ESSAY 37

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Symbols of Power,
Structures of Violence
Mia Hobbs
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Axes of power in the My Lai massacre
Acts of violence committed by a group reveal the social
prejudices held by that group. The victim or victims of
group violence are often seen or portrayed by the perpetrators
of violence as fundamentally different from the perpetrators:
less valuable, less powerful, less human. In hurting the
designated ‘other’, the group enacts power and demonstrates
its shared values. Group violence in the context of war is
therefore not solely concerned with the combat situation
but with the shared social situation of the group. Locating
the symbols of power enacted in violence by groups of
soldiers thus sheds light on the particular hierarchies in the
soldiers’ country. The My Lai massacre, for example,
demonstrates power structures entrenched in the Vietnam
War–era United States. The moment of the massacre can
be used as a lens through which to view broader trends of
socially mandated structures of oppression and signifiers of
power in the Vietnam War and in American culture at the
time. This essay will point to racial, gendered and colonial
or imperial acts of violence at the moment of My Lai, and
relate them to the wider experiences—military and
civilian—of American soldiers, showing that these methods
of violence acted as symbols of power that flowed through
the cultural fabric of the United States.
On 16 March 1968, soldiers of ‘Charlie Company’, of the First
Battalion, 20th Infantry, slaughtered civilian Vietnamese in
two hamlets in Son My, Quang Ngai province. The scale of
violence and the methods of brutality of the My Lai
massacre have reached infamy. Though the exact numbers
are disputed, it is estimated that between 300 and 500
Vietnamese civilians were killed. The massacre was initially
characterised as a singular tragedy and not representative of
As one goes through accounts of what happened at My
Lai, it is striking how thorough and systematic the
killing was. In My Lai 4, Seymour M. Hersh collects
testimonies from soldier witnesses and participants, as
well as survivors, all of whom recall methodical
slaughter throughout that day. Nguyen Bat, a survivor of
the massacre, reported that the GIs ‘gathered together
and shot’ villagers upon arrival at the hamlet. Private
Michael Bernhardt described the order of killing: ‘One:
they were setting fire to the hootches and huts and
waiting for people to come out and then shooting them.
Two: they were going into hootches and shooting them
up. Three: they were gathering people into groups and
shooting them’. The systematic, ordered methods of
violence by which civilians were killed demonstrates
extreme dehumanisation of Vietnamese people. The
American soldiers were in Vietnam to support the South
Vietnamese army, protect Vietnamese civilians, and
fight communism. However, many soldiers failed to
distinguish between enemy Vietnamese soldiers and
guerrilla fighters, and the Vietnamese civilians
supposedly under US protection. In his book Meeting the
Enemy: A Marine Goes Home, veteran Suel D. Jones
remembers: ‘in Vietnam’s reality I was taught to hate the
gooks, to see them as less than human. You can’t kill a
Vietnamese, but it’s easy to blow away a gook or a slope’.
The indiscriminate killing of all Vietnamese
encountered was a way of racialising the ‘other’:
maximising difference to establish unity with the ‘self’.
In their essay ‘The Gook Syndrome: The Vietnam War
as a Racial Encounter’, in Charles R. Figley and Seymour
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military conduct. However, testimonies from veterans,

interviews with Vietnamese survivors and archival research
have shown in recent years that, far from an anomaly, the
Testimonies from veter-
My Lai massacre was representative of an epidemic of
criminal violence in the Vietnam War. In Kill Anything That
ans, interviews with
Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, historian Nick Vietnamese survivors and
Turse demonstrates through archival research and witness,
survivor and perpetrator testimony that ‘murder, torture, archival research have
rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious
arrests, imprisonment without due process…were virtually shown in recent years
a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American
presence in Vietnam’. Although these acts of violence were that, far from an anomaly,
not part of official US military policy in Vietnam, they were
tacitly condoned by the military brass to produce higher
the My Lai massacre was
‘body counts’ and implicitly tolerated by attitudes of racial
and gendered superiority, as well as systemic cover-ups and
representative of an epi-
failure to prosecute reported war crimes. The My Lai demic of criminal violence
massacre can therefore be taken as indicative of military
conduct in the Vietnam War, and of Vietnam War–era in the Vietnam War.
power hierarchies.
38

Leventman’s Strangers at Home: Vietnam Veterans

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•
Since the War, historians Seymour Leventman and
Paul Camacho quote a GI tracing his own Torture in the form of rape •
•
Symbols of Power,
Structures of
degeneration into racial hatred: ‘I was sent on to was rampant. Gender was a • Violence
advanced genocide training down at Ft. Polk, •
Louisiana…this is where I started to hate, hate core symbol of difference • Mia Hobbs
anything that wasn’t like me’. The indoctrination •
of hatred of the ‘other’, of ‘anything that wasn’t
and an axis of power, and •
like me’—whether ally, enemy, or civilian through the violation of •
•
supposedly under protection—spilled out in the
Vietnam War to produce an indifference to the the ultimate ‘other’— •
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human suffering of any Vietnamese person. woman—soldiers had their •
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Basic training evidently had a direct relationship
to this racism. Turse argues that ‘remorseless
masculinity reinforced. •
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killing was…legitimized by the explicit racism •
that suffused the training…[one soldier Vietnamese were captured. ‘The men decided to
•
remembered] they called them dinks, gooks, have some fun…One GI lit a cigarette and stuffed •
slopes, slants, rice-eaters, everything that would it, still burning, inside an older man’s pants. •
take away humanity…that they were less than Grzesik watched as the man started to dance in •
human was clearly the message’. This message is pain and the GI danced alongside, mocking him’. •
highlighted by the way children, too, were seen as Charlie Company Captain Medina then ‘played •
Russian roulette with the man’. This incident of •
enemies to be killed. Hersh includes infantryman •
Harry Stanley’s account, given to the Criminal torture of living Vietnamese was common and the
•
Investigation Command, of how a young parallel mutilation of corpses was even more
•
Vietnamese boy was crying, wounded, and ‘the frequent: collecting ears and other body parts was •
radio operator…“stepped within two feet of the endemic. Depravity had folded into the warrior •
boy and shot him in the neck with a pistol”…The myth that American solders aspired to. Turse •
radio operator turned to Stanley and said, “Did highlights various reasons for collecting •
you see how I shot that son of a bitch?”’ mutilated body parts: ‘to keep, trade or exchange •
for prizes offered by commanders…frighten[ing] •
Leventman and Camacho argue that it was •
because of the ‘invisible’ nature of the enemy that the enemy…trophies presented to superiors as
•
the Vietnam War took on such racialized gifts or as proof to confirm a body count…worn
•
violence; that ‘military objects were replaced by on necklaces or otherwise displayed’. Veteran and •
racial objects’ in order to satisfy the status quo of writer Tim O’Brien documents, in The Things •
American victory. However, this racialised They Carried, how one soldier, who was ‘otherwise •
dehumanisation did not simply materialise in the a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had •
Vietnam War but had its roots in the military been presented to him as a gift’. Regardless of the •
stated motive behind individual acts of torture •
culture of the United States. •
and mutilation, the logic behind these acts of
The word ‘gook’—used by US troops to •
violence was degradation and dehumanisation,
characterise the Vietnamese during the Vietnam •
which served the specific purpose of distancing •
War—is a non-specific racial slur that had its the American soldier from the Vietnamese person. •
origins in the American-Philippine War some •
seventy years earlier, ‘where American troops Torture was usually a group effort, signifying the
•
began calling their indigenous enemies “goo- importance of the collective to military unity.
•
goos”’. Turse traces how ‘the pejorative term then Torture in the form of rape was rampant. Gender •
seems to have transmuted into “gook” and was was a core symbol of difference and an axis of •
applied over the decades to racially dissimilar power, and through the violation of the ultimate •
enemies in Haiti, Nicaragua and Korea’ before ‘other’—woman—soldiers had their masculinity •
being applied in Vietnam. The methodical killing reinforced. Turse documents that at My Lai, ‘a •
number of soldiers became “double veterans”, as •
of Vietnamese civilians occurred because in the •
collective psychology of the US military they the GIs referred to men who raped and then
•
were reduced from a people to a homogenous and murdered women…Many women were raped and
•
dehumanised enemy. Specific to the Vietnam sodomized, mutilated, and had their vaginas •
War, as James William Gibson recounts in The ripped open with knives or bayonets’. The use of •
Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, this reduction sexual violence to enact power reflected •
was characterised by the ‘“Mere Gook Rule”: “If American cultural values regarding gender •
it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC”’. The ‘Mere hierarchy. Historian Elizabeth Lutes Hillman •
argues in Defending America: Military Culture and •
Gook Rule’ or ‘MRG’—a widely used acronym •
among soldiers—produced other common forms the Cold War Court-Martial that in American
•
of violence that were apparent at the My Lai culture women ‘appear as the bodily antithesis of
•
massacre: torture and corpse mutilation. the honor, strength, and sacrifice that the •
military valorised…women were particularly •
Hersh documents how in the twenty-four hours threatening to the norms of masculinity, • 08 2015–09 2015
following the initial massacre, bursts of degrading aggressiveness, and physicality’. Social movements • Nº 137
violence flared up. In one incident, four at the time of the Vietnam War threatened this •
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ESSAY 39

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binary, and as women moved into the public sphere, the distribution and handling of weapons’. Recruits were
traditional notions of masculinity were threatened. The drilled around barracks, ‘with their rifle in one hand,
military was perceived as a last bastion for men to be men, their penis in the other, chanting, “This is my rifle, this
away from women, and as a result any presence of the is my gun; one is for fighting, the other’s for fun”…drill
feminine—read ‘weakness’—was taboo. O’Brien comments instructors repeatedly described war as a substitute for
on the repression of anxiety within the group: ‘they carried sex or as another form of sex’. This was invariably
the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. absorbed by soldiers, as sexualised descriptions of
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not warfare are prolific in Vietnam War literature. In
to’. Historian Susan Jeffords argues in The Remasculinization Drowning Out the Drums: A Marine Comes Home, veteran-
of America: Gender and the Vietnam War that this is because turned-writer John Akins insists that ‘killing is sexual.
‘while men are gentlemanly in the presence of women, men Death too. Grooving on the excitement and challenge of
are more likely to consider themselves really men in all- cheating death is a whopping turn-on…[It’s] akin to the
male groups. But while the masculine feels most “itself” in most heightened sexual experience. It amplifies the
its own presence, it is able to do so only in the knowledge chase and ecstasy of nailing a chick by the
of what it is not, that it is not the feminine’. Violence initiated…Someone once asked me to describe up-close
therefore took on gendered notions of masculine power and combat in a nutshell. How about this? Pure pussy’.
defined weakness as the realm of the woman. A gang rape at
The relationship between conquest and sex, between sex
My Lai recounted in Hersh’s book demonstrates how
and death and between death and conquest here is
connected ideas of gender and power were: ‘“They caught
circular. Sex and gender were so wrapped up in the
her ass…”, Wood said, “They all raped her…tore her
military’s ideals of manhood that both sex and death
up”…Later she escaped. “Tough?” he asked rhetorically, “She
became bonding exercises for soldiers. Gang rapes in
sure must have been—she took on all of them.”’ The use of
particular were extremely common. Hillman argues that
language like ‘she took on all of them’ shows admiration for
‘the military’s sex culture…made the consumption of
the violated woman because she withstood the harm done
sex a fraternal, rather than individual pursuit’. Men
to her in an act of power violence.
bonded over sexual desire, trying to find bar girls,
Charlie Company had been feeling increasingly powerless in sharing prostitutes—and as their environment
the month leading up to My Lai. Having suffered twenty- intensified and their reliance on each other increased, so
eight casualties, the men were particularly vulnerable did the violence of their sexual actions. Jeffords argues
because these casualties were caused by mines and booby that ‘rape is the most violent extreme of the
traps rather than direct combat, which enhanced the notion enforcement of the collective in the Vietnam narrative’.
that they were fighting ‘blind’ an invisible, elusive enemy. Gang rape bonds the perpetrators: they enact and share
The Vietnamese women and children at My Lai provided an the power provided by degrading an ‘other’, while the
opportunity for the men to assert power after months of depravity of the rape acts as an oath between them. Men
feeling weak. ‘She took on all of them’—the witness, a who share in illegal violence cannot turn each other in,
soldier in the company, suggests that the violence so instead absolute loyalty is fostered between them.
perpetrated against this woman was inevitable, and that it Furthermore, in sharing the rape, the men perform their
is her survival that is remarkable rather than the capacity of power to one another. Hersh records the account of Ron
his fellow soldiers to commit repeatedly this violation of Ridenhour, a soldier who came to report the massacre
her human dignity. Established gender hierarchies and once he discovered it. Ridenhour flew over the site and
entrenched concepts of masculinity and femininity ‘saw a body below… “It was a woman”, Ridenhour
therefore manifested in violence when the men were remembered, “spread-eagled as if on display. She had an
‘emasculated’ by lack of power and control: asserting their 11th Brigade patch between her legs—as if it were some
‘natural’ dominance over women. type of display, some badge of honour”.’ Jeffords argues
that acts of violence such as this ‘functioned both as
This gender hierarchy was reinforced by basic training. In
confirmation of masculine bonds and as display. The
Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam,
very frequency of accounts of gang rape in soldiers’
historian Christian Appy draws out the relationship
narratives of the war is only one symptom of the violent
between sex, violence, power and military authority: ‘the
force of the spectacular, of how the spectacle functions
model of male sexuality offered as a military ideal in boot
through violence to release tensions of difference’.
camp was directly linked to violence. Sexual talk permeated
Both racial and gendered acts of violence were part of a
............................. wider psychological drive to conquer Vietnam. Despite
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the given purpose of their mission—liberation of the

Recruits were drilled around
barracks, ‘with their rifle in one
hand, their penis in the other,
chanting, “This is my rifle, this
is my gun; one is for fighting,
the other’s for fun”…drill
instructors repeatedly described
war as a substitute for sex’.
Vietnamese people from communism—soldiers
frequently employed acts of violence that suggested
colonisation rather than liberation. In ‘Vietnam in Me’,
an article for The New York Times, O’Brien notes that
soldiers began to regard the land ‘itself as the true
enemy—the physical place, the soil and paddies’. In the
methods of violence there is a clear lack of distinction
not just between civilian, ally and enemy but between
humans and animals, between living things and
inanimate structures. At My Lai, a soldier ‘watched a
group of ten to fifteen GIs methodically pump bullets
into a cow until it keeled over. A woman then poked her
head out from behind some brush: she may have been
40

hiding in a bunker. The GIs turned their fire from than pornography, produced to validate the creator’s feeling of
the cow to the woman. “They just kept shooting power.
at her. You could see the bones flying in the air
Structures of violence at the My Lai massacre can be conclusively
chip by chip.”’ The violence was a totality of
seen as institutionalised hatred of the powerless. Historian Suvir
destruction without regard for what was being
Kaul, discussing tropes within colonial attitudes in his
destroyed—whether it was Vietnamese land,
introduction to Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, argues that
woman, animal, man, house or child. In his
the ‘rhetorical and psychological features’ of imperialism are ‘the
Orientalism, Edward Said shows that establishing
developments of codes of hypermasculinity; of the image of the
hierarchies around space is a ‘universal practice’
modern man as the servant of the expanding nation, working at
wherein designating the ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ of
the behest of the state; the insistence on racial, cultural, and
geography serves political purposes. Said states
religious hierarchy; the development of philosophical historical
that ‘to a certain extent modern and primitive
justifications for inhumanity’. The acts of violence at My Lai and
societies seem thus to derive a sense of their
throughout Vietnam are characterised by these features. The
identities negatively’. American soldiers in
methods of violence used were racist, dehumanising and
Vietnam used violence and language to denote
misogynistic, and the location of power through the symbol of the
the difference between their land and the
‘other’ is demonstrative of colonial attitudes that reflect the values
Vietnamese land by characterising the
not only of the military but of the cultural fabric of the United
Vietnamese land as territory to be conquered.
States at the time. The massacre at My Lai therefore shows how
Gibson presents us with ‘two common names for
collective acts of violence rely on existing axes of power in order
Vietnam…“Brown Disneyland” and “Six Flags Over
to reinforce the sense of belonging among the collective. Parallels
Nothing”; the country was like a playground or
can be drawn with this throughout history and today: from the
amusement part where social rules had been
sexual enslavement of Korean ‘comfort women’ in the Second
suspended, but the fun was gone’. In ‘Indigenous
World War, to the degrading atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in
Soldiers: Native American and Aboriginal
Iraq, to the grotesque performances of violence by Daesh:
Australian Service in Vietnam’, part of the essay
collective acts of violence are demonstrations of entrenched social
collection New Perceptions of the Vietnam War
values and axes of power existing within perpetrator societies.
edited by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, historian
Noah Riseman gives an even more explicit ................................................................
example: ‘NCOs [non-commissioned officers]
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often called the Viet Cong territory “Indian
Country” or referred to the American bases with
names like “Fort Apache”.’ Using language that
called forth historic American conquests and
American pastimes, soldiers were able to give
patriotic value to their fight—with the result
being violent attitudes of superiority.
Maggot
The notion of conquest is present in one more
method of violence at the My Lai massacre and
I see people on Survivor and Fear
throughout the war generally: soldiers
photographed their acts of violence. The woman Factor eating and rolling around in
who was shot like the cow was photographed. The tubs of maggots. I see countless queer
incident of torture and humiliation was witnessed kids enduring the nickname ‘maggot’ in
by a young Vietnamese boy, who was ‘gagged and
tied to a bamboo tree…[Captain] Medina later had place of the rhyme their tormentors actually
a photograph taken of himself drinking from a mean but won’t say in front of the grown-ups,
coconut with one hand and holding a sharp knife just like screenwriters give their fictional
under the throat of the trussed-up boy’. drill sergeants the milder ‘Maggot!’ in close-ups
Photography was very common: Turse documents
that soldiers would catalogue their torture and in which they humiliate those recruits
mutilation, ‘often taking photos of their who aren’t as tough and hardened as the rest.
handiwork and filling scrapbooks with the
When I hear ‘maggot’, I feel an acute
results’. These photographs were pornography,
sense of defiance for all those oppressed
and pornography at its core concerns domination.
Trauma historian Judith Lewes Herman argues in
and battered down by words and the pressure
Trauma and Recovery that ‘total control over
another person is the power dynamic at the heart to live up to someone else’s measure of manhood.
of pornography’. The photographing of corpses
Holly Painter
and torture victims as evidence of atrocities
highlights the link between the racial, gendered
and imperialistic ideas with which the US
military is imbued. The civilian becomes the
enemy because the enemy is of the same race.
Military conquest is sexualised and sexual
activity is understood as conquest.
‘Documentation’ of this conquest is nothing more ................................................................