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Dennis—I never forgot you.
Dennis Hammond, Chadsey High 1964
Acknowledgments When a writer takes on a project as large in scope as this one, with as many interlacing threads, he has to take the blame for any buggers he allowed to pass inspection. The same cannot be said for all of the things he got right. Had it not been for the priceless input I received free of charge from many people, Invisible Warriors could not have been published. They include: Greg Arceri, Bill Harris, Dennis and Veronica Moses, Cal Morrison, Len Olson, Ken and Helen Peterson, Sara Greer and Ross Plaetzer. For seeing a good beginning in the first chapter of the first typo-riddled manuscript, I owe much to Kristine Blahnik, a Phi Beta Kappa, a genius and one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She told me I was a writer, then helped me to become one. Her voice is the one I heard in my head most often, giving me an "attaboy" or a scolding, as needed, to do my best. My cousin Ann read my first rough draft without my knowledge and without the objections of those who wanted more action and less substance. I had all but given up in the summer of ’88, when she called me and restored my faith in my project and myself. Four Vietnam vets and a Korean vet also kept me going when the going was tougher than I could manage to negotiate on my own. They were, Bill Harbowy, Pete Gardnyc, John Steeter, David Barnes and my big brother, George. The late Frank Horenkamp deserves a special thanks, as does the courageous National Public Radio reporter who sent me an encouraging postcard with her signature attached when her colleagues were politely telling me to get lost. If I could thank only one person for the heartening praise, helpful criticism and practical advice it took to get Invisible Warriors into print it would have to be a brilliant engineer named Kathleen Dalessandro. I cannot say how anyone as thoughtful and caring as she is can call herself a Republican. There’s no explaining some things. I’m just glad she calls me a friend.
When one of my young proofreaders stumbled over the name Joe McCarthy, I knew I had stumbled into the dreaded "generation gap." So here is a short list of names and the meanings which most of us who reached adulthood before 1970 attach to them. JOE McCARTHY: Throughout the Korean War, Joe McCarthy, right-wing Republican from Wisconsin, chaired a Senate committee on Soviet infiltration and subversion of key American institutions. His committee, like its witch-hunting counterpart in the House, made reckless accusations of international communist conspiracy, guilt by association being McCarthy’s trademark standard of evidence for treason. That alone was usually enough to sully his victims’ reputations and to enhance his, until he was brought down by a televised hearing that showed him for the cruel, self-serving demagogue he was. LE DUAN and PHAM VAN DONG: Although these men succeeded Ho Chi Minh as head of state and leader of the Vietnamese Communist party in 1969; although they hosted Jane Fonda’s infamous POW/American bombing debate tour in 1972 and her "documentary" filming tour with Haskel Wexler in ’74; although they united Vietnam under totalitarian rule in ’75, received for their regime the thanks of the world for stopping Pol Pot in ’78, pursued war and genocide in all of Indochina well into the ’80s—which established a familiar pattern for unchecked aggression and "ethnic cleansing" worldwide—for the vast majority of Americans, their names have never struck a familiar note. Gort: In a 1951 sci-fi classic called The Day The Earth Stood Still, an emissary from an association of neighboring planets brings a message to war-prone earth, prefaced by a global demonstration of superior power. "The universe grows smaller every day," he says, "and the threats of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all or no one is secure... We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it." Gort, an invincible killer robot, who "acts automatically against the aggressor at the first sign of violence," is one of the policemen.
"If the Persian Gulf War produces no more than one enduring benefit for humanity, I pray that it will be the death of the peace movement..." Thus began my first attempt at becoming a commentator for National Public Radio. The date on the one-page text I sent to NPR was April 2, 1991. Operation Desert Storm had ended and a new phase of killing was getting under way. Ace NPR reporters Deborah Wong, Deborah Amos and John Hockenbery were giving vivid accounts of genocide against rebellious ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. President Bush and Secretary of Defense Cheney were declaring victory while using words of surrender, like "quagmire" and "another Vietnam," to explain the wisdom of doing nothing to stop them. The way I saw it, another Vietnam is what we had in the Gulf. As I said in the last paragraph of my oblivion-bound text: "...It looked for a while as though America had reawakened to the clarion moral imperative to use its decisive military power in the defense of liberty. Now, as we declare the end of a war and ignore the wholesale slaughter of a defeated people by the thugs we left in charge, it’s beginning to look as though the peace movement’s lessons of Vietnam are still being applied. It’s beginning to look as though the peace movement has won again." Vietnam, our second civil war, is still the conflict that guides our policies on war and peace. Hanoi’s war effort could not have succeeded as it did without the resolute actions of our media and our Congress to end our war effort on Hanoi’s terms. Americans fighting Americans for an aggressive, militaristic, Stalinist regime in the name of peace is the central fact of our involvement in Vietnam. Yet, the only lesson to come of that fact for the Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and the press has been the need for a national debate like the one we had then, before we commit troops to battle. See if this scenario strikes a familiar note: A tyrant attacks a neighboring country or an undesirable group within his own country and proceeds to do what Pol Pot did to his undesirables. The desperate plight of the victims becomes a daily featured news story. A national debate ensues, with months of expert testimony on the geo-historical particulars behind the atrocities in progress and the lessons of Vietnam. We then do as little as possible for as long as possible to give peace talks a chance to work, opting first to deliver as much humanitarian aid as the armed men committing the atrocities will allow. Then, we do all we can to avoid sending our fighting forces to fight them and announce those intentions to the international press. While the unilateral killing proceeds, we debate unilateral intervention. An exhaustive national debate before we send our ground combat forces into action is the peace movement’s first lesson of Vietnam. Other lessons tell us to do it only for a vital national interest, with a clear statement of objectives, the support of the American people, and a certainty of victory in a reasonable amount of time-as defined by the exhaustive national debate. Please note that these lessons were applied in the Gulf, making time the deadly ally of Saddam in Kuwait before Desert Shield and in Iraq after Desert Storm. Only it didn’t end there. It was taken up by the men in charge of George Bush’s "New World Order," in places like Sudan, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. While they raped, shelled, shot and starved their civilian enemies into submission, America, the free world’s leader, followed whoever proposed the most popular peaceful way to deal with them. Here is a lesson from Nazi Germany. It says: You can’t bargain with people like that. You can’t reason with them. You can’t appease them and you can’t leave them in power. You have to take them out. The free world has got to learn what war is and to establish a policy of war against any government or movement that so much as threatens to do what Hitler did. Before that can happen, the very idea of a unilateral peace movement, like the one Jane Fonda is so proud of belonging to, has to go. That was the conclusion of the dozen or so people who signed my NPR commentary. They included fellow African-Americans and fellow Vietnam vets, with no resemblance to the stereotypical right-wing advocates of force normally clustered around that issue in the media. Had anything like it been aired, it would have been our first opportunity to tell our fellow Americans what we thought about the peace movement in time to do some good. That’s what I tried to do with the previous draft of this book six months before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The image warfare I wrote about in that manuscript pitted the "anti-war" image makers in America, like Jane Fonda and the Vietnam vets who agreed with them, against vets like me who didn’t. Though I knew I wasn’t alone, I was so isolated from like-minded people by the editorial policies of the mainstream press that I was afraid to speak for anyone but myself, so I called my book, The Invisible Warrior. During the Desert Shield phase of the Gulf War, a black ex-marine named Calvin Morrison urged me to add an "s" to the title. He told me that he, too, was an invisible warrior in that he felt as I did about the peace movement and its vital link to the media. He further noted that Jane Fonda was an invisible warrior of another sort in that she was not seen as one although she was one for the victorious North Vietnamese Army. The story I tell in Chapter 1 was written, in its various incarnations, between 1979 and 1984, when Jane’s popularity was at an all-time high. I was suffering periodically from a mild form of what some survivors of traumatic experiences have always suffered. It was known by two names: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Delayed Stress Syndrome. In my case, it took the form of sleep-depriving night terrors arising from an experience with some of Jane’s war buddies that should have ended my life in Vietnam. I awoke to the knowledge that I was no longer in imminent danger of being killed, but the men who failed to kill me were killing others by the millions without objection from the peace movement. Even shrinks who specialized in Delayed Stress, Vietnam vets and former DSS sufferers themselves were counseling us to agree with people like Jane and to go from there. So, if you served in Indochina and cared enough about the mass murder of the people you left behind to lose sleep over it, you were on your own. Sound far-fetched? Grotesque? Obscene? It did back then, too. That is, it did to those of us who fought against the Indochinese communists and never changed sides the way media stars like Ron Kovec, Bob Kerry and Oliver Stone did. Veterans like me were a small minority of the overall population and nowhere in the media to be seen or heard as we were. That’s how my final draft of The Authorities came to be written, long before the man-made famines in Somalia or the "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia began. It is as shamefully valid today as it was then. It will stay that way until we require our fighting forces to fight-for unknown durations, at potentially high costs, with the fuzzy objectives of stopping genocide, deterring aggression, preserving democracy and containing the nuclear threat. We may, eventually, have to put as many troops as we did in WW II into appalling situations where the outcome is uncertain and the possibility exists that their best efforts will end in a fiasco. To do what is necessary in that situation for the lives and liberty of strangers who can’t defend themselves will require something that has been written out of our normal conduct of foreign affairs. It flies in the face of common sense. It goes against the grain of our individual survival instincts and our protective instincts for the people closest to us. You won’t find it in the peace movement’s lessons of Vietnam and I know better than most that it is an extremely difficult thing to practice. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be called "courage." To quote Cal Morrison, the African-American marine who made The Invisible Warrior plural when I didn’t have the guts to, "Courage means doing what’s right even if you don’t know what the outcome is going to be." It’s a matter of principle and long-term practicality for the survival of the free world. If it is not in the self-interest of the leader of the free world to do these things as a matter of principle, how can we survive as its leader? If no one else assumes the lead, when can we expect the shrinking free world to stop shrinking? How long can we expect it to survive? It is for certain that the authorities will decide. It is not for certain who they will be-unless enough good men do nothing. NOTE: As you get into this book, you may catch yourself bouncing forward and back from one slice of time to another; from memories to dreams to observations and from stories to essays and back again without understanding, at first, how you got there. If you don’t see the continuity right away, it doesn’t mean that you won’t or that you won’t have to stop and think about it, which I hope you will. In some instances you may be confused by my description of an experience because I was confused by the experience. That feeling is the canvas for the word picture I’m trying to paint. The same is true with abrupt mood shifts and salty language. Whatever expresses the truth of the moment as I lived it is what you’ll get whenever I can give it to you. I try not to waste space separating facts from opinions when they speak for themselves, which, in my opinion, they usually do if you have enough facts. Where I have given you my opinions I have also given you the facts they came from or invited you to research them for yourself. The more you know the better for me. The strength of my thesis does not rest on the fact that it’s mine. I do not take myself that seriously. But I know that I, by the dumbest accidents of birth, timing, hidden handicaps and character flaws, am uniquely qualified to say some things that have to be said. I won’t get mad if you skip the dull parts, if you don’t try to read them while you’re half-awake. When you read them with a fresh eye, you may be surprised. Not at what was there, but at what you didn’t see.
Chapter 1: The Authorities I was on emergency leave from Vietnam in the summer of `71 and the lovely lady walking toward me was the first American to acknowledge my return to The World. Stepping out of the Flying Tiger into the Seattle/Tacoma airport, I had expected to be greeted by at least an occasional curious stare only to discover that I had somehow become invisible. It was as though my straight-from-the-bush jungle fatigues had conferred upon me some unwanted power to cloud men’s minds, to make them see something other than the proud American fighting man I was. For a moment, I had the awful sensation of sleepwalking through a nightmare in which the ambush I thought I had survived a few weeks earlier had done the job it was suppose to do. Maybe I was dead. But no, the pretty young lady with the confident smile had locked her bright blue eyes on mine and stepped far enough out of her way in my direction to let me know that I wasn’t just so much free-floating ectoplasm to her-unless, of course, she was a ghost, too. She halted me with a light touch of her hand. "Hi," she said, in the manner of someone who’s about to offer you some free religious literature. I returned her smile and her greeting, a little wary of her motives for accosting me, but nonetheless delighted that she had for whatever reason. My limited experience with being invisible in The World was more than enough to tell me that I didn’t want to be. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "How does it feel to murder children?" she said. I stood there like a fool, still seeing the triumphant look on her face long after she had said her piece and moved on. It was like being ambushed all over again, only this time, I was one of the casualties and I got a good look at the enemy’s face. For all that shithead knew, I could have been a motor pool mechanic or a cook. I could have been a soldier who had actually killed an innocent child by accident or a not-so-innocent child in self-defense. Or maybe she was a gifted psychic who picked up on all the right pieces but put them together all wrong. There had been a child in my military past that one of my fellow GIs had suggested we blow away, a blond-haired little rascal with the cutest smile and the rosiest red cheeks you’ve ever seen. We were aboard a plane somewhere over the great Midwest, enroute to Everywhere, U.S.A. It was my last trip home before getting my first look at the war in Vietnam, and the crack about killing the kid was nothing that anyone would have taken seriously. What the kid said to inspire it was a different story.... Going back to the beginning of all that, you would find a 24-year-old soldier fresh out of jump school and eager to get home to see his own cute little rascals. That soldier was me. All I knew about the other two servicemen was that our uniforms gave us something special in common and they had invited me to sit in the open seat between them. Little Boy Rosy Cheeks got on the plane with his mother at a stopover in Chicago. He was an immediate hit with the flight attendants who made a big fuss over him. The blessed darling rewarded their attention by putting on a dazzling display of three-year-old wit and wisdom, including, but not limited to, his ability to count to 10, "1-2-5-47-10!" His mother was in her glory, offering a running commentary on the show. The kid was a star and he knew it. Having broadened his audience of admirers to include all who saw him, he proceeded to survey his fans in the nearby passenger seats, looking at and past the three of us in uniform. Then his gaze returned to us and centered on me. He frowned. There was something about me that he recognized, something of primary significance that was just out of his reach. Then his face lit up in sudden recollection of that elusive something, that name for the thing in his mind that meant so much, the name implanted there by the supreme authorities in his tiny universe, the people he trusted to tell him what was what. "Look!" he shouted, pointing at me and grinning from cheek to rosy cheek, "Look, there’s a nigger man!" It’s not hard to imagine that little boy in a little white sheet at a Klan rally, or in another time and place wearing a cute little Nazi suit and embracing everything that came with it. It’s just as easy to picture the Seattle Shithead in a peace demonstration, waving the Viet Cong flag and thinking she was doing something wonderful. I think of them when I think about future leaders of the extreme right and left, programming their young as they were programmed to be actively hostile to each other’s point of view and every other view in between. To prevent the institution of that sort of thing on the level of government is why my mentors fought the communists in South Korea and Joe McCarthy at home. For people of conscience in those years, there was no moral alternative but to challenge them both. By the end of the `60s, though, left-of-center politics had donned the mantle of superior moral authority, just as right-of-center politics did in the Reagan era. Being a person of conscience, as prominent members of the peace movement liked to call themselves, meant only that you supported causes championed by the left, including the communists in Indochina. So, as far as the organized bloodshed in Indochina was concerned, you needed only to have objected to the American sponsored portion of it to qualify. Thus, when the communists took over the business of running things exclusively in Indochina, what came next didn’t matter to the "people of conscience" who helped them do it. It didn’t matter to them that something so monstrous followed the communist victory that people by the tens of thousands were literally dying to get out of Vietnam. It didn’t matter to them that Cambodia might well have become a murderous slave-state and Laos, a brutal police-state. Since no one who counted was paying attention, it didn’t even matter that Thailand had become a repressive right-wing dictatorship, born out of chaos to "save" the country from communism. America’s unrepentant hawks and our Indochinese allies were still the bad guys in the American mass media, dominated by "people of conscience," so it mattered to the masses only that we were no longer in business over there. For those who had not agonized over the fate of the people we left behind, or contemplated the danger of a Thailand-style turn to the right in America, Vietnam was a metaphorical nightmare, long years and a wide ocean away. For me, the nightmare was much closer to home.... It began three years after the fall of Phnom Penh and Saigon, with the boat people stories of `78 in conjunction with the popularity of Jane Fonda’s newly released "Coming Home..." The smell of blood was overwhelming. It was beginning to seep in through the crack in the window sill, running down the concrete wall in thick red rivulets to form a sticky, noisome pool at our feet. My friend Jack didn’t notice. His back was to the window, his bright, friendly eyes on me. We were in the basement of the church where I was baptized as a child in the `50s. From somewhere beyond the wall, I could hear the terrifying explosive stutter of automatic rifle fire as hordes of people rushed by the window in panic-driven flight. An old man stiffened and fell into a small crater of blood, splashing the window pane. Obviously, I was dreaming. Unfortunately, Jack didn’t know that. He seemed to think that we were on a coffee break at work. "Let’s talk about something else," he said, concerned about how agitated I was becoming. My dream-self knew that we had been talking about Vietnam, but I was hard pressed to explain why we were discussing that faraway place in light of what was going on right outside. There was a connection, I was sure, but I was just as sure that I wouldn’t be able to get it across to anyone who mattered if I couldn’t get Jack to look out the window, which he steadfastly refused to do. "Goddamnit, Jack," I blurted out, "Just look out there! Just look!" His gentle face hardened, offended by my tone of voice. "Civilized people can disagree without being disagreeable," he scolded. "Why do you always harp on this one thing anyway?" He was talking about the Vietnam example of giving peace a chance. "Man’s inhumanity to man is universal," he continued. "Look at what’s happened to your own people in Africa. Why don’t you ever talk about them?" Even as he spoke, I could see a frail young black girl falling into another crater of blood where the bodies of other people of indeterminate ethnic origin were floating face down. My dream-self knew that the girl, at least, was African. The immensity of my horror was matched only by my frustration. Jack had forgotten our mutual abhorrence of "man’s inhumanity to man" in Africa and everywhere else-except Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. He suffered for all of the refugees we saw on television; but for the Indochinese we couldn’t see because they hadn’t escaped, he had nothing to say. Jack was one of the kindest, most thoughtful and intelligent people I knew. But talking to him was like talking to Jane Fonda, a woman he admired as much as I despised. You could see the pain in his eyes when he talked about the war crimes and apparent war crimes committed and alleged to have been committed by Americans. As a soldier in Army Intelligence during WW II, he was one of the few Americans who had seen such crimes committed by Americans against the Japanese. They were things that all of us saw and heard about repeatedly in Vietnam. Beyond that, it was as though Indochina had no place in his mind. If I couldn’t get him to make a place for it, I knew, in the way we all know things in our dreams, that there would be no hope for the people outside or for us. Then again, maybe Jack was right. Maybe I was getting all worked up over nothing. I had, undeniably, been rude. Jack’s winning smile returned. "Look at us," he laughed, "arguing like a couple of idiots. Let’s forget the whole thing; what do you say?" He knew that I would say, yes. It was the only civilized thing to do. The shame I felt was as oppressive in its effect as the smell of blood. I had to get away but there was nowhere to go but outside. I underwent a strange split in consciousness as my dream-self and my dreaming-self took on separate identities, the dream-self rushing frantically about accomplishing nothing, the dreamer looking on from a great distance, busily taking notes. Suddenly the two selves became one, catching a glimpse of what was happening on the church’s main floor. It was packed with foreign peasants from many lands and many points in time. Some of them were straining to close the doors against others clamoring to get in. I woke up, baffled by the dream and the terror rising in my chest and threatening to engulf my entire being in panic. How could I have felt mortally threatened by a senseless dream? And why was I having such a hard time persuading myself that it was nothing more than that? Turning the questions over and over in my mind, unable to resolve any of its whys and wherefores, I eventually calmed down enough to drift off into sleep again. I found myself on the busy sidewalk of a big city street, my nostrils once again assailed by the odor of blood. This time, a river of it stretched from one curb to the next where a paved thoroughfare should have been. On the far side was a swarm of people, some running, some walking and some lying dead on the steps of an imposing, official-looking building with high stone columns. The many low marble steps reaching down from the building to the curb dripped with the blood of people being shot to death by unseen executioners. On my side of the blood canal, people were going about their business like last-minute Christmas shoppers, too self-absorbed to be sidetracked by extraneous events, like the mass murder of their fellow citizens across the way. "We’ve got to do something about that!" I shouted, flailing my arms helplessly, like a drowning man trying to raise his head above water, while trying to make myself heard over the din of sidewalk traffic. Nobody saw me. Then, a middle-aged woman in the crowd looked at me and wrinkled her nose as though she had gotten a whiff of some foul odor. I thought that the smell of blood had gotten to her, too-I was wrong. Following the woman’s contempt-filled stare to its target, I was shocked and embarrassed to discover that I was wearing my jungle fatigues. They were the ones I had worn in the kill zone seven years earlier in Vietnam. But they were still wet with the blood of a dead NVA defector I had grown to like and some badly wounded GIs I had never had a chance to know. I attempted to cover my uniform with my arms and hands, like a woman caught naked in her shower by a prowler. It was an asinine gesture, not only because of its inherent futility but because it suggested that the combat uniform of a U.S. serviceman in Vietnam was something to be ashamed of. I was ashamed of trying to cover up, even though I knew it was to avoid being rejected on sight. The slaughter continued. Now I could see the killers emerging from the shadows of the pillars. They looked like ordinary men in dark business suits, only they were armed with submachine guns and they were unopposed, leaving no doubt they would have things their way. I stopped a man in an overcoat, grabbing hold of his sleeves and trying to turn him around. "Please," I begged with too much emotion to be perceived as fully rational by anyone who didn’t see what I did, "we have to do something!" He jerked free and stalked away looking back at me from over his shoulder as if to say, "You must be nuts!" Going from person to person, I gave my all to make them look at what was happening across the canal. Most of them refused. Some appeared to look and see nothing. Others wanted only to debate my motive for bringing it up. The vast majority just didn’t give a rat’s ass. The assassins began to descend the stairs, their machine gun fire sowing a peculiar mix of panic, indifference and death ahead of them. Slowly it became apparent that not everybody on the steps was at risk of being killed, the only ones I could identify being the ones trying to get away. At last, I got a young woman pushing a baby carriage to stop and listen but I couldn’t get her to look. "That’s very well put," she said. "Though I don’t agree with what you’re saying, everybody has a right to their opinion." Then she excused herself with a polite smile. "I’ve really enjoyed this conversation but I have to get back to work." I looked back to the carnage on the steps where the sight of children being gunned down took the greatest toll on my emotional stability-except for the sight of children in dark business suits being spared. Turning again to one last person within my reach, I pleaded with her to get involved, to at least acknowledge the atrocity in progress and utter a word or two of protest. She listened with growing impatience at my uncivilized tone, frowning and looking frequently at her wristwatch. Finally she said, "Let the authorities handle it." The simmering mix of rage, frustration and horror coursing through my blood boiled over in a frenzy of yelling and leaping about. I pointed to the men in dark business suits and heard myself scream, "They are the authorities!" |
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Copyright © 1994 by Jasper Garrison This publication is available at
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