American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Antiwar critics turned Tom Dooley’s picture of Vietnam upside down. Instead of rescuing the freedom-loving masses of Vietnam from an aggressive minority with an alien ideology, the United States was protecting a small, repressive regime against the will of its own people. Instead of saving an infant South Vietnam, it was keeping an ancient civilization divided and war torn. These claims became more widely shared as U.S. military escalation skyrocketed from 1965 to 1968.

  By the mid-1960s, Americans saw war news on television almost every night. The networks continued to support U.S. intervention, but many of the stories and images presented troubling evidence of the war’s brutality and intractability. As the killing continued with no end in sight, official justifications became less and less persuasive. By 1971, one poll found that 71 percent of Americans agreed that the war had been a “mistake” and a remarkable 58 percent believed it was “immoral.”

  In the same year, 1971, whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg released a massive collection of top secret government documents to the New York Times and sixteen other newspapers. Ellsberg was a once hawkish U.S. defense analyst who had turned against the war. He hoped the documents would galvanize even greater antiwar opposition by exposing the long history of government lies about the war. Quickly dubbed “The Pentagon Papers,” they were widely excerpted and soon published in book form. They made Dooley’s Deliver Us From Evil sound like a bizarre fairy tale from the distant past.

  Among other revelations, The Pentagon Papers detailed the CIA’s key role in promoting the migration of Vietnamese Catholics from the North to the South. While Dooley had made it sound like a spontaneous flight from Communist terror, the once secret documents showed that the CIA launched a major propaganda initiative to increase the migration. The goal was to build a political constituency of Catholics for Ngo Dinh Diem in the South. The CIA’s Edward Lansdale deployed agents to North Vietnam to sow terror among the people. They broadcast false reports about Chinese troops moving across the northern border raping and pillaging; about forced-labor camps set up by Ho Chi Minh; about the U.S. intention to drop nuclear bombs on North Vietnam. The CIA even distributed propaganda claiming that the Virgin Mary herself had moved to South Vietnam.

  Many Catholics would have moved south without prompting, but the CIA’s fearmongering surely inflated the migration. Diem predicted only a few thousand refugees and was surprised by the flood. Lansdale bragged that his psychological warfare campaign tripled the number of Vietnamese refugees from at least one Catholic district. Catholics who remained in North Vietnam had to accommodate their faith to Communist Party ideology just as southern Buddhists had to accommodate their faith to Diem’s Catholic-dominated state. However, Tom Dooley’s lurid stories of Viet Minh atrocities against Catholic children and priests have never been substantiated. His nearly pornographic accounts of priests with nails driven into their heads in sadistic imitation of the “crown of thorns,” or schoolchildren having chopsticks jammed into their ears, were almost certainly invented.

  In 1956, the U.S. Information Agency investigated Dooley’s atrocity claims. It found no evidence to support them but did nothing to repudiate them. Even William Lederer, who helped Dooley write and publish his famous book, later admitted that the atrocity stories were fraudulent. In a 1991 interview, Lederer said the “atrocities described [in Deliver Us From Evil] never took place or were committed by the French. I traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them.” Nor did one of Dooley’s most trusted aides, Norman Baker, believe his boss. “If I’d found a priest hanging by his heels with nails hammered into his head, I’d have the whole camp hearing about it.” But Baker never saw anything of the kind.

  Dooley was once a famous exemplar of American service, but his actual life was invisible to the public that adored him. Some of the details remain unknown. For example, although Dooley and Lansdale had many contacts, Dooley may not have realized that Lansdale worked for the CIA. But it is clear that the CIA supported Dooley’s work and regarded him as a valuable, if somewhat unreliable, asset—a positive symbol and spokesman for American policy in Southeast Asia.

  In fact, the CIA saved Dooley’s career. Unknown to the public, the navy pressured Dooley to resign in early 1956, before the publication of Deliver Us From Evil. He was the target of a navy sting operation to prove that he was a homosexual. The Office of Naval Intelligence, with multiple agents, informants, and phone bugs, found the evidence they sought. The navy wanted Dooley out, but did not want a public smearing of the man who was doing so much for the navy’s public image. Admiral Arleigh Burke had already drafted an admiring forward to Deliver Us From Evil, praising the “courageous exploits of the young lieutenant.” The public was encouraged to believe that Dooley resigned voluntarily.

  Incredibly, a few days later Dooley was cheerfully telling people about his plans to return to Southeast Asia as a civilian to establish medical clinics in Laos. Virtually overnight, he was secretly transformed from a navy outcast to a CIA asset. His Laotian project was supported officially by the International Rescue Committee, but secretly by the CIA and even the military. They all understood that Dooley was a promising champion of U.S. foreign policy. Unlike thousands of gay men who were victimized more cruelly by the military, Dooley continued to be celebrated as a Cold War hero. In fact, his fame came only after he was forced out of the navy.

  And even after Dooley’s death and Kennedy’s assassination, American officials still talked about “saving” Vietnam. The new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, sometimes made it sound as if Vietnam were not the site of a war so much as the recipient of a Great Society project aimed at eliminating economic hardship. In April 1965, just as he was ordering a major military escalation in Vietnam, Johnson gave an address on the war in which he said:

  Now there must be a much more massive effort to improve the life of man in that conflict-torn corner of our world. . . . The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA. The wonders of modern medicine can be spread through villages where thousands die every year from lack of care. . . . We should not allow people to go hungry and wear rags while our own warehouses overflow.

  Later, joking around with his advisers, Johnson said he had used the speech to throw a bone to all the “sob sisters and peace societies.”

  Even as evidence mounted that the war was devastating the South Vietnamese countryside, U.S. leaders still claimed, as they did in 1954–55, that they were saving Vietnamese refugees from Communism. By 1965 the “refugees” were not flowing from North to South, but from the rural countryside of South Vietnam into refugee camps and the cities.

  American officials said these displaced people were fleeing from Viet Cong aggression and terror. In fact, U.S. military policy drove the vast majority of peasants off their land. The goal was to get the farmers away from Viet Cong insurgents who relied on villagers for food, hiding places, intelligence, and recruits. By packing peasants onto trucks and helicopters and removing them to refugee camps, the U.S. military believed it could establish better control over South Vietnam. Once the civilians had been relocated, the military redefined their former villages as free-fire zones and claimed the right to destroy anything seen there again, including people who chose to return to their ancestral homes.

  In a 1967 military operation called Cedar Falls—the largest to that point in the war—American troops forced six thousand people off their land in and around Ben Suc, about thirty miles northwest of Saigon. They were rural peasants who were tied to their land by history, culture, and religion. Two-thirds of those removed were children. Once the villagers were “resettled” in a refugee camp, journalist Jonathan Schell noticed that the military gave these same people a different label. They had first called them “hostile civilians” or “Viet Cong suspects.” But once they were forced onto choppers or trucks and hauled into the confines of U.S.-controlled camps, they were called “refugees.” A poster at
the camp read “Welcome to the Reception Center for Refugees Fleeing Communism.” But they weren’t refugees from Communism. They were essentially American prisoners.

  By war’s end, the United States had driven more than five million South Vietnamese off their land—roughly one-third of the population. Most of them ended up in refugee camps, in shantytowns near American military bases, or in the cities. These civilians were victims of one of the largest forced relocations in history. The scale of this human displacement was at least five times greater than Operation Passage to Freedom—the mass movement of northern Vietnamese to the south in the mid-1950s.

  The U.S. military actually counted the refugees it “generated” as a metric of progress. The more, the better. But a growing number of home front critics viewed this as additional evidence that the United States was destroying Vietnam, not “saving” it. The most graphic evidence was the indiscriminate destruction caused by American bombs, napalm, artillery, and chemical defoliants. The devastating impact of U.S. warfare was dramatically revealed during the Tet Offensive of 1968. When the Communists launched their surprise attack all across South Vietnam and into the cities, the U.S. responded with a massive counteroffensive of bombing and artillery strikes to drive the Communists back into the countryside. These attacks destroyed many thickly populated towns and city neighborhoods. Thousands of civilians died in the rubble.

  In Ben Tre, a town in the Mekong Delta, the U.S. counteroffensive was particularly devastating. Journalist Peter Arnett asked an American officer to explain. The major replied with what would become the war’s most infamous line: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

  A few weeks later, on March 18, 1968, Democratic senator Robert Kennedy gave his first major speech as a candidate for president at Kansas State University, where the Young Republicans had five times more members than the Young Democrats. The field house was packed with 14,500 students. Kennedy quoted the American officer’s line about Ben Tre and then expanded it to raise fundamental questions about the entire war: “If it becomes ‘necessary’ to destroy all of South Vietnam in order to ‘save it,’ will we do that too? And if we care so little about South Vietnam that we are willing to see the land destroyed and its people dead, then why are we there in the first place? . . . Will it be said of us, as Tacitus said of Rome: ‘They made a desert and called it peace’?” The cheers were deafening. Observers compared it to seeing a rock star. “We want Bobby!” they screamed. Three months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The war would go on for seven more years.

  By the time Robert Kennedy died, millions of Americans had come to believe that Vietnam needed to be saved, not from the Communists but from the United States. In 1967, for example, a group of antiwar activists sailed a fifty-foot ketch, the Phoenix of Hiroshima, to North Vietnam to offer medical supplies for the treatment of civilians wounded by American bombs. And the Catholics most strongly associated with Vietnam by the late 1960s were not Cardinal Spellman and Tom Dooley, but the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, antiwar priests who were convicted of destroying draft records in Catonsville, Maryland, with homemade napalm. At their 1968 trial, Daniel Berrigan read a statement that included these words: “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of the Burning Children.”

  This was no longer Tom Dooley’s America. More than at any moment in history, Americans had come to believe their nation as capable of evil as any other. National identity was no longer figured as a kind sailor “bouncing a brown bare-bottom baby on his knee.” It was more likely to be represented as a napalm-dropping American jet. American exceptionalism was on its deathbed.

  Back in the 1950s, if an army general said that Vietnam was like a “child” in need of development, most Americans would have considered it a reasonable idea. And if the general went on to say that “the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” that “life is cheap in the Orient,” most would have taken it as a sage cultural insight. But in 1974, when those very words were uttered by General William Westmoreland, the man who had commanded American forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, a great many of his fellow citizens found them repulsive and racist.

  Even so, at war’s end in 1975 there remained an urge to recover some faith in exceptional American virtue. Ironically, Americans returned to the idea of parental adoption of Asians, this time not as a metaphor for beneficent U.S. intervention, but as an actual response to the unfolding disaster. On April 3, 1975, as Communist forces were routing the South Vietnamese military en route to their final victory, U.S. officials agreed to airlift thousands of Vietnamese children to the United States for adoption. Operation Babylift was embraced by U.S. ambassador Graham Martin in hopes that it might move Congress to pass a major new allocation of aid to support the crumbling regime of Nguyen Van Thieu.

  The Agency for International Development organized the airlift and set up a telephone hotline to handle inquiries from prospective parents. It was inundated with thousands of calls. MIT political scientist Lucien Pye, a proponent of the Vietnam War, believed Americans who responded to Operation Babylift were “trying to prove that we are not really abandoning these people. The guilt feeling is very deep, cutting across hawk and dove alike. We want to know we’re still good, we’re still decent.”

  The media tracked the airlift closely, searching for feel-good stories amid the war’s ruins. It began horribly. On April 4, an air force C-5A Galaxy jet, the world’s largest air transport, filled with 328 children, aid workers, government employees, and crew, had to crash-land after a hatch exploded. One hundred and fifty-three passengers were killed, most of them children and babies.

  A few thousand children made it safely to the United States, and the media generally concluded that they had been rescued from a terrible fate. But these silver lining stories masked a painful reality. A significant portion of the airlifted children were not actually orphans. In war-ravaged Vietnam some families put children in orphanages for protection, hoping to get them back in safer times. Sending those children to the United States without parental consent, critics argued, was tantamount to kidnapping. A legal suit was brought forward to give Vietnamese parents a right to recover their children. Experts on both sides testified that many children were not eligible for adoption under international standards. The files of some children had been deliberately altered to make them seem eligible. Yet the judge threw out the case, sealed the files, and ordered the attorneys not to inform Vietnamese families of their contents. In the decades since, a considerable number of Vietnamese families divided by Operation Babylift have tried to reunite. Few have succeeded.

  With the media focused on the evacuation of Vietnamese children, American officials waited until Communist forces had completely surrounded Saigon before ordering an evacuation of Americans and those Vietnamese who sought exile. When the evacuation did finally commence at the end of the month, tens of thousands managed to get out, but untold thousands of South Vietnamese were abandoned.

  The fall of Saigon in 1975, with its searing images of the U.S. embassy surrounded by desperate people begging for places on the final helicopters, made brutally clear that America had not saved the South Vietnam it had tried for twenty-one years to create and preserve. Nor could it honestly be said that the United States unequivocally saved the individual Vietnamese it carried to the United States. After all, these refugees had not only lost a war, they had lost their home.

  2

  Aggression

  MOVIE STAR AUDREY Hepburn is smiling and radiant, dressed entirely in white—white top, white slacks, white shoes. A white jacket is draped over one shoulder. She is looking at us from the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1967. A banner across the
top asks “Would you believe she’s 37?” The inside story says Hepburn is not too old to change her once “pure” and “inviolate” image. “All convention is rigidifying,” she declares. In an upcoming film, Two for the Road, “she will wear mini-skirts, vinyl shorts and also—are you ready?—has a love scene with Albert Finney in which she wears nothing.” Even away from the set she was seen “frugging in discotheques” and “wearing all the go-go-goodies.”

  Times were indeed changing, and not just in film, fashion, music, dance, and sexuality. The same issue of Ladies’ Home Journal that featured the Hepburn story ran a disturbing article by Martha Gellhorn. A searing account of Vietnamese refugees, war orphans, and wounded children, it may have been the most damning exposé of the civilian suffering caused by the American war in Vietnam yet to appear in a mass-circulation U.S. magazine. The previous August (1966), at age fifty-eight, Gellhorn had traveled to South Vietnam to write a series of articles about the impact of the war on Vietnamese civilians. “I would never have chosen to go near a war again if my own country had not, mysteriously, begun to wage an undeclared war,” she recalled years later. At first, she had paid little attention to the “obscure Asian country,” but by early 1965 it was no longer possible to ignore.

  We were suddenly, enormously involved in a war, without any explanation that made sense to me. . . . All the war reports I could find sounded inhuman, like describing a deadly football game between a team of heroes and a team of devils and chalking up the score by “body counts” and “kill ratio.” The American dead were mourned, but not enough; they should have been mourned with bitter unceasing questions about the value of sacrificing these young lives. The Vietnamese people were apparently forgotten except as clichés in speeches. American bombing missions were announced as if bombs were a selective weapon, or as if only the proclaimed enemy lived on the ground. Vietnamese civilians lived all over the ground, under that rain of bombs. They were being “freed from aggression” mercilessly.