Salon.com > Judith Coburn

Stiffing veterans

Mon, 01 May 2006 11:00:00 +0000

On the eve of his Marine unit's assault on Fallujah, Iraq, in November 2004, Blake Miller read to his men from the Bible (John 14:2-3): "In my father's house, there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I leave this place and go there to prepare a place for you, so that where I may be, you may be also."

A photograph of Miller's blood-smeared, filthy face, so reminiscent of David Douglas Duncan's photos of war-weary Marines in Vietnam, is one of the Iraq war's iconic images. Over a hundred newspapers ran it. But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported recently, Miller, a decorated war hero, has been shattered psychologically by Iraq. Disabled by flashbacks and nightmares, he continues to pay daily and dearly for his service there.

His eloquent commitment to his fellow Marines is the highest value in military life. But the Bush administration, which sent Blake Miller, his fellow Marines and 1.3 million other Americans (so far) to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, apparently does not share this commitment.

“My War Gone By, I Miss It So” by Anthony Loyd

Fri, 28 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"My War Gone By, I Miss It So," Anthony Loyd's provocatively titled memoir of the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, challenges many of the conventions of the genre. Loyd admits right off that he isn't interested in journalism -- that for him it's just a passport to war. So he doesn't "cover" these wars so much as he reports about himself playing tourist on the scene. He isn't sympathetic to any particular side or cause, and he isn't outraged by the carnage or moved to what he calls "sluttish displays of empathy." He doesn't see anything of value in being a witness. "What good did reporting do in Bosnia?" he asks with considerable justice.

Loyd says soldiering is in his blood. The military men he's descended from fought in the Boer War and in World War II, and he was a soldier himself with the British in Northern Ireland (where he apparently didn't witness a single shot fired in anger). He tells us he "wanted to know what it was like to shoot people. I felt it was the key to understanding so much more." But as a journalist/photographer (he's never clear about what, if anything, he's doing work-wise), when he gets his chance to actually kill a Serb, he doesn't. And elsewhere he forgets to take photos altogether, making him an all-around fuck-up as a "shooter."

An unnecessary crock: Michael Lind's “Vietnam: The Necessary War”

Wed, 24 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

I guess it's too much to ask that every American just bite the bullet and admit we lost the Vietnam War, because here comes Harper's Washington editor Michael Lind with yet another of the "if only" books about Vietnam. Is it still possible that a writer can blather on and on about an international communist conspiracy in 1999 without having to go to a survivalist press in Bumfuck, Idaho, to get the book published? Apparently so.

Lind is one of the bad boys of the Beltway. Like Christopher Hitchens, Maureen Dowd and Matt Drudge, he'd rather get off a good line than make a complex, well-reasoned argument. Now 32, he has lurched from one side of the political spectrum to the other and back again. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas, he considered himself a liberal Democrat, but in graduate school at Yale he solicited money from William F. Buckley for a campus magazine. Stints at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and assignments for the left-leaning magazine Dissent and the New York Review of Books followed. A polemicist by nature, he once told the Los Angeles Times, "One side is right and one side is wrong. You can't fraternize with the enemy. You have to drive them out of public life."

There's something about Mary

Tue, 12 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

You might expect that the biggest enemies of progressive Berkeley radio station KPFA-FM would be right-wingers in Congress, who for 50 years have railed against the left-wing Pacifica network of community-based, listener-supported "free-speech" radio stations.

But the radio network that survived McCarthyism, and more recently attempts by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., to cut its public funding, is facing the greatest threat to its existence yet, at the hands of its own leadership. And its primary antagonist is not a right winger, but Mary Frances Berry, the black scholar and civil rights activist who chairs both the Civil Rights Commission and the Pacifica Foundation.

In the last six months, the management changes pursued by Berry have ignited a civil war within the network. Attempts by the central foundation to reduce local control of the five stations triggered outrage at KPFA, but Berry defended her attempts as an effort to bring diversity to the station, whose programmers and listeners she derided as "white male hippies over 50."

“The Dragon Hunt”

Tue, 20 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It's after the war in Tran Vu's short stories. The shooting may have stopped, but there's no peace, no healing. All that's left is the postwar wreckage in people's souls and the continuing carnage only the deeply wounded can inflict.

It was "The Coral Reef," an art brut tour de force published in Granta in 1995, that introduced the 33-year-old Vu, who had been living in Paris as a refugee since he was 17, to English-speaking readers. And "The Dragon Hunt," Vu's first collection in English, begins with this autobiographical account of how the teenage author and a boatload of refugees fleeing postwar Vietnam were shipwrecked on a reef for 12 days. Although the boat people's escape is ripped from newspaper headlines, Vu's focus on the most repellant details of suffering -- people in the hold wallowing in shit and vomit, mouths blistered by the sun, feet shredded by coral during the futile efforts to free the boat, starving refugees stealing food from one another, mutineers on a sinking raft stalked by sharks, deaths from sheer despair -- is what makes this story, like the rest of the collection, so original (and so grueling to read).

Cambodia's other madmen

Fri, 24 Apr 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Just as it seemed Pol Pot's old international allies were conspiring to snatch him and put him on trial, the ailing mass murderer turns up dead in his jungle redoubt.

"Natural causes," claim his former comrades in the Khmer Rouge, burning his remains on a pyre before an autopsy could be performed. They say their former leader had been under house arrest for ordering the assassination of his own defense minister and 12 members of his family, including his grandchildren.

But nothing will ever seem "natural" about the terror Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge rained on Cambodia. And while the near 20-year search for the elusive Saloth Sar ("Pol Pot" was his nom de guerre) could make for a great Hollywood journalist-in-action movie, it presents a false, celebrity-style view of history. The millions of Cambodians who died beginning in 1970 -- and continue to die today -- did not perish simply because a single madman seized power in their country.

If Pol Pot had been tried in an international war crime tribunal, as the United States wanted, would he have stood alone in the dock? His most recent captors, the high-level leaders who held out with him in the jungle after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, men like Ieng Sary, Khieu Sampan and the guerrilla commander Ta Mok -- known to Cambodians as "the butcher" -- certainly should have been co-defendants.