Post by cityofchill on Oct 25, 2017 13:38:12 GMT
Sup everyone,
Haven't started a thread here in a while. Let me make myself comfortable. Yup, that's better.
ok. So, like many of you, I read winter's book on the EAR/ONS and one of the things I really liked about it was how certain patterns of behaviour that we knew about before either turned out to be fairly rare or extremely common. One threat made by the rapist that turned out to be extremely common was the threat to cut off ears.
After I got to the fourth or fifth description of an attack where he threatened to cut off ears, my mind went to Vietnam. The Vietnam War, I should say. I am not going to cite the sources that document American and French soldiers cutting off ears for reasons of sadism and trophy-collecting during the conflict there, because there are literally thousands of them. Try Googling "Vietnam Cutting" and Google will auto-complete your query with "off ears." It's that common a search term! And there are thousands of articles and sources with anecdotal and hard evidence of soldiers collecting ears as trophies.
The collecting of ears during wartime was common at least since the First World War, when both Allied and Entente forces took part in some of the most savage fighting the world has ever seen. But Vietnam was different. In Vietnam, the enemy was like a ghost. Americans were being killed by an unseen enemy. Often, a platoon or company would roll into a village after an ambush looking for VC and revenge. Women were raped, huts burned to the ground, farm animals shot, food spoiled, wells contaminated, men arrested, summarily executed, and ears cut off. This came to be so common that it became a widely known part of Vietnam lore. Soldiers wore necklaces of leathery ears as trophies. Not all these ears came from fighters.
EAR began his assaults in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam. The American public had learned about incidences like My Lai and the practice of cutting off ears. Still, it is a unique threat. I don't know and tend to not believe that EAR was a Vietnam vet. However, he did seem to use military tactics in his assaults, had knowledge of small arms, and wore military fatigues early in his reign of terror. Everyone knows the many military connections in this case, and there must have been thousands of Vietnam vets living in the East Area. Did the EAR have a mentor who served in the war and regaled him with stories of torture and murder that fueled the little fucker's already twisted fantasy world, รก la Richard Ramirez? Did he maybe serve in the Vietnam War himself and came home a volatile, sadistic mess?
I'm not sure what the answer is, but the cutting of ears is something very unique to that time, because of the end of the war and the widely known practice of cutting off ears (kinda strange, the EAR threatening to cut off ears, but I digress). This wasn't a threat he made once or twice. It was his go-to threat (along with "blowing your brains out," and "killing everyone in the house") and it definitely had me wondering about a Vietnam connection.
What do you guys think?
Haven't started a thread here in a while. Let me make myself comfortable. Yup, that's better.
ok. So, like many of you, I read winter's book on the EAR/ONS and one of the things I really liked about it was how certain patterns of behaviour that we knew about before either turned out to be fairly rare or extremely common. One threat made by the rapist that turned out to be extremely common was the threat to cut off ears.
After I got to the fourth or fifth description of an attack where he threatened to cut off ears, my mind went to Vietnam. The Vietnam War, I should say. I am not going to cite the sources that document American and French soldiers cutting off ears for reasons of sadism and trophy-collecting during the conflict there, because there are literally thousands of them. Try Googling "Vietnam Cutting" and Google will auto-complete your query with "off ears." It's that common a search term! And there are thousands of articles and sources with anecdotal and hard evidence of soldiers collecting ears as trophies.
The collecting of ears during wartime was common at least since the First World War, when both Allied and Entente forces took part in some of the most savage fighting the world has ever seen. But Vietnam was different. In Vietnam, the enemy was like a ghost. Americans were being killed by an unseen enemy. Often, a platoon or company would roll into a village after an ambush looking for VC and revenge. Women were raped, huts burned to the ground, farm animals shot, food spoiled, wells contaminated, men arrested, summarily executed, and ears cut off. This came to be so common that it became a widely known part of Vietnam lore. Soldiers wore necklaces of leathery ears as trophies. Not all these ears came from fighters.
EAR began his assaults in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam. The American public had learned about incidences like My Lai and the practice of cutting off ears. Still, it is a unique threat. I don't know and tend to not believe that EAR was a Vietnam vet. However, he did seem to use military tactics in his assaults, had knowledge of small arms, and wore military fatigues early in his reign of terror. Everyone knows the many military connections in this case, and there must have been thousands of Vietnam vets living in the East Area. Did the EAR have a mentor who served in the war and regaled him with stories of torture and murder that fueled the little fucker's already twisted fantasy world, รก la Richard Ramirez? Did he maybe serve in the Vietnam War himself and came home a volatile, sadistic mess?
I'm not sure what the answer is, but the cutting of ears is something very unique to that time, because of the end of the war and the widely known practice of cutting off ears (kinda strange, the EAR threatening to cut off ears, but I digress). This wasn't a threat he made once or twice. It was his go-to threat (along with "blowing your brains out," and "killing everyone in the house") and it definitely had me wondering about a Vietnam connection.
What do you guys think?