The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt

“On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about sun-rising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven. There were five persons taken in one house, the father, and the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive … another there was who running along was shot and wounded, and fell down; he begged of them his life, promising them money … but they would not hearken to him but knocked him in the head, and stripped him naked, and split open his bowels. … There were three others belonging to the same garrison who were killed; the Indians getting up upon the roof of the barn, had advantage to shoot down upon them over their fortification. Thus these murderous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them. … One of my elder sister’s children, named William, had then his leg broken, which the Indians perceiving, they knocked him on the head. Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels. … It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves. All of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out. …”

That’s an excerpt from a seventeenth-century captivity narrative by Mary Rowlandson, describing events that occurred when European settlers of North America entered a cultural “Indian country.” Engelhardt cites it to make the central claim of his book, especially when he purposely contrasts it with the following similar excerpt.

“At 6:30 A.M. on March 16, 1968, all the enemy batteries installed around Son My started pounding the village for more than half an hour. The eleven choppers came in, strafing the locality and landing American troops whose sanguinary intention was visible on their faces. They shot at all that came in sight: men, women, children, elderly people, plants and animals, and destroyed everything: crops, fruit-trees, houses. … Vo Thi Phu, mother of a 12-month-old baby, was shot dead. … The baby, which tried to suck at its mother’s breast, cried when it found only blood instead of milk. The Yankees got angry and shouted “Viet Cong, Viet Cong,” and heaped straw on mother and baby and set fire to it. … After raping to death Mrs. Sam, a sexagenarian, the aggressors made a deep slash in her body with a bayonet. … Mui, 14, was raped and shut in her hut. The GIs set fire to it, guarded the door and pushed back the poor little girl who tried to run from the fire. … Worse still, the aggressors threw over one hundred women and children and many dozen old people into a canal dug in front of Mr. Nhieu’s house and murdered them with machine-gun fire and hand grenades. The victims’ corpses were disfigured beyond identification. … In one day only, 502 people including over 170 children were massacred, 300 houses destroyed and over 870 head of cattle killed. Our coastal village so green with coconut palms, bamboos and willows is now but heaps of ashes.”

This is a Vietnamese account of what would become known as the My Lai massacre. As Engelhardt points out, much like Massachusetts in Mary Rowlandson’s time, the peninsula on which My Lai sat was thought of as “Indian country” by the American soldiers.

And this transition, I think, is the overall point of Engelhardt’s book. It is the story of how “America” went from victim to victimizer, from righteous fighter against sneak attacks to sneak attacker and devilish marauder. This, and the cultural cognitive dissonance that resulted when an older generation continued to cling to their narratives of victory culture while a younger generation exposed them for the myths that they had become. 

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.