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The Many Faces of JK
2004-05-05 4:59 p.m.

A few months ago, I was far from John Kerry's biggest fan. I am still an unrepentant Dean supporter, and shrugged when he lost the nomination, reluctantly coming to terms with the "anyone but Bush" song all of my friends were singing. However, in the wake of these reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse, some of what Kerry has been discussing (forced to defend himself, feh) regarding Viet Nam, his role as both soldier and post-home anti-war protester, and the chaotic confusion that is inevitable during war time has dramatically changed my opinion.

True, I don't exactly need a tangible reason to like Kerry - he's pro-choice and has a good environmental record, so he's got my vote already. However, being so honest about the undefinable and indescribable fragmented state of emotions combat veterans return home with tells me a couple of things: the man is expressive enough to put into words what many people can't, and the man has enough faith in the intelligence of his fellow citizens to understand he doesn't have to rely on dumbed-down, one sided, or oversimplified terms like "axis of evil".

In simpler terms: I'm sick to death of this G.I. Joe bullshit that the media and politicians seem to be so fond of. Enough with Pearl Harbor, enough with Ghost Soldiers, enough with Heaven and Earth and Rambo. How quickly we seem to forget what turmoil must be involved in killing people and knowing that you're causing mass pain and suffering, however you might have felt about your country's reasons for going to war. How difficult must it be to learn your whole life that killing is wrong - a moral and federal crime - and then be encouraged to kill? How impossible must it be to be raised as a human, people doing their best to foster empathy and caring in you, and then be trained as a soldier, to just follow orders and abandon your humanity, your empathy, for your own survival? How destructive to your sense of balance must it be to find yourself in a kill or be killed situation?

"I wonder how many people I killed," Willard, the narrator in Apocalypse Now, asks again and again. Far from the glory pics that preceded them, films like AN and Deerhunter do their best to expose the abstract, uncomfortable, and confusing psychology that results from the combat zone. Many of the characters in these films portray that "dangerous" notion that perhaps soldiers struggle with killing. Perhaps they do not instinctively high-five each other after blowing things up. Perhaps it starts to get fuzzy who the goodies and baddies are after some time.

But have these films done enough to bring those questions into a contemporary dialogue? Main stream films that read like patriotic propaganda still dominate our theaters and television screens. We still seem to have this country-western song mentality when it comes to war and our troops; we still play the hero game and create almost no other categories, make almost no other allowances for the psychological damage and conflict millions of men and women face, have faced, and will face.

Enter John Kerry, age 28, making a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971.

He questioned, somewhat, the nature and result of a "war-crimes" hearing, explaining what he and fellow soldiers had seen during their tour:

"These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...[Those testifying at the hearing] relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

Did we catch that bit about "what their country made them do?" I do not believe that John Kerry finds fundamental flaws in the framework or fabric of our country. I wish he did - cause I do. However, I do think he realizes that something must be revealed to the American public:

WAR IS UGLY

It is nasty, it is brutal, it is senseless, and it is destructive to the human psyche. It is confusing. It is your country telling you destroy, destroy, destroy, by any and all means necessary, but then punishing you at home via trial for being "inhumane". How does one kill humanely?

War is not a movie-version of Ben Affleck looking as pristine and beautiful after the bombing of the USS Arizona as he did the day before. It is not the noble American, coming to rescue the poor oppressed starving citizen of some other country. The mock-shock at what the US soldiers have been accused of doing to Iraqi POWs really burned me. Of course they tortured them; they've been hearing for YEARS now from their own president that Iraqi soldiers and terrorists are EVIL-DOERS, that they are Satan spawn. Why wouldn't these soldiers, these American men and women think they have a right or even a moral obligation to torture these POWs?

Can you see how this works? How we reduce the opposing side to mythical evil creations, to animals, but then insist they be treated humanely? How are soldiers supposed to muddle through those conflicting commands? If soldiers are systematically de-sensitized, taught to let go of those empathetic emotions that might keep them from disobeying a direct order (like to fire at will), why is it a surprise that such "war-crimes" occur?

Somewhere in that combat zone, it seems, it's easy to forget things like perspective, perception, and propaganda. It's difficult to remember that good and evil are mythical concepts, they're glittering terms used to sway a doe-eyed American public and swing elections.

Interestingly enough, though, coverage of these American soldiers' abuse is unraveling the G.I. Joe bit; is suddenly revealing that not everything is wrapped up in as neat a package as we'd all like to think. Kerry knows that too, and is somehow so much better at presenting that to the public than I could ever be, even at 28. He continued that day in his testimony:

"We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.... In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American."

Sounds all too frighteningly familiar. A resistant people, an imposed notion of freedom, torture as means to that freedom - it's no wonder that everyone and everything is so confusing.

And to come home - forget that - to survive and live through the next THIRTY YEARS and then be reprimanded for not providing concrete enough answers to questions about Viet Nam; it's just disgusting.

Echoing back much of what he said here, Kerry has been carefully choosing his words about our current "conflict" and the one in which he served, Viet Nam. His ability to so eloquently tell everyone to F- off about it all has impressed me. His reminders about what a confusing time it was and must be, about horrors that can't even begin to be covered through words, have shown me that he's not only self-aware, but alert to the subversive elements that dominate our collective psyche. That he can look a reporter straight in the eye after being questioned about his record, whether or not he threw out his medal, or what his stance was once home and say "I was a young man in a confusing time, I saw things that no human should see" tells me that he's for real about it all.

Yep, that's some maaaaaad street cred.

I'm pooped, and going to mom's to mull this over.

xoxo