American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (32 page)

As
collective resistance among GIs
rose, individual forms of rebellion also skyrocketed. In the army, desertions jumped from 14.9 per 1,000 soldiers in 1966 to 73.5 per 1,000 in 1971. Conscientious objector applications submitted by active-duty soldiers jumped from 829 in 1967 to 4,381 in 1971. In those same years the portion of applications that were approved jumped from 28 percent to 77 percent.

The most extreme form of GI resistance was the attempted murder, or “
fragging
,” of officers. The expression emerged from the weapon of choice—fragmentation grenades. “Frags” were preferred because they “left no fingerprints” and could be rolled under a cot, or booby-trapped on the door of a latrine. Some units conspired in killing officers by putting up cash bounties for anyone willing to kill or maim a particularly despised officer. The army reported 126 fraggings in 1969, 271 in 1970, and 333 in 1971. The numbers are shocking, especially considering that they only include reported incidents. And the rise in fraggings is particularly dramatic given the simultaneous lowering of American troop levels in those years from 540,000 to under 200,000 and the gradual reduction in aggressive search-and-destroy operations.

In a candid 1971 assessment published in
Armed Forces Journal
, Colonel Robert Heinl (Ret.) concluded: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in
a state approaching collapse
, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near-mutinous.” There were real doubts that the United States could continue to field an effective fighting force in Vietnam. The nation was close to realizing what was once regarded as a hopelessly dreamy antiwar slogan: “
Suppose they gave a war and no one came
.”

Along with mounting GI resistance in Vietnam came growing antiwar activism among veterans at home. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) confronted Americans with a specter as alarming to many citizens as anything the war had yet produced—the nation’s own former soldiers denouncing the nation for waging a criminal war. In early 1971
they gathered in Detroit
to testify about the atrocities they had committed or witnessed and to demand an end to the war. Later that spring they went to the U.S. Capitol and threw away the medals they had been awarded in Vietnam but could no longer bear to own.

VVAW members hoped their status as veterans might protect them from the charge of disloyalty or lack of patriotism. In front of Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, a group of VVAW marchers encountered a group of women who were there to attend a convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution. One of the DAR women took offense at the antiwar chants coming from the VVAW. She caught the eye of one of the men and said, “Son, I don’t think what you’re doing is good for the troops.”

“Lady,” he replied, “
we
are
the troops
.” The VVAW insisted that they revered the original American revolutionaries of 1776, the original “patriots,” at least as much as the DAR; that their opposition to the Vietnam War was founded in loyalty to the nation’s founding principles. They underlined that point by demonstrating at sites that symbolized American patriotism—Valley Forge, the U.S. Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Betsy Ross House, the Statue of Liberty, and the Lexington Battle Green.

On Labor Day weekend in 1970, about two hundred members of VVAW marched from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Called
Operation RAW
(Rapid American Withdrawal, a reversal of the word “war”), the march partly traced the route the Continental Army had taken in 1777 to reach its winter encampment.

En route to Valley Forge they wore jungle fatigues and carried toy M-16s. In small towns along the way they staged brief dramatic performances—guerrilla theater—designed to confront American citizens with a frightening vision of American military policies in Vietnam. Veterans pretending to be soldiers would grab a group of their supporters who played the roles of “civilians.” The soldiers screamed at and threatened the civilians, tied them up, blindfolded them, interrogated them, pushed them against walls, held knives to their throats, kicked them in the stomach, and herded them away. After the guerrilla theater, vets handed out leaflets to bystanders:

A U.S. infantry company has just passed through here

If you had been Vietnamese—

We might have burned your house

We might have shot your dog

We might have shot you . . .

We might have raped your wife and daughter

We might have turned you over to your government for torture . . .

If it doesn’t bother you that American soldiers do these things every day to the Vietnamese simply because they are “Gooks,”
THEN
picture
YOURSELF
as one of the silent
VICTIMS
.

Many onlookers were shocked; some were enraged. As the antiwar vets marched through rural Somerset County they were confronted by a veteran of World War II who was holding a large American flag across his chest. “
You men are a disgrace
to your uniforms,” he shouted. “You’re a disgrace to everything we stand for. You ought to go back to Hanoi.”

The war divided every significant class, group, and category of Americans. There were bitter debates about the war within both major political parties, all the military branches, every religious denomination, every race and region, every school, every union and professional organization, the young and the old, the rich and the poor. Debates raged across the land and across countless kitchen tables.

The passions were especially stormy because the war challenged so many commonly held assumptions about the nation’s core identity. It was no longer possible to see America as inevitably victorious and invincible; no longer possible for a vast majority of citizens to regard their nation as the greatest on earth or a clear force for good in the world.

The level of national self-criticism was as great as at any other time in history. Historian Henry Steele Commager had come to national prominence in the 1950s as a prolific champion of American exceptionalism, the faith that the United States was
unique in world history
, free of Old World hierarchies, imperial ambitions, persistent inequalities, or war-loving bellicosity. But the Vietnam War awakened in Commager, as in so many Americans, the ability to see his own nation’s capacity for evil.

In 1972, Commager published an article called “The Defeat of America,” in which he argued that America’s moral survival was at stake. Only defeat could save the nation.

This is not only a war we cannot win,
it is a war we must lose
if we are to survive morally. . . . We honor now those Southerners who stood by the Union when it was attacked by the Confederacy, just as we honor those Germans who rejected Hitler and his monstrous wars and were martyrs to the cause of freedom and humanity. Why do we find it so hard to accept this elementary lesson of history, that some wars are so deeply immoral that they must be lost, that the war in Vietnam is one of these wars, and that those who resist it are the truest patriots?

Commager’s moral imperative was realized—the war that must be lost was lost. But if our moral survival also depends on honoring the “truest patriots” who stood in opposition to the Vietnam War, then the United States remains in peril. We have not learned that lesson.

B
Y
THE
END
of 1972, the Vietnam War had been America’s major story for eight years. It was featured on the
covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
more than a hundred times. A constant stream of headlines, TV reports, speeches, debates, demonstrations, and photographs were daily reminders that the world’s greatest superpower was mired in a war its leaders could not find a way to win, but were unwilling to lose. Then the decade’s biggest story just slipped away. Once the Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, officially marking the end of direct American military involvement, U.S. news organizations closed their Saigon bureaus, leaving a dozen or so journalists to cover a country that had once drawn a media horde of more than five hundred.

President Nixon claimed the Paris Accords achieved “peace with honor.” In fact, South Vietnamese and Communist forces renewed combat almost before the ink was dry. The “standstill cease-fire” proved immediately untenable.
The failure of the Accords
was easy to predict because fundamental differences were simply papered over. Although the Communist side had agreed to allow the American-backed government in Saigon to stay in place temporarily, it was as committed as ever to the eventual reunification of the country under its authority. And the Saigon regime was still so lacking in popular support it could hardly be expected to survive in the absence of the U.S. military, especially since the Accords allowed North Vietnam to keep 150,000 troops in South Vietnam. With the last 20,000 U.S. troops removed from Vietnam, and hostilities renewed, the collapse of the Saigon regime was virtually inevitable. It was only a question of when. But as soon as the United States was officially at peace, the American media stopped paying attention to Vietnam.

Besides, there was
another major story to cover
: the slow but steady collapse of the Nixon presidency. As the crimes of Watergate were exposed, drip by drip, the nation was transfixed. On TV, millions of Americans watched the Senate Watergate Committee take hundreds of hours of testimony with tawdry details about White House “bagmen” who paid “hush money,” and “fall guys” who “deep-sixed” evidence, and “plumbers” who plugged “leaks,” all of it creating “a cancer on the presidency.” Eventually the daily spectacle turned to the House Judiciary Committee as it moved inexorably toward a vote to impeach Nixon for abuse of power and obstruction of justice. To avoid a Senate trial and conviction on those charges, Nixon finally resigned on August 9, 1974. Many of Nixon’s early crimes were linked to his effort to attack antiwar critics and keep his war policies secret (and some said the war itself was a crime), but those connections were lost in most of the coverage. During the year and a half that the Watergate drama unfolded,
Time
ran twenty-eight cover stories on the subject. Watergate 28, Vietnam 0. In the media, at least, the war was forgotten.

But in early 1975, Indochina roared back into the headlines. Communist forces, emboldened by recent victories, had begun their final offensive. They advanced virtually unopposed toward Saigon. By the middle of March they controlled three-quarters of South Vietnam. Fourteen North Vietnamese divisions had the capital in a vise. On April 30, 1975, Saigon fell. In the desperate few days before tanks broke through the gates of the presidential palace, U.S. helicopters evacuated thousands of people to offshore ships, but left behind hundreds of thousands of others who may have wanted to flee—the South Vietnamese who had worked or fought for the Saigon government and the United States and were thus most vulnerable to reprisals by the victors.

The two-decade effort to create a permanent non-Communist country called South Vietnam was ending in utter and humiliating defeat.
This was no longer a stalemate
; this was a rout. In the end, the war turned out to be one of the most lopsided defeats in military history. Despite a few pockets of intense resistance, most government troops quickly retreated, deserted, or surrendered. Many South Vietnamese soldiers stripped off their military boots and uniforms and tried to disappear into the civilian population. Some turned on each other, and on civilians, in desperate efforts to fight their way onto evacuation boats, choppers, and planes. Looting and rampaging were widespread, not by the advancing Communists but by their defeated enemies.

The final offensive was a stunning demonstration of Saigon’s lack of support. The South Vietnamese government had been so dependent on massive U.S. support that U.S. withdrawal made its collapse inevitable. The Communists were able to sweep through South Vietnam not so much because of their massive military power, but because there was so little to sweep away. And by 1975, very few Americans, including policymakers and politicians, wanted to reenter Vietnam to rescue the Saigon government in its final hours.

With Nixon forced out of office, President Gerald Ford encouraged the nation to wash its hands of Vietnam. No soap in the world could remove all the blood, or all the memories, but Ford would at least try to throw a towel over the mess. He began by issuing a pardon to Richard Nixon, foreclosing any possibility that a trial would further expose and adjudicate the crimes of the former president. Then, a week
before
the fall of Saigon,
Ford went to Tulane
University to close the book on a history that went back decades. On April 23, 1975, speaking before thousands of students, Ford offered only a vague allusion to the unfolding catastrophe. “We, of course, are saddened indeed by events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.” He said nothing about the fourteen divisions driving toward Saigon, the panicky retreats, or the twenty-one-year American failure to prevent the reunification of Vietnam under Communist leadership. The president sounded as if he were describing a minor natural disaster, nothing worthy of prolonged concern. “Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.”

Should anyone suggest that the United States was responsible for the disaster, Ford had only this to say: “We can and should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.” There could hardly be a more deceptive summary of America’s role in Vietnam. For two decades the United States had done everything possible to determine Vietnam’s fate. It had taken as many decisions into its own hands as possible. Indeed, South Vietnam would never have existed without American intervention. Had the United States been committed to self-determination in the mid-1950s it would have honored the Geneva Accords, allowing nationwide elections to reunite Vietnam peacefully. There never would have been an American war in Vietnam. Millions of lives might have been saved. But with Saigon on the brink of collapse, Ford implied that only South Vietnam was to blame for its defeat. The U.S. had merely tried to “help.”

Instead of calling for a great national reckoning of U.S. responsibility in Vietnam, Ford called for a “great national reconciliation.” It was really a call for a national forgetting, a willful amnesia. The president of South Vietnam was not so ready to forgive and forget. He was terrified, and he held the United States responsible for his regime’s collapse. Two days before Ford spoke at Tulane,
Nguyen Van Thieu gave an emotional
three-hour address announcing his resignation and attacking the American government: “The United States has not respected its promises. It is inhumane. It is not trustworthy. It is irresponsible.” A few days later, CIA agent Frank
Snepp whisked Thieu to the airport
in the dark of night.

I was assigned to drive the limousine to carry Thieu in total anonymity and blacked-out conditions to a rendezvous point at Tan Son Nhut air base, which was equally blacked out, to be picked up by a blacked-out CIA flight out of the country. When I arrived, Thieu came out with General Charles Timmes, a CIA operative. As they climbed into the back of the car some of Thieu’s aides threw suitcases in the trunk. They tinkled like metal. Thieu had already moved most of his gold out of the country, so I think this was just his stash. The city was in chaos. One hundred and forty thousand North Vietnamese troops were within an hour or so of downtown Saigon. . . . Thieu was crying all the way to the airport. At one point he was talking about the artworks he’d gotten out to Taipei and Hong Kong.

When Snepp pulled up at the airport, the American ambassador, Graham Martin, was waiting.

Thieu raced for the aircraft and Martin literally helped him by the elbow up the stairs. Then Martin leapt down and began dragging away the stairway as if he were trying to rip away the umbilical of the American commitment to Vietnam. I ran up to him and said, “Mr. Ambassador, can I help, can I help?” He just stood there in a panic saying, “No, no, it’s done, it’s done.”

As the CIA secretly evacuated Thieu, the American media was full of accounts of “
exhausted and dispirited
” civilians “fleeing desperately” toward Saigon and then offshore. However shocking it may have been, most Americans followed the news with little expectation that the collapse of South Vietnam could be averted. A sense of numb resignation pervaded the nation.

Two decades earlier, Dr. Tom Dooley had brought Americans to tears with his account of how the U.S. Navy had supported a mass exodus in Vietnam, how it helped transport hundreds of thousands of frightened refugees, many of them Catholics, from “terror-ridden North Viet Nam” to the South, where a new, independent, and democratic nation was to be established. That powerful faith in America’s righteous role in the world was gone.

Even
Time
magazine, a cheerleader at every step of U.S. escalation, concluded in April 1975 that Vietnam was “a country seemingly
fated for tragedy
.” There was nothing to be done. The America that once seemed capable of bending the future to its own design must now bend to a fate beyond its control. With tanks still rolling toward Saigon,
Time
found most Americans already forgetting Vietnam. To those beginning to celebrate the American Bicentennial, “the news from Indochina seems almost as much a part of past history as the rout of the redcoats at Lexington and Concord.”

But on May 12, 1975, just when it seemed as if the United States was truly “finished” with Indochina, an American cargo ship, the SS
Mayaguez
, was seized by the newly victorious Cambodian Communists—the Khmer Rouge. The assault was in international waters, sixty miles south of Cambodia, but the new rulers were claiming rights to disputed islands in the Gulf of Thailand and ordered their navy to patrol aggressively. They seized the
Mayaguez
and removed its forty crewmen from the ship.

Although the Ford administration lacked basic intelligence about the local islands, it moved immediately toward a military response. No thought was given to a diplomatic solution, or to the possibility that force might further imperil the Americans being held and result in unacceptably high casualties. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was determined to demonstrate U.S. military power in the wake of humiliating defeat in Vietnam. He called for a major attack to recover the ship and its crew. “
Let’s look ferocious
!” Kissinger advised. President Ford agreed.

After initial air strikes on mainland Cambodia, about a hundred marines were dropped by helicopter on the island of Koh Tang, where they believed the
Mayaguez
crew was being held. The assault on Koh Tang began on the evening of May 14, just as President Ford was presiding over a formal state dinner for the Dutch prime minister. He spent most of the evening ducking out to hear crisis updates. Koh Tang was well fortified and heavily defended by Cambodian troops. Of the eleven helicopters ferrying marines to Koh Tang, four were shot down. The marines who landed safely came under immediate and intense ground fire. Near midnight, with American troops still under heavy fire, Ford received word that the entire
Mayaguez
crew of forty men were in a fishing trawler sailing back to their empty ship. U.S. forces took them all safely aboard a nearby American destroyer.

With that, the beaming president rose out of his seat and faced the half-dozen men around his desk, most of them still in the tuxedos they had worn to the state dinner. “They’re all safe,” he exulted. “We got them all out, thank God. It went perfectly.” The room erupted in “whoops of joy.” One aide said, “Damn,
it puts the epaulets back on
!” Ford’s handling of the incident was supported by 79 percent of Americans surveyed by a Harris poll.

The celebratory media coverage failed to reveal a key fact. A major military operation had not been required to rescue the
Mayaguez
crew. The Khmer Rouge decided to release all forty men
before
the U.S. attack on Koh Tang island. In fact, the crew was not even on Koh Tang; they had been taken to another island and then sent back to the
Mayaguez
aboard a fishing boat. American troops were thrown into a brutal, bloody battle that cost the lives of forty-one men, three of whom were left behind on Koh Tang and later executed by the Khmer Rouge. An additional fifty Americans were wounded. All to “rescue” forty men who were
no longer in danger
.

The recent war, and the U.S. role in it, was also absent from most stories about the
Mayaguez
incident. A little history lesson might have made the seizure of the U.S. cargo ship more understandable. After all, from 1969 to 1973,
the United States had blasted Cambodia
with 1.5 million tons of bombs. The main goal of the bombing was to hit North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge troops, yet it killed or wounded thousands of Cambodian civilians, created thousands more homeless refugees, devastated the countryside, and led to massive food shortages by reducing the acreage of rice under cultivation from six million acres to one million. The bombing enraged Cambodians and drove many of them into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, who promised to destroy the American-backed government of Lon Nol and usher in a new dawn of equality and justice. Without American provocation, the Khmer Rouge might have remained the small, mostly ineffectual revolutionary force it had been in 1970. By 1975, it had grown into such a sizable movement it was able to rout the capital of Phnom Penh as easily as the Vietnamese Communists routed Saigon. The U.S. bombing had helped bring to power one of history’s most genocidal regimes, one that starved, worked to death, and murdered at least 1.5 million of its own people (from a population of about 7 million).