Watson is a professor of English at UCLA.
By Robert Watson
It’s the attack of the bleeding-heart conservatives! For
decades now, right-wingers have been pounding on liberals for
suggesting that people should try to understand ghetto criminals.
But put a uniform on somebody, and these same zero-tolerators
suddenly start muttering that it would be “insensitive”
even to inquire whether (as several witnesses attest) he and his
guys pinned a number of little children and grandparents to the
floor and cut their throats with a knife, then lined up the unarmed
survivors and massacred them so they wouldn’t tell.
Hey, come on: it’s not like he had tea with Buddhists or
sex with an intern.
Oddly, the people quickest to make excuses for the mass killing
of helpless innocents by Sen. Bob Kerrey and his team of Navy SEALs
are the conservatives who relentlessly bash the left for
“moral relativism.” It’s a favorite device for
disguising anti-intellectualism as moral intelligence: trap people
into acknowledging the possible complications of a situation, or
into exploring why bad things happened, and then you can attack
them for not knowing that certain things are absolutely right or
wrong, always, no matter what, period.
Now those hard-heads are suddenly invoking context to excuse
crimes which surely, in isolation, are more obviously and
grievously “wrong” than most of the things the left has
tried to explain.
In fact, these conservatives have suddenly transformed into
their arch-enemies in the culture wars: the deconstructionist who
argue that the truth of an event is essentially subjective and
contextual and unknowable. The Wall Street Journal editorial page
starts reading like a Yale graduate seminar on Conrad’s
“Heart of Darkness.”
The best-case scenario which Kerrey claims is plenty bad enough.
After the throat-cutting adventure, they gunned down many other
children and their mothers and grandparents ““ and not a
single plausible Vietcong soldier. They then allowed an utterly
false and extremely self-serving report of the event to gain them
medals and praise, and to stand without contradiction for 32 years,
until forced out by news coverage.
That report, claiming they killed 21 enemy soldiers, is yet
another of the countless “body count” lies by which our
government sustained support for their war (and called us lying
traitors if we challenged those counts).
The fall-back position taken by other admirable Vietnam war-hero
politicians such as Sens. McCain and Kerrey is generous, to a
fault. Sure, it was a dark night and a terrifying situation many
years ago, but don’t you think you could tell and recall the
difference between (on the one hand) returning fire at a town and
finding the wrong dead, and (on the other) slicing the throats of
children and grandparents, then gathering the survivors in the
center of town and executing them (which is what the position of
the bodies indicates)?
If you’d been in so many situations enough like the latter
that it didn’t stand out clearly, that would be damning
enough in itself.
I’ve generally liked Kerrey, and I don’t claim to be
sure exactly what happened that awful night in Tranh Phong.
It’s certainly possible to question the reliability of the
accuser among that SEAL team, Gerhard Klann, even though he seems
to have a lot less reason to claim to be a war criminal than his
colleagues would have to deny it.
It’s possible to dismiss as partial the confirmations of
his story by Vietnamese women, attributing them to Vietcong
affiliations and residual bitterness against the soldiers who
massacred their village, even if it was (in some sense) by
accident. There’s still a shadow of a doubt.
But the same conservatives who cling to that shadow would have
blithely thrown away the key on any ghetto kid whom a notorious
jailhouse “informant” claimed to have seen near a crack
vial.
Instead, those conservatives now roll out all the old liberal
cliches, and wrap them in the flag. Why compound the tragedy by
prosecuting a guy who regrets his mistake? The society he was
attacking had done many bad things to his people. It was an awful
situation, you don’t know what these guys might have been
through, it was a tough place where you had to be ready to kill or
be killed, and you can’t judge them unless you were there.
It’s an army thing ““ you wouldn’t understand.
The sententious worship of the U.S. military is clearly
resurgent in this country, despite a series of reckless blunders in
which our hot shot pilots and captains have killed innocent skiers
and fishermen and gone free, burdened with nothing but self-pity
and nice pensions. In recent wars, our soldiers have mostly been
killed by each other, resulting in a hail of medals and parade
streamers.
Prominent right wing commentators ““ including Richard
Nixon’s copy-boy William Safire ““ now take the position
that it’s wicked for intellectuals to condemn U.S. policy in
Vietnam, since it was mostly the underprivileged who died for it. I
don’t recall hearing a lot from them on that topic 35 years
ago; in fact, it was largely Nixon’s strategy for stifling
protest by recruiting a volunteer army that magnified the
death-rate among the poor.
Nor, in fact, if you study the transcripts from the Johnson and
Nixon White House tapes, do you hear anything about this
“noble cause” that Safire and his pals now claim was at
the heart of our Vietnam violence: instead it’s all about the
political damage to the president’s own reputation if he
concedes a war (which they knew they couldn’t win anyway) to
the communists. They saved the “noble cause” talk for
public speeches to convince suckers to feed themselves or their
sons into the meat-grinder.
That something so horrible as Tranh Phong (and My Lai and Son
Thang and who knows how many others) happened in service of such a
“noble cause” is not, in this case, an accident. The
defense of these men is in itself the most convincing condemnation
of the war, in which we tried to impose a corrupt, unpopular
right-wing puppet government on a poor and fiercely independent
people, in contradiction of both our treaties and our democratic
principles, driving them into the hands of increasingly radicalized
communists, who should be answerable for the evils they have
sanctioned, as we should be for ours.
The Kerrey revelations confirmed what many of us have been
saying for over 35 years ““ Vietnam was even worse than most
wars.
If (as Kerrey’s defenders keep saying) it was a situation
where the enemy and the population tended to be indistinguishable,
then we sure shouldn’t have been there killing them by the
million (and lately the right has been claiming we just
weren’t brutal enough!).
The primary blame belongs with our government for declaring
“free-fire zones,” encouraging the killing of everyone
in villages where the population failed to support our puppet
dictators ““ all in the cause of political freedom, of
course.
But the conservatives for whom the military can do no wrong have
yet one more reason to squint into the mirror this week. They have
met the enemy, and it is themselves.