Thanks to Thomas who started G.I.Special, at the beginning of the Cheerleading for War, modeled on the Underground Newsletters, both In-Country and at U.S. Bases during the Vietnam Era by Active and Vets of that time and that Tragic Debacle.
The following comes from the most recent edition of G.I.Special
Thomas also has the site: Traveling Soldier
Here’s a link GI Special 4F9 ‘Same Old Same Old’.pdf to the recent edition.
GI Special:
6.11.06
Haditha: Kilo Company
My Lai: Charlie Company
Same Old Same Old
[Vietnam GI, June 1970]Because when you come right down to it, the wrong people are on trial for atrocities.
Nixon, Westmoreland, Abrams and Mendal Rivers, the very bullshitters who are most eager to see Charlie Co. brought to justice, are finally the men most responsible for My Lai. They were the ones telling us that Ky and Thieu’s corrupt government is worth dying for. They are the ones who taught us to kill, who put us over here in this mind-fucking shit hole and told us to go to it. In short, they started the war and they know you never have a war without atrocities.Laughin’, Cryin’,
Livin’, Dyin’
Hee Haw
Who’s the jackass now?Charlie Co. is the jackass. From Nixon and Abrams on down to all sorts of deluded fat ass liters and selfrighteous civi-pigs there is a feeling that Charlie Co. really blew it. They didn’t give candy bars to the kids of My Lai. They didn’t pass out soap to the women. Instead they blew off the village.
So the men of Charlie Co. fucked up. They didn’t act like your friendly neighborhood Peace Corpsman. They acted instead like the ordinary sons of ordinary people.
They acted like an outfit of short-timers and Purple Heart winners who’d been in the shit, who’d lived it and breathed it for a long time. They acted like men who
were taught to believe in and respect officers like Lt. Calley, who awarded himself an extra 7 days leave while his platoon was being chopped to shit in a minefield. They acted like men who were given the bullshit line about getting their GED’s and going to an Army school and then were dumped into the infantry.
The men of Charlie Co. conducted themselves like men whose personal knowledge of the Vietnamese people came from encounters with whores, pimps, begging kids, black market operators, thieves, and of course the VC. They acted like men, a tight group of men, who for two months had seen their brothers getting mangled in mine fields and ripped off by snipers and who’d rarely seen anybody to shoot back at.
Sound familiar so far?
Then pay attention.
Charlie Co. is ordered by Lt. Col. Barker to hit My Lai 4. He tells Medina there’s a crack VC battalion in the village. They are supposed to destroy it, then burn out the village.
Next day they move in. No VC. But a few of the villagers panic and run. The men, fucked over, psyched up, looking for revenge, open fire.
A lot of people fall.
The rest of them are too scared to move.
Next we see Snot Calley ordering his men to herd the people into ditches and to start cutting them down. Some do and dig it. Some get pissed off and sickened by the whole thing.
Calley and Medina make a bullshit body count, find a few imaginary weapons, and pull out. A few days later Westmoreland commends Medina for doing a good job. The real story gets hushed up for the obvious reasons that nobody in the Army wanted the publicity
But after 20 months word does get out. And as the story gets pieced together by the CID, the press takes it up. The Establishment is surprised, shocked and outraged… both because there was a massacre (“How could our boys have done such a thing?”), and because the Army covered it up.
After showing that their hearts were in the right place, they gave up the stage to the Brass with parting remarks to the effect of “well, if you are just men, you will not sweep this under the rug… you will see to it that the guilty are punished.”
Enter the Brass, anxious to prove that they are indeed, just men.
How do they do it?
They tell the ex-GIs of Charlie Co. that they want them to come to Washington, all expenses paid, to tell their version of the massacre so they can get the goods on Calley.
Half of the company gets sucked in. Now that the Brass has the whole story of My Lai, what do they do?
The two-faced bastards turn around and announce their intention to prosecute the whole company. But you say most of the guys are civilians now, so they are out of the reach of military “justice”? Well, not exactly… the latest is that the JAG is trying to find a way to extradite them to SVN for trial.
The Brass is really pissed at Charlie Co. But it’s not because they give a fuck about the killing of innocent people.
If that were true they’d be a little more careful where they ordered air and artillery strikes. They’d also find it a little harder to just shrug when they hit our own men and say, “Well, accidents happen you know.”
What they are pissed about is that news of the massacre has made them and their war look worse than they ever have before. So they know what they have to do. Put the screws to Charlie Co., to make it look to people back home and around the world that they believe in-fighting a good clean war.
A t the same time they are making the GI’s of Charlie look like bloodthirsty freaks. While everyone is talking about what a terrible thing it is they completely forget who is really responsible.
Because when you come right down to it, the wrong people are on trial for atrocities.
Nixon, Westmoreland, Abrams and Mendal Rivers, the very bullshitters who are most eager to see Charlie Co. brought to justice, are finally the men most responsible for My Lai. They were the ones telling us that Ky and Thieu’s corrupt government is worth dying for. They are the ones who taught us to kill, who put us over here in this mind-fucking shit hole and told us to go to it. In short, they started the war and they know you never have a war without atrocities.
If you put men in the shit long enough, you’re going to have My Lai’s.
It’s as simple as that.
If they were really concerned about putting a stop to massacres like My Lai they’d stop the war.
But right now their concerns are very clear; easy promotions, soft civilian jobs for retired Brass, and money for the owners of the arms industry. If by making the men of Charlie Co. into the scapegoat they can keep the ball rolling a bit longer you can bet your ass they’ll do it.
Comment: Thomas
If you’re looking for people to blame for the endless evil shit that happens in Iraq in this dishonorable Imperial war, blame the politicians that put the troops downrange, in an impossible situation.
Everything flows from the act of invasion and conquest ordered up by the greedy Imperial liars and traitors in Washington DC. They are the enemy.
More:
“Atrocities Were As Common To The Vietnamese Battlefields As Shell Craters And Barbed Wire”
“The Thing We Had Done Was A Result Of What The War Had Done To Us”
[Thanks to Mark Shapiro, who sent this in.]
June 9, 2006 By Jason Motlagh, UPI Correspondent [Excerpts]
Allegations that 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down in cold blood by Marines on a rampage in the town of Haditha have unlocked the demons of Vietnam’s My Lai massacre, and other nameless atrocities that exist only in the darkest corners of the minds of former combatants.
Philip Caputo’s “A Rumor of War” is a disarmingly honest account of his experiences as a Marine unraveled by violence. Arriving in Vietnam March 1965 with the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first U.S. combat unit in Indochina, Lt. Caputo returned home after 16 months spent knee-deep in a brutal war that drove him from reasonable to the unthinkable, earning a court-martial that nearly ended in a murder conviction.
Unlike many war veterans who lapsed into drink and dissolution, Caputo went back to Vietnam in 1975 as a Chicago Tribune correspondent and covered the fall of Saigon. His motive in writing the book was to show that evil is not inherent in certain men as some people are quick to conclude, “except in the sense that the devil dwells in us all.”
Rather than describe the ill deeds of others, Caputo lays bare his own descent into murderousness.
Mentally and physically depleted after 10 months in the bush, mired in hostile territory, he orders some of his men to go to a nearby village to seize a pair of suspected VC and kill them if they resist.
Half-mad, the GIs execute the pair without provocation, and Caputo finds himself laughing at the sight of one of the victims’ head’s blown out, only to realize their innocence in a case of mistaken identity, and his own bottomless guilt. His cavalier emphasis to “kill,” in effect, was the green-light that sealed their deaths.
Caputo’s story is, in the most fundamental sense, cut from the same cloth as My Lai and Haditha: Death tolls may vary, along with the equipment and expertise of the fighting men involved, but the constant is that “war, by its nature, can arouse a psychopathic violence in men of seemingly normal impulses.”
“At times, the comradeship that was the war’s only redeeming quality caused some of its worst crimes — acts of retribution for friends who had been killed,” Caputo continues.
“Some men could not withstand the stress of guerilla fighting: the hair-trigger alertness constantly demanded of them, the feeling that the enemy was everywhere, the inability to distinguish civilians from combatants created emotional pressures which built to such a point that a trivial provocation could make these men explode with the blind destructiveness of a mortar shell.”
Caputo testifies in his memoir that “atrocities were as common to the Vietnamese battlefields as shell craters and barbed wire.”
If a raft of such incidents has already surfaced in Iraq, it is not a stretch to imagine that others remain buried.
“I could not conceive of the act as one of premeditated murder,” he writes. “It had not been committed in a vacuum. It was a direct result of the war. The thing we had done was a result of what the war had done to us.”
Ishikawa and Kuroshima would understand: insert troops into a hell on earth and there’s no way to prevent atrocities. Yet the real fiends in their capital suites are never spattered with a single drop of blood. Solidarity, Z
What do you think? Comments from service men and women, and veterans, are especially welcome. Send to contact@militaryproject.org . Name, I.D., address withheld unless publication requested. Replies confidential.
And More:
From: Mike Hastie
To: GI Special
Sent: June 10, 2006
Subject: Forgotten History
Forgotten History
America loves their veterans, as long as they keep their mouth shut.
The minute they start telling the truth, It’s Love It Or Leave It.
The tomb of the Unknown Soldier should read: Here Rests In Emotional Silence, An American Soldier Known But To God.There was an old Hoover
who lived in a shoe.
He had so many veterans
he didn’t know what to do.
So he gassed them and tanked them,
and burned up their beds.
And then told the people
the vets were all Reds.September 17, 1932
SUPPORT THE TROOPS
Mike Hastie
Vietnam Veteran
Thomas had his site Military Project-G.I. Special shut down for quite awhile, no explanation was given, but he had All of the G.I. Special Newsletters archived there. The site is back up, again apparently no explanation as to why. They are once again Archiving the issues there. There is much more within each issue than what is posted above, from the most recent one. With recent KIA’s names and photo’s, letters from In-Country etc., Toms Very Blunt Words and Thoughts, etc. etc.. If you haven’t ever read the Newsletter you may want to take a look, than again maybe not, as this Country didn’t pay Attention to the Lessons of ‘Nam, will it Repeat Same Apathy Again with Iraq and Afganistan!!
When it went done others started posting up some of the issues, I recently started doing same a few months back. You can find some at these sites:
Recent GI Special issues archived at website Military Project recently back online .
The following have posted issues; there may be others: William Bowles Info; Robin Lea.com; my site Imagine A World Of on the rightside; G.I. Special, Iraq News; Trap Rock Peace; URUKNET; Albasrah.net
