From Melos to My Lai

A Study in Violence, Culture and Social Survival

Lawrence A. Tritle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781134603640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

From Melos to My Lai presents an erudite, provocative and moving analysis of the accounts of violence in the literature and history of ancient Greece and in the film literature and veterans' accounts of the Vietnam War. This comparative investigation examines the nature of violence, its impact on society and culture, especially as reflected from th

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INTRODUCTION

A twentieth-century American odyssey

For Sergeant Harold Brown and Corporal Clarence Brown

When I was a boy growing up in 1950s America, one of the figures who came in and out of my life was an older brother of my mother. Uncle Harold would appear every three or four months, frequently with some new toy for me, so that his visits were always happy occasions. As I grew older, however, I heard more, usually in overheard remarks of my mother and my grandmother—remarks filled with sadness that spoke of Uncle Harold’s drinking, his inability to keep a job, the emptiness of a life without a woman’s love. I also learned that my uncle had spent two years in the Pacific as an army sergeant in New Guinea and that the experience had changed him radically: from an eager youth who had finished high school, who had a car, job, and girl before going off to war, to a shell of a man who seemed unable to get back on track after confronting the violence, the killing of war in the South Pacific. His troubles were shared by his brother Clarence, who had served in the merchant marine (because he was too tall and skinny for the Marines) and was torpedoed several times. He was later drafted into the army and served in Korea (1951–52), where he was wounded and contracted tuberculosis. This experience transformed him too and left him a recluse and alcohol dependent. These were my earliest contacts with the legacy of war and violence, but they would not be my last. My own turn in the line, so to speak, would come, and while I would try to shut the experience out of my mind for a quarter of a century, when I returned to it, I found it as vivid as ever.

My uncles were not the only veterans I grew up with as a child. My father had flown with the Eighth Air Force in England for three months in 1944 before being shot down over Germany; his father had served as an artillery officer in the European theater and had seen action in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. My uncles never talked about their experiences, but from my father and grandfather I did hear accounts of where they had been and something of what they had seen and done. I understand now that what I heard represented only a small part of their experiences and that much had been left out, presumably to avoid telling me anything “bad,” as well as avoiding a repetition of their own traumas. In many ways, then, my childhood was much like that recounted by Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July and surely hundreds of thousands of others of the “Baby Boom” generation, the beneficiaries of those who had fought, as Studs Terkel would later tell it, The Good War.¹ This upbringing without a doubt influenced the generation that would get caught up in the maelstrom that became Vietnam.

Through the 1950s and early 1960s this legacy imprinted an impressionable youth who were also fed a constant film depiction of these heroics. Films like The Sands of Iwo Jima and To Hell and Back, television programming such as Combat and the Rat Patrol, offered a fare that today may seem romantically naïve but at the time were as influential as the stories told by our fathers. By the time I was finishing high school in 1964, exotic names of faraway places were rekindling the heroics of war and battle: Laos, Vietnam. In August 1964 the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred—that shadowy, certainly manipulated incident involving North Vietnamese torpedo boats and US navy destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy—and spawned the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.² This congressional decision gave nearly carte blanche to Lyndon Johnson and then US military forces to escalate the growing war in South Vietnam. Within a year, regular US marine and army divisions had been deployed in Vietnam, and the door was opened to a widening conflict. During the next four years while in college, my own position on this issue would change from one of opposition to support and back again. I had numerous debates with my father and friends about what was going on in Vietnam and who was right. I still recall hearing over the radio in the fall of 1965 news of the Battle of the la Drang where the 1st Cavalry Division met and “defeated” for the first time opposing regular units of the North Vietnamese army (NVA). Only later would it be learned that the criterion of victory was simply quantitative—i.e. that of “bodycount”—and even later that the performance of the 1st Cavalry had been characterized by poor leadership and tactics.³

When I graduated from university in June 1968, parts of Vietnam were still smoldering from the Tet Offensive only four months past. In Los Angeles county thousands of men would be drafted into military service during the course of the year.⁴ It was into the war that I would now be pulled, volunteering for the army with an option to attend officer candidate school within a week of graduation. As it worked out, I spent nearly a year in training before completing infantry officer candidate school in May 1969 and then would spend the usual six months stateside duty before being sent overseas. Luck smiled on me again, however, as my orders were not for USARV (United States Army, Republic of Vietnam) but MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam), which meant that I would receive an additional four months of training in Vietnamese language and counterinsurgency techniques before shipping out for Vietnam and duty as an adviser. I finally arrived in Vietnam in May 1970 and was sent to the Mekong Delta, IV Corps, then commanded by J.Paul Vann, one of the few Americans who really understood the nature of the conflict in that country.⁵ For nearly eleven months that followed I served as an adviser on a (so-called) Mobile Advisory Team in Ba Xuyen Province in the southern part of the delta. During that time I would advise militia type units of the South Vietnamese army, village self-defense forces (who received just enough training to ensure that they would get killed when the Viet Cong arrived—which did happen on several occasions), and a reconnaissance platoon made up of former Viet Cong. On several occasions I was the particular target of some Viet Cong as I heard the tell-tale “crack” of a rifle round overhead. I learned too that the South Vietnamese were not particularly keen on dying for their country. In turn I adopted their laissez-faire attitude, thinking that if dying for their country meant little to them, it meant even less to me. I returned home in March 1971, immediately resuming my education, my goal to become a professor, which I did in 1978. I was also determined to forget Vietnam, which I never seemed quite able to do.

From the time that I returned home and resumed my education and until the mid-1990s, I spoke very little of Vietnam. When it did come up, whenever friends asked me about it or the topic came up in other situations, I found myself “going off on a sort of Dennis Miller rant. This occurred once while attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in December 1993. During the meeting, I attended a “conversations” session at which New York University professor Marilyn Young’s new book on Vietnam was being discussed. I arrived late but in time to hear several of the professors gathered there ask what to tell students who asked how the US could have won the war in Vietnam. Annoyed by such naïvety and ignorance on the part of those teaching about Vietnam, I interjected, “I’ll tell you how we could have won. First, you take all the Vietnamese and you put them in boats in the South China Sea and you black-top the country. Then you sink the boats!” This bit of GI sarcasm reveals how illusory any grand plan to victory was. My own lack of patience with those then teaching about Vietnam, who could not understand the futility of the effort there, also brought out all the old anger still seething in me at the time. When I first began teaching in 1978, it became known occasionally that I had served in Vietnam. Students then had grown up with the “television war,” and to them Vietnam meant something. I recall talking to them about the war, but in such a steely way that I could see some of them were just scared to death. It was only in early 1995, after I had read Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, that I was able to put the pieces together and figure out how the Vietnam Experience had affected me and, in some ways, changed my life.

Of violence and survival

Sweet is war to the untried, but anyone who has experienced it dreads its approach exceedingly in his heart.

(Pindar, Fragment 110, trans. W.H.Race)

The “Achilles in Vietnam” course that I have taught, and on which this study rests, is not concerned ultimately with the “history” of battles and tactics, either in the ancient Greek world or in Vietnam, though these will be mentioned from time to time. Neither am I concerned with the causes of the Vietnam War or the many wars that the Greeks fought from Homer’s great tale of Troy to the campaigns of Alexander. The principal concern is rather to show how societies sustain conflict and violence for prolonged periods, and how the experience of surviving that violence ripples through societies and cultures from one generation to the next.

There is little question that survivors of violence understand its impact differently than those not so exposed. There are a number of passages that demonstrate this truism, including examples from the ancient Greek world, but a pointed one comes from Michael Herr’s riveting yet surreal account of the Vietnam Experience, Dispatches, and the conversation he relates with a veteran soldier in Vietnam: “Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.”

Herr remarks how he waited for the rest of the story, finally asking, “What happened?” The soldier looked at him, “like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he’d waste time telling stories to anyone as dumb as I was.”⁶ Herr’s account demonstrates the gap between those who might be, in the words of Jimi Hendrix, “experienced” and those who are not, but his story should not be considered unique. Similar reflections on the toll of violence can be found elsewhere, including ancient Greece. Clearly the study of survivors and range of their experiences would contribute significantly to an understanding of how people are able to see the worst things imaginable and either be consumed by them or rise above them (and occasionally both).

Unlike most historians and other writers who might approach this topic, this investigation begins with the experience of one who has participated in ground combat: witnessing battle, hearing the cries of the wounded, listening to the mourning of families. I also understand the anguish of families torn by separation, not knowing if a husband or son will return from war, and then what to do when confronted by the return of the “honored dead” or the living but disturbed, silent warrior. Marita Sturken suggests in Tangled Memories that survivors disrupt history, which she claims “operates more efficiently when its agents are dead.”⁷ Historian Michael Bentley argues similarly, noting the complications for the historian posed by memory, which a number of historians and psychologists consider a social construct, i.e. something shaped by our own identity, what we read and so on. Bentley avoids an extreme position, and is right to caution on the intersection of memory and history.⁸ Yet the view that history can be somehow closed or past seems debatable, for as William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past,” and while memories may be influenced by external sources, they also represent a tremendous store of information to the historian.

Instead I would argue that survivors can actually enrich our understanding of events by establishing a living link between past and present. To some extent this happens when autobiographies or oral histories are used in order to bring to life a particular period or event.⁹ In my “Achilles in Vietnam” classes I have seen how students are able to broaden their understanding of not only the recent past—Vietnam—but also the distant past—the world of ancient Greece. This results from actively engaging in discussion actual survivors of events. From such discussions comes greater comprehension of what happens in the events that students have been able to learn of only through reading. Moreover, my own experience allows me to look at the Greek evidence attesting the nature of violence, culture and survival and to give this an interpretation that is at once “scholarly” yet also informed by an understanding acquired from first-hand experience of violence. A similar example can be seen in Robert Graves’ account of his post-war studies at Oxford. Graves disagreed with his tutor, who claimed that Anglo-Saxon literature possessed no intrinsic literary value. He writes how he “thought of Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet…The War still continued for both of us [i.e. Graves and Edmund Blunden] and we translated everything into trench-warfare terms.”¹⁰

My approach then brings together the personal dimension of a survivor with that of a trained classical historian. This experience does give me an advantage over the historian or writer who has no immediate knowledge of violence and its effects on those caught up in it. This is not to claim that others can never understand what happens in the stress of battle unless they have actually experienced it. But as Michael Herr’s story makes clear, those who have been exposed to violence are changed, often in ways not always apparent to them, and see things differently. Again Robert Graves illustrates the point. Returned to England on account of his wounds in 1917, he spoke one day with Bertrand Russell, whose pacifistic views Graves shared. As they discussed what action should be taken with striking munitions workers, Russell was stunned by Graves’ response that ordering troops to shoot them would be no different to shooting Germans. When Russell replied, “But they [i.e. the troops] realize that the War’s wicked nonsense?” Graves responded, “Yes, as well as I do.” Graves comments that, “He could not understand my attitude,” and probably few reading Graves today could either.¹¹

An empathetic understanding of violence and its effects may be obtained by those who have, fortunately in my estimation, not experienced violence themselves. Nevertheless it is my belief that survivors have an obligation to explain to the wider community what happens when violence is unleashed. Sadly not all are able to do so, which makes it that much more critical that those who can reflect on the consequences of violence do. Societies need to be aware that survivors who are seemingly whole may in fact be psychically damaged, that trauma not only occurs on the battlefield, but may surface years, even decades, later. Viewers of the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan have plainly experienced this...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Listening to Thersites
• 3 Achilles and the Heroic Ideal
• 4 Clearchus’ Story
• 5 Penelope and Waiting Wives and Lovers
• 6 War, Violence, and the Other
• 7 The Historiography and Language of Violence
• 8 Remembrance, Rhetoric, and Memory
• 9 The Visibly Dead
• 10 The Unanchored Dead
• 11 Afterword
• Bibliography