The one line in the entire documentary that made me the angriest was about 15 minutes from the end when General William Westmoreland says “The Oriental doesn’t put the same price on life as a Westerner”. He goes on to say that to them, “life is cheap” and “not important” This statement seemed so ridiculous after the scene just before it where a young Vietnamese boy was sobbing uncontrollably over the loss of a family member, I assume it was his father. In this same scene a woman tries to crawl into a grave that is being filled, to be with the person inside the grave. If that Westmorland had seen the same scene that I had, he never, never would have been able to say what he said. It just made me so angry!!!! It’s just so ridiculous that he would say such a thing!! This shows how many Americans didn’t even think of the Vietnamese as people during the war years. This shows why journalists like Sontag were so shocked to find that they were real living, breathing, feeling, human beings!
Okay, let me take a step back; obviously this documentary is very anti Vietnam War and so these two scenes were very strategically placed next to each other. Their placement did the rhetorical trick and got strong emotions out of me. Anger. Perhaps Westmoreland merely meant that the Oriental government doesn’t put the same price on life as American government; however I doubt that’s what he meant. And even if he did mean that, it seems to me that after watching this documentary and the scene where so many men are getting fitted for prosthetic legs, that the American government wasn’t very good at caring about American lives either.
Assuming that Westmoreland was talking about the Vietnamese people in general, I wonder how many other Americans shared this belief with him at the time. Throughout the documentary there were American military men talking about how killing the Vietnamese was their “job”, a “game”, or even that they “enjoyed it”. How brainwashed could Americans have been? At 1 hour and 17 minutes into the documentary a man talks about how the five presidential administrations related to the War had in some way lied to the American people. He goes on to say “it’s no tribute [to the American public] how easy it was to lie to us”. So here we have a country that has been taught to believe that they can blindly follow their government, because it will always do what is right for them. The problem is when these leaders lie and believe things like “the Oriental doesn’t put the same price on life” that things go terribly wrong. And whether these leaders realized what they were doing or not, they expected Americans to do and believe what they said. What kind of democracy is that?
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