American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  By combining the sophisticated technology and training of the world’s most advanced society with the wilderness arts of the “natives,” the Green Berets were cast as the latest version in a long line of American warrior heroes who, at least in national mythology, have drawn their power from both “civilization” and “savagery.” Laudatory accounts compared the “stealthy marauders” of Fort Bragg to the Indian fighters like Daniel Boone, the revolutionary patriots who used backwoods skills to defeat the redcoats, the Confederate rangers under John “The Gray Ghost” Mosby, and Merrill’s Marauders, who fought behind Japanese lines in the Burmese jungles during World War II.

  But the Green Berets were said to rely less on brute force than their predecessors. With antibiotics and folksy charm they would win the hearts and minds of indigenous populations and inspire them to do most of the fighting to defeat Communist rebels. They combined the service of Dr. Tom Dooley and the unflinching toughness of America’s best fighting men. It was as if they were a well-armed Peace Corps.

  The Green Berets had not always received such gushing tributes. Although founded in 1952, the Special Forces had languished in relative obscurity until the Kennedy administration. Many officers disdained elite units; they would only produce prima donnas—arrogant, undisciplined freelancers who flaunt their special status and undermine the morale of the regular army. In 1956, that viewpoint led to a crowning indignity—the Special Forces were officially denied permission to wear their distinctive green berets.

  But President Kennedy loved the Green Berets, revived their status, and returned their berets. They were, he believed, just the sort of men best suited to fight a smart, largely covert, small-scale counter-guerrilla war in South Vietnam. Early in his presidency he sent four hundred Green Berets to South Vietnam and steadily increased their number. “Wear the beret proudly,” Kennedy told the Special Forces when he went to Fort Bragg in October 1962 to see them in action. “It will be a mark of distinction and a badge of courage in the fight for freedom.” The president was treated to a demonstration that included everything from rappelling to archery to hand-to-hand combat techniques. They even had a guy flying around with a “rocketbelt” strapped to his back. As more dignitaries flocked to Fort Bragg to see the Green Berets perform, the demonstration was dubbed “Disneyland.”

  The Green Berets were not the only elite military unit. The navy had its SEALs, the air force its commandos, the marines their reconnaissance teams, and it must have galled them that the Special Forces received so much more hype. But there was, in fact, a deep respect for service of every kind in the early 1960s, most famously articulated and encouraged by JFK’s inaugural address.

  Kennedy’s famous call to service (“Ask not . . .”) has been repeated so often it has lost its original power, but in that moment it tapped a deep well of national feeling. Virtually every line of JFK’s inaugural links the efforts of ordinary citizens to the highest imaginable stakes. Indeed, “a new generation of Americans” was responsible for the fate of the entire world. “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” These stark extremes punctuate the entire speech—progress or annihilation, peace or war, freedom or tyranny, cooperation or division, hope or despair. People could transform the world for the better, or destroy it. The daily possibility of human extinction demanded a struggle to eradicate “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”

  Of course, if war was necessary, Americans must be willing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But JFK made clear that young people might help transform the world in every conceivable arena, not just military service. And he was not alone. The early 1960s, perhaps more than any other time in our history, provided an enormous and diverse set of role models who inspired teenagers to envision themselves as historical actors—civil rights activists, folksingers, astronauts, Peace Corps volunteers, Beat Generation writers, Green Berets. Even the four sensational mop tops from Liverpool, whose first hits were almost entirely about adolescent love and yearning, seemed to have the talent and magnetism to transform an entire culture and its values.

  When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in early 1964, seventy-three million Americans were watching, the largest television audience since JFK’s funeral just a few months before, and the largest audience for a regular TV show there had ever been. Many commentators dismissed Beatlemania as a transitory teen sensation dominated by young, shrieking, hair-tugging girls. But it soon became clear that the Beatles, and the cultural transformations they signaled, would have a deeper and more enduring impact on America than almost any adult could have imagined. At the very least they reignited the liberating, youthful idealism that had been wounded, but not crushed, by Kennedy’s death.

  The Ed Sullivan Show (initially called Toast of the Town) began in 1948 and ran until 1971, one of the most successful programs in television history. A true variety show, it brought together some of the most surreal combinations of entertainers ever assembled. Sullivan’s something-for-everyone approach (“And now for all you youngsters out there . . .”) partly explains the show’s popularity, but its success also exemplified the degree to which American culture in the two decades after World War II was united by powerful centripetal forces. Despite deep divisions and great diversity, postwar America was bound together by broadly held values and convictions, many of them linked to the faith that the United States acted as a force for good in the world and represented an exceptional set of political ideals open to improvement.

  By 1966, the Vietnam War and ongoing racial conflict had greatly strained that faith and cohesion, but not yet to the breaking point. On January 30, 1966, almost two years after the Beatles first appeared, The Ed Sullivan Show featured a typically bizarre mix of entertainment: Dinah Shore sang “Chim-Chim-Cher-ee” and a blues medley; Dick Capri cracked jokes; the Four Tops sang “It’s the Same Old Song”; an archer named Bob Markworth shot balloons off the head of his wife, Mayana; José Feliciano played an acoustic guitar version of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and somehow kept the tempo flying even after he dropped his pick; Jackie Vernon did a comedy bit about Gunga Din; Acadian folk dancers performed in wooden clogs; and frequent guest Topo Gigio, the ten-inch Italian mouse operated by four puppeteers, did his usual shtick (“Eddie, keees me goodnight!”). Also appearing was a twenty-five-year-old active-duty Green Beret medic, Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.

  In full-dress uniform, wearing the iconic beret, Sadler sang “The Ballad of the Green Berets”:

  Fighting soldiers from the sky

  Fearless men who jump and die . . .

  Silver wings upon their chests

  These are men, America’s best

  One hundred men will test today

  But only three win the Green Beret.

  A month after this performance, Sadler’s ballad reached number one on the pop charts and stayed there for six weeks, selling two million copies. “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was, in fact, Billboard magazine’s number one pop song for 1966 (eventually selling eight million copies), more popular than anything released that year by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys—everybody. The fact that Sadler’s unabashed tribute to military service had such massive appeal radically jars with common memories of the 1960s. After all, by the time “The Ballad of the Green Berets” hit the charts, American kids had already embraced “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (1955–1961), Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” (“You set back and watch / When the death count gets higher,” 1963), Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” (1965), and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” (“You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’ / You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?”—a number one hit in the fall of 1965).

  Many peace activists considered Barry Sadler’s ballad
a dangerous piece of militaristic propaganda. And pro-war students sometimes taunted antiwar protesters by blasting “Ballad of the Green Berets” out of their dorm rooms at full volume during campus rallies. The war divided Americans over just about everything, including music.

  Yet the culture of the mid-1960s resisted such clear-cut labels. Millions of young Americans liked “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and the folk songs of Peter, Paul and Mary. The emotions they touched had something in common. Like so much else in that era, they encouraged young people to think about their relationship to the world and to history—to have grand aspirations and commitments. Those longings might be unsettled, and even contradictory, but they were nurtured by a wide range of sources. And “The Ballad of the Green Berets” does not even mention Vietnam. It celebrates elite military training and the willingness to “jump and die” for “those oppressed.”

  The popularity of Sadler’s song reminds us that the Vietnam generation was one of the most patriotic ever raised. And millions of young men who would eventually turn against the Vietnam War grew up enchanted by military culture. They had spent endless hours in parks and woods with sticks and toy guns, mowing down “Japs” or “Krauts” or “Injuns,” watching World War II movies on TV into the early morning hours, idolizing aggressive macho stars like John Wayne, and harboring boyhood fantasies of military heroism. Many could imagine silver wings on their own chests, and even in 1966, with the war in Vietnam rapidly escalating, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” had the power to tingle the spines of millions of young Americans. But so, too, did the radical new music screaming out of transistor radios—songs like “My Generation” by the Who (“Things they do look awful c-c-cold / I hope I die before I get old”).

  Just a year or two later, however, it was far more difficult to reconcile the conflicting impulses in American politics and culture. People felt compelled to take sides on the burning issues of the day—Vietnam, civil rights, campus protest, even music. The crazy-quilt Ed Sullivan Show, like the nation itself, was designed to bring together all ages, regions, classes, races, and viewpoints. But as those differences widened, Sullivan’s efforts to hold them in harmony seemed ever more strained and comical. One night in 1967 Jim Morrison of the Doors defied Ed Sullivan by refusing to change a provocative word in “Light My Fire”—“Girl we couldn’t get much higher.” By then the other acts looked like throwbacks to some ancient past—Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme singing “Getting to Know You,” Yul Brynner doing a medley of Gypsy songs, and the Skating Bredos whipping around a six-foot rink.

  By the late 1960s patriotic, pro-military tunes had vanished from the pop charts. The culture was cracking apart, and music deemed conservative was largely relegated to country music charts and TV venues like The Lawrence Welk Show. Many of those songs sounded defensive, like defiant claims of pride voiced from a heartland America convinced that its own values were under attack. In 1969, when Merle Haggard wrote the country hit “Okie from Muskogee,” he assumed that many (if not most) Americans had come to believe that patriotism, military service, and “livin’ right” were hopelessly square.

  We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee

  We don’t take no trips on LSD

  We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street

  We like livin’ right, and bein’ free

  I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee

  A place where even squares can have a ball.

  Just a few years earlier most Americans had never even heard of LSD, and now its alarming presence announced itself in a country song played on the most conservative radio stations in the nation.

  Within the military, increasingly flooded by reluctant draftees or draft-pressured “volunteers,” countercultural music became as popular as it was at home. Country music retained a corps of fans, especially among the “lifers,” but most of the young troops favored songs like “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (the Animals, 1965), “Chain of Fools” (Aretha Franklin, 1967), “Purple Haze” (the Jimi Hendrix Experience, 1967), and “Fortunate Son” (Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969).

  By the late 1960s, the Green Berets would become symbols of the false hype that had sold America on a war it could not win and should not have fought. The reasons for that startling shift can be identified in the very book that did as much as anything to elevate the Special Forces to national prominence, Robin Moore’s best-selling novel, The Green Berets. It appeared in early 1965 just as the American Green Berets in Vietnam were being vastly outnumbered by conventional troops. It quickly became a best seller in hardcover and exploded in the fall when it was released as a paperback, selling three million copies in a year. In 1966, The Green Berets continued to fly off the paperback racks, no doubt given an extra boost by the success of Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The two works reinforced each other more closely than most people realized. Moore’s paperback cover featured a photograph of Sadler, and Sadler got his recording contract with help from Moore, who made enough changes in the lyrics to share the song’s copyright.

  Moore’s stories were based on his four-month experience with Green Beret teams in Vietnam during 1964. He was not just an embedded reporter, but a participant observer who carried an automatic rifle, dressed in jungle fatigues, and “was credited with several kills.”

  “The Green Berets is a book of truth,” Moore boldly claimed before acknowledging that it was, in fact, a work of fiction. It’s easy to see why the military was worried enough to require the publisher to plant a bright yellow label on the dust jacket reading “Fiction Stranger Than Fact!” Although Moore lionized the Green Berets as “true-life heroes,” he described them going on secret missions into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, realities no American official would dare to admit.

  Moore’s characters disdain deskbound army careerists who try to rein in the unconventional commandos. Each of the nine stories serves as a demonstration to military higher-ups, and readers, that the Green Berets should be allowed to “get special jobs done any way [they] can.” But, as one character complains, “the orthodox types running this crazy war don’t like to admit to themselves that Americans are violating treaties.” With the war controlled by “conventional officers sitting in comfortable offices,” the Green Berets would have to “outfight and outsmart the Viet Cong with their hands tied behind their backs.” Here was an early version of Ronald Reagan’s much grander claim that the entire military had been “denied permission to win.”

  Ironically, if you strip away Moore’s action-adventure framework and his unwavering assumption that the Green Berets “are serving the cause of freedom around the world,” The Green Berets provides the material for a very effective antiwar manifesto. For starters, Moore’s portrait of the South Vietnamese government and its military could hardly be more unflattering. They are utterly dependent on the United States and demonstrate no promise of gaining the support necessary to form an independent nation. With a few minor exceptions, Moore describes the South Vietnamese allies as hopelessly corrupt, unpopular, cowardly, and incompetent.

  Moore concurs with the prevalent Green Beret view that the allies cannot be trusted to “fight like men.” They call the South Vietnamese military forces LLDBs—lousy little dirty bug-outs—for their tendency to desert in the middle of battle. In the absence of reliable, hard-fighting allies, the Green Berets hire their own, including a group of Cambodian mercenaries, led by a “sinister little brown bandit,” who are paid by the number of Viet Cong they kill. The kills are “confirmed” by the chopped-off ears or hands they bring back to the Green Berets. In one story, Moore’s heroes try to assemble a gung-ho South Vietnamese strike force from Saigon’s jails by bailing out “about 100 assorted thieves, rapists, muggers, dope pushers, pimps, homosexuals, and murderers.”

  The appeal of The Green Berets suggests that whatever controversies the Vietnam War had ignited, there remained a huge market for blood-an
d-guts shoot-’em-ups with passages like this: “[He] grabbed a bayonet-tipped carbine from a lunging VC, gave it a twirl and plunged it through a Communist’s back with such force that it pinned him, squirming, to the mud wall.” Moore’s Green Berets were not the nation-building Peace Corps types that popped up in many of the fawning magazine articles of the early 1960s. These were combat-loving, hard-drinking cynics: “Funny thing about old Victor Charlie,” one of them muses, “he thinks Americans are dickheads for coming over here and trying to drill water wells and build schools and orphanages. The only time he respects us is when we’re killing him.”

  Yet it’s not all combat. Moore mixes in enough tawdry, leering, nearly pornographic passages to paint Southeast Asia as a land of unconstrained sexual adventure for America’s fighting men. In one of his longest stories, he encourages readers to applaud the decision of a married Green Beret major, Bernie Arklin, to take a Laotian “wife.” The officer is in a remote “Meo” village (a derogatory term for Hmong) to recruit and train the people to fight against the Laotian Communists (the Pathet Lao). The village chief brings three girls for Major Arklin to inspect, and invites him to choose one: “The Meo will feel you are part of them if the girl is part of you. She will be your wife.”