The anti-Vietnam War movement: Soldier discontent and the Calley case

Hundreds of thousands of Americans served in the armed forces in Vietnam.  And each of them had their own story to tell.

The Republican Party had its own ideological story to tell about the Vietnam War.  And about those who protested against it.  Despite the active participation of Vietnam veterans in the antiwar movement from the start, despite the generally good relations between antiwar activists and soldiers, the Republicans succeeded in popularizing an image of antiwar protesters as being hostile to soldiers, even to the point of personally attacking and insulting individual veterans they didn't even know.

Hopefully one of the things that comes out of the rehashing of John Kerry's war and antiwar experiences will be a wider realization of how unhistorical and phony that image really is.  Just as today, veterans of the Iraq War criticize the war itself and/or particular policies, just as families of servicepeople voice very diverse opinions, just as individual soldiers take risks to uphold the law in cases like Abu Ghuraib where they see other soldiers committing crimes, it was like that during the Vietnam War, too.

The disaffection of the soldiers

In 1971, the Armed Forces Journal published an article in its June 7 edition by USMC Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., called "The Collapse of the Armed Forces."  Col. Heinl was no admirer of antiwar sentiment in the military.  In fact, his article refers to it repeatedly as "sedition."

But his article does give a vivid picture, one supported by other sources as well, of how widespread discontent had become in the armed services by 1971 - the year John Kerry testified before Congress against the war.  It's doubtful that Col. Heinl was any fan of Kerry's that year.  But his article shows that the romantic notion of the Vietnam War today's Republicans propagate was not shared by many soldiers still in Vietnam by that time:

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officer, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous. ...

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.

Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat. ...

While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and midlevel officers, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services. ...

"Search and evade" (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, "CYA (cover your ass) and get home!"  

That "search-and-evade" has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation's recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them. ...

Symbolic anti-war fasts (such as the one at Pleiku where an entire medical unit, led by its officers, refused Thanksgiving turkey), peace symbols, "V"-signs not for victory but for peace, booing and cursing of officers and even of hapless entertainers such as Bob Hope, are unhappily commonplace.

The article is interesting in a number of ways.  But remembering the context is also important.  For one thing, this is a Marine officer writing, and his criticism is directed mainly at the Army.  In fact, he says in the first section that "the Army seems to be in the worst trouble."  While the Marines, he says, "seem, with their expected staunchness and tough tradition, to be weathering the storm."  So there may be a touch of inter-service rivalry involved in his presentation.  I'm not sure, for instance, that the description of drug addiction as "pandemic" is entirely accurate.

We can also see in Heinl's argument the contemporary version of the argument we still here today that criticizing the war is somehow "dishonoring" or "blaming" the soldiers.  The Nixon administration had been pushing this notion heavily, trying to position itself politically as "supporting the soldiers" while encouraging the public to look at antiwar protesters as irresponsible people who were blaming the soldiers for everything that was wrong with the war.  In fact, one of the reasons that Nixon and his team went to such lengths to oppose Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War - with Nixon personally interviewing John O'Neill (now of the Swift Boat Liars for Bush group) to encourage him to head a prowar veterans shell group - was that the existence of articulate, outspoken antiwar veterans like Kerry threatened to undermine that particular political ploy.

Some of Heinl's specific phrasing: "scapegoatise ... distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public" is more a reflection of the political slogans of the time than an actual description of the public's attitude.  It's worth noting, though, that Heinl specifically says that soldiers are "unsupported in their travail by the general government" both by Congress "as well as the executive branch," which I'm sure didn't entirely please Nixon partisans.

The William Calley case

Antiwar activists, in particular, normally viewed the soldiers, both draftees and volunteers, as victims of bad policies.  It even went to the extreme that some critics of the war even defended the war criminal William Calley, who was the instigator of the My Lai massacre, because they thought he was being a scapegoat for the war planners.

This even strikes me as an example in which some critics of the war let their sympathy for the soldiers and their opposition to the war override good sense.  Calley's crime was clear and extremely well documented.  As described on PBS' American Experience Web site:

As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped, and then killed. For his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire.

The description that Calley "was said to rounded up" that group is too mild.  Telford Taylor, who had been the US chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trial after the Second World War, wrote in Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970):

There was certainly nothing clandestine about the killings.  About 80 officers and men went into the Xom Lang [My Lai] area on the ground.  Above them, at various altitudes, were gunship, observation and command helicopters.  A reporter and a photographer from an Army Public Information Detachment went in with the troops virtually from start to finish.  The pilot of an observation helicopter, shocked by what he saw, reported the killings to brigade headquarters and repeatedly put his helicopter down to rescue wounded women and children.  Command helicopters for the divisional, brigade and task force commanders were assigned air space over the field of action, and were there at least part of the time. (my emphasis)

The documentation and supply of witnesses, in other words, was impressive.  Note also that an soldier in an observation helicopter rescued some of the victims who were still alive and reported the butchery, as his duty required him to.  Although the Army tried to cover up this particular crime, Calley was eventually tried and convicted, and was initially given a life sentence.

In an action that showed what kind of values it was on which he operated, President Nixon reduced his sentence so that he got out after serving only a few years.  This encouraged those who saw Calley as somekind of hero or at least a sympathetic figure.  To be fair, that attitude was mainly prevalent among those inclined to be hardliners on the war, not war critics.  But even a longtime critic of the war like Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas expressed the notion that Calley was a "scapegoat."

It's hard for me to muster up the slightest sympathy for a murderer like Calley.  He intended to just kill everyone in the village, unarmed civilian noncombatants.  And pretty much succeeded. What he did was illegal.  It was by no means the only atrocity of that kind.  But it did not represent the policy of the US Army.  On the contrary, if he received orders to do that as he claimed, he knew that he was obligated as a soldier to disobey those orders, as did those serving under him.  At least one of his soldiers did his duty and refused to participate in the massacre.

In my mind, excusing Calley for that gruesome massacre is the worst kind of insult to all those American soldiers who served in Vietnam without committing war crimes, without violating their duty and without deliberately murdering civilian noncombatants.  As an example of how muddled some of the notions about war crimes had become in the early 1970s, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote about the Calley case in a 1973 book, Whatever Became of Sin?  He used the example of Nixon's leniency to Calley and the sympathy expressed for him by many as an example of how the moral sense of right and wrong had become seriously degraded for most people.

And yet he also wrote the following, which I find astonishing:

Lt. Calley was one of those millions of marching men equipped with killing machines and told by us to use them.  He did.  He herded women and children and old men into a group and mowed them down - then pushed them into a ditch [also described as a canal].  But how can this be called a sin? Not distinguished for his intelligence, good judgment, culture, kindness, or social concern, Calley was nevertheless a "good soldier," i.e., a killer who obeyed orders, not a sinner.

Maybe it was careless editing, but the statement that Calley was acting as a "good soldier", even in quotation marks, shows a basic lack of understanding of the whole notion of laws of war.  No, he was not being a good soldier when he massacred civilian noncombatants.  He was being a criminal.  The soldier who refused Calley's orders - Calley even pointed his rifle at the guy and threatened to kill him - was being a good soldier.  The helicopter pilot who rescued the wounded and reported the crime was being a good soldier.

Taylor, an expert on war crimes, gave his readers a good idea of what he thought of Calley's action.  He displayed a graphic account of Calley having villagers taken to a canal and gunned down opposite a description of SS men taking Jews to a pit and gunning them down in the Ukraine in 1942.

Menninger was trying to make a larger point about the corrosive effects of war, and a valid one.  But even in criticizing the admirers and overt sympathizers of Calley, he also slipped into the kind of fuzzy thinking and basic misunderstanding of what the laws of war are about that at least some in the antiwar movement also shared.  Those critics of the war who made excuses for Calley were displaying a very misguided sense of sympathy for the soldiers.

A last comment about the Menninger quotation above.  That paragraph appears as part of a much longer, careful analysis of the concept of "sin" in modern society.  As I said, that one paragraph alone doesn't give any clear idea of the larger argument of which it is a part.  Yet someone who saw only that paragraph, and read it superficially, might jump to the conclusion that this guy was saying that all soldiers in Vietnam were criminals just like Calley.

Things like this make up what slim factual basis exists for the modern-day Republicans folklore that antiwar activists taunted Vietnam veterans as "baby killers."  It's a slim basis, indeed.  As I just explained, taken out of context, it actually looks like a defense of Calley's crime.  But the Nixon administration, still in power when that book was published, was encouraging people to make just such interpretations of statements by antiwar critics.

And people like John O'Neill and the Swift Boat Liars for Bush are still at it.  The Nixon legacy lives on.