American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (20 page)

“
Democracy in the Foxhole
,” a
Time
article from May 26, 1967, trumpeted the contribution of “Negro fighting men” as “a hopeful and creative development in a dirty, hard-fought war,” a chance for blacks to gain respect: “The American Negro is winning—indeed has won—a black badge of courage that his nation must forever honor.” But the greatest praise went not to black soldiers, but to the nation for understanding “a truth that Americans had not yet learned about themselves before Viet Nam: color has no place in war; merit is the only measure of the man.” For
Time
, the integrated military vindicated American exceptionalism: “More than anything, the performance of the Negro G.I. under fire reaffirms the success—and diversity—of the American experiment.”

Then, directly contradicting its own pretensions of color blindness,
Time
served up a shocking set of racial generalizations: “Often inchoate and inconsistent, instinctively self-serving yet naturally altruistic, the Negro fighting man is both savage in combat and gentle in his regard for the Vietnamese.” Then came some wild speculation about “the Negro’s” motives: “He may fight to prove his manhood—perhaps as a corrective to the matriarchal dominance of the Negro ghetto back home. . . . Mostly, though, he fights for the dignity of the Negro, to shatter the stereotypes of racial inferiority.” Clearly, very few stereotypes had been shattered at
Time.
It even hinted that racial discrimination in the military had once been justifiable: “Unlike Negroes in previous wars, the Viet Nam breed is well disciplined.”

The
Time
piece had an obvious political agenda: to use black soldiers in Vietnam (good) to criticize “Negro dissidents” at home (bad). Black soldiers,
Time
assured readers, had no patience for antiwar critics like Muhammad Ali (the magazine still called him Cassius Clay, three years after the famous boxer had changed his name). “What burns [SSgt. Glide] Brown and most Negro fighting men is the charge—first proclaimed by Stokely Carmichael and now echoed by the likes of Martin Luther King—that Viet Nam is a ‘race war’ in which the white U.S. Establishment is using colored mercenaries to murder brown-skinned freedom fighters.”

In a superficial way, the major African American
publications resembled
Time
’s upbeat coverage of blacks in the military. The magazines
Ebony
and
Jet
, and newspapers such as the
Chicago Defender
, the
Pittsburgh Courier,
and the
Amsterdam News,
initially supported the war editorially and were concerned that antiwar opposition would undermine LBJ’s support for civil rights at home. And much praise was lavished on the black paratroopers who served in famous units like the 173rd Airborne Brigade (Sky Soldiers), the 101st Airborne Division (the Screaming Eagles), and the 82nd Airborne (the All-American division). Indeed, there were so many blacks in the 82nd Airborne, some troops called it the “All Afro” division.

Yet the black press, unlike
Time
, did not believe the contributions of African American troops and nurses proved that the “American experiment” had achieved racial justice. Nor did they use the service of black troops to bash domestic civil rights activists. Nor did the black press ignore or dismiss the contributions of black servicemen from earlier times. Instead, the success of black soldiers in Vietnam was often used to highlight the
lack
of progress at home. For example, in “Negroes in ‘The Nam,’”
Ebony
writer Thomas A. Johnson concluded that “the Negro has found in his nation’s most totalitarian society—the military—the
greatest degree of functional democracy
that this nation has granted to black people.” The irony was obvious: blacks had to risk their lives in a horrific war under a rigidly authoritarian system to gain basic rights denied them at home.
Ebony
was also more likely than white-owned publications to include a diversity of black opinion and dissenting viewpoints. The Johnson article, for example, cites black troops who were worried that they would return to the United States and be ordered into black communities to suppress urban riots. Some said they would refuse any such orders. Even as early as August 1966,
Ebony
quoted a soldier saying: “I’ve been fighting ‘Charley’ (nickname for the Viet Cong) over here so I guess I’ll go back and start fighting ‘Charlie’ back home.”
Ebony
did not need to explain to its readers that “Charlie” was slang for white people.

The black press was also more attentive to the racial inequities within the military, such as the fact that despite integration, the
percentage of black officers
remained small. From 1965 to 1970 the portion of black officers in the army actually
declined
from 3.6 percent to 2.6 percent. African American publications were also more likely to point out that black troops were
over
represented in the frontline enlisted ranks and thus more likely to be killed, especially in the early years of the war. In 1965 and early 1966, almost a quarter of the Americans killed in Vietnam were African American, more than double their portion of the U.S. population.

As the war continued, the
percentage of black casualties
declined significantly. Part of the explanation is that the portion of pilots who died increased and there were relatively few black pilots. There is also anecdotal evidence that the military command, conscious of criticism about the disproportionate black casualties of 1965–1967, ordered a reduction of the number of blacks assigned to combat units. For example, in 1967 a general told
U.S. News and World Report
that his division “deliberately spread out Negroes in component units at a ratio pretty much according to the division total. We don’t want to risk having a platoon or company that has more Negroes than whites overrun or wiped out.” However, the Defense Department denied that it had given any explicit race-based deployment orders. In any case, for the war as a whole, 12.6 percent of American deaths were African American (blacks made up about 11 percent of the U.S. population).

African American troops were among the first antiwar dissenters within the military, paving the way for a GI protest movement that exploded in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the summer of 1967, for example, two African American marines at
Camp Pendleton
were court-martialed for speaking out against the war in front of about fifteen marines, most of them black, who gathered under a tree after noon chow “for an impromptu gripe session.”

Since the men were in the middle of advanced infantry training, many of them were destined to fight in Vietnam. But they began by talking about Detroit, not Vietnam. Someone had a newspaper with a headline story about the
enormous urban uprising
in the Motor City. There had been five days of burning, looting, confrontation, and armed suppression. Governor George Romney and President Lyndon Johnson ordered 8,000 National Guardsmen and 4,700 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division to move in and restore order. By week’s end, forty-three people were killed (most of them black), more than seven thousand people were jailed, and two thousand buildings were destroyed.

The most violent urban disorder of the 1960s, the Detroit uprising had its roots in fierce inequalities and a long history of institutional racism, discrimination, and police brutality. But the immediate spark was particularly relevant to the young black marines at Pendleton. The rioting began when Detroit police raided and busted an after-hours social club (a “blind pig”) where eighty-two friends and family were celebrating the homecoming of two black Vietnam veterans. They had just risked their lives overseas only to return to a mass arrest and a home front war zone.

At Pendleton, Private
George Daniels did most of the talking
. Why should black men fight in Vietnam against a nonwhite enemy? Muhammad Ali had it right—no Viet Cong ever called us nigger. They say we’re fighting for freedom in Vietnam but we haven’t even got freedom for ourselves. And what happens when we get home—are they going to send us to Detroit to put down our own people? This is a white man’s war. Let them fight it. Our battle is here at home.

Such arguments were rarely heard on the national airwaves, but they were a concern at the highest levels of American power. In 1965, when LBJ and his advisers debated massive escalation, George Ball and
McGeorge Bundy
both raised questions about the appearance and consequences of fighting a “white man’s war.” Bundy, who pushed for a deeper commitment despite his doubts, worried that the United States might be “getting into a white man’s war with all the brown men against us or apathetic.”

Private Daniels ended the noontime rap session by announcing that he had already put in a formal request to meet with the commanding officer to tell him he would refuse to fight in Vietnam. “Who all is going with me?” William Harvey and a dozen others decided to join Daniels. They were denied a meeting. Instead, the Office of Naval Intelligence interrogated all of the men individually and warned them that they could face charges of mutiny. On August 17, 1967, Daniels and Harvey were arrested and put in the brig to await a November court-martial.

The case had yet to receive any press and the two men had to rely on military lawyers to represent them.
Daniels was convicted of conspiring
to violate a section of the 1940 Smith Act, which forbids members of the naval forces from attempting to cause insubordination, disloyalty, and refusal of duty. He was sentenced to ten years of prison at hard labor. Harvey was acquitted on the Smith Act charge, but found guilty of violating Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbidding “disloyal statements . . . with design to promote disloyalty among the troops.” His sentence was six years of prison at hard labor. The two men were sent to Portsmouth Naval Prison.

Constraints on dissent within the military were draconian. Though George Daniels and William Harvey had certainly
talked
with other marines about refusing to fight in Vietnam, the only action they had taken was the perfectly legal step of requesting to speak with their commanding officer. There were no acts of disobedience; certainly no mutiny. Eventually the case received some attention in the hundreds of underground GI newspapers that sprang up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, published and distributed in secret by disaffected and rebellious troops. But by then Daniels and Harvey were doing time. An appeal was finally heard in 1969. The appeal failed, despite a strong case by the defense. The only concession made by the navy board of review was to reduce the prison sentences to four years for Daniels and three for Harvey.

The military did not usually have to rely on such extreme punishment to quell dissent. In the early years of the war, most men were kept in line with the standard tools of military training, indoctrination, and discipline. Given the power of the military to demand conformity, it is astonishing that GI opposition became so widespread. Yet in the last years of U.S. military involvement, 1969–1972, GI dissent was so endemic many officers were as concerned about maintaining discipline among their own troops as they were about fighting the enemy. The kind of antiwar talk that had produced maximum prison sentences for Daniels and Harvey in 1967 became so commonplace by 1970 that the military was unable to stop it and, to a great extent, had stopped trying.

Even the Green Berets lost their luster. In 1966, just a year after the publication of Robin Moore’s
The Green Berets
, the Vietnam War was denounced by Green Beret Donald Duncan. After returning from an eighteen-month tour in Vietnam, the highly decorated master sergeant declined a field commission promotion to captain. Instead, he left the army and joined the antiwar movement. In a
Ramparts
article called “I Quit!” he wrote, “
I couldn’t kid myself
any longer that my country was acting rationally, or even morally.” A year later, Random House published his memoir,
The New Legions
. It was simply incorrect, he wrote, to view the Green Berets as a force for freedom and democracy either at home or in Vietnam. When Duncan worked in recruitment and procurement, he was
told by the captain in charge
, “Don’t send me any niggers. Be careful, however, not to give the impression that we are prejudiced in the Special Forces. You won’t find it hard to find an excuse to reject them.” Duncan also offered details about the Green Berets’ secret training in torture techniques. “We will deny that any such thing is taught or intended,” warned the instructor. “The Mothers of America wouldn’t approve.” But the message was clear: “Your job is to teach the various methods of interrogation to your indigenous counterpart. It would be very bad form for you, as an outsider, to do the questioning—especially if it gets nasty.” Duncan described one incident that turned nasty indeed, as Vietnamese counterparts
tortured, murdered, and then mutilated
a Viet Cong suspect as several Green Berets looked on.

By 1968, even film star John Wayne couldn’t revive the reputation of the war or the military. But he tried. His film adaptation of
The Green Berets
is a preachy and completely improbable defense of American policy. The U.S. media is presented as so blatantly biased that a reporter asks a military spokesman: “Do you agree . . . that the Green Beret is just a military robot with no personal feelings?”

The film takes one of those dovish journalists and sends him to Vietnam with Green Beret colonel Kirby (John Wayne). Once there, it becomes more than obvious that the Americans are the good guys and the Viet Cong are hideous monsters. By the film’s end,
the once critical journalist
wants to return home and tell the “truth” about the war. In real life, an opposite conversion was far more common—many pro-war journalists went to Vietnam and changed their minds after firsthand exposure.

In John Wayne’s film, all the good guys are totally gung-ho, including the South Vietnamese soldiers. They sound like the “good Indians” in old movie westerns. “We build many camps; clobber many VC,” says Colonel Cai. “Affirmative?” Colonel Kirby replies: “Affirmative. I like the way you talk.”