American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

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  Who We Are

  Our nation is the greatest force for good in history.

  —President George W. Bush, August 31, 2002

  If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil—that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid.

  —President Barack Obama, April 16, 2013

  WHEN THE LAST U.S. combat troops finally pulled out of Iraq in December 2011, most Americans felt little relief. More than 60 percent of the public had opposed the war since 2006, yet their opinion seemed to count for nothing. Even when they elected a new president in 2008 who had been among the war’s first critics, it took Barack Obama another three years to find an exit. And so the war that began in March 2003 with “shock and awe” ended almost nine years later in head-shaking silence. No one could be confident that the United States had left behind anything but a wrecked and divided country.

  As President Obama slowly withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq, he added 35,000 more to Afghanistan, the war he always said was necessary and just, the land where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had once had their most important bases. But by the time Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, bin Laden and most al-Qaeda members had long since departed and others were vying to divide and control the country. The United States remained, struggling to defend an unpopular government against a seemingly endless insurgency.

  Then on May 2, 2011, the White House announced that a team of navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. To some, it felt like the first moment of closure in the long, disastrous decade since the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001. But the killing of bin Laden changed little. The United States had been attacked by stateless enemies with the ability to organize and recruit anywhere in the world. In response to that threat, President George W. Bush declared global war, the bluntest possible instrument to use against borderless criminals who lacked a standing army. President Obama believed he found in drone warfare and special operations a more surgical approach, but it only succeeded at extending the global war to more countries with no evidence that the United States or the world was safer because of it.

  Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan continued, and the news got no better. In early 2012, just after the United States had finally withdrawn from Iraq, a series of stories once again raised troubling questions about the morality and justice of America’s use of military force. First, in January 2012, a video surfaced showing four U.S. Marines in combat gear laughing as they urinated on Afghan corpses. In February 2012, six American soldiers burned at least a hundred copies of the Koran as part of an effort to destroy some two thousand books the military deemed “suspicious.” The book burning sparked a week of deadly riots. In March 2012, a U.S. soldier went into two Kandahar villages in the early morning and murdered sixteen civilians, most of them women and children. And then, in April 2012, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division posed for photos as they held up the severed legs of a suicide bomber.

  So many similar stories had piled up over the previous decade, it was hard to believe that anyone would claim that they were only the misdeeds of a “few bad apples” that said nothing of significance about the nation as a whole or its foreign policy. Yet that is precisely what the Obama administration claimed. In response to the Kandahar massacre the president said: “We are heartbroken over the loss of innocent life. . . . It’s not who we are as a country and it does not represent our military.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton read from the same script: “Like many Americans I was shocked and saddened by the killings of innocent Afghan villagers this weekend. . . . This is not who we are.”

  As for the Koran burnings? “This is not who we are,” commented General John Allen. And when American troops smiled for photographs while holding enemy body parts, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: “This is not who we are, and what we represent.” Whatever the revelation—atrocities in the field, torture in secret prisons, government sanction for abuses of rights at home and abroad—the mantra is always the same: evildoing is the work of our enemies alone.

  Things looked like they might take a new turn in May 2012, when Defense Secretary Panetta went to Fort Benning to give a major speech. A military spokesman said he wanted to respond to “recent isolated incidents of misconduct and ethical lapses in judgment.” In fact, however, Panetta made no specific reference to the pissed-upon corpses or murdered civilians. Nor did he take command responsibility for any crimes or abuses, or express remorse for the harm done to Afghanistan. In front of thirteen thousand soldiers of the Third Infantry Division’s Heavy Brigade Combat Team (the Hammer Brigade), Panetta devoted almost all of his speech to praising the troops—their “vigilance and honor” and their “very courageous” willingness to put their “lives on the line.” These blandishments were met with many cheers and “Hoo-ahs!”

  Near the end Panetta pointed to the “challenges ahead.” Although “our enemies are losing on the battlefield,” they “will seek any opportunity to damage us. In particular, they have sought to take advantage of a series of troubling incidents that have involved misconduct on the part of a few.”

  That brings me to the last point I want to make. I need every one of you . . . to always display the strongest character, the greatest discipline and the utmost integrity. . . . I know that you are proud, proud to wear the uniform of your country and that you strive to live up to the highest standards that we expect of you. But the reality is that we are fighting a different kind of war and living in a different kind of world than when I was a lieutenant here at Fort Benning. These days it takes only seconds—seconds for a picture, a photo, to suddenly become an international headline. And those headlines can impact the mission that we’re engaged in. They can put your fellow service members at risk. They can hurt morale. They can damage our standing in the world, and they can cost lives. I know that none of you—none of you deliberately acts to hurt your mission or to put your fellow soldiers at risk. You are the best.

  Panetta’s main point is that “misconduct” by U.S. troops hurts America. When U.S. troops defile the foreign dead, or commit atrocities, those acts damage our morale, our mission, our reputation, and further endanger our troops. We are the primary victims. Panetta does not tell the troops that war crimes are morally wrong. Indeed, the crimes themselves were not even his focus. His concern is the photographic evidence of them that appears in the media. The enemy will “take advantage” of those stories to “damage” the United States. Panetta’s implicit message boils down to this: Don’t commit war crimes, because you never know when someone might take a picture of it to make us look bad.

  For a quarter century after the Vietnam War, the military’s media management and censorship effectively screened out the most troubling images of American warfare from mainstream coverage. During the Persian Gulf War, for example, the most commonly viewed images featured American high-tech weapons, not their victims—smart bombs rocketing down chimneys, but no pictures of the wreckage when they landed. Photographers like Peter Turnley (The Unseen Gulf War) and Kenneth Jarecke (Just Another War) show unsanitized scenes of slaughter, but very few Americans saw them. Had some of those images been on the front pages of American newspapers, they might have become as iconic as the best-known photographs of the Vietnam War era—the self-immolating monk in Saigon (1963), the pistol-to-the-temple street-corner execution (1968), the trench of murdered civilians in My Lai (1968), the student shot dead at Kent State University (1970), the naked girl burned by napalm, running down a highway (1972).

  It was only after 9/11 that the public began again to see a new round of horrifying photographs from American war zones. As Leon Panetta well understood, cell phones and the Internet now made it virtually impossible to block the distribution of damning information and images. In 2004, for example, Americans saw pictures taken by U.S. soldiers serving as guards in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Many of the photos show the guards smiling and hamming it up as they abuse a
nd degrade prisoners. One photo shows a young American woman, Private Lynndie England, standing next to a line of naked male prisoners with bags over their heads. The men have been ordered to masturbate. England looks directly at the camera with a half smile and a cigarette jutting out the side of her mouth. She is using one hand to point at a prisoner’s genitals and the other to give a thumbs-up.

  Investigations revealed that U.S. guards beat and sodomized prisoners with broomsticks and phosphoric lights, forced them to eat out of toilets, slammed them against the wall, urinated and spat upon them, made them wear female underwear, led them around on leashes, made them sleep on wet floors, attacked them with dogs, poured chemicals on them, stripped them naked and rode them like animals.

  In response to the Abu Ghraib photographs, President George W. Bush said, “What took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country.” But, in fact, Bush opened the door to just such behavior when he signed a memorandum on February 7, 2002, waiving U.S. adherence to the Third Geneva Convention, which guarantees humane treatment to prisoners of war. The memo asserted that al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees were exempt from such protections. In practice, the military and CIA used that authorization to justify the use of torture on any of its captives, even those who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. An additional series of memos produced by the Bush administration explicitly sanctioned torture. Just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer, wrote a memo concluding that federal laws against torture, assault, and maiming would not apply to the overseas interrogation of terror suspects.

  Top officials like Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA director George Tenet may have shielded President Bush from detailed information about the worst U.S. practices, but the president clearly gave general sanction to torture (including the forced near-drowning called waterboarding) and “extraordinary rendition” (the kidnapping of suspects and removal to secret foreign prisons for interrogation and torture). These policies explicitly violated long-established U.S. and international law. More than that, they fundamentally contradicted a core principle of American exceptionalism—the belief that the United States adheres to a higher ethical standard than other nations.

  That claim had been violated throughout U.S. history, and ever more routinely during the Cold War when American-backed coups, assassinations, torture, and death squads were all common items on the nation’s foreign policy résumé. In 1954, the famous general James Doolittle advised the Eisenhower administration that the Cold War required the United States to adopt “fundamentally repugnant” measures to fight its “implacable enemy.” He warned, “There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Doolittle was preaching to the choir. Yet in those years the repugnant methods were never publicly acknowledged. The Vietnam War exposed them for all to see.

  Even so, until the post-9/11 period, American officials continued to insist that the United States only resorted to military force in response to clear-cut acts of aggression by foreign forces. That wasn’t true—the U.S. had many times acted as a preemptive, unilateral aggressor. But its stated policy never openly sanctioned the right to initiate war in the absence of hostile actions against the United States, its citizens, or allies. George Bush changed all that. With his “Bush Doctrine”—the policy of preemptive warfare—the United States claimed an “inherent right” to attack anyone anywhere in the world deemed by the government to pose an “imminent threat” to American security. Bush reserved to the United States the right to wage war merely in anticipation of potential hostile acts by others.

  By the time the Abu Ghraib photos became public in the spring of 2004, the idea that Iraq had posed an “imminent threat” to the United States was completely discredited. The primary pretext of the war—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use against us—proved to be utterly false. There were no WMD in Iraq. Nor was there any evidence to support the Bush administration’s other major pretext for war—that there was a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There was none. Iraq had nothing to do with the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001.

  After the rapid toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003, Iraq descended into chaos. The U.S. occupation failed in every possible way. There was massive looting, disorder, displacement, unemployment, and human suffering—all played out in a wrecked country with no clear plan for establishing security and reconstruction. The United States demobilized the entire Iraqi military, leaving 500,000 armed men unemployed and angry. They formed the basis of a growing anti-U.S. insurgency that escalated radically in the year after President Bush stood on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln (May 1, 2003) in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner to declare the end of major combat. In fact, the war had only just begun. In the next year the insurgency intensified. The number of attacks on U.S. forces multiplied month by month. The insurgency was soon accompanied by a bloody civil war between Iraqi religious factions. U.S. troops were given the impossible task of creating order out of the chaos that U.S. policies had created.

  Through it all, both the Bush and Obama administrations were desperate for any sign of good news, or at least some appeal to patriotism that might quiet dissent. In April 2004, just as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was exposed, the Bush administration believed it had found the ultimate example of patriotic sacrifice to honor and exploit—the death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman. Tillman had dropped out of a successful career in the National Football League to volunteer for military service. He had been so profoundly moved by the devastating losses of 9/11 that he was willing to forgo millions of dollars, in the prime of his athletic life, to fight for his country. On April 23, 2004, Tillman was killed in Afghanistan after already serving a tour in Iraq. On May 3, ESPN broadcast Pat Tillman’s entire memorial service, with tributes from NFL players, coaches, and national figures like John McCain. One after another, they honored Tillman for his heroic service and for saving fellow Rangers in the face of hostile fire from the Taliban.

  As the memorials to Tillman poured in, the military kept secret what it had known soon after Tillman’s death—he had not been killed in a firefight, he had been shot by his own men. The only uncertainty was whether he had been killed by accident or intentionally. Yet high-ranking generals worked with the Pentagon and the White House to mislead the Tillman family and the American public. They created a fraudulent combat narrative and awarded Tillman a Silver Star for a battle that never happened. They stuck to the lie for five weeks until forced to admit a tentative version of the truth—“Corporal Tillman probably died as a result of friendly fire.”

  Tillman’s death did not match the propaganda, nor did his political views. He opposed the war in Iraq even while he was fighting there. An army friend, Russell Baer, vividly recalls a day when they were watching U.S. bombs fall on an Iraqi city and Tillman said, “You know, this war is so fucking illegal.” Though he was less critical of the war in Afghanistan, doubts rose there as well, and before he was killed he had contacted Noam Chomsky, the famous critic of U.S. foreign policy, in an effort to schedule a discussion with him after returning from Afghanistan. Shortly before his death Tillman told a friend that if he were to die he didn’t “want them to parade me through the streets.”

  Though Pat Tillman was unable to return home to voice his objections to Bush’s Global War on Terror, his brother Kevin did. He served in the same Ranger unit as Pat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2006, on Pat’s birthday, Kevin wrote an antiwar statement in honor of his brother, in which he mocked the long list of justifications the Bush administration had offered for the war in Iraq:

  Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the Septe
mber 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created. . . .

  Our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

  The Pat Tillman story had once seemed such a perfect instrument for state propaganda: American volunteerism and patriotism at its finest with yet another bonus feature—a millionaire willing to serve his country for an enlisted man’s pay. But, in fact, as U.S. casualties mounted along with antiwar sentiment, privileged volunteers, always rare, became scarcer. Sheer economic need was increasingly the primary driver of enlistment. Yet even the hard-pressed young proved increasingly difficult to recruit. Simply to replenish its ranks, the military had to increase its recruitment budget from $3.7 billion in 2004 to $7.7 billion in 2008. The onset of the Great Recession made the job a little easier, though recruitment budgets continued to rise.

  The post-9/11 military was full of people like the children of Carlos Arredondo. Born in Costa Rica, Arredondo came to the United States as an undocumented worker—an “illegal alien.” Through hard labor, primarily as a handyman, he carved out a life and began a family. “My two boys—they are my American dream,” Carlos often said. The oldest, Alexander, enlisted in the marines at age seventeen after graduating from a Massachusetts vocational high school. He was exactly the type of kid military recruiters target—a first-generation working-class child of divorced parents who might be enticed by the promises of the armed forces. There were, to begin, the economic incentives—offers of career training, future college tuition, and a $10,000 signing bonus. Then came the cultural and psychological pitch—the military would build your confidence, make you feel proud, surround you with a community of intense comradeship, help you develop a new and more respected identity.