Vietnam War | Bob Schwartz

May 4, 2024

May 4, 1970: National Guard shoots and kills students at Kent State University

On May 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon said:

“You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue. You name it. Get rid of the war there will be another one.”

Three days later, on May 4, 1970, the National Guard shot and killed four and wounded nine at Kent State University in Ohio.

Nixon won election in 1968 on a platform of law and order. He had no use for student protests. But even those Americans who still supported the Vietnam War and agreed that student protestors were “bums” were troubled. So Nixon ordered a Commission on Campus Unrest. The Commission, under the leadership of former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, investigated and issued a 537-page report. It included a special section on Kent State, containing a detailed day-by-day, minute-by-minute description, leading up to this moment:

Major Jones said he first heard an explosion which he thought was a firecracker. As he turned to his left, he heard another explosion which he knew to be an M-1 rifle shot. As he turned to his right, toward Taylor Hall, he said he saw guardsmen kneeling (photographs show some crouching) and bringing their rifles to their shoulders. He heard another M-1 shot, and then a volley of them. He yelled, “Cease fire!” several times, and rushed down the line shoving rifle barrels up and away from the crowd. He hit several guardsmen on their helmets with his swagger stick to stop them from firing.

General Canterbury stated that he first heard a single shot, which he thought was fired from some distance away on his left and which in his opinion did not come from a military weapon. Immediately afterward, he heard a volley of M-1 fire · from his right, the Taylor Hall end of the line. The Guard’s fie was directed away from the direction from which Canterbury thought the initial, nonmilitary shot came. His first reaction, like that of Fassinger and Jones, was to stop the firing.

Canterbury, Fassinger, and Jones–the three ranking officers on the hill–all said no order to fire was given. Twenty-eight guardsmen have acknowledged firing from Blanket Hill. Of these, 25 fired 55 shots from rifles, two fired five shots from .45 caliber pistols, and one fired a single blast from a shotgun. Sound tracks indicate that the firing of these 61 shots lasted approximately 13 seconds. The time of the shooting was approximately 12:25 p.m.

Four persons were killed and nine were wounded.

A map from the report:

Any lessons for today and beyond?

Whenever a university or a government decides to enforce its standard of order against gatherings and protests, that enforcement should be pursued carefully and judiciously, if at all. Things can and will happen when those forces are let loose. The choice of enforcement should be pursued only if there are no other options, which there almost always are. Emotions run high on all sides. Whenever weapons are officially introduced—from batons to rubber bullets to tear gas to guns and rifles—they can easily be used indiscriminately. And fatally.

Few things are more tragically ironic than anti-war protestors being injured or killed. It doesn’t have to be.

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April 15, 2024

Movie to watch today: Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is regarded as an all-time great movie. Thought to be the best of many movies about the Vietnam War. To some, as great as his masterpiece Godfather movies.

It is more than a movie about the Vietnam War or about war. Inspired by Josef Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899), it is about how lost we can get on missions, no matter who we are or think we are, no matter how well or ill conceived, well or ill intentioned those missions are.

We are just people. As people we are irresistibly and inevitably prone to forces, inside and outside, seemingly controllable but ultimately uncontrollable, that drive us as we drift into terra incognita, unknown territory.

That is why to watch Apocalypse Now now. Right now.

One famous scene is the Air Cavalry descending on a Vietnamese village. The surfing colonel in charge blasts Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from the helicopters as they attack.

The soundtrack for the opening scene is The End by the Doors:

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain

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March 30, 2024

Gaza is more and more Biden’s Vietnam

Rhetoric doesn’t end war and save lives. Whatever the rhetoric he and his administration announce, Biden continues to arm a nation pursuing a questionable war strategy that is killing thousands. Reported just yesterday:

US reportedly approves transfer to Israel of bombs and jets worth billions
Sources say weapons package authorized even as Washington expresses public concern over anticipated offensive in Rafah
Friday, March 29, 2024

The US in recent days authorized the transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs and fighter jets to Israel, two sources familiar with the effort said on Friday, even as Washington publicly expresses concerns about an anticipated Israeli military offensive in Rafah.

The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK-84 2,000lb bombs and 500 MK-82 500lb bombs, said the sources, who confirmed a report in the Washington Post.

Whether you lived through the Vietnam War or know it only as history, this is seeming oppressively and depressingly familiar, not just as an unnecessary tragedy, but as a political nightmare.

LBJ accomplished a lot of important things for America, but his stubborn support of the war in Vietnam doomed his reelection in 1968, leading him to drop out of the race, and leading to the horrors of the Nixon White House.

Biden has also accomplished a lot of important things for America. But he already goes into the 2024 election with widespread questions about his age. Now added to that is his stubborn support, despite his rhetoric, for a war that is already tragic and a situation that will not look better by the time of the election.

The analogy isn’t perfect. But as the saying goes, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. This is looking a lot like Biden’s Vietnam. And as terrible as the Nixon presidency was, the Trump regime would be more evil and dangerous. Is there still time for Biden to do more than talk, to stand up and use American military support as leverage? Even if he does, is it too late to make a difference in what is almost certainly a toss-up election, with Biden in the eyes of some voters—especially some Democratic voters—a villain?

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January 6, 2024

Abraham Joshua Heschel on the Vietnam War and the blood of the innocent

“Remember the blood of the innocent cries forever. Should that blood stop to cry, humanity would cease to be.”
—Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a great Jewish thinker, writer and prophet of the twentieth century. I have included him in over 30 posts, far more than any other figure. Here is one example.

Heschel was one of the earliest religionists to oppose the Vietnam War. As a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement, he influenced King to publicly come out against the war.

Benjamin Sax talks about the price Heschel paid:

“When he came out against the Vietnam War for example, there were a lot of Jewish presses and a lot of Jewish leadership that spoke out against him. There was a lot of criticism about his leadership, about his point of view – he was considered naive. Worse he was considered theologically naive. That what he was doing was undermining the safety of his own people and undermining the safety of our country. And that aspiring to these universal, patriotic values was something that at least many in the Jewish community wanted to put out there even if they were uncomfortable with the reasons why we were in Vietnam. And so, it also put his reputation at risk.”

Heschel wrote about the war:

“The blood we shed in Vietnam makes a mockery of all our proclamations, dedications, celebrations. Has our conscience become a fossil, is all, mercy gone? If mercy, the mother of humility, is still alive as a demand, how can we say yes to our bringing agony to that tormented country? We are here because our own integrity as human beings is decaying in the agony and merciless killing done in our name. In a free society, some are guilty and all are responsible. We are here to call upon the governments of the United States as well as North Vietnam to stand still and to consider that no victory is worth the price of terror, which all parties commit in Vietnam, North and South. Remember the blood of the innocent cries forever. Should that blood stop to cry, humanity would cease to be.”

Heschel died in 1972. It would be beyond presumptuous—criminal and sinful—to claim to know what he would be saying about the current Israeli war in Gaza. All we can know is that he urged flawed human beings to rise above self to do better and be better, which is what he believed God needs us to do.

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December 18, 2023

“Oh my God—we hit a little girl”: 1966 America wakes up to civilian casualties in Vietnam

In 1966, Vietnam was not yet the broadly unpopular war it would become. News coverage was mostly supportive or neutral. It wasn’t until February 27, 1968 that CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite—“the most trusted man in America”—broadcast his message that victory was not possible.

In October 1966, Esquire magazine published a 33,000-word report by John Sack about his time embedded with “M” company in Vietnam. George Lois, the legendary Esquire art director, accompanied this with a simple stark cover, quoting a soldier. It is considered the first anti-Vietnam War cover from a major American magazine; it was not the last.

Note: Despite protests and many more casualties, the war would last another nine years. Without victory.

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November 2, 2015

If You’re Tired of Hearing About the Vietnam War, Tell Our Leaders to Stop Reenacting It

This weekend, an administration official tried to explain in an interview what exactly we are now doing in Iraq and Syria. It was like a ghost or the walking dead, sounding eerily and unhappily exactly like the rhetoric that was rolled out in the middle days of the Vietnam War.

There are roughly three groups about Vietnam: those who lived through it on the home front, those who lived through it (or not) in battle, and a generation or more that is so tired of hearing about a war that ended forty years ago. So tired of it. Can’t you all ever get over it?

Too bad. No, we should never “get over” Vietnam, no matter how many generations pass, and no matter how tired those generations are about the lessons we might learn. Vietnam was the first truly modern war of the media age and of the post-national era.

In media terms, it offered the best possibility up to that time to say positive stuff about a complex war policy, have it widely broadcast (though not as widely as digital today), and have the media endorse it and people believe it. Okay, that does sound like a description of what happened in Iraq, but that just proves the point.

As far as post-national warfare, Vietnam was technically a civil war, but it was obviously something else too. There was an army of North Vietnam, but there were also indigenous forces and a people’s movement trying to upset an unacceptable status quo, which we supported and ultimately defended. For a while. Until there was no more government of South Vietnam. And then it became a matter of just not losing. Which we did.

Another parallel is not paying attention to history, our own and that of others. The French abandoned Indochina, but that was supposedly just because they were, well, French. Americans know and are better than that. Just as in Afghanistan, where the Soviets abandoned their war, but that was supposedly because, well, they were Commies. Freedom loving Americans know and are better.

Which brings us back round to Iraq and Syria today. If you make the effort, you could go back to the LBJ days of Vietnam and hear exactly the same words that were spoken this weekend. Not just something like it, but exactly. Such as: it’s their fight, not ours.

There are things worth fighting for on the world stage, even when it is not on our homeland. But it is hard enough to figure out what those things are, and even harder to commit ourselves and our loved ones to the fight, when we are swimming in a sea of official stuff and nonsense. We want the brutal truth, if our leaders can tell it, especially when it is bound to be a brutal and long fight.

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October 16, 2015

Afghanistan Without End. Amen.

It is time to stop expecting American leadership in either party, at any level, to reasonably articulate an achievable goal in Afghanistan. Either the conclusion they’ve reached is that there is none or it is too hard to tell us the inconvenient truth they have concluded.

So we are just going to have to take on the role of citizen policy analysts and do it ourselves.

We are unlikely to ever help establish an Afghan military capable or willing to hold back whatever insurgent force mortally threatens stability and national integrity.

We are unlikely to see the establishment of a stable semi-permanent semi-democracy in Afghanistan.

We are never going to “defeat” the Taliban or other similar threats in Afghanistan, in the sense of forever eliminating and precluding such evil developments.

That leaves one possibility. We are keeping troops in Afghanistan to help keep things from getting worse.

It’s a problem to admit that. First, because a military mission of stopping things from getting worse seems unending, which it well might be. Entropy tells us that things fall apart naturally unless acted upon otherwise. In Afghanistan that otherwise is us. It’s also hard to tell those who serve that the point of their sacrifice is to keep things from getting worse, rather than seeing a genuinely better future and having a defined endpoint.

But at least it would be honest. And on top of the war without end, that is an equally big problem. From the Vietnam War to today, there has been a lot of official and political obfuscation. Well, let’s call it lying. It isn’t that the policy makers don’t have noble principles in mind, such as freedom, self-determination, and the like. It’s just that the plans they put in place—very expensive plans—have practically no chance of fulfilling any of those principles.

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January 20, 2015

Robert Stone

Author Robert Stone (1937-2015) died a couple of weeks ago. You may not know of him, but do celebrate his career by reading a little of his extraordinary work.

If you write, and if you read (which you should do, often and well, if you write), you may find yourself reading certain authors and saying: wow, I wish I could sound like that. Stone was one of those who had a voice so good that even when one of his many novels didn’t hit the mark, you still wanted to listen.

His most celebrated novel was his second, Dog Soldiers (1974), which Time magazine named to its list of the Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It may be the best novel written about the Vietnam War in America. It is a short, sharp, and compulsively readable take on the craziness and morality of it all. Compare to Francis Ford’s Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, also great, but big and spectacular, taking millions of dollars to do what Stone did in a few thousand words. (Speaking of movies, the film version of Dog Soldiers, called Who’ll Stop the Rain, is worth seeing only as evidence of the how great novels can and do go wrong on screen.)

Stone was interested in politics and government, particularly in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when those seemed to become unhinged and unmoored. People were becoming unhinged and unmoored too, but Stone never used his characters as mere stand-ins for ideas. He drew full-blooded, complex people.

He seemed to genuinely love people, even as they, and he, were at loose ends. If you like cultural history, read the memoir of his life and times in the early 1960s, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. It is a sketch of his role as a writer and traveler in the early counterculture, and while it is a very small picture, his honesty and self-awareness are refreshing and appealing.

Back to novels, if you do read Dog Soldiers and want more, try A Flag for Sunrise (1981). While the general topic of this political thriller is turbulent military and foreign policy in Latin America at that time, the subtext is timeless and global—as in, none of the issues has gone away, or will.

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December 3, 2014

The Promise of and Lessons from the Hong Kong Protests

Albert Einstein Institute

The Hong Kong pro-democracy protests appear to be over—for now. The protest leaders have surrendered, and the official plan to have Beijing approve candidates for Hong Kong’s highest office remains in place. The result is disappointing but not surprising. Facing off against the world’s biggest and most powerful non-democracy is by definition quixotic.

Yet for those of us in the U.S. and elsewhere who admire the thousands who engaged in this nonviolent movement, there are lessons to be learned and practiced. As pointed out here before, thinkers such as Gene Sharp at the Albert Einstein Institution have spent lifetimes mapping the path to nonviolent change. Here are a few of the lessons:

Be organized and disciplined. If you watched the news coverage of the Hong Kong events, you got to see an orderly and colorful tent city that served as a base, along with protestors carrying the symbolic (and also colorful) umbrellas, which served double-duty as a shield against police force.

Be specific. Movement goals can range in size and scope, from the ouster of a president to, as in Hong Kong, the right to select candidates for an election, as promised in an agreement. In the U.S., both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War movement had such specific goals. In civil rights, it was piece by piece in a bigger picture: desegregation of public transport, desegregation of restaurants, voting rights, etc. Vietnam was specific and absolute: get out. The recent Occupy movements in the U.S., on the other hand, seemed to be all over the map, even when their complaints were justified. We are now seeing a bit of that in the Ferguson movement. The general discontent over the treatment of black citizens by police and justice is justified, but the power of the protests is diluted by uncertainty about what is being requested. (Possible answer: The St. Louis county prosecutor, having made an unprecedented mess of the criminal charging and grand jury process, can convene another grand jury and do it properly the next time. That’s probably as unlikely as Beijing giving in, but it would be something specific to ask for.)

Be informed. One of the other things you might notice about the Hong Kong protest is that protestors could speak knowledgeably about why they were protesting and what they wanted. Not to keep picking on our Occupy movement, but if you asked a hundred protestors about what it is they wanted, you might well have gotten a hundred different answers.

Be patient. Perseverance furthers. The U.S. civil rights movement took decades to achieve its goals, though some would argue that in fact the spirit of those goals is still far from being reached. Globally, movements for change are like the tides, in and out, high and low. Just this week, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek was cleared of criminal charges in the deaths of protestors at Tahrir Square four years ago. Today, in terms of democracy, Egypt looks different than but the same as it did then. Perseverance can further, but it is no guarantee. Even without certainty, though, organized, disciplined, specific, informed, patient nonviolence remains the best that can be done.

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November 11, 2014

Warriors Day

Battle of the Somme - 1916

Today is Warriors Day. We call it Veterans Day, which intentionally or inadvertently distances it from a harsher reality. It began in 1919 to commemorate the Armistice that ended World War I, the War to End All Wars.

Who is a warrior?

In broad terms, all of us are warriors of some sort, battling for causes and ideals ranging from the personal to the cosmic, and everything in between. We fight for ourselves, our families, our nation, our ideologies, our traditions.

But the warriors of Warriors Day are something very specific. These are the people we delegate to fight for us, for causes that we deem significant enough to sacrifice their safety, their bodies, their lives. Under threat, current or prospective, real or perceived, we sacrifice them and peace so that we might ultimately have peace.

What should we do?

After the fact of war, we should keep whatever promises we make to warriors—without adjustment, equivocation, or renegotiation. World War I provided one of the most egregious instances of this. World War I veterans were not to receive full payment of their service bonus until 1945. But the Depression left many of them destitute. Thousands of them marched on Washington in 1932, seeking an advance of this payment. The letter of the law dictated waiting; the spirit of their sacrifice and hardship demanded payment. The Bonus Marchers were violently dispersed, though in 1936 Congress met the demands—over FDR’s veto.

Before the fact of war, we should consider everything involved. Really consider, not just blow hard self-righteously and politically. This is easier for those who have actually been warriors, though that number is decreasing as a proportion of our population, especially among our politicians and policy makers. Those veterans may or may not be able to sort through and articulate all the issues of our most complex geopolitics ever, but they can do something home front folks can’t—relive the experience of being a warrior.

Demand truth. Truth is said to be the first casualty of war, including pre-war and post-war. Right now, for example, Obama’s talk about “advisers only” in Iraq is making some veterans, particularly those of Vietnam, shake their heads. Col. Jack Jacobs, an NBC commentator, observed this morning that his experience as an “adviser” in Vietnam inevitably involved combat.

What about peace?

Peace, the absence of conflict at all levels, may not be a possibility. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be our default position, the one from which all other circumstances are an aberration. For whatever reasons, conflict seems to be the default position for some, including those in positions of power and influence. There are things worth fighting for, but before moving forward, we need to be much surer of what those things are, how we are going about the fight, and how honest we can be. Most of all, if it is someone else doing the fighting at our command, we must realize that we are totally answerable for the consequences, as uncomfortable and costly as that might turn out to be.

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Tag: Vietnam War