And Where It Came From
The right wing has spent decades blaming the media and the anti-war movement for losing the Vietnam War by not supporting the troops. The truth is far different: the troops themselves turned so profoundly against the war that it threatened to destroy the military. Withdrawing from Vietnam was absolutely necessary in order to avoid this.
In Iraq, a similar (though distinctly different) process seems to already be well under way, as open dissent is increasingly visible--though far more coherent than it was in Vietnam.
The state of collapse was so profound that it is difficult to comprehend today. But a devastating snapshot of it can be found in a 1971 article The Collapse of the Armed Forces by Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., which appeared in the Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971.
The testimony is all the more striking because it comes from a pro-war, pro-military perspective. Excerpts and discussion begin below the fold.
The article begins:
THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
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, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.
Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.
This article is written from the POV of a true believer and military professional, so it spreads blame liberally on forces outside the military:
Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.
Of course, his blame-placing could be justified. But it misses two fundamental points:
First, that all the undermining forces either resulted from the larger political failure, or else only gained traction because of it.
Second, that things looked very different to the troops who were rebelling than they did to career officers like him. The troops--largely draftees or volunteers avoiding the draft--were steeped in the very civilian values which the military was supposed to protect. In the mission in Vietnam, they saw no evidence whatsoever that this was the case.
Even though members of the guard and reserve have substantial military and law enforcement backgrounds, they, too, are steeped in civilian culture. They are not nearly as green as the young recruits filling the ranks in Vietnam. But this means they have an even more developed sense how the military mission ought to relate to protecting American security, and expressing American values. They are not likely to break down the same way that younger, greener Vietnam Forces did. But neither are they likely to wait for the civilian anti-war movement to show them the way to start organizing themselves. They have already begun to organize.
Farther down, the author continues:
"They have set up separate companies," writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, "for men who refuse to go into the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don't even put on their uniforms any more... The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key...There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion."
Can all this really be typical or even truthful?
Unfortunately the answer is yes.
So, the "liberal media" wasn't lying, after all.
Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.
Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969,the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, "G.I. Says", publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the officer who ordered(and led) the attack. Despite several attempts, however, Honeycutt managed to live out his tour and return Stateside.
"Another Hamburger Hill," (i.e., toughly contested assault), conceded a veteran major, is definitely out."
The issue of "combat refusal", and official euphemism for disobedience of orders to fight -- the soldier's gravest crime -- has only recently been again precipitated on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry's mass refusal to recapture their captain's command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders.
As early as mid-1969, however, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused -- on CBS-TV -- to advance down a dangerous trail.
What the author identifies as "sedition" we at DKos might see in a very different light. But whatever it is called, it is clear evidence that anti-war sentiment was deeply, even fiercely rooted among the troops:
Sedition -- coupled with disaffection within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable -- infests the Armed Services:
At best count, there appear to be some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas. Since 1970 the number of such sheets has increased 40% (up from 103 last fall). These journals are not mere gripe-sheets that poke soldier fun in the "Beetle Bailey" tradition, at the brass and the sergeants. "In Vietnam," writes the Ft Lewis-McChord Free Press, "the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy." Another West Coast sheet advises readers: "Don't desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer."
At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers) now operate more or less openly. Ancillary to these are at least six antiwar veterans? groups which strive to influence GIs.
Three well-established lawyer groups specialize in support of GI dissent. Two (GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee and new York Draft and Military Law Panel) operate in the open. A third is a semi-underground network of lawyers who can only be contacted through the GI Alliance, a Washing, D.C., group which tries to coordinate seditious antimilitary activities throughout the country.
One antimilitary legal effort operates right in the theater of war. A three-man law office, backed by the Lawyers' Military Defense Committee, of Cambridge, Mass., was set up last fall in Saigon to provide free civilian legal services for dissident soldiers being court-martialed in Vietnam.
Besides these lawyers' fronts, the Pacific Counseling Service (an umbrella organization with Unitarian backing for a prolifery of antimilitary activities) provides legal help and incitement to dissident GIs through not one but seven branches (Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Monterey, Tokyo, and Okinawa).
Another of Pacific Counseling's activities is to air-drop planeloads of sedition literature into Oakland's sprawling Army Base, our major West Coast staging point for Vietnam
On the religious front, a community of turbulent priests and clergymen, some unfrocked, calls itself the Order of Maximilian. Maximilian is a saint said to have been martyred by the Romans for refusing military service as un-Christian. Maximilian's present-day followers visit military posts, infiltrate brigs and stockades in the guise of spiritual counseling, work to recruit military chaplains, and hold services of "consecrations" of post chapels in the name of their saintly draft-dodger.
By present count at least 11 (some go as high as 26) off-base antiwar "coffee houses" ply GIs with rock music, lukewarm coffee, antiwar literature, how-t-do-it tips on desertion, and similar disruptive counsels. Among the best-known coffee houses are: The Shelter Half (Ft Lewis, Wash.); The Home Front (Ft Carson, Colo.); and The Oleo Strut (Ft Hood, Tex.).
So, "144 underground newspapers,""At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers)," "Three well-established lawyer groups," "at least 11 [perhaps as many as 26]... off-base antiwar 'coffee houses,'" and "a community of turbulent priests and clergymen, some unfrocked, [that] calls itself the Order of Maximilian."
Quite a strong antiwar movement largely within the military.
The author goes on to make some predictable accusations:
Virtually all the coffee houses are or have been supported by the U.S. Serviceman's Fund, whose offices are in new York City's Bronx. Until may 1970 the Fund was recognized as a tax-exempt "charitable corporations," a determination which changed when IRS agents found that its main function was sowing dissention among GIs and that it was a satellite of "The new Mobilization Committee", a communist-front organization aimed at disruption of the Armed Forces.
Another "new Mobe" satellite is the G.I. Press Service, based in Washington, which calls itself the Associate Press of military underground newspapers. Robert Wilkinson, G.I. Press's editor, is well known to military intelligence and has been barred from South Vietnam.
While refusing to divulge names, IRS sources say that the serviceman's Fund has been largely bankrolled by well-to-do liberals. One example of this kind of liberal support for sedition which did surface identifiably last year was the $8,500 nut channeled from the Philip Stern Family Foundation to underwrite Seaman Roger Priest's underground paper OM, which, among other writings, ran do-it-yourself advice for desertion to Canada and advocated assassination of President Nixon.
But what these accusations actually show is that, yes, anti-war liberals supported the troops in their own struggle against the war that was no longer even being fought to be won, but merely to "save face."
Clearly, the main difference between Vietnam then and Iraq today is that the broad-based anti-war movement of the Vietnam era has forever changed American society. The growing anti-war movement within the military today is far more autonomous, self-directed, articulate,disciplined, nuanced and advanced than its Vietnam-era counterpart.
It owes all this, in large part, to the fact that Vietnam has changed America forever. Even very high level officers today will not accept the blind loyalty ethos of yesteryear. They understand that they have multiple loyalties--to the men beneath them, whose lives are in their care, as well as to the constitution, and the rule of law--in additon to their loyalty to the chain of command.
If America's civilians are more passionately supportive of the troops, the troops themselves are more passionately civilian in embracing American values, and demanding that their service make sense in terms of those values. Both these changes have their roots in the Vietnam experience. The only thing that hasn't changed is the political disconnect of the civilian leadership. It has only gotten worse.