Hey y'all, check it out, the audiobook has finally been released.
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The audiobook of Fools Erend, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and yes it's read by me, and I'm sorry it took so long, I nitpicked the hell out of it trying to get it ready for you guys, and then plus it took them forever after I submitted it to finally release it.
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War is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Clausewitz, for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Alright you guys, introducing Christian Appy, he is the author of the book American Reckoning, the Vietnam War, and Our National Identity, and last Friday was the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, and at antiwar.com we ran an excerpt from the book American Reckoning from the end of, I believe it was chapter 5, Our Boys, 50 years after the My Lai Massacre.
Welcome back to the show, Chris, how are you?
I'm fine, thanks for having me, Scott.
Good to have you on.
Now, so, well, 50 years, huh?
I guess I was born sort of in the shadow of the Vietnam War, it happened sort of right before I was born, but I guess now, you know, I think of what World War II and Korea mean to me, and how far before I was born that I was, or yeah, you know what I mean?
And so that means that a lot of people listening to this show, for them, Vietnam is, you know, what World War II is to me, ancient history, black and white pictures at least in part, you know, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and all that, it was just all so long ago.
And yet, not as much to me, and I guess not so much to you either.
And you've written this whole book, so we could talk all about the book in Vietnam.
But particularly, I guess, well, go ahead and give us the context for the My Lai Massacre, that'll tell us a lot about the Vietnam War itself right there, I guess, huh?
Well, in terms of memory of the war, I think you're right, there have been a number of younger people grew up who didn't hear at all about it in high school, or anywhere else for that matter.
But when it was finally revealed to the American public, after a 20-month successful military cover-up of the massacre, it really was a stunning revelation to learn that a company of American infantrymen had gone into a Vietnamese village without receiving any hostile fire, completely unarmed, and unresisting villagers, most of them women and children, and were murdered point blank, 504 of them, by American infantrymen.
And the context of that revelation was that was a moment in the late 60s where the public was turning against the war.
But prior to that, a lot of the objections were more pragmatic, dealing with the fact that the war was costing so much, that it didn't seem to be making progress, that it didn't seem to be really affecting American or threatening American national security.
Now there really was a moral dimension to the criticism, which had existed for years, but now many more Americans were beginning to see that this was not just a military failure, but a moral one.
Well, you know, I mean, I guess this is probably somewhat right and somewhat wrong.
But I guess I kind of think that, or I guess my impression is that what the American people thought at the time was more or less what I thought when I was a kid, or my confusion was the same confusion that they had.
So you know, I grew up sort of under the impression mostly that it was a northern, North Vietnamese invasion of the South was most of the war.
And then yeah, there was also the Viet Cong guerrillas, and this and that kind of thing.
Where in reality, it's at least, I mean, obviously, the North Vietnamese army was part of it.
But it's really much more the other way around, right?
That the war was a counterinsurgency effort against the people of South Vietnam, who would not accept the government that the Americans were trying to foist on them.
And then the NVA and whoever else were helping them.
But it was really that was the war was against the people of the South, who dared to resist the local militiamen, who basically are civilians only holding rifles.
And so that's the context of something like My Lai, where the reality is, I think that you're talking about finally that hit home is the war is against the people of South Vietnam.
They're the enemy, because they won't accept the government we're trying to make them accept.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think American troops in Vietnam very clearly got the message that in the South Vietnamese countryside, they were to regard all villagers as, if not enemies, as potential enemies.
And this really was felt to many of them that they had sanction, a kind of license to make indiscriminate war against a whole population, which isn't to say that the rules of engagement, you know, officially ordered or even permitted point blank murders of unarmed civilians.
But it certainly, our policies certainly did encourage indiscriminate killing.
And so far, nothing, no massacre on the scale of My Lai has been exposed, but it's ever growing.
You know, we keep finding out new evidence of smaller scale killings of civilians.
The key point here is that while a good lieutenant on the ground might be able to avert that kind of thing with good leadership, if you look at the generals and colonels that are at the top, they were putting every kind of pressure on junior officers to produce.
And to produce what?
To produce a body count.
That is how they measured success.
And they didn't necessarily, weren't too worried about whether or not the dead Vietnamese that they were counting on their body count charts were armed combatants or just Vietnamese.
That didn't matter so much.
So that did create a kind of a perfect recipe for an atrocity producing situation where you have these incredibly heavily armed Americans who can not only with the arms they're carrying, but the arms that they can call in, that is to say the airstrikes and artillery strikes that they could call in on any village that showed any evidence of a harboring or supporting the Viet Cong.
Right.
Well, yeah, that's a side point we'll get, well, not a side point, but another major point that we got to get back to is most of the massacres did just happen from the air.
That sort of, for some reason, doesn't count as the same as rounding them up and machine gunning them to death in the center of town, but it really is the same in a lot of cases.
So now, and I'm sorry, because I don't know if I probably really phrased it right, and this is off topic from what you wrote, but do I have that right that the American people basically that that was what changed and part of what changed there was that they were under the same misunderstanding that I was raised on, that this was really a Northern invasion of the South that we were defending the South from, and that really that My Lai helped bring home that not so much, that really it's the South we're fighting against?
Yeah.
You're certainly right that the official justification of the war is that we were defending a free and independent nation called South Vietnam against an external communist invasion.
But from the perspective of the American enemy, this was a nationwide struggle for national reunification and liberation that dated back to a much longer anti-colonial struggle against the French and was seen in very much the same terms.
But I would say that Americans were beginning to learn of this reality earlier.
For example, during the Tet Offensive, I mean, My Lai wasn't revealed until the fall of 69, but during the Tet Offensive of early 68, 50 years ago, the Americans were beginning to hear about the massive counteroffensive that was waged by the United States, mostly from the air, to drive enemy forces out of the urban areas.
And that led to huge destruction of towns and city neighborhoods and led to the famous expression or defense of that by an American officer who said it became necessary to destroy the town.
He was referring to Binh Trei.
It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it, which seemed on the face of it, of course, so perfectly contradictory that it became a kind of slogan for the war as a whole that we were claiming to save South Vietnam while we were pulverizing it from the air at great civilian cost.
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All right.
Now, what's the difference between just the typical free-fire zones that they did have, right?
Where they would just say, look, anybody between here and here, at least presumably, we tried to warn them that they better run if they're not insurgents.
And if they didn't, then that means that it's a free-fire zone.
But now that happened kind of all the time and all over the place.
So what made MyLie different than that?
Well, yeah, MyLie was not a free-fire zone.
The villagers had not been forcibly removed as millions were from other villages that were then declared free-fire zones.
It had been the center for decades of resistance to the French and then to the Americans.
And what distinguishes it is that this particular company that was ordered to go into MyLie had been given a pep talk the night before by their captain, Medina, who by multiple accounts said, either we go in there and kill everything that moves or something close to that.
They really had the impression that this was going to be an opportunity not to waste civilians, as they would put it, but to actually engage in a real fight.
Medina told this company that intelligence reports showed that there was a hard-core Viet Cong battalion that was in that village and that this would be payback time.
There would be a chance to go in there and avenge the deaths of some of your buddies that have died over the previous couple of weeks from sniper fire and booby traps.
But of course, when they got into the village, they received no hostile fire, but went ahead and started picking off people in small numbers and then, in a much more systematic way, lining up dozens and dozens of people and putting them in ditches or on roads and gunning them down, sometimes under the direct orders of their officers, sometimes just on their own initiative.
And it also just turned into this scene from hell where they were not only murdering people, but they were raping them first and then murdering them, torturing them, mutilating them, literally scalping them.
So it was a kind of carnage that is just unimaginable and led Americans to say, this sounds so obviously like a Nazi kind of activity.
And even some Americans on the spot didn't participate and were appalled.
And there was, as you may know, a group of three Americans who landed by helicopter and saw what was happening and they were so appalled, they helped to rescue about a dozen or so Vietnamese from this situation.
So yeah, one thing that I write about in American Reckoning is that one of the things about the My Lai is that it really, like other parts of the war, shattered this faith in American exceptionalism that we are inevitably the greatest force for good in the world, a nation that prizes life more than anybody else.
Because in fact, even the people that wanted to somehow excuse or defend the My Lai massacre would say things like, well, you know, in war atrocities are inevitable and everybody does it.
All sides commit atrocities.
Well, even if you accept that as true, what that does is it's a pretty big concession because right there you're saying, well, you're kind of throwing American exceptionalism out the window if we're like every other nation in terms of our ability to commit acts of evil in war.
So I do think that was one of the significant outcomes of the My Lai massacre.
Well, it's not something that we hear too much about nowadays, but I grew up hearing about it.
I don't know when I first learned of it, but Vietnam was certainly still controversial in the 1980s when I was a kid and people still cared about what happened.
They were still upset about what had happened there and that was part of it.
And you know, I guess in the 80s they had put out some movies, Platoon and Hamburger Hill and Jacob's Ladder and some of these, I guess that was sort of an aberration one there.
There's a little bit of people trying to catch up on what really happened there anyway.
Yeah, I think so.
Though the Reagan, you can't underestimate the power of the rightward turn in American politics in the 1980s.
I think even a lot of people that voted for Reagan didn't share his idea that it was a noble war that should have been fought and could have been won.
But they did buy his sense that, I do think a lot of his supporters believed that the anti-war movement was full of kind of, I don't know, cowardly people who were just trying to save their own skins, who were really mean and nasty to returning veterans and a whole kind of demonization of the anti-war movement, which I think is a really unfortunate legacy of the Vietnam War that we don't really have a positive view, where we don't have any peace memorials, we don't have any peace highways or movies that really are flattering toward the anti-war movement, which was the most diverse and robust, vibrant anti-war movement in our history.
And even if you think about Martin Luther King, he by 67 was one of the most eloquent critics of the Vietnam War, and yet he's an American hero with his holiday named after him, but we don't really remember him so much for his anti-war activism.
Right.
Yeah, that's true.
They whitewashed that all away.
He just said that one thing about that half of one sentence out of the Lincoln Memorial address there, and then that was at the March on Washington address about the content of your character, not the color of your skin.
But that's all he ever said about anything.
Okay, let's move on.
We don't want to talk about that.
Right.
Not remembering the line in 67 at Riverside Church where he said, the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
Right.
And of course, I mean, that's really the thing too, right?
Is you can't get more PC and more patriotic than Martin Luther King, so you bring that one up and it's a little bit disarming that like, wow.
Yeah, and he was lambasted for it at the time in the press, called him, basically, stick to your knitting.
What's funny is that's not really right, because at that time, Mao was by far the worst.
Yeah, no, it's true.
But I think you could qualify it within his own borders, of course.
But in terms of doing violence overseas, King could make a very strong argument.
Sure.
Well, and it's certainly the case today.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so now talk to me a little bit more about this murder, because now this is a village where all the men are gone anyway, all fighting, they're already dead or something.
It's basically just women and children and elderly, is that right?
Yeah.
And then, so this goes on for, and I guess it is 500 people, that's a lot, but this goes on for four hours?
Yeah, that's the thing.
I think most people must have assumed that a slaughter like this must have been just kind of a spasmodic, spontaneous kind of collective frenzy, crazy breakdown, or that people were somehow caught in a terrible crossfire, and it was neither of those things.
It was very, one might almost say leisurely.
Yeah, it took place over four hours.
People, GIs stopped to smoke cigarettes and eat C-rations, and yeah, it's just the kind of thing where it's so hard to explain, especially without explaining it away, a lot of people will say, well, it was the tension of a war zone, and particularly guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency.
And that context is certainly true, but again, I think we have to focus on the policies from the top that encouraged indiscriminate killing, and we haven't talked yet in our conversation about the other thing that really fueled this event and others like it on a smaller scale, which is racism.
You know, there had been a long history by that point of anti-Asian racism in American culture and politics, amped up by three Asian wars, first in the Philippines at the turn of the century, and then against Japan in the Pacific, a brutal, brutal war, a race war, and then in Korea.
And so the racist pejorative, the G word, gook, had been around already for quite a while, and GIs who came to Vietnam had already been well indoctrinated in that kind of demonization and dehumanization of the Vietnamese, starting in boot camp, if not before.
And then that was just, you know, promoted more once they arrived in country.
So if you combine the sort of sense that we have a license and encouragement to kill as many people as possible with that kind of sense of these targets as not really human beings, that does help to explain, but it doesn't, you know, it still remains a mystery.
You know, you never know.
No one knows how they're going to behave in a certain situation, and it's certainly not inevitable that everybody's going to participate in that kind of mass murder.
But I think the conditions in Vietnam established by American policy, and as you say, you know, a counterinsurgency against people that, even in the South, that did not really support the American-backed government, that creates a situation where it is inevitable that atrocities will, many atrocities will take place and many civilians would die.
And the best estimate now is that probably a million and a half Vietnamese civilians died in that war, most of them in South Vietnam.
Yeah.
Now, I'm sorry, I'm not sure if this was in your book, in this excerpt we ran, I reviewed a lot of articles about the My Lai massacre here in the last week, but there was, you know, one of the quotes of these guys who talked about it said that, well, you know, I just barely thought of the Vietnamese as human at all.
I mean, you know, killing them wasn't even wrong.
We weren't really thinking about it in that sense.
Just do what you want.
Well, you know, and this comes from the top down.
I mean, in a well-known interview with William Westmoreland, who was the commander of American forces at the time, a few years later, it appears in the documentary Hearts and Minds, he says, the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner.
Life is cheap in the Orient.
I mean, this kind of attitude, I think, was certainly pervasive in American culture, but was changing in the 60s.
I mean, that same comment way back in the 40s and 50s, what I found it to most Americans like conventional wisdom.
But I think by the late 60s and early 70s, there were more and more Americans who say, well, man, that is flat out racist.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing is, it's a whole different level of racism than we're usually used to, like, usually racism just means, oh, I hate these people or those people.
But this is really a whole way of thinking where it's not different than kicking over an ant pile, where their lives really just don't matter at all, and they just talk themselves into believing that.
Right.
And that, again, to go back to the previous experience, during the World War II, we had commanders say things like the only good Jap is a Jap who's been dead for six months.
And then I was just sort of pervasive part of the cultural discourse in those years.
By the way, I have that clip of Westmoreland here.
It's just 16 seconds.
OK.
Well, the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner.
Life is plentiful.
Life is cheap in the Orient.
And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.
Which, you know, he was speaking for himself about how much value he put on it, I guess, and projecting a little bit.
And after all, there are a whole lot of Asians, if that's all that matters, is the supply and demand, you know.
All right.
So now, let's see, 500 killed, and we talked about the torture and this and that.
So I guess...
Well, with the air, I mean, you wanted to maybe talk a little bit about the air war.
Sure.
Well, actually, let's get to that in a second.
Stick with the massacre itself for a minute.
Can you elaborate about, is it Thompson and those who intervened to stop the massacre finally?
Yeah.
So Hugh Thompson was a pilot of a small reconnaissance helicopter that noticed all these bodies being piled up, you know, on the ground.
They were trying to figure out what the hell took place.
And they finally landed, which was actually against orders, and realized that it was, you know, American troops that were doing the killing.
And so Thompson landed, and he saw a group of Vietnamese being shepherded by American soldiers toward, you know, what looked like their deaths.
And he said, I'm going to go talk to this lieutenant.
And if those American soldiers start to shoot at these Vietnamese, you have my orders to shoot at them.
I mean, was it going to be like a high noon sort of situation?
He was able to talk the lieutenant to his senses, and he took those Vietnamese, and there was not room on his helicopter, but he called in another helicopter to have them evacuated.
And they did.
Another important point about their mission is that, of course, they reported everything they saw to commanders of this particular Americal division.
And their reports were just disregarded, because they just didn't want to hear it.
And they feared for their lives.
I mean, Larry Colburn, who was a door gunner in that helicopter with Hugh Thompson, he had to serve out his term, you know, and he was, you know, kind of worried about whether, you know, what would happen to him.
And so it was only, you know, like decades later, I think in 1999, where the Army finally partially came to its senses and gave these three men, one had died in the war, so it was posthumous for him, but gave him a medal for, you know, honorable service in a non-combat situation.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you talked about how you sort of brought it up in another context about, you know, the people who rallied around Cali, and the men here, and I guess, as you say, he's the only one who was held accountable in any way, anyway, for them to rally around.
Yeah, and then he got off after three years of house arrest.
Yeah.
I mean, you brought that up in the terms of, well, even they were then conceding that, okay, we are as bad as the Japanese sometimes, or whatever it is, but it's still its own phenomenon worth examining, right, is the way that the American right, I mean, why should it be so hard at all to imagine that, hey, sometimes, even in this one circumstance, you would have some guys that get out of line, you know, they have to spin it that, well, some people got caught in the crossfire, there was a battle going on, and whatever, you know what I mean?
They have to pretend that torture is enhanced interrogation, while they support it anyway.
Why not just go ahead and, you know, it just seems, it's funny to me, the right-wing defenses that kick in over stuff like this.
Right.
Well, in addition to the defense or excuse that I mentioned before, you know, everybody does it, there was the claim that this was just a rogue unit, you know, the sort of the A Few Bad Apples theory of My Lai, but in fact, people have looked pretty carefully at this company, did not find that it was exceptionally either undertrained or lacking in discipline or lacking in education, in some ways, by many of those measures, it was a good or better than some other units, which is not to say that Cali was a good leader, I mean, Cali was a horrendous leader who, even prior to this massacre, you know, had been known to do some despicable, had done some despicable things, but yeah, he was kind of lionized as a victim hero by many on the right.
One of the things in my book, I quote this song that ended up selling 2 million copies, which is called the Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Cali, set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, in which it sort of makes him into, you know, an American hero, but of course it does, as you just indicated, include this total fictional account of what happened, because there's a line in there that says, we took the jungle village exactly like they said, we responded to their rifle fire with everything we had, of course, they received no rifle fire, but you know, then when the smoke cleared away, a hundred souls lay dead, well, there was no enemy smoke to clear away, and it was far more than a hundred souls, but you know, that's the sort of fiction that sold 2 million copies of this record.
Hey y'all, next Saturday, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party of New Jersey State Convention, and this is at the University Inn on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and so I'm not exactly sure what time I go on, but it's in the afternoon of next Saturday, March the 24th, in New Brunswick, New Jersey there, at Rutgers University, so check it all out at njlp.org.
All right, now I forgot what awesome question I was going to ask you next, so we'll go back to air power, and its use in this war against the civilians in South Africa.
Yeah, I just wanted to mention again, this top-down emphasis on the body count, there was this general who ran the 9th Infantry Division...
Oh, that's what I was going to say, about Calley really was hung out to dry in a way, that yeah, it was all his fault, but that's the thing about responsibility, is it's a quality, not a quantity, so there's plenty to go around, and he really was following orders, which doesn't excuse him, but it does implicate those who ordered him to collect these numbers.
Right, so there are even people on the left, yes, there are even people on the anti-war left who said, Calley, everyone has some personal responsibility, true, but he is nevertheless being scapegoated here, because there are people with much more power who are responsible, and responsible for creating the conditions for these atrocities, but also responsible for covering them up, who got away scot-free, but yeah, there was this general I wanted to mention, because a year after My Lai, there was an operation called Operation Speedy Express down in the Delta, that was killing the equivalent of a My Lai a month, in terms of civilians, mostly from air and artillery fire, but the commander of that division at the time had a nickname, the Butcher of the Delta, his own men gave him that nickname, General Butcher Julian Ewell, and yeah, it was not point-blank murders face-to-face in villages, but it was called in from the air, and even according to the official American rules of engagement, you could call in an airstrike on a Vietnamese village, I mean, even just on the knowledge that they may have given some food or intelligence to the enemy, or a stray round of sniper fire from the vicinity of the village, you could wipe out the whole, just get on the phone and call an airstrike, wipe out the whole village, so yeah, they would say, you know, the rules of engagement say, whenever possible, the village should be warned before there's an airstrike, but you know, and that would, if they were warned, it usually came in the form of a kind of leaflet that was dropped from the air, that would say, you might be bombed if you support the Viet Cong, but of course, they never said when they would do the bombing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, is it really right, and this is a little bit off of My Lai, but more on to just mass curse overall, where, and I think this is in Terce's book, Kill Anything That Moves, where they're just continually running for years, these air raids over Laos and Cambodia, and then it comes out, I think there's even testimony in front of Congress that, well, so what was the mission here?
And that basically, well, the mission was to get rid of these bombs and not let them pile up at the base, because the bombs kept coming.
And so our job was to launch planes and drop bombs, because at that point, their incentives have been narrowed down to basically just that.
And so they didn't have even a purpose anymore at all, other than just this is their job.
Yeah, it does speak to the kind of obsessive quantification of the war.
And this just insane idea that the more you do of this, the more you do of that, the more operations you launch, the more patrols you go on, the more bombs you drop, the more you are achieving, it is assumed, the goal of breaking the will or the capacity of the enemy to continue fighting.
But it was, yeah.
So, you know, McNamara was rightly, you know, given credit for a lot of this quantification, but it wasn't just McNamara, for sure.
Yeah.
But that really is a major key to this, right, that these men just, no matter how much, like Harry Brown said, that the Pentagon is just the post office with M-16s or whatever.
In other words, these guys figure that, look, there's a breaking point.
And I say so.
Okay.
So that's premise one.
It doesn't matter if it's true or not now.
Now it's engraved in stone.
There's a breaking point.
At some point, if we bomb them enough and shoot them enough, they'll cry uncle and do what we say, even though it doesn't matter that that doesn't work for a decade.
Yeah.
They just keep going.
Yeah.
I mean, it is true by the late 60s, when Nixon came into office, Kissinger did a poll of all the, you know, the Pentagon, State Department, all these different governments, people.
And there was, even then, I have to say, within the military, there was by then very deep skepticism that the war would ever achieve its objectives.
I mean, even the rosiest scenarios were saying it's going to take a minimum of five to ten more years just to, you know, to achieve some stability.
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So now, is it right that politically speaking, it was, quote, necessary for Nixon to ramp up the air war to such a degree in order to basically cover for the fact that he was withdrawing the troops?
No, but I do think it was his, he did genuinely, I believe, I think that intensifying the air war would cover the apparent paradox that he, which is this, that he wanted to convince the Vietnamese enemy that he was still serious about achieving the objectives of a permanent non-communist South Vietnam.
At the same time that he's telling the American people that he's going to wind down the American presence there and turn it over to the Vietnamese.
So why wouldn't the Vietnamese communists say, well, we'll just wait it out?
If you're going to withdraw your troops, we'll just, he wanted them to believe that he was still serious.
So his, this was so-called madman, he called it the madman theory.
He wanted them to believe that he was crazy enough to do anything to achieve his objectives.
So what could be madder than enlarging the war by spreading it to Cambodia with secret bombing in 69, followed by a land invasion or ratcheting up the bombing over Laos to an intense degree.
And then even in a, in a small way at first, some secret bombing of, again, of North Vietnam and then in a bigger way in 72.
So, yeah, I mean, I think he thought it would, you know, it seems insane to me, but I think he actually, he believed that this was kind of a, that he was a good poker player and this was like a, a bluff that might work, but it was not just a bluff, he was carrying it out.
He did bluff nuclear strikes.
Yeah.
Well, you know, so this, this famous, and this goes back to what we were talking about, about the race and just the categorization of, of humans in these ways by these politicians, by the soldiers on the, on the ground, but also by the politicians.
And I don't know that this is necessarily, I guess it's somewhat tied up with race.
But I guess this might go for the Germans too.
But there's this audio of Nixon explaining to Kissinger that, you know, something to the effect, this isn't the quote, but you know, something very close to, well, look, the lives of civilians.
That doesn't matter to me.
I'm the, I'm a president, I deal on the level of states, all this stuff about civilians dying within the country.
That's their problem.
That's like some entire other category, because he's now on the level of Mount Olympus as at least some sort of demigod or whatever, where that's just, look, if we should bomb the dykes and flood them all out, maybe we should bomb the dykes and flood them all out.
Maybe we should use atomic bombs.
I'm pretty sure this is all the same conversation.
And Kissinger says, well, I'm just worried that you would look like a butcher to the rest of the world and that it would cost you credibility.
And so we can't have that.
And he's saying, anyway, it's just, it's funny to me because it comes down to basically just a simple change of conception, a willful change of conception that whoever I kill, even if it's just little babies burning to death and whatever it is, that that just doesn't matter to me because I'm a president.
And therefore, that's just somebody else's problem.
And I deal only, my only interest here is the government of South Vietnam, the government of North Vietnam, the government of China, and these different puzzle pieces I'm playing with and chess pieces on the board.
And that's all.
And if the Vietnamese burn, that's up to them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The maintenance of power can justify just about anything.
And you know, people who do dissent from within quickly find themselves posted at very best posted to other duties, if not, if not canned.
Yeah.
Hey, you said a one and a half million, usually I hear two to three, what do you think about the discrepancy?
Well, one and a half, I said for civilian casualty, add in a million and a half combatants.
These are very baggy terms, but maybe it's more civilians, fewer, but it's about 3 million.
And that doesn't include Cambodia, right?
Cambodia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's, it could be over five to six, but you know, so it's hard to say, but a lot, you know, I actually saw something recently where someone said, well, look, the domino theory was right.
Look what happened in Cambodia when we left and totally ignore the fact that it was the Americans who kicked over the domino in Cambodia.
Yeah.
Well, it did destabilize Cambodia to such an extent that a once unpopular extremist communist group, the Khmer Rouge suddenly gained a greater support after the bombing began.
But the other thing to say about that is while it's true, communist regimes came into those three countries, they were all quite different.
And in Vietnam, within a few years, actually went to war to put an end to Pol Pot's regime.
And then also had border skirmishes with the Chinese to the north.
And the Americans sided with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the battle against North Vietnam.
Yeah.
Because they hated North Vietnam so much.
Well, all of Vietnam at that point.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Was it Gerald Ford too?
Or do you know?
Well, you know, by then he was, yeah, to a certain extent, I mean, all this, this sort of the support was indirect, but nevertheless, I mean, it was, you know, there was, there was no, there was certainly no effort to call out and denounce and take steps against it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I thought they gave them aid for their camps and whatever, this guy, right?
Yeah.
Amazing.
All right.
Well, you know what?
There must be a million questions that I haven't asked you about Vietnam here.
I know you're, you must be short on time, but is there any kind of major point that you think that people need to take home about My Lai or My Lai or Vietnam in general?
Well, I mean, you know, it's such a bleak subject.
You know, my only concern is that people hear these horrible stories from the history of warfare and it leads to a kind of fatalism or even cynicism that there's nothing that citizens, you know, can do to shape foreign policy.
And I think since 9-11, that kind of attitude has been, you know, pretty widespread because it does seem at times like the sort of the machinery that creates and sustains wars is kind of impervious to any dissent and has kind of a life of its own.
But I, you know, I do think we have to remain hopeful that making the people in power accountable and that goes for Congress too, insisting that they take a greater role in trying to represent us on issues of foreign policy and that it is, in other words, a reasonable thing to expect and hope for and to struggle for a more, not just a reined in, scaled back imperial footprint, but a foreign policy that is truly more democratic.
So yeah, I mean, I think that the energy and activism of young people does seem to be on the rise, even among high school students now with these school walkouts after the mass shooting in Parkland.
So if, you know, the other thing is my hope is that some of these movements will start to find the connections between domestic and foreign issues and environmental issues, because they really, they are interconnected in ways that are not always so visible.
So that the campaign against nuclear weapons, against military interventions, against, you know, global climate change and against violence and guns and racism at home could somehow come together.
Yeah.
Well, I'm a libertarian, and so I'm with you on some of those and against you on others.
But I'll tell you what, it seems like focusing on all the very worst things first, as you do with your work here, you know, especially the foreign policy here.
And this is a place where, you know, the American people, I guess, I don't know, they don't really do the polls very much, because I don't think they want to know the answers anymore.
But it's, it's been, you know, years since a sound majority of the American people were against the Afghan war, for example, wanted to come home.
They really turned against it.
I think 2006 was the year that things flipped.
And since then, yes, a majority of Americans have opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The problem is, it's going to take a Tet Offensive or something to get people to sort of snap out of it and prioritize.
That's my fear.
You know what?
But it seems like the consensus is really with us if there was just, if we had a Smedley Butler or a Ron Paul presidency, or some kind of thing that was, that people could actually rally around, you know.
But right now, all the opposition to the president is accusing him of not being a hawk enough.
Right.
You know, like in Syria and in Europe.
No, and I think it's, I do think it's also underwritten and kind of kept in the status quo is kept in place by this lingering conviction and faith in American exceptionalism.
I mean, so one thing that always strikes me as puzzling is if you do these polls, and not just on foreign policy, but the schools, the criminal justice system, the infrastructure, Americans can be very self, you know, critical.
And but if you ask them, do you believe in American exceptionalism, it still gets very high majority assent.
And therefore, I think it makes us more willing to admit or not admit to it, to defer to or acquiesce to politicians who say, you know, we're the greatest, we continue to be the greatest force for good in the world.
And if we didn't take our responsibility to assert ourselves, you know, everywhere, all hell would break loose and chaos would reign, instead of sort of saying, well, let's look at it really more closely.
I mean, where are we bringing democracy and stability and freedom and order?
Show me, show me on the map exactly where that's happening.
Right.
Well, this is the thing too, right?
Is this term exceptionalism can mean all kinds of different stuff.
Like supposedly, I thought it meant that here, the American people, the country is basically founded on this revolution, where they overthrew a king.
And so we all have the same divine right of kings as kings do.
And we only allow the government to exist by this constitutional contract to protect our rights.
And that's what makes us essentially very lucky or something, right?
Is basically that kind of exceptional, that everybody else is a subject of their royal sovereign or some kind of thing, and we do it better.
But that's a lot different than like you talked about before, what we don't do atrocities like the Germans and Japanese do, because we're so exceptional that we would never behave that way.
And then it becomes, oh no, actually, we're so exceptional that we can commit atrocities all we want.
And screw you, it's perfectly fine because the laws of morality don't apply to us anymore because we're so exceptional.
At that point, nobody is even defining what's so exceptional about us anymore if we're a bunch of war criminals here, you know?
Right.
It's kind of, oh well, but what a great term.
And then if you watch Fox News, they'll be like, what, you don't think we're exceptional?
Like, oh boy, I guess this is where the whole argument on foreign policy must begin, you know?
It's a quick way to get to the heart of a big debate, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right, well listen, I've kept you too long, but thanks very much for coming on the show.
I really do appreciate it.
All right, Scott.
You're welcome.
All right, you guys.
That is Christian Appy.
His book is called American Reckoning, The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.
And this is a great article he wrote for Antiwar.com, or well, we exerted it from the book.
I mean to say exerted it.
Yeah.
PT in there, pronounced better.
Our boys, 50 years after the My Lai Massacre, My Lai Massacre.
And so you guys know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
That's for the shows.
Sign up for all the feeds and all that stuff.
My book is called Fool's Errand, Time Down the War in Afghanistan.
You can find it at foolserrand.us and the audio book is done and published and for sale.
You'll love it, maybe.
Go to antiwar.com and libertarianinstitute.org for things I want you to read and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Okay.
Thanks guys.
