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• CONVENTION

Duty? Honor? Country?

 A Reflection Upon Military Service in U.S. Armed Forces

by Thomas Brinson

Here I am at the An Nhon Cham Towers, about 50 klicks south of the Forward Operating Base for Task Force Barker at Duc Pho, where I delivered supplies about two weeks before the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968.

©August 1, 2008
Long Beach, NY

Duty, Honor, Country is the motto of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and is embedded in its coat of arms. General Douglas MacArthur, in a May 12, 1962 speech to the graduates of West Point while accepting the Thayer Award, eloquently spoke these words about what they mean for American soldiers:

“’Duty,’ ‘Honor,’ ‘Country’ -- those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you want to be, what you can be, what you will be . . . And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory? Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless . . . The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training - sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes, which his Maker gave when he created man in his own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help, which alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind.”

These lofty, high-minded sentiments from the General about his devotion to the sanctity of the American Soldier certainly flies in the face of reality in regards to the most controversial stance he took as Secretary of the Army with unemployed WWI combat veterans in 1932. Convinced, despite contrary intelligence from his staff, that the veterans were part of a dreaded Communist conspiracy, he viciously oversaw the Army’s brutal routing of 20,000 members of the “Bonus Expeditionary Forces” organized by Walter W. Walters. The Bonus Army of unemployed veterans with their families were camping out in the Anacostia Flats of Washington, DC, peacefully petitioning the federal government and Congress to finally disperse the long-overdue-but-promised bonus to those who had born “the burden of battle” in the trenches of Europe during the Great War to end all wars. Perhaps no other incident in our history more effectively displays the wanton disregard by the government and the elite class, which includes the general officer corps, of citizen-soldier’s military service than MacArthur’s obliteration of the Bonus Army of veterans and their families in 1932.

Nevertheless, this ideal of the American soldier’s dedication to Country, Honor, Duty, as MacArthur extols above, is certainly one of the primary factors that prompted me to pursue ROTC in college, so that I could be commissioned as an U.S. Army officer upon graduation. I was also strongly influenced by war novels and war movies I voraciously consumed as a southern male child growing up in the 1950s. These glorified the pursuit of valiant battle against dastardly enemies to protect the “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.” While on active duty, these supposed glories of service in war compelled me to volunteer to serve in the American War in Vietnam.

I am a veteran of that illegal, immoral, unnecessary war. I was in country from April 5, 1967 to April 4, 1968, during which I indirectly participated in the infamous My Lai Massacre that took place on March 16, 1968. Task Force Barker was the operational unit that Lt. Calley and Captain Medina were part of as officers in Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade. Task Force Barker had a mission that day to search and destroy a series of hamlets called My Lai, also known as Pinkville, an area of allegedly heavy NVA and VC infiltration and activity with stalwart support from the civilian populace.

Task Force Barker was one of the main customers of the warehouse complex I was the Officer-In-Charge of in the Qui Nhon Depot in II Corps on the coast of the Central Highlands in what was then South Vietnam. A couple of weeks before the My Lai Massacre in the aftermath of the brutal Tet Offensive, I ran a convoy of supplies to Duc Pho, a forward supply base of Task Force Barker. Though I did not pull a trigger, throw a grenade, or Zippo a hooch at My Lai, as part of my duty as a soldier in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, I provided the supplies to those who did. I am, therefore, indirectly involved in the My Lai Massacre of some 500 civilians, mostly old men, women and children, and the wanton destruction of their homes and livestock. As a soldier in the illegal invasion and war of occupation in South Vietnam, I share culpability for what happened that awful day – I, not too facetiously, consider myself a combat support war criminal. I live with this reality every day of his life, seeking forgiveness.

The soldiers of Charlie Company, led by Captain Medina and Lt. Calley, were not “a few bad apples," nor was My Lai, though certainly one of the most egregious incidents of combat atrocity that constitutes crimes against humanity, an isolated case. The soldiers were acting and behaving as soldiers are sanctioned to act. A soldier’s sole purpose and primary duty is to kill “the enemy.” A soldier’s duty has very little to do with defending freedom; it does not to protect the ole redwhite&blue or Mom’s apple pie or the little darlin’ sweetheart back home, though these are all powerful sentiments effectively utilized by the State to motivate young men and women to join the military.

In the euphemistic language of U.S. MilitarySpeak, the sole duty of the soldier is to “close with and destroy the enemy.” This is what every soldier, regardless of branch or MOS (Military Occupation Specialty), is most effectively trained to do by the highly efficient operant conditioning techniques utilized in Basic Training at boot camp. KILL! KILL! KILL! – this primary job of a soldier is reinforced and reinforced over and over during arduous training of recruits until it becomes an automatic response to orders or threat. Unit “esprit de corps,” morale boosters that reinforce and glorify the martial exploits of legendary combat units “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, augment and supplement the dominant purpose of military service to kill the enemy.

The “enemy”, especially since World War II, consists not only of the uniformed members of the military services, but also all civilian members of the population, who live within an alleged “rogue nation state or society”, as defined by our President, the Commander-in-chief. Such a dastardly enemy is portrayed as a direct and eminent threat to the American way of life in our celebrated democracy. The President is aided in this effort by the corporate media, a state propaganda machine that effectively influences both citizens and members of Congress, who provide the necessary funds to eradicate any enemy by all means possible in the name of us, the People. Whether “krauts” or “japs,” “gooks” or “dinks” or “slope heads,” or “Hajji-girls” or “rag heads” or “sand niggers,” the primary duty of a soldier is to kill the enemy and destroy or steal his/her property. It’s been that way since Aryan ---- roughly translated as “honorable” -- warrior tribes swept across the Russian Steppes in the 3rd millennium BC, stealing cattle and killing the more peaceful, agrarian landowners after raping their women. Increasingly, since WW I, when most of the casualties were uniformed combatants, the majority of casualties from combat are members of civilian populations, likewise defined as enemy combatants, mostly through superior air power -- Think Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, the Balkans, and in Iraq since the First Gulf War in 1991, as well as in Afghanistan since 2003 in an effort supposedly to capture Osama Bin Laden and exterminate Al Qaeda, which the U.S. created in the 80s in a proxy fight against the armed forces of the Soviet Union, and whose members, including Osama Bin Laden, are allegedly the perpetrators of 911.

Also increasingly since Vietnam, warfighters operate in a combat arena of guerrilla warfare through counter-insurgency operations against non-uniformed combatants, who are, indeed, imbedded within a civilian population that often does in fact support them, because they are part of that locale’s indigenous community and culture. Members of the U.S. military, on the other hand, are alien invaders of an occupying, heavily armed military force. This was the case in Korea and Vietnam, and today it is the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. Often the unspoken prerogative from higher headquarters is to “kill them all and let God sort them out!” Non-combatants killed, horribly wounded or displaced from their destroyed homes and property are euphemistically defined as “collateral damage”.

It makes little difference how the killing of the enemy and destruction of his/her property is done, whether by:

• 50-caliber machine gun bullets that can tear limbs off,
• fleshette, or bee-hive, artillery rounds that spews slivers of steel darts traveling at 2000 feet per second, which when they pierce flesh and hit a bone ricochet throughout the internal organs,
• cluster bombs that scatters thousand of bomblets, many with delayed timing devices, which like land mines, render a large geographic area uninhabitable or dangerous to farm or travel through for decades,
• napalm that not only incinerates, but sucks the oxygen out of the lungs with such force one explodes from the inside out,armor-piercing Depleted Uranium rounds that scatter radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion or so years throughout the environment,
• neutron bombs that kill all living tissue, but leave the property intact, described by Hunter S. Thompson as an ideal representation of capitalism,
• new and improved means to kill living beings and destroy property being turned out daily by research facilities at U.S. universities and war industries, which include a vast armory of infra-red, microwave, energy beam, taser, psycho-biologic-medical, etc., etc., etc. devices.

President Eisenhower, too late in my opinion, warned us about the Military Industrial Complex in his final speech before leaving the White House in 1961. A recently published book by Nick Turse, entitled The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, details the incredible extent during the past four decades that the Pentagon has achieved influence and control over every aspect of American society and culture. I totally agree with Smedley Butler, former Marine Corps Commandant, two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, who in 1935 published a small book entitled, “War Is A Racket.”

I have increasing difficulty understanding what is humane or civilized or noble concerning the vast majority of martial pursuits by the U.S. nation state during our 232-year history. U.S. military pursuits have included:

• the eradication by policy of Native American populations throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that included moving them to reservations and violating most treaties signed by their leaders;
• the illegal invasion and occupation of Mexico by Zachary Taylor to wrest control of Mexican lands, so the U.S. could achieve our self-determined, inherent right of Manifest Destiny from “sea to shining sea”;
• the “Scorched Earth,” “total war” policy of Sherman’s March to the Sea after the capture and destruction of Atlanta to decisively break the Confederacy’s strategic, economic and psychological capacity;
• the brutal first war and illegal occupations of the American Empire at the end of the 19th Century in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War;
• the “total war” policy against the civilian populations of the Axis powers by U.S. airpower to include the fire-bombing of Dresdren, the use of napalm to destroy Royan, France, and the first and only use of atomic weapons of mass destruction, of course, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki;
• in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, millions of civilians died, mostly as a result of the indiscriminate use of vastly superior American air power;
• in both Vietnam and today in Iraq internationally banned use of biochemical warfare agents are used – today some 3 million civilians of Vietnam suffer from continued birth defects and sickness due to the massive quantities of herbicides that were dumped that indelibly polluted the environment, and in the 2004 Fallujah operation in Iraq the reported use of white phosphorous rounds is in violation of the 1980 Geneva Convention ban on the use of incendiary weapons in civilian areas;
• the wanton massacre of unknown numbers of Iraqi soldiers and civilians retreating out of Kuwait on February 26, 1991 by U.S. airpower, as well as the humanitarian disaster of the UN sanctions against Iraq throughout the 1990’s, resulting in the alleged deaths of some 567,000 children as reported by The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society; and
• finally our current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands, even millions, of civilians have been killed, wounded or displaced from their homes and utterly destroyed lands, and which have seared the names of Haditha, Abu Graib, Fallujah, Bagram in to our Hall of Shame consciousness.

A further appalling phenomenon in the reality of service in Iraq and Afghanistan is the is the rampant misogyny and denigration of women service members that leads to the high level of sexual assault and harassment that is generally overlooked or denied by higher ups.

Reflecting upon this military history and the reality that I experienced on the ground in Vietnam, the eloquent language of General MacArthur quoted above to describe “Duty, Honor, Country” bears no semblance to what I know and have lived.

It is my strong belief that we Veterans For Peace, who have been graced with consciousness and insight to question the legitimacy not only of our individual military service, but of U.S. military service in general, have an obligation to ourselves, to other veterans -- especially those younger than us, who are currently engaged in the current illegal, immoral, unnecessary wars of aggression and occupation in foreign lands for the benefit not of the American people, but primarily to benefit the narrow class of elites, who manage, administer and unduly profit from American Empire -- and to our fellow citizens to study the harmful impact of U.S. militarism and the militaristic culture and society that constitutes the truth of what the United States has been throughout most of its history. We further need to develop sound strategies accompanied with appropriate tactics to expose, correct, reconcile and make reparations for the harmful impact that American military hegemony, backed by corporate and Congressional collusion, has had not only upon our own populace, but upon all peoples of the world due to the vast global economic and ecological consequences that result from full spectrum dominance of U.S. military power.

Therefore, in conclusion, let me offer this specific challenge for members of Veterans For Peace to consider based upon a reflection about what has been discussed in this Essay. If, as Veterans For Peace dedicated to the principles of nonviolence, who seek to abolish war as an instrument of national policy, we fully question the legitimacy of military service as it has been manifested in our individual service and throughout the historical record of the U.S., how can we wear our old military uniforms that proudly display medals, awards, achievements accrued during military indoctrination and/or on the field of crimes-against-humanity battle? Is there not a built in dichotomy between today being a Veteran For Peace and our need to demonstrate that, nevertheless, while serving in the military we were accomplished, dedicated, efficient warfighters? Were any of the wars we participated in, with the possible exception of WW II, truly deserving of the ideals of Duty? Honor? Country?

Thomas has been an ardent peace activist since he flew back from Vietnam landing in Washington, DC's National Airport a couple of hours after Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Before he volunteered for duty in Vietnam, he seriously questioned the legitimacy of the use of military force in Southeast Asia; joining SDS in 1962, he organized one of the earliest Teach-Ins against the American War in Vietnam at his alma mater, Xavier University, keynoted by then Georgia State Legislator, Julian Bond. Nevertheless, buying hook, line and sinker the hype about Duty Honor Country, he was determined not to miss the war of his generation, despite the considerable misgivings he had about it.

 He participated in every major Washington, DC protest rally and march against Vietnam except the initial October 21, 1967 March to levitate the Pentagon, when he was running convoys throughout II Corps in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. He was a student leader and organizer of the May 6, 1970 Student Strike in opposition to the killings at Kent State and Jackson State and Nixon's invasion of Cambodia at Catholic University, where he was a graduate student in theatre. A member of the Washington, DC Student Mobilization Committee that prepared for the Rennie Davis Stop the Government May Day Protest, 1971, he was among the thousands arrested and detained in RFK Stadium.

An on-and-off member of VFP since 1987, when he attended the second VFP Convention in Portland, Maine, he has been an individual member, a member of the New York City and Tucson, Arizona Chapters, and the founding Facilitator in 2006 of Long Island Veterans For Peace, Chapter 138, the SPC Raheen Tyson Heighter Memorial Chapter, named to honor the first Long Islander killed in the Iraq War. A member since the early 90s, he is also the Long Island Contact for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  

He served for almost two years as a Peacekeeper with the Nonviolent Peaceforce during 2003-2005 in Mutur, Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, mediating relations between Muslim, Tamil and Buddhist communities; he survived the devastating December 26, 2005 Tsunami and was instrumental in getting supplies through Sri Lankan Army checkpoints to totally destroyed Tamil fishing villages deep in LTTE territory. With Vietnam Veteran colleague, Vince Treanor, he did seminal research, publishing and training throughout the nation on the correlation between PTSD and Addiction. As a NYS Licensed Clinical Social Worker, he specialized in treating PTSD among combat veterans and assisted many Long Island vets to negotiate their PTSD claims through the onerous VA system. He was awarded his own 100% PTSD disability, after a six-year claim application and appeal process, in March of 2007. A poet, he has written scores of war poems, trying to exorcise the demons that still haunt him from Vietnam, and reads at every VFP open mic he can.

Elected to the VFP Board of Directors in 2007, he ardently advocates for VFP to shift its focus to be more Pro-Peace instead of Anti-War, and hopes to help in re-conceptualizing the mission, goals, strategies and tactics of the Veterans Peace Movement, which he believes relies more on what we did "back in the day" instead of realistically apprising how radically different a milieu we are confronted with today in the US of Empire, which requires fresh and innovative approaches to waging peace.