I’ve been reading Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, a relentlessly honest history of the American War in Vietnam.
Producing a high body count was crucial for promotion in the officer corps. Many high-level officers established ‘production quotas’ for their units, and systems of ‘debit’ and ‘credit’ to calculate exactly how efficiently subordinate units and middle-management personnel performed. Different formulas were used, but the commitment to war as a rational production process was common to all.”
I have a brother who served with the 101st. Airborne in ’67 and ’68, walking point on search-and-destroy missions. Turse will tell you more than you want to know about search-and-destroy missions. I’d have wound up in the same kind of service if that brother, and another who flew radio ops over Vietnam out of Thailand in ’65 and ’66, hadn’t grabbed me by the neck in 1971 and told me to enlist in the fucking Err Farce. Instead of slogging through a jungle or shitting my pants on an RC-135, I got sent to DLI for Chinese studies and stationed in cushy Taiwan where I listened, on April 29, 1975, to the live broadcast of the U.S. departure from the Saigon embassy.
I work with a young, much-loved teacher colleague who was born in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Thailand in 1982. She is the only co-worker I presently have who knows, deep in her heart, how the data-driven, production-quota based insanity of our militaristic empire is infecting public education. She’s an extraordinary teacher. Maybe, through her service, her students will extend the purpose of Memorial Day to honor all people, not just Americans, who have suffered and died as a result of our militarism.
Weeding the Collection 