American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

Some wartime construction projects remain in use, but many are in ruins. You can see videos on the Internet of Vietnam veterans exploring the almost unrecognizable sites of their former bases, the buildings stripped away or dilapidated and the land reclaimed by nature. Vietnam is littered with American military ghost towns—isolated, empty, and useless.

  During the war, however, those bases were flooded with Americans and an astounding quantity of American goods. Although Hollywood films about the war have focused primarily on the experience of combat soldiers who endure levels of physical deprivation and danger unknown to most Americans, the great majority of U.S. troops worked in the rear as mechanics, clerks, cooks, truck drivers, and stevedores and in other supporting roles, many of them housed on huge bases where living conditions were rudimentary by U.S. middle-class standards, but luxurious compared with life in the bush or the living conditions of most Vietnamese anywhere. By the late 1960s, the largest U.S. bases provided not only hot showers, hot meals, and access to well-stocked PXs, but also swimming pools, libraries, nightly movies, maid service (for a nominal charge), ice cream, hobby clubs, academic courses, American television shows (e.g., Laugh-In, Bonanza, and The Beverly Hillbillies), and service clubs that offered cheap alcohol, slot machines, and occasional go-go dancers, bands, and strippers. Even up in the Central Highlands near Pleiku at Camp Enari, headquarters of the Fourth Infantry Division, the United States built a PX that was 8,800 square feet and had six checkout counters.

  At bases across South Vietnam, GIs also had access to “massage parlors” and “steam baths” where they could buy sexual services. The largest U.S. military base in South Vietnam, Long Binh, featured a brothel that employed four hundred South Vietnamese women and adolescents. The military command typically denied that it authorized prostitution, but its actions proved otherwise. Many base commanders made sure that the sex workers were routinely treated for venereal diseases (whether they had one or not), and some brothel areas, like “Sin City” in An Khe, were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by U.S. military police.

  Occasionally, the military’s official support made it into the media. In 1966, Time reported, without a trace of disapproval, that the First Cavalry Division had created Sin City—“the first brothel quarter built exclusively for American soldiers in Vietnam.” The “25-acre sprawl of ‘boom-boom parlors’” would eventually include forty structures, each with “a bar and eight cubicles opening off the back.” The women were required to have a weekly medical exam and take “a U.S. provided shot of a long-lasting penicillin-type drug to suppress disease.” As one colonel explained, “We wanted to get the greatest good for our men with the least harm.” Time even quoted the rates: “The price of a ‘short time’ varies with the demand from $2.50 to $5.”

  The tens of thousands of Vietnamese who worked for Americans to construct bases and other military infrastructure were paid much less. Many of them were employed by the private firms that were contracted to do most of the military’s construction. The bulk of the contracts went to RMK-BRJ, a consortium of large American construction firms—Raymond International, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown & Root, and J. A. Jones. The Vietnam War brought a takeoff in military subcontracting, the privatization of jobs that historically had been done primarily by the armed forces. This trend has only escalated in the decades since Vietnam.

  In South Vietnam, RMK-BRJ employed 4,200 Americans, 5,700 Filipinos and Koreans, and 42,000 South Vietnamese. The Americans earned roughly $1,000 a month, not including bonuses (about $6,836 in current dollars), while the Vietnamese were paid about $35 a month (about $239 a month in current dollars). Consortium bosses claimed they wanted to raise wages for the Vietnamese but were prevented from doing so by U.S. embassy officials concerned about inflation.

  In the twenty-first-century U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, private contractors have played an even greater role in building and maintaining the military’s infrastructure, none more so than the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which has been the recipient of billions of dollars in federal spending. Brown & Root was formed in 1919 by Texas brothers Herman and George Brown. In 1962, after Herman’s death, George sold the company to Halliburton but continued to run it as an independent subsidiary. In the late 1960s, as part of the RMK-BRJ consortium, Brown & Root received so many profitable contracts in Vietnam it became the largest engineering and construction firm in the United States.

  Brown & Root rose to preeminence arm-in-arm with Lyndon Johnson. Herman and George Brown began offering large campaign contributions to LBJ when he was a first-term congressman from Texas. LBJ soon helped the brothers secure federal funding to build the Mansfield Dam, Brown & Root’s first major project. The favor was more than returned. According to biographer Robert Caro, LBJ’s first election to the Senate in 1948 was essentially purchased by Brown & Root. The Brown brothers flew the candidate around the state on their private plane, paid for media, shook down subcontractors for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash contributions, and provided the money to buy votes directly. In the end, LBJ was declared the winner by eighty-seven votes, earning him the facetious nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”

  Brown & Root, a fiercely antiunion firm, developed many strong supporters in Washington, but none as powerful and useful as Lyndon Johnson. In the 1950s, with LBJ’s help, the company built air bases in Spain, France, and Guam, and NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. In the 1960s, with LBJ in the White House, Vietnam contracts caused Brown & Root to double in size and rocket to the top of its industry.

  For the antiwar movement, Brown & Root became one of several corporate symbols of war profiteering. It didn’t have quite the same taint as Dow Chemical and other weapons producers, but GIs were especially aware of its power, witnessing firsthand its dramatic impact on the Vietnamese landscape. Their nickname for Brown & Root was “Burn & Loot.”

  In 1971, Brown & Root won a contract to rebuild the infamous prison “tiger cages” on Con Son Island operated by the South Vietnamese government with U.S. support. The existence of the tiger cages came to light earlier that year when a U.S. congressional delegation gained access to the small cement pits covered with bars. The tiger cages were reserved for South Vietnamese political prisoners who refused to pledge allegiance to the Saigon government. The prisoners were horribly ill-fed, abused, and tortured. Searing photographs of them in their tiny cells were published in Life magazine, and the international outcry generated official assurances of reform. The prison would be rebuilt, purportedly with more humane conditions and treatment. Brown & Root received $400,000 to furnish 384 new cells. According to Don Luce, who worked in Vietnam from 1958 to 1971, first for International Voluntary Services and then for the World Council of Churches, the new cells were actually two square feet smaller than the original tiger cages. He later interviewed former prisoners who said the new tiger cages were “in every way worse than the former ones.”

  While the war brought big profits to some American corporations, the profits of U.S. businesses and banks as a whole actually declined in the late 1960s. War-related inflation was part of the cause, eroding the real rate of return on corporate investments and loans. Another cause of declining corporate profits is that workers were doing better. The government’s enormous military spending had helped produce historically low rates of unemployment (3.8 percent from 1965 to 1969). With more jobs available, workers could successfully demand better wages, thus diminishing corporate profits. Of course, the government might have provided a healthier jobs program than warfare, and without the war in Vietnam it might also have devoted more resources to the war on poverty (which even at its peak received only one-seventeenth of the funding for Vietnam).

  In any case, American businesses came to believe that the war was hurting their profits, and that is the main reason many executives began to turn against it. Of course, some were simply outraged by the war itself. As early as January 1966, for example, Marriner Eccles, former ch
air of the Federal Reserve under FDR and Truman, publicly declared that the United States was acting as the aggressor in Vietnam and should get out.

  However, the heart of corporate opposition to the war was the pragmatic concern that it was not good for business. That was the point emphasized by Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace. By 1968 the group had some 1,600 members and ran an antiwar ad in the New York Times: “We are working actively to end the bombing, deescalate the war, and withdraw American troops. As businessmen, we know the Vietnam War is bad business.”

  The case was made most notably in 1970 by Louis B. Lundborg, the chairman of the board of the Bank of America, which was then the largest private bank in the world. Testifying before Senator William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee on the impact of the Vietnam War on the U.S. economy, Lundborg opened with this:

  The thrust of my testimony will be that the war in Vietnam distorts the American economy. The war is a major contributor to inflation—our most crucial domestic economic problem. It draws off resources that could be put to work solving imperative problems facing this nation at home. And despite the protestation of the New Left to the contrary, the fact is that an end to the war would be good, not bad, for American business.

  Chairman Lundborg was understandably sensitive to attacks on the Bank of America made by the most radical elements of the left. Six weeks before Lundborg’s congressional testimony, one of his banks was burned to the ground by a crowd of angry young protesters in Isla Vista, California, near the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). According to Time magazine, “the students rose up for three days of insane violence.” On the first night, a portion of the crowd broke every one of the bank’s windows. On the second night, the bank was torched. “Cowardly little bums” was Governor Ronald Reagan’s description of the rioters. He called in four hundred National Guardsmen to clear the streets. Weeks later, Bank of America brought in a trailer to serve as a temporary bank. The police arrived and fired tear gas. One cop also fired his weapon, killing UCSB student Kevin Moran.

  A small but growing number of radicals were joining revolutionary groups, like the Weather Underground, that endorsed acts of violence against key symbols of state and corporate power, and the Bank of America was a quintessential symbol. In the months after the bank burning in Isla Vista, there were at least forty more attempts to damage or destroy Bank of America buildings.

  Chairman Lundborg found it “repugnant” that some Americans believed the war had anything to do with economic motives. “The thought that war would be initiated or sustained for a single day because it might stimulate the economy should be abhorrent to any decent human being. And yet there are those who say that American business is helping to do just that.” However much Lundborg and other corporate leaders may have come to oppose the war, there was no move to turn down war-related business. The Bank of America did not close its branches in South Vietnam or sever its financial connections to the hundreds of major corporations that supplied the military with its weapons and filled its PXs.

  And Lundborg’s primary criticism of the war was not moral, it was economic. The war, he argued, hurt profits. That was the bottom line of his congressional testimony: “During the four years prior to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, corporate profits after taxes rose 71 percent. From 1966 through 1969 corporate profits after taxes rose only 9.2 percent.”

  Corporate chiefs were no more united in their views of the war than the public at large. Many businessmen still supported the war, and so did President Nixon. Lundborg’s antiwar testimony fell on deaf ears in the White House. Two weeks later Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia, which he had been secretly bombing for a year. He claimed it was the only way to achieve an honorable peace in Vietnam. The war continued for five more years.

  Twenty years after the war, in the mid-1990s, the United States ended its postwar economic embargo of Vietnam and established diplomatic relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. American corporations were among the most forceful advocates for normalized relations. Business Week and Fortune touted Vietnam as a vast new market and workshop—a new “Asian tiger.” With a large population (thirteenth in the world) of poor, but capable and industrious, workers, the economic opportunities were enormous. Better still, Vietnam was beginning to encourage entrepreneurship, profit-driven growth, and foreign investment. Though still politically controlled by the Communist Party, Vietnam was now open for business.

  The Bank of America returned to Vietnam, along with scores of other U. S. companies, old and new—Chevron, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Ford, Intel, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Shell, and Time Warner. Trade with the United States jumped from just a few hundred million dollars in the first years after normalization, to about $1.2 billion in 2000 and almost $30 billion in 2013, most of it in imports from Vietnam.

  One of the first American companies to enter Vietnam in the mid-1990s was Nike. It hired some 25,000 Vietnamese workers, most of them young women from the poor, rural countryside. Investigations of working conditions in the late 1990s found that most employees were paid about 20 cents an hour and worked seventy hours a week. The hot factories reeked of glue and paint and the discipline was draconian. Workers were allowed only one bathroom break per shift, and two drinks of water. Managers punished workers who fell behind or made mistakes by forcing them to kneel on the ground for extended periods with their arms up, or they sent them outside to stand in the sun. Verbal abuse and sexual harassment were reported as commonplace.

  Nike executives in the United States evaded responsibility for these conditions, arguing that they had subcontracted management of the factories to foreign companies (mostly South Korean and Taiwanese) or insisting that abuses were isolated and infrequent. In 1997, a small flurry of articles criticized Nike’s sweatshop labor practices in Vietnam, but Nike’s image in the U.S. was overwhelmingly defined by its flashy advertising for its expensive sports gear. Many of the riveting ads featured basketball legend Michael Jordan. By 1997, Nike was releasing the thirteenth annual design of Air Jordan, the sneakers named after the star player. Sneaker News reported that “the XIII takes its design inspiration from the black panther, and of course, from Michael’s predatory nature and catlike quickness on the court.” Retail price: $150.

  In 2010, in downtown Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), a sixty-eight-story skyscraper was completed—the Bitexco Financial Tower. It dwarfs the surrounding cityscape where even most of the largest buildings do not exceed ten or fifteen stories. Jutting out of the tower’s fiftieth floor, six hundred feet above the ground, is a giant semicircular platform—a helipad! This astonishing appendage is meant to suggest a lotus petal, a hint of Vietnam’s national flower. What a contrast to the makeshift helipads of 1975—those rooftops around Saigon (including the top of the U.S. embassy) from which Americans and their South Vietnamese allies desperately scrambled onto helicopters to evacuate the defeated city. Now the new, enormous landmark reaches out and beckons to the helicopters of the international corporate elite. Bitexco chairman Vu Quang Hoi said in an interview: “The building symbolizes Vietnam’s integration into the international marketplace. The purpose . . . is to attract companies wishing to have a foothold and offer their best services in the Vietnamese market.” If Walt Rostow were still alive, he might have said that the building proves that Vietnam is moving rapidly through its phase of economic takeoff on its inevitable path to the “age of high mass consumption.” Millions of other people, in both Vietnam and America, might look at the same evidence and say: What were we fighting for?

  PART 2

  America at War

  5

  Our Boys

  AS WORD SPREAD that President Kennedy had been killed, Americans turned to each other in shock and grief. They also turned to their televisions to watch the almost nonstop live news coverage. By Monday, November 25, 1963—a national day of mourning to mark Kennedy’s funeral—93 percent of America
n households were tuned in. Perhaps no other event in U.S. history has been viewed in real time by a greater percentage of the nation’s people.

  When the casket was carried down the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral and placed on the horse-drawn caisson for the final journey to Arlington National Cemetery, Jacqueline Kennedy leaned down and whispered something to her young son, John Kennedy Jr., who had, that very day, turned three years old. The little boy stepped forward and saluted his father’s flag-draped coffin.

  At Arlington, the uniformed pallbearers, representing every branch of the military, carried the casket to the hillside grave. En route, they passed through a cordon of soldiers who formed an honor guard. These men had been flown in from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at the request of the slain president’s brother. Robert Kennedy made the call because he knew how much these men had impressed the president, how much he identified them with all that was best about the American military and the nation. They were members of the army’s Special Forces, the Green Berets. After the president was laid to rest, the leader of the honor guard, Sergeant Major Francis Ruddy, removed his green beret and placed it near the eternal flame that marked the gravesite.

  By the time of JFK’s death, these elite, counter-guerrilla commandos had become icons of the New Frontier. Magazines and newspapers practically competed to offer the most lavish praise. The Green Berets were not ordinary G.I. Joes, or reluctant draftees; these were the ultimate professionals—the best of the best.

  The media relished the punishing thirty-eight-week training ordeal endured by the intrepid volunteers, “a killing tenure of unrelieved work and pressure” with nighttime drops into snake-infested swamps and endless runs in the baking southern sun. The Green Berets were not just the finest physical specimens the military could produce; they were, according to the Saturday Evening Post, the “Harvard Ph.D.’s of warfare”—“politico-military experts” who provided the perfect antidote to Communist-led insurgencies in remote areas throughout the world. Steeped in the works of Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara; trained in foreign languages; schooled on indigenous cultural mores; masters of stealth, ambush, demolitions, and emergency medical procedures; and capable of killing their enemy in dozens of ways, the Green Berets could out-guerrilla the guerrilla and defeat the Red insurgent on his own turf with his own techniques. As Time effused in 1961: “The [American] guerrillas can remove an appendix, fire a foreign-made or obsolete gun, blow up a bridge, handle a bow and arrow, sweet-talk some bread out of a native in his own language, fashion explosives out of chemical fertilizer, cut an enemy’s throat (Peking radio calls the operators ‘Killer Commandos’), live off the land.” Even the army’s own propaganda could not have been more celebratory.