Tyler Montague
The Systematized Psychology of Madness

Have you ever traveled to a far away and exotic land to meet and kill the natives who live there? Have you ever shielded yourself from a barrage of napalm with the corpse of a close friend? Well sir, if you haven’t, then you haven’t truly experienced modern warfare. Yes, modern warfare has, in its short span of existence, proven itself the undisputed champion of dehumanization. Vietnam was, for America, the un-ignorable representative of that deeply latent internal illness that has wracked all of Imperialist civilization since its inception; that sorely protected Achilles heel which serves as undeniable proof of our collective failure to realize that, in fact, all of humanity is connected, not most importantly by money and business, but by love, hate, sweat, tears, and blood.

It is my belief that as a collective, the human population at least subconsciously acknowledges this bond. Unfortunately it is in war that modern civilization’s cold, systematic tendencies are allowed to be carried to their most catastrophically logical conclusions; isn’t it only fitting that the machine’s creators would in time become the machine? And sadly, the narrowness of our mechanized perspective prevents us from collectively remembering the pain and hopelessness that embodies every ‘great’ war.

In order for a government to administer to its population a conscience numb enough to support another bloody campaign of modern warfare, a considerable amount of psychological manipulation must first take place. The insidious efforts to promote this type of thought manipulation by our government were, in the long run, perhaps even more damaging than the physical devastation experienced during the war. Complete mental desensitization is a terribly real product of modern warfare, and was immediately observable in American soldiers during the Vietnam War. In The New Soldier, Sgt. Jim Weber recalls training camp:

“. . . I was waving flags all the time that I was on my train, you know, down to South Carolina where I got my murder training. . . I went in there and my complete moral worth was completely destroyed. I mean I was a worthless human being. The worst thing you can be in the military is to be called a civilian. And so they had to completely re-socialize us, which they were very effective at doing.”

Sadly enough, the demoralization experienced in training camps would only serve as a precursor to the actual war, which would be infinitely more confusing and damaging. Arriving as an American soldier in Vietnam was, for most, an incredibly dissociating event, an experience from which many veterans still haven’t psychologically recovered. Traveling to the other side of the world is in and of itself a discombobulating experience, let alone traveling there to meet complete disorder and madness amongst both your adversaries and your companions upon arrival. A Private recalls watching his friends transform in the chaos:

“From one day to the next, you could see for yourself changes coming over guys on our side – decent fellows, who wouldn’t dream of calling an Oriental a ‘gook’ or a ‘slopehead’ back home. But they were halfway around the world now, in a strange country, where they couldn’t tell who was their friend and who wasn’t. Day after day, out on patrol, we’d come to a narrow dirt path leading through some shabby village, and the elders would welcome us and the children come running with smiles on their faces, waiting for the candy we’d give them. But at the other end of the path, just as we were leaving the village behind, the enemy would open up on us, and there was bitterness among us that the villagers hadn’t given us warning.”

The soldiers were unable to distinguish the enemy amongst the Vietnamese population, and to make things worse, there were growing divisions amongst the ranks, as well. Incidents of violent dissidence erupted, and some soldiers even went so far as to murder their own officers. This practice, commonly referred to as “fragging”, became increasingly frequent until the “enemy” could no longer be positively identified even within one’s own camp. The soldier’s and indeed the government’s inability to distinguish friend from foe in the conflict was compounded by the insane lack of cohesiveness which quickly developed in this “total war” environment. The chaos of Vietnam represented a forced psychological transition from reason into madness, both for the soldier and for the government. For the institution this chaos was involuntary, caused in part by traditional adherence to outdated war tactics; belief in the principle that when going to war with another country, an army will inevitably be there to oppose the attack upon arrival - presumably an organized army with relatively similar equipment, numbers and technical ability. World War I was perhaps the most drastic example of how (due to industrialization) this system of warfare ‘works’ only as a human meat grinder. With the invention of machine guns, millions stood face to face in a two-directional firing squad, unable to breach each other’s defenses, armed only with fossilized ideas of ‘chivalry’ and ‘fair play’. Hundreds of thousands died for piddling advances of under a hundred yards. Even though both sides had similar equipment and techniques, the first Great War was the devastating blow that would bring the long reign of the European superpowers to an end.

In Vietnam the defending ‘army’ of impoverished civilians stood absolutely no chance of winning a traditional war against the world’s most technologically advanced military force ever. This was not to be another “World War”. The idea that thousands of farmers with hoes and shovels could face off against tanks, fighter jets and machine gun mounted helicopters on a traditional battlefield following traditional courtesies is impossible and ludicrous. The only logical way for a force with drastically disparate capabilities to engage in battle with an Imperial superpower is through guerilla warfare.

Vietnam would come to epitomize the inconceivably cruel and inhuman way in which Imperial war machines interpret and fight wars which are incompatible with their traditional tactics. It also illustrates the fact that no popular social movement can be permanently suppressed, and that any attempt to do so will have horrible consequences for both the suppressed and the suppressor. The majority of any population should have the ability to remove unwanted foreign occupiers from the circulation of its system with the gradual force of popular unanimity. And if immediate removal is impossible, then a slow, eroding resistance will continue until either the foreign body removes itself voluntarily, is extinguished, or the majority of the population is extinguished.

Unfortunately it is the civilians and the soldiers who are most immediately extinguished. (It is also unfortunate to note that most of the soldiers who bear this burden are typically the poor and underprivileged.) It is logical then that the senseless madness of the conflict would at first manifest physically within the soldiers. After all, aren’t the soldier’s merely the physical representatives of the idea, of the strategy to win the war? Writer Marguerite Higgins explained in 1965, “It’s not that America wanted to play the enemy to its friends in Vietnam. As the months, years, coup d’etats, and crises went by it became appallingly evident that the United States simply did not know who its friends were in that tormented country or how to distinguish them from its foes.” Many of the soldiers, being the first wave emissaries of this confusion and themselves unable to distinguish friend from foe, literally went insane.

The horrific result of this mortal confusion was perhaps most infamously embodied when a group of American soldiers massacred the entire village of My Lai. A witness reported that before the massacre started, he saw American soldiers “shoot two guys who popped up from a rice field. They looked like military aged men . . . when certain guys pop up from the rice fields, you shoot them.” The frantic paranoia of this split-second logic overlooks the fact that a majority of Vietnam’s residents were farmers, and in effect these well-promoted stereotypes gave the soldiers the authority, and indeed the necessity, to kill at their discretion, so long as their targets were “certain guys”, “military aged men”.

For many Americans back home, such atrocities came as a horrible surprise. They simply couldn’t imagine the environment in which the soldiers lived, could not relate to the stress under which the soldiers were operating. More broadly they did not understand the dynamics of the war. When asked why he thought one Lieutenant helped to murder an entire village, one witness, overcome with emotion, responded,

“He did it because the American people wanted him to do it. I know the American people will say no, no, I didn’t want him to do that. I saw those pictures in Life magazine; I saw those dead women and children. I didn’t want him to do that. I wanted him to go to those Vietnamese villages and some of the people there, they are communists, yes. I wanted him to kill them.
But some of those people there, they are anti-communist, and I wanted him to say, good morning, and give them a cookie. And some of those people there, they don’t know if they are communists or not, and I wanted him to win their hearts and minds, President Nguyen Van Thieu, and the American people say I know it is a very hard job; these people all look alike; they all wear black clothes; they are all chewing betel nuts and saying hello, G.I.”

Some soldiers struggled deeply with their confusion over who to kill and who not to kill. Many struggled to decide whether or not it was right to be there in the first place and wrestled courageously with the deep-seated racisms and drastic moral inconsistencies glaringly apparent in their acts. Many privately acknowledged the fact that they had indeed killed innocent people. Many couldn’t handle the guilt and killed themselves over it. Others surrendered to the uncertainty and transformed into something not entirely human: a physical manifestation of the insanity. “After a while you just become like an animal”, admitted Sgt. Richard Dow, “you just do it out of instinct, you just don’t realize anymore.”

Some even managed to take this ghoulish indifference eerily close to delight. Col. George S. Patton III once explained that, “I do like to see the arms and legs fly” and was proud to explain “what a fine bunch of killers” his American soldiers were. When supposed ‘leaders’ descend to this level of blatant immorality and utter lack of respect for human life, one might argue that there is evidence of a severe psychological breakdown within society.

A great degree of this cold, inhuman sentiment carried over from Vietnam as it had from previous wars, and has doubtlessly played a part in every American war since. During the Vietnam War, for example, television audiences were bombarded nightly with graphic images of death and carnage. Media strategists, realizing the stimulatory effects of such displays, have now replaced the visual representations of modern warfare with computer images (perhaps in an attempt to graft the loose ends of reality and unreality together, much like a video game). The popular representation of Vietnam in the media has, much like everything else, over time been glazed and pardoned. “It was the sixties, and a lot of people were ‘experimenting’.” Perhaps if in subsequent years there had been less focus on the healthy social experimentation of the ‘counter-culture’, and more focus on the vast and deadly ‘experimentations’ of our governmental system which has come to represent all culture, we might have been able to stunt the growth of our expansionistic Imperial tendencies right then. Yet to this day these same tendencies continue to spiral us towards downfall. In 1990 Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien wrote solemnly, “I fear that we are back to where we started. I wish we were more troubled.”

There are many aspects of the Vietnam War that we as Americans should still be troubled over, but perhaps most troubling of all was the way in which our government perceived the conflict and used massive amounts of human life like some sort of raw resource, wood to fuel the furnace. Analyst Jeffrey Milstein explained in 1974:

“The hawk policy prescription for reducing enemy violence in a limited war has been to increase one’s own violent actions. The hawks’ hypothesis is that, in the face of escalated violence, the enemy’s motivation to continue the war at an intensified level will be reduced. The theoretical reason for an enemy to deescalate is that beyond some tolerable point the punishment, stress, and costs resulting from the escalated violence would, in the enemy’s mind, outweigh any possible future reward (e.g., future political control over disputed territory and people). Thus . . . the hawks hypothesize that in the face of overwhelming punishment the enemy’s violent behavior will be extinguished.”

This hypothesis (that if a popular social movement resists, it must be broken) is not only barbaric, but it is also genocidal, a trait which holds dire consequence not only for the belligerent nations involved but for the whole of humanity. It is true that Vietnam wasn’t America’s first genocidal stint: a great part of realizing ‘manifest destiny’ involved actively murdering and exiling natives from their homes. For the early settler, forging a place for oneself in the wilderness of North America meant a lot of work: chopping down trees and mowing down natives became almost one and the same, all part of a day’s work. And while with one hand we condemned the Nazis for their unspeakable acts of genocide during World War II, with the other we organized Japanese-Americans into our own American death camps, complete with barbed wire fences and armed guard towers.

Perhaps then this seed of dehumanization was long ago buried and has over the years remained latently active in our society, ever since we first lost control of our humanity attempting to massacre an entire people.

Even the language used to describe the latest weaponry was utterly soulless, and in fact terrifyingly equated human life to other battlefield ‘materials’ such as rocks or wood, like so much living dirt. The effects of one new innovation, napalm, are explained in mechanistic detail in the pages of Napalm and Other Incendiary Weapons and All Aspects of Their Possible Use, a report of the UN Secretary General issued in 1973. It explains from the cold perspective of the statistician that, “Targets vary in their vulnerability to heat. The human body, for example, and inflammable materials such as wood or dry vegetation, are more vulnerable than structures composed predominantly of concrete or metal.” Napalm was, for this reason, obviously an ideal weapon to drop in massive quantities from the skies upon the enemy population. Its physical tendency to adhere to the skin would insure many deaths, and many of those who were wounded but weren’t killed would die shortly thereafter due to lack of proper medical attention.

Many of the chemicals dropped on Vietnam had lasting, multi-generational effects: children born without limbs, miscarriages, cancer, etc. And “The long-term ecological consequences,” the report states, “which could be severe, are largely unpredictable.” Nevertheless the war machine utilized these tools as quickly as they were invented, all for the sake of ‘increasing punishment’.

Brigadier General William M. Creasy defined the term accurately in 1952 when he explained that, “Biological warfare is essentially public health and preventative medicine in reverse.” Perhaps it would have been wise, prior to utilizing biological warfare, for our government to examine its own skewed and drastically unhealthy motives. It is interesting to note from a modern perspective the irony of the current ‘terrorism’ scare and its implicated ties to chemical and biological warfare, never mind that we invented and produced most of these “weapons of mass destruction”. A similar example was America’s overwhelming Cold War fear of nuclear reprisal, our government having just years before used the first prototypes of the weapon for its own questionable purposes.

There are even indications that the skewed Vietnam hawk policy reached its sordid social ideologies into the contemplation of new and innovative techniques of psychological warfare, once thought impossible or unrealistic. In 1969 theorist C.R.B. Joyce, pondering aloud the relatively unknown possibilities of psychedelics-as-weapons, argued:

“It is clear that any psychedelic drug is one that enlarges the vision. A sufficiently enlarged enemy vision will contain all other points of view. Since one of these will be the objective, as far as the enemy is concerned, of any political commander, a psychedelic drug should be an ideal chemical warfare agent for major strategic use.”

Here is another instance of a narrow mind failing fully comprehend the psychological dynamics of the war. It was a horrible mistake that we were unable to shatter our racist ideas that the enemy soldiers in Vietnam were cruel, unintelligent, jungle-dwelling ape people, more animal than human. The ideas that a) they were completely ignorant of America’s intentions, and b) if only they had known America’s ideas, they would be instantly convinced of them, are incredibly pompous and naïve ones. And the assumption that all of this could somehow be done simply by poisoning water supplies with psychedelics only shines light on the inhuman nature of American war strategy.

In Strange War, Strange Strategy; a General’s Report On Vietnam, Gen. Lewis W. Walt assesses the enemy:

“Very few [Vietnamese soldiers] have any ideological reason for fighting. But a substantial number – and this is enormously important to us – are fighting as a result of deep indoctrination, relentless propaganda, the incessant repetition of ideas and slogans essential to the communist system. They fight for what their minds have been molded to regard as social justice and opportunity, and against what they have been conditioned to regard as evil.”


And why would this be enormously important to the General? Perhaps because he understood that an uncannily similar type of ‘deep indoctrination’, ‘relentless propaganda’ and ‘incessant repetition of ideas and slogans’ shaped and in fact created his own army, that “fine bunch of killers” George Patton was so proud of. In a way, General Walt was, much like Christopher Columbus first encountering the American natives, looking into a strange mirror, and didn’t in any way see himself.

It was because of this indoctrination that many could not perceive why these people kept fighting in the face of unthinkable punishment: could not perceive that there was a huge, popular social movement taking place, an insurgence against many generations of colonial exploitation. During the previous French occupation the indigenous peoples were reduced to indebted serfs starving in the fields, rationed handfuls of rotting rice to sustain entire families. An attempt at another colonial occupation coinciding with a popular social uprising would inspire a much more virulent resistance than the hawks had ever expected, the Vietnamese not about to surrender their painfully close freedom for another era of colonial domination.

The tragically ironic parallels between America’s own bloody struggle for independence in the late eighteenth century and Vietnam’s twentieth century attempt at the same are unmistakable and clearly drawn, yet were ignored in order to wage the war. Ho Chi Minh was himself inspired by the American struggle against the British and was actually surprised when the United States refused to acknowledge his regime. He had even begun his country’s own declaration of independence with the famous, “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet where was American respect of these same rights for the Vietnamese people? Graphic pictures of American violence and brutality appeared on television every night, and after years of visual and documented proof, the Vietnam War began to sicken the entire world. Gradually, popular opposition to the war began to build. Shortly after the deliberations of a tribunal designed to expose Vietnam War crimes adjourned, Jean-Paul Sartre released On Genocide.

“The press informs us every day that Americans bomb Vietnam. But from the reports of Boards of Inquiry that the Russell Tribunal had designated and from eyewitnesses and victims of the bombings, who had come of their own accord to testify, the Tribunal became convinced by degrees that numerous civilians are killed, that these bombings particularly over North Vietnam are massive and most of the time deliberately directed against objectives which are not at all military and are in fact intended to break the morale of the population.”

The irony of ‘democratic’ America annihilating its newborn brother became a terrible reflecting mirror for America, one that Lenin might have smiled at coyly; the cycle of capitalism evolving into imperialism, finally coming full circle on itself to destroy a movement which bared striking similarities to the revolution upon which its ideological moors were allegedly constructed. And who are we now? the conscious part of America protested, what exactly does ‘Democracy’ or ‘The Declaration of Independence’ mean to a nation that no longer bares any similarity to the ideas upon which it is based? The consequences of this psychological struggle are still rippling the waters of the American conscience, and we have yet to figure a working resolution to these tragic hypocrisies.

When the whole bloody fiasco was over, millions of humans lay dead and rotting. The world seemed tired, demoralized by the latest in an ever thickening string of wars. Many veterans became homeless, psychologically damaged beyond repair. Many left active duty already addicted to heroin, a product of the CIA’s lucrative trading in the region. Others managed to return to the fold of society silently nursing their unspeakable pains. For the American population, placing blame was a dismal process, for there was no one in particular to blame, aside from our own government. “It is not necessary to blame the entire structure of current policy on any one man or party,” a 1968 Ripon Society appraisal pleaded, “or any small group of officials. For although President Johnson and his advisers seem stubbornly committed to an imprudent and costly course of action, and although they will continue to use every available form of political leverage to avoid being confronted with their mistakes, the fault is not entirely theirs. Their misconceived policies could not have developed unchecked were it not for deeper malfunctions in our political institutions.” The same appraisal dismally blamed the problem on an imbalance “between Congress and the Executive Branch, [which] has permitted bureaucratic mistakes to go unchecked. The Legislative branch faces long-term problems in adapting its procedures to the growth of executive power.” The war had evidently shaken the very foundations of these institutions, and they remain shaken ever since.

In truth we are still deep in the shadow of our Imperial irony, and over the decades since Vietnam our grim international role has remained the same. We are the unquestioned dominators. As the impossibility of perpetuating this global stance increases, so does the force required to keep the existing power dynamic intact. The hawk policy for increasing escalation in the face of escalated resistance remains the standard, and so the question remains – how much longer will the masses of American people allow themselves to be manipulated and transformed into violent, self-sacrificial pawns, all in the name of protecting the international business interests of a few? How long until the citizens of the world revolt against this particular strain of Imperialism, which has wound its roots so tightly into the system as to choke the entire world?

We as Americans need to immediately stop our confusing and perpetual conflicts in order to deal with more significant problems, not least our alarming, almost religious belief in material gain above all else, and the violent protection of our ‘interests’. Words like these work to cloak a greed which has brought the world on several occasions to the brink of disaster. Now more than ever America needs to do some soul searching, we need some necessary yet painful merging of our ideas with our actualities. We need to see the people we are killing halfway across the world not as enemies or computerized stick-figures on a screen, but as living participants like us in the ever thickening web of connectedness that is our world. For when we lose ourselves in the dark fervor of war, we also lose our humanity, which alone holds the chance for the future of mankind.