The Inevitability of Songmy

...When the crusaders—knightly warriors trained in courtly combat and accustomed to treating enemies with all the regard for honor that marked feudal warfare among Christians— encountered the Muslim infidels, they felt no compunction in maiming and killing children or in burning cities...

...This led Hughes to "raise the whole problem of the extent to which those pariahs who do the dirty work of society are really acting for the rest of us...

...If this trend continues, we will enter a brutalizing age in which the "good people," far from trying to shield themselves from the impact of dirty work, will condone it with a good conscience...

...At Songmy, one of the participants reports, "We just pushed them all off a ravine, and just started using automatics on them .. men, women and children . . . and babies...

...To be sure, most American soldiers in Vietnam have probably not become as dehumanized as these prison guards, yet one cannot help feel that for most of them gooks are not people "like you and me...

...The "other" is cast into a subhuman category, his common humanity is denied and his brutal treatment justified by way of asserting his radical "otherness...

...It seems apparent that participants, superior officers at headquarters in Washington, and Mr...

...As so many "good people" said in Nazi Germany about the Jews, "they must have done something to deserve such treatment...

...And that is not the result of a criminal or deranged reaction on the part of individual soldiers or even a company...

...I assumed that he was running to tell the Vietcong of our presence and I thought to myself that some body ought to shoot the goddamned gook...

...It must...

...Wars of religion and their modern equivalent, ideological wars, are marked by unrestrained violence since victory can only come when the offensive creed is wiped out...

...In other words, in the process of "saving" these people from a Communist dictatorship we have helped to kill more of them than the Communists...

...A war against gooks who are also Commies leads to a certain kind of warfare and this COMMENTS AND OPINIONS leads to atrocities...

...Then each of us may become a gook to some other man...

...Herbert Marcuse already accomplished a feat of semantic legerdemain when he talked about "repressive tolerance," but the Colonel beats the dialectician...

...There then arises a moral disjunction in which morally distasteful acts are silently condoned by the very act of showing contempt for those specifically assigned to do this dirty work...

...COLONEL JOSEPH BELLAS IS PROBABLY one of those ordinary officers not likely to be remembered in the annals of warfare, but he recently delivered himself of a statement that is unforgettable...

...Hence, methods of warfare that would inspire horror and revolt when applied to human beings, are considered legitimate in regard to them...

...All wars are hell...

...The war is responsible, and those who set it into motion bear the responsibility— not the soldiers who, lost in a world of threat and evil, react by committing atrocities...

...He is purely malevolent—and hence must be squashed like a worm...

...Once men are so defined, their suffering, though concretely visible, is still not perceived...

...My emphasis...

...We cannot rest satisfied with the smug belief that, while the war may have brutalized some of "them," it has not done harm to the moral sensibilities of "us...

...The savage strangeness of the enemy," Hans Speier has written, "inspires horrrors...

...They are not "our kind," their ways are strange, barbarian, unclean and incomprehensible...

...The Koreans were gooks, and the South Vietnamese are gooks, just like the North Vietnamese...

...He is a quintessential alien since he does not partake of the pieties and assumptions that surround our habitual moral universe...

...They are not perceived, to use Buber's terminology, as a Thou but as an It...

...As they get older, they will become wiser and more tolerant...

...We had lost a lot of buddies, and so on...

...The psychological mechanism involved has been caught in its phenomenological purity in an account by John Osborne, an editor of the New Republic: On an April afternoon in 1966, I visited a hamlet in the region of Pinkville with an American officer...

...Instead, there seems to arise a conviction among many viewers that what happens to "them" cannot happen to us since we, the "good people," have nothing in common with them, those alien others upon whom we dare not lavish any sympathy...

...How the enemy is named provides an essential clue to the character of a war...

...A "Commie" is not "fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is...

...A soldier who had been a participant in the Songmy massacre put the matter most clearly, "You can't just blame Calley's platoon...

...A few years ago a Norwegian social scientist interviewed a number of concentration-camp and prison guards who had brutally murdered Jewish, Ukrainian, and other prisoners during the war, and were now imprisoned in their turn...

...It is the inevitable consequence of the unique character of this war in which the enormously destructive firepower of a modern army—bombs, napalm and all the rest—is used in a struggle in which there are no front lines and both friends and enemies are everywhere and look alike...

...But when men are designated as gooks, the designation serves, so to say, as a functional equivalent of invisibility...

...While he was at his business...

...The "other side" apparently did not consider it qualitatively different from other atrocities committed by Americans, and "our side" seems to have shared the opinion...

...It was a free fire zone...

...And when the conscience of "good people," rather than being protected by more or less hypocritical maneuvers, atrophies for good, then God help us all...

...he merely expresses it with characteristic bluntness...

...The crusaders saw themselves engaged in a hygienic operation...

...Michael Harrington in New America, December 30, 1969 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS rors of the war are brought home to all of us on our TV screens it is increasingly difficult to deny their existence...

...American soldiers who habitually use this term thereby signify to themselves and to others that these men are less than men...

...So immense is the distance between "them" and "us," they are perceived as not belonging to the human race...

...We are all in the same boat...

...And you know, if you can shoot artillery and bombs in there every night, how can the people in there be worth so much...

...But lest it be thought that these men lost their nerves under exceptional tension, let it be recorded that a few days after the incident Lieutenant Calley, the leader of the first platoon at Songmy, "threw an elderly South Vietnamese civilian man down a well and shot him through the head...

...The British were engaged, as they saw it, in a fumigating expedition, helping rid the countryside of obnoxious human undergrowth...

...This is a revolting lie...

...Orville Schell and others have told of the satisfaction expressed by American air crews in searching out and gunning down any and all Vietnamese they spotted in areas defined as hostile...

...A "gook" is the modern colonial equivalent of a "Commie...

...Colonial wars resemble ideological wars when the natives are seen and labeled as quintessentially alien...

...What distinguishes ordinary wars from wars fought in the name of religion or ideology, and from colonial wars against alien races, is that in the latter two types the adversary comes to be seen as lacking essential human characteristics...

...Not so with terms used in ideological wars...

...As Nietzsche warned long ago, "Those who set out to kill monsters should take care not to turn into monsters themselves...

...In limited wars the enemy may be referred to in terms that are meant to be pejorative but still leave intact his essential human characteristics...

...Hence it is foolish and indeed vicious to talk of "isolated incidents...

...What strikes one most about the massacre at Songmy or Pinkville on March 16, 1968, is not that it occurred, but that it took more than a year and a half until it came to public knowledge...

...The Colonel is in command of a hospital in Vietnam where a number of soldiers recently boycotted Thanksgiving dinner as a protest against the war...

...Denial of knowledge of the plight of the victim may still come under the rubric of hypocrisy, and, as the French moralists knew, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue...

...In this logic, Christians were quite justified in wiping them from the face of the earth, as one is justified in exterminating vermin...

...Such talk only serves to legitimize the war as a whole...

...Limited wars are fought for limited objectives...

...A consequence of American involvement in Vietnam has been the atrophy of human sensibilities among nearly all those who have been involved in it...

...Thieu's government—even the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong—saw it as an event not far removed from the ordinary...

...A few years ago the distinguished sociologist Everett C. Hughes was moved to ask why it was that so many "good people" in Germany had condoned the evils of the Nazis...

...Once such methods are authorized, some soldiers reason that if these methods are appropriate it must be because the gooks deserve it...

...Government officials from President Nixon down are now busy explaining that Songmy was "an isolated incident...

...When the horThe "Other Side"--And We IT HAS BEEN rightly pointed out that, after they took power in 1954, the North Vietnamese Communists, by their own admission, killed at least 50,000 peasants in the course of forced collectivization...

...Yet, in a sense, Colonel Bellas does not distort the American experience in Vietnam...

...He concluded that ordinary people can think of deeds so distasteful and horrible that they can never admit to being capable of performing them, and yet can be convinced that theses deeds need to be done...

...What we are witnessing now, however, is a much more frightening process...

...He suggested that we give a kind of unconscious mandate to such people to go beyond anything we ourselves would care to do or even to acknowledge...

...Said the Colonel, "They're young, they're idealistic and don't like man's inhumanity to man...

...The enemy's very existence comes to be perceived as a denial of all that is worthwhile and precious in the destiny of man...

...Colonial and ideological wars are worse than other wars since they are based on the denial of reciprocity between the antagonists and hence must routinely trigger reactions that in other wars occur only infrequently...

...Everyone who went into the village," says another participant, "had in mind to kill...

...The dissociation of moral sensibility implied in Hughes's analysis requires that some of these acts be conducted in secrecy so that the "good people" can engage in a strategy of denial, disclaiming guilty knowledge and asserting ignorance...

...However, when claims of ignorance are no longer credible, "good people" may resort to a new strategy, far more brutalizing than a denial that they knew of the dirty work...

...But punishing the guilty will not redeem America from a much more profound responsibility: that we have involved ourselves in the kind of conflict that made massacres more likely...

...It was not...

...In his dictionary tolerance is equated with lack of compassion, insensitivity, and a loss of the essential human quality of empathy...

...The higher and more expert functionaries who act in our behalf represent something of a distillation of what we may consider our public wishes, while some of the others show a sort of concentrate of those impulses of which we are or wish to be less aware...

...He claims that they showed no evidence of guilt or remorse and maintained staunchly that they had been justified in acting as they did because their victims were not "people like you and me...

...you've got to blame everyone...

...I am, of course, for justice being meted out to any who committed individual outrages— and I am for guaranteeing the accused the right to be tried under due process of law, not in the press...

...And the alleged murder of more than 2,000 people in Hue by the Viet Cong has been widely cited to counter American guilt over Song My...

...Calling the adversary a Kraut or a Fritz does not remove him from the human race, it may even COMMENTS AND OPINIONS connote a bit of condescending sympathy...

...Good People and Dirty Work MOST COMMENTARIES ON SONGMY have limited themselves to the discussion of the impact of the war on American soldiers...

...But it is morally obnoxious and mischievous not to discriminate among them...

...I noticed, across the paddies, a bowlegged and very small Vietnamese man running fast— to where and for what reason, I could not know but thought then that I knew...

...When British gentlemen confronted unruly natives in India or Burma, they did not hesitate, trained though they were in the virtues of fair play, to bomb and burn their villages...

...But how, then, explain the fact that, according to Senator Edward Kennedy's committee, more than 300,000 South Vietnamese civilians have died, most of them killed by American or Saigon troops...

...Yet, its impact on American civilians deserves equal attention...

...In the crusaders' perception, the infidels, being not only in error but in sin, lacked human characteristics...

...Tolerant...

...In such cases it may still be said that the invisibility of the concrete target can account for the callousness...