In his dark masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), novelist Cormac McCarthy tells the terrifying tale of a gang of Yanqui scalp-hunters who left an apocalyptic trail of carnage from Chihuahua to Southern California in the early 1850s.
Commissioned by Mexican authorities to hunt marauding Apaches, the company of ex-filibusters and convicts under the command of the psychopath John Glanton quickly became intoxicated with gore. They began to exterminate local farmers as well as Indians, and when there were no innocents left to rape and slaughter, they turned upon themselves with shark-like fury.
Many readers have recoiled from the gruesome extremism of McCarthy's imagery: the roasted skulls of tortured captives, necklaces of human ears, an unspeakable tree of dead infants. Others have balked at his unpatriotic emphasis on the genocidal origins of the American West and the book's obvious allusion to "search and destroy" missions à la Vietnam.
But Blood Meridian, like all of McCarthy's novels, is based on meticulous research. Glanton - the white savage, the satanic face of Manifest Destiny - really existed. He's simply the ancestor most Americans would prefer to forget. He's also the ghost we can't avoid.
Six weeks ago, a courageous hometown paper in rustbelt Ohio - the Toledo Blade - tore the wraps off an officially suppressed story of Vietnam-era exterminism that recapitulates Blood Meridian in the most ghastly and unbearable detail. The reincarnation of Glanton's scalping party was an elite 45-man unit of the 101 Airborne Division known as "Tiger Force." The Blade's intricate reconstruction of its murderous march through the Central Highlands of Vietnam in summer and fall 1967 needs to be read in full, horrifying detail [at <http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTIGERFORCE>]. Blade reporters interviewed more than 100 American veterans and Vietnamese survivors. . . .
[The full text is available at <http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17192>.] ***** -- Yoshie
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