American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Aha! The civilians in the State Department were so obsessed with hiding the fact that the United States was bombing Laos or Cambodia that they destroyed the reputation of a true hero. They blamed his death on incompetence or worse and then punished his son for the fictional sins of the father. But why go to such trouble? Why not just give Duke a posthumous medal and say that he crashed in Vietnam? That was the usual government response. But the 1980s was an age when Hollywood well understood that many Americans took it for granted that the government not only lied to preserve its power, but willfully betrayed and discredited the very men who had fought most heroically; a time when the president of the United States believed the government had actively prevented victory in Vietnam. Maverick doesn’t seem the least bit surprised by the revelation.

  Perhaps he was a fan of The A-Team, one of America’s most popular TV shows from 1983 to 1987 (it had top-ten ratings its first three seasons). The A-Team backstory is even more far-fetched than the one about Maverick’s father. The former Green Berets had been unjustly court-martialed for robbing the Bank of Hanoi near the end of the American war in Vietnam (they had orders to do it). A voice-over explains at the start of every episode:

  In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.

  Like Maverick’s father, the Green Berets of The A-Team are heroes who were victimized by their own government. Permanently defamed, they are actually men of honor. Though they became guns for hire, they only sell their services for just causes. The A-Team may not have done much to redeem the Vietnam War, but it was part of a broad cultural effort to replace the memory of America’s destruction of Vietnam with celebrations of aggressive masculinity.

  In the case of Maverick, discovering that his father was a hero, not a shameful embarrassment, has the added bonus of curing the young aviator of a crisis of confidence he suffers when his best friend dies in an emergency bailout. Once on the verge of quitting, Maverick accepts a call to fly in support of a ship that has “wandered into foreign territory” and is threatened by MiGs. “Gentlemen, this is the real thing. This is what you’ve been trained for. You are America’s best. Make us proud.” Maverick rises to the challenge, single-handedly blowing up several MiGs and scaring away the rest. He has won a fictional battle in an unknown place against a nameless enemy with no significant cause at stake, but back atop the aircraft carrier the top guns and crew celebrate as if they had saved the Free World from extinction.

  But none of this prideful chest-pounding managed to restore faith in one very important national institution—the government. Post-Vietnam nationalism contained a deep animus toward “big government.” By that, most people meant the immense, federal, civilian “bureaucracy.” According to the most strident New Right critics, the government was a faceless bastion of waste, incompetence, and oppressive rule-mongering that was stripping the nation of the kind of virtues on display in Top Gun and The A-Team. Yet their critique carefully excluded the government’s most significant institution—the military. The military could still be heroic, along with “anti-government” political leaders like President Reagan.

  Yet despite all the Top Gun fantasies, historical evasions, and over-the-top flag-waving, the resurgent nationalism of the 1980s contained a strong, if unspoken, feeling that the United States was in decline. As Neil Young put it in his 1989 song “Rockin’ in the Free World,” despite all the “red, white, and blue” on American streets, there were still many people “shufflin’ their feet,” and “sleepin’ in their shoes.”

  And despite the many efforts to erase the haunting memories of loss and failure left behind by the Vietnam War, the past could not be entirely refashioned. Even works that sought to put the best possible light on that record by honoring the service and sacrifice of American soldiers often included unavoidable evidence that the triumphalism of American exceptionalism could not be fully restored. In 1992, for example, Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway published a best-selling book about a major 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley of South Vietnam. We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young was written not just as a war story, but as a “love story” to honor the patriotism, brotherly bonds, and sacrifices of an elite unit of the First Cavalry Division, and to offer a “testament” and “tribute” to those who died. In the end, however, the significance of those sacrifices is cast in surprisingly modest terms. “What, then, had we learned with our sacrifices in the Ia Drang Valley? We had learned something about fighting the North Vietnamese regulars—and something important about ourselves. We could stand against the finest light infantry troops in the world and hold our ground.”

  That conclusion would have been unthinkable to readers prior to the Vietnam War. Who could have imagined then that a popular American military history would describe enemy troops as the world’s “finest”? Who could imagine that a major battle would not demonstrate, yet again, the invincibility of American power? How could American pride be founded on merely holding our ground? But after the Vietnam War a great many Americans had lost their appetite for claiming any other ground than our own or expecting victory as the inevitable birthright of Americans. A certain defensive pride may have come back to America, but no one wanted to test it with another Vietnam.

  10

  No More Vietnams

  Each train that goes by here with munitions, that gets by us, is going to kill people, people like you and me. . . . The question that I have to ask on these tracks is: am I any more valuable than those people? And if I say “No,” then I have to say, “You can’t move these munitions without moving my body or destroying my body.”

  —Brian Willson, September 1, 1987, Concord Naval Weapons Station

  BRIAN WILLSON, AGE forty-six, a former air force captain and Vietnam veteran, sat between the tracks with his legs crossed, facing an oncoming train. Two other veterans knelt beside him. Forty more peace activists stood outside the tracks. They were gathered on a public crossing at the Concord Naval Weapons Station—the Pentagon’s largest West Coast munitions depot. The trains from Concord traveled a few miles down the tracks to the docks of California’s Sacramento River, where their lethal cargo was loaded onto ships and sent into the Pacific to a long list of American clients. On September 1, 1987, Willson and the other protesters were there to stop the trains.

  Their main purpose was to oppose the flow of U.S. weapons to the Contras—a counterrevolutionary paramilitary force fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing government. The Contras depended on U.S. arms, training, and funding, and President Ronald Reagan was more than willing to provide it. He was their greatest champion. The Contras, he said, were “freedom fighters” battling to root out a “Communist stronghold” in Central America established by the Sandinistas. Reagan regarded the Sandinista government as an anti-American “cancer.” “If we ignore the malignancy of Nicaragua,” he warned, “it will spread and become a mortal threat to the entire New World.” Even the United States was not immune; the Sandinistas were “just two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.” Reagan said Americans should regard the Contras as the “moral equivalent to our founding fathers.”

  Brian Willson and his fellow protesters could not have disagreed more vehemently. For them, the Contras were not freedom fighters, but authoritarian thugs—U.S.-backed terrorists waging a campaign of torture and murder against the people of Nicaragua. The Contras had so little support within Nicaragua they had to launch their attacks from the borders. By contrast, the Sandinistas had come to power in a broadly popular revolution against a reviled dictator. They took their name from Augusto Sandino, the rebel and national hero who had fought against the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua in
the late 1920s and early ’30s. In 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Throughout the 1980s, the Sandinistas were under constant attack from the Contras, many of whom were former members of Somoza’s National Guard.

  While only a small portion of Americans were blocking munitions trains, a clear majority opposed Reagan’s policies in Central America. From 1983 to 1988, polls indicated that no more than 40 percent of the public ever agreed with the president’s support of the Contras. There was significant congressional opposition as well. In 1983, for example, Congressman Berkley Bedell, an Iowa Democrat, suggested that quiet public dissent would turn into mass protest if only there were greater awareness of what the Contras were doing with U.S. aid: “If the American people could have talked with the common people of Nicaragua, whose women and children are being indiscriminately kidnapped, tortured and killed by terrorists financed by the American taxpayers, they would rise up in legitimate anger and demand that support for criminal activity be ended.”

  An estimated 100,000 U.S. citizens did precisely as Bedell suggested. Through organizations like Witness for Peace, they went to Nicaragua, talked with families in the countryside—the campesinos—worked alongside them, and saw firsthand the results of the Contra war. Brian Willson was one of the North Americans who spent months in Nicaragua living with host families. Early in 1986, he saw horse-drawn wagons carrying five rudimentary caskets down a street in Estelí. Inside the open caskets were the bodies of five campesinos who had been killed by the Contras—four women and one child. Willson felt an electric jolt run through his body. “My God,” he said, “this is just like Vietnam.”

  Willson had come a long way from his small-town boyhood in upstate New York, the son of an archconservative father—a “teetotaling fundamentalist, anticommunist, antiunion, racist” who admired the John Birch Society. Brian never accepted his father’s racial and religious prejudices, but he did embrace his father’s fervent anti-Communism and fully supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In 1965, while teaching at a Methodist Sunday school, Willson helped his students draft a letter endorsing the American bombing of Vietnam as essential to the preservation of democracy in a world threatened by godless Communism.

  A few months later he was stunned to read that a Quaker named Norman Morrison had set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon, sacrificing his life as a protest against the Vietnam War. He quickly realized that this was the same Norman Morrison he had known growing up—a highly revered older boy who had graduated from Chautauqua Central School seven years before Willson. “He was the first Eagle Scout I had known, the polite boy who had dated our neighbor’s daughter. . . . What had gotten into him? Had he gone off the deep end?”

  In 1969, Willson went to Vietnam as an air force lieutenant who specialized in military base security. Stationed at a small air base in the Mekong Delta, he came to understand, firsthand, the effects of the bombing he had once supported. American and South Vietnamese pilots were attacking inhabited villages suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. One week, Willson estimated, the bombing conducted from his base alone had killed seven hundred to nine hundred villagers, most of them women and children, “all due to low-flying fighter-bombers who could see exactly who and what they were bombing.” When Willson was ordered to conduct bomb damage assessments in some of the destroyed villages, he saw the carnage directly. It was the sight of one woman that changed him forever. The young mother was lying at Willson’s feet, burned to death by napalm. Around her were three small children, also fatally burned and shredded with shrapnel. As he stared down at the woman, he saw that her eyes were open and she seemed to be staring directly at him. “From that moment on nothing would ever be the same. . . . I had no choice—God help me!—but to admit that my own country was engaged in an effort that was criminal and immoral beyond comprehension.”

  Some weeks later Willson was invited to dinner by a Vietnamese family. After the meal, they sang some Vietnamese songs, including one called “Ode to Norman Morrison.” The Quaker who had killed himself to protest the American war was famous in Vietnam, so revered that decades after the war many people would remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the American’s death. In the United States, Morrison was soon forgotten. So, too, were the eight other Americans, ages sixteen to eighty-two, who had immolated themselves in opposition to their nation’s war. Nor did most Americans realize that in Vietnam, at least seventy-six people, mostly Buddhists, had done the same.

  By 1986, fifteen years after coming home from Vietnam and leaving the military, Brian Willson was so tormented by ongoing U.S. support for repressive right-wing regimes in Central America that he began to consider following Norman Morrison’s example. No ordinary protest seemed capable of changing the government’s policies. Petitions, lobbying, vigils, demonstrations—none of it seemed to make any difference.

  In June 1986, Congress acceded to Reagan’s will and passed another $100 million aid bill for the Contras. That night Willson called his friend Charlie Liteky and the two began to plan an unlimited, water-only, fast to protest the war. Liteky had been a chaplain in Vietnam, where he often accompanied combat soldiers. One day in 1967 he was with a company of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade when it was attacked by a battalion-size force. As everyone dove for cover, Liteky ran into the firefight to drag wounded Americans to safety and to administer last rites to the dying. He was wounded in the neck and foot but still managed to rescue more than twenty men. For his heroism, Liteky received the Medal of Honor.

  After the war, Liteky left the priesthood and became a deeply committed peace activist, focusing primarily on U.S. policy in Central America. In 1986, shortly before beginning to fast with Brian Willson, Liteky dramatized his dissent by renouncing his Medal of Honor and the lifetime pension that accompanied it. He put the medal in an envelope, addressed it to President Reagan, and placed it at the apex of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. He included a letter. “I pray for your conversion, Mr. President,” Liteky wrote. “Come morning I hope you wake up and hear the cry of the poor riding on a southwest wind from Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. They’re crying, ‘Stop killing us!’”

  Explaining his decision to renounce the Medal of Honor, Liteky told journalists, “The question is no longer, ‘Will Central America become another Vietnam?’ Central America is another Vietnam, and the time to demonstrate against it is now, not only to prevent the future loss of young American lives, but to stop the current killing of Nicaraguan and Salvadoran innocents.”

  To make the case that Central America was “another Vietnam,” activists pointed out that once again the United States was waging undeclared wars on phony pretexts, once again claiming to defend democracy and freedom from Communist tyranny while actually supporting armies, death squads, and mercenaries that used terror and indiscriminate violence to maintain or reestablish repressive oligarchies.

  However, there was at least one major difference between the Central American wars and Vietnam—Americans were virtually invisible. Only a few thousand American soldiers were sent to Central America, while some three million served in Vietnam. And compared with the 58,000 killed in Vietnam, no more than a few dozen American soldiers were killed in Central America, and they died without public knowledge. Years later, in 1996, the army placed a small memorial stone in Arlington National Cemetery to acknowledge the twenty-one soldiers killed in the 1980s on secret counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador.

  American-backed wars by proxy, or secret CIA-sponsored coups, were hardly new in U.S. foreign policy. The past was littered with scores of small-scale U.S. interventions that the public quickly forgot or never knew about. For example, most Americans still don’t know that their government sponsored the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973). But the experience of the Vietnam War taught antiwar activists to scrutinize all foreign
policies—even those that did not cost many American lives. They would not settle for sugarcoated rhetoric about freedom fighters, or the claim that what was happening in Central America was merely “low-intensity conflict.” It was hardly “low intensity” for the tens of thousands who were dying.

  Activists helped spread the news that the United States was providing more than guns and money—the CIA, the military, and American mercenaries offered training in ruthless counterinsurgency tactics and participated in covert operations throughout the region. Most of it remained secret, but in 1984 two big revelations made the mainstream press. First, some retired Green Berets working for the CIA made a Spanish translation of a 1968 Vietnam War manual called Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare and distributed it to the Contras. It was quickly dubbed the Assassination Manual, since its recommendations included the hiring of professional criminals to “neutralize” Sandinista officials and coerce peasants to support the Contras. One section, titled “How to Explain a Shooting,” justified killing potential informers and explained how to cover up the crime.

  Earlier in 1984 there had been a more significant revelation—President Reagan had authorized a CIA plan to place mines in three Nicaraguan harbors as part of a larger effort to sabotage the nation’s economy. That act of war became the centerpiece of a World Court suit against the United States. In 1986, the court decided that the United States was “in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another State.” The ruling ordered the U.S. to end all support for the Contras and to pay Nicaragua a reported $17 billion in reparations. President Reagan simply ignored the court and claimed it had no jurisdiction. Yet the ruling was an accurate barometer of global opinion. At the United Nations, thirteen of fifteen members of the Security Council passed a resolution condemning American support for the Contras. In the eyes of much of the world, the United States had become a rogue nation.