American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (54 page)

“If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s Viet Cong”
:
Philip Caputo,
A Rumor of War
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977), p. xix.

“incentivizing of death”
:
Appy,
Patriots
, p. 365.

exhausted, frustrated, and angry
:
Appy,
Working-Class War
, pp. 174–80.

the enemy determined the time, place, and duration
:
Pentagon Papers,
vol. 4, p. 462; Appy,
Working-Class War
, pp. 162–64.

“Dangling the Bait”
: James Webb,
Fields of Fire
(New York: Bantam, 1978), p. 155.

Many grunts wanted revenge
:
Appy,
Working-Class War
, pp. 213–16, 228–29.

nine rules of conduct
:
William Westmoreland,
A Soldier Reports
, p. 299.

“Murder, torture, rape, abuse”
:
Turse,
Kill Anything That Moves
, p. 6.

Wayne Smith
:
Appy,
Patriots
, p. 365.

“We’re here to kill gooks”
:
Michael Herr,
Dispatches
(New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 20.

public relations campaign
:
Young,
The Vietnam Wars
, p. 215; Halberstam,
The Best and the Brightest
, p. 636; Larry Berman,
Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 84–88.

Westmoreland
 . . . addressed both houses of Congress:
New York Times
, April 29, 1967, p. 10 for transcript and response.

“The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt”
:
New York Times
, November 22, 1967.

“monument to deceit”
:
C. Michael Hiam,
A Monument to Deceit: Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
(Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2014). Originally published as
Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
(Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2006), pp. 124, 259; Harold P. Ford,
CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes
(Military Bookshop, 2011), p. 100.

All of these uncounted people
:
Sam Adams,
War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir
(Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 1995).

“Can you believe it?”
:
Hiam,
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?
, pp. 87–88.

Earle Wheeler cabled Westmoreland
:
Young,
The Vietnam Wars
, p. 214; Hiam,
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?
, p. 99.

an astonishing military victory
:
See, for example, James S. Robbins,
This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive
(New York: Encounter Books, 2012).

brutal and indiscriminate counteroffensive
:
Turse,
Kill Anything That Moves
, pp. 102–5.

“Now that the enemy had the town, the town was the enemy”
:
Tobias Wolff,
In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War
(New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 138.

“Hundreds of corpses and the count kept rising”
:
Ibid., p. 139.

“uncontrolled violence”
:
Appy,
Patriots
, p. 361.

“Get a hundred a day”
:
Emerson,
Winners and Losers
, p. 154.

“If it moves, shoot it”
:
David Hackworth,
About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 647, 668.

“I don’t give a shit”
:
Turse,
Kill Anything That Moves
, p. 216.

“brilliant and sensitive” leadership
:
Deborah Nelson,
The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About War Crimes
(New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 97.

“made the My Lai massacre look trifling”
:
Newsweek
, “Pacification’s Deadly Price,” June 19, 1972; Nick Turse, “The Vietnam Exposé That Wasn’t,”
Nation
, November 13, 2008.

Vietnam War Crimes Working Group
:
Turse,
Kill Anything That Moves
, pp. 14–16, 21, 104.

a “My Lay [Lai]” each month”
:
Ibid., pp. 215–19. Before Westmoreland shut down the case, the Criminal Investigation Division identified the “concerned sergeant” as George Lewis and made plans to interview him. There is no record that it did.

the army commissioned its own secret investigation
:
Ibid., pp. 254–55.

Kinnard published his findings
:
Douglas Kinnard,
The War Managers
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977), pp. 72–75.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
: T
HE
W
AR
AT
H
OME

“we are not sure there is a future for America”
:
New York Times
, May 7, 1970.

in 1965, antiwar protests had begun
:
Tom Wells,
The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 9–65; Charles DeBenedetti,
An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), pp. 81–140; Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan,
Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), pp. 33–67.

184
Those who organized
 . . . were a diverse lot:
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Simon Hall,
Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement
(New York: Routledge, 2011); Melvin Small,
Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

“All that we are and all that we can be”
:
New York Times
, May 7, 1970.

Daley
 . . . screamed back at Ribicoff:
Hunter S. Thompson,
Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, The Gonzo Letters,
vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 127.

“blowing up the campuses”
:
Schell,
The Time of Illusion
, pp. 97–98; Perlstein,
Nixonland
, p. 482.

“If it takes a bloodbath”
:
Philip Caputo,
13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings
(New York: Chamberlain Bros., 2005), p. 105.

“We are going to
eradicate
the problem”
:
Perlstein,
Nixonland
, p. 486.

“just imagine they [student protesters] are wearing brown shirts”:
Peter N. Carroll,
It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 11.

“Hey, boy, what’s that you’re carrying there?”
:
Tom Grace, “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties,” forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press (2015). Manuscript in author’s possession.

“You did what you had to do”
:
For the passages on the Kent State shootings I am drawing primarily on the manuscript of Tom Grace’s forthcoming book,
Kent State
. See also Daniel Miller’s documentary film,
Fire in the Heartland: Kent State, May 4th, and Student Protest in America
.

58 percent of Americans
:
Poll showing support for National Guard, see Martin Nolan, “What the Nation Learned at Kent State in 1970,”
Boston Globe
, May 3, 2000.

“This should remind us all”
:
Schell,
Time of Illusion
, p. 98; Reeves,
President Nixon: Alone in the White House
, p. 226.

Commission on Campus Unrest
:
Also known as the Scranton Commission. Jerry M. Lewis and Thomas R. Hensley, “The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The Search for Historical Accuracy,” http://dept.kent.edu/sociology/lewis/lewihen.htm.

protested the war for the first time
:
Wells,
The War Within
, pp. 441–45.

“Was the government so afraid”
:
Ron Kovic,
Born on the Fourth of July
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 136–39.

“Stop the bombing, stop the war”
:
Ibid., p. 180.

“We did not question”
:
Ron Kovic, “Breaking the Silence of the Night,” Truthdig.com, October 10, 2006, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601009_ron_kovic_breaking_silence_night.

“I remember tears coming to my eyes”
:
Ibid.

“The most severely injured”
:
Kovic,
Born on the Fourth of July
, pp. 51–52.

“You gotta stop crying like babies”
:
Ibid., pp. 202–3.

“
I believe in America!
”
:
Ibid., p. 110.

one of many sparks
:
New York Times
, May 7, 1970; Fred Cook, “Hard-Hats, the Rampaging Patriots,”
Nation
, June 15, 1970.

“day of reflection”
:
New York Times
, May 7, 1970; Woden Teachout,
Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism
(New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. 173–206.

“swatting them with their helmets”
:
Homer Bigart, “War Foes Here Attacked by Construction Workers,”
New York Times
, May 9, 1970.

mysterious men in suits
:
Cook, “Hard-Hats”;
New York Times
, May 9, 1970; Philip Foner, “Bloody Friday: May 8, 1970,”
Left Review,
vol. 4, no. 2, Spring 1980.

“The word was passed around”
:
Teachout,
Capture the Flag
, p. 198; Francis X. Clines, “For the Flag and for Country, They March,”
New York Times
, May 21, 1970.

All in the Family
:
Richard P. Adler, ed.,
All in the Family: A Critical Appraisal
(New York: Praeger, 1979).

Middle America Committee
:
Reeves,
President Nixon
, p. 138.

Nixon’s pit bull
:
Perlstein,
Nixonland
, pp. 431–32. On the mythology surrounding the hard hat stereotype, see Penny Lewis,
Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); also, Milton J. Bates,
The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 86–131.

antiwar opinion was stronger at the bottom
:
Mark D. Harmon, “Historical Revisionism and Vietnam Public Opinion,”
Peace Studies Journal
, vol. 3, issue 2, August 2010. Lewis,
Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks
, pp. 51–53; Bates,
The Wars We Took to Vietnam
, p. 89; Franklin,
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
, p. 87.

(AFSCME) adopted a resolution:
Philip S. Foner,
American Labor and the Indochina War
(New York: International, 1971), p. 87.

joined forces with students
:
Edmund F. Wehrle,
Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 159.

“At no time in the history of our free society”
:
Cited in Frank Koscielski,
Divided Loyalties: American Unions and the Vietnam War
(New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 83.

did not mention his opposition
:
“Reuther Dies in Jet Crash With Wife and 4 Others,”
New York Times
, May 11, 1970.

more accurate to see them as pro-GI
:
Joshua Freeman, “Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations,”
Journal of Social History
, vol. 26, no. 4, Summer 1993, p. 735.

“Get your clothes on”
:
Reeves,
President Nixon
, pp. 219–22.

Brennan
 . . . presented Nixon with a white hard hat:
Boston Globe
, May 27, 1970. Nixon began wearing the flag pin on a regular basis that fall. See Teachout,
Capture the Flag
, p. 255n9.

defang
 . . . affirmative action:
Trevor Griffey, “‘The Blacks Should Not Be Administering the Philadelphia Plan’: Nixon, the Hard Hats, and ‘Voluntary’ Affirmative Action,” in David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey, eds.,
Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 134–60.

“Here’s to you, Chuck”
:
Griffey, “‘The Blacks Should Not Be Administering the Philadelphia Plan,’” pp. 154–58.

school desegregation
:
Perlstein,
Nixonland
, pp. 459–76.

“Orangeburg massacre”
:
Jack Shuler,
Blood and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012).

“Better tell them security guards”
:
Tim Spofford,
Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988), pp. 33–52.

“When that bottle hit”
:
Ibid., p. 72.

“From the facts at hand today”
:
Ibid., p. 141.