|
And following the
GI and veterans' march for peace, four AWOL G.I.s turned themselves in
to the Presidio Army Stockade which was about to reach a breaking point.
RANDY ROWLAND,
U.S. ARMY: The moment of my epiphany ...
or the thing
that came to me was working in a hospital, in the military hospital up
at Fort Lewis on a neurology floor.
And it was all
head and neck injuries, guys that were so paralyzed that they couldn't
turn the page of a book, and they couldn't even take a poop by
themselves, and they couldn't kill themselves.
And every day
we'd come in as the medics to take care of them and they would beg us,
every day, to kill them, because they couldn't kill themselves.
And it was such
a horror, it caused me to think to myself -- 'cause I grew up in a
military family, my grandfather was a career officer, and my father was
a career officer, and I had no reason at all going into the military to
think that there was anything wrong with the Vietnam war, or anything
wrong with America the Beautiful -- and then there I was, faced with
this situation where guys every day were asking me to kill them.
And it was so
horrible that at a certain point I just made a vow to myself that I
would never put somebody else into the hospital under those
circumstances, that I wouldn't be the guy that squeezed the trigger that
caused some human being to be in that dreadful situation.
Go to Next Page |
