nineteen, nineteen sixty-two or three, I don’t remember, reported, it was an A., I think an A.P. or E.P. correspondence, reported that, uh, Saigon officials were sending American skyhawks, you know, airplanes, over to, uh, over Viet, uh,Vietnamese villages to wipe them out with napalm raids in order to cover instances of graft, for example. That’s, I think, depraved. Incidentally, I don’t condemn that, because, you see, uh, just to mention this matter of double standard, there are really three kinds of terror in Vietnam: there’s Vietcong terror, there’s the Saigon government terror, and there’s American terror. And if you read what I’ve written, I say practically nothing about either Vietcong terror or terror carried out by the Saigon government.
Uh, uh, uh, I don’t think
Uh, now if one wanted to talk about that one would have to point out that the terror carried out by the Saigon government is incredibly greater in extent, and has a very different political purpose, which one could discuss, but, I restrict myself to discussing American Terror.
American Terror libretto © Jeffrey Lependorf 2008
23