Why are we in Vietnam?
Recently, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld toured Indochina to revitalize concerns for Prisoners Of War and those left Missing In Action at the end of the Vietnam War. The POW/MIA organizations have refused to close-up shop and continue to propagate the myth of how the man in black pajamas never released captive US soldiers or their remains. The myth has generated rumors of mass graves, of secret detention centers (not unlike those really-existing facilities in use at this moment by covert US forces), torture camps and the like.
During the 1990’s a senate committee was organized under pressure from such POW/MIA groups, and rightly so, to find the truth of the situation and repatriate the dead from Vietnam. In a move that should not be mistaken for heroism, Senators McCain and Kerry took up the “unglamorous task that nobody else wanted.” Their Senate Select POW/MIA Committee found that the issue was closed, and confirmed in large part the thesis advanced in Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW-MIA Myth in America; namely, that U.S. politicians employed family ties and solidarity with veterans to advance unrelated political goals. For example, the postwar sanctions against Vietnam lasted until 1994 as a punitive measure that leveraged the POW issue as a smokescreen to stifle, among other economic activities, Vietnamese catfish and shrimp exports.
Rumsfeld’s South-Asian safari was yet another smokescreen. The vets he tries so desperately to appeal to, including those on active duty, are meant to see this trip as a significant “helping hand” from the DOD at a time when pay cuts, cuts to veterans benefits, cuts in tuition benefits for National Guardsmen and VA hospital closures* are being felt in aggregate by the potentially mutinous rank and file. The morale issue is certainly too broad to be understood in terms of Rumsfeld’s POW PR stunt, but the trip is symptomatic of the DOD’s awareness that a morale problem is on the rise.
In the Vietnam War this problem manifested itself in mass desertion and resistance against the Selective Service. The problem became so acute that many soldiers defected to Vietnam to start new lives, if not defecting into the North Vietnamese Army directly. Overworked soldiers, remunerated with less, and facing a crisis of mission legitimacy will ultimately disobey—the question is what form this disobedience will take. The US presence in Vietnam turned Americans against corruption in their own society, and those who realized their situation were drawn to a North Vietnamese politics that was more emancipatory than that which produced the Gulf of Tonkin and Napalm. It might be worth rethinking the heroism of those Missing In Action, who unlike John McCain, would rather be dead and forgotten than return to a diseased polics as a hero of that sinister war.
This side of the POW/MIA body count has never been reconciled among families and veterans organizations in the US, but the issue was pervasive enough to invite official recognition in a DOD amnesty program to bring defectors back into the fold. In the end 268 defectors came back to base, with some allegations of retaliatory violence against them in spite of the amnesty program, and the rest remain today in Vietnam, classified in the US as POW-MIA.
Rumsfeld’s trip has to be seen in relation to the Gen. Michael Hagee’s “Core Values” publicity tour. Hagee has taken an itinerant response to Haditha, conditioned by similar incidents in Afghanistan and the general unease about torture in Guantanamo and Europe. These trips aim to restore some of the key relationships between soldiers and their commanders, but in a completely therapeutic way. Rumsfeld makes a gesture toward the soldier’s sense of well-being and Hagee makes a complimentary gesture toward the soldier’s sense of purpose.
Hagee’s pitch is more difficult. The War on Terror is eroding the internal justifications of U.S. military force and this in turn pits soldiers against their own values. Haditha and Abu-Ghraib are just a small part of far larger theater of war that offers multiple opportunities for atrocity—which are sometimes taken up by men and women who would otherwise be living among us as well adjusted neighbors. Somehow low morale and a failure to identify with, (or perhaps an over-identification with), the “Core Values” leads our homespun heroes into dark acts, and while this path is complicated it is not above our understanding—or the DOD’s for the matter. Hence the Rumsfeld-Hagee PR campaigns.
Sadly, there is no Ho Chi Minh in the War on Terror. Disaffected soldiers wanting more than the morass of inner corruption at the DOD will not be turned around by the leadership’s therapeutic gestures—but there seems to be no politics to which they can turn and this begs the question: what happens to defectors in the absence of a concrete politics of human emancipation? To what side can they defect?
*The hospitals issues is complex, with scale-backs and closures contextualized by an increase in the number of veterans seeking care, as well as the beltway maneuvering over CARES recommendations to neoliberalize the VA health system. In some cases, today’s proposed closures are tomorrow’s electoral pet projects—but always the resolve to consolidate services in the VA health system mirrors what is happening in the civilian system: less service for more patients.
During the 1990’s a senate committee was organized under pressure from such POW/MIA groups, and rightly so, to find the truth of the situation and repatriate the dead from Vietnam. In a move that should not be mistaken for heroism, Senators McCain and Kerry took up the “unglamorous task that nobody else wanted.” Their Senate Select POW/MIA Committee found that the issue was closed, and confirmed in large part the thesis advanced in Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW-MIA Myth in America; namely, that U.S. politicians employed family ties and solidarity with veterans to advance unrelated political goals. For example, the postwar sanctions against Vietnam lasted until 1994 as a punitive measure that leveraged the POW issue as a smokescreen to stifle, among other economic activities, Vietnamese catfish and shrimp exports.
Rumsfeld’s South-Asian safari was yet another smokescreen. The vets he tries so desperately to appeal to, including those on active duty, are meant to see this trip as a significant “helping hand” from the DOD at a time when pay cuts, cuts to veterans benefits, cuts in tuition benefits for National Guardsmen and VA hospital closures* are being felt in aggregate by the potentially mutinous rank and file. The morale issue is certainly too broad to be understood in terms of Rumsfeld’s POW PR stunt, but the trip is symptomatic of the DOD’s awareness that a morale problem is on the rise.
In the Vietnam War this problem manifested itself in mass desertion and resistance against the Selective Service. The problem became so acute that many soldiers defected to Vietnam to start new lives, if not defecting into the North Vietnamese Army directly. Overworked soldiers, remunerated with less, and facing a crisis of mission legitimacy will ultimately disobey—the question is what form this disobedience will take. The US presence in Vietnam turned Americans against corruption in their own society, and those who realized their situation were drawn to a North Vietnamese politics that was more emancipatory than that which produced the Gulf of Tonkin and Napalm. It might be worth rethinking the heroism of those Missing In Action, who unlike John McCain, would rather be dead and forgotten than return to a diseased polics as a hero of that sinister war.
This side of the POW/MIA body count has never been reconciled among families and veterans organizations in the US, but the issue was pervasive enough to invite official recognition in a DOD amnesty program to bring defectors back into the fold. In the end 268 defectors came back to base, with some allegations of retaliatory violence against them in spite of the amnesty program, and the rest remain today in Vietnam, classified in the US as POW-MIA.
Rumsfeld’s trip has to be seen in relation to the Gen. Michael Hagee’s “Core Values” publicity tour. Hagee has taken an itinerant response to Haditha, conditioned by similar incidents in Afghanistan and the general unease about torture in Guantanamo and Europe. These trips aim to restore some of the key relationships between soldiers and their commanders, but in a completely therapeutic way. Rumsfeld makes a gesture toward the soldier’s sense of well-being and Hagee makes a complimentary gesture toward the soldier’s sense of purpose.
Hagee’s pitch is more difficult. The War on Terror is eroding the internal justifications of U.S. military force and this in turn pits soldiers against their own values. Haditha and Abu-Ghraib are just a small part of far larger theater of war that offers multiple opportunities for atrocity—which are sometimes taken up by men and women who would otherwise be living among us as well adjusted neighbors. Somehow low morale and a failure to identify with, (or perhaps an over-identification with), the “Core Values” leads our homespun heroes into dark acts, and while this path is complicated it is not above our understanding—or the DOD’s for the matter. Hence the Rumsfeld-Hagee PR campaigns.
Sadly, there is no Ho Chi Minh in the War on Terror. Disaffected soldiers wanting more than the morass of inner corruption at the DOD will not be turned around by the leadership’s therapeutic gestures—but there seems to be no politics to which they can turn and this begs the question: what happens to defectors in the absence of a concrete politics of human emancipation? To what side can they defect?
*The hospitals issues is complex, with scale-backs and closures contextualized by an increase in the number of veterans seeking care, as well as the beltway maneuvering over CARES recommendations to neoliberalize the VA health system. In some cases, today’s proposed closures are tomorrow’s electoral pet projects—but always the resolve to consolidate services in the VA health system mirrors what is happening in the civilian system: less service for more patients.
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