Vietnam War Protesters Have NOTHING
to Apologize For
When patriotism and pro-war become
synonymous.
By David Zeiger
September 29, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- How many times have you heard, or
even said yourself, something like this:
It
was beyond cruel what was done to Viet
Nam vets. I protested the war but not
the soldiers who'd been thru hell.
That’s a
comment made on my Facebook page when I
posted Jerry Lembcke’s very
insightful review
of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s series,
The Vietnam War. Lembcke points
out that the series promotes the
established narrative that for Vietnam
vets, the experience of coming home to a
“hostile” public was “more traumatic
than the war itself.” As I will discuss
here, Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran and
Associate Professor Emeritus at Holy
Cross College, has dedicated much of his
life to countering and disproving that
narrative.
Now take a close look at the above
statement. I protested the war but not
the soldiers who’d been thru hell. The
implication is, of course, that while
this person didn’t do it, others must
have “protested the soldiers,” referring
to the ubiquitous stories of soldiers
and veterans being harassed, hounded,
called baby killers and spat on by a
variety of protesters and, as the
stories usually go, “long haired
hippies.” Actually, this particular
comment was part of a string of
responses to someone who claimed he was
“urinated on while in uniform.”
That the returning Vietnam veterans were
“spat on and called baby killers” has
now reached the level of gospel truth,
most distressingly among those who were
themselves part of the very movement
being vilified by those claims. No one
saw or was a party to such attacks, yet
everyone “knows” it happened. Someone
must have done it, or why would so many
people claim it was done to them?
Why indeed. Answering that one question
sheds a lot of light on how and why the
relationship between the antiwar
movement and the veterans of that war
has been widely, and very effectively,
rewritten–a rewrite that has gone
virtually unchallenged by those who were
there and who, frankly, know better.
Today, four generations after the
Vietnam War, the mythology of mistreated
veterans continues to play a profoundly
powerful role in stifling protest
against America’s wars in the name of
“supporting the troops.” And with Donald
Trump threatening to “Completely destroy
North Korea” while unleashing the
military in the Middle East, nothing
could be more urgent than confronting
that myth.
First, some personal background. From
1970 to 1972 I was on the staff of the
Oleo Strut, a GI Coffeehouse in Killeen,
Texas, just outside of Ft. Hood, home to
tens of thousands of Vietnam returnees
who still had six months or more left to
serve. The Oleo Strut, like dozens of GI
Coffeehouses near bases around the
country, was a place where soldiers
could find literature about the antiwar
and Third World liberation movements,
discuss and debate the war with both
civilians and fellow GIs, and, most
significantly, build their own movement
against the war and the military. For
two years I helped them distribute their
underground paper, The Fatigue Press,
with a monthly press run of 5,000. In
1971, I helped plan and organize an
“Armed Farces Day” demonstration against
the war right outside the gates of Ft.
Hood that over two thousand GIs
participated in.
Statistics and a wealth of documentary
evidence from that time show that my
experience at Ft. Hood was the norm, not
the exception. The GI Movement of
1968-1973 was so all-pervasive that Col.
Robert Heinl famously wrote that it had
“infected the entire armed services.”
Historian James Lewes has documented
over 500 different GI underground
newspapers (available online at the
Wisconsin Historical Society), along
with dozens of organizations from GIs
United Against the War to clandestine
Black Panther chapters in the military.
A 1972 study commissioned by the
Department of Defense found that 51% of
all troops in Vietnam had engaged in
“some form of protest,” from wearing a
peace sign on uniforms, to desertion
(over 500,000 “Incidents of desertion”
in the course of the war),
demonstrations, and outright mutiny
(including the widespread practice of
“fragging”–troops killing their own
officers). And by 1972 Vietnam Veterans
Against the War was a highly visible,
major force across the country. The
widespread picture of a military full of
soldiers “doing their duty” while
privileged civilians protested and
hurled insults at them is, to put it
bluntly, a lie.
In
2005, at the height of Iraq war, I made
the film Sir! No Sir! That
film, broadcast in over 200 countries
around the world, told the story of the
GI Movement, a story that had been
erased from just about every history of
the Vietnam war. In Sir! No Sir!,
Jerry Lembcke makes the point that the
reality of thousands of GIs and veterans
opposing the war had been replaced by
the myth of hippies spitting on them,
and it was that contention that drew the
ire and attacks from pro war veterans
who hounded several critics who had
praised the film.
But Lembcke
is the only person I am aware of who has
thoroughly researched the claims of
veterans being spat on and the broader
insistence that they were shunned and
attacked by the antiwar movement. He
wrote about his findings in his 1998
book,
The Spitting Image: Myth,
Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam,
a must-read for everyone who wants to
know how veterans were actually treated
by the antiwar movement. Here are just a
few tidbits of what his research
revealed.
To
begin with, over the entire course of
the war there is not a shred of
documentary evidence that any spitting
incidents occurred. No articles in
newspapers or magazines, no letters to
the editor, no television news stories,
no FBI reports, no arrests or complaints
filed with police. Nothing. Not even
Stars and Stripes, voice of the
military, reported on any spitting
incidents. And in an era that was
heavily documented with photographs,
including by the GIs themselves (Lembcke
points out that Pentax cameras were sold
at PXs and were the camera of choice
among the troops, not unlike cell phones
today), not one photo of a
veteran being spat on exists.
The stories that are told almost always
happen in public, usually at airports
and coming from crowds of demonstrators
whose goal is to humiliate the returning
troops. We are told that commanding
officers warned GIs they’d be spat on
when they returned home, that they
should throw away their uniform to
protect themselves. Yet no one alerted
the cops, or military authorities, or
the press? We’re talking about assault
here. Wouldn’t the FBI, whose goal
throughout the nineteen sixties was to
thwart and undermine the antiwar
movement, have arrested at least one
spitter? There were, if the stories are
to be believed, hundreds—even
thousands—of them. And what about the
press? Soldiers at airports being
routinely abused and spat on would
certainly have gotten to the media, who
would, as Lembcke points out, “been
camping in the lobby of the San
Francisco airport, cameras in hand, just
waiting for a chance to record the real
thing–if, that is, they had any reason
to believe that such incidents might
occur.”
The simple fact is that between 1965 and
1975 no one was claiming to have been
spat on. Okay, so maybe they were spat
on metaphorically, as the
increasingly popular expression goes. I
have seen several people who initially
claim they were spat on, when
challenged, change the story to a
version of “Well, I wasn’t literally
spat on, but I may as well have been.”
When the gentleman who claimed on my
Facebook post to have been urinated on
was challenged by several people, his
story became “I ducked into a bar to get
away from the jerks.” Who the “jerks”
were was never explained.
But again, that’s not what vets were
saying back in the day. As Lembcke
writes, “A U.S. Senate study, based on
data collected in August 1971 by Harris
Associates, found that 75 percent of
Vietnam era veterans polled disagreed
with the statement, ‘Those people at
home who opposed the Vietnam war often
blame veterans for our involvement
there.’ Ninety-nine percent of the
veterans polled described their
reception by close friends and family as
friendly, while 94 percent said their
reception by people their own age who
had not served in the armed forces was
friendly. Only 3 percent of returning
veterans described their reception as
‘not at all friendly.’” (Emphasis
added)
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And just like the spitting stories,
there is no documentary evidence of
antiwar activists screaming “baby
killer!” at soldiers and veterans. In
fact, as every activist who looks
honestly at their history can attest, it
was the government and military machine
that was consistently targeted, not the
soldiers. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many
kids did you kill today?!” was one
of the most popular chants, until it was
Richard Nixon doing the killing.
So
where did this idea of vets being called
“baby killer” come from? A plausible
source is the My Lai massacre poster. In
March of 1968, over 500 unarmed
civilians–men, women, and children–were
systematically gunned down by a company
of GIs in the 23rd (Americal) Infantry
Division. The military covered up the My
Lai massacre for over a year until it
was exposed by journalist Seymour Hersh.
Caught in their coverup, the military
indicted 22 soldiers and Lt. Calley, the
officer on the scene, for the murders.
It was the military, not the movement,
who “blamed the troops” when the results
of their murderous policies were
exposed.
In the wake of My Lai,
the poster produced by the antiwar
movement featured a horrific photograph
of bodies piled up in the village. There
were only two lines of text:
“And babies? And babies.”
I
know this powerful poster well because
we had it in the Oleo Strut and
reproduced it in the Fatigue Press to be
seen by thousands of soldiers. Why?
Because it embodied the criminal nature
of the war they were forced to fight. I
imagine some people took it personally,
but it should go without saying that the
intent was never to accuse all soldiers
of being baby killers, but to confront
them with the hard reality of the war
and bring them into the movement. Should
we, in the name of “Honoring the
troops,” not have exposed and
condemned the My Lai massacre?
Were there angry debates about the war,
from dinner tables to street corners to
campuses? Absolutely. Were there
demonstrations outside military bases,
as the purveyors of spitting stories
complain about? Of Course–but, as in my
own experience, those demonstrations
were more often than not led by veterans
and active duty soldiers who targeted
the government, not their fellow GIs.
Did antiwar activists argue with
everyone, including veterans, that the
United States was engaged in a criminal,
genocidal invasion that targeted
civilians? Most definitely, as well they
should have. Did those arguments at
times get more than a bit personal (“You
support genocide!”)? Yes they did, and
understandably so. That was the nature
of the times, and the urgency of ending
the slaughter that was the Vietnam War.
In
one report I read recently, a veteran
described how isolated and uncomfortable
he felt at the college he attended. He
couldn’t express his opinions in
discussions about Vietnam, despite his
service. It turns out the college he
attended was Berkeley, and he supported
the war. I was struck by this, because
anyone who openly supported the war at
Berkeley was bound to be verbally
pummeled. It would be kind of like
advocating slavery at an NAACP
convention. But his discomfort most
likely had nothing to do with the fact
that he was a veteran, it was his
support for the war that was under
attack.
And that’s exactly the point. The debate
in society was about the war, and
veterans were as much a part of that
debate as everyone else, if not more so.
Veterans were not a monolithic group.
Those who opposed the war, and there
were thousands, were welcomed with open
arms by the antiwar movement, becoming a
leading force in the country as Vietnam
Veterans Against the War. It was
veterans, particularly in VVAW, who
exposed most vividly the policies of the
government and military–carpet bombing,
free fire zones, body count, and the
unprecedented use of napalm and agent
orange. These were the official weapons
and strategies employed by the U.S. in
Vietnam. And it was those strategies
that made Vietnam a genocidal war filled
with the atrocities so vehemently, and
rightly, denounced by the antiwar
movement.
So
what happened? How did “The reception
from my peers was friendly,” get turned
into “I was spat on and traumatized?”
This is the heart of the matter, and the
question Lembcke devotes most of his
book to answering. The short answer is
that it was the result of a highly
effective, decades long campaign by many
forces in society bent on casting blame
for America’s defeat in the war not on
the government and the nature of the war
itself, but on the supposed “betrayal”
of the soldiers by the antiwar movement.
By turning veterans into victims of
angry mobs of protesters, those seeking
more wars of conquest hoped to isolate
and suppress any opposition in the name
of “Supporting the troops.” And no one
did more to advance that cause than
Ronald Reagan.
Although the charge against the antiwar
movement of “Disloyalty to the troops”
was pushed by Richard Nixon as early as
1969, the spitting stories didn’t fully
emerge until the mid-1980s, fifteen
years after the war, which is itself
strong evidence of their mythical
nature. Most significantly, they sprang
up while the Reagan administration was
secretly funding reactionary armies in
Latin America and railing against what
he called the “Vietnam Syndrome”–the
reluctance of most Americans to support
sending troops into Third World
countries. Shaming the antiwar movement
was key to that campaign, and the
spitting stories, eagerly told by a
handful of pro-war veterans (the 3
percent of the above survey), did the
trick.
Hollywood did their part as well,
producing a wave of fantasy revenge
films starting in the late seventies.
Top of the heap was Sylvester Stallone’s
wildly popular First Blood
(1982) and Rambo: First Blood II
(1985), in which a bulked-up,
testosterone-filled caricature of a
Vietnam vet single-handedly takes out
his revenge first on an uncaring
America, then on the bloodthirsty
Vietnamese. First Blood
featured the absurd scenario of Rambo, a
former Green Beret and highly trained
killer, whining that “hippies” spat on
him at an airport. Those hippies sure
were a powerful bunch!
The spitting stories hit their zenith
when America did send large numbers of
troops overseas, to the Middle East, for
the first Gulf war in 1990. Iraq had
occupied Kuwait, claiming it was part of
their territory (Kuwait’s borders had
been created by British colonialists in
the early Twentieth Century). As the
first Bush administration was flailing
around looking for a justification to
invade, huge demonstrations were held
across the country demanding no
invasion. But once the troops were sent,
the media was filled with stories of
young boys fearful–not of facing battle,
but of the folks back home. Once again,
horror stories were spread about the
treatment of Vietnam vets, along with
dire warnings, including from protest
leaders, to not repeat the “mistakes” of
the nineteen sixties. Congressman John
Murtha visited the troops in the Gulf
and reported in the New York Times
that troops repeatedly asked him whether
the “folks back home” supported them.
“The aura of Vietnam hangs over these
kids,” he said. “Their parents were in
it. They’ve seen all these movies. They
worry, they wonder.” With that, the
“reason” for the war became supporting
“our boys in harm’s way.” The
demonstrations evaporated, replaced by
yellow ribbons.
And that, of course, has both continued
and intensified to this day. I’m a
baseball fan, and every Dodgers game I
attend includes a “Salute to a hero”
ceremony, with thousands of fans
standing and cheering as the veteran’s
deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan are
ticked off. You have to be blind to not
see that, in the name of “honoring” this
individual, it is the wars themselves
that are being cheered. But woe to
anyone who would actually say that. It’s
okay to oppose those wars, as long as
you are very careful to never imply that
soldiers are committing war crimes and
always say “Thank you for your service.”
Is it surprising in this atmosphere that
there is, today, no anti-war movement?
As
the saying goes, a lie repeated often
enough becomes the “truth.” The Burns/Novick
Vietnam War series ends with Nancy
Biberman, a Columbia University student
activist, asking forgiveness for calling
veterans “baby killers.” I’ll go out on
a limb and say that Ms. Biderman never
called veterans baby killers. Maybe she
now believes that even mentioning the
thousands of civilians killed by U.S.
forces in Vietnam is tantamount to doing
just that. Maybe she thinks that others
must have done those horrible things we
have heard about and every antiwar
activist should now atone for their
sins.
Both are a surrender to the lie. And
both are, despite intentions, an open
door to more wars and more slaughter.
David Zeiger was a
civilian organizer from 1970-72, for the
GI Movement against the war at Ft. Hood,
Texas. As a documentary filmmaker, he
has produced and directed several
award-winning features and series. His
2006 film, Sir!
No Sir!, was broadcast in over
200 countries worldwide. Check out his
website
here.