Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Ellsberg had been a keen supporter of McNamara and US involvement in Vietnam. But he was disillusion by what he learnt compiling the report. After the National Moratorium on 15 October 1969, he began secretly photocopying the study and passing pages to Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a prominent critic of the war. Later, he sent copies to The New York Times, who began publication on 13 June 1971. President Nixon slapped an injunction on the Times, but then the Washington Post began printing more extracts. When the Post in turn was silenced by an injunction, other newspapers in Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Boston took up the challenge. On 30 June the Supreme Court quashed the injunctions, condemning Nixon's attempt to gag the press. In the meantime, Ellsberg had given himself up to the police. He and another colleague, Anthony J. Russo, were indicted for theft but the charges were dropped in May 1973 when it was revealed that Nixon had authorised the burglary of the offices of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in an attempt to find evidence to smear him. The burglary was carried out by members of the White House staff in a sinister precursor to the Watergate break-in which would take place in 1972.

  While they now commanded national support, some protests then began to take a more violent turn. The SDS had grown increasingly militant, and by 1969 it had split into several factions, the most notorious of which was the Weathermen, or Weather Underground, who began planting bombs. Over 5,000 bombs went off in all, including one that wrecked a bathroom in the Pentagon.

  In 1970, protests against the incursion into Vietnam's neighbour Cambodia swept the universities. Conservative politicians demanded an end to campus unrest: California's Governor Ronald Reagan said, 'If it takes a bloodbath, then let's get it over with'.

  His words came true on the campus of the traditionally politically apathetic Kent State University. When protests broke out there, the Governor of Ohio came to the campus and described the demonstrators as 'troublemakers' who were 'worse than the brown shirts' (Hitler's early followers in Nazi Germany) and the Communist elements, and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They are the worse type of people that we harbour in America'. He was standing in the primaries for the Republican senate nomination the following week.

  The Ohio National Guard was called in. The protesters sang John Lennon's 'Give Peace a Chance' and the Riot Act was read. A campus policeman with a bullhorn ordered the crowd to disperse. They answered with cries of 'Pigs off campus' and 'Sieg Heil'. The National Guard commander, General Canterbury, ordered his men to load their rifles with live ammunition and don gas masks. From the top of a grassy knoll, 100 state troopers fired tear gas canisters into the crowd. The protesters hurled them back, along with rocks, lumps of concrete, and obscenities. Around 40 of the National Guardsmen moved down the hill to confront the crowd. A couple of times, they assumed firing positions to scare the demonstrators, but were eventually forced back. Then a single shot rang out, followed by a salvo from the troopers on the grassy knoll. Sixty-one shots were fired in all. No warning had been given.

  The protesters had no idea that the troopers were armed with live ammunition. One demonstrator said that they were firing blanks, otherwise they would be shooting in the air or at the ground. But four students died. There was no indication that they were regular SDS activists. One of them, Sandra Lee Sheuer, was passing on the way to class. Jeffrey Miller was a registered Republican and William Schroeder was a member of the university's Reserve Officer's Training Corps. The fourth victim was Allison Krause. Ten more students lay wounded, one paralysed from the waist down by a bullet lodged in his spine. Ignoring cries for help from the crowd, the National Guardsmen shouldered their arms and marched away.

  Attempts to justify the actions of the National Guard as self-defence were dented when the results of the FBI investigation into the shootings were leaked. The report concluded, 'The shootings were not necessary and not in order'. It also said, 'We have some reason to believe that the claim by the National Guard that their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated subsequent to the event'.

  Even so, when the National Guardsmen were brought to trial they were found not guilty. However, eight-and-a-half years later the defendants issued a statement admitting responsibility for the shootings and expressing their regret, and in January 1979, the parents and students received $675,000 from the State of Ohio in an out-of-court settlement.

  The shootings at Kent State brought the war home to white middle class America. The victims were not little yellow men on the other side of the world, or blacks in the ghetto, or student radicals from Berkeley. These were their sons and daughters, middle-class kids attending a relatively quiet campus in middle America. Over 150 colleges were closed or went on strike in the days following the killings. One hundred thousand protestors marched in Washington, DC, though construction workers broke up a demonstration on Wall Street while the NYPD looked on.

  Although Nixon dismissed the protesters as bums, America was shocked. Even the Education Secretary Robert Finch condemned the rhetoric that had heated the climate which led to the Kent State slayings. The days when hippie protesters put flowers in the barrels of soldier's guns were gone. The Weathermen set up a National War Council. The ladies' room in the US Senate was blown up. The home of a judge trying African-American radicals was bombed, as was the New York Police Department. An attack on an army dance at Fort Dix was planned. More seriously one person was killed and three wounded by a bomb attack on the army's Mathematics Research Center in Wisconsin. But the outrage of middle America meant that mainstream politicians were now forced to tackle the issue. Nixon was forced to withdraw American troops from Cambodia and funding for the war was cut by Congress.

  But protests continued. In May 1971, 12,000 demonstrators were arrested in Washington, DC. In November that year there were large-scale rallies in 16 cities. By then Nixon, the man who had come to power offering 'peace with honour', was the focus of the protests.

  One of the most powerful propaganda weapons the anti-war movement had was the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. These men could hardly be accused of being cowards or Communists, accusations regularly hurled at student protesters. They had served their country in Vietnam, and decided the war there was wrong. They turned up to demonstrations in uniform, though they often threw away their medals. The injured – amputees and men in wheelchairs – added a powerful wordless protest to student chanting. No New York hardhat was going to beat them up. They even defied a Supreme Court ban on demonstrating in Washington, DC, with impunity.

  On 28 December, 1971, 16 Vietnam veterans occupied the Statue of Liberty, hung the Stars and Stripes upside down from the observation platform, and sent an open letter to President Nixon, saying, 'We can no longer tolerate the war in Southeast Asia regardless of the colour of its dead or the method of its implementation'.

  In 1972, wheelchair-bound Vietnam Veteran Ron Kovic gatecrashed the Republican convention on the night of Nixon's speech accepting the presidential nomination, telling the guards who tried to throw him out, 'I'm a Vietnam veteran... I've got just as much right to be here as any of these delegates. I fought for that right and I was born on the Fourth of July'.

  For two minutes, he condemned the war on national television. Kovic's story was later immortalised in Oliver Stone's controversial film Born on the Fourth of July.

  Quite apart from all these anti-war demonstrations, opinion polls revealed disillusionment with the war throughout the nation, and it was clear that one way or the other the US had to extricate itself from what was graphically called the 'Vietnam quagmire'. Bowing to the inevitable, Nixon concluded a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War, which was signed in Paris in January 1973.

  A member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War group (VVAW) wields a plastic gun as the group march from New Jersey to Pennsylvannia, June 1970.

  A soldier of 198th Light Infantry Brigade shows support for Moratorium Day by wearing a black armband, 15 October 1969.

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  THE COLLAPSE OF MORALE

  THE WAR WAS NOT universally popular even among the military. On 8 July 1965 a US captain was court-martialled in Okinawa for feigning mental illness while serving in Vietnam. On 11 June 1966, Private Adam R. Weber, an African-American soldier in the 25th Infantry Division, was sentenced to one year hard labour for refusing to carry a rifle because of his pacifist convictions. In September, three army privates were court-martialled for refusing to go to Vietnam. The court rejected the defence argument that the war was immoral and illegal. In March 1967, USAF Captain Dale E. Noyd sued in court to have himself reclassified as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam conflict. His petition was denied in June. In August, the US Court of Military Appeals upheld a sentence of one year hard labour on a soldier found guilty of demonstrating against the war.

  To start with, these military objectors were few and far between. On the other hand, by September 1965, over 100 US servicemen were volunteering for service in Vietnam every day, although the enthusiasm for the war did not last long, even among the professional soldiers who longed for combat experience. The cherished discipline of the army and the Marine Corps was soon corrupted by exposure to the delights of Saigon and the other cities of the east.

  Before the war Saigon had been known as the 'Paris of the Orient'. Like Paris, Saigon was famous for its prostitutes. During their occupation, the French had both legalised and profited from it, and had developed a system of military brothels. Mobile brothels followed the troops and at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnamese and North African prostitutes acted as nurses and even frontline fighters. The South Vietnamese army inherited the system but, under the Diem regime, the president's sister-in-law Madame Nhu, known for her tight dresses and expensive jewellery, tried unsuccessfully to clean up the city, banning all overt forms of licentious behaviour including the latest American dance craze, the Twist, condemned by many as lewd. Madame Nhu had people arrested for wearing 'cowboy clothes', and she and her husband, warlord Ngo Dinh Nhu, took out full-page newspaper ads denying their involvement in illegal activities; an attempt doomed to failure.

  However, when the Americans arrived in force in 1965, Diem was dead and Madame Nhu's puritanism was on the retreat. Soon the black market was flourishing, selling everything from jeeps and fridges to hairspray and pantyhose, much of it direct from the US commissary. Cigarettes were another major item on the black market, with some American brands sold at $1 a pack with the tax seal apparently intact: in fact, the tobacco had often been taken out and substituted with marijuana. Other cigarettes were painted with opium and sold singly. Much of the drug supply was brought into the city by the Vietcong, who quickly realised the debilitating effect it had on US morale. Drug abuse was a central theme of 1960s music and culture, and was associated with the hippie movement and its anti-war stance.

  By 1967, there were 50,000 US troops stationed in Saigon with huge numbers moving through Tan Son Nhut Airport. Thousands more came into the city on three-day passes from the fighting in the surrounding countryside, and thousands of US and foreign journalists packed into Saigon for what they called the 'five o'clock follies', the regular afternoon press briefings held in the US Information Service auditorium. By then, much of the French flavour of the city had been lost. The US troops brought their own radio and TV stations. Traditional Vietnamese cafés began selling hamburgers, fries, and milk-shakes. Tailor shops sprung up providing safari suits and other American-style civilian clothing so that the troops could get out of uniform, while others specialised in military insignia and other souvenirs of the war. To cater to this huge influx of foreigners, there were bars, brothels, opium dens and massage parlours. Girls came pouring into Saigon from the countryside: a prostitute in Saigon could earn more than a cabinet minister. The streets were full of military jeeps, official Ford sedans, and the motor scooters and Japanese motorbikes of the Saigon Cowboys (pimps) and black marketeers.

  There were 'Turkish baths' where a soldier could pay to be bathed by a pretty young woman, 'magic finger' massage parlours, 'steam and cream' joints, and oral sex was freely available under bar-room tables. You could buy a hostess and take her away for sex, provided you paid the mama-san for the number of 'Saigon teas' she would have consumed. You could pay in US dollars or military script that was supposed to be spent only on military posts but was widely traded outside at a 40 per cent discount. Prostitutes were often working for the Vietcong and used to wheedle information out of GIs. This was widely known, but the authorities could do nothing about it. Although US soldiers were banned from carrying weapons in Saigon or wearing camouflage fatigues, many did. The South Vietnamese police were supposed to enforce the law, but few risked their lives trying to disarm a heavily armed Green Beret or prevent him taking his pleasures with a bar girl, even if she was VC. There was a ready supply of new girls among those driven off the land by search-and-destroy missions, but still there was the ever-present danger of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. An especially pernicious strain that was doing the rounds was called the Heinz 57 variety, for which there was no known cure and sufferers had to endure an endless drip.

  Servicemen on liberty in Saigon separated largely along racial lines, largely because of music. White GIs went to the bars along the Tu Do where rock music was played. African-American servicemen established a separate quarter, known as 'Soulsville' behind the docks in Khanh Hoi, where soul music was played, and many of the prostitutes were darker-skinned Khmer women from Cambodia or the daughters of Senegalese soldiers brought to Vietnam by the French. This racial division became such a sore point that, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Armed Forces TV station screened nothing but his picture for three whole days. The soul singer, Soul Brother Number One, the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, came to Vietnam to perform for the troops; Whitey got Bob Hope and Jayne Mansfield. After the death of King, Brown had to go on TV in the US to help quell the ensuing riots. As a result, he was accused of being an 'Uncle Tom,' but answered his critics in 1969 with his number one R&B hit 'Say It Loud, I'm Black and Proud'. However, he drew more flak in 1972 when he endorsed the re-election campaign of President Nixon.

  The racial tensions that were tearing apart the ghettoes back home in the US also infused the armed forces. In July 1969, there was a race riot in Lejeune Marine Camp in North Carolina. The Marines did not admit African-Americans until World War II, and the first black Leatherneck, Sergeant-Major Edgar A. Huff, was regularly arrested for impersonating a Marine – on the grounds that there 'weren't no coloreds in the Marines'. During World War II 'Negroes' were restricted to separate units. Although the US Army had been integrated in 1949, Vietnam was essentially the first war where blacks and whites fought side by side. African-Americans called themselves 'Negroes' or 'colored people' until 1966 when the term 'black' was coined by the activist Stokely Carmichael. After that 'black' as in 'black power' became a political statement, particularly when two African-American athletes at the 1968 Mexico Olympic raised gloved fists on the podium in a black power salute. In Vietnam, fights erupted between blacks and whites. Sometimes guns were used. And the walls of latrines were scrawled with racist graffiti, such as, 'Better a gook [a derogatory term used for the Vietnamese] than a nigger'.

  When one African-American patrol leader appeared on the cover of Time magazine, he woke up to find a burning cross outside his tent – the traditional warning from the Ku Klux Klan to any African-American who sought to better themselves. The day before Captain Lewis, an African-American officer later caught on film setting light to a hootch in the Kim Son Valley, was due to go to Vietnam he was in a phone booth in Montgomery, Alabama saying goodbye to his wife when he was shot in the back by a Klansman. The army's response was to make him commanding officer of an almost exclusively white unit. This was rare, but as the war dragged on African-Americans in the Marines won the rights to grow their hair in Afros. However, it was noted that there was one time when blacks and whites were comfortable with each other in Vi
etnam – that was when they were smoking marijuana.

  Since the Korean War, GIs had been given a week's R&R (rest and recreation) during a tour of duty. Among the troops R&R was known as I&I – intoxication and intercourse. From Vietnam, troops were sent to Bangkok, Penang, Hong Kong, Hawaii, Taipei or Sydney on a week's pass. Grunts also got three-day passes to Saigon or one of the in-country beach resorts at Nha Trang, Vung Tau, Chu Lai, Qui Nhon or Cam Ranh. The most famous, China Beach, was the Marine enclave just outside Da Nang.

  Three-day passes were used as an incentive to capture enemy prisoners. As the war dragged on, the number of POWs being taken dropped off dramatically. GIs were sick of seeing their buddies blown apart by booby traps and mines, mutilated by an unseen enemy and sent home in body bags. As a result, they simply killed any Communist that fell into their hands. But this also wasted valuable intelligence, and orders were issued that more live prisoners were to be taken and, when whole companies were offered R&R as a reward, the POW count quickly improved.

  At these beach resorts, the grunts found that sea water was the perfect cure for the terrible conditions they picked up in the jungle. China Beach offered five klicks (kilometres) of white sand, though swimmers and sunbathers had to keep a weather eye out for snipers. There was fresh lobster, fish, beer flown in from the States and Australia. Australian troops got a tinny for every day they spent in the field. The beach resorts also offered beautiful young Vietnamese women in scanty bikinis, discreet massage parlours, illicit brothels that masqueraded as coffee shops, car washes where a grunt could pull over and get a complete service, and a corpsman who specialised in treating the clap. From the old French villas at Nha Trang, Special Forces would go scuba diving, snorkelling, and surfing in the same waters where they dumped double agents in chains from helicopters.