Courageous Women of the Vietnam War
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PROTEST SONGS OF THE VIETNAM WAR
Prior to 1967, prowar songs such as “Hello Vietnam,” “Dear Uncle Sam,” and “The Ballad of the Green Berets” actually outnumbered antiwar songs broadcast on American radio. Popular songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Eve of Destruction,” and “Masters of War” (the last two written in the early 1960s to protest the Cold War’s nuclear arms buildup) became widely used by antiwar protestors later in the decade. As the war progressed and the protest movement gained momentum, some artists wrote and released songs—such as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and “Universal Soldier”—that could be heard more often at protest rallies and coffeehouses than on the radio because some stations banned them.
Though it was not written as a protest song, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” eventually became an anthem of the American fighting men in Vietnam, who frequently requested it of the bands hired to entertain them. They also loved the protest song “Fortunate Son,” a complaint about how wealthy young men could often avoid being sent to Vietnam.
“Give Peace a Chance,” arguably the most famous protest song of the war, was both played on the radio and sung at protest rallies: in November 1969, it was sung by hundreds of thousands of people who had gathered for an antiwar protest in Washington, DC.
But Joan wanted to do more. And she wanted to learn more. While her instincts had led her to become a major voice in the antiwar movement, she wanted to gain a more solid academic and historical foundation of the concepts of peaceful protest. So in 1965 she and her friend and mentor Ira Sandperl began an organization called the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. Joan purchased a building in Carmel Valley, California, and charged attending students nominal fees, provided them with reading lists, encouraged them to meditate and engage in discussions, and invited them to attend lectures and seminars from peace activists and speakers from all over the world.
The institute also helped young men in need of moral support if they chose to oppose their own military drafts. One young man named Billy, who had been corresponding with Joan for four months, had finally decided to go AWOL (absent without leave) from the army. He visited Joan before he turned himself in to the military authorities.
He told her that during his training he and other draftees had been brought into a chapel and told that, although one of the Bible’s 10 Commandments was “Do not kill,” the military was going to teach them how to do just that. The trainer asked the young men if that was right. Before they could answer the question, he did: “Yes, it’s right to kill because you’re killing for your country!”
Billy had prepared a statement to hand to the military authorities, part of which read, “I will not bring myself to bear down and fire with intent to kill another human being. I do not call myself a good, pure Christian person, my life has shown that I am not. But I found peace in myself with God in denying to kill.”
After working nearly full-time at the institute for a few years, Joan opened a branch of Amnesty International—a human rights organization—on the West Coast before she resumed a hectic schedule of concerts.
She was on the road in December 1972 when she received an opportunity to take a closer look at the war she had been protesting for so long. Cora Weiss, a leader of the Women Strike for Peace (WSP)—an organization begun in 1961 to protest nuclear testing and later also to try to end US involvement in Vietnam—said WSP was organizing trips for Americans to Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, in an attempt to create friendly relationships between American and North Vietnamese civilians. Would Joan like to go?
Joan agreed and was soon on a plane with three American men: lawyer and ex–brigadier general Telford Taylor; Episcopalian minister Rev. Michael Allen; and Barry Romo, a Vietnam veteran who was now against the war.
Their tour was carefully designed to show these four Americans the damage their military had inflicted on the people of North Vietnam. On the first day, Joan took an opportunity to speak to her tour guide about the ideals of nonviolence, saying that the Vietminh resistance had at one point been a peaceful movement. The guide laughed. Nonviolence was not appropriate in this war, he said.
On the first evening after dinner, the Americans were treated to some Vietnamese songs. Joan sang as well, dedicating her performance of “Sam Stone”—a song about a drug-addicted veteran—to all the people from both sides who had died in the war. Barry wept through her entire performance. The Vietnamese people at the dinner surrounded him in a protective way, as if, Joan thought, they were trying to shield him from further pain and let him know that they had forgiven him for his part in the war.
During the next two days, the North Vietnamese showed their American visitors propaganda films and photos of dead civilians and gave long lectures on what specific areas the American military had bombed. Since Joan had long been protesting the war, she was annoyed with these enforced activities and longed to explore Hanoi on her own.
On the third evening, December 18, she was feeling sick from watching yet another graphic propaganda film and was about to retire to her room for the night when the electricity in the building failed. Two long, loud sirens rang out. One of the Vietnamese men excused himself calmly, saying it was an “alert.”
All the hotel guests walked toward a nearby bomb shelter. Because everyone seemed so relaxed, Joan thought she must be the only nervous one in the group. Then she heard the roar of planes. Everyone jumped and ran down the narrow flight of stairs. An explosion shook the walls.
When the bombing stopped, someone joked that, because it was December, perhaps the raid was an early Christmas present to Hanoi from President Nixon. Everyone laughed. But this series of raids—technically referred to as Operation Linebacker II and specifically designed to intimidate the North into recommencing peace talks—would actually become known as the Christmas Bombings.
Ten more bombing raids occurred that night. In the morning, the Americans walked through a demolished village on the outskirts of Hanoi. Large craters were everywhere. Joan saw people hunting through the wreckage, apparently looking for lost items. One girl bitterly asked Joan and the other Americans if they were there to “look at Nixon’s peace.”
Left to right: Rev. Michael Allen, Joan Baez, and Barry Romo walking through Hanoi’s international airport after American B-52 airplanes had bombed it. Getty Images
Ten tense nights of bombing followed (with the exception of Christmas Day), and each morning, the Americans were invited to view the damage created the night before. When Joan saw a bombed hospital and a dead elderly woman laid out on the street, she broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.
During one raid, sophisticated Soviet antiaircraft guns and missiles shot down six American flyers. Bandaged and in shock, the American prisoners were forced to participate in a press conference. They each identified themselves and were allowed to give a message to the American press. One called the war “terrible” and said he hoped it would “end real soon.” Considering the damage the raids had caused, Joan thought the North Vietnamese conducted the press conference with amazing self-control.
But on the following night, she discovered that this restraint had a cruel edge. The Vietnamese were treating the prisoners inhumanely, including not allowing them into a shelter during the next raid. Instead the prisoners remained in their shoddy prison bunkhouses, which US bombs had already partially destroyed. Joan and the other Americans went to visit them. The prisoners seemed frightened and confused. One of them showed Joan a large piece of shrapnel that had come through the barracks ceiling. He asked her what was happening.
Joan, surprised by the question, explained with a bit of sarcasm how the American bombings were causing this type of damage.
“What I mean is, Kissinger said peace was at hand, isn’t that what he said?” the POW asked.
Joan’s sarcasm disappeared. She wanted to cry.
“That’s what he said,” she replied. “Maybe he didn’t mean it.”
One morning after a particularly damaging bombing raid, the Vietnamese took Joan to a devastated area. There a woman stood where her home had once been. She was crying, repeating the same phrase over and over. Joan asked for an interpreter. The woman was crying, “My son, my son. Where are you now, my son?”
When Joan returned to the United States, she distilled 15 hours of recordings she had made during her trip—Vietnamese warning sirens, American bombing raids, her own singing in the bomb shelter, and the laughter of Vietnamese children—into a new album. She dedicated her unusual new record to the Vietnamese people and called it Where Are You Now, My Son?
In 1979, five years after the United States had withdrawn from Vietnam, Joan spoke out publicly against the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In a letter published in four major US newspapers, she criticized the brutal reeducation centers that were forcing a Communist worldview upon the people of South Vietnam. She wrote, “Instead of bringing hope and reconciliation to war-torn Vietnam, your government has created a painful nightmare.” She maintained that her new protest was perfectly consistent with her previous antiwar stance, saying, “My politics have not changed. I have always spoken for the oppressed people of Vietnam who could not speak for themselves.”
Throughout the years and to this day, Joan has continued to lend her support for causes she believes in strongly, always accompanied by her singing and always in a manner that promotes the fundamentals of nonviolence. In August 2009 she again affirmed her commitment to peace. Before giving a concert in Idaho Falls, Idaho, she was told there were four Vietnam veterans outside protesting her appearance.
She immediately went outside to meet them. One was holding a sign that read, JOAN BAEZ GAVE COMFORT & AID TO OUR ENEMY IN VIETNAM & ENCOURAGED THEM TO KILL AMERICANS!
The veterans told her that decades earlier they had felt betrayed and hurt by American antiwar protestors who had lashed out at the servicemen upon their return from Vietnam. Joan listened to them quietly and then explained that she had never engaged in that sort of abuse, that she had always supported Vietnam veterans.
Her sincere friendliness diffused their anger, and before long, they asked her to sign their posters. She agreed to sign the backs, not the fronts, where the denigrating words were printed.
Later, during the concert, Joan dedicated a song to the veterans she had just met. “You know, they just wanted to be heard,” she explained. “Everyone wants to be heard. I feel like I made four new friends tonight.”
LEARN MORE
And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir by Joan Baez (Summit Books, 1987).
Daybreak by Joan Baez (Dial, 1966).
Where Are You Now, My Son? by Joan Baez (Pickwick Records, 1973).
Joan’s vinyl album of poetry and singing against a backdrop of sounds recorded in Hanoi during the 1972 Christmas Bombings.
TRACY WOOD
“They’re the Story”
ON MARCH 30, 1972, Bill Landry, foreign editor for United Press International (UPI), told reporter Tracy Wood she was next in line to go to Vietnam.
Up until that moment, Tracy’s plans had not included that war-torn country. She was working at UPI’s cable desk in New York City while learning Chinese. Nixon had visited China the previous month, and Tracy had been promised a spot on UPI’s first China-bound news team when the Communist nation opened its borders to Western journalists.
And the Vietnam War, which was winding down, had already been part of Tracy’s life for years: one New Jersey neighbor from her youth had been killed in Vietnam, and a high school friend was currently serving there as a helicopter medevac pilot. Tracy had also covered US war demonstrations before transferring to New York and, for the past seven months, had edited many reports coming out of Saigon.
But as soon as Bill invited her, she changed her plans.
“When do I leave?” she asked him.
Bill paused. Then he told Tracy that while his superiors wanted her to go, he did not. “I don’t believe women should cover wars,” he said.
Tracy was speechless. “For the first time in my life, someone in a position to decide my future was telling me that because I was a woman, I wasn’t good enough,” she wrote later.
Bill broke the silence and clarified his reasoning. “If anything happened to you,” he said, “I’d feel bad.”
“Landry had just articulated the problem that for generations held women back,” Tracy wrote later. “Not conviction that women couldn’t do the job. Something much harder to fight: well-meaning men in positions of authority who honestly believed it was more important to protect women from risks than encourage them to reach for the stars.”
She said nothing aloud and instead made plans to go over Bill’s head. He might be her immediate supervisor, but if those above him wanted her to go to Vietnam, she was going.
When her plans were set, she chose her arrival wardrobe carefully. She wanted to exude professionalism during her first meeting with her new boss, Saigon bureau chief Arthur Higbee, a journalist with three decades of impressive international work.
But her choice of a skirt, panty hose, and heels turned out to be a dreadful mistake. A few days after her arrival in Vietnam, Arthur told her to stay away from combat. “You’re too feminine,” he said. Before coming to Saigon, Tracy hadn’t realized that even in the Southern city’s relative safety, female reporters dressed like men: jeans and T-shirts or combat fatigues. “Don’t become like the others,” Arthur urged her. “Stay feminine.”
She could cover stories about politics, refugees, hospitals, and diplomatic receptions, he said, but not the war itself. “I couldn’t let this happen,” Tracy wrote later. “I was a full reporter, not a partial reporter.” But because Arthur was her top authority—she couldn’t go over his head—Tracy would have to find her own way into combat reporting.
Her first attempt was a helicopter tour an American province adviser arranged. It wasn’t exactly combat, but Tracy would be able to observe, from a distance, an area the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had recently overrun and that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), supported by US Marines, was fighting to take back.
“You don’t want anything to obstruct their field of fire,” the adviser said to her. He was pointing to two ARVN soldiers—door gunners—guarding the two doorless entryways on opposite sides of the helicopter. When the helicopter took off, these soldiers sat down on the helicopter’s floor, facing out, their legs dangling in the air.
The two US pilots flew past beautiful beaches that they said were hiding deadly mines. They demonstrated various helicopter flying techniques, one of them “a hard sideways turn” during which Tracy was “staring straight down at the earth through the missing doors.” They skimmed the treetops. “Heading dead straight for a line of tall trees,” she wrote later, “the pilots pulled up just in time to keep the skids from pruning the upper branches.”
“Cowboys,” shouted the smiling US adviser, trying to be heard over the engine. “Good practice. When they fly like this in combat, the North Vietnamese don’t see them until it’s too late.”
Tracy attempted to calmly respond to his comment when the door gunners began firing their M60s at the ground. The helicopter twisted sharply and turned. This was no stunt. Tracy grabbed hold of the seat with both hands. Her camera and tape recorder swung in all directions from her neck.
Tracy Wood. Ed Bassett
The helicopter had strayed into NVA-controlled territory.
Once they were safely back on the ground, the adviser reassured Tracy that it wasn’t easy to shoot down a helicopter from the ground. It had to be hit in a particular way. But they had definitely been hit. He showed her the bullet holes near t
he helicopter’s tail and near the front. Then he pointed out one that had gone through an empty seat directly behind Tracy’s.
“Well, we can’t tell Arthur,” said fellow UPI reporter Barney Seibert when Tracy related her day’s events. “He’ll have a fit you didn’t follow his orders.” Barney had covered the Korean War and had been in Vietnam for more than a year. He told Tracy, in secret, everything she wanted to know about combat reporting. He showed her how to use a handgun—some combat journalists carried them, he said, while others did not—and advised her to drive right through potholes in Vietcong-controlled territory. Knowing how well Americans cared for their cars, the Vietcong always mined the areas beside potholes.
But the most important piece of advice Barney gave her was to remember her role: “We’re only reporters. What happens to us, what we think, what we feel, what we experience, doesn’t matter. We’re here to cover the war. Anytime we get too scared, too sick of it, too tired, we can hop on a plane and go home. The military and civilians can’t do that. They’re stuck. They’re the story, not us.”
A short time later, Tracy was accompanying an ARVN unit that worked with a US Army major. He complained to her about the hopeless corruption of the South Vietnamese army. She would come to understand this more thoroughly as time went on, writing later:
Bribery was so commonplace at all levels of the Vietnamese government that it took routine under-the-table cash payments to get ordinary shipments through airport customs. And it ran so deep that cash could buy a man’s way out of the South Vietnamese military or get him promoted, regardless of qualifications. Corruption badly weakened the South Vietnamese military. Men in the bottom ranks fought and died but often were led by patronage appointees at the top who frequently disappeared when things got tough.