The Beast Within

The Beast Within

The post of a fellow member of this forum on the death of My Lai massacre hero Hugh Thompson Jr., a former U.S. military helicopter pilot who helped stopped one of the most infamous massacres of the Vietnam War, triggered the following rambling memories and thoughts.

1. Emile Zola, a French writer of naturalism, talked about the beast within Man’s heart. Humans are somewhere between angels and devils, between full-fledged homo sapiens with complete developed higher consciousness and incomplete brutes with sole preoccupation with lower, crude desires such as sex, cheap and infantile humor, survival at all costs, and turning their backs on their fellow countrymen who need help. Hugh Thompson Jr. was a true homo sapiens. Richard Nixon who commuted Lt. William Calley—the architect of the massacre, from life sentence to three months of house arrest, Calley himself, and the congressman who told Thompson that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai incident, were true animals. I wonder how some men turned out to be real men and others were merely humans in disguise. Was it upbringing, genetics, or a simple failure of one’s heart to respond to the calling of higher consciousness?

2. I recall leafing through the pages of Life magazine in a classroom of Faculty of Pedagogy in Saigon sometime in late 1968. A classmate had brought the magazine to the class. In the magazine were pictures of the massacre. Children and babies along with their mothers were shot dead. Blood rushed to my head and I was consumed with anger and hatred. But then I told myself no matter how I hated my enemy combatants, I would not do the same thing to their innocent loved ones because it was simply unfair. Fairness has been the over-arching principle by which I conduct myself.

3. I live in the comfort and safety in the United States, far away from the land of my birth where my fellow countrymen live under a totalitarian regime that does not respond to the needs of the people, and, worse still, seems to cater to the needs of our historical enemies, the Chinese. I ask myself a question: since I fancy myself as a fair-minded individual, what should I do? Armed with only some felicity with words, all I can do is to expose the injustice, the unfairness, and the quiet but comprehensive step-by-step take-over of Vietnam by China, currently under way, aided by the inept, corrupt, and totally selfish Vietnamese Communist Party leadership. Hopefully, somehow my words reach my fellow countrymen back home and they realize there are people like me out there who have not forgotten them. Hopefully, they find solace and strength and hope in my words and somehow decide that change is possible and to fight for survival is an option instead of rolling over and playing dead while China is taking over the country.

4. At this moment, as I am typing these reflections, my esteemed friend and comrade, Mr. HC, is laboriously typing almost a thousand of names of Vietnamese who find resonance in my words. Mr. HC has spent his own money to put an ad in the local Viet paper in Sydney, Australia to print the Declaration of the concerned Vietnamese worldwide regarding the quiet but comprehensive invasion of Vietnam by China. The ad should be out sometime next week. The act of Mr. HC is an act of unadulterated love, an act of true homo sapiens. His act reflects a man of real fire, and not of smoke, a man of true music, and not of banal noise.

Can Ngon
August 22, 2009