http://inverted-world.com/index.php/column/column/vietnam_and_the_whites_as_cancer_myth/By The Realist • 3/27/07
Our last column, “Utopia and its Scapegoats,” showed how the 1960s New Left portrayed whites as a uniquely power-hungry and greedy race that was to blame for the world’s suffering. While the New Left was a small, radical movement, the “whites as cancer” myth would entrench itself in the American psyche over the next 40 years. One of the primary vehicles by which the New Left’s ideas entered the mainstream was the portrayal of the Vietnam War in the American media.
Two lies about Vietnam that had their origin in the New Left have been repeated to us so often that they have become conventional wisdom: the first is that American soldiers regularly committed war crimes against the Vietnamese that were covered up, and the second is that the burden of fighting the war fell disproportionately on American minorities. In his 1998 book
Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History, Vietnam veteran B. G. Burkett has scrupulously researched both of these pieces of conventional wisdom and found them to be entirely unfounded.
American soldiers did commit some genuine war crimes in Vietnam—the My Lai massacre was the worst. However, there is every reason to believe that such events were rare and that the US military tracked down and punished war criminals.
The Left fostered the myth of hidden war crimes as part of its campaign to portray America a racist state. In 1970, the leftist group Vietnam Veterans Against the War sponsored the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit to gather testimony from soldiers about war crimes. The opening statement made clear the goals of the group:
"We went to preserve the peace and our testimony will show that we have set all of Indochina aflame. We went to defend the Vietnamese people and our testimony will show that we are committing genocide against them. We went to fight for freedom and our testimony will show that we have turned Vietnam into a series of concentration camps."
"We went to guarantee the right of self-determination to the people of South Vietnam and our testimony will show that we are forcing a corrupt and dictatorial government upon them. We went to work toward the brotherhood of man and our testimony will show that our strategy and tactics are permeated with racism. We went to protect America and our testimony will show why our country is being torn apart by what we are doing in Vietnam."
Though 109 soldiers testified about crimes they had seen or witnessed, hard evidence of their claims was non-existent. After the hearings were over, the Naval Investigative Service contacted the men in order to determine whether their claims had merit. However, many of the speakers refused to be interviewed. Indeed, one of the men contacted said that the VVAW leadership had instructed them not to cooperate with investigators. The testimony of one black veteran who did tell his story shows the general quality of these men’s testimony. He said Vietnam was “one huge atrocity” and a “racist plot.” However, he had no details about actual crimes committed in Vietnam and admitted his testimony had been assisted by a member of the Nation of Islam.
The most remarkable finding of the NSI investigation, however, was that many of the veterans who supposedly had testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation had never in fact been there. Rather, anti-war activists had assumed the names of real veterans1.
By looking up the military records of veterans who claimed that they had committed or witnessed atrocities, Burkett and others established that most of the stories were hoaxes; indeed, many of the “veterans” themselves were unbalanced people who had never been in Vietnam and were eager to find any audience for their delusions. For example, one “veteran” named Michael Schneider, who was featured in the 1970 anti-war book
Conversations with Americans claimed that he had shot three peasants in cold blood in Vietnam, and had been ordered to attach wires to a man’s testicles and to kill prisoners. However, subsequent investigation revealed that the man had never been in Vietnam. He had served in the US army in Europe, deserted, and been arrested in Oklahoma on a murder charge2.
One would think that this record would be enough to consign the myth of unreported atrocities to oblivion. However, that would be to underestimate the power of the “whites as cancer” myth, which never let reality or reason stand in its way. In 1988, CBS News aired a documentary on Vietnam veterans who maintained they had committed terrible war crimes in Vietnam. One, named Steve Southards, said that he had been ordered to by his commanding officers to kill the residents of a Vietnamese village and leave Chinese and North Vietnamese literature among the mutilated corpses so the US could blame the atrocity on the enemy. Another, Terry L. Bradley, claimed to have skinned alive up to fifty Vietnamese, including women and babies, and stacked their mangled bodies in heaps3.
Burkett obtained the military records of the six men interviewed in the documentary and found that the stories of at least five of them were bogus. Southards’ story was implausible on its very face: he had claimed to be a 16-year-old Navy SEAL at the time when he had committed his atrocity. The minimum enlistment age for the armed forces is 17, and it takes two years of training to become a SEAL. When Burkett managed to track down Southards’ military record, it turned out that he had not been a SEAL at all, nor had he seen combat. Rather, he had been an “internal communications repairman” who had been assigned to rear area bases4.
Bradley’s story also did not check out: he had not been a sergeant, as he had claimed to be in the documentary. Rather, he was an ammunition handler—someone who is responsible for assuring the proper storage and disposal of ammunition—and was thus unlikely to have seen much, if any, combat. There was no record of any killings such as he had described in the area of operations of the division to which he belonged. Finally, it turned out that Bradley had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, an illness which had begun before he was sent to Vietnam5.
Another myth of the Vietnam War is that blacks suffered a disproportionate share of fatalities because the government drafted them in large numbers. This claim was popularized by black author Wallace Terry in the 1984 book
Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. Terry asserts that a full 23 percent of fatalities in Vietnam were blacks. Again, the news media have shown themselves credulous: in 1986, the public television show
Frontline did a segment on Terry’s book. The myth that America used blacks as cannon fodder has been so often repeated that people take it for granted. During his effort to erect a memorial for the Vietnam dead, Burkett came across a black bureaucrat who said, “This is a worthy project. Everybody knows that the majority of those killed were poor black kids.”6
In fact, blacks were underrepresented in the war’s casualties: 13.5 percent of draft-aged males were black during the period of the war, but blacks made up only 12.5 percent of those killed in action. Furthermore, 75 percent of black soldiers in Vietnam were volunteers7.
If Terry’s statistics are bad, the stories of black Vietnam vets recorded in his “oral history” are even worse. The war provided fertile ground for the black imagination, which, as we know from the examples of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum, abounds in fantasies of mistreatment at the hands of whites. One example is Lawrence Kirkland, on whose story the film
Dead Presidents was based. Kirkland recites the usual litany of horrors: he had witnessed fellow soldiers push Vietnamese prisoners out of helicopters and mutilate corpses. All this he blamed on the racism inculcated by the military. In boot camp, he says:
"Right away they told us not to call them Vietnamese. Call everybody gooks, dinks."
"Then they told us when you go over in Vietnam, you gonna be face to face with Charlie, the Viet Cong. They were like animals, or something other than human. They ain’t have no regard for life. They’d blow up little babies just to kill one GI. They wouldn’t allow you to talk about them as if they were people. They told us they’re not to be treated with any type of mercy or apprehension. That’s what they engraved into you. That killer instinct. Just go away and do destruction."
Kirkland turned to a life of crime after he returned to the US, a fact that he blamed on the horrors of war. But nothing in Kirkland’s record indicates he ever saw combat; in fact, he had been a truck driver in a headquarters company in Vietnam8.
If scholars like Burkett can look up the military records of the men who told these stories, it would not have been hard for the well-staffed organizations that produce CBS News or
Frontline to do so. These distortions of the Vietnam War reveal a deep desire on the part of the media elites to believe that the American government and American culture naturally produce racist psychopaths. And it is not the news media alone that are guilty: a slew of movies on Vietnam, such as
Apocalypse Now, Casualties of War, Full Metal Jacket, and
Platoon, have reinforced this view of the war. It is due to this desire that the figure of the American “baby-killer” soldier was transformed from the fantasy of a fringe movement into conventional wisdom.
References
1. B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (Dallas: Verity Press, 1998), pp. 133-34. ↑
2. Ibid., p. 132. ↑
3. Ibid., pp. 87-91. ↑
4. Ibid., p. 93. ↑
5. Ibid., p. 94-95. ↑
6. Ibid., p. 82. ↑
7. Ibid., p. 454. ↑
8. Ibid., p. 455-56. ↑
Topic: Vietnam and the “Whites as Cancer” Myth (Read 1746 times)