Vietnam and the “Whites as Cancer” Myth
By • 3/27/07 |
Our last column, “Utopia and its Scapegoats,” showed how the 1960s New Left portrayed whites as a uniquely power-hungry and greedy race that was to blame for the world’s suffering. While the New Left was a small, radical movement, the “whites as cancer” myth would entrench itself in the American psyche over the next 40 years. One of the primary vehicles by which the New Left’s ideas entered the mainstream was the portrayal of the Vietnam War in the American media.
Two lies about Vietnam that had their origin in the New Left have been repeated to us so often that they have become conventional wisdom: the first is that American soldiers regularly committed war crimes against the Vietnamese that were covered up, and the second is that the burden of fighting the war fell disproportionately on American minorities. Vietnam veteran B. G. Burkett revealed both of these pieces of conventional wisdom to be entirely unfounded in his 1998 book Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History.
American soldiers did commit some genuine war crimes in Vietnam—the My Lai massacre was the worst. However, there is every reason to believe that such events were rare and that the US military tracked down and punished war criminals.
The Left fostered the myth of hidden war crimes as part of its campaign to portray America a racist state. In 1970, the leftist group Vietnam Veterans Against the War sponsored the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit to gather testimony from soldiers about war crimes. The opening statement made clear the goals of the group:
We went to preserve the peace and our testimony will show that we have set all of Indochina aflame. We went to defend the Vietnamese people and our testimony will show that we are committing genocide against them. We went to fight for freedom and our testimony will show that we have turned Vietnam into a series of concentration camps.
We went to guarantee the right of self-determination to the people of South Vietnam and our testimony will show that we are forcing a corrupt and dictatorial government upon them. We went to work toward the brotherhood of man and our testimony will show that our strategy and tactics are permeated with racism. We went to protect America and our testimony will show why our country is being torn apart by what we are doing in Vietnam.
Though 109 soldiers testified about crimes they had committed or witnessed, hard evidence of their claims was non-existent. After the hearings were over, the Naval Investigative Service contacted the men in order to determine whether their claims had merit. However, many of the speakers refused to be interviewed. Indeed, one of the men contacted said that the VVAW leadership had instructed them not to cooperate with investigators. The testimony of one black veteran who did tell his story shows the general quality of these men’s testimony. He said Vietnam was “one huge atrocity” and a “racist plot.” However, he had no details about actual crimes committed in Vietnam and admitted his testimony had been assisted by a member of the Nation of Islam.
The most remarkable finding of the NSI investigation, however, was that many of the veterans who supposedly had testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation had never in fact been there. Rather, anti-war activists had assumed the names of real veterans1.
By looking up the military records of veterans who claimed that they had committed or witnessed atrocities, Burkett and others established that most of the stories were hoaxes; indeed, many of the “veterans” themselves were unbalanced people who had never been in Vietnam and were eager to find any audience for their delusions. For example, one “veteran” named Michael Schneider, who was featured in the 1970 anti-war book Conversations with Americans claimed that he had shot three peasants in cold blood in Vietnam, and had been ordered to attach wires to a man’s testicles and to kill prisoners. However, subsequent investigation revealed that the man had never been in Vietnam. He had served in the US army in Europe, deserted, and been arrested in Oklahoma on a murder charge2.
One would think that this record would be enough to consign the myth of unreported atrocities to oblivion. However, that would be to underestimate the power of the “whites as cancer” myth, which never let reality or reason stand in its way. In 1988, CBS News aired a documentary on Vietnam veterans who maintained they had committed terrible war crimes in Vietnam. One, named Steve Southards, said that he had been ordered to by his commanding officers to kill the residents of a Vietnamese village and leave Chinese and North Vietnamese literature among the mutilated corpses so the US could blame the atrocity on the enemy. Another, Terry L. Bradley, claimed to have skinned alive up to fifty Vietnamese, including women and babies, and stacked their mangled bodies in heaps3.
Burkett obtained the military records of the six men interviewed in the documentary and found that the stories of at least five of them were bogus. Southards’ story was implausible on its very face: he had claimed to be a 16-year-old Navy SEAL at the time when he had committed his atrocity. The minimum enlistment age for the armed forces is 17, and it takes two years of training to become a SEAL. When Burkett managed to track down Southards’ military record, it turned out that he had not been a SEAL at all, nor had he seen combat. Rather, he had been an “internal communications repairman” who had been assigned to rear area bases4.
Bradley’s story also did not check out: he had not been a “fighting sergeant,” as he had claimed in the documentary. Rather, he was an ammunition handler—someone who is responsible for assuring the proper storage and disposal of ammunition—and was thus unlikely to have seen much, if any, combat. There was no record of any killings such as he had described in the area of operations of the division to which he belonged. Finally, it turned out that Bradley had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, an illness which had begun before he was sent to Vietnam5.
Another myth of the Vietnam War is that blacks suffered a disproportionate share of fatalities because the government drafted them in large numbers. This claim was popularized by black author Wallace Terry in the 1984 book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. Terry asserts that a full 23 percent of fatalities in Vietnam were blacks. Again, the news media showed themselves credulous: in 1986, the public television show Frontline did a segment on Terry’s book. The myth that America used blacks as cannon fodder has been so often repeated that people take it for granted. During his effort to erect a memorial for the Vietnam dead, Burkett came across a black bureaucrat who said, “This is a worthy project. Everybody knows that the majority of those killed were poor black kids.”6
In fact, blacks were underrepresented in the war’s casualties: 13.5 percent of draft-aged males were black during the period of the war, but blacks made up only 12.5 percent of those killed in action. Furthermore, 75 percent of black soldiers in Vietnam were volunteers7.
If Terry’s statistics are bad, the stories of black Vietnam vets recorded in his “oral history” are even worse. The war provided fertile ground for the black imagination, which, as we know from the examples of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum, abounds in fantasies of mistreatment at the hands of whites. One example is Lawrence Kirkland, on whose story the film Dead Presidents was based. Kirkland recites the usual litany of horrors: he had witnessed fellow soldiers push Vietnamese prisoners out of helicopters and mutilate corpses. All this he blamed on the racism inculcated by the military. In boot camp, he says:
Right away they told us not to call them Vietnamese. Call everybody gooks, dinks.
Then they told us when you go over in Vietnam, you gonna be face to face with Charlie, the Viet Cong. They were like animals, or something other than human. They ain’t have no regard for life. They’d blow up little babies just to kill one GI. They wouldn’t allow you to talk about them as if they were people. They told us they’re not to be treated with any type of mercy or apprehension. That’s what they engraved into you. That killer instinct. Just go away and do destruction.
Kirkland turned to a life of crime after he returned to the US, a fact that he blamed on the horrors of war. But nothing in Kirkland’s record indicates he ever saw combat; in fact, he had a position as a truck driver in a headquarters company in Vietnam8.
If scholars like Burkett can look up the military records of the men who told these stories, it would not have been difficult for the well-staffed organizations that produce CBS News or Frontline to do so. These distortions of the Vietnam War reveal a deep desire on the part of the media elites to believe that the American government and American culture naturally produce racist psychopaths. And it is not the news media alone that are guilty: a slew of movies on Vietnam, such as Apocalypse Now, Casualties of War, Full Metal Jacket, and Platoon, have reinforced this view of the war. It is due to this desire that the figure of the American “baby-killer” soldier was transformed from the fantasy of a fringe movement into conventional wisdom.
- B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (Dallas: Verity Press, 1998), pp. 133-34. ↑
- Ibid., p. 132. ↑
- Ibid., pp. 87-91. ↑
- Ibid., p. 93. ↑
- Ibid., p. 94-95. ↑
- Ibid., p. 82. ↑
- Ibid., p. 454. ↑
- Ibid., p. 455-56. ↑
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Irish,
Here’s the way out of your dilemma: the media’s stereotypes are all equally false! Blacks on TV are doctors and lawyers who are perfectly capable of performing at the same level as whites—the implication is that the only thing holding back blacks as a group is racism. Muslims on TV are pious people who are terribly misunderstood by America.
As you mention, Burkett’s book shows that the stereotype of Vietnam vets as drop-out bum drug addicts is false. Vietnam vets have been less likely to be unemployed than the average American man and no more likely to be prisoners or drug-addicts.
Realist,
Don’t forget that almost the only places you’ll ever see black judges are the Supreme Court, movies, and TV. The latter two are also the primary hang-out of black bosses, principals, fire/police chiefs, professors, and executives, and the exclusive domain of black presidents. (NB: I am a professor, and have met exactly zero black professors in my fields of specialization. Yes, I’m including international conferences with hundreds of participants.)
I also find the TV/movie presence of blacks among groups of whites, particularly small-town whites, to be jarring. It does not comport with reality.
The Vietnam war killed between 3-4 million Vietnamese civilians. Of course many of these civilians were killed by Communist forces. Even if its 60/40, with the American forces and their allies committing 40% of 3.5 million, thats 1.4 million civilian people. That is on top of 1 million soldiers killed. We dont know how many rapes and assualts were committed. We know millions more were injured. I personally know of more then a few instances of a young prostitute being stabbed to death and disposed of in a barrel, A soldier who raped and then killed a girl was called a double veteran, of G.I.s purposefully throwing a truck into reverse during unloading and gunning the engine, thereby crushing scores of Vietnamese men and women working to unload the shipments and then speeding away as the driver laughed. He had said watch this before reversing. I also know of heads and ears being cut-off and testicles smashed, electrical torture and sexual misconduct. Also stakes being shoved up womens vaginas and random revenge killing. These things happened. Not by all or even most, but they happened. This is a war where there was not always much accountability in terms of these kinds of things. Bob Kerrey’s SEAL team knifed to death 3 kids and their grandparents. This is how operations went. Anyone was fair game. And you can blame all that misery on the war itself that perhaps not even nessisary. We upset the whole region. Hell we are still killing their through agent orange and left over munitions. Those people never did a damn thing to us.
We owe that idea that Whites are the «cancer of humanity» to lesbian Jewish American writer Susan Sonntag.
Actually, Whites have often been on the receiving end, when it came to mistreatment and violence between the races.
That idea of Whites being uniquely evil, is a bad joke!
Did Susan Sontag hear about what Japanese soldiers, scientists and medical doctors did to Chinese prisoners, during World war II ? I’ve read stories about vivisection, and testing different kinds of chemical and biological warfare, among a few horrifying things…
The White race is actually the only race that consistently did things, throughout history, to make the entire world a more civilized place!
I’ve had had it with those evil leftist lies!
I’m a little torn on this issue. I appreciate Burkett’s work, and as the son and nephew of Vietnam veterans, I have long been infuriated by the media’s campaign against them. First the media portrayed Viet vets as cruel monsters, willing executors of an unust war. However, the media then realized the profound respect the military commands in the public at large, and sensing the patriotic backlash against this campaign, and the “baby killer” spitting incidents it caused, changed its tune. Now Viet vets were pathetic, emasculated victims, sobbing on camera, no longer responsible for their past actions, shambling, shuffling wrecks to be pitied instead of feared.
However, as race realists, we typically argue that stereotypes typically reflect reality because they come about from real people interacting with each other over time. As a result, a stereotype about a group is likely true, or likely to be more true about that group than about other comparable groups or the population at large. When, therefore, I complain about this stereotype as being unfair, untrue, or exagerrated, I sound, at least to myself, and perhaps to others, as a special pleader, undermining my own credibility when I defend stereotypes of blacks as less intelligent or more violent, or of Muslims/Arabs as being terrorists, and deny that these reputations were slapped on blameless groups by some evil white conspiracy. It’s hard to complain about a concerted distortion by the media and the popular culture and perception in such circumstances.
What we can point to is a core of truth. McNamara’s “Project 100,000” pushed substandard, low-IQ men into the military, and especially into combat, whom the armed forces would have rejected had they had their way. I suspect the vast majority of what abuses did occur in Vietnam can be laid directly at the feet of those men, and more importantly, of the social experimenters and liars such as McNamara who put them there.
That would in no way necessarily contradict Burkett’s research showing that social statistics for Vietnam vets exceed that of the average population.
Finally, that “Winter Soldier” label was exactly wrong. It is of course a reference to Thomas Paine’s condemnation of “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots”, people who stick with their country in its struggle only when doing so is easy and popular. The “Winter Soldiers” undermined public support for victory when the war became long and difficult; they stabbed their country in the back when it became fashionable and rewarding to do so. Calling themselves “Winter Soldiers” neatly encapsulated their fundamental mendacity.