The first thing I think of when I think of Vietnam is my vet friend who is still troubled by the killing he did all those years ago. Then I think about the kids who are there now. One of them, a nineteen-year-old who grew up in a town near my farm, came back on leave with that same “thousand mile stare” and a sad story of killing someone at a checkpoint. Vietnam and Iraq both involve face-to-face killing against an enemy who arises endlessly from the occupied civilian population. Read “The Price of Valor” and you will see how Iraq will haunt us in the same way Vietnam has:
Rachel MacNair, who studies the psychological effects of violence, earned her Ph.D. at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1999 with a dissertation that examined data from the congressionally funded National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, which, in the nineteen-eighties, interviewed almost seventeen hundred Vietnam veterans. MacNair found that soldiers who had killed in combat—or believed they had—suffered higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.). The fact that in Vietnam more soldiers were firing their weapons, MacNair argues, suggests that there was more killing for soldiers to be troubled by.
Since Vietnam, the Army has not had to dwell on how soldiers are affected by the killing they do. The first Gulf War was very short, and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were largely fought from long range, with airpower and artillery, which rendered the killing abstract. In the current Iraq war, though, soldiers are killing with small arms on battlefields the length of a city block. Exactly how many Iraqis American forces have killed is not known—as General Tommy Franks said, “We don’t do body counts”—but everyone agrees that the numbers are substantial. Major Peter Kilner, a former West Point philosophy instructor who went to Iraq last year as part of a team writing the official history of the war, believes that most infantrymen there have “looked down the barrel and shot at people, and many have killed.” American firepower is overwhelming, Kilner said. He ran into a former student in Iraq who told him, “There’s just too much killing. They shoot, we return fire, and they’re all dead.” Even some of the most grievously wounded Iraq-war veterans seem more disturbed by the killing they did than they are by their own injuries. I spent a week in December among amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the subject changed to the killing they’d done, a pall would settle over them.
rjung
February 3, 2005, 7:02am
42
In a way, Iraq is worse than Vietnam, as Iraq is demonstrating that we haven’t learned a damn thing from the Vietnam war.