Shooting Up by Lukasz Kamienski;

Author:Lukasz Kamienski; [Kamienski;, Lukasz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190263478
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

Vietnam

The First True Pharmacological War

Instead of taking away marijuana from the soldiers—we ought to be giving it to the negotiators in Paris.

—Bob Hope, comedian, 1970 quoted in Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Arm: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs

The Vietnam War was unquestionably one of the most landmark and tragic events in modern American history. In A Rumor of War, one of the finest war memoirs ever, Philip Caputo explained that Vietnam was a watershed event because it

has severely called into question American myth. Americans entered Vietnam with certain expectations that a story, a distinctly American story, would unfold. When the story of America in Vietnam turned into something unexpected, the true nature of the larger story of America itself became the subject of intense cultural dispute.1

What rendered the Vietnam War a truly harrowing experience was notably its unusually irregular character, which makes it probably one of the best examples of asymmetrical war in the twentieth century. Vietnam was not a conventional war with the frontlines, rears, enemy mobilizing its forces for an attack, or a territory to be conquered and occupied. Instead, it was a formless conflict in which former strategic and tactical principles did not apply. The Vietcong were fighting in an unexpected, surprising, and deceptive way to negate Americans’ strengths and exploit their weaknesses. All this made Vietnam the “last modern war” as some claim, or the “first postmodern war” as others suggest. The American response to the Vietcong’s asymmetry was the heavy deployment of modern military technology. The more asymmetry the Vietcong generated, the more technology the Americans deployed. Thus the war turned out to be a tragic example of a “techno-war.” Still, the conflict also came to be referred to as the first “pharmacological war” because both the prescribed and self-prescribed consumption of psychoactive substances by military personnel assumed alarming proportions, unprecedented in American history. The British philosopher Nick Land aptly described the Vietnam War as “a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence.”2

At times the Americans fought the enemy in Southeast Asia nearly as resolutely and brutally as they did some sixty years earlier in the Philippines, which they acquired control over in 1898 after the war with Spain. Then they ruthlessly suppressed a popular anti-American rebellion under the foregoing ally Emilio Aguinaldo. During the colonial war that dragged on for four years, American soldiers adopted the local habit of smoking opium, which soon grew to be so common in the ranks that in 1903 the American Pharmaceutical Association felt compelled to address this alarming problem.3 Later, such drugs as cocaine, marijuana, and heroin gained in popularity among the troops, with the latter being particularly attractive due to rumors about its amazing power to boost male potency. Officers usually followed a relatively restrictive policy, so that soldiers who got caught taking cocaine or heroin were punished, often even discharged. What the authorities feared most was the domino effect of one abuser infecting the entire unit.4 And it

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