There are several interesting parts to this massive work of biography and history. The subtitle here is “John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” and that well captures the dual focus of this work -- at once a history of America’s involvement in Vietnam and a biography of John Paul Vann.
Vann was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who served two tours in Vietnam, the first as an Army officer and the second, after his military retirement, as a civilian administrator. In Sheehan’s narrative, it is largely through Vann’s eyes that we see Vietnam -- a perspective that both changes over time and which reflects the general perspective of America and its administrators.
We’ll Show Them How Strong and Tough We Are
In the beginning, Vann is idealistic, and serving only as a kind of advisor to the South Vietnamese military, who is fighting both the North Vietnamese “Viet Cong” and a peasant class of South Vietnamese sympathizers and potential sympathizers.
John Vann had come to Vietnam to wage war on other men, not on their mothers and fathers or on their wives and children. That these people were relatives of guerrillas, and undoubtedly did sympathize with the Viet Cong and helped them, did not strip them of their noncombatant status and make them fair game in his mind. Rather, they were people whom the Saigon government ought to be seeking to win over by fair treatment so that they would talk their sons and husbands into deserting the Communist ranks.
And he is appalled by the perspectives and tactics of his South Vietnamese allies.
[Major General Huynh Van] Cao and the other Saigon officers, Vann concluded, wanted to kill these people and destroy their homes and slaughter their livestock, not on a systematic basis, but often enough to intimidate them. Their theory of pacification apparently was to terrorize the peasants out of supporting the Viet Cong. For this reason Cao and the province and district chiefs also did nothing to stop the torture and murder. They thought it useful. Their attitude was: “We’ll teach these people a lesson. We’ll show them how strong and tough we are.” The only coherent reply he could ever get out of Cao when they argued about the air strikes and shellings was that the planes and the artillery flaunted the power of the government and made the population respect it. Vann had also been puzzled at first as to why Cao and most of his fellow Saigon officers did not feel any guilt over this butchery and sadism. He had come to see that they regarded the peasantry as some sort of subspecies. They were not taking human life and destroying human homes. They were exterminating treacherous animals and stamping out their dens.
We’ll show them how strong and tough we are. Flaunting our power will make these people respect us. They’re not human; they’re animals. Vann (and America), while at first horrified by these perspectives will, of course, come to embrace them all.
An Inevitable Tragedy of the War
Much of the indiscriminate killing of Vietnamese civilians came through the air strikes and bombings orchestrated by a combined Vietnamese-American air force, commanded by Brigadier General Rollen “Buck” Anthis. Through his commanding officer, Colonel Daniel Boone Porter, Vann complained again and again to General Anthis, and frequently invited him out into the field to see the tragic results of his strikes.
Anthis reacted with irritation to the first invitation and with increased hostility each time Porter renewed it. They went round and round over the same arguments. Well, perhaps some innocent people were getting hurt, but this was an inevitable tragedy of the war, Anthis would concede in the time-tested “War is hell” theme. It was not a question of some noncombatants, it was a question of mostly noncombatants, and this was not an ordinary war, Porter would counter. Porter had to be exaggerating, Anthis would say; the commander of the VNAF and the ARVN officers he met told him that most of the casualties were guerrillas and that the bombing was hurting the Communists a great deal. He was being deceived, Porter would tell Anthis, and try to set him straight with the latest report from Vann on how the bombing was driving “these people right into the arms of the Viet Cong.” Anthis would refuse to accept the possibility that his bombs could be a boon to the Communists. Porter would challenge again, if Anthis wasn’t afraid of the truth, why didn’t he come down and see for himself who his planes were hitting? Anthis would fall back on a legal argument. He and his people didn’t initiate any of the bombings. The air strikes were all conducted at the request of the country’s legal authorities -- the responsible ARVN officer and the province and district chiefs.
It’s an old and familiar story, one that tragically unfolds in war after war. The exercise of might from a safe distance does not make potentially neutral civilians respect the exercisers of that might. Far from it, it invariably has the opposite effect, making the civilians more resistant and building their allegiance with the enemy. In my most recent experience, it is exactly like the thinking and approach described in Scahill’s Dirty Wars, there not in 1960’s Vietnam, but in 2000’s Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
But there is an even deeper and more systemic issue at work here.
[Vann] understood what Porter was up against with Anthis. Every service wanted as big a role as possible in Vietnam as soon as Kennedy committed the United States to the war. The more the Air Force bombed, the bigger its role. If air power was restricted the way it ought to be, the Air Force would not have much to do in Vietnam. It was in Anthis’s personal interest and the interest of his institution to believe that the bombing furthered the war effort, and so he believed it. Letting himself be confronted with the corpses of women and children would inhibit his ability to bomb with enthusiasm. Vann did not blame the Air Force for being the institutional creature it was. The fault lay with [overall war commander General Paul] Harkins for not grasping the nature of the war and curbing institutional proclivities.
This is one of the central lessons of war -- something every commander should learn and heed. The bureaucracy makes decisions based on what is good for it, not necessarily for the war aims or effort. In reading these passages, I am reminded of the stories of the political Civil War generals, all in-fighting amongst themselves as they jockeyed for command of larger and larger units.
The Imagery of the American Revolution
A big part of America’s handicap in Vietnam was its picking the wrong side to fight with and for. And here, we’re not talking about the South versus the North Vietnamese, but even more tragically, the two sides vying for control of South Vietnam.
Some of the people put in charge, people like Air Force General Edward Lansdale, couldn’t help themselves. Lansdale had a successful clandestine career in the Philippines (he would eventually work for the CIA), where he helped the local Filipinos fight against insurgent Communist forces -- and he tried to cut and paste those same tactics and strategies onto Vietnam. But it didn’t work, because in Vietnam, the “American” revolutionaries were not fighting the Communists in North Vietnam. They were fighting America’s puppet regime led by Ngo Dinh Diem.
When Diem told Lansdale that he had resisted the French and spoke of his abhorrence of godless Communism, Lansdale let his preconceptions lead him to false assumptions, as Vann was later to do with Cao. He also thought it was perfectly all right for a Vietnamese leader to be publicly supported by the United States and to associate with high ranking Americans. After all, he had just come from an Asian country in which the secretary of defense had shared a house in the American military compound with a CIA agent and had lost none of his political integrity as a result. Lansdale thought the Catholic refugees from the North were Vietnamese patriots who had “fought for their country’s freedom from the French” until they discovered that they were being hoodwinked in a Communist conspiracy and so were fleeing south to “Free Vietnam” to create a new life of liberty there. Haiphong in the final months of their evacuation was “reminiscent of our own pioneer days,” he said in a secret report. He saw nothing wrong with the United States singling out these Catholics for special assistance. He saw nothing inappropriate about having a Catholic as president of what he perceived to be a “Free Vietnam.”
Are you following this? Lansdale is viewing the installed Catholic president Diem and the Catholic refugees from the North through a glass darkly tinted with his inbred tropes of the American revolution. But…
Roman Catholics were a tainted minority in Vietnam. Lansdale was anxious to draw a distinction between Americans and French “colonialists.” What he did was to make the distinction one without a difference. His actions were now being seen in the perspective of Vietnamese, not Filipino, history. By singling out the Catholics for help, and by putting a Catholic in office in Saigon, he announced that the United States was stepping in to replace the French. Vietnamese converts to Catholicism had been used by the French as a fifth column to penetrate precolonial Vietnam and then had been rewarded by the colonizer for their collaboration. They were popularly regarded as a foreign-inspired, “un-Vietnamese” religious sect. With the French leaving, the Catholics were naturally seeking another foreign protector. They told Lansdale what they sensed he wanted to hear.
Prior to what Americans think of as “the Vietnam War,” the country of Vietnam had been partially colonized by the French, and thousands of native Vietnamese, including Ho Chi Minh, had fought a guerilla war for years, which eventually succeeded in throwing off that oppression. The Catholics had been the collaborators with the French in those days, and now the Americans were here, putting those very collaborators into power. Including, of course, Ngo Dinh Diem.
Ngo Dinh Diem did not believe in representative government, although he had learned enough about Americans during two and a half years of exile in the United States to give Lansdale the impression that he did. He was also not interested in social justice. He did not want to alter the traditional Vietnamese social structure that the French had preserved in desiccated form. Diem was a fervent reactionary, intent on founding a new family dynasty in a country where most other thinking people thought that dynasties were anachronisms. There had once been a Ngo dynasty, a brief one, in the tenth century. Diem saw himself heading a second one to replace the Nguyen dynasty that had been discredited by the degenerate [Emperor and French colonial vassal] Bao Dai. His family would help him to rule in the traditional dynastic manner. His concession to modernity would be to call himself a president. Diem’s quarrel with the French had been an angry but narrow one, and what dimmed claim to nationalist credentials he once held was besmirched the moment he became Bao Dai’s prime minister. At that moment Diem inherited Bao Dai’s quisling administration and the Vietnamese element of the French colonial army, police, and civil bureaucracy, and he let the Americans make him their surrogate. The attitude that held in the Philippines held in reverse in Vietnam. It was not patriotic in Vietnam to collaborate with the Americans. To many Vietnamese, the Americans stood for colonialism, oppression, and social injustice.
And yet this is the regime that Americans like Lansdale and Vann (and Kennedy and Nixon) saw as on the side of truth and justice. Almost everyone has seen the horrific photograph of the buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc self-immolating himself on the streets of 1963 Saigon. What is often not remembered is that he did it as an act of protest against the oppressive regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and his American masters. But too many Americans, then and now, were blinded by their own mythical narrative to see these realities.
With so much of the imagery of the American Revolution in his head, Lansdale could not imagine that he could join the wrong side or become the wrong side in an Asian country in the midst of its national revolution. The strength of their American ideology also made it impossible for men like [Foreign Service Officer Everet] Bumgardner and Vann to accept this possibility. Yet this was precisely what had happened in Vietnam. There was a national revolution going on in Vietnam, and the United States was not part of it. America had first joined the wrong side by equipping and financing the French in their venture to reimpose colonial rule. America was now becoming the wrong side by moving directly into Vietnam to install Diem and his family as the representatives of its power.
Ungodly, Subhuman, Beastly, Sneaky, and Treacherous
And then there was the racism. Anti-Asian racism that had been sharpened to a razor-barbed point during the second World War.
Hopeful Asians who looked to the United States for protection also did not understand that American attitudes toward them were influenced by a racism so profound that Americans usually did not realize they were applying a racist double standard in Asia. The lyrics of the World War II ditty sung on the assembly line of America had been:
“Whistle while you work
Hitler is a jerk
Mussolini is a weenie,
But the Japs are worse.”
The Japs were not worse; the Germans were. The Germans were the dangerous and fiendish enemy. Japan never possessed the military potential to threaten the existence of the United States; Germany did. The urgency behind the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb came from the realization of the American and emigre European scientists that Hitler might be ahead in a race to construct these “superbombs” with which to give the United States and Britain the choice of surrender or annihilation. Japan’s World War II technological capacity was so limited that its navy was forced to fight blind at night and in bad weather because the development of radar, let alone nuclear weapons, was beyond Japanese wartime science and industry. In contrast to the satanic planning and efficiency with which the Nazis used the facilities of an industrialized society to liquidate 12 million persons in the concentration camps (6 million Jews and an equal number of non-Jews from the occupied countries), the Japanese atrocities, however barbarous and cruel, were haphazard.
It is amazing that Americans would fear and hate the Japanese to such a larger degree than the Germans given these simple facts.
The market-research pollsters in the Treasury Department discovered that advertising that relied on racist hate propaganda against the Japanese sold more war bonds than anti-German hatemongering. Their polls showed that the average American viewed Japanese as “ungodly, subhuman, beastly, sneaky, and treacherous.” The war-bond drives therefore concentrated on toothy “Nips.” The FBI arrested some of the more prominent American Nazis in the Bund. Otherwise, German-Americans were not disturbed, except for the heckling of neighborhood children.
For Japanese-Americans, of course, there were other, much more disturbing measures taken.
After Pearl Harbor there was a wave of hysterical rumors in California and other West Coast states, encouraged by the press and the Army, that Japanese-Americans were signaling submarines, sending secret radio transmissions to invasion fleets, caching arms, and drawing maps with which to guide the Nipponese hordes after they landed. An attempt to organize a program of voluntary resettlement inland failed because no one would have the Japanese. The reply of the governor of Idaho was typical: “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats. We don’t want them.” The Army rounded up more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the spring of 1942, 60,000 of whom were U.S. citizens by birth, and herded them into concentration camps in barren and arid federal reservations in the West. The governor of California tried to have them employed on their way to the camps as menial agricultural labor. The Supreme Court approved what had since been recognized as the greatest violation of civil liberties in the history of the Republic.
It is against this racist history and understanding of history that decisions were made with regard to Vietnam that would most likely not have been made if the Vietnamese had been white Europeans. Indeed, in many ways, it seemed like decisions regarding how to treat Vietnam went against the stated strategic objectives of the American world power that emerged after World War II.
Truman’s high-minded warning in his October 1945 Navy Day speech that the United States would refuse to “recognize any government imposed on any nation by the force of any foreign power” -- the twelve-point Wilsonian declaration that had encouraged Ho [Chi Minh] to appeal to him for protection against the French -- showed that the racist double standard of the American stateman had not changed since Wilson’s time. Truman’s words were directed at the Soviet Union for imposing its rule on the white nations of Eastern Europe. There is no indication he was disturbed by the atrocities the French had been committing for a month in their campaign to reconquer the Saigon region and the Mekong Delta. Nor is there any evidence that he or anyone else in a senior position in the U.S. government became seriously upset about the greater atrocities in Haiphong, which the French were to commit during their subsequent campaign in the North.
Better Dead than Red
The policy of the United States, despite Wilson’s and Truman’s words, was not to disavow any government imposed upon a nation by the force of a foreign power. If it was, the United States would never have chosen sides in Vietnam at all. No, the policy of the United States, stated or otherwise, was to stop the spread of Communism. And in this regard…
The emergence of Communists at the head of the Vietnamese Revolution gave the leaders of the United States a conscience-salving reason to do in Vietnam what Washington had intended to do there in any case. The men in Washington swiftly forgot the original circumstances and told themselves, to justify inflicting on the Vietnamese the sufferings of a war that was to endure for seven and half more years, that they were preventing the spread of Soviet (soon to be Sino-Soviet) imperialism in Southeast Asia. Succeeding generations of American statesmen, who never examined the past because they too were so certain of what they wanted to do, were to tell themselves the same thing.
This mindset against Communism would become all-consuming. Long after it became clear -- even to Vann -- that the toll in human lives and human misery that they were tallying was worse than life under even the most totalitarian Communist regime -- the war had to continue to be fought.
The war had reached the point, they agreed, where only blind men could claim that continuing it indefinitely was in the interest of the Vietnamese. As bad as a Communist Vietnam would be -- and Vann and his friends envisioned it as a place of Maoist agricultural communes where even martial sex would be state-supervised -- it would be a lesser evil than torturing these peasants with endless war.
This is an absolutely essential point, and one that I have rarely come across in all of my reading. Communism and War are both bad, we are told. But when, if ever, is War worse than Communism? Should we be prepared to do anything -- literally anything -- to keep people from living (in some cases voluntarily) under Communism?
One incident in particular stood out for Vann and [Foreign Service Officer Douglas] Ramsey. It occurred at the end of April, on the afternoon of the day the Ranger company was overrun at So Do. A young peasant woman and her two children and two of her friends and their children were cutting sugar cane in a field about a mile away. VNAF and U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers had been called out, as they invariably were after such debacles by the Saigon side, and were over the area with spotter planes looking for the long-gone guerrillas. Two fighter-bombers made a pass over the sugar cane field. To try to indicate that they were not Viet Cong, the woman and her friends and the children did not run. The planes made several more passes and the women and their children kept cutting cane, hoping that their innocence would be recognized. On the next pass the planes dropped napalm. The young woman was the only survivor of the eight in the field. Vann and Ramsey found out what had happened when she walked into Bau Trai for treatment at the dispensary and they questioned her. Both her arms were burned so badly they were going to have to be amputated. She would never be able to close her eyes to sleep again because her eyelids had been scorched away. She was eight months pregnant with another child, but she was not going to be able to nurse her baby. The nipples of her breasts had been burned off.
Well, at least that woman wasn’t forced to live under Communism!
John’s "Sexual" Compulsion
One of the things that surprised me about the biography part of this work is how unflinching it is. Vann’s narcissistic side is on display here, although, when it first emerges on page 474, I have to say it took me a little by surprise.
John’s resentment at being forced to leave the war would pass, [his wife] Mary Jane felt, but there was something else between them that time did not seem to change, despite their physical attachment. It was John’s sexual compulsion. She had learned of it before he left for Korea. It was another of the unsettling discoveries she had made in the house on the hill. He was making love to the two Japanese housemaids. At first she was outraged that he would betray her and magnify the indignity by doing so in her home. Then she became fearful because she thought that if she confronted him openly, it might destroy their marriage, and every action she took to show her disapproval silently only brought firmer resistance from him. The maids, who were sixteen to eighteen years old, could hardly refuse him, with jobs and food so scarce for Japanese in 1949-50. She nevertheless decided to fire the maid he seemed most actively involved with and hoped that he would get the message. He ignored it and took up with the new maid she hired. When Mary Jane fired her and did not replace her, he hired another second maid himself without informing her. She could tell that he had selected this latest girl and brought her into the house in order to make love to her. When Mary Jane fired this girl too, he got still another. His activity with the maids did not seem to affect his ability or desire to make love to her. It seemed that John had plenty of sexual energy to spare. Mary Jane had remained silent, but for the first time in their marriage there had been tension between them. He made it clear that he was going to have his harem and that he expected her to accept his behavior. He showed no sign of guilt.
This seemed so far out of left field that I actually wrote in the margin next to that paragraph: “Out of the blue -- but deeply relevant -- will it be mentioned again?” Turns out, it is mentioned again -- extensively. Initially, it is told from Mary Jane’s point of view -- a 1950s wife and mother of three children, trapped by her circumstances and the expectations of her social class.
Mary Jane refused to consider the possibility of leaving him. Raising three children on what she could expect to earn as an unskilled woman intimidated her, and she regarded divorce as a public admission to her parents and friends that she had failed at the one enterprise in life at which she most wanted to succeed. She told herself that she would not be able to bear the shame of it. She could not even bring herself to take revenge by having an affair.
If he had given her the semblance of the marriage she wanted, she might have learned to accept his promiscuity. She would plead with him to come home for dinner after classes on a given evening. He would promise and she would cook a special meal, put candles on the table, buy some wine -- everything just for the two of them and the expectation of making love afterward -- and he would fail to show up. She would be hysterical by the time he did return well after midnight, railing at him in tears that she was his wife, that he had taken marriage vows, that it was his duty to come to her. One evening he promised to return early to eat with her and the children because it was [their daughter] Patricia’s birthday. Mary Jane baked a cake. Midnight came and went without Patricia’s father coming home. Patricia remembered her birthday cake sitting on the table uncut, the candles unlit, and her mother lying on her parents’ bed sobbing uncontrollably.
But even through this lens, Vann’s selfish pathology shines through. It is central to understanding who he was and what drove him to do the things that he had done -- both in Vietnam and in his marriage. Why is he this way? There is one piece to his backstory that provides some level of explanation, a piece that he eventually does share with Mary Jane.
During earlier and happier years of the marriage, John had told her more about his childhood than he was ever to tell anyone. He had told her that he was illegitimate and had taken her to meet Johnny Spry [Vann’s biological father] during a stopover in Norfolk in 1947 on their first trip to Fort Benning. She was struck by his resemblance to his natural father and listened to him reminisce about riding on kegs of bootleg whiskey as a little boy when Spry had taken him along on delivery runs before Spry’s still had been raided. She heard how Mollie [Vann’s aunt, his mother’s sister] had rescued him from the crib in which his mother had abandoned him, of Frank Vann’s [Vann’s stepfather] perpetual fried potatoes and biscuits, of how Garland Hopkins [Vann’s childhood minister] had given him an escape by sending him to Ferrum [a military prep school and junior college]. They had driven over to Ferrum so that he could show her the school and introduce her to his teachers. At the time Myrtle [Vann’s mother] had taken up with a chief petty officer in the Navy for whom she was soon to leave Frank Vann. Mary Jane had gathered from what John said of his mother that she was altogether egocentric, a drinker and a loose woman who had rejected him and her other children. His first memory of his mother, he had said, was of her sitting in front of her dresser brushing her hair.
But there are deeper and darker pieces to his backstory, pieces which Vann kept hidden from everyone, including his wife. Pieces that filled him with the conscious shame that he had to struggle and fight to overcome.
For every fragment of his childhood John revealed to her, he concealed many more. He was too ashamed of the memories to speak of them even to her, or he suppressed them. At this unhappy time in her marriage she had no way of knowing why John behaved as he did. She had no way of understanding the magnitude of the insecurity that Myrtle had created in him. The boy who had to prove to himself that he had the courage of a male by feats of daring was the man who had to keep assuring himself of his masculinity by a never-ending marathon of seduction. What was a penchant for womanizing in Spry was a hunger that no number of women could satisfy in John. Using women to give himself fleeting assurance was also not enough for him. He had to victimize women too, as he was victimizing Mary Jane in a kind of revenge on his mother.
And then there are those pieces that Vann likely kept hidden even from himself.
He also had not told her that Garland Hopkins was another man with a dark side and that Hopkins had exacted a price for liberating him. Hopkins’s tragic flaw was pedophilia, a homosexual attraction to boys. Hopkins did not recite ghost stories around the campfire simply to entertain his Boy Scouts. He would pick out a boy who had been frightened by his tales and crawl into the boy’s sleeping bag later that night saying that he wanted to comfort him. Hopkins’s particular compulsion did not involve sodomy or other advanced acts of homosexuality. It was the fondling of the genitals that little boys commonly engage in with each other as sex play. (He had a normal relationship with his wife and fathered three children.) Men like Hopkins are most attracted to the blond-slip-of-a-youth sort that Vann was at fourteen. There is no doubt there was a relationship between them. It is not unusual in such cases for the sexual relationship to end as the boy grows older and for the two men to wind up being friends. This is apparently what happened in the case of Vann and Hopkins. Vann admired Hopkins’s qualities as a social reformer and political activist and was immensely grateful to him. The relationship does seem to have aggravated the insecurity that Myrtle created, making Vann even more ferociously heterosexual.
It is a sad and painful tale -- one that make me wonder, as I have frequently wondered when encountering anecdotes like this, how prevalent sexual abuse is in our repressed society -- and to what degree that abuse accounts for the dysfunction of the adults who are supposedly the keepers of that society. You know, the kind of people willing to incinerate Vietnamese peasants in the name of fighting Communism. In a previous investigation, I found an estimate that one in ten people are sexually abused as children and that, clinically, those who are abused as children often grow into adults who abuse children.
In this context, some of Sheehan’s take on the “relationship” between Vann and Hopkins seem a little subdued. There’s plenty of characterizations above that should be questioned, if not outright disputed. Pedophilia is a “tragic flaw”? A grown man fondling the genitals of young boys is akin to the sex play that “little boys commonly engage in”? The relationship made Vann “even more ferociously heterosexual”? There is a myopia here that may be a product of Sheehan’s time and place, even as he presents clear evidence that many others did not view things in the same subdued way.
Vann had a cruel encounter with his youth just before he left [for his second tour in Vietnam]. While in Washington in February and March for three weeks of processing and orientation lectures at AID headquarters, he stayed with Garland Hopkins at Hopkins’s house in the Virginia suburb of McLean. Hopkins had been destroyed by his pedophilia. The CIA had fired him as head of the American Friends of the Middle East, the pro-Arab lobby that he had built and that the CIA secretly funded. He had then been dismissed as pastor of a prominent church in Arlington and also removed from the Virginia Conference of Methodist ministers, in which his father and grandfather had held honored places. His wife had divorced him because he had taken to beating her and their youngest son under the stress of his disgrace. He still could not control his obsession and molested some boys in the neighborhood. The parents complained to the police, and this time he was going to be prosecuted. He could not bear the shame. He wrote out his will and an obituary listing his accomplishments. He also wrote a note to Vann, and then he took a rat poison containing strychnine, inflicting a painful death on himself -- strychnine kills with convulsions. Vann found Hopkins’s body when he returned to the house on a Sunday night. The note asked Vann to distribute the obituary to the newspapers, listed family members and friends for Vann to notify, and also asked him to see to it that Hopkins’s body was cremated. Vann called the police and then did as his boyhood mentor asked. “Let these few chores be a last token of our long and splendid friendship,” the note said. The horror of it made Vann more eager than ever to be gone.
Horror seems the appropriate word. According to statistics, Hopkins was likely a victim himself -- likely abused as a boy -- but he was still a monster, in his last moments more focused on his “accomplishments” than the (dozens of? hundreds of?) boys he traumatized. And Vann, a victim himself -- of Hopkins, of Myrtle, of Vietnam -- was in this moment “more eager than ever to be gone.” But gone from what? Most likely from the thing he couldn’t escape. From himself.
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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.
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