Hugh Thompson and the My Lai Massacre, an opera

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT A MASSACRE

HARRIET SCOTT CHESSMAN GRAPPLES WITH THE STORY OF MY LAI

March 28, 2017 By Harriet Scott Chessman

Throughout my childhood, my mother sang to me: hymns and spirituals, folk songs, songs from her girlhood in Tennessee and St. Louis. Saturday afternoons added a layer of something extraordinary, however. My mother would set up the ironing board and tell us to go outside if we couldn’t be quiet—the live opera performance at the Met was about to start. She would iron as she listened, occasionally giving herself over to the emotion of some heightened aria or duet as tears came into her eyes. As a child, I found her emotional response fascinating. How did that music have the power to make her weep?

So when Jonathan Berger invited me four years ago to write the lyrics for an opera he hoped to compose, I hesitated. “I know nothing about opera,” I said, and in an embarrassing number of ways, this was true. “What should I read?” I asked him. “What are the rules for a libretto?”

“No, no, no!” he said. “Don’t read anything! Just write some words and ideas as they come to you!” With this advice, it was as if Jonathan had calmly and generously opened the gate to a whole landscape of musicality and story I could inhabit. He showed me, in fact, that there was no gate. He encouraged me to trust the emotions and words that came to me.

Jonathan already had a strong sense of what this opera (or more specifically, operatic monodrama) would be about. At the center would be Hugh C. Thompson Jr., the young Army helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War who—together with his teenaged crew, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta—attempted to intervene in the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968. Thompson made three spontaneous, urgent, and wholly unauthorized landings that morning in the midst of the mass killing of over 500 South Vietnamese civilians, including women, children, babies, and the elderly. Ultimately, he was able to save about a dozen people, including a small boy whom Andreotta pulled from a ditch filled with the dead and dying. Hugh reported the atrocities insistently by radio several times from his helicopter, and yet, the massacre continued.

Jonathan was less interested in Thompson’s heroic actions than in the ways that morning might have haunted him as he was dying of cancer in 2005. As in his earlier operas, Theotokia and The War Reporter—with libretti by Dan O’Brien—what moved Jonathan was the echo chambers of memory and trauma, elements I have also explored in my fiction. Jonathan presented this idea of an opera called My Lai to the Kronos Performing Arts Association, who gladly commissioned the piece. An extraordinary group of performers came on board: in addition to the Kronos Quartet, the Vietnamese musician Vân Ánh Võ would play her instruments, some of them made out of American military detritus, and Rinde Eckert would sing the part of Thompson.

As I started to research this massacre and Thompson’s life, I listened for his voice within the opera. And soon, I could hear its tone and import, if not its exact words, somewhere in the air around me. I felt him to be ravaged, grief-stricken, sorrowful, and still enraged by his fellow soldiers’ brutality. I listened for him as I read about his furious arguments with the officers on the ground that morning, including the primary officer in charge of the Army “action,” Lieutenant Calley. I tried to imagine what it would have been like for him to experience the Army’s cover-up and the House Armed Services Committee’s eventual undermining of his credibility, despite his efforts to be a good soldier and to expose the unimaginable cruelty that occurred on that day. I contemplated the difficulties he must have faced afterward, both because he had testified against the Army and because he could not stop dreaming and thinking about the children and the families he was unable to save. There was such injustice and sorrow in this story. It was clear from video interviews with Thompson and from descriptions of his visit to My Lai, decades later with his crewmember Colburn, that he was deeply and irrevocably affected by the senseless suffering he had witnessed that day.

One day, the first words of the libretto came to me: Thompson singing, “I always wanted to fly.” Soon after that opening line floated into my consciousness, my mother’s voice came to me too, singing a spiritual she had loved, “My Lord, What a Morning.”

My Lord, what a morning!My Lord, what a morning!O my Lord, what a morning!When the stars begin to fall.

As I listened to Marian Anderson’s gorgeous, sorrowful version of this spiritual, I realized that despite its seeming tenderness, this song is actually about the violent upheaval of Revelation and the last days. It seemed to me to speak to Thompson’s experience—he had witnessed a terrible twisting of Judgment when he beheld young American soldiers massacring innocent, unarmed civilians. Our opera now opens with the character of Hugh Thompson singing this profound song in half-darkness.

I wrote most of the libretto before hearing one note of music; for Jonathan as a composer, the words come first and inspire the music. It was circular, however, as the lyrics came only as I listened for the yet-to-be-written music. The song, as I sensed it coming, contained all that could not be said, all that swirled and wrung and pulled and hurt. The libretto transported me to a state of pure emotion, allowing me to recreate the agony I imagined Thompson must have felt, even after all those years.

The music Jonathan composed for string quartet, voice, and Vietnamese instruments brought the unspeakably tragic experience of that day, as filtered through Thompson, into expressive, anguished, disturbing immediacy. All that he could not say—all that haunted him—was present, achingly, in what the music brought to life on stage. Listening to this rich, incredibly intricate piece, watching as Rinde Eckert became Hugh Thompson, hearing my words combine with music, I understood what, exactly, had caused my mother to weep on those Saturday afternoons years ago.

Harriet Scott Chessman

Harriet Scott Chessman is the American author of five novels, including Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, Someone Not Really Her Mother, The Beauty of Ordinary Thingsand Ohio Angels. Her latest book is The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas.

http://lithub.com/how-to-write-about-a-massacre/

Film in production http://mylai.clarityfilms.org/index.html :
"The Whistleblower of My Lai"

HUGH THOMPSON

< BACK TO HOME

Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. (April 15, 1943 – January 6, 2006) was a United States Army Captain, and formerly a warrant officer in the 123rd Aviation Battalion, 23rd Infantry Division, who played a major role in ending the My Lai Massacre in Sơn Mỹ Village, Sơn Tịnh District, Quảng Ngãi Province, South Vietnam, on March 16, 1968.

During the My Lai massacre, Thompson and his Hiller OH-23 Raven crew, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, stopped a number of killings by threatening and blocking officers and enlisted soldiers of Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division. Additionally, Thompson and his crew saved a number of Vietnamese civilians by personally escorting them away from advancing United States Army ground units and assuring their evacuation by air. Thompson reported the atrocities by radio several times while at Sơn Mỹ. Although these reports reached Task Force Barker operational headquarters, nothing was done to stop the massacre. After evacuating a child to a Quảng Ngãi hospital, Thompson angrily reported to his superiors at Task Force Barker headquarters that a massacre was occurring at Sơn Mỹ. Immediately following Thompson's report, Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker ordered all ground units in Sơn Mỹ to cease search and destroy operations in the village.

In 1970, Thompson testified against those responsible for the My Lai Massacre. Twenty-six officers and enlisted soldiers, including William Calley and Ernest Medina, were charged with criminal offenses, but all were either acquitted or pardoned. Thompson was condemned and ostracized by many individuals in the United States military and government, as well as the public, for his role in the investigations and trials concerning the My Lai massacre. As a direct result of what he experienced, Thompson suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, divorce, and severe nightmare disorder. Despite the adversity he faced, he remained in the United States Army until November 1, 1983, and continued to make a living as a helicopter pilot in the southeastern United States.

In 1998, 30 years after the massacre, Thompson and the two other members of his crew, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, were awarded the Soldier's Medal (Andreotta posthumously), the United States Army's highest award for bravery not involving direct contact with the enemy. Thompson and Colburn also returned to Sơn Mỹ in 1998, where the massacre took place, to meet with survivors of the massacre. In 1999, Thompson and Colburn received the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award.

source: Wikipedia

http://mylai.clarityfilms.org/hugh-thompson.html

President Trump's Visit to Vietnam

The visit of President Trump to Vietnam more that forty-two years after the end of the war between our countries suggests several lessons that should be on his agenda:

1) US-Vietnam relations today are very positive based on shared economic and security interests, notably concern about Beijing’s destabilizing behavior in the South China Sea. We have developed real friendship and cooperation between people, universities and businesses. A fundamental prerequisite is non-intervention and mutual respect, despite different economic and political systems.

2) It is easier to get into a war in Asia than to get out. As painful as our losses are of military personnel and equipment, the magnitude of death and destruction is overwhelmingly greater in the countries where conflict occurs, especially among non-combatants.

3) The deadly legacies of war are still felt on a daily basis by tens of thousands of innocent civilians from the residue of land mines, unexploded ordnance and the environmental, medical and genetic effects of the defoliant Agent Orange.

4) The US has provided limited financial and technical assistance to address these legacies, but we have not yet addressed the breadth and magnitude of need or of our national responsibility for the consequences of the kind of war we fought. The FY 2018 Congressional Budget Justification released by the Trump administration cut the budget by a third for “non-proliferation, antiterrorism, de-mining and related programmes”, from US$10.5 million to US$7 million. Fortunately that modest amount was restored by Congress.

The Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (VPCC) was created in 2014 by civilians and veterans who worked to end the war in Indochina. It is devoted to learning from the experience of a painful past and to applying its lessons to the present and future. Its most recent activities have included celebration of the historic April 4, 1967, anti-war message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church, engagement with the PBS series “The Vietnam War”, and remembering the 50th anniversary of the March on the Pentagon. VPCC plans special attention to the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 2018 as a time for national recognition of responsibility for the legacies of war.

--John McAuliff, 11/6/17

Vietnamese Portrayed by Burns/Novick

Some thoughts on how Vietnamese people are represented in the Burns/Novick documentary

This is a documentary focused on the American Experience, so it has only small slots of time allotted to the Vietnamese. We have to be grateful that those Vietnamese selected to speak in the film are so articulate and passionate. More on this below. But when it comes to the main issue -- was our combat role in Vietnam a well-intentioned mistake? -- the audience is forced to draw its own conclusions. We never hear a clear statement from a representative of the Vietnamese government as to why they believed they had to fight. From the interviews with former marines and US government advisers, we learn that they knew little about the people they had come to protect. Over time they realized that many Vietnamese resented their presence, but we do not hear anyone state the obvious: we were invading a sovereign country that had never attacked the United States. The country we claimed to be defending, the Government of Vietnam with its capital in Saigon, was our offspring, as JFK is quoted as saying in an early episode.

Watching episode two, and the long segment on the battle of Ap Bac in 1963, I found it odd that the narrator extolled the power of the APCs that the US had furnished to the ARVN, without mentioning that these behemoths were destroying the peasants' rice crops. Planting rice is arduous work in the flooded paddies; it is usually women who spend hours in the muddy water to plant each seedling by hand. The mud dikes between the fields are built up over the years to keep the water in -- did our soldiers and military advisers not realize how unpopular it would make our army when they tore up the rice fields to search for "the enemy"?

These ten episodes on the Vietnam War do include some excellent interviews with a group of Vietnamese, as I said above. Overall their views on the war add greatly to the picture being presented. Some viewers complain that there is no representation of the South Vietnamese government, but the same is true for the official DRV point of view. We hear the honest views of people who are non-official spokespeople. However, it would have helped the viewers to put their remarks into context if they had been better identified and introduced from the outset.

In the case of Nguyen Ngoc, an important literary figure in the history of post-war Vietnam, this is especially true. He was the head of the Writers' Union during the few years of Vietnamese "glasnost", when important new authors including Bao Ninh were first published. He was removed from this post in 1989, as the communist bloc began to crumble and the Vietnamese leadership decided that political reform had gone too far. Bao Ninh himself, the author of The Sorrow of War, should also have had more of an intro, as it is important to know that he is still one of the rare popular writers who has been willing the criticize the DRV's sacrifice of young men and women to the war machine. Finally, Huy Duc, the younger commentator who appears throughout the documentary, also deserves a special introduction. He first became known as a dissenting blogger, "Osin". He has held two scholarships to study journalism in the US and during his last one at Harvard, he published in Vietnamese a two-volume history of post-war Vietnam, The Winning Side.

As it transpires from this work, he is critical of post-war policies, but a supporter of one of the more powerful figures in the wartime leadership, Truong Chinh. Truong Chinh's former personal secretary is a key source for his critique of Le Duan, the wartime first secretary of the Workers' Party. One of the things that Huy Duc contributes to the documentary is a strong endorsement of the idea that from 1960 Le Duan was the all-powerful chief of the DRV Politburo, who designed the aggressive strategy and tactics of the DRV, including the Tet Offensive. This is a popular view that is also being promoted by young US scholars; it conveniently deflects responsibility for the war from the US. Originally the vision of LD as the evil leader who countermanded Ho Chi Minh's policies was promoted by a pro-Chinese leader in Hanoi, Hoang Van Hoan. In 1979 he defected to China. One can see that Le Duan's original sin was to accept Soviet support for the Vietnamese campaign against the Khmer Rouge, and to refuse to join the Chinese sphere of influence.

This singling out of one member of the Hanoi leadership as an oppressive promoter of war, leaves the impression that some in Hanoi doubted the legitimacy of their fight to unify their country. This is a clear misrepresentation -- the differences that existed among the Hanoi leadership concerned, among other things, whether and when to negotiate with the Americans, but not the legitimacy of their struggle for unification. There is compelling evidence to show that Le Duan himself was always more favorable towards a negotiated peace than the more Maoist members of the leadership. This seems to have clearly been the case in 1966. Zhou Enlai in June of that year accused "pro-Kremlin revisionists" of infiltrating the DRV leadership, "producing a struggle between those who backed fighting until a military victory... and those who favored talks to end the war quickly." Zhou Enlai referred to Le Duan as someone who had "changed course". "Until now he had been a leftist," Zhou said (The Third Force in the Vietnam War, p. 119).

--Sophie Quinn-Judge

Ho Dang Hoa

For helping show the Vietnam War in a new light

HO DANG HOA
TV PRODUCER, 61
VIETNAM

BY JAMES PALMER

The war came to Ho Dang Hoa when he was a child, as the first American bombs fell on his hometown of Hanoi in 1966. “I was a curious boy,” he recalls. “I used to run to see the fires and the people killed.” Nine years later, he was a student learning Russian and planning to study in the Soviet Union when the North Vietnamese Army drafted him as part of the call-up for its final push against South Vietnam. He served for 13 years, at first in the anti-air artillery, then the air force as an intelligence officer.

But it took two Americans, he says, to give him the chance to see the war in its full light. Ho’s relationship with the United States had been as long and twisted as his country’s. As a child, he thought of the Americans only as invaders; as an adult, the army taught him the enemy’s language in order to study its war plans; once released from the military, he became one of Vietnam’s Fulbright scholars in 1993, studying for an MBA at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, before returning to Vietnam as a lecturer himself. In 2011, Ho began working with Lynn Novick and Ken Burns on the epic documentary series The Vietnam War, released on PBS this September, that traces the stories of Vietnamese fighters. “These people had disappeared when the war ended,” he says. “Tracking them down, I found stories I had never heard.”

Ho was introduced to Novick and Burns by Thomas Vallely, a U.S. Marine veteran who runs Harvard University’s Vietnam program and was an advisor on the series. The filmmakers wanted Ho to be another bridge to Vietnam, emphasizing their desire to tell the war from both sides, giving the series’s American audience a chance to see the conflict through the eyes of the Vietnamese.

Ho is modest about his own role, but his work was critical for the film. He shaped the Vietnamese side of the story, finding individuals who had played roles unknown to Americans and aspects of the war forgotten even in Vietnam. The scope of interviewees he collected ranged from North Vietnamese propaganda artists to veterans of the anti-French war in the 1950s, who had taken the skills they learned fighting one occupier and passed them down to a new generation of soldiers.

In Vietnam, the war gets plenty of attention — but largely as a matter of patriotic monuments and victory celebrations, not individual stories. “I was looking for the Vietnamese soldiers who had fought on Hill 875 [at the Battle of Dak To in 1967],” Ho says. His quest took him from one end to the other of Vietnam, in what was often a winding and complex investigation: “I found the name of the unit, and a veteran gave me the name of one of the survivors of the battle. So I went to a mountain village to talk to him, and it turned out he’d joined afterward, but he gave me the name of another man, in the south. I went down to see him, and he’d been wounded just before the battle and evacuated. But he gave me one more name — in Hanoi. That was the actual veteran of the battle, and he lived a mile away from my house.”

In contrast, America’s vision of the war has too often been an exercise in self-reflection; the needless deaths of young men in muddy rice fields half a world away or the students at Kent State. Vietnamese were mostly in the background, the body count mere numbers. The Vietnam War strives to correct this; the audience hears the cracking voices of soldiers who lost comrades, parents who lost children, and South Vietnamese who lost their country. In September, after the series aired, Vallely told a reporter that a friend had called it “the re-education camp for America.”

Like all of his generation, Ho’s whole life was shaped by the war, from his lost education to his memories of the dead. Being a part of this series was not an end to that story, but perhaps an unexpected addendum that brings a new kind of clarity. “Americans are good people — kind, friendly, interesting,” Ho says. “We should have been friends 50 years ago — there should never have been a war. And I hope the sons and daughters of Americans no longer have to go to die in foreign countries.”

James Palmer is Asia editor at Foreign Policy.

https://gt.foreignpolicy.com/2017/profile/ho-dang-hoa?92cb47faa7=

David Cortright: Military Resistance to the War

Antiwar resistance within the military during the Vietnam War

by David Cortright

One of the least known but most important chapters in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement was the rebellion of troops within the military. In June 1971 the prestigious military publication Armed Forces Journal published an article entitled, “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” which stated: “The morale, discipline and battle worthiness of the U.S. armed forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.”[1] A year later the eminent military sociologist Morris Janowitz seconded that analysis, declaring: “The military establishment, and especially its ground forces, are experiencing a profound crisis in legitimacy due to the impact of Vietnam, internal racial tension, corruption, extensive drug abuse, loss of command and operational effectiveness, and widespread antimilitary sentiment.”[2] In virtually every corner of the military, the burden of fighting an unpopular and unwinnable war led to dissent, social disruption and institutional decay.

Opposition to the war within the military can be classified into two broad categories—dissent and resistance. The dissenters were part of what became known as the GI movement, soldiers publishing ‘underground’ newspapers, signing antiwar petitions, attending protest rallies and engaging in various forms of public speech to demand an end to the war. The resisters were those who disobeyed orders, defied military authority, refused orders, went absent without leave, committed acts of sabotage, and in some cases attacked their own officers and sergeants.[3]

The GI Movement

Antiwar groups emerged within the enlisted ranks and among junior officers throughout the military during the years 1968-1972. They appeared first in the Army and Marine Corps and spread to the Navy and Air Force. GI antiwar newspapers were published by service members on nearly every major U.S. military base and on many ships. The total number of these antiwar periodicals was more than 400.[4] The GI press was an important expression of the ‘underground’ culture of protest and resistance that spread through the ranks during the war.[5]

Antiwar protests and acts of resistance occurred at or near military bases through the military in those years. These included demonstrations, picketing, vigils and the circulation of antiwar petitions. The most famous petition appeared as a full page ad in the New York Times the week before the historic Moratorium Mobilization in Washington DC of November 15, 1969. The ad covered the back page of the Sunday Week in Review section of the Times. Its demand to ‘end the war,’ and ‘bring us home now’ was signed by 1365 active duty service members. Hundreds of active duty soldiers participated in the Mobilization march in Washington that weekend.

Troops stationed in Vietnam often sympathized with the antiwar movement back home. During the fall 1969 Moratorium mobilizations, combat troops on patrol near Da Nang wore black armbands in solidarity with the protests.^{^[6]} In 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War circulated a petition to Congress among troops in Vietnam demanding an end to U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. The petition was signed by hundreds of active-duty soldiers before being confiscated by commanders.^{^[7]}

As the GI movement spread, civilian supporters and recent veterans helped the movement by creating GI coffeehouses outside major military bases in the United States, Europe and Asia. More than two coffeehouses were in operation in 1971.[8] The coffeehouses featured free coffee, live music, counterculture posters and newspapers, antiwar literature and art work. They also served as centers of political education and antiwar organizing.

All across the military active duty service members were engaging in acts of dissent and resistance. A 1970 social science survey of soldiers at several military bases in the U.S. found that one quarter of the interviewees admitted to engaging in acts of dissent, defined as participating in a protest, reading a GI antiwar newspaper or going to an antiwar coffeehouse.[9]

These figures are roughly equivalent to the proportion of activists among students at the time.[10]

The resistance

Equally prevalent in the military during the Vietnam War were acts of disobedience and defiance of authority. One of the most common and significant forms of GI resistance was absence without leave. Absentee and desertion rates during the Vietnam War soared to record levels. The desertion rate in the Army increased 400 per cent between 1966 and 1971.[11] In 1971 the AWOL rate in the Army (those absent from duty for less than 30 days) was 17 per cent, affecting one of every six soldiers. The official desertion rate (those absent for more than thirty days) was 7 per cent. This meant that more than 70,000 Army soldiers deserted that year, the equivalent of several divisions. Desertion rates also rose in the Marine Corps, reaching 6.5 per cent in 1972. Vietnam-era desertion rates were three times those of the Korean War.[12] The massive wave of AWOL and desertion during the war deprived the military of about one million person-years of service.[13] As Moser writes, this widespread unauthorized absence of troops “forcibly curtailed military capabilities and contributed to the aura of chaos that hung over the armed forces by the early 1970s.”[14]

The most consistently rebellious and antiwar troops in Vietnam and throughout the military were African Americans. Influenced by the civil rights movement and growing black militancy at home, African American troops tended to group together (the ‘bloods’ they often called themselves) and posed a significant challenge to the military’s mostly white power structure.[15] Many black GIs opposed the war but they also resisted the pervasive racism that existed in the military in those years.

Many major racial uprisings occurred in the military during the Vietnam War. One of the largest and most explosive was the prison rebellion at Long Binh Jail at Bien Hoa northeast of Saigon in August 1968.[16] The uprising in the overcrowded prison left dozens of prisoners injured, and one soldier died. Much of the prison was burned to the ground.[17] The largest in the Marine Corps occurred at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in the summer of 1969 when African American and Puerto Rican combat veterans rebelled against unequal treatment and racial abuse.[18] Travis Air Force base in California witnessed the largest mass rebellion in the history of the Air Force in May 1971. More than 600 airmen were drawn into the brawl, an officers’ club was burned to the ground, and dozens of troops were injured.[19] For several days this vital center of military transport for the Vietnam War was in a virtual state of siege as commanders sought to end the violence and restore order. The most serious racial uprising in the Navy occurred in October 1972 aboard the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, as a violent clash between African American sailors and members of the ship’s Marines left 46 injured.[20]

The “Quasi-Mutiny”

The waves of resistance coursing through the military in those years came together and were magnified in the crucible of Vietnam. Incidents of organized dissent were relatively rare, but acts of direct resistance were pervasive and tore at the very fabric of military capability. By 1970 the Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam were experiencing what I have described as the “quasi-mutiny”: widespread defiance, intentional incompetence and various other forms of noncooperation that effectively crippled the military’s operational capacity.[21] Moser called this the “grunts’ ceasefire”: acts of resistance by a significant minority of troops that undermined the military’s ability to wage war.[22]

The most significant form of resistance to the war was combat refusal.[23] Several were prominently reported in the press. On August 26, 1969 the headline on the front page of the New York Daily News blared “Sir, My Men Refuse to Go!” with the subtitle “Weary Viet GIs Defy Order.”[24] The article told the story of sixty soldiers in an Army company near Da Nang who refused direct orders from their commander. Another incident of combat refusal was captured by CBS News in April 1970 when a company of the 7^th Cavalry balked at the order of their gung-ho Captain to march down a jungle path the troops considered too risky.[25] Other known incidents of mutiny occurred during the Cambodia invasion in May 1970 and in March 1971 when U.S. troops were ordered to support the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos.[26]

There were many additional unreported instances of combat refusal. According to former Army combat commander Shelby Stanton, 35 incidents of combat refusal occurred in the 1^st Cavalry Division during 1970.[27] Some of the incidents involved entire units. This was an extraordinarily high number of combat refusals, an average of three per month in just one division. If we extrapolate the experience of the 1^st Cavalry to the other six Army divisions in Vietnam at the time, it is likely that hundreds of mutinous events occurred in the latter years of the ground war. When commanders sent their units into the field, they could not be certain that the troops would follow orders. In the face of such resistance and noncooperation in the ranks, U.S. combat effectiveness melted away.

The most horrific indication of the breakdown of the armed forces was the prevalence of fragging, an attack with a fragmentation grenade. The Army began keeping records on assaults with explosive devices in 1969. By July 1972, with the last troops on their way out of Vietnam, the total number of fragging incidents had reached 551, with 86 fatalities and over 700 injuries.[28] The targets of these fragging attacks were mostly officers and noncommissioned officers.[29] The frequency of fragging in Vietnam War indicated an army at war with itself. It provides grim evidence of the anger and social decay that were tearing the military apart.

Opposing the Air War

As the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces accelerated in 1971, the Nixon administration compensated for diminished firepower on the ground with intensified bombing attacks from the air.[30] As sailors and airmen were ordered to participate in this onslaught, morale dropped and antiwar protest and resistance increased. The number of GI antiwar papers in the Navy and Air Force increased sharply after 1970.[31] Organized antiwar protest began to emerge aboard several aircraft carriers. In 1971 junior officers and enlisted sailors aboard the U.S.S. Constellation based in San Diego organized an informal referendum against the ship’s scheduled deployment to Vietnam. Thousands of military service members in the area participated in the ballot and ‘voted’ for the Connie to stay home. A similar movement emerged in November 1971 in the San Francisco Bay Area to protest the sailing of the U.S.S Coral Sea from Alameda Naval Station. Approximately 1,200 sailors, one quarter of the crew, signed a petition protesting the deployment.[32]

Some antiwar sailors took matters into their own hands. By 1971 acts of sabotage by crew members against their own ships became a serious problem in the Navy. Figures supplied to the House Internal Security Committee investigation of subversion within the military listed 488 acts of “damage or attempted damage” in the Navy during fiscal year 1971, including 191 incidents of sabotage, 135 arson attacks, and 162 episodes of “wrongful destruction.”[33] The House Armed Services Subcommittee investigating disciplinary problems in the Navy disclosed “an alarming frequency of successful acts of sabotage and apparent sabotage on a wide variety of ships and stations.”[34]

Two major incidents occurred in July 1972 that had significant impact on the Navy’s ability to carry out its mission. A fire aboard the carrier U.S.S. Forrestal based in Norfolk burned the admiral’s quarters and extensively damaged the ship’s radar communication system, resulting in more than $7 million in damage. It was the largest single act of sabotage in naval history. [35] Later that month sabotage struck the carrier U.S.S. Ranger based in California. A few days before the ship’s scheduled departure for Vietnam, a paint scraper and two 12-inch bolts were dropped into one of the ship’s engine reduction gears. This caused major damage and a three and a half month delay in the ship’s sailing.[36]

Antiwar dissent and resistance also emerged in the Air Force. The number of GI papers at air bases jumped from 10 at the beginning of 1971 to 30 a year later.[37] Antiwar coffeehouses opened near several bases, and demonstrations and protest actions occurred at or near air bases in April and May 1972. The staff of the House Internal Security Committee investigation observed a “trend towards organizing among U.S. Air Force personnel, in line with continued U.S. air activities in Indochina.”[38] Antiwar opposition in the Air Force intensified during the December 1972 bombing of Hanoi. Some B-52 bomber pilots began to question their mission, and two joined Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman of New York in filing a law suit to challenge the constitutionality of bombing Cambodia.[39]

Conclusion

As outlined above, dissent and resistance were widespread in the military in the later years of the war. It is arguable that by 1970 U.S. ground troops in Vietnam had ceased to function as an effective fighting force. The disintegration of military morale was a factor in the Nixon administration’s decision to accelerate troop withdrawals.[40] Senior officers from Chief of Staff William Westmoreland on down were arguing for a faster pullout.[41] Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird reportedly returned from an inspection tour of Vietnam in early 1971 “shocked and distressed” by morale problems and in favor of more rapid force reductions.[42]

Revisionist historians argue that the military was winning the war in Vietnam and that it was a ‘stab in the back’ from politicians and the media that caused U.S. defeat. This ignores the fact that many within the military opposed the war and were increasingly unwilling to fight. The spread of antiwar dissent and resistance and the defiance of troops in Vietnam played a decisive role in limiting the U.S. ability to continue the war. The widespread resistance in American society and within the military itself placed limits on U.S. military capability and forced an end to the war.

[1] Robert Heinl, “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” Armed Forces Journal, June 1971.

[2] Morris Janowitz, "Volunteer Armed Forces and Military Purpose," Foreign Affairs, April 1972, 428.

[3] See the discussion of this distinction in David Cortright and Max Watts, Left Face: Soldier Unions and Resistance Movements in Modern Armies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 19-22.

[4] In my book Soldiers in Revolt I documented 250 GI papers and estimated the total number at more than 300. Further research by James Lewes found more than one hundred additional GI papers. All known GI papers are now archived in the GI Press Project, an online digital archive housed at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. See David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance during the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1975, 2005); and James Lewes, Protest and Survive: Underground GI Newspapers during the Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2003).

[5] Barbara L. Tischler, “Breaking Ranks: GI Antiwar Newspapers and the Culture of Protest,” Vietnam Generation, Special Issue: GI Resistance: Soldiers and Veterans Against the War, 2, No. 1 (1990), 20-50.

[6] “Some G.I.’s in Vietnam Join Protest,” New York Times, October 16, 1969, 22.

[7] Overseas Weekly (Pacific edition), October 30, 1971, and November 6, 1971.

[8] Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: G.I. and Veteran Dissent during the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 99.

[9] Howard C. Olson and R. William Rae, Determination of the Potential for Dissidence event in the U.S. Army, Technical Paper RAC-TP-410 (McLean, Va: Research Analysis Corporation, March 1971); R. William Rae, Stephen B. Forman and Howard C. Olson, Future Impact of Dissident Elements Within the Army, Technical Paper RAC-TP-441 (McLean, Va: Research Analysis Corporation, January 1972).

[10] Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 132.

[11] Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Random House, 1978), 122.

[12] All figures for desertion rates drawn from statistics provided to the author by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Magazine and Book Branch, 1973, as published in Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 11-15.

[13] Baskir and Strauss, Chance and Circumstance, 122.

[14] Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 80.

[15] See the classic work by Wallace Terry, Bloods, Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History (New York: Random House, 1984).

[16] Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 51-52.

[17] Cecil Barr Currey, Long Binh Jail: An Oral History of Vietnam’s Most Notorious U.S. Military Prison (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2001).

[18] Flora Lewis, “The Rumble at Camp Lejeune,” Atlantic, January 1970, 35-41.

[19] Senior Airman Nicole Leidholm, “Race Riots Shape Travis’ History, Travis Air Force Base, news story, updated 11/8/2013, at http://www.travis.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123370166

[20] See the account of John Darrell Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet During the Vietnam War Era (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

[21] Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 28-49.

[22] Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 132.

[23] Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 242.

[24] The headline image is captured at http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/daily-news-front-page-august-26-headline-sir-my-men-refuse-news-photo/453339726

[25] The CBS incident was reported in Newsweek magazine, April 20, 1970, 51, and May 25, 1970, 45.

[26] See Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 36-38.

[27] Shelby L. Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965-1973 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1985), 349.

[28] Congressional Quarterly, "Problems in the Ranks: Vietnam Disenchantment, Drug Addiction, Racism Contribute to Declining Morale," in The Power of the Pentagon (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1972), 22.

[29] Hearings Before the Defense Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 92nd Congress, 1st Session, Part 9, 585.

[30] Michael Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars 1772-1991 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995).

[31] Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, Appendix B, 322-23.

[32] Ibid., 111-112.

[33] "Investigation of Attempts to Subvert the United States Armed Services," Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security, House of Representatives, 92nd Congress, 1^st and 2^nd Sessions, 1972, II, 7051.

[34] Report by the Special Subcommittee on Disciplinary Problems in the U.S. Navy of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 92^nd Congress, 2^nd Session, 17670 and 17684.

[35] “Navy Says Sailor Confessed He Set Blaze on Carrier,” New York Times, November 28, 1972, p. 18; and “Seaman is Guilty in Carrier Blaze,” New York Times, December 8, 1972, p. 18.

[36] “Sailor is Freed by Navy Board in Trial on Sabotage of Carrier,” New York Times, June 13, 1973, p. 5; Village Voice, February 1, 1973, p. 16.

[37] Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 131.

[38] "Staff Analysis of Recent Trends in GI Movement Organizing Activities, December, 1971-April, 1972," in House Internal Security Files.

[39] “Air Force Takes 3 Officers Off Cambodia Runs,” New York Times, June 6, 1973, p. 10; “U.S. Judge Here Says Bombing of Cambodia is ‘Unauthorized,’” New York Times, July 26, 1973, p. 4.

[40] Stewart Alsop, Newsweek, December 7, 1970, p. 104.

[41] Time, January 25, 1971, p. 34; “Army in Anguish,” Washington Post, September 15, 1971, p. 8.

[42] San Francisco Examiner, January 17, 1971.