Swift Boat Atrocities and Why War Always Sucks

Charges and counter-charges. Bush was AWOL. Kerry shot himself to get a Purple Heart. This is the stuff of an election year, and largely not a big surprise.

The surprise, and a dirty one it is, is just how the Swift Boat Veterans, an organization funded largely by hard-core Bush supporters, has managed to once again widen the rift amongst veterans in our country, pitting what seems to be the flag-waving, Bush-loving, go-America vets against the Jane Fonda loving, dope-smoking, long-haired vets who supported Kerry.

At least that’s the way the media would like to play it.

The bottom line to this debate has less to do with anything Kerry (or Bush) ever said or did than it has to do with how young men and women react to the atrocities of warfare. Because, folks, war is always an atrocity. We might think there are good wars and bad wars, and in some cases there’s no question that we just don’t have any choice. But even in a war that is forced on you, even in a war where everything makes sense, it’s still an atrocity. The whole purpose of war is to kill, and civilians and innocent bystanders always get in the way.

I vividly recall the day I rode my tank into the Rumayla Oil Field in March of 1991, machine gun at the ready, as we moved to wipe out retreating Iraqi forces who made the mistake of moving too closely to Barry McCaffrey’s 24th Infantry Division. I saw a young man, about my age, crawling toward the road, begging for help. His legs had been blown off, and blood soaked the ground around him. Like the good, terrified soldier I was, I pointed my machine gun at him and screamed, “Don’t move, motherfucker!” I wasn’t even human anymore.

Like I said, war is an atrocity, no matter how you slice it.

Vietnam vets saw their share of atrocities, and for many of them, coming home was just as hideous as the war. When my dad got home from Vietnam, he had to commute across Atlanta on the bus for two years, in his Marine Corps uniform. My mother was terrified; because every day people would insult him, even threaten him. Our country went temporarily insane, and spent too much time blaming a bunch of kids for what their leaders did to them.

In 1971, when Kerry testified before the Senate, he got it right. Atrocities happened in Vietnam, just like they do in every war. More importantly, he got it right in assigning blame where it belonged: the leaders of the administration and the Defense Department who made the bad decisions that got us there in the first place.

Today isn’t that different. We all know atrocities are happening in Iraq. According to the Iraq Body County, somewhere between 11 and 13 thousand civilians have been killed. Innocent bystanders. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone – it’s just part of the cost of war.

Unfortunately, we’re seeing an institutional gathering of the wagons, where the only people punished are low level privates and sergeants who were present at abu Ghraib, and ignoring the folks in the administration who were busy writing legal briefs on how torture isn’t really torture when we don’t like the people we’re doing it to. It’s all too reminiscent of My Lai, when the only people who were punished (and just barely at that) were a lowly company commander and platoon leader. Because then, as now, it was just a few bad apples, not an institutional failing, certainly not a national failing.

You have to congratulate the administration on its effectiveness in killing two birds with one stone. Not only did they get to attack the challenger, but by bringing up the visceral pain of the atrocities of Vietnam, it makes it easier to forget the atrocities of today.

When you see (and commit) atrocities in war – and let’s remember that all war is an atrocity – there’s only a couple ways to go and stay sane. You can wrap yourself in the flag, and convince yourself that you were doing the right thing, that the war was right, and anything that happened had to happen in order to support the mission of the war. Or, alternatively, you can get angry. You can condemn the war and those who made it. Kerry happened to fall into the latter camp. The Swifties fall into the other. And the administration is using all of that pent up pain and rage and horror and using it for political gain.

My war was mostly thought of as a “good” war. We had to throw the bad guy out of Kuwait. It was over pretty quickly, and with not a lot of casualties (that is, if you ignore Gulf War illnesses, which everybody generally does). But I’ll be the first to say out loud that I committed atrocities. I killed people. And I came home, and instead of waving the flag and talking about how great it was, I went insane for a little while. Then I got mad. Though I’ve never been a big fan of Kerry, I can relate to the Winter Soldier vets on a visceral level.

It’s time our society faced the reality of war. No matter how “good” a war is, it still sucks. And for the folks now serving in Iraq, they’ll go through the same process (some already are). It’d be nice if our country were with them. Whether you support the war or not, whether you support Bush or not, remember that nobody asked those kids if they wanted to go to Iraq and fight in a war.

The reality is; we sent them. We all did. And when one of those young men or women pulls the trigger, we all do. That’s what it means to live in a democracy. You may never have to pull the trigger yourself, but voting is the same thing.

Remember that when Election Day rolls around.

Charles Sheehan-Miles, author of Prayer at Rumayla: A Novel of the Gulf War (www.sheehanmiles.com) is executive director of Veterans for Common Sense