You Hate to Think About it All, But Trust me, Not Thinking About it is Worse
Before I left on my trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, I called my family. First my sister. Then my parents. We talked for a long time, discussed my flight itinerary, said I love you and meant it. Thinking back to those phone calls during my time in Vietnam and Cambodia, a deeply disturbing question continually pushed itself to the forefront of my mind. Would someone, out there in the world, be willing to kill me and the people I love?
I hate to imagine it, but I think before the act of taking away my life, the person who wanted to kill me would probably cite some sort of philosophy, ideology, religion, politics, or belief about the world. They would act as if any of it mattered to me as I stared at their gun. It is such a disturbing thought experiment that I, quite frankly, did not want to think about it, let alone write and make you think about it. It’s not a likable experience to ruminate on the fact that one human being is capable of killing another human being, but we need to acknowledge something about that. It happens whether you like thinking about it or not.
Not only does it happen out in the world, it also happens in your world, the very country you’re living in. Governments make decisions about this stuff all the time. It’s really messy because, whether they get involved or not, they’re still being forced to make a decision. Kill or not kill. Save lives or not save lives. Every action determines something, whether intentional or unintentional. There’re layers to all of this. Even with that acknowledgement of moral complexity, there’s still wrong, of course. Agonizing, writhing, unimaginable wrong.
I witnessed its consequences while I was on my trip. I remember, at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, that I couldn’t keep a knot from welling up in my throat or spare myself from the creeping numbness in my hands. My feet felt shaky. Physically and emotionally, it felt unbearable because of the things that I was seeing. On the walls, there were pictures of war, photos of people killing each other in the most brutal, body-destroying sort of ways.
How do we, as individuals or societies, get to a point where we feel like that’s acceptable? Well, we feel like we have to, just sort of like how the person holding the gun towards me feels like they have to for any given reason.
These reasons don’t happen suddenly. They build over time. We often only see war or violence right when it starts, but that’s because the steps leading to conflict are often unnoticed, due to their nuanced nature. This is certainly true for Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh was trying to find a way to reunify the northern and southern regions of his country after hundreds of years of occupation, invasion, and political upheaval. You’ll be surprised to know that Ho Chi Minh (1945) felt a certain kinship with the U.S. In one of his speeches, he said, “all men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness (p.1)," when citing the need for his country to throw off the tyrannical nature of European control in his country. And he was absolutely right too. The Vietnamese people were being abused.
Not only did Ho Chi Minh quote the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he also wrote to President Truman asking for support. He said, “French population and troops are making active preparations for a coup de main in Hanoi and for military aggression, I therefore most earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence (Ho, 1946, p. 1).”
We didn’t offer support though1. We had political obligations elsewhere. Vietnam had to look for other sources of support, so they went to Russia and China and, at that point, we became rivals ideologically. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that we had been peaceful nations cooperating with each other. Ho Chi Minh’s northern Vietnam were “evil” and the capitalist, American-affiliated South Vietnam were “good.” At least, that’s what we were told and understood as the American public.
We didn’t have the finer details. We didn’t know the years of abuse that had led to that point, the trauma and the desperation that Vietnam had and was suffering. Thinking about those circumstances, you start to wonder why we had to kill each other, don’t you? You start to wonder if our reason for killing was good enough, especially in the context that Vietnam was attempting to do the exact same thing America had done in its early history. Our need to kill never really added up when you think about the Vietnam War in that context.
It certainly didn’t for me when I read a placard at the museum that was written in black letters. Really black letters. It felt blacker than any of the other placards in that museum, in fact. I can’t remember the exact wording. I was most likely in shock at this point, if I’m being honest. To paraphrase, it said, “Vietnam had fought hundreds of years of war, but the U.S. fought with unusual cruelty.”
And we really did, I can attest. Burnt corpses. Children pleading with American G.I.’s not to shoot their parents. Chemicals sprayed across Vietnam’s beautiful landscapes, turning it all into crumbling messes of dead trees and rotting animals. War crimes. We committed absolute war crimes against Vietnam.
Consider the massacre at My Lai. Different numbers have been reported from the Son Tinh district, but it’s somewhere between 300 and 500 people that were brutally murdered by American soldiers. Not only were they brutally murdered, but the entire incident was covered up by the soldiers responsible for the killing. Hundreds upon hundreds of bodies of men, women, and children, never reported. The public was told that we won a victory there, that the Viet Cong had been wiped out in that area. It was all a lie (Cook, 2018).
Rape. Mutilation. Target practice. These are all words used in the summary of that event. Why did it have to happen? That’s the thing about violence. It doesn’t. It doesn’t have to happen. I think that’s why it feels so revolting to us because, at its core, war is waged because we are putting resources or principles above the value of a human life, potential, and experience. And, when we place those things above human life, we begin to believe that we can start calling places we affiliate with the Viet Cong, “Pinkville,” instead of Son Tinh. We take an entire culture, full of vibrant, bright people, all of whom have family, friends, feelings, and desires for the life, and we stuff them into a slur, like “gook.”
Each of us has the potential of dehumanizing each other. We can turn each other into objects used to justify our own actions. Never have I seen a more shocking example of this than when I had the opportunity to visit Tuol Sleng, the genocide museum, in Cambodia. There, the Khmer Rouge turned evil into a meticulous, systemized operation. S-21, what the museum was before it became a memorial, was a station created by the Khmer Rouge. It was used to find out the identities of spies and Western sympathizers who would betray them. Most of the people there were innocent, but after continual weeks and months of brutal torture, they would confess to imaginary crimes and affiliations. They then, upon more torture, would give up the names of their family and neighbors.
Their suffering was not just physical, but mental and emotional, as their very dignity as a human being was intentionally, even surgically targeted. Their names were blotted out. Their identity became a number. One record recounted the story of a prisoner who died there and how his official S-21 record read, “It did not eat rice because it wanted to die.”
We cannot allow ourselves to turn each other into objects to use. We cannot use each other to shove our pain or anger at, we can use each other as vehicles for our own objectives. We cannot allow the objectification of each other as human beings.
Because we’ve all done it. That’s the worst part of all of this. Individuals. Societies. We’ve all done it. When America went into Vietnam, we shouted our usual pro-democratic stances and ideals about rights and freedoms and then we completely coated a land in a chemical that caused fishes’ stomachs to become hollow, trees to wither from the inside out, and genetically mutilated parents and their children. Our principles become absolutely useless to us when we used them to objectify a community who needed them.
It goes back to my analogy of the killer with his gun, standing over me, spouting off words and ideas that don’t mean anything to me if I can’t continue to be alive, if I can’t continue to be me.
It makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Because at this point, what I’m hoping for you, as the reader, is that you’re wondering if you’ve ever been the one staring at the gun or the one who has been talking as you’ve held the gun.
That little blank space, where we’re not sure who we are in that relationship, is our inability to empathize. If we don’t know the power dynamics that exist in the world, the context of who we’re speaking with and how we’re engaging with them, we have dissociated too far into our own comfort and world view. We’ve objectified others. It’s why I wanted to write this article so badly and to describe all of these really hard things.
Because it is really hard to say things like, “America secretly bombed Cambodia in an effort to protect the world from what they perceived as the threat of communism, which in turn opened the door for the Khmer Rouge, a communist authoritarian regime, to take power due to the lack of infrastructure. This in turn led to one of the most gruesome and depraved acts witnessed by history, the Cambodian Genocide” (A. & O., 2022). But when I take the responsibility to say that, suddenly I drop the metaphorical gun. I stop dissociating from the feelings and ideas of others. I can start noticing other guns that are being held and maybe I can help other people drop theirs so that we can start talking to each other instead of at each other.
You hate to think about it all, but trust me, not thinking about it is worse. If we don’t think about it, then cycles repeat. We all want good things, but good only happens if we can recognize what went wrong.
This engagement of emotion can become an incredible catalyst for preventing violence. You’ve probably heard that human beings, in order to kill, have to have a certain level of dissociation; they have to objectify them. So, if war is run by not feeling anything at all, perhaps the cure for such a persistent illness is to become more emotionally aware.
And, actually, there’s records of that in the Vietnam and Cambodian Genocide as well. People who chose not to dehumanize each other. Individual acts of redemption that stood in the overwhelming face of wrong and simply said, “No. I won’t.” Major Hugh Thompson was a helicopter pilot who personally stood in the way of soldiers trying to reach more Vietnamese to kill during the My Lai Massacre. Not only did he record descriptions of the event that were used later on to know what actually happened, he and other pilots personally escorted Vietnamese victims to safety, all in the face of American soldiers that, no doubt, raged in the face of his moral stance (Sof, 2022, p.1).
We all have to be that courageous, to act calmly in the face of raging guns, to be peaceful in the middle of wars. We must continue to see each other as human, even those sides that seem completely and totally opposite of us. Listening and sitting. Hearing stories instead of assuming them. Finding out the context of lives. Understanding that society is a constant exchange of ideologies, traditions, opinions, thoughts, and power dynamics.
And what if this exchange was something that was sought after instead of squashed out. Imagine societies becoming places of collaboration instead of competition, where ideas or beliefs and ways of living were welcomed as perspectives instead of threats. I think, so often, the very things we fear in each other are the very connections we are craving as people suffering from our own dissociative emotional states.
For example, I know thinking about these ugly parts of history is hard, no matter your background. Processing difficult issues, like violence and injustice, is tiring and discouraging. However, our connection is found in our hope for the future as we move forward from these circumstances however we can.
When we acknowledge past mistakes, we free ourselves from them. They don’t keep us shackled emotionally. That freed up emotional space allows us to create new things to fill ourselves with, new things like connections with human beings, compassionate policies, and an understanding of different perspectives, even if you don’t share those perspectives. It makes the future a place where we can grow together, instead of a place where we’re growing apart.
It’s something we can all do for ourselves and for each other. Things like the Vietnamese War and Cambodian Genocide can often feel inevitable or too big to face. When we break down the structures that support war and violence, we can make even the most inevitable of destruction become something we deescalate together, united in all our differences.
References:
A., R., & O., E. (Eds.). (n.d.). Nixon's Fatal Decision. https://www.cambodiabombing.org/about-us. Retrieved August 30, 2022, from https://www.cambodiabombing.org/introduction
Cook, A. (2018, October 9). Investigation into the My Lai Massacre, 1968. StMU Research Scholars. Retrieved August 30, 2022, from https://stmuscholars.org/investigation-into-the-my-lai-massacre-1968/
Ho, M. C. (1945, September 2). Ho Chi Minh: "All men are created equal", Declaration of Independence. Speakola. Retrieved August 30, 2022, from https://kdhist.sitehost.iu.edu/ H105-documents-web/week16/Minh1945.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CAll%20men%20are%20created%20equal,States%20of%20America%20in%201776.
Ho, M. C. (1946, February 26). Letter from Ho Chi Minh to President Harry Truman Asking for Intervention, February 28, 1946. State Historical Society of Iowa. Retrieved August 30, 2022, from https://iowaculture.gov/history/education/educator-resources/primary-source-sets/cold-war-vietnam/letter-ho-chi-minh-to
Sof, E. (2022, April 15). Hugh Thompson: The Forgotten Hero of My Lai. Retrieved August 30, 2022, from https://special-ops.org/hugh-thompson-the-forgotten-hero-of-my-lai/
There was a period of time in which the United States worked clandestinely with Ho Chi Minh against Japan during World War II. For more information see, for example, The OSS and Ho Ch Minh: Unexpected Alllies in the War with Japan by Dixee Bartholamew-Feis, University of Kansas Press, 2006.