"Human Beings Fused Together"

While campaigning in Minneapolis, George McGovern brought an audience at the University of Minnesota to stunned silence and tears by playing a tape recording. It was the account of an anonymous Viet Nam veteran, who on Labor Day called Jerry Williams' telephone talk show on Boston's WBZ. Williams gave the tape to McGovern after he appeared on the program last week. Excerpts:

I AM a Viet Nam veteran, and I don't think the American people really, really understand war and what's going on. We went into villages after they dropped napalm, and the human beings were fused together like pieces of metal that had been soldered. Sometimes you couldn't tell if they were people or animals. We have jets that drop rockets, and in the shells they have penny nails. Those nails--one nail per sq. in. [over an area] the size of a football field--you can't believe what they do to a human being.

I was there a year, and I never had the courage to say that was wrong. I condoned that. I watched it go on. Now I'm home. Sometimes I, my heart, it bothers me inside, because I remember all that, and I didn't have the courage then to say it was wrong.

The Viet Cong are bad. But that doesn't make it right for me to be bad, or for someone to say that we should send their son, or their husband, or their brother to go over there to be just as vicious. It's unbelievable. People don't understand what that does to your mind. You go into a village that has had a 1,000-lb. bomb--it's called the daisy cutter--a 1,000-lb. bomb dropped on it. You don't worry about taking prisoners because there are no prisoners. You don't know if you kill Viet Cong because you can't put the people together. That is what the people in this country have got to understand.

That's what Americans are doing, and when you are over there in the middle of it, you think it's right because it's going on every day. You rationalize it. And when you come back, you see your own wife or your own family, then you understand what you did.

You take an aerial photograph of a place like Quang Tri, and then you take a photograph after B-52s have been over it. You can't believe what happened. What bothers me is that when you're there, you accept it. You rationalize it. You condone it. You say it's right because they are the enemy, and then when you come home, you can't believe that you didn't have the courage to open your mouth against that kind of murder, that kind of devastation over people, over animals. You don't know if they are Viet Cong. You can't tell.

There's no way people in this country can understand what napalm is. You go into a place, and the people, they are just bent. It's incredible. When you go to a piece of something and you don't have any idea whether it's a human being or an animal [because of] what's been done to it. And you have to come home and live knowing you didn't have the guts to say it was wrong. A lot of guys had the guts. They got sectioned out, and on the discharge, it was put that they were unfit for military duty--unfit because they had the courage. Guys like me were fit because we condoned it, we rationalized it.

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