American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (17 page)

In South Vietnam,
RMK-BRJ employed
4,200 Americans, 5,700 Filipinos and Koreans, and 42,000 South Vietnamese. The Americans earned roughly $1,000 a month, not including bonuses (about $6,836 in current dollars), while the Vietnamese were paid about $35 a month (about $239 a month in current dollars). Consortium bosses claimed they wanted to raise wages for the Vietnamese but were prevented from doing so by U.S. embassy officials concerned about inflation.

In the twenty-first-century U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, private contractors have played an even greater role in building and maintaining the military’s infrastructure, none more so than the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which has been the recipient of billions of dollars in federal spending. Brown & Root was formed in 1919 by Texas brothers Herman and George Brown. In 1962, after Herman’s death, George sold the company to Halliburton but continued to run it as an independent subsidiary. In the late 1960s, as part of the RMK-BRJ consortium, Brown & Root received so many profitable contracts in Vietnam it became the largest engineering and construction firm in the United States.

Brown & Root rose to preeminence
arm-in-arm with Lyndon Johnson. Herman and George Brown began offering large campaign contributions to LBJ when he was a first-term congressman from Texas. LBJ soon helped the brothers secure federal funding to build the Mansfield Dam, Brown & Root’s first major project. The favor was more than returned. According to biographer Robert Caro, LBJ’s first election to the Senate in 1948 was essentially purchased by Brown & Root. The Brown brothers flew the candidate around the state on their private plane, paid for media, shook down subcontractors for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash contributions, and provided the money to buy votes directly. In the end, LBJ was declared the winner by eighty-seven votes, earning him the facetious nickname “
Landslide Lyndon
.”

Brown & Root, a fiercely antiunion firm, developed many strong supporters in Washington, but none as powerful and useful as Lyndon Johnson. In the 1950s, with LBJ’s help, the company built air bases in Spain, France, and Guam, and NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. In the 1960s, with LBJ in the White House,
Vietnam contracts caused Brown & Root to double in size
and rocket to the top of its industry.

For the antiwar movement, Brown & Root became one of several corporate symbols of war profiteering. It didn’t have quite the same taint as Dow Chemical and other weapons producers, but GIs were especially aware of its power, witnessing firsthand its dramatic impact on the Vietnamese landscape. Their nickname for Brown & Root was “Burn & Loot.”

In 1971,
Brown & Root won a contract
to rebuild the infamous prison “tiger cages” on Con Son Island operated by the South Vietnamese government with U.S. support. The existence of the tiger cages came to light earlier that year when a U.S. congressional delegation gained access to the small cement pits covered with bars. The tiger cages were reserved for South Vietnamese political prisoners who refused to pledge allegiance to the Saigon government. The prisoners were horribly ill-fed, abused, and tortured. Searing photographs of them in their tiny cells were published in
Life
magazine, and the international outcry generated official assurances of reform. The prison would be rebuilt, purportedly with more humane conditions and treatment. Brown & Root received $400,000 to furnish 384 new cells. According to Don Luce, who worked in Vietnam from 1958 to 1971, first for International Voluntary Services and then for the World Council of Churches, the new cells were actually two square feet
smaller
than the original tiger cages. He later interviewed former prisoners who said the new tiger cages were “in every way worse than the former ones.”

While the war brought big profits to some American corporations, the profits of U.S. businesses and banks as a whole actually declined in the late 1960s. War-related inflation was part of the cause, eroding the real rate of return on corporate investments and loans. Another cause of declining corporate profits is that workers were doing better. The government’s enormous military spending had helped produce historically low rates of unemployment (3.8 percent from 1965 to 1969). With
more jobs available
, workers could successfully demand better wages, thus diminishing corporate profits. Of course, the government might have provided a healthier jobs program than warfare, and without the war in Vietnam it might also have devoted more resources to the war on poverty (which even at its peak received only one-seventeenth of the funding for Vietnam).

In any case, American businesses came to believe that the war was hurting their profits, and that is the main reason many executives began to turn against it. Of course, some were simply outraged by the war itself. As early as January 1966, for example, Marriner Eccles, former chair of the Federal Reserve under FDR and Truman, publicly declared that the United States was acting as the aggressor in Vietnam and should get out.

However, the heart of corporate opposition to the war was the pragmatic concern that it was not good for business. That was the point emphasized by Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace. By 1968 the group had some 1,600 members and ran an antiwar ad in the
New York Times
: “We are working actively to
end the bombing, deescalate the war
, and
withdraw American troops
. As businessmen, we know
the Vietnam War is
bad business
.”

The case was made most notably in 1970 by Louis B. Lundborg, the chairman of the board of the Bank of America, which was then the largest private bank in the world. Testifying before Senator William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee on the impact of the Vietnam War on the U.S. economy, Lundborg opened with this:

The thrust of my testimony
will be that the war in Vietnam distorts the American economy. The war is a major contributor to inflation—our most crucial domestic economic problem. It draws off resources that could be put to work solving imperative problems facing this nation at home. And despite the protestation of the New Left to the contrary, the fact is that an end to the war would be good, not bad, for American business.

Chairman Lundborg was understandably sensitive to attacks on the Bank of America made by the most radical elements of the left. Six weeks before Lundborg’s congressional testimony, one of his banks was burned to the ground by a crowd of angry young protesters in Isla Vista, California, near the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). According to
Time
magazine, “the students rose up for three days of insane violence.” On the first night, a portion of the crowd broke every one of the bank’s windows. On the second night, the bank was torched. “
Cowardly little bums
” was Governor Ronald Reagan’s description of the rioters. He called in four hundred National Guardsmen to clear the streets. Weeks later, Bank of America brought in a trailer to serve as a temporary bank. The police arrived and fired tear gas. One cop also fired his weapon, killing UCSB student Kevin Moran.

A small but growing number of radicals were joining revolutionary groups, like the Weather Underground, that endorsed acts of violence against key symbols of state and corporate power, and the Bank of America was a quintessential symbol. In the months after the bank burning in Isla Vista, there were at least
forty more attempts to damage
or destroy Bank of America buildings.

Chairman Lundborg found it “repugnant” that some Americans believed the war had anything to do with economic motives. “The thought that war would be initiated or sustained for a single day because it might stimulate the economy should be abhorrent to any decent human being. And yet there are those who say that American business is helping to do just that.” However much Lundborg and other corporate leaders may have come to oppose the war, there was no move to turn down war-related business. The Bank of America did not close its branches in South Vietnam or sever its financial connections to the hundreds of major corporations that supplied the military with its weapons and filled its PXs.

And Lundborg’s primary criticism of the war was not moral, it was economic.
The war, he argued, hurt profits
. That was the bottom line of his congressional testimony: “During the four years prior to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, corporate profits after taxes rose 71 percent. From 1966 through 1969 corporate profits after taxes rose only 9.2 percent.”

Corporate chiefs were no more united in their views of the war than the public at large. Many businessmen still supported the war, and so did President Nixon. Lundborg’s antiwar testimony fell on deaf ears in the White House. Two weeks later Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia, which he had been secretly bombing for a year. He claimed it was the only way to achieve an honorable peace in Vietnam. The war continued for five more years.

Twenty years after the war, in the mid-1990s, the United States ended its postwar economic embargo of Vietnam and established diplomatic relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. American corporations were among the most forceful advocates for normalized relations.
Business Week
and
Fortune
touted Vietnam as a vast new market and workshop—
a new “Asian tiger
.” With a large population (thirteenth in the world) of poor, but capable and industrious, workers, the economic opportunities were enormous. Better still, Vietnam was beginning to encourage entrepreneurship, profit-driven growth, and foreign investment. Though still politically controlled by the Communist Party, Vietnam was now open for business.

The Bank of America returned to Vietnam, along with scores of other U. S. companies, old and new—Chevron, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Ford, Intel, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Shell, and Time Warner.
Trade with the United States
jumped from just a few hundred million dollars in the first years after normalization, to about $1.2 billion in 2000 and almost $30 billion in 2013, most of it in imports from Vietnam.

One of the first American companies to enter Vietnam in the mid-1990s was Nike. It hired some 25,000 Vietnamese workers, most of them young women from the poor, rural countryside. Investigations of working conditions in the late 1990s found that most employees were paid about 20 cents an hour and worked seventy hours a week. The hot factories reeked of glue and paint and the discipline was draconian. Workers were allowed only one bathroom break per shift, and two drinks of water. Managers punished workers who fell behind or made mistakes by forcing them to kneel on the ground for extended periods with their arms up, or they sent them outside to stand in the sun. Verbal abuse and sexual harassment were reported as commonplace.

Nike executives in the United States evaded responsibility for these conditions, arguing that they had subcontracted management of the factories to foreign companies (mostly South Korean and Taiwanese) or insisting that abuses were isolated and infrequent. In 1997, a small flurry of articles criticized
Nike’s sweatshop labor
practices in Vietnam, but Nike’s image in the U.S. was overwhelmingly defined by its flashy advertising for its expensive sports gear. Many of the riveting ads featured basketball legend Michael Jordan. By 1997, Nike was releasing the thirteenth annual design of
Air Jordan, the sneakers
named after the star player.
Sneaker News
reported that “the XIII takes its design inspiration from the black panther, and of course, from Michael’s predatory nature and catlike quickness on the court.” Retail price: $150.

In 2010, in downtown Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), a sixty-eight-story skyscraper was completed—the Bitexco Financial Tower. It dwarfs the surrounding cityscape where even most of the largest buildings do not exceed ten or fifteen stories. Jutting out of the tower’s fiftieth floor, six hundred feet above the ground, is a giant semicircular platform—a helipad! This astonishing appendage is meant to suggest a lotus petal, a hint of Vietnam’s national flower. What a contrast to the makeshift helipads of 1975—those rooftops around Saigon (including the top of the U.S. embassy) from which Americans and their South Vietnamese allies desperately scrambled onto helicopters to evacuate the defeated city. Now the new, enormous landmark reaches out and beckons to the helicopters of the international corporate elite. Bitexco chairman Vu Quang Hoi said in an interview: “The building symbolizes Vietnam’s integration into the international marketplace.
The purpose
 . . . is to attract companies wishing to have a foothold and offer their best services in the Vietnamese market.” If Walt Rostow were still alive, he might have said that the building proves that Vietnam is moving rapidly through its phase of economic takeoff on its inevitable path to the “age of high mass consumption.” Millions of other people, in both Vietnam and America, might look at the same evidence and say: What were we fighting for?

A
S
WORD
SPREAD
that President Kennedy had been killed, Americans turned to each other in shock and grief.
They also turned to their televisions
to watch the almost nonstop live news coverage. By Monday, November 25, 1963—a national day of mourning to mark Kennedy’s funeral—93 percent of American households were tuned in. Perhaps no other event in U.S. history has been viewed in real time by a greater percentage of the nation’s people.

When the casket was carried down the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral and placed on the horse-drawn caisson for the final journey to Arlington National Cemetery, Jacqueline Kennedy leaned down and whispered something to her young son, John Kennedy Jr., who had, that very day, turned three years old. The little boy stepped forward and saluted his father’s flag-draped coffin.

At Arlington, the uniformed pallbearers, representing every branch of the military, carried the casket to the hillside grave. En route, they passed through a cordon of soldiers who formed an honor guard. These men had been flown in from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at the request of the slain president’s brother.
Robert Kennedy made the call
because he knew how much these men had impressed the president, how much he identified them with all that was best about the American military and the nation. They were members of the army’s Special Forces, the Green Berets. After the president was laid to rest, the leader of the honor guard, Sergeant Major Francis Ruddy, removed his green beret and placed it near the eternal flame that marked the gravesite.

By the time of JFK’s death, these elite, counter-guerrilla commandos had become icons of the New Frontier. Magazines and newspapers practically competed to offer the most lavish praise. The Green Berets were not ordinary G.I. Joes, or reluctant draftees; these were the ultimate professionals—the best of the best.

The media relished the
punishing thirty-eight-week training ordeal endured by the intrepid volunteers, “a killing tenure of unrelieved work and pressure” with nighttime drops into snake-infested swamps and endless runs in the baking southern sun. The Green Berets were not just the finest physical specimens the military could produce; they were, according to the
Saturday Evening Post
, the “
Harvard Ph.D.’s of warfare
”—“politico-military experts” who provided the perfect antidote to Communist-led insurgencies in remote areas throughout the world. Steeped in the works of Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara; trained in foreign languages; schooled on indigenous cultural mores; masters of stealth, ambush, demolitions, and emergency medical procedures; and capable of killing their enemy in dozens of ways, the Green Berets could out-guerrilla the guerrilla and defeat the Red insurgent on his own turf with his own techniques.
As
Time
effused
in 1961: “The [American] guerrillas can remove an appendix, fire a foreign-made or obsolete gun, blow up a bridge, handle a bow and arrow, sweet-talk some bread out of a native in his own language, fashion explosives out of chemical fertilizer, cut an enemy’s throat (Peking radio calls the operators ‘Killer Commandos’), live off the land.” Even the army’s own propaganda could not have been more celebratory.

By combining the sophisticated technology and training of the world’s most advanced society with the wilderness arts of the “natives,” the Green Berets were cast as the latest version in a long line of American warrior heroes who, at least in national mythology, have drawn their power from both “civilization” and “savagery.” Laudatory accounts compared the “stealthy marauders” of Fort Bragg to the Indian fighters like Daniel Boone, the revolutionary patriots who used backwoods skills to defeat the redcoats, the Confederate rangers under John “The Gray Ghost” Mosby, and Merrill’s Marauders, who fought behind Japanese lines in the Burmese jungles during World War II.

But the Green Berets were said to rely less on brute force than their predecessors. With antibiotics and folksy charm they would win the hearts and minds of indigenous populations and inspire them to do most of the fighting to defeat Communist rebels. They combined the service of Dr. Tom Dooley and the unflinching toughness of America’s best fighting men. It was as if they were a well-armed Peace Corps.

The Green Berets had not always received such gushing tributes. Although founded in 1952, the Special Forces had languished in relative obscurity until the Kennedy administration. Many officers disdained elite units; they would only produce prima donnas—arrogant, undisciplined freelancers who flaunt their special status and undermine the morale of the regular army. In 1956, that viewpoint led to a crowning indignity—the Special Forces were officially
denied permission to wear
their distinctive green berets.

But President Kennedy loved the Green Berets, revived their status, and returned their berets. They were, he believed, just the sort of men best suited to fight a smart, largely covert, small-scale counter-guerrilla war in South Vietnam. Early in his presidency he sent four hundred Green Berets to South Vietnam and steadily increased their number. “Wear the beret proudly,” Kennedy told the Special Forces when he went to Fort Bragg in October 1962 to see them in action. “It will be a mark of distinction and
a badge of courage
in the fight for freedom.” The president was treated to a demonstration that included everything from rappelling to archery to hand-to-hand combat techniques. They even had a guy flying around with a “rocketbelt” strapped to his back. As more dignitaries flocked to Fort Bragg to see the Green Berets perform, the demonstration was dubbed “Disneyland.”

The Green Berets were not the only elite military unit. The navy had its SEALs, the air force its commandos, the marines their reconnaissance teams, and it must have galled them that the Special Forces received so much more hype. But there was, in fact, a deep respect for service of every kind in the early 1960s, most famously articulated and encouraged by JFK’s inaugural address.

Kennedy’s famous call to service (“Ask not . . .”) has been repeated so often it has lost its original power, but in that moment it tapped a deep well of national feeling. Virtually every line of JFK’s inaugural links the efforts of ordinary citizens to the highest imaginable stakes. Indeed, “
a new generation of Americans
” was responsible for the fate of the entire world. “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” These stark extremes punctuate the entire speech—progress or annihilation, peace or war, freedom or tyranny, cooperation or division, hope or despair. People could transform the world for the better, or destroy it. The daily possibility of human extinction demanded a struggle to eradicate “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”

Of course, if war was necessary, Americans must be willing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But JFK made clear that young people might help transform the world in every conceivable arena, not just military service. And he was not alone. The early 1960s, perhaps more than any other time in our history, provided an enormous and diverse set of role models who inspired teenagers to envision themselves as historical actors—civil rights activists, folksingers, astronauts, Peace Corps volunteers, Beat Generation writers, Green Berets. Even the four sensational mop tops from Liverpool, whose first hits were almost entirely about adolescent love and yearning, seemed to have the talent and magnetism to transform an entire culture and its values.

When the Beatles appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in early 1964,
seventy-three million Americans
were watching, the largest television audience since JFK’s funeral just a few months before, and the largest audience for a regular TV show there had ever been. Many commentators dismissed Beatlemania as a transitory teen sensation dominated by young, shrieking, hair-tugging girls. But it soon became clear that the Beatles, and the cultural transformations they signaled, would have a deeper and more enduring impact on America than almost any adult could have imagined. At the very least they reignited the liberating, youthful idealism that had been wounded, but not crushed, by Kennedy’s death.

The Ed Sullivan Show
(initially called
Toast of the Town
) began in 1948 and ran until 1971, one of the most successful programs in television history. A true variety show, it brought together some of the most surreal combinations of entertainers ever assembled. Sullivan’s something-for-everyone approach (“And now for all you youngsters out there . . .”) partly explains the show’s popularity, but its success also exemplified the degree to which American culture in the two decades after World War II was united by powerful centripetal forces. Despite deep divisions and great diversity, postwar America was bound together by broadly held values and convictions, many of them linked to the faith that the United States acted as a force for good in the world and represented an exceptional set of political ideals open to improvement.

By 1966, the Vietnam War and ongoing racial conflict had greatly strained that faith and cohesion, but not yet to the breaking point.
On January 30, 1966
, almost two years after the Beatles first appeared,
The Ed Sullivan Show
featured a typically bizarre mix of entertainment: Dinah Shore sang “Chim-Chim-Cher-ee” and a blues medley; Dick Capri cracked jokes; the Four Tops sang “It’s the Same Old Song”; an archer named Bob Markworth shot balloons off the head of his wife, Mayana; José Feliciano played an acoustic guitar version of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and somehow kept the tempo flying even after he dropped his pick; Jackie Vernon did a comedy bit about Gunga Din; Acadian folk dancers performed in wooden clogs; and frequent guest Topo Gigio, the ten-inch Italian mouse operated by four puppeteers, did his usual shtick (“Eddie, keees me goodnight!”). Also appearing was a twenty-five-year-old active-duty Green Beret medic, Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.

In full-dress uniform, wearing the iconic beret, Sadler sang “The Ballad of the Green Berets”:

Fighting soldiers from the sky

Fearless men who jump and die . . .

Silver wings upon their chests

These are men, America’s best

One hundred men will test today

But only three win the Green Beret.

A month after this performance, Sadler’s ballad reached number one on the pop charts and stayed there for six weeks, selling two million copies. “
The Ballad of the Green Berets
” was, in fact,
Billboard
magazine’s number one pop song for 1966 (eventually selling eight million copies), more popular than anything released that year by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys—everybody. The fact that Sadler’s unabashed tribute to military service had such massive appeal radically jars with common memories of the 1960s. After all, by the time “The Ballad of the Green Berets” hit the charts, American kids had already embraced “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (1955–1961), Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” (“You set back and watch / When the death count gets higher,” 1963), Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” (1965), and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” (“You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’ / You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?”—a number one hit in the fall of 1965).

Many peace activists considered
Barry Sadler’s ballad a dangerous piece of militaristic propaganda. And pro-war students sometimes taunted antiwar protesters by blasting “Ballad of the Green Berets” out of their dorm rooms at full volume during campus rallies. The war divided Americans over just about everything, including music.

Yet the culture of the mid-1960s
resisted such clear-cut labels
. Millions of young Americans liked “The Ballad of the Green Berets”
and
the folk songs of Peter, Paul and Mary. The emotions they touched had something in common. Like so much else in that era, they encouraged young people to think about their relationship to the world and to history—to have grand aspirations and commitments. Those longings might be unsettled, and even contradictory, but they were nurtured by a wide range of sources. And “The Ballad of the Green Berets” does not even mention Vietnam. It celebrates elite military training and the willingness to “jump and die” for “those oppressed.”

The popularity of Sadler’s song reminds us that the Vietnam generation was one of the most patriotic ever raised. And millions of young men who would eventually turn against the Vietnam War grew up enchanted by military culture. They had spent endless hours in parks and woods with sticks and toy guns, mowing down “Japs” or “Krauts” or “Injuns,” watching World War II movies on TV into the early morning hours, idolizing aggressive macho stars like John Wayne, and harboring boyhood fantasies of military heroism. Many could imagine silver wings on their own chests, and even in 1966, with the war in Vietnam rapidly escalating, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” had the power to tingle the spines of millions of young Americans. But so, too, did the radical new music screaming out of transistor radios—songs like “My Generation” by the Who (“Things they do look awful c-c-cold / I hope I die before I get old”).

Just a year or two later, however, it was far more difficult to reconcile the conflicting impulses in American politics and culture. People felt compelled to take sides on the burning issues of the day—Vietnam, civil rights, campus protest, even music. The crazy-quilt
Ed Sullivan Show
, like the nation itself, was designed to bring together all ages, regions, classes, races, and viewpoints. But as those differences widened, Sullivan’s efforts to hold them in harmony seemed ever more strained and comical. One night in 1967
Jim Morrison
of the Doors defied Ed Sullivan by refusing to change a provocative word in “Light My Fire”—“Girl we couldn’t get much
higher.
” By then the other acts looked like throwbacks to some ancient past—Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme singing “Getting to Know You,” Yul Brynner doing a medley of Gypsy songs, and the Skating Bredos whipping around a six-foot rink.