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to say how much guilt was involved, for while there's awe in a sug–
gestion of guilt or guilt potential, it was never allowed to reach articu–
late or conscious form.
It
couldn't be, for various psychic reasons. At
the time the bomb was tested and used, many of the scientists seemed
to have almost a profound religious experience: they came out on the
other side of the conversion in the desert either giving much of their
lives, as in the case of Zillard and Rabinowitch, to warning the world
about the weapon that had been unleashed or identifying with the
force, deifying it, as did Teller and a few others. A number of them,
the vast in-between, remained desensitized and refused to allow the
possibility of guilt to enter them so to speak.
Finally, if one turns to the experience with anti-war veterans–
again, I'm giving only a precis - there's something interesting, and, I
think, very important going- on. The anti-war veterans I've worked with
and interviewed talk a great deal about the experience of guilt and do
indeed feel guilt in a lot of ways. If one is to schematize it, one can
speak of the guilt they feel as survivors, for they are survivors of a
particular kind of holocaust, and also of their guilt as slaughterers.
They've been both victims and executioners. Further, some of the
veterans' most vivid guilt, even with those who were not committed to
anti-war positions, has been for not stopping atrocities, as in the case
of one man at Mylai who did not fire but remains bound in a kind of
self-punitive guilt for not having stopped that massacre, even though
there was nothing he could have done.
In
general, Vietnam veterans have a broad sense of having been
part of an evil project. This is a social experience the country as a
whole and the veterans share, which I think has to do with the whole
theory of the survivor: there's no rationale, no
raison
d'
etre,
no mean–
ing one can find, as one could in World War II, in this war to give
one the sense of having to do a dirty job that is necessary because
there is real evil out there. The Vietnam war is a dirty job that is un–
necessary, and in some ways still dirtier because there are no battle
lines. The reaction of the population, which sees the war as a tainted
war and then sees the men who fight the war as tainted, plays, of
course, a central role in a ll this.
But the point to make here is that among the anti-war veterans
who, in some degree, confront their guilt in terms of responsibility,
the guilt becomes energizing. So ]",'e come in this work to distinguish
rather sharply bet\\'een static forms of guilt - either numbed relation–
ships to it, resistance of feeling, or the self-punitive or self-lacerating–
mea culpa,
a closed circle of guilt which goes nowhere - and ener–
gizing or animating guilt, which always connects with an image beyond
the guilt and beyond the atrocity and mo\'es toward change and trans–
formation.
In
this sense, the anti-war veterans, among the three groups
I've been talking about, are outstanding in their capacity to take hold
of their guilt and use it without renouncing it. I don't claim this is
typical of a ll Vietnam veterans, and perhaps it's true only of a small
group of anti-war veterans, Nonethe less, it's a \'erv interesting and im–
portant kind of model.
Now, one could say that these men are cu lpable in a lIIoral and
