Jeremiah Gallagher took the stand. “The story changed drastically after publication of the Pentagon Papers,” he explained. “These documents, or at least the fraction carried by the mass media, about ten percent, seemed to prove that America under Truman and Eisenhower supported French colonialism and opposed Viet Namese nationalism.
“Yet,” Gallagher continued, “as a result of an agreement by the Big Three at Yalta, in the immediate post-World War Two period, France, prodded by the United States, set, if reluctantly, upon a course to grant independence to its colonies. By stages France did grant Cambodia and Laos independence, with full independence being given during the year preceding Dien Bien Phu. One can argue that ‘granting’ and ‘giving’ were not the just rights of the colonial powers—that colonies always had the right to independence. If you feel such, substitute the word acquiesced. The reality is the same.
“But in Viet Nam the independence process was thwarted because of a violent anticolonial movement. Ho Chi Minh and the communists needed the antagonism of the French to rise to, and to consolidate, power. Instead of supporting nationalist causes, Ho actually undermined all non-communist, anticolonial, proindependence organizations through various means including the assassination of their leaders. After the Geneva Accords divided Viet Nam into the communist North and the non-communist South, Ho’s party, between ’54 and ’56, consolidated internal control via Stalinesque tactics. In 1956 the peasants of Ho’s home province, Nghe An, revolted. This uprising was crushed by the communists’ 325th Division. At that time the Hungarian Revolution was also being crushed. Media attention was focused on Europe, and the tyranny in Southeast Asia was ignored. Nghe An was one of thousands of incidents of communist oppression that were virtually disregarded by the media. Today those barbarities are continuously left out of the retelling of what happened, and of how America became involved.”
Gary Sherrick cross-examined. “Might not the rise of Ho Chi Minh and the communists be seen as a justifiable reaction, as a backlash, to colonialism?”
“Yeah. Maybe. But they didn’t have to—”
“And might not it be said that Ho Chi Minh was driven by his abhorrence of imperialism?”
“That doesn’t justify—”
“Maybe,” Sherrick said. His expression changed. “There was a navy doctor, Tom Dooley, who wrote several books about this period.” Sherrick smiled. “Did you read them?”
“Yes,” Gallagher answered.
“And you’ve cited other sources for your claims.”
“Yes. You have my bibliography.”
“Um. It was extensive. You found quite a bit of information, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it wasn’t ignored, was it?”
“It was by the mass—” Gallagher began.
Sherrick cut him off. “It’s available to anyone who wishes to look, isn’t it?”
“Come on, Gary. That’s not what this is about. We’re talking general public knowledge.”
“Are we?” Sherrick asked. “You’ve accused my clients of fraud, cover-up, malicious skewings and misrepresentations, yet you have used sources produced by my clients to establish that my clients haven’t produced those sources.”
“The information’s only there if you dig for it,” Gallagher snapped.
“Then perhaps you should accuse the public of laziness, not the media of conspiracy.”
Ed Fernandez testified about the early period in the South. “Despite having to deal with a deluge of refugees from the North—the equivalent of the U.S. attempting to resettle nearly eighteen million refugees within a two-year span—the Saigon regime was developing a modicum of political legitimacy, international acceptance and economic growth. In contrast to the severe regimentation in the North, the South, with American economic assistance, was blossoming. Ho Chi Minh’s agents saw that Ngo Dinh Diem not only was not on the verge of collapse, as had been anticipated, but that the South held more promise and more hope than did the North. These observations were reported in May 1959 to the Hanoi politburo at the Fifteenth Plenum. In response, Ho Chi Minh ordered the establishment of a supply trail from the North to the South, and the resuscitation of the guerrilla war—this time against the Saigon government.
“The myths here,” Fernandez said, “are first that the South, because of its chaotic pluralism and observable repression of various sects, was highly unstable; and that Ho Chi Minh was the legitimate leader of the North, while Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic in a Confucian and Buddhist country, was an illegitimate ruler in the South. Without denying any of the South’s significant problems, these conclusions simply are not true. Had the North Viet Namese communists not launched their war against the South, including, by 1962, the assassination of approximately one thousand hamlet, village, district and province officials each month, South Viet Nam today might be the democratic and economic equal of South Korea.”
“Objection,” Sherrick blurted. “Conjecture.”
“Sustained,” Bobby agreed.
Sherrick’s cross-examination again demonstrated that the “myths” the prosecution perceived were mirages the prosecution had created and then dispelled using information from public media reports.
Deeper into the session historical myths about the ’60 to ’67 period, and Tet of ’68, were presented and parried by the defense. Every prosecution witness was followed by a defense witness who reestablished the foundation for the “myths,” and who in turn was cross-examined by either Renneau, the Wagner or Pisano. Like the defense, the prosecution was able to discredit every testimony by showing how each was limited in depth and focus.
After the break the Myth Busters altered their tactics. “Americans were animals at My Lai but that incident was minor in the scope of the war. Yet of a total of 9,447 network evening news stories about the war that aired between 1963 and 1977,” Al Palanzo testified, “473 dealt with the atrocity at My Lai. The media focused and fixated on this single incident which represented three of every one hundred thousand war deaths. The NVA assassinated six thousand Saigon government civilian personnel in 1970. That did not receive one minute of American television air time. Not one minute!
“The ramifications of this reportage are the labeling of allied soldiers as baby killers, and the dissolution of the moral rightness of the cause. By the way,” Al added, “these media figures have never been made public, and are not now in the public record. They have been derived from an internal network report.”
That seemed to catch Sherrick and the defense off balance. He questioned Palanzo at length about his source and how the information had been obtained. Then he requested that the evidence be declared inadmissible. Bobby ruled against him. Sherrick called Derrick Eaton and Steven Smith to the stand for the defense. They spoke of atrocities they’d seen, exclaimed that My Lai itself may have been a drop in the bucket but that it represented all American atrocities, reported and unreported, “which probably numbered in the millions.” Renneau cross-examined Eaton; Pisano took on Smith. The point stalemated.
The role of the media with regard to the Easter Offensive of 1972 was examined next. Data was presented about the NVA’s 200,000-man, 500-tank, three-pronged attack that included the communist four-division assault on Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces, their successful capture of Dak To, and their siege of An Loc. Civilian casualty figures were presented along with a picture of the vast uprooting of millions of South Viet Namese. Then John Manfrieda explained how, without this massive, communist conventional-military assault, none of the casualties would have occurred. Manfrieda continued on about how the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong were reactions to that NVA assault. “Yet,” Manfrieda said, “the story was skewed away from communist assaults on civilians, away from communist atrocities, and away from Soviet and Chinese collaboration, to U.S. military reactions and antiwar demonstrations in the U.S. Even when South Viet Namese ground forces, assisted only by U.S. air power, blunted, countered, and defeated the attacking force—ca
using the infamous NVA general, Vo Nguyen Giap, victor of Dien Bien Phu, to be relieved of command—the media concentrated its attention on American bomb damage to civilian areas of Hanoi and Haiphong, and on antiwar speeches by members of Congress. Just as Tet ’68 was reported,” Manfrieda continued, “so too was the communist Nguyen Hue Offensive first labeled a communist victory, then, when the counteroffensive crushed the attacks, this real victory was ignored and never reported. That is collusion. That is misrepresentation. Four hundred seventy-three stories on the several hundred American-committed murders at My Lai; but only twenty-six stories on the upwards of 25,000 civilian deaths caused by that NVA offensive. That is malicious skewing of available information.
“It is only through military documents of the time, not through public press stories, that I was able to document these assertions,” Manfrieda continued. “In light of communist documents released in 1978, what I have told you is irrefutable. These documents, too, were essentially ignored by all but the most esoteric journals.”
Sherrick and the defense were not deterred. That perhaps the prosecution had established a beachhead to biased reportage was of no concern. The charge was malicious skewing, and the prosecution had yet to present any evidence of malice.
Session Three—22 October 1981—The prosecution directed its attacks away from historical phases myths to ambient myths: the “Viet Cong as a ragtag peasant army of ‘minutemen’ instantly abandoning their paddies when called to arms” myth versus the “highly structured proselytizing organization partially directed by Northern cadre, and composed—only one in ten was an armed combatant—primarily of unarmed, impressed peasants, of part-time bureaucrats, and of full-time autocrats” reality; the “unwinnable war” myth versus the “allied military victory and political forfeiture” reality; the “no safe place in Viet Nam because there were no ‘front lines’” myth versus the “physical distribution of violence, which clearly showed, with the exception of the major offensives of ’68, ’72 and ’75, that there were, albeit vague, ‘front lines,’ and that the populated areas were relatively peaceful” reality; the “war never changed and was a quagmire of meaningless firefights and death” myth versus the “phases coupled with their adjunct social, political, economic and martial evolution” reality; the “all GIs were druggies” myth versus the “actual figures for different periods, which showed early drug use was virtually unknown and that it did not become epidemic (ten percent users) until the withdrawal phase was well under way, and that overall heroin addiction was less than one percent” reality; and on and on.
After the break Hollywood and literature were examined. “Images are Tinseltown’s business,” Mike Hawley stated. “‘High concept,’” he quoted a trade journal, “that is, a story so simplified it can be reduced to one sentence, ‘is what producers want today. How it is said is more important than what is said.’” Hawley reviewed images from Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Heroes, and Coming Home. He identified “prowar” and “antiwar” themes and gave detailed examples using well-known scenes. “‘The stories,’” he quoted from a Newsweek review, “‘tend to be relentlessly downbeat and the protagonists are invariably antiheroic—war-numbed GIs who lop off enemy soldiers’ ears, or unhinged veterans like the character ... in Heroes.’ The problem,” Hawley concluded, “is inherent to the nature of this medium—simplicity, drama, and temporocentricism. As one major publisher put it, ‘There has been no counterwave of exculpatory literature to balance these bleak accounts.’”
“Temporocentricism?” Carl Mariano asked on cross-examination.
“The pattern or need of centering on only one’s moment in time,” Mike Hawley explained. “Ethnocentricism and temporocentricism narrow our perceptions and knowledge by ignoring other-culture activities and historical antecedents. For example, if the storytellers relay only what Americans did in a specific and limited circumstance, without relaying the antecedents that placed a faceless enemy in the sights of the home-boys, the viewer can only judge the American action in the snapshot of presented time. Meanings, motives, and reasons are lost. Gary himself talked about shallow conclusions being drawn from shallow presentations.”
Rich Urbanowski followed Hawley and attacked literary produce. He quoted one best-selling novelist who’d written about the emotional baggage of his dope-smoking, cocaine-sniffing, baby-killing characters and then said in an interview at Nittany Mountain College, “They aren’t me. I wasn’t like that.”
Sam Linderman presented his analysis of the syllabi from forty college courses being taught on the war. He took academia to task for “its politically driven curricula,” for its lauding of the works of Noam Chomsky and D. Gareth Porter; and he demonstrated that thirty-six of the forty courses were highly slanted. As Linderman explained, “There seems to be a preponderance of sixties liberals who are now professors or assistant professors because they stayed in school to avoid the draft.”
Session Four—29 October 1981—“A race war,” Ty Mohammed said. “Racism pervaded every aspect of our lives there and it ran the war.” In the audience, in the jury box, on the loft floor, even behind the prosecution’s table, white vets and white students slightly bowed their heads or shifted their eyes. Of all the topics this was the most discomforting. Feelings of guilt, of being from the privileged class, of being one with the Oppressor, of a need to listen and acquiesce, ranged from subtle to strong, but they were universal. On the other hand, the black and Hispanic vets were vocal and virtually split down the middle on the issue of racism in Viet Nam.
“Black soldiers went and fought,” Ty testified, ‘because we wanted to prove we were part of America. We wanted to show whites that we held the same ideals. We thought that going would gain us respect. We thought racism and stigmatization would end. Then we got there. Millions of us, some of us part of McNamara’s Hundred Thousand that was really two hundred forty-six thousand, that took indigent young black men with dismal educations—See, they knew what they were lookin for. Get the dumb niggers to go be-boppin in the paddies like ... who said it ... flypaper. They were lookin for cannon fodder and scarfed up nearly a quarter million young bloods. Then they exploited us. It is well documented that there were more black soldiers killed in Nam than white soldiers. I know a lot of you are thinking, shee-it, I saw lots of whites killed too. And that is true. But mostly it was blacks, browns and reds because The System put us in infantry units while it put most whites in supply or transportation or even artillery. Whites, when they got killed, were helicopter pilots or doorgunners or truck drivers that hit mines. When a brother got greased he was humpin a 60 in the boonies or he was on the perimeter at a forward base like Khe Sanh. You understand me. I don’t mean all. I mean in general. I mean the average white and the average black and that is the story the media told because they told about average guys.
“I know lots of guys here, white guys, humped too. I know whites bled just like blacks. But it was disproportionate. And we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘We are taking young black men who have been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they have not found in Southwest Georgia or in East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together at the same school.’
“See,” Ty continued. “I’m not sayin anything against white vets. I’m sayin blacks gave more and got less. I’m sayin the true evils lay with The System. When I was charged with possession, Man, The System that prosecuted me, including my own defense counsel, was all white. That is not justice. I’m ashamed of things I did in Nam. But I shouldn’t have been there. And even though I served, I have a racially instigated bad paper discharge that stigmatizes me. Rodney says the war was a ruse by white capitalists to eliminate a lot of young bloods because we were just beginning to come into our own. Racism is about power and the
power hierarchy knew how to maintain. If lots of whites were wasted that was acceptable because whites outnumber blacks nine to one. This was a war within a war. It cost one hundred and twenty billion tax dollars. That don’t include interest. The war was fought by sons of minorities and by sons of the poor.”
“Amen,” Rodney Smith shouted.
“No questions,” Tony Pisano said.
“You may step down.” Wapinski shook his head. “Who’s next?”
“The prosecution calls Steve Travellers,” Mark Renneau said. The buzzing within the barn remained subdued but the craning of necks and the rocking of bodies was pronounced.
“Uncle Tom,” Rodney hooted. From the jury box Calvin Dee flashed Rodney a power fist. Then Rodney and Ty began an elaborate dap.
“Order,” Wapinski called out.
“A lot of dying was done by black soldiers,” Steve Travellers began. “And it is true that significantly more blacks than whites, in relationship to their respective percentages of U.S. population, started out being killed and wounded in Viet Nam. Quantifying that significance, however, illuminates the story. Especially since some in the old antiwar movement, and some historians today, regard the U.S. effort as racist, that is, ‘a white man’s war fought by the sons of blacks and other ethnic minorities.’ Or if the effort wasn’t racist, they describe it in economic or class terms; ‘a rich man’s war fought by the sons of the working-class poor.’ But is this true? And if it is, or if it isn’t, what ramifications has the story had?
“African-Americans constitute 12.9 per cent of the U.S. population. In the early years of the American build-up, there is no doubt that this minority was disproportionately deployed in infantry units. In ’65 and ’66, blacks accounted for 20 percent of all combat deaths. The armed forces recognized this, perhaps because of media exposition, and took corrective action. In ’67 black combat deaths fell to 13 percent of all American KIAs. By 1972, and remember half of all U.S. casualties came after January ’69, the percentage of KIAs who were black dropped to 7.6. From the beginning to the end, of 47,244 American combat deaths, 5,711, or 12.1 percent, were African-American. This is a statistically significant difference but not only is it not the ‘half of all deaths’ some politicians, commentators and ‘historians’ have claimed, it is actually significant in the opposite direction. Hey, Ty, maybe it was a race war, huh? But then you’d have to say it was to kill whitey. By the way, other racial minorities accounted for less than two percent of the KIAs.
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