American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (19 page)

But somehow America’s finest and all their firepower would carry the day. “
Today’s American soldier
and marine is as well prepared as any fighting man in the world for waging guerrilla warfare,”
Newsweek
reassured readers in 1965.
Time
agreed: “The American serviceman in Viet Nam is probably the most proficient the nation has ever produced.”

The U.S. military that fought in 1965 and 1966 did include a substantially higher portion of true volunteers and career professionals than it would a few years later. But
Time
grossly exaggerated their eagerness to fight. “They are in Viet Nam not because they have to be, but because they want to be . . .
almost to a man
they believe that the Vietnamese war can be won—if only their efforts are not undercut on the home front.” The possibility that American soldiers might hate the war was, at least in
Time
magazine, unthinkable.

Yet when sociologist Charles Moskos went to Vietnam in 1965 to interview army enlisted men and asked them why they were there, the answers were far different from those offered up in
Time
. “
I was fool enough to join
this man’s army,” said one. “My own stupidity for listening to the recruiting sergeant,” said another. “My tough luck in getting drafted,” said a third. He found little ideological commitment to the war. Even early on in the war, soldiers thought of their one-year tours as something like prison sentences to be endured. Most men knew exactly how many days they had left.

Despite the media’s initial focus on the “professional” military, it was an overwhelmingly working-class institution throughout the war.
A 1964 survey
of more than 78,000 active-duty enlisted men (conducted by the National Opinion Research Center) found that almost 70 percent had fathers who did blue-collar work or farm labor and an additional 10 percent had no father at home. Only about 19 percent had fathers with white-collar jobs.

As draft quotas shot up in 1965, the military
lowered its admission standards
. Prior to massive escalation in Vietnam, the military routinely rejected men who scored in the bottom two quintiles of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, its mental aptitude test. Beginning in 1965, however, the military admitted hundreds of thousands of draftees and volunteers it once would have deemed unqualified. Most of them were from poor and broken families, 80 percent were high school dropouts, and half had IQs of less than 85.

These lower standards were further dropped with the institution of Project 100,000. Begun in 1966 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it was designed to admit 100,000 poorly educated men into the military every year.
Project 100,000
was touted as a program of social uplift. One of its advocates was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As assistant secretary of labor in the early 1960s, Moynihan was disturbed by the high percentage of poor boys rejected by the military. He viewed the military as a vast, untapped agent of upward mobility with the potential to train the unskilled, employ the young and the poor, and bring self-esteem to the psychologically defeated. To reject such men, he argued, was a form of “de facto job discrimination” against “the least mobile, least educated young men.”

More than that, he thought the military could help overcome what he believed was a central explanation for black poverty—broken, fatherless families. The military, he argued, might provide a surrogate black family: “Given the strains of disorganized and matrifocal family life in which so many Negro youth come of age, the armed forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change; a world away from women, a world run by strong men and unquestioned authority.”

When Moynihan’s ideas about race in America were published in a 1965 book called
The Negro Family,
they caused a firestorm of controversy, drawing heated criticism from civil rights activists and scholars. Critics argued that Moynihan’s claims were founded on racist stereotypes and assumptions; that he attributed black poverty primarily to pathology and dysfunction rather than systemic economic inequality, discrimination, and racism.

These were not merely academic debates—Moynihan’s ideas provided the intellectual underpinning for Project 100,000. Secretary of Defense McNamara agreed that the military could provide remedial help to the “subterranean poor,” who “have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation’s abundance.” With military training they could “return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which . . . will reverse the downward spiral of decay.” Though Project 100,000 is rarely mentioned in histories of the Great Society, it was conceived and justified as a liberal reform, a part of the war on poverty. Just as policymakers defended the war as an idealistic, even liberal, effort to save the people of South Vietnam, they also claimed the military would improve the life chances of America’s most disadvantaged. Both claims proved cruel mockeries of reality.

Project 100,000 was a terrible failure. Only some 6 percent of the men inducted under Project 100,000 received any additional training, and this amounted to little more than an effort to raise reading skills to a fifth-grade level. Instead, it sent some 200,000 very poor, confused, and ill-equipped young men to Vietnam, where their death rate was twice what it was for American forces as a whole. When Martin Luther King Jr. argued that “the promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam,” he meant that the war had taken money and support away from domestic reform programs. But Project 100,000 was a Great Society program that was quite literally shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Though many poor Americans were sent to Vietnam, the vast majority were from the working class, primarily because the Vietnam-era draft was fundamentally biased in favor of the affluent and well connected. The most obvious class inequity was the student deferment that allowed those who could afford full-time college to avoid, or at least delay, military service.
Fewer than 8 percent
of all Americans who served in Vietnam (including officers) had completed college. And even by the early 1980s, Vietnam veterans were more than two times less likely to have completed college than their non-veteran peers. The most typical GIs in Vietnam were nineteen- and twenty-year-old high school graduates whose parents were factory workers, waitresses, truck drivers, nurses, firefighters, construction workers, salespeople, mechanics, police officers, miners, custodians, farm workers, and secretaries. The most uncommon GIs were young men of wealth and privilege. They had the best chance of avoiding the draft and few of them volunteered.

About 60 percent of the Vietnam generation’s men were able to avoid military service, most of them simply by taking advantage of the rules created by the draft. Three-and-a-half million men received
medical exemptions
. You might expect those from the poorest homes with the least access to consistent, high-quality medical care would receive the bulk of those exemptions. Yet, in practice, those young men had to rely on military doctors to evaluate their fitness for service. With draft quotas soaring, induction center doctors overlooked all but the most obvious disqualifying physical problems. However, men who arrived with a letter from a private doctor documenting even relatively minor physical ailments (high blood pressure, chronic skin rashes, asthma, a balky knee from a high school football injury, etc.) often gained draft exemptions. One study found that 90 percent of the men who had the means and knowledge to press these claims were successful, even if they were in generally good health.

The Vietnam-era draft began in 1948 as the first permanent peacetime draft in U.S. history. It evolved into a form of social engineering called “human resource planning.” Policy planners believed the advent of nuclear weapons made truly massive armies obsolete. But the Cold War would require tens of thousands of civilian experts to serve the military-industrial complex—engineers, scientists, technicians, even English majors with a gift for writing government propaganda. More than ever before, the “national interest,” as the government conceived it, demanded not just grunts in muddy boots, but an enormous range of highly educated civilians in jackets and ties. The goal was to create a
selective
service that produced soldiers
and
civilians who served the interests of U.S. power. To produce that result the Selective Service System devised a scheme that included both force and incentive—the club of the draft and the carrot of deferments and exemptions. Since the baby boom was huge—twenty-seven million men came of draft age during the Vietnam War—the military took 40 percent, of whom only 10 percent went to Vietnam.

The antiwar movement helped expose how the draft system was designed to manipulate the lives of an entire generation. The most damning evidence was a
Selective Service memo
discovered by a member of Students for a Democratic Society and published in
New Left Notes
in January 1967. The memo, sent to all 4,100 local draft boards in July 1965, made clear that the purpose of the draft system was to “channel” young people into careers that served the “national interest.” Channeling, the memo explains, is a “device of pressurized guidance.” The “club of induction” was used not just to draft soldiers but to “drive” other young people into higher education. Once in school, students would fear the loss of their draft deferment, a “threat” they would continue to feel “with equal intensity after graduation.” A young man would thus be “impelled to pursue his skill rather than embark upon some less important enterprise and . . . apply [it] in an essential activity in the national interest.”

Oddly enough, the memo said little about drafting soldiers. That was the easy part—“not much of an administrative or financial challenge.” The harder job was “dealing with the other millions of registrants” and finding ways to make them “more effective human beings in the national interest.” The Selective Service System regarded college and graduate students as valuable assets worthy of keeping out of combat, but only if they continued to pursue “essential” professions. Anyone who dared to drop out of school, hitchhike around the country, organize full-time against the war, or any number of other activities the Selective Service deemed inessential to the “national interest” would quickly face the “club of induction.” This system was “the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.”

To
many draft-age Americans
, it felt like a faceless system was attempting to control their lives. Equally galling was the apparent pride the Selective Service took in its ability to produce “effective human beings” with an “American” form of social control. For a generation raised to believe in the exceptional freedom of American life, encounters with the draft could be a profound awakening.

Many students began to believe that universities, allied with big business, were also designed to channel them into work that served the interests of entrenched power. At the University of California, Berkeley,
the Free Speech Movement
(1964–1965) criticized the impersonal “knowledge factories” that trained people to become compliant servants of corporate America. The movement began as a protest against the administration’s decision to forbid political organizing on campus. Hundreds of Berkeley students had already been arrested in Bay Area protests against racially discriminatory employers, including major hotels and car dealerships. And during the summer of 1964, a few dozen Berkeley students went south to organize on behalf of voting rights for African Americans as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer. Students like these were not about to stand by as the university restricted their own political rights.

The Free Speech Movement’s most famous address came in December 1964 from a twenty-two-year-old student named Mario Savio, a former altar boy from Queens (and son of a steelworker) who had participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer. According to an activist friend, Savio’s organizing experience transformed him “from being
a shy do-gooder
with a bad stutter . . . to an articulate activist who quickly became the de facto leader of the Free Speech Movement.” In front of four thousand students, Savio shouted:

We’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to . . . be made into any product! Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University. . . .
We’re human beings
! [thunderous applause]. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Less than four years earlier, John Kennedy convinced many young Americans that serving the United States would help destroy tyranny throughout the world. By 1964, a growing number had changed their minds—they now viewed their government and their nation as a force for repression, not freedom. Nor did they trust any authorities—including liberals like Berkeley president Clark Kerr—to alter the status quo without pressure from below.

Activist protest against the draft and its inequities eventually led Congress to institute draft reforms culminating in a lottery system by late 1969 and, in 1973, the end of the draft altogether. However, reform came too late to change significantly the primarily working-class composition of the military.

The major media gave little attention to the inequities of the draft. In fact, in the years 1961–1965, the media often celebrated the military as an “elite” and “professional” fighting force. Then, during the years of massive escalation in Vietnam (1965–1967), many articles touted the military as a bastion of democratic opportunity, particularly for African Americans.

President Harry Truman officially desegregated the military in 1948, but the process unfolded slowly. There were still some segregated units during the Korean War, and integrated units typically relegated African Americans to noncombat assignments because of the long-standing racist assumption that blacks lacked the courage and competence to fight well. Vietnam was the first fully integrated war, and many media accounts found it an unambiguously positive change.