Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran

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people who can't assume safety. So is the world suffering from PTSD, and if it is, what is its meaning? Who is responsible? Even those who purport to heal us don't understand. It don't mean nuthin', we used to say. What? Nuthin.' People think we're all damaged. A lot of that's hype. A lot of it is veterans who never saw combat cashing in on the tragic pose they can cop with the credulous war-worshipping public. But those of us who did see combat, we are really just the healthiest people in the whole society, at least by some standards. No patience for hypocrisy. We understand why the guy in All Quiet on the Western Front goes back to the front. Shit is real there; honest. Some of us can be what you wanted us to be, men, but not like you wanted us to be, liars. The military boosters would hesitate to tell you how homoerotic the whole thing is, because they are still bent on the instrumental project of de-feminizing their boys so they'll be good workers, good husbands, good fathers. Good soldiers. Men, good men. Get with your significant other sometime and do something that cheats death. Jump out of an airplane. Get into a fight with firearms. That luminous feeling lasts for hours. It's like an orgy, like entering a haunted house, like murder, like giving up your religion. Transgression. Then it's just a question of whether you refuse to see or not. I started to see something. I saw people who were supposed to be my enemies who practiced transgression. But they didn't do it out of fear, like me. They did it because there were no options left open to them. They did it because their families had been burned out or murdered or had sharpened stakes driven into their vaginas. They did it so a next generation might not have to live under someone's heel. They did it out of hate, because they did it out of love. Some were older than soldiers, and some were younger than soldiers, and some were women. They fought not to dominate but to defend and liberate. We rotated back to the States, where we could nurse out post-trauma syndrome disorders, but they were there for the duration. I don't know how to explain this because the voices in me, after 50 years, two marriages, five continents, and more than two decades in a uniform are as numerous as they are contradictory. And I was so slow to learn, lost in the fog of my phallicentric, shattered little world. The veterans. Former US Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska ordered the execution of 15 Vietnamese children, women and old men in 1969. Do we remember how fast that story popped up last year, then disappeared?
He's a liar. That lame story that the victims were caught in the crossfire! He's a liar. But everyone hushed right up on that one, because his fly was open, and his dick was showing, and we do so cherish our denials. Fifteen people don't get killed outright in the crossfire of a single, short, small-scale firefight. The odds against it are astronomical. And it was night. On April 23, 1971, as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, future Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, whose name and background are so similar to Kerrey's that it had me confused for a day about the Kerrey story, testified to the U.S. Senate that U.S. troops he knew "had personally 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 Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside," and that "these were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He'd get it if I told him about the Tiger Mountains. Thirty years later, Senator Kerry has been mainstreamed. He supports the sanctions on Iraq, and has been a vocal cheerleader for the bombing of Yugoslavia, the attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, et al. This is a testimony to "compromise and reform," the lexicon of opportunism. He set aside his hate and his love for a career. What a man! Bob Kerrey is a liar today, but I can assure you that John Kerry told the truth, on April 23, 1971. I was a machine gunner with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in a mountain range we called the Suikai on that day. All that he was describing to the comfortable white men of the U.S. Senate was still taking place in Vietnam at the very moment of his description. Months earlier, in the Tiger Mountains, the November Rangers "took out the NVA hospital" and the nurses were shot in the head and had stakes driven into their vaginas, who knows in what order. Bob Kerrey says he is ashamed. Maybe. I don't think our shame is enough. Do you? Military people, especially that minority who have actually been combatants (and know that in the end we are all combatants), who take that first baby step of comprehending the poisonous lies of the American military fetish, the most important transgression of all, have a duty to go beyond mere shame. We must witness. And we must interpret, with all our pathologies, and all our voices.
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Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran

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