Dear Reader,
In 1971, at a dreary Howard Johnson motel in Detroit, a group of discharged soldiers detailed the atrocities they had seen and performed upon Southeast Asian civilians during their tours in Vietnam. While it flew under the national radar at the time, the powerful testimonies shed an unflinching light on the war crimes perpetrated during the conflict and prompted congressional hearings on the subject. It even launched the political career of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
At an emotionally riveting conference this past weekend, 14 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans took a page from the history books, giving their own eyewitness accounts of the systemic brutality in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. In These Times Assistant Editor Jacob Wheeler was in Washington DC for the second Winter Soldiers hearings and his dispatch provides a great summation of the soldiers' tortured experiences.
Horrific tales from the front lines filled the weekend, and many a tear followed.Jason Hurd, an Army National Guard medic who served in Baghdad in 2004-05, said his unit regularly opened fire on civilians. After taking stray rounds from a nearby gunfight, a machine gunner fired 200 rounds into a nearby apartment building. "Things like that happened every day in Iraq," he said. "We reacted out of fear for our lives, and we reacted with total destruction."
"Over time, as the absurdity of war set in, individuals from my unit indiscriminately opened fire at vehicles driving down the wrong side of the road," Hurd continued. "People in my unit would later brag about it. I remember thinking how appalled I was that we were laughing at this, but that was the reality."
Read the rest of his web piece, The War That Never Ends here.
In 2005, Milestone Films rescued the the first hearing tapes from obscurity, releasing the grainy documentary for the first time publicly. It played in over 100 cities, and as Michael Atkinson wrote at the time of the release, it could have been the most important film of the Johnson-Nixon era.
The films relentless first-person-witness assault echoes Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, demonstrating that being told can be more lacerating than being shown. We experience not only the atrocities but the shock felt by the witnesses and the emotional venom still necrotizing their lives. No fiction film about Vietnam has ever come close to this movies portrayal of American guilt and trauma. The chillingly calm speakers recount incidents that have made many walk out of the theater in a sickened swoon. But while we may weep for the broken heart of an American generation, the real remorse here is for the victims: Asian farmers mutilated and slaughtered as a kind of imperial bloodsportҗtossed out of helicopters on a bet, disemboweled alive, thrown down wells with grenades, men, women and children, by the thousands.Click here for the full review, When We Were Psychos.
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Yours Truly,
Adam Doster, senior editor and acting Web editor