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INTRODUCTION

The Commemoration Story

In May 2012, President Barack Obama and the Pentagon announced a Commemoration of the Vietnam War to continue through 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict’s end. Among the Commemoration’s objectives, three stand out: “To thank and honor” veterans of the war and their families, including those “who were held as prisoners of war or listed as missing in action for their service and sacrifice on behalf of the United States”; to “highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during” the war; and to “recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by the allies.…” The Commemoration will sponsor thousands of activities over the next ten years, including concerts, educational curricula, school visits by veterans, symposia, school projects, memorial festivities, and POW/MIA ceremonies.

Also that May, Obama gave a Commemoration speech at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. He urged the nation to honor veterans who fought—an implicit call to honor the cause for which they fought, and to deter challenges to the official story. The American war in Vietnam remains “one of the most painful chapters in our history … most particularly, how we treated our troops who served there.… You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few when the honorable service of the many should have been praised.” Was he thinking of the My Lai massacre? “You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.”

The Commemoration is “another chance to set the record straight.” Obama emphasized the POW issue, as he praised those who “wrote one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.” In a criticism of the antiwar movement, he cited the need to tell the story of “how … some Americans turned their back on you.…” In a brief sentence, he urged Americans to “never forget the costs of war, including the terrible loss of innocent civilians—not just in Vietnam.…” He erased from history, however, the millions of Vietnamese who were killed, maimed, and became refugees.

Obama claimed that Americans “hate” war. “When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it’s necessary.” Although acknowledging the “deep divisions” the conflict produced at home, he asserted that “in our democracy we can debate and disagree—even in a time of war.… Patriots can support a war; patriots can oppose a war.” Regardless of our powerful differences, however, we must “always stand united in support of our troops.…” Like many presidents before him, Obama closed his speech by calling upon God to bless “our men and women in uniform [and] these United States of America.”

The Commemoration objectives and Obama’s speech reveal the official story that will be taught about the American war in Vietnam—and will be challenged in this book. This official story has many lessons.

The most fundamental lesson is that the war in Vietnam was fought on behalf of “the ideals we hold dear as Americans.” Obama and the Vietnam Commemoration embrace the view put forth by President Ronald Reagan in 1980: “It is time we recognized that ours, in truth, was a Noble Cause.”

According to Obama and the Vietnam Commemoration Commission, the war was honorable. Therefore, it follows that those who fought it deserve citizens’ respect and support. This raises some profound questions: Can a war be honorable if, as will be argued here, it was a violation of international law, a criminal act of aggression? If so, can the warrior be separated from the war, and act with honor in a criminal cause?

Since more than sixteen hundred servicemen are still Missing in Action (MIA), the Vietnamese should provide us with “the fullest possible accounting for those who have not returned,” Obama said. Thus, he extended the POW/MIA myth that has been sustained in the United States for decades.

This was “one of the most painful chapters in our history,” Obama continued, a reminder that the focus of the Commemoration will be on what the war did to Americans, not to the Vietnamese, who suffered staggering human and ecological losses.

Those who served in the war were not well treated when they returned home, an attack on Americans who opposed the conflict: this reopens the widely believed myth that antiwar activists spit on and generally mistreated returning veterans. Although “deep divisions” arose over the conflict, Americans are a family who can support or oppose a war while standing united in supporting those who fought. The president’s claim, however, rewrites the actual history of that period. “Patriot” was not the word of choice for U.S. officials to describe those who dissented from their policies—including antiwar activists in the military—as they maligned, harassed, and imprisoned citizens who exercised their constitutional rights to protest the war.

It is important that the record of this war be set straight, particularly for young people. Americans are asked to believe that government officials who supported the American war as a Noble Cause—and lied about it for decades—are now going to set them “straight” about what happened and why. Finally, saying that as a nation we “hate war” and “only fight to protect to ourselves because it’s necessary” is a gross distortion easily refuted by the facts of U.S. history.

Another Story

After each war the United States fights, the dominant and official story is presented to succeeding generations, particularly young people. This story stresses the importance and justice of U.S. involvement, and defends the nobility of wartime conduct. Long after the guns are silent, therefore, there is a struggle over memory. Why did the United States go to war? What were the costs—ecological, human, and material? Throughout U.S. history, the answers to these questions have been shaped by dominant and powerful war makers based in Washington, and passed on by the corporate media, public ceremonies, political officials, and school history textbooks. These answers have been challenged, however, by the not-so-powerful who counter the dominant view: critical public intellectuals and citizens, independent filmmakers, poets and writers, and teachers.

The essential message of the dominant view remains the same: U.S. wars are just and honorable, fought for a Noble Cause, the essence of which is the belief that the United States is “a unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life.”¹ The American War challenges this dominant view.

The Real History and Its Lessons

Journalist and antiwar activist Jack Smith argues that the Commemoration seeks to accomplish two fundamental and long-lasting goals: “The first is to legitimize and intensify a renewed warrior spirit within America as the Pentagon emerges from two counter-productive, ruinously expensive and stalemated unjust wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and prepares for further military adventures in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.” The second goal is to essentially shape and change citizens’ “memory of historic public opposition” to the American war with the Pentagon’s “censored account of the conflict.…”²

The actual lessons of the American war in Vietnam contradict the view put forth by the Commemoration and Obama. Writing at the end of the conflict in 1975, Noam Chomsky, arguably the foremost critic of American foreign policy, addresses these:

American imperialism has suffered a stunning defeat in Indochina. But the same forces are engaged in another war against a much less resilient enemy, the American people. Here, the prospects for success are much greater. The battleground is ideological, not military. At stake are the lessons to be drawn from the American war in Indochina; the outcome will determine the course and character of new imperial ventures.³

What Chomsky asserts is key to any critique of the Commemoration. If the American war in Vietnam “is understood, as it properly must be, as a major crime against peace,” then the Noble Cause thesis must be rejected. Those who support the Commemoration’s view of the imperial war against the Vietnamese, therefore, will attempt to “guarantee that ‘no wrong lessons’ are learned from the … war and the resistance to it.” U.S. leaders will find it necessary to “reestablish the basic principle that the use of force by the United States is legitimate, if only it can succeed.”⁴

What lessons, therefore, does the Commemoration wish to teach about this epic event in history? Whose truth will be highlighted for generations to come? Who will speak for the millions who were killed and maimed? What will the lessons of the American war in Vietnam teach about present and future U.S. wars?

Tom Hayden, longtime political and antiwar activist, challenges the Reagan “Noble Cause” view of the American war, the Commemoration, and Obama’s claims:

The effort seems focused primarily on the sacrifices made by American troops in a battle for American ideals. There is nothing revealed about Vietnamese nationalism, sacrifice, casualties or ultimate success—not to mention the ongoing deprivation, Agent Orange poisonings, cluster bombs left behind as signs of inhumanity. Nor is there mention of the peace movement, the historic rallies, the unity across racial lines, the GI revolts inside the armed forces, the unconstitutional domestic spying and indictments, the McGovern campaign, or the Pentagon Papers. Clearly the National Security State is attempting to win on the field of American memory what was lost on the battlefield. Since the struggle for memory shapes our future choices, it is important that peace activists engage in this debate wherever possible.⁵

How citizens, especially young ones, analyze the American war in Vietnam will determine whether they accept or resist the organized propaganda campaign to gain support for it. In March 2013, for example, the Gallup organization polled Americans about their views on the conflict: “Looking back, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” Fifty-seven percent said yes, 34 percent said no, and 9 percent had no opinion—the lowest opposition to the war since it ended in 1975. The age differences are striking: only 43 percent of those eighteen to twenty-nine said it was a mistake, compared to 70 percent of those sixty-five or older.⁶

Education: Basic Training for War

Even amid the height of protest during the American war, far too many educators, public officials, and media pundits passed on an uncritical patriotism and militarism, leaving citizens and youth without the critical skills needed for informed dissent and empowered citizenship in a democracy. At the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the journalist Andrew Kopkind laid out this dissenting challenge: “America has been in a state of war—cold, hot and lukewarm—for as long as most citizens now living can remember.” This militaristic state “is so ingrained in American institutions … in short, so totalitarian—that the government is practically unthinkable without it.” This war mentality influences every social institution and emphasizes “secrecy not candor, propaganda not information.”⁷ Kopkind shatters the story of American benevolence put forth by Obama and the Vietnam Commemoration.

Lessons that Should Be Learned

Before discussing some of the major lessons of the American war that should be learned, it is important to pause and think about the staggering human and environmental toll left behind in Vietnam:

Total war dead: The estimates include a figure of 882 thousand reported in a demographic study published in Population and Development Review, 1995, and a 3.6 million estimate by General Nguyen Dinh Uoc, of the Vietnamese Institute of Military History, 1995. In Kill Anything that Moves, historian Nick Turse states: “The most sophisticated analysis … of wartime mortality in Vietnam, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, suggested that a reasonable estimate might be 3.8 million violent war deaths, combat and civilian. The findings lend credence to an official 1995 Vietnamese government estimate of more than three million deaths in total … for the years when the Americans were involved in combat.” The Indochina Newsletter estimates a total of 14.3 million refugees overall. In South Vietnam there were three hundred thousand orphans and eight hundred thousand children who lost one or both parents; 15.5 million tons of bombs, ground and naval munitions landed on Vietnam, more than double that used by the United States in all of the Second World War; and twenty million gallons of poisonous herbicides were spread over South Vietnam.⁸

Historian Marilyn Young states that at the end of the war, some 9,000 hamlets out of a total of 15,000 were destroyed, as well as 25 million acres of farmland and 12 million acres of forest. In addition, there were about 200,000 prostitutes, 181,000 people disabled, and 1 million widows.⁹ The 3.8 million dead Vietnamese were approximately 8 percent of the total population of that country in 1975. The equivalent death toll in the United States would be about 17.5 million people.

Recent History

A brief review of U.S. military actions after 1975 is necessary to counter the notion that the death and destruction the United States rained upon Vietnam was merely something from the past that has no bearing on recent decades and the present. As documented by Vietnam veteran and historian Andrew Bacevich, historian and writer Tom Engelhardt, late historian and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, and historians Alfred McCoy and Nick Turse, the last forty years have witnessed an endless string of wars and attempted regime changes in Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria; the massive growth of a worldwide system of military bases; secret Special Operations missions in 2014 in more than a hundred nations; drone attacks in countless countries; massive spying on Americans and citizens of other nations by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden; and a “War on Terror” since September 11, 2001, that has, in the name of combating terror, created conditions and “blowback” that have fueled the rise of militant Islamist armed forces now active in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.¹⁰

The Corporate Media

The Vietnam Commemoration and Obama’s speech are merely the latest attempts since 1975 to deny the horrors listed above and portray U.S. violence as a Noble Cause that went astray—the dominant theme put forth by the corporate media, including the influential New York Times. Despite criticisms of American decisions and tactics in the war, the corporate mass media supported the premises underlying Washington’s foreign policy and the ends of the conflict. Journalist and media historian Philip Knightly challenges the widely held belief that American reporters opposed the war: “There is only one flaw in this: the correspondents were not questioning American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness.” They were “as interested in seeing the United States win the war as was the Pentagon. What [they] questioned was not American policy, but the tactics used to implement that policy.…”¹¹

Daniel Hallin, a professor of communications, also disputes the myth that press and television reports confronted civilian and military authorities, and undermined the war effort, essentially the “liberal myth of the adversary press in Vietnam.” Despite this myth, those who have “systematically investigated the media’s role in the war [reveal that] there is an impressive consensus rejecting the notions that the media were adversaries to America’s policy in Vietnam or a decisive factor in the outcome of the war.” As of the time of Hallin’s study in 1989, the three major studies of network television coverage of the war had arrived at the same conclusion: “All reject the idea that the living-room war meant graphic portrayals of violence on a daily basis, or that the television was consistently negative toward U.S. policy or led public opinion in turning against the war.”¹²

The Antiwar Movement at Home and in the Military

The domestic antiwar movement challenged Washington’s policies; however, the key forces bringing the conflict to an end were the Vietnamese resistance and antiwar protest within the U.S. military. The protest against the war did not begin with college students in 1965, as many Americans believe, but twenty years earlier—in October 1945 when troopships bringing GIs home after the Second World War were diverted to transport French troops to Vietnam to continue its colonial rule there, sparking the first antiwar protest against American involvement. Tens of thousands of veterans of the American war became involved in the antiwar movement, as extraordinary dissent and rebellion emerged from within the U.S. military.

Commemoration Myths

Air Force veteran and scholar H. Bruce Franklin disputes one of the great myths of the American war, resurrected in a different form by Obama and the Commemoration: a deeply held belief held by most citizens decades after the fighting ended that “American prisoners of war [were] still being held as captives in Indochina.” Obama’s reference to this controversy in his speech lends credence to the myth. According to Franklin, the anguish over POWs and MIAs remained “the most important concern of many Vietnam veterans,” exceeding that around other pressing issues, such as Agent Orange and medical care. This myth was linked with that of returning vets abused by antiwar activists, a myth discredited by Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke’s Spitting Image, but a testimony to the strength of the dominant and inaccurate beliefs on the war that keep people uninformed and manipulated.¹³ In their concern for alleged American prisoners and missing in action, citizens here ignored the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese missing at the end of the war, as well as the thousands of homeless Vietnam veterans walking U.S. streets.

The MIA/POW issue helped postwar presidents engage in economic and political warfare against Vietnam for at least two decades, until diplomatic relations were established during the Clinton presidency. After the war ended in 1975, the United States was the only major nation to withhold diplomatic recognition to Vietnam. In 1977 former president Carter was asked whether the United States had “a moral obligation to help rebuild” the country. He stated that we owed Vietnam no debt and had no responsibility because “the destruction was mutual.” Since “we went to Vietnam without any desire … to impose American will on other people” but to “defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese,” there was no reason “to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.” Called one of the “most astonishing statements in diplomatic history,” it created no stir “among educated Americans” and did not “diminish Carter’s standing as patron saint of human rights.”¹⁴

Ecological Catastrophe

The devastating environmental health effects of the war continue to this day, for Vietnamese and U.S. veterans. The ongoing damage to both is told by Arthur Westing in Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War; Fred Wilcox in Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Waiting for an Army to Die; and Edwin Martini in Agent Orange. Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, participated as one of the judges in the 2009 International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange. The panel found that the U.S. government and the chemical manufacturers “knew that dioxin, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to humans, was present in one of the components of Agent Orange. Yet they continued to use it.” It also found that the U.S. war in Vietnam “was an illegal war of aggression (crime against peace) … in violation of the United Nations Charter. It further decided that the use of dioxin was a war crime because it qualified as a poisoned weapon in violation of … international law.” And finally, “The use of dioxin was a crime against humanity, as it constituted an inhuman act perpetrated against a civilian population in connection with a crime against peace and war crimes.”¹⁵

The False Story and Denial

Unless challenged, the Vietnam Commemoration and Obama-Reagan view will dominate the lessons of the American war. H. Bruce Franklin’s critique of the dominant view should therefore be considered: “Denial has been, in every sense, the terms necessary to fathom the depths of deception and delusion essential to America’s war in Vietnam.” The main competing American stories of the war are the Noble Cause, the quagmire, and Imperialism. The Noble Cause story is Ronald Reagan’s ignorant history of the war that began after 1954 when “North Vietnam” tried to take over “South Vietnam.” The quagmire story also begins in 1954 when “a ‘reluctant United States’” decided to support the Diem regime and got stuck in “the mire of Vietnam.” The Imperialism history begins in 1945 when American leaders “committed the nation to buttressing, maintaining, and becoming the dominant power within [a worldwide] imperial system.” For Franklin, and this writer, the imperial explanation is the only one that makes sense and can reasonably account for America’s “half-century of military, political and economic warfare against Vietnam and hostility toward every other colony and former colony that resisted” its aggression.¹⁶

An Alternative Commemoration

The Veterans for Peace (VFP) is challenging the Commemoration’s propaganda, based on the work of antiwar veterans, historians, poets, writers, and activists. Its Full Disclosure campaign seeks to “speak truth to power and keep alive the antiwar perspective on the American war in Viet Nam.… It represents a clear alternative to the Pentagon’s current efforts to sanitize and mythologize” that war and thereby “legitimize further unnecessary and destructive wars.”

Scheduled events and activities in the campaign have included a series of teach-ins around the country that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first teach-in held at the University of Michigan in March 1965; ongoing work with educational advocacy organizations such as the Zinn Educational Project to prepare alternative reading guides, articles, and curricula for students and teachers; antiwar films such as Yes Sir, No Sir, which focuses on the GI antiwar movement; protests against current American military actions around the world; and the development of written material by antiwar activists, scholars, and veterans on the conflict and related contemporary issues. The Full Disclosure campaign will continue during the Commemoration, until 2025. For more information, readers should go to its website.