American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  The Times ignored Martha Gellhorn’s reports on napalm and the special feature of Ramparts that appeared at the same time. Called “The Children of Vietnam,” it was a photo-essay written by William Pepper. It included six pictures of Vietnamese children who had been victims of napalm attacks. Pepper estimated that a quarter-million South Vietnamese children had already been killed in the Vietnam War and another 750,000 wounded. And even the Times article that claimed civilian napalm casualties were “negligible” undermined its credibility by quoting a U.S. pilot describing napalm as a “terror weapon” that worked well with cluster bombs and white phosphorus. The pilot offered his own explanation for why napalm was so controversial: “People have this thing about being burned to death.”

  American soldiers in Vietnam didn’t need to examine hospital reports to understand the effects of napalm. They saw the victims who never made it to hospitals. They even had a dark, protective euphemism for the incinerated dead, taken from a 1960s breakfast cereal—crispy critters. “We had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead,” writes Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried. “By our language, which was both hard and wistful, we transformed the bodies into piles of waste. . . . And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. ‘Just a crunchie munchie,’ Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body.”

  Some American soldiers experienced the horror of having napalm fall on their own units, either by accident or as a desperate measure to save units being overrun by Viet Cong or North Vietnamese troops. In one of the most memorable moments in the documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), an American veteran named William Marshall describes a napalm attack that hit his unit:

  The dude in the foxhole with me, he was dead. And here come the jets. Everybody’s, “Yeah, jets! Do it to ’em. Get these motherfuckers off our ass,” you know, cause they were diggin’ in our behind real good. . . . And he [swooped] over that way and let it go and you say, “Uh-oh.” And you could see it’s a napalm canister. . . . They spin asshole over head, backwards as they’re tumbling through the air . . . I grabbed this [dead] dude, just put him up over my head. . . . Fuckin’ napalm went down the whole line. Just creamed everybody in the line. Thirty-five dudes, man, just burnt—post-toasty to the bitter, you dig? And that napalm was just drippin’ on both sides of this dude. . . . He’s dead . . . I’m just holding him up as a shield . . . I just chunked this dude off of me and just sprung out of the hole . . . just ran through, burned my pants off.

  By the end of 1967 there had been more than five hundred protests against napalm, many of them directed at Dow Chemical, the primary manufacturer. The protests did not stop the production or use of napalm, but they did mark the emergence of a moral critique of the Vietnam War. And they marked a growing awakening of national self-criticism that challenged the idea that America was a moral beacon to the world.

  That point was made most eloquently in 1967 by the decade’s most recognizable voice of change, Martin Luther King Jr. King had opposed the war for years, but had held his tongue, concerned that outspoken criticism of the war could irrevocably damage his tenuous relationship with Lyndon Johnson and thus destroy any chance for further federal support of civil rights legislation. By early 1967, however, King could no longer tolerate his own silence on the war.

  At an airport restaurant, he flipped through a stack of magazines with his colleague the Reverend Bernard Lee. Among them was the Ramparts special issue “The Children of Vietnam,” which included photographs of children with amputated limbs, faces pockmarked by shrapnel scars, and bodies burned by napalm. King was transfixed. Bernard Lee would never forget the moment. “When he came to Ramparts magazine he stopped. He froze as he looked at the pictures. . . . Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, ‘Doesn’t it taste any good?’ and he answered, ‘Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.’” The photographs carried the same message he had been hearing from others in the civil rights movement—his wife, Coretta Scott King, and people like James Lawson, Diane Nash, and Dick Gregory: It was time to speak out against the war.

  On April 4, 1967, in front of four thousand people packed into Riverside Church in Manhattan, King offered a multilayered critique of the war—economic, historical, political, and moral. Above all, he linked the injustices of the faraway war to injustices at home. The destruction of a poor agricultural nation in Asia was wasting resources that might be used to overcome inequities at home. And the burden of fighting that war fell disproportionately on poor and working-class Americans still denied full equality and opportunity at home:

  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 in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago.

  The United States, King continued, was crushing Vietnamese aspirations for independence and unification by defending a corrupt and repressive regime in Saigon that lacked the support of its own people, first Ngo Dinh Diem and then “a long line of military dictators.” Our military escalation had subjected Vietnamese civilians, most of them poor peasants, to indiscriminate bombing and shelling and forced millions off their land. We had laid waste to vast stretches of land and crops.

  King was not a pacifist. Some wars, like World War II, were necessary and just. But King believed nonviolent resistance was the best means to advance social change. He had gone into urban ghettos each of the prior three summers to preach nonviolence to many young men; had tried to persuade them that “Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems.” In response they often said, “What about Vietnam?” Wasn’t the American government itself using violence on a massive scale? “Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

  That last phrase was widely quoted and condemned, but King’s criticism cut deeper still. “I wish to go on to say something even more disturbing,” he said. The war in Vietnam was only a symptom of a greater problem. The United States was on the wrong side of history. The globe’s poor and disenfranchised were rising up, and America had not found a way to embrace their cause. To do so would require a fundamental change, not just in a particular foreign policy but in the nation’s most basic values and institutions. Americans had to be willing “to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments” and to give up conventional identities. Loyalty to “tribe, race, class, and nation” had to be superseded by “loyalty to mankind as a whole.” Only then would “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” be conquered.

  The speech was widely denounced. The NAACP and the Urban League attacked King for the “tactical mistake” of trying to unite the peace and civil rights movements. Life magazine claimed he had gone “beyond his personal right to dissent” by advocating “abject surrender” in a “slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post claimed the speech was full of “sheer inventions” and that “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence.”

  King was shaken but not deterred. Less than two weeks later he marched with Dr. Benjamin Spock and a few hundred thousand others in an antiwar march to the United Nations in New York City, the largest antiwar demonstration to date. Spock was the pediatrician who helped raise the baby boom generation with his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care—one of the top best sellers in history, first published in 1946. With King on one side, Spock escorted a nine-year-old boy who carried a sign reading “Children Are Not Born to Burn.”

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sp; Dr. Spock, once a figure of almost universal national respect, was now a lightning rod for dissent on all sides. Along with ever more fervent fan mail, he now received death threats. Many on the right began to see him, and people like him, as a key cause of youthful protest and disorder. His “permissive” ideas about child-rearing had, they said, encouraged a new and shocking disrespect for all forms of authority. Norman Vincent Peale said Spock’s philosophy was “Feed ’em whatever they want, don’t let them cry, instant gratification of needs.”

  According to this line of reasoning, societal disorder had erupted not because of fundamental injustices, but from a lack of discipline. Liberals like Spock, conservatives argued, not only encouraged protest, but found excuses for those who broke the law—whether they be campus radicals, urban rioters and arsonists, welfare cheats, or common criminals. The nation’s strength and integrity were being undermined by people more worried about the rights of criminals than the safety and dignity of hardworking, law-abiding, taxpaying, patriotic Americans who stood up for their nation instead of denouncing it.

  No one articulated those claims more successfully than Richard Nixon. His narrow presidential victory in 1968 depended, in large part, on his appeal to voters disturbed by the decade’s social turmoil and disorder. Throughout his presidency, Nixon often pandered to an imagined “silent majority” of law-abiding citizens while condemning virtually all forms of public protest as a fundamental assault on the patriotism and decency of average Americans. During the midterm elections of 1970, Nixon told an audience that the reason demonstrators were able to “terrorize decent citizens” is “summed up in a single word: appeasement. . . . The strength of freedom in our society,” he went on, “has been eroded by creeping permissiveness—in our legislatures, in our courts, in our family life, in our universities. For far too long we have appeased aggression here at home.” Since the Munich Agreement of 1938 had failed to placate Hitler, “appeasement” had been brandished like a red flag to whip up support for tougher Cold War foreign policies; now Nixon was using it to whip up hostility toward his domestic enemies.

  It was somewhat harder to demonize Vietnam veterans who were increasingly turning against the war. You could hardly say that they had been overindulged by a permissive society. Rebellious vets started showing up at antiwar demonstrations, first in small numbers, but more and more as the war continued. As early as October 1967, four antiwar American sailors from the aircraft carrier Intrepid deserted while their ship was in Japan after a bombing mission in the Gulf of Tonkin. They had worked on the catapult, helping to launch countless A-4 Skyhawks and A-1 Skyraiders, taking off every thirty seconds to bomb North Vietnam. “We consider it a crime for a technologically developed country to be engaged in the murder of civilians and to be destroying a small developing, agricultural country,” they wrote in a formal statement. “Through our action, we would like other people throughout the world to follow our footsteps in opposing American aggression in Vietnam.” For two decades Americans had heard endlessly about “Communist aggression.” Now young veterans were joining other antiwar activists to denounce “American aggression.”

  Five years later, in 1972, the point would be made in the tersest possible way by Daniel Ellsberg, the formerly hawkish defense analyst who had become one of the most prominent and outspoken critics of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, he proclaimed, “is, after all, a foreign aggression. Our aggression.”

  But those words never lost their power to shock, so ingrained was the national assumption that aggression always comes from outside, from beyond “our” boundaries. As Tom Engelhardt has written, in the traditional American war story, as portrayed in countless westerns and war movies of the mid-twentieth century, “the enemy bore down without warning from the peripheries of human existence, whooping and screeching, burning and killing.” The aggressor was typically nonwhite and savage. Survival depended on righteous retaliation. However excessive the revenge, it was morally cleansed by the justice of the cause and the certain victory that followed.

  But the Vietnam War completely reversed this idea for many Americans, and led others at least to question it. There was now inescapable evidence that Americans were doing most of the screeching, burning, and killing as outsiders, foreigners in a distant land. A core tenet of American exceptionalism—the uncritical faith that the United States only uses force reluctantly and as a force for good and freedom—was profoundly shattered.

  3

  Paper Tigers

  MCGEORGE BUNDY DIDN’T need to see the burned-out barracks in Pleiku to know it was time to begin the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. Bundy was as tough-minded as any of the president’s men. His spine didn’t need any stiffening. It’s just that no one had seen him so emotional, so fired up. General Westmoreland thought the national security adviser, a civilian staff man, sounded like a “field marshal” as he barked instructions at military headquarters in Saigon.

  It was February 7, 1965, just a few days into McGeorge Bundy’s first trip to Vietnam. Since John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, “Mac” had been one of the three or four most important architects of U.S. policy in Vietnam, but he had never visited the country; he’d never been “out there,” the quaint phrase American officials often used for that faraway land. President Johnson thought it was high time for Mac to get out there and take a fresh, hard look—make sure it was really necessary to commence the daily bombing of the North that insiders had been seriously considering for the past year.

  So there was “Field Marshal” Bundy in a tense, early morning meeting at the MACV operations center in Saigon, where alarming reports were coming in from Pleiku, up there on the red clay plateau of South Vietnam’s Central Highlands where the U.S. military had built an airstrip and barracks—Camp Holloway—for one of its aviation battalions, a unit that supplied helicopter transportation to South Vietnamese ground troops and their American advisers. A few hours earlier, at two in the morning, Viet Cong commandos had pulled off a devastating sneak attack. Cutting through a double apron of barbed wire and slipping past inattentive South Vietnamese guards, they blew up parked helicopters and light reconnaissance planes with satchels full of plastic explosives. At the same time, from a nearby hamlet, another Viet Cong squad launched a barrage of 81 mm mortars at the barracks using ammo they had captured from the Americans.

  Their targeting was precise. Nine Americans were killed and a staggering 137 were wounded. Bill Mauldin, the famous World War II cartoonist (Willie and Joe), was visiting his son at the base. “The infirmary was a real charnel house,” he reported. “There was blood all over the place.” Most of the wounded were evacuated to a field hospital in Nha Trang, where five surgeons worked around the clock to keep them alive. Twenty-two American aircraft were destroyed or badly damaged. The Viet Cong had few, if any, casualties.

  Back in Washington, twelve time zones away, LBJ convened a nighttime meeting of the National Security Council and two congressional leaders. Mac Bundy was on the phone from Saigon reporting the latest details. He recommended a retaliatory bombing strike against North Vietnam. Only Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield spoke in opposition. Why escalate a war on behalf of such an unpopular and unstable regime? You couldn’t even say for sure who was in charge in South Vietnam. Just a few days ago there had been yet another coup, bringing in the seventh regime since the assassination of Diem in 1963. Should the United States really raise the ante on behalf of a revolving-door “government” that faced such a formidable foe? The fact that the Viet Cong had pulled off the sneak attack at Camp Holloway suggested that they were getting lots of information and support from local villagers. And what if bombing North Vietnam prompted China to intervene? It could be worse than Korea.

  All good points, but no one sided with Mansfield. Even George Ball, an undersecretary of state who usually played the role of designated dissenter, challenged the senator from Montana. Everyone else, Ball said, agreed that an air strike was nec
essary. Ball’s only concern was that some citizens might ask why we were bombing North Vietnam when U.S. forces had been attacked by Viet Cong in South Vietnam. Therefore, the public announcement should clearly state that North Vietnam was responsible for the attack at Pleiku. (There was no evidence to uphold the claim.)

  The president, of course, had the final word. “We have kept our gun over the mantel and our shells in the cupboard for a long time now, and what was the result? They are killing our men while they sleep in the night. I can’t ask our American soldiers out there to continue to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.” LBJ ordered 132 carrier-based warplanes to bomb North Vietnamese military barracks. The Pentagon estimated that the attack would produce 4,500 Vietnamese casualties.

  Before Mac Bundy headed home from Vietnam, he flew up to Pleiku to inspect the damage at Camp Holloway. The destroyed choppers and barracks were still smoldering. Bundy seemed increasingly unnerved. He looked pale and stricken. A colonel showed him where some of the American soldiers had died. There, on one of the cots, was a small mound of brain tissue. Bundy walked outside, slumped against a wall, and vomited.

  A very human reaction, but it was surprising to many who knew him. Bundy was such a cool, unflappable administrator—always neatly attired, always in command of his emotions, always examining the world with a steady gaze from behind the clear plastic frames of his glasses. The national security adviser dazzled people with his ability to dissect opinions, summarize positions, and present options without ever appearing overwrought or undone. He never lost control. A Time magazine profile said his customary calm contributed to the overriding impression that he was “self-confident to the point of arrogance, intelligent to the point of intimidation.”

  So now there was joking gossip at the highest levels of power. Did you hear about Bundy at Pleiku? The biggest gossip of all was the president. LBJ had always been a little wary of the man he called “my intellectual.” Bundy’s rapid academic ascent was legendary—first in his class at Groton, a star columnist and math major at Yale, and at age thirty-four, the youngest dean of faculty in Harvard’s history. The government department at Harvard had been so impressed by Bundy they awarded him tenure despite the fact that he lacked two key credentials—he did not have a PhD and had never taken a single course in political science.