President demonstrated that they as a people remember something
that we as a people have chosen to forget. It is time to restore
our memory of that great antiwar movement by tens of millions of
Americans, a movement that began with the first U.S. acts of war in
1945.
Yes, 1945. In September and October of that year, eight troopships
were diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from
Europe to transport US-armed French soldiers and Foreign
Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam. The enlisted seamen
on those ships immediately began organized protests. On arriving in
Vietnam, the entire crews of the first four troopships met in
Saigon and drew up a resolution condemning the US government for
using American ships to transport an invasion army "to subjugate
the native population" of Vietnam.
The movement kept growing. In 1954, when Vice President Nixon
suggested sending American troops to replace the French because
"the Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war or govern
themselves," thousands of letters and telegrams opposing US
intervention deluged the White House. An American Legion division
with 78,000 members demanded that "the United States should refrain
from dispatching any of its Armed Forces to participate as
combatants in the fighting in Indochina or in southeast Asia." On
the Senate floor, Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado declared, "I am
against sending American GIs into the mud and muck of Indochina on
a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man's
exploitation in Asia." A Gallup poll revealed that 68 percent of
those surveyed were against sending US troops to Indochina. Because
of the American people's opposition, the US war had to be waged by
four administrations under the cloak of plausible deniability.
We have been depriving ourselves of pride about the finest American
behavior during that war. In most wars, a nation dehumanizes and
demonizes the people on the other side. Almost the opposite
happened during the Vietnam War. Tens of millions of Americans
sympathized with the Vietnamese people's suffering, many came to
identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence, and some
even found them an inspiration for their own lives.
But in the decades since the war's conclusion, American
consciousness of the Vietnamese people, with all its potential for
healing and redemption, has been systematically obliterated.
Ironically, it was after the war that demonization of the
Vietnamese began to succeed, thanks in part to the national
beatification of POWs and the myth of POWs as martyrs still being
tortured by Vietnam. Soon those who had fought against the war
became, as a corollary, a despised enemy. They also became the
villains in another myth developed from the 1980s to the
present: the spat-upon veteran. As Vietnam veteran and sociologist
Jerry Lembcke has shown in The Spitting Image, there is not a
shred of evidence of this supposedly widespread phenomenon.
In fact, Vietnam veterans and active-duty soldiers and sailors
became the vanguard of the antiwar movement. At home, veterans led
the marches and demonstrations, including the 1971 assembly of a
half-million protesters headed by a thousand Vietnam veterans, many
in wheelchairs and on crutches, who paraded up to a barricade
erected to keep them from the Capitol and hurled their Purple
Hearts, Bronze Stars, and Silver Stars at the government that had
bestowed them. In Vietnam, fraggings and mutinies helped force the
withdrawal of most of the ground forces, while rebellions and
sabotage put at least five aircraft carriers out of combat. (Who
today can believe that 1,500 crew members of the USS Constellation
signed a petition demanding that Jane Fonda's antiwar show be
allowed to perform on board?)
As the antiwar movement spread even into the intelligence
establishment, the American people got access to the most damning
truths in the leaked Pentagon Papers. As Senator Mike Gravel noted
IN 1971, only a person "who has failed to read the Pentagon Papers"
could believe we were fighting for "freedom and liberty in
Southeast Asia."
But we as a nation have forgotten all that, just as we have
forgotten our government's pledge to help rebuild the country it
destroyed despite all our opposition.
H.
Bruce Franklin, the author or editor of eighteen books,
including the just-published
Vietnam
and Other American Fantasies
(Massachusetts), is the John
Cotton Dana Professor of English and
American Studies at Rutgers
University, Newark.
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf
_