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Ue mic ae UC UC Re Ca 24)

in Binh Thuy, Vietnam (1969):

By Dylan Hackett, News Editor

ast week I had the
opportunity to have lunch
and a chat with S. Brian
Willson, Vietnam War veteran,
peace activist, and advocate
against the worldwide death and
destruction caused by the United
States of America’s foreign policy.
He was on his short book tour
supporting the second run of his
recent book, Blood on the Tracks: The
Life and Times of S. Brian Willson.
He stood tall on his prosthetic legs
and leopard-printed sockets and
carried himself with strength not
usually found in man 70 years of
age. He spoke, with his distinct
American dialect (reminding me
of my grandfather’s own manner
of speaking), of his life of learning,
tragedy, and non-violent protest.
“TMy book] is kind of a

metaphorical map for those people
who want to look at how one
person navigated through the
bullshit, one who totally believed
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in it then realized it was bullshit.
I’m still navigating,” Willson said
humbly, with a hint of laughter.
“So, I call myself a recovering white
male because I’m recovering my
humanity.”

Willson describes his book
as “psychohistorical memoir”—a
description brought on by the many
scholarly fields he has studied, but
also because he chronicles a mental
journey.

“T call [the book] a
psychohistorical memoir because
I was answering a question that
was on my mind for 20 years and
the question was this,” Willson
explained. ““How was it so easy
for a kid like me to follow on order
to go 9,000 miles from my farming
community in upstate New York to
destroying farming communities in
Vietnam of people I knew nothing
about?”

He traces his life journey in
the book from his archetypical
American boyhood, to his
deployment as a captain in

Vietnam, to his loss of legs by the
charge of a US Navy train (carrying
munitions to central America), to
his life now. He is active despite
his maimed legs, which were
replaced by prosthetic “third world
legs’”—a term he uses to express
solidarity with those in Vietnam
and elsewhere who have been
maimed by the American global
war machine.

Willson spoke in detail about
the major turning points in his life,
a story which kept me rapt in awe
at the horrors he faced and the
stoic, steady tone with which he
described them.

“Life is a journey that mommy
and daddy didn’t tell me about. My
church didn’t tell me about it, my
school didn’t tell me about it, but
it’s a reality that I learn about that
really goes on behind the facade of
the pretend societies called ‘Western
Democracies.’” Willson remarked.

When Willson came to tell me
his first-hand accounts of walking
over the corpses of the napalmed

 

villages in Vietnam, I was taken
aback by the poise with which he
described the epiphany he had that
led him on the learning path he
took.

“T happened to be ina village
where | couldn’t walk any further
because the bodies were so densely
packed on the ground. I looked
down and I saw what looked like a
fairly young woman who had been
clutching three children when they
died. Her eyes were open. I was
in shock, myself, to see this scene.

I bent over to look into her eyes.

I don’t know what I was doing,
actually. I was just, enamoured by
her eyes which were just staring at
me, or at least from the angle I was
looking at her. Then I realized the
napalm had burned her eyelids off.
She was dead.”

“I was crying, I was gagging
bile juice and I was witha
Vietnamese Lieutenant and he
asked me what my problem was.
Without thinking about it I said
‘I’m looking at my sister, my