What it is Like to Go to War (14 page)

Mike now has a wife, kids, and a steady job in the upper management levels of a large corporation. When he told the story to me and a small group of veterans his eyes flickered from our faces to the floor and back again. I could see how desperately he wanted us to understand about the brutal and ugly way his friends had died, about his state of mind at the time. I could see his nervousness, even fear, that in admitting such an act he’d lose our respect. That he told this story is witness to his basic integrity.
We didn’t condemn Mike, but many of us, thinking we’d seen and heard it all, were still shocked.

This act haunts Mike still. He did it. It happened.

I search my soul for whether or not I could have done what Mike did—or worse. I say no, but where is that “I” after months of killing, no sleep, and sheer horror? What, indeed, is the last straw when that “I,” facing the longest, most terrible storm of its life and fearing the loss of all hands, finally abandons ship, leaving only the primal split-off core, a core in too many of us that is a primitive enraged child?

What pushes the few over the edge into perpetrating something like My Lai, or what Mike did, I don’t know. But with my war experiences behind me, and five kids, I can only say I no longer make hard and fast judgments. What amount of pressure is reasonable before one checks out and lets the rage take over? How do you judge another human on this level?

In the My Lai massacre Calley, Medina, and a bunch of others all lost it one day, just like Mike, just like me. The degree to which we each lost it varied. Suppose we all sat in a nice comfortable living room and watched a videotape of me shooting people who probably could have been taken prisoner and screaming at Isle to kill the fleeing enemy or, even harder, watched Mike hanging a body beaten to a pulp upside down from a flagpole. It will be close to impossible for people who have never experienced anything like these circumstances to reconcile the person on the video with this seemingly normal individual sitting next to them. Even I have a lot of difficulty. We veterans know this. We may wish it weren’t true, we may resent it, but deny it we cannot. This is yet another factor that drives us into silence.

Suppose Mike had killed that kid? Mike would have been no different, his motives no different, his “red heat” no different. Should he have been sent to prison for life because he happened to be placed in that particular circumstance and the cumulative effects of months of warfare finally caused his particular ego to crack, to lose it? I become very uncomfortable when I’m around people with a superior and self-righteous attitude—a conviction that they could never have done such a thing as Mike did. True enough, perhaps, but if they had been in Mike’s skin from day zero, with Mike’s genetic makeup, specific childhood culture, and experiences of evil and of Vietnam, could they have acted any differently? Could they have had the “power and the freedom to do otherwise”? When we meet the next test, we can meet it only with the character we have at the time, and in this way we aren’t free. Our freedom lies in the fact that we can continually work to improve our character.

Still, we can’t let the Mikes of the world off the hook because of this lack of freedom at the time. This is because the threat of punishment for committing atrocities probably saves lots of prisoners’ lives. It provides just that much societal structure to help keep a wobbling ego from collapsing. And egos get pretty wobbly in warfare. But when we punish, the correct attitude should be not self-righteousness but sorrow. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

The third kind of atrocity is the atrocity of the fallen standard. This doesn’t happen instantly, nor does it happen only under the stress of actual fighting. Remember, in my story about the no-quarter fight, we’d actually decided ahead of time not to take prisoners and not to let any of the enemy get away. I had even devised a plan for it. It was clearly premeditated.

We didn’t decide this by vote. We didn’t talk about it. We just knew what we were going to do—shoot anything that moved that day until it stopped moving—and we did.

Marines have traditionally engaged in fierce no-quarter combat. The very nature of their traditional mission, as shock troops against tough objectives, puts them in situations where the taking of prisoners is not even close to convenient and is usually downright dangerous.
⁵¹
The Marines were the ones who primarily fought the so-called Banana Wars of the 1920s and ’30s. These “wars” were some of the first the United States conducted against guerrillas, excepting the American Indian wars. Guerrillas faced very probable death if captured, because they would be tried as traitors or criminals, not prisoners of war. Men in these circumstances are much less likely to surrender. The fighting, necessarily, gets more brutal for both sides. The war in the Pacific against the Japanese was an order of magnitude worse in this regard. The Japanese soldiers considered surrender to be shameful, while dying for the emperor was believed a great honor for them and their families. Not only did the Japanese not surrender; they would often commit suicide trying to take some of the enemy with them.
⁵²
Trusting the surrender signal, only to have the hidden hand grenade go off, soon led to not trusting surrender signals. It was also well known that surrender
to
the
Japanese entailed a very high chance of death through starvation and brutality. This too was a far different circumstance from surrender to the Germans, no picnic but a situation with much higher survival rates.

The Pacific theater fighting grew more brutal. New recruits had to be prepared for all of this. The wisdom of past mistakes got incorporated in the training and the culture, even though you’d be hard pressed ever to find a Marine, during World War II or in Vietnam, who would have said Marines don’t believe in taking prisoners. Don’t get me wrong. Marines do take prisoners. But, back then, in Vietnam, closer to World War II than it is to us today, with most of the very senior officers and noncommissioned officers having fought against the Japanese, the code of conduct concerning the taking of prisoners, at least in my unit, was “not very goddamn often.”

When I arrived in-country I heard stories about previous operations where it was clear that no one took prisoners. The remarks seem callous now. Obviously many of the enemy soldiers were conscripted, as were ours. Surely, most of them must have wished they were back home, just as I did. I had nothing personal against these people. I actually admired them for their fighting abilities. It now seems obviously senseless and unnecessarily cruel to have continued to shoot at them when they wanted to quit or retreat.

Yet our
job
was to kill as many as possible, retreating or not. Taking the hill was only secondary to the strategy of attrition and its measurement, the body count. No-quarter fighting fit perfectly with that disastrous and stupid notion of body count upon which all professional soldiers in Vietnam were judged. I remember the crisply starched major giving our bunch of brand-new lieutenants
our first briefing on the division’s current operation, which we were about to join. “It’s a war of attrition, gentlemen. We’re here to kill the enemy, and kill him in far greater numbers than he kills us. Don’t ever forget that.”

I didn’t forget.

During the war we were constantly faced with the stark fact that taking prisoners entails risk to your own side. You are slowed down and divided in order to guard them. You risk your own helicopters and helicopter crews to fly them out. They can turn on you if you fall asleep.

And I wanted to live too. I wanted to be the meanest motherfucker in the valley, and if I couldn’t be, then I wanted him on my side.

No-quarter was floating around. I tuned in.

Racism and pseudospeciation were also floating around. If you were a soldier during World War II and your own grandparents were German or Italian, or if people in your unit spoke German or Italian as a mother tongue, it was far more difficult to fall into thinking of the enemy as animals deserving of slaughter. If they stood up to surrender, you were a little more likely to see them as humans wanting to quit, just as you would want to quit under similar circumstances. But if someone is of a different color and a vastly different culture, as was the case with the Japanese, it gets a lot easier to pseudospeciate. And both sides did. On the Japanese side this was exacerbated by a government policy of isolation from foreign influences for years. On the American side this was furthered by government policy that directed second- or third-generation Japanese Americans away from fighting in the Pacific, making it even easier to dehumanize the Japanese, since
no one on our side looked like them.
⁵³
Worse, the U.S. government officially condoned racism by sending innocent Japanese Americans to concentration camps, making the “Jap” scapegoat USDA approved.

Pseudospeciation happened in Vietnam, as in all wars. Most Americans were big and black or big and white compared with most Vietnamese, who were small and sort of brownish. The Americans had very few small brownish people on their side to remind them that small brownish people are people too. We had no Asian Americans in my particular unit, and they were rare in the Marine Corps in general. I don’t know why. Perhaps a lingering suspicion of racism in the Marine Corps steered them toward other services. Perhaps their culture didn’t send young men into volunteer military organizations during the Vietnam War as blindly as did other cultures.
⁵⁴

Fallen-standard atrocities don’t occur just around taking prisoners. Another example of an atrocity of the fallen standard was the time several of the kids in my platoon cut off ears from the bodies of the NVA that they’d killed. They did this as a way of gathering a sort of trophy. I don’t believe they actually thought for a moment in any conscious way about desecrating or dishonoring the dead soldiers—no more than a hunter would think about taking the antlers from an elk to hang over the barn door. The ears went into rubber bands on their helmets or were hung by string around their necks. “I killed this many. Look at me. Seven with
one blow.” It’s similar to the psychology that lies behind letter jackets. It’s just that these eighteen-year-olds weren’t playing high school basketball.

After all the horror I’d seen already, this particular act actually didn’t bother me at all. I could easily have let it go. I pretended to be angry, but they probably saw through it. It goes back to Lawrence’s comment: “What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.” The ordinary dead body in Vietnam was usually a mess. Whether it had an ear or not was nothing. One might just as well have taken belt buckles, as we often did. We could trade them for socks and beer with the guys in the rear areas. Ears could also be traded. One pair was worth about a case of beer.

The ear cutters were surprised when I disciplined them by making them throw away the ears and then go outside our lines and bury the bodies, hard hot work in an environment definitely lacking OSHA approval. I should have had them bury the ears with the bodies, but it didn’t occur to me then.

We have an idea of what is right or wrong. And we can debate moral issues as ideas. But moral
standards
are not ideas; they exist in the form of observable measurable behavior. What one sees, hears, and feels every day, by observing how people around one behave, inculcates such standards of behavior. Take standards of excellence in companies. Everyone knows what perfect quality is. That’s an idea. But if every day a worker trashes some 3 percent of the production through carelessness, and no one says anything, pretty soon the standard is a 3 percent error rate, even though the ideal is perfect. Three percent was pretty well accepted as an American standard in the manufacture of memory devices in the early 1980s. Then along came Japanese memory-component manufacturers. These people would get very exercised about
even one mistake—one—not 1 percent. They would fly a vice president over to apologize if it happened. You can imagine what got said to the employees involved.

Both sides of the ocean had the same ideal. They both knew what “meets specifications” was. But the Japanese
behaved
differently. Behavior sets standards, not ideals. So the Japanese ate American market share like park bears going through picnic baskets.

We talk about moral ideas. We operate on standards. It’s the same in war, where cruelty not only is allowable but often is encouraged.

The answer to fallen-standard kinds of atrocities is quite simply to never allow behavior to differ from what is stated publicly. We do this by very quickly punishing even small lapses. We punish with compassion and understanding. War is cruel. People crack under its pressure. But we punish—and we try to help the one who failed to unravel the complex feelings afterward. The instant any excess in cruelty occurs it must be noted and screamed about. Not only did few scream about taking ears; many commanders actually encouraged it “to confirm the body count.” It was as if we were back in the days of my childhood in Oregon shooting crows for bounty, cutting the feet off and turning them in to the Department of Fish and Wildlife for fifteen cents a pair.

One of the greatest tests of character is telling the truth when it hurts the teller. The Vietnam War will be infamous for the way those who perpetrated it lied to those who fought and paid for it. Lies in the Vietnam War were more prevalent because that war was fought without meaning. Death, destruction, and sorrow need to be constantly justified in the absence of some overarching meaning for the suffering. Lack of this overarching meaning encourages making things up, lying, to fill the gap in meaning
.

People lie. They lie in business, they lie in universities, they lie in marriages, and they lie in the military. Lying, however, is usually considered not normal, an exception. In Vietnam lying became the norm and I did my part. In Vietnam, lying became so much part of the system that sometimes
not lying
seemed immoral.