American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Major Arklin resists at first, but then decides it is his “duty” to take one of the girls to gain the allegiance of the villagers. So he selects a fifteen-year-old girl who is “much lighter colored than the others,” turns out to be half French, and is named Nanette. His next duty is to sleep with her. “It would probably be an insult and a disgrace if they lived together without his enjoying the connubial pleasure she was expecting to give him.” Arklin’s adultery has magnificent results. The entire village is inspired. Everyone gets busy and the hamlet is transformed into a model of order, hygiene, and anti-Communist fervor.

  Not for long. The story ends in defeat. The Pathet Lao Communists pose such a threat, Arklin has the entire village evacuated to Vientiane. Here, way back in 1964, is a foreshadowing of America’s entire venture in Southeast Asia. It unwittingly prefigures the defeat of the American-backed regimes in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, all of which were taken over by Communists in April 1975. Though Moore does not acknowledge it, Arklin’s mission in Laos is an utter failure. It merely delayed a Communist victory over the villagers. All Arklin can do is plead for an evacuation: “I want to see these people safely out of here. We owe it to them.”

  Instead of denouncing the war and its failures, Moore focuses on American heroism. Major Arklin is promoted to lieutenant colonel and ordered home. When asked about his fifteen-year-old Laotian wife, he says this: “That’s one of the little tragedies in this kind of war. Nanette and I, we’ll just have to say good-bye. She had a lot to do with my success on this job.”

  Even in the war’s early years it proved impossible to find American military heroes whose brave acts were paving the way to inevitable victory—heroes who seized essential territory, who liberated a grateful town, who led an advance toward the enemy’s capital. In Vietnam, the Americans had no territorial lines to advance, no grateful villagers crying out for liberation, no decisive battle or final offensive. Only the Vietnamese enemy had those. All the Pentagon could present as “progress” was the high enemy body counts reported by its troops. For the troops themselves, success was measured primarily by survival. The American heroes of Vietnam gave their lives for one another.

  The first American in Vietnam to receive the nation’s highest military decoration—the Medal of Honor—was Green Beret captain Roger Donlon. In July 1964 he commanded a remote outpost near the Laotian border. His small Special Forces team was assigned to train a force of several hundred South Vietnamese. In the middle of the night their camp was overrun by Viet Cong. Donlon’s award citation gives a hint of his enormous courage. He “dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades,” “completely disregarded” serious shrapnel wounds to his stomach, shoulder, leg, and face, personally “annihilated” an enemy demolition team, dragged wounded men to safety, administered first aid, directed mortar fire, and more. “His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp.”

  The citation failed to mention that at least a hundred of the “friendly Vietnamese” fought for the Viet Cong. As Donlon later reported, “The first thing each of the traitors did when the attack started—and they knew it was coming—was to slit the throat or break the neck of the person next to them . . . the people we thought would be shooting outward were now shooting inward.” The Green Beret hero had to defend his camp from American “allies” as well as the “enemy.”

  The media in the mid-1960s tried its best to identify and praise American military heroism even in the face of mounting evidence that no amount of bravery could overcome the inherent impossibility of defending an unpopular government against a strongly supported indigenous foe. Formulaic tributes to “the American fighting man” and “our boys in uniform” often deflected attention from the war’s disturbing details. The war might be “complex” or “frustrating” or “dirty,” but much mid-’60s reportage suggested that the world’s strongest and best-trained soldiers were more than up to the task. The media’s reflexive cheerleading for American troops easily slid into a form of cheerleading for the mission they were ordered to execute.

  “Who’s Fighting in Viet Nam: A Gallery of American Combatants” was the headline for the April 23, 1965, cover of Time magazine featuring an illustration of air force pilot Robert Risner, a craggy-faced forty-year-old lieutenant colonel in his flight suit and helmet. Risner, we learn, is the leader of the Fighting Cocks, a squadron of fighter pilots who fly F-105 Thunderchiefs (“streaking in like vengeful lightning bolts” on “unremitting, round-the-clock attacks”). These superfast jets carry nine thousand pounds of bombs. To fly them requires “the highest degree of human ingenuity and precision.” Risner had vast experience. In Korea, many years earlier, he had shot down eight enemy MiGs. He still regarded himself as “the luckiest man in the world to be doing what I’m doing.” Five months after appearing on the cover of Time, Risner was shot down over North Vietnam on his fifty-fifth bombing mission and spent the next seven years as a prisoner of war.

  The Risner issue presented “the fighting American” in Vietnam by profiling a dozen servicemen. Eight of them were pilots (and thus all officers), two others were infantry officers, and another was a Green Beret on his third tour (“Damned if I can think of any place I’d rather be”). Only one of the dozen men was a young enlisted man. This wildly unrepresentative sample drove home the article’s main points. First, morale was so great even the wounded wanted to get back in the action (“With a little luck, I’ll be flying again in a few days”). Second, this was a professional military: “Viet Nam is no place for the 90-day wonder or the left-footed recruit. It is a place for the career man, the highly trained specialist.”

  Ironically, just as this April 1965 story appeared, the massive U.S. escalation was beginning to flood Vietnam with quickly trained lieutenants (“ninety-day wonders”), one-term draftees, and “volunteers” who enlisted only because they were sure the draft would soon grab them. Within a year or two the most common media representative of the American fighting man would not be a career officer or pilot but a young enlisted infantryman who slogged through jungles and paddies with a heavy pack searching for the enemy. In the post-Vietnam years, these “grunts” were so stereotypically associated with the Vietnam War—through films and books—you might never know that thousands of Americans flew bombing missions from aircraft carriers in the South China Sea or from air force bases in Thailand and Guam.

  On October 22, 1965, as the young grunts surged into Vietnam, Time ran a cover story called “South Vietnam: A New Kind of War.” The main point was to celebrate a “remarkable turnabout in the war” caused by “one of the swiftest, biggest military buildups in the history of warfare.” With “wave upon wave of combat booted Americans—lean, laconic and looking for a fight,” the enemy was now in trouble. “The Viet Cong’s once-cocky hunters have become the cowering hunted as the cutting edge of U.S. fire power slashes into the thickets of Communist strength.” Buried beneath the purple prose, a few nagging details challenged the “remarkable turnabout” thesis. We learn, for example, that army chief of staff General Harold Johnson estimates it will take ten years to “finish off” the Viet Cong and that “even the most optimistic U.S. officials think five years the outside minimum.”

  But somehow America’s finest and all their firepower would carry the day. “Today’s American soldier and marine is as well prepared as any fighting man in the world for waging guerrilla warfare,” Newsweek reassured readers in 1965. Time agreed: “The American serviceman in Viet Nam is probably the most proficient the nation has ever produced.”

  The U.S. military that fought in 1965 and 1966 did include a substantially higher portion of true volunteers and career professionals than it would a few years later. But Time grossly exaggerated their eagerness to fight. “They are in Viet Nam not because they have to be, but because they want to be . . . almost to
a man they believe that the Vietnamese war can be won—if only their efforts are not undercut on the home front.” The possibility that American soldiers might hate the war was, at least in Time magazine, unthinkable.

  Yet when sociologist Charles Moskos went to Vietnam in 1965 to interview army enlisted men and asked them why they were there, the answers were far different from those offered up in Time. “I was fool enough to join this man’s army,” said one. “My own stupidity for listening to the recruiting sergeant,” said another. “My tough luck in getting drafted,” said a third. He found little ideological commitment to the war. Even early on in the war, soldiers thought of their one-year tours as something like prison sentences to be endured. Most men knew exactly how many days they had left.

  Despite the media’s initial focus on the “professional” military, it was an overwhelmingly working-class institution throughout the war. A 1964 survey of more than 78,000 active-duty enlisted men (conducted by the National Opinion Research Center) found that almost 70 percent had fathers who did blue-collar work or farm labor and an additional 10 percent had no father at home. Only about 19 percent had fathers with white-collar jobs.

  As draft quotas shot up in 1965, the military lowered its admission standards. Prior to massive escalation in Vietnam, the military routinely rejected men who scored in the bottom two quintiles of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, its mental aptitude test. Beginning in 1965, however, the military admitted hundreds of thousands of draftees and volunteers it once would have deemed unqualified. Most of them were from poor and broken families, 80 percent were high school dropouts, and half had IQs of less than 85.

  These lower standards were further dropped with the institution of Project 100,000. Begun in 1966 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it was designed to admit 100,000 poorly educated men into the military every year. Project 100,000 was touted as a program of social uplift. One of its advocates was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As assistant secretary of labor in the early 1960s, Moynihan was disturbed by the high percentage of poor boys rejected by the military. He viewed the military as a vast, untapped agent of upward mobility with the potential to train the unskilled, employ the young and the poor, and bring self-esteem to the psychologically defeated. To reject such men, he argued, was a form of “de facto job discrimination” against “the least mobile, least educated young men.”

  More than that, he thought the military could help overcome what he believed was a central explanation for black poverty—broken, fatherless families. The military, he argued, might provide a surrogate black family: “Given the strains of disorganized and matrifocal family life in which so many Negro youth come of age, the armed forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change; a world away from women, a world run by strong men and unquestioned authority.”

  When Moynihan’s ideas about race in America were published in a 1965 book called The Negro Family, they caused a firestorm of controversy, drawing heated criticism from civil rights activists and scholars. Critics argued that Moynihan’s claims were founded on racist stereotypes and assumptions; that he attributed black poverty primarily to pathology and dysfunction rather than systemic economic inequality, discrimination, and racism.

  These were not merely academic debates—Moynihan’s ideas provided the intellectual underpinning for Project 100,000. Secretary of Defense McNamara agreed that the military could provide remedial help to the “subterranean poor,” who “have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation’s abundance.” With military training they could “return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which . . . will reverse the downward spiral of decay.” Though Project 100,000 is rarely mentioned in histories of the Great Society, it was conceived and justified as a liberal reform, a part of the war on poverty. Just as policymakers defended the war as an idealistic, even liberal, effort to save the people of South Vietnam, they also claimed the military would improve the life chances of America’s most disadvantaged. Both claims proved cruel mockeries of reality.

  Project 100,000 was a terrible failure. Only some 6 percent of the men inducted under Project 100,000 received any additional training, and this amounted to little more than an effort to raise reading skills to a fifth-grade level. Instead, it sent some 200,000 very poor, confused, and ill-equipped young men to Vietnam, where their death rate was twice what it was for American forces as a whole. When Martin Luther King Jr. argued that “the promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam,” he meant that the war had taken money and support away from domestic reform programs. But Project 100,000 was a Great Society program that was quite literally shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam.

  Though many poor Americans were sent to Vietnam, the vast majority were from the working class, primarily because the Vietnam-era draft was fundamentally biased in favor of the affluent and well connected. The most obvious class inequity was the student deferment that allowed those who could afford full-time college to avoid, or at least delay, military service. Fewer than 8 percent of all Americans who served in Vietnam (including officers) had completed college. And even by the early 1980s, Vietnam veterans were more than two times less likely to have completed college than their non-veteran peers. The most typical GIs in Vietnam were nineteen- and twenty-year-old high school graduates whose parents were factory workers, waitresses, truck drivers, nurses, firefighters, construction workers, salespeople, mechanics, police officers, miners, custodians, farm workers, and secretaries. The most uncommon GIs were young men of wealth and privilege. They had the best chance of avoiding the draft and few of them volunteered.

  About 60 percent of the Vietnam generation’s men were able to avoid military service, most of them simply by taking advantage of the rules created by the draft. Three-and-a-half million men received medical exemptions. You might expect those from the poorest homes with the least access to consistent, high-quality medical care would receive the bulk of those exemptions. Yet, in practice, those young men had to rely on military doctors to evaluate their fitness for service. With draft quotas soaring, induction center doctors overlooked all but the most obvious disqualifying physical problems. However, men who arrived with a letter from a private doctor documenting even relatively minor physical ailments (high blood pressure, chronic skin rashes, asthma, a balky knee from a high school football injury, etc.) often gained draft exemptions. One study found that 90 percent of the men who had the means and knowledge to press these claims were successful, even if they were in generally good health.

  The Vietnam-era draft began in 1948 as the first permanent peacetime draft in U.S. history. It evolved into a form of social engineering called “human resource planning.” Policy planners believed the advent of nuclear weapons made truly massive armies obsolete. But the Cold War would require tens of thousands of civilian experts to serve the military-industrial complex—engineers, scientists, technicians, even English majors with a gift for writing government propaganda. More than ever before, the “national interest,” as the government conceived it, demanded not just grunts in muddy boots, but an enormous range of highly educated civilians in jackets and ties. The goal was to create a selective service that produced soldiers and civilians who served the interests of U.S. power. To produce that result the Selective Service System devised a scheme that included both force and incentive—the club of the draft and the carrot of deferments and exemptions. Since the baby boom was huge—twenty-seven million men came of draft age during the Vietnam War—the military took 40 percent, of whom only 10 percent went to Vietnam.

  The antiwar movement helped expose how the draft system was designed to manipulate the lives of an entire generation. The most damning evidence was a Selective Service memo discovered by a member of Students for a Democratic Society and published in New Left Notes in January 1967. The memo, sent to all 4,100 local draft boards in July 1965, made clear that the purpose of the draft system was to “channel” young people into ca
reers that served the “national interest.” Channeling, the memo explains, is a “device of pressurized guidance.” The “club of induction” was used not just to draft soldiers but to “drive” other young people into higher education. Once in school, students would fear the loss of their draft deferment, a “threat” they would continue to feel “with equal intensity after graduation.” A young man would thus be “impelled to pursue his skill rather than embark upon some less important enterprise and . . . apply [it] in an essential activity in the national interest.”

  Oddly enough, the memo said little about drafting soldiers. That was the easy part—“not much of an administrative or financial challenge.” The harder job was “dealing with the other millions of registrants” and finding ways to make them “more effective human beings in the national interest.” The Selective Service System regarded college and graduate students as valuable assets worthy of keeping out of combat, but only if they continued to pursue “essential” professions. Anyone who dared to drop out of school, hitchhike around the country, organize full-time against the war, or any number of other activities the Selective Service deemed inessential to the “national interest” would quickly face the “club of induction.” This system was “the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.”

  To many draft-age Americans, it felt like a faceless system was attempting to control their lives. Equally galling was the apparent pride the Selective Service took in its ability to produce “effective human beings” with an “American” form of social control. For a generation raised to believe in the exceptional freedom of American life, encounters with the draft could be a profound awakening.