Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Destroying the
Town Is Not Saving It
William
J. Astore
June
2, 2022
TomDispatch
Twenty years ago,
I left the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for my next assignment. I
haven’t been back since, but today I travel there (if only in my imagination)
to give my graduation address to the class of 2022. So, won’t you take a few
minutes and join me, as well as the corps of cadets, in Falcon Stadium?
Congratulations to
all you newly minted second lieutenants! As a former military professor who,
for six years, taught cadets very much like you at the Academy, I salute you
and your accomplishments. You’ve weathered a demanding curriculum, far too many
room and uniform inspections, parades, restrictions, and everything else
associated with a military that thrives on busywork and enforced
conformity. You’ve emerged from all of that today as America’s newest officers,
part of what recent commanders-in-chief like to call “the finest
fighting force” in human history. Merely for the act of donning a uniform and
taking the oath of office, many of your fellow Americans already think of
you as heroes deserving of a hearty “thank you for your service” and
unqualified expressions of “support.”
And I must say you
do exude health, youth, and enthusiasm, as well as a feeling that you’re about
to graduate to better things, like pilot training or intelligence school, among
so many other Air Force specialties. Some of you will even join America’s
newest service, the Space Force, which resonates with me, as my first
assignment in 1985 was to Air Force Space Command.
In my initial
three years in the service, I tested the computer software the Air Force used
back then to keep track of all objects in earth orbit, an inglorious but
necessary task. I also worked on war games in Cheyenne Mountain, America’s
ultimate command center for its nuclear defense. You could say I was paid to
think about the unthinkable, the end of civilization as we know it due to
nuclear Armageddon. That was near the tail end of the Cold War with the Soviet
Union. So much has changed since I wore gold bars like you and yet, somehow, we
find ourselves once again in another “cold war” with Russia, this time centered
on an all-too-hot war in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, instead of, as in 1962,
a country in our immediate neighborhood, Cuba. Still, that distant conflict is
only raising fresh fears of a nuclear nightmare that could well destroy us all.
What does this old
light colonel, who’s been retired for almost as long as he wore the uniform,
have to teach you cadets so many years later? What can I tell you that you
haven’t heard before in all the classes you’ve attended and all the lectures
you’ve endured?
How about this:
You’ve been lied to big time while you’ve been here at the Academy.
Ah, I see I have
your attention now. More than a few of you are smiling. I used to joke with
cadets about how four years at a military school were designed to smother
idealism and encourage cynicism, or so it sometimes seemed. Yes, our lead core
value may still be “integrity first,” but the brass, the senior leadership,
often convinces itself that what really comes first is the Air Force itself, an
ideal of “service” that, I think you’ll agree, is far from selfless.
What do I mean
when I say you’ve been lied to while being taught the glorious history of the
U.S. Air Force? Since World War II began, the air forces of the United States
have killed millions of people around the world. And yet here’s the strange
thing: we can’t even say that we’ve clearly won a war since the “Greatest
Generation” earned its wings in the 1930s and 1940s. In short, boasts to the
contrary, airpower has proven to be neither cheap, surgical, nor
decisive. You see what I mean about lies now, I hope.
I know, I know.
You’re not supposed to think this way. You eat in Mitchell Hall, named after
General Billy Mitchell, that airpower martyr who fought so hard after World War
I for an independent air service. (His and our collective dream, long delayed,
finally came to fruition in 1947.) You celebrate the Doolittle Raiders,
those intrepid aviators who flew off an aircraft carrier in 1942, launching a
daring and dangerous surprise attack on Tokyo, a raid that helped restore
America’s sagging morale after Pearl Harbor. You mark the courage of the Tuskegee
Airmen, those African American pilots who broke racial barriers, while proving
their mettle in the skies over Nazi Germany. They are indeed worthy heroes to
celebrate.
And yet shouldn’t
we airmen also reflect on the bombing of Germany during World War II that
killed roughly 600,000 civilians but didn’t prove crucial to the
defeat of Adolf Hitler? (In fact, Soviet troops deserve the lion’s share of the
credit there.) We should reflect on the firebombing of Tokyo that killed more
than 100,000 people, among 60 other sites firebombed, and the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that, both instantly and over time, killed an
estimated 220,000 Japanese. During the Korean War, our air forces leveled
North Korea and yet that war ended in a stalemate that persists to this day.
During Vietnam, our air power pummeled Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia,
unleashing high explosives, napalm, and poisons like Agent Orange against so
many innocent people caught up in American rhetoric that the only good
Communist was a dead one. Yet the Vietnamese version of Communism prevailed,
even as the peoples of Southeast Asia still suffer and die from the
torrent of destruction we rained down on them half a century ago.
Turning to more
recent events, the U.S. military enjoyed total air supremacy in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and other battlefields of the war on terror, yet that supremacy led to
little but munitions expended, civilians killed, and wars lost. It led to
tens of thousands of deaths by airpower, because, sadly, there are no such
things as freedom bombs or liberty missiles.
If you haven’t
thought about such matters already (though I’ll bet you have, at least a
little), consider this: You are potentially a death-dealer. Indeed, if you
become a nuclear launch officer in a silo in Wyoming or North Dakota, you may
yet become a death-dealer of an almost unimaginable sort. Even if you “fly” a
drone while sitting in a trailer thousands of miles from your target, you
remain a death-dealer. Recall that the very last drone attack the U.S. launched
in Afghanistan in 2021 killed 10 civilians, including seven children, and
that no one in the chain of command was held accountable. There’s a
very good reason, after all, why those drones, or, as we prefer to call them,
remotely piloted aircraft, have over the years been given names like Predator
and Reaper. Consider that a rare but refreshing burst of honesty.
I remember how
“doolies,” or new cadets, had to memorize “knowledge” and recite it on command
to upper-class cadets. Assuming that’s still a thing, here’s a phrase I’d like
you to memorize and recite: Destroying the town is not saving it. The
opposite sentiment emerged as an iconic and ironic catchphrase of the
Vietnam War, after journalist Peter Arnett reported a U.S. major
saying of devastated Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save
it.” Incredibly, the U.S. military came to believe, or at least to assert, that
destroying such a town was a form of salvation from the alleged ideological
evil of communism. But whether by bombs or bullets or fire, destruction is
destruction. It should never be confused with salvation.
Will you have the
moral courage, when it’s not strictly in defense of the U.S. Constitution to
which you, once again, swore an oath today, to refuse to become a destroyer?
Two Unsung Heroes
of the U.S. Air Force
In your four years
here, you’ve learned a lot about heroes like Billy Mitchell and Lance
Sijan, an Academy grad and Medal of Honor recipient who demonstrated enormous
toughness and resilience after being shot down and captured in Vietnam. We like
to showcase airmen like these, the true believers, the ones prepared to
sacrifice everything, even their own lives, to advance what we hold dear. And
they are indeed easy to respect.
I have two more
courageous and sacrificial role models to introduce to you today. One you may
have heard of; one you almost certainly haven’t. Let’s start with the latter.
His name was James Robert “Cotton” Hildreth and he rose to the rank of major
general in our service. As a lieutenant colonel in Vietnam, Cotton Hildreth and
his wingman, flying A-1 Skyraiders, were given an order to drop napalm on a
village that allegedly harbored enemy Viet Cong soldiers.
Hildreth disobeyed that order, dropping his napalm outside the target area
and saving (alas, only temporarily) the lives of 1,200 innocent villagers.
How could Hildreth
have possibly disobeyed his “destroy the town” order? The answer: because he
and his wingman took the time to look at the villagers they were assigned to
kill. In their Skyraiders, they flew low and slow. Seeing nothing but
apparently friendly people waving up at them, including children, they sensed
that something was amiss. It turns out that they were oh-so-right. The man who
wanted the village destroyed was ostensibly an American ally, a high-ranking
South Vietnamese official. The village hadn’t paid its taxes to him, so he was
using American airpower to exact his revenge and set an example for other
villages that dared to deny his demands. By refusing to bomb and kill
innocents, Hildreth passed his “gut check,” if you will, and his career doesn’t
appear to have suffered for it.
But he himself did
suffer. He spoke about his Vietnam experiences in an oral interview after he’d
retired, saying they’d left him “really sick” and “very bitter.” In a
melancholy, almost haunted, tone, he added, “I don’t talk about this [the war]
very much,” and one can understand why.
So, what happened
to the village that Hildreth and his wingman had spared from execution by
napalm? Several days later, it was obliterated by U.S. pilots flying high and
fast in F-105s, rather than low and slow as Hildreth had flown in his A-1. The
South Vietnamese provincial official had gotten his way and Hildreth’s chain of
command was complicit in the destruction of 1,200 people whose only crime was
fighting a tax levy.
My second hero is
not a general, not even an officer. He’s a former airman who’s currently behind
bars, serving a 45-month sentence because he leaked the so-called drone
papers, which revealed that our military’s drone strikes killed far more
innocent civilians than enemy combatants in the war on terror. His name is
Daniel Hale, and you should all know about him and reflect on his integrity and
honorable service to our country.
What was his
“crime”? He wanted the American people to know about their military and the
innocent people being killed in our name. He felt the burden of the lies he was
forced to shoulder, the civilians he watched dying on video monitors due to
drone strikes. He wanted us to know, too, because he thought that if enough
Americans knew, truly knew, we’d come together and put a stop to such
atrocities. That was his crime.
Daniel Hale was an
airman of tremendous moral courage. Before he was sentenced to prison, he wrote
an eloquent and searing letter about what had moved him to share information
that, in my view, was classified mainly to cover up murderous levels of
incompetence. I urge you to read Hale’s letter in which he
graphically describes the deaths of children and the trauma he experienced in
coming to grips with what he termed “the undeniable cruelties that I
perpetuated” while serving as an Air Force intelligence analyst.
It’s sobering
stuff, but we airmen, you graduates in particular, deserve just such sobering
information, because you’re going to be potential death-dealers. Yet it’s
important that you not become indiscriminate murderers, even if you never see
the people being vaporized by the bombs you drop and missiles you’ll launch
with such profligacy.
In closing, do me
one small favor before you throw your caps in the air, before the Thunderbirds
roar overhead, before you clap yourselves on the back, before you head off to
graduation parties and the congratulations of your friends and family. Think
about a saying I learned from Spider-Man. Yes, I really do mean the comic-book
hero. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Like so many
airmen before you, you may soon find yourself in possession of great power over
life and death in wars and other conflicts that, at least so far in this
century, have been all too grim. Are you really prepared for such a burden?
Because power and authority, unchecked by morality and integrity, will lead you
and our country down a very dark path indeed.
Always remember
your oath, always aim high, the high of Hildreth and Hale, the high of those
who remember that they are citizen-airmen in service to a nation founded on
lofty ideals. Listen to your conscience, do the right thing, and you may yet
earn the right to the thanks that so many Americans will so readily grant you
just by virtue of wearing the uniform.
And if you’ll
allow this aging airman one final wish: I wish you a world where the bombs stay
in their aircraft, the missiles in their silos, the bullets in their guns, a
world, dare I say it, where America is finally at peace.
Copyright 2022
William J. Astore
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join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s
new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his
Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a
Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred
McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of
U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
William
J. Astore,
a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is
a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower
Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national
security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2022-06-06/destroying-town-not-saving-it
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