Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  I wanted us to be the winners; to vanquish the enemies, so to speak. But then all the politics involved, you know. So it changed me. Not so much my eleven-plus months there, but that whole period from ’63 or ’64 to ’73 or ’75, because … that whole ten-to-twelve-year period was all around Vietnam and the social unrest. You can’t separate one from the other, because there was so much going on and I had four years in the military. I left with short hair; [then] I went long-haired hippie, drugs …

  In 1975, when he heard the news about the official end of the war, it was a devastating moment for Mauro.

  I remember the day. I was sitting in the apartment at 247 Garfield and they made the announcement and I broke down; I was in tears. I remember calling my brother Jimmy and [I] said, “Did you just hear the news?” He said, “Yeah.” He was in tears too. I said, “But why, Jimmy? What happened?” It’s very vivid. I can feel the sun coming through the window just sitting there in the little anteroom that we had off to the side overlooking Garfield Place, and I just sat there and cried. What happened, what happened? The war was over.

  I wanted us to be the winners.

  9

  AGAINST WAR: FRIEDMAN AND LOUIS

  The public memory of the war in Vietnam is dominated by several stereotypical images. The first is that of a dirty soldier in the midst of combat in a dense jungle. The second image is that of the civilian protester, voicing displeasure about American policy in Vietnam. The third is that of the returned veteran as victim. It has remained difficult for the American public to see beyond these clichés.

  Plenty of veterans protested against the war—and continue to protest against present wars—and they speak with an authority that few others can match. They know what war means because they have seen it and experienced it. Some continue to live the consequences of the war in Vietnam every day. The experiences of Danny Friedman and Fred Louis reveal something of what it has meant to be an antiwar veteran.

  The organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War has its roots in New York City. In April 1967, a Vietnam vet named Jan Barry, then known as Jan Crumb, marched in demonstrations under a banner held aloft by members of an organization called Veterans for Peace (VFP), a pacifist group made up mostly of men who had fought in World War II and the Korean War. VFP put up a sign reading VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR! mostly to see what would happen. In fact, as the historian Gerald Nicosia has noted, there was no Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization at the time, but Barry and five others would soon create one.1 This veterans’ organization would go on to deeply influence the lives of many and would have a significant impact on the national discourse about the war. Hundreds—some say thousands—of men and women moved through the organization, which continues to exist to this day.

  Friedman grew up in the Homecrest section of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a relatively liberal Jewish family. He had a stable upbringing: he lived in the same house from the age of six until he went into the Army. His parents, who both worked, volunteered at the local Jewish community center. His mother kept a kosher house, and the family kept the Sabbath, but over time religious observance became a less significant part of family life. While the family continued to go to synagogue on the High Holy Days, they did not attend on a regular basis. Still, they made certain that Friedman went to Hebrew school and had his Bar Mitzvah. Social consciousness was a component of their culture at home, albeit of a rather passive variety. He recalls:

  We watched all the stuff on TV about the racial problems in the South with horror. We were offended by what was going on; we were outraged. We weren’t activists; we didn’t go join marches or anything. But mostly my friends in the neighborhood, we didn’t really discuss stuff like that. It was just stuff that happened somewhere else. What we were involved in was the Giants and the Yankees and the Dodgers and the Mets and you know—the Knicks and the Rangers. That was important.

  After he graduated from high school at the age of sixteen, he attended Kingsborough Community College for three semesters, until late fall 1966.

  When he arrived at Kingsborough, the school was new, but many of its buildings were World War II–era barracks left over from a defunct military base. Friedman recalls taking part in the demolition of some of the older structures dotting the area. The school had the advantage of being close to home, and Friedman did not have a car.

  In the mid-1960s, the antiwar movement was just beginning to take shape nationally. In March 1965 students and faculty at the University of Michigan held one of the first antiwar teach-ins, followed by an even larger one at the University of California, Berkeley, in May. Friedman remembers seeing groups like Students for a Democratic Society and antiwar activists on campus, especially in the student center. But like many American college students at the time, he viewed them with little sympathy. While antiwar momentum would later grow on college campuses, at this stage the movement remained quite small.

  Academically, Friedman did not perform as well as he had hoped. If he felt interested in either a subject or a faculty member, he had the ability to get As and Bs, but some subjects, like economics, seemed to stump him. By the end of the third semester he was on academic probation.

  Friedman knew that without a student deferment, he would be drafted. As a result, he tried to enlist in the National Guard, Air Force, and Navy Reserve. Of course, many young men had a similar idea, and these branches of the military had long wait lists. Rather than matriculate back at school for a fourth semester, Friedman took a job.

  To this day, he believes that his economics professor, a faculty adviser for Kingsborough’s branch of Students for a Democratic Society, turned him in to the draft board.

  We didn’t get along. I was the resident John Wayne enthusiast.

  In May 1967, Friedman received notification that he had been reclassified as 1-A for the draft and the following week his induction notice arrived. He went down to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn for his physical and was soon taken by bus to Whitehall Street in Manhattan for his swearing in.

  I really didn’t care. Though I wasn’t prepared to enlist, I didn’t lose any sleep when I got a draft notice, either. I bought the political philosophy that we were going to have to fight in Vietnam to keep them from fighting on the beaches of California and save the world from Communism. I didn’t know a lot about it back in those days, but I bought the line; I bought the political story.

  His mother was extremely nervous. Friedman says that every day he was in Vietnam was a living hell for her. She had nightmares about it, and he says it aged her a lot. His father had been 4-F during World War II, serving in New York as an air-raid warden when there was concern about possible Nazi raids on the Port of New York. His father didn’t have much to say about Vietnam.

  Immediately after being sworn in, Friedman was put on a train to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for reception, then to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for basic training. Despite being invited to apply for officer candidate training, Friedman says: I declined because my father never had a nice thing to say about an officer.

  He also did not want to give the military the extra year necessary. Eventually, Friedman went to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for Advanced Individual Training (AIT) as an armored reconnaissance scout. After a few months at Fort Knox he left for Vietnam in November 1967.

  The trip was long, with a layover at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Upon arrival at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, the pilot made a rapid descent, and everyone on board was hustled out quickly.

  Everybody was still a little woozy from drinking and everything, and I remember saying to the stewardesses, “Don’t let them take us; don’t let them take us; hide us—hide us,” you know. [Laughs.] And she was looking at me like, “Get the hell off my plane,” you know. [Laughs.]

  Friedman was assigned to the D Troop, Seventeenth Armored Cavalry, 199th Light Infantry. He was soon educated in the intricacies of the Vietnamese black market. Soldiers would buy items from the American PX and sell them to Vietnamese cabdrivers. W
hen they had enough money, they would go to the city of Bien Hoa for a big steak dinner and some entertainment, which they enjoyed while the other newly arrived replacements went about their business on base, assigned to routine duties.

  We had intense action not [on] a daily basis but, I would say, on a weekly basis. We were having combat operations, I’d say, in the period between the end of January and the middle of May on a pretty much regular basis.

  Basically, this was still like a lark for me. This was like an extension of playing soldier in the neighborhood; it was just like doing it for real; it’s kind of cool, you know. You get to wear a uniform; the guns are real. Somebody says there’s bad guys out in that area, we will fire our guns out there, you know. Maybe we got somebody and maybe we don’t; we don’t know.

  On January 30, 1968, an estimated eighty thousand members of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army launched attacks on thirty-six of forty-four South Vietnamese provincial capitals and more than a hundred towns and cities in total. Caught by surprise, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces recovered and counterattacked. While the military situation in South Vietnam was quickly stabilized, the boldness of the Tet Offensive demonstrated that years of graduated escalation, bombing, and body counts had failed to secure military victory for the United States and the government of the Republic of South Vietnam. For a range of reasons—military, economic, and political—it seemed the limit of American intervention in Vietnam had been reached.

  Friedman now says that, for him, Tet changed everything.

  In the dry season after Tet, on February 25, 1968, Friedman and his unit were out on operation in some rice paddies when a rocket hit one of the vehicles in his troop. As the rocket exploded, it killed everyone inside, including James Thornton from Philadelphia. Thornton was a friend and the first man Friedman had ever smoked pot with in Vietnam.

  Immediately, Friedman and the other troopers were ordered to dismount from their tracked vehicles as their commander called in an air strike. The strikes were aimed at the area just in front of Friedman. Assuming nothing could survive after such an air strike, Friedman and his unit began firing into spider holes and dropping grenades, not believing any real danger existed. Then, he recalls, “all hell broke loose.” From deep within their holes, the Vietcong emerged, firing away.

  I hit the ground, and I don’t know [why, but] I’m not even wearing a shirt; I’m wearing a flak vest but no shirt underneath, and I remember hearing the rounds go over my head. I remember hugging the ground, and I remember there being a lot of red ants on the ground that were knocked out of the trees from the air strikes and they were very angry red ants. And they were eating me and I couldn’t move.

  Finally, I see off to my side there’s like a muddy canal, and I crawl over to the [combat photographer] and said we’re going to roll over into the canal, which we did, and it felt good just to get wet and get the mud. Some other guys we could hear were pinned down sort of like on the other side of this [brush], and I said let’s work over to them. Let’s work over in that area.

  So [we were] slowly moving in a crouched position through this canal with this photographer who now [had] his M16 in his hand. And we turn—it’s like a bend in the canal, and there’s three VC there. And they look at me and I look at them and then they fall dead. I had my hand on my trigger; I don’t remember firing. But I emptied a magazine into them. And—and I look back at the [photographer]. He had his camera in his hand. He was behind me.

  And I flipped out; first of all, then I realized there was no way he could have shot them. And I saw my hand on my trigger, and I realized it was still depressed; the trigger was still depressed. I guess automatically I ejected my magazine and put in a new magazine, locked in a round, and then I turned around to him and I just went at him. I didn’t hit him, but I kind of like started to scream in his face: “What the fuck are you doing taking pictures? We could have been killed! You’ve got an M16 and you better fucking use it or I’ll kill you—you son of a bitch.” I was just like flipping out.

  Within the same few weeks we had a very similar operation. This time it was only one guy was killed and the lieutenant and a couple guys were wounded.

  In that second incident, Friedman’s unit took small-arms fire as he worked to make himself as small as possible behind his gun and shield. A grenade hit the shield of his machine gun, and a round exploded in the machine gun’s chamber and blew up the weapon’s bolt. Shrapnel hurled itself into Friedman’s hand. The medic patched him up.

  After May 1968, the action around Friedman’s unit tapered off. By September of that year, the plan was for Friedman to rotate back to the United States in November. A request went out for volunteers to join a security force for the base at Long Binh. Friedman, who was up for promotion to sergeant at the time, was acting track commander and therefore in charge of an armored personnel carrier and didn’t want to leave the field. However, he was “volunteered” for the job and assigned to perimeter duty at Long Binh, where he was wounded a second time.

  In a friendly-fire incident, a single, isolated shot hit Friedman in the neck. It was almost as if someone were specifically aiming at him—or got lucky. Apparently, there was little significant damage because within a few days, even though the bullet was still in his body and located near his spine, Friedman was sewn up and sent back to his unit.

  Friedman’s mother, distraught over his assignment to Vietnam in the first place, found out that he had been returned to service with a bullet still lodged in his body. She was working as a bookkeeper in a synagogue at the time and complained to her rabbi that the Army was not treating Friedman properly. The rabbi got in touch with the New York senator Jacob Javits, who contacted the Army. Shortly thereafter, Friedman was called into the troop commander’s office to answer questions about a congressional inquiry and asked to sign a letter indicating that he did not want the bullet removed.

  I was embarrassed by the whole thing; I was very anxious to sign it and say I was okay. And I basically was kind of in limbo for a couple of months until I rotated stateside.

  Home on leave in 1968, Friedman went in uniform to visit friends at Hunter College. Hunter, and other New York City colleges, hosted significant antiwar activity in the late 1960s. While he was there, friends pointed out some students handing out peace-related petitions and information and suggested to Friedman that he go “teach them a lesson.”

  I walked out there, and they looked like some cute girls, you know? I look at the literature and said, “How can you do this? You’re betraying your country. Don’t you know what we’re fighting for?”

  In retrospect, Friedman realized that he was simply repeating information he had been taught in high school, basic training, and AIT.

  At some point I just froze up and realized that what I was saying was what I was told before Vietnam and totally contradictory to what I had experienced in Vietnam.

  The incident caused him to shut down for the next six months. He recalls not wanting to talk to anyone about Vietnam. He needed to evaluate what he thought he knew and compare it with what he had experienced himself.

  [I] drank a lot of beer, went to some parties … and made believe Vietnam had never happened.

  Friedman was finally discharged in 1969. Once home, he became slowly radicalized. A number of events pushed him toward an antiwar position. He attended Woodstock, worked summers in the Catskill Mountains, and went back to school. By the spring of 1970, he was working on Wall Street, around the time the Hard Hat Riot took place. On May 8, 1970, some two hundred construction workers, led by the New York State AFL-CIO union, took to the streets and confronted a thousand college students and protesters who had gathered to demonstrate against the Kent State shootings, the invasion of Cambodia, and the Vietnam War. Newspapers reported that seventy persons were injured in the disturbance and six were arrested.2 One day in roughly the same period of time—Friedman does not recall the date exactly—he found himself in a fistfight with a construction worker.


  I’m wearing a Wall Street smock with my ID, and I’m wearing a tie and everything, and I had a little bushy mustache. My hair was starting to get bushy. This guy was talking about the draft-card burners and the Communists and this and that, and I was saying, “Oh, man, you know, that ain’t the way it is, you know. Vietnam is fucked-up.”

  And the guy attacks me and said, “What the fuck do you know, you draft-card-burning hippie?” I said, “What the fuck do you know? I just came back from Vietnam a few months ago.” And they started whacking on me. The cops—it was like a high-ranking police officer there, and I said, “Are you going to let them do this?” And he just turned his back. And I said okay; I said I know where the fucking cops are at on this. That’s why the students got all their asses kicked over by Pace College and everything.

  Friedman soon learned about the growing Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement through another Vietnam veteran, a high school friend who had become publicly vocal about his views. Not ready to act, Friedman filed the information about the organization away until the spring of 1971. After a Miami vacation, he was on his way back home when he heard on the news that Vietnam veterans in Washington, D.C., were throwing their medals over a hurricane fence on the steps of the U.S. Congress.

  As soon as I got home, I called the VVAW office at 156 Fifth Avenue. They said they weren’t protesting the war so much as they were protesting the way the veterans were being treated, and I went down there, said I’m a Vietnam vet, and said I want to do stuff with you guys.

  By the time the Republican National Convention took place in August 1972, Friedman was deeply involved in the antiwar movement, heading to the convention in Miami with a group of Vietnam veterans to demonstrate there.

  We had about three days of actions, basically running battles with the state police: tear gas, people getting fucked-up, bad. We had one march where we had three guys in wheelchairs out front—Ron Kovic, Bobby Muller, and Bill Wieman. They attacked us, and they tried to arrest Kovic. Did you see Born on the Fourth of July? I was actually one of the guys portrayed as breaking him away from the cops. We got him out of there.