Any War Just as Cruel

I was sitting yesterday, listening to a song, "The Cruel War", sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary, the same song that was playing on a radio in a café in San Bernardino, California while I was there in 1972 eating a piece of apple pie, considering the reasons for having enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. At the time, there was an especially high casualty report coming out of Saigon, in Vietnam, revealing that 150 marines and soldiers had been killed that day in skirmishes with the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet-Cong. The report had solemnly followed the song, and I recall finishing my pie, stepping down from the bar, and barking a loud “Marine Corps!” followed by a guttural “OORAUGH.” My closely cropped hair and military demeanor instantly identified me to the variety of people sitting in the café as a U.S. Marine, a jarhead, sometimes referred to as underpaid, oversexed, teenage killers, as was coined by Eleanor Roosevelt. The reactions I got from the other patrons in the cafe were not what I’d expected. Instead of rousing cheers, such as what met GI’s returning home from the Second World War, I got censuring hateful stares. One woman, a little older than me, gloweringly stood up at her table and said something like,

“How could you condone more killing after listening to that song?” But like water that hastens off a duck’s feathered back, the words she said were meaningless to me. They were repressive and maddening. My mentality couldn’t, at that time, handle any presumption that I was anything less than the sword of God striking vengeance against a heathen communist hoard who was slaughtering my fellow marines. Killing to me was second nature, and I found pleasure in my business.

Yesterday, while dwelling on the words of "The Cruel War," some poignant thoughts went threw my mind as I reflected on the changes which had occurred in me prior to the fall of Saigon in 1975, that had drastically altered my perception of the Vietnam War. Numerous factors went into my social and political transformation. Nothing, though, had more impact on my thoroughly military mentality than a personal de-programming, which had involved an acceptance of the cold hard fact and a disregard for the rabid propaganda forced on me by the Pentagon during boot camp.

If I hadn’t enlisted in the Marine Corps, I would have been drafted shortly after my nineteenth birthday. My lottery number was 27, and I might have ended up in the Army. But I chose to join the Vietnam-era Marine Corps to avenge a friend's tragic death. That was my pressing vengeful goal in life. On arriving at MCRD, San Diego, my entire world began to revolve around learning how to kill men in a variety of ways and to stay alive while doing it. It was ultimately a process of conformity. I had a choice to either adapt to the harsh military regimen and standards imposed by boot camp training, or face reduction by force to the status of a degenerate non-conforming peacenik, which to the Marine Corps was the equivalent of pond scum. Conforming wasn’t any problem for me, as I had already trained hard as an award-winning cadet in the Civil Air Patrol for seven years before enlisting. I knew well the military way of life and had accepted the systematic regimentation that would eventually control every facet of my being. But I saw other recruits in boot camp refusing to conform, and witnessed the physical pain and humiliation they suffered at the hands of cruel and sadistic drill instructors, who I then revered as the epitome of soldiery virtue. As a squad leader, I took delight in adding the extra kick or punch to oddballs in my platoon who were non-performing in their 12 weeks of training. That’s probably the primary reason that, out of the eighty recruits in my platoon, I was chosen as one of the seven privates promoted to private-first-class.

I distinctly remember one night of the two weeks spent at Edson Range, at Camp Pendleton, during marksmanship training. It was a platoon tradition, enforced by the drill instructors, of praying vocally, in unison, each and every night before taps to Smedley Butler, god of war, imploring him to grant an official declaration of war against North Vietnam. That particular night, my senior drill instructor had rousted me out of my rack (bed) shortly after lights-out, ordering me to follow him to the duty hut. There he severely chided me about one of my squad privates who was probably not going to qualify with the M-14 rifle the next day.

A private not qualifying at the range was a severe embarrassment to the platoon commander, an arrogantly proud gunnery sergeant, and his staff of subordinate drill instructors. Just like a cop during a code 3 car chase, my adrenalin was pumping to the max when the drill instructor ordered me to take the private to the head and beat him severely about the body (but not the head or face), in order to motivate him. What resulted is something I would rather forget. Nonetheless, the memory of it is etched indelibly into my psyche as a vivid example of man’s willing and fanatical inhumanity to man.

The most deplorable aspect of the Vietnam-era Marine Corps boot camp, which I condoned as necessary at that time in my life, was Motivation Platoon, a systematically illegal and sadistic methodology designed secretly by the Pentagon for motivating recalcitrant marine recruits. You got sent there if the beatings by your drill instructors and squad leaders didn’t change your attitude. It was a torture compound built securely inside of the two recruit depots, San Diego and Paris Island. At San Diego, it resembled a POW camp, with concertina razor wire topping a perimeter of sixteen-foot concrete walls. If you were sent there, you either came out motivated, insane, or dead. The first of several MP deaths investigated by Congress was that of a retarded recruit from Lufkin, Texas, named McClure, who had refused to fight with pugil-sticks, large over-grown Q-tips used for close combat training. Refusing to fight had resulted in a drill instructor ordering another recruit to beat McClure about the head and shoulders until he collapsed and died from a brain aneurism. If it hadn’t been for McClure’s parents pressing their Congressman for a death investigation, the closely kept secret of the Motivation Platoon might still be a facet of boot camp training.

Now, as I think of the many soldiers and marines dying daily in Iraq and of the movie, Jarhead, which glorifies the death and destruction that occurred during Operation Desert Storm, I recoil in disgust. On hearing one of the actors in that movie dramatize the exaggerated enthusiasm of a fanatical Marine in the line, “I thank God for every blessed moment I have spent here as a Marine,” I thought about what General Omar Bradley had supposedly said to General George S. Patton during World War II. “I do this job because I have been trained to do it. War is only a job to me, though terrible it is. But, George, you love it.”

The young men and women who are experiencing death and despair in Iraq have been programmed by the Pentagon to either accept their killing job as a moral legitimate duty or suffer the harsh consequences of a military reprimand and an ultimate courts-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As standard practice, a soldier or marine refusing to fight and kill in a wartime setting can be summarily executed by firing squad under the UCMJ. Just how many of these executions have unofficially occurred in Iraq, I don’t know. But I know that these executions occurred randomly during the fourteen years of Vietnam, and were falsely reported to the parents of the deceased as deaths from “friendly fire.” There has been no official declaration of war against Iraq by Congress? There wasn’t such a declaration of war at the beginning of Vietnam. The Iraq War did not begin as an official war, in the same way the Second World War was a war. It was, rather, an unjust pre-emptive invasion of a nation-state which did not pose an imminent danger to the United States. So, does the Pentagon have a legal right to execute members of the armed forces who refuse to fight in Iraq? I don’t think so.

Any war is cruel and unjust, but a war, which is fought to protect our homeland, our families, and our freedom, against an aggressive foreign enemy, is a war worth fighting. Nonetheless, if that war, and the death of thousands of warriors and civilians, can be averted diplomatically through compromise, so the opposing sides are equally benefited through the negotiation, let it be so. The only time that war is inevitable is at the moment when we realize that totally surrendering our freedom and way of life is the only option for the sake of peace. This would be unacceptable under any condition, and would justify fighting and dying for a united cause. I sincerely hope that the leaders of the American republic will take time to listen carefully to the words of The Cruel War and realize that unnecessary death in any military conflict is tantamount to legal murder.