May 23: War

At first I typed "war atrocities" in this post title, but then I felt like that was redundant. Is there ever war without atrocity? 

Despite my passivist inclinations, my education at UM helped me see that sometimes wars are fought for good causes—like to stop genocide or free people from an oppressive regime (e.g. US involvement in WWII). But things are hardly ever that simple. When it comes to US military intervention, we almost always have a mix of motivations that all lead back to economics. We say we want more democracies because it provides better lives for the common people and more global stability in general, but democracies are also more likely to be friendly trading partners. We say we want to support our allies because it's the "right thing to do," but it also preserves our political coalitions and thus our global power and economic opportunities. All of these reasons have serious merit, and I don’t mean to diminish them. But I think it's important to analyze when and how we use each of these reasons. 

Of course, another major factor is often American public opinion, which can be incredibly fickle and can prevent even the most noble-minded leaders from pushing for military intervention based on moral reasoning. Public opinion also can sometimes incentivize a leader to pull out of a conflict, as with Afghanistan.

I'm far from an expert on these topics, but I'm informed by: 

• Samantha Power's book A Problem from Hell (here is a good review of it)
• UM Prof. James Morrow, for whom I GSI-ed in my first semester at UM. He taught me that democracies are the least likely form of government to engage in warfare against one another, but a democracy is just as likely as any other form of gvt to attack a non-democracy.
• IU Prof. John Ciorciari, who worked at UM's Ford School until this year. I took his "politics of international policy" class in my first semester at UM, and GSI-ed for him the following year. He taught me about a variety of conflicts in modern history, including Bay of Pigs, botched UN interventions in Haiti, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and much more. 

I wish I knew more about all these topics. My understanding at this point is that sometimes it's complicated.... and sometimes it's not. My visit to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City was a sobering reminder of how obviously wrong it was for the US to fight in the Vietnam War—and that statement doesn’t even begin to contain the appalling war crimes our military members committed.

US Secretary of State explaining the US' economic interests in Indochina

I first learned about the atrocities of the Vietnam War when I was at Governor’s School the summer before 12th grade. At assembly one evening, my peers and I watched a documentary about the My Lai massacre. I was deeply disturbed, but at 17 I was already cynical enough to not be shocked. I already knew that war was horrific and inevitably resulted in the loss of innocent lives. 

Also, at some point in high school (I think senior year), I read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which is still one of my favorite books because of how powerfully he captures “the story truth”—when telling the simple facts of “what happened” becomes numbingly insufficient.

But I don’t know if it really sunk in for me then that US military forces killed three million Vietnamese people, two million of whom were civilians. And that doesn’t include the chemical burns caused by napalm or the multigenerational effects of Agent Orange, a pesticide that the US sprayed widely across Vietnam from the air. The goal was to decimate the jungles so that the Viet Cong had fewer places to hide—and it did indeed decimate the biodiverse flora and fauna of Vietnam. But, as an untested chemical, it also had the unintended effect of causing the following symptoms for people exposed to it:

• Facial acne.
• Getting infections frequently.
• Numbness, prickly or tingling feeling in your hands and feet.
• Fatigue.
• Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing.
• Swelling of your feet and legs (edema).
• Tremors while your muscles are at rest.

And these much more severe conditions:

• AL amyloidosis.
• Severe birth defects, abnormal fetal development or miscarriage.
• Bladder cancer.
• B-cell leukemia.
• Chloracne or acneform disease.
• Diabetes (Type 2).
• Hodgkin lymphoma.
• Hypothyroidism.
• Ischemic heart disease.
• Multiple myeloma.
• Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
• Parkinsonism.
• Parkinson’s disease.
• Peripheral neuropathy.
• Porphyria.
• Prostate cancer.
• Respiratory cancers (lung cancer).
• Soft tissue sarcoma.

It also caused death. More than 300,000 US veterans and 400,000 Vietnamese people died from exposure to Agent Orange between 1962 and 1971. 

And none of these direct effects capture the tragedy of the generational effects, as Agent Orange caused reproductive issues for people exposed and horrible birth defects for the children of those exposed. These congenital disorders include missing limbs, conjoined twins, spina bifida (a gap in the baby’s spine), oral clefts (cleft lip/cleft palate), cardiovascular defects, hip dislocations and hypospadias (penis deformities). Now, whenever I see someone in Vietnam who is missing a limb or has discolored skin, I wonder if it’s an effect of Agent Orange. 

And all this is totally separate from the US’ use of napalm, a “highly flammable sticky jelly” shot by flamethrowers at tanks, buildings, jungles, and people. It burns at 2,000 degrees F and was manufactured by the Dow Chemical Company, from whom I accepted $20,000 to complete a sustainability project in 2022 as part of their greenwashing efforts in Michigan. Casual. 

Our use of chemical warfare in Vietnam was atrocious, and people in the US knew it. Even though US troops aren’t fighting directly in the Israel-Palestine conflict, I’ve heard protestors draw parallels to Vietnam War protests since the US is funding “some 15% of Israel’s defense budget.” Aggressive university and police crackdowns on campus protests sure do seem familiar. The War Remnants Museum included the famous photo of a Kent State University student screaming over the dead body of one of her classmates who had just been shot by the National Guard in response to anti-Vietnam War protests. The National Guard killed four students that day. I haven’t heard of any pro-Palestine students killed by police (yet) but I know several have been hospitalized for injuries caused by police aggression. 

Oh yes, and then there were the war crimes. The War Remnants Museum had an entire exhibit on crimes committed by the US against the Vietnamese People during the war, but I couldn’t really absorb it. I walked in, glanced around, started feeling nauseated and dizzy, and walked out. Just one example is the apparently common practice of tying Vietnamese corpses to the back of US jeeps/tanks and dragging them through the streets. So yeah, I couldn’t stomach it.

At the end of my museum tour, I visited the gift shop, where you can buy model military helmets as a keepsake! *gag*

gross souvenirs

I don’t have a good conclusion for these reflections, just that I think acknowledging the atrocities is important. I know this content is not what my ~devoted readers~ are looking for when they come to my travel blog, but it would feel dishonest for me to write only about climbing volcanos and swimming with sea turtles and eating pho—and not acknowledge the hard parts. I guess my main takeaway, applying this heavy history to the present, is wondering whether I should be doing more to protest Palestinian genocide. And I know that only I can answer that question.