[Mb-hair] The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Last Saturday April 30 2005 was the 30th anniversary of the end of the 
Vietnam War.  Many of Americans have forgotten or never learned what 
happened and why.  The following exerpt, from Howard Zinn's People's 
History of the United States, is long for an email--will take 15 minutes or so 
to read--but an extremely worthwhile 15+ minutes in remembering.  When we 
forget our history we become extremely gullible and believe the lies that are 
told to us about current and past events.  This is worth forwarding, printing, 
reading to your children.  Maybe you will be inspired to read, if you haven't 
already, Howard Zinn's book.  Or to call your kids' or grandkids' history 
teachers and ask them to use it in class (as many have).....

***

Vietnamese Children's Song

The enemy is not people
Kill people, who shall we live with then?

The enemy's name is cruelty
The enemy's name is no conscience
Its name is hatred; its name is bitterness
It's a group of phantoms

The enemy wears a coat of doctrine
The enemy wears the false front of freedom
It wears a deceiving appearance
It sifts and twists our words

People, oh people, have compassion for the weak
People, oh people, have compassion for the innocent
Have compassion for the sellouts
Have compassion for the cheats
Have compassion for those who pity us

The enemy's name is unjust accusation
The enemy's name is ignorance
Its name is greed
Its name is selfishness
Its name is jealous hatred

The enemy is no stranger
It lies here, inside each one of us
The enemy is covetous eyes
The enemy is an arrogant head
In a lonely head
In a narrow mind
In the dream of conquering

People, oh people, love people more and more
People, oh people, love people as people
Love people forever
Love people night and day
Love people hand in hand.

The enemy is not people

Kill people, who will we live with then?

The enemy is no stranger
It lies here, inside each one of us.

                   *

News of Victory

by Ho Chi Minh

The Moon opens my window, asking:
"Is your poem ready yet?"
-Wait a minute, Moon,
I am still busy on military matters
And can't possibly compose poetry.
-Just a moment, Moon.
There, the mountain bell
Awakens autumn dreams,
 From the front lines
News of victory has just arrived!

---

The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

excerpted from "A People's History of the United States"

by Howard Zinn

In the fall of 1945 Japan, defeated, was forced to leave Indochina, the
former French colony it had occupied at the start of the war. In the
meantime, a revolutionary movement had grown there, determined to end
colonial control and to achieve a new life for the peasants of Indochina.
Led by a Communist named Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionists fought against
the Japanese, and when they were gone held a spectacular celebration in
Hanoi in late 1945, with a million people in the streets, and issued a
Declaration of Independence. It borrowed from the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen, in the French Revolution, and from the
American Declaration of Independence, and began: "All men are created
equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Just as the
Americans in 1776 had listed their grievances against the English King,
the Vietnamese listed their complaints against French rule:

They have enforced inhuman laws.... They have built more prisons than
schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots, they have drowned
uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion.... They
have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw
materials...

They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people,
especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty....... from the
end of last year, to the beginning of this year... more than two million
of our fellow-citizens died of starvation....

The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are deter
mined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French
colonialists to reconquer their country.

The U.S. Defense Department study of the Vietnam war, intended to be
"top secret" but released publicly by Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in
the famous Pentagon Papers case, described Ho Chi Minh's work:

"... Ho had built the Viet Minh into the only Vietnam-wide political
organization capable of effective resistance to either the Japanese or the
French. He was the only Vietnamese wartime leader with a national
following, and he assured himself wider fealty among the Vietnamese people
when in August September, 1945, he overthrew the Japanese... established
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and staged receptions for in-coming
allied occupation forces.... For a few weeks in September, 1945, Vietnam
was-for the first and only time in its modern history-free of foreign
domination, and united from north to south under Ho Chi Minh...."

The Western powers were already at work to change this. England occupied
the southern part of Indochina and then turned it back to the French.
Nationalist China (this was under Chiang Kai-shek, before the Communist
revolution) occupied the northern part of Indochina, and the United States
persuaded it to turn that back to the French. As Ho Chi Minh told an
American journalist: "We apparently stand quite alone.... We shall have to
depend on ourselves."

Between October 1945 and February 1946, Ho Chi Minh wrote eight letters 
to
President Truman, reminding him of the self-determination promises of the
Atlantic Charter. One of the letters was sent both to Truman and to the
United Nations:

I wish to invite attention of your Excellency for strictly humanitarian
reasons to following matter. Two million Vietnamese died of starvation
during winter of 1944 and spring 1945 because of starvation policy of
French who seized and stored until it rotted all available rice....
Three-fourths of cultivated land was flooded in summer 1945, which was
followed by a severe drought; of normal harvest five-sixths was lost....
Many people are starving.... Unless great world powers and international
relief organizations bring us immediate assistance we face imminent
catastrophe....

Truman never replied.

In October of 1946, the French bombarded Haiphong, a port in northern
Vietnam, and there began the eight-year war between the Vietminh movement
and the French over who would rule Vietnam. After the Communist victory in
China in 1949 and the Korean war the following year, the United States
began giving large amounts of military aid to the French. By 1954, the
United States had given 300,000 small arms and machine guns, enough to
equip the entire French army in Indochina, and $1 billion; all together,
the U.S. was financing 80 percent of the French war effort. Why was the
United States doing this? To the public, the word was that the United
States was helping to stop Communism in Asia, but there was not much
public discussion. In the secret memoranda of the National Security
Council (which advised the President on foreign policy) there was talk in
1950 of what came to be known as the "domino theory"-that, like a row of
dominoes, if one country fell to Communism, the next one would do the same
and so on. It was important therefore to keep the first one from falling.

A secret memo of the National Security Council in June 1952 also pointed
to the chain of U.S. military bases along the coast of China, the
Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea:

Communist control of all of Southeast Asia would render the U.S.
position in the Pacific offshore island chain precarious and would
seriously jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests in the Far East.

Southeast Asia, especially Malaya and Indonesia, is the principal world
source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other
strategically important commodities....

It was also noted that Japan depended on the rice of Southeast Asia, and
Communist victory there would "make it extremely difficult to prevent
Japan's eventual accommodation to communism." In 1953, a congressional
study mission reported: "The area of Indochina is immensely wealthy in
rice, rubber, coal and iron ore. Its position makes it a strategic key to
the rest of Southeast Asia." That year, a State Department memorandum said
that the French were losing the war in Indochina, had failed "to win a
sufficient native support," feared that a negotiated settlement "would
mean the eventual loss to Communism not only of Indochina but of the whole
of Southeast Asia, and concluded: "If the French actually decided to
withdraw, the U.S. would have to consider most seriously whether to take
over in this area."

In 1954, the French, having been unable to win Vietnamese popular
support, which was overwhelmingly behind Ho Chi Minh and the
revolutionary movement, had to withdraw.

An international assemblage at Geneva presided over the peace agreement
between the French and the Vietminh. It was agreed that the French would
temporarily withdraw into the southern part of Vietnam, that the Vietminh
would remain in the north, and that an election would take place in two
years in a unified Vietnam to enable the Vietnamese to choose their own
government.

The United States moved quickly to prevent the unification and to
establish South Vietnam as an American sphere. It set up in Saigon as head
of the government a former Vietnamese official named Ngo Dinh Diem, who
had recently been living in New Jersey, and encouraged him not to hold the
scheduled elections for unification. A memo in early 1954 of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff said that intelligence estimates showed "a settlement
based on free elections would be attended by almost certain loss of the
Associated States [Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam-the three parts of
Indochina created by the Geneva Conference] to Communist control." Diem
again and again blocked the elections requested by the Vietminh, and with
American money and arms his government became more and more firmly
established. As the Pentagon Papers put it: "South Viet Nam was
essentially the creation of the United States."

                              *

During 1965, over 200,000 American soldiers were sent to South Vietnam,
and in 1966, 200,000 more. By early 1968, there were more than 500,000
American troops there, and the U.S. Air Force was dropping bombs at a rate
unequaled in history. Tiny glimmerings of the massive human suffering
under this bombardment came to the outside world. On June 5, 1965, the New
York Times carried a dispatch from Saigon:

As the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, U.S. jet
bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Many Vietnamese 
one
estimate is as high as 500 were killed by the strikes. The American
contention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. But three out of four
patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns
from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women.

On September 6, another press dispatch from Saigon:

"In Bien Hoa province south of Saigon on August 15 United States
aircraft accidentally bombed a Buddhist pagoda and a Catholic church.. .
it was the third time their pagoda had been bombed in 1965. A temple of
the Cao Dai religious sect in the same area had been bombed twice this
year. In another delta province there is a woman who has both arms burned
off by napalm and her eyelids so badly burned that she cannot close them.
When it is time for her to sleep her family puts a blanket over her head.
The woman had two of her children killed in the air strike that maimed
her."

Few Americans appreciate what their nation is doing to South Vietnam
with airpower... innocent civilians are dying every day in South Vietnam.

Large areas of South Vietnam were declared "free fire zones," which
meant that all persons remaining within them-civilians, old people,
children-were considered an enemy, and bombs were dropped at will.
Villages suspected of harboring Viet Cong were subject to "search and
destroy" missions-men of military age in the villages were killed, the
homes were burned, the women, children, and old people were sent off to
refugee camps. Jonathan Schell, in his book The Village of Ben Suc,
describes such an operation: a village surrounded, attacked, a man riding
on a bicycle shot down, three people picnicking by the river shot to
death, the houses destroyed, the women, children, old people herded
together, taken away from their ancestral homes.

The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called "Operation Phoenix," secretly,
without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South
Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist 
underground.
A pro-administration analyst wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs in
January 1975: "Although the Phoenix program did undoubtedly kill or
incarcerate many innocent civilians, it did also eliminate many members of
the Communist infrastructure."

After the war, the release of records of the International Red Cross
showed that in South Vietnamese prison camps, where at the height of
the war 65,000 to 70,000 people were held and often beaten and tortured,
American advisers observed and sometimes participated. The Red Cross
observers found continuing, systematic brutality at the two principal
Vietnamese POW camps-at Phu Quoc and Qui Nhon, where American 
advisers
were stationed.

By the end of the war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia-more than twice the amount of bombs
dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II. In addition, poisonous sprays
were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth- an area
the size of the state of Massachusetts was covered with such poi son.
Vietnamese mothers reported birth defects in their children. Yale
biologists, using the same poison (2,4,5,T) on mice, reported defective
mice born and said they had no reason to believe the effect on humans was
different.

On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of
My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai province. They rounded up the inhabitants,
including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people
were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death by
American soldiers. The testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman, at the later
trial of Lieutenant William Calley, was reported in the New York Times:

Lieutenant Calley and a weeping rifleman named Paul D. Meadlo the same
soldier who had fed candy to the children before shooting them-pushed the
prisoners into the ditch...

"There was an order to shoot by Lieutenant Calley, I can't remember the
exact words-it was something like 'Start firing.' "Meadlo turned to me and
said: 'Shoot, why don't you shoot?'

"He was crying. "I said, 'I can't. I won't.'

"Then Lieutenant Calley and Meadlo pointed their rifles into the ditch and
fired.

"People were diving on top of each other; mothers were trying to protect
their children...."

Journalist Seymour Hersh, in his book My Lai 4, writes:

"When Army investigators reached the barren area in November, 1969, in
connection with the My Lai probe in the United States, they found mass
graves at three sites, as well as a ditch full of bodies. It was estimated
that between 450 and 500 people-most of them women, children and old men-
had been slain and buried there."

The army tried to cover up what happened. But a letter began circulating
from a GI named Ron Ridenhour, who had heard about the massacre. There
were photos taken of the killing by an army photographer, Ronald Haeberle.
Seymour Hersh, then working for an antiwar news agency in Southeast Asia
called Dispatch News Service, wrote about it. The story of the massacre
had appeared in May 1968 in two French publications, one called Sud
Vietnam en Lutte, and another published by the North Vietnamese delegation
to the peace talks in Paris-but the American press did not pay any
attention.

Several of the officers in the My Lai massacre were put on trial, but only
Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty. He was sentenced to life
imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced twice; he served three
years-Nixon ordered that he be under house arrest rather than a regular
prison-and then was paroled. Thousands of Americans came to his defense.
Part of it was in patriotic justification of his action as necessary
against the "Communists." Part of it seems to have been a feeling that he
was unjustly singled out in a war with many similar atrocities.  Colonel
Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings,
told reporters in early 1971: "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai
hidden someplace."

Indeed, My Lai was unique only in its details. Hersh reported a letter
sent by a GI to his family, and published in a local newspaper:

"Dear Mom and Dad:

Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my
friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight!

It was a small rural network of villages and the people were incredibly
poor. My unit burned and plundered their meager possessions. Let me try to
explain the situation to you.

The huts here are thatched palm leaves. Each one has a dried mud bunker
inside. These bunkers are to protect the families. Kind of like air raid
shelters.

My unit commanders, however, chose to think that these bunkers are
offensive. So every hut we find that has a bunker we are ordered to burn
to the ground.

When the ten helicopters landed this morning, in the midst of these
huts, and six men jumped out of each "chopper", we were firing the
moment we hit the ground. We fired into all the huts we could....

It is then that we burned these huts.... Everyone is crying, begging and
praying that we don't separate them and take their husbands and fathers,
sons and grandfathers. The women wail and moan.

Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions and
food. Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock."

                               *

The massacre at My Lai by a company of ordinary soldiers was a small
event compared with the plans of high-level military and civilian
leaders to visit massive destruction on the civilian population of
Vietnam. Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton in early 1966,
seeing that large-scale bombing of North Vietnam villages was not
producing the desired result, suggested a different strategy. The air
strikes on villages, he said, would "create a counterproductive wave of
revulsion abroad and at home." He suggested instead:

Destruction of locks and dams, however-if handled right-might...
offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction doesn't kill or
drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to
widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided-which
we could offer to do "at the conference table."...

The heavy bombings were intended to destroy the will of ordinary
Vietnamese to resist, as in the bombings of German and Japanese
population centers in World War II-despite President Johnson's public
insistence that only "military targets" were being bombed. The government
was using language like "one more turn of the screw" to describe bombing.
The CIA at one point in 1966 recommended a "bombing program of greater
intensity," according to the Pentagon Papers, directed against, in the
ClA's words, "the will of the regime as a target system."

Meanwhile, just across the border of Vietnam, in a neighboring country,
Laos, where a right-wing government installed by the CIA faced a
rebellion, one of the most beautiful areas in the world, the Plain of
Jars, was being destroyed by bombing. This was not reported by the
government or the press, but an American who lived in Laos, Fred Branfman,
told the story in his book Voices from the Plain of Jars:

Over 25,000 attack sorties were flown against the Plain of Jars from
May, 1964, through September, 1969; over 75,000 tons of bombs were
dropped on it; on the ground, thousands were killed and wounded, tens of
thousands driven underground, and the entire aboveground society leveled.

                             *

In September 1973, a former government official in Laos, Jerome
Doolittle, wrote in the New York Times:

"The Pentagon's most recent lies about bombing Cambodia bring back a
question that often occurred to me when I was press attaché at the
American Embassy in Vientiane, Laos.

Why did we bother to lie?

When I first arrived in Laos, I was instructed to answer all press
questions about our massive and merciless bombing campaign in that tiny
country with: "At the request of the Royal Laotian Government, the United
States is conducting unarmed reconnaissance flights accompanied by armed
escorts who have the right to return if fired upon."

This was a lie. Every reporter to whom I told it knew it was a lie.
Hanoi knew it was a lie. The International Control Commission knew it was
a lie. Every interested Congressman and newspaper reader knew it was a
lie....

After all, the lies did serve to keep something from somebody, and the
somebody was us."

By early 1968, the cruelty of the war began touching the conscience of
many Americans. For many others, the problem was that the United States
was unable to win the war, while 40,000 American soldiers were dead by
this time, 250,000 wounded, with no end in sight. (The Vietnam casualties
were many times this number.)

Lyndon Johnson had escalated a brutal war and failed to win it. His
popularity was at an all-time low; he could not appear publicly without a
demonstration against him and the war. The chant "LBJ, LBJ, how many kids
did you kill today?" was heard in demonstrations throughout the country.
In the spring of 1968 Johnson announced he would not run again for
President, and that negotiations for peace would begin with the Vietnamese
in Paris.

In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon, pledging that he would get the
United States out of Vietnam, was elected President. He began to
withdraw troops; by February 1972, less than 150,000 were left. But the
bombing continued. Nixon's policy was "Vietnamization"-the Saigon
government, with Vietnamese ground troops, using American money and air
power, would carry on the war. Nixon was not ending the war; he was ending
the most unpopular aspect of it, the involvement of American soldiers on
the soil of a faraway country.

In the spring of 1970, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
launched an invasion of Cambodia, after a long bombardment that the
government never disclosed to the public. The invasion not only led to an
outcry of protest in the United States, it was a military failure, and
Congress resolved that Nixon could not use American troops in extending
the war without congressional approval. The following year, without
American troops, the United States supported a South Vietnamese invasion
of Laos. This too failed. In 1971, 800,000 tons of bombs were dropped by
the United States on Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam.

                               *

... In August of 1965, 61 percent of the population thought the American
involvement in Vietnam was not wrong. By May 1971 it was exactly 
reversed;
61 percent thought our involvement was wrong. Bruce Andrews, a Harvard
student of public opinion, found that the people most opposed to the war
were people over fifty, blacks, and women. He also noted that a study in
the spring of 1964, when Vietnam was a minor issue in the newspapers,
showed that 53 percent of college educated people were willing to send
troops to Vietnam, but only 33 percent of grade school-educated people
were so willing.

It seems that the media, themselves controlled by higher-education,
higher-income people who were more aggressive in foreign policy, tended to
give the erroneous impression that working-class people were superpatriots
for the war. Lewis Lipsitz, in a mid-1968 survey of poor blacks and whites
in the South, paraphrased an attitude he found typical: "The only way to
help the poor man is to get out of that war in Vietnam... These taxes-high
taxes-it's going over yonder to kill people with and I don't see no cause
in it."

The capacity for independent judgment among ordinary Americans is
probably best shown by the swift development of antiwar feeling among
American GIs-volunteers and draftees who came mostly from lower-income
groups. There had been, earlier in American history, in stances of
soldiers' disaffection from the war: isolated mutinies in the
Revolutionary War, refusal of reenlistment in the midst of hostilities in
the Mexican war, desertion and conscientious objection in World War I and
World War II. But Vietnam produced opposition by soldiers and veterans on
a scale, and with a fervor, never seen before.

It began with isolated protests. As early as June 1965, Richard Steinke, a
West Point graduate in Vietnam, refused to board an aircraft taking him to
a remote Vietnamese village. "The Vietnamese war," he said, "is not worth
a single American life." Steinke was court-martialed and dismissed from
the service. The following year, three army privates, one black, one
Puerto Rican, one Lithuanian-Italian-all poor-refused to embark for
Vietnam, denouncing the war as "immoral, illegal, and unjust." They were
court-martialed and imprisoned.

In early 1967, Captain Howard Levy, an army doctor at Fort Jackson,
South Carolina, refused to teach Green Berets, a Special Forces elite in
the military. He said they were "murderers of women and children" and
"killers of peasants." He was court-martialed on the ground that he was
trying to promote disaffection among enlisted men by his statements. The
colonel who presided at the trial said: "The truth of the statements is
not an issue in this case." Levy was convicted and sentenced to prison.

The individual acts multiplied: A black private in Oakland refused to
board a troop plane to Vietnam, although he faced eleven years at hard
labor. A navy nurse, Lieutenant Susan Schnall, was court-martialed for
marching in a peace demonstration while in uniform, and for drop ping
antiwar leaflets from a plane on navy installations. In Norfolk, Virginia,
a sailor refused to train fighter pilots because he said the war was
immoral. An army lieutenant was arrested in Washington, D.C., in early
1968 for picketing the White House with a sign that said: " 120,000
American Casualties-Why?" Two black marines, George Daniels and William
Harvey, were given long prison sentences (Daniels, six years, Harvey, ten
years, both later reduced) for talking to other black marines against the
war.

As the war went on, desertions from the armed forces mounted. Thousands
went to Western Europe-France, Sweden, Holland. Most deserters crossed
into Canada; some estimates were 50,000, others 100,000. Some stayed in
the United States. A few openly defied the military authorities by taking
"sanctuary" in churches, where, surrounded by antiwar friends and
sympathizers, they waited for capture and court-martial. At Boston
University, a thousand students kept vigil for five days and nights in the
chapel, supporting an eighteen-year old deserter, Ray Kroll.

Kroll's story was a common one. He had been inveigled into joining the
army; he came from a poor family, was brought into court, charged with
drunkenness, and given the choice of prison or enlistment. He enlisted.
And then he began to think about the nature of the war.

On a Sunday morning, federal agents showed up at the Boston University
chapel, stomped their way through aisles clogged with students, smashed
down doors, and took Kroll away. From the stockade, he wrote back to
friends: "I ain't gonna kill; it's against my will...." A friend he had
made at the chapel brought him books, and he noted a saying he had found
in one of them: "What we have done will not be lost to all Eternity.
Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour."

The GI antiwar movement became more organized. Near Fort Jackson,
South Carolina, the first "GI coffeehouse" was set up, a place where
soldiers could get coffee and doughnuts, find antiwar literature, and talk
freely with others. It was called the UFO, and lasted for several years
before it was declared a "public nuisance" and closed by court action. But
other GI coffeehouses sprang up in half a dozen other places across the
country. An antiwar "bookstore" was opened near Fort Devens,
Massachusetts, and another one at the Newport, Rhode Island, naval base.

Underground newspapers sprang up at military bases across the country; by
1970 more than fifty were circulating. Among them: About Face in Los
Angeles; Fed Up! in Tacoma, Washington; Short Times at Fort Jackson;
Vietnam Gl in Chicago; Graffiti in Heidelberg, Germany; Bragg Briefs in
North Carolina; Last Harass at Fort Gordon, Georgia; Helping Hand at
Mountain Home Air Base, Idaho. These newspapers printed antiwar articles,
gave news about the harassment of GIs and practical advice on the legal
rights of servicemen, told how to resist military domination.

Mixed with feeling against the war was resentment at the cruelty, the
dehumanization, of military life. In the army prisons, the stockades, this
was especially true. In 1968, at the Presidio stockade in California, a
guard shot to death an emotionally disturbed prisoner for walking away
from a work detail. Twenty-seven prisoners then sat down and refused to
work, singing "We Shall Overcome." They were court-martialed, found guilty
of mutiny, and sentenced to terms of up to fourteen years, later reduced
after much public attention and protest.

The dissidence spread to the war front itself. When the great Moratorium
Day demonstrations were taking place in October 1969 in the United States,
some GIs in Vietnam wore black armbands to show their support. A news
photographer reported that in a platoon on patrol near Da Nang, about half
of the men were wearing black armbands. One soldier stationed at Cu Chi
wrote to a friend on October 26, 1970, that separate companies had been
set up for men refusing to go into the field to fight. "It's no big thing
here anymore to refuse to go." The French newspaper Le Monde reported that
in four months, 109 soldiers of the first air cavalry division were
charged with refusal to fight. "A common sight," the correspondent for Le
Monde wrote, "is the black soldier, with his left fist clenched in
defiance of a war he has never considered his own."

Wallace Terry, a black American reporter for Time magazine, taped
conversations with hundreds of black soldiers; he found bitterness
against army racism, disgust with the war, generally low morale. More and
more cases of "fragging" were reported in Vietnam-incidents where
servicemen rolled fragmentation bombs under the tents of officers who were
ordering them into combat, or against whom they had other grievances. The
Pentagon reported 209 fraggings in Vietnam in 1970 alone.

Veterans back from Vietnam formed a group called Vietnam Veterans
Against the War. In December 1970, hundreds of them went to Detroit to
what was called the "Winter Soldier" investigations, to testify publicly
about atrocities they had participated in or seen in Vietnam, committed by
Americans against Vietnamese. In April 1971 more than a thousand of them
went to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against the war. One by one, they
went up to a wire fence around the Capitol, threw over the fence the
medals they had won in Vietnam, and made brief statements about the war,
sometimes emotionally, sometimes in icy, bitter calm.

In the summer of 1970, twenty-eight commissioned officers of the
military, including some veterans of Vietnam, saying they represented
about 250 other officers, announced formation of the Concerned Officers
Movement against the war. During the fierce bombings of Hanoi and
Haiphong, around Christmas 1972, came the first defiance of B-52 pilots
who refused to fly those missions.

On June 3, 1973, the New York Times reported dropouts among West
Point cadets. Officials there, the reporter wrote, "linked the rate to an
affluent, less disciplined, skeptical, and questioning generation and to
the anti-military mood that a small radical minority and the Vietnam war
had created."

But most of the antiwar action came from ordinary GIs, and most of these
came from lower-income groups-white, black, Native American, Chinese.

A twenty-year-old New York City Chinese-American named Sam Choy
enlisted at seventeen in the army, was sent to Vietnam, was made a cook,
and found himself the target of abuse by fellow GIs, who called him
"Chink"

and "gook" (the term for the Vietnamese) and said he looked like the
enemy. One day he took a rifle and fired warning shots at his
tormentors. "By this time I was near the perimeter of the base and was
thinking of joining the Viet Cong; at least they would trust me. " Choy
was taken by military police, beaten, court-martialed, sentenced to
eighteen months of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth. "They beat me up every
day, like a time clock." He ended his interview with a New York Chinatown
newspaper saying: "One thing: I want to tell all the Chinese kids that the
army made me sick. They made me so sick that I can't stand it."

A dispatch from Phu Bai in April 1972 said that fifty GIs out of 142 men
in the company refused to go on patrol, crying: "This isn't our war!" The
New York Times on July 14,1973, reported that American prisoners of war in
Vietnam, ordered by officers in the POW camp to stop cooperating with the
enemy, shouted back: "Who's the enemy?" They formed a peace committee in
the camp, and a sergeant on the committee later recalled his march from
capture to the POW camp:

Until we got to the first camp, we didn't see a village intact; they
were all destroyed. I sat down and put myself in the middle and asked
myself: Is this right or wrong? Is it right to destroy villages? Is it
right to kill people en masse? After a while it just got to me.

Pentagon officials in Washington and navy spokesmen in San Diego
announced, after the United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam in
1973, that the navy was going to purge itself of "undesirables"- and that
these included as many as six thousand men in the Pacific fleet, "a
substantial proportion of them black." All together, about 563,000 GIs had
received less than honorable discharges. In the year 1973, one of every
five discharges was "less than honorable." indicating something less than
dutiful obedience to the military. By 1971, 177 of every 1,000 American
soldiers were listed as "absent without leave," some of them three or four
times. Deserters doubled from 47,000 in 1967 to 89,000 in 1971.

One of those who stayed, fought, but then turned against the war was
Ron Kovic. His father worked in a supermarket on Long Island. In 1963, at
the age of seventeen, he enlisted in the marines. Two years later, in
Vietnam, at the age of nineteen, his spine was shattered by shellfire.
Paralyzed from the waist down, he was put in a wheelchair. Back in the
States, he observed the brutal treatment of wounded veterans in the
veterans' hospitals, thought more and more about the war, and joined the
Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He went to demonstrations to speak
against the war. One evening he heard actor Donald Sutherland read from
the post-World War I novel by Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, about a
soldier whose limbs and face were shot away by gunfire, a thinking torso
who invented a way of communicating with the outside world and then beat
out a message so powerful it could not be heard without trembling.

Sutherland began to read the passage and something I will never forget
swept over me. It was as if someone was speaking for everything I ever
went through in the hospital.... I began to shake and I remember there
were tears in my eyes.

Kovic demonstrated against the war, and was arrested. He tells his story
in Born on the Fourth of July:

They help me back into the chair and take me to another part of the
prison building to be booked. "What's your name?" the officer behind the
desk says.

"Ron Kovic," I say. "Occupation, Vietnam veteran against the war."

"What?" he says sarcastically, looking down at me.

"I'm a Vietnam veteran against the war," I almost shout back.

"You should have died over there," he says. He turns to his assistant "I'd
like to take this guy and throw him off the roof."

They fingerprint me and take my picture and put me in a cell. I have
begun to wet my pants like a little baby. The tube has slipped out
during my examination by the doctor. I try to fall asleep but even
though I am exhausted, the anger is alive in me like a huge hot stone in
my chest. I lean my head up against the wall and listen to the toilets
flush again and again.

Kovic and the other veterans drove to Miami to the Republican National
Convention in 1972, went into the Convention Hall, wheeled themselves 
down
the aisles, and as Nixon began his acceptance speech shouted, "Stop the
bombing! Stop the war!" Delegates cursed them: "Traitor!" and Secret
Service men hustled them out of the hall.

In the fall of 1973, with no victory in sight and North Vietnamese
troops entrenched in various parts of the South, the United States
agreed to accept a settlement that would withdraw American troops and
leave the revolutionary troops where they were, until a new elected
government would be set up including Communist and non-Communist 
elements.
But the Saigon government refused to agree, and the United States decided
to make one final attempt to bludgeon the North Vietnamese into
submission. It sent waves of B-52s over Hanoi and Haiphong, destroying
homes and hospitals, killing unknown numbers of civilians. The attack did
not work. Many of the B-52s were shot down, there was angry protest all
over the world-and Kissinger went back to Paris and signed very much the
same peace agreement that had been agreed on before.

The United States withdrew its forces, continuing to give aid to the
Saigon government, but when the North Vietnamese launched at tacks in
early 1975 against the major cities in South Vietnam, the government
collapsed. In late April 1975, North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon. The
American embassy staff fled, along with many Vietnamese who feared
Communist rule, and the long war in Vietnam was over. Saigon was renamed
Ho Chi Minh City, and both parts of Vietnam were unified as the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam.

Traditional history portrays the end of wars as coming from the
initiatives of leaders-negotiations in Paris or Brussels or Geneva or
Versailles-just as it often finds the coming of war a response to the
demand of "the people." The Vietnam war gave clear evidence that at least
for that war (making one wonder about the others) the political leaders
were the last to take steps to end the war-"the people" were far ahead.
The President was always far behind. The Supreme Court silently turned
away from cases challenging the Constitutionality of the war. Congress was
years behind public opinion.

In the spring of 1971, syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert
Novak, two firm supporters of the war, wrote regretfully of a "sudden
outbreak of anti-war emotionalism" in the House of Representatives, and
said: "The anti-war animosities now suddenly so pervasive among House
Democrats are viewed by Administration backers as less anti-Nixon than as
a response to constituent pressures."

It was only after the intervention in Cambodia ended, and only after the
nationwide campus uproar over that invasion, that Congress passed a
resolution declaring that American troops should not be sent into Cambodia
without its approval. And it was not until late 1973, when American troops
had finally been removed from Vietnam, that Congress passed a bill
limiting the power of the President to make war without congressional
consent; even there, in that "War Powers Resolution," the President could
make war for sixty days on his own without a congressional declaration.

The administration tried to persuade the American people that the war was
ending because of its decision to negotiate a peace-not because it was
losing the war, not because of the powerful antiwar movement in the United
States. But the government's own secret memoranda all through the war
testify to its sensitivity at each stage about "public opinion" in the
United States and abroad. The data is in the Pentagon Papers.

In June of 1964, top American military and State Department officials,
including Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, met in Honolulu. "Rusk stated 
that
public opinion on our SEA policy was badly divided and that, therefore,
the President needed an affirmation of support."

Diem had been replaced by a general named Khanh. The Pentagon
historians write: "Upon his return to Saigon on June 5 Ambassador Lodge
went straight from the airport to call on General Khanh... the main thrust
of his talk with Khanh was to hint that the United States Government would
in the immediate future be preparing U.S. public opinion for actions
against North Vietnam." Two months later came the Gulf of Tonkin affair.

On April 2, 1965, a memo from CIA director John McCone suggested that the
bombing of North Vietnam be increased because it was "not sufficiently
severe" to change North Vietnam's policy. "On the other hand... we can
expect increasing pressure to stop the bombing... from various elements of
the American public, from the press, the United Nations and world
opinion." The U.S. should try for a fast knockout before this opinion
could build up, McCone said.

Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton's memo of early 1966
suggested destruction of locks and dams to create mass starvation,
because "strikes at population targets" would "create a
counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home." In May 1967, the
Pentagon historians write: "McNaughton was also very deeply concerned
about the breadth and intensity of public unrest and dissatisfaction with
the war... especially with young people, the underprivileged, the
intelligentsia and the women." McNaughton worried: "Will the move to call
up 20,000 Reserves... polarize opinion to the extent that the 'doves' in
the United States will get out of hand-massive refusals to serve, or to
fight, or to cooperate, or worse?" He warned:

There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the
world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world's
greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1000 non-combatants a
week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission, on an
issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could
conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national
consciousness.

                               *

One sign that the ideas of the antiwar movement had taken hold in the
American public was that juries became more reluctant to convict antiwar
protesters, and local judges too were treating them differently. In
Washington, by 1971, judges were dismissing charges against demonstrators
in cases where two years before they almost certainly would have been sent
to jail. The antiwar groups who had raided draft boards- the Baltimore
Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the Boston Five, and
more-were receiving lighter sentences for the same crimes.

The last group of draft board raiders, the "Camden 28," were priests,
nuns, and laypeople who raided a draft board in Camden, New Jersey, in
August 1971. It was essentially what the Baltimore Four had done four
years earlier, when all were convicted and Phil Berrigan got six years in
prison. But in this instance, the Camden defendants were acquitted by the
jury on all counts. When the verdict was in, one of the jurors, a
fifty-three-year-old black taxi driver from Atlantic City named Samuel
Braithwaite, who had spent eleven years in the army, left a letter for the
defendants:

To you, the clerical physicians with your God-given talents, I say, well
done. Well done for trying to heal the sick irresponsible men, men who
were chosen by the people to govern and lead them. These men, who failed
the people, by raining death and destruction on a hapless country.. You
went out to do your part while your brothers remained in their ivory
towers watching... and hopefully some day in the near future, peace and
harmony may reign to people of all nations.


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
http://www.freedomarchives.org

---


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