From My Lai to Abu Ghraib, some things never change.

[reprehensor]

Let’s not forget who won, and why

by Mahir Ali
April 25, 2005

“RECENTLY, a few individuals involved in serious incidents have been highlighted in the news. Some would have these incidents reflect on the army as a whole. They are, however, the actions of a pitiful few. Certainly the army cannot and will not condone improper conduct or criminal acts - I personally assure you that I will not.”

Knowing that this statement was made by a general in the US army, it doesn’t exactly require a leap of the imagination to associate with the prison abuse scandal that erupted about a year ago, and has by now been to a large extent purged from the public consciousness. That doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that torture and humiliation are no longer deployed as interrogation techniques. All that it means is that individuals are no longer permitted to use digital cameras to document their inhumane antics.

snip

The general quoted at the outset is William C. Westmoreland, who was the commander of US forces in Vietnam, the Tommy Franks of his day. His vow that “the army cannot and will not condone improper conduct or criminal acts” was, as one would expect, honoured in the breach. Lieutenant William Calley - undoubtedly guilty of the unprovoked mass murder of unarmed civilians, although hardly solely responsible for what happened at My Lai 4 - was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Not long afterwards, his sentence was reduced to 20 years. Then to 10. He was eventually paroled after three-and-a-half years. In that period he spent about three days in prison; the rest of the time he was “confined”, along with his girlfriend, at his house inside a military base.

snip

They heard the thud of bombs falling in the distance, felt the ground shake. Given the all-clear by her interpreter, a distraught and blubbering Fonda emerged from the hole and, channelling her nation’s guilt, began “saying over and over to the girl, ‘I’m sorry, oh, I am so sorry, I’m so sorry’.” The girl stopped her and calmly delivered a response in Vietnamese. Her interpreter translated: “You shouldn’t cry for us. We know why we are fighting. The sadness should be for your country, your soldiers. They don’t know why they are fighting us.”

Three decades on, that simple yet powerful truth has retained - or perhaps regained - much of its validity.

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[nightfire]

1. Appropos quote, I think, from a new Vietnam memoir

"By the way, it bears mentioning that our war in Vietnam was
unwinnable. For the whole of my adult life there has circulated the
bizarre contention that the United States could have won the thing -
if only we had done this or that, or the other; that wish list
stretching to the horizon. Where did this idiot notion come from?
Which Defense Department think-tank chuckle-head did that math? To
say we could have won the war is the same as saying that we didn't
fill our hearts with enough hate; didn't shoot enough Vietnamese down
like dogs; didn't dispatch enough of their wounded with enough large
caliber bullets to the head; didn't dump enough of their corpses in
the bushy ditch-scrub like so many roadkills; didn't throw enough of
them out of helicopters; didn't --------- enough of their women;
didn't Zippo enough of their hooches; didn't napalm or strafe or frag
them hard enough; didn't poison enough of their woods and farmland
with Agent Orange; didn't bomb them with enough B-52 strikes
("whispering death," they called it); into enough small pieces far
enough back into the Stone age . . ."

Larry Heinemann, Black Virgin Mountain: Return to Vietnam pp. 37-38