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War is sometimes justified, often not, but always insane
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Oct. 7, 2005
There is an old story about a seventeenth century British aristocrat
who considered incompetence in the British military to be necessary to
continued civilian rule. There may be something to that idea, but the
degree of incompetence that we are witnessing in the US military goes
way beyond what might possibly be useful for ensuring civilian rule and
threatens the continued existence of our country and even the entire
world.
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This is not anti-militarist whining. Although I am technically a
Conscientious Objector to military service, I am not anti-military, not
even a pacifist. Numerous members of my family have served in the
military with honor. My uncle was wounded on Iwo Jima. My mother was
a World War II Marine Drill Instructor while she carried me.
Chalk it
up to prenatal influences if you like, but I am actually intensely
supportive of the need for an honorable and effective military in
today's world. If it had not been so abundantly clear that the US
Military was being used for illegal and immoral purposes, I would have
considered serving. I'm sure I would have been willing, as so many
members of my family were, to have served in WWII had I the chance.
However, I would not have served in any conflict since that time, due to
an intense moral repugnance, based on my best understanding, toward the
criminality, masquerading as patriotic fervor, that has characterized
all the conflicts that the US military has participated in since that
time.
From an idealistic, spiritual point of view I see the possibility, and
the need, for a world so transformed that military force is
unnecessary. In a world so transformed, interpersonal violence would
be a psychological problem when it arose, and not a function of the
state. But, in the real world, as I have experienced it, organized
criminal violence needs to be dealt with on a regular basis. Hence the
need for a military.
In 1966, in the midst of the escalation of the American War in Viet
Nam, I had just completed my junior year of college. From the
admittedly sketchy information available at the time, from the study of
history and attendance at several "teach ins," I had made a firm
personal commitment to resist service in that illegal and immoral war.
In fact, I was studying bus schedules to Canada when someone tapped me
on the shoulder and proceeded to explain how I could serve in Viet Nam
as a civilian aid worker with the International Voluntary Service and
earn a deferment from service in the military.
I spent over four years living and working in the towns and
villages of Viet Nam as the war raged around me. I had the best ringside seat in the house. I was able to witness more aspects of the war
than the soldiers, than the war correspondents, than even the
Vietnamese people themselves. Everyone else was confined to their
particular corner while I was free to go anywhere, talk to anyone,
observe everything in the stark realism that comes from being unaligned
with any segment of the conflict.
I never, ever, carried a weapon of any kind. When any topic even
remotely related to politics would come up, I would assert no interest and less understanding, out of a necessity for
personal survival. I had a little funny rant in that I would go into,
in what became very serviceable Vietnamese, about how incredibly
ignorant and uninterested in politics I was. A somewhat popular game
amongst my Vietnamese friends was to provoke this rant for its
entertainment value.
Very soon after arriving I began to rigorously avoid contact with
Americans and their South Vietnamese counterparts. I did not use US
government or South Vietnamese transport, choosing instead to drive my
own vehicle or use public transportation. Above all I came to absolutely not trust anything any official
person said.
These were not measures taken out of some ideological bias. They were
firmly based in the reality I was experiencing on a daily basis.
In
the decades since, I have despaired about being able to tell any part
of my Viet Nam experience. Inevitably, no matter what the nationality
or experience of the person I am talking to about those times, I
encounter a brick wall of preconceived ignorance that prevents
understanding.
But here we are again, as a nation, the country of my
birth, once again embroiled in a phantasmagorically asinine, illegal
and horrendously destructive senseless war, so I feel I must try, even
if I sense failure at the onset.
On those intimate occasions when I have sensed a glimmer of
understanding of my view of the American War in Viet Nam, it has been
the result of telling a personal story that has some humor as well
as horror. I can tell you till the cows come home, how certain I am
that the officer corps of the US Military is completely dominated by
corrupt, insane men, and you will not get it. I can cite innumerable
facts that prove my case, and you will not get it. You may find
yourself in agreement with numerous assertions based on fact and my
personal experience, but you will not get the whole picture. Even, and
especially, when people are predisposed to hear the worst about the US
military, there will be deeply held misunderstandings, born largely, I
think, from the incredible investment of dollars in the propaganda war
and myth-making that has been inflicted on, not only the American
people, but on the entire world.
The sole exception I have experienced to this very general rule of
non-comprehension, is when I talk to some of the actual foot soldiers,
from both sides, who fought each other and suffered at each other's
hands. I have had, on a couple of occasions during visits to Viet Nam
since the war, the opportunity to be the translator for encounters
between common soldiers from the opposing sides. It is an amazing
experience. I have not found any hint of anger or resentment in these
contacts. Rather, I have seen brothers in arms talking about an
intense experience that they shared on the battle field. I have
seen former enemies cry and embrace upon the realization that someone
else understands their tortured memories.
So, in yet another doomed attempt to rub a little mud off the opaque
window of history, allow me to tell you one of thousands of little
stories that people my understanding of war as fought by the US
military. It was a formative experience, virtually my first real
contact with the military upon arriving in Viet Nam, and one that
offered insights that served me well throughout my years there.
At the beginning of my service in Viet Nam, after a few weeks of
cursory language training, my boss took me out to my assignment and
introduced me to the people I was to help. My boss, Don Luce, was one
of the most interesting and knowledgeable people I ever encountered in
Viet Nam. His Northern-accented Vietnamese was impeccable, and much,
much better than I would ever attain, but his management style seemed
to consist of throwing people in the deep water to see if they could
swim.
He took me out to a small, desperately poor refugee camp on the
outskirts of the Binh Duong Province (now renamed Tu Dau Mot) capital of
Phu Cuong in the Phu Loi District. Veterans of the Big Red One
division might recall the name Phu Loi where the First Division HQ was
situated.
This small refugee camp had been given a small sliver of
land where no one else wanted to live. It was hemmed in on every side
by heavily fortified military bases. Mine fields where everywhere.
The nights were illuminated so brightly by the incessant phosphorus
flares floating above it, fired off by the various forts, that one
could comfortably read a book by the light. Especially at night,
gunfire and explosions were so common that you just didn't consciously
hear them any more after a while.
This small refugee village didn't
even have a name. It was situated just off the main road between the
town of Phu Cuong and the First Division base. Between the road and
the camp was an old, unused cemetery that was about a hundred yards
wide.
The shelters in the camp consisted of bamboo sheds with corrugated
metal roofs. Floors were dirt. Walls were absent. There was the
constant smell of feces from the open latrines. Small children,
dressed in rags, shoeless, stared, unblinking and impassive from
concealed positions. Death was a common visitor. The first body I saw
was of a very pregnant young woman that I had met on a previous visit.
The mound of her aborted pregnancy was evident through the blood
drenched grass mat that wrapped her shrapnel shredded body as it lay in
the mud in the center of the village. This was a very grim place.
Perhaps you can imagine my dismay as I watched my boss take off after a
brief introduction over the weak, bitter tea that is a social ritual in
rural Viet Nam, leaving me alone in this little village, with people
who I could neither understand or speak with. My instructions? "Just
ask the refugees what they want you to do to help them."
Hours passed,
and much tea was drunk on that first day, but no understanding was
reached in spite of every effort on their part to use broken English, French and hand signals to explain what was clearly a
fervent wish on their part that I help them with a very specific and
pressing problem. Just before I gave up entirely and was planning to
just leave, they managed to communicate that I should return to the
village at four o'clock, which I did.
On my return we resumed the polite non-communication over bitter tea
until a few minutes before four thirty, when, with no warning
whatsoever I was bodily grabbed and pulled down into a hole under a bed
beside the table where we had been smiling at each other
uncomprehendingly for the previous half hour. Needless to say my
bladder was not happy after all that tea. All I wanted to do was to
find a place to pee and here I was in a dark hole, squatting down with
a group of poorly washed people in total incomprehension and
discomfort. That is when the shooting started.
For about twenty or thirty minutes that seemed like the proverbial
eternity, bullets raged above my head. Clumps of dirt and splinters
pelted me in spite of my hosts attempts to shield me. I suddenly knew
the terror of war. To be subjected to sustained machine gun fire with
no imaginable escape is the essence of terror.
Finally the shooting stopped and my hosts helped me out of the hole. I
looked at my surroundings with very new eyes. What I was recently
blind to suddenly became clear. Now I saw the bullet holes in the
roofs, the shattered bamboo poles, the shards of tea cups and the pock
marked dirt berms that surrounded the small camp. These things had
been there before, but because I had no reference, no experience of war
up close, I could not see them.
Over the following weeks of language training on the job, and numerous
visits to the hole, it became clear that what these people fervently
wanted me to do was to get the US Army to stop shooting at them. It
turned out that every day a convoy of Army vehicles would stop on the
road exactly at four thirty and unleash a tremendous barrage of fire at
the village. There seemed to be no explanation for this, and all the
people could do was hide in their holes every afternoon and wait it
out. The worst problem was the condition of the roofs that most
resembled very outsized cheese graters.
As only a naive and dedicated twenty one year old could do, I accepted
the challenge. I would address my assigned task as best as I could.
No one I spoke to, including the refugees, had the slightest idea of
how to address the problem, and in the case of the Americans, not the
slightest interest in addressing it. Left to my own I decided to take
the direct approach.
One afternoon I followed the convoy back from town in my little Vespa
scooter, after it had disgorged its daily load of "hooch maids,"
civilian women employees that did laundry and attended to various other
needs of the US First Division troops during their work day at the
base. I parked a hundred feet or so behind the convoy as it stopped in
its usual place. I watched as the soldiers flopped down along the edge
of the road and opened up with all their weapons on the village. The
noise was deafening, and then some. I was scared feces-less, but there
was nothing to do but to put on as casual an air as possible and stroll
up to the soldiers as they poured instant death into the village I was
trying to help.
I stood there for a number of minutes behind the parked trucks and
jeeps, just a few feet from the soldiers lying on the ground and firing
relentlessly across the grave yard and into the village. I just stood
there with my hands in my pockets, ignored, until the nearest soldier
shouted for me to get down. I asked him why. He yelled that "the
grave yard sniper" was out there and I would get shot.
I looked out at
the place that I had become quite familiar with over the previous weeks
in total incomprehension. "What grave yard sniper?" I thought to
myself. After some more awkward minutes standing there, enveloped in
gun smoke and occasionally being hit by an expended shell casing from
the many roaring automatic weapons, and being totally ignored, I turned
around and casually went back to my vehicle and left. Clearly the
direct approach was not going to work.
Later, someone suggested that I look at the bumpers of the trucks and
decipher from the odd collection numbers and letters printed there,
which units were involved. Then I should try looking up the unit
commander at the base to see if they were willing to do anything. This
I did and some days later managed to find the relevant HQ. I located a
junior officer, who took me to a large tent to talk to "the Colonel."
The man was sitting behind a table looking like a character out of
MASH, very stiff and stern in his demeanor. From a standing position
(I was not invited to sit but rather was stopped by the junior officer
some ten feet or so in front of the commanding officer) I told the
above story to a glaring, and increasingly angry uniformed man, who, at
the end of my little speech directed the junior officer to arrest me.
Then ensued a bizarre discussion between the commander and the junior
officer as to why exactly that was not possible, my being a civilian
and outside the jurisdiction of the Army and all. The Colonel finally
relented and I was allowed to putter off on my Vespa, feeling very
dysphoric and not at all sure that my shorts were clean.
I eventually did come up with a solution. The Army continued with its
clockwork senseless violence. However, I was able to locate a source
of free corrugated roofing, and just about every week, I was able to
supply the village with a palate of new, high quality aluminum
corrugated sheets.
The villagers were very pleased. Not only did they
have renewed roofs, they also were able to go into the scrap aluminum
business. With pieces of downed American aircraft and other bits of the
flotsam and jetsam of the American style of war, as well as their
recycled roofs, they were able to improve their lives greatly.
It was my
first success as an aid worker, and the beginning of a deep awakening
to the reality of the utter insanity of modern American warfare.
During my years traveling throughout that theater of war, no part of
the war ever made any more sense than the part I saw in this first
experience, and much made even less sense. So it was then, and so it is,
undoubtedly, now.
Sometimes people ask me what book I recommend to read to try to
understand the American War in Viet Nam. Unhesitatingly I recommend
Catch 22. When people object that that was about WWII, I respond that
nothing essentially has changed and this is the ONLY book I can
recommend as a sole source of enlightenment. I suspect it works for
the American War in Iraq as well.
© by the author.
What do you think?
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Over the following weeks of language training on the job, and numerous
visits to the hole, it became clear that what these people fervently
wanted me to do was to get the US Army to stop shooting at them.
It
turned out that every day a convoy of Army vehicles would stop on the
road exactly at four thirty and unleash a tremendous barrage of fire at
the village.
There seemed to be no explanation for this, and all the
people could do was hide in their holes every afternoon and wait it
out.
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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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Previous articles by this author:
The bad news is the same as the good news
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Trying to control your emotions "can make you pretty stupid"
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The gangsters' mentality
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Nietzsche, New Orleans, and 'Nam
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Four decades in five minutes
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The masquerade of "civilization"
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Habits of successful modern cannibals
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Face these horrors with acceptance, equanimity, humor
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Yet another, higher dose of pain
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The war of one against all:
The roots of our enslavement
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Doctors, medicine, hospitals, and the rest of the story
by Herb Ruhs, MD
System of privilege expands in scope and overall power
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Highway robbery turns out to be legal after all
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Class warfare, anyone?
Why class war is not a fiction but a fixture of our lives
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Why the little-known news is the most important
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Why "Free Speech" does not matter
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Big pharma
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The genius fish and other comments
by Herb Ruhs, MD
When all else fails, try the truth
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Childhood abuse and the role it plays in maintaining coercive power
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Murder by medical device
by Herb Ruhs, MD
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Roy Rogers and Dale Evans
entertaining U.S. airmen in Vietnam
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Although I am technically a Conscientious Objector to military service, I am not anti-military, not even a pacifist.
Numerous members of my family have served in the military with honor.
My uncle was wounded on Iwo Jima.
My mother was a World War II Marine Drill Instructor while she carried me.
Chalk it up to prenatal influences if you like, but I am actually intensely supportive of the need for an honorable and effective military in today's world.
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Say it with a bumper sticker:
$3 each, or two for $5
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