It’s 50 years since the public learned the details of the My Lai massacre, in which American troops destroyed a Vietnamese village and killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. In that Fall of 1969, millions of people took to the streets in a Moratorium against the war, and protesters chanted the chorus to the newly-released song “Give Peace a Chance.”
Yet the dizzying array of fifty-year commemorations of signal events of the 1960s, from the voting rights march in Selma to the Stonewall gay rights protest against police repression, has neglected the movement against the war in Vietnam. There are no feature films devoted to the anti-war movement, and stereotypes and misconceptions still dominate popular memory.
The American public needs to revise its understanding of the movement against the Vietnam War, especially the view that protesters did not “support the troops.” This powerful and persistent myth, given new life in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s recent series (The Vietnam War), has afforded politicians a way to wage wars without justification while discrediting dissenters. Rallying support for the 1991 Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush claimed the U.S. had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome”—this time around, Americans would “support the troops,” by which he meant not protest the war. The purposeful conflation of opposing a policy with opposing those who carry it out took root and has been repeated and widely accepted ever since.
Contrary to the myth, documented evidence demonstrates the Vietnam anti-war movement’s support for the troops, which took many forms: protesters at antiwar demonstrations carried signs that said "support the G.I.'s, bring them home.” This call was echoed in the underground press: Atlanta’s Great Speckled Bird proposed, "Support our boys—bring one home now." Pete Seeger said the same in song, “Support our boys in Vietnam, Bring them home."
Women who opposed the war organized letter-writing campaigns to support G.I. morale while civilian antiwar activists contributed to the establishment of G.I. coffeehouses near army bases to give U.S. troops a place to unwind and share stories and concerns. G.I.s and veterans played a critical role in the antiwar movement, which targeted decision-makers, not ordinary soldiers, for criticism--as in “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Another persistent myth paints antiwar protesters as “hippies,” privileged (white) youth who were both naively idealistic and concerned mainly with saving their own skin. This misconception erases dissent by people of color, many of whom opposed the war as part of their own movements for equality.
Some of the earliest proclamations against the war came out of the civil rights movement. In 1965, a group of African Americans in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party issued an antiwar statement in response to news that a former classmate had been killed in combat in Vietnam. They argued that black people in the state should not be “fighting in Viet Nam for the 'White Man’s freedom" until African Americans in Mississippi were free. "Negro boys should not honor the draft here. . . . Mothers should encourage their sons not to go."
In a powerful speech against the war in April 1967, Martin Luther King linked the issues of racism, poverty, and militarism, while arguing that the U.S. was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, expressed similar critiques of the war, which are documented in photographs, manifestoes, and posters.
Once we acknowledge the diversity of the anti-war movement and its support for the troops, we can effectively counter the idea that anti-war protesters were (and are) unpatriotic, a notion still used by our government to undermine opposition to its wars.
To be sure, there were divisions within the movement, including activists whose view of “Amerikkka” could be construed as contemptuous. But most of the dissenters against the Vietnam War, as peace historian Michael Foley has written, "thought of themselves as patriots, distraught over the government's abandonment of core American values." ( http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/05/the-lies-of-war/)
As a recent student of mine, Samantha C., wrote: blindly supporting war “is doing a disservice to our country . . . It is not unpatriotic to disagree with or protest government action, and it is not a crime or bad to recognize when the government and society is wrong and to call them out on it.”
The willingness to speak out against a government that was “wrong” and try to prevent many needless deaths –American and Vietnamese--is what we should remember about the antiwar movement. The 50th anniversary of the Fall Moratorium demonstrations offers an ideal moment to express our gratitude to those who protested against the war. They also served our country.