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Vietnam Vets Target War

By Pete Zastrow

High School and Military Recruiters

By Pete Zastrow

"Did you ever kill anyone?" "Did people try to kill you?" "How did you feel about it?" "Did you see any bodies?" "Do you have nightmares—or any of the other things that affect Vietnam vets?"

Questions, asked by high school students of a Vietnam vet, begin as very specific, often personal, sometimes based on the fictions of the Vietnam War. As a class goes on and the answers pile up, there are better question: "What can we learn from your experience?" "If the U.S. had all these great weapons and technology, why did we lose?" That is a question which the U.S. military machine is still mulling over almost 15 years after the National Liberation Front finally freed Saigon from its American controlled government.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War—which began in 1967 dedicated to bringing an end to the Vietnam War and doing what we could to prevent another Vietnam—sends members into high schools and colleges around the country to give students a glimpse of the past and to pass along some of the lessons we learned, often when we were slightly older than the students to whom we are speaking (troops in Vietnam were younger than any other war and were typically 18 and 19-year olds).

I gave my first high school talk as a recently returned Vietnam veteran in 1970; I talked to a class in current events. There was much I did not have to tell the students of 1970—hundreds of thousands of people of all varieties were in the streets protesting the war and when it was not the demonstrators bringing the war home, it was the nightly news. There were other differences for speakers: the day after my first high school talk, I found the local gossip columnist writing about an "alleged Vietnam veteran" spreading "communist propaganda" in the schools.

Today vets are no longer invited to current events classes—instead we've become resource persons for history classes. And, given the treatment of the Vietnam War in high school history books, it is a good thing we're there. You may remember from your high school history, no matter what was current at the time: the most recent material, even if it is covered in the books, always gets lost in the crunch of finishing up the year, and only a wise and extraordinarily well organized teacher could leave time to discuss recent events.

For VVAW members speaking to high school and college classes is as important as anything we do. We've been doing it since we started as an organization, and probably will keep on speaking for as long as we can stay out of Veterans' Administration domiciliaries where old veterans are housed.

Of course classes differ: we talk in front of classes ranging from the affluent suburbs where kids can afford to be bored by the thought of having to spend time in the military to inner-city young people for whom the military is a real, and sometimes the only real alternative to a life on the streets.

Much of what we can say to today's students is based on our understanding of the military of which we were a part. What used to be called brainwashing is an essential technique of military training. "Brain-washing is exactly the right term: the mind of the military recruit is scrubbed clean of ideas, of individuality, of previous allegiances. Once clean and barren, then the recruit's mind is ready for whatever new material the military wishes to inscribe—the evils of communism, the unwavering obedience to orders no matter what, the basic inferiority of Asians (a favorite during training for those of us who went to Vietnam, but a technique equally useful for Nicaraguans or Panamanians or Filipinos or whomever is appropriate), and the vital importance of having boots so well shined that you can see your reflection in them. That spit-shined boots become as important to the recruit as his family ties is a measure of the effectiveness of the military brainwashing techniques—but that is hardly surprising: the military has had a lot of years to perfect their work.

Other aspects of the military are crucial when talking to young people. Perhaps only since the Vietnam War has it been possible to underline the uses of the U.S. military; the Vietnam War is, of course, the prime example of how policy dictated by economics rather than compassion or morality or even concern for the people of other countries. As Vietnam veterans we can walk into a classroom and announce the the Vietnam War was wrong, was immoral, was an exercise in putting the power of the U.S. military on the wrong side and attempting to squash the ambitions and desires of the people of the country. It was then—and still is today—their country and it has never been our right to make the decisions for the people who live there.

This point easily meshes with the present: when it seemed possible that the U.S. would step up pressure against Nicaragua to the point of a conceivable military adventure there, we could use the Vietnam War as the scale against which to measure U.S. actions. Today when the U.S. military squats with all its might in the Philippines, while the people of that country struggle against U.S. bases and all they represent, shows a continuing example of what students can apply from the Vietnam experience. Who knows which international powder keg will be next to ignite? What we can safely predict is that the U.S. government's reaction will ignore the lessons from Vietnam unless people remind their representatives of what happened—and students are a vital part of this process as they have been in country after country (including the U.S. during the Vietnam war and China in the recent past).

If students have some understanding of how the military operates and how the military is, or might be, used, vets have made a useful contribution. But part of what we must do involves seeing the relationship between the military and young people. When your TV set blares out the message about "Be All That You Can Be," or anyone of the numerous other advertisements for the military that our tax dollars are buying, there is more at stake than the simple "serve your country" you see on the screen. Some of it is simple lies: surveys have demonstrated, for instance, that only 12% of veterans make any use of their military experience in civilian life which doesn't say much for the military "job training" that is advertised. As we used to say when we got out of Vietnam and couldn't find a job, "How many jobs are there for helicopter door gunners?"

There is, however, a more subtle message in all these ads and in the military's approach to youth. For years—maybe since the Revolution and certainly since World War II—the military has been seen as a way for boys to become "men." In some ways a primitive rite of passage takes place (in the public mind): if you spent a wild and slightly errant youth, you need to spend some time in the army to grow up. For boys and increasingly for girls, here's a way to repeat the experience of your father, to be able to fathom the mysteries of risking your life for your country and to belong to something important.

Although VVAW members do not go into the school primarily as "counter-recruiters," explaining some of the underlying facts of the military has the effect of creating some questions in the minds of the students---they should! And if we are talking in a school where a large percentage of the students are likely to end up in the military, we can at least give them the basis to ask some questions themselves. If nothing better there are parts of the Military Justice Code—the "UCMJ"—which provide individual soldiers with some ability to fight back against their officers (those these provisions of the rules are seldom mentioned during basic training).

Our ability to open the minds of young people to the uses and techniques of the military depends to some extent on our ability to talk about Vietnam; that is why we are invited to classes to speak. Our being Vietnam vets gives us a credibility which others do not have a—and our entrance ticket into class. In reality that credibility should be much limited: as almost any Vietnam vet can say, he or she saw only the tiniest piece of the war and while that may provide some useful and telling stories, it does not unfold into a full-fledged analysis of the U.S. experience in Vietnam. Early on we learned that the credibility of being there was just as great for right-wing veterans or for military lifers who were trotted out to show support for the war.

It didn't take long to learn that we needed not only to have the experience of being in Vietnam but also knowledge about the war, about the history behind the war, about the forces involved. When, for instance, we know that over 100,000 soldiers from the National liberation Front and from North Vietnam are still listed as Missing in Action—soldiers whose bodies were never recovered in their own country—it provides a telling comparison with the relative handful of American troops still listed as MIA's and whose return gives the U.s. government a continued rationale for keeping Vietnam in diplomatic limbo by refusing to restore normal diplomatic relations.

Information is especially important at present since, for pretty much the first time, we are facing students who are children of Vietnam vets. Remarkably, they often know that only their dad—or perhaps uncle or close friend of their parents—was in Vietnam but little more. Vietnam vets did not, for many years, talk much of their experiences and many of us still do not.

Several students have asked questions which they have hoped would provide them a way to talk a relative about his war experience.

CCCO, from their national office in Philadelphia, sponsors an "Ask A Vet" contest in which they give prizes for the best responses to a conversation with a veteran. I've had the opportunity for several years now to help judge the contest, so instead of seeing the winners, I've seen all the entries in one or another of the age categories. Although CCCO provides lists of veterans who have agreed to talk to students, each year a number of the students have talked to their own fathers—and in several cases, it is the first time their dad ever really discussed his Vietnam experience with his teenage child.

If anything, the ignorance of what war is like reinforces our need to continue to speak to high school or college students. Rarely are we able to keep a kid determined to enlist in the military from enlisting; we can, however, prepare him or her—and all the students who will not go into the military—to ask some questions. When most of us first heard about Vietnam there was already a war going on; today, with enough questions from enough people, getting the next war started will be far more difficult. We hope so.