Yes, I can remember playing Canasta with my grandma. That was "cards" in my childhood. And when I was an editor in publishing, I actually had a little card with my name, position, and address on it that I could give out to potential authors (or, I guess, whomever). But in those years, if you had ever told me about the "cards" that TomDispatch regular Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, describes today, the ones being left by ICE agents in the empty cars of people they personally "disappeared," I would never have believed you. Not in America. Not even in a future America, decades away, the kind of country that, in my college years, I was reading about in science-fiction novels.
Of course, the sci-fi writers of that era could never have imagined Donald Trump's America, a "new world" that would then have been quite literally inconceivable. Today, however, we all find ourselves in a futuristic America that once would have been beyond belief. People in this country being shot in the street by government policemen (of a sort that would once themselves have been beyond imagining)? A vice president refusing to apologize for calling a 37-year-old nurse and U.S. citizen, shot and killed on one of those very streets, an "assassin"? A president threatening to "nationalize" or "take over" the running of our elections (the Constitution be damned)?
And, of course, that's just to start down a list that grows stranger and longer by the week. With that in mind, let Turse, who fortunately is an expert on a place -- South Vietnam during the American war there -- where such things did indeed happen (as he'll explain), take you into a world that, at least in this country, would once have been beyond imagining. Tom
ICE Brings the War Home
Immigration Agents Mimic Past U.S. Dealers of Death
By Nick Turse
Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers pulled over several cars in Eagle County, Colorado.They took the people away in handcuffs, according to a witness, and left the cars idling at the side of the road.When family members of the disappeared immigrants arrived, there was no sign of their loved ones. What they found instead were customized ace of spades playing cards that read "ICE Denver Field Office."
When I saw an image of that card, the memories came flooding back. I'd seen something similar many years before.Sitting in the U.S. National Archives building -- Archives II -- in College Park, Maryland, sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, I'd spent parts of several afternoons watching film footage shot by -- and of -- U.S. troops in Vietnam back in the 1960s.One of those silent military home movies always stuck with me.
That short film opened with a Vietnamese woman clutching a child next to a group of 10 or 15 other children huddled together. They all look wary. Worried. Scared. The camera lingered on a young girl, perhaps five years old, clutching a baby. If that girl survived, she would be around 64 years old today.
After several shots of those children, the source of their fear was revealed. The film cut to a group of foreign young men -- heavily armed U.S. soldiers. They were tanned and gaunt, smoking and talking, standing over the corpses of some young Vietnamese men or boys. We see the dead bodies at a distance, again. Lying together and yet eerily alone. Next, the film cuts to a collection of weapons -- perhaps a cache found in or near the Vietnamese village where all of this occurred -- that resembled old junk more than lethal armaments. The film kept cutting between short scenes of American troops and Vietnamese bodies until it happened.
I've never forgotten the scene that followed because I was initially shocked that it had been immortalized on film. I was also surprised that the film had never been destroyed. But then I remembered how ubiquitous such activity was at the time. How soldiers bragged about it. How it was covered -- positively -- in the U.S. press. How it even showed up in the Congressional Record, not as an outrage deserving of investigation but essentially as a thank you to a manufacturer of playing cards.
In the next scene, we see a soldier pull an ace of spades from what looks like a big stack of such cards. He's nonchalant. He's clearly not worried about an officer seeing what he's doing. He obviously knows he's being filmed. He reaches down and, as another soldier presses his boot into the chest of that corpse to hold it steady, he tries to insert the card into the mouth of one of the dead Vietnamese. It's apparently not so easy. It takes a bit of doing, but it proves possible. The next scene shows an ace of spades sticking out of the dead boy's mouth. The camera lingers. It's oddly and sickeningly cinematic. The following scene shows another Vietnamese, his face blackened. There's a battered ace of spades jammed in his mouth, too.
"Impeding" ICE
Such "death cards" -- generally either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for a kill -- were ubiquitous among U.S. troops in Vietnam in those years.Some soldiers, like those in that unit of the 25th Infantry Division operating in Quang Ngai Province in 1967, used a regular ace of spades of the type you'd find in a standard deck of cards. But Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, for instance, left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit's nickname "Gunfighters," a skull-and-crossbones, and the phrase "dealers of death."Helicopter pilots, like Captain Lynn Carlson, occasionally dropped similar specially made calling cards from their gunships. One side of Carlson's card read: "Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther 20." The other side proclaimed, "The Lord giveth and the 20mm [cannon] taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good."
The cards found last month in Eagle County harken back to that brutal heritage. They were the same general size and shape as those shoved into the mouths of dead Vietnamese: black and white 4---6-inch cards with an "A" over a spade in their top left and bottom right corners. A larger ornate black-and-white spade dominates the center of the card. Above it is the phrase "ICE Denver Field Office."Below it, you find the address and phone number of the ICE detention facility in nearby Aurora, Colorado.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
