13th Valley (89 page)

A common adverse effect of every organized system of thought, religious or governmental, is the encouragement of dependence. Governments make us feel that international and indeed even interpersonal relationships are beyond our comprehension and ability. Correct, relations can be achieved only through the augmentation of their system powered by our supportive backing. People today consider it impossible not to leave international affairs to the government. They consider it normal for the government to establish goals and quotas for racial and sexual harmony, equal-opportunity reinforcement. We have become victims of the establishment even as we have become part of it
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People who understand that conflict in interpersonal relations is a normal event, that it tends to come and go in cycles, that they are capable of dealing with others themselves without a rigid set of regulations directing them, these people will not wind up as victims, as automatons of the machine. They will not become dependent upon external sources for their security therefore they will not become defensive, then aggressively defensive forcing others into aggressive-defensive postures simply because X leader from Y country or B leader from C race says their security is threatened—says that because he needs that to keep him in power. People who understand will not become dependent on external sources for their security because they will be confident of their own competence to interrelate, to relate with all people of the world. They may consult professionals for information and advice when a problem seems beyond their own competence but they will accept responsibility for the routine management of their own relationships and extend them as far as they may go
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EXPLORATION THREE: Thoughts of Friends
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El Paso: With the exception of oil, world primary commodity prices dropped in relationship to the price of manufactured goods during the past several decades. The United States is partly to blame. During the 1950s the US produced vast quantities of inexpensive, exportable rice through a farm subsidy program. This resulted in an over supply on the world market and it destroyed the export market for Vietnam and it caused increased poverty in this land. (Incredible, how we are all tied together.) The industrialized West controls the price of manufactured goods because it alone is capable of producing such goods and it has the ability and wealth to control the price of raw materials. Poverty, need, causes conflict
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Egan: There are two ways to solve the problem of poverty and wealth between the haves and the have-nots. One, the poor can increase their wealth through increased production so that simply there is more wealth and everybody lives better and has a better standard of living; or two, wealth can be redistributed so the rich don't have so much and the poor don't have so little. Here the amount of wealth stays the same
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The first view is capitalistic, the second communistic or socialistic. Now, I ask you, under what systems in the world do we see people having the best standard of living? (Note rhetorical Q? Eg asks.) Empirically, is there any doubt?

Doc: The wars of the 20th century may be due to population pressures caused by longer life expectancy. In Vietnam, the introduction of Western medical practices caused the population to increase from sixteen million in 1900 to twenty-eight million in 1950. A 56% increase. Doc says he is not sure of his figures but that is what they tell new medics in San Antonio
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FO: If you think our society is sick maybe it's because we are catering to the illness instead of promoting good health
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Cahalan: Critics and English teachers tend to see all stories as conflicts between antagonists and protagonists. In reality your best stories are written with the characters being people doing things people do. In good literature each character has good and bad qualities which interact with the good and bad qualities of the other characters. They intertwine, not oppose. That's how it should be. That's how life is
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Jax: All wars are expressions by suppressed people of their desires to rule themselves
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Cherry: Maslow once said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” If you're a soldier, I guess you tend to see every problem as a target
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Brown: Sports are war. You'd kill a man to beat him on a basketball court if it were for the NCAA championship. Man, I love the game. I love the competition. But, we got to realize it's part of our society which helps a crazy man like Nixon control the people
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Minh: Nothing happens by itself. Everything is unity. Though you may seem isolated from the rest of the world, everything you do is interconnected with the universe. You are not here alone
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The state does not exist apart from the individuals who comprise its citizenry
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There is no such thing as inconsistency. Inconsistencies are a product of a static view of life. (To me this rings true. I have heard and expressed these views before myself, in a slightly different slant. Minh, sometimes I think you are inside my head.) Life is a balance. For everything we acquire, we lose something. To dam a river to generate electrical power you must be willing to accept the loss of the river. You say love is inconsistent with hate. I say they are one. To eliminate hate is also to destroy love. (Perhaps he means to destroy the capacity to hate is also to destroy the capacity to love.) Perhaps that may be taken some steps further. I do not know. Is peace a quality of war? Can one be eliminated without eliminating both?

EXPLORATION FOUR: Personal Conflict—Marriage
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Conflict at all levels follows a pattern. At all levels it has seeds, it grows, evolves and finally explodes or perhaps the final level is, it dies. We liked each other, respected each other and perhaps loved each other. Or perhaps we only loved the image we each held of the other. Did our learned language control our perception of each other? Were our ideals of marriage and mates limited, controlled by that language? Were our responses within that marriage, our responses to each other, pre-established by language and thus predestined for conflict? I believe our respect for each other forbade us from stepping over pre-determined bounds and the limiting of our responses to each other destroyed us. These limits, these restrictions were both qualitative and quantitative. They confined our acceptable behavior to a mass-produced, language-induced, artificial rut. If we could graph emotions, ours would have been flat lines with no peaks of elation nor dips to despair. We became excessive only in our limitations and our boundaries were closing on the center. The limits on our emotions became a progressively steeper descent, a self-enhancing restrictiveness ever concentrating until we had no acceptable responses left and had to explode. The more thwarted I, and now I realize, she, became, the more we allowed ourselves to die. Suffocation was evident in physical and sexual as well as psychological and social events in our lives. We had locked ourselves together in a decaying relationship. All this I believe was due to our accepting pre-established frequency responses in our language and they controlled our thoughts. Hawaii was an effect. It began like a movie script—every word and motion perfectly culturally acceptable, perfectly played. Oh, how well we knew our roles without even realizing we were playing them. The perception of differences we did not know how to accept led to irritation we could not diffuse. The irritation led us to entrench, to build false securities, to build walls. We sought and built separate support systems and we prepared for war. The walls heightened our fears and insecurities. We passed from defensive to offensive. We exploded. Perhaps divorce is the death of conflict
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EXPLORATION FIVE: The American Ideal in Vietnam
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We came not to conquer. We came to help. We came to insure security and independence. We came to end conflict. We said and we showed that we would selflessly lay down our lives to end this conflict. And yet our altruism has corrupted itself until we can only be satisfied with annihilation. We define everything about is in terms of conflict. As long as there are two sides there will be conflict and we have said we will not tolerate conflict. We will stamp it out. It is the same as sentencing Vietnam to total destruction and annihilation. Perhaps they do not need us. Perhaps without us they will annihilate themselves for they too are determined to end the conflict
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EXPLORATION SIX: Proposals and Solutions—A Proposal for Disarmament
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War is an end result of a series of happenings that occur or which begin when two cultures find they have real or imagined differences and they react in accordance with pre-established behavior patterns. In order to eliminate confrontation behavior and tactics we must substitute for it mutual analysis of the differences, undertaken with mutual respect. We must develop structures which drain away tension. Those structures must be in our thought patterns, in our language, for if we succeed in achieving peace without changing the thought patterns which produced the war we will simply find those same patterns producing wars in the future
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Our language must not speak of power but of people, not of buildings but of lives. We must remove the plastic wrap of fear, domination and status quo and let reality breathe freely
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We must alter our perceptions of reality, alter the language structure which contains the mechanism and forms which teach the raw human, the infant, how to perceive, how to interpret what is perceived, and how to act upon those interpretations, so that war is more difficult than peace. It must become easier for mankind to disengage from conflicts than to either engage in or maintain conflicts. And these things we must do without forcing the conflict inside individuals, races, nations—for that is repression and repression compresses tension into a bomb casing and it soon must explode
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This will require time. I doubt it can be legislated. It will eventually require every man to be a leader of himself. Is that possible? Where do we begin? Pre-in-dustrialization, were all men leaders? Is that what a culture gives up to become modern?

Let us treat all people as individuals and all individuals fairly. Let us each believe and teach our young—first, I am an individual human being and then I am a human being. From that basis, I am male. Then Black. Then a soldier. But before all, I am a human individual supporting myself and the unity of humanity
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A more specific proposal. If peace is our long-range objective then armament and deterrence are not the ultimate courses to follow. They do not lead to long-term peace. They are short-range, stop-gap procedures and must be viewed as such. Long-term peace can only be achieved in the absence of 15% GNP military budgets and giant arms stockpiles. We must accomplish the following very soon or the world will cease to exist for humanity. No one is willing to disarm unilaterally. Minh's approach to unifying Vietnam may serve as a model for universal disarmament. Every nation on earth—all will be UN members—will, through their own internally administered mechanism, supply the UN army with, let's begin with one tenth of one percent and work up to ? percent of its men, ages 18 to 25, for 2 1/2 years. Each nation will reduce its armed forces by the number of men contributed. Each UN soldier will learn to speak two languages: possibly Chinese, English or Spanish, beyond his native tongue. Each country will be taxed for this army's upkeep equivalent to what it would pay to support these soldiers at home. All units will be totally integrated by nationality. Gradually all arms will be turned over to the world government and then, once accomplished, gradually the arms will be reduced. The World Army will never be completely disbanded for it will become the security instrument for the people of the world.

Some possibilities: All multi-national corporations shall pay an income tax [deductible from their present national income taxes (perhaps)] to the world government
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If the UN is to serve as the world government it must be restructured to have real
inter-
national power while maintaining little or no
intra
-national power.

The day passed. Night arrived. Brooks was elated and exhausted. He conversed via krypto radio with Major Hellman, the XO, in the GreenMan's absence. The Major was not elated. “What in hell are you doing?” he demanded. “You're sitting on your asses while everybody else is humping their tails off. What's wrong with you, Lieutenant?”

“We're getting results, Sir,” Brooks answered. He wanted to add, Isn't that what we're here for?

“Get the lead out, Lieutenant. Get moving. Do you want to be another Delta?”

“Oh, yes Sir,” Brooks answered. “I had forgotten all about Delta, Sir. How dumb of me. Yes Sir, we're being just like Sky Devil.”

Brooks rolled toward El Paso and told him to call the rover teams. “Have them work their way in,” he said. “Bring them in slowly. At their pace.”

Hellman was still raving on the other radio. El Paso began his call but Brooks stopped him. “This guy's fucked,” Brooks said suddenly, uncharacteristically. “Wait one.” He paused to think. “Call in the following,” he said. “Call in Rover Teams Ellen, Claudia and Stephanie. Tell them I want them here by 0300. They can do anything they want until then. We'll call the others in tomorrow. When you're finished, get the advisers together.”

A semblance of CP advisers assembled about the commander. There was fighting to the east. From the sound it could have been either Rover Team Cindy or Jill. To the southwest artillery explosions, first a single round, then a salvo of six, then another and another exploding above the river. Laurie was calling in the raid. They had spotted three or four sampans on the river. In the fog they were not certain. The artillery sunk at least two boats.

Doc, the three CP RTOs, FO and Minh sat in a semi-circle before Brooks. Lt. De Barti and Molino and Lt. Caldwell made a second row. Good God, Brooks thought to himself. Where are all my best troops? No Pop, no Egan, no Jax, Monk, Baiez, Snell, Jenkins, White. Those present were his middle-troops, comfort zone troops. Brooks slid a hand beneath his odd-style cap and scratched his scalp. He was tired from all the writing yet happy about his rough draft. It would have to be revised, he knew, but it was a start. He looked around. FO's tactical opinion was good. El Paso's good. De Barti's fair. Brooks did not really trust Minh. After all this time he had to admit to himself he did not trust Minh with tactics. The rest were worthless, he thought. He did not include Cahalan in any category. Cahalan was his secretary, his guy-Friday. Cahalan knew everything; he just didn't know how to put it together.