Pham To looked great for 78 years
old. (At least, that's about how old he thought he
was.) His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the
temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique
robust - all the more remarkable given what he had
lived through. I listened intently, as I had so
many times before to so many similar stories, but
it was still beyond my ability to comprehend. It's
probably beyond yours, too.
Pham To told
me that the planes began their bombing runs in
1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started
about the same time. Nobody will ever know just
how many civilians were killed in the years after.
"The number is uncountable," he said one spring
day a few years ago in a village in the mountains
of rural central Vietnam. "So many people died."
And it only got worse. Chemical defoliants
came next, ravaging
the land. Helicopter machine
gunners began firing on locals. By 1969, bombing
and shelling were day-and-night occurrences. Many
villagers fled. Some headed further into the
mountains, trading the terror of imminent death
for a daily struggle of hardscrabble privation;
others were forced into squalid refugee
resettlement areas. Those who remained in the
village suffered more when the troops came
through. Homes were burned as a matter of course.
People were kicked and beaten. Men were shot when
they ran in fear. Women were raped. One morning, a
massacre by American soldiers wiped out 21 fellow
villagers. This was the Vietnam War for Pham To,
as for so many rural Vietnamese.
One,
two … many Vietnams? At the beginning of
the Iraq War, and for years after, reporters,
pundits, veterans, politicians, and ordinary
Americans asked whether the American debacle in
Southeast Asia was being repeated. Would it be
"another Vietnam"? Would it become a "quagmire"?
The same held true for Afghanistan. Years
after 9/11, as that war, too, foundered, questions
about whether it was "Obama's Vietnam" appeared
ever more frequently. In fact, by October 2009, a
majority of Americans had come to believe it was
"turning into another Vietnam".
In those
years, "Vietnam" even proved a surprisingly
two-sided analogy - after, at least, generals
began reading and citing revisionist texts about
that war. These claimed, despite all appearances,
that the US military had actually won in Vietnam
(before the politicians, media, and antiwar
movement gave the gains away). The same winning
formula, they insisted, could be used to triumph
again. And so, a failed solution from that failed
war, counterinsurgency, or COIN, was trotted out
as the military panacea for impending disaster.
Debated comparisons between the two
ongoing wars and the one that somehow never went
away, came to litter newspapers, journals,
magazines, and the Internet - until David
Petraeus, a top COINdinista general who had
written his doctoral dissertation on the "lessons"
of the Vietnam War, was called in to settle the
matter by putting those lessons to work winning
the other two. In the end, of course, US troops
were booted out of Iraq, while the war in
Afghanistan continues to this day as a dismally
devolving stalemate, now wracked by
"green-on-blue" or "insider" attacks on US forces,
while the general himself returned to Washington
as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director to
run covert wars in Pakistan and Yemen before
retiring in disgrace following a sex scandal.
Still, for all the ink about the "Vietnam
analogy," virtually none of the reporters,
pundits, historians, generals, politicians, or
other members of the chattering classes ever so
much as mentioned the Vietnam War as Pham To knew
it. In that way, they managed to miss the one
unfailing parallel between America's wars in all
three places: civilian suffering.
For all
the dissimilarities, botched analogies, and
tortured comparisons, there has been one
connecting thread in Washington's foreign wars of
the last half century that, in recent years at
least, Americans have seldom found of the
slightest interest: misery for local nationals.
Civilian suffering is, in fact, the defining
characteristic of modern war in general, even if
only rarely discussed in the halls of power or the
mainstream media.
An unimaginable
toll Pham To was lucky. He and Pham Thang,
another victim and a neighbor, told me that, of
the 2,000 people living in their village before
the war, only 300 survived it. Bombing, shelling,
a massacre, disease, and starvation had come close
to wiping out their entire settlement. "So many
people were hungry," Pham Thang said. "With no
food, many died. Others were sick and with
medications unavailable, they died, too. Then
there was the bombing and shelling, which took
still more lives. They all died because of the
war."
Leaving aside those who perished
from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at
least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war
deaths according to researchers from Harvard
Medical School and the University of Washington.
The best estimate we have is that 2 million of
them were civilians. Using a very conservative
extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million
civilians were wounded during the war, for a total
of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties
overall. To such figures might be added an
estimated 11.7 million Vietnamese forced from
their homes and turned into refugees, up to 4.8
million sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent
Orange, an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million war
orphans, and 1 million war widows.
The
numbers are staggering, the suffering
incalculable, the misery almost incomprehensible
to most Americans but not, perhaps, to an Iraqi.
No one will ever know just how many Iraqis
died in the wake of the US invasion of 2003. In a
country with an estimated population of about 25
million at the time, a much-debated survey - the
results of which were published in the British
medical journal The Lancet - suggested more than
601,000 violent "excess deaths" had occurred by
2006. Another survey indicated that more than 1.2
million Iraqi civilians had died because of the
war (and the various internal conflicts that
flowed from it) as of 2007. The Associated Press
tallied up records of 110,600 deaths by early
2009. An Iraqi family health survey fixed the
number at 151,000 violent deaths by June 2006.
Official documents made public by Wikileaks
counted 109,000 deaths, including 66,081 civilian
deaths, between 2004 and 2009. Iraq Body Count has
tallied as many as 121,220 documented cases of
violent civilian deaths alone.
Then there
are those 3.2 million Iraqis who were internally
displaced or fled the violence to other lands,
only to find uncertainty and deprivation in places
like Jordan, Iran, and now war-torn Syria. By
2011, 9% or more of Iraq's women, as many as 1
million, were widows (a number that skyrocketed in
the years after the US invasion). A recent survey
found that 800,000 to 1 million Iraqi children had
lost one or both parents, a figure that only grows
with the continuing violence that the US unleashed
but never stamped out.
Today, the country,
which experienced an enormous brain drain of
professionals, has a total of 200 social workers
and psychiatrists to aid all those, armed and
unarmed, who suffered every sort of horror and
trauma. (In just the last seven years, by
comparison, the US Veterans Administration has
hired 7,000 new mental health professionals to
deal with Americans who have been psychologically
scarred by war.)
Many Afghans, too, would
surely be able to relate to what Pham To and
millions of Vietnamese war victims endured. For
more than 30 years, Afghanistan has, with the
rarest of exceptions, been at war. It all started
with the 1979 Soviet invasion and Washington's
support for some of the most extreme of the
Islamic militants who opposed the Russian
occupation of the country.
The latest
iteration of war there began with an invasion by
US and allied forces in 2001, and has since
claimed the lives of many thousands of civilians
in roadside and aerial bombings, suicide attacks
and helicopter attacks, night raids and outright
massacres. Untold numbers of Afghans have also
died of everything from lack of access to medical
care (there are just 2 doctors for every 10,000
Afghans) to exposure, including shocking reports
of children freezing to death in refugee camps
last winter and again this year. They were among
the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who have been
internally displaced during the war. Millions more
live as refugees outside the country, mostly in
Iran and Pakistan. Of the women who remain in the
country, up to 2 million are widows. In addition,
there are now an estimated 2 million Afghan
orphans. No wonder polling by Gallup this past
summer found 96% of Afghans claiming they were
either "suffering" or "struggling," and just 4%
"thriving".
American refugees in
Mexico? For most Americans, this type of
unrelenting, war-related misery is unfathomable.
Few have ever personally experienced anything like
what their tax dollars have wrought in Southeast
Asia, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia in the
last half-century. And while surprising numbers of
Americans do suffer from poverty and deprivation,
few know anything about what it's like to live
through a year of war - let alone 10, as Pham To
did - under the constant threat of air strikes,
artillery fire, and violence perpetrated by
foreign ground troops.
Still, as a simple
thought experiment, let's consider for a moment
what it might be like in American terms. Imagine
that the United States had experienced an
occupation by a foreign military force. Imagine
millions or even tens of millions of American
civilians dead or wounded as a result of an
invasion and resulting civil strife.
Imagine a country in which your door might
be kicked down in the dead of night by
heavily-armed, foreign young men, in strange
uniforms, helmets and imposing body armor, yelling
things in a language you don't understand. Imagine
them rifling through your drawers, upending your
furniture, holding you at gunpoint, roughing up
your husband or son or brother, and marching him
off in the middle of the night.
Imagine,
as well, a country in which those foreigners kill
American "insurgents" and then routinely strip
them naked; in which those occupying troops
sometimes urinate on American bodies (and shoot
videos of it); or take trophy photos of their
"kills"; or mutilate them; or pose with the body
parts of dead Americans; or from time to time -
for reasons again beyond your comprehension - rape
or murder your friends and neighbors.
Imagine, for a moment, violence so extreme
that you and literally millions like you have to
flee your hometowns for squalid refugee camps or
expanding slums ringing the nearest cities.
Imagine trading your home for a new one without
heat or electricity, possibly made of refuse with
a corrugated metal roof that roars when it rains.
Then imagine living there for months, if not
years.
Imagine things getting so bad that
you decide to trek across the Mexican border to
live an uncertain life, forever wondering if your
new violence- and poverty-wracked host nation will
turn you out or if you'll ever be able to return
to your home in the US Imagine living with these
realities day after day for up to decade.
After natural disasters like Hurricane
Sandy or Katrina, small numbers of Americans
briefly experience something like what millions of
war victims - Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, and
others - have often had to endure for significant
parts of their lives. But for those in America's
war zones, there will be no telethons, benefit
concerts, or texting fund drives.
Pham To
and Pham Thang had to bury the bodies of their
family members, friends, and neighbors after they
were massacred by American troops passing through
their village on patrol. They had to rebuild their
homes and their lives after the war with
remarkably little help. One thing was as certain
for them as it has been for war-traumatized Iraqis
and Afghans of our moment: no Hollywood luminaries
lined up to help raise funds for them or their
village. And they never will.
"We lost so
many people and so much else. And this land was
affected by Agent Orange, too. You've come to
write about the war, but you could never know the
whole story," Pham Thang told me. Then he became
circumspect. "Now, our two governments, our two
countries, live in peace and harmony. And we just
want to restore life to what it once was here. We
suffered great losses. The US government should
offer assistance to help increase the local
standard of living, provide better healthcare, and
build infrastructure like better roads."
No doubt - despite the last decade of US
nation-building debacles in its war zones - many
Iraqis and Afghans would express similar
sentiments. Perhaps they will even be saying the
same sort of thing to an American reporter decades
from now.
Over these last years, I've
interviewed hundreds of war victims like Pham
Thang, and he's right: I'll probably never come
close to knowing what life was like for those
whose worlds were upended by America's foreign
wars. And I'm far from alone. Most Americans never
make it to a war zone, and even US military
personnel arrive only for finite tours of duty,
while for combat correspondents and aid workers an
exit door generally remains open. Civilians like
Pham To, however, are in it for the duration.
In the Vietnam years, there was at least
an antiwar movement in this country that included
many Vietnam veterans who made genuine efforts to
highlight the civilian suffering they knew was
going on at almost unimaginable levels. In
contrast, in the decade-plus since 9/11, with the
rarest of exceptions, Americans have remained
remarkably detached from their distant wars,
thoroughly ignoring what can be known about the
suffering that has been caused in their name.
As I was wrapping up my interview, Pham
Thang asked me about the purpose of the last hour
and a half of questions I'd asked him. Through my
interpreter, I explained that most Americans knew
next to nothing about Vietnamese suffering during
the war and that most books written in my country
on the war years ignored it. I wanted, I told him,
to offer Americans the chance to hear about the
experiences of ordinary Vietnamese for the first
time.
"If the American people know about
these incidents, if they learn about the wartime
suffering of people in Vietnam, do you think they
will sympathize?" he asked me.
Soon
enough, I should finally know the answer to his
question.
Nick Turse is the
managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at
the Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist,
his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times,
the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is
the author most recently of Kill Anything that
Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (The
American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).
Published on January 15, it offers a new look at
the American war machine in Vietnam and the
suffering it caused. His website is NickTurse.com.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
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Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
