Hopefully for most Americans, it was excruciatingly painful to read the Senate report on torture. I know I read it with a pain in my gut and a tear in my heart. Perhaps I have a more visceral and personal experience.
The report took me back to when I was 17½. That was the legal age I could volunteer for the Marines with my parents’ permission. I was full of pride in my country and looking forward to helping people defend their country from a foreign invasion.
In boot camp I remember the three times I tried to volunteer for Vietnam. Each time the gunny sergeant told me to be patient, that with the casualty rates running so high everyone in my class was headed for Vietnam. Of course, he was right. The meat grinder was running at full gear, and we were needed to feed it.
When in Vietnam, the realities of war ran headlong into the lies and propaganda that our government had used to justify our intervention in a civil war. The so-called guerrilla war was anything but, as our primary opponent was the extremely well-armed soldiers of the 324B Division of the People’s Army of North Vietnam. Better trained, and in some cases better armed with their artillery having longer range than ours, it was a bitter and deadly war of attrition with death as the only measure of so-called victory.
Regardless of the reality of that war, the reasons I volunteered to face death was a deeply held belief in what my country stood for. The war showed me another side of my country: what we were prepared to do, and how much carnage and blood we were prepared to shed for peace with honor — neither of which did we obtain.
But I never allowed the ideals of what America should stand for to become a casualty of the betrayal I was so cruelly subjected to. There is a place in my heart that holds onto the core ideals of democracy and decency, of justice and the fairness that America stands for — or should stand for. It is true that my heart acknowledges the horrors of slavery and the slaughter of the Native-Americans as a reality that tarnishes those ideals. But nothing so sickens me and calls into question my decision to risk my life as this report — and the reaction to it.
To debate if solitary confinement in a completely darkened environment with piercingly loud rock music days on end, violent slamming bodies against walls, prolonged stress positions, threats of violence against person and families, and waterboarding — where the sense of drowning is endured time after time — and violations of the body becomes part of our country’s operating procedure whenever we feel threatened is a blatant betrayal to veterans who volunteered to defend the ideals of America. To allow chicken hawks, who always find an easy excuse for why they personally should never have to face death, to defend their country so casually debate the merits of torture is a form of unbearable pain.
All combat veterans suffer. The saying “some gave all, all gave some” is a truism written in blood. But for torturers to pontificate on the merits of torture as a necessity and as a part of who we are is the cruelest betrayal yet. Perhaps it is best to have died with naïve beliefs of country intact than live to hear such gut-wrenching commentary.
It is the proponents of torture who drag our country’s reputation down and serve the aims of our enemies. It is they who are the cruelest torturers of those who have volunteered to die in defense of the ideals so many around the world believe in. And it is they who open the door for future American prisoners of war to be inflicted with torture by those who would use the rationale, “Our enemies use it so we must.”
If America is to stand for something different, something unique among so many savage countries, ideologies and beliefs, then let it do so. Let her stand proud and strong, and say no to the infliction of willful pain. If we are no better than those who inflict pain on their enemies for a means to an end than it is these torture advocates who place America in her grave.
For those who believe in God, do you really think he would do anything other that cry oceans of tears on behalf of not only the victims but those who stood silently aside, while the asinine excuses for torture pontificate ad nauseum?
— Ken Williams has been a social worker for the homeless for the past 30 years, and is the author of China White, Shattered Dreams: A Story of the Streets and his first nonfiction book, There Must Be Honor. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.