Unlearned lessons from past

On the evening of the 2nd of November 50 years ago, a 31-year-old American, the father of three little children, drove 40 miles from his home in Baltimore to the Pentagon in Washington DC.
As the day turned to dusk and staff at the US Department of Defense began to make their way home, he positioned himself some 40 feet from the third-floor window of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, poured kerosene on himself, struck a match on his shoe and set himself alight.
“He did it in Washington,” as the British poet Adrian Mitchell put it more or less immediately afterward, “where everyone could see/ because/ people were being set on fire/ in the dark corners of Vietnam where no one could see.”
The first official American ground troops had been dispatched to Indochina just a few months earlier in 1965. There wasn’t, at that point, widespread alarm among the American populace about what was going on. After all, the conflict was thousands of miles away, and it was all about keeping communism at bay and defending “the American way of life” — during a period, mind you, when a civil rights movement was struggling to overcome the oppression of American apartheid.
Just a few months ago, I was listening to a fascinating 13-disc compilation of American popular music related to the Vietnam War, and it was disconcerting to discover that in the early 1960s, with a few honorable exceptions, the songs churned out by a vast variety of performers accurately reflected the litany of lies America told itself in order to justify its participation in the conflict.
Those who dissented tended to be vilified as agents of a communist conspiracy. It would have been enormously difficult, though, to press that particular charge against Norman Morrison, the human torch who presumably hoped to sear America’s conscience on Nov. 2, 1965.
Norman was a Quaker, a member by choice of a Christian sect associated with pacifism because it took seriously the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Earlier that day, he had been discussing with his wife, Anne, an article that quoted a French Catholic priest whose church in Vietnam had been at the receiving end of American military “assistance.”
“I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm,” the priest was quoted as saying in the article. “I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits.” Just a few hours later, while on his way to the Pentagon, Norman made a pit stop to mail off a brief letter to Anne. “Know that I love thee,” he wrote, “but I must go to help the children of the priest’s village.”
Norman was not alone. He had Emily with him. His daughter was just 11 months old. To his wife, he explained that “like Abraham, I dare not go without my child.” Emily was evidently still in his arms when he went up in flames. Plenty of eyewitnesses recall hearing shouts of “Drop the baby!” from appalled onlookers, but there is little consensus on how it came to be that Emily was, ultimately, completely unscathed.
Decades later, she noted: “By involving me, I feel he was asking the question, ‘How would you feel if this child were burned too?’ People condemned him for my presence there when perhaps he wanted us to question this horrifying possibility.”
Norman Morrison’s sacrifice made headlines locally, but it would be safe to say that most Americans were unmoved. One who wasn’t, it turned out 30 years later, was McNamara himself. Devoting two pages to Morrison in his 1995 memoir (and mea culpa) “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lesson of Vietnam,” the man justifiably seen as a key architect of the conflict noted that Norman’s “death was a tragedy not only for his family but also for me and the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth.”
Many other Americans, too, were disturbed by the flaming response to depredations being wrought by America, but Norman Morrison did not become a household name in US. It did in Vietnam, though. Songs and poems were spontaneously composed to honor what was seen as a selfless sacrifice, and within months his visage was imprinted on a North Vietnamese postage stamp. The innumerable condolences Anne Morrison received rom Vietnam included one from Ho Chi Minh.
For a long time, though, she turned down invitations to visit Vietnam, partly because she saw her husband’s act as non-partisan, a cri de coeur against killing in general. She changed her mind in the late 1990s, after encountering a Vietnamese man who told her that long ago, like most Vietnamese children, he had learned by heart a poem dedicated to Norman by North Vietnam’s poet laureate.
Anne and her daughters Christina — who was five when her father died, and inclined in later years to question his dedication to the children of a distant land over his own — and Emily were completely overwhelmed by the love and recognition they encountered in Vietnam in 1999, nearly a quarter of a century after the war had ended.
All too many American interventions in the past 40 years, notwithstanding periodic breast-beating about the “Vietnam syndrome,” indicate that the lessons of the unnecessary conflict in Indochina remain largely unlearned. And the likes of Norman Morrison generally remain subject to apathy and ridicule.
Back in 1965, though, at least the victims understood where he was coming from and were eternally grateful for his honesty, his solidarity and his searing self-sacrifice — when he, as Adrian Mitchell put it, “simply burned away his clothes/ his passport, his pink-tinted skin,/ put on a new skin of flame/ and became/ Vietnamese.”