Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  MICHAEL UHL (veteran antiwar activist)

  My Lai opened a gate for us to mobilize within the antiwar movement. I don’t think you could ever suggest that My Lai wasn’t a particularly vile expression of all of those military policies that came together at that one particular moment. It’s just that all those policies like search and destroy and forced relocations were being acted out—in most cases—on a less grand scale. There were a couple of other large massacres like that, but it was more the small, everyday atrocities. That’s what we were trying to show, the overall pattern of the war. We could not allow My Lai to become just a singular isolated event and we couldn’t allow Calley to become the person that somehow took the blame, had to fall on his sword or had to be pushed on his sword, when we should be indicting the architects and managers of the war as the true criminals.

  I volunteered to serve in Vietnam and was a first lieutenant in the Counter​intelli​gence Corps attached to the Eleventh Infantry from November ’68 to April ’69. I was evacuated from Vietnam because I had tuberculosis and I was in Valley Forge Army Hospital for four months, where my anger was sizzling to the point where I got in trouble and got kicked out of the army hospital. I was quietly, honorably medically discharged and sent to the VA in Manhattan.

  JANE FONDA

  In 1969, as my husband [the French film director Roger Vadim] was finishing editing Barbarella, I began to hear from American resisters who had left the army in Vietnam and were living in Paris. These had been active-duty servicemen, and they were looking for American expats who could help them with money, doctors, dentists, clothing, stuff like that. And I did. I met with them frequently, and gave them money, and gave them Vadim’s old clothes. Interestingly enough, I didn’t find out until later, many of them were housed at the farm of the sculptor Alexander Calder.

  All they wanted to talk about was what was happening in Vietnam. My father [Henry Fonda] had fought in the Second World War, where he got a Bronze Star. I felt that if our troops were fighting someplace, then we were on the side of the angels. So it was very hard for me to believe what I was hearing. Free-fire zones, torture, internment camps where people were rounded up and put into prison. The way we treated the Vietnamese belied everything I thought about my country. When I was having a hard time believing what they were telling me, they said, “Here, read this.” And they gave me a book called The Village of Ben Suc, by Jonathan Schell.*2 I was one person before I read it, and I was another person after I finished. And that was when I decided I’m going to leave France and move back to the States. That was the beginning of my outrage. The more staunchly patriotic you are, when you realize that your country has betrayed your belief in it, you become angrier than most other people who don’t care one way or the other. I was beside myself.

  MICHAEL UHL

  As soon as I arrived in Manhattan, I started looking for the movement. I was looking for the vets. I was reading the radical underground papers. I was looking for the opposition. So, by the time I walked into the NYU Law School auditorium to attend an antiwar teach-in calling for a Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry [CCI] to document the truth about war crimes in Vietnam, I had already become politicized. I was just looking for a structure in which I could become active.

  By ’69 and ’70 the counterculture and the New Left had come together to create this mass youth rebellion. For example, the Gray Line bus service used to come down to the East Village as part of the tour of New York City. All of these straight people were sitting in the Gray Line bus driving down to St. Mark’s Place and the tour guide would be giving his spiel about what folks were seeing—it was like being on safari. They were pointing out all the hippies on the street, and if I was walking down St. Mark’s that day, I would not have been distinguishable from any apolitical hippie. I wore the same uniform: yellow and blue striped bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dye long underwear shirt. My hair was very long and I had a bushy mustache. I looked like any hippie.

  But we were also political zealots, and I don’t regret that for a moment. We were passionately opposed not only to the war, but to the entire system. We had all become instant revolutionaries, instant socialists. We studied the literature, we had study and discussion groups, we had meetings where people who were extraordinarily articulate and intelligent would debate the different positions on the nature of the Soviet state—very esoteric stuff.

  So in January, at the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry teach-in at NYU Law School, Jan Barry and another activist got up and made their pitch to try to identify any Vietnam veterans in the audience, and they used the term war crimes. That was the moment that clicked for me. I had formed this strong consciousness in Vietnam that this war was a war waged against a civilian population, not against combatants, and I had witnessed atrocities. I went up afterwards and introduced myself to Jan. That was the beginning of my association with CCI.

  JAN BARRY

  I was speaking at NYU Law School and Michael Uhl comes over to me. I remember because he was very intense. He was studying linguistics, and he mentioned studying Noam Chomsky and I didn’t even know who Chomsky was.*3 But we got into this conversation, which, I guess, convinced him that this is something he should look further into. This really resonated with him, and shortly afterwards he decided he wanted to get involved with CCI.

  At any rate, I was impressed by the fact that very quickly there was this professional network taking this extremely seriously. They were people who could speak from direct experience. Part of my initial speaking was to try to convince other veterans who had more direct experiences than I did to talk about something they had probably never talked about before. Previously, we couldn’t get an audience. Nobody wanted to hear about this, but now everybody wanted to hear the latest atrocity story. It wasn’t that I could one-up you with an atrocity story, but the message was this is what we are doing as a pattern.

  MICHAEL UHL

  The next morning Jeremy Rifkin showed up in my apartment to take my testimony with his reel-to-reel tape recorder, his Samsonite briefcase, and his safari hat. Those were his trademarks at the time. I was living on Waverly Place, and we went around the corner to a coffee shop. He set up this huge tape recorder on the table and I told him my stories.

  I was a team leader of an intelligence team that was assigned to the Eleventh Infantry, was part of that Americal Division. It was located in Duc Pho, which is in the southern part of I Corps. This was an army brigade made up of several infantry battalions on the coast of the South China Sea and on the periphery of a district capital, in the province of Quang Ngai. This was a province that had been historically very militant during the period of French colonialism. Quang Ngai was still considered to be a place where the Viet Cong controlled the local hamlets, which in some ways explains the My Lai massacre. In other words, there was this sense among the commanders that they were in a very, very dangerous area, where the enemy operated extensively if not freely. So, I think in that context there was this sense that we were at war with the entire Vietnamese population. So our infantry units operating in the field would round up all of these civilians and we treated them as guilty until proven innocent. In intelligence language we sought to classify them as civil defendants, so first they would have to be filtered through our interrogation unit.

  They would be taken in and sat at desks with American GI interrogators and Vietnamese interpreters. To have called these individuals interpreters was really stretching the point, because none of them spoke very good English. So right from the start, you’ve got a substantial lack of communication going on. But interrogation is not about communication; it’s about intimidation. So each one of these suspects would be abused to one degree or another.

  I told Jeremy of this one incident the first day I arrived, when I was brought down and introduced to John Patton, who was the interrogation officer. He was showing me around and I’m watching these dinks, as we called them, being interrogated—being rapped on the head with pencils, and sort of jostled and screa
med at by the Americans using their pidgin Vietnamese. So it’s already an atmosphere that’s tinged with a kind of racial shading.

  Anyway, Patton is showing me around, and there’s a trailer attached to this small building and inside there’s a table with an army blanket on the table and a field telephone, and the wires are extending from the telephone because it’s not hooked up to a telephone system; the wires are attached to the fingers of these victims. There was a young woman that was hooked up to this device and they’re turning the crank and after a while, of course this woman is screaming and she immediately begins to menstruate—Patton and everybody was just shocked.

  So there was the systematic use of torture in this unit and there were several individuals who would take this to the most extreme levels. Not the majority. But there were incidents where people were genuinely tortured, and there was this general atmosphere of constant abuse toward the Vietnamese.

  JANE FONDA

  One night at the home of Mike Nichols in Los Angeles, there was a screening party for Michelangelo Antonioni and his movie Zabriskie Point. I met Fred Gardner there, who was an antiwar activist, and he and I got to talking about the GIs. It was the first time that anyone told me that there was a movement of active-duty soldiers and veterans here in the United States called the GI movement and that people, including Fred Gardner, were creating these GI coffeehouses around the country where antiwar civilian activists would run them, and would have educational forums, conversations, libraries, where the soldiers could read literature about the war.

  TOD ENSIGN

  At this stage, the GI movement was gathering steam at the same time as the veterans’ movement and they fed off each other. They also brought a new attitude to the antiwar movement about soldiers that was less critical and less judgmental. At the March on the Pentagon in 1967 there were signs calling vets “killers.” We were against all that, of course. So we picked the right time. That’s when it began to shift, as the vets came into the movement.

  Jan Barry was a Vietnam vet who had struggled for years to get the VVAW off the ground and he gave me the name of this guy. We went together to see him in Brooklyn. He was disturbed but he was not changed by the war. He wasn’t an antiwar-nik. He wasn’t ashamed to show us the pictures of Vietnamese civilian heads lined up on the grass, with him standing over them with a rifle. I saw pictures like this many times. Often vets would be ashamed to show it to you. They wore heads—they wore pieces of eyes. They cut off a thumb, wore it around their neck on a lanyard. That’s what happens. War dehumanizes people. He gave me a set of photos and I remember coming back and showing them to Jeremy and Michael, and they said, “Whoa, we can’t use those!”

  Word spread quickly about the Citizens’ Commissions and within weeks a Veterans for Peace group in Baltimore agreed to cosponsor the first commission in Annapolis, Maryland, on March 11 and 12, 1970. This guy named Bob Johnson wanted to have his hearing. He’d been in Vietnam as a first lieutenant right out of West Point, and he saw a lot of shit.

  JAN BARRY

  There was a West Point graduate, Robert Johnson, who lived in the Annapolis area, and he organized the first hearing in Annapolis. It was a big deal because it was on the record in the American news media. It was a big deal because it’s being treated with respect by institutions like a law school and a church.

  MICHAEL UHL

  A story in the Annapolis paper reported, “Photographs, motion pictures and slides of dead and maimed children were used last night to convey the horror of the Vietnamese War to an audience of 100 persons at the…Unitarian Church.”

  The Baltimore Afro-American quoted Peter Martinsen, a former U.S. Army prisoner of war interrogator: “One technique I saw used to get prisoners to talk was to wire them around the ears with field phones and ‘ring’ them up. Sometimes they would have burn marks on their ears from the electric shock.”*4

  JANE FONDA

  I was getting ready to drive across the country. I’d been living outside of the country for ten years, and I had to end up in New York to make a movie called Klute. I thought, Well, I’m just going to drive, because I don’t know what this country is anymore. It was very clear to me that everything had changed. Fred Gardner suggested that I visit the GI coffeehouses. The first one I visited was Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. I hadn’t started on my trip yet, but I could just drive there and back from L.A. My friend Elisabeth Vailland came with me, and we drove to Fort Ord, and I mostly just listened. I’ll never forget meeting this young kid—I mean he looked thirteen. When the conversation was winding down, he came over to me, and he got very close to my ear, because he couldn’t speak above a whisper. It sounded like he was trying to tell me something that he had done to a child, and he was having a hard time getting the words out. I realized that he was totally traumatized. He wanted me to know, but he was having a hard time saying it. Some of the other guys were also talking about killing civilians. Some of them wanted to talk, and some of them had a hard time talking.

  Before I left on the trip I was introduced to Donald Duncan, who had been a Green Beret in Vietnam. To be a Green Beret and become part of the GI movement meant that there were threats against his life all the time. It was very heavy being around him, because he was being followed. You could feel danger. It was weird feeling there’s danger, and it’s coming from my government. He was a dangerous voice for them, this Special Forces guy, who was talking about what was happening over there. Donald introduced me to Ken Cloke, who taught military law at Occidental College, and Ken gave me a crash course in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and he would bring me piles of newspapers written by GIs that were part of the GI movement. Each coffeehouse had its own newspaper, and in these newspapers they talked about fragging, they talked about all the things that were being done to soldiers who in any way raised their voices.

  TOD ENSIGN

  I picked Springfield, Massachusetts, next, of all places. I just got on a bus and went up there and I found a guy right away who was one of our best witnesses ever. First I went to the local college. It wasn’t hard to find people there—you could identify the vets immediately by what they looked like—long hair, incense, amulets, patchouli oil. It was a broad, cultural movement of women, blacks, Hispanics, whites, any sort mixed together. That’s where I met David Bressam, but at first I didn’t know how much he’d talk. I had to win his trust. His battalion was involved in a helicopter “turkey shoot” where they shot more than thirty people from their helicopter—mowed them down on orders from the commander. In the hearing, Bressam really spilled his guts. We organized a morning hearing with veterans, April 6.

  This was the first commission that received national attention and both The New York Times and the Associated Press gave the allegations prominent coverage, and it taught us how the Pentagon would respond when unwanted publicity became too pervasive. Within hours the Pentagon sent criminal investigators to Bressam’s home. They wanted to question him about the identities of those involved in the incident so, they claimed, they could prosecute any who might still be on active duty. Bressam also received a phone call from his former commander, who expressed fear that his army career might be ruined.

  The Pentagon’s tactic of seeking the identities of wrongdoers for possible prosecution presented us with a difficult problem. By taking the position that witnesses should not cooperate with military investigators whose goal was to prosecute low-ranking GIs, we came across as being indifferent to criminal conduct. Even though we continually explained that we wanted a thorough, independent investigation of policies conceived by our military and civilian leaders, I’m afraid that we were often viewed as moral agnostics, even by some in the peace movement.

  During the next few months, we held successful Citizens’ Commissions of Inquiries in Richmond, Virginia; New York City; Buffalo; Boston; Minneapolis; Los Angeles; and Portland, Oregon.

  MICHAEL UHL

  Whether we were in Duluth or Richmond or Philadelphia or Los Angeles, we wer
e always with veterans who were pissed enough about the war that they were willing to go before TV cameras and reporters and tell them about what they had witnessed and experienced in Vietnam, and it always had to do with an atrocity—they were narrating their atrocities.

  I gave my own testimony publicly on my twenty-sixth birthday. It was April 14, 1970, and we had a joint press conference in New York and Los Angeles. I was nervous, but I just told my stories. My testimony appeared in articles in the New York papers. There was an article in The New York Times, Daily News, and New York Post. At CCI we were constantly having our success recognized by the fourth estate as legitimate news, and we just got tons and tons of publicity, adding to whatever else was going on in the antiwar movement. So right from the start, I could see that my two comrades, Jeremy [Rifkin] and Tod [Ensign], were natural publicists. Our primary technique in organizing these commissions all over the country was having guys step forward, and always making sure that to the best of our ability we were dealing with real veterans. We always had people verify their bona fides by showing us their discharge papers and by interviewing them first. So we went around and organized these events where vets could tell their stories directly in their own words to the American people, through the good offices of the media.

  JAN BARRY

  To some degree, it was therapy for those people who participated in speaking out. When you finally get mad and they speak out, you’re doing something about it rather than just stewing in your anger.*5