American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (52 page)

Brown & Root rose to preeminence
:
Robert A. Caro,
Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,
vol. 1
(New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 461–64; Joseph A. Pratt and Christopher J. Castaneda,
Builders: Herman and George R. Brown
(College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1999), p. 52. The Mansfield Dam was originally called the Marshall Ford Dam.

“Landslide Lyndon”
:
Robert Caro,
Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,
vol. 2
(New York: Knopf, 1990).

Vietnam contracts caused Brown & Root to double in size
:
Carter,
Inventing Vietnam
, pp. 157–59, 173, 239; Bryce,
Cronies
, p. 109.

Brown & Root won a contract
:
Holmes Brown and Don Luce,
Hostages of War
(Indochina Mobile Education Project, 1973), Appendix B, p. 43. Pratt and Castaneda,
Builders
, pp. 240–41, These authors accept the claim that the new prisons were more humane. The evidence hints that the new cells were intended for one person—“isolation cells”—but in practice, as Brown and Luce argue, they were used for multiple prisoners and were therefore even worse than the original cells.

more jobs available
:
Dean Baker, Robert Pollin, and Elizabeth Zahart, “The Vietnam War and the Political Economy of Full Employment,”
Challenge
,
May–June 1996.

“the Vietnam War is
bad business
”
:
New York Times
, June 21, 1969, p. 54. Marriner Eccles, “Vietnam—Its Effect on the Nation,”
Vital Speeches
, September 15, 1967. For Eccles on aggression, see http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/utahandthevietnamconflict.html.

“The thrust of my testimony”
:
“Impact of the War in Southeast Asia on the U.S. Economy,”
Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations
, 91st Congress, 2nd Sess., April 15, 1970, p. 3.

“Cowardly little bums”
:
New York Times
, February 27, 1970;
Time
, March 9, 1970.

forty more attempts to damage
:
Steven V. Roberts, “For Bombers and Critics, It’s a Favorite Enemy Now,”
New York Times
, May 16, 1971.

The war, he argued, hurt profits
:
“Impact of the War . . . on the U.S. Economy,” p. 12.

a new “Asian tiger”
:
“Rising from the Ashes: Can Free Markets Turn Vietnam into a Tiger?”
Business Week
, November 29, 1993, pp. 100–108; “Vietnam: Business Rushes to Get In,”
Fortune
, April 5, 1993, p. 98.

Trade with the United States
:
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5520.html.

Nike’s sweatshop labor
:
For an example of some of this criticism, see Bob Herbert, “In America,”
New York Times
, March 28, 1997.

Air Jordan, the sneakers
:
http://sneakernews.com/air-jordan-brand-jordan/air-jordan-13/.

“The purpose
 . . . is to attract companies”:
Saigon Times Weekly
, January 27, 2011.

C
HAP
TER
F
IVE
: O
UR
B
OYS

They also turned to their televisions
:
Vaughn, ed.,
Encyclopedia of American Journalism
,
p. 242.

Robert Kennedy made the call
:
New York Times
, November 26, 1963; http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Green-Berets.aspx.

The media relished the
 . . . training:
See, for example, “The American Guerrillas,”
Time
, March 10, 1961.

“Harvard Ph.D.’s of warfare”
:
Joseph Kraft, “Hot Weapon in the Cold War,”
Saturday Evening Post
, April 28, 1962, pp. 87–91. John Hellmann has an insightful analysis of popular responses to the Green Berets in
American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 41–50, as does Alasdair Spark, “The Soldier at the Heart of the War: The Myth of the Green Beret in the Popular Culture of the Vietnam Era,”
Journal of American Studies
, vol. 18, no. 1 (April 1984), pp. 29–48.

As
Time
effused
:
Time
, March 10, 1961.

denied permission to wear
 . . . berets:
Ibid., August 22, 1969.

“a badge of courage”
:
Ibid., June 25, 1965.

“a new generation of Americans”
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8032.

seventy-three million Americans
:
Susan Douglas,
Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media
(New York: Three Rivers, 1995), p. 114; James Maguire,
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan
(New York: Billboard Books, 2006).

On January 30, 1966,
 . . .
The Ed Sullivan Show
:
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-ed-sullivan-show/january-30-1966-the-four-tops-dinah-shore-jos-feliciano-ssgt-barry-sadler-107866/; for Sadler’s performance on the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5WJJVSE_BE.

“The Ballad of the Green Berets”
 . . . number one pop song:
James E. Perone,
Songs of the Vietnam Conflict
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), pp. 82–85.

Many peace activists considered
:
See R. Serge Denisoff, “Protest Movements: Class Consciousness and the Propaganda Song,”
Sociological Quarterly
, vol. 9, 1968, pp. 228–47; R. Serge Denisoff, “Fighting Prophecy With Napalm: ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets,’”
Journal of American Culture
, Spring 1990, pp. 81–93.

resisted such clear-cut labels
:
James Perone reports that “it was not unheard of [among folk revival performers] for a musician to sing ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’ at the same performance as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ or ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’” Perone,
Songs of the Vietnam Conflict
, p. 83.

Jim Morrison
 . . . defied Ed Sullivan:
Stephen Davis,
Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend
(New York: Gotham, 2005), pp. 203–5.

Within the military
 . . . countercultural music:
Brian Mattmiller, “‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’: Music, Memory and the Vietnam War,”
University of Wisconsin-Madison News
, February 16, 2006. Based on an interview with Craig Werner and Doug Bradley about their manuscript “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music, Survival, Healing and the Soundtrack of Vietnam.” Manuscript in author’s possession.

The two works reinforced each other
:
John Hellman,
American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam
, p. 54.

“was credited with several kills”
:
Time
, June 25, 1965.

“Fiction Stranger Than Fact!”
:
Hanson W. Baldwin, “Book on U.S. Forces in Vietnam Stirs Army Ire,”
New York Times
, May 29, 1965.

“hands tied behind their backs”
:
Robin Moore,
The Green Berets
(New York: Crown, 1965), pp. 29, 49–50, 184–85; Reagan quotation: http://www.presidency .ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43454.

“serving the cause of freedom”
:
Moore,
The Green Berets
, p. 339; Garry Wills,
John Wayne’s America
(New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 230–31.

lousy little dirty bug-outs
:
Moore,
The Green Berets
, p. 69, “brown bandit,” p. 36, “assorted thieves,” p. 104.

“pinned him, squirming”
:
Ibid., pp. 61, 119.

Bernie Arklin
:
Moore calls this story “Home to Nanette,” ibid., pp. 164–222.

Roger Donlon
:
Appy,
Patriots
, pp. 12–15.

“Who’s Fighting in Viet Nam”
:
Time
, April 23, 1965.

“South Vietnam
: A New Kind of War”:
Time,
October 22, 1965.

“Today’s American soldier”
:
Cited in Andrew J. Huebner,
The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 178.

“almost to a man”
:
Time
, October 22, 1965.

“I was fool enough to join”
:
See Charles Moskos,
The
American Enlisted Man: The Rank and File in Today’s Military
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970), pp. 149–50; Christian G. Appy,
Working-Class War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 206–49.

A 1964 survey
:
Appy,
Working-Class War
, pp. 23–24.

Lowered admission standards
and
Project 100,000:
Ibid., pp. 30–33.

Fewer than 8 percent
 . . . had completed college:
John Helmer
, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After
(New York: Free Press, 1974), p. 303; Arthur Egendorf et al.,
Legacies of Vietnam: Comparative Adjustments of Veterans and Their Peers
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), p. 13.

medical exemptions
:
Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss,
Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation
(New York: Knopf, 1978), pp. 36–48.

Selective Service memo
:
Peter Henig, “On the Manpower Channelers,”
New Left Notes
, January 20, 1967. It was later published in
Ramparts
(December 1967) and excerpted in countless underground newspapers and other antiwar publications of the era.

many draft-age Americans
:
Paul Lauter and Florence Howe,
The Conspiracy of the Young
(New York: World, 1970), p. 198.

the Free Speech Movement
:
Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds.,
The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). The phrase “knowledge factory” is just a slight revision of “knowledge industry,” a phrase used by UC Berkeley president Clark Kerr, who openly celebrated the role of universities in serving the interests of the government, the military, and corporate America.

“a shy do-gooder”
:
Jo Freeman, “The Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,”
Left History
, vol. 8, no. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 135–44.

“We’re human beings!”
:
See Mark Kitchell’s 1990 documentary film
Berkeley in the Sixties
.

“Democracy in the Foxhole”
:
Time
, May 26, 1967.

In a superficial way, the major African American
:
Lawrence Allen Elbridge,
Chronicles of a Two-Front War: Civil Rights and Vietnam in the African American Press
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012); Paul Dickson,
War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases Since the Civil War
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2011), p. 260.

“greatest degree of functional democracy”
:
Thomas A. Johnson, “Negroes in ‘the Nam,’”
Ebony
, August 1968;
Ebony
, August 1966, p. 23. The 1966 issue also includes an article on black nurses in Vietnam.

percentage of black officers
:
William L. Hauser,
America’s Army in Crisis: A Study in Civil-Military Relations
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 77.

percentage of black casualties
:
“How Negro Americans Perform in Vietnam,”
U.S. News and World Report
, August 15, 1966, p. 62; James E. Westheider,
The African American Experience in Vietnam: Brothers in Arms
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 47–49.

Camp Pendleton
 . . . “gripe session”:
New York Times
, March 7, 1969, p. 11.

enormous urban uprising
:
Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin,
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution
(Boston: South End Press, 1999); Heather Ann Thompson,
Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Sidney Fine,
Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Race Riot of 1967
(Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989).

George Daniels did most of the talking
:
Shirley Jolls and Walter Aponte, “Kangaroo Court-Martial: George Daniels and William Harvey, Two Black Marines Who Got 6 and 10 Years for Opposing the Vietnam War,” Committee for GI Rights, March 10, 1969. This committee formed in July 1967 to support antiwar soldiers at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then became the core group that formed the American Servicemen’s Union. A copy of this pamphlet can be found online at: http://www.aavw.org/served/racetensions_danielsandharvey_abstract02.html. Details also drawn from author’s personal correspondence with George Daniels.