The War Behind Me

The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About US War Crimes
Written by Deborah Nelson

Recommended by New York Times Book Review

I am in general a book behind on this blog. Even though it was a week or so ago that I was reading this book I remember closing it and crying almost every night.

A number of years ago I remember a conversation between my Aunt Beth, Uncle Dan, Robert (his son) and I believe Stephanie. We were talking about the US history of torture. This book provides documentation of what Robert and I were arguing: the Iraq war is not the first example of America using torture. Rather, torture has been common in modern American war fare (post WWII as far as I have read) and throughout the 80's we were even teaching other countries how to use these tactics (at The School of the Americas where El Salvadorean and Guatemalan, among other, militaries learned specifically how to torture). It was through my experiences in these countries and reading about them at the end of high school and throughout college that I became aware of these realities.

I think this is a very difficult concept for us to grasping like meaningless torture.(1) But this is simply, in my opinion, a communal self-delusion. And a good one to explore next to Bacavich's "American exceptionalism." How can we fully understand who we are as Americans if we do not utilize all the facts about our history, no matter how difficult some of them are to accept?

The War Behind Me is a fairly brutal read, not because of the lack of skill of the writer but simply because of the content of what she writes about and the reality she is unearthing. The soldiers who recount the massacres and desecrations(2) they witnessed have had to suffer with these memories for years and years. On top of that, they filed official reports which they believed in good faith would be acted upon. But they were not. And if they went public the military turned their back on them, accusing them of instability or spinning their complaint as a poor performing soldier with a chip on their shoulder. Most of this book is official, documented military reports with pages and pages of narrative from soldiers who believed if the higher ranking officers knew what was going on they would put a stop to it as any decent American would do.

The underlying conditions which seemed to breed torture: the use and obvious abuse of fire- free zones and the notorious obsession with body count during the Vietnam war.

This is an excerpt from one soldiers letters. I quote it here verbatim:
"I read last week where we hung some Japan general after world war 2, not for killing people, but for failing to prevent his men from killing people, civilians and such. Well, Sir, the 9th Division did nothing to prevent the killing, and by pushing the body count so hard, we were 'told' to kill many times more Vietnamese than at My Lay, and very few per cents of them did we know were enemy . . . In case you don't think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way, I can give you some idea how many. A batalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 batalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120 - 150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year."

"You have to forgive me, but I have a reservation about blaming soldiers who are told to do something, and they let it get out of hand. I believe the chain of command should be disciplined and curbed. I don't think they [army leaders] did that."

The stories were horrific, one after another. Not only from the perspective of the soldiers but from villagers who lost parents, siblings, aunts, children. I believe if we do not honestly address with our eyes wide open things like this within our history we will just keep repeating it.

1. I hate to use a phrase like this without some explanation. I do not believe there is meaningful torture. But post Abu Gharib and the entry of torture into American public discourse you really have to discern between torture as understood by an intellectual argument about how many lives you could save if you torture just the right person at just the right time and extract information that saves lives and torture as experienced by the one being tortured, the majority of the time without saving any lives.

2. Ears cut off and saved as souvenirs, field operated phones electrical lines attached to suspects genitals, water torture . . . I will stop the list there.