Last week I remembered the war in Vietnam and my own experience of that war. As we approach the 20thanniversary of the American invasion of Iraq and the flawed and destructive occupation that followed, I was taken back to the previous experience whose lessons we not only failed to learn, but which were actively rejected by the policy-makers who took the nation into Baghdad. This is Part 2 of that recollection.
My active opposition to the war was full-blown by 1967, when my academic track took me to Belgium to do research on my thesis. The war followed me there. That December, my California draft board decided that I was not a full-time student and reclassified me. Losing a student deferment focused many young minds with a combination of fear and anger.
Deeply worried, I knew I would not put my life on the line for something that stupid. I knew what the US was doing in Danang, Pleiku, the Mekong Delta; the cruel bombardments, the war crimes, the death and destruction. My wife and I sat in our little flat on the Rue de la Fraîcheur in Brussels and agonized: fight the draft board, go to Sweden, be drafted but try to get a safe assignment like something in Washington, DC? Pull strings and fight was our decision, with moving to Sweden as the backup plan. String-pulling worked. My father talked to the draft board; the war and the risks his two sons faced, had turned him into an opponent of the policy. My thesis advisor assured the board I was a full-time student. The decision was reversed. Otherwise , I might be writing in Swedish. Race, class, and privilege kept me out of Vietnam; a lot of men I know, or knew, were not so lucky.
I returned to the US with my anti-war activism undiminished (including occupying the Free University of Brussels and time in Paris streets in May 1968). I felt obligated to oppose the war as vocally as possible. That was the beginning of the end of my academic career and an unanticipated step into a different life.
By 1968 the war was being argued everywhere. A year later, I stood in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, surrounded by political science professors and students at their annual, national conference, in a knock-down, drag-out graduate student battle with another Columbia student. We were arguing over the proposal to build an electronic barrier between Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to prevent the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong from using the Ho Chi Minh trail to resupply their war effort. Scholars swirled around us, no longer surprised by our anger and passion; the war was dividing the profession I was in.
When I finished my thesis, my advisor nominated me for a prestigious fellowship with the Council on Foreign Relations. He wanted me to work on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Staff – a big step up in the world of national security. I said I would not. Even if I wanted to be in the world of national security, my judgment was that Kissinger was a war criminal and I would do nothing to support his policies. I told my advisor exactly that.
Despite my rejection of the next step in my career he had in mind and hoping I would see reason and change mine, he got me an appointment as an assistant professor at Columbia, with prospects of tenure.
And then it happened. The war intruded directly onto my path. In April 1970, President Nixon and Kissinger ordered the invasion and bombing of Cambodia and, a month later, four students protesting the invasion were killed by the National Guard at Kent State in Ohio. The Columbia campus erupted again. We took our classes onto the lawn, refusing to teach in the usual way in the usual classrooms, leading seminars about the war, instead.
As we sat outside in a circle one day, a graduate student I didn’t know came by and invited me to speak against the war and in support of physics students occupying Pupin Hall, the physics building. No problem; I stood at the mike on a makeshift platform castigating the administration in Washington for the war and the administration of the university for allowing faculty to conduct research in support of the war effort. This included research on that electronic barrier we had argued about in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania.
The speech ended my academic career, with a time delay. Two years later my faculty advisor died after a long bout with bone cancer. Two weeks after that, the senior member of the political science faculty called me into his office. Sitting at his desk, he said, “You will get six years at Columbia, like every assistant professor.” Then he leaned forward and put his index finger in my face, saying, “But you will never get tenure at Columbia University.” I was fired.
Ironically, it was not because I opposed the war, though the faculty was pretty conservative and many supported the war, making my active opposition stand out. It was for supporting the illegal occupation of a university building, an even greater sin for a faculty member to commit.
By the end of that semester, I was out of academia. The life I had planned was over. I floundered as the war subsided. I hung out a lot with a former student who had spent his year in Vietnam flying in helicopters for Army intelligence, dropping hand grenades onto Viet Cong field hospitals clearly marked with a red cross on the tent roof. A war crime. He ended up in the hospital psych ward as his PTSD took over his life.
Vietnam left a heavy shadow on my life, as well, and the lives of many others. I struggled with a direction for several years. The end of my academic career was also a gift, setting me on a different path, without the protection of tenure and deep in the world of activism and policy-making. I created a military research program at a small NYC think tank, supported the nuclear freeze campaign, and began to learn how to lobby in Washington, DC through the campaign to cancel the B-1 bomber program. I wrote a book on the military industrial complex and created a think tank - the Defense Budget Project - in Washington, DC. I even ended up in the White House doing national security and foreign policy budgets for President Clinton.
Being fired was probably the best thing that could have happened. I learned to survive by my wits in the real world, without guaranteed employment. Being white, male, and middle class left me with a fair amount of privilege.
It has been sad, though, to see my country make the same mistake in Iraq and Afghanistan we made in Vietnam. Lies about the reasons for the wars; lies about the elusive progress in those wars; lies that sacrificed another generation of young men, joined, now, by a significant number of women. We have improved how we can get soldiers home alive. Home to lost limbs, brain damage, PTSD, and worse. But the mistakes are the same; another generation pays the price, and the nation reaps the consequences.
The Vietnam war was personal; for me it became political and moral. It continues to be the one policy issue and personal experience that brings me to deep and instant anger and sadness. It is an experience I have shared with other men, men who fought in Vietnam. At some level, we get each other.
In 1984 I was living in Washington, DC, building that think tank. My daughter, then 13, came down from New York to visit. We went to The Wall on the Mall, that brilliant, dark remembrance of the war created by Maya Lin. It is such an honest piece of work, a testimonial to fallen soldiers, with a simple beauty, no heroics.
My daughter and I walked down to the center of the black gash, along the panels of names. When we reached the heart of the memorial, tears were streaming down my face. They stream now, just writing about it. My daughter looked up at me and asked me why I was crying. I replied: “Because there are 58,000 names here that shouldn’t be here.”
Thank you for part two. In some ways more achingly painful than the first part. As a nation we need to do an arrogance check: who are we in the global society in which we are inextricably bound and how do we use the lessons of our past to avoid the mistakes we have made in the future. It is curious that it is the conservatives who are making a fuss about Ukraine and the liberals who are ready to help a country that would never survive a war such as theirs without support. And I also understand that the conservative reaction is very different because they want to focus inward only. I don't remember that was the argument in Vietnam. The argument I remember was a moral one: we are commiting atrocities . And, to an extent it was about the self preservation of a generation of young men who were so often forced to fight a terrible war in terrible ways that was not our business. Although I still have the same questions I posed before, I am going to move to a different subject. Back during Vietnam for as divide as we were, for as much as the argument had to do with the conservative push back on the cultural and moral behavior of the liberal side there seems to be a profound difference now. Not only is the moral outrage of conservatives lashed out with such venom and disgust, there is a split in the information ( the news) the conservatives get from their media outlets from what the liberals receive from theirs. For whatever mistrust anyone had about the news, we all watched the same TV news and pretty much all read the same newspapers who all pretty much reported the news with the same set of facts. Now It is like an insane disinformation campaign by the right to absolutely villainize one side ,-- to lash out against the president making his choices and decisions with extremely biased and distorted information. Now, know I did not pay attention with the kind of "care" I am using now. And now there is all this online dialoguing that I sadly immerse myself with. But I am deeply disturbed by not just the kind of thinking, analysis and informational basis of information used by the right but the level of deep hatred and disregard of the other side. It is primitive and primal. It is embedded in a lack of critical thinking and ability to assess veracity of information outlets. If the guy they really like says X they all repeat and repeat X without question or thought. I know in part it is a conservative backlash against how Trump was reported on. Was it always like this and I just didn't know what I didn't know or has something changed? You were in the middle of the shit during Vietnam. I only entered the arena during Trump. Has it changed as profoundly as I think it has? Trump really was a dispicable, incompetent, dangerous president. I didn't even need the news to tell me that. I could see it on my own. But now the right is using the exact same language and the exact same attacks on Biden. And although I depend more on the news to form my opinions of Biden, I just do not see what they imagine they see. It really bothers me.