Scapegoats of War

By Dan Borntrager

Contributing Writer

When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty.
-Arthur Ponsonby

I had many reservations about visiting the Vietnam War Crimes Museum, when I traveled through Saigon 2 months ago. In general, I have a peculiar aversion to the stale, stuffy atmosphere that lingers throughout most museums - I tend to fall asleep in them. However, this one proved to be quite different.
Near the entrance, many old planes, guns, and other metal weapons of war leaned their frail, rusty bodies together like retired veterans begging for some small acknowledgment - a nod perhaps or maybe just the slightly raised eyebrow of a passerby. I don't care much for objects used in obliterating other human beings and I thought that I had wasted yet another trip. But what lay ahead within the walls of the museum, I could never have prepared myself for.
Pictures of US soldiers torturing civilians and horrifying stories about the war dominated the small rooms. The means of accomplishing these tasks resided safely, sanitarily against white backgrounds beneath glass as if some cruel physician had cleaned and stored them after completing his sadistic machinations. I walked from wall to wall and then back again in a dazed, almost delirious stupor; it must have taken me an hour to leave the first room. One picture showed a US soldier walking with the husk of a Vietnamese body in his left hand and a smile on his "right" face. My first impulse was to hide somewhere; I thought that at any moment one of the visiting Vietnamese would go crazy and attack me for being American. I felt as if I intruded on something, as if I walked in on a stranger's funeral with jeans on.
After I overcame my initial discomfort, I could feel nothing except disgust. I thought to myself, "How could they do this to another person? What kind of deranged lunatic would spend his time thinking up ways of torturing people?" It made me particularly proud when I realized some of the methods they developed displayed 'good old American ingenuity': using portable telephones to electrocute, needles in the fingers, snakes up the pants, or wet towels to suffocate - I mean these methods must be premeditated; it takes thought to kill and torture so creatively.
As I carefully picked apart each picture, trying to understand how these atrocities occurred, I noticed the faces of our soldiers: young, frightened, some smiling, but all young. Most of the "men" in the photographs were younger than myself, and they had been sent to fight in a war across the world in a small country they had probably never even heard of before - most of them probably didn't even know why they fought. Most of us still can't figure it out.
What would I have done in their situation? I graduate from high school and then a year later find myself in a United States Marines uniform in the middle of a sweltering jungle, pointing a gun at ghosts, watching my new friends die from unseen devices, and never really knowing what I'm fighting or protecting - all I know is my blind patriotic spirit in the rightness of my country and my God and this so thoughtfully imbedded in me by the United States Marine Corps.
After I left the museum that day, I spent many hours alone with only my imagination and rationale, working the problem, kneading it over and over. I attempted to move my mind as close to the Vietnam War as possible and then I realized what I had done. I realized my hypocrisy, the cold metal shield defending my fragile ego that had allowed me to judge the "criminals" in that war. Just as they had dehumanized the Vietnamese in their mind, I had dehumanized the American soldiers in mine by thinking of them as monsters and inexplicable maniacs. But the truth, if there really is one, is that I don't know what I would have done either. I don't know.
Dehumanization - it's how we still cope with our involvement in war. What those young men did was wrong, very wrong, but I don't know how to hold them responsible. It frightens me that I might have done the same. The only way to hold them responsible is to know for sure that I would have acted differently, and that, I do not know.
In order to place blame on others, we must first hold our country responsible and ourselves responsible, and diffuse this weighty judgment. The situation with any war cannot be elucidated by simply laying blame. The men of the Vietnam War were simply the tools used to accomplish some end someone else's goals. Ostensibly, the United States posed as if this war was declared to keep the "domino effect" from occurring. However, we now know that the likelihood of this effect was close to nothing. Like most wars, the soldiers in this war were the real victims.
I don't like to generalize, but in this case I will: few wars have ever truly been lost or won: they have only been ended.

Dan Borntrager is currently a Junior English major at Loyola U of New Orleans who has just returned from a third world jaunt that took him around the globe. He lives in a slum in uptown New Orleans (no, you can't sleep at his house during Mardi Gras unless you're a gorgeous young lady) and will accept all forms of care packages that involve food. He is also coming to believe that objective reality does not exist. Please E-mail comments and other correspondence to him at Rocinante1@aol.com.