P A G E 13
N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , MA Y/JUNE 2004
The antiwar movement at first rejected antiwar veterans
as “hopelessly guilty" for having served in Vietnam in the first
place. Veterans were slowly, grudgingly accepted, initially as
confessed lepers to otherwise be avoided, ultimately as the
vanguard of antiwar activities. (The attitude of the prowar right
has not changed: W A W even now is accused of aiding North
Vietnam as a result of its opposition to the war.)
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 W A W 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 contrasting political definition to a shared negative experi
ence, it was yet 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 right had failed them, had inducted them into an unholy
war cloaked in righteous deceit, made them prisoners of consci
ence. 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,
W A W was at first stimulated by argument but eventually debate
and disagreement degenerated into quarreling animosities that
broke the group apart.
The W A W was started in the fall of 1967. The idea for
the organization began during a massive antiwar demonstration
in New York City that April. Six veterans marched with a large
banner proclaiming “Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” The
same banner was carried by other veterans at the Pentagon in
October that year for the gigantic “March Against Death." One
of the vets, Jan Crumb, who had been a U S. Army “advisor” in
South Vietnam in 1963 and later quit West Point in protest to the
war his second year, envisioned the W A W as a result of the
banner’s slogan.
The first public evidence of the W A W was a newspaper
ad signed by 40 Vietnam veterans. Beneath the headline banner
“Vietnam Veterans Speak Out," the text of their purpose was
eloquently simple:
We are veterans o f the Vietnam War. We believe that
this ‘conflict’ in which our country is now engaged in Vietnam
is wrong, unjustifiable and contrary to the principles o f self-
determination on which this nation is founded. We believe that
the activities and objectives o f our forces in Vietnam are directly
contrary to the best interests o f the Vietnamese people and of
the people o f the United States. We believe that our policy in
Vietnam supports tyranny and denies democracy. We believe
this because o f our experiences in Vietnam.
We know that:
Vietnam is one country — historically, culturally and as
specified in the Geneva Accords o f 1954.
This conflict is basically a civil war.
The government in Saigon, despite the recent 'election'
(1967) is a military dictatorship — supported by a small feudal
aristocracy, the ARVN (Saigon) officer corps and half a million
American troops.
The basic problem in Vietnam is not military — but
social, economic and political; not American — but Vietnamese.
There is no military ‘solution’. There is no 'American solution’.
We believe that true support for our buddies still in
Vietnam is to demand that they be brought home now!.
The first of many factional divisions of W A W resulted
from the Eugene McCarthy for President campaign in 1968
when more extreme vets devoted to urban warfare refused
to reorganize into Presidential politics. However, from the
McCarthy campaign grew a national register of antiwar vets who
later joined the W A W , which was primarily fallow for a year of
recruiting and organizing throughout the country and resurged
into public notice in the spring of 1970 on several campuses
during the national university strike against the war.
At Portland State University in Oregon, Vietnam vets
acted as medics and inadvertently became focus of the strike
when police charged to destroy their ersatz hospital and beat
up several who attempted to protect it. That summer a coalition
of Northwest antiwar groups that mirthfully called itself People's
Army Jamboree challenged the American Legion at its annual
national convention in Portland, spearheaded by veterans of the
W AW .
Soldiers and veterans then as now were used as propa
ganda against the antiwar movement; hardly any acknowledge
ment of veterans opposing the war was made publicly until the
W AW -led protest against the American Legion. National media
found the contrast irresistible: a newer era of veterans counter-
posed to veterans of an earlier era, which at the time was rather
unprecedented. (Life magazine ran a full-page photograph of an ■
American Legionnaire sitting next to an ex-Army medic member
of W A W to confirm the contrariety.)
A week later, an East Coast contingent of W A W vets
narched from Morristown, N.J., to Valley Forge, Pa., feigning
»earch and destroy assaults in cities and towns along the way
'Operation Rapid American Withdrawal'), which became
amous as a form of unique guerrilla theater, the vets pretending
o assault actors staged among each village’s gawking citizens
n the manner they earlier mishandled Vietnamese peasants.
Following fast on the heels of the “grunts" in each city
issaulted during Operation RAW were other vets who passed
>ut leaflets to everyone in sight:
RODRIGUEZ
A U. S. infantry company just came through here!
If you had been Vietnamese — We might have burned
your house: We might have shot your dog: We might have shot
you. .. We might have raped your wife and daughter: We might
have turned you over to your government for torture: We might
have taken souvenirs from your property: We might have done
all these things to you — and your whole town!
If it doesn't bother you that American soldiers do these
things every day to the Vietnamese simply because they are
"gooks,” then picture yourself as one of the silent victims.
Help us to end the war before they turn your son into a
butcher or a corpse.
Two of the most hallowed of American institutions were
involved in both actions and the media could not ignore the
implications. First was the American Legion, second was Valley
Forge*
The unequivocal purpose of W A W was to end the war
and bring U S. troops home from overseas. To that end, W A W
held two war crimes inquiries to publicly make clear the war's
deception, amorality and decimation of Vietnamese as a people
and culture, but also the threat to American values the war
was allegedly being fought for. The testimonies, named Winter
Soldier Investigations (in contrast to “Sunshine Patriots”), were
in Washington, D C. in December 1970 and Detroit, Michigan
in February 1971.
VIETNAM VETERANS
AGAINST THE WAR
In the last ten years, over 335,000 of our buddies have
been killed or wounded in Vietnam And more are being killed
and wounded every day. We don't think it's worth it.
We are veterans of the Vietnam War. We have fought
and bled from the swamps and hills of Vietnam to the plains of
Cambodia We have seen our buddies die there. And we can no
longer remain silent.
We have seen the Vietnam War for ourselves. And from
what we have seen, we believe that it is wrong, unjustifiable and
contrary to the principle of self-determination on which our
nation was founded.
We believe that the Vietnam War is a civil war — a war
in which the United States has no right or obligation to intervene.
We believe that the Saigon Government must stand or fall on
its own. And we have seen the type of government it really is.
A military dictatorship in which there are no free elections and
some 40,000 people are held as political prisoners. We don’t
think that is the kind of government worth fighting for.
We have seen what war is doing to Vietnam.The country
is being physically destroyed by bombing, defoliation, and the
killing of its civilian population. (Civilians in Vietnam are being
killed and wounded at the rate of 200,000 a year, 60% of them
children. And 80% of them as a result of American firepower.
And we don't think that that’s worth it.
We have seen what the war is doing to our own country.
We are being torn apart. Our young people are being alienated
Our most pressing domestic problems are being neglected for
lack of funds while the war which has already cost $130 billion
goes on at $800 a second . .$48,000 a minute. . . $2,880,000 an
hour Meanwhile the value of our dollar is being destroyed by
inflation And we don't think that that's worth it.
We have seen what the war is doing to our buddies and
their families. Over 43,000 have already been killed and another
229,000 wounded— many of us maimed for the rest of our lives
And more are being killed and wounded every day And we don't
think that that's worth it
We believe that the basic problems of Vietnam are not
military but social, economic, and political We believe that there
is no military solution to the war We believe that, in any case,
we cannot win a land war in Asia And we believe that in this
nuclear age our national security does not require us to win it.
Therefore, we believe that the best way to support our
buddies in Vietnam is to ask that they be brought home, now,
before anyone else dies in a war that the American people do
not understand, did not vote for, and do not want And we think
that that's worth fighting for.
If you're a Vietnam veteran and feel the same way we
do we ask you to join us If you're a concerned citizen we ask
you to support us But we ask you to please do it now The lives
of a great many of our friends depend on i,
-V V A W (1971)
Winter Soldier was a response to the slaughter of Viet
namese civilians at My Lai in 1968 but only publicly revealed
the previous year. The veterans hoped to show that although
an Army platoon had killed more people in a single place, the
attitude toward Vietnamese generated by fear, racism and
revenge that led to My Lai was universal throughout Vietnam
and the war.
By the mandate of Nuremberg, military men and women
are required to speak out against war crimes and other forms of
injustice and wrongdoing within the military. It is usually next to
impossible to so without isolation and punishment while in
uniform, and the great majority of those in W A W waited until
they were free of the military; many in uniform were heartened
by W A W as a result and took a chance to speak out against
Vietnam despite the risks.
For most of the veterans who testified it was the first
time they had recounted their experiences in Vietnam, and for
nearly all of them it was the first opportunity they had to listen
to the experiences of others who had done virtually the same
things over a decade of war — the most important factor was
the redundancy, the same genocidal pattern linked by men
whose service in Vietnam spanned the period of American
involvement. It was the first time the whole puzzle pieced itself
together for each one of them, most of whom had spent not
much more than a single year in country.
They testified for three days, more than a hundred vets
speaking as though possessed with devils bursting past their
shaky voices. They told of genocide, psychological and physical,
of forced urbanization of peasants from villages, of burning and
pillaging hundreds upon hundreds of villages, of wholesale
defoliation of jungles and fields, of indiscriminate bombing with
napalm and high fragmentation bombs, of harassment and inter
diction fire by artillery every night with no particular targets, just
shooting up the countryside to instill fear and carnage; and they
told of free-fire zones where everything that moved was fair
game to be killed no questions asked.
Even as men broke down and cried while testifying
or listening, Winter Soldier emerged as a terse elaboration of
American policy in Vietnam through the combined narratives
of the soldiers who carried it out.
But no one seemed to listen. The news media for the
most part embargoed their testimony; what coverage they
received was vicarious and quietly sensational in its limited
coverage, calling them “alleged” veterans, though all of them
presented their documents of legitimacy. Detractors who
attended the hearings called them phonies, cowards and traitors.
The Pentagon denied their accusations and put the burden of
proof as well as guilt as specific war criminals upon the vets.
(Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield defied criticism and had
the testimonies inserted into the Congressional Record.)
The most significant split of the W A W rank and file
occurred during Winter Soldier — the breach was essentially
between focus of W A W as a top-down organization aloof from
the rest of the antiwar movement, an “elite" militant anti-military
cadre pursuing its own methods and goals toward ending the
Vietnam War, or a loosely-formed national confederacy based
on autonomy and freedom of action at the local chapter level
that would intrinsically involve other community organized
antiwar groups. The result, after three days of ardent negotiation
that also reflected interminable officer/enlisted issues, was that
the basic unit of W A W was to be the community chapter, not
unlike the predominance of small unit operation in Vietnam.
Confronting the American Legion, theatrically raiding
American cities as if they were Vietnamese villages, and testi
fying to war crimes at the Winter Soldier hearings culminated
that spring of 1971 when W A W bivouacked for a week in
Washington, D C., hurling war medals at Congress which never
had the courage to challenge Pentagon or President during the
decade long war, and nearly a hundred pounds of chickenshit
at the Pentagon on May Day, probably the largest attack upon
America’s military heart prior to 9/11
Vietnam veterans poured into Washington, D C. from all
over the country for Operation Dewey Canyon III, named after
two ill-starred military operations conducted by U S Marines and
Saigon troops in Vietnam and Laos. W A W vets occupied and
held a stretch of public park in front of the U S. Capitol despite a
Supreme Court ban Their actions got media attention all over
the world They invaded Congress with demands to end the war
based on their Winter Soldier testimonies. They held their
guerrilla theater every day throughout the city, dressed in
fatigues and brandishing plastic toy M-16 rifles Shut out of
Arlington National Cemetery, they went back and were let in.
The Nixon administration denied they were veterans and they
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