American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (6 page)

Dooley was once a famous exemplar of American service, but his actual life was invisible to the public that adored him. Some of the details remain unknown. For example, although Dooley and Lansdale had many contacts, Dooley
may not have realized
that Lansdale worked for the CIA. But it is clear that the CIA supported Dooley’s work and regarded him as a valuable, if somewhat unreliable, asset—a positive symbol and spokesman for American policy in Southeast Asia.

In fact, the CIA saved Dooley’s career. Unknown to the public, the navy pressured Dooley to resign in early 1956, before the publication of
Deliver Us From Evil
. He was the target of
a navy sting operation
to prove that he was a homosexual. The Office of Naval Intelligence, with multiple agents, informants, and phone bugs, found the evidence they sought. The navy wanted Dooley out, but did not want a public smearing of the man who was doing so much for the navy’s public image. Admiral Arleigh Burke had already drafted an admiring forward to
Deliver Us From Evil,
praising the “courageous exploits of the young lieutenant.” The public was encouraged to believe that Dooley resigned voluntarily.

Incredibly, a few days later Dooley was cheerfully telling people about his plans to return to Southeast Asia as a civilian to establish medical clinics in Laos. Virtually overnight, he was secretly transformed from a navy outcast to a CIA asset.
His Laotian project was supported
officially by the International Rescue Committee, but secretly by the CIA and even the military. They all understood that Dooley was a promising champion of U.S. foreign policy. Unlike thousands of gay men who were victimized more cruelly by the military, Dooley continued to be celebrated as a Cold War hero. In fact, his fame came only
after
he was forced out of the navy.

And even after Dooley’s death and Kennedy’s assassination, American officials still talked about “saving” Vietnam. The new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, sometimes made it sound as if Vietnam were not the site of a war so much as the recipient of a Great Society project aimed at eliminating economic hardship. In April 1965, just as he was ordering a major military escalation in Vietnam, Johnson gave an address on the war in which he said:

Now there must be a much more massive effort to improve the life of man in that conflict-torn corner of our world. . . . The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA. The wonders of modern medicine can be spread through villages where thousands die every year from lack of care. . . . We should not allow people to go hungry and wear rags while our own warehouses overflow.

Later, joking around with his advisers, Johnson said he had used the speech to throw a bone to all the “
sob sisters
and peace societies.”

Even as evidence mounted that the war was devastating the South Vietnamese countryside, U.S. leaders still claimed, as they did in 1954–55, that they were saving Vietnamese refugees from Communism. By 1965 the “refugees” were not flowing from North to South, but from the rural countryside of South Vietnam into refugee camps and the cities.

American officials said
these displaced people were fleeing from Viet Cong aggression and terror. In fact, U.S. military policy drove the vast majority of peasants off their land. The goal was to get the farmers away from Viet Cong insurgents who relied on villagers for food, hiding places, intelligence, and recruits. By packing peasants onto trucks and helicopters and removing them to refugee camps, the U.S. military believed it could establish better control over South Vietnam. Once the civilians had been relocated, the military redefined their former villages as free-fire zones and claimed the right to destroy anything seen there again, including people who chose to return to their ancestral homes.

In a 1967
military operation called Cedar Falls
—the largest to that point in the war—American troops forced six thousand people off their land in and around Ben Suc, about thirty miles northwest of Saigon. They were rural peasants who were tied to their land by history, culture, and religion. Two-thirds of those removed were children. Once the villagers were “resettled” in a refugee camp, journalist Jonathan Schell noticed that the military gave these same people a different label. They had first called them “hostile civilians” or “Viet Cong suspects.” But once they were forced onto choppers or trucks and hauled into the confines of U.S.-controlled camps, they were called “refugees.” A poster at the camp read “Welcome to the Reception Center for Refugees Fleeing Communism.” But they weren’t refugees from Communism. They were essentially American prisoners.

By war’s end, the United States had driven
more than five million South Vietnamese
off their land—roughly one-third of the population. Most of them ended up in refugee camps, in shantytowns near American military bases, or in the cities. These civilians were victims of one of the largest forced relocations in history. The scale of this human displacement was at least five times greater than Operation Passage to Freedom—the mass movement of northern Vietnamese to the south in the mid-1950s.

The U.S. military actually counted the refugees it “generated” as a metric of progress. The more, the better. But a growing number of home front critics viewed this as additional evidence that the United States was destroying Vietnam, not “saving” it. The most graphic evidence was the indiscriminate destruction caused by American bombs, napalm, artillery, and chemical defoliants. The devastating impact of U.S. warfare was dramatically revealed during the Tet Offensive of 1968. When the Communists launched their surprise attack all across South Vietnam and into the cities, the U.S. responded with a massive counteroffensive of bombing and artillery strikes to drive the Communists back into the countryside. These attacks destroyed many thickly populated towns and city neighborhoods. Thousands of civilians died in the rubble.

In Ben Tre, a town in the Mekong Delta, the U.S. counteroffensive was particularly devastating. Journalist Peter Arnett asked an American officer to explain. The major replied with what would become the war’s most infamous line: “
It became necessary
to destroy the town in order to save it.”

A few weeks later, on March 18, 1968, Democratic senator Robert Kennedy gave his first major speech as a candidate for president at Kansas State University, where the Young Republicans had five times more members than the Young Democrats. The field house was packed with 14,500 students. Kennedy quoted the American officer’s line about Ben Tre and then expanded it to raise fundamental questions about the entire war: “If it becomes ‘necessary’ to
destroy all of South Vietnam
in order to ‘save it,’ will we do that too? And if we care so little about South Vietnam that we are willing to see the land destroyed and its people dead, then why are we there in the first place? . . . Will it be said of us, as Tacitus said of Rome: ‘They made a desert and called it peace’?” The cheers were deafening. Observers compared it to seeing a rock star. “We want Bobby!” they screamed. Three months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The war would go on for seven more years.

By the time Robert Kennedy died, millions of Americans had come to believe that Vietnam needed to be saved, not from the Communists but from the United States. In 1967, for example, a group of antiwar activists sailed a fifty-foot ketch,
the
Phoenix of Hiroshima
, to North Vietnam to offer medical supplies for the treatment of civilians wounded by American bombs. And the Catholics most strongly associated with Vietnam by the late 1960s were not Cardinal Spellman and Tom Dooley, but the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, antiwar priests who were convicted of destroying draft records in Catonsville, Maryland, with homemade napalm. At their 1968 trial, Daniel Berrigan read a statement that included these words: “Our apologies, good friends, for
the fracture of good order
, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of the Burning Children.”

This was no longer Tom Dooley’s America. More than at any moment in history, Americans had come to believe their nation as capable of evil as any other. National identity was no longer figured as a kind sailor “bouncing a brown bare-bottom baby on his knee.” It was more likely to be represented as a napalm-dropping American jet. American exceptionalism was on its deathbed.

Back in the 1950s, if an army general said that Vietnam was like a “child” in need of development, most Americans would have considered it a reasonable idea. And if the general went on to say that “the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” that “
life is cheap in the Orient
,” most would have taken it as a sage cultural insight. But in 1974, when those very words were uttered by General William Westmoreland, the man who had commanded American forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, a great many of his fellow citizens found them repulsive and racist.

Even so, at war’s end in 1975 there remained an urge to recover some faith in exceptional American virtue. Ironically, Americans returned to the idea of parental adoption of Asians, this time not as a metaphor for beneficent U.S. intervention, but as an actual response to the unfolding disaster. On April 3, 1975, as Communist forces were routing the South Vietnamese military en route to their final victory, U.S. officials agreed to airlift thousands of Vietnamese children to the United States for adoption. Operation Babylift was embraced by U.S. ambassador Graham Martin in hopes that it might move Congress to pass a major new allocation of aid to support the crumbling regime of Nguyen Van Thieu.

The Agency for International Development organized the airlift and set up a telephone hotline to handle inquiries from prospective parents. It was inundated with thousands of calls. MIT political scientist Lucien Pye, a proponent of the Vietnam War, believed Americans who responded to Operation Babylift were “trying to prove that we are not really abandoning these people. The guilt feeling is very deep, cutting across hawk and dove alike.
We want to know we’re still good
, we’re still decent.”

The media tracked the airlift closely, searching for feel-good stories amid the war’s ruins. It began horribly. On April 4, an air force C-5A Galaxy jet, the world’s largest air transport, filled with 328 children, aid workers, government employees, and crew, had to crash-land after a hatch exploded. One hundred and fifty-three passengers were killed, most of them children and babies.

A few thousand children made it safely to the United States, and the media generally concluded that they had been rescued from a terrible fate. But these silver lining stories masked a painful reality. A significant portion of the airlifted children were not actually orphans. In war-ravaged Vietnam some families put children in orphanages for protection, hoping to get them back in safer times. Sending those children to the United States without parental consent, critics argued, was tantamount to kidnapping. A legal suit was brought forward to give Vietnamese parents a right to recover their children. Experts on both sides testified that many children were not eligible for adoption under international standards. The files of some children had been deliberately altered to make them seem eligible. Yet
the judge threw out the case
, sealed the files, and ordered the attorneys not to inform Vietnamese families of their contents. In the decades since, a considerable number of Vietnamese families divided by Operation Babylift have tried to reunite. Few have succeeded.

With the media focused on the evacuation of Vietnamese children, American officials waited until Communist forces had completely surrounded Saigon before ordering an evacuation of Americans and those Vietnamese who sought exile. When the evacuation did finally commence at the end of the month, tens of thousands managed to get out, but untold thousands of
South Vietnamese were abandoned
.

The fall of Saigon in 1975, with its searing images of the U.S. embassy surrounded by desperate people begging for places on the final helicopters, made brutally clear that America had not saved the South Vietnam it had tried for twenty-one years to create and preserve. Nor could it honestly be said that the United States unequivocally saved the individual Vietnamese it carried to the United States. After all, these refugees had not only lost a war, they had lost their home.

M
OVIE
STAR
A
UDREY
Hepburn is smiling and radiant, dressed entirely in white—white top, white slacks, white shoes. A white jacket is draped over one shoulder. She is looking at us from the cover of
Ladies’ Home Journal
, January 1967. A banner across the top asks “
Would you believe
she’s 37?” The inside story says Hepburn is not too old to change her once “pure” and “inviolate” image. “All convention is rigidifying,” she declares. In an upcoming film,
Two for the Road
, “she will wear mini-skirts, vinyl shorts and also—are you ready?—has a love scene with Albert Finney in which she wears nothing.” Even away from the set she was seen “frugging in discotheques” and “wearing all the go-go-goodies.”

Times were indeed changing, and not just in film, fashion, music, dance, and sexuality. The same issue of
Ladies’ Home Journal
that featured the
Hepburn story ran a disturbing article by Martha Gellhorn. A searing account of Vietnamese refugees, war orphans, and wounded children, it may have been the most damning exposé of the civilian suffering caused by the American war in Vietnam yet to appear in a mass-circulation U.S. magazine. The previous August (1966), at age fifty-eight, Gellhorn had traveled to South Vietnam to write a series of articles about the impact of the war on Vietnamese civilians. “
I would never have chosen
to go near a war again if my own country had not, mysteriously, begun to wage an undeclared war,” she recalled years later. At first, she had paid little attention to the “obscure Asian country,” but by early 1965 it was no longer possible to ignore.

We were suddenly, enormously involved in a war, without any explanation that made sense to me. . . . All the war reports I could find sounded inhuman, like describing a deadly football game between a team of heroes and a team of devils and chalking up the score by “body counts” and “kill ratio.” The American dead were mourned, but not enough; they should have been mourned with bitter unceasing questions about the value of sacrificing these young lives. The Vietnamese people were apparently forgotten except as clichés in speeches. American bombing missions were announced as if bombs were a selective weapon, or as if only the proclaimed enemy lived on the ground. Vietnamese civilians lived all over the ground, under that rain of bombs. They were being “freed from aggression” mercilessly.

Gellhorn went to one publisher after another, pleading in vain to be sent to Vietnam. It is “
the only work I want
to do,” she wrote a friend. “But nobody wants it; I am plainly too old.” Whether it was her age, her gender, her public criticism of the war, or all three, no American publisher would hire her. Finally, the
Manchester
Guardian
in Britain agreed to publish her articles if she would pay for the trip to Vietnam. She went.

To the resistant publishers, it did not matter that Martha Gellhorn had reported on war from eight countries, starting with the Spanish Civil War in 1937. It did not matter that she had made an amphibious landing on Omaha Beach at Normandy two days after D-day in 1944 amid a still dangerous and chaotic scene in which she helped carry wounded soldiers to a beached LST. To do so, she had
stowed away on a hospital ship
, locked herself in a toilet stall, and jumped into a landing craft. These daring moves were necessary not only because women reporters were officially denied access to the front lines, but also because her magazine,
Collier’s
, had given her press credential to a famous male writer—her husband, Ernest Hemingway. Almost a year later, in May 1945, Gellhorn reported from
Dachau
, Nazi Germany’s oldest concentration camp.

Few Americans had Gellhorn’s firsthand exposure to the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, but most shared her conviction that World War II had taught a clear lesson: Never again should a regime like Hitler’s be allowed to expand its power and exercise its aggression.

This lesson was easy to proclaim—Never again!—but much harder to enact. It raised more questions than it answered. How do you identify “another Hitler”? What policy can reliably prevent such a monstrous force from gaining ground? How do you know when an initial act of aggression signals the rise of a state as bent on conquest as Nazi Germany? Is diplomacy always an inadequate response to powerful enemies? And isn’t the specter of “another Hitler” a convenient means for U.S. leaders to justify unprovoked attacks against proclaimed “enemies” who do not actually threaten our security? These questions divided Americans throughout the Cold War. They divide us still.

The once unifying legacy of World War II eventually became bitterly divisive in large part because many cold warriors equated Hitler’s genocidal Fascism to every imaginable manifestation of “Communism.” In the early days of the Cold War, that linkage was made explicit when the term “
Red Fascism
” was used to describe Communism. It was also commonplace for American leaders to claim that Communism was an interconnected, monolithic threat, masterminded from the Soviet Union and devoted to global conquest. Every form it took was therefore regarded as dangerous—whether it cropped up in Western European electoral politics, in revolutionary movements in Greece and Indochina, or among a group of accused “Reds” in Hollywood.

And just as Fascism had advanced “while England slept,” as Winston Churchill put it, Cold War Americans heard countless warnings that Communism was rapidly metastasizing without sufficient alarm or opposition. The World War II lesson included a sharp self-rebuke for ignoring Hitler’s rise. The West had not only “slept,” but actually stimulated Hitler’s rapacious appetite by “appeasing” him; by passively accepting his blatant acts of aggression, first in 1936 when he moved troops into the Rhineland (in violation of the Versailles Treaty), then in 1937 when he bombed Republican Spain in support of General Francisco Franco, and again in 1938 when he annexed Austria. In September 1938, Hitler met with French and British leaders at a conference in Munich and demanded Germany’s right to claim yet more territory—the Sudetenland (a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia).

In Munich, Hitler promised that he only wanted this one more piece of territory. If he had the Sudetenland, his goals would be achieved, he would go no farther. The French and British accepted his word. A settlement was reached. Hitler would take the Sudetenland and a second world war would be avoided. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned home and bragged that the Munich Agreement had achieved “peace for our time.” Within months the “peace” collapsed. Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Then on September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland. The carnage of World War II began. For decades to come American foreign policy makers believed they had learned a profound lesson—the lesson of Munich. Because Hitler betrayed the agreement, “Munich” became a one-word curse, a synonym for surrender, a symbol of appeasement. Munich, they believed, proved that diplomacy cannot be trusted to placate aggressors. Force is the only “language” they understand.

In April 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower invoked this lesson with one of its major popularizers—British prime minister Winston Churchill. Eisenhower wanted Britain to join the United States in a last-ditch effort to save the French in Indochina. At the time, French forces were desperately under siege at Dien Bien Phu. America was already paying 78 percent of the cost of France’s failing war, but the Communist-led Viet Minh were winning their anticolonial struggle nonetheless. Eisenhower was thinking of ordering air strikes against the Viet Minh—but he wanted Churchill’s support. In a letter to the prime minister, he suggested that standing by while France lost Indochina would be akin to sleeping while Fascism advanced: “
We failed to halt Hirohito
, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?”

One might have expected Churchill to buy the Hitler–Viet Minh connection. After all, in 1946, at a Missouri college, Churchill had famously denounced the Soviet Union for expanding its control into Eastern Europe and sealing it off with an “iron curtain.” Communism, he warned, presented the same threat of conquest posed by Hitler: “
We must not let it happen again
.” But to Churchill in 1954, the peace talks in Geneva were not like the 1938 talks in Munich. Global security did not require saving a French colony, even to the Communists. The Viet Minh were not a Hitler-like threat.

A few days after Eisenhower’s failed attempt to persuade Churchill, the president explained the domino theory to journalists. A loss of Indochina to Communist rebels, he claimed, would inevitably lead to the loss of all of Southeast Asia: “
You have a row of dominoes
set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” The domino theory grew directly out of the “Munich analogy.” Aggressors like Hitler want to conquer the world and unless that aggression is opposed, one country after another will fall under their sway.

Congress wasn’t buying it any more than Churchill, at least not as a convincing justification to escalate U.S. support for France in a war many believed was doomed. On April 6, 1954, for example, Senator John Kennedy spoke against U.S. military intervention:

The time has come
for the American people to be told the blunt truth about Indochina. . . . [T]o pour money, materiel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. . . . I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere . . . [and] which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.

And the American people weren’t buying it.
A Gallup poll
in April 1954 found that 68 percent opposed direct U.S. military intervention to support the French. In Illinois, an American Legion division with 78,000 members passed a resolution demanding that the government “refrain from dispatching any of its Armed Forces to participate as combatants in the fighting in Indochina.”

American resistance stemmed in large part from the recent experience of the Korean War. That stalemated and costly war had just ended the previous fall, leaving 33,000 Americans dead. There was little public protest against the Korean War, but opinion polls indicated widespread disillusionment. Throughout most of the war, 40–50 percent of Americans said their country
had made a mistake
“going into war in Korea.” That level of opposition is especially remarkable since it coincided with the heyday of McCarthyism—an era in which all forms of dissent were routinely branded “un-American.”

The Korean War was disillusioning even to the military brass. Although the initial goal of containing North Korea at the 38th parallel was achieved, the United States soon embarked on a much more ambitious mission. A few months into the war Truman endorsed the effort to drive the Communists all the way back to the Chinese border. The rapid achievement of that objective led to premature gloating. As soon as U.S. troops approached the border, in October 1950, 300,000 Chinese troops poured across in support of North Korea. Chinese intervention drove the forces under General Douglas MacArthur all the way back to the 38th parallel. The war stalemated there for two and a half more years until an armistice was finally agreed upon.

General MacArthur claimed that Truman’s timidity prevented complete victory. Had the United States been willing to drop atomic bombs on North Korea and China, Communism might have been defeated throughout Korea and perhaps even in China. Not all officers shared MacArthur’s eagerness to go nuclear, but a large number did share his angry faith that victory had been denied them by their civilian bosses, that there was something fundamentally flawed about the very idea of limited warfare. Although the U.S. air attacks against North Korea were among the most ruthless and indiscriminate in military history, they had been “limited” to nonnuclear bombs and napalm, and did not target China. For many career officers, Korea left a profound resentment of how “politics” could inhibit their ability to do their job, a grievance that would deepen and fester during the Vietnam War and remain alive in institutional memory to the very present.

However, the Korean experience, like the Vietnam War that followed, produced conflicting impulses within the military—a resentment of political “restraints”
and
a reluctance to go to war. Over drinks at the officers’ club there might be a lot of hostile invective aimed at spineless politicians, but when it came down to whether or not American troops should be sent to fight in Indochina, all but a few were opposed. In fact, the Pentagon was soon said to house an unofficial organization called the Never Again Club. This “never again” lesson was remarkably different from the World War II lesson (never again another Munich or another Hitler). The Korean War lesson was “
Never again should we fight
a land war in Asia.”

The Never Again Club easily checked off the numerous reasons why war in Asia might fail, particularly if the United States was not committed to an all-out nuclear attack: hostile and unfamiliar terrain, radically different languages and cultures, long transoceanic supply lines, and enemies with reservoirs of dedicated, even “fanatical,” troops willing to fight to the last man, en masse, wave after wave. Given those obstacles,
many officers wanted assurances
that they could use nuclear weapons in any future Asian war.

Eisenhower understood the broad reluctance to fight another war after Korea. That’s one of the reasons he was so attracted to the use of secret operations to assert U.S. power. There would be few, if any, American casualties and no public knowledge or debate. In the summer of 1954, after the French defeat in Indochina, American agents under the CIA’s Edward Lansdale were already in Saigon plotting to build and bolster a permanent, non-Communist South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem. Few could have predicted that these were the first steps in the creation of an unpopular police state and a major war. When Americans did begin to hear more about American involvement in Vietnam, the news was generally upbeat. The stories told by Dr. Tom Dooley and the American Friends of Vietnam made it sound as if the United States was involved in nothing more than an idealistic, humanitarian campaign to help a struggling young nation.