By Dave Lindorff
When I was a 17-year-old kid in my senior year of high school, I
didn’t think much about Vietnam. It was 1967, the war was raging, but I
didn’t personally know anyone who was over there, Tet hadn’t happened
yet. If anything, the excitement of jungle warfare attracted my
interest more than anything (I had a .22 cal rifle, and liked to go off
in the woods and shoot at things, often, I’ll admit, imagining it was
an armed enemy.)
But then I had to do a major project in my humanities program and I
chose the Vietnam War. As I started researching this paper, which was
supposed to be a multi-media presentation, I ran across a series of
photos of civilian victims of American napalm bombing. These victims,
often, were women and children—even babies.
The project opened my eyes to something that had never occurred to
me: my country’s army was killing civilians. And it wasn’t just killing
them. It was killing them, and maiming them, in ways that were almost
unimaginable in their horror: napalm, phosphorus, anti-personnel bombs
that threw out spinning flechettes that ripped through the flesh like
tiny buzz saws, and gunships that randomly spewed out so many
projectiles that everything within the range of several football fields
was killed or maimed almost instantly (all weapons still in use now)
Afghan child burned by a US bomb.
I learned that scientists like what I at the time wanted to become were
actually working on projects to make these weapons even more lethal,
for example trying to make napalm more sticky so it would burn longer
on exposed flesh.
By the time I had finished my project, I had actively joined the
anti-war movement, and later that year, when I turned 18 and had to
register for the draft, I made the decision that no way was I going to
allow myself to participate in that war.
A key reason my—and millions of other Americans’--eyes were opened
to what the US was up to in Indochina was that the media at that time,
at least by 1967, had begun to show Americans the reality of that war.
I didn’t have to look too hard to find the photos of napalm victims, or
to read about the true nature of the weapons that our forces were using.
Today, while the internet makes it possible to find similar
information about the conflicts in the world in which the US is
participating, either as primary combatant or as the chief provider of
arms, as in Gaza, one actually has to make a concerted effort to look
for them. The corporate media which provide the information that most
Americans simply receive passively on the evening news or at breakfast
over coffee carefully avoid showing us most of the graphic horror
inflicted by our military machine.
We may read the cold fact that the US military, after initial
denials, admits that its forces killed not four enemy combatants in an
assault on a house in Afghanistan, but rather five civilians—including
a man, a female teacher, a 10-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and a
tiny baby. But we don’t see pictures of their shattered bodies, no
doubt shredded by the high-powered automatic rifles typically used by
American forces.
We may read about wedding parties that are bombed by American
forces—something that has happened with some frequency in both Iraq and
Afghanistan-- where the death toll is tallied in dozens, but we are, as
a rule, not provided with photos that would likely show bodies torn
apart by anti-personnel bombs—a favored weapon for such attacks on
groups of supposed enemy “fighters.” (A giveaway that such weapons are
being used is a typically high death count with only a few wounded.)
Obviously one reason for this is that the US military no longer
gives US journalists, including photo journalists, free reign on the
battlefield. Those who travel with troops are under the control of
those troops and generally aren’t allowed to photograph the scenes of
devastation, and sites of such “mishaps” are generally ruled off limits
until the evidence has been cleared away.
But another reason is that the media themselves sanitize their
pages and their broadcasts. It isn’t just American dead that we don’t
get to see. It’s the civilian dead—at least if our guys do it. We are
not spared gruesome images following attacks on civilians by Iraqi
insurgent groups, or by Taliban forces in Afghanistan. But we don’t get
the same kind of photos when it’s our forces doing the slaughtering.
Because often the photos and video images do exist—taken by foreign
reporters who take the risk of going where the US military doesn’t want
them.
No wonder that even today, most Americans oppose the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan not because of sympathy with the long-suffering peoples
of those two lands, but because of the hardships faced by our own
forces, and the financial cost of the two wars.
For some real information on the horror that is being perpetrated
on one of the poorest countries in the world by the greatest military
power the world has ever known, check out the excellent work by
Professor Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire (http://cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm and http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/10/06/the-imprecision-ofus-bombing-...).
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
