Part 1

Not long afterward, there was that incident at My Lai -- a massacre of men, women and children -- which had been covered up for over a year before the word got out. I may have heard references to it from Cronkhite when the story broke, but didn't think much about it until I saw the poster with a picture of a massacre. I think I may have intuited the meaning of the poster, but my young consciousness (I was only eight when the word got out) was unable to deal with it until I had that explained to me also. American soldiers were killing civilians.

What the hell? I had ideas about how wars were fought: soldiers shooting at each other, or charging each other with broadswords, or whatever. But it always involved soldiers, not the regular people like me. I started asking myself questions that many others, older than I, were asking: What were we doing over there?

Oh, yeah. We were killing communist insurgents left over from 1954. That explains it. After the U.S. backed the military coup which assassinated President Diem in November of 1963, the communists started getting a little too big for their britches. In the mind of our leaders, the reunification of Vietnam under a communist government would have been a threat to the U.S., so they sent in troops.

That's the nutshell version of how we got into the middle of someone else's conflict. Of course from our point of view, it wasn't a war exactly -- since it takes an act of Congress to have one of those. As far as I have since determined, a relatively unknown alchemical process was implemented, so that our leaders could name our involvement in Southeast Asia 'Police Action' instead of 'War'. This presumably made the dead soldiers that came back not smell so bad.

Parenthetically…
Make a note that the words we hear, and in turn use ourselves, greatly influence our perception. Moses used a rod while Merlin used a wand. That makes the tools different in the eyes of most people. If two events have exactly the same cause and produces the same effect, there is a perception that they are different -- if one is referred to as a miracle, and the other magic. Calling one group of trained people 'soldiers' and another group 'peacekeeping troops' doesn't necessarily make them different. However, it is often politically easier to send peacekeepers into a dangerous situation than soldiers.

Noncombatants
Wars are nasty by definition, but Southeast Asia was a particularly loathsome situation for American troops. Most Americans are used to the idea, of least, of killing the bad guys, but it wasn't always clear who the actual enemy was. In a guerrilla war, the opposition doesn't necessarily (or even usually) wear uniforms, march in rank and file, or have well-established positions. They looked like, and lived among, the rest of the population. Sometimes by negligence, sometimes by design, civilians died.

The accidental death of civilians in battle has become a common occurrence in the world that has been left to us. This tragedy does not have a long-standing tradition behind it, as a person might assume. In fact, there are people alive today that remember when the United States approached adopting a policy that the death of civilians should be carefully avoided by civilized nations. Under this policy, killing noncombatants would have been viewed as the criminal behavior of savages and rogue nations.

Even before this opportunity was presented to our government to support this policy, war was generally waged between the armies of nations -- not by one army against innocent, untrained noncombatant men, women and children. The U.S. -- along with other allegedly civilized nations -- successfully began to ignore this venerable old guideline of war, as a direct result of a modification of perception.