Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  At the end of the demonstration, the group agreed that everyone needed to get out of Miami as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a few of the cars in their convoy needed gasoline. When those cars stopped at the next exit on Florida’s Turnpike, the passengers were arrested immediately. Friedman’s car made it all the way to Gainesville without incident.

  The Nixon administration bombed and mined Haiphong Harbor in May 1972, and antiwar demonstrations erupted anew. Vietnam veterans took part in many of these demonstrations, at the Miami convention and elsewhere. There were two takeovers of the Statue of Liberty, a demonstration at the United Nations, and several actions at Veterans Administration facilities around Manhattan. These were episodes of guerrilla theater intended not to injure anyone but rather to raise the visibility of the antiwar position and to direct attention to the VA’s lack of dedication to Vietnam veterans.

  They were not doing anything for employment; they were not helping people get their disability claims; there was just general disdain for Vietnam veterans inherent in the VA at the time.

  The Nixon administration attempted to make the case that Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a minority group with violent tendencies. Friedman rejects that characterization and affirms the organization’s legitimacy. He had taken a bullet in Vietnam and received two Purple Hearts. He understands the nature of violence in a way only combat veterans can. He has also been on the wrong end of a police club on several occasions, and he knows the difference between violence and protest.

  Vietnam Veterans Against the War was taken over by a Maoist group known as the Revolutionary Union in the mid-1970s. Friedman, like many other VVAW members, lost interest in the organization.3 His goal was to wake the American people up to the injustices of the war itself and to make them aware of the struggles Vietnam veterans faced here in the United States.

  Friedman felt that confrontational but nonviolent events provided the best opportunity to do this. He understood, too, that democracy and the confrontations it can spark come with a price. On one VVAW march, he watched while an automobile struck a fellow veteran. He believes the woman hit the man on purpose.

  Despite this, Friedman insists that he never plotted the violent overthrow of anything. He just wanted, he says, to end the war. And to that end, he believes that the VVAW gave the peace movement credibility. Once the political agendas of other groups such as the Black Panthers and the Communist Party began to creep into organizational efforts, he left. What he discovered, however, is that he liked community development and support work.

  I liked working with people … we set up the Brooklyn chapter at the storefront in Red Hook, and I lived in a little room in the back. We did health testing, you know; that’s when John Hamill got involved and everything, and that’s when we planned out the Prospect Park [demonstration]. We would go around, and we were doing TB testing and we were doing diabetes testing, you know; we had some nurses who worked with us. Not just for veterans, just to be involved. It was like a community health center, something that veterans did in the community. We were also fighting against the gentrification of Park Slope, the takeover by Methodist Hospital when they were expanding and buying up houses and stuff.

  After Friedman left VVAW, he became involved with the less political and more veteran-oriented Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA).

  We did a lot of good things. We initiated programs that are still going on today, like the [Christmas party at the Brooklyn VA hospital]. I started that. We used to come there once a month with a six-foot hero and canteen books. Christmastime we’d bring Santa Claus, we’d bring a band, we’d have music. That’s kind of what I liked about VVA.

  The VA Christmas parties continue as a VVA Chapter 72 tradition. In 2011, Friedman played Santa Claus again, bringing canteen coupon books and other supplies to men stuck in the hospital over the holiday.

  By the 1980s, Friedman was working as a New York State veterans counselor and, with others, began to focus his work on veterans at the VA hospital in Brooklyn. Friedman participated in the establishment of a multiservice center within the hospital, on the fifth floor, bringing in representatives from Social Security, the Department of Labor, the New York City Human Resources Administration, and others. Friedman became increasingly involved with assisting veterans in their efforts to file claims with the Veterans Administration.

  Everybody who failed somewhere else was coming to me. Everything else was just walk-in—a couple, three people a day; I had lines outside my office all day long. You know, widows whose husbands had just died in the hospital would come in and the same day even sometimes just, you know, crying and stuff.

  And, Friedman found, he was good at it.

  I tell the veteran, I says, “Tell me your story; what did you do in Vietnam? What significant incidents do you remember?” And then I’ll help him rewrite it into a form that will fit into a claim, into a format that the VA [can understand]. For PTSD in particular you have to first show that the person served in a situation where he would have been faced with stressors—[a] combat situation. If they didn’t have a CIB [Combat Infantryman Badge] or Purple Heart or whatever, if they weren’t infantry, you had to show, you know, that they did convoys in hostile territories or their bases were subject to attacks … The Joint Services Environmental Task Force maintained an archive of morning reports, all from the units. So we got morning reports from units, and we were able to show that these units came under attack these days and that this guy was there certain days, through these morning reports.

  And we were able to get them, because the VA was supposed to get them but they never would. So we got them in advance of when we presented them with a claim. When I put in a claim, it was a well-documented claim that the VA didn’t have to do a lot of developmental on; everything was spelled out for them in a simple language of one syllable or less, you know, like this is a PTSD claim; you will grant it. Yes, master. [Laughs.]

  One particular story illustrates Friedman’s transformation from out-side activist to one working within the system. In 1972, George H. W. Bush was serving as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He was scheduled to speak at the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, and the VVAW decided to engage in an act of street theater. Friedman and four others filled balloons with stage blood. Students from Riverdale smuggled the activists into the kitchen under the noses of the New York City Police Department. During the early portion of the event, Friedman and the others burst in, shouting, “The blood of the Vietnamese people is on your hands!” and threw the balloons up into the air. When they burst, blood was all over everyone. Friedman distinctly recalls hearing a woman scream, “Oh, my mink coat!” The group escaped, scrambled down the hill to their car, and headed back to Manhattan.4

  Fast-forward to 2001: Friedman was working for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service. He and a number of other veterans were invited to an event at the National Guard Armory on Park Avenue in Manhattan. In attendance at the event were Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg, and George H. W. Bush’s son President George W. Bush. As he was introduced to the president, Friedman said, “I had the pleasure of meeting your father when he was ambassador to the United Nations.”

  To this day, Friedman sees himself as someone who defends all people and their right to live in peace. His status as a veteran, he believes, gives him special insight into the realities of war and the wrongs it can inflict. He says he uses this knowledge to help veterans defend themselves against injustice, standing up to power when necessary. Currently, he is an assistant director for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service, working to meet the needs of a new generation of returning veterans.

  I wasn’t really interested in arguing politics; I just wanted to help those who wanted to make the statement be effective. I was good at logistics—getting things done. I was never one to be into rhetoric. I didn’t accept it on a religious level, and I didn’t accept it on a polit
ical level. I enjoyed doing things on a human level.

  Fred Louis did not participate in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement. While his antiwar activism came later than Friedman’s, it was also inspired by what he had seen and experienced in Vietnam.

  Louis, the son of an assistant civil engineer, lived on a farm in Orange County, New York, until the age of four. In the summer, the guesthouse bungalow would host relatives who would come up from Brooklyn for the fresh air. The family moved to the Midwood/Flatbush section of Brooklyn when his father’s job at the Rondout Reservoir in the Catskill Mountains ended.

  The area was heavily populated with Italian and Jewish families. While his last name does not give immediate clues to an ethnic identity, his mother’s maiden name was Moscowitz and his father’s family name was Losser. As he would learn later from a relative, the Lossers moved from Germany to France. To avoid the French anti-Semitism prevalent at the time, the family changed its name to Louis.

  A shy young man, Louis attended P.S. 99 on East Tenth Street in Brooklyn and stayed there through the eighth grade, when he passed the entrance exam for the highly prestigious Brooklyn Tech High School. As he puts it, school was a source of approval. I learned how to play the game. I learned how to give teachers what they wanted. I learned to be able to read that really well.

  A number of his friends’ families were affiliated, in some way or other, with the Communist Party. While it was not obvious at the time, he realized it later.

  I just happened to end up with this whole group of red diaper babies, just surrounded by them, as it turned out.

  While Communism as an influence did not stick—at all—the social environment did introduce him to folk music and especially to Pete Seeger. He remains close to a group of folk musicians, and music is still a big part of his life.

  I remember having box seats in Carnegie Hall for my first hootenanny, hosted by Pete, and I think Lead Belly was there. It was the first New York appearance of Joan Baez, and my reaction was, why is she wasting that incredible voice on this music?

  Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter) wasn’t there, having died in 1949, but Louis may well have seen another one of the many blues musicians traveling on the folk circuit in the early 1960s. Anyway, Joan Baez was the one who made the impression on Louis that evening.

  Louis had an aptitude for math and believed he might follow his father’s path into engineering. After his graduation from Brooklyn Tech High School in 1964, he applied to MIT and Cornell University, eventually enrolling at Cornell, where he lasted two years. He did not like it at all.

  I love[d] physics to the point where I’d spend hours and hours and hours doing physics problems and not doing much of anything else. So first semester I went on probation, second semester I got off probation, third semester I got back on probation, fourth semester they kicked me out for a year. At that point I got drafted.

  It was early 1967. His close friends from the neighborhood were also getting drafted. He felt isolated, as though he had screwed up his life and disappointed his parents. He tried to resist induction into the Army.

  I did get my induction date delayed by writing to everybody I could think of, including President Johnson. My draft board, I’m sure, got letters. They had no idea what was going on. And I had doctor’s notes, but you had to be basically dead not to get in, you know. At that point they were pretty desperate. I started working at the ACLU, which was interesting, and got to see at least one very prominent CO [conscientious objector] case and read a whole bunch of the briefs and stuff and [thought], “I’m going; I don’t have a prayer for CO status.” And I wasn’t about to go to Canada, although I did think about it. And I wasn’t about to go to jail. So that didn’t leave a lot of options.

  Still, Louis tried to control his fate by volunteering for early induction in exchange for the opportunity to select his job in the Army—his military occupational specialty, or MOS.

  I went to the local recruiter on Flatbush Avenue, and I plunked myself very cockily and said, “What can you offer me?” and he looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Well, I’ll send you to Fort Hamilton for tests.”

  When I got the results, I walked in and I put them down on his desk and he looked at them and he shook his head and the phone rang and he’s on the phone talking to somebody and he’s looking at them and he’s shaking his head and he gets off the phone and he’s looking at them and he’s shaking his head and he looks over at me and he says, “Are you a college graduate?” And I said no, and he says, “You’re a high school graduate?” And I say yeah, and I finally said, “What’s going on?”

  He says, “Well, I’ve had PhDs in here who don’t have scores anywhere near as high as yours,” at which point he gave me the book, you know, every job you could have in the military; here’s the book, pick something. So I’m there and I’m thumbing through all this stuff, and he’s doing his business. [Later] that day, then I got on the phone with [a friend] who is in Fort Hood, Texas, and is arming up, preparing to go. And he started screaming at me: “Are you crazy? I can put a hundred guys on the phone right now who got screwed out of their MOS. Don’t do it.”

  He knew that if he enlisted in the Army, he would be expected to serve for three years, and he might end up in Vietnam even if he requested a noncombat MOS. If he was drafted, he would serve for only two.

  So I went back to the guy and I said, “You can’t guarantee me any of this, can you?” And to his credit he said, “No, I can’t, but I figure you’re smart enough, once you get in you’ll, you know…” But little did I know that Catch-22 is right on and PFC Wintergreens run the Army. Company clerks run the Army. But I said, “No thanks.”

  Louis decided to take his chances with the draft and accepted induction into the Army on July 25, 1967, his parents’ wedding anniversary. In basic training he ended up with an “alternative” crowd.

  Somebody in this little cadre had a copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind, which is still one of my favorite books, and after evening chow they gave us a little smoke break at the parade ground, and there would be five or six or seven or eight of us sitting around, reading Ferlinghetti poems out loud.

  Offered a spot in Officer Candidate School on the basis of his test scores, Louis declined, opting instead to try to escape—he went absent without leave (AWOL). As he recalls, he just took the bus into town, went across the state line to catch a plane to New York from Columbia, South Carolina. And then was totally freaked. Here I am, shaved head, the whole bit, figuring that any minute now they’re just gonna cuff me and take me away. I was one of probably hundreds of thousands.

  Finally, I stayed at a friend’s house and basically wasn’t home very much and was pretty much terrified whenever I was out in public and turned myself in about three weeks later. So I report back to [Fort] Polk [and] I missed my training cycle. They didn’t even dock me for the time, actually; they were supposed to, but they didn’t.

  After additional training in Fort Lewis, Washington, he was sent as part of a complete company to join a battalion in Vietnam. Arrival, for Louis, was memorable.

  Our welcome to Vietnam was a .30-caliber round. The guy was a good shot. We were glidepathing into Chu Lai, and this guy shot dead center right through the middle of the plane. Hit the pile of packs, luckily. Put a hole in somebody’s canteen; that was about it.

  Arriving in the first week of February 1968, he served with the Twenty-Third Infantry Division (Americal) until early February 1969. Thinking back, Louis recalls his attitude when he entered Vietnam:

  The attitude was “Don’t volunteer for anything and be as invisible as possible, for obvious reasons.”

  When asked how he managed the rigors of combat duty, he replied:

  Oh, God—well, I still sort of have a perspective that it really didn’t have much effect on me, which I also know is bullshit. I’m sure you’ve heard this from everybody. You definitely just kind of numb out.

  He tried to distance himse
lf emotionally from what was going on. Still, he recalls his experience of Vietnam as a combination of 99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer terror. On one occasion he recalls being attacked by American artillery, with big chunks of dirt falling on him while he and two others were on listening-post duty.

  Body counts, used to measure progress against a stubborn and often invisible enemy, were, for Louis, a reflection of the chaotic and ultimately illegitimate nature of the war in Vietnam. In one incident, he recalls:

  We’re up on top of this ridge, full company, [and] down in the valley we spot some black pajamas walking on this trail, and everybody just lined up and started shooting. And I suppose that’s when I found out that the CO’s [commanding officer’s] policy was “no prisoners.” Apparently, it had been from an experience—sending these guys back for interrogation and then running into them again. I was carrying a grenade launcher, so they were way out of my range. The guy next to me offered to let me shoot his rifle, and I said, “No, that’s okay, no thanks.” And they sent a patrol down to see what had happened, and they found what they estimated to be an eight-year-old kid with a belly wound and just left him. I heard the CO on the radio call in three VC kills. I guess that was my first experience with what bullshit the body count stuff was.

  Later that night, Louis again experienced friendly fire:

  We were on the other part of the ridge and setting up camp for the night, and there was this chopper circling around, circling around, circling around, and he circles around and he must have been up there for ten minutes. And he opens fire on us. Luckily, it didn’t hurt anybody and probably got [him] into a little bit of hot water. [Laughs.] So another friendly-fire incident. [There were] lots of them. And that’s just totally terrifying.

  In retrospect, the war Louis experienced was already spinning out of control by 1968. These were very young men, trying to stay alive while making the best of a difficult situation. He recalls one incident that took place while his unit was stationed near Chu Lai: