American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (31 page)

They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me

Yeah, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me

Runnin’ down the way of life

Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep

If you don’t love it, leave it

The last line had already become a well-known bumper sticker: “
America—Love It or Leave It
.” A surprising number of Americans were doing just what the slogan suggested.
More than fifty thousand left
the country because of their opposition to the Vietnam War. Many were draft evaders and military deserters, but about half were women.

Bob Hope shared the “love it or leave it” position, but his craving for national appeal often curbed his most partisan impulses. His popularity remained enormous and rested to a large degree on his annual Christmas tours to entertain U.S. troops at foreign posts. Sponsored by the United Service Organizations (USO), Hope began these trips during World War II and made them an annual ritual in the 1950s. Starting in 1965, CBS began offering a ninety-minute TV special every January with highlights of the Christmas tour. From 1965 to 1973,
the
Bob Hope Christmas Special
was always among the year’s most widely viewed TV specials. The image of Hope hamming it up in front of huge crowds of GIs in Vietnam became one of the era’s most indelible collective memories.

There he was, with his famous ski-slope nose, jutting jaw, and leering smile as he sauntered onto the stage twirling a golf club, so casual and confident he looked like he was strolling into his own backyard, his cockiness immediately softened by a stream of self-mocking jokes about his cowardice. Wearing ever more outlandish military jackets covered with patches, stripes, and insignia, he appeared with Les Brown and His Band of Renown and a troupe of female singers, dancers, actresses, starlets, go-go dancers, and beauty pageant winners.

Even as Hope became increasingly identified as a pro-Nixon establishment figure, the shows themselves did not lose their appeal. The 1970 show was watched by 46.6 percent of American households, slightly
higher
than the percentage tuned in to the Beatles’ first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.

Most GIs loved Hope’s shows because he told genuinely funny jokes about the war, because the performers displayed obvious affection for the troops, and because it was an opportunity to see sexy stars like Ann-Margret, Joey Heatherton, and Raquel Welch. Home front viewers had the double pleasure of watching an entertaining show and seeing GIs laugh and cheer (a great contrast to the troubling images of GIs in body bags or GIs burning down Vietnamese homes).

The shows also contained many jokes that poked fun at official claims about the war. Hope and his writers understood that their topical humor would fail if it didn’t acknowledge some of the ways the GIs’ day-to-day experience of the war was laughably contrary to government press releases. Hope’s jokes never insulted the powerful enough to jeopardize his coveted place on presidential invitation lists, but they were more subversive than might be expected from the host of Honor America Day.

On his first visit to Vietnam in 1964, at a time when the government still denied direct American participation in combat, Hope came onto the stage at Bien Hoa and shouted out, “Hello, advisers!” The troops roared with laughter and applause, thrilled that Hope had immediately skewered the phony euphemism. He also made fun of the American-backed government in Saigon, which had been replaced by one military coup after another. “I know quite a bit about Vietnam,” Hope said. “For instance, it’s a very democratic country [some derisive laughter]. It really is. Everyone gets to be president! [big laughs and applause]”

A year later, Hope addressed twelve thousand troops in Saigon. Setup: “I’m happy to be here. I understand everything’s great, the situation’s improved, in fact things couldn’t be better [loud jeering].” Punch line: “Well who am I gonna believe—you, or Huntley and Brinkley [the NBC news anchors]?” No one appreciated the dark humor of “progress” better than GIs.

Hope also scored easy laughs at the expense of draft-card burners and protesters. “Hey, can you imagine those peaceniks back home burning their draft cards? Why don’t they come over here and Charlie’ll burn ’em for ’em.” But he got just as many laughs with jokes that assumed nobody wanted to be in Vietnam. “Miniskirts are bigger than ever,” one joke began. “Even some of the fellas are wearing ’em. Don’t laugh. If you’d thought of it, you wouldn’t be here.” Or: “I don’t know what you guys did to get here, but let that be a lesson to you.”

Hope ended many of his TV specials with a tribute to the soldiers and some pro-war propaganda. To close the 1965 show, he showed footage of American soldiers handing out gifts to Vietnamese kids (“That’s the story of our country—giving. Let’s face it, we’re the Big Daddy of this world”). And then he reassured viewers that the troops were fully committed to the war: “They’re not about to give up because they know if they walked out of this bamboo obstacle course it would be like saying to the Commies, come and get it.”

That was for home front consumption. In front of the troops, he generally avoided mouthing the official line. One time, in 1969, he tried it and was booed. In Lai Khe, Hope told troops that President Nixon had personally assured him he had a plan to bring peace to Vietnam. It may have sounded like a setup for a joke, but he was serious. The boos poured in. “They were the coldest, most unresponsive audience my show had ever played to,” Hope later recalled. “
They didn’t laugh at anything
 . . . I just couldn’t get through to them.”

It was a wake-up call for the sixty-three-year-old comedian, who had been slow to recognize the disillusionment of American soldiers. By 1968, many GIs in his audiences flashed the peace sign, but Hope stubbornly insisted that the sign meant
V for victory
.

TV viewers did not see the booing soldiers at Lai Khe. And when Hope starting telling
marijuana jokes
in 1970, NBC censored those as well, despite their getting the loudest laughs of the tour. Before fifteen thousand soldiers, Hope asked: “Is it true that you guys are interested in gardening? The security guards said you are growing your own grass.” Then the joke that got the biggest cheers and laughs: “Instead of taking [marijuana] away from the soldiers, they ought to give it to the negotiators in Paris.” Hope was finally acknowledging that almost everyone, including the troops, wanted the war to end. On his 1971 trip, in the midst of a downpour in Da Nang, he opened with this: “I want to ask you one thing: How long does it have to rain before they call off this war, huh?”

Hope’s Vietnam shows were the culture’s best attempt to make the nation’s most divisive war look like World War II. But in the end, none of the gags could reunite the nation or make it forget the war’s cruelty and deceit, failure and shame. Yet Hope’s yearly homage to U.S. troops was forward-looking in one respect. It anticipated a powerful post-Vietnam impulse to cultivate national unity around controversial and divisive foreign policies by honoring the service and sacrifice of American troops. Hope said, in effect, whatever you think of the war, everyone should thank our soldiers. Of course, then and since, the injunction to “support the troops” has often been used as a club to dampen antiwar dissent. American presidents have routinely said, or implied, that public opposition demoralizes the troops and emboldens their enemies.

American soldiers in Vietnam were primarily demoralized by the war itself. Even pro-war soldiers understood better than most people at home how the war’s realities contradicted official claims—they knew the United States wasn’t supporting democracy in Vietnam; that the Communist troops had stronger popular support than the Saigon government; that U.S. military policies failed to achieve American objectives and caused many civilian casualties. Those realities were more disillusioning to American troops than the debates and disunity at home.

As the military in Vietnam became ever more disaffected, it became as fractured as the home front. Every difference—by race, region, rank, politics, culture—could trigger hostility, especially in rear areas where troops lacked the intense, but temporary, bonding of combat. For example, when news of Martin Luther King’s assassination hit Vietnam,
racial brawls
broke out at many bases, some of them deadly. As the war dragged on, many officers were more worried about keeping peace among their own troops than fighting the enemy.

Frontline combat troops—the grunts—were often bitterly resentful, not just of those who evaded the draft at home but also of the great majority of military personnel who served in noncombat jobs in the rear with easy access to hot meals, showers, air-conditioning, and beer. The grunts called them REMFs—rear echelon motherfuckers. Even smaller differences could spark fights—conflicts, say, between “heads” (pot smokers) and “juicers” (drinkers), or between rock ’n’ rollers and country music fans.

But the bitterest conflicts were between enlisted men and those officers regarded as careerist “ticket punchers” who demanded aggressive, high-risk tactics. In the final years of the war, those officers were not only reviled, but disobeyed. Combat troops who had once united around the collective effort to survive or to “pay back” the enemy began to unite around a radically different goal—the collective effort to avoid combat and even resist direct orders.

One common form of combat avoidance was called sandbagging. Troops sandbagged missions they considered particularly dangerous—like a nighttime ambush deep in the bush. Instead of carrying out the order, they would walk to a place they considered safer (often close to the base), make camp, and call in phony reports on their field radios to make their commanding officers believe they were where they had been ordered to go. As writer Tim O’Brien put it in a memoir about his 1969 tour in Quang Ngai Province: “
Phony ambushes
were good for morale, the best game we played on LZ Minuteman.” The war was disillusioning, but the effort to avoid combat offered a unifying cause to embrace. In O’Brien’s unit, even some junior officers sandbagged missions.

Combat avoidance soon gave rise to direct refusal to obey orders. In 1970, the Senate Armed Services Committee identified thirty-five “
combat refusals
” in the First Cavalry Division alone. An unknowable number of small mutinies were never reported up the chain of command. No line officer wanted his superiors to know that he had lost control of his men. It could be a career-threatening disaster. Many officers adapted to GI dissent by no longer insisting on aggressive infantry tactics. The level of GI resistance became endemic. One study of “
military disintegration
” in Vietnam found the duration and scale of disobedience unprecedented. “Unlike mutinous outbreaks of the past and in other armies, which were usually sporadic short-lived events, the progressive unwillingness of American soldiers to fight to the point of open disobedience took place over a four-year period between 1968 and 1971.”

Dissent among GIs had become as routine as it was on college campuses. An army-commissioned survey of troops on five major U.S. military bases in 1970–1971 found that
47 percent admitted to acts of dissent
or disobedience. Their forms of protest and rebellion were many and varied—underground newspapers, petitions, music, study groups, poetry, armbands, peace symbols, power salutes, marches, guerrilla theater, hunger strikes, boycotts, legal counseling, sabotage, desertion, combat avoidance, and mutiny.

Television viewers got a close look at rebellious GIs in 1970 when CBS aired a documentary called
The World of Charlie Company
. Correspondent John Laurence reported that Charlie Company (in the First Cavalry Division) reflected the new “sense of independence” and “open rebelliousness” that now characterized American soldiers in Vietnam. Their former commander was very popular, primarily because his cautious tactics minimized casualties. He was adamant about avoiding trails and roads where his men might be ambushed. The new captain was far more aggressive. Shortly after he took command he ordered his men to walk down a road.

“We ain’t walkin’ down that [bleeping] road,” one of the squad leaders announced. The captain, facing a potential mutiny of some hundred troops, addressed his men: “We’re gonna move out on the road, period. . . . We gotta job to do and we’re gonna do it. It’s not half as dangerous as some of the crap we’ve been doing out in the boonies.” The captain decided to take the point himself and lead the men out onto the road. “Okay, let’s move out.” Only five or six of the men followed.

A wide range of men defied the captain. The squad leader who initiated the rebellion was hardly a peacenik. His nickname was “Killer.” “How’d you get the nickname?” reporter Laurence asked. “Killed a couple of gooks in a bomb crater one time [laughs]. Put a few 60 [machine gun] rounds into them. They was takin’, dig it, they was takin’ a bath. Just proves—don’t take no baths while you’re in the field.” Other men in the unit wanted nothing to do with killing. “If I ever do have to kill somebody,” one man said, “I think I’d go insane afterwards cause of the conscience thing.” Another man said, “I haven’t fired my gun since I’ve been here. The army’s really paranoid about all the people coming over here now that are a lot different than they used to be. . . . It’s the Woodstock generation coming to Vietnam.” And even Killer wore a peace symbol around his neck: “I figured I could do it too cause I’m the one over here fighting.”

The increase in drug use by U.S. troops was, in part, simply a reflection of a home front trend, the countercultural turn to alternative forms of pleasure-seeking. Yet in Vietnam it also represented the rising disillusionment with the war as GIs turned to drugs as a form of self-medication and withdrawal. Marijuana was almost as commonly consumed as beer by the end of the war, and heroin was used regularly by as many as 10 percent of GIs. However, the idea that a large portion of the army became drug
addicts
was a
wildly distorted myth
that gained traction in the media and popular culture. It was not a harmless stereotype. It stigmatized Vietnam veterans and also provided fodder for the fearmongering that Nixon employed to generate support for his war on drugs.