Two years later in an apparent copycat suicide, a 31-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison poured kerosene on himself outside the Pentagon and left his family fatherless because he apparently cared more about suffering Vietnamese children than he cared about his own children. He had mailed a letter to his wife that stated, “Know that I love thee…but I must go to help the children of the priest’s village.” Only a week later, yet another self-hating white American male named Roger Allen LaPorte turned himself into a charcoal briquette outside the UN building.
And yet the Vietnam War raged on for years afterwards, almost as if no one cared about these suicides, almost as if the military-industrial complex’s official attitude was “please spare us these drama queens; we have a war to fight.”
