Copyright © 1972 by Don Luce
“Tell Your Friends that We’re People” by Don Luce
The human consequences of American policy toward
Vietnam have not been considered by U.S. policymakers. The private memos,
official statements and policy speeches leave out the Vietnamese refugees,
children, farmers and slum dwellers ... and the American GI. They are all
missing in the Pentagon Papers.
I remember trying to discuss the breakdown of the
family structure with Ambassador Bunker in 1967. “Do they [the refugees] need
more Bulgar wheat and cooking oil?” he kept asking me. He could not understand,
or he did not want to understand, that the Vietnamese did not want, or need,
American relief. They wanted to see the end to the defoliation and bombing so
that they could return to their farms.
In May 1971, I was ordered to leave Vietnam for “special
reasons.” I had taken two American Congressmen to the Tiger Cages of Con Son.
Before leaving, I asked the Vietnamese with whom I worked to tell me what they
would like me to say to my American friends.
“Tell your friends that we’re people,” they said. “We’re
not slants, slopes, gooks or dinks. We’re people!”
The Vietnamese feel that they have been presented by
U.S. government officials and the news media for so long as statistics and kill
ratios that Americans have forgotten that they are people with many of the same
aspirations, dreams and fears that we have. To many Americans, the Vietnamese
have become the nonpeople.
How has this happened? In reading the Pentagon Papers
I was struck by the fact that none of the writers of the different documents
could speak, read, or write Vietnamese. We have never had an ambassador in
Vietnam who could say “hello” in Vietnamese. Our decisionmakers have all had to
depend on interpreters or the elite class of Vietnamese who speak English for
their understanding of that country. The result has been that our officials
have learned how the farm people and workers feel from the educated
English-speaking community—something like learning about the farmers in Iowa
and Nebraska from Harvard professors or about New York City dock workers from
Smith College co-eds.
The Vietnamese language is hard to learn. It is tonal
and, unlike most European languages, has no similarity to English. (When
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once tried to shout in Vietnamese “Long
Live Vietnam” to a group of Saigonese, he got the tones mixed up. Raising his
arms high in a victory gesture, he shouted: “The Southern Duck Wants to Lie
Down.”)
We have lost more than 50,000 American lives and $150
billion of our national wealth there. Yet a few months of language study has
never been required from our decisionmakers.
Often the Vietnamese see things differently than U.S.
officials. For example: —An NLF soldier enters a village, shoots at a U.S.
spotter plane, and then runs away. The pilot of the plane sends a message to
headquarters and the village is bombed or bombarded. I have discussed this with
U.S. army officers. They know the NLF soldiers usually leave the village
immediately after shooting at the plane, but, one explained, the village is
bombed so that “someday the villagers will learn if they allow Viet Cong in
their village they’re going to get bombed.”
The villagers look at it differently. They were
bombed by airplanes, they say, and only the Americans have airplanes.
Therefore, as long as the Americans are there, they’ll be bombed. The solution,
as it appears to them, is to join the NLF.
—In the Ba Long An Peninsula of Quang Ngai province
and other areas where the machine-gunning of farm people by U.S. planes has
been most prevalent, the farmers have learned to stand still and point their
heads at the airplanes so they will make a smaller target as the planes look
down on them.
“We used to lie down,” they explain. “But now we
stand there and point our heads at the planes. Fewer people are killed that
way.”
American pilots explain that they could still hit the
farmers, but the fact that they just stand there indicates that they have
nothing to hide—they’re not Viet Cong.
Ironically, the farmers have learned this “trick”
from the NLF cadre.
Often the villagers are warned before the
bombardment. U.S. government officials carefully explain to visitors how much
care is taken to prevent innocent civilian casualties.
One method described as “surprisingly successful” by
the U.S. Air Force is the “I told you so” approach. Super Skymaster planes drop
leaflets or use airrecorded tapes from powerful loudspeakers over suspected NLF
areas telling everyone to Chieu Hoi, or come to the side of the Saigon
government. A 1971 press release (#4016) by the Directorate of Information,
Headquarters Seventh Air Force described the purpose of the psyops
(psychological operations) leaflets this way:
The message also contains a warning. A warning of
attacks by planes and artillery. As the psyops aircraft moves away U.S. Air
Force, Republic of Vietnam Air Force, or Royal Australian Air Force fighter
bombers blanket the area with a barrage of firepower. Before the smoke clears
the psyops pilot returns with another tape message, promising more of the same
to the survivors who do not rally. “This is why we call it the ‘I told you so’
approach,” Lieutenant Loss said.
In Quang Ngai province of Central Vietnam, the
Americal Division has used tape recordings from an airplane to warn the
villagers. A plane flies over the village a ten- or twenty-second tape tells
the villagers to leave immediately. Tape number T7-21A-70, used in 1971,
announces:
Attention citizens: You must leave this area immediately.
There will be artillery and air strikes tomorrow morning. Evacuate to the east
to avoid an accident. There will be artillery and airstrikes tomorrow morning.
Evacuate to the east.
If there are NLF in the village, they pick up their
guns and leave. Or, as some of the refugees say, the NLF soldiers stay and help
the people to pack — perhaps discussing the cruelty of the Americans in making
them move!
The villagers gather together their buffalo, pigs,
chickens, rice and children. Then the grandparents refuse to leave.
“We’ve lived here for seventy years,” the old people
say. “Our parents lived here and are buried here. We will not leave the graves
of the ancestors.”
And the only way that the family can get the
grandparents to leave is to tell them that if they don’t the grandchildren will
be killed.
The family leaves the coconut trees, the rice fields
and the graves of the ancestors— all those things that have held the family
together and been meaningful. The rice-planting songs and the evening stories
told by Grandfather about days gone by are replaced by the thud of bombs. The
people are crowded into the city slums and around the air bases. Their houses,
if they have any, are built of cardboard, U.S. government cement and tin, or
artillery-shell packing boxes. The bewildered, apathetic people sit in front of
these dwellings staring at the ground. The six-cent-a-day refugee payments are
held up by bureaucracy, or never come at all.
But the Vietnamese are a resilient people. They
survive.
The men who once plowed the acre or two of riceland
join one army or the other.
The women try to sing the old rice-planting songs as
they wash the khaki uniforms of foreign soldiers. In the evenings they no
longer shell beans or preserve the food for the dry season as their children
crowd around the grandparents, who tell stories of when they were boys and
girls. Now they worry about their husbands and when, or if, their children will
return from shining shoes.
The seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls who once
helped their mothers plant rice and preserve food receive visits in the refugee
camps by madames who offer them lots of money to work in the bars and brothels.
The family needs money, so they go and, if they are lucky, they become
temporary wives for soldiers. They are paid well—often in Salem cigarettes,
Tide soap, and perhaps even a T.V. set. When their soldier goes back to the
United States, they are passed on to his buddy or they go back to the bar to
find another husband. They have children. They want children because they
cannot imagine their soldier leaving them if they have a child. Children, they
feel, are the most precious possession that a man can have.
Between 100,000 and 200,000 Amer-Asian children have
been born in Vietnam. The French, during their war, provided health care for
the mothers and educational benefits for the children. Today, the
French/Vietnamese are among the best educated in the country. They are
teachers, lawyers and other professional people. The U.S. government has
ignored the existence of the Amer-Asian children—they might add fuel to the
peace movement in the United States. Vietnamese women who have caught VD from
U.S. soldiers must find their own source of penicillin (often outdated and
watered-down penicillin from quack doctors). No provisions have been made for
the education of the Amer-Asian children in Vietnam. “They should be treated
like any other children,” is the position of U.S. officials. This ignores the
extra problems that they and their mothers face.
The refugee children who once tended the buffalo and
caught fish and shrimp in the canals and rice fields now shine shoes, watch and
wash cars, sell peanuts, pimp, steal, and push drugs. Once, in the late
afternoon when Dad and the buffalo were
tired, they learned to plow. Now their education is learning to exist in the
jungle of the city slums. Each day in the late afternoon, they can be seen
beginning their rounds of the bars and brothels, pushing their wares and changing
money.
Six-year-old boys make more money than their parents
and the smallest boys make the most money because they are the cutest and the
soldiers pay them more. The children run away from home and sleep on the
streets. Often they are picked up by a corrupt policeman. If they can pay the
100-piaster bribe (25 cents), they are released. If they can’t, they are sent
to jail for vagrancy. Each day in the Vietnamese newspapers, you can see ads
with a picture of a little boy or girl:
Lost child: Our child, Tran Van Be, age seven, ran
away from home last year. Please help us to find him.
Between 5 and 6 million Vietnamese people have been
moved from their farm homes into the city slums and refugee camps. Most of
these people have been forced off their land by Allied firepower. In 1958, less
than a million people lived in Saigon; ten years later, its population had
tripled to 3 million. Saigon became the world’s most densely populated city
with twice the population density of Tokyo, its nearest rival. With the
crowding came disease. The U.S. troops brought their goods in tin cans, the rat
population increased, and now there is the danger of bubonic plague.
Tuberculosis and dysentery are rampant.
There are more Vietnamese doctors in France than in
Vietnam. The few doctors that are in Vietnam are usually in the army or
treating the very rich. American, British, German, Philippine, and other
medical programs have given vaccines and dedicated service. Without them,
epidemics would have caused even more havoc. These medical people have worked
very hard—there are not only the sick, but, especially, the war-wounded (most
of them victims of the U.S. bombardments). Patients are crowded two or three to
a bed. Sometimes medicines have been cut off. Dr. Eric Wulff, a German doctor
working at the Hue hospital, explained in late 1966 that all the penicillin and
sulfa drugs had been cut off to that hospital as a punishment to the Buddhists
for their part in the anti-Saigon government Struggle Movement.
Our officials have occasionally voiced concern about
the “other war.” In mid- 1965, General Maxwell Taylor, the American ambassador,
expressed the fear that the NLF might “swamp the agencies of the Vietnamese
government engaged in the care and handling of refugees.” While this has never
happened — the villagers are the families and neighbors of the NLF—Allied
firepower has driven them in. In Binh Dinh province, thousands of refugees were
generated by a Search And Destroy (SAD) mission in 1966. A team from the
Ministry of Social Welfare in Saigon went to Binh Dinh and reported back:
The number of refugees increases day by day. Social
Welfare Service can’t control because of the lack of personnel. This number
will be increased and also belongs to the operations settled by us and the
Allied armies in order to seize the land. For example, in Bong Son the
Operation Than Phong II created about 5,000 people who took refuge in the city.
These people have not received anything as of a week ago. The refugee
settlements of the district can’t contain all of them, for that they have to
stay under the porch roofs of the school. Many families go to beg, because they
miss all things. (1)
In 1966, Robert Komer expressed his ambivalence in
one of his famous “Komergrams” from Washington to Deputy Ambassador Porter in
Saigon:
We here deeply concerned by growing number of
refugees. Latest reports indicate that as of 31 August, a total of 1,361,288
had been processed ... Of course, in some ways, increased flow of refugees is a
plus. It helps deprive VC of recruiting potential and rice growers, and is
partly indicative of growing peasant desire seek security on our side. Question
arises, however, of whether we and GVN adequately set up to deal with increased
refugee flow of this magnitude (Gravel edition, 11:569).
But Robert Komer believed in numbers and in mass
brute force. Later, he wrote:
Wastefully, expensively, but nonetheless
indisputably, we are winning the war in the South. Few of our programs—civil or
military—are very efficient, but we are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight
and mass ... (Gravel ed., 11:575).
The United States has made more “Viet Cong” than it
has killed. When a farmer’s tomatoes or papaya are defoliated, that farmer
becomes more sympathetic to the NLF. When families are forced to leave their
homes and the burial grounds of their ancestors, they hate the people who move
them. The lack of understanding of the Vietnamese and the disregard for
Vietnamese life expressed throughout the Pentagon Papers has been militarily
self-defeating.
For example, the United States forced the farm people
into the refugee camps in order to deprive the NLF of food, intelligence and
personnel. But by placing so many people sympathetic to the NLF right in the
middle of city slums, the NLF had a base of operations during the 1968 Tet
offensive. Guns and ammunition were brought into Saigon prior to the Tet
offensive in mock funerals. The “coffins” were buried in the cemeteries, where
the refugees had been forced to build their shacks because of lack of any other
space. The NLF soldiers moved in with friends, relatives and sympathizers just
prior to Tet. And while the children lit firecrackers, the men test-fired their
rifles. When the offensive began, there were plenty of refugees to show them
the police stations and act as guides through the alleyways that form the
jungles of Saigon.
The NLF made a misjudgment too. In their offensive,
they did not expect that the Allies would bomb the Allied cities. “We just did
not expect that the United States would bomb Saigon, Hue and the other cities,”
I was told by one NLF official. The U.S. major who said about Ben Tre, “It
became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” was describing in a very real
sense what has happened to all. of Vietnam. To the military, there was no other
alternative.
When the refugees came into the cities, they were
paid well to wash the khaki uniforms, serve the meals, sleep with the soldiers,
make souvenirs, build the airports and roads, and shine the big, black shoes.
The mamasans, papasans, hootchmaids, and all the others smoldered in anger—but
they were paid well. Some became agents for the NLF and some left for the
jungle to join NFL units. But mostly, they just existed. As Vietnamization came
along, existing became harder.
Take Mr. Vinh, for example. In 1966, his wife and two
children moved to Tam Ky, near Chu Lai Air Base, after one of his children was
wounded by napalm. Two years later, he and the other three children followed
when it became impossible to farm their land because of the military action. In
the hills, Mr. Vinh had ten acres of
land, two buffalo, several pigs, some chickens, a fruit orchard, and plenty of
rice paddy land. Now he makes bamboo mugs to sell as souvenirs to the soldiers
at Chu Lai. But now there are fewer soldiers and Mr. Vinh cannot sell all of
the bamboo mugs that he makes. Security is no better in the hills of Quang Tin
province and he cannot return to his farm.
There is not a single decisionmaker in Vietnam who
can talk directly with Mr. Vinh and the millions of poor people like him. So
the information is secondhand. The Pentagon and State Department officials have
been concerned with the relationships among the Vietnamese generals and
politicians and how to bring a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem. But seldom, if ever,
have they been concerned about the people. Nowhere is this brought out as
clearly as in the Pentagon Papers.
There is a street in Saigon called Cong Ly, which
means Justice in English. It so happens that Cong Ly is a one-way street. So
the Vietnamese have a saying: “Justice in Vietnam is a one-way street.”
About five years ago, Vu Thi Dung was brought to the
United States to study about democracy in an American high school. She was an
excellent student and graduated from high school here and went back to Vietnam
and went to the university. When the one-man presidential elections were held
in October 1971, Miss Dung protested these. One-man elections, she said, are
what dictators have —not democracy. She was arrested, interrogated, and finally
signed a “confession” saying that she had participated in and encouraged other
students to participate in demonstrations against the elections.
There is something ironic about sending a young girl
to this country to study democracy, then sending her back to Vietnam and paying
the police who arrested and interrogated her for protesting the one-man
elections.
There are 100,000 political prisoners in the
Vietnamese jails. These include Truong Dinh Dzu, the runner-up in the 1967
presidential elections, Tran Ngoc Chau, the National Assemblyman who received
the largest majority of votes in the 1967 Assembly race, and at least four
newspaper editors. But mostly they are peasant farm people caught in the middle
or politically resisting the Saigon government—though not joining the NLF with
weapons.
As the urban unrest grew, the United States responded
with more and more aid to the police. In 1963, the Vietnamese police force was
16,000. By 1971, it had reached 113,000. The United States has built the
Interrogation Centers, provided the tear gas, and supplied increasing
quantities of sophisticated equipment to the police. In April 1970, eleven
students were released from Chi Hoa prison. They had slivers under their
fingernails, small burns caused by their interrogators extinguishing cigarettes
in sensitive parts of the body, and blackand- blue welts all over their bodies.
A group of American volunteers who had seen the students were concerned about
the use of American money and equipment in the torture of the students. They
went to Ambassador Bunker’s office to set up an appointment. They were told
that Ambassador Bunker could not see them and were sent to Deputy Ambassador
Berger’s office. His office said that the deputy ambassador could not see them
and sent them on to Youth Affairs, which sent them to the U.S. AID Public
Safety Director. He would not talk to the group and sent them on to the
American who advised the Vietnamese prison system. He told them that their
problem was at too high a level for him and that they should see Ambassador
Bunker.
The Saigon government has used an increasing amount
of repression to control the growing urban unrest. Two laws which the Saigon
government has used most frequently are:
Article 2 of Decree Law Number 93/SL/CT of 1964,
which states: “Shall be considered as pro-Communist neutralist a person who
commits acts of propaganda for and incitement of Neutralism; these acts are
assimilated to acts of jeopardizing public security.”
Article 19 of Decree Law Number 004/66 of 1966, which
states: “Those persons considered dangerous to the national defense and public
security may be [without trial] interned in a prison or banished from
designated areas for a maximum period of two years, which is renewable... .”
The U.S. government has encouraged the use of the
police against all political opposition. In the 1970 Annual Report from the
Director of the United States Agency for International Development in Vietnam
to Ambassador Bunker, the role of the police is described:
During 1970 the police continued to improve their
capability in traditional police functions. Their timely and positive action
effectively contained civil disturbances involving war veterans, students and
religious groups, thereby preventing the spread of violence.
Assistance to the police and prisons has steadily increased.
In February 1970, $20.9 million was spent on the police and prisons; thirty
million dollars was budgeted for February 1971. (As a comparison, aid to public
health went from $27.8 million down to $25 million and aid to education went
from $6.1 million down to $4.5 milHon in the same period.) (2)
After the discovery of the Tiger Cages at Con Son
prison island and the subsequent international press coverage, the Saigon
government held a press conference announcing that it was doing away with the
Tiger Cages. Two months later, they ordered the political prisoners on the
island to build new ones as a “self-help project.” The prisoners refused to
build their own Tiger Cages and were put back into shackles. On January 7,
1971, the Department of the Navy gave a $400,000 contract to Raymond, Morrison,
Knutson-Brown, Root, and Jones to build an “isolation compound” to replace the
Tiger Cages. The new cells are six feet by eight feet, or two square feet
smaller than the former five by ten foot Tiger Cages. There were 120 Tiger
Cages built by the French; now there are 386 “isolation cells” built by the
United States.
The Vietnamese have protested the building of “new
Tiger Cages” by the U.S. government. On February 25, 1971, for example. Con Ong
(The Bee) printed a full-page cartoon of President Nixon unloading a new Tiger
Cage for the Vietnamese. The poor people are shouting up to President Nixon as
he unloads the boat, “Oh, this is needed more than schools, hospitals,
churches, pagodas or clothes for our women!”
There is nothing the Vietnamese can do to protest
U.S. policy in Vietnam short of demonstrating or joining the NLF. For example,
when Vice-President Agnew went to Vietnam in the autumn of 1970, a group of
twenty-one Vietnamese women tried to see him:
“We are the Mothers of the political prisoners
detained in the various prisons of South Vietnam,” they wrote. “None of our
children is convicted of crime or robbery. All of them are being imprisoned
because they have dared spoken of Peace and Independence, a most profound
desire of all the Vietnamese People after years and years of war. Our children
were arrested and barbarously tortured. They have been denied food and drink,
even medicine when they are sick.”
The guards at the U.S. embassy would not allow the
leader of the women, Mrs. Ngo Ba Thanh, to enter the embassy to give the letter
to Vice-President Agnew. Nor would they
take the letter into the embassy or use the phone which they had at the gate to
inform anyone inside the embassy that the women had a petition to give to the
Vice-President.
“The police forces which arrest and repress our
children are being paid by the Americans,” they wrote. “The equipment used by
the Police to repress, torture, and jail our children is part of the U.S. aid.
The tear gas, the rockets used to repress them are ‘made in U.S.A.’ We actually
witnessed the terrible repression being carried out right in front of the U.S.
embassy when we and our foreign friends demonstrated against the prison system
on July 11th, 1970... . Our children witness the presence of American advisors
at the prisons. They know that more aid is being given to build more and bigger
prisons.”
The women presented sixteen suggested improvements.
These included: No citizen shall be arrested without lawful grounds. All
prisoners should be provided proper food and drink and appropriate care when
they are sick. The prisoners should be allowed to write to their families.
Parents should be notified when children are arrested. Criminal prisoners
should not be used to guard political prisoners. Prisoners whose jail terms
have expired should be released. Tiger cages, cattle cages, mysterious caves,
separate cells, discipline cells and rooms used for inhumane tortures should be
abolished. When a prisoner dies, his body should be returned to his family for
proper burial.
“The role of the American advisors should be to
improve the prisoners’ conditions, not merely watch the tortures done to our
children, who suffer from hunger, thirst, disease and survive in agony in jail,”
the women argued.
But there is no way for average citizens of Vietnam
to indicate how they would like to see U.S. aid given. Nothing is said in the
Pentagon Papers about how a farm woman or a market saleslady might indicate how
she would like to see American help used. If the Pentagon Papers were
translated for the Vietnamese farm people, they would see things being done
just as they were while the French were there. They saw no help coming to them
then nor was there any way for them to change the “system” when the French were
there except for armed revolution. Things have not changed.
One other group of people that the decisionmakers who
wrote the memos in the Pentagon Papers ignored is the American soldiers. Most
American soldiers go to Vietnam thinking that they are going to help the
Vietnamese. When they arrive, they find that the Vietnamese don’t want them
there. They are demonstrating against U.S. policy. U.S. jeeps are being burned
and signs are painted on the sidewalk walls: “GI go home.” The American soldier
goes to Vietnam to fight communism. Yet none of the soldiers knows who the
Communists are. Everyone wears black pajamas!
He is frustrated, and often terribly bored. He is
looking for help, some kind of escape. His officer tells him to be a man and go
on to battle. He finds the chaplaincy as conservative as General William
Westmoreland. It’s Christ’s war, he’s told, and given a prayer book:
Guide me, direct me in my military duty. You know
what my responsibility is: if I must use force, let it be without hatred for
the enemy as a person, but only with greater love of what I believe is better,
good, true and necessary to defend so that “Thy will be done. Thy Kingdom come.”
Jesus, You are the God of both me and the enemy—You made us both. Because of
You, I respect the dignity of all men, even my enemy. If I kill or injure
anyone in my duty, I pray You will have mercy on their souls and families. Help me, dear God, to
fulfull my military duty in line with genuine Christian principles, honor and
true justice. (3)
The American soldier becomes part of the push-button
war. If he is a pilot, he drops bombs on a village without any idea of whom he
is killing. Through electronic devices called “people sniffers,” or seismic
sensors, body heat can be picked up in remote jungle areas. A signal is sent by
the electronic “people sniffers” to headquarters and the area is bombed by
airplanes or bombarded by 105 or 155 howitzer guns. The “people sniffers”
cannot tell the difference between North Vietnamese soldiers, Montagnard women
going to market, or farmers getting bamboo to fix their homes. They cannot even
tell the difference between people and animals. One soldier told me about
following fifty or so “bodies” moving southward on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The
area was bombed and he was on the detail sent out to make the body count. They
got twentyseven— monkeys.
The American soldier is looking for escape. And he
finds more “escape” and solace in heroin than he does from his officers or
chaplains. In May 1971, heroin was selling for two dollars a vial. It could be
bought from almost any cigarette saleslady and from many of the shoeshine boys
(who sometimes got hooked when soldiers would get them to sniff it so that they
could watch the boy’s reaction). By mid- 1971, 15 percent of the U.S. soldiers
were using hard drugs. One reason for the high number of nonhostile casualties
has been the ODs (overdoses). The purity of heroin in Vietnam is about 95
percent. Men who used heroin in the U.S. before going to Vietnam got it in the
U.S. at 10 percent purity. When the same amount of powder was used in Vietnam,
it killed the soldier. Another problem has been that two dollars’ worth of
heroin in Vietnam will cost $50 or $100 in the United States. The returning
addict often resorts to stealing or pushing drugs to others. The problem of
addiction has almost been ignored by the Veterans’ Hospitals in this country.
The officials who made the decisions that got us
deeper and deeper into Vietnam have moved on—McNamara to head the World Bank,
McGeorge Bundy to head the Ford Foundation, William Bundy to edit Foreign
Affairs. Each has been given a new job in one of the foundations or
institutions where our foreign and domestic policies are made. Perhaps it
should not surprise us to find that the officials who treated the Vietnamese so
callously would treat Americans (or Brazilians, East Pakistanis, Greeks, etc.)
any differently.
The similarities to Vietnam are obvious. In Vietnam,
the growing police force has not been used to combat the growing crime rate,
but to control and repress political opposition. In the United States, where
the police and crime are both increasing rapidly, the police and court systems
are being used more and more often as political forces. An increasing amount of
surveillance is being used; mass arrests in Washington and other large cities
have become frequent; the Washington Post, New York Times and other newspapers
were censored on the question of the Pentagon Papers.
In Vietnam, one whole organization. International
Voluntary Services, was kicked out of that country for being “too political.”
The Vietnam director, Hugh Manke, had testified before the Kennedy Senate
Subcommittee on Refugees and protested the forced movement of the Montagnards
from their mountain homes into the city slums. One of the IVS team members,
Alex Shimkin, had told a New York Times reporter about the forced use of farm
labor to clear a mine field in Ba Chuc village in the Mekong delta when American
officials there refused to act even
after some of the farm people were killed and several wounded. In Charleston,
West Virginia, a group of volunteers from VISTA, a domestic group which is
similar to IVS, were fired for stirring up trouble there. They had helped the
mountain people around Charleston get school lunches for their children and to
protest the inequalities between elemencary education for mountain children and
Charleston children.
Another example can be found in the different
standards of justice for the rich and for the poor. In Vietnam, when Pham Chi
Thien was caught smuggling a million dollars’ worth of heroin into Saigon, he
just continued his job as congressman. When election time came, he was allowed
to run for office again (he lost!). But poor people caught stealing ten pounds
of rice, or students caught in peace demonstrations, can spend five years in
jail. As a parallel, when Bobby Baker was caught at extortion involving
hundreds of thousands of dollars at the highest levels of our government, he
was sentenced to less time in jail than George Jackson spent when he was
charged with stealing seventy dollars’ worth of groceries.
The Pentagon Papers came as a shock to this country.
Most people feel powerless, though. We have seen and heard our highest
officials lie and violate the international agreement on warfare before. Yet
most feel helpless to cope with the actions of high officials.
While Lieutenant Calley was being tried,
Vice-President Spiro Agnew appeared on “Face the Nation” (May 3, 1970) to
explain the invasion of Cambodia: “The purpose of the strikes into the
sanctuaries is not to go into Cambodia,” the Vice-President said, “but to take
and reduce these supply depots, the hospital complexes... .” To re-emphasize
his point, he added five minutes later: “But they cannot move these facilities
such as hospitals... .”
Article 19 of the Geneva Convention for the
Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the
Field of 12 August 1959 states: “Fixed establishments and mobile medical units
of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all
times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.”
In Vietnam some American adventurers managed several
small groups of Vietnamese dance girls who went out to the remote American
outposts to put on their show. The final act was to auction off the leading
lady to one of the U.S. military officers.
The Pentagon Papers show the United States callously
pursuing its own selfish motives through the Second Indochina War without
regard for the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos or concern for America.
Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned is that a person cannot destroy
another person without destroying something of himself; a nation cannot destroy
another nation without destroying something of itself.
Notes
1.
Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices, by Don Luce and
John Sommer, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1969, pages 181-182.
2.
Report to the Ambassador from the Director of
the United States Agency for International Development, 1970, pages 42 and 43.
3.
From A Soldier Prays in Vietnam, “Prayer for the
Enemy,” page 13 (no publisher is listed on the pamphlet). It is passed out by
chaplains and at the USO.
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