My father died at the age of 52. The cancer which took his life is not uncommon in people who can vividly recall the smell of napalm and who resided temporarily in a forest possibly sprayed by Agent Orange. The specter of Vietnam seemed to reappear after his death, with his obituary noting his Purple Hearts and Bronze Star for valor. During his life, my dad spoke little about these medals. Most of his war stories highlighted some absurdity, such as the time he weathered a field training exercise by jettisoning all of his survival equipment in favor of a case of beer. Or, he told of being rudely awoken from a nap for the trivial reason that the compound was shelled in a mortar attack. “Do you know what the odds are that a shell is going to hit you? Basically zero,” he told me. “They told me to take cover. I told them I was going to sleep.” Or, one time in a village, he was approached by soldiers from another unit who wanted his translators to tell the people: “We’re up there! Up there! Tell them! Tell them we’re up there!” The “up there” was the moon visible in the early evening sky. As my father would later learn, the source of the excitement was the Apollo lunar landing. It was unclear how the Vietnamese took the news, but implicit in the soldiers’ excited proclamations of triumph was that any nation capable of breaking free of terrestrial bonds promised great things. The success of the errand to place the American flag on the barren moonscape stood in stark contrast to the failing mission to the win the hearts and minds of villagers in French Indochina.
As an herbicide, Agent Orange’s job was to wither plant life. But this was no mere landscaping exercise. It promised freedom. Chemical spraying cleared the territory American soldiers sought to liberate from communist tyranny. The memory of fighting in forests informed my father’s reductionist theory of the first Iraq War, which he claimed was promoted by an officer corps of Vietnam vets relishing the chance to redo their lost conflict in a place with no damn trees. While the explanatory power of this theory might be limited, I do remember thinking that the glee we had over that victorious war might for some soldiers compensate for the memory of a failed one.
While Agent Orange and smart bombs are distinctly modern methods of clearing space, the same herbicidal logic that ties freedom to the destruction of life can be found in Mather’s celebration of the providential work that cleared New England of its Native American inhabitants. “The Indians in these parts had newly, even about a year or two before, been visited with such a prodigious pestilence, as carried away not a tenth, but nine parts of ten, (yea, ‘tis said, nineteen of twenty) among them; so that the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth.” Mather offered no commentary on these graves.
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