Substacks

THE HIPPIE LIEUTENANT Seymour Hersh

Published

11 months ago

August 31, 2023

US troops of the 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division ford a river about 11 miles west of Chu Lai in South Vietnam in August 1971. / Photo via Getty Images.

My dispatch of last week about General Tony Taguba, Abu Ghraib prison, and the perils of telling the truth led to more responses than usual, including an extraordinary unpublished manuscript from reader Anthony St. John. A bright and patriotic graduate of St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, he believed in America and the need to fight communism in South Vietnam. He was in the Army ROTC as a college student, and after a year of officer training he entered the Army as a second lieutenant. He ended his tour in mid-1968 as a first lieutenant in combat with the Americal Division—by far the least desirable assignment in that war and the division with the lowest morale. It was a company in the Americal Division that committed the My Lai massacre of up to five hundred peasants in March 1968. It was a horror I exposed as a young journalist eighteen months later. St. John knew nothing of that horror, but his manuscript, entitled The Hippie Lieutenant, tells the truth when it comes to the day-to-day life of the grunts, the young men who were drafted or volunteered for combat. St. John, who now lives outside of Florence in Italy, where he teaches English, has a lot to say about the lack of integrity, as he saw it, in the officer corps, but the book is at its best in depicting life for the GIs in the triple canopy jungles of South Vietnam.

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Here, with the author’s permission, is an excerpt:

MURKY WATERS

At three o’clock in the morning on a moonlit November 1967 day, Bravo Company and I were chest high in the turbid waters of an irrigation ditch adjacent to a rice paddy somewhere near the Cambodian border. We had been called to (Saddle up!) in the middle of the night because the S-3, our infantry battalion’s operations officer, had received an “intelligence” report indicating a massive enemy build-up some ten kilometers from our night position. With the moans and groans of one hundred and twenty men chewing and biting as if with toothless gums, the unit proceeded cautiously, but noisily, along the way and slushed through the long, narrow excavation’s soft mud.

To the right were acres and acres of rice paddies, and to the left a thick curtain of seemingly impenetrable jungle. The moon’s reflected light bounced off rice paddy waters, the sometimes sheeny leaves of jungle underbrush, and the shiny wet necks and hands of the men who marched disgustedly through the night. FTA. Some men kept their weapons and ammunition above their heads to keep their fire-fight equipment dry; most didn’t care and permitted their offensive instruments to sink, along with tired arms, into the roily waters.

It was not too long before the leeches made their climb up legs to crotches and backs of the weary and disgruntled grunts. There was no way to remove them—yet. Waterproof matches could not be lighted because they could reveal the company’s position; and, scorching insect repellent could not be applied in the gloomy waters.

Suddenly, overpowering fright gripped the entire company as men made futile efforts to pick off the hangers-on whose suckers had embedded themselves in thighs, calves, shoulders, and even the sensitive skin of the scrotum. The unit was out of control. It was in an uproar. It was terrorized. Snakes had also been spotted in the marshy waterway. Some men jumped out of the water onto the slimy, tree-rooted ground bordering the left side of the irrigation canal. They discarded their weapons and ran bewildered into the nearby thickets where they ripped off fatigue shirts, then boots, then pants, and culled away at bloodsuckers with knives, mosquito repellent, and the butts of cigarettes which had been set aflame against regulations and common sense, all the while warning the stealthy scouts of a North Vietnam Army regiment, bedded down from the grunts versus leeches melee.

Against the company commanders’ wishes and orders—he could go take a flying f******o—the men continued the march refusing to reenter the trench filled with water that reached up to their necks. Instead, they groped along the muddied, wet banks making occasional falls into the water when they lost their grips on the roots of the trees adjacent to the banks of the narrow canal. Progress was severely impeded, and before long, the S-3 radioed his impatience and threat of relief from command if the company’s CO did not get to his objective posthaste. I actually felt sorry for the CO, but I remained content with the notion that I had not been in command. The CO could do nothing to speed the men up. He knew their tempers were very labile, and keeping himself as less authoritarian as he should have been, he did nothing to stir them into action which might have caused further panic and perhaps insurrection. He was thinking, thank goodness. He knew he had a simmering case of mass hysteria on his hands, and the delicacy of the predicament plus the irritated stance taken by the S-3, kept the infantry commander in a worried state as he expected the worst from his undisciplined, scared-to-death men.

More terror came. The early morning—illumination was nearly nil—was made for hallucinating. Strange visions were imagined by many of the exhausted men who cared to look deep within the forest to see things that had no reality. The moonlight and jungle thickets conspired to produce eerie delusions. One man mistook a water buffalo for an enemy soldier, but when he raised his dripping wet rifle to shoot at it, the weapon failed to function. The men were haggard and petulant. Desperate screams and falls from the banks into the irrigation ditch made the event pathetic, outlandish. Relief came finally around dawn when the long watercourse, that had been such a bothersome obstruction during two long, gruesome hours, ended, and the men—surveying, at the break of dawn, their leech bites and bloodied skin and clothes—laid exhausted on the ground and exchanged shameful expressions. Breakfast was being prepared by most of the grunts, while some tried to dry weapons and other essential equipment in a vain attempt to regain their soldierly equanimity which for the past two hours had degenerated to its lowest level. The CO was depressed, wordless. He knew his “men” were not really soldiers at all—just scared youth. He knew his men would be useless in any enemy contact. He knew there was something very wrong.

[The next morning, the men, exhausted by the leech attack, awoke to the sound of a sudden volley of artillery in the distance. The company was ordered to make an immediate march in support of fellow Americans under attack.]

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In the chaos, the men of Bravo Company wished they were in an irrigation ditch pulling leeches off. They watched the Charlie company bodies being brought in and placed with Graves’ Registration. They watched groups of fresh troops receive orders from colonels and majors, and then be sent out into the surrounding mountains to charge up their sides to meet the enemy. They watched Marines react with efficiency and professionalism in a manner they could only have dreamt about. They listened to artillery batteries swish volleys over their heads onto the attacking enemy positions and, very likely, unto American GIs. They looked to gray clouds in the skies and prepared for the late afternoon deluge. They watched the engineers lay sheet upon sheet of metal on the scraped surface of the runway that had been cleared away minutes ago. They filled gray sandbags with mounds of reddish dirt, and they took part in the building process of a modern war center at the foothills of the mountains that bordered Cambodia and Laos. They watched Chinook helicopters land with wounded men. They watched men on stretchers cup their hands with the intestines that were oozing out of their guts. They watched men who had no faces. They watched men who had no arms, no legs. They watched men who would never walk again because their spines were cracked with bullets. They watched men with napalm burns. They watched men walk into first aid tents carrying their own bottles of saline solution. They watched men with their brains blown out. They watched men whose eyes were wrapped with bloody gauze. They watched and they watched and they watched all the while filling sandbags, all the while confused by shame for not meeting up with Charlie company, and relief for not having to have been caught up in the ugly fray of a battle.

They recorded images which would make them feel disenfranchised from their very own country because they now realized they had been exploited to further the causes of injustice and unethicalness. They recorded images which would be scoffed at by political leaders after the “war” when it would become fashionable to look at Vietnam as a “diplomatic, militaristic” mistake to be forgotten so the economic and military frames of reference might lumber on uninterrupted. They recorded images which would be laughed at by their fellow countrymen and women who had always disregarded the facts about World I, World War II, the Korean War, and now were looking forever to cancel Vietnam from their superegos. They recorded images which would cause them so much agony and suffering that psychiatrists would term their behavior a syndrome, the post-Vietnam syndrome, PVS for psychiatric registration forms, and men, desperately reacting against the horrors of Vietnam, and the hopelessness of their own people, would be codified by national mental health experts so that they could join other post-war syndromic veterans who were allaying—in drunken stupors in Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion beer halls—the post-World War I Syndrome, the post-World War II Syndrome, and the post-Korean War Syndrome. They recorded images which would later cause them to glue themselves to whatever negative issues they could cook up about their country, and they sank deeper into the mire of letdown and nihilism that would later spread further and further through all segments of American society that looked not to face the realities of Vietnam, but, rather, looked to try to blot out an awkward national error that had taken away a great deal of the prestige the United States had before had in the eyes of other nations. They recorded images which would act as a cancer and continue to eat away at the fortitude of a once vital nation that comprises not even 5% of the world’s population, but a far greater percentage of that worlds wealth.

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July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

7 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

14 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641