The North Coast times-eagle., May 01, 2004, Page 14, Image 14

P A G E 14
WINTER SOLDIERS
MCNAMARA ADMITTED
THE WAR WAS A MISTAKE-
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FROM PAGE 13
proved to the media they were with military discharge papers.
Ordered off the mall by the Supreme Court, they refused to go,
inspiring newspaper headlines such as “Vets Overrule Supreme
Court."
Several hundred active duty soldiers standing riot duty
in Washington (many of them Vietnam vets) threatened to join
the \PJM\I vets if their units were mobilized against them. On
the last day of Dewey Canyon III, more than a 1,000 vets threw
their war medals at the Capitol steps — one active-duty Army
lieutenant showed up to add the decorations of several officers
including his commanding colonel.
Overnight, W A \N became national heroes; from then
on the W A W was acknowledged as a respected “loyal opposi­
tion" by a majority of Americans whether they supported or
opposed the war. None of W A W ’s demands toward ending
the war were directly met, nor were they really expected to be;
their main objective was to make their presence known to the
American public, which they quite obviously accomplished.
Veterans who were unable to go to Washington for
Dewey Canyon III held complimentary actions in their local
regions all over the country. In Oregon, \N M \I spearheaded
demands for war crimes investigations by the state legislature
in support of what was then called the Massachusetts Law which
declared no draftees from any state were to fight in undeclared
wars.
Following Dewey Canyon III more than 500,000 people
marched against the war in Washington, D C., almost the exact
number of Americans serving in Vietnam, while several thous­
and marched simultaneously in San Francisco.
Then came May Day in which demonstrators from every
state attempted to shut down the city, hundreds of whom were
arrested and penned up in sports stadiums. Twenty W A W
members penetrated police and military defenses around the
Pentagon and hurled bags of freshly gathered chickenshit on
the front steps, and were arrested — for “chicken defecation
distribution," one of them said.
Afterwards was M-16 Day with W A W members working
with active duty GIs in actions at military bases in the U S. as
well as overseas; W A W members on active duty in Vietnam
held demonstrations and sit-down strikes against the war.
Dewey Canyon III was the highwater mark of the W A W .
The last W A W actions of national prominence were occupation
of the Statue of Liberty'by New York vets in early 1972 and
participation in demonstrations that summer at the Republican
National Convention in Miami, Florida The government decided
to judicially destroy W A W and prosecuted veterans who were at
the GOP convention, muzzling all publicity that might help their
case. But as it turned out, the government depended on its own
agents provocateur as witnesses against the vets; the defense
predicated its case on those very same witness’ testimony of
infiltration and provocation, and the jury quickly acquitted the
defendants.
W A W did a number of other things beside oppose the
war: it provided help for war wounded and traumatized vets who
had no one else they felt they could trust; even if they might not
oppose the war, they sought the counseling and companionship
of Vietnam rap groups inaugurated by W A \N long before the
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Veterans Administration recognized what was then called “Post-
Vietnam Syndrome (now PTSD). W A W researched the effects
of Agent Orange as well as other toxic defoliants sprayed upon
U S. troops and Vietnamese, and helped bring so-far unsuccess­
ful lawsuits against the government and chemical companies.
(The original organizers and initial members of Vietnam
Veterans for America, which among many other activities,
sponsored the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D C.,
were drawn from W M N .)
W M I deactivated before the Vietnam War ended. It
had failed its quest to end the war yet notably contributed to its
end by defiantly acting on the collective belief that no one knows
about a war better than its veterans. By the time the counterfeit
government of South Vietnam collapsed and the last American
left Saigon, W M N seemed to have disappeared.
Yet when W A W had been consigned to history as a
single issue aberration its opponents and critics undoubtedly
hoped would never recur, newer wars in Central America in the
1980s and the first Persian Gulf War in the 1990s forced the
apostate veterans out of languishment and W A W reemerged in
response, recruiting newer generations of disaffected veterans.
W A W remains in existence with a solid cadre nationally of
original and new members, and once again publishes its own
newspaper, The Veteran as successor to The Vietnam Gl which
died with its editor/publisher Jeff Sharlet, an early victim of
Vietnam induced disease.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War has been the only
group of veterans formed against a war in which they fought
while it was being fought — probably because the war seemed
to interminably drag on for nearly a decade with more than half
a million killed or wounded.
It is not often soldiers turn against their own armies.
From a very small beginning the W A W grew to about 20,000
members in four years — not many in comparison to the 2.5
million who are accounted to have served in Vietnam, but quite
enough to have become the most vital antiwar veterans group
in the nation's history.
“From its inception, Vietnam Veterans Against the War
was a curiosity and an influential force in the Vietnam protest
movement because of the novelty, and political potency, of
antiwar demonstrators in uniform,” New York Times reporter
David M. Halbfinger wrote in a recent article (April 2004). "To
this day, Vietnam Veterans Against the War remains controver­
sial to some veterans who view its dissent as harmful to troops
overseas.” **
W A W is receiving nearly as much attention three
decades after the fall of Saigon as a result of John F. Kerry’s
candidacy for President of the USA in 2004 as it once received
when it was actively opposed to the Vietnam War. Spurious
accusations are being made about W A W to discredit Kerry,
who emerged as a principal spokesman for W A W following his
return from Vietnam as a Navy lieutenant, and they are for the
most part as trite as they are untrue.
“In the year and a half that Mr. Kerry belonged to the
group, (W A W ) was loosely structured and had its share of
revolutionaries and provocateurs — including many secretly
working for law enforcement — who pushed the writings of
Chairman Mao and talked of tossing grenades, though they
seldom did worse than toss bags of chicken droppings at the
Pentagon,” New York Times reporter Halbfinger wrote.
It is ironic that although the Vietnam War is usually
considered to have been at the very least morally corrupt if
not fundamentally iniquitous, those who dissented against it
are too often readily condemned — especially the veterans who
protested the war upon their return. “By sending young men into
an atrocious, mistaken war, (the powers that be) created a truth
so distasteful to the public that its disclosure, by discrediting the
discloser, keeps them in power," Jonathan Schell has written in
a recent article, ‘Politics & Truth’. Perhaps, as it was with the
famously infamous Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against
Franco in the Spanish Civil War and were blacklisted by the
American government for being “prematurely anti-fascist,” the
W A W is damned for being prematurely anti-Vietnam War in
addition to the ignominy of defying the omnipotence of the
Presidency and Pentagon its members previously served.
Kerry has been both criticized and lampooned for
remarks he made during his now notorious appearance at the
Senate in 1971 — he said that American troops “raped, cut
off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones
TRIANGULAR GRIDLOCK
BY DAVID A. HOROWITZ
Memoirs of Vietnam War protest help to describe the
turbulent events of that period but not to understand them. As a
young professor of American history at Portland State University
I participated in antiwar protest, but unlike others of my genera­
tion subsequent experiences as both a teacher and scholar has
led me to frame the past in different terms.
I believe the Vietnam War era produced a triangular
gridlock in the United States that still has not been resolved.
Antiwar protesters, most Americans, and the federal government
all shared a tragic role in the public drama that tore this country
apart.
First, antiwar activists were frustrated over failure to
stop the government’s involvement in a bloody civil war that
initially pitted advanced military technology against poorly
armed Vietnamese guerrillas and peasant villagers. We could
only conclude that American leaders were building a global
economic and military empire based on the ruthless suppression
of the aspirations of the poor Accordingly, the antiwar move­
ment looked back to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials after
World War 2 and the example of the "good Germans" who
followed orders and refused to acknowledge the evil done in
their name.
Angry over our own political impotence, we identified
with Vietnamese revolutionaries whom we saw as underdogs
confronting the same American power structure we seemed
unable to change here at home. Our inability to stop the war
furthered the mistrust of government we had learned from the
southern civil rights movement of the early 1960s. Unfortunately
our bitterness sometimes carried over into a distrust of demo­
cracy itself, a stance which lent itself to disruptive tactics and
in a few cases even bombings against symbols of American
power We also came to question many of the social values and
practices that seemed to legitimize the system we had come to
hate — capitalism, individualism, patriotic loyalty to the nation
and military, and the elevation of obligation and duty over rights
and personal freedoms.
Ordinary Americans constituted the second spoke of the
national gridlock Most turned against the VietnamWar as unwin-
nable after the Tet Offensive of early 1968. Some even believed
it was immoral But the same majorities continued to criticize the
antiwar movement as self-righteous children of privilege who
fantasized themselves as “the people" while targeting ordinary
Americans as the enemies of social justice.
Many Americans resented the antiwar movement's
tendency to identify with Vietnamese communists who ruthlessly
sought to unify their society under party discipline It was easy
to believe that the movement was betraying American soldiers
and the country’s democratic principles by collaborating with a
foreign enemy and dictatorship These Americans harked back
to another German city— Munich, a symbol of the appeasement
that had resulted in the Nazi empire and World War 2. Other
Americans saw the antiwar movement's affinity for countercult­
ural values as selfish and self-indulgent — a form of elite privi;
lege associated with the universities and the intelligentsia. Still
others feared that the disruptions fostered by the movement
threatened democracy and social order itself.
The third element of Vietnam era gridlock was the
government in Washington.The great irony of the war, as Robert
McNamara now has demonstrated, was that antiwar protesters
were actually doing the work of the Establishment — trying to
extricate the country from an over extension of its power in
a conflict that was not in its national interest. But Presidents
Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon found themselves the prisoners
of a Cold War ideology that held leaders politically accountable
for the loss of any nation to communism. Each President feared
that surrender in Vietnam would make the U.S. appear weak
and unable to lead the coalition against global communism.
Each also bonded with the majority of Americans who supported
traditional values and saw the United States as the protector of
ordinary people.
Richard Nixon sought to withdraw from Vietnam on
terms which would preserve the image of Washington as a
superpower led by a strong President. He could not let it appear
that he was giving in to either Hanoi or the vocal antiwar demon-
trators at home. The Cambodia incursion of 1970, the move into
Laos in 1971 and the Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam in
1972 were all futile gestures by an out of control government
seeking not to win a war but to flex American muscle in the
process of defeat.
Nevertheless, Nixon did speak for most Americans
when he used harsh rhetoric against disruptive elements of the
antiwar movement in the spring of 1970. Like police actions
at Columbia University and Chicago in 1968, the spontaneous
attack by National Guardsmen at Kent State was part of a public
ritual of reprisal against the antiwar movement.American society
was not genuinely threatened by antiwar disruptions. Nor were
elites taking the first step toward the creation of a militaristic
state Instead, political leaders simply set the climate for violent
expression of rampant public fury toward young radicals whom
a frustrated society saw as a symbol of its own decline.
One year short of three decades after the end of the
war on the last day of April 1975, healing may or not be in order.
Hopefully, however, all Americans can acknowledge their shared
past and take it from there. Perhaps all three sides of the triang­
ular gridlock can see their own role in the tragedy surrounding
the Vietnam War and in the nation’s costly but ultimate extricat­
ion from its grasp.
David Horowitz has been an American History professor
at Portland State University since 1968. He is the author of a
number of books, his latest America's Political Class Under Fire:
The 20th Century’s Great Culture War, published by Routledge
Press He is also a semi-regular contributor to the NCTE.
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