Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  The vets wanted nothing to do with the peace movement. They wanted to speak as this group of veterans who were outraged about Kent State and the invasion of Cambodia. I was talking to vets all across the country on the phone, and the same thing was happening all across the country. They made it very clear that if any police or National Guard were going to come on campus, they were going to have to go through a line of vets.

  BOBBY MULLER

  I don’t know if you remember who Phil Donahue was. Phil Donahue was the Oprah Winfrey of the seventies and eighties. I quickly became a spokesman for the spinal cord injury guys because I was college educated and I had the bona fides of being a combat casualty. I didn’t give a shit anymore, so I would talk to anybody. I got called upon to comment on the situation at the hospital, and wound up rapidly doing a lot of media. Donahue was operating out of Orrville, Ohio, where they made Smucker’s jelly, and he flew me out there to do his TV show. It was all about, “What’s going on with the veterans hospital? How’d you get there? What’s it like? What do you think about the war?”

  We also had congressional hearings that were triggered by the Life magazine piece. I still remember the first time I ever did the Today show. I remember going into the NBC studio in New York at six thirty in the morning and I said to the producer, “You must be fucking kidding. Is anybody watching television at this hour?” He said, “Is anybody watching? This is the biggest news show.” What? Are you for real? I had no fucking idea. So because I was getting media attention, I started talking to some guys that were part of Vietnam Vets Against the War.

  MICHAEL UHL

  (Vietnam vet, Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry organizer)

  Vietnam Vets Against the War was really emerging as a mass organization after the revelation of My Lai, so by the summer of 1970, VVAW was now marching primarily under its own steam. Whatever Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry had done to help stimulate the growth of the organization was now pretty much in the past. Al Hubbard had emerged as the president, Jan Barry had resigned for the second time—he just really didn’t like conflict and politics. This is a period where everybody was fighting; fighting against the war, fighting each other, escalating the polemic. It was hardly peace and love. So Al and others had now begun to assemble a talented core of organizers. By the end of 1970, VVAW claimed, at least on paper, to have over twenty-five thousand members but that figure certainly underestimates the size of the antiwar veteran community in the early 1970s. Consider, for example, that I never officially joined VVAW.

  JAN BARRY

  We were hearing about the conditions at the Bronx VA Hospital, where rats are running over people’s feet who are paralyzed, and they can’t chase the rats off. That’s where Bobby Muller was, who also became active in VVAW. Bobby Muller and some other people would soon be leading the marches in their wheelchairs.

  We called them rap groups, which got picked up from the black liberation groups, and the women’s liberation groups were also using the same terminology. It was the concept, “Let’s sit down and compare notes about something that society doesn’t want to talk about….” Many of these vets couldn’t keep a marriage together, couldn’t keep a friendship together, and they’d been out of the war for a while, but their life was still a mess. They may or may not be finishing college, and they just felt like their life really didn’t hold together well, and why is that?

  Robert J. Lifton had written about Hiroshima and a number of other issues from a psychological perspective. He’d been an air force psychiatrist in the Korean War, and he was teaching at Yale. He testified before a congressional committee in 1970 about something that he was tentatively calling post-Vietnam syndrome. He explained that a lot of these veterans are having a hard time readjusting to society. I sent him a letter, and I said, “I have a group of veterans who are wrestling with this. I wonder if you could meet with us.”

  He said yes and I said, “We don’t want to be treated as patients. This is peer-to-peer. We’re veterans. You’ve been in the military. What are we looking at here?” And in those conversations, what we initially seemed to be hearing was there wasn’t a terminology for this. In World War II it was shell shock, or World War I, combat fatigue, various other terms that actually were more applicable if you’re under constant bombardment.

  BOBBY MULLER

  I didn’t get a chance to talk to the guys in the hospital about actually being in the war. So when I got out of the hospital and started talking publicly about the conditions there, it ended a sense of isolation. I had thought that I had just had a bad experience; I just drew a bad hand. It wasn’t until talking to other guys that I started to really put it together. I said, “Wait a second, it wasn’t just me?” These guys are saying the same thing. And there was a process of communalizing the shared experience we’d had, one by one, and then we started to realize that, “Okay, it wasn’t just me.”

  WAYNE SMITH

  When I got home my family was very happy to see me. But I didn’t like them. They had no sense of how to ask what I did. I’m not sure I wanted to talk about it, but for them not even to ask, just to pretend, was avoiding this obvious subject. I treated them like strangers. I couldn’t even fake it well. “You must be so glad you’re home.” I’d say, “Mm-hmm.” It was really equivocating, keeping them at a distance….Even one of my nephews blurted out, “Did you kill anybody?” I said, “Yeah, lots of people.” That was a showstopper. That worked. No one wanted to take it to the next level of questions.

  Some of my friends came by to pick me up. I told my mom to tell them I wasn’t home. It was really awful. Maybe two weeks after being home, some friends threw a party for me, but I couldn’t go. I was terrified. I couldn’t face this party that they had. It was at a steak house, a nice restaurant in our neighborhood. It had a bar, so I went to the bar and just drank quite a bit. I’m not a drinker, but I did. I eventually made my way to the party and people clapped when I walked in. I felt so dirty, so awful. I managed to get to the bathroom, and I stayed in the bathroom for forty-five minutes to an hour. I just felt dishonest. They were celebrating that I survived and that I did my duty. They would repeatedly knock on the bathroom door, “You okay, Wayne? Come on out.” Finally when I came out, almost no one was there, fortunately.

  I felt completely alone even with friends of mine in Rhode Island that had gone to Vietnam and were back home, and reached out to me. I saw a few of them. We didn’t talk much. It was this strange kind of coconspiracy to avoid talking about what was troubling us. We thought, You’re home. You should feel glad. That was the attitude: You’re home. Thank God you’re home. Everything’s going to be okay now. No, it isn’t going to be okay. That was what I was thinking. I had this attitude, “Fuck you, America. You’re not to be trusted.” If I was not in the military, I think I would have fled this country. I really felt that you can’t go home again.

  I increased using drugs. I went back to my next assignment, which was down in Fort Sam Houston, to train medics to go to war. I said, “Fuck this. I’m not going to do it.” I had a little bit of rank; I was an E-4 at the time. They threatened to take rank. I said, “Do your best shot.”

  OLIVER STONE (Vietnam veteran, filmmaker)

  When I came back, I was definitely “Fuck you. Fuck the system,” you know, anti-authority, smoking dope—I carried dope back with me from Vietnam. I’d just come out of the field about five days before they let me go. We were on this mission that got stuck up in the mountains with a lot of rain and we couldn’t get out. So five days after I’m out of the jungle, I’m in Fort Lewis, Washington.

  Anyway, I took acid in San Francisco. I was trying to get into the groove of what was going on. I just felt like this freedom is too much. I couldn’t handle the freedom. No one wanted to know about Vietnam. You couldn’t talk to anybody. I went to Santa Cruz and San Francisco and no one wanted to talk about that shit. I got the message pretty quick: “Shut up, just don’t talk about it.”

  I broke up with all my friends
in my platoon. They went back to small towns. These guys came from Utah, Indiana, or Kentucky and Tennessee towns. I made my way back to New York. I don’t remember 1969 too well. Put it this way: It was really alienating. The whole thing in New York was alien to me. I started to take half steps, but I just couldn’t get back into society. I began taking drugs, a lot of LSD, and stuff like that. My acid trips were really dark sometimes. I was taking acid in subways. I wasn’t doing the peaceful shit. It was more like “Strange Days,” with Jim Morrison, like strange people coming out of the rain.

  Getting the GI Bill was important. I don’t know if I would have done it any other way. I had to do it on my own. In September ’69 I enrolled in NYU film school. I was older than the other students, which made me strange. It was hard because I didn’t like some of those kids. They were all protesting. They were doing documentaries on tunnel workers, and talking the game but not living it. There was a lot of talk, talk, talk, but I was quiet. I was alienated. I would sit in the corner. I made short films that were not good. But we worked together and it brought us into a collective. Marty Scorsese was my first teacher, so that helped. Marty was one of these guys who didn’t make a lot of sense to me. He had long hair, and talked a mile a minute, but he loved film.

  After the Kent State shootings the protests went through the school; there were protesters all over New York. I was not joining them. I was not even talking about Vietnam. Gradually I made better and better short films, and I made a film that Marty praised, called Last Year in Vietnam. It was a twelve-minute film about a veteran who returns from a war, who is alienated. It’s a good film, a lonely film. And that was reintegration. The kids in my class didn’t know I had been in Vietnam until I made that film.

  JANE FONDA (actor, peace activist)

  I became friends with Al Hubbard, who was the president of the VVAW, and I was made a civilian member of the VVAW. They were planning the Valley Forge march, which I thought was a really cool idea. The idea was, we’re going to do the march that the American revolutionary forces made, ending at Valley Forge, and all along the way, we are going to reenact what we are doing in Vietnam. You know, the bayoneting, pulling people out of their homes—search-and-destroy missions in civilian villages. We’re going to bring the war to the streets that we pass through in Pennsylvania, on the way to Valley Forge. It was called Operation RAW, for Rapid American Withdrawal. It was a big deal. It didn’t have the impact that we hoped it would. But people were pretty affected by it. I did not march with them, because I didn’t want to detract attention.

  We were all waiting at the staging area where the rally was going to take place, and a lot of the parents of the soldiers were there. I will never forget—whew. It was so moving when over two hundred vets who had walked a hundred miles came up over the hill, carrying these fake guns. Some of them were in wheelchairs, and on crutches. And they came down singing and chanting. I spoke, as did others, including John Kerry, on the back of a flatbed truck.

  In my speech I said, “I cannot escape the belief that My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military….One thing Nixon can’t ignore is the sound of his own troops marching against his policies….The rest of us can be accused of being reds, hippies, unpatriotic, what-have-you, but the guys who have been there can’t be ignored.”*2

  Later, the right wing doctored the photos to make it look like Kerry and I were speaking together, which we weren’t.*3

  WAYNE SMITH

  I was on active duty in 1970 in Texas, and the VVAW was pretty big. Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland were doing this routine, “FTA,” for “Fuck the Army.” They traveled the country to towns with military bases to do these political vaudeville skits. It was a spoof on Bob Hope’s pro-war USO, and it also poked fun at the army’s slogan, “Fun Travel and Adventure.” It was mildly entertaining, and mildly educational. They had a couple of people go up onstage, and they would talk about the war and what they were trying to do was convince soldiers not to be deployed, and organize vets to oppose the war at home.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN (Weather Underground leader)

  When the people coming back from Vietnam became a force in the movement, organized the Vietnam Vets Against the War, organized throwing back the medals during Dewey Canyon III,*4 their stories of having been lied to about the light at the end of the tunnel were just unacceptable. And you had to believe them. They were truth tellers in a way that the antiwar movement up to then had not been able to be.

  Credit 23.1

  Vietnam veterans demonstrate against the war at the Dewey Canyon III protest outside the U.S. Capitol building in April 1971. More than eight hundred veterans threw their medals and other military-related materials over the fence in front of the Capitol building.

  BOBBY MULLER

  I think people came to look at Vietnam Veterans Against the War as a political entity that had the uniqueness of being the first time that veterans who had fought in an American war actively came together to say, “This war sucks.” And that’s how they knew us, for politically opposing the war. But for those of us who were part of VVAW, it was really just a continuous fucking rap group. It was an ability to actually talk about what you had gone through, and how you felt with others that understood what you were saying.

  Out of the rap groups with Vietnam Vets Against the War, we got this whole thing of peer support, talking it through, and what essentially became the vet center program. That’s what we were talking about. “Hey, we’ve got issues here. We’ve got unemployment. The GI Bill is bullshit. It’s nothing compared to what it was in the Second World War. We’ve got issues with the chemicals that we used like Agent Orange.”

  I never really saw any Vietnam vets on the other side of the argument going, “Yay team, rah, rah, rah.” That came later. So my experience out of New York was, if you’re a Vietnam vet, you thought the war was stupid, and those were the only guys I ever saw. And there were a lot of them. Those of us that were part of Vietnam Vets Against the War, when a group of like-minded people get together and talk to each other, they reinforce each other and they radicalize each other. So we talked to ourselves, and the anger built and the radicalization built. That happened quickly.

  Credit 23.2

  Vietnam Veterans Against the War grew rapidly in size in 1969 and 1970 as more and more troops came home from the war, many of them injured and demoralized. The vets brought new energy and credibility to the peace movement, and were targeted by the FBI for harassment and disruption.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.

  RICK AYERS (GI antiwar organizer)

  The war eventually ended because these guys wouldn’t fight. Everyone talks about the mean antiwar movement, and the poor GIs, and the antiwar movement spit on the GIs, and no one gave us a parade when we got home, which is crap. The heart of the antiwar movement was the GIs. Even on the streets it was veterans. A bunch of veterans led in all the marches. They would not fight that war. They were the ones who knew that Vietnam was a people’s war. They knew that the [North] Vietnamese strategy was “We’re never going to beat the Americans militarily, but we’re going to wear them down, demoralize them, and psychologically make them say, ‘Screw this.’ ” Now, Americans will say, “We didn’t lose that war. We won every battle.” But they don’t understand that war is a holistic thing. It’s moral, psychological, and physical; Americans still don’t get that. The Pentagon doesn’t get that.*5

  * * *

  *1 “Monster” is the title song of Steppenwolf’s most political album, released in November 1969.

  *2 This excerpt from Jane Fonda’s speech at Operation RAW comes from Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Crown, 2001).

  *3 Kerry and Fonda both spoke at Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal), which took place over Labor Day weekend, 1970, and was a three-day march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where VVAW members dramatized the inhumanity of the war with gu
errilla theater reenactments. The vets were greeted at the end of their march in Valley Forge by 1,500 supporters and speakers including Senators George McGovern and Edmund Muskie, Congressman Allard “Al” Lowenstein, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and John Kerry, who at the time was a young returning vet and VVAW organizer.

  *4 Dewey Canyon III was a VVAW protest, named after a military incursion into Laos, that took place in Washington, D.C., April 19–23, 1971. It was at this protest that Vietnam vets threw their war medals on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

  *5 A breakdown in military morale turned into near mutiny by 1970. There were frequent cases of fragging, combat refusals, and infantry platoons purposely avoiding enemy engagements. The military prison population increased from 4,800 in 1968 to 6,400 in 1969. Army desertion rates rose 400 percent during peak years of the war, from 14.9 incidents per 1,000 in 1966, to 73.5 per 1,000 in 1971. Army desertion and AWOL rates in 1971 were the highest in modern history. Nicosia, Home to War, p. 40.

  CHAPTER 24

  ARMY MATH