American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  After two days of nearly constant shelling, “the jets showed up” and proceeded to bomb the town, taking out whatever targets the artillery had missed and then some.

  Only when we finally took the town back . . . did I see what we had done, we and the VC together. The place was a wreck, still smoldering two weeks later, still reeking sweetly of corpses. The corpses were everywhere, lying in the streets, floating in the reservoir . . . the smell so thick and foul we had to wear surgical masks scented with cologne, aftershave, deodorant, whatever we had, simply to move through the town. . . . Hundreds of corpses and the count kept rising. . . . One day I passed a line of them that went on for almost a block, all children.

  There were similar scenes all over South Vietnam. Tobias Wolff concluded that the Tet Offensive had failed as a Communist “military project.” But as a political “lesson” it had succeeded.

  The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen. They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins. To believe otherwise was self-deception.

  After the Tet Offensive, General Westmoreland was replaced by General Creighton Abrams (1968–1972). Admirers of Abrams credit him with waging a smarter, more focused war, providing more security to villagers and attacking the enemy with greater precision. The record does not substantiate these claims. In fact, Abrams presided over an even more indiscriminate air war (against South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and cooperated with the CIA’s notorious program of political assassinations called the Phoenix Program. Phoenix began in 1967 and expanded during Abrams’s tenure. It was designed to “neutralize” the Viet Cong Infrastructure—the shadow government of Communist political officers and operatives. Under Phoenix, thousands of unarmed, unresisting suspects were murdered. The killing of unarmed noncombatants, even those who proved to be Communist officials, was a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions of war and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Moral condemnation of the Phoenix Program grew as evidence mounted that many victims were not Communist agents but ordinary civilians. Untold numbers of civilians were killed because they were misidentified, wrongly accused, or simply in the same vicinity as the “target.”

  Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto was assigned to the Phoenix Program for two months in late 1968. A recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in the 25th Infantry Division, the future judge came to view Phoenix as a program of “uncontrolled violence.” At times, he says, “I think it became just wholesale killing.” The Phoenix teams often relied on unreliable informants. “Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything.” Once a target was identified, a Phoenix team often arrived at the suspect’s house in the middle of the night. “Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they’d come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.”

  Under the command of General Creighton Abrams, the body count continued to be a primary measure of success. Abrams supported and promoted one of its most flagrant advocates, General Julian J. Ewell. As commander of the Ninth Infantry Division in 1968–1969, Ewell was dubbed the Butcher of the Delta. He was notorious for hectoring his troops for body counts. “Get a hundred a day, every day,” he demanded. When Lieutenant Colonel David Hackworth arrived to take command of one of Ewell’s battalions, the general said, “It’s a pussy battalion and I want tigers, not pussies.” According to Hackworth, every battalion commander in the Ninth Division was required to carry a small card with an “up-to-date, day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month body-count tally, just in case Gen. Ewell happened to show up.” Ewell “didn’t give a damn whose body was counted, and a great many—too many—civilians in the Delta were part of the scores. . . . ‘If it moves, shoot it; if it doesn’t, count it’ would have been the perfect division motto.” In his postwar memoir, Hackworth criticized Ewell’s ruthlessness, but the colonel was hardly free of complicity. He made no protest at the time, and one of Hackworth’s sergeants was holding the radiophone when he heard his commander screaming at helicopter gunship pilots to destroy a sampan. “I don’t give a shit,” Hackworth reportedly said. “Shoot them anyway, women or not.”

  From December 1968 to May 1969, Ewell’s Ninth Infantry launched a major offensive to gain control of a large and heavily populated region of the Mekong Delta. Called Operation Speedy Express, the offensive employed eight thousand infantrymen backed by heavy artillery, helicopters, fighter-bombers, and B-52s. The military command considered it one of the war’s most stunning successes. Even before the operation was over, General Creighton Abrams promoted General Ewell to the largest army command in Vietnam—II Field Force. At the change-of-command ceremony Abrams praised the “magnificent” performance of the Ninth Division and the “brilliant and sensitive” leadership of Ewell. “General Ewell has been the epitome of the professional soldier.”

  The body counts were staggering. The Ninth Division claimed that Operation Speedy Express achieved an enemy body count of 10,889. American deaths were put at 267, a kill ratio of roughly 41 to 1. One of the most telling statistics from the operation is the number of enemy weapons claimed: a mere 748. How could almost 11,000 enemy troops be killed with so few weapons to be found? That question, along with the physical evidence of destroyed villages and hospitals full of civilian casualties, led Newsweek reporters Kevin Buckley and Alex Shimkin to investigate. Three years later the magazine finally published a much truncated version of the study. But the evidence was profoundly disturbing. It “pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians—perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official—were killed by U.S. firepower to ‘pacify’ Kien Hoa [a Mekong Delta province]. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison.”

  Decades later, in 2001, additional evidence was unearthed by Columbia graduate student Nick Turse. A tireless investigator, Turse discovered a previously unexamined collection of shocking documents in the National Archives. These twenty-nine boxes of wartime documents (nine thousand pages of them) had been classified for decades. They were assembled in the wake of the My Lai massacre revelations by a group of officers charged by the Pentagon to investigate allegations of other war crimes committed by members of the U.S. Army in Vietnam. This Vietnam War Crimes Working Group gathered hundreds of sworn testimonies from soldiers and veterans who witnessed or participated in torture, rape, murder, and other war crimes. For all the damning evidence they found, a number of the army investigators believed they had discovered only the tip of the iceberg. Most war crimes were never reported or investigated.

  Among the documents, Turse found a ten-page letter written in 1970 to General William Westmoreland, then the army chief of staff. It came from a “concerned sergeant” who had participated in Speedy Express and wanted the Pentagon to investigate. “Sir,” he wrote, “by pushing the body count so hard, we were ‘told’ to kill many times more Vietnamese than at My Lay [Lai], and very few per cents of them did we know were enemy.” Great sections of the delta had been declared free-fire zones, he explained, even though many of the villages were still fully populated. Air strikes and artillery were called in “even if we didn’t get shot at.” The number of civilians killed, the sergeant claimed, added up to a “My Lay [Lai] each month for a year.” A Pentagon lawyer deemed the sergeant’s charges plausible, and investigators located him for further investigation. Before they could proceed, Westmoreland shut it down.

  However, after the Newsweek story on Speedy Express appeared in 1972, the army commissioned its own secret investigation. It reached the same conclusion: “While there appears to be n
o means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by U.S. forces during Operation Speedy Express . . . a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).”

  No top commanders openly rebelled against the body count obsession, even though many harbored serious private doubts about its effectiveness and morality. That surprising news emerged from a study by retired general Douglas Kinnard. In 1970, after two tours in Vietnam, Kinnard was disgusted with the war and quietly resigned to pursue a PhD in political science at Princeton. In 1974, he sent a questionnaire to each of the 173 army general officers who had held command positions in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. Promised anonymity, two-thirds of the generals complied, and Kinnard published his findings in The War Managers (1977). Kinnard found that only 2 percent of the generals believed that the “measurement of progress system,” based largely on the body count, “was a valid system to measure progress in the war.” Some of the generals added personal comments denouncing the body count: “A great crime and cancer in the Army in the eyes of young officers in 1969–1971,” wrote one. “Gruesome,” wrote another. “The bane of my existence,” wrote a third.

  Throughout the war and beyond, many military elites have defended their institution by blaming the failures in Vietnam on politicians, or home front dissent, or the media. They have often said that U.S. forces in Vietnam never lost on the battlefield. In a narrow sense that is true. The United States consistently proved that it was the greatest military superpower in the world. With B-52s, supersonic jets, aircraft carriers, cluster bombs, napalm, gunships, chemical defoliants, artillery strikes, ground operations by the thousands, year after year, the military demonstrated its capacity to maintain control of South Vietnam as long as the United States was willing to incur the costs. But the U.S. goal was not to fight forever; it was to bolster a non-Communist South Vietnamese government that could survive on its own. Achieving that end depended on gaining what the United States could never secure—the broad political support of the people. Military power could not persuade; it could only destroy. Some U.S. officers used a short expression to encourage greater aggression against the enemy: “Make ’em believers!” they cried. It meant to kill them.

  7

  The War at Home

  “THE COUNTRY IS virtually on the edge of a spiritual, and perhaps even physical, breakdown. For the first time in a century we are not sure there is a future for America.” This apocalyptic assessment came from John Lindsay, the liberal mayor of New York City, on May 6, 1970, two days after four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. Lindsay’s stark vision of national peril came just five years after he was first elected mayor in 1965 with a politics of idealism and hope. He reminded many of John Kennedy—young, handsome, charismatic, articulate, inspiring, and rich. But unlike Kennedy, Lindsay was a Republican, a reflection of the fact that in the mid-1960s members of both political parties could unite around liberal reforms to overcome persistent problems. Mayor Lindsay said the future looked bright, and many people agreed. By 1970, he wondered if there would even be a future, and many people shared his concern. America’s deep and bitter divisions had become greater than at any time since the Civil War.

  The Vietnam War was the knife that cut the deepest. It had spawned increasingly fiery debates for half a decade. Back in 1965, antiwar protests had begun in earnest but were still on the periphery of national consciousness. Demonstrations were generally small and well-mannered affairs. Groups gathered in public spaces to stand in silent vigil. Or they marched with signs, the women in skirts or dresses and the men in ties and jackets. Or they attended “teach-ins” to hear public debates about the war. Even in 1965, some protests were defiant: there were public draft card burnings and efforts to block trains carrying U.S. troops. And some actions were extreme: three Americans burned themselves to death that year in protest of the war. But most of the activism was inspired by a conviction that collective political protest could effect meaningful change. After all, the nonviolent civil rights movement had moved Congress to pass landmark legislation in 1964 and 1965; perhaps the peace movement could indeed stop the war.

  With time, that faith faded. Despite growing opposition, the war only got larger and more lethal. From 1965 to 1968, U.S. troop levels soared to a half million and beyond. The size of antiwar protests rose accordingly, and so did their stridency. As the war continued, frustration and anger deepened, especially among long-term activists. Yet the movement continued to attract new people and groups with fresh energy and commitment. Those who organized against the war were a diverse lot, despite a common stereotype suggesting that virtually all protest came from college campuses. And as the antiwar movement grew by leaps and bounds in the late 1960s its variety became all the more striking, including students, church groups, civil rights activists, pacifists, socialists, professionals, writers, businesspeople, homemakers, union activists, and Vietnam veterans. And there was also a small but fervent group of self-declared revolutionaries determined not just to end the Vietnam War but to bring down the capitalist state that waged it.

  And each new manifestation of public opposition to the war further raised the hackles of Americans who viewed the uprising as a fundamental insult to national pride, patriotism, and “the American way of life,” a phrase that once stood for a set of widely accepted values, but was now denounced by many critics as a smug expression of rampant materialism and militarism. By 1970, debates about the war had deepened into debates about the very meaning of America. Was it the “greatest nation on earth” as so many citizens had long contended, or was it a counterrevolutionary empire that betrayed its own revolutionary ideals at home and abroad? Was America a model and agent of good throughout the world or, as Dr. King had said, its “greatest purveyor of violence”? In the 1950s, the claim of national superiority—American exceptionalism—was so commonplace it rarely prompted more than quiet assent. By the late 1960s, it could trigger a brawl.

  And the war, as Mayor Lindsay warned in 1970, was driving the wedge ever deeper: “All that we are and all that we can be dies a little bit each day the war goes on,” he said, “and it dies whenever we succumb to the easy conclusion that the contestants there or here are gooks or devils, bums or pigs.” Lindsay’s call for civility between “contestants” was almost laughable given the ugly rancor of the times—like whispering “calm down” in the middle of a bar fight. But he was right to suggest that the home front battles were almost as venomous as the war itself. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon often sounded as if they were more troubled by their political enemies at home than their enemies in Hanoi.

  The war prompted some of the angriest public speech in U.S. history. “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” became a common chant of young protesters. And it wasn’t just the kids. Powerful and prominent adults could be as foulmouthed as the most profane demonstrator. At the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, for example, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut denounced the beating of antiwar protesters by Chicago’s police. From the podium, he looked directly at Mayor Richard Daley and attacked the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” TV cameras turned to the enraged Chicago mayor as he cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed back at Ribicoff. His words were inaudible on TV, but you did not have to be a skilled lip reader to pick up Daley’s words: “Fuck you, you Jew son-of-a-bitch, you lousy motherfucker! Go home!”

  The protesters in Chicago were beaten and tear-gassed so severely it looked to many as if civil war had truly begun. “The whole world is watching!” chanted the young activists, imagining that anyone who saw the police brutality on TV would side with the protesters. In fact, polls showed that more people sided with the cops. That is one explanation for the narrow presidential victory of Republican Richard Nixon. Many Americans wanted an end to the war and an end to turmoil at home. Nixon promised both. No one co
uld imagine that Nixon would be forced from office six years later with both goals still unrealized.

  When Nixon took office he soon announced a plan to gradually withdraw U.S. ground troops and begin turning more of the fighting over to the South Vietnamese. But the plan was so vague and unpromising the antiwar movement continued to expand. The largest protests to date took place in the fall of 1969.

  Then on April 30, 1970, Nixon made the stunning announcement that he was expanding the war; U.S. troops were invading Cambodia. It ignited a firestorm of opposition throughout the nation, from the halls of Congress to the streets. Within days, hundreds of campuses were brought to a standstill by the news. Nixon added fuel to the fire by denouncing the “bums” who were “blowing up the campuses.” To a group of Pentagon staffers, the president explained that these bums were actually “the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are, burning up the books.” The White House liked these off-the-cuff remarks so much, it distributed a transcript.

  Book burning was rare, but campus activists were certainly embracing more radical steps to challenge authority. Petitions, vigils, marches, and demonstrations had all accomplished nothing, they argued. It was time to “raise the stakes” of opposition. On dozens of campuses, radical students occupied buildings and burned or bombed the most obvious campus symbol of the war—the ROTC building. Advocates of violence always represented a small subset of the huge and growing number of young people opposed to the war, but their provocative rhetoric and actions aroused equally inflammatory calls for a crackdown. In April 1970, California governor Ronald Reagan said it was time, at last, to rid college campuses of radical student dissent: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”