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VVAW 1970

By James May

The silence in America about what was going on at our war in Vietnam was loud enough to smother a person. We early members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War helped to break through the censorship and spin control, though it was sometimes costly to do it. We ourselves didn't know just what it was that had made us so angry about our longest war, then still in full swing. Few knew then that the North Vietnamese attack on USS Maddox, which the president said had provoked U.S. involvement, was mostly a lie. We didn't know that America had secretly been the force behind the "French" Indochina War, and didn't have much of a clue what colonialism had done to the "coolies." Most Americans today still don't know about the holocaust of a man-made famine in 1944 to '45 that killed off about 20% of the population "in the affected areas" and caused Vietnam's stoically enduring peasants to embark in desperation on a revolution against terrible odds. Most Americans still do not know that we killed five million Vietnamese trying to stop it.

We early members of VVAW did not know these things then either. We spoke simply of what we did know, of what had gone on around us personally. In doing so we suggested that something had gone wrong with our war in Vietnam to save the people from being taken over by the communists, to save South Vietnam from North Vietnam. We ruffled America's unofficial blanket of censorship and spin control and fabrication.

It was dangerous, and some of us suffered greatly for speaking out. What we had to say prodded dangerously at a political fault line in America that was already quaking under stress. Americans are often undecided as to where to map this fault line, where to draw the political line between "left" and "right," so for our silent majority a security blanket of censorship might have been a comfort. But most people here do make some line between "right" and "wrong," and when our American wars get dirty enough, even some of those who fight them will stand up against the wrong.

We could state the fundamental mystery about Vietnam, but we could not fully explain it. The mystery was that despite being the world's most powerful nation, the harder we Americans fought our war in Southeast Asia, the more we were certainly losing it. We hammered at shadowy targets with a sledge, expending more ordnance than had all the combined armies during World War II. Our methods made our country infamous. We caused over ten thousand dioxin birth defects, targeted tens of thousands of civilian "subversives" for assassination, and tried to dry up the sea in which the (communist revolutionary) fish swam by forcing a large percent of the population into "protected hamlets." The social costs to the Vietnamese we were trying to save were enormous. How baffling that all these methods failed to pound democracy and free enterprise into the hearts and minds of the "gooks," "slants," "dinks," "gomers," "slopes" and "zipperheads" that we had come to defend from a ruthless foreign invasion.

But that "don't mean nothin'," according to the cynical philosophy of the time. "Grab 'em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow." We couldn't explain why it wasn't working, except that there was something increasingly unacceptable to our own hearts and minds in all this.

We Vietnam Veterans Against the War formed at the grassroots. In my hometown, a bunch of guys met one frosty morning in response to flyers announcing a first meeting, made and posted by a young ex-Green Beret sergeant. Without much discussion, we organized to tell our experiences at small venues and on local TV, and linked up with the national organization through its publications.

Opposition to the Vietnam War in our town centered around a Vietnam Studies Center at the university funded by Aid for International Development (AID). Many people considered AID to be a synonym for CIA, particularly in South Vietnam. The official purpose of this center was to aid research useful to the war effort, and to train Vietnamese in industrial arts for a postwar reconstruction of Vietnam. Most students knew little about the center, however, other than that it was somehow connected to the CIA and the war.

We VVAW guys had a different focus: in our experience what was going on and what the government said were two different things. How this was so was our simple message. Our Special Forces veteran told of an incident in which he had needed to race through the jungle to warn the crew of a river patrol boat not to shoot at or offend his tribal mercenary troops, who were on the way with a gift of human hearts. After the boat's machine guns had managed to kill a couple of Liberation Front soldiers, the tribesmen decided that it was the sailors who were entitled to eat the hearts. The sergeant had only just arrived with his warning, that failure to eat these hearts might have serious consequences, when the tribesmen showed up to present the award. One sailor bravely accepted this honor, but soon felt nauseous. He dove into the river in an attempt to vomit underwater.

My Navy stories were tame in comparison to that. I told about a fast mover pilot crowing about spearing a little old man on a bicycle "right through the back with a 2.75 cm rocket," and of joyous elephant shooting contests with the same rockets. I spoke of an ancient little old man shot down by a seventeen-year-old squid with an M1 carbine, for charging at us with a homemade bomb in a shoe box, which EOD said wouldn't have gone off anyway. He fell forward on his thin chest and died. What had made him do it? The shooter was so small that his white helmet made him look like a little mushroom. I spoke about a cop who killed a little boy in a muddy street, firing pop after pop with a .45, the little body jerking in a mud puddle as the rounds hit, all for pickpocketing a wallet from a marine on his way to a whorehouse, a wallet containing forty dollars in MPC. Odd how the blood spreading into the puddle congealed right away. One might have expected a riot, but the local people stood silent and impassive.

The first local student protests amounted to little more than a few dozen people shouting slogans in front of the Vietnam Studies Center, and seemed comic. These protests soon evolved into frequent mass meetings, then swelled into conflicts with uniformed police. Some faculty organized a conference of Concerned Asian Scholars to strip the veneer of academia from our CIA Vietnam Studies Center. Student organizations put together bus trips to demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere.

Locally, we VVAW guys continued to testify. A Marine veteran told about his interview and practical exam for a job as gunner when arriving as a new guy on an M48 tank crew.

"See that dink bitch plowing with the water buffalo out in the paddy? Think you can hit her with the first shot?" It was a test of attitude as well as of skill with M48's ninety mike mike main gun. Its hard to lay the gun by eye, firing manually, and get a first round kill. Nobody asked why a mother would be out plowing, the man - if there was one - away in the ARVN or NLF, maybe.

"No problem!" he said, with the correct gung-ho enthusiasm, bringing the turret around. And when the newbie did blow that "dink bitch" away with the first round, he won a punch in the shoulder - "Good 'nuff for government work!"

"But of course," he concluded, "the water buffalo was dead too. I had tried not to hit that." This story is not, I say again, not one of a bad individual, or even of a bad squadron. The attitudes were widespread; it is a story of a bad war.

Tricky Dicky's May 1970 invasion of Cambodia set off more and bigger demonstrations through the streets of our town. A platoon of angry National Guardsmen let loose shooting at unarmed students on the campus of Kent State and hit a bunch of them, some on their way to class, killing four. It was not the first such event, either. These killings caused more campus demonstrations. A few VVAW members helped to keep order as parade marshals. At the Vietnam Studies Center scores of students were hospitalized after a clash with a phalanx of helmeted, baton-wielding police. More clashes led to a National Guard infantry battalion complete with support units arriving in our college town. At our local armory the inexperienced, half-trained guardsmen were shaken down for personal weapons, and a small, glittering pile of confiscated pistols and knives formed on the drill floor. Army quarter-ton jeeps with big, boxy wooden frames strung with barbed wire mounted on the fronts careened through the streets of the town.

Within a week, several thousand students occupied "the strip" on the main street of the town, in a wall-to-wall sit-in that extended for blocks. It was at first a festive street party, in which marijuana cigarettes and bottles of wine circulated freely. I noticed a line of young people in wheelchairs up on the sidewalk. After strolling around greeting friends, I went home kind of bored. Near midnight, I heard the familiar shrill scream of "deuce and half" army truck superchargers, as riflemen in gas masks were being convoyed up to the student street party. Many were noticeably overweight, and their gas masks did look like pig snouts. Dressing quickly, I was soon jogging beside the rolling column of screaming army trucks.

For a brief moment, when the guardsmen were clumsily dismounting their vehicles, I had a very odd feeling - soldiers in uniforms that in Vietnam had instantly signaled "brothers" were now deploying against my fellow university students, and therefore deploying against me. And just for one instant I instinctively oriented myself as to whatever was available in the terrain as cover, that is to say anything thick enough to stop a full metal jacket thirty ought six. It didn't seem ironic that a lot of guys in those days were in the Guard to dodge the draft and Vietnam; they were still soldiers and still my brothers and it was a very odd feeling.

A few of the demonstration's more radical organizers had become frustrated with a mere street party and led a small group to sit on the railroad track. Current doctrine would say to isolate and arrest these few, using the Guardsmen as a blocking force. The excited local mayor, untrained in handling civil disturbance and for some reason in command, immediately ordered a gas and riot baton general attack. The strategy was apparently the customary simple "mace 'em and chase 'em," in the jargon of the trade.

What happened next was the end of innocence, the end of political agnosticism as our campus had known it. Screaming and unable to flee the pepper gas, the panicked crowd surged against one rank of swinging riot batons and then surged back toward another, and managing to seep away through gaps and alleys, reforming for other confrontations throughout the night. The "wheelies," however, could not flee the first assault by the Illinois State Police. Wheelchairs toppled, spilling the kids onto the street, where through the stinging gas I could see them taking a thumping from state police riot batons. I charged past a little knot of crew-cut men peering from the doorway of of a large church, loudly screaming, "Kill 'em! Kill 'em!"

In this atmosphere, the university soon closed. We VVAW guys continued to persuade by writing little articles and letters to the editor. One Native American who had spent a year as an army journalist in Saigon wrote about being unable to forget stepping over a gutter each day on his way to lunch in which fluids from a GI morgue across the street gurgled beneath his feet.

Soon a set of local ordinances set a 19:00 curfew on our town, and it required a written request submitted three months in advance to hold any assembly of more than nine unrelated persons, indoors or out. With an extreme conservative as governor at that time, it was not long thereafter that faculty who had openly opposed the Vietnam Studies Center were fired, 106 people at a stroke, and lawsuits be damned. Any anti-war activity could have serious repercussions. I witnessed negative recommendations mailed by campus administrators, blackballing graduates in their field. I learned only recently that our Special Forces guy had been blackballed by his academic department in that manner, all for a twenty-five minute talk we VVAW guys made late one afternoon on local television. A graduating senior then, a good soldier and a Green Beret, an excellent man, and his hard-earned degree was suddenly worthless.

Scores of students were arbitrarily expelled for having been present at demonstrations. In researching for this memoir I interviewed a gentleman who had been an assistant dean of students then, in charge of discipline. I am now in my mid-fifties, did two tours at the Vietnam War by the time of the riots in 1970, and am now retired from the military after a further twenty-six years of it, mostly infantry, and this gentleman treated me to the same browbeating lecture he had given to students he had expelled. "So what if you are at the back of a demonstration, just wanting to see what's going on? What happens when that demonstration turns and runs? You become one of the leaders!"

One of my police friends at that time took me to see an old armored vehicle that was a toy belonging to a couple of good old boys, telling me that he hoped to use it as an "urban assault vehicle," to attack barricaded houses. That ambition seemed odd somehow in this normally quiet college town, but the vehicle never did become more than a plaything, as its engine was too unreliable.

Fresh city ordinances lowered the number of persons constituting an "assembly" down to six, then down to three. The guardsmen and police patrolled in columns of vehicles, never less than six, stopping occasionally to surround student houses and peer closely into the windows. If more than three people were spotted inside, the house might be gassed and assaulted by what we would now call SWAT. At least three houses were burned down here by fires started by gas grenades tossed through the windows. Two of my friends walking to work were jumped by the police patrols without warning and given a thumping with batons.

A veteran friend in Seattle called to inform me about demonstrations and repressive tactics going on in his area. We suspected that a general news blackout was downplaying the political disturbances across the nation; we learned eventually that over three hundred universities closed their doors.

Friends led me to one house that had been sacked by the police with particular thoroughness. For the crime of being more than three persons together (without the required permit), the student renters and some friends visiting from out of state had been flex-cuffed, forced to lay face down in the middle of the street, and given a good thumping. All the doors were torn off their hinges, all windows were broken out, the furniture and appliances had been thoroughly smashed, all the LP records were stomped into bits, and an awed neighbor quietly related that even the cat had had its brains dashed out against the door. Three days afterward, the ruined house still reeked strongly of pepper gas.

Naturally, my veteran buddies and I violated these curfews, if only to keep each other informed. Veterans could be distinguished among the people sneaking around the empty streets, dodging the police patrols by their use of "individual movement techniques," flitting from bush to tree, staying always in shadow. And once inside a house, to avoid being noticed by the army patrols, we conversed in low tones lying flat on the floor. I will never forget a certain moment during one of these clandestine meetings, when I craned my neck up to watch the news on television. I remember being fascinated by the famous quivering blue jowls of President Nixon, as he petulantly assured America, "There is no repression!"