Pat Lang posted on Sunday about his perception of one cultural effect of the Vietnam War (Back to the "Follies" 10/22/06):
The Vietnam period was a really bad thing for the United States. In that time the country split left, right and center. Some people fought the war and others supported the enemy. There were even some who were actually pacifists. We don't have that split yet and people on all sides should draw back from re-enacting it. It was a terrible thing. Some Americans marched inthe streets behind the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese flags chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF are going to win" while other Americans were dying or being maimed under the US flag.
Those of us who remained in the armed forces after the war remember just how bitter was the feeling on both sides, and it is with mixed feelings that Vietnam veterans see the appropriate and good way in which soldiers are treated today. The mythology of Vietnam lingers on today with many people in the population still believing that veterans of that war are ruined, drug soaked losers guilty of crimes they won't admit, and unable to adjust to normal life. In fact, the opposite is true, but that does not stop people from thinking otherwise.
After Vietnam it took many years of "hard work" (quoting the pres.) to overcome the psychological gap between those who serve the Republic and those who are served. Iraq is dragging us back to that hateful period in American history. You only had to see that demonstration in Washington last week to know that the danger of deep division is upon us. What flag will the demonstrators march behind this time?
At least he doesn't use the "hippie girl spitting at soldiers" line that's so popular among Republicans.
But I question the extent to which feelings of antagonism were "bitter ... on both sides".
It's somewhat ironic what he writes about the Vietnam War days, because his post is really focused on today's version of what made the public rightly suspicious of the military's credibility during the Vietnam War: senior officials and military spokespeople going out in public and saying things about the Iraq War that are clearly bogus. People just stopped believing them after a while.
Civilian life and military life are obviously different spheres, so some feeling of tension between the two is always inevitable. But what Lang describes above is obviously a whole different level of perceived conflict.
I would argue that the tension came more from the military side, specifically from the officer corps who felt extremely defensive about the loss of the war in Vietnam and the change in general public attitude toward the military's public claims from awe to skepticism and even cynicism.
The image of the antiwar hippies who hated the military is largely a propaganda construct deliberately promoted by the Nixon administration, particularly reflected in Spiro Agnew's public tirades before he had to resign in disgrace over taking bribes when he was Governor of Maryland. Lang would probably call it an "information operation".
Pat Buchanan, one of Agnew's speechwriters, gives an example of the Vice President's approach to encouraging what Nixon called "the silent majority" (i.e., "respectable" white people) to viewing antiwar protesters - really, young people in general - as antiwar hippie commies in league with the threatening Negroes (Spiro Agnew: Prophet Without Honor Internet Brigade 05/29/1998):
On April 13, 1970, in Des Moines, Iowa, Vice President Spiro Agnew deplored "a trend that may drastically depreciate those national assets," U.S. colleges and universities. "(T)here are two methods by which unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism. One is called a quota system, and the other an open-admissions policy. Each is implemented by lessening admissions requirements. They may be equally bad."
This is another quote along those lines:
Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike - I would swap the whole damn zoo for the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.
This was long before the Yahoo! that we know today. I'm not sure who he meant by that one. But the point is clear. He's lumping all the images that looked scary to a lot of conventional-minded white people - radical blacks, protesters, long-haired dope-smokers - and comparing them to animals and contrasting them to the soldiers in Vietnam. It was still unusual in those days for a Vice President to talk like Rush Limbaugh. Times have changed.
Despite thiscontrast between the respectable "boys" in Vietnam and the collection of dirty hippies and bad Negroes that Agnew liked to draw as red meat for the "angry white man" voters, a big part of the conception of military officers that the "counter-culture" was hostile to them may well have been from various forms of social nonconformity and dysfunction that they encountered in the military itself.
A famous article, The Collapse of the Armed Forces by Marine Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. Armed Forces 06/07/1971, gave a detailed accounting of such problems. (It's worth keeping in mind that there was and is inter-service rivalry between the Marines and the Army which may color his presentation of problems largely experienced by the Army.
It is a truism that national armies closely reflect societies from which they have been raised. It would be strange indeed if the Armed Forces did not today mirror the agonizing divisions and social traumas of American society, and of course they do.
For this very reason, our Armed Forces outside Vietnam not only reflect these conditions but disclose the depths of their troubles in an awful litany of sedition, disaffection, desertion, race, drugs, breakdowns of authority, abandonment of discipline, and, as a cumulative result, the lowest state of military morale in the history of the country.
Sedition – coupled with disaffection within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable – infests the Armed Services:
At best count, there appear to be some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas. Since 1970 the number of such sheets has increased 40% (up from 103 last fall). These journals are not mere gripe-sheets that poke soldier fun in the "Beetle Bailey" tradition, at the brass and the sergeants. "In Vietnam," writes the Ft Lewis-McChord Free Press, "the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy." Another West Coast sheet advises readers: "Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer."
At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers) now operate more or less openly. Ancillary to these are at least six antiwar veterans’ groups which strive to influence GIs.
Whatever Heinl's intent was in the article, it provides some important contemporary evidence of the kinds of issues that were going on in the services that gives us some insight into the "culture war" memories of officers from that period. Notice that what he describes as "sedition" in the section just quoted is mostly focused on antiwar sentiment among soldiers and the interactions between service people (then as now mostly men) and civilian antiwar activists.
In fact, the anti-Vietnam War movement included veterans from the early days, and the participation and leadership of veterans in that movement became more prominent as the years went on. Conservatives still hold it very much against John Kerry that he was an antiwar activist and leader.
But were Kerry and other war opponents, both veterans and non-veterans, hostile to soldiers? Did they fail to "honor the troops", as the current phrase has it? I think it's safe to say that those antiwar coffeehouses that Col. Heinl wrote about were not inviting servicemen in to spit on them or insult them.
Back during the 2004 campaign, Joe Conason provided us with a retrospective on how threatening the veterans' antiwar movement appeared to the Nixon-Agnew administration in Salon 04/23/04.
Houston attorney John E. O'Neill, the Navy veteran who has emerged recently as a harsh and ubiquitous critic of John Kerry's military service, tells reporters that he has never really been interested in politics and isn't motivated by partisan interests. In the media, O'Neill is often described simply as a Vietnam vet still enraged by the antiwar speeches Kerry delivered more than 30 years ago. That was when O'Neill first came to public attention as a clean-cut, pro-war protégé of the Nixon White House's highest-ranking dirty trickster (aside from the late president himself), Charles Colson.
Colson, who went to prison for Watergate crimes, saw O'Neill as a perfect foil to Kerry, whom Nixon and his aides feared as a decorated, articulate and reasonable opponent of the war and their regime. Indeed, O'Neill was perfect -- a crewcut officer who had served on the same Navy swift boat that Kerry had commanded, although their stints in the Mekong Delta didn't overlap. In June 1971, Colson brought O'Neill up to Washington for an Oval Office audience with Nixon. His impressions live on in a memo filed later:
"O'Neill went out charging like a tiger, has agreed that he will appear anytime, anywhere that we program him and was last seen walking up West Executive Avenue mumbling to himself that he had just been with the most magnificent man he had ever met in his life."
Now O'Neill has emerged from those decades of silence, roaring denunciations of the man who will become the Democratic nominee for president this summer. "I saw some war heroes," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday. "John Kerry is not a war hero."
No comments:
Post a Comment