Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran

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Kerrey's foray into the Mekong, the My Lai massacre, No Gun Ri in Korea, the current slow-boil murder of Iraqi people, the violation of Yugoslav sovereignty, and the financing and advisement of the bloodthirsty Colombian Army and their drug-trafficking paramilitary allies: these are not, in John Kerry’s words, “isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers (and political officials) at all levels of command.” The truth has ever been the same. The cover stories have ever been the same. The job of penitent veterans must be to assault the denial that these cover stories market to the public consciousness and conscience. This is the transgression that can begin to redeem us, the way to grace from our wretchedness as soldiers, as imperialists, and as men. If we want meaning, we better make it. Even as many of our own people go without, we have acquiesced to a government in the thrall of corporate money and power that wants to appropriate $350 billion a year for what is euphemistically called "defense." The U.S. military establishment is a monstrous thing, put to monstrous purposes, and we who were the instruments of that establishment – if we are to reclaim our own humanity – must come forward and help Americans understand what is done in their name. Especially Southerners, because we are still trapped in the deadly headlights at the racesex-death intersection. We must be the blasphemers, because that gives others permission to confront the orthodoxy of reverence before "warriors." What were the lynching parties and the rapes of black women but rites of masculinity and war? What did they serve but systemic power? Our children who go, as I did, into the armed services, are being made tools – or worse – for an institution whose sole purpose is to employ violence against those who threaten the dominance of those who are dominant, and against those who would tell the submissive that they need not submit. We often worry about sending our children to die, but we should also worry about sending our children to kill. To do that, we will have to encourage them to love, and not to fear. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. I hope Bob Kerrey can come to terms with it. I really do. But ... The women and children who died in the Mekong on February 25, 1969 do not have the living luxury of shame and reassessment. Neither do the "NVA nurses." The most any of us can do for them now is tell their story, in all its truthful brutality, and tear down the walls of denial that stand between a people and their consciousness. If you want meaning, that's all the meaning I've got.
Stan Goff concluded a thirty-year career in the military after taking part in the U.S. invasion of Haiti of 1994. As a Special Forces operative in Haiti, Goff defied his superiors’ instructions to cooperate with the CIA-backed death squad FRAPH, leading to his removal. Now an organizer with the North Carolina Alliance for Democracy/ North Carolina Network for Popular Democracy, Goff lives in Raleigh.
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Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran

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