I was putzing around on the web. Cranking out some 2000 words/day is no joke. Then taking care of the kids?
Anyway i come across an interview with Seymour Hersh. He uncovered My Lai. He dropped something that I wish I could get some type of confirmation on:
In any case, you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing.
Now I'm going to assume he's on the money. Given the types of travails these particular groups of soldiers had gone through at home, I'm betting that killing an entire village of women and children was a bit too much to stomach.
His thoughts on the government are insightful as well. Democracy really is a tenuous thing when you think about it. All you need is a few folks to fall down on the job, to be less willing to hold someone accountable, to be less willing to be transparent, and we're in trouble. Where Hersh is helpful--probably more helpful than he knows--is that he actually understands how long it normally takes to turn the tide. The critique against Vietnam didn't begin in earnest until years after the war. We've got a different beast going on here, but I think as casualties mount (and here I'm not talking about deaths. Cobb is right, those numbers are too small. I'm talking about deaths and wounded.) we're going to see a growing willingness to question Bush. Hopefully that will lead to regime change.
Posted by at February 2, 2005 11:26 PM | TrackBackLKS,what should be mention during the vietnam conflict there was a ground swell of opinion from people of color that this was not are fight ;this manifest it self by a going thru the motion type of fightning(shooting in the air).Hersh brought up in the article a personality of the soldier in Irag, a descriptive;poor white persona that dehumanize the enemy this is true in Irag and was true in Vietnam.By in large the educated were defered from service and it they were GI's most likely they were in support companies not infantry grunts.
Posted by: tootsie at February 3, 2005 11:43 AM
Hersh is on fire isn't he?
I sent this link to P6 last week looking for some feedback/verification, no haps. But it feels correct. Contrast that with Colin Powell's role as cleaner in the aftermath of My Lai for an interesting taste of irony.
Also check out what Chomsky has to say on counterpunch.org I'll excerpt the relevant passages;
I think that conscription is going to be a last resort. The reason is the Vietnam experience. The Vietnam experience, I think, is the first time in the history of European imperialism that an imperial power tried to fight a colonial war with a citizen's army. I mean the British didn't do it, and the French had the Foreign Legion In colonial wars, civilians are just no good at. Colonial wars are too brutal and vicious and murderous. You just can't take kids off the street and have them fight that kind of war. You need trained killers, like the French Foreign Legion.
In fact you could see it happening in Vietnam. To its credit, the U.S. army fell apart. It took too long, but finally the army essentially fell apart. Soldiers were on drugs, they were fragging officers, not following orders, and so on and the top brass wanted them out. If you look back at the military journals in the late Sixties, they were writing about how we gotta get this army out of here or the army's going to collapsemuch like the head of the Army reserves said two or three days ago. He said this is becoming a broken force.
Posted by: cnulan at February 3, 2005 09:29 AM