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| The Stress of Combat |
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| ....as discussed by one who's never been in it... |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, July 15, 1998. Imagine, please, the following visual. A young, attractive woman, dressed to the nines, writing a thank-you letter to her boyfriend in the armed forces. She is thanking him for a gift, displayed prominently next to her, recently received. She is effusive; she is grateful, and not a little proud. Perhaps she cannot wait to show it off to her friends. The gift is autographed by boyfriend and his comrades. Thus far, I’m willing to bet some of you see a painting by Norman Rockwell, and the momento is a Hawaiian Lei or something romantic and nondescript, and the obvious feeling to be engendered in viewers is sentimentality and sadness at the separation of young lovers. Well, forget it. It is not a painting, it is a photograph, and the gift from the boyfriend is not a flower. It is a human skull, supposedly of a Japanese fighting man, perhaps killed by the boyfriend. It was Life Magazine’s Picture of the Week in the issue of May 22, 1944. There is no report of much protest about showing the photograph. It may have been staged, but either way it shows how taste – to say no more – takes the express train south during times of war, and this is the supposedly civilized United States. In fact, the United States soldier was every bit as likely to deface the corpse of an enemy, to cut off fingers for rings, to desecrate the enemy in ways that would nauseate those of us who have never been forced into combat. A soldier under extreme duress, away from home and having seen the only thing that keeps him sane – his buddies – blown to smithereens, is as likely to go on murderous rampages as the worst Nazi, the most dedicated son of the Rising Son, as the most prolific serial killers. It is, apparently, the nature of war, and I for one thank god I never experienced it, and I do not understand why civilians slap their head in disbelief. That said, I do a lot of writing and research that involves war and historical combat and while I am under no impression I might as well have been there, I believe I have developed some relatively accurate barometers about certain truths. For example, during the CNN crisis over the last few weeks, the network came under fire because it had claimed that during the Vietnam War a Special Forces team had been sent to Southeast Asia to find eliminate some traitorous US soldiers aiding the enemy. It was stated that sarin, a poison gas specifically outlawed, might have been involved. Everyone, from many journalists to the Pentagon, to Boulder’s Col. Robert Brown, Publisher of Soldier of Fortune and no lover of either other journalists or the Pentagon, thought the story was bogus from the word go. The young, female producer of the piece and her male counterpart were fired by the network, although she has stood by the story. I have no idea whether or not it is true, but when I started reading quotes saying that United States soldiers would never kill United States citizens, even traitors or defectors, every warning light I have went on. Because of that, I am suspiciously beginning to think the story is true, and the reason is that the military and its shills are beginning to sound like all the other times they were found out in something insidious. They have provided consistency in that regard. Take that photo in Life Magazine, for example. From it, given wartime censorship, one could conclude that desecration of the enemy dead was so common that it warranted no comment. But read the official histories, and all of that is missing. One of the reasons our soldiers in Vietnam seemed like a lot of surreal thugs at times was that the public still didn’t know how common cutting off ears and desecrations of the dead had been in previous wars. They didn’t know, perhaps still do not, that US submarines routinely surfaced to machine gun survivors, or that entire divisions in the US Army took no prisoners and bragged about it. There are more and more references to a special squadron of US fighters in Europe whose job it was to shoot down our bombers trying to defect to Sweden. There were a lot of those, and only now – when all the participants are nearly dead, do the admissions begin. There are other stories, like how wounded were left aboard the USS Yorktown at Midway – a ship Robert Ballard just found, by the way – when the ship was initially abandoned, contrary to original history. But when it didn’t sink as forecast, they sank her by our own ships, with the wounded still there. Nobody is going to admit that officially, but it tore at the souls of participants. But given what we do know about our soldiers in combat, it is no stretch at all to think that the army in Vietnam would not assassinate deserters, especially those they felt were giving aid to the enemy of some sort, and it seems preposterous to pretend otherwise. That they would use poison gas is another matter, except that what passes for a crushing retort from the establishment is that they have the paperwork to prove it didn’t happen, all the sarin remained on Okinawa, an admission I believe contradicting what they have said previously about where chemical weapons were stored. A black ops would, in any case, have no such paperwork, and to even offer that as a defense is remarkably lame. Recall, it was our longest war, our most pointless war, and the military was frustrated, furious, and scared. Nothing about such an operation as described strikes me as out of place in that mental framework. As much as I dislike the self-congratulatory press, I am willing to bet that when the dust settles, more truth will hang with the producer than not. I am not a conspiracy nut, and this doesn’t require one, but merely an observer of how the military does spin control. Recall the missing bombs near Vail, the Navy fabricating charges of a gay affair to excuse a gun blowing up on a battleship, and another famous photograph from Life Magazine in the 1950’s, this time on the cover. It’s of a bunch of soldiers, with no special protection, watching a mushroom cloud at a nuclear test site in Nevada. Trust these guys. They know what they’re doing. |
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