Eric Sevareid grabbed his hat, a parachute, and a bottle of gin as he contemplated his next, possibly last, few moments. He was high over the Himalayas and both engines had failed. Hundreds of feet below, the Burmese jungle prowled over rugged terrain claimed by the fierce Naga tribe.
Headhunters, more specifically.
Sevareid, a CBS war reporter, was one of the last civilians, diplomats, and flight crew who were forced to jump from their C-46 Commando, nicknamed “the flying coffin,” before it struck the side of a mountain.
It was August of 1943, well into monsoon season, and the passengers’ odds of survival were abysmal. Their cargo transport was one of nearly 600 such aircraft eventually lost in “The Hump,” the Allied supply operation from India to China in World War II.
The approaching Naga warriors would have been a terrifying sight - tribesmen who tattooed their faces and chests to denote bravery in battle or celebrate the taking of enemy heads. There was little doubt the crash survivors knew they had dodged death in the air only to shake its hand on the ground.
Yet 22 days later, all of the 21 refugees emerged — on foot — from the jungle. They owed their survival in no small part to the Naga who kept the strangers from harm, despite not speaking their language, until rescuers parachuted in weeks later.
“Instead of decapitating us, the savages adopted us,” wrote survivor and diplomat John Paton Davies.
Yet it would hardly have been a war crime if the Naga slaughtered the men under the assumption that — having fallen from a military craft and in military parachutes — they were actually soldiers. The fact that the tribe instead cared for the civilian survivors is telling of their honor as warriors.
Had Republican senators greeted Davies and companions instead, their story would have been lost with their bones in the jungle. One doubts they would have been allowed to live, given some Congressmens’ recent assumptions regarding who constitutes an “enemy combatant” and what constitutes “incapacitated.”
Congress has become embroiled in the game of assumptions as of late while it investigates the Sept. 2 attack on an unconfirmed drug boat in the Caribbean – an attack that left two survivors who, about 40 minutes later, were killed in a second attack despite being reportedly adrift and unable to return fire.
As reported by CBS, “Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said the survivors were ‘trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight.’” This was his assumption despite the clearly inoperable boat segment they clung to, the potential injuries they sustained in the first blast, the lack of surface-to-air assault weapons in their hands, or their apparent state of distress.
Killing injured, shipwrecked civilians constitutes a war crime. It is beneath our nation’s soldiers to sully their reputation with such blatant thumbing of the nose at both the rules of engagement and maritime law. It constitutes the extermination of witnesses under the guise of war, which will tarnish the honor of American soldiers, past and present, who have faithfully abided by the rules of combat despite much more perilous circumstances.
The president has claimed such targets were smuggling drugs into the country, thus putting the nation’s drug users at risk. But given the lack of evidence against them, those killed in such strikes are nothing more sinister than brown people from poor nations in fast boats. Their deaths have become a legal farce and moral train wreck, just the sort of social media distraction the White House craves.
The men in the boat, those now at the center of the Congressional inquiry, are seen on video in the last moments of their lives waving at an American aircraft in a bid for help.
Of course, this is an assumption. They could have been signaling to the nation’s elite fighting force to come down to their watery graves and fight like men, face to face, hand to hand. Or, they could have become exactly what the Department of Defense fears the most: two injured men, scared and unarmed, desperately flagging down help as they fight to stay afloat.
We are told to believe — without evidence beyond “trust me” — that their death penalties were warranted because we must win the war against drugs. Yet this year, Trump has cut billions in funding for the nation’s drug addiction and mental health programs. And just this month, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, who has actually been convicted of wide-reaching drug crimes in a court of law.
“If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life,” Trump explained. To that end, nor should you blow his boat out of the water, killing him “for the rest of his life” without evidence of a crime just because “somebody sells drugs in that country.”
Americans might never know so much as the names of those killed in the Sept. 2 attack, what evidence made them targets, or the reasons they reached up to us, in pain, and waved.
Had they been found by Naga headhunters instead, they might have survived the encounter - even “savages” understand honor in times of war.
--30--
Comments
