Classism in War

The Vietnam conflict has been widely ridiculed as a racist war. One historian wrote that it was a war where "white people sent black people to kill yellow people in an effort to supposedly protect a land that they stole from red people."

One black soldier, upon realizing that the treatment the Vietnamese received from the Americans was much like what he himself received back home, said to his commanding officer, "A gook is just the same as a nigger, right?" The officer slapped him on the back- "You're a smart nigger."

But he wasn't being racist. He was proving the soldier's sordid point.

Racism is born of classism. Modern war, by nature, is classist. The wheat of society administrate a war that the chaff go and fight. It's the old army game, from here to eternity.

Kids that had grown up begging and scraping for their existence in America were suddenly confronted by a people who saw them as unimaginably rich. These poor American kids were then the objects of all the hate and pain that they themselves felt back home. The children that begged the soldiers for food alternately needed and despised them. Some soldiers simply couldn't handle the constant reminders of their own pain and what waited for them when(if) they got home, and resorted to frustrated violence against these children. Cans of army rations were hurled at kid's heads from personnel trucks.

I was deeply moved when I read of one of these soldier's return to America. He sat at the kitchen table talking quietly with his mother. His mother apologized that there was no food in the house. The boy jumped up in a frenzy, flinging open cabinets and drawers. Within minutes the table was heaped with boxes and cans of edible things, and he stood red-faced in front of his mother.

"No food, Mom?? NO FOOD?!?"