American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Brian Willson and Charlie Liteky hoped to make the same point by fasting in public. They were joined by another Vietnam veteran, George Mizo, and a World War II veteran, Duncan Murphy. Under the banner “Veterans Fast for Life,” the men spent four hours each day on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The fast drew little media attention, but as it continued, week after week, activists around the country staged some five hundred demonstrations in support of the fasters and their cause. After forty-seven days, with George Mizo near death, the four men ended their fast.

  A year later, Brian Willson and two other veterans sat down on the tracks at Concord Naval Weapons Station to block a munitions train. It was an act of principled, nonviolent civil disobedience. They believed the train would stop and fully expected to be arrested and serve up to a year in prison. Their action was not unprecedented. During the Vietnam War many people had blocked trains at Concord and faced fines and imprisonment. In fact, the train engineers had always been under orders to stop and remove any obstacle on the tracks—a stalled car, an animal, anything. After all, they were carrying dangerous explosives. They were not to travel faster than five miles per hour.

  The train that approached the three men was short, a locomotive with two boxcars. On a platform in front of the engine stood two spotters whose job was to look for obstructions on the track. The demonstrators were clearly visible. But instead of slowing down and stopping, the train accelerated.

  The two men on either side of Willson sprang to safety just as the train was about to strike. Willson, sitting with his legs crossed, tried to push himself up and off the tracks. It was too late. The locomotive slammed into Willson. He was thrashed around like a rag doll as the train rolled over him. The wheels completely sliced off one leg below the knee and crushed the other badly enough to require surgical amputation. A lemon-size chunk of Willson’s cranium was knocked into his frontal lobe and his skull was so badly fractured the brain was visible. Nineteen bones were broken.

  Within a few minutes a navy ambulance arrived, but refused to take Willson to the hospital on the grounds that the wounded man was on a public right-of-way, not on navy property. It took another seventeen minutes for a civilian ambulance to arrive. Incredibly, Willson survived. Days later, when he woke up in the hospital, he did not remember being run over by the train. At first he assumed he was in prison, but there were too many green plants in the room. Then he noticed that his body was covered with casts, bandages, and splints.

  Initially the navy claimed the engineer and spotters did not see Willson, that he must have jumped onto the tracks at the last instant, or been pushed. Subsequent reports and legal suits demolished that claim. The protesters had given ample warning of their intention to block the tracks, and the spotters could see Willson and the other men from a distance of more than two hundred yards. As the train approached, it accelerated to seventeen miles per hour (more than three times the speed limit). Most damning of all, the crew claimed it had orders from the base commander not to stop the train because, they were told, the protesters might try to climb onto the train and seize it.

  The FBI had fueled the fire by sending a warning to every FBI office before the encounter that Willson and other participants in Veterans Fast for Life were “domestic terrorist suspects.” The official memorandum said the men were suspected of being part of “an organized conspiracy to use force/violence to coerce the United States Government into modifying its direction.” These details were exposed by FBI agent Jack Ryan. An agent for twenty-one years, Ryan was fired in 1987 just short of his retirement for refusing to investigate Brian Willson and other members of Veterans Fast for Life. He told his bosses that they were “totally non-violent” and clearly not “terrorists.” What happened at Concord was not a train accident, but a deliberate effort to crush an act of nonviolent civil disobedience.

  On his fourth day in the hospital, Willson learned that nine thousand demonstrators had gathered at the Concord Naval Weapons Station and torn up three hundred feet of tracks. They also built an encampment to support a permanent occupation. Although the navy quickly rebuilt the tracks and began moving weapons out of the depot, it met constant resistance. For the next twenty-eight months, twenty-four hours a day, every munitions train was blocked. No one else was run over, but more than 2,200 people were hauled off the tracks and taken to prison. The train blockages became more selective in 1990, but a permanent occupation of small numbers of protesters remained in place, 24/7, until 2002, and periodically in the years since.

  Opposition to Reagan’s Central American policies was only one of many manifestations of 1980s activism. There was a vibrant campaign against nuclear power that effectively ended the production of new plants; a “nuclear freeze” movement that attracted millions of people in the effort to halt additional production of nuclear weapons as a first step toward disarmament; a passionate protest against South African apartheid that pushed universities and corporations to end their economic support for that racist regime; and a growing movement for gay and lesbian rights that, in the 1980s, drew attention to the need for public education and research on HIV/AIDs when the media still marginalized the disease as the “gay plague,” and when President Reagan waited until late in his second term even to acknowledge the catastrophe. The 1980s was also the decade in which the struggle for disabled rights came to full flower, a civil rights movement that was essential to the passage of the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. All of these movements took inspiration from the activism of the 1960s and were as much a part of the post-Vietnam legacy as the memorialization of military service, the growing sense of national victimhood, and the resurgence of flag-waving nationalism.

  The persistence of dissent beyond the 1960s was also evident in a broad public skepticism about military intervention. Although the political center of gravity moved strongly to the right in the 1980s and beyond, an underlying conviction that the nation should avoid getting mired in “another Vietnam” was deeply felt across the ideological spectrum. Of course, that concern took very different forms depending on which lesson was drawn from the Vietnam War. Although many Americans believed the obvious lesson was to pursue a more restrained foreign policy, President Ronald Reagan appealed to a broad constituency with the opposite position—that the nation needed an ever more powerful military and a stronger commitment to global preeminence.

  To hawkish Americans, the Vietnam War demonstrated a lamentable decline in national will. Defeat was attributed not to the weakness of the American cause, but to the weakness of American character on the political and cultural left. They feared that the social movements of the 1960s had engendered a permanent revulsion to the use of military force. It was as if antiwar sentiment had infected the country’s spine and heart with a debilitating disease. By 1980, hawks had found a diagnostic label for the malady—“the Vietnam syndrome.”

  The phrase had been around since about 1970, but with a much different meaning. It did not originally refer to gun-shy Americans who were overly reticent to risk another war, but to the emotional and psychological distress experienced by returning Vietnam veterans. Vietnam syndrome, or post-Vietnam syndrome, was the early name for what, by 1980, had become known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In 1972, for example, a newspaper story reported that “the most commonly reported symptoms of what has been called the ‘post-Vietnam syndrome’ are a sense of shame and guilt for having participated in a war that the veteran now questions and the deeply felt anger and distrust of the government that the veterans believe duped and manipulated them.”

  The evolution of post-Vietnam syndrome to PTSD has its own complex diagnostic history, but the focus was always on the moral and psychological distress of American veterans, not the nation’s presumed loss of military power and aggressiveness. By 1980, however, Vietnam syndrome was typically invoked by conservatives to decry national impotence. It was soon picked up by the Christian Right, neoconservatives, Reagan Republicans
, groups like the Committee on the Present Danger, right-wing think tanks, and the mass media.

  The view that Vietnam was a disastrous blow to American power was the centerpiece of a new conservative orthodoxy calling for a massive expansion of military might and the ideological commitment to project it overseas. A classic formulation of the creed was published in a March 1979 special issue of Business Week called “The Decline of U.S. Power.” The striking cover featured a tight close-up photograph of an American icon—the Statue of Liberty. We see only her upper face and unmistakable evidence that Lady Liberty grieves her nation’s enfeebled state: a giant blue tear is running down her right cheek.

  The inside story gets right to the point: “Between the fall of Vietnam and the fall of the Shah of Iran, the U.S. has been buffeted by an unnerving series of shocks that signal an accelerating erosion of power and influence.” Once a “colossus,” the U.S. is now in “decay.” After the “shattering experience of Vietnam,” the nation has turned inward and adopted an “isolationist posture.” Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is brazenly “encroaching” in Southeast Asia, Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. “Vietnam caused a loss of confidence in the ability of the U.S. to defend non-Communist regimes in Third World Countries. . . . This perception of paralysis was confirmed when the U.S. stood by helplessly as Russian-backed insurgents, aided by Cuban troops, took over in Angola.” Even America’s massive nuclear arsenal can no longer be trusted to keep the nation safe. “Serious questions are being raised as to whether U.S. nuclear strength is sufficient to deter a nuclear first strike by the Russians.”

  As if this assessment weren’t bleak enough, Business Week claimed that the entire American economy and way of life was imperiled by declining global power. “Now there are signs of U.S. weakness everywhere. . . . The policies set in motion during the Vietnam War are now threatening the way of life built since World War II.” The “remarkable world economic system” that the U.S. had created after 1945 was “now in crisis.” Nowhere were the stakes higher than in the Middle East, where the American failure to defend the Shah of Iran from his own people imperiled access to the lifeblood of the Western-dominated economy—oil. “The military retreat that began with the defeat of the U.S. in a place that held no natural resources or markets [Vietnam] now threatens to undermine the nation’s ability to protect the vital oil supply and the energy base of the global economy.”

  Failure, decline, shock, paralysis, weakness, vulnerability—this conservative critique of America made Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech sound almost upbeat. Yet the Democrats were tagged as the party of pessimism, the merchants of “malaise.” The Republicans avoided these labels because Ronald Reagan successfully translated Business Week’s dismal analysis into a stirring vision of national renewal, a “national crusade to make America great again.” He would restore American dynamism by rebuilding the military, cutting taxes, deregulating business, and slashing away at “big government.” The emotional heat beneath these policy prescriptions was the promise that they would revive faith in America as a unique force for good in the world. “I believe it is our pre-ordained destiny to show all mankind that they, too, can be free.”

  To revive a proud faith in American exceptionalism required some serious scrubbing of the historical record. Reagan believed that antiwar memories of the Vietnam War posed an especially dangerous threat to his restoration project. He had to find a way to make even that bleak experience fit into a narrative of nobility and pride. His answer was to paint those who opposed the war as guilt-ridden losers who betrayed and dishonored heroic American soldiers. Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (1980), Reagan said:

  For too long, we have lived with the “Vietnam Syndrome.” . . . It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. A small country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful. . . . There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam. If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and the determination to prevail. . . . And while we are at it, let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win.

  Few Americans still believed their country had been “forced” to fight in Vietnam. And even a good many people who voted for Reagan did not share his view that it was a “noble cause.” But he certainly tapped a widespread desire to recover a faith in national virtue and resolve.

  Of course, the right-wing claim that American military power had collapsed after Vietnam was vastly exaggerated. The foreign policy establishment of both political parties was as firmly committed as ever to the preservation of U.S. global preeminence. The infrastructure of a global military empire had been in place for decades and continued to grow—hundreds of foreign military bases, thousands of ships and submarines, and a long pipeline of new weapons and aircraft. For all the heated rhetoric about the Vietnam syndrome, it never produced a drastic military downsizing or demobilization.

  But it did produce one widely agreed-upon lesson, a lesson strongly supported by both political parties: never again should the U.S. engage in long, inconclusive wars with high American casualties. Policymakers and military leaders agreed that most Americans would continue to support gigantic military budgets, expensive high-tech weapons systems, and even lots of military interventions, but they simply would not tolerate the sight of long lines of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base from far-flung wars, year after year.

  That lesson was quickly forgotten after 9/11, but for the quarter century after Vietnam it remained firmly in place, and it did so despite the continuation of a profligately interventionist foreign policy. From 1975 to 2000 the United States directly and indirectly engaged in dozens of military operations and wars around the world—in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Afghanistan, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia, Sudan, Kosovo, and more. Yet the total number of U.S. troops killed in warfare during that entire twenty-five-year period was under eight hundred. At the peak of the Vietnam War, more than eight hundred Americans were killed every month.

  During those post-Vietnam years it seemed unthinkable that there would be another day like January 31, 1968, when 245 Americans were killed in the first twenty-four hours of the Tet Offensive. And yet, just eight years after the Vietnam War ended, there was another equally bloody day for American troops. On October 23, 1983, in Beirut, Lebanon, more than 350 U.S. servicemen, most of them marines, were in bed in their four-story barracks near the airport. At 6:20 in the morning, a truck ran through a barbed-wire fence on the outer perimeter, crossed a parking lot, smashed down a six-foot-high wrought-iron fence, penetrated the iron gate in front of the barracks, swerved around a blast wall of sandbags, and headed straight through a final sentry box to crash into the building’s lobby. At that moment, the driver detonated the explosives in the truck, the equivalent of six tons of TNT.

  The force of the explosion lifted the entire structure into the air and sheared the thick supporting columns. The blast threw some bodies fifty yards away from the site. “I haven’t seen carnage like that since Vietnam,” said marine spokesman Major Robert Jordan after emerging from the rubble, his forearms smeared with blood. The final death count: 241 American troops, nearly as many as were killed eight years later in the entire Persian Gulf War of 1991.

  In the wake of that devastating attack, it would not have been surprising to hear President Reagan announce a major military escalation—retaliatory air strikes, increased troops, a resolute commitment to erase the threat posed by the radical jihadists responsible for the truck bombing. After all, Reagan had often promised just such a response. Early in his presidency, welcoming home American hostages from I
ran, he declared: “Let terrorists be aware that when the rules of international behavior are violated, our policy will be one of swift and effective retribution.” Surely he would not tolerate this wanton attack on U.S. troops who had been sent to Lebanon as “peacekeepers.” There could hardly be a more heart-wrenching pretext for war—far more compelling than the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, which did not produce a single U.S. casualty but led Congress to give LBJ a blank slate for escalation.

  But the president did not call for escalation. Nor did the nation cry out for it. In fact, within a few months, Reagan did what no Vietnam-era president could bring himself to do—he simply withdrew the troops. This was the same president who claimed that American leaders were “afraid” to let U.S. troops win in Vietnam, that they had no “determination to prevail.” But in Lebanon at least, it seemed evident that Reagan was himself hamstrung by the Vietnam syndrome. When it came to further jeopardizing American lives, it turned out that Reagan shared the broad national reluctance to enter what might become “another Vietnam.”

  Reagan had once advocated intervention in Lebanon, believing that U.S. forces would be embraced as neutral peacekeepers; that they were only there to keep warring factions apart and help establish a cease-fire in a nation that had been ravaged by war since 1975. In fact, U.S. “neutrality” was compromised from the outset by its alliance with Israel, the nation that had recently invaded Lebanon, launched devastating bombing strikes on Beirut, and been complicit in the Christian Phalangist slaughter of more than eight hundred unarmed Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. Furthermore, the CIA had long supported the Christian government, and well before the Beirut barracks bombing, so too would the U.S. military. The USS New Jersey fired shells from its sixteen-inch guns on Islamic settlements around Beirut. These gigantic missiles each weighed 2,700 pounds—“the size of Volkswagens” was how the navy liked to describe them. They were capable of destroying an area the “size of a football field” and were notoriously inaccurate. In his memoir, Colin Powell wrote, “When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’ had taken sides against them. And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target: the exposed marines at the airport.”