Doug Valentine Journeys into the Heart of U.S. War Crimes in Southeast Asia
Douglas Valentine’s latest book, "Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire," is part memoir, and part "a critical analysis of how Western imperialists impose their will on foreign nations”
“I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.”
— Kurtz to Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Doug Valentine’s latest book, Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire, has more of a retrospective feel than his previous books. Given that the author is now in his seventies, such evocation of autobiographical memories is not unusual, as it recalls truths discovered through hard discovery and psychological and emotional growth.
Valentine is the premier historian of the dark crimes of the U.S. and its allies in Southeast Asia, the author of The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam. He is also a novelist and a poet, who writes that his new book is “more than a memoir and travelogue; it is also a critical analysis of how Western imperialists impose their will on foreign nations.” It describes “the ‘dark arts’ of religious propaganda and CIA psychological warfare (psywar) and drug trafficking operations, and how they ultimately corrupted America. [Valentine, Douglas. Pisces Moon (p. 10). Trine Day. Kindle Edition]
Indeed, the sections of Moon which are autobiographical memoir serve as a frame for Valentine, to revisit and document U.S. crimes wreaked upon Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam in the decades of the Cold War. The references to astrological and celestial motions provide ironic commentary about his journey. (“Moon in Aries. Put a spring in your step,” one chapter epigraph reads [p. 40].)
Valentine, who was 41 years old at the time of his BBC-sponsored journey back to Southeast Asia, is like a modern Dante, “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” He is symbolically guided by his Beatrice – an astrologer friend named Helen – through the hellish landscape of CIA torturers, assassins, corrupt spies and avaricious military “advisers,” and their partner warlords, generals, and drug lords, waging both covert and overt wars to enrich the U.S. ruling class.
At the time, the author, half-heartedly bankrolled by the BBC, was investigating the CIA’s use of drug trafficking to enrich itself and fund its secret wars. Years later some of this material was used in his two books exposing the CIA’s penetration of the so-called “war on drugs,” The Strength of the Pack and The Strength of the Wolf.
Pisces Moon elaborates on much of this material, and in many ways is a culmination of Valentine’s work documenting the debauched and evil enterprises that consume American foreign policy, touching on America’s penchant for self-deception and its addiction to “sacred male aggression” (p. 231).
While the memoir passages are symbolically a voyage into a Dantean hell, it is also a work of self-discovery for a man then entering middle age, who must face on the benighted lands themselves the men he had written about who staffed and ran the assassination, drug-running, torturing enterprises. Echoing Conrad’s Marlow going up the river to find the elusive, mysterious and debauched Colonel Kurtz, Valentine’s journey takes him to meet three key CIA figures, the “debauched” Bill Young, the “deranged” Tony Poshepny (himself considered a model for the Kurtz-like Brando character in Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”), and the “baleful” Jack Shirley.
The journey is not without danger, both physically and psychically. “Every journey is a quest for self-knowledge,” Valentine reminds us (pg. 12).
In the course of the book, we learn a lot about who the author is, and how he came upon his journey. We learn how (in Doug’s words) “in 1971, I dropped out of college three weeks shy of graduation; when I burned every bridge – to my family, fiancée and pending career as a high school English teacher – in exchange for the freedom to recreate myself as a writer. Twenty years later I was off on my own lonely long-distance journey, an echo of the Sixties anti-heroes in the empty corridors of the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution. Like Brodsky said, ‘A writer is a lonely traveler, and no one is his helper’” (p. 49). (I discovered that both Valentine and I were roaming around San Francisco’s North Beach at roughly the same time, exploring our own versions of self and societal alienation.)
At one point, Valentine enters a Vietnamese village, the first American to do so since South Vietnam feel to the victorious North Vietnamese army in 1975, sixteen years earlier.
“Three young girls linked arm-in-arm and giggling uncontrollably shyly approached and cautiously touched my arm, just to see if I was real. And I was. Never before had I been so keenly aware of my humanity. How strange, I thought, that I must travel halfway round the world to awaken to that most fundamental fact.” (p. 124)
Doug’s journey brings home to him the devastation the U.S. led in its wake from its two decades of covert and overt wars in Southeast Asia, and its differential toll.
“I was struck by how prosperous Bangkok seemed in comparison to Saigon. Bangkok wasn’t reeling from a recent war of liberation or starving from medieval economic sanctions. The people weren’t poisoned by Agent Orange and the countryside wasn’t pockmarked with bomb craters and the wreckage of helicopter gunships. Unlike people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the Thais can walk around the countryside without fear of stepping on a landmine.” (p. 193)
Valentine reminds us in some detail of the terrible histories of this region, and the myriad ways the U.S. suborned warlords and drug dealers, missionaries and art dealers, mountain peasants and Khmer Rouge militants, to produce a cataclysm of destruction.
Writing about the secret bombing of Cambodia and its aftermath, Doug recalls:
On 30 April [1970], Nixon announced the joint US and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. That day, the 3rd Mobile Strike Force seized Sihanoukville, while [Kampuchea Khmer Krom] units were flown from Bien Hoa to Phnom Penh. Upon learning of the secret bombings and invasion, demonstrations erupted around the world. On 4 May, four protesters at Kent State were killed where they stood by US National Guardsmen. To this day, no one knows their murderers’ names.
By mid-1970 an estimated 600,000 Cambodians had been killed. Rendered homeless, a million more had fled to Phnom Penh or seething with hatred for the Americans, had enlisted in the Khmer Rouge. Initially opposed by the North Vietnamese and Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge had idled until the US invasion, after which point the North Vietnamese supported them. It was Sihanouk’s worst nightmare but the members of the high cabal in Washington patted themselves on the back and forged ahead. (p. 341)
At the end of his journey, our hero, like a haggard Odysseus, returns home to his wife, who kindly offers him a marijuana joint, at the cusp of the Pisces new moon, which we learn represents a “home coming.” He is ready to take up the project of writing his new books, and help enlighten his readers with the knowledge he has gathered at much personal expense.
Beyond the memoir and autobiography, Pisces Moon is a work of intense history: a retelling of the real story of how the United States undermined governments and societies in Southeast Asia, and in the process bombed and otherwise killed millions of people. It’s a complex and horrific tale of covert ops, shifting alliances, comprador capitalists, and international power politics.
At the end of both the history and the memoir’s dual journeys, we are left to consider the tragic import of the U.S. wars in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the penetration and subversion of states like Thailand. The final disaster was maybe the greatest of all. Cambodia was secretly bombed, as the U.S. had in Laos. Laos was littered with cluster bombs, which still cause deaths to this day.
The amount of chemical defoliants dropped on Vietnam by the U.S. was horrific, poisoning “nearly 12,000 square miles of Vietnamese jungles… over a 10-year period in an effort to clear large areas of jungle that provided Viet Cong guerrillas with cover, shelter and food,” leaving a legacy decades later of “ illnesses, birth defects and continued deforestation.”
In Cambodia, the U.S. dropped more bombs than it did over Japan in World War II. The U.S. cynically backed the Khmer Rouge, Khmer Serai, and any group or politician it could find it could bend to its purposes. Over a million Cambodian souls paid with their lives for this American macho-inspired hubris, and Doug Valentine wants us to remember, to understand the intense barbarity of it all.
The history is dense, at times phantasmagorical and vertiginous, as it details the events that today’s young and rising generations know precious little about.
Valentine’s book is a gem, a gift offered by an author who has literally been there, talked with the Kurtzes of the world, and returned intact to tell us what he saw and recorded. Everyone should have this book. Read it slowly. Let its message filter through.
Endnote:
Parts of this post were originally published as an Amazon review by this author: “A Dantean Descent into the Heart of America’s Self-Deception About Itself”.