Two soldiers write about
the depravity of war

One of the burning questions of this political season is
whether John Kerry participated in or was witness to acts
of depravity while a navy officer during Vietnam. The question
has opened up old wounds — wounds not quite yet healed —
from 30 years ago. Kerry testified before Congress in the
early 1970s and repeated what some of his fellow soldiers
had told him about atrocities committed during battle.

But the very nature of the debate underscores, as it should,
the insanity of war. War creates an atmosphere where decent
people are thrown into a cauldron of madness, where the rules
of engagement change overnight, and where opportunities for
inhuman behavior present themselves when they otherwise, in
a less violent world, would not.

It
is easy for us, on the sidelines, to condemn what happened
at Abu Ghraib prison, or at Buchenwald, for that matter —
because we were not there. Would all of us have acted just
as inhumanly, as we would like to believe we never would?
That’s the scary thing. Or would we have risen above the actions
of the mob to be the voice of sanity? We don’t know.

But while we consider the question of whether John Kerry
is telling the truth or not, we can listen to two different
accounts from two different wars, both of which unveil the
sense of anger and chaos that war can cause. One, from the
Civil War, is told by an unnamed Connecticut soldier who recounts
a disgusting episode of casual bigotry. And the other is from
World War II veteran Lenny Bruce, who unleashes a torrent
of lingering resentment during a drug-besotted concert in
1962.

Did John Kerry witness acts of depravity during Vietnam?
Maybe, maybe not. But he had many brothers in arms who, unfortunately,
had.

This is from an issue of the Connecticut War Record, published
in 1864:

The 21st (Conn. Volunteers) were ordered on board the
Transport "John Farren," but were subsequently disembarked
and returned to their position in the ‘Rifle Pits.’ We were
again ordered to embark, and returned to the boat for that
purpose. Arriving at the wharf we found that through some
misunderstanding of the Quartermaster, the ‘John Farren,’
which was laden with all our baggage, had been completely
loaded down with negroes and their baggage. The way those
darkies and effects were transferred from the boat to the
shore ‘was a caution’ to the ‘poor emancipated Africans.’
After the negroes were all disembarked our men were ordered
on board to unload the baggage, and mounting the hurricane
deck, where it had been packed away, they charged upon the
confused mass of African possessions and commenced transferring
them in a very unceremonious manner to the wharf. The scene
which followed baffles description – and I doubt if the history
of the whole war can present a like scene, or the Emancipation
Proclamation of Father Abraham ever called forth another such
sight. Feather beds fell like snow flakes, only rather more
forcibly, upon the heads of frantic searchers for ‘their own’
household goods. Bedding, clothing, all manner of domestic
goods, filled the air and fell like rain in one confused and
inextricable mass. Wenches displaying the pluck and muscle
of a Hercules in giving punishment to some luckless darkey,
who in her fruitless search for her undiscovered property
had invaded the rights of another.

Hooped skirts were hurled gracefully from the deck to
come down enveloping some corpulent wench, and adding to her
wrath, already rampant. Some were crying, some laughing, some
fighting, and all wrangled amid the shower of ‘bag and baggage,’
which ‘mingling fell.’ And thus we left them, to be subsequently
conveyed to Newbern, but if they ever live to sort that baggage
they will exceed the average length of African longevity.

Yes, well. And this is a report from the liberators.

On Dec. 4, 1964, Lenny Bruce performed at the Gate of Horn
nightclub. "Let the buyer beware," the emcee intones,
probably for two reasons. Bruce was known not just for his
comedy, but for his well-known use of obscenities. At this
concert, he also seems to be quite stoned.

Nonetheless, even under the influence, Bruce could be funny
and devastating. Here, he is slashing, as he asks the question
"Why are Americans hated everywhere?" He answers
it by recounting what he says happened between American soldiers
and the Europeans who were needing some of the things the
Americans carried. It isn’t a happy tale, nor was it meant
to be.

"I
think I did a little more traveling than anyone in this audience.
I think I’ve been on more invasions than anyone in this audience.
I was on six. I made some real daddies. I was on a cruiser
called the USS Brooklyn. I was a 2nd class gunners mate. I
was [unintelligible] from ’42 to ’45 July — that’s when Germany
fell, in July. Doing it’s dirty. They hate Americans everywhere,
do you know why? Because they fucked all their mothers for
chocolate bars and don’t you forget that, jim. You don’t think
those kids have heard that since 1942? ‘You know what those
Americans did to your poor mother?’ They lined her up those
bastards — your father had to throw up his poor guts in the
kitchen while he waited out there and that master sergeant
schtupped your poor mother for their stinkin’ coffee and their
eggs and their friggin’ cigarettes. Those Americans. That’s
it, jim. That’s all they’ve heard, those kids. Those kids
are now 23, 25 years old. The Americans. There’s the guy that
did it to my mother. Would you assume that they would say
‘There’s the guy who fucked my mother. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Thank you for that and for giving us candy?"

Lenny Bruce was arrested later in that performance and today
it’s easy to ask: Was Bruce arrested for swearing, or for
saying things like the above which you could imagine were
the things no one, ever, wanted to hear?

War makes people do things and say things they’d rather never
have done in the first place and it certainly makes them do
things they’d just as soon forget.

One way, of course, to avoid this heartache is to not put
people in this terrible and unfair situation in the first
place.