1st Lieutenant S. Brian Willson, standing in front of members of his fire teams in Section 6, 823rd Combat Security Police Squadron, Phan Rang AB, Viet Nam, June 1969. USAF Photo

Introductory Note: This essay, in its earlier version, received harsh critiques from former members of “Operation Safeside,” the Air Force’s code name for its brief attempt to create a ranger-type unit during the years the United States was at war with Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. There were four squadrons that comprised “Operation Safeside”: the prototype 1041st, and the subsequent 821st, the 822nd, and the 823rd. The program was disbanded in 1970. The originator of the USAF ranger idea was a highly touted former member of an elite ranger unit in World War II, a USAF Lt. Colonel.

An officer who served in his prototype 1041st squadron conveyed to me how determined this Lt. Colonel was to make the “Safeside” ranger units a successful addition to security of USAF missions around the world. One of the most important factors was to develop a highly motivated leadership cadre. He knew that for such unit in the Air Force to be successful, just as a ranger unit in the Army, it required highly motivated members, especially among the commissioned and noncommissioned officers. However, those who enlist in the US Air Force do so knowing more or less what they are enlisting for, ranger functions not normally being one of the options considered. Of course, special assignments are frequently created but they only function well with those who are obviously motivated to perform the new missions.

The first three squadrons, I have been told, were comprised of all volunteers, or nearly all. The fourth, the 823rd, of which I was part, was comprised of a large number of airmen who clearly were not volunteers. In fact, one of the 823rd officers with access to squadron personnel records characterized a number of the noncoms and officers as misfits. I don’t know if I was one of those, but I certainly was not a volunteer for the 823rd.

Most of those who angrily contacted me were members of the first three squadrons, i.e., those who were more or less gung ho volunteers. Some call me an out and out liar, some describe my accounts as “fiction,” some have accused me of being shameless and clueless, some state unequivocally that it is impossible for me to have been a graduate of the USAF combat security police training school, others that I could not have been a member of the particular unit I describe, some say I could not have been in Viet Nam at all. Some accuse me of being an “asshole wannabe,” others have issued various threats including that I should be the target of a stray bullet. One admitted honestly that “it is hard to believe that someone who went through SAFESIDE training could be so anti-American.”

These ex-military men (in this case) continue to believe as I once believed, but cannot fathom a changed perspective critical of the “Safeside” concept, the U.S. war against the Vietnamese people and nation, and critical of U.S. policies described as consistently imperial. They seem to experience my critiques as personal attacks. They are not intended to be personal.

In an effort to be as accurate and fair as possible in my accounts, I have had conversations with former members of my 823rd squadron, including its Operations Officer and one of its intelligence officers, and have again examined my personal notes and re-read various historical reports related to “Operation Safeside” and to the conditions I was exposed to and functions which I was performing in the Binh Thuy/Can Tho area of the Mekong Delta in South Viet Nam in 1969.

I have made no knowingly inaccurate statements. If information is the product of a rumor I will so state. I have removed all names of individuals in my direct chain of command. In earlier versions I recalled two events where there was physical contact between a superior and myself resulting in my falling to the ground, not hurt, but stunned. In my anger, and emotional state at the time, I characterized those actions as intentional. I have removed the idea they were intentional (not knowing whether they were or not), simply stating that physical contact was made during mutually agitated moments, but focusing on what was going on inside my own mind and emotional nature at the time, and how it gradually created a more critically thought out assessment of the military, the war, myself, and my society.

Essentially everything I have written in this essay remains true according to my memory and historical records, but with more sensitivity given to the language I use in describing acrimonial interchanges with superiors.

It is likely that persons who have been outraged at my comments have not been exposed to “dissenters,” either in the military or out, and likely do not genuinely believe in free speech, only speech that is in harmony with their own views. This is too common a trait in rhetorical “America.” There is rhetoric, and then there is reality. Most of us, myself included, were conditioned into a rhetorical fantasy about the “American” civilization that cannot stand up in the face of honest history and genuine critique.] BW   

In the fall of 1968, after serving nearly two years at Headquarters Air Force (AF) Systems Command in Washington, D.C. as an Installation Security Police staff officer, I received orders to report to the 823rd Combat Security Police Squadron headquartered at an airbase in central Louisiana. The several hundred members of that squadron were to be trained, in turn, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in a 12-week Air Force version of the U.S. Army’s Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia.

I had never heard of this unit, code-named “Operation Safeside,” and certainly had no voluntary interest in such Air Force “ranger” assignment. I was still waiting for orders to serve in the AF correctional program that had been all but promised when I enlisted. I subsequently learned that shortly after TET 1968, on February 18, as airbases were being hit hard, Seventh Air Force in Vietnam had requested deployment of a newly created “Operation Safeside” comprised of combat security teams to fortify protection of airbases.

Upon hearing of my assignment, a Major in my Washington office informed me that he had been a Captain in the original Safeside prototype squadron, the 1041st, and knew its originator and the importance of its members being gung-ho volunteers. Knowing that I was not a career officer, and had no interest in a USAF ranger program, he was concerned. That made me even more anxious.

Our training began on December 16, 1968. I immediately possessed anxiety about being in a combat-oriented Air Force mission, and shared those concerns with our 823rd Commander, a Lieutenant Colonel. I asked if it was possible to seek a different assignment. He informed me that he knew a young officer who had seriously sought placement in the 823rd, and that it was a shame that I, not the desirous officer, was in the squadron. I asked whether it was too late to make a personnel change. The Commander angrily dismissed the idea as impossible at that late date. I stressed that an Air Force assignment of this type was likely to be workable only for those who desired it and volunteered for such combat-oriented duty. He gave the traditional retort — “You’re in the military and you will do as ordered.” However, I soon learned that the three Air Force combat security police squadrons preceding the 823rd were made up of virtually all volunteers, unlike our squadron, comprised of a certain number such as myself who, if we had a choice, would not volunteer for such Air Force assignment.

I also wondered if there might be command-and-control issues when Safeside teams were deployed to augment long-standing regular security police squadrons led by experienced commanders overseeing already well-armed and trained units. The Commander quickly disregarded such questions, coming from a “loser” like me. So much for my striving to be a conscientious officer.

It seemed an unusual assignment for the Air Force. As a first lieutenant I was designated one of several leaders of “sections” (cp. Army platoon) comprised of fire teams and mortar units, part of a new worldwide mobile security force to protect U.S. air bases in hostile areas. There were four sections to a Flight, and four Flights to a Squadron, three of which were combat trained plus a fourth support Flight. It seemed like I was in the U.S. Army but I had taken an oath in the Air Force. Damn! Though we knew we were being readied for Vietnam, our trainers insisted we also be prepared for other humid/tropical areas such as Guatemala, or cold climates such as Korea. I didn’t have a clue at the time what was going on in Guatemala.

The School Commandant for our training program was a Lieutenant Colonel who had been a young Army Ranger during World War II. Some claimed he had been a member of Darby’s Rangers, but truth is that he was a member of a sister ranger unit to Darby’s group. He was promoting issuance of blue berets and Australian bush hats, which excited those men who were pleased to be in “Operation Safeside.” Unfortunately for them, Air Force higher ups later de-authorized those headgear uniform additions. However, I was relieved.

During one of our training briefings intended to psyche us up for our mission, the Commandant used the word “gook” when referring to Vietnamese and Koreans. Though this was not such an unusual racist term to hear uttered, I thought it unbecoming of our School Commandant. I hesitatingly expressed my concern about his use of the word “gook,” and tried to explain to him that I felt it a derogatory characterization directed at supposed allies. He quickly admonished me to mind my own business, which he reminded me was learning the art of defending U.S. air bases located in hostile areas around the world.

Along with hundreds of other Air Force rangers-to-be, I endured the 12-week training at dismal Fort Campbell, an hour at a time. Though I had successfully completed all the early firearms training — shooting at targets with M-16 machine guns, firing mortars and grenade launchers — I had been gritting my teeth to get through it. In early January, however, my sense of unfitness came to a head. During bayonet training I felt reviled that I would have to scream Kill! Kill! a hundred times while plunging a bayonet into a dummy. My body did not want to do it though my brain was saying, “Come on, just do it!” I paused as I was trying to muster up the determination. Seeing my hesitation the training sergeant walked over to be right next to me, very angry, and in an agitated effort to shout in my ear — I doubt if it was intentional — there was physical contact with the back of my legs and my knees buckled. I went down, and at that moment my brain caught up with my body. I knew I was not going to do this exercise, and that I shouldn’t be in this assignment at all.

I don’t know whether the training sergeant reported my “insubordination,” but I didn’t wait to find out. I decided to formally make known my concerns of unfitness, even revulsion, through the chain of command. I started with my immediate superior, “B” Flight Commander, a Captain, who arranged a meeting with the 823rd Operations Officer, a Major, who, in turn, arranged a meeting with our 823rd Commander.

Quickly responding to my continued “negative” attitude and the fear I might refuse further orders, the Colonel/Commander had warned me that with this kind of behavior you are looking at a place called Leavenworth for about 20 years. Subsequently during the meeting in the Lt. Colonel’s barrack’s office with the Major present, the fact that I had not completed the bayonet exercise had raised questions about whether I was a “traitor.”

My Commander was livid, furious with my attempts to describe a troubling sense of unfitness for the assignment. His voice was agitated as he declared, “shame, shame, shame on you. It’s like you’re working with the enemy VC,” or something to that effect. And the Major, reading from the UCMJ, informed me of the severe prison punishment I was facing for failure to obey lawful training and deployment orders — 5 years at hard labor. The Major, apparently knowing of my personal history with university professor and mentor, Howard B. Gill, suddenly asked, What would Howard Gill would think of you?” That question surprised me but did not allay my concerns.

As the Commander raised his voice further he scolded, “As a ‘regular’ officer you are a traitor to America.” [In fact I was a "reserve" officer.] He was increasingly losing his physical and mental composure. Accompanying his angry voice, his arms were thrusting back and forth, up and down, in a very animated fashion. I was in a very emotional state as I stood witnessing and reeling from his raving antics. At one point there was physical contact made, intentionally or not, and I found myself falling off balance to the floor where I even feared I might be kicked. The Commander himself, overweight and not in great physical shape, also had almost lost his balance after I fell. Stunned but not physically hurt, in a matter of 2 or 3 seconds I was quickly on my feet again facing a recovering Colonel. He seemed startled himself at what had just happened and, for a moment, seemed pensive, realizing that he had lost his composure.

Then the Major made a statement that worried me, saying something to the effect that, “Nothing out of the ordinary has occurred here.” My fragile emotional state at the time internally interpreted those words to mean that if I were to complain about the physical and verbal abuse, it would be my word as a First Lieutenant against the words of a Major and a Lt. Colonel. Perhaps the Major was sincere, suggesting that he and our Commander were engaged in what they perceived as “constructive counseling” of a disgruntled officer. Perhaps it was more routine than I was aware, and therefore was ordinary from their perspective. Whatever the intent, I was stunned, experiencing emotional, even potentially physical terror. I had never been in a situation like this.

Later the Major admitted that the commander’s “royal chewing out” of me was based partially on a belief they both held that I was exhibiting traitorous “cowardice.” He also later acknowledged that my anti-war feelings, openly expressed in uniform, posed a real problem, and that the bayonet incident got around to the noncoms and officers, creating “morale problems” for the 823rd.

The Lt. Colonel/Commander, though more calm than previously, ironically but seriously accused me of being “a very disturbed man!” to which the Major seemed to assent. Then my Commander ordered that I undergo “morals” counseling with a chaplain. I did not know our squadron had a chaplain but soon I was in a Chaplain/Major’s office, only to experience another acrimonial moment at which he repeated similar angry words of our 823rd Commander, “Shame, shame, shame on you…The Vietnamese are being slaughtered by the VC and you have a duty to be part of stopping that,” showing me photographs of bodies, ostensibly of Vietnamese killed by other Vietnamese. Of course, I was very scared and anxious as this scolding continued, nearly in tears.

Baptist like me, the Chaplain expressed no sympathy. He did not want to hear my version of what had happened. The thought of being a “failure” was still part of my thinking, remnants of an old conditioned expectation to comply with orders and keep pace with the performance of my peers. I was simply seeking, apparently in vain, to express my sense that I seemed unfit for this particular assignment and wanted genuine counseling. It only seemed good military policy that when an officer (or any solider/airman) is feeling repulsed and unable to perform a particular duty that the military would not be so foolish as to force such person into a critical assignment where other lives are at stake. However, the Chaplain did not want to hear anything I was saying, and he simply repeated the Lt. Colonel’s words that I was “very disturbed.” He ordered that I be seen and diagnosed by a psychiatrist. Soon I found myself in a USAF doctor’s office, a Captain who was presumably a psychiatrist, at a nearby USAF military installation in Tennessee.

The uniformed doctor, a kind man, conversed with me over a period of several hours. It was the first time in months that I felt safe and actually listened to. He affirmed that I was of “sound mind,” and that it would be best for all concerned if I was re-assigned. He so recommended. Once my Commander read the psychiatrist’s report and recommendation for re-assignment, he was furious ever more. He said that since I was of “sound mind,” I would be expected to follow all training and deployment orders. It was too late, he retorted, to juggle personnel while preparing to deploy to Viet Nam as TET 1969 was approaching.

I was in a Catch-22 situation! Soon after, my Commander called me once again into his barracks’ office and presented me with a document, “Officer Control Roster Action,” stating that I would be placed on such list for 180 days because of a “self-admitted failure to accept the responsibilities commensurate with your grade,…specifically….that you do not agree with certain major concepts and policies of the 82nd Combat Security Police Wing. You have further stated that you cannot, in good conscience, support the wing mission….” He informed me that this action was formally communicated to the Squadron Operations Officer, and to the full Colonel who was our overall 82nd Combat Security Police Wing Commander.

When I enlisted in the Air Force in 1966 at 25 years of age (after an Army draft notice), I was already halfway through studies in law school and an associated master’s program in criminology. My hometown recruiter virtually guaranteed me an assignment in some administrative role dealing with Air Force defendants/prisoners. There were several Air Force correctional settings in both the U.S. and in Vietnam. I was advised that to get into that program I needed to select the security police career field. But as I discovered, and many veterans will tell you, representations of military recruiters are not worth much.

Once receiving copy of the Officer Control Roster action, the Wing Commander became alarmed. He perceived a situation that could produce “unnecessary unfavorable publicity to the U.S. Air Force or to the individual,” and embarrassment to Tactical Air Command Commander General Momyer. He quickly removed me from the “Officer Control Roster,” saying “it is inappropriate to place an officer on the Control Roster while he is attending formal school.” He also arranged a visit from my wife from Washington, D.C. to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, after my Commander had refused my request for a visit. My attorney wife and I had been married less than 2 months by that time.

My 823rd Commander had declared to me that the 823rd “Operation Safeside” mission was “classified” as to time, place and date of deployment, and therefore, he could not grant even a one-day visit. That he refused a visit based on explicitly claiming a classified mission which I had not previously known of infuriated me even more.

My pleas fell on deaf ears. I was being prevented from a change in assignment no matter how much I expressed my serious personal reservations to my superiors, concerns affirmed even by an Air Force psychiatrist who had recommended a different assignment. I felt stuck. Truly conflicted, I lacked the courage to refuse orders to Vietnam with the 823rd and begrudgingly “graduated” from the 12 weeks of training without ever completing the bayonet drill.

On March 7, a C-141 flew our “B” Flight (nearly 170 men in all) to Vietnam, initially landing at Cam Ranh Bay Airbase on March 8 before taking the short flight to Phan Rang, the in-country headquarters for our Air Force Combat Security Police operations, “Operation Safeside.” There, our Commander ordered my particular section and an additional weapons unit, comprised of 32 men in all, still ten men and an NCO short of what was authorized for my section, dispatched to Binh Thuy, a small Vietnamese-controlled airbase nearly 100 miles south of then-Saigon. Binh Thuy was in the hostile Delta region northwest of Can Tho city along the Bassac River. It was considered the most vulnerable of the ten primary USAF airbases in country, nicknamed “mortar alley,” having been attacked 18 times during the 6 weeks of TET 1968, and 47 times since receiving its first attack in February 1966, far more than any other airbase. We were arriving 2 weeks after the start of the much milder (as it turned out) TET 1969. Everyone everywhere was tense and nervous. Arriving just before midnight we immediately experienced mortar explosions outside the base perimeter, a rattling introduction to Vietnam. And to add to my anxiety I soon learned that the Commander of the nearby Army Military Police Company in Can Tho had been fragged on the day of my arrival. Luckily, he survived with only minor injuries, though others were killed.

I was immediately designated the night security force commander at Binh Thuy by the Major/Commander of its regular security police squadron, the 632nd. My anxiety motivated me to study every intelligence and action report I could find. Though I worked under the illusion that the more I knew the better I could position fire teams and machine gunners, it was what I learned about overall Mekong Delta military policy that staggered me.

Later, a member of the 823rd intelligence section at Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon told me that he believed that our Commander’s fury landed me at Binh Thuy as a punishment. I started to believe he might be right. Things got more entangled, and more intriguing as the days went by.

To be continued…!

I was flabbergasted to read Sally Satel’s March 1, 2006 New York Times Op-Ed, "For Some, the War Won’t End," describing the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as creation of a suspicious "culture of trauma" providing veterans a "free ride" as they approach retirement age. A flag immediately went up for me because of my own history with PTSD, but also because Satel is a former VA psychiatrist who now is a resident scholar at the very biased, neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). AEI is a very wealthy think tank funded largely by old-line conservative family money such as the Scaife and Olin Foundations, and is closely associated and shares headquarters with the Project For A New American Century (PNAC), the latter offering a 1997 blueprint for an aggressive, unilateral U.S. global hegemony, including domination of Middle Eastern and Central Asian energy reserves.

The American Enterprise Institute

AEI, a more than 60-year-old think tank committed to preservation of private enterprise at the expense of The Commons, supports such policies as censorship of the arts, required prayer in schools, and privatizing Social Security. It has a list of current and past fellows, scholars and trustees which makes those interested in a just human community shudder in angst. Lynne and Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Ken Lay, Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, John Yoo, Charles Murray, and many, many others are affiliated with AEI. One might remember Korean-American John Yoo who, only a few years ago as a young lawyer in the Justice Department, wrote legal memos supporting torture while denying legal protections for "illegal combatants" and advocating the legal imperative of the Patriot Act. It is worth reminding ourselves that Charles Murray is the architect of the Bell Curve concluding existence of intelligence differences between the "races," meaning in fact the superiority of the White "race," just as Hitler’s vision motivated German Aryan efforts to conquer Europe.

AEI’s Board of Trustees includes present and past corporate insiders such as the Chair of Dow Chemical which exposed several million people like me and the Vietnamese to the most intense chemical warfare in human history, and more recently, with the acquisition of Union Carbide, continues to ignore responsibility for the Bhopal, India chemical leak disaster that killed and severely maimed thousands. Other trustees include the CEO of huge corporations such as ExxonMobil, State Farm Insurance, and Merck Pharmaceutical, the latter still reeling from misrepresentations about its painkiller, Vioxx, which, it turns out, increases risk of heart attacks.

George Bush II The Younger, in a February 2003 speech to the AEI lauded them as possessing some of the "finest minds in our nation" and noted that he had grabbed twenty of its thinkers for his administration. Along with Sally Satel, Lynne Cheney is also an AEI scholar, and they have worked together with the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) to counter efforts of the National Organization For Women (NOW) and to oppose feminist politics in general.

Dr. Satel & "Oppression-Based Therapy"

In Sally Satel’s book, PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001), she defines "politically correct" medicine as a dangerous orthodoxy intended to maintain victim status. She insists that the healing profession’s concern for "social justice" interferes with patient health because it downplays the role of personal responsibility. Satel condemns three popular "oppression-based therapies": (1) those encouraging patients to be part of what she calls "victim groups"; (2) those suggesting that psychic stress results from racist or patriarchal society; and (3) those suggesting that healing is enhanced by activism that assumes a malignant political-socio environment that contributed to illness of the patient in the first place. She goes so far as to accuse these therapies of being malpractice. She opposes "consumer and psychiatric survivor" organizations and believes in the necessity of coerced drugging.

By subscribing to these "malpractice" techniques I was rescued from the scrapheap of war-induced traumas being part of veteran’s groups where we safely share experiences and help process our cognitive dissonance crises; recognizing that many of our decisions and harmful behaviors resulted from a cultural racist ideology and blind obedience to patriarchy that disempowered and dumbed us down; and becoming active in addressing the causes of war and working for a just society has assisted in our validation and redemption as human beings.

Satel stoops to the comforts of reductionist thinking, denying the holistic interplay among dispositional, situational and systemic factors. In so doing, she ignores the need for understanding the revolutionary role that historical, social, racial, economic, and political contexts have had in shaping our thinking, assumptions, and behavioral patterns. Thus, Satel advocates, in the name of therapy, perpetuation of the politics of massive obedience to the prevailing authority and power system, even as such obedience assures rapid deterioration of the necessary ingredients for a healthy society — empathy, equity, and mutual respect for all life. Of course, it is likely that her sense of mental health "requires" ideological adherence to the prevailing system. I prefer the emergence of homo humanus, replacing homo hostilus, and the terrifying possibility of homo extinctus.

I would like someone like Satel, and all those folks associated with AEI to have shared just one or two hours of my traumatic experiences. A dose of that reality likely would overwhelm their ad nauseum rhetoric in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

My PTSD

Coming from the "indentured servant" class, I was drafted out of law school in 1966 at 25 years of age. Unlike Vice-President Dick Cheney, I possessed no special connections or family money that enabled me to keep my deferment in order to pursue those other things that I would have preferred. So, I enlisted in the USAF in lieu of going into the Army to more likely avoid a combat experience. In 1969, however, I was ordered to Vietnam as head of a special ranger-trained AF combat security unit. While there, as fate would have it, I experienced sickening patterns of crimes that led to my opposition to the war. I was discharged in 1970 as a Captain at 29 years of age.

In 1981, twelve years after those traumatic experiences, I suffered, at age 40, a near psychotic flashback that revealed graphic details of what I had witnessed on a special assignment in April 1969 while documenting the aftermath of bombing missions that intentionally annihilated a number of inhabited villages. The flashback revealed that I had observed somewhere between 700-900 Vietnamese, mostly women and young children in five separate villages in a week’s time. In the very first village I initially heard, then observed a water buffalo screaming in pain from a 3-foot gash in its belly. Taking several additional steps I could walk no further. There were bodies lying everywhere; I estimated more than 125. I covered my face with a handkerchief as the stench from burning flesh and lingering napalm was overpowering and I began to weep, then vomit. This was just the beginning of the memory. The flashback shook me to my roots and it took me several months to recover from the sudden recall of what had been buried in my subconscious.

I attended a few VA rap sessions but didn’t feel safe, so sought my own therapy, both grou
p and individual, and continued to pursue my life. I avoided alcohol or drug use and was considered quite functional. But I began to experience chronic insomnia; hyper-alertness to noises; sudden crying periods; distracting, intrusive memories during daytime hours; avoidance of public crowds; terrifying bodily sensations later termed "panic attacks," etc. Nonetheless, for a while I even directed a state-funded veteran’s outreach center as I struggled to mask my symptoms the best I could.

In the early 1990s my symptoms were becoming more acute and I sought Jungian therapy. Several people suggested I was suffering from PTSD and advised me to consider help from the VA. In 1994, at age 53, I had my first scheduled assessment with a VA psychiatrist. I was so terrified at the thought of baring my soul to an employee of the government that I remained in my car outside the VA hospital and never made my appointment. Three years later, in 1997, with the emotional support of other veterans, I re-applied and within a year I was diagnosed with PTSD at age 57, twenty-nine years after the worst of the traumas. Now 64, I have discovered lessons about managing the symptoms, and am more mindful of taking care of myself. However, the trauma and memories of the events remain vivid, though I allow space for them in my psyche.

PTSD is nothing to make light of and Dr. Satel, I would submit, needs a dose of war to grasp a reality about her "theories." War is insane, and those of us thrust into it for God, Country and Right of Passage pay a dear price for the remainder of our lives, even though we may have been politically awakened as a result. WWI German soldier Paul Baumer, in the epic film, "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930), had it right when he proclaimed, "I’m no good for back there anymore." That was true then, and it is true now.

Don’t Blame the Victim

Instead of questioning motives of veterans who have been forced to endure wars, the vast majority of which are grotesquely illegal upon honest examination, it would behoove psychiatrist Satel and others who think similarly, to condemn the criminality of the political leaders who continually conspire, plan, prepare, initiate, and wage wars of aggression in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, and the Constitution itself. Blaming the victim, rather than the intellectual and political architects of this supreme international crime, practices the ad nauseum trick of "shadow" projection of fault onto others, perpetuating cultural denial and avoidance of accountability.

Satel wants only the lowly troopers to take responsibility for their healing, ignoring the responsibility of war policy makers and profiteers, who are committing the supreme international crime of aggressive wars deserving Nuremberg-style prosecutions. And I suspect also that it would not occur to her that these policy making men and women be subjected to forced therapy or coercive drugging to cure them of their dangerous psychopatholgical behavior. Thus, we witness the typical double standard imposed by those at the top in hierarchical power systems.

If Satel and her comrades were really concerned about saving taxpayer funds, they would cease their glib support for extraordinarily costly aggressive wars of hegemony. Then the psychiatric community could truly be proud that they are preventing hundreds of thousands of people from becoming PTSD patients. How about that for modern psychiatry? But then the shrinks would have to possess the courage to confront the inherent contradictions of a market-obsessed, capitalist economy that values private profit over public justice and caring. Hmm!

"A cross dangling on her chest, her face taut with the pain of multiple wounds, a 12-year-old girl leans on a stick as she hobbles with a neighbor across a field littered with battle rubble to an evacuation helicopter. The girl’s home was destroyed and her father, sister and a brother were killed. Her mother and two brothers survived and claimed her in a hospital in Saigon." [Photo and caption from LIFE, July 2, 1965. Photographer: Horst Faas. Location: Dong Xoai, 55 miles north of Saigon, South Vietnam.]

This 1965 LIFE photo was taken in Dong Xoai nearly four years before my arrival in Vietnam in the spring of 1969, 150 miles further south in the Mekong Delta. It reminds me of scenes I witnessed during the immediate aftermath of several daylight bombing attacks on totally undefended village targets in Vinh Long and Phong Dinh Provinces in the Delta. I saved this photo for my personal Vietnam files after discovering it in the 1970s.

In my horrible experiences, however, I have no memory of seeing any villagers on their feet, or any buildings standing intact. The villages were small, no larger in size than a baseball stadium, built on mounds in rice paddies, with somewhere between 100 and 200 residents caught as easy prey in the pilots’ targeting. There were virtually no men visible. Most of the villagers I saw were either relatively young females and children, or elderly. No weapons were visible and each village was clearly undefended.

I do remember one small girl trying to stand up on a stick similar to the girl shown in the LIFE photo here, though she kept falling down. Villagers and farm animals who had not immediately died from the bomb shrapnel or napalm, or Gatling machine-gun rounds from the low-flying fighter-bomber planes were simply lying on the ground left to die in their painful misery. There were certainly no evacuation helicopters or ground ambulances waiting to aid the maimed and injured.

This scene more than any other has haunted me through all the years since. My Vietnamese lieutenant cohort and I, incidentally assigned this mission as an extra duty, simply documented the pilots’ bombing "successes" during our eerily safe daytime mission. After quickly recording the first of these "successful" bombings, we departed in my USAF jeep for the 45-minute return trip on a rutted dirt road south to the Bassac River ferry crossing to nearby Can Tho City, then the final five miles north to our home base at Binh Thuy. During the ride back to the base, there was no discussion of calling in help for those villagers who might be saved by medical intervention. Everyone was considered a "communist" and the more dead the better. I was in shock, and had gagged and wept in the villages. My Vietnamese sidekick was ecstatic over the "victory." I did not have sufficient composure to insist on assuring medical follow-up to the wounded in the decimated villages. I began speaking out against the bombing missions after realizing the intention was to deliberately annihilate civilian populations in whole regions of the Mekong Delta. During several subsequent missions, I refused to travel close enough to the bombed villages to actually tabulate detailed destruction and body counts.

My anti-war views intensified during my time in Vietnam. On August 2, 1969, 150 days after my arrival in Vietnam, a courier personally delivered to me a telegram which read: "Termination…Lt Willson…will report to Phan Rang AB, RVN, on first available aircraft for processing to return to CONUS." [CONUS = Continental United States]

War! It changed me forever. If humanity wants to continue evolving on this awesome journey called life that has creatively unfolded over our 15-billion-year evolutionary history, then we will have to realize that war will inevitably cut this journey short for all of us. We must choose to end our addiction to war. Only a quantum leap from a technozoic, or anthropomorphic way of thinking, to an ecozoic, or biocentric consciousness, will save us from the extinction that is now staring us in the face. Only when we internalize our own sacredness within the larger sacredness, and pursue justice for all life, will there will be peace. War shall be no more. The continuation of life requires war’s termination once and for all.

During Tet 1968, the Delta, as most of South Vietnam, had been hit hard. Thirteen of the sixteen provincial capitals had been seriously penetrated by the VC. Binh Thuy airbase had received eighteen different attacks in February and March 1968, far more than the other ten airbases in South Vietnam, with the exception of Tan Son Nhut in Saigon, which was also hit eighteen times. The U.S. response had been furious, especially against VC operations in Can Tho City, and in My Tho and Ben Tre in Kien Hoa Province to the east, not far from Thang Phong. At that time, The New York Times (February 6, 1968) reported infliction of at least 750 civilian casualties in My Tho, 350 in Can Tho, and 2,500 in Ben Tre. Ben Tre had been so pulverized by U.S. firepower that a U.S. Major explained, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

Some months later, in December 1968, Operation "Speedy Express," conducted primarily by the Ninth Infantry Division, had begun sweeping missions designed to finish off VC units in the Delta, especially in the provinces of Kien Hoa and Vinh Binh. This operation was in full swing when I arrived. According to military historian, retired Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr., when Speedy Express had concluded operations in May 1969, there were nearly 11,000 "enemy" casualties.

As a combat security officer I had to quickly acquaint myself with intelligence reports on "enemy" activity, and locations and types of friendly resources. I had not been in Vietnam more than a month or so when it seemed to me that virtually everybody, other than Vietnamese business, political, and military leaders, was at least secretly hostile to the U.S. presence, and alternately sympathetic with the Vietnamese struggle for independence from ANY outside political/military force. Though at first I did not want to believe this "sense," it became confirmed by a combination of other experiences: discussions with other U.S. Air Force personnel and members of the Vietnamese military, interactions with members of the U.S. Army’s Ninth Infantry Division, conversations with numerous Vietnamese in Can Tho City and various villages in the area, examination of Seventh Air Force bombing reports that conflicted with my own personal knowledge of bombings, and the reading of a history of U.S. intervention written by two Cornell University professors [George McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York: Dial Press, 1967)].

After Tet 1968, the CIA Phoenix program had begun intense efforts to eliminate perceived political and military leadership in the VC. U.S. air and ground forces had become much more indiscriminate in killing Vietnamese while glibly considering most of them VC. By 1969 I had been briefed that three-quarters of South Vietnam had been designated by the U.S. military command and local Vietnamese officials as a "free fire zone," meaning that virtually any villager in that vast area could be killed with little question. Nonetheless, in my continued visits to various villages northwest and northeast of Can Tho, there seemed little real support among villagers for the U.S. and our South Vietnamese political/military ally.

Bob Kerrey, as leader of the Navy SEAL team, was likely participating in Operation Speedy Express and/or the Phoenix assassination program. Many Navy SEAL units were identified as "hunter-killer" teams, and were especially skilled at infiltrating areas by sea in small boats or as frogmen. Their rigorous training explicitly prepared them for just such missions.

It became obvious that we in the U.S. military knew little or nothing about the Vietnamese people, their history, or their authentic sentiments. I doubt if many of our political leaders in Washington or those in our military chain of command knew much. The Vietnamese had a long history of successfully resisting outside forces, no matter the heaviness of their own losses. They fought the Chinese for nearly a thousand years and then the French for a hundred. Since the end of World War II the French had suffered nearly 175,000 casualties in their effort to restore their pre-war colony, while the the Vietnamese had suffered perhaps more than a million dead in defending their independence.

The unilateral U.S. intervention began in 1954, immediately following the humiliating French defeat. Unfortunately, we military troopers had been tragically duped! Our ignorance as U.S. Americans, along with our intrinsic cultural racism and historic sense of superiority, combined to manifest in a lawless, brutal force that knew virtually no limits in our violent assaults against the humble but proud Vietnamese people and their culture. We troopers had simply been guinea pigs! We did not realize the Vietnamese were prepared to defend their sacred independence at any cost. We did not even believe that the Vietnamese had the right to their independence.

The July 21, 1954 Geneva Agreement concluded the French war against the Vietnamese and promised them a unifying election, mandated to be held in July 1956. The U.S. government knew that fair elections, in effect, meant a genuine democratic victory for revered Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. This was not acceptable! Therefore, in June 1954, prior to the signing of the historic Agreement, the U.S. began CIA-directed internal sabotage operations against the Vietnamese, while setting up puppet Ngo Dinh Diem (brought over to VN from the U.S.) as "our" political leader. No elections were ever held! This set the stage for yet another war for Vietnamese independence–this time of unwanted U.S forces and their S. Vietnamese puppets. The Vietnamese had been betrayed!

The seriousness of the U.S. government to interfere with independence movements in Asia cannot be underestimated. U.S. National Security Council documents from 1956 declared that our "national security…would be endangered by Communist domination of mainland Southeast Asia." Secret military plans stated that "nuclear weapons will be used in general war and in military operations short of general war." By March 1961, the Pentagon brass recommended sending 60,000 soldiers to western Laos accompanied by air power that included, if necessary, use of nuclear weapons to assure that the Royal Laotian government would prevail against the popular insurgency being waged against it.

The covert operations intended to destabilize the Vietnamese independence movement were, of course, in direct violation of the Geneva Agreements. They were also in violation of the United Nations Charter and other international laws. This covert war lasted nearly eleven years until the overt invasion by U.S. forces commenced on March 8, 1965. This invasion was also in violation of international laws, as well as the U.S. Constitution, which requires a Declaration of War by Congress prior to initiating acts of war.

For the next ten years the U.S. continued its lawless behavior, unleashing forces that caused (and continue to cause) an incomprehensible amount of devastation in Vi
etnam:

• Eight million tons worth of indiscriminate bombing (four times the amount used by the U.S. in all World War II), destroyed an area the size of the State of Maine, if laid crater to crater;
• Utilization of eight million additional tons of other kinds of ordnance;
• Dropping of nearly 400,000 tons of napalm on people targets, a totally indiscriminate incendiary weapon;
• The callous identification of as much as three-fourths of South Vietnam as a "free fire zone" justified the murder of virtually anyone found in thousands of villages in those vast areas;
• A historically unprecedented level of chemical warfare in the indiscriminate spraying of nearly 20 million gallons on one-seventh the area of South Vietnam. The vestigial effects of chemical warfare poisoning continues to plague the health of adult Vietnamese (and ex-GIs) while causing escalated birth defects. Samples of soil, water, food, and body fat of Vietnamese continues to reveal dangerously elevated levels of dioxin to the present day.
• Today Vietnamese officials estimate the continued dangerous presence of 35 million landmines left over from the war, and 300,000 tons of unexploded ordnance. Tragically they continue to explode when farmers and children accidentally detonate them in their work and play activities, and kill or injure several thousand every year. The Vietnamese report 40,000 people killed alone since 1975 by land mines and buried bombs. That means that every day 4 or 5 Vietnamese are continually killed due to U.S. ordnance.

The war against the Vietnamese, thus, goes on and on.

It is now believed that the U.S. and its allies killed as many as 5 million Southeast Asian citizens during the active war years. The numbers of dead in Laos and Cambodia remain uncounted, but as of 1971, a Congressional Research Service report prepared for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicated that over one million Laotians had been killed, wounded, and refugeed, with the figure for Cambodia being two million. More than a half million "secret" U.S. bombing missions of Laos that began in late 1964 devastated whole populations of ancient cultures there. Estimates indicate that around 230,000 tons of bombs were dropped over northern Laos in 1968 and 1969 alone. Increasing numbers of U.S. military personnel were added on the Laotian ground in 1961. Land invasions of Laos occurred for two months in early 1969, and again for one week in early 1971. "Secret" bombing of Cambodia had begun in March 1969. An outright land invasion of Cambodia had occurred from late April 1970 through the end of June, causing thousands of casualties. And the raging U.S. covert wars in these countries did not finally cease until August 14,1973, inflicting countless additional casualties. When the bombing in Cambodia finally ceased the U.S. Air Force had officially recorded dropping nearly 260,000 tons of bombs there. The total tonnage of bombs dropped in Laos over eight-and-a-half years exceeded two million.

The consensus now is that more than 3 million Vietnamese were killed, with 300,000 additional missing in action and presumed dead. In the process the U.S. lost nearly 59,000 of her own men and women, with about 2,000 additional missing, while four of her allies lost over 6,000 more. South Vietnamese military counted nearly 225,000 dead. All this carnage in order to destroy the basic rights and capacity of the Vietnamese to construct their own independent, sovereign society. None of these people deserved to die in war. Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and U.S. military grunts were all victims. All of these corpses had been created because of the perpetuation of an incredible LIE–a "cause" that had been concocted by White male plutocrats in Washington, many of whom possessed PhDs from prestigious universities. These politicians and their appointees, along with their profitable arms makers/dealers, desired, as did most of their predecessors going back in U.S. history, to assure the destruction of peoples’ democratic movements that threatened the virtually unlimited hegemony of the U.S. over markets and resources–in this case those located in East Asia–and the profits to be derived therefrom. But never did a small country suffer so much from an imperial nation, as the Vietnamese did from the United States.

To grasp the nearly incomprehensible consequences to the Vietnamese society it is instructive to reflect that during the U.S. war against the Vietnamese, nearly one in ten, or 10 percent of her population of approximately 35 million was grievously killed. In addition, vast areas of territory were devastated by bombing and chemical warfare, and Vietnam’s infrastructure was largely destroyed. This contrasts with one in 3,300, or .03 percent of the U.S. population who needlessly died in the lawless intervention. What would be the effects on the U.S. society if we had suffered losses of twenty million, or 10 percent of our population in a war? Furthermore, how would it have affected us if vast regions of our country had been bombed and chemically defoliated, simply because we insisted on the right to be free from a foreign power intending to dominate and control our political ideology and functioning society?

During the devastating U.S. Civil War, slightly more than 185,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died out of a population of about 32 million, or about .6 percent of the U.S. population. During World War II, with a population of about 135 million, the U.S. lost nearly 300,000 soldiers, or .22 percent. In the latter war, the U.S. suffered no property damage with the exception of the destruction of their military base at Pearl Harbor, but that was located on colonized land taken from Hawaiian natives formally annexed in 1898 against their will. The people of the United States simply have no comprehension of the amount of damage and destruction our policies have caused others, as we have never faced anything closely comparable to what we did in Vietnam. Similarly, in Korea only ten years earlier, though unknown to virtually all Westerners to this day, there was a similar effort on the part of Koreans throughout its Peninsula to be free of U.S. occupation and subsequent military intervention following the Japanese surrender in August 1945. That conflict ultimately culminated in what we call the Korean War, where it is now believed that a shocking 5 million were killed, 4 million of whom were Koreans and one million Chinese. Korea had a total population of about 30 million, meaning that Korea’s population losses were greater per capita than Vietnam’s–greater than one in seven killed, or more than 13 percent!

To repeat: Bob Kerrey and I, along with 3.5 to 4 million other U.S. men and women were thrust into a fundamentally immoral, lawless intervention against the authentic desires of the Vietnamese to build an independent, sovereign nation. (The Pentagon appears to not know a precise number of military personnel assigned to Southeast Asia due to significant numbers assigned temporary, versus permanent, duty, and others participating in classified, unreportable missions. For example my entire unit in Vietnam was considered temporary duty with our official location identified at an airbase in Louisiana.) Most of us simply did not understand the historical context at the time. We believed we were doing our duty for our country to protect Vietnam from the evils of monolithic communism. Of course, our government did not want us to know the authentic history, even if it did know. My job was, in essence, to protect airplanes in between their bombing missions. Since the villages they were bombing had been identified as being in a "free fire zone," it was easy to rationalize destroying everything. On occasion, through ground observations, I witnessed the horrific aftermath of these bombing missions–villages with bodies of only young women, many children, and a few elderly strewn on the ground. I never saw any weapons
in these virtually defenseless villages. The bombing of villages which at first I thought must be the result of mistakes, I later concluded was deliberate and systematic. I was feeling sick about what I was realizing was happening but I had no one to talk to.

Now we know more about United States history, and that our violent intervention in Vietnam was, unfortunately, not an aberration. The defining and enabling experience of our U.S. civilization was the Holocaust perpetrated against the millions of original inhabitants living on the Hemispheric land base. That experience was followed by the kidnapping and transporting of millions of Africans to the Americas providing "free" labor for building our original agricultural and mercantile system. Two-thirds of those originally apprehended in Africa perished while resisting arrest or during the deplorable conditions of transport across the Atlantic Ocean. "Free " land at gunpoint. "Free" labor at gunpoint. This is an intrinsic part of our cultural ethos and karma.

It is known that the U.S. has historically intervened militarily exceeding 400 times in more than 100 nations expanding our control over global resources and markets. And it is now believed that the U.S. covertly intervened in a variety of destabilizing actions anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 times in over 100 countries since the end of World War II. No one knows just how many people have been murdered and maimed by these aggressive (and lawless) actions, but the figure is in multiples of millions. This is a tough conclusion, one that is extremely painful, to acknowledge about the nation of our upbringing and citizenship.

Obsessive addiction to our disproportionately privileged American Way Of Life (AWOL) exacts heavy demands upon Mother Earth and her citizens. As a nation we have but 4.5 percent of the world’s population, yet insist on consuming anywhere from 25 percent to nearly half of the world’s resources, depending upon which asset is examined. For example, the U.S. consumes slightly more than 25 percent of the world’s oil production, but higher percentages of other critical resources. The U.S. has nearly 500 passenger cars per one thousand people, nearly six times the rate for the entire world’s population, consuming high percentages of the globe’s steel and rubber resources. People in the U.S. consume paper at seventeen times the rate of those in the "developing" world, and nearly six times the rate of the total world population. We in the United States are carefully insulated from experiencing the incredible pain and suffering that directly results from our ignorance and arrogance.

We veterans who now understand this grotesquely unfair reality can exercise a choice to take courageous responsibility for our actions, especially since our cowardly government which made the intervention decisions is sadly unlikely to do so. Regularly forgotten is that the Paris Peace Accords signed by the United States and Vietnamese governments on January 27, 1973, and subsequent letter signed by President Nixon on February 1, promised more than $4 billion for healing the wounds of war and postwar reconstruction. The U.S. shamelessly reneged on this promise and the aid has never been provided.

In a profound way the entire U.S. American society needs to take responsibility for the crime against Vietnam. The U.S. Constitutional democracy and its political structures representing the people and taxpayers of the United States, made a series of choices, all of them criminal and in violation of both international law and its own Constitution, to invade the nations of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, devastating the people, their infrastructures and cultures. Nonetheless, veterans who viscerally participated in the tragic war have an opportunity to pursue our own healing and set an example for our society. Bob Kerrey and his men killed for this lie, and participated in this terrible assault on the Vietnamese people. Though Kerrey had been on a mission designed to likely result in the direct killing of villagers, my duties led me to only witnessing the aftermath of bombings that murdered large numbers of Vietnamese. I viewed the sickening sight of dozens of bodies of women, children, and elderly. I was a participant, nonetheless, in the killing machine, even being minimally complicit in the bombing campaigns that murdered far more Vietnamese (and Cambodians and Laotians) than all ground operations combined.

I herein offer a healing prescription for Bob Kerrey. Other U.S. souls still haunted by participation in that criminal war might consider something similar:

First, Mr. Kerrey, please publicly return your Bronze Star received for the killing of the civilians at Thang Phong. You need to clearly renounce it as a medal drenched in the blood of the innocent people of that village.

Second, Mr. Kerrey, I urge you to travel to the village of Thang Phong in the Province of Kien Hoa to personally express your sorrow for the consequences of your actions, asking those people for forgiveness.

Third, Mr. Kerrey, create a reparations or atonement fund, in cooperation with the Vietnamese people in that area, as a concrete effort to repair in some way the harm done. This will make saying your sorry possess more meaning.

And fourth, Mr. Kerrey, and perhaps the most important act for your own healing and for the healing of our entire nation, begin publicly speaking and teaching about the authentic history of the Vietnamese people and the U.S. role in sabotaging the 1956 unifying elections as mandated by the 1954 Geneva Agreements, how the U.S. fabricated an alternative puppet government not supported by the vast majority of the Vietnamese people, how the U.S. maintained its posture through a series of incredible lies that put the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and U.S. men and women in harm’s way, causing the needless death and maiming of millions. Thus you can educate the U.S. American society on why so many civilians were murdered in confusion about who was a VC or not, as the vast majority of Vietnamese were simply defending their rights to be free of unwanted outside forces. We would likely do no less if invaded here at home.

Never has there been a more critical time in our nation’s history for there to emerge a dramatic new consciousness rooted in humility and genuine respect for other nations and people, including all of our own citizens. Veterans have a unique standing to initiate courageous leadership in a national healing process. This requires speaking truth to what we know, including that all people and the earth are intrinsically interconnected. It requires recognizing that at a deep level we feel lonely sadness, which we have often defended with anger, but begs to be grieved with voluminous tears. Our souls, and the soul of our country, are at stake. Furthermore, the future of peace in the world may rest on a profound reckoning on the part of U.S. Americans that our historical imperial policies have been wrong, and that we now want to truly make amends for our crimes, for our arrogance. I urge all veterans, especially those from Vietnam, to find the courage to reveal our own, and our country’s, dark role, and disclose the incredible lies that our government perpetuated against us, leading to the murder of millions of innocent human beings. The future of the human condition, not just our souls, may actually be at stake!

This war, as with virtually all wars, was born in and sustained by incredible lies. The U.S. initially was complicit in obstruction of the mandated unifying Vietnamese elections scheduled for 1956 according to the 1954 Geneva Agreement which was signed after defeat of the French by the Vietnamese. Before conclusion of the Agreement the U.S. had already covertly introduced paramilitary sabotage teams into Vietnam and began dispatching hundreds, eventually thousands, of military advisers, activities clearly in violation of the Agreement. The pretext for overtly invading Vietnam (the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin "incident") was fabricated and the subsequent brutal air and ground war was politically reported by exaggerating enemy dead while undercounting civilian murders. As part of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords President Nixon promised Vietnam more than $4 billion for postwar reconstruction which the U.S. quickly refused to acknowledge. Again, the first casualty in this war was the truth.

Ironically, we as a nation behaved in a manner far more demonic than the worst that we alleged of our purported enemies. The catastrophic results of our blinding arrogance is nearly incalculable. U.S. air power dropped more than 6.5 million tons of bombs on these nations, more than three times the tonnage dropped in all World War II theaters. At least ten thousand hamlets were destroyed in the south, as well as countless civilian areas in the north. Ancient societies in northeastern Laos were totally destroyed by aerial bombings alone. Four hundred thousand tons of "improved" napalm and nearly 20 million gallons of chemical warfare killed and poisoned countless civilians in villages and farming areas. In the process we poisoned our own military forces. Veterans in the United States continue to experience a myriad of unanticipated illnesses and deaths as well as increased rates of birth defects among their offspring.

And then there was the lethal ground war.

Human casualties were almost unimaginable. Mostly civilians, somewhere between four to six million were killed, with countless wounded, maimed, and displaced. Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 are still missing from that war, including about 2,000 Americans. Though more than 58,000 U.S. troops were directly killed in the war (and several thousand from Australia, S. Korea, Thailand and the Philippines), many others after returning home have prematurely died from suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, chronic wounds, and other unexplained causes.

An opportunity to genuinely begin a national healing was missed when U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen explicitly refused to apologize on his recent historic visit to Vietnam. Chronic patterns of U.S. violence and arrogance are historically rooted in racism and ethnocentrism that earlier manifested in rationalizing genocides against Indigenous Americans and ancient African cultures, enabling "free" development of the "American civilization." During the 20th Century, termed by some historians "the American Century," U.S. policy justified hundreds of overt and thousands of covert actions interfering with the sovereignty of over one hundred nations by self-righteously asserting the "need" to secure (unjustly) the disproportionately consumptive American Way Of Life (AWOL).

If we continue to believe that Vietnam was a noble cause, then efforts to conceal our humiliating loss will continue to manifest in belligerent activities and their accompanying lies. We pretend to have overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome" with a combination of high tech weapons and proxy forces that assure few or no U.S. casualties. Our "forever war," however, clearly revealed a dark psyche which continues to show in lawless, imperial behavior. The darkness that resides deeply in our cultural soul needs to be pierced, then healed. Genuine apologies create a psychological and emotional basis for reparations and reconciliation. If we are able to genuinely acknowledge the harms we have caused, asking forgiveness while offering appropriate reparations that evidence a profound transformation in our hearts, then space opens for genuine peace. In so doing our "forever war" can be an experience that transforms our dark psyche to a global spirit committed to justice, which is the foundation for enduring peace, as we come to comprehend that all life is sacred and interconnected.

Some of us Vietnam veterans have chosen, out of necessity, to pursue our own healing in this manner. We anxiously await an authentic healing and transformation of our national heart and soul.

During the early 1980s, while first living in Franklin County, Massachusetts, I became active with other Vietnam veterans in response to the myriad physical, psychological, and social problems we seemed to be experiencing. I was active in a local Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) chapter, and subsequently became director of the state-funded Western Massachusetts Agent Orange Information Project, and later, executive director of a veterans outreach center.

Through numerous conversations and formal interviews with hundreds of veterans I began to establish an empirical substantiation of the syndrome of problems that certainly is one of the tragic legacies of the Vietnam War (i.e., the war against the Vietnamese which the Vietnamese call "the American War"). Grasping the depth of the prevailing sense of shame, malaise, and deteriorating physical and mental health, I began to understand more deeply both the burden and incredible potential wisdom of the war, not just for veterans, but for the entire American society. Both the syndrome known as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), often delayed for a decade or more enabling the psyche time to integrate the horrible realities that the Vietnam experience possesses for many, and exposure to the most intensive application of chemical warfare in history by the Pentagon (in cahoots with seven chemical companies, including Monsanto and Dow), directly contributed to a myriad of symptoms, physical, emotional, and psychic. A pattern of extraordinary sickness and depression for this age group of young males (age 30-45 in 1984-85) is believed unprecedented in the United States.

Nineteen million gallons of Agents Orange, Blue, White, and Purple were sprayed over an area the size of Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined (over 6 million acres), applied up to 14 times the recommended domestic agricultural application rate. Subsequently, these chemicals have been banned in the U.S. due to their intense toxicity, being considered, perhaps, the most potent cancer-causing substance ever studied by the Environmental Protection Agency. It should be noted that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, based on studies conducted by the National Academy of Sciences ‘ Institute of Medicine, now presumes the following conditions as service-connected for Vietnam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange or other herbicides:

• Chloracne
• Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
• Soft tissue sarcoma
• Hodgkin’s disease
• Porphyria cutanea tarda
• Multiple myeloma
• Respiratory cancers (including cancers of the lung, larynx, trachea and bronchus)
• Prostate cancer
• Peripheral neuropathy (acute or subacute)
• Spina bifida in children of Vietnam veterans

Mortality Rates for Vietnam Veterans

There have been a number of representations and claims over the years that more Vietnam veterans have died from suicide since returning from the war than the 58,000-plus who died in the war. There is no certain way for determining precise data on veterans’ suicides. My involvement with many physically and mentally troubled veterans, and search of "scientific" data about the subject of mortality rates of Vietnam veterans, produced the following information by mid-1986.

When first conversing with local veterans in rural Franklin County, Massachusetts in mid-1983, they informed me that there had been four suicides of local Vietnam veterans between 1981 and June 1983.

Phil Girard, in 1982 the Senior Vice President, Agent Orange Victims International, reported at a public meeting at Greenfield, Massachusetts Community College (April 17) that their organizational research indicated that "from the end of the war to 1981 there have been 109,000 veterans who have died."

An unpublished manuscript, Vietnam Veterans, by Tom Williams, University of Denver School of Professional Psychology, April 1979, concluded that "More Vietnam veterans have died since the war by their own hand than were actually killed in Vietnam."

Testimony presented to the Massachusetts Commission on the Concerns of Vietnam veterans in Greenfield, Massachusetts on May 4, 1982, declared that "Vietnam veterans have nationally averaged 28 suicides a day since 1975, amounting to over 70,000."

"Suicide rates 33% higher than the national average rate" were reported in The Forgotten Warrior Project by John P. Wilson, Cleveland State University, 1978. This definitive study was originally titled, Identity, Ideology and Crisis: The Vietnam Veteran in Transition.

A classified VA memo dated 6/30/82 identified a total of approximately 300,000 deaths occurring among Vietnam-era veterans from 1965-1981 calculated by adding together deaths in-service with an actuarial estimate of the number of Vietnam-era veterans who have died since returning to civilian life, a much higher figure than estimated by the VA in previous reports. Research conducted by the U.S. Center for Disease Control in the early 1980s had found a number of illnesses and suicides contributing to elevated death rates for Vietnam veterans than for non-veterans in the same age group.

An alarming disparity in official VA figures reporting a dramatic decrease in the estimated number of Vietnam Era Veterans in Civilian Life from September 30, 1981 to March 31, 1983, reveals a loss of 793,000 Vietnam-era veterans in that 18-month period. The disparity was never explained. I suggest four possible explanations: (1) changed, inconsistent, and/or mistaken reporting and estimation procedures; (2) a large emigration of Vietnam-era veterans out of the U.S.; (3) a high mortality rate for Vietnam-era veterans; or (4) a combination of any and/or all of the above explanations.

On Monday, January 28, 1985, the Massachusetts Agent Orange Program of the State Office of Commissioner of Veterans’ Services released results of its study, Mortality Among Vietnam Veterans in Massachusetts, 1972-1983. The one-year study revealed that deaths due to suicides and motor vehicle accidents, along with kidney cancer, were "significantly elevated" among Vietnam veterans compared to non-veteran Massachusetts males for the study period 1972-1983.

A comprehensive research study by the University of California at San Francisco published in the March 6, 1986 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, titled "Delayed Effects of the Military Draft on Mortality," disclosed that Vietnam veterans were 86% more likely than non-veterans to die of suicide in the years after the war, and 53% more likely to die in traffic accidents. The researchers claim that this study of California and Pennsylvania men is the first to show a cause-and-effect relationship between military service during the Vietnam War and an unusual risk of suicide.

From Summer 1983 through Summer 1985 there were seven known additional suicides of Vietnam veterans in the Franklin-Hampshire County area of Massachusetts. Because one’s veteran status is often not known at time of death, whether by suicide or other cause, and because suicides are often masked under causes listed as single-car accidents, drug or alcohol overdose, etc., actual deaths by suicide remain unknown. Other veterans whom I knew in the 1982-1985 time period died of alcohol and drug abuse.

A November 1, 1984 U.S. House Report 98-1167, Diversion of Funds from Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Counseling Program, by the Committee on Government Operations, concluded that "the suicide rate among Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD is high . . . not because of massive underlying neuroses, but as a result of the harsh treatment they received in Vietnam, and experiences upon returning to the U.S." Dr. Arnold, Chief of Psychiatry at the VA Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona at the time, and an acknowledged expert on PTSD, explained to the Committee that the VA’s most rece
nt statistics indicate that while Vietnam veterans make up only about 14% of the veterans they treat, Vietnam veterans constitute 30% of the suicides of all veterans treated by the VA, over-contributing substantially to the total number of suicides of patients who are treated by the VA.

Conclusion

There is no certain way of knowing how many Vietnam veterans have died through suicide, motor vehicle "accidents," or illnesses. The available evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, however, suggests elevated mortality rates from suicides, motor vehicle accidents, and certain cancers for Vietnam veterans. In some cases the data suggests mortality rates are "significantly elevated."

Some U.S. veteran’s groups bitterly opposed lifting the embargo, using the old argument that the Vietnamese need to be continually punished until they fully cooperate in revealing the fate of the 2200 plus U.S. military whose bodies remain unaccounted for due to the violent activities of the 1965 U.S. invasion and the 10 years of subsequent war waged against the various countrysides. The number of U.S. missing represents about one percent or less of the 200,000 to 400,000 still missing Vietnamese bodies rotting in their own war-torn jungles, mountains, and rice paddies. The number of U.S. killed during the invasion and marauding of Vietnam represents about one percent of all Southeast Asians directly murdered on their own soil from U.S. military firepower.

While so many are jubilant, and a few remain bitter, I note that I am feeling depressed. The U.S. has finally achieved virtual total victory in a small country with about 1.3% of the world’s population. This victory, with money and market expansion, had previously eluded us through years and years of incredible military battles, firepower and bombings in this small country 12,000 miles west of my rural home town farming village in upstate New York.

Continually lost in this hoopla is the fact that the U.S. diabolically invaded and assaulted Vietnam, Loas, and Cambodia, in clear violation of international laws, basic human rights, and moral conscience for over 10 years, causing incomprehensible destruction, suffering, and deaths that continue to this day.

Also lost is the fact that the U.S. promised, instead of a trade embargo against Vietnam, between $4.25 and $4.75 billion in postwar reconstruction aid. This promise was explicitly communicated in the Paris Peace Accords, "Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam," Article 21, signed by the U.S. government and the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) on January 27, 1973, and U.S. President Richard Nixion’s subsequent February 1 letter addressed to DRV Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. The U.S. soon claimed that such promises were not binding. Hmm! The Native American people have continually reminded us, if we would take the time to listen, that the U.S. government has breached each of the more than 400 treaties signed with the various indigenous nations that led to the violent theft of virtually all the land area that today comprises the United States of America.

During the early years of the post-Cold War era, "New World Order," I find myself more an observer than activist. I am discerning the changes, both in the larger world of political economics, ecological and sociological phenomena, and within the solidarity movement, as well as in my more personal, local life and spiritual reflections. I have been amused, but anguished from observing the language and passions of the politics of this "New World Order." Some of the headlines I have noted: "Hunting For Riches In Ex-Soviet Lands; Capitalism’s New Frontier," (NYT, 12/27/91); "A New Rush Into Latin America…A Fountain of Stability South of the Border," (NYT, 4/11/93); "U.S. Businesses Eager For South Africa Trade:…Some Companies See A Big Market When Sanctions End," (NYT, 9/9/93); "Ho Chi Minh City Journal: The Boat People Fly Back, With Riches To Invest," (NYT, 11/3/93); "Commerce Dept. In ‘91 Urged Moves To Caribbean For Low Wages," (NYT, 11/10/93); "Gold Adds Glitter To Remote Russian Region," (NYT, 11/11/93); "Thinking Long Term In Latin America…Trade Pact Jitters Aside, Economic Growth Looks Promising," (NYT11/13/93); "Mexico: Business Leaders Like Deal; Others See Rich Getting Richer," regarding House vote on NFTA, (Boston Globe, 11/18/93); "Publishers Tap The Potential Of Latin American Markets," (NYT, 11/29/93); and "Czech Out This KMart: American Retailing Giant Finds A Market In Czech Republic," (Boston Globe, 1/13/94).

In 1992, many either celebrated or bemoaned the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ INVASION of the "New World." Columbus himself referred to his efforts as "La Empresa de las Indias," or, the "Enterprise of the Indies." His motivation to search for profits and gold is captured crassly in his log where he describes his initial exposure to people of the Arawak nation on Hispaniola (not India as he believed): "They would make fine servants…With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." In the 1840s, the term, "Manifest Destiny," was popularized in the United States which declared our destiny "to over spread the continent allotted by Providence for the development of our yearly multiplying millions." Manifest Destiny has now encircled the entire globe. A model of arrogant self righteousness and greed has its tentacles everywhere–almost.

In the post-Cold War era, the U.S. asserted its global hegemony, Pax Americana, with the unprecedented 43 days of consecutive bombing of Iraq in 1991, one of the few nations bold enough to continue to resist the western edict to "Cry Uncle!" The unipolar, Pax Americana-imposed world order will use any force or device to force compliance with the global supermarket, "free" market economy, or to assure obedience to U.S. perceived "national security" interests, the latter defined by free access to world markets and commodities. Pax Americana knows no limits!

The merciless use of world supermarket economics has become the west’s most potent weapon for assuring conformity with a capitalist market (heavily subsidized and protected by nation state governments). From imposed embargoes (such as against Cuba, Iraq and North Korea), and enforcing the concept of the external "debt," holding hostage most "Third" World nations, "First" World political and economic institutions now assert their hegemony with little resistance. The U.S. obsession with destroying the Nicaraguan revolution through overt and covert military terrorism, and economic strangulation, reveals just how much evil it is willing to inflict on peoples and nations to assure that they "Cry Uncle."

This U.S. victory in Vietnam, or more accurately, the victory of a Western economic paradigm promoting accumulation of endless commodities, threatens a serious degradation of the Vietnamese culture, and demise of their ancient ways and wisdom, all because their socialist revolution was never tolerated by the West. This makes me feel sick because, as I have come to understand since my own Vietnam experiences, our Western model, our greed-driven, blinding obsession with profits, destroys culture, ecology, community, spirituality, local self-reliance, emotional health, ancient wisdom, and the essence of life itself. Perhaps I was hoping that Vietnam would hold out and say NO to Uncle Sam, YES to Uncle Ho, just as I had hoped the Nicaraguans would spurn all U.S. efforts to overthrow Sandino’s inspired affront to historical Yankee imperialism. But as people’s lives are made more miserable by military, political and economic interventions, I cannot blame them for wanting relief from the misery that has been inflicted upon them against their will by Western values and interests. But I weep as I witness this seemingly uncontrollable, limitless greed taking over life’s ancient wisdoms. It depletes our finite resources, creates voluminous unabsorbable toxic wastes, and destroys every component of the ecological infrastructure necessary to sustain human life on the earth. Thus, this model is destined, if left unchecked, to cause the extinction of human
and much other life on the planet.

Even if the ecological imperatives are ignored, numerous socioeconomic signs understood by increasing numbers of people reveal that the gap between the haves and have nots is increasing at an alarming rate as the global supermarket economy expands. Thus the misery index is increasing. Of course ecological health and human well being go hand in hand. What is redeemable about this western, "free" market model? What is redeemable? Please tell me!

I believe the Zapatista Army, that group of mostly Mayan peasants in southern Mexico who rose up on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect, are speaking truth for all to hear. During this "New World Order" period, lies and denial are thicker than ever, rationalizing with vigor this absolutely unsustainable market model. The Zapatistas have articulated one central point: the Mexican government, and now NAFTA, are expected to bring massive new wealth to the rich and upper middle class, while the plight of the poor, an ever increasing number of people, has experienced new levels of misery and hopelessness. Jorge Castaneda, a professor of international relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has indicated that only 25% of the Mexican population represents what the Mexican government has described as a modern, forward-looking, business-oriented, free trade loving people. The remaining 75%, according to Castaneda, are relegated to unbelievable misery and kept in that condition by corrupt and repressive political and economic structures. The population of the world in 1994 was about 5.5 billion people. Three quarters of them live in the impoverished "Third World." Thus, the Zapatista position represents the plight of over four billion human beings.

As many social scientists are aware, there is an increasing dramatic polarization within the United States and the Western world in general. As world unregulated capital increases, we experience expansion of the globalization of the economy, i.e., the gobal supermarket economy discussed above. One significant consequence of this globalization is that it extends the "Third" World model internally to industrial, "First" World societies. We are witnessing this phenomenon now. Though I do not personally fit the criterion as a "Third" World person, I find myself more and more identifying with those "Third" World peoples, within the United States and without, as my alienation from the American Way Of Life (AWOL) dramatically increases. I seek to participate in an uprising: I would hope a mindful and visionary one, as well as militant, and nonviolent. An uprising of unprecedented depth and vision becomes our hope.

My dream is to join many people within the U.S., with the Zapatistas, Nicaraguans, and the Vietnamese, among many, to forge a radical, revolutionary nonviolent transformation of our consciences, our communities, our way of life, our manner of interconnecting with all of nature on this globe and in this cosmos.

The lessons of Vietnam, just as the lessons of the original sins of racism and genocide upon which all of the Americas have been built, have not been addressed, and are not understood yet. Perhaps as we continue to sink into our selfish, dysfunctional model, and as we witness the westernization of Vietnam, and as the Vietnamese experience it themselves, together we will come to an awareness of our sickness. Then we can proceed with the motivation to seek health, i.e. revolutionary justice for all life, a sharing paradigm, one opposite of our market, greed driven paradigm that benefits but a few.

I believe that only in decentralized, locally self-reliant, face-to-face communities within a bioregional model, can we hope to survive with dignity. This model seeks sustainability. Then we will understand and appreciate the nature of all our interrelationships, moving slowly, and living and working in small enough units, to actually feel and actually see. I weep for us and the Vietnamese as "normalization" occurs with the lifting of the embargo. I pray that in this continued pursuit of limitless materialism we come to our knees in humility and recover the ancient wisdom possessed by the indigenous peoples who we slaughtered, as they, the "savages," stood in the way of our plundering.

As Chief Sitting Bull once said about the white settlers, "The love of possessions is a disease with them." The them is us. You and me!