Carry Me Home (108 page)

Rich Urbanowski followed Hawley and attacked literary produce. He quoted one best-selling novelist who’d written about the emotional baggage of his dope-smoking, cocaine-sniffing, baby-killing characters and then said in an interview at Nittany Mountain College, “They aren’t me. I wasn’t like that.”

Sam Linderman presented his analysis of the syllabi from forty college courses being taught on the war. He took academia to task for “its politically driven curricula,” for its lauding of the works of Noam Chomsky and D. Gareth Porter; and he demonstrated that thirty-six of the forty courses were highly slanted. As Linderman explained, “There seems to be a preponderance of sixties liberals who are now professors or assistant professors because they stayed in school to avoid the draft.”

Session Four—29 October 1981—“A race war,” Ty Mohammed said. “Racism pervaded every aspect of our lives there and it ran the war.” In the audience, in the jury box, on the loft floor, even behind the prosecution’s table, white vets and white students slightly bowed their heads or shifted their eyes. Of all the topics this was the most discomforting. Feelings of guilt, of being from the privileged class, of being one with the Oppressor, of a need to listen and acquiesce, ranged from subtle to strong, but they were universal. On the other hand, the black and Hispanic vets were vocal and virtually split down the middle on the issue of racism in Viet Nam.

“Black soldiers went and fought,” Ty testified, ‘because we wanted to prove we were part of America. We wanted to show whites that we held the same ideals. We thought that going would gain us respect. We thought racism and stigmatization would end. Then we got there. Millions of us, some of us part of McNamara’s Hundred Thousand that was really two hundred forty-six thousand, that took indigent young black men with dismal educations—See, they knew what they were lookin for. Get the dumb niggers to go be-boppin in the paddies like ... who said it ... flypaper. They were lookin for cannon fodder and scarfed up nearly a quarter million young bloods. Then they exploited us. It is well documented that there were more black soldiers killed in Nam than white soldiers. I know a lot of you are thinking, shee-it, I saw lots of whites killed too. And that is true. But mostly it was blacks, browns and reds because The System put us in infantry units while it put most whites in supply or transportation or even artillery. Whites, when they got killed, were helicopter pilots or doorgunners or truck drivers that hit mines. When a brother got greased he was humpin a 60 in the boonies or he was on the perimeter at a forward base like Khe Sanh. You understand me. I don’t mean all. I mean in general. I mean the average white and the average black and that is the story the media told because they told about average guys.

“I know lots of guys here, white guys, humped too. I know whites bled just like blacks. But it was disproportionate. And we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘We are taking young black men who have been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they have not found in Southwest Georgia or in East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together at the same school.’

“See,” Ty continued. “I’m not sayin anything against white vets. I’m sayin blacks gave more and got less. I’m sayin the true evils lay with The System. When I was charged with possession, Man, The System that prosecuted me, including my own defense counsel, was all white. That is not justice. I’m ashamed of things I did in Nam. But I shouldn’t have been there. And even though I served, I have a racially instigated bad paper discharge that stigmatizes me. Rodney says the war was a ruse by white capitalists to eliminate a lot of young bloods because we were just beginning to come into our own. Racism is about power and the power hierarchy knew how to maintain. If lots of whites were wasted that was acceptable because whites outnumber blacks nine to one. This was a war within a war. It cost one hundred and twenty billion tax dollars. That don’t include interest. The war was fought by sons of minorities and by sons of the poor.”

“Amen,” Rodney Smith shouted.

“No questions,” Tony Pisano said.

“You may step down.” Wapinski shook his head. “Who’s next?”

“The prosecution calls Steve Travellers,” Mark Renneau said. The buzzing within the barn remained subdued but the craning of necks and the rocking of bodies was pronounced.

“Uncle Tom,” Rodney hooted. From the jury box Calvin Dee flashed Rodney a power fist. Then Rodney and Ty began an elaborate dap.

“Order,” Wapinski called out.

“A lot of dying was done by black soldiers,” Steve Travellers began. “And it is true that significantly more blacks than whites, in relationship to their respective percentages of U.S. population, started out being killed and wounded in Viet Nam. Quantifying that significance, however, illuminates the story. Especially since some in the old antiwar movement, and some historians today, regard the U.S. effort as racist, that is, ‘a white man’s war fought by the sons of blacks and other ethnic minorities.’ Or if the effort wasn’t racist, they describe it in economic or class terms; ‘a rich man’s war fought by the sons of the working-class poor.’ But is this true? And if it is, or if it isn’t, what ramifications has the story had?

“African-Americans constitute 12.9 per cent of the U.S. population. In the early years of the American build-up, there is no doubt that this minority was disproportionately deployed in infantry units. In ’65 and ’66, blacks accounted for 20 percent of all combat deaths. The armed forces recognized this, perhaps because of media exposition, and took corrective action. In ’67 black combat deaths fell to 13 percent of all American KIAs. By 1972, and remember half of all U.S. casualties came after January ’69, the percentage of KIAs who were black dropped to 7.6. From the beginning to the end, of 47,244 American combat deaths, 5,711, or 12.1 percent, were African-American. This is a statistically significant difference but not only is it not the ‘half of all deaths’ some politicians, commentators and ‘historians’ have claimed, it is actually significant in the opposite direction. Hey, Ty, maybe it was a race war, huh? But then you’d have to say it was to kill whitey. By the way, other racial minorities accounted for less than two percent of the KIAs.

“Damn it,” Travellers continued, “that argument, that image, hurts black pride more than it enhances it. It pushes people who believe the racist-war theory into a victim-sucker self-image. Is that you, Ty? Calvin? Rodney? You
want
to live that stereotype? Maybe you
want
that to be your story because it excuses you from overcoming the very real racism we are up against.

“Black soldiers in Viet Nam, in general, like white soldiers, did an outstanding job of soldiering. It was the first war in which the armed forces were truly integrated, and the physical closeness and interdependency of blacks and whites created intense and meaningful friendships. This had
never
before happened in America on such a massive scale. That the media missed that story and instead chose to report racist fraggings says to me those reporters and editors were more interested in the sensational than the truth, no matter the consequences. Perhaps the vested interest in racism is not held by the capitalists but by the journalists.

“Consequences!” Travellers balled both his fists, placed them on his thighs, leaned forward in the witness chair. “The consequences of the race-war story are a new and deeper polarization between races in America. That was unnecessary. It is tragic.

“U.S. policy wasn’t antiblack. There were other social and cultural phenomena working in America in the sixties that created the early bias and the lopsided results. For example, the percent of blacks in The Old South was higher than in the rest of the country, and The South was the most promilitary, or the most patriotic, region in the U.S. That led to higher enlistment rates. The percent of southerners killed is significantly higher than troops from other regions. But southern blacks and southern whites were killed at rates proportionate to their regional demographics.

“I examined serious incident reports, too. Fraggings, mostly. I don’t know how pervasive fraggings were, but the black director of the army’s Office of Equal Opportunity reported that in Viet Nam 1970 was the worst year. That year two hundred GIs were wounded or murdered by fellow troops in racial incidents; two hundred out of 500,000 in twelve months, including rotations. It is significant, but keep it in perspective. That’s one in every twenty-five hundred. And it can be argued that the racial tension that led to many of those incidents was stirred up by inaccurate and misleading media reports. That’s their vested interest again.

“I strongly believe that the separation of white and black America today, and the resurgence of hate groups, is directly tied to the misinformation aired by the mass media about blacks and whites in Viet Nam. I also believe that the decline, economically and socially, of the three-quarters of all African-Americans who did not advance under the Civil Rights laws, is a direct ramification of this misinformation, which robs black vets and the black community of their pride, and fills them with additional and unnecessary resentment at government and at whites in general.

“What would have happened had the media focused on interracial harmony, interracial cooperation, interracial camaraderie that existed in Nam? Let me project a different scenario. What if the media had told a different, and in reality a more accurate, story? What would have been the ramifications to the present?”

“Objection,” Sherrick spoke up. “Conjecture.”

“Overruled,” Wapinski countered. “He’s only asked the question, not answered it.”

“It’s still leading,” Sherrick said.

“Screw it,” Travellers snapped. “These guys don’t want to hear this stuff. It interrupts their self-image.”

The Last Session—5 November 1981—All week the vets had bickered, aided, cajoled or snubbed each other. The weather turned colder. High Meadow lay shrouded in a thick mist. Inside the barn Vu Van Hieu took the witness stand. He was neither prosecution nor defense witness.

“I will just say some things and you use how you like,” Hieu began. He then related his experiences after the fall of Saigon, told of the imprisonments, tortures and killings he’d seen, of the extrapolation of thousands of refugee reports into the conclusion that a bloodbath—70,000 killed in the first ninety days—had indeed occurred. “Maybe the media,” Hieu said, “say little about this because we are not Americans. Or maybe because that would shame them because they say earlier no bloodbath will happen.

“Viet Namese people do the same. We too were blind. Before we lost our country many of my friends say we live under the yoke of American imperialism. My countrymen were free to say that. Even members of my family called for us to support this communist five-point plan or that communist ten-point plan.

“During the American time my countrymen stick their noses into every ministry and every prison in South Viet Nam and they raise hell about corruption and moral turpitude. They show the world tiger cages. They say their own families are cruel and inhuman. They expose this general for bribery, that one for having a fifteen-year-old mistress. They cheer when an American flag is burned, and when they see pictures of Americans ripping their draft cards, and when the pictures are of someone waving a communist flag on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

“On 30 April we were liberated and we were no longer blind. Even for NLF leaders like Duong Quynh Hoa and Truong Nhu Tang, and opposition journalists like Ngo Cong Duc and Ly Chanh Trung, liberation too gives the miracle of sight. Now they see with their own eyes how all Viet Namese live happily, united in peace and freedom. We are so happy now that maybe two million enemies of the state are locked away in new economic zones, that maybe one million risk escape in tiny boats, maybe half happy to end up as fish food. Since liberation no tiger cages. Since liberation no opposition. Since liberation no prostitutes, no marijuana, no terrorists.

“Since liberation tiger camps! Since liberation opposition stamped into the earth by the PAVN which has more than five million soldiers to control the people. Since liberation twelve Buddhist monks protest Hanoi’s repression by self-immolation. Why are there no pictures in the world press? Why are there no pictures, is because there are no photographers in Viet Nam except those approved by the state? Since liberation prostitutes can only work for party members, dope only sold by government cadre, terrorism only run by the state.

“Yes, now I see. There was much disinformation, and I was blind, but now I can see. If you still suffer disinformation, maybe it covers just how wrong so many were about the war. They say liberation and oppression just happen or are inevitable and not a communist long-term plan. Americans don’t want to believe the communists had their plan and worked their plan and not just in the South but in Laos and Cambodia, too. Americans don’t want to believe there was preconceived malice. The communists have a plan for America, too. To me this is very frightening. They hide from us their intent. Then Americans say communists have no plan. Communists do not enslave Viet Nam. If you gain your sight you too must see, must believe the communists have a plan—for your country, too.”

After the break Tony Pisano delivered the prosecution’s closing argument. He was at a loss as to where to begin, what to include. Wapinski had warned both sides they needed to reserve time for the jury to deliberate and report its verdict.

“Who are we?” Tony looked at the jurors, then the audience. “We are the stories of ourselves. We are the ethos and the mythos. We are our history and our interpretation and selective recollection of that history. This shapes us. This tells us who we are, what our beliefs and ideals are, what our behavior must be to be consistent with that self-image. Upon story one can forecast the future.

“The communists, too, have a story. They were and are determined to remake all Southeast Asia in their own antidemocratic image—no matter the cost, no matter the lives lost, no matter the misery produced. Their determination lured us, albeit as their opposition, into their story. We clashed militarily. We clashed culturally, not so much American versus Viet Namese but free democratic idealism versus rigid Asian communist tyranny. Today’s true story is the story of the clash of these stories.