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vietnam war
'Into Sunlight': Commemorating the Vietnam War Through Dance
Choreographer Robin Becker reimagines this story of the human tragedy of war and the eruption of violence during student protests into a powerful and poignant dance production.
Jan 02, 2026
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the American War in Vietnam, Hofstra University hosted a performance of choreographer Robin Becker’s “Into Sunlight.” Inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss’ book, They Marched Into Sunlight,
Becker reimagines this story of the human tragedy of war and the eruption of violence during student protests into a powerful and poignant dance production. Through expressive movement and visual artistry, the performance explores the psychological, emotional, and moral complexities, as well as the historical significance of this tumultuous period.
As a combat veteran of the American war in Vietnam and having yet to “put the war behind me and go on with my life,” as is often advised by those who were not there, I must admit that I was profoundly conflicted by this performance. “Into Sunlight’s” portrayal of the horror and ugliness of war set against the artistic backdrop of Robin Becker’s brilliant choreography and the skilled movements of her dancers, provided a striking contrast that mirrored a personal unease, one that I have long endured and labored to express in my poem "The Rose":
I remember once, in another lifetime,
noticing a lone rose rising defiantly
from beneath the rubble
of a destroyed city North of Danang.
It had no business being there,
adding color to the drabness of war,
beauty to the ugliness of destruction,
and the hope of life
when life held nothing
but suffering and death.
It was a contradiction
and created confusion
amidst the clarity of killing to survive.
...I stepped on it.
There are no flowers in a warzone
nor color, nor beauty, nor hope.
During the talkback that followed the performance, my uneasiness found expression in my rather abrupt request that audience members refrain from applauding my “service” as they had for previous veteran speakers. While I understood that their intentions were sincere—especially at an event intended to honor the "selfless sacrifices" of veterans—I do not believe that my actions as a warrior deserve praise or appreciation. Nor do I believe that participation in war should routinely be met with honor or celebration.
Moreover, after experiencing the horror of war so powerfully portrayed aesthetically in dance, I thought it crucial that the lessons conveyed by the performance not be misunderstood or, worse, glorified. I felt compelled to point out that the common practice of heroizing veterans is not only misguided and dangerous, but perhaps more importantly, fails to serve the interest of both veterans and civilians for several important reasons.
The Mythology of Warrior Worship
- The glorification of warriors hinders readjustment. By providing veterans a refuge of sorts where they may choose to see themselves as heroes, they can avoid facing the realities of their experiences—especially their personal responsibility and guilt for the deaths and destruction they may have caused. Confronting these realities is an essential step toward healing, or better, for reestablishing a sense of normalcy in their lives.
- Heroization of warriors significantly affects public discourse about militarism and war. By making warriors into heroes, open discussion and debate about the necessity, legality, and morality of military engagement become far less likely. As a result, veterans and civilians may be more inclined to support the deployment of military forces to distant battlefields and, increasingly, to American cities, under the pretext of “quelling” what in many cases are manufactured crises.
- Glorification of warriors functions as an effective propaganda and military recruitment tool, an asset to maintaining public support for militarism and endless war, attracting the next generation of “cannon fodder” into military service, often without adequately addressing the realities and consequences involved.
- Though public displays of gratitude and support for veterans and members of the military may appear genuine, they are often superficial and mask the reality of the scandalous way this nation has neglected the needs of returning warriors—the high rates of unemployment, PTSD, moral Injury, homelessness, addiction, and suicide.
- And finally, the heroization of warriors benefits no one in this nation other than the militarists and war profiteers and does little to serve the true interests of veterans and the broader public. Instead, glorification upholds a system that prioritizes military endeavors over the well-being of those most directly affected by them.
Rejecting Troop Blame: Shared Responsibility in War
While recognizing that the mythology of warrior worship must be rejected, and that war is not noble, it is equally important to reject its antithesis as well, the mythology of troop blame. This view regards veterans as murderers and places the entire burden of responsibility for illegal and brutal war on their shoulders while backhandedly absolving civilians of culpability. In a democratic society, governance and responsibility for war is a collective burden—by and for the people. Thus, in a very real sense, there is blood on all of our hands.
The Integrative Power of “Into Sunlight”: Dance as a pathway to Healing
The genius of “Into Sunlight” lies in Robin Becker’s ability to choreograph the sublime movement of her dancers to provide audience members a face-to-face confrontation with the harsh realities of military violence, human suffering, and death. By blending the visual beauty of dance with the discomfort, awe, pain, and exhilaration experienced by warriors on the battlefield, Becker creates a powerful contrast that evokes, in the realm of art, the intense and complex emotions associated with personal trauma.
“Into Sunlight” is not to be passively enjoyed in the conventional sense. Rather, it is participatory, reactive, and demands personal engagement and interpretation. Such art provides an immersive experience transforming audience members from passive observers into active co-creators of meaning. By blurring the boundaries between creator and audience, this performance encourages personal growth, introspection, understanding, self-forgiveness, and reconciliation, opening a pathway for audience members to begin the difficult task of identifying, processing, and healing the lingering effects of personal trauma and moral injury. Or, at least, it provides a way to come to terms with these experiences—to find a place for it in one’s “being.” It is precisely at this intersection where beauty meets the sublime that anguish is transformed into poignant artistry, allowing “Into Sunlight” to succeed in ways other more conventional therapies may have failed.
Conclusion
Though the performance is undeniably unsettling, I know I have benefited from the experience and am confident that other “victims” of war or of personal trauma, will benefit as well. Facing the demons we have for so long tried to suppress, though uncomfortable, is a difficult, though necessary, prerequisite on the path to healing.
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When Obedience Becomes Complicity: From Mỹ Lai to Today’s Military Conscience
The bravest act is sometimes the one that defies orders, safeguards the innocent, and enforces the law.
Dec 02, 2025
Courage is rarely convenient. Sometimes it is condemned. Ask Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr.
On March 16, 1968, Thompson, a young Army helicopter pilot in the 123rd Aviation Battalion of the 23rd Infantry Division, flew over the South Vietnamese village of Sơn Mỹ and witnessed something unimaginable. American soldiers were systematically killing unarmed civilians—women, children, and the elderly. There were no enemy combatants. This was not war. This was a massacre.
Most soldiers either did not see or refused to confront the truth. Thompson did. He acted decisively: He hovered his helicopter between the troops and the villagers; ordered his crew, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, to fire on American soldiers if the killing continued; and personally escorted terrified civilians to safety. He radioed repeated warnings to Task Force Barker headquarters. Eventually, his actions forced command to halt the massacre.
For Thompson, the cost of moral courage was immense. He endured ostracism, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, and personal strife for years. In 1970, he testified in a closed congressional hearing about what he had seen, facing hostility from some quarters of government and military leadership. Congressman Mendel Rivers (D-SC) even declared that Thompson was the only soldier at Mỹ Lai who should be punished, attempting to have him court-martialed for turning his weapons on fellow troops. As the US government tried to cover up the massacre, Thompson was vilified and received death threats. Recognition came decades later when the Army awarded him the Soldier’s Medal, a belated acknowledgment of moral courage under fire.
When the chain of command conflicts with the Constitution or the law, the obligation to act ethically supersedes the obligation to obey.
Decades later, Thompson’s example has returned to the national conversation. Recently, a group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Penn.), Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.), and Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), released a video urging active-duty military and intelligence personnel to refuse illegal orders. “You can refuse illegal orders…you must refuse illegal orders,” the lawmakers said. “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.” They framed their guidance as a duty to uphold the oath to the Constitution, not to any individual leader.
The reaction was swift and incendiary. President Donald Trump called the statement “seditious behavior at the highest level,” while Pentagon officials warned it could undermine “good order and discipline.” Some lawmakers were reportedly notified of an FBI inquiry. Social media amplified threats, escalating beyond rhetoric into menace. On Truth Social, a user openly called for the lawmakers to be hanged—a post the president reposted. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) denounced the act, stating from the Senate floor that Trump was “calling for the execution of elected officials” and emphasizing, “This is an outright threat, and it’s deadly serious.” When questioned in an interview, Trump insisted he was “not threatening” the lawmakers, but added, “I think they’re in serious trouble. In the old days, they would have [been] dead.”
Yet legal experts insist the lawmakers’ message was not only lawful—it was accurate. “They did not encourage unlawful action,” explained Brenner Fissell, professor of law at Villanova University and vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice. “They were not encouraging the disobedience of lawful orders; they were encouraging the disobedience of unlawful orders. And that is a correct statement of the law.” Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), service members must obey lawful orders, but there is a strong presumption that orders are lawful. At the same time, service members may refuse patently illegal commands, including those that constitute war crimes, and can even face prosecution for carrying them out.
The stakes of following orders have never been abstract. Recent reporting has raised alarms that American military officials may have been ordered to commit grave violations of the laws of war. A Washington Post report described a September strike in the Caribbean in which boats suspected of smuggling drugs were attacked, and survivors were allegedly targeted in a follow-up strike. According to the report, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a verbal order to “kill everyone aboard” the boats, prompting a military commander to carry out a second strike on those who initially survived.
Lawmakers across the aisle responded with alarm. Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican and former Intelligence Committee chair, called the act “very serious” and “an illegal act.” Sen. Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said the report—if accurate—“rises to the level of a war crime.” And Sen. Mark Kelly echoed the concern, stating plainly on CNN: “It seems to.”
The ethical unease is not just theoretical, it is coming from inside the chain of command. The Orders Project, founded five years ago to provide independent legal guidance to US service members, has seen a noticeable uptick in calls over the past three months. Staff officers involved in planning the Caribbean strikes have reached out seeking guidance, as have National Guard members concerned about potential domestic deployments. Some callers even express fear of legal complicity in what they describe as potential atrocities abroad, including US weapons being used in Gaza.
“These are people who are performing some sort of role in between,” explained retired Lieutenant Colonel Frank Rosenblatt, an Army lawyer and president of the National Institute of Military Justice, which runs The Orders Project. “They’re not the ones on the operations themselves, but they are concerned that the guidance they’re being asked to provide has been very disfavored. They’re feeling pressure from their higher-ups to convert a ‘nonconcur’ into a ‘concur.’”
From Sơn Mỹ to Capitol Hill, and now to the Caribbean, the principle is clear: Silence in the face of wrongdoing is complicity; conscience in the face of authority is courage. As historian Howard Zinn once observed, “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” Thompson drew a line between duty and obedience, risking his career, reputation, and personal safety to protect the innocent. Today, lawmakers and service members alike are grappling with the same lesson: Patriotism is not measured by conformity—it is measured by integrity.
This is more than a legal debate; it is a moral one. History offers no ambiguity. When the chain of command conflicts with the Constitution or the law, the obligation to act ethically supersedes the obligation to obey. Thompson’s helicopter hovering over the bodies in Sơn Mỹ, the lawmakers’ warning to military personnel, the threats that followed, reports of potential unlawful strikes in the Caribbean, and internal military concerns about legal complicity are chapters of the same story: one of conscience, courage, and accountability.
In a time when authority can intimidate, mislead, or threaten the nation’s foundational laws, the lesson of Hugh Thompson Jr. endures. True service is not blind obedience. It is the willingness to say no, to defend the innocent, and to honor the Constitution, even when doing so invites condemnation, career jeopardy, or worse. Democracy is not measured by the strength of its institutions alone, but by the moral courage of those entrusted to uphold them.
The challenge is timeless: The bravest act is sometimes the one that defies orders, safeguards the innocent, and enforces the law. From the rice paddies of Sơn Mỹ to the halls of Capitol Hill, and across oceans to the Caribbean, the measure of our nation, and its soldiers, is in the courage to act rightly, even when it costs everything. As General Omar N. Bradley once reminded the world, “Leadership is intangible, and no weapon ever designed can replace it.”Keep ReadingShow Less
'Just Following Orders': From the My Lai Massacre to Trump and Hegseth
As the Trump regime deteriorates, there may come a day when right and wrong feels as obvious as it did that 1968 day in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Nov 26, 2025
A U.S. Army helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson Jr. may be the greatest American hero you’ve probably never heard of. On March 16, 1968, Thompson—a warrant officer serving in Vietnam—and his crew were dispatched to support a “search and destroy” mission supposedly targeting the Viet Cong in a tiny hamlet called My Lai.
Instead, the Georgia-born soldier came up upon arguably the most notorious war crime in U.S. history—with thatch hutches ablaze and countless villagers, including women and children, laying dead or dying in an irrigation ditch.
Thompson landed and found the commander on the ground, Lt. William Calley. “What is this?” he asked. “Who are these people?”
“Just following orders,” Calley replied. After some more back and forth, the flustered Thompson replied: “But, these are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.”
What Thompson and his helicopter crew did next was truly remarkable. Holding Calley and their other U.S. comrades at bay, they shielded a group of Vietnamese women, children and old men as they fled. Eventually, he loaded 11 villagers into the helicopter, and then Thompson and his men thought they detected movement in the ditch. Two fellow solders found a boy, just 5 or 6, hiding under the corpses, “covered in blood and obviously in a state of shock.” After safely evacuating the boy to a military hospital, Thompson reached a lieutenant colonel who ordered Calley to stop the killings.
Near the end of his life, Thompson—who died in 2006—and two comrades were recognized for their courage and the many lives they saved at My Lai, awarded the Army’s highest award for bravery not in conflict with an enemy (the Soldier’s Medal), as well as the the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award. He even returned to My Lai for an emotional reunion in 1998.
But it wasn’t like that in real time. During the war, a prominent congressman demanded that Thompson be court-martialed. “I’d received death threats over the phone,” he told CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2004. “Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up.”
A generation after Thompson’s death, the kind of bold action he took that day in 1968 — disobeying what he correctly understood as an illegal order—is yet again on America’s front burner. This time, the debate is fueled by a video from six veterans who now serve as Democrats in Congress―reminding today’s soldiers about their sworn duty to disobey unlawful commands.
That every expert in military law agrees with this principle hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump or his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, from going ballistic—calling the Democrats “traitors” or even reposting calls for their death by hanging.
On Monday, Hegseth kicked things up a notch by endorsing a plan for one of the six—Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and decorated Navy fighter pilot—to return to active duty, so that he can be court-martialed for taking part in the video. A statement from the Pentagon, which Trump and Hegseth call “the Department of War,” insisted that “orders are presumed to be lawful. A servicemember’s personal philosophy does not justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.”
Even as the growing controversy dominates the headlines, there is one aspect to the illegal-orders debate that practically no one is talking about. Actions like Thompson’s refusal at My Lai don’t only stand out for the soldier’s gumption. It is also the stuff of peace prizes and 60 Minutes profiles because it is so incredibly rare.
Do your own research. It’s very difficult to find examples in America’s 249-year history of troops disobeying orders because they are believed to be illegal. To be sure, there are famous incidents of soldiers who disobeyed an order and heroically saved lives — but almost all of them were because the command was reckless or just plain stupid, which isn’t the same as illegal or unconstitutional.
It’s not like there haven’t been opportunities. There have been American war crimes from Wounded Knee to Abu Ghraib, what Barack Obama famously called “dumb wars” like the 2003 assault on Iraq, and moments of intense moral agony, like dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These did produce a few whistleblowers or conscientious objectors, of course, but cases of actually refusing an order are few.
It’s not hard to understand why. Most military orders—even ones later reviled by history—come with some veneer of legality, whether it’s an opinion from a military lawyer or a congressional authorization vote, as happened with Vietnam, Iraq, and other conflicts.
The video recorded by Kelly and the others (including Pennsylvania Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio) focuses only on the widely accepted principle that military men and women must follow the law and the Constitution above all else, and doesn’t mention Trump or any specific disputed orders. In interviews, though, Democrats like Kelly and Houlahan have criticized Trump’s ongoing attacks on boats off South America that the regime claims are smuggling drugs.
While almost every expert on military laws describes these attacks—which have killed at least 83 people—as extrajudicial killings lacking legal justification, the Office of Legal Counsel in Trump’s Justice Department has nonetheless written a secret classified memo to justify them. Any officer or lower-level troop ordered to blow up these boats and kill all the people on board hasn’t seen the memo. And they won’t get a medal for saying “no”—at least not in 2025. They will be court-martialed and vilified by MAGA.
New York Times opinion writer David French, a Harvard Law grad who served as an Army lawyer in Iraq, notes the congressional video didn’t advise troops on what exactly is an illegal order, and adds: “Individual service members don’t have sufficient knowledge or information to make those kinds of judgments. When time is of the essence and lives are on the line, your first impulse must be to do as you’re told.”
Not always, as Thompson showed at My Lai, but military matters are rarely that black and white. The Trump regime’s sending of National Guard units and even active-duty military into cities such as Los Angeles may be an unnecessary and inflammatory violation of democratic norms, but experienced judges continue to debate its legality. Expecting the rank-and-file troops to decide is asking a lot.
It is very much in the spirit of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel and its legendary Catch-22: A soldier must disobey an illegal order, yet orders, in the heat of the moment, are almost never illegal.
That doesn’t mean Trump and Hegseth threatening Kelly and the other Democrats with jail and possibly the noose isn’t utterly outrageous. After all, they did nothing more than remind soldiers of their obligation to the law in the same language their drill sergeants use in boot camp.
I do also think—understanding the limitations of a MAGA-fed Congress—that good people of both parties on Capitol Hill should be doing a lot more to invoke the War Powers Act, hold hearings, debate impeachment, and do whatever else they can to prevent Trump’s reckless acts in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In other words, stop illegal orders before they’re given.
That said, as the Trump regime deteriorates, there may come a day when right and wrong feels as obvious as it did that 1968 day in the rice paddies of Vietnam. If, heaven forbid, this government ever ordered troops to put down a protest by firing on citizens, we will need a platoon full of Hugh Thompsons and no William Calleys, “just following orders.”
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