Revisiting My Lai

I just watched a disturbing and well-done documentary on the My Lai massacre. (http://www.amazon.com/American-Experience-My-Lai-n/dp/B003CP1SS8/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1325821542&sr=1-1) For those of my generation, this is something that we may have never heard of, except in history classes.

According to the PBS website, the My Lai massacre was an incident in which "the angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai. "This is what you've been waiting for -- search and destroy -- and you've got it," said their superior officers. A short time later the killing began."

On that day, March 16, 1968, American soldiers killed over 500 unarmed men, women, and children. They shot infants, the elderly... and what I really enjoyed about this documentary was the way they built up the story. 


The real question they raise is: how did American men get pushed to the point where they believed that the massacre of innocents was justified by duty to their country and company?  I'll save the answer for the documentary, which does a much better job than I could do in recounting the buildup.


Many iconic images came out of this atrocity, including the following. This image was captured when the photographer walked up to women, cowering on the ground under threat of American soldiers and their automatic weapons. After the photographer took this image, the men opened fire and all of these people were killed:

{from Britannica.com}

The human darkness, the dehumanization of the Vietnamese villagers in this case is stark and disturbing.  Thus, this documentary also poses the question of:

What is this war doing to America?

How did our country reach the point of the My Lai massacre? This is why it disturbs me that we have relegated this event to the pages of history textbooks.  My generation has no sense of this event (or I should say that I feel I don't), but don't we have our national humiliations?  Lest we forget the Abu Ghraib photos, the dehumanization of the "enemy" that occurred there.


Violence begets violence. Looking at the issue historically, I cannot see any other way. For me, this is why the path of nonviolence is important. 


Some see nonviolence as unrealistic, naive even. The argument is that we must defend ourselves.... However, I wonder how much the world could be improved if the US, as the largest military and economic force in the world, put down its weapons. The shame of wartime atrocities is ours, as a whole people.  The shame of My Lai is mine, because I am a citizen of this country. I believe we cannot call ourselves proud Americans without taking on all the components of our history.


Martin Luther King, Jr, in his speech on the war, quoted Buddhist leaders in Vietnam as saying:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

Before I digress into the intangible world of conjecture, I would like to share a personal story.


When I visited Vietnam while working for CIEE-Thailand, I was introduced to several wonderful Vietnamese folks who helped us around the country's public health system.  After visiting the Cu Chi tunnels and seeing the lengths poor rural villagers went to defend themselves from the huge American army (because yes, 2 million Vietnamese were killed in the conflict and not all were soldiers), I was speaking with one of the Vietnamese doctors about the war. I was feeling horrible, because when I looked around the country I was forced to confront the war that my generation had only read about. I was suddenly very aware that my place in the country as a tourist felt invasive, even wrong.


I asked him how he felt about the war, how people around him talk about the Americans now. How could the people move past such horror on their own land, in their homes? 


To paraphrase, he said that people were fine with the Americans. That they wanted to do business with us. He said he didn't hate the Americans, that it was a long time ago and now we could be business partners.


Upon hearing this, I felt even worse than before. From what I saw in Thailand and Vietnam, the United States in now waging an economic war in SE Asia and many other parts of the world. And a people that we once massacred are now at the mercy of our economic policies. In many ways, this war is all the more insidious because it is easy to ignore and more complicated to explain.


Because we aren't just talking about maps and GDPs, but real people and real places who are worthy of life and love. Beautiful people and places, some of which I have been privileged to encounter.

Such power and responsibility make me feel heavy with burdens right now. What does it mean to be American? I think to answer that, we must first look outward. And then deeply inward, asking the tough questions of ourselves. 


Because we are in wars now, across the world. How will someone viewing a documentary on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq write about them? How will they write about us? The church? Me?


How did people start killing people, giving us traps such as this?

As a future faith leader, these questions trouble me greatly and compel me forward. Thus, I want to end this with words from MLK, Jr, a faith leader whose work I feel am still only beginning to understand.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. 

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. 

[....] 

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. 

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries. 

They must see Americans as strange liberators.  

[....] 

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing -- in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon, the only solid -- solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

[Full speech available here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm]