During the Vietnam War the United States dropped more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than it did in all of World War II.  Bombs, napalm, grenades, mortars, rocket launchers, flame throwers, rifles and other materiel were used to kill as many of the enemy as possible.  One of our main strategies for winning the war was the war of attrition, better known as the body count.  The belief was that if we could kill as many Communists as possible, they would eventually wear down and call for a cease fire.  Over the course of the war, an estimated one million North Vietnamese were killed and three million were wounded.  Still, they just wouldn’t quit.

For their part, the North Vietnamese received weaponry from both China and the Soviet Union in the forms of assault rifles, rocket launchers, anti-aircraft missiles, mines, rifles, mortars, machine guns, tanks, and other materiel.  They also used many homemade weapons consisting of punji stakes, hidden mines, and tin can grenades. They killed over 58,000 Americans and approximately 700,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. Additionally, they wounded over 300,000 Americans and 1.5 million South Vietnamese.

It seems impossible to imagine that so many people could be killed by these so-called conventional weapons, and yet it happened.  When reviewing the aftermath of wars, military analysts and historians often wonder who had the best weapons.  Which was the better rifle, they wonder, the U.S. made M-16 or the Russian AK-47?  Who had better tanks and more effective bombs, and did these differences affect the outcome of the war?  While those questions are certainly valid in an objective review of any war, the purpose of this section is to consider the single most powerful weapon on either side.

Long before a weapon of war is made, the image of the enemy is made.  Constructing an image of the enemy is critical to the success of any war, if one can call war itself successful.  Visual metaphors instilled in the minds of combatants make it possible for one human being to kill another.  But these visual metaphors are not limited to the combatants, as public opinion must also be won over through the dehumanization process.

The dehumanization of a person makes it possible for a soldier to kill, not someone, but something that is less than him.  A classic example of metaphoric images being used in this regard was the Nazi reference to Jewish people as rats.  It is impossible to fathom how 6,000,000 people could be murdered in so heinous a manner without an understanding of the dehumanization process.  The Nazis believed Jewish people were something less than human and tried to exterminate them.
 

Developing visual metaphors does not always include images of specific animals.  Referring to leaders of other countries as a “madman,” “liar,” "aggressor,” or “animal” can be an effective tool.  For instance, when Iran was holding U.S. hostages in the late 1970’s, caricature images of the Ayatollah Khomeini flashed across television screens throughout the United States and he was referred to as a madman.

Nations around the world ridicule the people of the United States and often refer to us as imperialists, Yankees, and other choice words.  The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong showed no mercy in their attacks against U.S. forces because they viewed us as “imperialists dogs.”  For our part, our soldiers referred to the enemy as charlie, gook, vc, cong, as well as some other rather foul names.

It’s important to point out that the dehumanization process is not anywhere near the only reason man can kill man.  Perhaps the biggest reason deals mostly with one’s sense of physical survival.  When you are being shot at, it is natural to fight back.  Training that does take place involves following orders and firing when told to do so.  While there are examples of abuses of this training, the training exists to save the lives of soldiers in combat.  In wild and chaotic battles, hesitating to shoot can lead to a quick end to your life, as well as the lives of your comrades.

Taking the time to think of the enemy in terms of being a human can be very dangerous.  A great example of the danger of actually humanizing an enemy can be seen in the movie, “Saving Private Ryan.”  In the movie, a small group of soldiers capture a German prisoner.  Some in the group want to kill him, but one soldier who has humanized the prisoner in his mind, convinces the leader to release him once they have finished their interrogation.  Sure enough, later in the movie the released prisoner comes back to kill several Americans, including members of the group that released him.

Is the dehumanization process an organized and planned part of military training?  The answer is no.  I called Fort Knox and spoke with Captain Henry about how soldiers are trained both physically and psychologically.  Captain Henry, a veteran of the Bosnian War, said he knows of no attempt to dehumanize people.  Captain Henry made an excellent point when he noted that the Army does quite the opposite.  Captain Henry said that the Army informs its men and women to treat all people of other countries with respect, until such time that they must defend themselves.  In fact, his comments match the objectives of the Nine Rule Card given to soldiers who went to Vietnam.  The Nine Rule Card directed soldiers to treat the Vietnamese with respect.
 
 
 

If the dehumanization process is not part of training, what then is its origin?  It appears that the dehumanization process is something that is learned over time and experience.  There is no way to properly describe war, unless one has been in it, so understanding how the dehumanization process occurs is difficult for most of us to comprehend.  Soldiers who saw so much killing that they couldn’t deal with it, eventually did just as nurses and doctors working with the injured did.  They built walls around their feelings, their natural human feelings.  They tried to become immune to the carnage about them by mentally turning off the inhumanity of death and destruction.  Seeing so many people killed and seeing others living in those conditions may have caused life itself to become surreal.

In other words, a barrage of surreal inhuman experiences over time may cause the dehumanization process to become part of our instinctive sense of survival.  An instinctive sense of both physical and psychological survival.  Not knowing who the enemy was, the only way to survive in Vietnam was to shoot first and ask questions later.  But that sense of survival, it seems to me, was not just physical.  It had to include psychological survival as well.  Dehumanization, then, seems to have occurred without training and was developed only after experiencing many horrible sights.  The dehumanization process appears to be an untrained psychological, yet natural extension of our sense of survival.

Veterans I have spoken with about the dehumanization process report that they hadn’t even thought about it until we discussed the issue.  Still, their very next comment is normally, “Well, that makes sense.  I guess that happened without me even thinking about it.”  The sense of psychological survival of veterans of wars may also be one of the reasons that so many veterans simply do not want to talk about their experiences.  Talking about it is just too hard, and talking about it begins to break down that protective wall they have built around their natural human feelings.

It’s ironic, too, that it took a wall to remove a wall.  Many veterans who have held their feelings inside themselves for years, have found a true healing power when visiting the Wall in Washington or the aptly named, Wall That Heals, the traveling Vietnam Memorial.  The names on the wall, which veteran Jan Scruggs insisted upon from day one, are a humanizing and glorious tribute to, not only those who died, but to all who served.

Mix idealistic zealots, the strong desire for survival, the relative immaturity of young men in a far off country, the desire for revenge after seeing friends killed, and the dehumanization process and you have quite a fire building.  Now add the millions of aforementioned weapons and you can begin to see how nearly 7 million people could have been killed or wounded in Vietnam.