Next time someone shoves a flag in your face, glorifying war…

…think about this. They’ll never read it, but it can help you remember (from a friend):

Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 9:37 PM
Subject: Blood on the Tracks

I’ve had an audiotape for a number of years of Brian Willson describing a particular experience he had while stationed in Vietnam during the war there.  He just came out with an autobiography, ‘Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson.’  I’ve just read to page 70, but I can say if you want to read a truthful book that will change your life forever, read this one.

Below is his description in the book, slightly shortened here, of the passage that has impacted me so much.

Page 45: Colonel Anh asked me to accompany a Vietnamese lieutenant (nicknamed “Bao”) to visit freshly bombed “targets.”

I was a bit startled at this request. The purpose of our visit, as Anh described it, was to perform a quick estimate of the pilots’
success at hitting their specified targets.

There was a possible explanation for my being asked to perform this unusual, extra-duty assignment. Conducting damage assessments was very unpopular. When PRUs (Recon Units) were not available, this
duty was sometimes assigned to unpopular officers, especially as punishment for known fraternizers. In fact, my Company Grade Officer Effectiveness Report rated me poor in leadership and judgment, primarily because I “was extremely well liked by my men, due, in part, to a very marked tendency to over-identify with them.”

The first target Bao and I visited was just northwest of Highway 4 in southern Vinh Long Province, north of the Bassac River, four or five miles as the crow flies from Binh Thuy, and perhaps eight or nine miles south of Sa Dec. With Bao in the passenger seat of my Jeep, I drove to Can Tho and then took the ferry north across the Bassac River to Highway 4. Within a couple miles we turned onto a side track and soon we saw plumes of smoke behind some high grass. The bombing
reportedly had occurred within an hour or so prior to our arrival.

We got out of the Jeep. As I walked cautiously through the high grass toward the smoke, I heard low moans, then increasingly loud roars. I looked to my right, and saw a water buffalo, a third of its skull gone and a three-foot gash in its belly. I couldn’t believe it was
still alive. I felt sick to my stomach.

Soon, even more pitiful sights came into view. Out of the corner of my eye, perhaps eighty feet toward center-left, I saw one young girl
trying to get up on her feet, using a stick as a makeshift cane, but she quickly fell down. A few other people were moving ever so slightly as they cried and moaned on the ground. Most of the human victims I saw were women and children, the vast majority lying motionless. Most, I am sure, were dead. Napalm had blackened their bodies, making many ofthem nearly unrecognizable.

My first thought was that I was witnessing an egregious, horrendous mistake. The “target” was no more than a small fishing and rice farming community. The “village” was smaller than a baseball playing field. The Mekong Delta region is completely flat, and the modest houses in its hamlets are built on small mounds among rice paddies. As with most settlements, this one was undefended-we saw no antiaircraft guns, no visible small arms, no defenders of any kind. The pilots who bombed this small hamlet flew low-flying planes, probably A-3yBs, and were able to get close to the ground without fear of being shot down, thus increasing the accuracy of their strafing and bombing. They certainly would have been able to see the inhabitants, mostly women with children taking care of various farming and domestic chores. They had the option to abort their mission based on their own observations from the air. They
could have been back, safe and sound in Binh Thuy, in less than fifteen minutes. Instead, they had come back with a big thumbs-up, mission accomplished.

Colonel Anh need not have worried about any of his pilots missing their targets. The buildings were virtually flattened by explosions or destroyed by fire. I didn’t see one person standing. Most were ripped apart from bomb shrapnel and machine gun wounds, many blackened by napalm beyond recognition; the majority were obviously children.

I began sobbing and gagging. I couldn’t fathom what I was seeing, smelling, thinking. I took a few faltering steps to my left, only to find my way blocked by the body of a young woman lying at my feet. She had been clutching three small, partially blackened children when she apparently collapsed. I bent down for a closer look and stared, aghast, at the woman’s open eyes. The children were motionless, blackened blood drying on their bullet and shrapnel-riddled bodies. Napalm had melted much of the woman’s face, including her eyelids, but as I focused on her face, it seemed that her eyes were staring at me.

She was not alive. But at the moment her eyes met mine, it felt like a lightning bolt jolted through my entire being. Over the years I have thought of her so often I have given her the name “Mai Ly.” (I simply rearranged the letters of My Lai, location of the infamous March 1968 massacre of Vietnamese villagers by U. S. forces.)

I was startled when Bao, who was several feet to my right, asked why I was crying. I remember struggling to answer. The words that came out astonished me. “She is my family,” I said, or something to that effect. I don’t know where those words came from. I wasn’t thinking rationally. But I felt, in my body, that she and I were one.

Bao just smirked, and said something about how satisfied he was with the bombing success in killing communists. I did not reply. I had nothing to say. From that moment on, nothing would ever be the same for me.

I now knew, viscerally, the evil nature of the war. But more than that, I knew that these bombings had deliberately targeted inhabited, undefended villages, and therefore murdered countless civilians. And those murders had been planned and carried out as part of a policy created by the U. S. government, with the complicity of their Vietnamese puppets. The policy was genocide. Those Vietnamese people who chose with their words and deeds not to openly support the U. S. presence and the Thieu government were considered totally expendable. I had no choice-God help me!-but to admit that my own country was engaged in an effort that was criminal and immoral beyond comprehension.

During that same week in mid-April, Bao and I went to four other bombing “targets” in south central Vinh Long Province, and they too were inhabited hamlets or Vietnamese settlements, similarly destroyed. Though that week remains a blur, I estimated that we documented somewhere between seven and nine hundred murders of Vietnamese peasants, all due to low-flying fighter-bombers who could see exactly who and what they were bombing.

There was clearly no further need to document the pilots’ “successes.” All had hit their targets-collections of unarmed fellow Vietnamese farmers and families clustered in easy view from low flying bombers. Colonel Anh was pleased. He was not even interested in any formal report.

I could not talk about this experience for twelve years, and the thought of it still creates tremors in my body. I often find myself crying at the thought of it, and at times feel a rage that nearly chokes me.

After Viet Nam, I knew that my own government, the government for which I had hoped to work, was not only criminal but psychotic. Buried deeper inside me, however, was an even more radical epiphany, the truth Mai Ly offered me through her open eyes. She is my family. It would take me many years to understand the real meaning of this experience-that we are all one-a lesson that continues to deepen and expand as I grow older.