Senator Obama gave a speech today outlining his case for a new GI Bill. On the whole the speech showed an abiding and deep concern for the plight of servicemen and women who have been injured, both physically and emotionally, by the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you boil the speech down to its core, his argument can be read as America has long understood it owed a debt of gratitude to those men and women, who out of an abiding sense of patriotism, are willing to lay down their lives for their country, families and friends so that future generations can enjoy the fruits of freedom and democracy. Those lucky enough to survive are owed a debt of gratitude by those they served to protect and we, as citizens have an obligation to ensure it is paid in full.
Unfortunately, these remarks were not made in a vacuum, but in the heat of a political campaign in which he is still running for his Party's nomination against a candidate who opposed the Vietnam War and whose husband claimed he had actively worked to undermine the military effort to win the war in Vietnam. (3) Likewise, his opponent, once he has secured the nomination, is the revisionist historian of the Vietnam War's dream. He was a prisoner of war, who claimed to have supported the war throughout his captivity, which he was able to survived while antiwar activists stayed home and got stoned at Woodstock.
The need to protect himself from McCain, may explain why he has wholeheartedly embraced the "stab-in-the-back" theory of the Vietnam war, that was first advanced by Ronald Reagan when he was Governor of California and embellished upon by the most reactionary elements of the American far right, including the now infamous Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. While I am sure that Senator Obama did not mean to act irresponsibly, and was most likely advised by his staff to draw a distinction between his opposition to the war in Iraq and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement. Someone on his staff should have vetted his comments for historical inaccuracies and the comfort they must have given to groups like Eagles Up and the Gathering of Eagles, both of which are run by the founder of Swiftboat Veterans for Truth , who are actively attempting to apply their fallacious narrative of the Vietnam era to those Iraq and Afghan war veterans who have chosen to publicly oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I intend to spend time over the next couple of days exploring the current GI movement, its use of media to empower its members and how the current movement is not an aberration but instead deeply rooted in the history of the American military. Before doing so, however, I wish to briefly look at the American experience in Vietnam and how it transformed the men who served there, causing a vocal minority to publicly oppose the war as members of groups like Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and a great many more to privately counsel newly minted draftees and enlisted men to desert and/or go absent without leave to avoid deployment to Vietnam.(4)
The Effect of the Vietnam Experience on those who Served
On 8 March 1965, 1,500 advance troops from the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade flew into the American air base in DaNang. The Brigade was brought up to full strength the next day, when the remaining 2,000 men waded ashore in full battle gear. Instead, of the expected Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops, "they were met by city officials from DaNang, curious Vietnamese, Special Forces Advisors . . . and groups of American airmen who had erected signs of welcome."(5) Like tourists, these persons watched as the marines assaulted "the beach in full battle array."(6)
While the United States had supported the South Vietnamese military with men and material since 1954, these were the first combat troops stationed "in country." Their arrival meant that "the floodgates were [now] open. Johnson had managed to surmount the final obstacles [standing] in the way of [an] American takeover of the war." (7) Within a year there were more than one quarter of a million U.S. troops stationed in Southeast Asia.
Over the last thirty years, American military historians —including Colonels Robert Heinl, Shelby Stanton, and Harry Summers—have gone to great lengths to prove this was the "finest military force the United States had ever sent abroad." What they ignore, however, is the fact that these men, from the lowliest private to the highest-ranking officer, arrived in South Vietnam unprepared to fight a war of attrition against an elusive guerilla army. First, the U.S. military had trained them to fight a ground war in Central Europe against the Soviets, not a war of attrition against peasants in South Vietnam. Second, in spite of being warned against "going in there thinking [they were] . . . John Wayne,"(9) many of these troops arrived expecting the war to be like the movies.
Third, encumbered by history (10) and racist stereotypes inherited from World War II (11), many officers and senior noncommissioned officers arrived in Vietnam expecting to "win this brushfire war, and win it . . . very quickly. I guess we [had] believed . . . our own publicity. There was nothing we could not do because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right."( 12)
As attested to by Philip Caputo, Bill Ehrhart, and other Vietnam veterans, these illusions evaporated amidst the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam, where GIs learned that
Their mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill Communists and to kill as many of them as possible.(13)
Having seen comrades and close friends, who "wiped out by seventeen years of war movies" (14) had come to "Vietnam . . . [to] get wiped out for good," many GIs "acquired a contempt for human life and a predilection for taking it."(15)
Likewise, those officers who had believed they "could win this brushfire war, and win it quickly" soon discovered that the men they "had scorned as peasants . . . were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our survival." (16)
In his review of Vietnam veteran memoirs and oral histories, Lloyd Lewis argues that these GIs came to see the war as "shapeless, disjointed, fragmented¾a reality wholly other than any they had known or were prepared to meet. It seemed to many as though they had been ripped out of one world in which the familiar order of cause-effect, means-end, premises-conclusions operated and had been transported to another planet for their thirteen-month tour of duty. . . . As one soldier commented, ‘It was no orderly campaign, as in Europe, but a war waged in a wilderness without rules or laws.’"(17)
Every GI appears to have responded to this formless war differently. Most tried to survive their tour of duty by "block[ing] the war from their minds." (18) Others embraced the war and slipped into a state of barbarism. For example, a veteran reported to Mark Lane that he "had a friend that had a pet skull. He chopped the head off and he used to keep it in his tent." (19) A minority went berserk and "lost all concern for the safety of others, as much as for [themselves]." (20) And some began to question why they should have to fight in a war that "was unwinnable . . . for a bunch of corrupt politicians in Saigon."(21)
Christian Appy argues that rank-and-file troops in Vietnam were radicalized in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet offensive, as an increasing number of them questioned whether the war in Vietnam was worth the life of a single GI. This, he claims, can clearly be seen in the fact that "by 1969 combat avoidance increasingly developed into direct ‘combat refusals,’ the military’s euphemism for mutiny." (22)
This shift in attitude had to have been known to the Pentagon brass because in April 1969 the Pentagon had commissioned a committee of army historians to interview GIs in the field and assess their attitude toward the war. The committee reported that GIs believed "the war is about the biggest blunder the United States has ever made." (23) They felt the government should "get all the boats and planes that we have, put every American GI on it, and get us out of here as fast as we can." (24)
While there is no evidence the committee’s report had any effect on either the Pentagon or the administration, their finding that GIs felt "if there is a chance we might get [killed] we shouldn’t take the chance,"(25) was not concocted out of thin air. In fact, GIs began measuring "the success of an operation . . . not by how many enemy were killed but by how few Americans, not by how much fighting but by how little." (26)
The fact that GIs had begun to deliberately avoid contact with "the enemy" cannot be explained away as merely a survival tactic. Instead, it suggests these men had come to doubt the legitimacy of their officers’ command and control. As Michael Herr observed—during the siege of Khe Sanh—these men felt there was nothing their officers could do to them that was any worse than being stationed in Vietnam:
"Fuck the lieutenant," Mayhew said. "You remember from before, he ain’t wrapped too tight."
"Well he wrapped tight enough to tear you a new asshole."
"Now what’s he gonna do to me? Send me to Vietnam?" (27)
Once legitimate command disintegrated, there was nothing to stop GIs in Vietnam turning on their officers and "fragging" them for real and supposed slights. In fact, according to one Vietnam veteran, after 1969, traditional relations of power in Vietnam all but disappeared. "If you mess with my partner as an NCO or something like that, in the unwritten code there, I had the right to blow your brains out. And the guys would do it. Those lieutenants and the CO didn’t mess with nobody in the field." (28)
Unfortunately, the Pentagon claimed that these behaviors proved "deliberate efforts [were] being made to introduce the divisiveness found in our society into the army." (29) For GI activists, such claims were absurd. The editor of The Ally, for example, wrote that it was not civilians but "the war [that] created the anti-war GI. Men do not need the kind of stupid discipline the military hands out if they believe in what they are doing. When men are asked to fight an unjust war and are then harassed and abused while doing it, they begin to ask questions."(30)
In 1971, the Pentagon commissioned the Research Analysis Corporation to identify the causes of dissent amongst Vietnam-era servicemen. Employing findings from a survey of 844 soldiers at five bases in the United States, the Research Analysis Corporation reported "that more than half of all soldiers . . . became involved in some form of resistance activity [emphasis mine]." (31) When questioned about their involvement, 58 percent cited their opposition to the Vietnam War and 38 percent blamed "the way the army treats the individual."(32)
In the three decades since the war, the fact that a plurality of GIs not only opposed U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, but got "involved in some form of resistance activity" has been ignored by historian and commentator alike. So long as debates about the Vietnam War are dominated by those who claim that GIs "had been denied permission to win," (33) no one will be able to hear those GIs who believed that the war was not worth winning:
We were angry about what the Army was doing—the stupidity of haircuts, the long hours of KP, the constant harassment, the utter lack of usual rights and the total disrespect for us as human beings. We also knew the war was crap—that it wasn't being fought to save the Vietnamese or to protect America. We saw clearly that it was the rulers of our country—the big businessmen—using us to maintain their control of another country. But that wasn't all, we also knew that all wasn't right in America. We were aware that 35 million of our people lived in poverty, and that 22 million of our Black brothers and sisters were kept on the bottom—used and abused as the white power structure saw fit—and put down brutally if they objected. Some of us had worked before we came in so we knew that long hours and overtime was the only way to have some extra spending money. We wanted a decent life when we got out—something we knew wasn't waiting for us. A Job that meant something, not just selling 40-50 hours a week to the highest bidder. We wanted a decent living, not one taxed away to nothing because of a war that was making someone else rich. But the thing of it was, we were in the Army. What could we do? Wait two or three years? We were tired of wasting time, tired of waiting for things to get better and knowing they never would. So we decided to try and stop some of the stuff that was coming down, see what we could do to change things.
That was the . . . motivating force behind our paper. (34)
Footnotes
- Barack Obama, May 12 2008
- Greg Sargent, May 12 2008
- The claim by Clinton, that while at Oxford he was a central figure in the movement to organize American Exiles in Britain is not supported by the historical record.
- In 1969 and 1970, the U.S. armed services experienced a dramatic increase in the levels of disaffection and dissent. For example in 1967 and 1968 there were 2,216 in-service applications for conscientious objection, in 1969 and 1970 there were 5,752. (David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt. New York: Anchor Press (1975), 16.) Likewise, in 1967 and 1968 there were 41 incidents of unauthorized absence (AWOL) per 1,000 servicemen, in 1969 and 1970 this rose to 58. In 1967 and 1968 there were 14 incidents of desertion per 1,000
In June 1971, Dr Hamid Molwana and Paul Geffert published a “profile study of members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” In contradistinction to the claims of the antiwar movement’s conservative critics, most of these veterans had either supported — or had no opinion — about the war before going to Vietnam. Furthermore, when asked about their prewar political beliefs, 29.5% reported they had been conservative and 29.5% reported they had been moderates. Only 7% had reported being radicals. Finally, and most important, 61.7% reported seeing “a drastic change in . . . [their] views about U.S. involvement in Vietnam [while serving in Vietnam]” (Molwana and Geffert, “Vietnam Veterans Against the War: A Profile Study of the Dissenters,” in David Thorne and George Butler eds., The New Soldier, New York, NY: The MacMillan Company (1971), 174).
- Douglas Welsh, The History of the Vietnam War (New York: Galahad Books, 1981), 69.
- ibid., 69
- ibid., 70
- Ronald H. Spector, After Tet (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 26.
- Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War, 44.
- Caputo writes that "for Americans who did not come of age in the early sixties, it may be hard to grasp what those years were like—the pride and overpowering self-assurance that prevailed. . . . We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth" (Caputo, A Rumor of War, xiii-xiv).
- See John Dower, War without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
- Caputo, A Rumor of War, xiii-xiv.
- ibid , xix
- Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), 209.
- Caputo, A Rumor of War, xix.
- ibid., xiv
- Lloyd Lewis, . The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives (Westport: The Greenwood Press, 1986), 72.
- Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press,1993), 207.
19 See Mark Lane, Conversations with Americans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) and the testimony given before the Winter Soldier Hearings in February 1971.
- Johnathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Athaneum,1994), 90.
- Caputo, A Rumor of War, 317.
- Appy, Working-Class War, 242.
- ibid. 233
- ibid., 234
- ibid., 233
- ibid., 232
- Herr, Dispatches, 116
- Mark Baker, ed., NAM (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), 171
- "Growth of GI Power," in The Ally 1, no. 17 (June 1969): 3.
- ibid., 3
- David Cortright, "GI Resistance," in Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, eds. Melvin Small and William Hoover (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press 1992), 117.
- ibid., 119
- Ronald Reagan cited by Jeffrey Kimball, "The Stab-in-the-back Legend and the Vietnam War," in Armed Forces and Society 14, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 39.
- "An FTA Birthday," in Fun Travel Adventure 9 (June 1969): 1.
