I read the Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement, this took place during the testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during April 23, 1971. This was quite tough to read. We are always brought up as America is the defender of the brave, and always fights for what is right, but what was right in the Vietnam War? For Americans, we have always have had a sense of pride in our country, but when men come back and tell their dastardly stories about what they did in-country, for example they spoke of "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... shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks" (2). When a loyal American reads this they lose their belief system of what they hold is right, they start to question the government as a whole. If the government is allowing me to do this diabolical things across the world, what else are they allowing other Americans do? The culture and the value system's are greatly shaken when Americans here these stories of TERROR and evil.
During the same time I picked a the My Lai 4 Story for CNN's Vietnam echos of war, this tells us that a: "Free-lance journalist Seymour Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for helping to break the story of the My Lai massacre, in which Calley led a division of U.S. troops in the murder of an estimated 500 Vietnamese civilians at the villiage of Son My"(1). This text was chosen to reiterate how unethical and unmoral American's troops actions are over-sees.
I particularly wrote about how American civilians were affected by hearing about this cruelty that has taken place millions of miles away from American soil, because if Americans were this bad about what happen from hearing second hand accounts of the war, can you imagine how terrified and tormented the Vietnamese people, who witnessed it on a first hand account. The American troops and planes completely destroyed everything in Vietnam, we destroyed people, animals, and even most of their culture. I can only guess how many stories that have been passed down and passed down to be whipped out by a white man with an m-16.
These stories completely reminds me of Rat Kiley when he, " He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back... The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn't a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo" (O'Brien 78). This just shows how immoral and evil these troops are. They do not feel anymore they are lethargic when it comes to feeling the difference between what is right and what wrong. I can't imagine how the Vietnamese society was tortured, maybe not on the physical scenes but more on the tool that witnessing all of these evil events has on the mind.
2 comments:
I dont think its fair for any government to say that they are doing what is right and moral. What may seem okay to us may be very worng according to others standards and morals across the world. I think that this is what happend in Vietnam and in many wars, the blending of cultures and morals do not always see eye to eye: what we saw in Vietnam as communism and a torture of people, they mught see as everday living and the norm, which could be why nobody in Vietnam really undersood who was the "good guys?"
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