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Life Onboard |
LAST UPDATE
July 12, 2005
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| May 24, 2005 |
Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? – Allen Nelson |
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| Allen Nelson, a peace activist and Viet Nam war veteran, will visit Viet Nam for the first time since the war on the Peace Boat |
This was a question asked by a child when Allen Nelson, a Vietnam War veteran from New York, gave a lecture on anti-violence at an elementary school in the US. As an 18 year old Marine, he did indeed kill people in Viet Nam. On the 30th anniversary of the end of the Viet Nam War, Mr. Nelson, now a peace activist, was invited aboard Peace Boat to give a series of lectures against war, militarism and violence. Visiting Viet Nam with the Peace Boat for the first time since the war, Allen believes there is no better way for him to confront the aggression of the past by returning with a clear message of peace and justice.
As a Marine, Mr. Nelson was once stationed in Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa carries the weight of having the most US military bases in all of Asia, and it was here where many of the US soldiers fighting in Viet Nam were trained. Mr. Nelson has been traveling to Japan since 1996 after hearing about the rape of a 12 year old Okinawan girl by US soldiers.
Although many mainland Japanese people believe that the close proximity of the US military bases in the country will protect them from their enemies, Mr. Nelson argues that they are not there as a means to protect the world from aggression. This became clear in his mind after visiting the atomic bomb memorial museums in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where he realized the US taught the whole world how to be terrorists when they began dropping nuclear weapons on women, children and the elderly, hospitals, schools and homes. As such, he stated that “America is in no position to call anyone else a ‘terrorist’.”
The US, Mr. Nelson argues, has a long history of exhibiting terrorist behavior, from when the first Europeans landed in the country and slaughtered the Native peoples and stole their land to kidnapping many Africans in chains to work as slaves for 400 years, and now many in America are entrenched in chains of poverty.
Born and raised in the slums and ghettos of Brooklyn, New York, Mr. Nelson was surrounded by violence, unemployment, drug addition and alcoholism. Escape from this world led him to drop out of high school and promptly join the US Marine Corps in 1965. He was tired of being poor and the military was offering him opportunities as many poor young men have done before and after him. Mr. Nelson wants the participants to remember that the US military soldiers in Okinawa, Afghanistan and Iraq do not come from middle class and upper middle class families in America. “It is always the poor children of every country finding themselves on the battlefields, killing each other.”
The training of a military soldier is hard and brutal, and the first thing they told the young Nelson was to “keep his mouth shut” and follow orders. “In training, you don’t learn about peace, you learn how to kill.” In a battalion of 40 young men between the ages of 18 and 19, the young Nelson was trained in Okinawa, where they would go into the hills to practice war. “This training was very different than the training in US. In Okinawa we used live ammunition everyday and we practiced how to surround villages without letting people escape.” The target was no longer a bull’s eye but in the shape of a human form. This was the beginning of real war training.
Real war means you can’t shoot at your enemy and miss because in real war the enemy does not know where you are until you shoot your weapon. And in real war, soldiers are taught to group their bullets and aim for the largest part of the body where they cannot miss—the stomach area. This is not a wound where one can die quickly; instead young men stayed alive for many hours screaming and crying in great pain before they die. “You can see that real war is absolutely brutal.”
After training was over, Mr. Nelson’s battalion was shipped to Viet Nam expecting war to be like the movies. Instead, the truth was horribly different: “I spent 13 months in Viet Nam and killed many Vietnamese soldiers and saw many die. The first thing I learned in the jungles of Viet Nam is that real war is not what you see in the movies. There are no handsome heroes, no beautiful music playing the background, there is no honor in war, and no one saves the women and children, they must save themselves. You kill your enemies anyway that you can.” |
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| The audience was treated to a gospel rendition of “Amazing Grace,” which Mr. Nelson dedicated to those who have lost lives in the wars currently raging in Iraq and Africa |
Mr. Nelson recounted how his battalion would go into villages and killed all the Vietnamese men, then go into the jungle to find the women and children. “It was always easy to find them because after days of no food and water, the children would be crying. We would go deep in the jungle and listen and hear the crying and soon we would find their hiding place.” After they would gather all the dead into piles and count them, and in the end there were only the dead and dying left in the villages. The dying would crawl into the jungles to escape, but eventually the US marines would search for them by standing still and listen for the flies or smell decomposing flesh.
After finding the women and children in the jungle, they returned to the village to witness the piles of dead bodies. “I have seen little children run over to the dead women and grab onto legs and arms, screaming and crying. I have seen the women run to the children and try to pull them away. They would refuse to let go of their mothers even though their mothers are dead. The old people would go to pile after pile and many would cry realizing there is no one left in their families.”
Mr. Nelson is often asked what triggered his desire to advocate peace instead of war, and he pointed to one incident in Viet Nam that changed his life forever. When his battalion was attacked, he ran into a Vietnamese family’s bunker to escape. This young girl was in the midst of delivering her baby, and Mr. Nelson felt helpless trying to assist because the Marines “didn’t tell me how to deal with life coming into the world; they only told me how to kill.” This incident was an incredibly important moment because it was then that Mr. Nelson realized that the Vietnamese people were human beings. In training, they were dehumanized as “the other,” as communists or “gooks” to make it easier for soldiers to kill them. Now, US military soldiers are calling the people of Iraq “sand monkeys,” not humans.
The Viet Nam War, of course, is not the first time such wartime atrocities have occurred. Rather, as Mr. Nelson noted, “this happens with every war that happens on this planet in places like Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, even Okinawa.” The participants were reminded that over 200,000 Okinawan people were killed during the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War, and now the US military still occupies their islands. The concern over this continuing occupation as well as the need to seek justice for the rape of a 12 year old by three US soldiers led Mr. Nelson to return to Okinawa.
Sadly, this was not the first or last time the women and children of Okinawa have been abused by US military personnel. Hundreds have been raped, but due to the shame factor, many crimes go unreported. Further, many Okinawans are maimed and killed in road accidents with US military vehicles. What concerns Mr. Nelson is that this is what the children of Okinawa witness everyday: “World War Two is over and it is time for the American military to go home and stop occupying Japan.”
When Mr. Nelson first came to Japan in 1996, a Japanese peace activist gave him a copy of the constitution and pointed out Article 9 (the ‘peace’ clause which prohibits maintenance of a military force and negates the right to go to war). He found it more powerful than any nuclear weapon or any army, because “when I look at your children’s faces, I see something wonderful – you do not know war. That is the beauty and power of Article 9.” With sincerity, Mr. Nelson said that he wished every nation on this planet had an Article 9. He urged the participants to fight for it since there are now politicians in Japan working very hard to remove Article 9 from the constitution. “Article 9 has saved and protected you, so now it’s time for the citizens of Japan to stand and protect Article 9” not only for the Japanese people but for every human being in the world.
Finally, Mr. Nelson asked the participants to “leave their anger and violence behind” by helping him sing the song “Down by the Riverside.” During the time of slavery in the US, African slaves would run away and swim across the river and leave their anger and violence behind at the river’s edge. The song’s chorus was a perfect accompaniment to the evening: “I ain’t going to hate anymore.” |
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