American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  American soldiers in Vietnam were primarily demoralized by the war itself. Even pro-war soldiers understood better than most people at home how the war’s realities contradicted official claims—they knew the United States wasn’t supporting democracy in Vietnam; that the Communist troops had stronger popular support than the Saigon government; that U.S. military policies failed to achieve American objectives and caused many civilian casualties. Those realities were more disillusioning to American troops than the debates and disunity at home.

  As the military in Vietnam became ever more disaffected, it became as fractured as the home front. Every difference—by race, region, rank, politics, culture—could trigger hostility, especially in rear areas where troops lacked the intense, but temporary, bonding of combat. For example, when news of Martin Luther King’s assassination hit Vietnam, racial brawls broke out at many bases, some of them deadly. As the war dragged on, many officers were more worried about keeping peace among their own troops than fighting the enemy.

  Frontline combat troops—the grunts—were often bitterly resentful, not just of those who evaded the draft at home but also of the great majority of military personnel who served in noncombat jobs in the rear with easy access to hot meals, showers, air-conditioning, and beer. The grunts called them REMFs—rear echelon motherfuckers. Even smaller differences could spark fights—conflicts, say, between “heads” (pot smokers) and “juicers” (drinkers), or between rock ’n’ rollers and country music fans.

  But the bitterest conflicts were between enlisted men and those officers regarded as careerist “ticket punchers” who demanded aggressive, high-risk tactics. In the final years of the war, those officers were not only reviled, but disobeyed. Combat troops who had once united around the collective effort to survive or to “pay back” the enemy began to unite around a radically different goal—the collective effort to avoid combat and even resist direct orders.

  One common form of combat avoidance was called sandbagging. Troops sandbagged missions they considered particularly dangerous—like a nighttime ambush deep in the bush. Instead of carrying out the order, they would walk to a place they considered safer (often close to the base), make camp, and call in phony reports on their field radios to make their commanding officers believe they were where they had been ordered to go. As writer Tim O’Brien put it in a memoir about his 1969 tour in Quang Ngai Province: “Phony ambushes were good for morale, the best game we played on LZ Minuteman.” The war was disillusioning, but the effort to avoid combat offered a unifying cause to embrace. In O’Brien’s unit, even some junior officers sandbagged missions.

  Combat avoidance soon gave rise to direct refusal to obey orders. In 1970, the Senate Armed Services Committee identified thirty-five “combat refusals” in the First Cavalry Division alone. An unknowable number of small mutinies were never reported up the chain of command. No line officer wanted his superiors to know that he had lost control of his men. It could be a career-threatening disaster. Many officers adapted to GI dissent by no longer insisting on aggressive infantry tactics. The level of GI resistance became endemic. One study of “military disintegration” in Vietnam found the duration and scale of disobedience unprecedented. “Unlike mutinous outbreaks of the past and in other armies, which were usually sporadic short-lived events, the progressive unwillingness of American soldiers to fight to the point of open disobedience took place over a four-year period between 1968 and 1971.”

  Dissent among GIs had become as routine as it was on college campuses. An army-commissioned survey of troops on five major U.S. military bases in 1970–1971 found that 47 percent admitted to acts of dissent or disobedience. Their forms of protest and rebellion were many and varied—underground newspapers, petitions, music, study groups, poetry, armbands, peace symbols, power salutes, marches, guerrilla theater, hunger strikes, boycotts, legal counseling, sabotage, desertion, combat avoidance, and mutiny.

  Television viewers got a close look at rebellious GIs in 1970 when CBS aired a documentary called The World of Charlie Company. Correspondent John Laurence reported that Charlie Company (in the First Cavalry Division) reflected the new “sense of independence” and “open rebelliousness” that now characterized American soldiers in Vietnam. Their former commander was very popular, primarily because his cautious tactics minimized casualties. He was adamant about avoiding trails and roads where his men might be ambushed. The new captain was far more aggressive. Shortly after he took command he ordered his men to walk down a road.

  “We ain’t walkin’ down that [bleeping] road,” one of the squad leaders announced. The captain, facing a potential mutiny of some hundred troops, addressed his men: “We’re gonna move out on the road, period. . . . We gotta job to do and we’re gonna do it. It’s not half as dangerous as some of the crap we’ve been doing out in the boonies.” The captain decided to take the point himself and lead the men out onto the road. “Okay, let’s move out.” Only five or six of the men followed.

  A wide range of men defied the captain. The squad leader who initiated the rebellion was hardly a peacenik. His nickname was “Killer.” “How’d you get the nickname?” reporter Laurence asked. “Killed a couple of gooks in a bomb crater one time [laughs]. Put a few 60 [machine gun] rounds into them. They was takin’, dig it, they was takin’ a bath. Just proves—don’t take no baths while you’re in the field.” Other men in the unit wanted nothing to do with killing. “If I ever do have to kill somebody,” one man said, “I think I’d go insane afterwards cause of the conscience thing.” Another man said, “I haven’t fired my gun since I’ve been here. The army’s really paranoid about all the people coming over here now that are a lot different than they used to be. . . . It’s the Woodstock generation coming to Vietnam.” And even Killer wore a peace symbol around his neck: “I figured I could do it too cause I’m the one over here fighting.”

  The increase in drug use by U.S. troops was, in part, simply a reflection of a home front trend, the countercultural turn to alternative forms of pleasure-seeking. Yet in Vietnam it also represented the rising disillusionment with the war as GIs turned to drugs as a form of self-medication and withdrawal. Marijuana was almost as commonly consumed as beer by the end of the war, and heroin was used regularly by as many as 10 percent of GIs. However, the idea that a large portion of the army became drug addicts was a wildly distorted myth that gained traction in the media and popular culture. It was not a harmless stereotype. It stigmatized Vietnam veterans and also provided fodder for the fearmongering that Nixon employed to generate support for his war on drugs.

  As collective resistance among GIs rose, individual forms of rebellion also skyrocketed. In the army, desertions jumped from 14.9 per 1,000 soldiers in 1966 to 73.5 per 1,000 in 1971. Conscientious objector applications submitted by active-duty soldiers jumped from 829 in 1967 to 4,381 in 1971. In those same years the portion of applications that were approved jumped from 28 percent to 77 percent.

  The most extreme form of GI resistance was the attempted murder, or “fragging,” of officers. The expression emerged from the weapon of choice—fragmentation grenades. “Frags” were preferred because they “left no fingerprints” and could be rolled under a cot, or booby-trapped on the door of a latrine. Some units conspired in killing officers by putting up cash bounties for anyone willing to kill or maim a particularly despised officer. The army reported 126 fraggings in 1969, 271 in 1970, and 333 in 1971. The numbers are shocking, especially considering that they only include reported incidents. And the rise in fraggings is particularly dramatic given the simultaneous lowering of American troop levels in those years from 540,000 to under 200,000 and the gradual reduction in aggressive search-and-destroy operations.

  In a candid 1971 assessment published in Armed Forces Journal, Colonel Robert Heinl (Ret.) concluded: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, mu
rdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near-mutinous.” There were real doubts that the United States could continue to field an effective fighting force in Vietnam. The nation was close to realizing what was once regarded as a hopelessly dreamy antiwar slogan: “Suppose they gave a war and no one came.”

  Along with mounting GI resistance in Vietnam came growing antiwar activism among veterans at home. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) confronted Americans with a specter as alarming to many citizens as anything the war had yet produced—the nation’s own former soldiers denouncing the nation for waging a criminal war. In early 1971 they gathered in Detroit to testify about the atrocities they had committed or witnessed and to demand an end to the war. Later that spring they went to the U.S. Capitol and threw away the medals they had been awarded in Vietnam but could no longer bear to own.

  VVAW members hoped their status as veterans might protect them from the charge of disloyalty or lack of patriotism. In front of Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, a group of VVAW marchers encountered a group of women who were there to attend a convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution. One of the DAR women took offense at the antiwar chants coming from the VVAW. She caught the eye of one of the men and said, “Son, I don’t think what you’re doing is good for the troops.”

  “Lady,” he replied, “we are the troops.” The VVAW insisted that they revered the original American revolutionaries of 1776, the original “patriots,” at least as much as the DAR; that their opposition to the Vietnam War was founded in loyalty to the nation’s founding principles. They underlined that point by demonstrating at sites that symbolized American patriotism—Valley Forge, the U.S. Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Betsy Ross House, the Statue of Liberty, and the Lexington Battle Green.

  On Labor Day weekend in 1970, about two hundred members of VVAW marched from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Called Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal, a reversal of the word “war”), the march partly traced the route the Continental Army had taken in 1777 to reach its winter encampment.

  En route to Valley Forge they wore jungle fatigues and carried toy M-16s. In small towns along the way they staged brief dramatic performances—guerrilla theater—designed to confront American citizens with a frightening vision of American military policies in Vietnam. Veterans pretending to be soldiers would grab a group of their supporters who played the roles of “civilians.” The soldiers screamed at and threatened the civilians, tied them up, blindfolded them, interrogated them, pushed them against walls, held knives to their throats, kicked them in the stomach, and herded them away. After the guerrilla theater, vets handed out leaflets to bystanders:

  A U.S. infantry company has just passed through here

  If you had been Vietnamese—

  We might have burned your house

  We might have shot your dog

  We might have shot you . . .

  We might have raped your wife and daughter

  We might have turned you over to your government for torture . . .

  If it doesn’t bother you that American soldiers do these things every day to the Vietnamese simply because they are “Gooks,” THEN picture YOURSELF as one of the silent VICTIMS.

  Many onlookers were shocked; some were enraged. As the antiwar vets marched through rural Somerset County they were confronted by a veteran of World War II who was holding a large American flag across his chest. “You men are a disgrace to your uniforms,” he shouted. “You’re a disgrace to everything we stand for. You ought to go back to Hanoi.”

  The war divided every significant class, group, and category of Americans. There were bitter debates about the war within both major political parties, all the military branches, every religious denomination, every race and region, every school, every union and professional organization, the young and the old, the rich and the poor. Debates raged across the land and across countless kitchen tables.

  The passions were especially stormy because the war challenged so many commonly held assumptions about the nation’s core identity. It was no longer possible to see America as inevitably victorious and invincible; no longer possible for a vast majority of citizens to regard their nation as the greatest on earth or a clear force for good in the world.

  The level of national self-criticism was as great as at any other time in history. Historian Henry Steele Commager had come to national prominence in the 1950s as a prolific champion of American exceptionalism, the faith that the United States was unique in world history, free of Old World hierarchies, imperial ambitions, persistent inequalities, or war-loving bellicosity. But the Vietnam War awakened in Commager, as in so many Americans, the ability to see his own nation’s capacity for evil.

  In 1972, Commager published an article called “The Defeat of America,” in which he argued that America’s moral survival was at stake. Only defeat could save the nation.

  This is not only a war we cannot win, it is a war we must lose if we are to survive morally. . . . We honor now those Southerners who stood by the Union when it was attacked by the Confederacy, just as we honor those Germans who rejected Hitler and his monstrous wars and were martyrs to the cause of freedom and humanity. Why do we find it so hard to accept this elementary lesson of history, that some wars are so deeply immoral that they must be lost, that the war in Vietnam is one of these wars, and that those who resist it are the truest patriots?

  Commager’s moral imperative was realized—the war that must be lost was lost. But if our moral survival also depends on honoring the “truest patriots” who stood in opposition to the Vietnam War, then the United States remains in peril. We have not learned that lesson.

  PART 3

  What Have We Become?

  8

  Victim Nation

  BY THE END of 1972, the Vietnam War had been America’s major story for eight years. It was featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek more than a hundred times. A constant stream of headlines, TV reports, speeches, debates, demonstrations, and photographs were daily reminders that the world’s greatest superpower was mired in a war its leaders could not find a way to win, but were unwilling to lose. Then the decade’s biggest story just slipped away. Once the Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, officially marking the end of direct American military involvement, U.S. news organizations closed their Saigon bureaus, leaving a dozen or so journalists to cover a country that had once drawn a media horde of more than five hundred.

  President Nixon claimed the Paris Accords achieved “peace with honor.” In fact, South Vietnamese and Communist forces renewed combat almost before the ink was dry. The “standstill cease-fire” proved immediately untenable. The failure of the Accords was easy to predict because fundamental differences were simply papered over. Although the Communist side had agreed to allow the American-backed government in Saigon to stay in place temporarily, it was as committed as ever to the eventual reunification of the country under its authority. And the Saigon regime was still so lacking in popular support it could hardly be expected to survive in the absence of the U.S. military, especially since the Accords allowed North Vietnam to keep 150,000 troops in South Vietnam. With the last 20,000 U.S. troops removed from Vietnam, and hostilities renewed, the collapse of the Saigon regime was virtually inevitable. It was only a question of when. But as soon as the United States was officially at peace, the American media stopped paying attention to Vietnam.

  Besides, there was another major story to cover: the slow but steady collapse of the Nixon presidency. As the crimes of Watergate were exposed, drip by drip, the nation was transfixed. On TV, millions of Americans watched the Senate Watergate Committee take hundreds of hours of testimony with tawdry details about White House “bagmen” who paid “hush money,” and “fall guys” who “deep-sixed” evidence, and “plumbers” who plugged “leaks,” all of it creating “a cancer on the pre
sidency.” Eventually the daily spectacle turned to the House Judiciary Committee as it moved inexorably toward a vote to impeach Nixon for abuse of power and obstruction of justice. To avoid a Senate trial and conviction on those charges, Nixon finally resigned on August 9, 1974. Many of Nixon’s early crimes were linked to his effort to attack antiwar critics and keep his war policies secret (and some said the war itself was a crime), but those connections were lost in most of the coverage. During the year and a half that the Watergate drama unfolded, Time ran twenty-eight cover stories on the subject. Watergate 28, Vietnam 0. In the media, at least, the war was forgotten.

  But in early 1975, Indochina roared back into the headlines. Communist forces, emboldened by recent victories, had begun their final offensive. They advanced virtually unopposed toward Saigon. By the middle of March they controlled three-quarters of South Vietnam. Fourteen North Vietnamese divisions had the capital in a vise. On April 30, 1975, Saigon fell. In the desperate few days before tanks broke through the gates of the presidential palace, U.S. helicopters evacuated thousands of people to offshore ships, but left behind hundreds of thousands of others who may have wanted to flee—the South Vietnamese who had worked or fought for the Saigon government and the United States and were thus most vulnerable to reprisals by the victors.

  The two-decade effort to create a permanent non-Communist country called South Vietnam was ending in utter and humiliating defeat. This was no longer a stalemate; this was a rout. In the end, the war turned out to be one of the most lopsided defeats in military history. Despite a few pockets of intense resistance, most government troops quickly retreated, deserted, or surrendered. Many South Vietnamese soldiers stripped off their military boots and uniforms and tried to disappear into the civilian population. Some turned on each other, and on civilians, in desperate efforts to fight their way onto evacuation boats, choppers, and planes. Looting and rampaging were widespread, not by the advancing Communists but by their defeated enemies.