A student last week asked why she has to say the pledge of allegiance (she doesn't, if she can prove "conscientious scruples"). Another student this week said she wants to join the Marines next year and asked me about my experience in the navy. Army National Guard recruiters, meanwhile, were in our cafeteria on Thursday. (Recruiters spend a lot more time in the Passaics out there than the LaSalles or Delbartons.)
Disciplined pedagogy and good mentorship would have me ask thoughtful questions, guide them to their own answers, emphasize the student's conscience. It is their duty to follow their conscience. Mine to respect it.
But it is first their duty to form their conscience, and it is difficult to do that in this country where the mythology, the propaganda, and the consumerism mystify what the military actually does. What exactly do we pledge to? What does "serving my country" mean? These are questions I couldn't really answer at 17 either, when I signed up.
Using mostly the government's own declassified documents and accounts from US soldiers themselves and Vietnamese accounts too, Nick Turse shows that My Lai was "not an aberration, but an operation."
Liberal apologia (let alone right-wing revanchist accounts) holds up American exceptionalism when we say the Vietnam war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation" (Ken Burns, for instance, in the opening sequence to his documentary). Liberal approaches (let alone conservative ones) focus on the tragedy of sending our boys to fight an unwinnable war and their psychological or biological entanglements in the aftermath. But in many of our favorite artistic accounts, from “Goodnight Saigon” to Miss Saigon, from “Born in the USA” to Born on the Fourth of July, little attention is paid to the three to four million people we killed in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. We say, "My Lai was a bad thing that we atoned for. Look at us atoning for My Lai. Aren't we so democratic and exceptional, atoning for our crimes?"
Nick Turse's book disabuses us of these notions. My Lai was a regular occurence. It was policy in action. Stand by for similar apologia about Afghanistan, Iraq, and the greater "War on Terror," which of course continues.
What does it mean to "serve your country"? It should involve some truth-telling. We should only pledge allegiance to our consciences, which we have the duty to form and form again.
