By Mickey Walker-May 24, 2009
After my combat tour in Viet Nam was up, I packed up my
duffle bag, hopped in the ship’s jeep, and the Second Class Petty Officer on watch drove me to the Da Nang
airbase. As we eased away in the
early morning mist, there was a steep mountain on the left, Monkey Mountain, as
it was called, and I peeped out of the corner of my eye to see if I could see
movement in the underbrush all the way to the peaks, or maybe a puff of smoke
from a rifle, or any sign of insurgent rapskallions that would prevent my
escape to America and back into the world of civilized human beings. I lucked out. No incident of the kind would interrupt my departure. It was October 12, 1965.
The heavy troop-carrier Air Force plane roared forever, it
seemed, in its attempt to lift up
off the runway where snipers sometimes lay in wait to pop a few rounds off at
all the aircraft that used the airstrip for takeoffs and landings. As the big engines labored like steel
beating on steel, I remember praying in my nylon mesh seat and harness, to
please, please, please, dear God, to let me get away from that awful place I
had had to call home for so long. He did let me escape, and I flew into Manila for a week of Navy
business, mainly court martial depositions in behalf of a Petty Officer who had
slugged my roommate, but that’s another story. I was free in the air and moving away from the horror of
Viet Nam and a society gone crazy and drunk with torturing its own people.
The way the Viet Nam people treated their own has stayed
with me all this time. When my own
country some 40 years later, engaged in torture techniques reminiscent of the
total disregard for human beings the Vietnamese had for their fellow creatures
of the earth, the feeling took me back in time. Our main ship, the USS Sumner County, was moored to a pier
in Da Nang Harbor where we supported Coast Guard cutters, 96-footers that made
night raids to points along the coastline up toward the north. In addition, we used our own boats as
part of the Riverine Operations in the Da Nang harbor and up the Da Nang River
to the city, itself.
There was a garbage dump about two miles from our ship. We took all the ship’s garbage there
twice a day in cans loaded on the back of our jeep, and when the hordes of Viet
Namese civilians who lived at the dump, saw us coming, they ran like a human
wave toward us to get the scraps, the tossed away food, the vegetables, the ham
bones, coffee grounds, whatever they could use to stave off the pangs of hunger
they faced daily. The first time I
went, the driver parked well in advance of the human wave of hunger and told me
to jump out of the jeep and run. I
did. We both watched from a
distance how the hungry people swarmed the jeep, plucked the cans off the truck
and went about dumping out and grabbing whatever contents they could
manage. Before long all the
materials were picked clean from the cans, the jeep, and the ground, as if a
swarm of army ants had made a fast forage. Two women, I remember, fought over a ham bone, and one took
a piece of glass and slashed the other one across the chest. The slasher won the prize and backed
off any other threats with her dagger of glass she poked menacingly at the
crowd. Many of them laughed at the
pain of the slashee, bleeding on the ground, the one who had to give up the ham
bone. It was not a fatal wound,
but it was deep. I wondered if she
would survive the probability of contracting a bacteria infection at the
dump. They laughed!
Sometimes a fight would break out in the town. There was an old woman with Leechy Nut
purple teeth, who was kicked out of a crowd at dusk and fell to the ground,
front teeth knocked out by some unseen assailant, but it was of no
consequence. The crowd laughed at
the torturous treatment of one of their own. I remember taking a rickshaw back to the boat station to wait
for our next scheduled transport back to the ship. The ways of the war in Viet Nam and the way the people
behaved as human beings told a story of a country torn by bullets where its
citizens did callously overlooked the rules of human decency toward your fellow
man. Torture seemed to be the order
of the day. On another morning,
two VN regular army soldiers drug a Viet Cong prisoner in black pajamas down
the main street. All who gathered
around were laughing as usual. The
prisoner had both wrists tied with barbed wire, and the wire ran through
incisions in his flesh on both wrists near the bend so that no attempt at
escape would be possible. The
soldiers derided the prisoner and gave the wire a yank from time to time, and
the prisoner would scream and the crowd of civilian spectators would laugh. What a despicable place! Torture was as commonplace as the sun
rising every day. So I flew away
from there on that fine October day, thinking that I could come back home where
Americans had laws to protect us, the Constitution, and a fine bunch of American
neighbors to make certain that our laws were never shredded, trampled on, or
taken away. I knew that things
like I had seen in Viet Nam just could not happen in America.
They say that dictatorships and totalitarian governments are
spawned by a need for something to be corrected. If a tyrant rules a country like Batista ruled Cuba, then
you need an insurgent like Castro to start a revolution and take over and to
bring freedom and democracy to the people. It’s the decent human thing to do. So why do things go so wrong?
On my next duty station, courtesy of the US Navy, I was
stationed in, Yorktown, Virginia, and after my combat tour in Viet Nam, I felt
good about how my sense of being an American brought the blood back into my
heart. When I had liberty, I
fished the waters of the James River and an offshoot stream called Skiffes
Creek. There, I met a man in a
long john boat with wire traps he was running perched on the prow of his
boat. In one of them was a large
furry creature, all wet and still through the steel meshes, and I asked him about
the animal. “He’s a muskrat.” The boatman announced, proudly. The furry animal lay motionless, nice
white whiskers delightfully contrasted against a smoothed-out body of brown,
watery fur, all seal-like and still. He was dead.
I asked the muskrateer how he managed to catch the splendid
animal in the trap. “Nothing to
it,” he said, “you bait the trap, sink it in about 3 feet of water, the muskrat
swims to the food, and can’t get back out.” I waited for the other shoe to drop. “So he drowns?” I asked. “Yep.” He smiled all curious at me, such a novice to the
marshy waters of Skiffes Creek and the ways of old sand crabs such as him.
I meandered away, sad, to think that the muskrat had been
looking for something to eat, got caught in the trap and had to wait until his
final minutes on the planet saw him gasping as his lungs filled with water in
the agony of drowning. When I
first heard about our former president and country condoning water boarding, I
thought of the muskrat that day, that lovely creature who, but for the lack of
power and support by the laws of man, had to face the immortality of seconds
that carried with it much suffering before the end. I heard that it is illegal now to trap muskrats by drowning
them in traps. In fact, someone
said it was illegal even back then, but when lawlessness rules, the strong will
and can torture the weak. I told
of the muskrat’s demise at the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters bar, and someone
said, “Hey, it’s a fu----- animal, who cares?” I remember thinking then, “And what are we who don’t give a
sh—about torturing animals, much less, humans, if we can somehow justify
the horror of who we have become.” I thought of Dick Cheney and how he argues that torture and breaking the
Geneva Convention Treaty articles against torture that the United States
signed, is a good thing.
Nothing good comes of a nation who tortures other human
beings for any reason. The greater
good is never served by torture because we kill parts of ourselves in the
process; we water board our
morality until it drowns us. We
must live with knowing that we can not do the things of Hitler and other
ruthless human beings of history. And that if we do them, we are no better than they are.
I applaud President Obama whose first order of business as
President of the United States was to shut down our Guantanamo torture facility
and to denounce torture to the rest of the world. In this time of disregard for our own fellow man, our very
own human species, it’s good that mankind has true human beings like Obama in
reserve. 