Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  Q. What kind of people—men, women, children?

  A. Men, women, children.

  Q. Babies?

  A. Babies. And we all huddled them up. We made them squat down, and Lieutenant Calley came over and said, “You know what to do with them, don’t you?” And I said yes. So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them. And he left, and came back about ten or fifteen minutes later and said, “How come you ain’t killed them yet?” And I told him that “I didn’t think you wanted us to kill them, that you just wanted us to guard them.” He said, “No, I want them dead.”

  Q. He told this to all of you, or to you particularly?

  A. Well, I was facing him. So, but the other three, four guys heard it and so he stepped back about ten, fifteen feet, and he started shooting them. And he told me to start shooting. So I started shooting, I poured about four clips into the group.

  …

  Q. And you killed how many? At that time?

  A. Well, I fired an automatic, so you can’t—you just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ’cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.

  Q. Men, women, and children?

  A. Men, women, and children.

  Q. And babies?

  A. And babies….

  …

  Q. Obviously, the thought that goes through my mind—I spent some time over there, and I killed in the Second World War, and so forth. But the thought that goes through your mind is, We’ve raised such a dickens about what the Nazis did. Or what the Japanese did, but particularly what the Nazis did in the Second World War, the brutalization and so forth, you know. It’s hard for a good many Americans to understand that young, capable American boys could line up old men, women, and children and babies and shoot them down in cold blood. How do you explain that?

  A. I wouldn’t know.

  Q. Did you ever dream about all of this that went on in Pinkville?

  A. Yes, I did…and I still dream about it.

  Q. What kind of dreams?

  A. I see the women and children in my sleep. Some days…some nights, I can’t even sleep. I just lay there thinking about it.

  SEYMOUR HERSH

  My story ran that same morning, and that night, the buzz was big.

  The first story we sold for a hundred bucks, and by the third and fourth stories, it was five thousand dollars, and ten thousand dollars per story. Money was coming in like crazy—enough so I could buy a house.

  Then The New York Times and other people began to use the stories, so that’s how I ended up getting a Pulitzer Prize, because the establishment press finally bought into the story, which was a lucky thing.

  “TOP-SECRET” NOTES FROM CONVERSATION WITH PRESIDENT NIXON, NOVEMBER 27, 1969, BY ALEXANDER BUTTERFIELD, AIDE

  Check out Claremont man [Ron Ridenhour]…Check out all talkers. Pentagon too scared to investigate adequately…Another vulnerable spot—Claremont fellow Jewish (lib Jew)…Get backgrounds of all involved—all must be exposed…Meadlo too smooth for a farmer…Extent to which it happened greatly exaggerated…Let’s check this Mike Wallace too. He’s far left.

  Credit 12.3

  Army photographer Ron Haeberle was assigned to Charlie Company during the My Lai massacre and took photographs both with his official army camera and his own “unofficial” camera. Haeberle kept the film from his personal camera and released the photos to Life magazine and his hometown paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, after he was discharged. This graphic photo of a pile of dead Vietnamese women and children became an iconic image, frequently reproduced in antiwar posters.

  ALEXANDER BUTTERFIELD, DECEMBER 17, 1969, MEMO TO PRESIDENT NIXON RE: RONALD LEE RIDENHOUR (and Other Information re My Lai)

  —Seymour Hersh, the 32-year-old former McCarthy campaign press secretary, received a $1,000 grant to pursue development of the My Lai story. The grant came from the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund which is clearly left-wing and anti-administration….

  Credit 12.4

  Lieutenant William Calley, Jr., on the cover of Time magazine, December 5, 1969. Calley became the poster child for atrocities committed in Vietnam against civilians by American soldiers.

  —Our current aim is to compile discreet investigative reports on Ridenhour, Haeberle, Hersh, Meadlo, the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund, and Dispatch News Service (to include a run-down on its present editor, 22-year-old David Obst).*5

  PLAQUE AT THE MUSEUM OF SON MY MASSACRE, VIETNAM

  504 dead

  247 families

  182 women

  17 were pregnant

  173 children

  56 were infants

  60 men over 60

  * * *

  *1 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described Project 100,000, which drafted thousands of men who had failed the Armed Forces Qualifications Test, as a liberal extension of Johnson’s Great Society. “The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of the wealth of this nation’s abundance, but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their country’s defense and they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which, for them, and their families, will reverse the downward spiral of human decay.” George Mariscal, ed., Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 20.

  *2 Black GIs would become the most militant members of the GI resistance movement, and by 1970 many black soldiers were considered unreliable in combat. The top brass considered black radicalism a hindrance to U.S. fighting capabilities. In August 1968, black GIs led two U.S. military prison rebellions in Long Binh and Da Nang. Black separatist antiwar groups cropped up among GIs called the Black Brothers Union and the Black Liberation Front of the Armed Forces, led by Black Panther Party supporters. See David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005 edition), pp. 39–40.

  *3 Operation Speedy Express was a military offensive in the Mekong Delta that lasted from December 1968 to May 1969, in which 10,899 enemy soldiers were killed and only 267 Americans. Though thousands of civilians were killed, the U.S. Army later covered up the full civilian death toll. Details about Operation Speedy Express were revealed by Nick Turse in “A My Lai a Month: In Operation Speedy Express, New Evidence of Civilian Slaughter and Cover-Up in Vietnam,” The Nation, November 13, 2008.

  *4 An army survey of returning GIs found that 44 percent of the men contacted had tried either heroin or opium while they were in Vietnam, and 10 percent were using narcotics every day. Ninety-three percent of those who used heroin had their first contact with the drug while in Vietnam. Another army survey showed that 51 percent of the soldiers stationed in Vietnam smoked marijuana. Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, pp. 29–31.

  *5 These “Butterfieldgram” memos were first published by Bob Woodward in The Last of the President’s Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), pp. 206–7, p. 211. Nothing ever came of Butterfield and Ehrlichman’s investigation. Calley was convicted of premeditated murder of twenty-two Vietnamese civilians and sentenced to life in prison. Captain Ernest Medina was acquitted of all charges, and no other member of Calley’s platoon was convicted. The day after his sentence, Nixon ordered Calley released from military prison and put under house arrest at Fort Benning, where he stayed for three years. In 1974 Nixon granted Calley a presidential pardon. No one else was prosecuted for the crimes at My Lai.

  CHAPTER 13

  EXILE

  (November 1969–February 1970)

  The first rule of our [Woodstock] Nation prohibits any of us from serving in the army of a foreign power with which we do not have an alliance. Since we exist in a state of war with the Pig Empire, we all have a responsibility to beat the draft by any means necessary.

  —ABBIE HOFFMAN, Steal This Book

  By the end of 1969 many young men were willfully breaking the law by resisting the draft, and many of those who were in the military refused to fight. The
Great Refusal was in full swing. Statistics paint a clear picture of the havoc that the war and the draft visited on America in 1969 and 1970. Of the nine million men enlisted in the military during the Vietnam War era, 2.2 million were drafted, 570,000 violated draft laws and did not serve, 25,000 were indicted, 9,000 were convicted, and 170,000 were granted conscientious objector (CO) status. The Justice Department sent 3,250 draft resisters to prison and draft resistance activists disrupted 300 local draft boards between January and September of 1969.

  Protesters who attacked draft boards in Delaware and Rhode Island in 1970 destroyed nearly all of the records, crippling the system in those states. In Oakland, California, between October 1969 and March 1970, 50 percent of those called did not report to the Selective Service office. Eleven percent of the men who did refused induction. Army Conscientious Objector status applications jumped 400 percent between 1967 and 1971, and desertion and AWOL rates were the highest in modern American history. Secreted out of the country by an underground railroad, draft resisters and GI deserters congregated in Canada and Sweden.

  By 1970, American soldiers regularly refused commands to fight in the field and military accounts recorded 68 cases of fragging—attacks by soldiers against their own officers—and many more cases went unreported. GIs rioted at more than 30 military bases and military jails, and GIs circulated 250 antiwar underground papers. Widespread draft resistance, desertions, and dissent inside the ranks drove the American armed forces to near collapse.

  DAVID HARRIS (leader of the Resistance)

  I remember Joan [Baez] telling me that she’d been at this thing, Woodstock. You have to perceive how remote it all was in the federal prison camp in Safford, Arizona. You survive prison by not being anyplace else—you go crazy if you try to live outside the walls. If, in your mind, you are out there, then you’re fucked, because you’re not there, and that means you’re going to go batshit. So the way you do time is not to pretend you’re anyplace else. The guys who identify themselves by the car they’re able to drive have a hard time doing time. Some people I knew wouldn’t take visits, because it’s really disorienting. No question I was going to take them. There was my son.

  RANDY KEHLER (draft resistance organizer)

  I got arraigned in November of ’69, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the trial was the first week of February 1970. So there were several months between the arraignment and the trial. At the trial itself, one of the probation officers said to me in front of my parents, “Look, here’s the address form. Tell you what, if you just give us your current address, we’ll drop all the other charges.” My parents were totally elated, but I said, “No.” I wanted to resist. It’s like the great line from Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. I wanted “to be friction against their wheel.” However insignificant my action might be. I remember not even being tempted. I remember being clear. I had come this far. I ticked off the names of my friends, including David Harris, who were already in prison and I said, I will be proud to be joining them. So I had my mind made up: prison or let me go free. Those were the only options I would entertain.

  DAVID HARRIS

  On December 2, 1969, they cut me a special dispensation and let me stay up in the rec room and wait for the phone call to tell me that my son had been born. After that, for eight hours every month was the only time I got to see my son, Gabe. Joan would bring him and we’d take our eight hours. Eight hours a month to get to be a father, that’s it. So I was always going to take those. But it put your head in a twist. Because all the sudden, for eight hours, you’re part of some life that’s out there somewhere. And then they leave and you’re back in your cell block. Visits are definitely a mixed bag.

  The guards would do shit like I’d be sitting in my cell one weekend. I knew I was getting a visit. You had to dress up. I have my bonnaroos on, which means my khaki pants and shirt—like an army uniform. They called my name and number over the loudspeaker, “Harris, 4697-159. Visit.” So I’d then stand at my gate waiting for them to open my cell. They’d do the thing just like in the movies. You step out, get through the next gate, get patted down, get through the next set of gates. You make a left-hand turn. You have to go through another gate to get to where the visits are, but you get through that gate and then you have to go into this room, and they strip-search you. “Take your clothes off, bend over, show us your asshole.”

  So you’d go through that whole process, and then you’re there at the last gate and I can see Joan and Gabe there waiting for me, and all the sudden the guard would say, “Oh, Harris, man, look at those sideburns. God, those are at least a quarter inch too long, man. You’ve got to go back and cut those things.” So I’d have to turn around and go through the strip search again, get my clothes back on, and go back through all the gates, go up to my cell, cut my sideburns, turn around, go do the whole thing over again. They just like to fuck with you. That’s the game that’s going on all the time between you and the guards.

  I remember once they cut my visit short, because there were these water faucets on the wall they use for the lawn. It was hot and we took Gabe’s clothes off and put him under the water fountain and dripped some water on him. They busted my ass. “You can’t do that! You’re done.” That was the end of my eight hours of visit, for having a naked baby.

  Credit 13.1

  “Mr. and Mrs. Peace in America,” David Harris and Joan Baez, with their newborn son, Gabe, on the cover of Look magazine, May 5, 1970. The photo was taken while Harris was still serving time in jail for resisting the draft.

  RICK AYERS (draft dodger, GI organizer)

  I showed up at the induction center in Chicago on November 5, 1969, and it was basically a bunch of working-class dudes—the big south-side African American group, and a big west- and north-side white, working-class group. There were very few middle-class people.

  I was scared, very scared, but very clear on my politics and what this was about and what I was going to do. We took a bus down to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, which is where all the Chicago boys go for basic training, and did all the classic things of getting our heads shaved and going through training.

  The weird thing about training was, I liked that part. I liked getting up at 4:30 A.M., and I liked the food, and I liked the physical training, and I liked the weapons training. I just didn’t like the mission. But I was definitely shit-talking, complaining about things, and especially trying to bring up Vietnam. What was really weird is they never once—this is the height of the war—gave us a political indoctrination. They never said you’re fighting communism; you’re fighting for the survival of our way of life. Nothing. The only indoctrination was, Don’t be a pussy, don’t be a faggot. Your girlfriend is fucking someone else. It was all sexual politics, and it was all about your buddies.

  I would talk to the guys about how the war was wrong. How you could be the last one killed, but the U.S. wasn’t going to win and what the conditions were for the Vietnamese. Whatever I could talk about. It wasn’t all the time. It was little talks here and there, but they knew me as the antiwar guy, and they also knew that I knew lawyers.

  PHYLLIS MENKEN (girlfriend of draft dodger)

  I had a really hard adolescent relationship with my parents, so as soon as I graduated from high school in 1969, I left the country and moved to Paris, where I got a job teaching English in a French public school. That was my excuse for getting out of town. My parents signed on to this only because they thought that they were going to get me away from my boyfriend, who was an Irish kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and who was older than I was. He was poor and his dad had died when he was little and he was addicted to heroin, so they wanted to separate me from him. So they signed on to this idea that I would go to Europe and have this job and get an apartment. But I sent my boyfriend money to come and be with me as soon as I got to Paris, and then I ended up getting pregnant.

  We ended up going to Sweden because he was avoiding the draft and in Sweden we could get government support. I
was going to have a baby, and there was a network of people supporting the Black Panthers and supporting the draft resisters and the war deserters in Paris, and they sent us to Amsterdam and we stayed with this incredible Dutch woman who had this beautiful art-filled apartment and she welcomed us. At that point I was probably six months pregnant, an eighteen-year-old kid.

  ABBIE HOFFMAN (Steal This Book)*1

  If you’ve totally fucked up your chances of getting a deferment or already are in the service and considering ditching, there are some things that you should know about asylum….

  …Sweden will provide political asylum for draft dodgers and deserters. It helps to have a passport, but even that isn’t necessary since they are required by their own laws to let you in. There are now about 35,000 exiles from the Pig Empire living in Sweden. The American Deserters Committee…will provide you with immediate help, contacts and procedural information once you get there.

  RICK AYERS

  I learned it’s very easy in jail or in the army to hang out with the black guys if you’re the white radical, because they like you. They like a white guy who gets them. So there was a part of the barracks called the Soul Hole where all the black guys hung out. They were like, “Ayers, you’re cool, man. What’s up?” I’d sit with them.

  My girlfriend Melody and another guy from SDS came down to visit me, and I was telling them things I learned: One, they called me the hippie. I was trying to blend in and be a working-class guy. And so Melody said, “So what do they think a hippie is?” “Well, a hippie has access to drugs, a hippie is against the war, a hippie is anti-authority.” “Well, those are good things. So be that.” So instead of trying to hide and blend in, I decided to be the oddball. The second point they raised with me is that I shouldn’t just hang in the Soul Hole. The black guys are already revolutionaries. Talk to those white guys. I was doing it for comfort. I pushed myself to push the white guys. That was good for me.