Adrian C. Louis and the reservation of the mind

“I’m writing about my life. I guess deep down I sort of fancy myself as speaking for certain kinds of people who don’t have a choice—for the downtrodden.” 

Adrian C. Louis 

"Faces skyward, we all seek
songs in the whirlwinds
that parch our slow lives."
Adrian C. Louis from Sun/Dance/Song

Sonny’s Purple Heart
By Adrian C. Louis

"But it’s too late to say you’re sorry." — The Zombies

I
Man, if you’re dead, why are you leading
me to drink after five sober years?
Sonny, can I get a witness?
I had a Snow White vision of the prodigal
son returning to America
that day of my final hangover.
I tried to clear the mixture
of cobwebs and shooting stars
from my brain with spit-warm
Budweiser, but the hair of the dog
just was not doing the trick.
I ended up pummeling myself
seven times that day and named each egg
white load for a Disney dwarf.
The first was Dopey.
The final was Sleepy, I think, or Droopy.

II
Last year you scrawled a letter to me
about your first and final visit
to the Vietnam Memorial and how your eyes
reflected off the shiny black stone
and shot back into your brain like guidons
unfurling the stench of cordite and the boy screams
of men whose souls evaporated
into morning mists over blue-green jungles.
You had to be there, you said.
That’s where you caught the cancer, you said.

III
Sonny. Tonight I had a dream of Mom’s death
twenty years too late and now my eyes
will not close like I imagine the lid
on her cheap casket did.
I was not there when she died.
Home on leave from Basic Training,
you stood in for me
because I was running scared
through the drugged-out alleys of America,
hiding from those Asian shadows
that would finally ace you and now, now
in the dark victory of your Agent Orange cancer,
it gives me not one ounce of ease
to say fuck Nixon and Kissinger,
fuck all the generals and all
the armies of God and fuck me,
twenty years
too late.

IV
History is history and thank God for that.
When we were wise-ass American boys
in our fifth grade geography class,
we tittered over the prurient-sounding
waves of Lake Titticaca … Titti … ca-ca
and we never even had the slightest
clue that Che was camping out
en las montañas de Bolivia …
We never knew American chemists would
kill you slicker than slant-eyed bullets.

V
Damn Sonny. Five sober years done squeaked
by like a silent fart and I’m on autopilot,
sitting in a bar hoisting suds with ghosts,
yours and my slowly evolving own.
When we were seventeen with fake I.D.’s,
we got into the Bucket of Blood
in Virginia City and slurped sloe gin fizzes
while the innocent jukebox blared
“She’s Not There” by the Zombies.
Later that drunken night you puked purple
splotches onto my new, white Levis
and a short, few years into your future
this lost nation would award
you two purple hearts,
one of which your mother pressed
into my hand that bright day
we filed you under
dry desert dirt.

(Adrian C. Louis, "Sonny’s Purple Heart" from Vortex of Indian Fevers. Copyright © 1995 by Adrian C. Louis)

The Sacred Circle
by Adrian C. Louis

Numanah, Grandfather, grant me the grace
of a new song far from this lament
of lame words and fossils of a losing game.
No more flat pebbles skimmed between the wetness
of tongue and thigh and eye again!
I never asked to be the son of a stained mattress
who contemplated venison stew and knew
the shame hidden in grease clouds stuck to the wall
behind the woodstove where Grandmother cooked.
I only wanted to run far, so far from Indian land.
And, God damn it, when I was old enough I did.

I loitered in some great halls of ivy
and allowed the inquisition of education:
electric cattle prods placed lovingly
to the lobes of my earth memories.
I carried the false spirit force of sadness
wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket
of a worn, tweed coat.
In junkie alleyways I whispered of forgotten arrows
in the narrow passages of my own discarded history.
Then, when I was old enough
I ran back to Indian land.
Now I’m thinking of running from here.

Pine Ridge, South Dakota
February 1988

(Adrian C. Louis, "The Sacred Circle" from Fire Water World. Copyright © 1989 by Adrian C. Louis.)

Adrian C. Louis is a member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe from Nevada who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He has written ten books of poetry, two novels and a book of short stories.His most recent book of poetry is Random Exorcisms.

He has been a journalist, editor of tribal newspapers and magazines and has taught at Lakota College and in the Minnesota public university system. He is editor for Lakota Times and Indian Country Today and co-founder of the Native American Journalists Association.

On his writing Adrian Louis said:

"Early on in my writing, I did a lot of speaking from behind masks. The older I got, the more honest and direct I became. I think that’s simply human nature. As we grow older, we learn that in the end, a lie will always return to bite you on the ass. But, I am no hero, no shaman/warrior. I am simply a common man. Even though I’ve gotten an education and have written books, I am still a person who grew up using an outhouse. I think people react strongly to my writings for varied reasons. Life can beat you down and I’ve survived my share of trauma, a lot of it self-inflicted. People can relate to that and to the fact that in a lot of my poems I don’t take any prisoners. I think many readers like to find a poem that in some way reflects their own complicated lives."

An online collection of poems is here. His website is here & interviews are here and here.

Denise Levertov and the political power of contemplation and action

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountains
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm
that witnessing prescence.
Witness
Denise Levertov

In her poem About Political Action in which each Individual Acts from the Heart, Denise Levertov speaks to the power of contemplation and action and how we can bring together our private concerns with larger social and political concerns. 

The poem also reminds us of the importance of celebrating occasional victories, no matter how small.

About Political Action in which each Individual Acts from the Heart 

by Denise Levertov

When solitaries draw close, releasing
each solitude into its blossoming, 

when we give to each other the roses
of our communion— 

a culture of gardens, horticulture not agribusiness, 

arbors among the lettuce, small terrains— 

when we taste in small victories sometimes
the small, ephemeral yet joyful
harvest of our striving, 

great power flows from us,
luminous, a promise. Yes! ... Then

 
great energy flows from solitude,
and great power from communion. 

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was a British born American poet whose poetry always moves with ease between private experience and larger political events.

As a poet and citizen Levertov was mobilised by the political events of the 60's and 70's , particularly the Vietnam War, which figures prominently in her poetry, most notably her 1967 collection Sorrow Dance, which is full of poems of outrage against the Vietnam War.

Levertov composed poems about contemporary political events, such as the Vietnam War, the peace movement, Cold War politics, war and violence and US financed wars in Central America in the 1980's and the Gulf War of 1991. Until her death in 1997, Levertov maintained an active commitment to justice and peace organizations, supporting them with benefit readings.

Levertov was well aware of the dangers and limits of "political poetry" which can become overly didactic and polemical. Her work demonstrates that an engaged political poem can disturb us, while more contemplative poems can also serve political ends by pointing us towards a vision for living that leads towards compassion, peace and justice and ultimately to meaningful social change.

 Michael True writes, that in her poetry (and her life), Levertov:  

"refused to surrender to that dissociation of sensibility that separates the individual person from the common life of all. 

More poems by Denise Levertov are here.

Earlier blog pieces on Denise Levertov are here and here. 

Sunday's poems: Cathy Linh Che

I came across Cathy Linh Che's  poetry on the website Behind the Lines: Poetry, War and peacemaking.

Split 

Cathy Linh Che

    

I see my mother at thirteen

in a village so small,
it's never given a name.

Monsoon season drying up--
steam lifting in full-bodied waves.
She chops corn for the hogs,

her hair dipping to the small of her back 
as if dipped in black
and polished to a shine.

She wears a side-part 
that splits her hair
into two uneven planes.

They come to watch her, 
Americans, Marines, just boys,
eighteen or nineteen.

With scissor-fingers, 
they snip the air,
repeat cut,
point at their helmets 

and then at her hair.

All they want is a small lock.
What does she say 

to her mother

to make her so afraid?

Days later 
she will be sent away

to the city for safekeeping.

She will return home 
only once to be given away

to my father.

Her hair 
was dark, washed,
and uncut.

copyright Cathy Linh Che

Talk
for my brother
  
The New York rain
keeps me inside.

Remember Hong Kong,
how dense the air,
how hard to breathe

inside buildings
of blue-green glass?

Here, the rain sounds
like paper tearing,
then crumpled.

How do I find my way back
to your fridge, always stocked
with Gatorade?

Today, did you call
just to talk? It seemed
we had nothing to say.

You are a coat
I want to turn inside-out
to see where the silk frays,

in the arms, along the back,
your massive shoulders.

When did you get so big?
There’s a picture of us.
I was four. I held you in my lap.

You were half my size,
so heavy, even then.

We used to stay up talking
across the room.
I read books by lamplight.

You turned away
when you wanted to sleep,
your radio by your ear,

a song by Aaliyah,
in my dream, repeating,

Come back to me 

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet born in Los Angeles in 1980. Her parents immigrated to America in 1976, after spending a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines.  Her first book of poems, winner the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2014. She is also co-editing an anthology of poetry and prose from the children of the Vietnam War called Inheriting the War

"4 Dead in Ohio": New evidence of state murder of students at Kent State University 42 years ago

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in O-hi-o...

Neil Young, Ohio

The images are shocking and iconic. The event shocked and divided a nation and galvanized the anti- war protest movement.

Neil Young wrote one of the great protests songs of all time about it. And 42 years later the truth of what really happened at Kent State University on May 4 1970 remains hidden.

On May 4 1970 the Ohio State National Guard opened fire on Kent State university students protesting the Vietnam War and the US invasion of Cambodia. The Guardsmen shot and killed 4 students- William Schroeder, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause- and wounded another 9 students.

Some of the students killed and wounded were not involved in the protest but were walking to class.

The Kent State shootings took place after National Guards dispersed a student protest using tear gas and charges with bayonets and rifles. As the students dispersed the Guardsmen retreated but around a dozen Guards reeled around and opened fire on the students, unleashing a 13 second barrage of 67 discriminant shots.

Eye witness accounts suggested that the National Guardsmen opened fire on the students without warning. 

Many of the students involved, family members and political campaigners have long argued  that the shootings were a form of state murder of student protestors with the goal of silencing anti war protests.

The official line has always been that the shootings were a tragic accident and that Guardsman feared for their lives claiming that a sniper among the students opened fire on them.  

The families of those killed and the wounded never accepted the official version of events and have fought for 42 years to find out the truth of what happened.

Now, new evidence suggests that that the National Guard were ordered by military commanders to fire. A number of the wounded students  and family members of those killed  now have digital forensic evidence to prove that military commanders shouted orders commanding the Guardsmen to fire before the barrage of shots broke out.

Further there are claims that the FBI and Government intelligence agencies managed the operation at Kent State, including events leading up to the shootings, the actual shootings and  the subsequent cover up to send a message to anti-war protestors in the US and over seas.

In an article to be published in the book Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution Laurel Krause the sister of one of the students killed at Kent State has marshaled the evidence to shine the light on the shocking history of the the US Government involvement in the Kent State shootings and subsequent cover up. 

She writes:

For forty-two years, the United States government has held the position that Kent State was a tragic and unfortunate incident occurring at a noontime antiwar rally on an American college campus. In 2010, compelling forensic evidence emerged showing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were the lead agencies in managing Kent State government operations, including the cover-up. At Kent State, lawful protest was pushed into the realm of massacre as the US federal government, the state of Ohio, and the Ohio National Guard (ONG) executed their plans to silence antiwar protest in America.

The new evidence threatens much more than the accuracy of accounts of the Kent State massacre in history books. As a result of this successful, ongoing Kent State government cover-up, American protesters today are at much greater risk than they realize, with no real guarantees or protections offered by the US First Amendment rights to protest and assemble. This chapter intends to expose the lies of the state in order to uncensor the “unhistory” of the Kent State massacre, while also aiming toward justice and healing, as censoring the past impacts our perspectives in the present.

They are now calls for an Independent Review and Justice Department investigation into the new evidence that the National Guard were ordered to fire on the students and that an FBI informant may have actually fired the first shots.

An official inquiry into the shooting at the time blamed both the students and the National Guardsmen but no one was ever charged, although civil action was pursued by the families of those shot and the wounded students. The Official Inquiry failed to investigate the reasons why the shootings happened.

At the time the shootings evoked national outrage and led to nationwide protests in the streets and on university campuses, including a national strike involving 4 million students and citizens. The shootings galvanised opposition to the war and the Nixon administration.

Senior Nixon officials later suggested that the shootings contributed to the descent into the Watergate scandal. The shootings came to symbolize the deep political and social divisions that so sharply divided the country during the Vietnam War era.

The shootings inspired Neil Young to write the song Ohio which was recorded and released by Crosby Stills, Nash and Young within 2 weeks of the shootings. The song is recognised as one of the great topical political 'protest 'songs of all time. It evokes the profound horror, anger and outrage that existed at the time.

This clip of the Crosby Stills Nash and Young version of Neil Young's song Ohio features chilling images from the shooting.

John Pilger and the political extremism that masquerades as democracy

John Pilger's latest article in New Statesman exposes the political and corporate extremism that masquerades as democracy:

Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20th century. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as best they could.

Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the "collection room" and, unofficially, as the "room of horrors". It has shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses. During its invasion of Vietnam, the United States sprayed a defoliant herbicide on vegetation and villages to deny "cover to the enemy". This was Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, poisons of such power that they cause foetal death, miscarriage, chromosomal damage and cancer.

In 1970, a US Senate report revealed that "the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children". The code-name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand.  Today, an estimated 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children.

Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society, recently returned from Vietnam with a letter for the International Olympic Committee from the Vietnam Women's Union. The union's president, Nguyen Thi  Thanh  Hoa, described "the severe congenital deformities [caused by Agent Orange] from generation to generation". She asked the IOC to reconsider its decision to accept sponsorship of the London Olympics from the Dow Chemical Corporation, which was one of the companies that manufactured the poison and has refused to compensate its victims. 

Aldis hand-delivered the letter to the office of Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee. He has had no reply. When Amnesty International pointed out that in 2001 Dow Chemical acquired "the company responsible for the Bhopal gas leak [in India in 1984] which killed 7,000 to 10,000 people immediately and 15,000 in the following twenty years", David Cameron described Dow as a "reputable company". Cheers, then, as the TV cameras pan across the £7 million decorative wrap that sheathes the Olympic stadium: the product of a 10-year "deal" between the IOC and such a reputable destroyer.

History is buried with the dead and deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal. And history is the new enemy. On 28 May, President Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society. It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey, "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history". 

The following day, the New York Times published a long article documenting how Obama personally selects the victims of his drone attacks across the world. He does this on "terror Tuesdays" when he browses through mug shots on a "kill list", some of them teenagers, including "a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years". Many are unknown or simply of military age. Guided by "pilots" sitting in front of computer screens in Las Vegas, the drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of lungs and blow people to bits. Last September, Obama killed a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, purely on the basis of hearsay that he was inciting terrorism. "This one is easy," he is quoted by aides as saying as he signed the man's death warrant. On 6 June, a drone killed 18 people in a village in Afghanistan, including women, children and the elderly who were celebrating a wedding. 

The New York Times article was not a leak or an expose. It was a piece of PR designed by the Obama administration to show what a tough guy the 'commander-in-chief' can be in an election year. If re-elected, Brand Obama will continue serving the wealthy, pursuing truth-tellers, threatening countries, spreading computer viruses and murdering people every Tuesday. 

The threats against Syria, co-ordinated in Washington and London, scale new peaks of hypocrisy. Contrary to the raw propaganda presented as news, the investigative journalism of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung identifies those responsible for the massacre in Houla as the 'rebels' backed by Obama and Cameron. The paper's sources include the rebels themselves. This has not been completely ignored in Britain. Writing in his personal blog, ever so quietly, Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor, effectively dishes his own 'coverage', citing western officials who describe the 'psy-ops' operation against Syria as 'brilliant'. As brilliant as the destruction of Libya, and Iraq, and Afghanistan.

And as brilliant as the psy-ops of the Guardian's latest promotion of Alastair Campbell, the chief collaborator of Tony Blair in the criminal invasion of Iraq. In his "diaries", Campbell tries to splash Iraqi blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to drench them all. But recognition that the respectable, liberal, Blair-fawning media was a vital accessory to such an epic crime is omitted and remains a singular test of intellectual and moral honesty in Britain. 

How much longer must we subject ourselves to such an "invisible government"?  This term for insidious propaganda, first used by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and inventor of modern public relations, has never been more apt.  "False reality" requires historical amnesia, lying by omission and the transfer of significance to the insignificant. In this way, political systems promising security and social justice have been replaced by piracy, "austerity" and "perpetual war": an extremism dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. Applied to an individual, this would identify a psychopath. Why do we accept it?

Wikileaks and the new radical citizen activistswho challenge state and corporate power

Wikileaks has once again exposed the lies, brutality and pointlessness of the Coalition's supposed war to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan.

In publishing 90,00 classified US documents about the war in Afghanistan Wikileaks has shed light not only on the brutality and pointlessness of the war, but also the appalling failure of the corporate and mainstream media to do its job and tell the truth about this war.

Wikileaks demonstrates the power of civil society and committed individuals to challenge and expose injustice and confront power. A small group of dedicated computer experts and volunteers operating completely outside the traditional power structures has not only broken a number of extraordinary stories , it is now considered a dangerous threat to the interests of the US Government and its allies and corporate interests.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the 1960's, (the Papers were instrumental in changing public opinion about the Vietnam War) believes that Wikileaks is perceived by the US Government as such a serious threat that it may well attempt to silence Assage and Wikileaks by any means, including assassination.

There are few civil society groups doing such important work as Wikileaks, and few under such direct threat because of it. Do all you can to support Wikileaks.

Read this interview with Wikileaks founder Australian Julian Assange in SPIEGEL where he says this:

"Reform can only come about when injustice is exposed. To oppose an unjust plan before it reaches implementation is to stop injustice".

"We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have, and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work."

Bruce Dawe: a poet of social and political critique

Currently I am enjoying Australian poet Bruce Dawe's Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954-1997. This is such a rich collection. There is much to like in Dawe's poetry.

In particular, I enjoy that Dawe is a poet with a strong sense of social critique whose poetry engages with the social and political issues of the day. Homecoming is an anti-war poem written about the processing and return of the dead during the Vietnam War.

Homecoming

All day, day after day, they're bringing them home,

they're picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them home,

they're bringing them in, piled on the hulls of grants, in trucks, in convoys,

they're zipping them up in green plastic bags,

they're tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness-

they're giving them names, they're rolling them out of

the deep-freeze lockers-on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut

they are bringing them home

- curly-heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms

- they're high, now, high and higher, over the land, the steaming chow mein

their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific

with sorrowful quick fingers, heading south, heading east,

home, home, home- and the coasts swing upward,the old

ridiculous curvatures

of earth, the knuckled hills, the mangrove-swamps, the desert emptiness...

in their sterile housing they tilt towards these like skiers

- taxiing in, on the long runways, the howl of their homecoming rises

surrounding them like their last moments (the mash, the splendour)

then fading at length as they move

on to small towns where dogs in the frozen sunset

raise muzzles in mute salute,

and on to cities in whose wide web of suburbs

telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree

and the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry

- they're bringing them home, now, too late, too early.

copyright courtesy of Bruce Dawe

The moratorium and Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War

It was 40 years ago this weekend that some 200,000 Australians marched against Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War (and conscription) , as part of a citizen led movement that came to be known as the "Moratorium". In cities and towns across Australia people marched against Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and the conscription of youth to fight in that war.

Nick Irving has written an important piece on this forgotten but important chapter in Australian history in a piece on the ABC website Drum Unleashed. Irving's piece has generated intense online debate.

Irving poses the question- what is the legacy of the Moratorium forty years on? Irving believes that a lasting lesson is the importance of citizen led participatory democracy- about the need for citizens to inform, mobilize and engage with ideas and with each other to address injustice.

As Irving points out the efforts of Australians who protested for peace and against war, be it during the Vietnam War in the 1960's and 1970's, or during WW 1 and other wars, are forgotten and overlooked, whilst the mythology and ethos of ANZAC is celebrated and glorified.

Dueling books in the Obama White House

There's a great piece by Tom Englehardt on his site TomDispatch in which he suggests a reading list on the Vietnam War for the Obama administration as it debates whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Here is an extract from the piece:

"Now, according to Peter Baker of the Wall Street Journal, a "battle" of two Vietnam histories is underway at the White House and the Pentagon. Think of them as dueling books. The president and a number of his advisors have just finished reading Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam about a White House "being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead" and backed by a hawkish national security adviser. The other, a Pentagon favorite, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, focuses on a military that by the early 1970s was supposedly winning its counterinsurgency struggle only to be "rejected by political leaders who bow[ed] to popular opinion and end[ed] the fight."

If it's a battle of Vietnam histories that Washington wants, should the contest really be limited to these two books?

....... If it's a Vietnam syllabus you're looking for, President Obama, why not start with The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam's brilliant dissection of the Vietnam disaster? Having covered Vietnam as a New York Times reporter, he knew a bankrupt war when he saw one. Or why not consider what an American "counterinsurgency" war really meant on the ground? Nothing will give you a more visceral sense of the destruction visited on Vietnam and the Vietnamese in those grim years than Jonathan Schell's double-barreled classic The Real War.

....Or you might check out William Gibson's devastating, sardonically entitled post-war book, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. It's a history of what the war managers did and, believe me, it gives the World War II acronym snafu new punch. Or you could pick up Patriots, Christian Appy's unique oral history of the war as seen from all sides. It provides a perfect way to explore why, faced with overwhelming American firepower, the other side so often refuses to quit.

Not long ago, your special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, picked up a phone in Kabul and called Stanley Karnow, who got a Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 middle-of-the-road, one-volume history of the war. We don't know how that consultation -- in the presence of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal -- went, but Karnow did offer this comment to an AP reporter later: "What did we learn from Vietnam? We learned that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody else seem to want to be in Afghanistan, but not I."

My own suggestion to you and your staff for a single-volume history is Marilyn Young's cautionary tale, The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990. And then give her a buzz, too, and see what she thinks about the present moment. (Notice, by the way, that "s" on "wars" in her title, since she includes the U.S.-backed French war. When a good history of the conflict in Afghanistan is written, its title, too, will undoubtedly have the plural "wars" in it. After all, we've been fighting there on and off for three decades now.)"

My Lai massacre, Afghanistan and what is forgotten

"accuracy is essential
we must not be wrong
even by a single one
we are despite everything
the guardians of our brothers
ignorance about those who have disappeared
undermines the reality of the world"

Zbigniew Herbert

As civilian deaths escalate in Afghanistan, President Obama, (despite supposedly opposing the war) is moving to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan.

The parallels with the Vietnam war become clearer by the day. Will Obama become another Lyndon Johnson? - a Democratic President elected on a platform of economic and social reform at home, whose Presidency is destroyed by being drawn further and further into an unwinnable war.

The legacy of Vietnam in the American memory has resurfaced in recent weeks following recent reports about the My Lai massacre. After 40 years the massacre is back in the news in the States.

On March 16, 1968 a unit of the US Army massacred 500 unarmed citizens in My Lai South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women and children and elderly people. Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.

For over a year the killings were systematically covered up by the USA military and the mainstream USA press which refused to publish the initial story. It was largely as a a result of the efforts of a Vietnam veteran and the investigative journalist Seymour Hersch that the massacre became public. Many Americans were untroubled by revelations of the massacre. Twenty US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at My Lai, but only one US soldier- William Calley- was convicted.

William Calley (who served only three years of an original life sentence, while on house arrest and had his sentence commuted by President Reagan) has recently spoken publicly for the first time, issuing a belated public apology. Calley was reported as saying:

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."

Calley used the defense of most soldiers who commit atrocities- that he was only following orders.

As Christian Appy points out in his definitive oral history of the Vietnam War there was a major systemic cover up of the massacre. At least 50 American officers, up to and including generals, had significant knowledge of the massacre, either through firsthand observation or eyewitness accounts. All had actively supported the cover up. None suffered any consequences.

In a recent piece in consortiumnews.com investigative journalist Robert Parry documents the role played by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell in the cover up of the massacre. Parry meticulously shows how Powell's career was jump started by his role in the US Army's cover up of the My Lai massacre:

"Powell’s role in rebuffing an early appeal from a GI for an investigation of Americal Division abuses of Vietnamese -- encompassing My Lai -- was an important early marker in Powell’s career as he climbed the ladder of Pentagon and Washington success by never standing up for a principle that made a superior uncomfortable.

That pattern continued through the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and culminated in the deadly falsehoods that Powell presented to the United Nations in 2003 justifying the invasion of Iraq."

At a time of growing US military intervention in Afghanistan, and rapidly escalating civilian casualties, the story of My Lai is instructive. The historian Oliver Kendrick has argued that America and the American military learned nothing from the events. Attention was shifted away from the victims of the massacre, to who was responsible and how it happened . The Vietnamese victims were displaced, forgotten. Instead it was the American soldiers who became the victim.

Kendrick shows how the murder of civilians at My Lai (and during the Vietnam War) was filtered through a explanatory and justificatory framework that shifted blame and culpability. Kendrick argues that the massacre is now largely forgotten " a vague recollection of something unpleasant that happened during the Vietnam War".

In a recent piece in Tomgram Nick Turse has written of the long standing American aversion to facing what the U.S. did to Vietnam and its people during the war. Turse the author of the book The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives has written of the long list of cover ups of mass murder by Americans during the Vietnam War and concludes:

A failure to demand an honest accounting of the suffering the United States caused the Vietnamese people and a willingness to ignore ample evidence of widespread slaughter remains a lasting legacy of the Vietnam War. So does a desire to reduce all discussion of U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia to the massacre at My Lai, with William Calley bearing the burden -- not just for his crimes but for all U.S. crimes there. And it will remain so until the American people do what their military and civilian leadership have failed to do for more than 40 years: take responsibility for the misery the U.S. inflicted in Southeast Asia.

We see the same narrative at work in Afghanistan. There is little interest in the escalating civilian casualties. Instead from the American authorities (and the Australian authorities) there are just reasons and justifications for the continued murder of innocent civilians and the misery inflicted on Afghanistan.

Death of Robert McNamara, Architect of the Vietnam War

Robert McNamara, who died in the United States on Monday aged 93 was one of the leading architects of the Vietnam war. For those of us who grew up in the 60's our lives unfolded with the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Each night images and news footage of the war were beamed into our lounge rooms. As Defense Secretary in the Kennedy and then the Johnston Administrations Robert McNamara was perhaps the most vocal spokesman and advocate for the American cause. It was McNamara who oversaw the tragic and ultimately disastrous American (and Australian) military involvement in Vietnam. It was McNamara who executed the plans that resulted in the slaughter of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian people people and nearly 60,00 American deaths.

But what we now know was that during much of his tenure as Defense Secretary McNamara had deep misgivings about the war but remained silent. From around the mid 60's McNamara doubted the American cause but continued to prosecute the war forcefully. The war ground on until 1975.

McNamara eventually came to regret his decisions and apparently suffered guilt in his later years. His 1995 book and participation in Erroll Morris's documentary The Fog of War were in a sense a prolonged apology. But even then McNamara deflected blame by stressing that every other official in Washington made similar mistakes and that US policies were based on incorrect information.

But Robert Scheer in Truth Dig and Ted Rall in an article in Information Clearing House both point out that his change of heart came far to late for the millions who died. As Rall writes:

"If the dead could speak, surely they would ask;why couldn't you see then what you understood so clearly now"

Like so many politicians and people who hold great power McNamara failed to speak out when he should have and failed to act to prevent the great evil he was responsible for perpetrating. There is no better recent example of what Hannah Arendt called 'the banality of evil"

As Will Bunch writes in a piece in Huffington Post the tragedy of Robert McNamara is an American tragedy that does not stop with Vietnam but continues today with respect to American involvement in military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bunch writes:

The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy -- because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed "best and brightest" in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our policy-makers knew nothing or cared little about the long history and convoluted ethnic and religious politics of Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no plan for the proper military follow-up to a period of "shock and awe" bombing. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we totally misjudged the "nationalism" of the people who lived there and how they would react to a long American occupation. And perhaps most importantly, In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no real "public debate" as we marched headlong and foolishly into 2003 -- with way too many "unexamined assumptions," "unasked questions," and "readily dismissed alternatives."

Perhaps the best non- fiction book I read has McNamara as its central figure. Paul Hendrickson's book The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War. From www.amazon.com

Hendrickson interweaves the stories of five others caught up in the whirlwind of the times: an artist who tried to kill McNamara by flinging him off a ferry in 1972; a Marine who fought in the war; a Quaker who immolated himself in protest against the war; a nurse who served in Vietnam; and a Saigon native who suffered horribly at the hands of the Communists. With breathtaking dexterity, Hendrickson juxtaposes insights on McNamara, whose life he describes as "a kind of postwar technocratic hubristic fable," against episodes in the lives of those over whom McNamara wielded a distant yet very real power. Hendrickson finds that McNamara "owned a significant conscience, which he struggled against and was continually willing to compromise above all, perhaps, in helping to escalate a war that he believed could not be won militarily. Hendrickson, who once studied for the priesthood, writes in a voice that is moral yet not preachy, and he is careful to identify his own mixed feelings about McNamara.

Hendrickson's book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand McNamara and the Vietnam War.