April 30th marked 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War & nobody said a thing!
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Setting the record straight on Vietnam War’s end (I): Some false assumptions
By Arnold R. Isaacs
Best Defense guest historian
Who lost the Vietnam war?
Forty years after the event, the facts on that question have been increasingly challenged by a series of myths. Those alternative histories come in several variations, but in general, they minimize America’s failure in Vietnam and create a new narrative that is more consistent with our self-image as a righteous, successful nation. As we approach this spring’s anniversary, we’re likely to hear quite a bit of that revised narrative, so this is a good time to remind ourselves of the actual historical record.
Here are some facts that should be remembered:
— The United States did not, as is often alleged, cut off aid to South Vietnam after American troops left. In a series of votes in August 1974, lawmakers cute back but did not end Vietnam’s military assistance appropriation, reducing it from a little over $1.1 billion the previous year to $700 million for FY1975. (These figures do not include economic aid.) That was not an insignificant cut, but not a complete cut-off of funds. The reduced aid budget was a contributing factor, but not the only one and almost certainly not the most important, in South Vietnam’s collapse in the spring of 1975 — at which time, incidentally, South Vietnamese forces were still vastly better armed and equipped than their Communist enemies.
— The votes to reduce aid were not the work of antiwar activists, left-wing radicals, and other forces of defeatism and disloyalty. In 1974, with the U.S. war over and the military draft a thing of the past, the mass protest movement was a spent force. But the country as a whole was overwhelmingly relieved to be done with Vietnam and wary of anything that might lead to further involvement. Once American soldiers were no longer engaged in Vietnam, Americans had little concern for what happened there. That mood was reflected in Congress across both parties and the whole span of political beliefs. The voice expressing the national sentiment was not that of a long-haired war protester chanting “Ho ho ho, Ho Chi Minh is going to win!” It was (to give one of many possible examples) the voice of Senator Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, a Republican of the kind that used to be called rock-ribbed, who declared a few months after the last U.S. troops came home that he no longer had any reason to support hostilities in Southeast Asia. “I think perhaps it has a little more significance for me to say it than for some of my friends who have been fighting the battle all back through the years,” Cotton went on. “They have been doves all the time. I have just been a dove since we got our prisoners back.” In the coming debates over military aid for South Vietnam, it was the votes of those new doves, not the old ones, that were decisive.
— The claim advanced by some historians (call them the “we-really-won” school) that U.S. forces accomplished their mission and successfully beat the enemy in Vietnam has been welcomed by many veterans, along with more recent soldiers and others who like to think that American wars are always just and victorious. But that claim stretches the facts beyond the breaking point. It rests on false assumptions, beginning with a false definition of the U.S. mission in Vietnam. The revisionist argument is that Americans “won” because they beat the Viet Cong insurgency in the South, so the Communist victory had to be ultimately achieved by regular forces from North Vietnam. The claim of defeating the Viet Cong is a considerable overstatement, but even if it were completely accurate, it still would not mean American forces accomplished their mission. The legal and strategic basis of the U.S. intervention was that South Vietnam was the victim of foreign aggression — that is, from North Vietnam. The U.S. role was to defend its ally against those aggressors. (The South Vietnamese insisted that the Viet Cong didn’t exist, that there was no southern insurgency and that the enemy forces were all invaders from the North. The United States did not go quite that far, but consistently took the position that the Viet Cong was not a separate combatant force but wholly owned and controlled by the Communist government in Hanoi.) Thus, the U.S. military objective was never defined as defeating the southern guerrillas but to beat back the North Vietnamese. Clearly, that did not happen.
- BY THOMAS E. RICKS
- APRIL 13, 2015
-
By Arnold R. Isaacs
Best Defense guest historian
Who lost the Vietnam war?
Forty years after the event, the facts on that question have been increasingly challenged by a series of myths. Those alternative histories come in several variations, but in general, they minimize America’s failure in Vietnam and create a new narrative that is more consistent with our self-image as a righteous, successful nation. As we approach this spring’s anniversary, we’re likely to hear quite a bit of that revised narrative, so this is a good time to remind ourselves of the actual historical record.
Here are some facts that should be remembered:
— The United States did not, as is often alleged, cut off aid to South Vietnam after American troops left. In a series of votes in August 1974, lawmakers cute back but did not end Vietnam’s military assistance appropriation, reducing it from a little over $1.1 billion the previous year to $700 million for FY1975. (These figures do not include economic aid.) That was not an insignificant cut, but not a complete cut-off of funds. The reduced aid budget was a contributing factor, but not the only one and almost certainly not the most important, in South Vietnam’s collapse in the spring of 1975 — at which time, incidentally, South Vietnamese forces were still vastly better armed and equipped than their Communist enemies.
— The votes to reduce aid were not the work of antiwar activists, left-wing radicals, and other forces of defeatism and disloyalty. In 1974, with the U.S. war over and the military draft a thing of the past, the mass protest movement was a spent force. But the country as a whole was overwhelmingly relieved to be done with Vietnam and wary of anything that might lead to further involvement. Once American soldiers were no longer engaged in Vietnam, Americans had little concern for what happened there. That mood was reflected in Congress across both parties and the whole span of political beliefs. The voice expressing the national sentiment was not that of a long-haired war protester chanting “Ho ho ho, Ho Chi Minh is going to win!” It was (to give one of many possible examples) the voice of Senator Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, a Republican of the kind that used to be called rock-ribbed, who declared a few months after the last U.S. troops came home that he no longer had any reason to support hostilities in Southeast Asia. “I think perhaps it has a little more significance for me to say it than for some of my friends who have been fighting the battle all back through the years,” Cotton went on. “They have been doves all the time. I have just been a dove since we got our prisoners back.” In the coming debates over military aid for South Vietnam, it was the votes of those new doves, not the old ones, that were decisive.
— The claim advanced by some historians (call them the “we-really-won” school) that U.S. forces accomplished their mission and successfully beat the enemy in Vietnam has been welcomed by many veterans, along with more recent soldiers and others who like to think that American wars are always just and victorious. But that claim stretches the facts beyond the breaking point. It rests on false assumptions, beginning with a false definition of the U.S. mission in Vietnam. The revisionist argument is that Americans “won” because they beat the Viet Cong insurgency in the South, so the Communist victory had to be ultimately achieved by regular forces from North Vietnam. The claim of defeating the Viet Cong is a considerable overstatement, but even if it were completely accurate, it still would not mean American forces accomplished their mission. The legal and strategic basis of the U.S. intervention was that South Vietnam was the victim of foreign aggression — that is, from North Vietnam. The U.S. role was to defend its ally against those aggressors. (The South Vietnamese insisted that the Viet Cong didn’t exist, that there was no southern insurgency and that the enemy forces were all invaders from the North. The United States did not go quite that far, but consistently took the position that the Viet Cong was not a separate combatant force but wholly owned and controlled by the Communist government in Hanoi.) Thus, the U.S. military objective was never defined as defeating the southern guerrillas but to beat back the North Vietnamese. Clearly, that did not happen.
Vietnam Is the War That Didn’t End
William Greider on May 5, 2015 - 4:12 PM ET
A napalm strike erupts in a fireball near US troops in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. (AP Photo)
Forty years after the US withdrawal from Vietnam, scholars and old soldiers gathered last week in Washington for sober reflection on what Americans learned from that bloody conflict and what many historians now teach. The Pentagon produced its own white-washed commemoration of the war it lost, but the seminars sponsored by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and New York University sounded more like regretful lamentations.
It wasn’t that government policy makers and the US military learned nothing from Vietnam. On the contrary, they learned how to fight two, three, many mini-Vietnams all at once, and without provoking the anger of the American people. That’s an extraordinary political achievement, when you think about it. Most Americans don’t think about it. Instead, they occasionally participate as spectators in the maudlin rituals of faux patriotism that have replaced the mammoth anti-war rallies of yesteryear.
One lesson of Vietnam, as a seminar participant quipped, is “Don’t draft white kids from the Ivy League.”
Working-class young people (of all colors) do the fighting for us now and take the casualties, especially when there are no good jobs for them back home. In return, people will pause for a solemn moment at baseball games and other public events to thank the dead and wounded for their sacrifice. “They were not heroes,” Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies observed. “They were the victims.”
Nevertheless, the military commanders and elite crafters of US foreign policy have established that the American people will tolerate long, even endless wars that do not lead to old-fashioned, unambiguous victory so long as American casualties are kept low. Never mind the foreign casualties or the massive bombing that kills so many innocent bystanders. Disregard the blatant illegalities of torture and murder in the midst of warfare. America insists upon seeing itself as the injured innocent in world affairs.
Soldiers and scholars at the NYU seminars argued the opposite—that the nation has still failed to recognize and confront the true lesson of Vietnam. The consequences of this failure are visible now in the chaos and killing across the Middle East and in some African nations. Just as in Vietnam, the military establishment political leaders cling to a naïve and arrogant presumption that American military power will solve political problems in foreign societies.
“That is what we’re still saying in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Colonel Gregory Daddis, who teaches history at West Point. “We just believe we can create new societies by applying military power. We are engaged in the same thing despite what happened in Iraq. We still believe we can build democracies with military force.”
I asked Colonel Daddis if his skepticism is now widely expressed at West Point. “In the history department,” he said with a smile.
How could the political transformation from peace to war happen so soon after the disastrous failed war in Vietnam and the explosive popular opposition it provoked?
Colonel Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, who fought in Vietnam and whose son fought and died in Iraq, provided a coherent narrative. In the 1970s, he explained, the military faced what it called the “Vietnam syndrome”—the long war fought by citizen soldiers had seriously restricted the military establishment and posed a terrible problem for Pentagon strategists.
“The public was regarded as fickle and untrustworthy and prone to isolationism,” he said. “Members of the national security elite viewed this as a monstrous thing. Efforts to overturn the Vietnam Syndrome involved two important things. The first was the creation of the all-volunteer force. Rather than citizen soldiers, it relied on a professional force. That would save money and produce a more reliable force. It promised to give members of the policy elite greater latitude in employing that force. With a sufficiently capable army of professionals, the state could take the nation to war without involving the public.
Phyllis Bennis of IPS described a parallel way in which the shift was fundamentally driven by the horrendous casualties in Vietnam, but also by class conflict. “There was the end of the Legal Draft and the beginning of the Poverty Draft,” she said. “Then the shift was no longer dependent on the poor and racial minorities, but what you do have is a shift to the people from small towns and rural places—people so cut off from the power centers on both coasts. Now it is the Draft by Lack of Opportunity.”
The second major change Bacevich described was in war-planning—a new high-tech force designed and equipped to produce rapid results. “Future wars, unlike Vietnam, would be short rather than long,” the colonel explained, “and more importantly, they would involve clear-cut victories. Disciplined, highly trained soldiers along with technology, the best that money could buy, would give the force clear advantage on any battlefield.”
Desert Storm in 1991 was the test model—overwhelming force and quick victory. It succeeded brilliantly. Most everyone cheered. The military videos were a big hit.
Desert Storm “produced the illusion of a decisive victory, won quickly and safely, which left the American people confined happily to the role of spectators,” Bacevich added.
About the same time, the Cold War ended with the Soviet collapse. But that didn’t change much. As the only remaining superpower, Washington expanded its military reach in a string of small quasi-wars—Somalia, Panama, Haiti, Kosovo. “So Cold War or no Cold War, kicking the Vietnam syndrome opened the door to a new age of interventionism,” the colonel observed. “Happy to indulge in the notion of the world’s sole superpower, the American public really didn’t pay all that much attention.”
Nor did the wars remain short and sweet. The war-fighting capabilities and failure to limit military ambitions created something resembling “permanent war,” Bacevich concluded. The new wars do not end neatly but keep expanding to new battlefields.
The new wars, he judged, “are waged by a military force that has proven to be remarkably durable but that can’t win and is directed by a strategically clueless elite and is indulged by a public that professes to support the troops but is largely indifferent as to how the troops are actually used.”
“No end in sight,” he concluded. “In terms of recognizing the limits of force we are no better shape today than we were back in 1965 when President Johnson so recklessly sent US troops off to fight.”
There were moments of hopeful discussion and polite disagreement, though optimism was muted. Bennis sees real momentum in anti-war organizations and the peace movement. Bacevich did not see the movement that she sees.
“How are we going to get out of this?” the colonel asked. “We are going to get out of this once the officer corps become alert to the dangerous course on which we have been headed for such a long time—the course I would argue that is not in the interest of the military institution they serve and which they profess to love.”
He gently suggested to the peace movement: “Do not work on the assumption that the officer corps is your adversary. In truth, there is a unique potential for the officer corps to be your ally.”
From her experience addressing military ranks, Bennis said she doubted that potential. “l don’t think the officer corps is our adversary,” she said. “Militarism is our adversary.”
Maybe both of them are right. Certainly they do agree on this: US militarism will not be reined in until the American people get off the sidelines and accept their own culpability for stupid, horrendous, endless wars fought in their name.
William Greider on May 5, 2015 - 4:12 PM ET
A napalm strike erupts in a fireball near US troops in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. (AP Photo)
Forty years after the US withdrawal from Vietnam, scholars and old soldiers gathered last week in Washington for sober reflection on what Americans learned from that bloody conflict and what many historians now teach. The Pentagon produced its own white-washed commemoration of the war it lost, but the seminars sponsored by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and New York University sounded more like regretful lamentations.
It wasn’t that government policy makers and the US military learned nothing from Vietnam. On the contrary, they learned how to fight two, three, many mini-Vietnams all at once, and without provoking the anger of the American people. That’s an extraordinary political achievement, when you think about it. Most Americans don’t think about it. Instead, they occasionally participate as spectators in the maudlin rituals of faux patriotism that have replaced the mammoth anti-war rallies of yesteryear.
One lesson of Vietnam, as a seminar participant quipped, is “Don’t draft white kids from the Ivy League.”
Working-class young people (of all colors) do the fighting for us now and take the casualties, especially when there are no good jobs for them back home. In return, people will pause for a solemn moment at baseball games and other public events to thank the dead and wounded for their sacrifice. “They were not heroes,” Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies observed. “They were the victims.”
Nevertheless, the military commanders and elite crafters of US foreign policy have established that the American people will tolerate long, even endless wars that do not lead to old-fashioned, unambiguous victory so long as American casualties are kept low. Never mind the foreign casualties or the massive bombing that kills so many innocent bystanders. Disregard the blatant illegalities of torture and murder in the midst of warfare. America insists upon seeing itself as the injured innocent in world affairs.
Soldiers and scholars at the NYU seminars argued the opposite—that the nation has still failed to recognize and confront the true lesson of Vietnam. The consequences of this failure are visible now in the chaos and killing across the Middle East and in some African nations. Just as in Vietnam, the military establishment political leaders cling to a naïve and arrogant presumption that American military power will solve political problems in foreign societies.
“That is what we’re still saying in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Colonel Gregory Daddis, who teaches history at West Point. “We just believe we can create new societies by applying military power. We are engaged in the same thing despite what happened in Iraq. We still believe we can build democracies with military force.”
I asked Colonel Daddis if his skepticism is now widely expressed at West Point. “In the history department,” he said with a smile.
How could the political transformation from peace to war happen so soon after the disastrous failed war in Vietnam and the explosive popular opposition it provoked?
Colonel Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, who fought in Vietnam and whose son fought and died in Iraq, provided a coherent narrative. In the 1970s, he explained, the military faced what it called the “Vietnam syndrome”—the long war fought by citizen soldiers had seriously restricted the military establishment and posed a terrible problem for Pentagon strategists.
“The public was regarded as fickle and untrustworthy and prone to isolationism,” he said. “Members of the national security elite viewed this as a monstrous thing. Efforts to overturn the Vietnam Syndrome involved two important things. The first was the creation of the all-volunteer force. Rather than citizen soldiers, it relied on a professional force. That would save money and produce a more reliable force. It promised to give members of the policy elite greater latitude in employing that force. With a sufficiently capable army of professionals, the state could take the nation to war without involving the public.
Phyllis Bennis of IPS described a parallel way in which the shift was fundamentally driven by the horrendous casualties in Vietnam, but also by class conflict. “There was the end of the Legal Draft and the beginning of the Poverty Draft,” she said. “Then the shift was no longer dependent on the poor and racial minorities, but what you do have is a shift to the people from small towns and rural places—people so cut off from the power centers on both coasts. Now it is the Draft by Lack of Opportunity.”
The second major change Bacevich described was in war-planning—a new high-tech force designed and equipped to produce rapid results. “Future wars, unlike Vietnam, would be short rather than long,” the colonel explained, “and more importantly, they would involve clear-cut victories. Disciplined, highly trained soldiers along with technology, the best that money could buy, would give the force clear advantage on any battlefield.”
Desert Storm in 1991 was the test model—overwhelming force and quick victory. It succeeded brilliantly. Most everyone cheered. The military videos were a big hit.
Desert Storm “produced the illusion of a decisive victory, won quickly and safely, which left the American people confined happily to the role of spectators,” Bacevich added.
About the same time, the Cold War ended with the Soviet collapse. But that didn’t change much. As the only remaining superpower, Washington expanded its military reach in a string of small quasi-wars—Somalia, Panama, Haiti, Kosovo. “So Cold War or no Cold War, kicking the Vietnam syndrome opened the door to a new age of interventionism,” the colonel observed. “Happy to indulge in the notion of the world’s sole superpower, the American public really didn’t pay all that much attention.”
Nor did the wars remain short and sweet. The war-fighting capabilities and failure to limit military ambitions created something resembling “permanent war,” Bacevich concluded. The new wars do not end neatly but keep expanding to new battlefields.
The new wars, he judged, “are waged by a military force that has proven to be remarkably durable but that can’t win and is directed by a strategically clueless elite and is indulged by a public that professes to support the troops but is largely indifferent as to how the troops are actually used.”
“No end in sight,” he concluded. “In terms of recognizing the limits of force we are no better shape today than we were back in 1965 when President Johnson so recklessly sent US troops off to fight.”
There were moments of hopeful discussion and polite disagreement, though optimism was muted. Bennis sees real momentum in anti-war organizations and the peace movement. Bacevich did not see the movement that she sees.
“How are we going to get out of this?” the colonel asked. “We are going to get out of this once the officer corps become alert to the dangerous course on which we have been headed for such a long time—the course I would argue that is not in the interest of the military institution they serve and which they profess to love.”
He gently suggested to the peace movement: “Do not work on the assumption that the officer corps is your adversary. In truth, there is a unique potential for the officer corps to be your ally.”
From her experience addressing military ranks, Bennis said she doubted that potential. “l don’t think the officer corps is our adversary,” she said. “Militarism is our adversary.”
Maybe both of them are right. Certainly they do agree on this: US militarism will not be reined in until the American people get off the sidelines and accept their own culpability for stupid, horrendous, endless wars fought in their name.
http://www.alternet.org/world/40-ye...t-who-helped-stop-it-and-vietnamese-who-still
Forty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war against Vietnam finally ended with a victory for the national liberation forces. After decades of struggle against French and U.S. intervention, Vietnam was finally independent and at peace.
Millions of Americans took part in anti-war activities during the 1960s and early ‘70s. Together with the civil rights movements, this activism changed the body politic in this country. It made it harder for U.S. administrations to wage full-on land wars until the Persian Gulf wars. Today as the U.S. wages simultaneous land and drone wars in several countries, the lessons of the Vietnam War are under attack as never before.
The U.S. Department of Defense has a website commemorating the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War. Dedicated to whitewashing history, the website's goals are, “to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during the Vietnam War.” One wonders whether these advances include the development and use of napalm, Agent Orange and other weapons that killed millions of Vietnamese people along with U.S. veterans. Veterans For Peace, and its many members who fought in Vietnam, is fighting against this revisionist history though a campaign called Vietnam Full Disclosure.
The U.S. government clearly has an interest in obliterating the lessons of the war as it slogs on with brutal interventions in the Middle East and attempts at intervention in Latin America. American drones, white phosphorus, depleted uranium, and other weapons of destruction are built upon the “advances” in technology lauded by the DoD’s 50th anniversary website.
The DoD and others are working hard to obscure the history of the Vietnam War because they seek to blunt criticism of unpopular U.S. interventions and to give the Pentagon a freer hand in conducting future wars. They seek to spend more of our tax dollars on military hardware and weaponry for use in their wars. What are some of the myths that the right is trying to spread about the Vietnam War?
A major general in the U.S. Air Force who served in Vietnam told an anti-war veteran recently that the U.S. could have won if it had committed enough resources to achieving victory. During the war, General Curtis LeMay suggested that the U.S. could bomb Vietnam “back into the stone ages.” While the U.S. did not use the atomic bomb due to international pressure, it did everything short of this, deploying more air and ground munitions than were used in all of World War II.
Despite overwhelming U.S. military superiority, the Vietnamese liberation forces won because they had the support of the people. Use of more U.S. firepower and troops might have prolonged the war and the killing, but it would not have changed the outcome. A people who are organized and dedicated to winning their independence cannot be truly defeated—a lesson the U.S. government has yet to learn in conducting its international affairs.
Another shibboleth of the right is that the U.S. conducted an “honorable” war in Vietnam with only sporadic human rights violations such as the massacre at My Lai. The Winter Soldier Investigation, conducted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971, painfully documented the massive scale of the massacres, torture of civilians and other war crimes perpetrated against the Vietnamese people.
Testifying before Congress on April 22, 1971, a young John Kerry, then representing VVAW, spoke of, “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He went on to describe the testimony of his fellow veterans, who, “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Nick Turse’s well-documented book describing U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is a more recent recounting of the war crimes Kerry testified about. The book has unsurprisingly been attacked by conservative pundits.
Connected to the whitewashing of U.S. war crimes is a denial of how U.S. racism fueled the war in Vietnam. General William Westmoreland, the four-star general who was in command of all U.S. military operations from 1964 to 1968, famously said, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
Vietnamese people were referred to by the racist expletive “gooks” and outright murder of civilians was justified by the “mere gook rule” which held that the death of any Vietnamese person, including women and children, was justified. Today, bigotry directed at Arabs and Muslims in countries the U.S. has attacked and occupied and at home eerily echoes such racism as does the police murders of black men in cities across the U.S.
Perhaps the most tired of all the myths the right is trying to perpetuate is that anti-war activists’ actions dishonor U.S. soldiers. This goes hand in hand with the myth that U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam were routinely spat upon by anti-war activists. Soldiers involved in illegal and immoral wars benefit greatly from anti-war movements (which they often lead upon their return). Ending U.S. wars of intervention saves human lives abroad as well as the lives of our soldiers.
The soldiers who come back from U.S. wars are not dishonored by anti-war movements, but by the callous disregard for their welfare shown by the U.S. government which refuses to provide adequate treatment, rehabilitation and jobs. The impact of the violence of unjust wars echoes long after the wars are over and beyond the ranks of the soldiers and their families. Seymour Hersh, the reporter who documented the My Lai massacre, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that when he spoke to a mother whose son had been involved in the massacre, she told him, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer."
The final lesson that is being undermined by the revisionists is their contention that the war is long over and is ancient history. In fact, wars are not over until those harmed by them receive justice and compensation. The Vietnam War killed four million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans. But the war continues in those still suffering from its legacy of unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange, a dioxin-laden chemical weapon.
Agent Orange causes cancers and other diseases as well as horrific birth defects in the children and grandchildren of those exposed. The U.S. government has done precious little to provide redress to the Vietnamese victims or to Vietnamese-Americans who were exposed. While U.S. veterans fought for and won some compensation from the Veterans Administration, the children of U.S. veterans who suffer with disabilities due to birth defects related to exposure to Agent Orange receive no aid at all. To address this, Representative Barbara Lee is introducing the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015 to provide medical, rehabilitative and human services to several generations of Vietnamese and Americans suffering with diseases and disabilities. The Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign is working to build public support for U.S. aid to the victims to heal the wounds of war.
Progressives also espouse myths about the war. One that some among us perpetuate is the portrayal of the anti-war movement as a mainly white student movement and ignorance of the leading role of black and other movements of color. While students did play an important role, the role of returning anti-war veterans, the Vietnamese-American anti-war movemen, and movements of color was crucial.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in 1967, Beyond Vietnam, helped turned the tide of public opinion in the U.S. against the war. Even before Dr. King, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came out against the war in 1965 as did Malcolm X. Muhammed Ali lost his heavyweight title and was convicted for refusing to fight in Vietnam. While there was media coverage of the National Guard shooting of unarmed white anti-war protesters at Kent State, scant attention was paid to the killings of black anti-war students at Jackson State. Vietnamese-Americans, particularly the Union of Vietnamese in the U.S., played a crucial role in analyzing the events in Vietnam even as they were often sidelined in some rallies for fear they would be identified with the “enemy.” The national veteran’s anti-war movement, led by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, brought formidable credibility and a working-class base to the anti-war movement. Seeing and giving voice to those who truly made up the anti-war movement is crucial if we are to build a strong and successful diverse anti-war movement today.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once called the United States, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." He noted that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of peace and independence in Vietnam, it is important that we bring the unadulterated and true lessons of the war forward as we build the movement to end wars of aggression and to invest our resources in projects of social uplift.
Forty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war against Vietnam finally ended with a victory for the national liberation forces. After decades of struggle against French and U.S. intervention, Vietnam was finally independent and at peace.
Millions of Americans took part in anti-war activities during the 1960s and early ‘70s. Together with the civil rights movements, this activism changed the body politic in this country. It made it harder for U.S. administrations to wage full-on land wars until the Persian Gulf wars. Today as the U.S. wages simultaneous land and drone wars in several countries, the lessons of the Vietnam War are under attack as never before.
Forty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war against Vietnam finally ended with a victory for the national liberation forces. After decades of struggle against French and U.S. intervention, Vietnam was finally independent and at peace.
Millions of Americans took part in anti-war activities during the 1960s and early ‘70s. Together with the civil rights movements, this activism changed the body politic in this country. It made it harder for U.S. administrations to wage full-on land wars until the Persian Gulf wars. Today as the U.S. wages simultaneous land and drone wars in several countries, the lessons of the Vietnam War are under attack as never before.
The U.S. Department of Defense has a website commemorating the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War. Dedicated to whitewashing history, the website's goals are, “to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during the Vietnam War.” One wonders whether these advances include the development and use of napalm, Agent Orange and other weapons that killed millions of Vietnamese people along with U.S. veterans. Veterans For Peace, and its many members who fought in Vietnam, is fighting against this revisionist history though a campaign called Vietnam Full Disclosure.
The U.S. government clearly has an interest in obliterating the lessons of the war as it slogs on with brutal interventions in the Middle East and attempts at intervention in Latin America. American drones, white phosphorus, depleted uranium, and other weapons of destruction are built upon the “advances” in technology lauded by the DoD’s 50th anniversary website.
The DoD and others are working hard to obscure the history of the Vietnam War because they seek to blunt criticism of unpopular U.S. interventions and to give the Pentagon a freer hand in conducting future wars. They seek to spend more of our tax dollars on military hardware and weaponry for use in their wars. What are some of the myths that the right is trying to spread about the Vietnam War?
A major general in the U.S. Air Force who served in Vietnam told an anti-war veteran recently that the U.S. could have won if it had committed enough resources to achieving victory. During the war, General Curtis LeMay suggested that the U.S. could bomb Vietnam “back into the stone ages.” While the U.S. did not use the atomic bomb due to international pressure, it did everything short of this, deploying more air and ground munitions than were used in all of World War II.
Despite overwhelming U.S. military superiority, the Vietnamese liberation forces won because they had the support of the people. Use of more U.S. firepower and troops might have prolonged the war and the killing, but it would not have changed the outcome. A people who are organized and dedicated to winning their independence cannot be truly defeated—a lesson the U.S. government has yet to learn in conducting its international affairs.
Another shibboleth of the right is that the U.S. conducted an “honorable” war in Vietnam with only sporadic human rights violations such as the massacre at My Lai. The Winter Soldier Investigation, conducted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971, painfully documented the massive scale of the massacres, torture of civilians and other war crimes perpetrated against the Vietnamese people.
Testifying before Congress on April 22, 1971, a young John Kerry, then representing VVAW, spoke of, “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He went on to describe the testimony of his fellow veterans, who, “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Nick Turse’s well-documented book describing U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is a more recent recounting of the war crimes Kerry testified about. The book has unsurprisingly been attacked by conservative pundits.
Connected to the whitewashing of U.S. war crimes is a denial of how U.S. racism fueled the war in Vietnam. General William Westmoreland, the four-star general who was in command of all U.S. military operations from 1964 to 1968, famously said, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
Vietnamese people were referred to by the racist expletive “gooks” and outright murder of civilians was justified by the “mere gook rule” which held that the death of any Vietnamese person, including women and children, was justified. Today, bigotry directed at Arabs and Muslims in countries the U.S. has attacked and occupied and at home eerily echoes such racism as does the police murders of black men in cities across the U.S.
Perhaps the most tired of all the myths the right is trying to perpetuate is that anti-war activists’ actions dishonor U.S. soldiers. This goes hand in hand with the myth that U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam were routinely spat upon by anti-war activists. Soldiers involved in illegal and immoral wars benefit greatly from anti-war movements (which they often lead upon their return). Ending U.S. wars of intervention saves human lives abroad as well as the lives of our soldiers.
The soldiers who come back from U.S. wars are not dishonored by anti-war movements, but by the callous disregard for their welfare shown by the U.S. government which refuses to provide adequate treatment, rehabilitation and jobs. The impact of the violence of unjust wars echoes long after the wars are over and beyond the ranks of the soldiers and their families. Seymour Hersh, the reporter who documented the My Lai massacre, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that when he spoke to a mother whose son had been involved in the massacre, she told him, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer."
The final lesson that is being undermined by the revisionists is their contention that the war is long over and is ancient history. In fact, wars are not over until those harmed by them receive justice and compensation. The Vietnam War killed four million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans. But the war continues in those still suffering from its legacy of unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange, a dioxin-laden chemical weapon.
Agent Orange causes cancers and other diseases as well as horrific birth defects in the children and grandchildren of those exposed. The U.S. government has done precious little to provide redress to the Vietnamese victims or to Vietnamese-Americans who were exposed. While U.S. veterans fought for and won some compensation from the Veterans Administration, the children of U.S. veterans who suffer with disabilities due to birth defects related to exposure to Agent Orange receive no aid at all. To address this, Representative Barbara Lee is introducing the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015 to provide medical, rehabilitative and human services to several generations of Vietnamese and Americans suffering with diseases and disabilities. The Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign is working to build public support for U.S. aid to the victims to heal the wounds of war.
Progressives also espouse myths about the war. One that some among us perpetuate is the portrayal of the anti-war movement as a mainly white student movement and ignorance of the leading role of black and other movements of color. While students did play an important role, the role of returning anti-war veterans, the Vietnamese-American anti-war movemen, and movements of color was crucial.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in 1967, Beyond Vietnam, helped turned the tide of public opinion in the U.S. against the war. Even before Dr. King, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came out against the war in 1965 as did Malcolm X. Muhammed Ali lost his heavyweight title and was convicted for refusing to fight in Vietnam. While there was media coverage of the National Guard shooting of unarmed white anti-war protesters at Kent State, scant attention was paid to the killings of black anti-war students at Jackson State. Vietnamese-Americans, particularly the Union of Vietnamese in the U.S., played a crucial role in analyzing the events in Vietnam even as they were often sidelined in some rallies for fear they would be identified with the “enemy.” The national veteran’s anti-war movement, led by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, brought formidable credibility and a working-class base to the anti-war movement. Seeing and giving voice to those who truly made up the anti-war movement is crucial if we are to build a strong and successful diverse anti-war movement today.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once called the United States, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." He noted that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of peace and independence in Vietnam, it is important that we bring the unadulterated and true lessons of the war forward as we build the movement to end wars of aggression and to invest our resources in projects of social uplift.
Forty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war against Vietnam finally ended with a victory for the national liberation forces. After decades of struggle against French and U.S. intervention, Vietnam was finally independent and at peace.
Millions of Americans took part in anti-war activities during the 1960s and early ‘70s. Together with the civil rights movements, this activism changed the body politic in this country. It made it harder for U.S. administrations to wage full-on land wars until the Persian Gulf wars. Today as the U.S. wages simultaneous land and drone wars in several countries, the lessons of the Vietnam War are under attack as never before.
The U.S. Department of Defense has a website commemorating the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War. Dedicated to whitewashing history, the website's goals are, “to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during the Vietnam War.” One wonders whether these advances include the development and use of napalm, Agent Orange and other weapons that killed millions of Vietnamese people along with U.S. veterans. Veterans For Peace, and its many members who fought in Vietnam, is fighting against this revisionist history though a campaign called Vietnam Full Disclosure.
The U.S. government clearly has an interest in obliterating the lessons of the war as it slogs on with brutal interventions in the Middle East and attempts at intervention in Latin America. American drones, white phosphorus, depleted uranium, and other weapons of destruction are built upon the “advances” in technology lauded by the DoD’s 50th anniversary website.
The DoD and others are working hard to obscure the history of the Vietnam War because they seek to blunt criticism of unpopular U.S. interventions and to give the Pentagon a freer hand in conducting future wars. They seek to spend more of our tax dollars on military hardware and weaponry for use in their wars. What are some of the myths that the right is trying to spread about the Vietnam War?
A major general in the U.S. Air Force who served in Vietnam told an anti-war veteran recently that the U.S. could have won if it had committed enough resources to achieving victory. During the war, General Curtis LeMay suggested that the U.S. could bomb Vietnam “back into the stone ages.” While the U.S. did not use the atomic bomb due to international pressure, it did everything short of this, deploying more air and ground munitions than were used in all of World War II.
Despite overwhelming U.S. military superiority, the Vietnamese liberation forces won because they had the support of the people. Use of more U.S. firepower and troops might have prolonged the war and the killing, but it would not have changed the outcome. A people who are organized and dedicated to winning their independence cannot be truly defeated—a lesson the U.S. government has yet to learn in conducting its international affairs.
Another shibboleth of the right is that the U.S. conducted an “honorable” war in Vietnam with only sporadic human rights violations such as the massacre at My Lai. The Winter Soldier Investigation, conducted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971, painfully documented the massive scale of the massacres, torture of civilians and other war crimes perpetrated against the Vietnamese people.
Testifying before Congress on April 22, 1971, a young John Kerry, then representing VVAW, spoke of, “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He went on to describe the testimony of his fellow veterans, who, “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Nick Turse’s well-documented book describing U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is a more recent recounting of the war crimes Kerry testified about. The book has unsurprisingly been attacked by conservative pundits.
Connected to the whitewashing of U.S. war crimes is a denial of how U.S. racism fueled the war in Vietnam. General William Westmoreland, the four-star general who was in command of all U.S. military operations from 1964 to 1968, famously said, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
Vietnamese people were referred to by the racist expletive “gooks” and outright murder of civilians was justified by the “mere gook rule” which held that the death of any Vietnamese person, including women and children, was justified. Today, bigotry directed at Arabs and Muslims in countries the U.S. has attacked and occupied and at home eerily echoes such racism as does the police murders of black men in cities across the U.S.
Perhaps the most tired of all the myths the right is trying to perpetuate is that anti-war activists’ actions dishonor U.S. soldiers. This goes hand in hand with the myth that U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam were routinely spat upon by anti-war activists. Soldiers involved in illegal and immoral wars benefit greatly from anti-war movements (which they often lead upon their return). Ending U.S. wars of intervention saves human lives abroad as well as the lives of our soldiers.
The soldiers who come back from U.S. wars are not dishonored by anti-war movements, but by the callous disregard for their welfare shown by the U.S. government which refuses to provide adequate treatment, rehabilitation and jobs. The impact of the violence of unjust wars echoes long after the wars are over and beyond the ranks of the soldiers and their families. Seymour Hersh, the reporter who documented the My Lai massacre, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that when he spoke to a mother whose son had been involved in the massacre, she told him, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer."
The final lesson that is being undermined by the revisionists is their contention that the war is long over and is ancient history. In fact, wars are not over until those harmed by them receive justice and compensation. The Vietnam War killed four million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans. But the war continues in those still suffering from its legacy of unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange, a dioxin-laden chemical weapon.
Agent Orange causes cancers and other diseases as well as horrific birth defects in the children and grandchildren of those exposed. The U.S. government has done precious little to provide redress to the Vietnamese victims or to Vietnamese-Americans who were exposed. While U.S. veterans fought for and won some compensation from the Veterans Administration, the children of U.S. veterans who suffer with disabilities due to birth defects related to exposure to Agent Orange receive no aid at all. To address this, Representative Barbara Lee is introducing the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015 to provide medical, rehabilitative and human services to several generations of Vietnamese and Americans suffering with diseases and disabilities. The Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign is working to build public support for U.S. aid to the victims to heal the wounds of war.
Progressives also espouse myths about the war. One that some among us perpetuate is the portrayal of the anti-war movement as a mainly white student movement and ignorance of the leading role of black and other movements of color. While students did play an important role, the role of returning anti-war veterans, the Vietnamese-American anti-war movemen, and movements of color was crucial.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in 1967, Beyond Vietnam, helped turned the tide of public opinion in the U.S. against the war. Even before Dr. King, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came out against the war in 1965 as did Malcolm X. Muhammed Ali lost his heavyweight title and was convicted for refusing to fight in Vietnam. While there was media coverage of the National Guard shooting of unarmed white anti-war protesters at Kent State, scant attention was paid to the killings of black anti-war students at Jackson State. Vietnamese-Americans, particularly the Union of Vietnamese in the U.S., played a crucial role in analyzing the events in Vietnam even as they were often sidelined in some rallies for fear they would be identified with the “enemy.” The national veteran’s anti-war movement, led by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, brought formidable credibility and a working-class base to the anti-war movement. Seeing and giving voice to those who truly made up the anti-war movement is crucial if we are to build a strong and successful diverse anti-war movement today.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once called the United States, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." He noted that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of peace and independence in Vietnam, it is important that we bring the unadulterated and true lessons of the war forward as we build the movement to end wars of aggression and to invest our resources in projects of social uplift.
The U.S. government clearly has an interest in obliterating the lessons of the war as it slogs on with brutal interventions in the Middle East and attempts at intervention in Latin America. American drones, white phosphorus, depleted uranium, and other weapons of destruction are built upon the “advances” in technology lauded by the DoD’s 50th anniversary website.
The DoD and others are working hard to obscure the history of the Vietnam War because they seek to blunt criticism of unpopular U.S. interventions and to give the Pentagon a freer hand in conducting future wars. They seek to spend more of our tax dollars on military hardware and weaponry for use in their wars. What are some of the myths that the right is trying to spread about the Vietnam War?
A major general in the U.S. Air Force who served in Vietnam told an anti-war veteran recently that the U.S. could have won if it had committed enough resources to achieving victory. During the war, General Curtis LeMay suggested that the U.S. could bomb Vietnam “back into the stone ages.” While the U.S. did not use the atomic bomb due to international pressure, it did everything short of this, deploying more air and ground munitions than were used in all of World War II.
Despite overwhelming U.S. military superiority, the Vietnamese liberation forces won because they had the support of the people. Use of more U.S. firepower and troops might have prolonged the war and the killing, but it would not have changed the outcome. A people who are organized and dedicated to winning their independence cannot be truly defeated—a lesson the U.S. government has yet to learn in conducting its international affairs.
Another shibboleth of the right is that the U.S. conducted an “honorable” war in Vietnam with only sporadic human rights violations such as the massacre at My Lai. The Winter Soldier Investigation, conducted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971, painfully documented the massive scale of the massacres, torture of civilians and other war crimes perpetrated against the Vietnamese people.
Testifying before Congress on April 22, 1971, a young John Kerry, then representing VVAW, spoke of, “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He went on to describe the testimony of his fellow veterans, who, “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Nick Turse’s well-documented book describing U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is a more recent recounting of the war crimes Kerry testified about. The book has unsurprisingly been attacked by conservative pundits.
Connected to the whitewashing of U.S. war crimes is a denial of how U.S. racism fueled the war in Vietnam. General William Westmoreland, the four-star general who was in command of all U.S. military operations from 1964 to 1968, famously said, “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
Vietnamese people were referred to by the racist expletive “gooks” and outright murder of civilians was justified by the “mere gook rule” which held that the death of any Vietnamese person, including women and children, was justified. Today, bigotry directed at Arabs and Muslims in countries the U.S. has attacked and occupied and at home eerily echoes such racism as does the police murders of black men in cities across the U.S.
Perhaps the most tired of all the myths the right is trying to perpetuate is that anti-war activists’ actions dishonor U.S. soldiers. This goes hand in hand with the myth that U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam were routinely spat upon by anti-war activists. Soldiers involved in illegal and immoral wars benefit greatly from anti-war movements (which they often lead upon their return). Ending U.S. wars of intervention saves human lives abroad as well as the lives of our soldiers.
The soldiers who come back from U.S. wars are not dishonored by anti-war movements, but by the callous disregard for their welfare shown by the U.S. government which refuses to provide adequate treatment, rehabilitation and jobs. The impact of the violence of unjust wars echoes long after the wars are over and beyond the ranks of the soldiers and their families. Seymour Hersh, the reporter who documented the My Lai massacre, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that when he spoke to a mother whose son had been involved in the massacre, she told him, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer."
The final lesson that is being undermined by the revisionists is their contention that the war is long over and is ancient history. In fact, wars are not over until those harmed by them receive justice and compensation. The Vietnam War killed four million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans. But the war continues in those still suffering from its legacy of unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange, a dioxin-laden chemical weapon.
Agent Orange causes cancers and other diseases as well as horrific birth defects in the children and grandchildren of those exposed. The U.S. government has done precious little to provide redress to the Vietnamese victims or to Vietnamese-Americans who were exposed. While U.S. veterans fought for and won some compensation from the Veterans Administration, the children of U.S. veterans who suffer with disabilities due to birth defects related to exposure to Agent Orange receive no aid at all. To address this, Representative Barbara Lee is introducing the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015 to provide medical, rehabilitative and human services to several generations of Vietnamese and Americans suffering with diseases and disabilities. The Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign is working to build public support for U.S. aid to the victims to heal the wounds of war.
Progressives also espouse myths about the war. One that some among us perpetuate is the portrayal of the anti-war movement as a mainly white student movement and ignorance of the leading role of black and other movements of color. While students did play an important role, the role of returning anti-war veterans, the Vietnamese-American anti-war movemen, and movements of color was crucial.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in 1967, Beyond Vietnam, helped turned the tide of public opinion in the U.S. against the war. Even before Dr. King, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came out against the war in 1965 as did Malcolm X. Muhammed Ali lost his heavyweight title and was convicted for refusing to fight in Vietnam. While there was media coverage of the National Guard shooting of unarmed white anti-war protesters at Kent State, scant attention was paid to the killings of black anti-war students at Jackson State. Vietnamese-Americans, particularly the Union of Vietnamese in the U.S., played a crucial role in analyzing the events in Vietnam even as they were often sidelined in some rallies for fear they would be identified with the “enemy.” The national veteran’s anti-war movement, led by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, brought formidable credibility and a working-class base to the anti-war movement. Seeing and giving voice to those who truly made up the anti-war movement is crucial if we are to build a strong and successful diverse anti-war movement today.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once called the United States, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." He noted that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of peace and independence in Vietnam, it is important that we bring the unadulterated and true lessons of the war forward as we build the movement to end wars of aggression and to invest our resources in projects of social uplift.
Burying Vietnam, Launching Perpetual War: How Thanking the Veteran Meant Ignoring What Happened
SP5 Capezza burning a Vietnamese dwelling during the My Lai massacre, March 16, 1968. (Photo:Ronald L. Haeberle)
The 1960s -- that extraordinary decade -- is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965! How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era's signature catastrophe? After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.
So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We've been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say: "Let's honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice."
For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we're now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt. For today's typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history. Most of their parents weren't even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.
In the post-Vietnam decades, our culture has buried so much of the history once considered essential to any debate about that most controversial of all American wars that little of substance remains. Still, oddly enough, most of the 180 students who take my Vietnam War class each year arrive deeply curious. They seem to sense that the subject is like a dark family secret that might finally be exposed. All that most of them know is that the Sixties, the war years, were a "time of turmoil." As for Vietnam, they have few cultural markers or landmarks, which shouldn't be surprising. Even Hollywood -- that powerful shaper of historical memory -- stopped making Vietnam movies long ago. Some of my students have stumbled across old films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but it's rare for even one of them to have seen either of the most searing documentaries made during that war, In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds. Such relics of profound antiwar fervor simply disappeared from popular memory along with the antiwar movement itself.
On the other hand, there is an advantage to the fact that students make it to that first class without strong convictions about the war. It means they can be surprised, even shocked, when they learn about the war's wrenching realities and that's when real education can begin. For example, many students are stunned to discover that the U.S. government, forever proclaiming its desire to spread democracy, actually blocked Vietnam's internationally sanctioned reunification election in 1956 because of the near certainty that Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would be the overwhelming winner.
They're even more astonished to discover the kind of "free-fire zone" bloodshed and mayhem the U.S. military unleashed on the South Vietnamese countryside. Nothing shocks them more, though, than the details of the My Lai massacre in which American ground troops killed, at close range, more than 500 unarmed, unresisting, South Vietnamese civilians -- most of them women, children, and old men -- over a four-hour stretch on March 16, 1968. In high school, many students tell me, My Lai is not discussed.
An American Tragedy
Don't think that young students are the only products of a whitewashed history of the Vietnam War. Many older Americans have also been affected by decades of distortion and revision designed to sanitize an impossibly soiled record. The first step in the cleansing process was to scrub out as much memory as possible and it began even before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. A week before the fall of Saigon, President Gerald Ford was already encouragingcitizens to put aside a war that was "finished as far as America is concerned." A kind of willful amnesia was needed, he suggested, to "regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam."
At that moment, forgetting made all the sense in the world since it seemed unimaginable, even to the president, that Americans would ever find a positive way to remember the war -- and little wonder. Except for a few unapologetic former policymakers like Walt Rostow and Henry Kissinger, virtually everyone, whatever their politics, believed that it had been an unmitigated disaster. In 1971, for example, a remarkable 58% of the public told pollsters that they thought the conflict was "immoral," a word that most Americans had never applied to their country's wars.
How quickly times change. Jump ahead a decade and Americans had already found an appealing formula for commemorating the war. It turned out to be surprisingly simple: focus on us, not them, and agree that the war was primarily an Americantragedy. Stop worrying about the damage Americans had inflicted on Vietnam and focus on what we had done to ourselves. Soon enough, President Ronald Reagan and his followers were claiming that the war had been disastrous mainly because it had weakened an American sense of pride and patriotism, while inhibiting the nation's desire to project power globally. Under Reagan, "Vietnam" became arallying cry for both a revived nationalism and militarism.
Though liberals and moderates didn't buy Reagan's view that Vietnam had been a "noble" and winnable war, they did generally support a growing belief that would, in the end, successfully supplant lingering antiwar perspectives and focus instead on a process of national "healing." At the heart of that new creed was the idea that our own veterans were the greatest victims of the war and that their wounds were largely a consequence of their shabby treatment by antiwar protestors upon returning from the battle zone to an unwelcoming home front. Indeed, it became an article of faith that the most shameful aspect of the Vietnam War was the nation's failure to embrace and honor its returning soldiers.
Of course, there was a truth to the vet-as-victim belief. Vietnam veterans had, in fact, been horribly ill-treated. Their chief abuser, however, was their own government, which first lied to them about the causes and nature of the war, then sent them off to fight for an unpopular, dictatorial regime in a land where they were widely regarded as foreign invaders. Finally, on their return, it failed to provide them with either adequate support or benefits.
And corporate America was also to blame. Employers were reluctant to hire or train them, in many cases scared off by crude 1970s media stereotypes about wacko, drug-addled, and violent vets. Nor did traditional veterans' organizations like the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars provide a warm welcome to those coming home from a deeply contested and unpopular war filled with disillusioned soldiers.
The Antiwar Movement Dispatched to the Trash Bin of History
In the 1980s, however, the Americans most saddled with blame for abusing Vietnam veterans were the antiwar activists of the previous era. Forget that, in its later years, the antiwar movement was often led by and filled with antiwar vets. According to a pervasive postwar myth, veterans returning home from Vietnam were commonly accused of being "baby killers" and spat upon by protestors. The spat-upon story -- wildly exaggerated, if not entirely invented -- helped reinforce the rightward turn in American politics in the post-Vietnam era. It was a way of teaching Americans to "honor" victimized veterans, while dishonoring the millions of Americans who had fervently worked to bring them safely home from war. In this way, the most extraordinary antiwar movement in memory was discredited and dispatched to the trash bin of history.
In the process, something new happened. Americans began to treat those who served the country as heroic by definition, no matter what they had actually done. This phenomenon first appeared in another context entirely. In early 1981, when American diplomats and other personnel were finally released from 444 days of captivity in Iran, the former hostages were given a hero's welcome for the ages. There was a White House party, ticker-tape parades, the bestowal of season tickets to professional sporting events, you name it. This proved to be where a new definition of "heroism" first took root. Americans had once believed that true heroes took great risks on behalf of noble ideals. Now, they conferred such status on an entire group of people who had simply survived a horrible ordeal.
To do so next with Vietnam veterans, and indeed with every soldier or veteran who followed in their footsteps seemed like a no-brainer. It was such an easy formula to apply in a new, far more cynical age. You no longer had to believe that the missions American "heroes" fought were noble and just; you could simply agree that anyone who "served America" in whatever capacity automatically deserved acclaim.
By the time the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened on Washington's Mall in 1982, a consensus had grown up around the idea that, whatever you thought about the Vietnam War, all Americans should honor the vets who fought in it, no matter what any of them had done. Memorial planners helped persuade the public that it was possible to "separate the warrior from the war." As the black granite wall of the Memorial itself so vividly demonstrated, you could honor veterans without commenting on the war in which they had fought. In the years to come, that lesson would be repeated so often that it became a bedrock part of the culture. A classic example was an ad run in 1985 on the 10th anniversary of the war's end by defense contractor United Technologies:
"Let others use this occasion to explain why we were there, what we accomplished, what went wrong, and who was right. We seek here only to draw attention to those who served... They fought not for territorial gain, or national glory, or personal wealth. They fought only because they were called to serve... whatever acrimony lingers in our consciousness... let us not forget the Vietnam veteran."
Since the attacks of 9/11, ritualized support for troops and veterans, more symbolic than substantive, has grown ever more common, replete with yellow ribbons, airport greetings, welcome home ceremonies, memorial highways, honor flights, benefit concerts, and ballgame flyovers. Through it all, politicians, celebrities, and athletes constantly remind us that we've never done enough to demonstrate our support.
Perhaps some veterans do find meaning and sustenance in our endless thank-yous, but others find them hollow and demeaning. The noble vet is as reductive a stereotype as the crazy vet, and repeated empty gestures of gratitude foreclose the possibility of real dialogue and debate. "Thank you for your service" requires nothing of us, while "Please tell me about your service" might, though we could then be in for a disturbing few hours. As two-tour Afghan War veteran Rory Fanning haspointed out, "We use the term hero in part because it makes us feel good and in part because it shuts soldiers up... Thank yous to heroes discourage dissent, which is one reason military bureaucrats feed off the term."
The 1960s -- that extraordinary decade -- is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965! How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era's signature catastrophe? After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.
So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We've been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say: "Let's honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice."
For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we're now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt. For today's typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history. Most of their parents weren't even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.
In the post-Vietnam decades, our culture has buried so much of the history once considered essential to any debate about that most controversial of all American wars that little of substance remains. Still, oddly enough, most of the 180 students who take my Vietnam War class each year arrive deeply curious. They seem to sense that the subject is like a dark family secret that might finally be exposed. All that most of them know is that the Sixties, the war years, were a "time of turmoil." As for Vietnam, they have few cultural markers or landmarks, which shouldn't be surprising. Even Hollywood -- that powerful shaper of historical memory -- stopped making Vietnam movies long ago. Some of my students have stumbled across old films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but it's rare for even one of them to have seen either of the most searing documentaries made during that war, In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds. Such relics of profound antiwar fervor simply disappeared from popular memory along with the antiwar movement itself.
On the other hand, there is an advantage to the fact that students make it to that first class without strong convictions about the war. It means they can be surprised, even shocked, when they learn about the war's wrenching realities and that's when real education can begin. For example, many students are stunned to discover that the U.S. government, forever proclaiming its desire to spread democracy, actually blocked Vietnam's internationally sanctioned reunification election in 1956 because of the near certainty that Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would be the overwhelming winner.
They're even more astonished to discover the kind of "free-fire zone" bloodshed and mayhem the U.S. military unleashed on the South Vietnamese countryside. Nothing shocks them more, though, than the details of the My Lai massacre in which American ground troops killed, at close range, more than 500 unarmed, unresisting, South Vietnamese civilians -- most of them women, children, and old men -- over a four-hour stretch on March 16, 1968. In high school, many students tell me, My Lai is not discussed.
An American Tragedy
Don't think that young students are the only products of a whitewashed history of the Vietnam War. Many older Americans have also been affected by decades of distortion and revision designed to sanitize an impossibly soiled record. The first step in the cleansing process was to scrub out as much memory as possible and it began even before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. A week before the fall of Saigon, President Gerald Ford was already encouragingcitizens to put aside a war that was "finished as far as America is concerned." A kind of willful amnesia was needed, he suggested, to "regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam."
At that moment, forgetting made all the sense in the world since it seemed unimaginable, even to the president, that Americans would ever find a positive way to remember the war -- and little wonder. Except for a few unapologetic former policymakers like Walt Rostow and Henry Kissinger, virtually everyone, whatever their politics, believed that it had been an unmitigated disaster. In 1971, for example, a remarkable 58% of the public told pollsters that they thought the conflict was "immoral," a word that most Americans had never applied to their country's wars.
How quickly times change. Jump ahead a decade and Americans had already found an appealing formula for commemorating the war. It turned out to be surprisingly simple: focus on us, not them, and agree that the war was primarily an Americantragedy. Stop worrying about the damage Americans had inflicted on Vietnam and focus on what we had done to ourselves. Soon enough, President Ronald Reagan and his followers were claiming that the war had been disastrous mainly because it had weakened an American sense of pride and patriotism, while inhibiting the nation's desire to project power globally. Under Reagan, "Vietnam" became arallying cry for both a revived nationalism and militarism.
Though liberals and moderates didn't buy Reagan's view that Vietnam had been a "noble" and winnable war, they did generally support a growing belief that would, in the end, successfully supplant lingering antiwar perspectives and focus instead on a process of national "healing." At the heart of that new creed was the idea that our own veterans were the greatest victims of the war and that their wounds were largely a consequence of their shabby treatment by antiwar protestors upon returning from the battle zone to an unwelcoming home front. Indeed, it became an article of faith that the most shameful aspect of the Vietnam War was the nation's failure to embrace and honor its returning soldiers.
Of course, there was a truth to the vet-as-victim belief. Vietnam veterans had, in fact, been horribly ill-treated. Their chief abuser, however, was their own government, which first lied to them about the causes and nature of the war, then sent them off to fight for an unpopular, dictatorial regime in a land where they were widely regarded as foreign invaders. Finally, on their return, it failed to provide them with either adequate support or benefits.
And corporate America was also to blame. Employers were reluctant to hire or train them, in many cases scared off by crude 1970s media stereotypes about wacko, drug-addled, and violent vets. Nor did traditional veterans' organizations like the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars provide a warm welcome to those coming home from a deeply contested and unpopular war filled with disillusioned soldiers.
The Antiwar Movement Dispatched to the Trash Bin of History
In the 1980s, however, the Americans most saddled with blame for abusing Vietnam veterans were the antiwar activists of the previous era. Forget that, in its later years, the antiwar movement was often led by and filled with antiwar vets. According to a pervasive postwar myth, veterans returning home from Vietnam were commonly accused of being "baby killers" and spat upon by protestors. The spat-upon story -- wildly exaggerated, if not entirely invented -- helped reinforce the rightward turn in American politics in the post-Vietnam era. It was a way of teaching Americans to "honor" victimized veterans, while dishonoring the millions of Americans who had fervently worked to bring them safely home from war. In this way, the most extraordinary antiwar movement in memory was discredited and dispatched to the trash bin of history.
In the process, something new happened. Americans began to treat those who served the country as heroic by definition, no matter what they had actually done. This phenomenon first appeared in another context entirely. In early 1981, when American diplomats and other personnel were finally released from 444 days of captivity in Iran, the former hostages were given a hero's welcome for the ages. There was a White House party, ticker-tape parades, the bestowal of season tickets to professional sporting events, you name it. This proved to be where a new definition of "heroism" first took root. Americans had once believed that true heroes took great risks on behalf of noble ideals. Now, they conferred such status on an entire group of people who had simply survived a horrible ordeal.
To do so next with Vietnam veterans, and indeed with every soldier or veteran who followed in their footsteps seemed like a no-brainer. It was such an easy formula to apply in a new, far more cynical age. You no longer had to believe that the missions American "heroes" fought were noble and just; you could simply agree that anyone who "served America" in whatever capacity automatically deserved acclaim.
By the time the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened on Washington's Mall in 1982, a consensus had grown up around the idea that, whatever you thought about the Vietnam War, all Americans should honor the vets who fought in it, no matter what any of them had done. Memorial planners helped persuade the public that it was possible to "separate the warrior from the war." As the black granite wall of the Memorial itself so vividly demonstrated, you could honor veterans without commenting on the war in which they had fought. In the years to come, that lesson would be repeated so often that it became a bedrock part of the culture. A classic example was an ad run in 1985 on the 10th anniversary of the war's end by defense contractor United Technologies:
"Let others use this occasion to explain why we were there, what we accomplished, what went wrong, and who was right. We seek here only to draw attention to those who served... They fought not for territorial gain, or national glory, or personal wealth. They fought only because they were called to serve... whatever acrimony lingers in our consciousness... let us not forget the Vietnam veteran."
Since the attacks of 9/11, ritualized support for troops and veterans, more symbolic than substantive, has grown ever more common, replete with yellow ribbons, airport greetings, welcome home ceremonies, memorial highways, honor flights, benefit concerts, and ballgame flyovers. Through it all, politicians, celebrities, and athletes constantly remind us that we've never done enough to demonstrate our support.
Perhaps some veterans do find meaning and sustenance in our endless thank-yous, but others find them hollow and demeaning. The noble vet is as reductive a stereotype as the crazy vet, and repeated empty gestures of gratitude foreclose the possibility of real dialogue and debate. "Thank you for your service" requires nothing of us, while "Please tell me about your service" might, though we could then be in for a disturbing few hours. As two-tour Afghan War veteran Rory Fanning haspointed out, "We use the term hero in part because it makes us feel good and in part because it shuts soldiers up... Thank yous to heroes discourage dissent, which is one reason military bureaucrats feed off the term."
Thirteen Years' Worth of Commemorating the Warriors
Although a majority of Americans came to reject the wars in both Afghanistan andIraq in proportions roughly as high as in the Vietnam era, the present knee-jerk association between military service and "our freedom" inhibits thinking about Washington's highly militarized policies in the world. And in 2012, with congressional approval and funding, the Pentagon began institutionalizing that Vietnam "thank you" as a multi-year, multi-million-dollar "50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Vietnam War." It's a thank-you celebration that is slated to last 13 years until 2025, although the emphasis is on the period from Memorial Day 2015 to Veterans Day 2017.
You won't be surprised to learn that the Pentagon's number-one objective is "to thank and honor veterans of the Vietnam War" in "partnership" with more than 10,000 corporations and local groups which are "to sponsor hometown events to honor Vietnam veterans, their families, and those who were prisoners of war and missing in action." Additional goals include: "to pay tribute to the contributions made on the home front" (presumably not by peace activists) and "to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during the Vietnam War." (It's a little hard to imagine quite what that refers to though an even more effective Agent Orange defoliant or improved cluster bombs come to mind.)
Since the Pentagon realizes that, however hard you try, you can't entirely "separate the warrior from the war," it is also seeking "to provide the American public with historically accurate materials and interactive experiences that will help Americans better understand and appreciate the service of our Vietnam veterans and the history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War." However, it turns out that "accuracy" and "appreciation" can both be served only if you carefully scrub that history clean of untoward incidents and exclude all the under-appreciators, including the thousands of American soldiers who became so disgusted with the war that they turned on their officers, avoided or refused combat missions, deserted in record numbers, and created the most vibrant antiwar GI and veterans movement in our history.
The most ambitious of the "educational resources" provided on the Vietnam War Commemoration website is an "interactive timeline." As other historians havedemonstrated, this historical cavalcade has proven to be a masterwork of disproportion, distortion, and omission. For example, it offers just three short sentences on the "killings" at My Lai (the word "massacre" does not appear) and says that the officer who led Charlie Company into the village, Lt. William Calley, was "sentenced to life in prison" without adding that he was paroled by President Richard Nixon after just three-and-a-half years under house arrest.
That desperately inadequate description avoids the most obviously embarrassing question: How could such a thing happen? It is conveniently dropped onto a page that includes lengthy official citations of seven American servicemen who received Medals of Honor. The fact that antiwar Senator Robert Kennedy entered the presidential race on the same day as the My Lai massacre isn't even mentioned, nor his assassination three months later, nor the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., just weeks after My Lai, an event that spurred bitter and bloody racial clashes on U.S. military bases throughout South Vietnam and the world.
It should not go unnoticed that the same government that is spending $65 million commemorating the veterans of a once-reviled war has failed to provide sufficient medical care for them. In 2014, news surfaced that the Veterans Administration hadleft some 100,000 veterans waiting for medical attention and that some VA hospitals sought to cover up their egregious delays. Every day an estimated 22 veteranscommit suicide, and among vets of Iraq and Afghanistan the suicide rate, according to one study, is 50% higher than that of their civilian peers.
The Pentagon's anniversary commemoration has triggered some heated push-back from groups like Veterans for Peace and the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (co-founded by Tom Hayden). Both are planning alternative commemorations designed to include antiwar perspectives once so common but now glaringly absent from popular memory. From such efforts might come the first full public critical reappraisal of the war to challenge four decades of cosmetic makeover.
Unfortunately, in our twenty-first-century American world of permanent war, rehashing Vietnam may strike many as irrelevant or redundant. If so, it's likely that neither the Pentagon's commemoration nor the antiwar counter-commemorations will get much notice. Perhaps the most damaging legacy of the post-Vietnam era lies in the way Americans have learned to live in a perpetual "wartime" without war being part of daily consciousness. While public support for Washington's war policies is feeble at best, few share the Vietnam era faith that they can challenge a war-making machine that seems to have a life of its own.
Last year, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted secret military missions in 133 countries and are on pace to beat that mark in 2015, yet these far-flung commitments go largely unnoticed by the major media and most citizens. We rely on 1% of Americans "to protect our freedoms" in roughly 70% of the world's countries and at home, and all that is asked of us is that we offer an occasional "thank you for your service" to people we don't know and whose wars we need not spend precious time thinking about.
From the Vietnam War, the Pentagon and its apologists learned fundamental lessons about how to burnish, bend, and bury the truth. The results have been devastating. The fashioning of a bogus American tragedy from a real Vietnamese one has paved the way for so many more such tragedies, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Yemen, and -- if history is any guide -- an unknown one still emerging, no doubt from another of those 133 countries.
Although a majority of Americans came to reject the wars in both Afghanistan andIraq in proportions roughly as high as in the Vietnam era, the present knee-jerk association between military service and "our freedom" inhibits thinking about Washington's highly militarized policies in the world. And in 2012, with congressional approval and funding, the Pentagon began institutionalizing that Vietnam "thank you" as a multi-year, multi-million-dollar "50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Vietnam War." It's a thank-you celebration that is slated to last 13 years until 2025, although the emphasis is on the period from Memorial Day 2015 to Veterans Day 2017.
You won't be surprised to learn that the Pentagon's number-one objective is "to thank and honor veterans of the Vietnam War" in "partnership" with more than 10,000 corporations and local groups which are "to sponsor hometown events to honor Vietnam veterans, their families, and those who were prisoners of war and missing in action." Additional goals include: "to pay tribute to the contributions made on the home front" (presumably not by peace activists) and "to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during the Vietnam War." (It's a little hard to imagine quite what that refers to though an even more effective Agent Orange defoliant or improved cluster bombs come to mind.)
Since the Pentagon realizes that, however hard you try, you can't entirely "separate the warrior from the war," it is also seeking "to provide the American public with historically accurate materials and interactive experiences that will help Americans better understand and appreciate the service of our Vietnam veterans and the history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War." However, it turns out that "accuracy" and "appreciation" can both be served only if you carefully scrub that history clean of untoward incidents and exclude all the under-appreciators, including the thousands of American soldiers who became so disgusted with the war that they turned on their officers, avoided or refused combat missions, deserted in record numbers, and created the most vibrant antiwar GI and veterans movement in our history.
The most ambitious of the "educational resources" provided on the Vietnam War Commemoration website is an "interactive timeline." As other historians havedemonstrated, this historical cavalcade has proven to be a masterwork of disproportion, distortion, and omission. For example, it offers just three short sentences on the "killings" at My Lai (the word "massacre" does not appear) and says that the officer who led Charlie Company into the village, Lt. William Calley, was "sentenced to life in prison" without adding that he was paroled by President Richard Nixon after just three-and-a-half years under house arrest.
That desperately inadequate description avoids the most obviously embarrassing question: How could such a thing happen? It is conveniently dropped onto a page that includes lengthy official citations of seven American servicemen who received Medals of Honor. The fact that antiwar Senator Robert Kennedy entered the presidential race on the same day as the My Lai massacre isn't even mentioned, nor his assassination three months later, nor the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., just weeks after My Lai, an event that spurred bitter and bloody racial clashes on U.S. military bases throughout South Vietnam and the world.
It should not go unnoticed that the same government that is spending $65 million commemorating the veterans of a once-reviled war has failed to provide sufficient medical care for them. In 2014, news surfaced that the Veterans Administration hadleft some 100,000 veterans waiting for medical attention and that some VA hospitals sought to cover up their egregious delays. Every day an estimated 22 veteranscommit suicide, and among vets of Iraq and Afghanistan the suicide rate, according to one study, is 50% higher than that of their civilian peers.
The Pentagon's anniversary commemoration has triggered some heated push-back from groups like Veterans for Peace and the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (co-founded by Tom Hayden). Both are planning alternative commemorations designed to include antiwar perspectives once so common but now glaringly absent from popular memory. From such efforts might come the first full public critical reappraisal of the war to challenge four decades of cosmetic makeover.
Unfortunately, in our twenty-first-century American world of permanent war, rehashing Vietnam may strike many as irrelevant or redundant. If so, it's likely that neither the Pentagon's commemoration nor the antiwar counter-commemorations will get much notice. Perhaps the most damaging legacy of the post-Vietnam era lies in the way Americans have learned to live in a perpetual "wartime" without war being part of daily consciousness. While public support for Washington's war policies is feeble at best, few share the Vietnam era faith that they can challenge a war-making machine that seems to have a life of its own.
Last year, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted secret military missions in 133 countries and are on pace to beat that mark in 2015, yet these far-flung commitments go largely unnoticed by the major media and most citizens. We rely on 1% of Americans "to protect our freedoms" in roughly 70% of the world's countries and at home, and all that is asked of us is that we offer an occasional "thank you for your service" to people we don't know and whose wars we need not spend precious time thinking about.
From the Vietnam War, the Pentagon and its apologists learned fundamental lessons about how to burnish, bend, and bury the truth. The results have been devastating. The fashioning of a bogus American tragedy from a real Vietnamese one has paved the way for so many more such tragedies, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Yemen, and -- if history is any guide -- an unknown one still emerging, no doubt from another of those 133 countries.
Nick Turse, The Pentagon Makes History the First Casualty
In 2012, the Pentagon kicked off a 13-year program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, complete with a sprawling website that includes a “history and education” component. Billed as a “public service” provided by the Department of Defense, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration site boasts of its “resources for teachers and students in the grades 7-12” and includes a selection of official government documents, all of them produced from 1943-1954; that is, only during the earliest stages of modern U.S. involvement in what was then called Indochina.
The Vietnam War Commemoration’s educational aspirations, however, extend beyond students. “The goal of the History and Education effort,” according to the site, “is to provide the American public with historically accurate materials and interactive experiences that will help Americans better understand and appreciate the service of our Vietnam War veterans and the history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.” To that end, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration offers an interactive historical timeline.
By far the largest and most impressive offering on the site, the timeline spans 70 interactive pages with 830 individual entries that take a viewer from 1833 to 1976. The entries run the gamut from tales of daring and sacrifice from the official citations of Medal of Honor recipients to short offerings about changes of command. There are even couple-of-sentence accounts of relatively minor operations -- like a December 20, 1969, sweep in Binh Duong Province by elements of the 1st Infantry Division, which captured 12 of 18 members of a North Vietnamese intelligence unit and 2,000 documents that “proved how much information the enemy had about American operations.”
It’s an eclectic mix, but give credit where it’s due: the digital chronology does mention casualties from the oft-forgotten first U.S. attack on Vietnam (an 1845 naval shelling of the city we now know as Danang). For the next 131 years, however, mention of Vietnamese dead and wounded is, to put the matter as politely as possible, in short supply. Flawed history, though, isn’t.
History is Bunk
Take the August 2, 1964, “Gulf of Tonkin Incident.” It was a key moment of American escalation and, by the looks of the Pentagon’s historical timeline, just what President Lyndon Johnson made it out to be when he went on television to inform the American people of “open aggression” on the part of North Vietnam. “The USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin,” reads the entry. A later one mentions “U.S. Naval Vessels being fired upon by North Vietnamese on two separate occassions [sic].” Case closed. Or is it?
Click here to see a larger version
The official story, the one that kicked off a cycle of U.S. military escalations that led to millions of casualties in Indochina, went like this: the USS Maddox, a destroyer, was innocently sailing through the Gulf of Tonkin when it was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2, 1964. President Lyndon Johnson, showing great restraint, refused to respond militarily. Two nights later, the North Vietnamese attacked again, targeting the Maddox and the USS Turner Joy and prompting the president to take to the airways toannounce that "renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply." Johnson sought and Congress quickly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- giving the president carte blanche to repeatedly intensify the war in the years to come.
But as it turned out, there was nothing innocent about those U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (as the President had implied). A claim of two separate attacks on U.S. Navy ships turned out to be untrue and the congressional resolution had not been drafted in the wake of the supposed attacks, but had been writtenmonths before, in anticipation of an opportune incident. In addition, the single attack by those torpedo boats occurred in the wake of a maritime raid on the North Vietnamese coast -- part of a covert program of attacks that Johnson hadapproved months earlier.
In 2012, the Pentagon kicked off a 13-year program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, complete with a sprawling website that includes a “history and education” component. Billed as a “public service” provided by the Department of Defense, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration site boasts of its “resources for teachers and students in the grades 7-12” and includes a selection of official government documents, all of them produced from 1943-1954; that is, only during the earliest stages of modern U.S. involvement in what was then called Indochina.
The Vietnam War Commemoration’s educational aspirations, however, extend beyond students. “The goal of the History and Education effort,” according to the site, “is to provide the American public with historically accurate materials and interactive experiences that will help Americans better understand and appreciate the service of our Vietnam War veterans and the history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.” To that end, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration offers an interactive historical timeline.
By far the largest and most impressive offering on the site, the timeline spans 70 interactive pages with 830 individual entries that take a viewer from 1833 to 1976. The entries run the gamut from tales of daring and sacrifice from the official citations of Medal of Honor recipients to short offerings about changes of command. There are even couple-of-sentence accounts of relatively minor operations -- like a December 20, 1969, sweep in Binh Duong Province by elements of the 1st Infantry Division, which captured 12 of 18 members of a North Vietnamese intelligence unit and 2,000 documents that “proved how much information the enemy had about American operations.”
It’s an eclectic mix, but give credit where it’s due: the digital chronology does mention casualties from the oft-forgotten first U.S. attack on Vietnam (an 1845 naval shelling of the city we now know as Danang). For the next 131 years, however, mention of Vietnamese dead and wounded is, to put the matter as politely as possible, in short supply. Flawed history, though, isn’t.
History is Bunk
Take the August 2, 1964, “Gulf of Tonkin Incident.” It was a key moment of American escalation and, by the looks of the Pentagon’s historical timeline, just what President Lyndon Johnson made it out to be when he went on television to inform the American people of “open aggression” on the part of North Vietnam. “The USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin,” reads the entry. A later one mentions “U.S. Naval Vessels being fired upon by North Vietnamese on two separate occassions [sic].” Case closed. Or is it?
Click here to see a larger version
The official story, the one that kicked off a cycle of U.S. military escalations that led to millions of casualties in Indochina, went like this: the USS Maddox, a destroyer, was innocently sailing through the Gulf of Tonkin when it was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2, 1964. President Lyndon Johnson, showing great restraint, refused to respond militarily. Two nights later, the North Vietnamese attacked again, targeting the Maddox and the USS Turner Joy and prompting the president to take to the airways toannounce that "renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply." Johnson sought and Congress quickly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- giving the president carte blanche to repeatedly intensify the war in the years to come.
But as it turned out, there was nothing innocent about those U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (as the President had implied). A claim of two separate attacks on U.S. Navy ships turned out to be untrue and the congressional resolution had not been drafted in the wake of the supposed attacks, but had been writtenmonths before, in anticipation of an opportune incident. In addition, the single attack by those torpedo boats occurred in the wake of a maritime raid on the North Vietnamese coast -- part of a covert program of attacks that Johnson hadapproved months earlier.
After reviewing the history of the incident, it seemed to me that the timeline was on distinctly shaky ground, but I decided to get a second opinion and went to the man who wrote thebook on the subject, Edwin Moïse, author ofTonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. He did me not one, but two better. He also pointed out apparent errors in the July 11, 1964, entry, “Joint Chiefs of Staff Unveiled ‘94 Target List,’” and criticized the August 4, 1964, entry, which offers nothing more than a title: “Two U.S. Aircraft Downed.”
“I think this is simply false,” he told me by email. “I am not aware of any U.S. aircraft downed that day and I think I would know.” These planes, he suspected, were actually lost the following day while flying missions “in retaliation for the (imaginary) second Tonkin Gulf Incident on August 4th.” The August 2nd Tonkin Gulf entry, he added, was “not quite accurate” either and was only “marginally useful” insofar as it was “close enough to the truth to allow readers to go looking for more information.”
With that in mind, I turned to Fredrik Logevall, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam and author of Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, a landmark study of American policymaking on Vietnam from 1963 to 1965. When it came to the Commemoration’s take on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, he told me that “some context for this entry is sorely needed.”
“There's little doubt in my mind that the administration entered the month of August [1964] looking for a pretext to flex a little muscle in Vietnam,” he added. “Finally, it should be said the administration misrepresented what occurred in the Gulf, particularly with respect to the alleged second attack on August 4th, which evidence even at the time showed almost certainly never happened.”
None of this essential context can, of course, be found anywhere in the timeline. Still, everyone makes mistakes, so I meandered through the Pentagon’s chronology looking at other key entries.
Soon, I found the one dealing with My Lai.
On March 15, 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, ahead of an operation in an area they knew as “Pinkville.” As unit member Harry Stanley recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina’s words only slightly differently: they were to “kill everything that breathed.” What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.”
The next morning, roughly 100 soldiers were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in South Vietnam’s Quang Ngai Province and followed Medina’s orders to a T. Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water. It took a year and a half for a cover-up that extended from soldiers in the field to generals at the top of the division to unravel -- thanks in large measure to veterans Ron Ridenhour and Ron Haberle and crack investigative reporterSeymour Hersh.
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The military took great pains to contain the fallout from the My Lai revelations, offering basement-level estimates of the death toll and focusing its attention onLieutenant William Calley, the lowest ranking officer who could conceivably shoulder the blame, while also burying other atrocity allegations, deep-sixinginquiries, classifying documents, and obstructing investigations in order to cast My Lai as a one-off aberration. In their meticulously researched 1992 bookFour Hours at My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim write:
“What was first a ‘massacre’ quickly became a ‘tragedy’ and was then referred to as an ‘incident.’ General [William R.] Peers, whose exhaustive inquiry into the events at My Lai remains the best source for what really happened there, was warned by his superiors not to use the word ‘massacre’ at the press conference held on the publication of his report [in 1970].”
More than 40 years later, the Department of Defense is still operating from the same playbook. The Vietnam War Commemoration’s interactive timeline refers to My Lai as an “incident” not a massacre, the death toll is listed at “more than 200” instead of more than 500, and it singles out only Lieutenant Calley (who certainly had plenty of blood on his hands) as if the deaths of all those Vietnamese civilians, carried out by dozens of men at the behest of higher command, could be the fault of just one junior officer.
Given the Pentagon’s take on the My Lai massacre, I was hardly surprised by the one-sentence timeline entry on Operation Speedy Express, which says little more than that the six-month operation in the Mekong Delta “yield[ed] an enemy body count of 11,000.” This has long been the military’s official position, but the Defense Department knows full well that it isn’t the whole story.
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In the early 1970s, a veteran who served in that operation sent a letter to the Pentagon (and then followed up with letters to other top Army generals) blowing the whistle on the systematic use of heavy firepower on populated areas which resulted in what he called a “My Lai each month.” His allegations were bolstered by those of U.S. advisors and Vietnamese sources, as well as by an internal report commissioned by the Army's acting general counsel, endorsing the whistleblower’s contention that an obsession with what was called “the body count” likely led to civilian deaths. The veteran’s shocking allegations were, however, kept secret for decades and a nascent inquiry into them was suppressed.
A later Newsweek investigation would conclude that as many as 5,000 civilians were killed during Operation Speedy Express. And a hush-hush internal military report, commissioned in the wake of the Newsweek story, suggested that the magazine had offered a low-end estimate. The document -- also kept secret and then buried for decades -- concluded:
“While there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by U.S. forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).”
Despite these findings, which have -- in recent years -- been aired in publications from the Nation to the Washington Post, the Vietnam War Commemoration ignores even the military’s own estimate that as many as 60% of those killed in the operation may have been innocents.
Keep scrolling through the timeline and additional examples of dubious history regularly present themselves. Take March 15, 1969: “President Nixon ordered a B-52 strike on enemy bases in Cambodia. The first strike was made on 17 March and initiated a fourteen month bombing campaign labeled Operation Menu,” reads the entry. Next to it, there’s a picture of Nixon holding a press conference to announce the missions and point out the targets. Pretty cut and dried, right? Maybe not.
Click here to see a larger version
Operation Menu was a coldly titled collection of B-52 bomber raids against suspected Vietnamese enemy “base areas” -- given the codenames "Breakfast," "Lunch," "Snack," "Dinner," "Dessert," and "Supper." As William Shawcross demonstrated in Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, it was kept secret from the American people, Congress, and even some top military brass via a conspiracy of silence, phony cover stories, the burning of documents, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged the strikes as occurring in South Vietnam, not Cambodia. Not exactly the kind of thing presidents tend to talk about on TV. (Even the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum’s timeline describes the attacks as “secret bombings.”) The image in the Commemoration timeline is actually from an April 30, 1970 press conference in which Nixon announced the “incursion” of U.S. and South Vietnamese forces into Cambodia. It would take until August 1973, more than four years after it began, for the president to admit to the clandestine bombing campaign.
The covert attacks on Cambodia eventually became the basis for the firstmotion to impeach Nixon, and a resulting investigation revealed documents that proved the president himself had ordered its cover-up. The motion was voted down due to political considerations -- in favor of articles of impeachment for the Watergate crimes and abuse of power, including wiretaps that resulted from the cover-up of the secret bombing -- but 10 members of Congress who backed the motion filed a dissenting view that read, in part:
“It is difficult to imagine Presidential misconduct more dangerously in violation of our constitutional form of government than Mr. Nixon’s decision secretly and unilaterally to order the use of American military power against another nation, and to deceive and mislead the Congress about this action."
Given all of this, it’s reasonable to ask whether the timeline entry didn’t warrant a few additional facts, slightly more context, and, perhaps, a photo that doesn’t deceive the audience.
So I did just that.
In August 2013, I tried contacting the Vietnam War Commemoration Office to get some answers about the timeline. When asked about the entries for My Lai and Speedy Express, a spokesperson from the office said that they were written by an individual who no longer worked there, so no one could address specific questions. Next, I aired my concerns about the timeline to M.J. Jadikk, chief of strategic communications for the U.S. Vietnam War Commemoration, and then followed up by email. I asked eight pointed questions about the entries on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, My Lai, Speedy Express, Operation Menu, and other problematic information as well, and I didn’t exactly pull punches. “It seems to me,” I wrote her, “that some timeline entries are lacking pertinent information, are watered-down, misleading, and in some cases grossly disingenuous... The sheer number of examples suggests that this is something more than accidental.”
Jadikk answered none of my questions. “Our timeline is a work in progress and will continue to be reviewed accordingly,” she responded. “I have forwarded your concerns to our Branch Chief for History and Education for review.” When I checked back four months later on the results of that review, new procedures were indeed in place -- for media queries! Now, all of them were being forwarded to Lieutenant Colonel Tom Crosson at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Crosson? The name rang a bell.
In August, while writing an article for the BBC, I had contacted Lieutenant Colonel Crosson for comment about evidence of U.S. atrocities and Vietnamese civilian suffering -- much of it from long-classified U.S. military records -- that I present in my book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Although decades had passed since the end of the conflict, he expressed doubt that it was possible for the military to provide an official statement in “a timely manner.”
Not much has changed since then.
My follow-up request for answers to months-old questions was forwarded to Crosson in early December. A couple weeks later, I contacted him looking for a comment. More than a month has passed and I’m still waiting for an answer to any of the questions I first posed in August.
“I think this is simply false,” he told me by email. “I am not aware of any U.S. aircraft downed that day and I think I would know.” These planes, he suspected, were actually lost the following day while flying missions “in retaliation for the (imaginary) second Tonkin Gulf Incident on August 4th.” The August 2nd Tonkin Gulf entry, he added, was “not quite accurate” either and was only “marginally useful” insofar as it was “close enough to the truth to allow readers to go looking for more information.”
With that in mind, I turned to Fredrik Logevall, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam and author of Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, a landmark study of American policymaking on Vietnam from 1963 to 1965. When it came to the Commemoration’s take on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, he told me that “some context for this entry is sorely needed.”
“There's little doubt in my mind that the administration entered the month of August [1964] looking for a pretext to flex a little muscle in Vietnam,” he added. “Finally, it should be said the administration misrepresented what occurred in the Gulf, particularly with respect to the alleged second attack on August 4th, which evidence even at the time showed almost certainly never happened.”
None of this essential context can, of course, be found anywhere in the timeline. Still, everyone makes mistakes, so I meandered through the Pentagon’s chronology looking at other key entries.
Soon, I found the one dealing with My Lai.
On March 15, 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, ahead of an operation in an area they knew as “Pinkville.” As unit member Harry Stanley recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina’s words only slightly differently: they were to “kill everything that breathed.” What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.”
The next morning, roughly 100 soldiers were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in South Vietnam’s Quang Ngai Province and followed Medina’s orders to a T. Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water. It took a year and a half for a cover-up that extended from soldiers in the field to generals at the top of the division to unravel -- thanks in large measure to veterans Ron Ridenhour and Ron Haberle and crack investigative reporterSeymour Hersh.
Click here to see a larger version
The military took great pains to contain the fallout from the My Lai revelations, offering basement-level estimates of the death toll and focusing its attention onLieutenant William Calley, the lowest ranking officer who could conceivably shoulder the blame, while also burying other atrocity allegations, deep-sixinginquiries, classifying documents, and obstructing investigations in order to cast My Lai as a one-off aberration. In their meticulously researched 1992 bookFour Hours at My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim write:
“What was first a ‘massacre’ quickly became a ‘tragedy’ and was then referred to as an ‘incident.’ General [William R.] Peers, whose exhaustive inquiry into the events at My Lai remains the best source for what really happened there, was warned by his superiors not to use the word ‘massacre’ at the press conference held on the publication of his report [in 1970].”
More than 40 years later, the Department of Defense is still operating from the same playbook. The Vietnam War Commemoration’s interactive timeline refers to My Lai as an “incident” not a massacre, the death toll is listed at “more than 200” instead of more than 500, and it singles out only Lieutenant Calley (who certainly had plenty of blood on his hands) as if the deaths of all those Vietnamese civilians, carried out by dozens of men at the behest of higher command, could be the fault of just one junior officer.
Given the Pentagon’s take on the My Lai massacre, I was hardly surprised by the one-sentence timeline entry on Operation Speedy Express, which says little more than that the six-month operation in the Mekong Delta “yield[ed] an enemy body count of 11,000.” This has long been the military’s official position, but the Defense Department knows full well that it isn’t the whole story.
Click here to see a larger version
In the early 1970s, a veteran who served in that operation sent a letter to the Pentagon (and then followed up with letters to other top Army generals) blowing the whistle on the systematic use of heavy firepower on populated areas which resulted in what he called a “My Lai each month.” His allegations were bolstered by those of U.S. advisors and Vietnamese sources, as well as by an internal report commissioned by the Army's acting general counsel, endorsing the whistleblower’s contention that an obsession with what was called “the body count” likely led to civilian deaths. The veteran’s shocking allegations were, however, kept secret for decades and a nascent inquiry into them was suppressed.
A later Newsweek investigation would conclude that as many as 5,000 civilians were killed during Operation Speedy Express. And a hush-hush internal military report, commissioned in the wake of the Newsweek story, suggested that the magazine had offered a low-end estimate. The document -- also kept secret and then buried for decades -- concluded:
“While there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by U.S. forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).”
Despite these findings, which have -- in recent years -- been aired in publications from the Nation to the Washington Post, the Vietnam War Commemoration ignores even the military’s own estimate that as many as 60% of those killed in the operation may have been innocents.
Keep scrolling through the timeline and additional examples of dubious history regularly present themselves. Take March 15, 1969: “President Nixon ordered a B-52 strike on enemy bases in Cambodia. The first strike was made on 17 March and initiated a fourteen month bombing campaign labeled Operation Menu,” reads the entry. Next to it, there’s a picture of Nixon holding a press conference to announce the missions and point out the targets. Pretty cut and dried, right? Maybe not.
Click here to see a larger version
Operation Menu was a coldly titled collection of B-52 bomber raids against suspected Vietnamese enemy “base areas” -- given the codenames "Breakfast," "Lunch," "Snack," "Dinner," "Dessert," and "Supper." As William Shawcross demonstrated in Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, it was kept secret from the American people, Congress, and even some top military brass via a conspiracy of silence, phony cover stories, the burning of documents, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged the strikes as occurring in South Vietnam, not Cambodia. Not exactly the kind of thing presidents tend to talk about on TV. (Even the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum’s timeline describes the attacks as “secret bombings.”) The image in the Commemoration timeline is actually from an April 30, 1970 press conference in which Nixon announced the “incursion” of U.S. and South Vietnamese forces into Cambodia. It would take until August 1973, more than four years after it began, for the president to admit to the clandestine bombing campaign.
The covert attacks on Cambodia eventually became the basis for the firstmotion to impeach Nixon, and a resulting investigation revealed documents that proved the president himself had ordered its cover-up. The motion was voted down due to political considerations -- in favor of articles of impeachment for the Watergate crimes and abuse of power, including wiretaps that resulted from the cover-up of the secret bombing -- but 10 members of Congress who backed the motion filed a dissenting view that read, in part:
“It is difficult to imagine Presidential misconduct more dangerously in violation of our constitutional form of government than Mr. Nixon’s decision secretly and unilaterally to order the use of American military power against another nation, and to deceive and mislead the Congress about this action."
Given all of this, it’s reasonable to ask whether the timeline entry didn’t warrant a few additional facts, slightly more context, and, perhaps, a photo that doesn’t deceive the audience.
So I did just that.
In August 2013, I tried contacting the Vietnam War Commemoration Office to get some answers about the timeline. When asked about the entries for My Lai and Speedy Express, a spokesperson from the office said that they were written by an individual who no longer worked there, so no one could address specific questions. Next, I aired my concerns about the timeline to M.J. Jadikk, chief of strategic communications for the U.S. Vietnam War Commemoration, and then followed up by email. I asked eight pointed questions about the entries on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, My Lai, Speedy Express, Operation Menu, and other problematic information as well, and I didn’t exactly pull punches. “It seems to me,” I wrote her, “that some timeline entries are lacking pertinent information, are watered-down, misleading, and in some cases grossly disingenuous... The sheer number of examples suggests that this is something more than accidental.”
Jadikk answered none of my questions. “Our timeline is a work in progress and will continue to be reviewed accordingly,” she responded. “I have forwarded your concerns to our Branch Chief for History and Education for review.” When I checked back four months later on the results of that review, new procedures were indeed in place -- for media queries! Now, all of them were being forwarded to Lieutenant Colonel Tom Crosson at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Crosson? The name rang a bell.
In August, while writing an article for the BBC, I had contacted Lieutenant Colonel Crosson for comment about evidence of U.S. atrocities and Vietnamese civilian suffering -- much of it from long-classified U.S. military records -- that I present in my book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Although decades had passed since the end of the conflict, he expressed doubt that it was possible for the military to provide an official statement in “a timely manner.”
Not much has changed since then.
My follow-up request for answers to months-old questions was forwarded to Crosson in early December. A couple weeks later, I contacted him looking for a comment. More than a month has passed and I’m still waiting for an answer to any of the questions I first posed in August.
@tru_m.a.c
Upping
www.thetimes.com
Upping
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www.thetimes.com