We flew over in a snowstorm and I dropped one of the bombs out. I told my brother, “I don’t think I hit anything except snow. You have to go a lot lower.” And he said, “If we go any lower, and that bomb goes off, we are dead ducks.” And I said, “You’re going to have to go lower if we’re going to hit anything.” So we made another pass, and by that point I was thinking, Well, it’s just symbolic anyway. And I just dumped the bombs out of the door as we flew over the fuel tanks.
We landed at the airport outside of Prairie du Sac, left the plane in the middle of the runway, and ran to the car with Lynn to go back to Madison. When we got back to Madison, I thought, Maybe we should call the newspapers and tell them what we did. So I called the State Journal and I said, “I just firebombed the Badger ordnance plant.” And the guy says something like, “Yeah, yeah. And what’s your name, please?” And I said, “No, we firebombed the Badger ordnance plant from the air.” Then I remember calling The Daily Cardinal and I believe the Kaleidoscope, the two student newspapers, and told them the bombing was because of the Vietnam War. Basically I wanted to lock into people’s minds that we were acting like Nazi Germany. That this aerial bomb was symbolic of the Allies’ bombing of munitions plants in Germany. It was my way of bringing the war home, so people would be able to see it in a different light.
BILL DYSON (FBI agent)
These leads start coming in and the supposition then was “This guy must have been a Vietnam pilot, because he landed with the wind!” I mean, there’s a snowstorm, he comes in, and he lands the wrong way. And it was like, “Oh my God, this guy stole the plane, and he was actually able to land it? He must be really a tremendous pilot!” And hell, the guy didn’t have a license, and it was miraculous that he was able to land the plane that way. They dropped the fuel. I don’t know where the bombs went. They had no detonator. Maybe it was the Weathermen, we didn’t know.*14
STEVE REINER (editor of The Daily Cardinal)
After the Christmas bombings by what we would later call the “New Year’s Gang,” there was a debate at the Cardinal about the difference between property damage and personal damage. I think the fact that no one was hurt and that these episodes all seemed to be calculated to destroy property, but not to harm people, helped us rationalize it. We made a distinction between political sabotage and terrorism. I think it was obvious that these guys never intended to hurt anybody. We rationalized it because the levels of frustration, anger, and exasperation that were welling up in all of us had reached a crescendo. We rationalized it because no one was hurt.
This is what I wrote in an editorial: “And if acts such as those committed in the last few days are needed to strike fear into the bodies of once fearless men and rid this campus once and for all of repressive and deadly ideas and institutions, then so be it.” It was the line “then so be it” that I regret writing now. I don’t really regret anything else in the editorial. I think saying that that kind of manifestation is inevitable is absolutely correct. And I think it was. It’s easy to say that it’s inevitable after it happens. But it was inevitable.
* * *
*1 In one of the most brazen examples of police violence and FBI dirty tricks, Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was gunned down in his sleep at 4:30 A.M. on December 4, 1969, by the Chicago police. Mark Clark, another Panther leader, was also killed in the raid. Though the police claimed they acted in self-defense, they were proven wrong by evidence showing ninety gunshots going one way through the front door of Fred Hampton’s apartment, where he slept with his fiancée, who was eight months pregnant. Hampton was killed by two bullets fired to his head at point-blank range in a coldblooded assassination. The FBI assisted the Chicago police by giving them a map of the floor plan of Hampton’s apartment that they obtained from William O’Neal, an FBI informant who was Hampton’s trusted bodyguard. O’Neal had slipped a sleeping pill into Hampton’s drink when they had dinner together that night, sedating him so that he could not defend himself.
*2 J. Edgar Hoover was particularly threatened by Hampton because he preached racial solidarity against an oppressive U.S. government. He appealed to white as well as black radicals and moderates and had a charisma and way with words that enabled him to unite a fractured movement. One of the FBI’s COINTELPRO objectives was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” In 1967 the FBI opened a file on Fred Hampton that would eventually fill twelve volumes and more than four thousand pages.
*3 Ericka Huggins, along with Bobby Seale (cofounder of the Black Panther Party), was in jail awaiting trial on murder charges that were part of the New Haven Nine conspiracy trial.
*4 Five thousand people attended Fred Hampton’s funeral.
*5 The police officers were found not guilty in a 1972 trial, but after thirteen years of litigating the civil rights case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were awarded $1.8 million—the largest settlement of its kind at the time. In 1990, FBI informant William O’Neal, who was Fred Hampton’s bodyguard, died in what some believe was a suicide.
*6 Huey Newton, who with Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in 1966, wrote an autobiography titled Revolutionary Suicide, which was published in 1973.
*7 After Altamont, Sam Cutler left the Rolling Stones and began working as the Grateful Dead’s tour manager.
*8 Peter Berg, Peter Coyote, and Emmett Grogan cofounded the San Francisco improv and radical community action group called the Diggers. They were fixtures in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in the mid- to late sixties.
*9 Albert and David Maysles made a documentary, Gimme Shelter, about the last weeks of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour, which ended with the Altamont Free Concert in Northern California.
*10 The Hells Angels were a motorcycle gang with a violent, outlaw history who rode Harley-Davidsons and were affiliated with parts of the counterculture, and were sometimes used to provide security.
*11 Charles Manson, a mentally disturbed musician who created a small cult called the Manson Family, was responsible for nine grisly murders committed in Los Angeles in July and early August of 1969, the most famous one being Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski. Manson and his accomplices were indicted for the Tate and other murders in December 1969. The high-profile trial began in Los Angeles in June 1970.
*12 Sly and the Family Stone, who played at Woodstock, was a racially integrated soul/funk band that created an original blend of the black Motown and San Francisco white psychedelic sound. The band released the album Stand! in May 1969; it sold three million copies and is considered one of the most successful albums of the sixties. The single “Stand!” reached number three on the charts in 1969. “Sly was less interested in crossing racial musical lines than in tearing them up,” wrote Greil Marcus in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 65.
*13 The Badger Army Ammunition Plant, or Badger Ordnance Works, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, made ammunition during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. During World War II it was the largest munitions factory in the world.
*14 Armstrong and the New Year’s Gang didn’t know the Weathermen and were acting independently, but according to FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, Bill Ayers sent a cell of Weathermen to Madison to try to make contact with the New Year’s Gang and scout out more locations in Madison to bomb in February 1970, but the plan was scrapped after events that occurred on March 6. See Larry Grathwohl, Bringing Down America (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), p. 159.
CHAPTER 15
WAR CRIMES
(January–April 1970)
The country doesn’t know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who hav
e returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
—LIEUTENANT JOHN KERRY,
TESTIMONY BEFORE U.S. SENATE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN
RELATIONS, April 23, 1971
On December 5, 1969, Life magazine published a cover story about the My Lai massacre with graphic color photographs taken by army photographer Sergeant Ron Haeberle, who had witnessed the extermination of the village. Haeberle took photos with his army-issue black-and-white camera and with his personal color camera. After he was discharged, Haeberle sold his color photographs to Life. Haeberle’s images of piles of bodies of women and small children hit newsstands all over America soon after the publication of Seymour Hersh’s vivid reporting of the massacre. The collective force of these stories galvanized an increasingly violent and radical resistance to the war.
The Pentagon called My Lai an aberration. It was the only civilian massacre recorded by an official photographer, but Vietnam veterans recently home from the war were beginning to disclose that the systematic slaughter of civilians was part of an unofficial “kill anything that moves” policy. This coincided with the objective to generate high enemy body counts on battlegrounds where American soldiers could not distinguish between villagers and enemy forces. A secret Pentagon task force, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, later unearthed by author Nick Turse, chronicled three hundred incidents of massacres, rapes, torture, mutilations, and other atrocities similar to My Lai. Of the estimated three million Vietnamese war casualties, two million were civilians.
TOD ENSIGN (GI antiwar activist)
When I first read the My Lai story, it had a big impression. I thought, Damn, this is big. This is big. This just breaks the whole mythology of the war open. The Pentagon responded to the furor over the atrocity by claiming it to be an isolated incident. Vice President Spiro Agnew blamed the incident on a few “bad apples” who should be rooted out and punished. Only the Tet Offensive did more to shake the public’s faith in the American military than the revelations about My Lai. The disclosure lent strong support to the antiwar movement’s claim that we were waging a genocidal war against the Vietnamese people.
I went to law school at Wayne State in Detroit from 1963 to 1966. Those years are relevant because they’re the peak Vietnam War years, and I was avoiding the draft. But when I got out of law school, I realized I still had five months to avoid draft eligibility. So I came to New York and in a year I got an LLM from NYU Law School. And that got me out of Vietnam, thank God.
About two weeks after the My Lai story broke, my friend and fellow activist Jeremy Rifkin told me about this guy Ralph Schoenman, who was the secretary to English pacifist Lord Bertrand Russell. In reaction to My Lai, Schoenman called for a Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. Schoenman had organized the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal in 1967 in Stockholm, Sweden, and Roskilde, Denmark, which was the first time American veterans testified about Vietnam War crimes. The first three veterans to testify were Peter Martinsen, David Tuck, and Donald Duncan, and their eyewitness testimony of wanton killing and torture reportedly had a powerful impact on many illustrious tribunal members who attended, like Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, and Simone de Beauvoir.
The hearings received wide attention in Europe but were largely ignored by the American media. The New York Times did, however, find the space to print an editorial lambasting the tribunal as a kangaroo court, which lacked any legal or moral authority. We had read about the tribunals in the leftist newspaper The Guardian. They covered the Bertrand Russell Tribunal extensively. So I was impressed with Russell, who was in his late eighties at the time. I really liked the fact that despite his age and his respectability and his esteem he said, “This must be done.”
JANE FONDA (actor, peace activist)
One of my close friends in Paris was Simone Signoret, who was probably the most famous French actress at the time. She was married to Yves Montand. She took me to antiwar rallies to hear Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre speak. I was becoming really uncomfortable about being an American, living in Paris. I didn’t want to be in France, talking against the war, because I also felt kind of defensive. Simone had been one of the people who had stood in front of trains during the French-Indochinese conflict. She was very active against the French war in Indochina, and she had been a member of the French Resistance when she was very young, during the Second World War. She helped me understand the history of the Vietnam War.
TOD ENSIGN
Ralph Schoenman said that he wanted to hold hearings in this country to show that soldiers at the low ranks are not responsible for policies and that My Lai was the logical conclusion of “search and destroy” and other policies of the Vietnam War that were conceived in Washington. We knew that colonels, generals, secretaries of defense were responsible for war crimes, not some fucking lonely jackass soldier from Kansas who had never even seen an Asian person before.
So Jeremy and I, we went to see Ralph. He had an office down on Twentieth and Fifth Ave—at that time it was called the Movement Building, 156 Fifth Avenue. The ACLU was in there, Workers World [Party], a bunch of groups were in there. We said to Ralph, “Look, we’re interested in what you’re proposing. How can we work with you?” And he said, “Well, I need a lot of money to do that.” And we said, “We’re from the New Left; we don’t need money. We’ll do it.” And he believed us.
I said, “We believe this is everywhere, in every city; let’s just pick cities and go out and find vets who will testify.” We saw it as a way of organizing veterans—coming together, speaking out, taking action against their own victimization. We also thought that most combat veterans would feel threatened and angered by the Pentagon’s insistence that war crimes were caused by aberrant or sadistic GIs—rather than the logical consequences of military policies designed at the highest levels of the command.
At that time, there were only two national veterans groups that were antiwar—the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, then headquartered in New York City, and the Chicago-based Vets for Peace. Both groups were quite small, with VVAW consisting of only a few active members and no regular staff.
JAN BARRY (founder, Vietnam Veterans Against the War)
After Sy Hersh’s series of My Lai stories were published, I started getting phone calls from journalists who knew me from the days when I worked for the Bergen Record and knew I was active with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and they said, “Tell me your worst atrocity stories.” I said, “That’s not what this is about.” This wasn’t just an individual lieutenant going amok. This is an unwritten policy. In fact, we’d been trying to speak about this, but nobody wanted to hear it.
Starting from the time that I was in Vietnam in late 1962, and going into early 1963, we were told that there were free-fire zones in which anything that moved could be killed. I went to West Point and studied military history. You can’t find a policy like that in World War II. They didn’t arrive on D-Day in France and were told, “There’s a huge area of France where you can kill anything that moves—the farmers, the people in their homes.” Furthermore, it’s a violation of various international laws to target civilians. But that was a policy that was there when I arrived in Vietnam.
When the My Lai revelation came out, it clicked for an awful lot of Vietnam veterans that this was the larger version of smaller things that just went on on an almost daily basis. The civilians had become the targets in all kinds of ways. I got involved in helping to start VVAW because in early 1967 I read something in The New York Times about how yet again we’d bombed a friendly village. I just blew up—you can’t make this mistake over and over and over again. It reminded me of the very first statement that I heard the first night I got into a chow line when I arrived in Vietnam, at Tan Son Nhut, which is the air base next to Saigon. It was December 1962, and I get into line, and there are helicopter crews coming back from a mission, and these two guys in line next to me a
re bragging about how they had just attacked a village and created some more Viet Cong.
That was part of the policy when we were there in the early sixties—to start a war, to stir up somebody to fight us, so that we could say, “There’s a war going on,” because they’re shooting back at us. And no matter how many times I mentioned this previously when I spoke to various audiences, people would say, “American boys don’t do things like that.”
We were asked to speak at all kinds of teach-ins, and we did our research. We insisted everybody speaking on behalf of VVAW in the early days learn about the Geneva Accords of 1956. Now we could start putting My Lai into a larger context, which was that we had utter contempt for the people who we were supposed to save and protect. Since we couldn’t find the army we were fighting against, because it was guerrilla warfare, the people who were in sight were the ones who took the brunt. Their villages got attacked, and they got attacked if they were working in their fields, they got attacked if they were going to market on a road. In many cases they were deliberately driven to these hamlets—they were called strategic hamlets—and basically surrounded by barbed wire. They were prison camps.
Initially, people in the peace movement were harassing Vietnam vets. When I started speaking to peace groups I said, “Don’t rush up to some guy in uniform and start calling him a baby killer, whether or not he was participating in things that ended up with babies being killed. If you want to get him on your side to protest the war, you don’t rush right up and immediately accuse him of being a war criminal.”*1
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