Thursday - February 26, 2004

Category Image I Only Know What I Know


I hear a lot of indignant protests from Viet Nam veterans nowadays that John Kerry's claims of American brutality during their war is a complete fiction. I have nothing but disgust for Senator Kerry, and truth be told I suspect he is a tool, if not a member, of the International Communist movement and formerly influenced if not controlled by the Soviets, but I have to confess that I think these protests from these veterans are misguided.

I've seen what I've seen, I know what I know, and I'm here to relate what little I know, and it's not pretty. Those of delicate natures should not continue (that's you mom).

The military was a much different animal when I joined my NROTC unit in 1981 than it is today. We didn't have any sensitivity training. Graphic, violent language was accepted, expected, and not quite encouraged. In 1984 our platoon at Officer Candidates School in Quantico took on the name "Skull Fucking 3rd Platoon" and very creative and somewhat humorous ditties were created to explain what this name meant. I think I won't go into details because it really is pretty gross. We were polite enough to publicly call ourselves S.F. 3rd, and two platoon members were ridiculed for objecting to even that much in our skull and crossbones logo. I won't pretend that this was a good name, or that our attitude was widely encouraged, but it was certainly tolerated or winked at by all levels of the school.

The war in Viet Nam was long over, so far as I was aware, and events in that war were as far removed from my perspective as World War II or even World War I. I marveled that the rifle I used at OCS was the same type used in that war "so long ago." Heck, my helmet was the same type used in WWII. Both were changed (M-16A2 and Kevlar helmets) by 1985 when I was commissioned, removing my perspective even further from my father's war.

So I wasn't in Viet Nam, by a long shot, and it seemed a long time ago. But graphic, violent imagery was common among us and stories were told, usually complete fiction, of what happened to "gooks" that had the misfortune of meeting up with Marines. For instance, everybody knew from our songs that "Napalm sticks to kids." Most of this was silly gallows humor, but I always wondered whether there was any basis in reality for the creation of these songs, or whether it was intended just to shock people in the lingering peace movement and the nuclear disarmament crowd which was very strong on campus.

So what does all this have to do with Senator Kerry and his claims of atrocities? I'm not entirely sure. I only know what I know. What I know is that there was a culture in our training that encouraged, at least in a humorous way, the very things that Kerry claimed happened. I can't say whether this was a reaction to the charges of atrocities that he made after returning from Viet Nam, or if it was like that already. I only know what I lived through.

The final element I'll submit is my experiences with Viet Nam vets that I ran into over the years. In particular, when I joined my first unit, Marine Aircraft Group 13 in El Toro, California, my initial duties for a few weeks were to bounce around the various sections of Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron and learn how things worked. This always sounds like an enlightened way to train new people, but in reality the new trainee is typically shunted off to pair up with the weakest leaders. One master sergeant, for example, saw me as a clerk to do extremely mundane paperwork for him while he stood around pompously telling stories. I finally told him that I was moving on, whether he cared or not, because filing his paperwork for days on end may have been helping him catch up, but was not helping me learn anything.

In my travels through this squadron's bowels in these first weeks, many of the older losers were intrigued by a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed second lieutenant and saw it as their own misguided mission to indoctrinate me into their little sordid circles. One in particular, whose name I can't recall, was a Sergeant who had been swept into the squadron training department with the other trash that can't do their real jobs. And this is the man I think of whenever I think of the war in Viet Nam.

He had been in the Marine Corps for quite some time, long enough to have all the Viet Nam campaign ribbons. You could tell who was in that war because they always had three rows of ribbons and everyone else only had one row or part of a second row at most. He was slovenly, not very bright, but bright enough to be an avionics technician that couldn't do his job very well and that's why he was helping run the training section. He must have been quite a screw up to still be a sergeant. In his first years in the Corps, he was in the infantry and caught the tail end of action in Viet Nam.

This sergeant was one of those guys who thought it important to share his love of the Marine Corps. I still have a 16" sticker of the Marine Corps Emblem that he gave me. Among the benefits of being a Marine that he relished was his collection of teeth and ears.

Yes, you read that correctly. I never saw the ears in person, but he had lots of photographs of disembodied ears strung together. I vaguely recall pictures of corpses, dead and mutilated, with missing ears and other items of anatomy. I think he may have had a string of teeth physically on hand. He was very proud of these things. I wonder if my nonchalant reaction disappointed him. He didn't display these things openly, he kept them in his desk drawer.

Looking back, I guess I might have questioned how he got these things, but I vaguely recall that these were collected by ARVN he served with, not Marines. In any case it wasn't clear to me that collecting ears from corpses was wrong, for all I knew it was how they were doing body counts. Frankly, to me it was all ancient history and the guy was creepy and I wanted to keep my interactions with him as short as possible. Besides, these things were only slightly discouraged by all the training I had gone through.

So, after hearing first hand accounts of helicopter door gunners shooting people in rice paddies (exactly as it was portrayed in the movie "Platoon") and seeing these ears, I think that Viet Nam veterans are protesting a bit much at Kerry's accounts of atrocities occurring. Perhaps Kerry is a liar on this issue, heck, he lies about everything else so why not this? But that distasteful and atrocious acts were committed in that war is hardly disputable. I can't say that it's more or less than any other war, we've all read similar accounts by Marines in the Pacific War, and by soldiers in the war against Germany.

It's just politically popular to posture that American fighting men are pure and noble. Kerry is a despicable man, but we should attack him on real issues, it's easy enough to do. Attacking him for reporting that atrocities were committed in a war is not going to work, because it will destroy the credibility of his detractors.

Kerry is a communist, a traitor to his country, and he did his awful worst to undermine our nation in a time of war. His testimony was inappropriate and intended to support the efforts of the Soviets in the Cold War. But the claims of others that everyone in the military are boy scouts is a losing argument. I only know what I know, and what I know is that many in that war like all wars do things that shouldn't have been done. It is a byproduct of encouraging them to kill ruthlessly.

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