By Kathleen Kern

Last month marked the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 39th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers slaughtered more than 400 Vietnamese women, children and elders.

Gene Stoltzfus, who would become director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, went to Vietnam in 1963 as an education and development worker. He resigned from his U.S.-funded position five years later because he thought the government was using it as a fig leaf to hide the enormous harm the U.S. military was inflicting on the Vietnamese, 2 million of whom died by the war’s end.

As he was traveling around the United States in 1968, speaking about what he had witnessed, he heard about My Lai from colleagues. Knowing that similar atrocities had occurred and gone unreported, he did not expect the world to pay much attention. However, the story hit the media in 1969, and My Lai became symbol of all that was evil about America’s involvement in Vietnam.

In 2003 and 2004, Stoltzfus traveled to Iraq, hoping, he said “to find a new U.S. military force that had instituted a system of discipline and intelligence that would never again permit the kind of ravages I had seen in the 1960s in Vietnam.”

“Right now,” he wrote in his blog, “Iraq is entering a particularly delicate and dangerous period. The White House has determined to push on, despite lagging support. Though they are supposed to be professional watchers, the press remain largely confined in the walled-off Green Zone or embedded with the military (read ‘in bed with’).

“The combination of spotty intelligence and urgency arising from declining political support gives large discretionary space to commanders, enough room to invite the ghosts of My Lai and Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld to cohabit in the battlefield.

“These are moments of urgency for the rest of us as well, to find ways to break through the Green Wall of silence in the desert where ‘deplorable’ [the word a young Colin Powell used after minimizing the scope of the My Lai massacre] stories are waiting to be heard.”

I sent an early draft of this column to Stoltzfus, in which I referred to U.S. soldiers in Iraq who committed the massacre at Haditha and the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. I postulated that the fact the press and military were holding these soldiers accountable in a way they had not for soldiers at My Lai was a sign of hope.

Stoltzfus responded: “I would not compare My Lai to Haditha. Politically it must be compared to Abu Ghraib, which alerted the world that something terrible was wrong, and the military legal trail there is so similar to My Lai its frightening. . . .

“I wish I could believe that the dreadful pillaging and abuses in Iraq are getting out. . . . We will only know when the Iraqis feel safe enough to step up to the plate and talk.”

He noted that he finds hope in the concern for human rights that evangelicals and conservatives and “tired liberals” are showing.

However, he wrote, “I see much less learning from Vietnam or Iraq than I would have expected in a society that claims to be so rooted in the story of the Bible and a God who went to such great lengths to show a pattern of love.”

Stoltzfus’ reflections about My Lai may be found at www.gstoltzfus.blogspot.com.