"I have seen my faithful
burned up in napalm. I have seen the bodies of women and children
blown to bits. I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it's not
possible. They must settle their accounts with God."
A
French priest in Viet-Nam said those words during an interview with
Paris Match in 1965. I. F. Stone reprinted them in his I. F Stone's
Weekly, which is where Norman Morrison read them and then immolated
himself about 100 feet from the office window of Robert McNamara at
the Pentagon, November 2nd, 1965. That was fifty years
ago.
The
final sentence, “They must settle their accounts with God,” is
usually deleted when you find the quote, but it will never die.
There
is now a literature about what seems to be the “amnesia”
concerning such contributions as Morrison's self-immolation, and the
atrocities, but I trust the next fifty years will bring out more
scholarship and understanding. A long period of reflection and
development is necessary after such events in order to break through
the excuses, rationalizations and defenses to settle those “accounts
with God.”
I
recently finished Deborah Nelson's 2008 book,“The War Behind Me:
Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U. S. War Crimes,” in
which amnesia or cover-up is the central theme, and also Andrew
Preston's 2006 book, “The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and
Vietnam,” in which we see how Bundy's brilliance, immense talent,
connections, experience, information and determination played a
crucial part in creating and continuing the war - the connivance and
collusion of the “best and the brightest” is not as forgotten as
it might seem.
The
cover-up of the U.S. killings of innocent Viet-Namese, planting
weapons on them, and then claiming them as enemy kills in order to
boost one's body count and thereby to look good to one's superiors
and thereby to advance one's military career, is much more
comprehensible to me now after having experiencing forty years of
conscious, progammatic, you-are-on-your-own, selfishness in every
aspect of US culture. The recent videos of U.S. police killing
unarmed civilians within the US itself also help one to face it and
to believe it.
U.S.
Ret. Brig. General John Johns has a prominent place in Nelson's book
because he was so well-informed, mindful and articulate about U.S.
crimes in Viet-Nam. He tells Nelson in an interview why he had not
wanted to discuss them in public but then became disillusioned. She
writes, p. 181:
“The Iraq war to me is
one of the great blunders of history,” he says, and a watershed in
his own thinking. He had supported dealing with atrocities
internally. But the war in Iraq showed that the government and
military leaders had forgotten the lessons from Vietnam – or never
learned them. He now believes that the public must be informed and
enlisted to avoid another Vietnam in Iraq and prevent similar
mistakes in the future.
“We can't change current
practices unless we acknowledge the past. If we rationalize it as
isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we're doing with Abu
Ghraib and similar atrocities, we'll never correct the problem.”
