I used to think that war was Henry Fonda shooting it out behind a water trough on a dusty Wyoming street. Or Achilles chasing Hector around Troy. So the only way that I have been able to understand the war in Vietnam is to pretend, each time a GI or a Vietnamese died, that it was my brother or my father or my mother that died. By now over a million Vietnamese have been killed and probably 80 thousand Americans. If all of us felt even a little bit of that in our stomachs, not even all of America could digest that much sorrow.

The other thing I used to think about war is that when it got really evil. God would come down and stop it. The day of the eclipse, I prayed that God would blot out the sun and announce that the earth would stay black and cold until the war ended. That would fix them, I thought, Hoo-hah, I thought. Finally I'd have someone really big on my side.

But as the eclipse came and went, I realized that if God hadn't intervened for the Crusades or for the American Indians, and for the black people torn from their roots in Africa and stomped into the mud in this country, then He wasn't going to step in this time either.

It is very tempting to give one stroke of the pen for each of the millions of people that America has killed or starved or maimed, or the thousands of rivers that it has polluted, and reduce it all to a table or graph and then say, "Look!"

Six or seven million South Vietnamese-nearly half of the population of the country-now live in concentration camps. Some of the camps are near the major cities, but many are placed around American army bases to absorb the NLF mortar attacks. Saigon now has 2,800,000 people in it, making it the densest city in the world-twice as crowded as Tokyo.

The newspapers give the number of dead every morning. But numbers have turned into the ultimate refuge of rational man. A bleeding, dying man is not even in the same world as a number.

The New York Times, March 17, 1968, page one:

"Saigon-American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement in the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting."

That's the Times story about the My Lai massacre. Like most of the news in American papers about the war, it is written from an Army press handout, which means it's a lie. But even if it had said "128 massacred," how could you understand that at breakfast? How hard is it to understand the fact that the U.S. sent 217 separate GIs-mostly black-to their own separate deaths a couple weeks ago? How many stories like the one in the Times have you read in the last year?

The horror stories give me nightmares, and what I see in nightmares are faces. Mostly of kids. One is the face of a kid who is rolling over and over on the ground, trying to extinguish the burning napalm, his flesh turning to charcoal underneath.

At 5 a.m. on October 28, 1967, Oakland policeman John Frey tried to kill Huey Newton. Minister of Defense for the Black Panther Party. Immediately after Huey hit the ground, someone, from somewhere, shot and killed John Frey, Newton finally hailed a passing car, and asked to be driven to Kaiser Hospital. Now from Gene Marine's The Black Panthers:

"Newton arrived at Kaiser Hospital with four bullet holes in his abdomen and one in his thigh... The hospital refused to treat him until the police arrived, and then, when they did treat him, allowed the cops to shackle him to an operating table. Although he was shouting in pain for the doctors to ease the shackles, the doctor treating him told him to shut up. He insists that at least one cop hit him in his wounded abdomen with a nightstick and that several beat him on the wrists and elsewhere until he passed out from the pain.

"Later, when he was in a hospital room being fed intravenously, police guards told him that they were going to cut the tubes. One pointed a loaded shotgun at his head and announced that he was going to kill him and report that he had tried to escape: then the policeman lowered his gun and said he wouldn't shoot Newton because he was going to die in the gas chamber anyway. It was a common practice for the police guards to kick the foot of the bed to jar Newton's wound open and to start it bleeding under the bandage."

They may let Huey out of jail soon. After all, he's innocent. People tell me that the American judicial system goes lumbering on, sometimes with a few hitches and inconveniences, but justice just the same. Except that the same day that Huey was shot, and 80-year-old Palo Alto black man, who was later proved to be guilty of no crime, was shot to death by a Palo Alto policeman.

In the fall of 1968, I helped Peace and Freedom canvass Cambridge for rent control. Most of the people just stared back blankly when I tried to tell them that their rents were too high and that their rooms were dangerous.