Thank you for coming tonight. I'm very very happy to be
here. I'm also happy to see the mothers who have brought their
children because it's very very important that children get to
hear the stories what I want to tell you tonight. The first
people that I ever told my experiences to was <were> a fifth
grade class in New York. And I was very surprised at the
response of children. Many adults had asked me about my
experiences in Vietnam and every time I got to tell them, they
always got very upset and nervous and would change the
conversation. But children's response was a lot different. And
after I would tell them my experiences in Vietnam, they would
ask the most incredible questions. One of the questions that I
would never forget is the question that a little seven year old
who asked me; "how did it make you feel when your friend
died
in the jungle?" That's the type of question that adults would
never ask me.
I'd like to start at this lecture tonight by giving you some
background of my childhood. I was born and raised in Brooklyn
New York by a single mother and I have three sisters. I think
it's probably hard for you to imagine America, the most
powerful country in the world, certainly the most rich
<richest>, having such poverty. But my family grew up in
abject poverty in Brooklyn New York. My mother worked real hard
just to try to feed four children by herself. Like other poor
families, my family moved a great deal from one building to
another. And the buildings all had one thing in common, they
all had rats and they all had roaches. Growing up in this poor
communities from a very early age, I witnessed violence. The
schools that I attended was <were> also very poor. Most
of the
children were like me, very poor and single parents raising them.
I was always small in size for my age. And so the first thing
I
had to learn was how to fight. My schools had many bullies and
I was chased from school many days. One day when I was trying
to run away from this one bully, I could not escape and I was
forced to fight with him. He was bigger than I was and he was
tall and he was older than I was. But for some reason, I was so
afraid that I beat this boy this day. My mother was very proud
of me. But the strange thing is that after I beat this bully
who terrorized me, I became a bully. And I started terrorizing
the other boys. I hated the school because I was so poor then
the clothes that my mother could provide for me were always
very poor and it always seemed that kids laughed at me and my
clothes. So I hated school and did not attend very often. So in
the winter of 1965, I dropped out the high school and I joined
the United States Marine Corps.
I joined the United States Marines because I knew that the
United States Marine Corps is the toughest of all the
United States military service groups. The training to be a
Marine was extremely difficult and very hard. The first thing
that they teach you is how to follow orders. They teach you not
to ask questions, just to do exactly what you were told to
do. One of the famous sayings that I always heard in the Marine
Corps was that they would remind you that you are not in the
Marine Corps to think, you are there to follow orders. I
enjoyed the United States military training. Because I was such
a tough kid, it was like a challenge to me. The other thing
that I liked about the Marine Corps was that they fed
you. Three meals a day. That was more than what I got; growing
up as a child. So I was very very proud to be a Marine. After
training in the United States, I found out that I was going to
Vietnam.
I was very very excited about going to war. I had seen many
World War II movies as a child in America. And to me, war
always seemed like a very wonderful and exciting thing to
do. So we shipped out for Vietnam. But on the way to Vietnam,
we stopped at a little island right off the coast to Japan. The
name of this island is Okinawa. We spent two weeks in Okinawa,
Camp Hansen, in jungle war fit training. It was in Camp Hansen
on Okinawa, where we really learned the art of killing
people. After training in the jungles in the mountains of
Okinawa, we would go back to Camp Hansen, take showers and go
into a town. We would go into a town to get drunk, to fight,
and to look for women. We would be very cool to Okinawan
people. One of the favorite things that we would do is [to]
take a cab back to Camp Hansen and then get out and refuse to
pay to the cab driver. If the cab driver insisted on being
paid, we would beat him up and leave him on the street
bleeding. All we had to do is get on to the base because the
cab drivers were not allowed to come on to the military base
and the Okinawan police were not allowed to come on to the
base. So basically we could do anything that we want <wanted>
to do as long as we got back to the military base.
I would like to just take a break from this lecture and I will
ask parents of small children that please talk to your
children about the things what they would hear tonight. So that
you will understand what questions that they may have.
So after two weeks in Okinawa, we finally shipped out to
Vietnam. I was so excited to get there. I couldn't wait. I
thought I understood and knew what the war was because I had
seen so many war movies and I had heard many men talked about
war. Movies and war stories always made war seem like a very
honorable thing to do. In movies, there were <was> always
music
playing and always a hero, who always saved the day. The first
thing that I leaned in Vietnam is that war is not a movie. In
real war, people die. It is the most horrible experience that
one could live through. I spent thirteen months in the jungles
of Vietnam. I've killed many North Vietnam soldiers and I have
seen many people died. To me, Vietnam was not thirty years ago.
To me, Vietnam happened yesterday.
The scenes that I remember most are the scenes of women and
children and old people. When we would attack a village, the
village people would run away and hide in the jungle. We would
find many old people who could not keep up with the rest of
village. The villagers would have to leave them and we would
find their bodies in the jungle. The women would gather all the
children and they would run into the jungle to live in caves.
But children would always be screaming and crying because they
would be hungry because they would have no rice and no water.
Women and children and old people are not trained for war. As
United States Marine, I was trained to kill and I was trained
to die. I've seen many women in Vietnam died trying to save
children. Sometimes the children that they would try to save
would not be their own. Children do not understand war. They
are not trained as soldiers. They are not trained to live and
die. Children still want to eat. And so we would hear many of
the children screaming and crying and begging for food, begging
for water. The children would sometimes wander on to the
battlefield. The women who would sometimes be in safe places
would run out to save a child only to be killed themselves.
One of the things that they do not show you in the movies is
that after a big battle, you have to clean up the battlefield.
You have to count all the dead people and you have to separate
them. You stack all the dead women together, all the dead men
together, all the dead children together, and all the dead old
people together. And if the bodies are missing parts, you have
to find body parts and stack them next to the bodies. So if
the bodies are missing heads, then you have to find their heads
and stack them. If they are missing arms and legs, you have to
find these things and put them next to the dead bodies. Many of
the village people and notably soldiers would be badly wounded
and they would crawl up into the jungle to hide and die. We
would have to go into the jungle to hunt and to search for
those people. Because it was so hot in Vietnam, the bodies
would start decomposing within twenty-four hours. So it was two
ways that you could find dead people. One way was to follow the
flies because dead people always attract many many, millions of
flies all around them. The other way of finding the dead people
was to put your nose to the air and smell. It is a smell that
I
never ever got used to; a sweet sweet smell that forced the
food from your stomach up to your throat. It made your eyes
water and your knees weak. One of the saddest scenes that I
always remember is when the village people would come back into
the village to look for their loved ones among the dead bodies
that we stacked; seeing children screaming and yelling and
crying trying to make a dead mother stand up not understanding
that they are dead and will not stand. I learned first hand
that war is the most horrible thing that human beings can do to
each other.
People often ask me what happened to me in Vietnam that made
me
change. There was a number of things, but one thing in
particular which I will share with you. We were going through
a
village in Vietnam when the north Vietnamese attacked the
Marine outfit that I was with. They attacked us with heavy
machine guns and mortar fire. Many men were hit and were
yelling and screaming and everyone else was running to try to
find a place to hide. I ran behind a Vietnamese person's house
and I went down inside their family bunker. Once I got inside
the bunker, I realized that there was someone else inside there
with me. For some reason as I turned to shoot this person, I
realized that they were in a position where they could not run
away from me. It was a young Vietnamese girl, maybe about
fifteen years old. She was laying on her back. She had no pants
on. She was naked from her waste down. I looked at her
face. And I could see that she was terrified of me. But for
some reason, she could not get up and run. So I crawled over to
look at her. I looked in between her legs and I saw the small
head of a baby. I did not know what it was. I had no idea what
I was seeing or why I was seeing it. This girl started to push
and push and finally she pushed very hard and for some reason I
stuck my hand down between her legs. And this little baby slid
out of her body into my hand. I was shocked and terrified at
the same time because I did not know that babies came into the
world that way. No one ever showed me. I had no idea. The
baby's body was covered with after birth and the umbilical cord
was still attached. The other thing I remember was the steam
coming off the baby's body. The girl snatched the baby from my
hands and took the umbilical cord and bit it in her teeth, and
she wrapped the baby in black rags and she ran out of the
bunker. This happened very very quickly. It happened so quickly
that after she left the bunker, I didn't believe that this had
happened at all. At first I thought maybe I had imagined
this. But then I looked at my hands and I still had the after
birth from the child on my hands. I was not the same person
when I came out of that bunker. I had changed. I realized from
that moment that I could no longer kill the Vietnamese
people. I also realized that that girl was the same age as my
sister. I did not tell the other Marines what I had seen. I
don't know if this girl lived or she died in the jungle with
her child.
This is what war is. War is the suffering of other human
beings. We keep thinking that we can have war with rules. But
war is not a game. It is not the Olympics. There is no rules in
war. In war, you learn to kill your enemies in any way that you
can kill them. You kill them while they are sleeping, while
they are eating, while they are going to the toilet. It does
not matter. During World War II, on the small old island of
Okinawa, hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and
American soldiers and Okinawan people died on this small little
island. The story that I just told you has happened over and
over again. It has happened in World War I. It has happened in
World War II. It has happened in the Korean War. It has
happened in the Vietnam War. And it has happened in the Persian
War. When I speak in Okinawa, when I do my lectures, I always
get eighty-year-old women and seventy-year-old women who come
to speak to me after my lecture is done. They come up to me
with their children who are in their fifties and thorough my
interpreter they explain to me that their child, this person
standing next to them, was also born in a cave during World War
II. I always enjoy speaking with these women because we have
much in common. We understand something that most people don't
understand. We also have shared an experience that is very very
unique. The Okinawan people have suffered much injustice.
Fifty-two years after World War II, their lands are still
occupied by the United States. The rape of the school girl by
three military service men, United States military service
persons, is not the first time that an Okinawan woman has been
raped. Since the Americans have been occupying the Okinawan
island, hundreds and thousands of Okinawan women have been
raped. Some of these rapes have been reported. Many have
not. Hundreds and thousands of Okinawan people have been killed
in car accidents caused by United States military personnel.
So it's time now. Fifty-two years after World War II that the
Americans pack up their weapons and go back to America. The
Okinawan children grow up in an environment where for the last
fifty-two years all they have seen is weapons of war. The old
people of Okinawa who was <were> lucky enough to survive World
War II and the battle of Okinawa now still hears <hear> weapons
and jet planes flying over their homes. It is against human
rights that our children have to grow up in a world where we
is <are> still preparing and training men to kill.
The United States Marines are coming to your community to use
your lands to train young men how to kill other human
beings. So it is very very important that we together protest
against the Marines coming. We must protest against the
continuing preparing <preparation> for war. I do not want your
children to have to grow up in an environment where they see
violence, where they see men preparing and training to war. I
work with a network of people. We are called "Remove Troops
from Okinawa Network". This network was made up of Okinawans,
mainland Japanese, Americans, Christians, and Buddhists. We are
working to remove all the military troops from Okinawa. We are
working to remove all the military troops from Japan. We do
this work for all the innocent people who have died in all the
wars. We do this work for all the children and do it for all
the old people because they have the right to live their lives
in peace. We need the money that our governments spend on war
materials. We need this money for our children's
education. This is their money and this is their land. We need
this money to build more universities, more schools, to hire
more teachers. We need this money to build peaceful industry
<industries> so that all our people are employed and making a
decent salary. The question is what you can do about it. I ask
you to organize yourselves. I ask you to work with your local
peace groups which are here in Japan in your local
community. We need your support. We need your words. We need
you to speak out against war. For myself, and I ask you to
think about this pledge. I pledge myself that I will not
support war any more. I will not support war with my money, I
will not support war with my land, and I will not support war
with my children.
I am about to finish with this lecture, but before I do, I'd
like to share something very important that I learned in that
cave with that girl. I realized from watching that young girl
go through that pain that that's what my mother did for me on
the day I was born. I do not celebrate my birthday. On my
birthday, I celebrate my mother. I send her a thank-you card
and flowers. This has helped me to understand mothers. I thank
you for coming tonight and I look forward to questions that you
may have. Thank you.
Transcripted by Yoichi Hariguchi from the tape.
Note:
<WORD>: the word previous to <WORD> is wrong. It should be
WORD.
[WORD]: missing word (the word WORD is missing in his speech).f