enemy is a child throwing a hand grenade. And the North Vietnamese and Vietcong understood this. Among the many excellent narratives gained from personal interviews in Al Santoli's book To Bear Any Burden is the story of T r o u n g "Mealy," a former Vietcong agent in the M e k o n g Delta. "Children were trained,"

  said Mealy, " t o throw grenades, not only for the terror factor, but so the government or American soldiers would have to shoot them. T h e n the Americans feel very ashamed. And they blame themselves and call their soldiers war criminals."

  And it worked.

  W h e n a soldier shoots a child who is throwing a grenade the child's weapon explodes, and there is only the mutilated body left to rationalize. There is no convenient weapon indisputably telling the world of the victim's lethality and the killer's innocence; there is only a dead child, speaking mutely of horror and innocence lost.

  The innocence of childhood, soldiers, and nations, all lost in a single act reenacted countless times for ten endless years until a weary nation finally retreats in horror and dismay from its long nightmare.

  The Inescapable War

  There were no real lines of demarcation, and just about any area was subject to attack. . . . It was an endless war with invisible enemies and no ground gains—just a constant flow of troops in and out of the country. The only observable outcome was an 268

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  interminable production of maimed, crippled bodies and countless corpses.

  —Jim Goodwin

  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders

  In The Face of Battle, John Keegan traces conflicts across the centuries, noting in particular how the duration of a battle and the depth of the battlefield increased over the years. From a duration of a few hours and a depth of only a few hundred yards in the Middle Ages, battle grew to the point where, in this century, the depth of the danger zone extended for miles into the rear areas, and the battles could last for months, even blending into one another to create one endless conflict that would last for years.

  In World War I and World War II we discovered that this endless battle would take a horrendous psychological toll on the combatant, and we were able to deal with this endless batlle by rotating soldiers into the rear lines. Within Vietnam, the danger zone increased exponentially, and for ten years we fought a war unlike any we had experienced before. In Vietnam there were no rear lines to escape to, there was no escape from the stress of combat, and the psychological stress of continuously existing at

  "the front" took an enormous, if delayed, toll.

  The Lonely War

  Prior to Vietnam the American soldier's first experience with the battlefield was usually as a member of a unit that had been trained and bonded together prior to combat. The soldier in these wars usually knew that he was in for the duration or until he had established sufficient points on some type of scale that kept track of his combat exposure; either way the end of combat for him was at some vague point in an uncertain future.

  Vietnam was distinctly different from any war we have fought before or since, in that it was a war of individuals. With very few exceptions, every combatant arrived in Vietnam as an individual replacement on a twelve-month tour — thirteen months for the U.S. Marines.

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  The average soldier had only to survive his year in hell and thus, for the first time, had a clear-cut way out of combat other than as a physical or psychological casualty. In this environment it was far more possible, even natural, that many soldiers would remain aloof, and their bonding would never develop into the full, mature, lifelong relationships of previous wars. This policy (combined with the use of drugs, maintenance of proximity to the combat zone, and establishment of an expectancy of returning to combat) resulted in an all-time-record low number of psychiatric casualties in Vietnam.

  Military psychiatrists and leaders believed that they had found a solution for the age-old problem of battlefield psychiatric casualties, a problem that, at one point in World War II, was creating casualties faster than we could replace them. Given a less traumatic war and an unconditionally positive World War II—style welcome to the returning veteran, this might have been an acceptable system, but in Vietnam what appears to have happened is that many a combatant simply endured traumatic experiences (experiences that might otherwise have been unbearable) by refusing to come to terms with his grief and guilt and turned instead to the escapist therapy of a "short timer's calendar" and the promise of "only forty-five days and a wake-up."

  This rotation policy (combined with the extensive use of psychi-atrically and self-prescribed drugs) did create an environment in which the incidence of psychiatric casualties on the battlefield was much lower than that of past wan in this century. But a tragic, long-term price, a price that was far too high, was paid for the short-term gains of this policy.

  World War II soldiers joined for the duration. A soldier
may have come into combat as an individual replacement, but he knew that he would be with his unit for the rest of the war. He was very invested in establishing himself with his newfound unit, and those who were already in the unit had equal cause to bond with this individual, who they knew would be their comrade until the war was over. These individuals developed very mature, fulfilling relationships that for most of them have lasted throughout their lives.

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  In Vietnam most soldiers arrived on the battlefield alone, afraid, and without friends. A soldier joined a unit where he was an FNG, a "f- ing new guy," whose inexperience and incompetence represented a threat to the continued survival of those in the unit.

  In a few months, for a brief period, he became an old hand who was bonded to a few friends and able to function well in combat.

  But then, all too soon, his friends left him via death, injury, or the end of their tours, and he too became a short timer, whose only concern was surviving until the end of his tour of duty. Unit morale, cohesion, and bonding suffered tremendously. All but the best of units became just a collection of men experiencing endless leavings and arrivals, and that sacred process of bonding, which makes it possible for men to do what they must do in combat, became a tattered and torn remnant of the support structure experienced by veterans of past American wars.

  That does not mean that no bonds were forged, for men will always forge strong bonds in the face of death, but they were few and all too fleeting, destined never to last longer than a year and usually much less than that.

  The First Pharmacological War

  One of the major factors that combined with the rotation policy to suppress or delay dealing with psychological trauma was the use of a powerful new family of drugs. Soldiers in past wars often drank themselves into numbness, and Vietnam was no exception.

  But Vietnam was also the first war in which the forces of modern pharmacology were directed to empower the battlefield soldier.

  The administration of tranquillizing drugs and phenothiazines on the combat front first occurred in Vietnam. The soldiers who became psychiatric casualties were generally placed in psychiatric-care facilities in close proximity to the combat zone where these drugs were prescribed by MDs and psychiatrists. The soldiers under their care readily took their "medicine," and this program was touted as a major factor in reducing the incidence of evacuations of psychiatric casualties.5

  In the same way, many soldiers "self-prescribed" marijuana and, to a lesser extent, opium and heroin to help them deal with the W H A T HAVE W E D O N E T O O U R SOLDIERS? 271

  stress they were facing. At first it appeared that this widespread use of illegal drugs had no negative psychiatric result, but we soon came to realize that the effect of these drugs was much the same as the effect of the legally prescribed tranquilizers.

  Basically, whether legally or illegally used, these drugs combined with the one-year tour (with the knowledge that all you had to do was "gut o u t " twelve months to escape) to submerge or delay combat-stress reactions. Tranquilizers do not deal with psychological stressors; they merely do what insulin does for a diabetic: they treat the symptoms, but the disease is still there.

  Drugs may help make an individual more susceptible to some forms of therapy, if therapy is available. But if drugs are given while the stressor is still being experienced, then they will arrest or supersede the development of effective coping mechanisms, resulting in an increase in the long-term trauma from the stress.

  What happened in Vietnam is the moral equivalent of giving a soldier a local anesthetic for a gunshot wound and then sending him back into combat.

  At their best these drugs only served to delay the inevitable confrontation with the pain, suffering, grief, and guilt that the Vietnam veteran repressed and buried deep inside himself. And at worst they actually increased the impact of the trauma suffered by the soldier.

  The Uncleansed Veteran

  The traditional cooldown period while marching or sailing home in intact units forms a kind of group therapy that was not available to the Vietnam veteran. This, too, is essential to the mental health of the returning veteran, and this too was denied the American veteran of Vietnam.

  Arthur Hadley is a master of military psychological operations (psyops), author of the excellent book Straw Giant, and one of this century's great military intellectuals.6 After his tour as a psyops commander in World War II (for which he was awarded two Silver Stars), Hadley conducted an extensive study on major warrior societies around the world. In this study he concluded that all warrior societies, tribes, and nations incorporate some form of 272 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

  purification ritual for their returning soldiers, and this ritual appears to be essential to the health of both the returning warrior and the society as a whole.

  Gabriel understands and powerfully illuminates the role of this purification ritual, and the price of its absence: Societies have always recognized that war changes men, that they are not the same after they return. That is why primitive societies often require soldiers to perform purification rites before allowing them to rejoin their communities. These rites often involved washing or other forms of ceremonial cleansing. Psychologically, these rituals provided soldiers with a way of ridding themselves of stress and the terrible guilt that always accompanies the sane after war.

  It was also a way of treating guilt by providing a mechanism through which fighting men could decompress and relive their terror without feeling weak or exposed. Finally, it was a way of telling the soldier that what he did was right and that the community for which he fought was grateful and that, above all, his community of sane and normal men welcomed him back.

  Modern armies have similar mechanisms of purification. In WWII soldiers en route home often spent days together on troopships. Among themselves, the warriors could relive their feelings, express grief for lost comrades, tell each other about their fears, and, above all, receive the support of their fellow soldiers. They were provided with a sounding board for their own sanity. Upon reaching home, soldiers were often honored with parades or other civic tributes. They received the respect of their communities as stories of their experiences were told to children and relatives by proud parents and wives. All this served the same cleansing purpose as the rituals of the past.

  When soldiers are denied these rituals they often tend to become emotionally disturbed. Unable to purge their guilt or be reassured that what they did was right, they turned their emotions inward.

  Soldiers returning from the Vietnam War were victims of this kind of neglect. There were no long troopship voyages where they could confide in their comrades. Instead, soldiers who had finished their tour of duty were flown home to arrive "back in the world"

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  often within days, and sometimes within hours, of their last combat with the enemy. There were no fellow soldiers to meet them and to serve as a sympathetic sounding board for their experiences; no one to convince them of their own sanity.

  Since Vietnam, several different returning armies have applied this vital lesson. The British troops returning from the Falklands could have been airlifted home, but instead they made the long, dreary, and therapeutic South Atlantic crossing with their navy.

  In the same way, Israel addressed the need for a cooldown period among their soldiers returning from the nation's extremely unpopular 1982 incursion into Lebanon. They were aware that in the United States there occurred what some have termed a

  "conspiracy of silence" in discussing the Vietnam War and its moral issues upon its conclusion. Recognizing this problem and the need for psychological decompression, the Israelis did what was probably one of the healthiest things they could have done for the mental welfare of those who participated in their Vietnam.

  According to Shalit, the withdrawing Israeli soldiers were gathered by unit in meetings in which they could relax for the first time after many months. Th
ere they went through a lengthy process of "ventilating their feelings, questions, doubts, and criticisms about all issues: from the failure of military action and planning, to the unnecessary sacrifice of life and the feeling of total failure."

  And the U.S. troops deployed to Grenada, Panama, and Iraq left these conflicts in intact units. The continued stability of these units after departing the combat zone ensured that detailed (and psychologically essential) after-action briefings and reviews could be conducted at home stations.

  The Defeated Veteran

  The Vietnam veteran's belief in the justice of his cause and the necessity for his acts was constantly challenged and ultimately bankrupt when South Vietnam fell to an invasion from the North in 1975. A dim foreshadowing of this form of trauma can be seen in World War I, when the war ended without the unconditional 274 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

  surrender of the enemy, and many veterans bitterly understood that it wasn't really over, over there.

  With the collapse of the Soviet U n i o n and the end of the Cold War it might be legitimately argued that we did not lose in Vietnam any more than we lost in the Battle of the Bulge: we got pushed back for a while, but ultimately we w o n the war. But today such a perspective is small consolation to the Vietnam vet. For the Vietnam veteran there is no walking Flanders Field, no reenactment of D Day, no commemoration of Inchon, or any other celebration by grateful nations whose peace and prosperity was preserved by American blood and sweat and tears. For too many years the Vietnam veterans knew only the defeat of a nation they fought and suffered for and the victory of a regime that many of them believed to be evil and malignant enough to risk dying to fight against.

  Ultimately, they have been vindicated. The containment policy that they were an instrument of has been successful. N o w the Russians themselves will concede the evils of communism. H u n -

  dreds of thousands of boat people attest to the disastrous nature of the North Vietnamese regime. N o w the Cold War has ended in victory. And from one perspective we were no more defeated in Vietnam than the U.S. forces were in the Philippines or at the Battle of the Bulge. They lost the battle but they w o n the war.