American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (18 page)

By the late 1960s patriotic, pro-military tunes had vanished from the pop charts. The culture was cracking apart, and music deemed conservative was largely relegated to country music charts and TV venues like
The Lawrence Welk Show
. Many of those songs sounded defensive, like defiant claims of pride voiced from a heartland America convinced that its own values were under attack. In 1969, when Merle Haggard wrote the country hit “Okie from Muskogee,” he assumed that many (if not most) Americans had come to believe that patriotism, military service, and “livin’ right” were hopelessly square.

We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee

We don’t take no trips on LSD

We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street

We like livin’ right, and bein’ free

I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee

A place where even squares can have a ball.

Just a few years earlier most Americans had never even heard of LSD, and now its alarming presence announced itself in a country song played on the most conservative radio stations in the nation.

Within the military
, increasingly flooded by reluctant draftees or draft-pressured “volunteers,” countercultural music became as popular as it was at home. Country music retained a corps of fans, especially among the “lifers,” but most of the young troops favored songs like “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (the Animals, 1965), “Chain of Fools” (Aretha Franklin, 1967), “Purple Haze” (the Jimi Hendrix Experience, 1967), and “Fortunate Son” (Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969).

By the late 1960s, the Green Berets would become symbols of the false hype that had sold America on a war it could not win and should not have fought. The reasons for that startling shift can be identified in the very book that did as much as anything to elevate the Special Forces to national prominence, Robin Moore’s best-selling novel,
The Green Berets
. It appeared in early 1965 just as the American Green Berets in Vietnam were being vastly outnumbered by conventional troops. It quickly became a best seller in hardcover and exploded in the fall when it was released as a paperback, selling three million copies in a year. In 1966,
The Green Berets
continued to fly off the paperback racks, no doubt given an extra boost by the success of Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”
The two works reinforced each other
more closely than most people realized. Moore’s paperback cover featured a photograph of Sadler, and Sadler got his recording contract with help from Moore, who made enough changes in the lyrics to share the song’s copyright.

Moore’s stories were based on his four-month experience with Green Beret teams in Vietnam during 1964. He was not just an embedded reporter, but a participant observer who carried an automatic rifle, dressed in jungle fatigues, and “
was credited with several kills
.”

“
The Green Berets
is a book of truth,” Moore boldly claimed before acknowledging that it was, in fact, a work of fiction. It’s easy to see why the military was worried enough to require the publisher to plant a bright yellow label on the dust jacket reading “
Fiction Stranger Than Fact
!” Although Moore lionized the Green Berets as “true-life heroes,” he described them going on secret missions into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, realities no American official would dare to admit.

Moore’s characters disdain deskbound army careerists who try to rein in the unconventional commandos. Each of the nine stories serves as a demonstration to military higher-ups, and readers, that the Green Berets should be allowed to “get special jobs done any way [they] can.” But, as one character complains, “the orthodox types running this crazy war don’t like to admit to themselves that Americans are violating treaties.” With the war controlled by “conventional officers sitting in comfortable offices,” the Green Berets would have to “outfight and outsmart the Viet Cong with their
hands tied behind their backs
.” Here was an early version of Ronald Reagan’s much grander claim that the entire military had been “denied permission to win.”

Ironically, if you strip away Moore’s action-adventure framework and his unwavering assumption that the Green Berets “are
serving the cause of freedom
around the world,”
The Green Berets
provides the material for a very effective antiwar manifesto. For starters, Moore’s portrait of the South Vietnamese government and its military could hardly be more unflattering. They are utterly dependent on the United States and demonstrate no promise of gaining the support necessary to form an independent nation. With a few minor exceptions, Moore describes the South Vietnamese allies as hopelessly corrupt, unpopular, cowardly, and incompetent.

Moore concurs with the prevalent Green Beret view that the allies cannot be trusted to “fight like men.” They call the South Vietnamese military forces LLDBs—
lousy little dirty bug-outs
—for their tendency to desert in the middle of battle. In the absence of reliable, hard-fighting allies, the Green Berets hire their own, including a group of Cambodian mercenaries, led by a “sinister little brown bandit,” who are paid by the number of Viet Cong they kill. The kills are “confirmed” by the chopped-off ears or hands they bring back to the Green Berets. In one story, Moore’s heroes try to assemble a gung-ho South Vietnamese strike force from Saigon’s jails by bailing out “about 100 assorted thieves, rapists, muggers, dope pushers, pimps, homosexuals, and murderers.”

The appeal of
The Green Berets
suggests that whatever controversies the Vietnam War had ignited, there remained a huge market for blood-and-guts shoot-’em-ups with passages like this: “[He] grabbed a bayonet-tipped carbine from a lunging VC, gave it a twirl and plunged it through a Communist’s back with such force that it
pinned him, squirming
, to the mud wall.” Moore’s Green Berets were not the nation-building Peace Corps types that popped up in many of the fawning magazine articles of the early 1960s. These were combat-loving, hard-drinking cynics: “Funny thing about old Victor Charlie,” one of them muses, “he thinks Americans are dickheads for coming over here and trying to drill water wells and build schools and orphanages. The only time he respects us is when we’re killing him.”

Yet it’s not all combat. Moore mixes in enough tawdry, leering, nearly pornographic passages to paint Southeast Asia as a land of unconstrained sexual adventure for America’s fighting men. In one of his longest stories, he encourages readers to applaud the decision of a married Green Beret major,
Bernie Arklin
, to take a Laotian “wife.” The officer is in a remote “Meo” village (a derogatory term for Hmong) to recruit and train the people to fight against the Laotian Communists (the Pathet Lao). The village chief brings three girls for Major Arklin to inspect, and invites him to choose one: “The Meo will feel you are part of them if the girl is part of you. She will be your wife.”

Major Arklin resists at first, but then decides it is his “duty” to take one of the girls to gain the allegiance of the villagers. So he selects a fifteen-year-old girl who is “much lighter colored than the others,” turns out to be half French, and is named Nanette. His next duty is to sleep with her. “It would probably be an insult and a disgrace if they lived together without his enjoying the connubial pleasure she was expecting to give him.” Arklin’s adultery has magnificent results. The entire village is inspired. Everyone gets busy and the hamlet is transformed into a model of order, hygiene, and anti-Communist fervor.

Not for long. The story ends in defeat. The Pathet Lao Communists pose such a threat, Arklin has the entire village evacuated to Vientiane. Here, way back in 1964, is a foreshadowing of America’s entire venture in Southeast Asia. It unwittingly prefigures the defeat of the American-backed regimes in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, all of which were taken over by Communists in April 1975. Though Moore does not acknowledge it, Arklin’s mission in Laos is an utter failure. It merely delayed a Communist victory over the villagers. All Arklin can do is plead for an evacuation: “I want to see these people safely out of here. We owe it to them.”

Instead of denouncing the war and its failures, Moore focuses on American heroism. Major Arklin is promoted to lieutenant colonel and ordered home. When asked about his fifteen-year-old Laotian wife, he says this: “That’s one of the little tragedies in this kind of war. Nanette and I, we’ll just have to say good-bye. She had a lot to do with my success on this job.”

Even in the war’s early years it proved impossible to find American military heroes whose brave acts were paving the way to inevitable victory—heroes who seized essential territory, who liberated a grateful town, who led an advance toward the enemy’s capital. In Vietnam, the Americans had no territorial lines to advance, no grateful villagers crying out for liberation, no decisive battle or final offensive. Only the Vietnamese enemy had those. All the Pentagon could present as “progress” was the high enemy body counts reported by its troops. For the troops themselves, success was measured primarily by survival. The American heroes of Vietnam gave their lives for one another.

The first American in Vietnam to receive the nation’s highest military decoration—the Medal of Honor—was Green Beret captain
Roger Donlon
. In July 1964 he commanded a remote outpost near the Laotian border. His small Special Forces team was assigned to train a force of several hundred South Vietnamese. In the middle of the night their camp was overrun by Viet Cong. Donlon’s award citation gives a hint of his enormous courage. He “dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades,” “completely disregarded” serious shrapnel wounds to his stomach, shoulder, leg, and face, personally “annihilated” an enemy demolition team, dragged wounded men to safety, administered first aid, directed mortar fire, and more. “His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp.”

The citation failed to mention that at least a hundred of the “friendly Vietnamese” fought for the Viet Cong. As Donlon later reported, “The first thing each of the traitors did when the attack started—and they knew it was coming—was to slit the throat or break the neck of the person next to them . . . the people we thought would be shooting outward were now shooting inward.” The Green Beret hero had to defend his camp from American “allies” as well as the “enemy.”

The media in the mid-1960s tried its best to identify and praise American military heroism even in the face of mounting evidence that no amount of bravery could overcome the inherent impossibility of defending an unpopular government against a strongly supported indigenous foe. Formulaic tributes to “the American fighting man” and “our boys in uniform” often deflected attention from the war’s disturbing details. The war might be “complex” or “frustrating” or “dirty,” but much mid-’60s reportage suggested that the world’s strongest and best-trained soldiers were more than up to the task. The media’s reflexive cheerleading for American troops easily slid into a form of cheerleading for the mission they were ordered to execute.

“
Who’s Fighting in Viet Nam
: A Gallery of American Combatants” was the headline for the April 23, 1965, cover of
Time
magazine featuring an illustration of air force pilot Robert Risner, a craggy-faced forty-year-old lieutenant colonel in his flight suit and helmet. Risner, we learn, is the leader of the Fighting Cocks, a squadron of fighter pilots who fly F-105 Thunderchiefs (“streaking in like vengeful lightning bolts” on “unremitting, round-the-clock attacks”). These superfast jets carry nine thousand pounds of bombs. To fly them requires “the highest degree of human ingenuity and precision.” Risner had vast experience. In Korea, many years earlier, he had shot down eight enemy MiGs. He still regarded himself as “the luckiest man in the world to be doing what I’m doing.” Five months after appearing on the cover of
Time
, Risner was shot down over North Vietnam on his fifty-fifth bombing mission and spent the next seven years as a prisoner of war.

The Risner issue presented “the fighting American” in Vietnam by profiling a dozen servicemen. Eight of them were pilots (and thus all officers), two others were infantry officers, and another was a Green Beret on his third tour (“Damned if I can think of any place I’d rather be”). Only one of the dozen men was a young enlisted man. This wildly unrepresentative sample drove home the article’s main points. First, morale was so great even the wounded wanted to get back in the action (“With a little luck, I’ll be flying again in a few days”). Second, this was a
professional
military: “Viet Nam is no place for the 90-day wonder or the left-footed recruit. It is a place for the career man, the highly trained specialist.”

Ironically, just as this April 1965 story appeared, the massive U.S. escalation was beginning to flood Vietnam with quickly trained lieutenants (“ninety-day wonders”), one-term draftees, and “volunteers” who enlisted only because they were sure the draft would soon grab them. Within a year or two the most common media representative of the American fighting man would not be a career officer or pilot but a young enlisted infantryman who slogged through jungles and paddies with a heavy pack searching for the enemy. In the post-Vietnam years, these “grunts” were so stereotypically associated with the Vietnam War—through films and books—you might never know that thousands of Americans flew bombing missions from aircraft carriers in the South China Sea or from air force bases in Thailand and Guam.

On October 22, 1965, as the young grunts surged into Vietnam,
Time
ran a cover story called “
South Vietnam
: A New Kind of War.” The main point was to celebrate a “remarkable turnabout in the war” caused by “one of the swiftest, biggest military buildups in the history of warfare.” With “wave upon wave of combat booted Americans—lean, laconic and looking for a fight,” the enemy was now in trouble. “The Viet Cong’s once-cocky hunters have become the cowering hunted as the cutting edge of U.S. fire power slashes into the thickets of Communist strength.” Buried beneath the purple prose, a few nagging details challenged the “remarkable turnabout” thesis. We learn, for example, that army chief of staff General Harold Johnson estimates it will take ten years to “finish off” the Viet Cong and that “even the most optimistic U.S. officials think five years the outside minimum.”