Could you put me in touch with a Young American who’d like to own a bayonet, forged of Solingen steel and bearing the inscription Blut und Ehre (Blood and Honor)—all for his very own? A helmet on which the swastika may still be discerned? How about a picture-paste-in history—Deutschland Erwacht—of the NSDAP? Would you believe a coffeegrinder from Essen? I’ll throw in a bolt-action Mauser if the price is right.
To Americans who lugged this Schrecklichkeit hardware home in duffel bags—lo these twenty swift years gone—the stuff has lost all ominousness. One who remembers those buttonless beggars in coats too long, shuffling across the snow on shoes chopped from Goodrich rubber, hoping to barter Blut und Ehre for half a Hershey bar, can only wonder now whether honor was ever involved at all.
We are a people who like to win wars. Nobody who ever went to one wearing jackboots ever won one, we know. As we know nobody who ever went to one wearing a coonskin cap ever lost one.
Only the other day Lyndon Birdsong Johnson instructed our troops: “Bring back that ky-yoonskin ’n we’ll nail it to the wall!” We are a people who like to win wars and nail “kyoonskins” to walls. They have to be nailed these days to keep the swastika beneath from showing.
“Were you aware, Dr. Von Braun, of the number of civilians being killed nightly by the German Avenger weapon at the time you were associated with it?” someone once asked Dr. Wernher von Braun.
“I was aiming at the stars,” replied Dr. Wernher von Braun.
At what far star was Admiral Radford aiming in naming an American carrier-based bombing design Operation Guernica-Vulture? Merely to honor the destruction of a defenseless city? Or because it differed from Goering’s raid in that our planes were to carry French insignia to evade diplomatic repercussions?
(“No, son, that wouldn’t be a ‘sneak-attack.’ A sneak-attack is made by military personnel upon installations by plane, without formal declaration of war. When you send mercenaries by water under cover of darkness to assault civilians it’s an heroic commando raid.”)
Look out for the man whose honor may be redeemed only in blood: his poor aim in sighting the stars fills the paraplegic wards. And his plea, “Come, let us reason together,” is made to gain time to build up firepower sufficient to make reasoning of no use.
“Those who now most oppose our methods will come to adopt them,” Hitler gave warning before our man in Saigon, in a charming interview, acknowledged he had no other personal hero.
Young Americans now fashioning cults from the emblems of Fascism are greatly outnumbered by older Americans whose insignia are less alien; whose respectability is unimpeachable; whose honor may not be impugned; and whose passion for destruction, couched in phrasing so benign, is wholly corrupting.
Leaving other young Americans, whose sole insignia is a passion for humaneness, with no room to stand.
TV viewers who witnessed a chop-job recently performed upon Miss Megan Terry and her play, Viet Rock, will take my meaning. “Have you been to Saigon, Miss Terry?” one of the more highly paid Honorable-Unimpeachables now for hire asked—but didn’t stay for an answer. “Well, I have—and I’m going to give you a piece of advice.…” Miss Terry had been to the war emotionally. The interviewer had never been to either a play or a war by that route. He’d had a junket to Saigon and had travelled here and there, but what has that got to do with it? My grandfather went to the Civil War and Stephen Crane never did; this makes Grandpa a better short-story writer than Stephen Crane and Howard K. Smith a critic of the American stage.
A play expressing repugnance for herding women and children behind American barbed wire required discrediting before American viewers. The emblems and the proofs of power are vested in voices as well as in green berets.
Have Voice: Will Travel.
And those whom our society excludes from civilization devise their own emblems to proclaim that they, too, belong to The Company of Men. Lee Oswald was foreshadowed by Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas. When society passed the sentence of death upon Bigger it was his triumph, because by it he was recognized as a man at last. “I’m alright now,” he says at the novel’s close. By assassination Oswald forced history to take him into account.
“If you don’t know my name you don’t know your own,” James Baldwin applied Wright’s perception most usefully two decades after—yet didn’t apply it widely. For to know who we are we had to know that Perry Smith and Richard Speck are part of ourselves, as well as Bigger Thomas.
To live a lifetime in the same house with another human being without admitting his reality is to fail to find one’s own true self. Yet we send marines to Santo Domingo to sustain our delusion that the slum-dwellers of San Isidro aren’t actually there. The only reality we act upon is our immediate political expedient. And we act with a violence which has replaced the Furor Teutonicus with a Furor Americanus.
Therefore your inquiry about our Wild Leftouts on motorbikes cannot be answered out of context of the violence for which we, as a nation, now stand in the eyes of the world. Can we sanction starvation, torture, death by fire and death by bomb abroad and not expect to get a recoil here?
“We don’t start fights,” a twenty-five-year-old Harley-Davidson rider assures me. “The squares won’t let us alone.” He’s painted a black swastika on his helmet, pinned a small Confederate flag in the lapel of his brown leather jacket and wears an earring in his left ear. You can tell he’s not the sort who craves attention because he doesn’t have a beard. I couldn’t tell what his wife looked like because she was wearing shades. They’d been married out of the Harley-Davidson Book of Rules instead of the Bible. “We mind our own business,” the bride assures me. “We’re not Communists.”
All true. They’re not. And they don’t begin fights, the Wild Leftouts. Half a dozen or so of them merely go into a crowded bar to have a quiet drink. Just because they’re wearing swastikas, shades, beards, earrings, knucks and the Stars-and-Bars means they want to be left alone. But bartenders pick on them, and some bum who never won a fight in his life cracks wise and then, of course, the cops, the courts pick on them, and the papers print their pictures to make it even worse. Why can’t people leave us alone?
Because they have no lives of their own, the Wild Leftouts have to create a life. No man can stand belonging nowhere; he cannot bear it. It’s better to be a heroin-head and belong to other addicts than to be just nothing, nobody at all.
We must recognize that an overt act of war has been committed by an enemy when that enemy builds a military force intended for our eventual destruction, and that the destruction of that force before it can be launched is a defensive action and not an aggression … the earlier such an overt act is recognized the more effective the defense can be.1
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we see clearly now, was a defensive action. The SS men were merely defending themselves at Lidice. The military mind, geared for nothing but destruction, must destroy to survive: the world is a field of fire and all movement is hostile. So it’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Had not controls been put upon minds like LeMay’s, the world would long, long ago have gone blind and toothless.
And when you have fifty billions invested in defense what you need most isn’t allies, but an enemy.
It is no mere coincidence that the Harley-Davidson riders and the thinkers of the Far Eastern Bomber Command never commit an aggression. Other people, other nations, insist on picking on them. The difference is one of sophistication: the riders carry springblade knives or wear skull-and-crossboned patches; the Pentagon riders’ paraphernalia is in the PR phraseology that disguises barbarity.
“It’s a nasty little war but we have to win it to survive,” Dwight Eisenhower, a man who melted like cotton candy in the mouth of history, explains the nightmare in Asia.
What kind of country can it be that requires nasty little wars simply to survive? Isn’t the man confusing Morrison-Knudsen of Asia, Inc., Brown & Root, Inc., Raymond International of Delaware and J. A. Jones
Construction—the whole consortium of economic privilege in Vietnam—with the word “country?”
“What is this strategy of Terror?” Humpty-Dumpty Hubert Humphrey adds in horror because a boy on a bike stopped pedaling long enough to pitch a bomb into an American PX. Lieut. Yossarian of Catch-22 wanted to know the same thing when he asked the company doctor to send him home because somebody was trying to kill him. Every time he went on a bombing mission somebody on the ground started firing at him.
Everybody was out to kill Yossarian. Everybody keeps picking on the Far Eastern Bomber Command. Even the water buffalo attack our soldiers:
After ringing the hamlet (Hia Nhut) a man asked permission to go into the field to get the carcasses of two water buffalo shot when they attacked an American soldier.2
Encountering a herd of 40 water buffalo, the American Commandoes pumped several grenades into them to slow them down. Then the leader took two men with him and killed or maimed the lot in fifteen minutes. One buffalo represents one year’s income for a Vietnamese farmer.3
Two girls were caught near the weapons factory. The leader of the Commandoes decided to execute them as “an example to those who help the Viet Cong.” His plans were thwarted by the commander of a unit who claimed he had captured the girls first.4
Perhaps this has something to do with references in the German press to American Commando units as Bandenkampf-Verbande (Bandit-Fighting Units) as the Waffen SS outfits, who specialized in the killing of guerillas and their families, were known in World War II.
And may account for American GIs satirizing the American Air Force:
The FAC (Forward Air Controller) rides forth to battle
A warrior without match
In his monogrammed flak-jacket and his F-100 patch
Put napalm on a hamlet and burn the whole thing flat
Got a thousand noncombatants and he’s sorry about that.5
Young Americans, seeking a cult, strike me as less ominous than the cultists of the Pentagon who have adapted the jargon of the Public Relations world to camouflage a cruel and cowardly assault for political ends. Nauseous gas has become a “beneficent incapacitator.” When used to smoke civilians out of caves into a “field of fire” they haven’t been machine-gunned so much as having been beneficially incapacitated, it would seem. “If they weren’t V.C. what were they doing out of their area?” an American colonel justified this maneuver. He was from Denver. What was he doing out of his area?
“Defoliation” now runs so trippingly on the tongue that anyone who claims it actually means crop-poisoning is a subversive and ought to be drafted. “Operation County Fair” has the clean outdoorsy ring of a Methodist Outing in McHenry County on the longest day of the year:
Operation County Fair consists of pulling out of the village structure the V.C.’s, identifying them, encouraging them to return to the government side through the “Open Arms” Defector Program, capturing and killing them. We put a cordon around a hamlet, screen each individual and move the people into an enclosure where we give them medical treatment, feed them and issue identity cards.6
Emphasis my own: after such encouragement medical treatment must be fairly urgent. Rep. Chamberlain (R. Mich.) was so carried away, on a visit behind the American barbed wire, that he envisioned our Pacification Program as a direct road to victory.
“The simple application of soap helps remarkably,” the representative writers. “As for candy, the nutritive value can’t be questioned: Candy is Dandy and Soap Brings Hope.”
This is the same operation, essentially, that the Japanese called, simply, “Break-and-Subdue.” The difference seems to be that the Americans break and subdue with Tootsie Rolls.
Indeed, the major cadres applied to the American Pacification Program today are from the party whose formation was first encouraged by the old Japanese Empire: the Dai Viet. Diem’s Concentration Camp Order of January 11, 1956, maintained the attitudes of Imperial Japan toward the Vietnamese peasantry; and Diem’s measures have since been sustained by American treasure and American blood.
“What is it about Shintoism that makes atrocities possible?” General Yamashita was asked during his trial as a war criminal.
“In the same fashion as atrocities are made possible by Christianity,” the general replied without anger.
The boy on the bike was executed in front of the Railway Building in Saigon, before TV cameras, by Col. Ky. Who was the boy on the bike, this strategist of terror willing to lay down his life to become a man? Was his mother that woman of the An Lao Valley who lost both her arms and the lids of her eyes in an American napalm raid, so that now, when it is time for her to sleep, someone must put a black cloth across her eyes? Did she have a nice wash-up with Lux or Camay before sleep? Did she get a free Milky Way before nodding off? Did she get $33.90 for each of her children killed in the same raid? Or were they out of their area?
I think he is a poor man, an empty-handed man, a farmer or the son of a farmer, fighting rich men who possess the wealthiest army in the world at their command.
And yet he is not without wealth. In a sense he is the wealthiest of men. He is wealthy in hatred. The murderous heart he carries is refreshed continually by the indifferent slaughter of women, children, men, buffalo, crops, homes, culture and tradition. Indeed, he has lost so much he does not think of himself as being any longer among living men. He cannot survive without losing his manhood. All dignity taken from him, he regains his pride in executing Americans before they execute him.
And isn’t he also David Morrison, dying in order to show us what it is like to die by fire?
Unless we know who this boy on the bike is, we do not know who we are. Because he has gone to the wall before, in many lands under many names; and will go to the wall again.
He is Father Camilo Torres, the guerilla priest of Bogota, whose demands for land reform forced him out of his church and into the hills, to be shot down in a battle with Colombian police.
He is also that Austrian peasant youth who refused to soldier for Hitler.
“People today come up with every conceivable argument,” this unsophisticated boy argued, “to put the issue and the conflict in a favorable light. For instance, one is simply fighting for the German State. Inasmuch as Christ commanded that one must obey the secular rulers even when they are not religious, this is admittedly true. But I do not believe that Christ ever said that one must obey such rulers when they command something that is actually wicked. Can I still say I have a Fatherland?”
Franz Jagerstatter was beheaded by the Nazis in Brandenburg prison on August 9, 1943.
And there he stands, an untutored Catholic peasant who refused the Act of Supremacy; who never received the Sword of Loyola; so strongly rooted in the Church of the Martyrs and his catechism that he could go to his death firmly, without even the knowledge that anyone else in the world was aware of his stand.
He, too, was the boy on the bike. And for all the paraphernalia of Public Relations we now employ to disguise a peasant insurrection for land as a Communist conspiracy, he has 450,000 American soldiers pinned down. For he is fighting the same type of war we ourselves fought, also against overwhelming odds, in order to gain our own land, our own culture; and recognition that we too belong to The Company of Men.
Perhaps that was why, when I received a phone call from a Boston newspaper on the day that a drifter of no trade slaughtered eight student nurses here, saying, “We want you to cover The Crime of the Century for us,” I answered, “I don’t want to go to Vietnam.”
And hung up.
Cordially yours,
Nelson Algren
NOTES
1. Mission with LeMay, by Curtis LeMay.
2. Chicago Tribune.
3. St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
4. Horst Faas for the AP.
5. New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 30, 1966.
6. Marine Corps General Greene in U.S. News and World Report, September 5, 1966.
NOBODY K
NOWS WHERE CHARLIE’S GONE
There’s a dog down the hotel alley who isn’t trying to win anyone’s heart nor mind. It’s all he can do to hold onto his own.
He hotel is the Catinat, off the street once named the Rue Catinat that is now the Duong Tu-Do. He’s a yellowy, almond-eyed dog, still young despite his Ho Chi Minh goatee. He gets up when the people of his hotel get up, trots warily down Tu-Do just far enough to get his breakfast: eats it fast then scampers back to the Catinat.
It isn’t other dogs of Tu-Do the yellow dog fears; nor the heat of the day from which he hides. It isn’t even the man on the Honda-50 with the python around his neck, a caged mongoose on his handlebars and a lemur riding behind. Pythons, as the yellow dog sees it, simply aren’t in it with people.
People on Hondas, Vespas, Ischias, Mobylettes, Suzukis, Yamahas, Bridgestones and Kawasakis, gunning their motors through exhaust fumes from Tu-Do to Cho-lon. The traffic doesn’t begin to slow till the first Spooky hangs the night’s earliest flare. Then the sky above Cho-lon goes bright with a spreading light, glows yet more bright, turning night-clouds to molten copper: that darken again, in a smoking wake, as the flare falls at last. For all the world a spaceship coming in for a landing.
Now, all night long, from the Ben Bach docks to Gia Dinh, gun-ship and fireship, looking for Charlie, will lighten river, paddy and jungle. MP night-patrols will cruise the dark markets, the darker alleys and the bright boulevards. Looking for Charlie. Riverine patrols will run in the dark on the hawks for a sampan’s shadow: God help the fisherman stealing home late when the starlight-scope picks him out.
If he crouches in the sampan the helicopter-gunner will blast him. If he goes over the side he’ll be shot in the water. You can’t take chances with Charlie.
While the yellow dog sleeps in the door: and dreams of a breakfast-bone. Spookies guard him from Charlie.