Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage:

I’m reflecting on an idea I’ve been hearing from some of the white, Western, Eurocentric, Christianized, non-combatant politicians who are preaching an escalation to our involvement in both the bombing campaign and the ground wars around the globe, but particularly in the Middle East. Forget the fact that we are leaving Afghanistan after 20 years of trying to shore up a broken state with bribes, corruption, American lives, and a trillion dollars of wasted money. We will leave allies and indigenous staff that worked as interpreters and support personnel to be savaged by the Taliban. We will claim that we made “progress” against terrorism, and we will continue shadow operations and bombing operations in surrounding countries. This continual global war that feeds our economic system of defense contractors and oil corporations, will be spun in the media on the principles of exporting freedom and protecting us from a vague threat of “moozlams” and an arrogant concept we believe is our moral superiority. However, the main requirement for our continued imperialism is based on a more practical idea which must be maintained by politicians at all costs and in any way necessary from lies to manipulation to draconian policies that pretend to protect us from evil.

That idea is the indifference to collateral damage, damage that they find socially, morally, ethically, and theologically acceptable for our continued world dominance. This all strikes me as racist and illogical because to begin with terrorists slaughter tens of thousands more Muslims in Lebanon, Yemen, Mali, Palestine, and who knows where else, than Christians in Western nations. The major threat is not to Americans. For example, toddlers and cows killed more citizens on American soil accidently than Islamic terrorists murdered here last year. Our nationalistic and righteous anger assumes that white people from Western nations are worth more that brown people from anywhere. Moreover, it is counterproductive. The phrase “collateral damage” is one I heard often in Vietnam. It always meant one thing—the death of innocent civilians who had no part in the conflict, who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. It meant that the heavier the collateral damage, the more new enemies we would make as well.

I was part of the only program that had even a little success during the Vietnam War called a Combined Action Group. This program came from an idea suggested by an army colonel named John Vann as early as 1962 (see Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Bright, Shining Lie). Vann’s theory nested in the idea that to win a guerilla type war among an indigenous population, especially as the occupying force, it would be necessary for small teams of men to form specialized units that could move into villages and fight the Viet Cong in two ways. First, win the hearts and minds of the peasants who had no particular political leanings one way or the other, who only wanted to survive. Secondly, once the villagers trusted that your group had their best interest at heart, they would supply useful intelligence against the Viet Cong cadres who stole their resources and who terrorized and murdered their families. In turn, you could then terminate the threat with extreme prejudice surgically, providing security and eliminating much collateral damage. You were the friendly assassins.

In its infinite wisdom, the Army ignored Vann and gave control of the war to an idiot named Westmorland. The general decided that to win, we needed to fight a war of attrition. In other words, we should kill as many Vietnamese as possible till the enemy quit coming. To that end, our forces carpet-bombed an area about the size of Florida, dropping more tonnage of bombs on it in an operation called Rolling Thunder than we dropped in the entirety of World War II on Japan and Germany combined. The Army and the Marine Corps built stationary bases along the DMZ and ran countless “search and destroy” missions from them. American forces engaged in fierce battles with both Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars until civilian and military casualties combined ran into millions of Vietnamese men, women, and children. And, they just kept coming.

By 1967, some leaders in the Marine Corps had realized the failure of this approach and resurrected Vann’s concept. I left my infantry unit in that year to volunteer for the recently formed CAG (Combined Action Group). After some weeks in school learning Vietnamese phrases, how to disarm common booby traps found around villages, what were important customs to the villagers, and how to kill more efficiently with less collateral damage, I was shipped to my new home—a small community of huts collected around a central marketplace about a mile south of Hue on Highway 1. There were eighteen of us living in a compound with twenty Popular Force troops. They were a rag-tag collection of local militia called Dan De and ours to train with the idea that one day they might fight the VC on their own.

We did everything we were supposed to do and then some. The Navy Corpsman ran medical patrols with me and another jarhead providing armed security. He handed out antibiotics, patched cuts and scrapes, taught children to brush their teeth and mama-sans to boil water. We petted dogs, drank rice wine, shared English phrases, checked ID cards, and played games with the kids. My sergeant conferred with village elders, gathered useful intel, and passed along enemy locations to artillery units in Phu Bai. We dug wells, built and rebuilt damaged homes, shared food supplies, and we seemed to be winning hearts and minds. At night, my squad hunted. I walked point most nights. We suffered no casualties and provided the VC with some until a week or two before TET, 1968.

My orders were clear and not unusual on this particular night. Walk a specific patrol route around the village perimeter, set up an ambush site near the old French schoolhouse, and wait till dawn. If we made contact, kill everything that moved. If we didn’t, come back in and eat breakfast. Start all over on a new day.

The village was quiet. Normal night sounds drifted on a light breeze, a water buffalo munching straw, a stray dog padding across Highway 1, goats shuffling around a thatch lean-to, a baby crying softly. The last wisps of smoke from cooking fires carried the scent of Pho and weak tea along our path. Out front, my adrenalin level stayed so high that every sense in my body became electrified the night, but the night itself remained calm.

In the early morning hours, the limbo time after midnight and before first light when all the demons hiding in your brain come out to play, I arrived at a crossroads. The intersection of these two dirt trails formed a T and at the top a hedgerow separated the trails from a small rice paddy. Hidden behind clouds, the moon provided just enough oblique light to create vague shadows. With the jungle heat and humidity, I felt like I was hiking in deep, dark water. I signaled the rest of the squad to kneel in single file behind me and scanned the rice paddy for movement. I swear I saw a human form dressed in black scuttle across the paddy about twenty five yards away. Was it a sniper, a bomber, a scout for a larger unit, a kid out for a nighttime piss? Was it real? These are all questions you ask yourself after the fact. During the event, you raise your M-16 to your shoulder, fire off three quick rounds and try to bring the shadow down.

Headquarters was quick to respond on the radio. My squad leader relayed what I thought I saw and, since I had considerable experience walking point, someone at headquarters assumed I had seen it. Two quick thumps from the mortar in our compound sent two shell canisters high above our position. The heavy brass fell away, parachutes opened, and dangling beneath them two globes of light from the flares cast an eerie fluorescent glow over the field and the surrounding homes. As the sway from the slowly descending flares created a strobe effect, we searched the area within the circle of light and found nothing. There was no trace of human activity. Maybe exhaustion had caused my eyes to play a trick on my mind. Maybe an animal had run across the paddy. Maybe my aim was bad and I missed a Viet Cong off to set a booby trap somewhere in the village. No one, including me, will ever know.

Late the next morning, I awoke to a wailing that sounded more animal than human. Coming from my bunker I joined our CAP (Combined Action Platoon) leader and an interpreter at the barbed wire entrance to our compound. Outside the gate and under the watchful gaze of an M-60 machine gun mounted in the sentry tower, a family from the village gathered around a small bundle of mangled flesh carried in a rubber rain poncho. An old woman writhed in pain as her children and grandchildren held the four corners of the rubber poncho. The old man spoke in rapid staccato burst, like the M-60 above his head would do if he attempted a hostile act. I could not connect the language in any coherent way because of the shrill speed at which the words came but got most of the simple story through the interpreter.

The old woman was fast asleep with her family when the flares popped open the night before and when one of the brass shell casings fell to earth, it crashed through the roof of their home and severed her leg. That’s what I saw in the poncho, blood and body and right leg disconnected but seeking that body like the roots of a Joshua tree reach out for water in a desert where none exists. The old man, her husband, was furious. He wanted us to bring her to the hospital in Phu Bai and pay him several thousand piasters for her pain and his pain and the pain of the children.

We had no vehicle in the compound to take her anywhere and our Navy Corpsman did what he could with primitive first aid equipment to ease her suffering. But, when we radioed Phu Bai for a Medi-Vac, we were told by some senior officer that the old woman was simple collateral damage and to send her home, which is exactly what we did despite the loud threats from her family. She was a dispensable person, and her loss, one among millions, was acceptable in the prosecution of the war. I understood the logic but wish I had thought more about consequences.

Almost immediately, our intelligence sources dried up. We were forced by security concerns to quit visiting the marketplace. Night patrols had to be called off because large numbers of NVA regulars started using village trails as a route into the southern part of Hue in preparation for the coming Tet Offensive. Just days later, on January 31^st, 1968, most of our Popular Force militia deserted the compound and left us undermanned and unprepared for the siege that followed. By the end of February our entire unit had been either wounded or killed, myself included. I was flown to Japan for surgery and then Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Chicago for rehab.

The point I’m trying to make here isn’t new and it isn’t profound. Given the confusion and the volatility of human nature, there will most certainly be wars, and with wars there will always be “collateral” damage. The innocent will die brutally and randomly. However, the minute we begin to think this damage is morally acceptable, we begin to lose, not just the war but our humanity as well.

After the horrors of any terror attack by groups such as ISIS or Al-Qaeda or any of a dozen more terrorist organizations operating around the globe the quest for both justice and revenge is foreseeable and even understandable. However, the belief that America must expand its war efforts without considerable concern for how many innocent Muslims die is not. When we begin to think of human beings, any human beings, as nothing more than collateral damage, we have begun to lose the war with terrorists. It means that we have become what we despise. It guarantees we will make more terrorists from the very demographic that could aid our struggle. Most of all, it will devalue the very things we claim to be fighting to protect.

Regardless of our personal attitudes, our leaders will continue this war, some because they believe in it and some because they profit from it. I understand that better than most. On the one hand President Biden recently agreed to remove troops from Afghanistan. This means that regardless of what military experts who thrive on war say, he has realized, after twenty years of struggle, that no way to win that war exists without obliterating the entire country. We have been ignoring the tragic lessons of Vietnam.

On the other hand, he has ordered more reprisal action in Syria and other areas, and we are carrying out clandestine operations in several other countries that the public may never be aware of. But we need to acknowledge that when a hospital is bombed “by mistake” or when a drone fires missiles into a wedding party or when we torture people who may have meant us no harm that we will have a reckoning at some point for our blithe dismissal of the innocents killed as “collateral damage.” For many of us who have been combatants that may mean the weight of memory. I still carry the image of that old woman in that rain poncho from fifty years ago. For the rest of us, it will mean being part of a nation that could have done better but didn’t.