Sacrificial GIs

by Bruce Patterson

Combat has a way of clearing your mind of superfluous thoughts. Nothing like the prospect of your own gruesome death to get you focused on the difference between what's important and what's not.

I hadn't been in Vietnam long before I asked myself, "Who is killing us? How is it the guys in my outfit are dropping like flies?"

Sure it was the Vietnamese who were zapping us. But who was giving them the opportunity? How did they get so good at it?

Putting two and two together, I realized that if me and mine -- armed to the teeth, trigger happy, scared shitless and homesick in a way not one in one hundred people in the Mother Country ever experience -- just went home, then the Vietnamese would quit killing us. They wouldn't chase us across the ocean with murder in their hearts. They would let us live.

An elementary discovery. Like about every other 20th Century soldier who has been involved in the invasion, conquest, occupation and "pacification" of a foreign people, I realized that we were where we seriously did not belong. Moreover, immersed in the blood and guts of battle, that we were doing what was wrong. Wrong and certainly not within the realm, or even the orbit, of our own self interest. Or in the interest of anybody we were seeing, whether dead or alive, as far as we could tell.

And so it is with your enemy. He also would rather be doing just about anything else under the sun. But with one huge difference. Unlike you, he's fighting a war from his own front porch. He's among his neighbors, living in a place he, his father and his father before had helped build and populate. Fortified by long standing tradition, they have their own ways of doing things and could care less about yours. And their ways are so foreign to you that you don't even care to try to begin to understand them. You just know that you, your uniforms and your weapons stick out among them like painted targets. You are so obviously out of place in their country that your very presence insults most of them. You can see it in their eyes. Whatever moral justification they think they need to kill you is provided by the dirt under their feet. The land watered with the blood of their kinsmen that you have come and killed.

While sitting in your foxhole pondering your fate it takes a powerful amount of imagination to be able to justify your own self getting needlessly splattered in a hostile land. And if you cannot justify your own self getting snuffed out so far from home, how can you justify the slaughter of others?

The people in the Mother Country who blithely consider the killings of thousands of civilians to be a small price to pay from them to get what they think they want are the same people who are killing you.

* * *

Unlike our GIs now flapping in the breeze in Iraq, when I arrived in Vietnam I knew there was a good part of the population that wanted to kill me. Yet I still expected to be welcomed by most of the people over there. I was an American, after all, and we Americans didn't go and invade people even when we were invading them. (We'd been told we'd been "invited.") Along with our attack helicopters, 16-inch deck guns, daisy cluster bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and B-52s, we also brought our own sweet selves with our Democratic Traditions. The way we'd been taught to see it, our invasion of Vietnam was an act of mercy. Peace, Freedom and God's Justice all flowed from the barrels of our guns.

It was embarrassing looking back on what I'd once believed. And I'm talking about looking back while I was a kid sitting in my foxhole. To think these poverty stricken, beaten down, beaten up people had done anything to deserve our "assistance," or that they in any way posed a threat to the well kept folks back home -- we were supposed to die for this?

* * *

Recently in Iraq some American GIs were manning a roadblock. Under orders and scared shitless, they fired about 300 rounds of ammunition into an oncoming SUV carrying a pregnant young mother, her mother and her two young kids.

"Blew them all to shit," in the lingo.

Slide into a pair of those GI's boots and, now that the smoke has cleared, imagine yourself walking up to the SUV and inspecting its interior. You reach in and search for small arms and, as a formality, you feel for human pulses.

You get off duty and carry yourself back to your barracks. Imagine writing home to your parents, or to your pregnant young wife, a letter about how your day went.

Do you think any of those American boys joined the US Army to do that? Equally important, do you think any of those GIs thought the folks back home had hired them to do that?

* * *

When we GIs invaded Vietnam we had no trouble "securing" Saigon, Hue, Da Nang and the other major cities. In fact, without too much bloodshed, we almost immediately took over about every "strategic asset" in the country. But by so doing we hadn't ended a war. We'd only just started one.

Soon after our arrival Viet Cong recruitment soared. Our solution was to kill off the recruits just as quickly as we could. But a funny thing happened on our way to Military Victory through "superior firepower" and "attrition." The more enemy "terrorists" we killed, the more enemies we made. Like the French before us, we got caught in a downward spiral.

Which is what our GIs in Iraq are caught in right now. The "imminent, grave and intolerable threat" posed by the rag-tag Saddam regime they have eliminated. The Iraqi people they have "liberated." But now that their mission has been accomplished they must fight to stay in Iraq (and that wasn't in the contract). Now the folks in the Mother Country won't let them come home and the Iraqis, or at least a significant percentage of them, won't peacefully abide them staying even one more day.

For 30 years American Presidents have promised that never again would our GIs be sent off to kill and die in a counter-insurgency war like in Vietnam. Our GIs in Iraq were promised by their own parents and grandparents the exact same thing.

Yet there they are. Hung out to dry. Flapping in the breeze.