Why would we apologize?
Viewing the stark untouched original image of women and children lying bloodied where they were heartlessly, brutally slain, produced a reaction of deep distress and sadness – a dreadful feeling of disturbing a grave, treading upon sacred ground, offending the tortured feelings of their families, and guilt for trivializing such a potent, sepulchral horror.
Were I one of their spirits I would fervently want that image seen until the sobering message disheartened all, even shallowest of selfish intellects, to accept our blame.
Twentieth-century war repeatedly demonstrated that young males of apparent ‘decent, normal’ upbringing – taught and trained by governments to kill – will too often acquire a taste for murdering ‘them’, the citizens of foreign lands, in the moral wilderness of a weakly-managed (or cynically wielded) force of occupation.
To fix it is to merely and honestly admit a communal burden, to let the trivia fade from dissolute, daily, empty, habitual parades – to widen our world-view beyond selfish appetites and desires and release that stifled, buried, burning childhood need for fairness, cooperation and fellowship.
To fix it means further admitting, as members of greedy civilizations, our governments have no idea how to manage conflicts to avoid violence, and absolutely no intention of doing so.
The tentacles of My Lai
Raised in a society oozing righteous heroism in the aftermath of World War Two, I imagined nations-of-good always fought evil dictatorships.
Then My Lai muddied my moral water forever.
Nixon’s disgrace, the Veterans fury at their Governments (other nations fought in Vietnam too), Buddhist monks squatting in streets consumed by their gasoline pyre, outrage around the globe – and the last time a free press reported savagely on a war – all accumulated to a disconcerting crescendo.
And then the massacre at My Lai bespoke a modern horror, tolerable only in its apparent aberration, while probity joined the roll call of childhood notions quashed.
Now, researching these sad little essays, I learn intricacies and subtleties I’d rather not. If the film Apocalypse Now rang strangely true decades ago, the more I read the more realistic that film grows.
Was the entire American army of half a million men increasingly in open revolt against orders, demoralized and undisciplined … or ‘manipulated’ into genocidal massacres as covert policy?
Did the Phoenix Program strategically direct the U.S. military in a numbers game to obliterate the worth of Vietnamese individuals?
In Vietnam, a demoralized, confused and weary army was exactly the tool to implement any bizarre policy. This was the strangest, cruelest and ugliest war ever fought – and they have all been cruel and ugly.
What an astonishing irony that this covert wing of government directed the greatest military machine in history to a humiliation dwarfing defeats of all time.
These same iron-willed fools repeat their incredible mistakes as we wearily, warily survey the new century’s promise.
