S.A.M.
01-11-08, 02:03 PM
Commissioned by Mexican authorities to hunt marauding Apaches, the company of ex-filibusters and convicts under the command of the psychopath John Glanton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton)quickly became intoxicated with gore. They began to exterminate local farmers as well as Indians, and when there were no innocents left to rape and slaughter, they turned upon themselves with shark-like fury.
Many readers have recoiled from the gruesome extremism of McCarthy's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy) imagery: the roasted skulls of tortured captives, necklaces of human ears, an unspeakable tree of dead infants. Others have balked at his unpatriotic emphasis on the genocidal origins of the American West and the book's obvious allusion to search-and-destroy missions à la Vietnam.
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Recently a courageous hometown paper in rustbelt Ohio, the Toledo Blade, tore the wraps off an officially suppressed story of Vietnam-era exterminism that recapitulates "Blood Meridian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy)'' in the most ghastly and unbearable detail.
The reincarnation of Glanton's scalping party was an elite 45-man unit of the 101st Airborne Division known as Tiger Force.
The Blade's intricate reconstruction of its murderous march through the central highlands of Vietnam in summer and fall 1967 needs to be read in full, horrifying detail. Blade reporters interviewed more than 100 American veterans and Vietnamese survivors.
Tiger Force atrocities began with the torture and execution of prisoners in the field, then grew to the routine slaughter of unarmed farmers, elderly people, even small children. As one former sergeant told the Blade, "It didn't matter if they were civilians. If they weren't supposed to be in an area, we shot them. If they didn't understand fear, I taught it to them."
Very early, Tiger Force began scalping its victims (the scalps were dangled from the ends of M-16s) and cutting off their ears as souvenirs. One member, who would later behead an infant, wore the ears as a ghoulish necklace (just like the character Toadvine in "Blood Meridian''), while another mailed them home to his wife. Others kicked out the teeth of dead villagers for their gold fillings.
A former Tiger Force sergeant told reporters that he "killed so many civilians he lost count." The Blade estimates that innocent casualties were in the hundreds. Another veteran, a medic with the unit, recalled 150 unarmed civilians murdered in a single month.
Superior officers, especially the Glanton-like battalion commander Gerald Morse (or "Ghost Rider," as he fancied himself), sponsored the carnage. Orders were given to "shoot everything that moves," and Morse established a body- count quota of 327 (the numerical designation of the battalion) that Tiger Force enthusiastically filled with dead peasants and teenage girls.
Soldiers in other units who complained about these exterminations were ignored or warned to keep silent, while Tiger Force slackers were quickly transferred out. As with Glanton's gang, or, for that matter, Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile extermination squads in the western Ukraine in 1941, atrocity created its own insatiable momentum. Eventually, nothing was unthinkable in the Song Ve Valley.
"A 13-year-old girl's throat was slashed after she was sexually assaulted,
and a young mother was shot to death after soldiers torched her hut. An unarmed teenager was shot in the back after a platoon sergeant ordered the youth to leave a village, and a baby was decapitated so that a soldier could remove a necklace."
Stories about the beheading of the baby spread so widely that the Army was finally forced to conduct a secret inquiry in 1971. The investigation lasted for almost five years and probed 30 alleged Tiger Force war crimes. Evidence was found to support the prosecution of at least 18 members of the platoon.
In the end, however, a half dozen of the most compromised veterans were allowed to resign from the Army, avoiding military indictment, and in 1975 the Pentagon quietly buried the entire investigation.
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As one veteran told the AP, "There was lieutenant screaming like a madman,
'fire on everything, kill 'em all.' . . . Kids, there was kids out there. It didn't matter what it was, 8 to 80, blind, crippled or crazy. They shot them all."
Another ex-soldier was haunted by the memory of a terrified child: "She came running toward us. You should have seen guys trying to kill that little girl. With machine guns."
A reluctant Pentagon inquiry into this Korean version of the Wounded Knee massacre acknowledged that there was a civilian toll but cited very low figures for the dead and then dismissed it as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent in war," despite overwhelming evidence of a deliberate U.S. policy of bombing and strafing refugee columns. "The Bridge at No Gun Ri'' (2001), by the three Pulitzer Prize-winning AP journalists, languishes at near 600,000 on the Amazon sales index.
-------------
Likewise there has been little enduring outrage that Bob Kerrey reigns as president of New York City's once liberal New School University. In 2001, the former Navy SEAL and ex-senator from Nebraska was forced to concede, after years of lies, that the heroic engagement for which he received a Bronze Star in 1969 involved the massacre of a score of unarmed civilians, mainly women and children. "To describe it as an atrocity," he admitted, "is pretty close to being right."
The blue-collar ex-SEAL team member who revealed the truth about the killings at Than Phong under Kerrey's command was publicly excoriated as a drunk and traitor, while powerful Democrats, led by Sens. Max Cleland and John Kerry, both Vietnam veterans, circled the wagons to protect Kerrey from further investigation or possible prosecution. They argued that it was wrong to "blame the warrior instead of the war" and called for a "healing process."
---------------
Why is such history suppressed?
Why is it not front page news? Heavily exposed in the media?
Doesn't history suppressed lead to history repeated?
Link:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/23/INGUL36QMH1.DTL
Many readers have recoiled from the gruesome extremism of McCarthy's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy) imagery: the roasted skulls of tortured captives, necklaces of human ears, an unspeakable tree of dead infants. Others have balked at his unpatriotic emphasis on the genocidal origins of the American West and the book's obvious allusion to search-and-destroy missions à la Vietnam.
-------------
Recently a courageous hometown paper in rustbelt Ohio, the Toledo Blade, tore the wraps off an officially suppressed story of Vietnam-era exterminism that recapitulates "Blood Meridian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy)'' in the most ghastly and unbearable detail.
The reincarnation of Glanton's scalping party was an elite 45-man unit of the 101st Airborne Division known as Tiger Force.
The Blade's intricate reconstruction of its murderous march through the central highlands of Vietnam in summer and fall 1967 needs to be read in full, horrifying detail. Blade reporters interviewed more than 100 American veterans and Vietnamese survivors.
Tiger Force atrocities began with the torture and execution of prisoners in the field, then grew to the routine slaughter of unarmed farmers, elderly people, even small children. As one former sergeant told the Blade, "It didn't matter if they were civilians. If they weren't supposed to be in an area, we shot them. If they didn't understand fear, I taught it to them."
Very early, Tiger Force began scalping its victims (the scalps were dangled from the ends of M-16s) and cutting off their ears as souvenirs. One member, who would later behead an infant, wore the ears as a ghoulish necklace (just like the character Toadvine in "Blood Meridian''), while another mailed them home to his wife. Others kicked out the teeth of dead villagers for their gold fillings.
A former Tiger Force sergeant told reporters that he "killed so many civilians he lost count." The Blade estimates that innocent casualties were in the hundreds. Another veteran, a medic with the unit, recalled 150 unarmed civilians murdered in a single month.
Superior officers, especially the Glanton-like battalion commander Gerald Morse (or "Ghost Rider," as he fancied himself), sponsored the carnage. Orders were given to "shoot everything that moves," and Morse established a body- count quota of 327 (the numerical designation of the battalion) that Tiger Force enthusiastically filled with dead peasants and teenage girls.
Soldiers in other units who complained about these exterminations were ignored or warned to keep silent, while Tiger Force slackers were quickly transferred out. As with Glanton's gang, or, for that matter, Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile extermination squads in the western Ukraine in 1941, atrocity created its own insatiable momentum. Eventually, nothing was unthinkable in the Song Ve Valley.
"A 13-year-old girl's throat was slashed after she was sexually assaulted,
and a young mother was shot to death after soldiers torched her hut. An unarmed teenager was shot in the back after a platoon sergeant ordered the youth to leave a village, and a baby was decapitated so that a soldier could remove a necklace."
Stories about the beheading of the baby spread so widely that the Army was finally forced to conduct a secret inquiry in 1971. The investigation lasted for almost five years and probed 30 alleged Tiger Force war crimes. Evidence was found to support the prosecution of at least 18 members of the platoon.
In the end, however, a half dozen of the most compromised veterans were allowed to resign from the Army, avoiding military indictment, and in 1975 the Pentagon quietly buried the entire investigation.
-------------
As one veteran told the AP, "There was lieutenant screaming like a madman,
'fire on everything, kill 'em all.' . . . Kids, there was kids out there. It didn't matter what it was, 8 to 80, blind, crippled or crazy. They shot them all."
Another ex-soldier was haunted by the memory of a terrified child: "She came running toward us. You should have seen guys trying to kill that little girl. With machine guns."
A reluctant Pentagon inquiry into this Korean version of the Wounded Knee massacre acknowledged that there was a civilian toll but cited very low figures for the dead and then dismissed it as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent in war," despite overwhelming evidence of a deliberate U.S. policy of bombing and strafing refugee columns. "The Bridge at No Gun Ri'' (2001), by the three Pulitzer Prize-winning AP journalists, languishes at near 600,000 on the Amazon sales index.
-------------
Likewise there has been little enduring outrage that Bob Kerrey reigns as president of New York City's once liberal New School University. In 2001, the former Navy SEAL and ex-senator from Nebraska was forced to concede, after years of lies, that the heroic engagement for which he received a Bronze Star in 1969 involved the massacre of a score of unarmed civilians, mainly women and children. "To describe it as an atrocity," he admitted, "is pretty close to being right."
The blue-collar ex-SEAL team member who revealed the truth about the killings at Than Phong under Kerrey's command was publicly excoriated as a drunk and traitor, while powerful Democrats, led by Sens. Max Cleland and John Kerry, both Vietnam veterans, circled the wagons to protect Kerrey from further investigation or possible prosecution. They argued that it was wrong to "blame the warrior instead of the war" and called for a "healing process."
---------------
Why is such history suppressed?
Why is it not front page news? Heavily exposed in the media?
Doesn't history suppressed lead to history repeated?
Link:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/23/INGUL36QMH1.DTL