Jane Fonda’s antiwar activism began only late in the war, in 1970, when she helped form an antiwar road show for GIs called FTA (Free the Army, a play on the GI expression “Fuck the Army,” which was itself a play on the army slogan “Fun, Travel, and Adventure”). Intended as a leftist alternative to Bob Hope’s USO shows, FTA included antiwar skits, comedic dialogues, and music. The shows drew huge crowds of enthusiastic active-duty GIs. In the 2005 documentary Sir! No Sir! you can see footage of the FTA shows in which thousands of GIs are cheering Jane Fonda. From a contemporary vantage point those scenes are astonishing and even surreal. How could GIs support “Hanoi Jane”? The post-Vietnam media made it seem as if Fonda was universally loathed by soldiers and veterans, as if all of them had a bumper sticker on their cars and pickups reading “Hanoi Jane: American Traitor Bitch.”
Fonda’s wartime visit to Hanoi came in July 1972, by which time more than 300 American antiwar activists had already visited the Communist capital and fewer than 35,000 U.S. troops remained in Vietnam, most of them in rear area noncombat roles. Some of them might have heard her broadcasts from Radio Hanoi calling U.S. leaders war criminals, but by then soldiers had heard such claims many times over, and a growing number shared the opinion. There is no persuasive evidence that Fonda’s words and actions demoralized large numbers of U.S. troops; by 1972 most were already thoroughly disillusioned with the American mission in Vietnam.
While Fonda’s actions in Hanoi undoubtedly offended many Americans in 1972, the greatest vitriol against her emerged years later in the 1980s as part of a larger postwar backlash against the liberal and left-wing movements of the 1960s. The vilification of Fonda offered a powerful object lesson to Americans about the dangers of dissent—you, too, might be scorned for having demonstrated against the Vietnam War. While very few antiwar activists recorded propaganda broadcasts for Hanoi, her example became a convenient way to implicate an entire movement.
In post-Vietnam presidential campaigns, Republicans routinely tarred their Democratic opponents by trying to link them to the left-wing movements of the 1960s. In 1988, for example, Republican George H. W. Bush branded Michael Dukakis a “McGovernite” liberal who had “veered far outside” the “mainstream.” Senator George McGovern had been one of the most forceful congressional opponents of the Vietnam War. In 1972, McGovern was badly defeated in his bid for the presidency by Richard Nixon, in part because the Republicans successfully painted McGovern as a radical who would be soft on criminals and draft dodgers, legalize illegal drugs, weaken U.S. defenses, expand the welfare system, and undermine traditional American values.
Bush followed a similar script in 1988, routinely hammering Governor Dukakis for not supporting a bill to make the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory in Massachusetts schools. Meanwhile, Bush almost literally wrapped himself in the flag by campaigning at two factories that manufactured Old Glory. “The flag is back,” Bush announced in Findlay, Ohio (“Flag City, U.S.A.”). “Today America is flag city, and we can never let that change again.”
The Democrats, Bush suggested, threatened once again to undermine reverence for the flag and faith in American exceptionalism. “It all comes down to this,” he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans. “My opponent’s view of the world sees a long slow decline for our country. . . . He sees America as another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. I see America as the leader—a unique nation with a special role in the world . . . the dominant force for good in the world.”
A week later, Republican senator Steven Symms of Idaho claimed there was a photograph of Dukakis’s wife, Kitty, burning an American flag at an anti–Vietnam War demonstration in the 1960s. The charge was completely fabricated, but it represented how far some Republicans would go to associate Dukakis with the most damning stereotypes of 1960s activism.
Such practices have extended throughout the post-Vietnam decades. In 2004, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smeared Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry. Funded primarily by rich GOP donors, the “Swift-boaters” declared Kerry “unfit” for the presidency because of his Vietnam-era activities. First, they claimed that Kerry had misrepresented his record as a navy Swift boat commander in Vietnam. Kerry was highly decorated for his service—including a Silver Star—but the Swift-boaters insisted that his heroism was fabricated and unmerited. These allegations were eventually discredited, but the smear did deep damage to Kerry’s campaign and made “Swift-boating” a pejorative term for unfair and unfounded attacks on political opponents.
But the primary reason the Swift-boaters attacked Kerry was not his military record, but his antiwar activism when he returned from Vietnam and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They were especially incensed that his criticism of the war included the claim that American atrocities were widespread. Kerry, they said, betrayed American soldiers by slandering their honor and integrity with “phony” charges. In fact, Kerry had directed responsibility for “this barbaric war” at U.S. policymakers, not the troops (“Where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy . . . now that we . . . have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops.”) But that distinction was irrelevant to right-wing activists like the Swift-boaters. Their aim was to smear Kerry with a line of attack that went back to the war itself—the charge that the antiwar movement’s primary function was to undermine, demean, and demoralize brave American troops.
In the face of such charges, many Americans, like Kerry, have been put on the defensive about their participation in the most significant peace movement in American history. Although a vast majority may remain proud of their activism, they did not have a profound impact on post–Vietnam War public memory. In the decades since 1980, few, if any, prominent Americans have publicly praised the courage and determination of peace activists who opposed our most unpopular war. And how many times has Hollywood made a film in which Vietnam-era peace activists are cast as appealing characters? Once you’ve mentioned Hair and Coming Home (both from 1979), you might have to jump to Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) to find a major film with a sympathetic treatment of an antiwar activist. And in that case, only the antiwar Vietnam veterans are put in a heroic light; the campus activists are sanctimonious caricatures. Far more typical are pop culture activists who play tiny roles as arrogant jerks, like the character in Forrest Gump (1994) who takes one look at the film’s hero in a military uniform and says, “Who’s this baby-killer?”
As peace activists were recalled with mounting disgust, the appalling evidence of the violence U.S. policy had brought to Vietnam was disappearing. A study of twelve widely used high school U.S. history textbooks published between 1974 and 1991 found that only one of them included the famous 1963 photograph of the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in downtown Saigon in protest of the American-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem. None of the twelve books had the 1968 picture of South Vietnam’s chief of national police, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executing a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner by firing a pistol into his temple. None included the photograph of dozens of Vietnamese civilians, including many children and babies, lying slaughtered in a ditch, the victims of the massacre at My Lai. And none included the photograph of Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old South Vietnamese girl running screaming and naked toward the camera after being horribly burned by napalm.
Those four photographs were among the most well known and influential wartime photographs, yet millions of young Americans would not see them in their high school textbooks. Of course, many saw these images elsewhere, usually with no context or explanation, like those who first encountered the photograph of the burning monk on the cover of the 1992 compact disc Rage Against the Machine. That same year college professor Bruce Franklin visited many campuses and showed students the photograph of the point-blank execution of the Viet Cong prisoner by the U.S.-supported general. Almost everyone sa
id they’d seen the photograph. But then he asked them what the picture depicted. Usually about three-fourths of the students said the shooter was a “communist officer” or a “North Vietnamese officer.” Franklin was not surprised, because many post-Vietnam movies—especially in the POW genre—had transformed the Communists into the unequivocal bad guys and Americans into victims. In The Deer Hunter, for example, American prisoners were forced to put pistols to their own heads and fire them in a game of Russian roulette, effectively transforming the famous wartime image that raised fundamental questions about the American war (e.g., Why are we supporting war crimes?) to images that elicited outrage against Communist brutality and tearful sympathy for the American victims. As a result, several generations of American students came of age with only the vaguest idea of why so many people had opposed the Vietnam War, and thus it became all the easier to breathe new life into the myth that the peace movement was full of self-righteous and cowardly draft dodgers.
Hollywood wasn’t the only place rummaging over the war for stimulating action adventure. For war enthusiasts (almost entirely male), the revolving shelves of mass-market paperbacks were loaded with new “Nam” titles. Much of it was little more than combat pornography, unabashed in its exploitation of violence for titillation and profit. The 1980s produced at least fifteen multivolume fiction series with Vietnam as the setting for every imaginable fantasy of revenge, slaughter, conquest, and vindication—from Jack Buchanan’s M.I.A. Hunter to Eric Helm’s the Scorpion Squad to Donald Zlotnik’s Fields of Honor. The ad copy for one of the books in Jonathan Cain’s Saigon Commandos series offers this teaser: “Someone’s torching GIs in a hellhole known as Fire Alley and Sergeant Stryker and his MPs are in on the manhunt. To top it all off, Stryker’s got to keep the lid on the hustlers, deserters, and Cong sympathizers who make his beat the toughest in the world!” Another series, The Black Eagles, features a title called Hanoi Hellground: “They’re the best jungle fighters the United States has to offer, and no matter where Charlie is hiding, they’ll find him. They’re the greatest unsung heroes of the dirtiest, most challenging war of all time. They’re THE BLACK EAGLES.” Combat action adventure did not overshadow the great literature about the Vietnam War and its aftermath by Tim O’Brien, Bobbie Ann Mason, Wayne Karlin, Larry Heinemann, and Robert Olen Butler (to name just a few), but it marked one of the ways postwar culture transformed and repackaged the war from a bleak and troubling memory to something more consumable and appealing.
As the Vietnam market boomed, publishers reissued some out-of-print Vietnam War books from the 1960s. In 1986, for example, Bantam Books published a mass-market paperback edition of Malcolm Browne’s The New Face of War, first published in 1965. A former AP and New York Times reporter, Browne revised the new edition, mostly to add material on the years after the huge U.S. escalation. But he also strengthened his critique of U.S. policy in Vietnam. For example, these lines did not appear in the original: “Those who speak of America bringing freedom, democracy and civil liberties to Viet Nam know nothing of the country and its people. Somehow, America has always ended up on the side of the police state in Viet Nam.”
Textual changes aside, the publishers repackaged Browne’s book to make it appeal to war buffs interested in military action and hardware more than political criticism. The new mass-market edition of The New Face of War, priced at $3.95, featured a new cover with an illustration of a white American infantry officer in jungle cammies with helicopters flying overhead. He is looking back over his shoulder with his right arm extended as if waving his men (and readers) into the rice paddies. A vivid red sky lights up the horizon. By contrast, the book’s original 1965 cover showed the famous photograph, taken by Malcolm Browne himself, of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burning himself to death.
That photo, and the thirty-two others that were included inside the first edition, were all missing from the 1986 edition. Many of them were just as troubling as the picture on the cover. One showed a Viet Cong prisoner tied to an American armored personnel carrier being dragged to his death. Another showed the decapitated heads of “three Viet Cong” carried on a stick (“The severed heads are suspended from the pole with vine strung through their ears” reads the caption). Also included was Horst Faas’s unforgettable 1964 photograph of a naked Vietnamese toddler held in the arms of a Vietnamese man. The child looks back over his shoulder directly into the camera, his entire body horribly burned by napalm.
The 1986 edition replaced the disturbing photographs with twenty-eight illustrations. Not one of the drawings shows a Vietnamese person. There are only three images of people and they are all U.S. soldiers, carrying or firing weapons. The twenty-five other illustrations all feature weapons and aircraft—the McDonnell F-4C Phantom, the Boeing Vertol CH-47 Chinook, the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, the 57 mm Chicom Recoilless Rifle Type 36, the Sikorsky CH-54 Skycrane . . . and many more, including a full-page picture of a handgun, the Colt .45 Automatic M1911A1. Weapons sell books—that, apparently, was the reasoning of many publishers in the 1980s. The humans slaughtered by those weapons remained invisible. Malcolm Browne was himself fascinated by American weapons and the “gadgets of war,” but his main point was how ineffective they were in achieving U.S. objectives in Vietnam.
By the 1980s none of that seemed to matter. Americans were learning to stop worrying and once again love the machinery of war and the handsome, heroic Americans who knew how to use it. The quintessential 1980s celebration of American military technology and macho militarism was the blockbuster film Top Gun. The biggest moneymaking movie of 1986, Top Gun featured young navy fighter pilot Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise). Set in the “present day,” it opens with a game of aerial chicken between two U.S. F-14s and three “MiG-28s” over the Indian Ocean. The filmmakers did not feel it necessary to name an actual enemy. The fictional MiG-28s (actually American-made F-5s) were painted a sinister black and given a red star, enough to identify them as generic Communist aircraft (many viewers may have assumed the pilots were Soviet, but you could pick your own favorite enemy—Chinese, North Korean, Libyan, whatever).
The supersonic standoff establishes Maverick’s boundless nerve and gleefully reckless cockiness. Forbidden from firing, he resorts to a classic male expression of American-style intimidation—he flips the bird at the enemy pilot. But to do so, he risks a midair collision. He turns his aircraft upside down and drops it to within a few feet of the MiG cockpit so he can get eyeball-to-eyeball with his opponent before thrusting his middle finger. The symbolic insult saves the day—the MiG pilot, who was locked on the tail of the other American F-14, breaks away and flees.
Maverick’s brazen showboating and defiance earn him numerous reprimands from the brass, but his skill and bravery are so exceptional he is sent for elite training in aerial combat at the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School in Miramar, California (Top Gun). In the first training scene, we hear the film’s only explicit reference to Vietnam. An instructor says, “During Korea the Navy kill ratio was twelve to one. We shot down twelve of their jets for every one of ours. During Vietnam that ratio fell to three to one. Our pilots became dependent on missiles. They’d lost some of their dogfighting skills. ‘Top Gun’ was created [in 1969] to teach . . . air combat maneuvering.” At this point one of the pilots turns to another and says, “This gives me a hard-on.” The instructor finishes with the reassuring news that the Top Gun training immediately turned things around: “By the end of Vietnam, that ratio was back up to twelve to one.”
Bragging about body counts had become taboo because of the Vietnam War, but Top Gun helped restore technological “kills” as a culturally safe measure of pride, prowess, and power. The brief reference to the Vietnam War implied that the United States, by the end, was decisively winning the war, offering a little salute to those in the audience tempted to believe that the military was deprived of victory by home front doves.
No one in the gung-ho 1986 Top Gun film cl
ass is about to question their history lesson. No one points out that kill ratios were completely irrelevant, that military “victories” never brought political legitimacy to the South Vietnamese government. Nor does anyone dare to remind the instructor that by 1972, the navy was so plagued by antiwar rebellion that five U.S. aircraft carriers were kept out of the war zone by acts of sabotage and protest by active-duty sailors, and some antiwar pilots were refusing to fly combat missions.
Top Gun’s backstory provides another fairy tale about the Vietnam War, this one about Maverick’s dead father, Duke Mitchell. In bits and pieces we learn that Duke, a pilot during the Vietnam War, had such a bad reputation the navy punished his son by denying him admission to Annapolis. “What happened to your father?” asks Charlie (Kelly McGillis). Charlie is the stunning astrophysicist who helps train the pilots and falls in love with Maverick. He tells her that his father’s F-4 disappeared in 1965. “The stink of it is he screwed up. No way. My old man was a great fighter pilot. But who the hell knows. It’s all classified.”
Only near the end of the film do we learn the truth from Viper, the flight school commander who had flown with Duke during the Vietnam War. “He was a natural heroic son-of-a-bitch. . . . Yeah, your old man did it right. What I’m about to tell you is classified. It could end my career. We were in the worst dog fight I ever dreamed of. There were bogies [enemy planes] like fireflies all over the sky. His F-4 was hit, he was wounded, but he coulda made it back [to the aircraft carrier]. He stayed in it, saved three planes before he bought it.”
“How come I never heard that before?” Maverick asks.
“Well, that’s not something the State Department tells dependents when the battle occurred over the wrong line on some map.”
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 33
