More Dewitt Roberts: Religion and Cannibalism in Vietnam

This next item is one of the stranger things I've come across while doing research on the war in Vietnam.  In relates to one of the justifications for mutilations of dead Vietnamese by soldiers who had served with CIDG - during his Winter Soldier testimony, SP4 Ronald Palosari (1/6, 198 LIB, Americal Division) had testified that:

And they had spotted (they were like our point men, more or less) an NVA, presumably carrying a weapon, I guess it must have been. And they had fired on him. They had blown off the top of his head. And then one of the CIDG had cut off one of his ears. And I understand, that according to Buddhism, unless your body is complete, you cannot go wherever it is that the Buddhists go to after they die. So, they had done this. And as we walked by, you know, everyone thought it was, you know, kind of cool, to see this head there that was, you know, half gone to begin with and have the ear sliced off and there it was just like a, you know, it was flat--with a small hole left in the side of the head. This feeling that we had that it was, you know, a rather humorous incident, or, you know, looked upon as being a good thing, and we were really men because, not that the CIDG had done this, but because, you know, it was an act that we would have liked to have perpetrated ourselves, I think. It's something, you know, it's, it's more or less condoned over there. And the feelings that you have are the policies of the military--that this is really, you know, a thing to be manly about. 

In his interview about the time he spent with CIDG, Dewitt Roberts discussed a different type of mutilation of the dead that he had witnessed that also had religious overtones:

We landed at a base camp A-Team called Treku. The person calling in the chopper that I came in on was my stick leader in special forces when I was a trainee and my squad leader. We ran missions with special forces. Every member of that special forces team died before leaving Vietnam and this probably could tell you the kind of action we received while we were with them and many of the team members on my team experienced this during the early periods and we became involved with certain aspects that was not experienced by any other military force in Vietnam, probably any other tracker team in Vietnam. We experienced ritualistic cannibalism by the CIDG forces which are volunteers in the green beret A teams. The A team members, the green berets, performed the duty of advisors. They appointed lieutenants for company commanders. They appointed platoon sergeants and they hired the regular soldiers. To my understanding, they were paid 6 dollars a month per soldier, 6 dollars per automatic weapon that they captured, and so much per kill. They wore tiger fatigues and they were organized in the south. They were made up of all types of outlaws that were given immunity for prosecution for their volunteered as CIDG force which stood to my understanding was Civilian Indigenous Defense Group forces, but local, and it was to their advantage to capture as many weapons and kill as many Viet Cong as possible. Many of these people were double agents. They were known to be double agents by the green berets. They were on whichever side was winning and they would switch sides depending on who was winning. 

RF: In the tracker teams, you worked with the CIDGs? 

DR: We worked with the CIDGs and the green berets. To my understanding my team was the only team that did this. I experienced, while out with the green berets, the CIDGs would take their kills and I’d seen this many times, I have photographs which I will show you in a couple of minutes, whereas the CIDGs would take the north Vietnamese kills, stab them in the stomach, rip them to the side, on the right side below the rib cage. They would pull out their livers and their hearts and they would take their machetes and they would cut the top of heads off and take the brains along with the livers and the hearts. They would take parachute silk that they could obtain from [?] that was kicked out of choppers during the night, we call them aerial flares which had a large parachute attached to it, and it was like a can of white phosphorous gas, like a gallon can, that was ignited and kicked out of a chopper and it would light the sky up like daylight and these buckets would fly over your head at night during battles and the Vietnamese CIDGs would run out of their fox holes and trenches and retrieve these parachutes. I’d seen the CIDGs run for the parachutes. Other CIDGs would point a carbine rifle at him and shoot over his head, yelling to him in Vietnamese, “Leave it alone! The lieutenant wants it!” and make him retrieve the parachute, bring it back, and give it to the lieutenant which was the company commander. The green berets were only advisors. They could not order these people to do anything; they could only advise them that the team commander was given the ultimate authority of taking his advice or refusing it, and it was usually his platoon support, radio operator or somebody close to him that enforced when he said, “I want that parachute,” and if the guy didn’t bring it back he would have shot him. The parachute was cut into little squares and used for various things but one purpose they used it for they would cut it in squares approximately a foot and a half square and they would take these brains and livers and hearts and lay them in it like a handkerchief and tie them into a pouch and they would tie it on their side. They would also use them for carrying ammunition, the little pouches, and once they returned back to the base camp, the A team, they would take rice wine which looked like vodka, it was clear in appearance, and they would dice the liver into little pieces and put it in the wine to pickle it and they would lie in hammocks and drink it. I have observed them with the hearts and the livers sticking on a sharp stick by their hooch being dried. I asked the green beret, “What is happening here?” He told me that this is a ritualistic way they have of obtaining control over their kill, the adversary; you eat his brain, you gain his conscious in the afterlife because the Vietnamese have various religions that is somewhat intact with Christianity, Buddhism, and their relatives. They believe they worship their relatives, their ancestors, and this is all tied together. I’ve observed in different ways in the past in my future experiences in Vietnam other things that fit into this type of ritualistic beliefs which I’ll explain later, but this eating the liver would give a person courage, stamina. The heart would give a [?] would perform a similar function as the heart and the liver and the brain and the person that had the brain would become the slave of this person in the afterlife. I observed outside each village, Vietnamese village, there will be a pagoda which is similar to an old fashioned bath tub sticking out of the ground with the round end pointed up with a picture of Mother Mary or a statue, only theirs it was a little box sitting on legs resembling some type of Buddhist temple with a Buddha sitting inside a little building maybe 3 or 4 feet square with Buddha in an open end in the front. In the back it closed, and a place to burn incense. This little pagoda would be on the outskirts of a village outside a cemetery. Almost every village had a cemetery on the outskirts of the pagoda and the Vietnamese worshiped their ancestors... 

Interview with Dewitt Roberts,  19 June 2000, Dewitt Roberts Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 3 Jan. 2013. .

Dewitt Roberts on Abuse of Viet Cong Prisoners by CIDG

This item peripherally relates to my dissertation because it occurred before Dewitt Roberts served in the 173rd Airborne Brigade.  His portrayal of how the CIDG operated is both interesting and troubling.  I pulled this out because it illustrates his reaction to abuse of prisoners by allied forces, and because it also illustrates the attitude of another U.S. Army soldier who witnessed abuse.  The second soldier's reaction seems to confirm part of Joanna Bourke's assertion that soldiers who did not engage in atrocities didn't do so out of a sense of moral ambiguity rather than out of some greater philosophical or religious motivation.

This portion of the interview comes immediately after Roberts helped capture a suspected Viet Cong nurse while working as a combat tracker with CIDG.  His unit proceeded to a nearby village to search it for more guerillas.

We got them in the village, in the middle of the village, and another soldier came up and asked me, “Do you want a souvenir?” I said, “Souvenir?” He said, “Yeah, do you want the scalp of the nurse you just caught?” I said, “Scalp?” He said, “Well, we cut her hair off real close and she had a pony tail,” and he handed it to me and 2he said, “I had to leave because that scalp was bleeding so bad I couldn’t stand to watch it.” So I went up to see it myself because I felt bad because I had captured these two Viet Cong nurses; one that talked and the other one didn’t. The one that wouldn’t talk got 31 beaten severely. The Kit Carson scout had her off to the side, a little on the side of out commander, and he was beating her; doing side kicks to the boob, elbows to the boob, knees to the boob, the crotch, her face was swollen and bruised badly, her hair was cut off. She was laying against a hay stack around a telephone pole...not a telephone pole, but a hay pole and she had fallen into this stack so many times she kind of wore out a hole where he had beat her into this hole and she locked eyes with me, contact, like, “Are you happy? You caught me.” But, she wouldn’t take her eyes off of me while he was beating her. She had a large breast and he was hitting her in her boobs and in the face and all that. Then he drug her...I had to leave because I didn’t want to see it and I began to wonder if what I just did was the right thing even though they kill us and they were probably doing it and that’s the reason we caught them. This is not the way I’d intended for it to wind up. I walked away and I had to come back again later and I saw her standing in a little stream that ran through the village, its kind of...reeds growing out of the stream about 3 foot high above the water and he was holding her under the water with both hands between his legs and he’d hold her for a long period and pull her out and push her back down again. I told one of the soldiers, “Why don’t you stop him?” He said, “I don’t get involved.” So, I had to walk away. I stuck the hair in my sock and stuck it in my clothes as we returned to the United States when we came and I kept it for years because I wanted to remember the details of the actual facts and I knew a lot of stuff people wouldn’t believe if you told them...

Roberts follows this up later with these observations about American behavior toward Vietnamese civilians, and the possible effect it had...

I don’t think we understood that these people had no concept of politics; of a democrat or republican or what was going on here. They would see us as personalities and as individuals, of course, and then they saw us as a whole. But if they saw us do something that was offensive towards them, irregardless of which was they were leaning for, they could easily become a Viet Cong sympathizer which may mean the difference between telling you something with the promise of confidence, or not telling you or telling you the wrong thing and that’s why I did not like seeing GI’s do things - degrading people they were interrogating. If the village that they definitely saw these people being abused; beaten, hair cut off, and beaten in the boobs, held underwater, and if they weren’t a Viet Cong sympathizer, they would have been one when it was over and we didn’t place enough emphasis on that. I’ve seen them kill Viet Cong and ask the village if there was any more in the village, if there’s any there and they’d say, “No.” Then they would pull out the bodies and say, “Do you know these people, because they came from your village last night? We killed them here,” knowing that they’re probably the son of some of the villagers that grew up in the village and is known by all of them. “Well, if you don't know them then you shouldn’t mind,” and they would hang them over the side of the tank with the heads tied to one end and the feet tied to the other, hang it over the side and run through the villages and, “Well, it shouldn’t offend you because these are Viet Cong and we don’t like them, do we? One of those things.” This is an American thing; you don't hear about this. People don’t talk about it, they try to cover up for it, but this is stuff that was wrong. We did it. It was 3 bodies at a time being drug...hung over the side of the tank. Now I understand animosity for people who had 11 their buddies killed, like some things happened to them and we were told before we went over even in the regular Army, “Don’t get off into cutting X’s on the front of your bullets with a knife, putting an X on it, because if you do that’s called dumb-dumb. When that bullet hits a body it’ll split 4 different directions; it’ll tear them all up. Its like shooting a [?]. If they catch you with dumb-dumb bullets and stuff like that and your body is retrieved by them, they’ll mutilate you. They’ll cut your guts open and sit your head down inside your guts and they’ll leave you for the Americans; that’s one of the things they do. So, don’t get off into that.” Well, we did little things like that. We did little things; every unit did it, but nothing near as bad as special forces, you know. 

Interview with Dewitt Roberts,  19 June 2000, Dewitt Roberts Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 3 Jan. 2013. .

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White," will present "South Americans in the American South: A Memoir

Mark your calendars! On March 14 at 5 pm in Room 110 of the AIME Building on the UA campus, Lila Quintero Weaver, author of the stunning "Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White," will present "South Americans in the American South: A Memoir." Books will be available for purchase following the presentation.

Antoine Roy on ROE, Free Fire Zones

Just about done with the Antoine Roy oral history interview.  After the 173rd Airborne, he cycled through 1st Cavalry and 101st Airborne.  Here he's talking about his experiences as a door gunner on UH-1 Iroquois helicopters in Vietnam:

Okay. What kind of rules of engagement did you have as the door gunner? Did they vary from mission to mission or were you kind of given, here’s what you can and can’t do in general? 

AR: Well, you can’t kill civilians. Anybody carrying a weapon, even if they’re dressed as a civilian, but they’re carrying an AK-47, they’re fair game. There are areas that were free fire zones. Now a free fire zone, and you hear about this, doesn’t mean that you get to kill anything you want in that zone. If there’s an old lady and three or four kids in a free fire zone, you don’t get to—you are not are not required to gun them down. It just means that it’s an area where there are no civilians living. There aren’t supposed to be any and you don’t need to call in and get permission to fire at them. You can fire back at somebody that’s shooting at you no matter where, if you can identify the target. It just meant that there were supposed to be no civilians in the area. Well, there could also be your own troops in the area too. You always identified your target, but if it was an enemy soldier he was fair game. That’s basically the rules of engagement. I mean, if an enemy soldier, if you flew up on one suddenly and he turned around and threw his arms up in the air, you had the option. It could be an ambush. You want to take prisoners so you might just fly around him and if he tires to move left or right put some rounds in front of him to stop him, give him the message, stay where you are. Then maybe try and call in a couple of other ships, gunships or something to cover you while you’d land and take him prisoner. 

RV: Did you ever do that? 

AR: No, personally, myself no, others yes. But usually if they hear you’re coming or something they’re going to run. If they got a weapon then you just plain shoot them. If they don’t have a weapon and they’re dressed as a peasant and you know that you’re not too far from the edge of a free fire zone, you might want to hold your fire, but if they started running then that’s guilt right there. 

RV: Right. Did you witness or hear of any abuse of these rules of engagement? 

AR: Once. We had an avionics, which is your communication system within the helicopter, guy. I’d always liked him and they used to like to get some door gunner time in too. We went out to make an assault in a rice paddy area between two villages. It was not a free fire zone. We came in. I was about fifth ship back in a stick of six. You come in first wave and you’re really—I mean your fingers are really on the trigger, you’re always nervous, especially on the first one. The front of the stick had come in over this one village, where they were landing between these two villages and rice paddies. I’m in my seat looking around. I got my fingers around the triggers and all of a sudden I hear bap-bap-bap-bap-ba-ba-ba-bop. It’s like when everybody’s on edge and there’s something like that, one person fires, everybody just starts to fire. A whole bunch of us just pull the trigger for maybe ten, fifteen rounds before we realize, oh Jesus, we’re over a village. We don’t hear any incoming fire, just an M-60 that fired about ten, fifteen rounds. So I stop and I’m looking for targets and I’m looking for targets and I don’t see anything. As we come down and land I look forward just a little bit and here’s a dead Vietnamese man laying along the side of a rice paddy dyke. The grunts jump off the helicopter and we take off right away. The rice paddies are wet. They’re actively being grown. I had no idea what happened. I assumed he had a weapon or something and we just happened to land when he was crossing over the dykes between the two villages. Well, later on that night we had a get-together in one of the tents. This guy, and I won’t name names, this guy had been drinking a little bit and he’s laughing and boasting about this guy that he shot earlier in the day during that CA. I'm in the corner and I’m listening because I’m interested in what happened. Come to find out the guy did not have a weapon at all. He was walking along this dyke. All of a sudden here comes these six helicopters and they land just about right next to him, or they start landing. He’s just standing there totally surprised and this guy just gunned him down. I remember being just so totally shocked because I didn’t expect it from this person. Secondly I mean you had six, seven infantrymen on the helicopter you’re landing. They’re going to take the guy prisoner. They’re going to check his ID. If he doesn’t have any ID he’s going to be taken prisoner. For all that guy knows he could have been an ARVN soldier on leave. I remember from that day on I just did not like this guy. About half the guys there were drunk, at this little get together. They were laughing. The other half just didn’t express any emotion. I had heard a couple of comments after that, you know, “Shouldn’t have done that.” I was really disappointed because I had liked the guy a lot, earlier. Well, you know. You have cruel crime in civilian life and you have it in war time too and certainly read about it enough in other wars. We obviously didn’t make any friends in that incident, but generally I don’t think it left very much of an impression, good impression on people.

Interview with Antoine Roy,  No Date, Antoine Roy Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 3 Jan. 2013. .

This is what Oral History is All About

This is from the fifth session of the oral history interview with Antoine Roy.  It probably won't help with my dissertation, but represents the interesting type of thing you can come across.  I've never hear any Vietnam veteran discuss finding enemy burial plots before this.

I remember one scene that’s really special from that day burned into my mind. We’re going along the ridge and the land went up a little bit to the right. Off to the left it went over maybe about thirty feet kind of flat and then dropped off steeply down towards the valley on that side. There was a little flat area. It was a graveyard and it had just been dug that morning. There were little—there were star— they’d take a strip of bamboo and at the top of the strip they’d fold it so it formed a star. In the bottom part of that long strip of bamboo they’d stick into the ground. There must have been, oh gee thirty graves at least there. It was very quiet, very peaceful. It was a very beautiful little area. I guess you know, if you have to be buried on a battlefield or near the battlefield, it was a nice place to be buried. I still see it so easily.

Interview with Antoine Roy,  No Date, Antoine Roy Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 3 Jan. 2013. .

Christianity and the Roman Empire - The Student View

Last week I assigned a group of online students a discussion question that asked them to discuss the influence of Christianity from the point of view of an Emperor of their choice.  This is a new approach to this subject, and is based on a course redesign done by a different instructor.  My usual approach is to  ask them a straightforward question about Christianity in the Empire, or about the fall of the Empire in the West, but this time, I figured that I would just go with this new "standard" to see what happened.

It was... interesting.

Like in any class, whether face-to-face, hybrid, or online this class has a hierarchy of students.  Some of them always bring their "A" game.  These are the smart, motivated, prepared ones for whom anything less than a great grade and learning the material is not an option.  There's a tier of students that are satisfied with a "B" or "C" as long as they don't have to work too hard, and another layer that tries hard, but can only scrape a "B" or "C" from the class.  Then there are the folks that procrastinate, aren't prepared for college classes, or just have too much going on to focus on the class to do well.  Online classes are a real problem for this last group since they frequent slip through the cracks.

The hierarchy of students was really apparent in this week's discussion about how Roman Emperors might have viewed Christianity.  The top tier of students gave their normal performance - they engaged with the material, wrote a bit more than they strictly needed to, provided citations, and talked about Constantine, the cult of the Emperor, and stability in the Empire.  The lowest tier, the students that I worry about the most, really struggled with this Discussion, and it showed not only that they didn't read the text or listen to the course lectures (or read them, which is what I would do), but they have only the faintest conception of the timelines for the crucifixion or the rise of Imperial Rome.

This week I saw two big issues: chronology and a misunderstanding of the level of importance that Jesus had in the Empire during his lifetime. Several students seemed to think that Jesus was executed on the Emperor's order because Jesus gathered followers and took attention away from the cult of the Emperor and traditional Roman religion.  Others were convinced that Pontius Pilate had Jesus executed for heresy against Roman religion.  That last one is probably an issue of interpretation of the Gospels and the textbook, but the first part of that seems to be a result of not understanding the end of the Republic, when we believe Jesus lived, and the assumption that because Christianity is important in our culture now, then, of course, an obscure preacher in Judea was of such importance that Octavian/Augustus was worried about him as a threat to stability.

There's something clearly missing here in the students' preparation before college, in their willingness to  do the reading and sit through lectures on their own, but also in the course.  I feel as if by not leading them through the material by the nose, my students are missing critical information that they need in order to understand the material and do well on the assignments.  The issue for me, is how do I fix my part in this within the context of classes that have a shared design across several instructors?  Why do I feel like we're failing students with the current model we have for secondary and higher education?

I've Got the Magic Rubric!

Jonathan Rees has a longer post on the "magic rubric" the MOOC thinks is out there.  His final paragraph is great:

The longer we act as if the magic rubric actualy exists, the more damage MOOCs will inflict on the education of our most vulnerable college students and the livelihoods of our most vulnerable faculty colleagues. What I don’t understand is why more superprofessors can’t reach this conclusion before their MOOCs even gets off the ground. After all, the non-existence of the magic rubric, like so many other things about online education, is actually bloody obvious.

Go read the rest.

The magic rubric. | More or Less Bunk

Some Groups May Not Benefit From Online Education | Inside Higher Ed

This is not good news for someone who makes so much of his living teaching online classes, but at the same time, the statistics are hardly surprising.  While a good online course can enhance interaction among students and instructors, facilitate deeper discussions of content, appeal to varying learning styles, and broaden access to college education, many students slip through the cracks.  Recent studies have highlighted how many community college students don't finish their online courses, and this one shows that they may not achieve as much, especially if they are members of at risk groups.  The real question for us now is how we boost student success in online courses, and how we guide people who might not succeed in them to take face-to-face courses where they might have a greater chance of success.

Some Groups May Not Benefit From Online Education | Inside Higher Ed

“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted - Salon.com

This is another item going on the post-dissertation reading list, not just because I find it interesting, but I think it will be handy in teaching and future research.  The connections between religion and violence are pretty interesting - one of the reasons I wish I'd taken the time to learn to read Latin and Greek is so I could look at the development of Christian theology about war without having to rely on translators.   A great example of that is in with the Crusades - what's the difference between a pilgrim and a Crusader in theological terms?  That's an important concept for understand their motivations.

Since I teach Western Civilization I every semester (sometimes in multiple sections), I deal with the development of Christianity and its relationship with the Roman Empire a lot, and it's a topic that my students are often confused about.  They really seem to accept the argument that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the Empire in the West without really digging into the evidence, so I hope that Professor Moss' work will help me add some nuance to our conversations about Rome and Christianity.

“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted - Salon.com

Just Add Rubrics?

Jonathan Rees points out Daphne Koller's belief that the right rubric is all that is needed for students to do rigorous peer reviews in MOOC courses.  She almost has to espouse such a view since she's one of Coursera's founders, but it boggles the mind to think that she might actually believe this.  That attitude so diminishes the role of college instructors and the complexity of the material presented, that it's hard to take seriously.  I mean really, is she just another cynical CEO or politician trying to suck the profit out of education while killing its value, or does she really think that students who don't see a problem with plagiarism or using Wikipedia as their only source of information can reliably grade each other's work? I know she was on the faculty at Stanford, but has she never been in a regular college or community college classroom?  Who do these people think they're kidding?

I’m speechless. | More or Less Bunk

Antoine Roy on Religion and Atrocities in Vietnam

I think I've finally found something useful for my dissertation in an Oral History interview - I'm looking for the reactions of guys that witnessed, but didn't participate in atrocities.  This is the first of the oral histories I've dealt with to even deal with the issue at all.  If this one hand't been so long, I never would have gotten it.  This is from Antoine Roy's 4th interview sessions with Dr. Richard Verrone, and runs from pages 141-144 in the 328-transcript.

RV: Okay. How did you reconcile as a strong Catholic there in your initial time in Vietnam and in your other tours with being in a war and seeing so much death and doing killing and having men killed beside you? 

AR: Well, my experience, Catholicism is not a pacifistic Christian sect. To kill in defense of somebody innocent or in defense of your own life is not considered a sin. Outright murder is. I mean, if you had a prisoner and he was unarmed and unresisting, you had him right there and you just shot him down, yes the church would have considered that a murder, but I had no problems. I’m not one that could murder without—I couldn’t murder. It would have to be a very, very, very unique situation. I couldn’t cold bloodedly murder. Like I explained once in assaults, if you’re going forward and there’s two North Vietnamese stand up in a trench with their arms up and you’ve got more North Vietnamese you have to fight beyond them, you have no choice but to shoot them, because everybody’s got keep going. If one person stops to take prisoners that’s less bullets going out and that’s a gap in the line. So you really have no choice. That’s not murder. But like I said if you have unarmed, unresisting and you know you can take them prisoner and you just murder, you just shoot them, that’s murder. I’m not the kind of person that could just murder somebody. Sometimes I have these feelings that certain individuals in the world should be killed for the good of the herd, like Saddam Hussein or somebody like that you know, but to get angry at somebody and to come out and kill them, no that’s not in my ethics at all. Self-defense certainly is. I will admit ever since I’ve gotten back that I carry a knife. I use it for all kinds of things, but I also know, deep down, subconsciously the reason I carry that knife is for a defensive weapon, even though I’ve never run into a situation where I’ve had to use it. That’s one of the old—that’s one of the symptoms I think. Most guys, the vast, vast majority of guys I know, we were not murderers. You do what you have to do. There were a couple, there always are a few. I mean, our jails are filled with people who commit murder and you’re going to get a couple of those bad apples in the bushel, but it definitely wasn't respected. Our guys would kind of stand away from that. If it got out of hand then somebody would talk to an officer, say you know, “This is just too much.” Even My Lai, that whole company did not participate in the murders. When the people in that large ditch were shot and killed, there were only four people who did the firing. The rest of the troops, I mean if you read the records and the like, the rest of the troops stood there kind of stunned because they didn’t normally do this kind of thing and didn’t quite know what to do. They were given an order—actually they were given the order initially and Calley went off on a patrol. They thought, he said to waste them. They thought he was kind of kidding. They spent the next couple of hours actually interfacing with these people, playing with the kids, I mean we always played with the kids. Sometimes we got these military chocolates, tropical chocolates. They didn’t melt that easily and they weren’t that good. We called them gorilla bars, but the kids not having any, or very little access to sugar, they loved them. We were always playing with the kids and the like and kidding around with—there were no young men there. These were families of Viet Cong, but still, to kill them, no it doesn’t make—we keep an eye on them and we check them to make sure they weren’t carrying any weapons or the like because some of them were a little radical. Once they’re in custody, no, it’s just, it’s unthinkable to me. We interacted—whenever I was in an area where there were civilians, and I wasn't all the time—places like Dak To, there’s hardly anybody there, its all primeval jungle, except for Montagnards now and the. I mean it was a lot of interaction, some trading, things like that. There were some guys who were kind of bullying or some guys who just didn’t care or stop and think as teenagers do that what they’re doing is offensive. We have that— every society has that problem with teenagers. Aristotle complained about, or Socrates complained about teenagers, real pain in the ass. I can see how the South Vietnamese civilians must have been a little nervous when you got these young men acting like that and they’re all armed to the teeth. Then you really don’t want to offend them. Sometimes the South Vietnamese villagers would act very, very submissive, until they saw that we weren’t going to do anything like that, but there always were a few people who were uncaring or unthinking, especially the young. That’s kind of common actually. 

RV: Would those of you who didn’t really participate in that or believe in that, would you try to restrain those around you who? 

AR: I only saw one murder. I would classify it as a murder. Another one happened right after I left my first unit and it happened by a guy that I wasn’t surprised to hear about it. I think I told you about this guy that was going to kill our officer. 

RV: Mm-hmm. Yes. 

AR: Okay, that was him. After I left, they’d run into, I don’t know, one North Vietnamese or something. They chased him down the trail and these two guys captured him. When you captured somebody you got a three day R&R (rest and recuperation). The reason for that wasn’t just so that you’d capture them, but that you be willing to take more of a risk because you do have to take more of a risk sometimes, to take them alive. Well, they’re both—well, they’re standing there kind of arguing—this poor North Vietnamese soldier is standing between them—arguing over who captured him and who gets the three day R&R. So this guy that I was talking about just walks up and just shoots him in the chest. 

RV: Both of them? 

AR: No, one, one North Vietnamese. 

RV: It was just one, one soldier. 

AR: Yeah, the two guys arguing were Americans. The other one I know of was a
guy, when I was in helicopter unit my second tour. 

RV: Did you hear about that or did you see it? AR: I heard about it afterwards, but I wasn't surprised when they said who it was. The second tour, we were doing a, landing troops in rice paddies between two villages. I was further back. I was maybe the fifth ship in a five ship stick landing in this big open area. This guy that didn’t usually gun, he volunteered to be a gunner for the day. A lot of times they’ll like do that, if you can put in a certain number of hours you get flight pay, but he was normally sort of a mechanic kind of guy. Normally I liked him. We landed, and where we landed, walking along the rice paddy dyke was this, I don’t know, probably eighteen, nineteen year old Vietnamese guy. He’s walking along and all of a sudden these helicopters come out of the sky and land right next to him in a long line. He’s standing there kind of surprised and this guy just lifted up his gun and gunned him down. I remember he was laughing about it and everything that night. I wasn’t impressed at all because number one, who’s to say this wasn’t a South Vietnamese soldier on leave. Number two, even if he was North Vietnamese or Viet Cong we were discharging a whole company of infantry and the first thing they would have done is checked him for ID and weapons and stuff like that. He just gunned the guy down. I was further back in the ships, and we didn’t fire. Usually when we come in the first wave the gunners are firing in every direction, but since there were large villages on either side we didn’t. So you’re always ready. Your finger’s on the trigger waiting for it. When he fired, the instinct just goes right down the line without even thinking and you pull the trigger. I was over one of the villages when the firing started up, when he fired, which caused everybody else to fire. I fired probably ten, fifteen rounds and stopped right away. I suddenly realized I was over the village. I felt a little guilty about that and I’ve always hoped that I never hit anybody, because I didn’t hear any rounds coming our way. That’s a snap or a crack or a pop. Everybody else had stopped firing. When we landed I looked over towards the front and I could see this guy lying on one side of this little rice paddy dyke. I didn’t know the exact situation. For all I knew he had a weapon or something that I didn’t see. So we dropped off the company, or part of it, went back, picked up the rest of the company, came in. Later on that night the pilots were having a little party in their tent. He was in there, kind of laughing and boasting about it. A couple of guys were laughing with them, but everybody else just kind of ignored it. It was not considered a brave thing to do or, nobody really come out and took him to task for it. It was just kind of a turn off. But, those are the only two. I mean off the top of my head, those are the only two murders I can think of. I have heard of a couple sort of like this first guy I was telling you about, but I also know that during all wars it happens unfortunately. I’ve even seen films from the Second World War German—snipers during the Second World War were considered very immoral. I remember seeing films of snipers surrendering and then all the GIs, just shooting them down. To us a sniper was a fact of life in a guerilla war. So we didn’t have that hatred, but during the Second World War they did. Again it’s unfortunate. The North Vietnamese did it to us constantly, I mean just constantly, shoot prisoners, kill them, but generally, except for one reaction one time, after that company was wiped out in June 18th, ’67, generally we got angry, but officers and sergeants made sure we didn’t lose control of ourselves. 

RV: Why do you think there’s a big misconception about this idea of American atrocities in Vietnam, where you guys are running around burning down every other village, shooting civilians? 

AR: Because the people don’t realize why that was happening. I mean to clear an area out so that the enemy can’t get sustenance and support and shelter and influence over the population is very important. This has happened before in a lot of wars. You just clear that area out. You move the people closer to where your forces are, in your static positions and you can deny the enemy a lot of the support and shelter and they had to get a lot of their food and the like from it and intelligence information. You had to do it. If you don’t understand why, and if you’ve never really had your life in danger, you especially don’t understand why, it looks cruel. The My Lai affair, oh geez, what that did to guys like me was just devastating because all of us got identified with that. It’s like the North Vietnamese would do atrocities constantly. These throwing rockets indiscriminately into cities, murdering government officials, teachers, everything in villages. It’s like the press just—well, you know, they’re guerillas. They’re expected to do that. That hurt too, because that was standard operating procedure for the communists, terrorism, for most tyrannies, not just communist, but most tyrannies. I get frustrated but—and I still get frustrated after all these years. Some guys can brush it off, I can’t because I guess I still feel, hear that echo of those times that things were said to me and feeling it being just so very unfair and very misunderstood. It’s like friendly fire incidents, people just don’t understand, but they don’t stop and look. When you get in your car and go out on the highway, how many accidents take place? The press always has this tendency to well, “Who’s to blame for this?” and somebody’s got to be punished, but they just don’t understand the situation. If there’s gross negligence, that’s another matter. If a guy in the battery fire direction control was drunk back at the fire support base and he put the rounds in the wrong place, that’s gross—that’s gross negligence and yes, he should go to prison for that, but if, you know, you’re pinned down by bullets, you know, don, dada donot, and you miss one number on that six digit or eight digit coordinates and the rounds come in on top of you, I mean you can’t blame somebody for negligence, because things have to be done so quickly. A lot of times you don’t even know. They didn’t have GPS (global positioning system) systems. I know I’m somewhere on this ridgeline. They happen now too, Afghanistan they’ve had some issues, but people just don’t understand. Sometimes if I run into it I may try and explain it, but generally I look very much down my nose at people like that. I figure these are people that are ignorant and not stopping to think. 

Interview with Antoine Roy,  No Date, Antoine Roy Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 3 Jan. 2013. .

Paradis et Pouvoir: Two Visions for French Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century

Monday, Feb. 25th, Professor Christian Crouch of Bard College will be giving a talk at 4pm in Gorgas 205. The title of her talk is "Paradis et Pouvoir: Two Visions for French Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century"

Light refreshments will be served.

Teacher questions value of AP program

I took the AP test in U.S. History back in 1989, earning credit for both of the surveys in U.S. history when I arrived on campus at USF for my Freshman year.  As a result, the only courses I took in U.S. History as an undergraduate were The Civil War, U.S. Military History, and the History of Baseball.  I was quite happy to avoid taking the two surveys since it allowed me to focus almost exclusively on classes that I enjoyed more - G. Kelly Tipps' four courses in Roman History (The Roman Republic, The Roman Empire, The Punic Wars, and Rome and the Gracchi) and Bill Murray's Ancient History survey courses (in retrospect, I should have also taken his Age of Alexander and Peloponnesian War courses).

Looking back on my AP courses, though, I'm not sure they prepared me for the type of work we did at USF, though I certainly enjoyed taking them.  My AP experience was more like a college classroom than a high school one in that we read and discussed several different works rather than just sticking with a textbook and answering very simple multiple choice tests like we had in our regular History courses.  The experience was valuable because it exposed me to the possibilities of what a History course could be, but I'm not so sure about whether I should have been given college credit afterward.

Anyway, here's more in the on-going debate about the relatively value of the expanded AP program...

Teacher questions value of AP program

Battle of the LittleBig Horn - History Is Written by the Victor. Finally.

It looks like the National Park Service is finally getting around to telling the Lakota and Cheyenne part of this story.  It is important to remember the 263 U.S. cavalry troopers who died in the battle, but the real story is why they died - what were these guys even there for, what was Custer's role and motivation, political ramifications, etc... Done well, this project may be a good step in that direction.

History Is Written by the Victor. Finally. | TIME.com

Cultural Awareness and the Vietnam War

This afternoon I'm reading the transcript of a very long oral history interview with SP4 Antoine Roy (interviewed by Dr. Richard Verrone).  He's got a lot to say about his service in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, but so far this exchange has stuck out:

RV: Let me ask you a question about, going back to that cultural adjustment, how important do you think that is in a war, to be able to come into a country and okay, I can adjust, because of my past experience or my own intellectual or emotional ability I can adjust a little quicker than the guy next to me? How important is that in a war zone? 

AR: Especially in this particular kind of war it was our greatest failure, one of our greatest failures. We should have had an extended, at least two weeks minimum heavy training on Vietnamese culture, some Vietnamese language, Vietnamese history, why the people do the things they do, why they live the way they live and how actually they’re quite similar to us. I can remember, one thing especially that used to turn off a lot of GIs. Vietnamese, a lot of times while they’re talking, one will sit behind the other. While they’re talking they’ll be fingering through the other persons hair. What they do is they’re looking for lice. Well, lice are a fact of life over there. A lot of GIs thought, God, they look like monkeys. Well, they just didn’t understand that that’s part of life over there. You live with pests like that. They didn’t understand. Actually a lot of the history of Vietnam that led up to what was going on at that particular time, the reasons for being there. They didn’t understand and they didn’t have it emphasized tremendously and it should have been emphasized just so tremendously, do not piss off any South Vietnamese because if you do you’re just going to create yourself another enemy. At the very least that South Vietnamese sees trouble coming your way, they’re just going to go in another direction. We should have been taught very heavily, you make friends with these people. Your life depends on it and the course of the war depends upon it. You’re dealing with a bunch of eighteen, nineteen, twenty year olds who are rather egotistic at that age.

RV: You were nineteen, is that right? 

AR: I was eighteen when I got there. I turned nineteen about a month after I got there. But it just should have been pushed so heavily that the people are different, but they’re basically the same people. They have the same emotions. They love their children. The family is everything is that kind of culture, different from ours. They live in poverty. They make think they’re living an average life, but don’t look down upon them because you’ve got things better than they do. They should have explained the cultural differences in some more words. Once in a while you’d get teenagers that would be a little pushy, which is common in war or out of war. That should have been the discipline for that should have just been so heavy, I mean extremely heavy. It wasn’t. It didn’t happen all the time, but I saw a lot of things that, like an abandoned temple that we’d set up in for a while. Well, its like, nobody realized that this is as if foreign troops came to your country and set up in an abandoned church. This temple was the equivalent of a 13 church. It may not be used at the time, but hey it’s still something religious and you never should have set up there, but we never thought about it in that way. 

Did you think about it when you were actually doing these things? 

AR: No. 

RV: But in retrospect you’re able to see this. 

AR: Oh, yes. I know this one time during my third tour there was an abandoned temple we set up in it and the priests had been storing some items there. There’s something in the Buddhist culture about a stork crossing the sky on a turtle’s back or something like that. Well, a couple of guys found some stuff like that and they sent it home. Well, the priests got real upset, went to the company commander, and complained. The company commander immediately went to those troops and said, “You have your parents send that stuff back and then explain the religious significance of it.” The stuff was sent back, but the thing is those kind of things should have been explained in the first place. Yeah, it’s an abandoned temple but it’s the same as a church in your country. You’ve got to respect those things. If you’re searching villages, if you’re pulling roadblock checks and the like, you be very courteous, especially to the elderly. You’ve got to gain these people’s support.

Interview with Antoine Roy,  No Date, Antoine Roy Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Accessed 3 Jan. 2013. .

Students and Historical Thinking

This Lenten season I decided to give up on making negative comments about my students to myself or others, and to focus on helping them learn and develop their skills.  I figure that shifting focus is good for both me and my students in the long run, so it isn't a sacrifice in traditional Lenten terms, as it is an exercise in self-development.  I knew that this would be difficult due to my habit of grumbling about poor writing skills and lack of effort, but I didn't think this first week would be the challenge that it is presenting itself to be.

Last week my online students were assigned to complete what we call a "WOW Discussion" where they picked an interesting, unusual, or shocking tidbit from the chapter and wrote a paragraph on why they found it interesting, then posed three questions about the topic, along with short paragraphs proposing answers to the three questions.  As is normal for my courses, all of this is supposed to have standard parenthetical citations showing where they got the information.

So far this sounds pretty straightforward right?  I'm happy to report that most of the class did pretty well on the actual activity, even though some could have used longer responses explaining the answers to their questions.  That's really no big deal - I just explain to them that in the future they need to approach it like they are explaining the subject to someone who is reasonably intelligent, but doesn't know anything about it.  They are essentially trying to teach the topic to the class.  No big deal.  Most of them just aren't used to thinking about assignments in that fashion.

So what is driving me to the edge of my Lenten goal?

We spent the last two weeks studying ancient Greece. Usually the only problems are that students always want to draw a direct line from Athenian democracy to American democracy, or that they see Greece in terms of modern nation-states rather than independent city-states.  That's easy enough to deal with most of the time, and it provides a good way to discuss differences in government an economics of the major Greek poleis.  This semester, I got those issues during last week's content discussion, but something less common.  This time my classes focused themselves on the issue of Greek, especially Spartan, sexuality, practices of eunomia (exposing weak or deformed infants), and Cretan cannibalism or children.

These topics come up every once in awhile, and we discuss the issues that might have led to them pretty rationally, and try to historicize things.  This week my students went straight to condemnation of Spartans as unfeeling pedophiles who were brainwashed in to doing and accepting these practices without trying to understand the environment that they developed in.  The Cretans also came in for abuse - one student said that reading about the "dirty Cretes" made him physically ill.  Although I gave them my standard bit about not judging people in the past, that our job was not to condemn, but try to understand why cultural practices developed, I don't think it really sank in.

So, my issue now is how do I introduce my varied group of community college students to the concepts of historical thinking?  That it is fine to be shocked by things that happened in the past,  but to try to understand them before leaping to indignation and condemnation?  Would appropriating portions of John Fea's virtual office hours be a suitable place to start?

Any suggestions? Does anyone out there have some suggestions for materials or exercises that might be helpful for this?