VIEWPOINT
Green Berets, bucks & a bishop
GEORGE GALE
George Gale will be contributing a 'Viewpoint' article in these columns each week.
The idea that wars ought to be fought according to gentlemanly, even if no longer chivalrous, conventions of conduct dies hard, harder than soldiers, and much harder than poor ignorant civilians who happen to be in the way. I do not myself understand pre- cisely why it is that grown men, sorrowing widows, Christian preachers, Realpolitik apologists and the like hanker after each stratagem and device which make the con- duct of a war apparently respectable, if not nice. But they do. Wars, it is popularly demanded, must not only be just in their ends but seemly in their means.
Everyone who knows about wars knows hat they are not seemly in their means, how- ever just they may be imagined to be in their ends. But widows and mothers must be com- forted, preachers and politicians must not be discomfited, and heroes must be made. So our side fights cleaner than theirs, shall we retend? It's not a bad working pretence. It is obvious that only an appalling series of rivalries and mistakes and inter-service bloody-mindedness could have led to the
• itial charges of murder being preferred by nited States authorities against the former
• mmander of the United States Special orces, or Green Berets, and some of his oldiers. The Green Berets were alleged to ave killed a Vietnamese, Thai Khac Chuyen, or having been a double agent. The charges ave since been dropped, the case closed. Suite right too, and not before time.
The dead man's widow has now been Id the odd figure of $6,472 by way of corn- nsation. A senior American official is uoted thus: 'We are dodging the issue, and or a few lousy bucks it will help to soothe v ruffled feelings among the Vietnamese. t is very generous by Vietnamese standards, ut very little by United States standards. If ey are happy, we are happy.'
I do not doubt this senior American offi- al's presumption. A few thousand dollars more than most Vietnamese widows will xpect or get. The widow Chuyen can con- Kier herself most fortunate. Had her hus- and's death not threatened to develop into most ugly trial of American officers and ergeants she would not have got a cent. The mericans have dodged the issue and hope hat a few lousy bucks will help. But of course • e issue cannot be other than dodged. The nd of war being fought in Vietnam is a very asty kind of war which cannot be fought herwise than by nasty means. Once in a Saigon nightclub Donald Wise ad I discussed means of interrogating isoners with some British policemen who ad been sent out to advise the South Viet- amese on civil security. The policemen told • of several methods then being used. One at I recall was to take half a dozen Viet- Ong up in a helicopter and assemble them in LI gh and ready order of seniority. The ntor suspect would first be asked—in front his fellow soldiers and superiors—for formation about Vietcong movements and so forth. Upon refusing, he would be thrown out. This procedure would be followed until there were only one or two left. Usually only the last man left would talk. He would be the senior man, the one they wanted to talk. But he would only talk when he was sure that no one was left to say he had talked. This was regarded, so we were told, as a very satisfactory way of extracting intelligence information.
Now the interrogators and the soldiers who bundled the Vietcong out of the heli- copters were all South Vietnamese. But the pilots and the aircraft were American. Were they worse than the napalm bombers, or any Green Berets who may have killed a sus- pected double agent? Surely such categoris- ing is meaningless? A war, whether or not the cause be 'just', licenses thuggery. The Geneva Convention has never been in date. Gas, disabling temporarily rather than per- manently, is the most humane of modem weapons. Assassination, or, lower down the line, murder, may well be very economical methods of pursuing war-like policies.
If men do not like modem wars, then they should refuse to fight in them: and if mothers and wives do not like wars, they should dissuade their sons and husbands. It is, I am very much afraid, as simple as that. If the Americans secretly desire to be squeamish, or to appear to be gentlemanly, in Vietnam, then they should not have gone there in the first place and they should get out fast now, preferably leaving behind a few hundred million lousy bucks.
This is not to say that some men do not behave in war worse than others. Mariano Morelli, one of the many Italians taken hostage by the Germans at Filetto in 1944, asked an Italian-speaking German soldier whether he could save them. The German soldier, so Morelli recalls, replied: 'if a cer- tain soldier comes he'll make just a small reprisal, he'll probably take a few hams and valuables from the houses. But if it's the other officer, the nasty one, he'll kill for sure.' It was the nasty one that came. The one who came is now Dr Mathias Defregger, the suspended auxiliary Bishop of Munich. Says Defregger on Bavarian tele- vision: 'I myself feel that I am legally, and above all morally, not guilty. That does not change the fact that ever since the mis- fortune happened — and 1 behaved with human insufficiency, which I have admitted and do admit—I have carried a heavy bur- den, which no confessor and no public opinion can take away.'
With bishops such as Defregger, the Christian Church need not fear to survive well into the coming millennium, long after the Green Berets have been forgotten.
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