Regret to Inform (Unfunny)

There's an old joke I love from the Vietnam war. Or maybe it just gets told over and over for every war. It goes like this:

A GI is visiting his friend in the hospital and asks how he was wounded.

His friend says, "I was out on patrol when I spotted a Viet Cong solider. Right before I was going to shoot him, he shouted, 'Fuck Ho Chi Minh!' So then I shouted, 'Fuck LBJ!'"

The GI says, "Yeah, but how were you hurt?"

The friend says, "Well, we were shaking hands in the middle of the road when we got run over by a tank."

I thought of this recently when I watched Regret to Inform, a documentary from 1998. I tried to think of some jokes about it or the general subject, but I couldn't because it's so overwhelmingly sorrowful. It was made by a woman named Barbara Sonneborn, whose husband was killed in Vietnam. In the film, she interviews other women -- both Vietnamese and American -- whose husbands were killed in the war, and visits the location in Vietnam where her husband died.

Then I tried to think of some words to describe men like George Bush and Dick Cheney who supported the war yet made certain other young men had to go kill and die instead of them. But I couldn't. I don't believe there are any such words in the English language. If we had more honor as a country, not only would Bush and Cheney not be president and vice president; they wouldn't be able to go outside without everyone spitting on them.

When Sonneborn gets to the village where he husband was killed, she meets a woman who belonged to the Viet Cong. Judging by her appearance, she must have been a teenager at the time. She and Sonneborn make an offering "to honor everybody who died in the war." Then she tells Sonneborn:

I am deeply touched by your visit and concern. I would like to send with you all the beautiful scenes that happened today. And please take them home to your people. And I hope there will be a good result. To help Vietnam heal the wounds of war. But the road from here to there is very difficult. But please try. And not just for us, you do it for yourself. And it will make us feel better that you tried.

This woman, living in a poor corner of one of the poorest places on earth, possesses a thousand times more wisdom in a lock of her hair than all the preening cretins who run America. As Chris Hedges (author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning) says:

Following our defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation. We were humbled, even humiliated. We asked questions about ourselves we had not asked before.

We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us and the sight was not always a pretty one. We were forced to confront our own capacity for a atrocity –- for evil -– and in this we understood not only war but more about ourselves. But that humility is gone.

I try very hard not to hate individual people. But I do loathe ignorance, and the arrogance to which it gives birth. There's certainly a lot of both to loathe these days.