PAGE 12
TALES OF THE CHICKENSHIT 20
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
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"No normal man who has smelled and associated
with death ever wants to see any more of it. ..The surest
way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry. "
-BILL MAULDIN
1/Var feels to me an oblique place “
-EMILY DICKINSON
March 2001 is 35 years since I began a year long
experience of a hopeless and morally reprehensible war in
Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, a minor year in the decade long
war the USA finally abandoned after almost 60,000 Americans
were killed and perhaps 300,000 wounded and crippled, many
more hundreds of thousands psychologically damaged as well.
Perhaps the only notable battle that year 1966 was
against North Vietnamese Army regiments in the Demilitarized
Zone that separated North from South Vietnam, named after
the original battle of Hastings 900 years earlier in 1066
On average an estimated 200 Americans were killed
or wounded every week that year. The body count of dead Viet
Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army soldiers was wildly
inflated while collateral casualties of noncombatant Vietnamese
women, men and children was considerably downplayed and
often denied although they were the overwhelming majority of
victims of the war.
We razed Vietnamese culture and slaughtered its
people as if it was our historical prerogative. We imposed a
hated government and enforced its control with our bombers
and battalions. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than
during all of World War 2 and poisoned its fields and population
with herbicides sprayed from the sky. We invented the body
count as an index and declared every peasant we killed an
enemy which was proved by their deaths. We removed
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese from their ancestral
farms and villages to prevent them from assisting the guerrillas
we were never able to destroy and abandoned them to filthy
over-crowded refugee camps or to beg and starve or whore
in the cities. We hired death squads to liquidate political
opposition and participated in the opium trade to pay
mercenaries.
I survived my one-year assignment to war by embracing
a thought that guilt was the provenance of only the living and
quickly accepted the war's grim circumstances, but no amount
of star spangled banner justified the horror of indiscriminate
eco/genodde against Vietnamese, who mostly died because
they were in the way
Alive and back stateside I attempted to keep the
promise of my accepted guilt. I was an early member of the
Vietnam Veterans Against the War and organized chapters
of disaffected Vietnam veterans all over the USA I wote
articles, gave speeches and took part in demonstrations
I was gassed, maced, clubbed and arrested
In societies that wish to quickly forget a war or obscure
its purpose, surviving soldiers are more apparent in their grim
invisibility. Returning soldiers are earners of the disease of
conscience and are more likely to be shunned rather than
embraced Many retreat into alcohol and drugs, react violently
and bitterly to criticism; they are restless and are often unable
to hold a job or maintain a romance A few openly repudiate the
war in which they fought
Each opposition to the Vietnam War had its own logic
and internal history. For most antiwar veterans it was sympathy
for Vietnamese and guilt in assisting killing them, or that one
American life lost was worth more than all of Vietnam which
was the reason those who held that opinion felt the war should
be ended Regardless of their reasons for opposing the war
F
they fought in, the usual attitude toward dissenting veterans
was as traitors (from the Right) and babykillers (from the Left),
though both attitudes were to change I estimated that for every
vet who made public his or her protest, perhaps 10 or 100 were
in quiet sympathy.
Most veterans who returned from Vietnam abandoned
everything military, even a group formed against it. Very few
joined the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Ironically the only veterans group to come out of the war
opposed it. By any standards the WAW was a Frankenstein
to the Pentagon Although the reverse side of the mirror — the
antithesis to the American Legion and VFW — and although it
understood the problems of Vietnam vets and gave something
of a political definition to a shared negative expenence. it was
still part of the same thing.
The veterans who crossed political lines to oppose
the war that seasoned and repelled them, became immersed
in leftist ideology although many did not approve of it. Yet
the political nght had failed them, had inducted them into an
unholy war cloaked in righteous deceit, made them prisoners
of conscience. Whereas the early New Left had been inspired
by the Civil Rights Movement and embraced liberation
philosophies, the veterans came into the movement angry
and embittered Most of the veterans had a limited focus
that ultimately was fatal to the antiwar veterans campaign
far short of its goal to end the war. Like the majority of New
Left organizations WMN was at first stimulated by argument
but eventually debate and disagreement degenerated into
quarreling animosities that broke the group apart All that
survived were two mutually hostile splinter groups that orbited
a far and exotic fringe
The Vietnam Veterans Against the War started organ­
izing in early 1968 Its first of many factional divisions resulted
from the McCarthy for President campaign when more extreme
vets devoted to urban warfare refused to reorganize into presi­
dential politics However, from the McCarthy campaign grew a
national register of antiwar vets who later joined the WAW.
which, primarily fallow for a year of recruiting and organizing
throughout the country, resurged into public notice in the Spring
of 1970 on a hundred campuses during the national university
strike against the war.
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At Portland State University in Oregon we Vietnam vets
acted as medics and inadvertently became focus of the strike
when police charged to destroy our ersatz hospital and beat
up several of us who attempted to protect it. That summer
;
an amalgamation of Northwest antiwar groups that mirthfully
called itself The People’s Army Jamboree challenged the
American Legion at its annual national convention in Portland,
spearheaded by veterans of the WAW.
A week later, an East Coast contingent of WAW vets
marched from Morristown, N.J., to Valley Forge, Pa., feigning
search and destroy assaults in cities and towns along the way,
which became famous as a form of unique guerrilla theater, the
vets pretending to assault actors staged among each village’s
gawking citizens in the manner they earlier mishandled Viet­
namese peasants.
Confronting the American Legion and theatrically raiding
American cities as if they were Vietnamese villages culminated
the following year, in the Spring of 1971, when the WAW
camped out for a week in Washington, D.C., hurling our war
medals at Congress which never had the courage to challenge
the President or the Pentagon during the entire decade long
war, and nearly a hundred pounds of chickenshit at the
Pentagon on May Day.
April 19 — the day the American Revolution
began in 1775 — was the date we gathered from virtually every
state in the Union in Washington, D C. in 1971 to protest the war
we had fought in and turned against. We likened ourselves to
the 'Patriots' who fought for liberty and freedom in the American
Revolution and called ourselves "Winter Soldiers." We were
working off a bad war’s bitter karma.
Perhaps our encampment on the Mall might have gone
unnoticed if we had not been locked out of Arlington National
Cemetery, but it was too much for the media to ignore: war
veterans not allowed to visit their dead. Suddenly all over the
country people began to pay attention to us — scruffy, bearded
and longhaired stressed-out dope smoking renegades wearing
tattered patchy assortments of uniforms, carrying plastic toy
M-16 rifles, chests beaming with tarnished medals and ribbons.
Our purpose at Arlington was challenged 'You can't come in
here because political demonstrations are not allowed." the
cops said — and we answered: These dead are manipulated to
coerce others to die every time a politician comes here to lay
a wreath and praise the dead for their "noble sacrifice". 'We're
here because these guys don't want you guys using the fact
they are dead to get anybody else killed," one ex-soldier said.
The gates to Arlington were opened to us the next day, but the
government denied that most of us were veterans then denied
making the charge v/ien we proved our claim with personal
military documents vtfiich we carried in anticipation that we
would be accused of being frauds
We went to Washington, D C. in delegations from every
state and for the week that we occupied the mall across from
the Capitol we killers remained peaceful, spreading like fire
through the city, assaulting neighborhoods with our guerrilla
theater of mock search and destroy that was so realistic people
screamed in fear and anger as uniformed men wth toy M-16s
pretended to beat and kill others dressed in pajamas and cone
hats Some of the actors were hurt because the soldiers
sometimes forgot it was not for real but they had accepted the
nsk from the start
We assaulted Congress, mostly in a rude manner —
guerrilla theater on the Capitol steps ended wth sheep's blood
splattered on the porch — cutting through bureaucratic excuses
and justifications, badgering even those reluctant to see us
("Open up Buckley, we know you're in there!" fifty New York
vets shouted vtfiile pounding on the door of William F.'s brother
the Senator), not so much in hopes of any meaningful response
but more to give our elected representatives a good look at the
monsters they helped create