January, 2009

Professor Chmiel,

Sorry, I am not in class today.  I made the long drive home last night.  However, I wanted to let you know that I am really enjoying reading The Book of Mev and am really glad that you decided to share it with us.  Unlike, many of the other books we have read in class, I feel like I can relate to  Mev in most ways.  Many of the questions that she asks in life are the same questions that I ask in life, and it’s interesting to learn about where she looked for answers to those questions and what she found.  I know it might not be the easiest book for you to teach, but I really think it is one of the most valuable books we have read in class.  All of the other books have been wonderful, but I am sometimes left thinking what can I do, here in this society today.  Most of the other people we have read about were forced into action by the harsh conditions or political changes in their lives, however, I assume that most of my peers and I have not been faced with such hardships or injustices so directly in our lives.  Sometimes, I wonder where we begin.  Mev’s experience with this is inspiring and gives us an example of how one woman who was in a very similar situation to myself at this age, made a significant impact on the world, even in her short life.  It has really helped me think about how I hope to go about my life. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Laura

Laura Kraus is in the Cook School of Business at Saint Louis University.

Double standard, noun. Any code or set of principles containing different provisions for one group of people than for another.

Hopes are being raised for President Obama’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. To many, the appointing of George Mitchell as the Special Middle East Envoy seems to augur well, given Mr. Mitchell’s previous negotiations in the Northern Ireland conflict. President Obama acknowledged the difficulties of reaching an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, but said, “That’s why we’ve got George Mitchell going there. This is somebody with extraordinary patience as well as extraordinary skill, and that’s what’s going to be necessary.”

Undoubtedly, these traits and skills are necessary, but certainly not sufficient. For there to be a breakthrough, Mr. Mitchell is going to have to terminate a long-standing practice of U.S policy in the Middle East, which is the adherence to a strict double-standard.

For example, prepare yourself to hear for the thousandth time how it is absolutely central for Hamas to make good on three issues: recognize Israel, renounce all violence, and adhere to previous agreements.

Who could disagree with these wonderful goals?

Yet, will Mr. Mitchell insist (not merely ask) that Israel also renounce violence? If so, will that renunciation include the fundamental violence of the Israel occupation of the West Bank and the violence of the embargo and the creation of Gaza as an open-air prison (and, now, morgue)? Will the U.S. envoy call for others in the international community to work to prevent Israel from securing more weapons, which aren’t smuggled in through tunnels, but arrive in broad daylight at Israeli ports?

Will Mr. Mitchell’s research assistants provide him with a single instance of any Israeli Prime Minister who has recognized any Palestinian right to exist on the land they have cultivated for centuries?

Will the Special Envoy demand that Israel, like Hamas, abide by previous agreements or, more broadly, international law? Like the Geneva Conventions which prohibit an occupying power from moving its population into occupied territory?

These questions cut to the heart of the matter: How can one reasonably expect our government to “broker” a peace settlement, when the United States has such a lopsided relationship to one of the antagonists? Consider the arms deals, the diplomatic support in the U.N., and the year-after-year munificence lavished on the Jewish state.

Here’s a thought experiment: Given the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, how many U.S. Senators do you think would issue a public statement (however belated) supporting the Palestinians’ right to self-defense?

As La Rochefoucauld remarked, “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” In U.S. policy in the Middle East (a region so indispensable because of the oil resources), double standards are standard operating procedure. The U.S. cloaks its actions and policies in the most noble and moralistic rhetoric, yet realpolitik is the way, the truth, and the life.

Remember: Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds did not arouse the Reagan Administration’s indignation; that indignation was only expressible years later when, in his rhetorical build-up to invasion, George W. Bush repeated ad nauseum, “He gassed his own people!”

Remember: The U.S. is dead set against Iran having a nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the thought of Iran having nuclear bombs is nerve-wracking, but the thought of anyone having nuclear weapons ought to be similarly nerve-wracking. When have you heard a single comment from a U.S. politician critical of Israel’s existing nuclear weapons arsenal? It’s regularly asserted that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; it’s also the only nuclear power. The U.S. isn’t concerned about that some nation has nuclear weapons per se; it’s which nation has them.

Remember: The U.S. justified its invasion of Iraq because the Iraqi people deserved freedom and democracy, which we, as U.S. citizens, are to understand as worthwhile objectives. Notice, though: There has been no invasion of Saudi Arabia to liberate those people under the thumb of a brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime.

Remember: In recent years, U.S. military officials and politicians have expressed outrage that a foreign political power—Iran—dares to interfere with Iraq’s progress to stability and democracy. Of course, the foreign power that is the U.S. isn’t meddling—it’s helping.

Many people outside U.S. borders understand quite clearly that the U.S. government and corporations have long played a crucial role in assisting Israel in its dispossession and torment of the Palestinian people. They can also see the pertinence to the U.S. of Orwell’s observation, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”

The horrors in Gaza are indefensible. We have to undermine the righteous defense of these horrors and increase the number of people in our own society who can see the true workings of the United States in the Middle East. We can start by asking our friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, clergy, teachers, and media workers: Should we conduct our public affairs by a single standard based on human rights and international law? Or is the United States entitled to a double standard? Does might make right? Are we above the law?

How the Bush Administration answered these questions is painfully clear. Mr. Mitchell, President Obama, and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are soon to reveal their answer.

Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sociologists have identified two traditions in what they call the American civil religion: The Priestly emphasizes superior morality and singular calling of American power, while the Prophetic does not hesitate to criticize power for violating its ideals. One example of the Priestly tradition in U.S. history is the theory and practice of Manifest Destiny in the 19th century, while an example of the Prophetic tradition is the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

The national calendar provides an unusual juxtaposition for a consideration of these two traditions, amounting to two distinct options for the American future. Monday Americans remember and celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King and on Tuesday witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.

What’s striking is that Dr. King, who once referred to his own United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” has been appropriated into the national pantheon. King has been honored with this holiday on the third Monday of January, while plans move forward for establishing a Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc., to be located on the National Mall.

Such a foundation needs generous donors and they have been responding to the call. For example, in summer 2008, the Boeing Company gave a million dollars to this project to further the memory of Dr. King’s work. Boeing president James Bell said, “on behalf of Boeing and its employees, I am proud to announce this gift with the sincere hope that, through this Memorial, the power of Dr. King’s example will endure and become a reality in our lifetime. Striving to create a better future by bringing people together, enabling communication and protecting peace is what inspires our 160,000 employees every day. We are tremendously honored to support the Memorial as an enduring reminder of Dr. King’s legacy of inclusion, hope and freedom.”

It may be that Mr. Bell has not yet studied Dr. King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam” from 1967. A stirring indictment of U.S. policy, King states therein, “A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Or, possibly, Mr. Bell has read the speech but no matter. Even Boeing can cite Dr. King for its purpose.

In her study, America, Amerikkka, U.S. theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether comments, “[American leaders] both pursue murderous policies motivated by that they see as American self-interest and also manage to sincerely believe that they are serving the best interests of these colonized and exploited people as well. Few American politicians are pure hypocrites who know that what they say to justify their policies has little to do with what they are doing. Most politicians are deeply self-deluded by their own rhetoric. Indeed, to combine being both practitioners of realpolitik and also self-deluded believers in the rhetoric of America’s messianic role is the basic requirement of an effective American politician.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama officially begins his presidential work of offering stirring rhetoric and pursuing American self-interest. During the campaign, Mr. Obama’s mantra-like oratory on change and hope supposedly indicated his distance from the horrors of these last eight years of Republican rule. Yet, it may be useful to keep in mind what a character said in Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Change everything just a little so as to keep everything exactly the same.” Quote Dr. King and support Israel. Call for more diplomacy and say no option is off the table. Pull back from Iraq and go full-throttle in Afghanistan. Acknowledge the mistakes (not crimes) of your predecessors and be relentless in pursuing victory in the Global War on Terror. Call for citizen sacrifice but don’t ask too much of the corporations.

The King Holiday and the Obama inauguration can lead us to consider: With whom and what do we Americans identify, past and present: the priestly or the prophetic lineage of our history?

The abolitionists or the defenders of the slavery status quo?

The Robber Barons or Nader’s Raiders?

Boeing’s sale of weapons to Israel for its Gaza bombing or Hedy Epstein, Paul Larudee and the Free Gaza Movement?

The neoconservatives who planned and plotted the invasion of Iraq for reasons of WMD, democracy, and liberation (and oil and hegemony) or the veterans who return from Iraq to speak the truth of the brutal killing of civilians?

Journalist Ida B. Wells or the respectable city fathers and citizens who applauded lynching?

Cardinal Spellman who blessed the U.S. invaders of Vietnam or Daniel Berrigan who burned draft files?

The nationally approved iconic King on the National Mall or the King who in his last days stood with the Memphis sanitation workers?

An accommodation to Obama’s new and improved American Exceptionalism or a commitment to a growing, permanent opposition of conscience?

Because of the extensive, though sanitized, U.S. news coverage of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza, many Americans are paying closer attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict (those with access to Arabic news programming and Youtube clips are not spared the gruesomeness and enormous destruction of Israel’s effort to deal Hamas a death-blow.)

Many people are shocked, if not disgusted, by the mounting death and injury tolls, the David and Goliath asymmetry, and the “collateral damage” and war crimes inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Given this latest escalating round of brutality, and events in recent years such as the publications of Jimmy Carter’s controversial book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid and Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby, more people may be ready to critically question the U.S.-Israel relationship. Further, those horrified by the mass death in what has been called the world’s largest prison may ask, “What can be done to stop this?”

Americans may pride ourselves on being problem-solvers and pragmatists. Yet, these dispositions can sometimes lead to knee-jerk quests for quick-fixes.

Over twenty years ago, MIT professor Noam Chomsky concluded his grim study of the U.S. support for bloodbaths in Central America with these sobering words: “There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change — and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.”

As far as the search for understanding and education, allow me to mention a few resources that provide alternatives perspectives to those often found in the mainstream media or voiced by the U.S. Congress. That search for understanding and education requires a willingness to question all kinds of authority, exposure to various viewpoints, thoughtful consideration of evidence, and on-going dialogue. I offer the following not as “the last word,” but for those wanting to begin to invest more attention to this part of the world.

One website: www.electronicintifada.net offers a stimulating range of news, analysis, and commentary, including diary entries from internationals working in the Palestinian territories.

One book: The Question of Palestine, by the late Edward Said, the foremost Palestinian voice in the U.S. for decades. Part of his work is to show what Zionism has looked like, not from the standpoint of Jews fleeing anti-Semitic Europe, but from the standpoint of Zionism’s victims, the Palestinians.

One documentary: Occupation 101: The Voices of the Silenced Majority deals the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group If Americans Knew is distributing this documentary for free; contact them at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/freeocc101.html. The group’s hope is that people will take the initiative to screen the film in homes and gathering places for friends, family, neighbors, and community members.

For those who want to deepen their understanding by acting in concert with others, whether that means material aid, lobbying Congress, political protest, boycott campaigns, and/or travel to Palestine, one can begin by investigating the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation: http://endtheoccupation.org/index.php.

Chomsky’s “hope of a brighter future” is undoubtedly tested by the accumulated misery of the Gazans in the last few years up to this very hour. More of us need to reach out to others who have begun to question the predictable pieties of American political discourse. Further, as activist Kathy Kelly has said, we need to “catch courage from one another” as we seek ways to encourage moves toward justice and peace. Last, we ought to ponder these famous words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly….”

written by Miranda Portwine to Katie Lochhead

Hey Katie,

I was thinking about you today. Remember at the beginning of the semester how you were telling me you don’t know what to do with your life? You love theology and social justice but you are majoring in art. You are incredibly talented at art but it is not your passion. I know how passionate you are about just being with people–being present with them. You want to hear the stories and voices of those that don’t get heard and you want to share those stories with others.

I know in high school, you and your brother would volunteer at the soup kitchen on Sunday mornings. I thought you were crazy giving up a prime day to sleep in to go work your butt off at a kitchen. How foolish I feel now. I know that this sort of thing is effortless to you and it is just one thing out of a multitude that you do that I cannot even fathom having the time or the energy for. But like I said, you do it so effortlessly. You do not see it as giving up a day to sleep in. You do not see it as a sacrifice of yourself, but a chance to help others. I respect and honor you so much that you do that.

You are a role model in my life. Whenever I think about people who are just good right down to the bone, people who would sacrifice so much for the good of others, and people who will just be there for and with others, you are one of the people that come to mind. Another is Mev Puleo, but I have the honor and the pleasure of knowing you, being friends with you, and growing with you. I really do consider myself lucky. But you are probably wondering who this Mev is that I speak.

Well I will tell you. I took this class at SLU that I think you would be really interested in. It is a Social Justice class, and the professor is Dr. Mark Chmiel. My first encounter with Mev however was through a picture. I was at this woman’s house dropping off money for children in Haiti. Jane Corbett used to go down to Haiti and work with the poor there and when my grandma introduced me to her I know that I had to help somehow. While I was there, I saw a picture of a woman on her fridge and in the picture the woman was whispering something to Pope John Paul II. Jane noticed me looking at it and she told me that the woman in the picture also helped the poor and that she was a very nice, compassionate woman. She then went on to say that the woman was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and that we should keep her in our prayers. That woman was Mev.

It was a long time ago, however, and though some of the details are lost for me, that picture forever stayed burned in my brain. I would think about Mev from time to time, wonder how she was doing, and wonder what she had done. Years later, I found myself in a Social Justice class not knowing what I was getting myself into. I mean, I took it in high school and snored through most of it. I still had no idea what it was all about, and on top of that, after reading the syllabus for this one, I didn’t think I would have a chance to sleep at all. It was overwhelming but for some reason, I felt like I needed to be there. Well I ended up sticking with it and even friending my professor on Facebook! I was looking through his albums and there was a whole one devoted to Mev. To my surprise, I stumbled upon the very same picture! A chill went through me. A picture that I thought about for years, expecting my own memory to be faded, was staring at me exactly how I remembered it from so many years ago.

I told the professor about this happening and he told me a little bit about Mev, his late wife and even gave me a book he wrote on her, The Book of Mev. It sounded a bit biblical but I thought I’d give it a chance. Once I started reading it, I could not put it down. The book goes through how my professor, Dr. Chmiel, met Mev. It talked about her work with the poor in Brazil; it even has some of her interviews that she had with the people there: men, women, widows, priests, etc. It is covered with photos of her and photos she took of the people she interviewed and heard, and now we can hear them too. It went through her frustrations of finding publishers, frustrations of others not seeming to care, but also her determination and hope that we can make change. I learned more about her through this book not only her professional life, but her infectious laugh, her love for Ben and Jerry’s, and even some of her deepest fears. I feel like somehow, through the pages, I almost know her. It sounds crazy, I’m sure, but I think another reason I feel that way is because she reminds me of you: silly, goofy, loving, dedicated, motivated, hard-working, and a true friend.

I think you would really enjoy reading this book and I think it would really help you come up with what you could do through your gift of art and passion for social justice. I love you sweets; give me a call sometime if you want to talk more about it.

Until then, it is late and I should probably get to bed! J

Love you,

Miranda

Saturday 3 January 2009

I received this message from Katie Consumaus, who took Social Justice in spring 2008. Katie graduated from SLU in May 2008 and is an actor.

Dr Chmiel,

I just flipped on CNN after getting home from rehearsal and immediately thought of our encounter on New Year’s Eve as I watched a saddening report on Gaza.

My immediate reaction was desolation and helplessness– so often my response these days as I watch the news.

But then I became happier when I remembered I had good news to share with you that I neglected to mention the other day. My apologies for my forgetfulness– my mind was already on the show I was rushing off to perform in.

But anyway. This holiday, while riding around in the tour van between shows, I was able to start and complete THE BOOK OF MEV. I was so engrossed that I finished the last 100 pages of the book by the feeble blue light of my open cell phone late at night on the road. (It couldn’t wait until I got home, evidently, although I paid for it the next day with an eye strain headache. Haha.)

Social Justice as a course truly changed my entire perspective on life, and THE BOOK OF MEV only solidified my new perspectives into the deepest corners of my heart.

I am extremely grateful to you.

I have not yet processed my thoughts well enough to articulate an intelligible response to your book, but it is coming, and when I have come up with them, I will be sure to share them with you.

Thank you for sharing your words and your heart with your students and your readers.

Katie

Under review

Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes—Inside the Army’s Secret Archive of Investigations (New York: Basic Books, 2008) and Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians (New York: Nation Books, 2008).

“[U.S. military forces] raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war….” – Vietnam Veteran John Kerry

“I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he’s going to start shooting. And you gotta understand… when you have spent nine months in a war zone, where no one—every time you’ve been shot at, you’ve never seen the person shooting at you, and you could never shoot back. He’s some guy, some fourteen-year-old kid with an AK-47, decides he’s going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you’ve ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds…. Everyone was so happy, like this released that they finally killed an insurgent. Then when we got there, they realized it was just a little kid. And I know that really fucked up a lot of people in the head….They’d show all the pictures and some people were really happy, like, “Oh, look what we did.’ And other people were like, ‘I don’t want to see that ever again.’” – Iraq Veteran. Patrick Campbell

“Support the troops.” How many times in the last seven years have you heard or seen this imperative? Its frequency may be due to its mindless lack of specificity. With the dominance of the Bush Administration’s viewpoint in the media during this “global war on terror,” “support the troops” easily functioned as “support the Bush Administration.” Don’t question authority.

One Iraq war veteran, Aidan Delgado offered a more specific challenge to those fond of repeating, mantra-like, support the troops: “Honor the veterans by listening to what they really have to say.” Of course, veterans have all kinds of things to say as well as all kinds of things they are unable and unwilling to say. Several of my students over the years have spoken about a relative who was in the Vietnam War, and the young people have never heard a word from their uncle or father about their war-time experiences. It’s obvious, too, that they know not even to ask a question of their elders.

Two recent books provide an opportunity for us to consider veterans who want to communicate to us about the crimes of war that are barely acknowledged in the mainstream press. Deborah Nelson’s The War Behind Me and Laila al-Arian and Chris Hedges’s Collateral Damage examine U.S. soldiers who’ve been willing to confront the U.S. military’s contempt for civilian life in Vietnam and Iraq. A few hours with these two succinct and revelatory volumes may better enable us to understand what has happened in both Vietnam and Iraq and so stimulate our critical thinking and responsible action.

Deborah Nelson conducted interviews with a number of Vietnam veterans whose stories she initially found in a recently declassified Army archive of war crimes investigations about U.S. troops in Vietnam. Composed of letters from soldiers, official investigations, and statistical reports, the archive provided ample, official confirmation of what soldiers had long been desperate to reveal to those high in the chain of command. Nelson excerpts amply from these documents as well as from recent interviews with the soldiers, and some of the higher-ups responsible for the policies that horrified these soldiers.

Nelson offers the following pointed rationale for her book: “It’s a place for [veterans] to tell their stories again, now with the full force of the army’s own investigation findings behind them. Years ago, many of them hoped their accounts would pressure the Pentagon to stop ‘all the wrong killing,’ as a soldier wrote in a private letter to then army chief of staff William C. Westmoreland in 1970. The war ended without an accounting or acknowledgement of the war crimes they witnessed. Their retelling comes at an equally important time when, having failed to address the past, we’re destined to repeat it.” [4-5]

The very nature of U.S. strategy in South Vietnam was to increase the “body count” of the enemy, the “Viet Cong” (National Liberation Front). This necessitated neutralizing the value of the civilian population to the guerilla fighters, which required uprooting villagers and moving them to “strategic hamlets” behind barbed wire. Once removed, the areas around their villages became “free-fire zones,” which allowed the U.S. to bomb or shoot anything that moved, including civilians who went back seeking food or to be near where their ancestors were buried. Vietnam veteran Myron Ambeau observed, “The firefighting you could handle. It’s all that other stuff that plays on your mind. We just basically search and destroy with no rhyme or reason….How in the hell do you go in there, completely destroy everything they have, beat up their family members, rape their wives, and burn down their houses?” [37]

Some older Americans will be able to link the name My Lai with U.S. atrocity in Vietnam. One “Anonymous Soldier” had written persistently to U.S. commanders, asserting that the My Lai massacre of March 1968 wasn’t unique: “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.” [78]

Dead civilians were counted as “V.C.” and so increased the body count, said quantification facilitating officer advancement and perks for the enthusiastic soldiers. In one case, a U.S. soldier eager to win a competition of the most kills was convicted on unpremeditated murder, but only received less pay and demotion in rank. He was soon able to get another tour in Vietnam. One of Nelson’s interviewees, Robert Stemme, Jr., told her, “I just couldn’t believe that went away after what happened to those people. I was really kind of shocked.” Nelson goes on to write, “The wrist slap reflected the ‘mere gook rule,’ [Stemme] says. U.S. soldiers learned in basic training to dehumanize the enemy and carried the lesson to its logical conclusion in the field. So when Army leaders pressured the men at LZ English [a support area and camp] to produce more bodies and intelligence, the ‘mere gook’ rule provided an easy solution.” [59]

Some defenses of the Vietnam War view claim that the war was lost because of a cantankerous, anti-military media, or the half-hearted timidity of the politicians, who did not allow the military to use all the power at its disposal. Yet, Vietnamese themselves used words like “extermination” for what the U.S. military was doing in the 1960s. Consider two perspectives contrary to the view that the U.S. might have won if allowed to use its full might. The first is James Henry, one of the whistle blowers interviewed by Nelson: “All we wanted to do is survive this and get out. Nobody wanted to quit. Everybody wanted to do their job. When we were told to attack, we did. It was a fight. But it was pretty obvious that we weren’t going to accomplish what the government wanted us to accomplish, especially the way we were going about it. I mean, going around killing all the people that we’re supposed to be saving isn’t going to work. If they weren’t enemies before we got there, they were enemies after we got there.” A second view is that of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: “The more American troops sent to Vietnam, the more the anti-American campaign led by the NLF becomes successful. Anger and hatred rise in the hearts of the peasants as they see their villages burned, their compatriots killed, their houses destroyed. Pictures showing NLF soldiers with arms tied, followed by American soldiers holding guns with bayonets, make people think of the Indochina war between the French and the Viet Minh and cause pain even to the anti-Communist Vietnamese.” [from Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, 63-64]

As more and more soldiers began to complain of systematic disregard for Vietnamese civilian life, the Army grew concerned. It was obligated to investigate each claim of a war crime, but, like President Richard Nixon, military officials weren’t interested in seeing these crimes make the front page of the nation’s newspapers. Damage control mode kicked into high gear, which tried to minimize what happened, or to discredit the soldiers who became increasingly outspoken.

There has yet to be an honest national reckoning with the crimes the United States committed in Indochina. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission needs to take place here. If such were to happen, the testimony revealed in Nelson’s book would surely be crucial evidence in the process of facing the gruesome truth of what really happened and who was ultimately responsible. Let James Henry have the last word: “I would guess that there hundreds if not thousands of allegations of various abuses. Not stealing bananas, but serious abuses. The army could not possibly bring all of these problems out into the open, (which court martial trials would do) without admitting that they had failed in every aspect of training, tactics, and command of the troops in Viet Nam and the ultimate responsibility and the corruption went from the rice paddies, all the way to the Pentagon.” [185-186]

&&&

One striking difference between the U.S occupation of Iraq and the U.S. occupation of South Vietnam is that in the latter case, U.S. commanders were obsessed with body counts—the greater the number of “Viet Cong” killed, the closer we were to “victory.” Yet, General Tommy Franks said after the invasion of Iraq, “We don’t do body counts.” When he declared “mission accomplished” in May 2003, President Bush also said, “With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent…” In Collateral Damage Hedges and al-Arian focus principally on those modes of a military occupation that cause harm and death to innocent civilians: convoys, checkpoints, raids, and detentions. By understanding the dynamics of these phenomena, we can detect an operative “mere haji rule” in Iraq. The authors state, “The word ‘haji’ in the Muslim world is a term of respect and denotes someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is used by American troops as a slur, taking the place of ‘gook’ in Vietnam or ‘raghead’ in Afghanistan. The dehumanization of the Iraqis, the implicit assumption that they were less than human, made it easier to cope with abuse and killing, to deny the humanity of those standing on the wrong end of the conflict.” [94]

According to the authors, “conveys are the arteries that sustain the occupation. They ferry water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food, and fuel to bases across Iraq.” [9] But to the Iraqis, they are seen as “freight trains of death.” To supply the troops, convoys have to travel great distances and need protection. Drivers are therefore instructed by commanders never to stop because that puts the convoy and its protectors at risk of insurgent attack. The human consequences: if Iraqis of whatever age, including children, are seen as an impediment to the plan to go smoothly from point A to point B, then the Iraqis will be run over, or shot, no matter what. Sergeant Geoffrey Millard said, “No one ever questioned if someone skipped the step [of firing a warning shot] and just fired directly into the vehicle, because it’s a split-second decision. And you err on the side of life, meaning your life and not the life of the person in the vehicle.” [16] Sergeant Kelly Dougherty commented, “It was just like, the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don’t have to kill them back in Colorado. He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a potential terrorist.” [26] National Guardsman Fernando Braga reported: “[The lieutenant] said the reason was that we shouldn’t hesitate [to run over children] because of the way they would treat their children. They don’t value human life like we do and they don’t share our same Western values.” [13]

The authors describe the checkpoint system as follows: “The U.S. military has checkpoints dotted across Iraq. They are designed to restrict the flow of traffic, make travel by insurgents difficult on roads, and prevent the shipment of weapons and explosives. These checkpoints serve as safety valves, used by the occupation troops to protect neighborhoods, fortified compounds, and city streets from attack. But the checkpoints are deadly for civilians.” [30] Due to the ignorance of the Iraqi civilian drivers, or to the short temper of the U.S soldiers, a checkpoint is a calamity waiting to happen. A family in a car approaches and the driver is neither able to read the minds of the soldiers positioned many meters away nor understand their language, the U.S. modus operandi is predictable: Shoot first, ask questions later. Sergeant Dougherty admitted, “You start looking at everyone as a criminal…. Is this the car that’s going to try to run into me? Is this the car that has explosives in it? Or is this just someone who’s confused?” [36] Sergeant Ben Flanders recollected, “The enemy can come from any direction. They can come in any form, whether it’s a pregnant woman who blows herself up on soldiers or it’s this car just sitting idly on the side of the road.” [37] Spc. Patrick Resta stated, “I even specifically remember being told that it was better to kill them than to have somebody be wounded and still alive.” [41] The U.S. military does not keep statistics of civilians killed at checkpoints.

Raids are frequently undertaken to identify and arrest the insurgents. The raids typically take place from midnight to 4 or 5 a.m. These are incursions into domestic Iraqi lives, disruptive, destructive, and tending to the dehumanizing. Sergeant John Bruhns pointed out, “And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes. [53-54] Staff Sergeant T.J. Westphal contended: “Most of the people were terrified. You could see it in their eyes. We knew that this was not the way to win the hearts and minds. You don’t come in the middle of the night and harass people and then expect them to give you flowers the next day.” [70] As with U.S. “pacification” efforts that uprooted Vietnamese civilians, the raids, according to some of the interviewees, were seen as counterproductive, as they led outraged Iraqis to become opposed to the U.S. occupation.

Detentions have achieved certain notoriety in the U.S. as increasing attention has been paid to the practice of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Hedges and al-Arian state the gravity of the problem: “Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been incarcerated in prisons and detention facilities in Iraq. The numbers range from 60,000 to 120,000, according to military officials. Some prisoners have languished for months, even years, in Iraqi prisons. Families are forced to navigate a dysfunctional bureaucracy to find and plead for the release of their relatives.” [72] Spc. Resta’s supervisor claimed, “The Geneva Conventions don’t exist at all in Iraq, and that’s in writing if you want to see it.” Resta had the gumption to ask to see it in writing, but the commander refused. Resta realized that he could be obedient and relent or risk a court-martial. Power trips by the soldiers and dehumanization of the Iraqis went hand in hand.

The last chapter, “Hearts and Minds,” alludes to President Lyndon Johnson’s “Hearts and Minds” speech. To win in Vietnam required military success and political success, the latter involving “winning over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.” Yet the U.S. was doomed in Vietnam, because napalm, Agent Orange, search and destroy, torture, mass murder, and strategic hamlets/concentration camps were guaranteed to be great recruiting for the resistance, as Thich Nhat Hanh observed in 1967. The continued U.S. domination of Iraq is guaranteed to generate outrage, bitterness, leading some to take up arms (or to throw shoes at Bush), leading others to recall, in a hard to fathom nostalgia, the good old days under Saddam Hussein.

Many have felt a sense of relief at Barak Obama’s 2008 election victory, as well as the impending supposed handing over of power from the U.S. to Iraqis. Yet, these two books ought to give pause. 30,000 more troops going to Afghanistan? Won’t they have to institute more checkpoints there? Won’t these troops undertake hundreds of nocturnal raids, seeking Taliban terrorists? Won’t there be a proliferation of convoys, leading to further “collateral damage” of Afghan civilians, added to those already killed while celebrating at their weddings by U.S. aerial bombings? Won’t more Afghanis and other nationals be swept up in raids and pressured to confess via means Americans have found abhorrent?

In Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the United States created an incalculable disaster for the people of these countries. The damage and destruction of human life and society has continued in Iraq and is soon to accelerate in Afghanistan. But veterans ranging in age from their mid-20s to their mid-60s, continue to speak out about the human costs of U.S. arrogance and belligerence past and present. In his communication to superiors when the Vietnam war was a daily topic of conversation in the United States, James Henry said, “My motivation can be stated quite briefly: I want the murder of Vietnamese stopped and I want the military to stop putting Americans in the position of becoming murderers.” [16]