I CHING TO POGO

     But governments always lie. Sure, that’s part of the picture. I spent a couple of decades of my life studying the lies of presidents and other politicians, especially concerning the mechanisms of our national security apparatus and the processes by which it leads us into armed conflicts. 

     Forty- plus years after I left Vietnam, and more than thirty years after that first NVA tank drove over the gate to the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, and our nation had lost the war that we were always bound to lose, that is still not okay with me. So much needless and wrongful death is never in the past. To put it in a larger context, Nanking is never in the past. Leningrad and Treblinka, even Sand Creek and Wounded Knee and My Lai, are never in the past. People remember - families remember - as Muslims remember the crusades.

     So studying the great lies of my time – of the Kennedys, the Dulles brothers, Johnson, McNamara, the Rostows, the Bundys, the Lodges, Nixon and Kissinger - felt satisfying for a while, giving me someone to blame and avoiding the need to look in the mirror. But now I’m more interested in the rest of the picture, the part that’s “in front of our noses,” to paraphrase Orwell, but not really seen, because it’s so close. Having studied political thinkers from the I Ching to modern times, my favorite philosopher these days is Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo the Possum: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

YOUNG MEN... AND YOUNGER

YOUNG MEN, AND ... YOUNGER

     War is the way our species eats our young. It’s been so at least since Homeric times – three thousand years, give or take - but probably much longer. The Iliad is considered by many to be the first great work of Western literature, and is, of course, a war story. But reading Homer’s Iliad  and Odyssey turns up no mention of 8- or 12-year-old warriors. The warriors in the story were young men, not children. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Patroclus, 

Odysseus, Paris, Greater and Lesser Ajax - they were all fully grown – if not always grown up. By 1579, the practice of recruiting and conscripting adolescent boys into Europe’s armies had grown to the point that the word used to name groups of foot soldiers was Middle French/German infanterie, Old Italian infanteria, Spanish infantería. Though combat has always been a young man’s game, the phenomenon of child soldiers has acquired a whole new meaning in recent decades. There are now an estimated 300,000 combatants in their early teen and pre

teen years(43) in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and,especially, in Africa(44). The youngest soldier I’ve read about was a combatant with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in Uganda. He was 5 years old. Not 15; he was 5(45). The AK47 is a bit heavier and more awkward than the M16, but even a young child can carry one. And anyone has the strength to pull a trigger.

     So far, not many U.S. soldiers have been younger than 

17(46); just the ones who lied about their ages. But our 

soldiers have lately met children in combat. P.W. Singer

43 See “Child Soldiers: The New Faces of War,” by P.W. Singer. http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter05-06/singer.htm; also Council on Foreign Relations, “Child Soldiers Around the World,” http://www.cfr.org/publications/9331/ by Eben Kaplan

44 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Pantheon, 2005. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, cites such references as UNICEF and Human Rights Watch reports, John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, etc.

45 ibid., p. 20.

46 The youngest U.S. soldier on record as having been killed in Vietnam was 15. His name was Dan Bullock. The Website for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“The Wall”) (http://thewall-usa.com) in Washington, D.C.says that 5 Americans aged 16 were killed there, and 12 aged 17. The same site says that more than 25,000 aged 20 or under were killed in that war.

writes in his book on child soldiers: “U.S. Marines fighting in the battle to retake Falluja [Iraq] in November 2004

reported numerous instances of being fired upon by ‘12 year old children with assault rifles’ and wrestled with the dilemmas it presented.(47)” 

     Among the many instances of child soldiers cited by Singer is the Indonesian island of Ambon, where “thousands of Muslim and Christian boys have formed local paramilitary units that protect and raid against the other community.” He quotes an aid worker: “’They are so proud of their contribution. It’s a common thing for them to say they’ve killed. Since the government can’t seem to do anything, they all say they have an obligation to protect their families and their religion.’” 

     During the 1980’s contra war, with President Reagan leading the anti-communist crusade, re-institution of the draft was being widely debated. Because I had written articles in local newspapers about my own military experience and my two trips to Nicaragua as a journalist, more than one young man of draft age asked me for advice about what he should do if the United States went to war in Nicaragua and the draft were reinstated. Part of my response was always that if they enlisted in, or were drafted into, the military, they should be prepared to be looking at 12 year old boys across their rifle sights, based on the ages of some of the kids I had seen under arms in Nicaragua and southern Honduras during the contra war.

     It is this deadly mix of young men – or boys - and big ideas which I want to address. With us Marines it was Semper Fidelis: always faithful. It was “ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.” 

47 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Op. cit. University of California Press, 2006; p.24.

     I boarded the chopper with the Marine grunts bound for Tho An, having virtually begged to go on the mission, and joined the line of Headquarters Platoon, F/2/7, as we approached the village. I already had my bayonet out of its scabbard and was sliding its ring over the flash suppressor on my M14 rifle to engage the bayonet lug when Captain Love, the “F” company commander, a few paces in front of me, turned around to check on the new guys who had been attached to his company for this operation, saw me fixing my bayonet, and said “That’s it, that’s what I like, gimme some steel on the end of it.”

     I was there because of my faith: faith in that confusing entity variously known as God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; in my country, and in the United States Marine Corps. Sure, I was nervous and afraid. The firing had already begun in the village, not many paces in front of us. I had been a Marine for 3½ years, but that meant nothing if I did not perform as a Marine today, my first time directly under fire. I was ready to fight. I wanted to hold up my end of the Great Bargain.

     The night before, I had prayed as I always did, with that truncated childhood prayer I used because it was the only prayer I knew: “...if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take....” It wasn’t much, but I hoped it would make up the difference between my own level of personal courage and whatever might be required of me this day. And of course to get me into heaven if I died. That was what prayers were for, right?

     A few hours later, after the long moments with the screaming baby boy and the screaming mothers and the 

silent old man with his stare of hatred and after the firefight when I was ordered to move up(48) because I 

had the only automatic rifle in the group, and to stand alone in the open and cover the other Marines as they pulled back, that cloak of faith had already begun to slip from my shoulders. Not because of fear, but because my experiences were showing me that faith wasn’t working. 

     The cloak of faith would continue to slip for the rest of my tour. The burst of rounds from an automatic weapon that snapped past my ears – they were close enough to hit one man standing nearby, and to puncture at least one of the canteens held by a Marine standing near me at the well – had contributed to my loss of faith. So, earlier in the year, had my failure to get a medevac chopper to the desperate platoon when my efforts had been met with an accusing “You’re too late,” meaning we had lost a man, and his buddy the radio operator blamed me.

     My faith would take an especially big hit two months after Tho An during the night-long mutual slaughter between Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard’s 18 Recon Marines(49) and two battalions of NVA, a few kilometers from our base at Chu Lai. I had the midnight-0400 watch in the DASC (Direct Air Support Center) that June night. We helped coordinate helicopter and fixed wing air support for Howard’s men. When I

48 I wasn’t directly ordered to move up. In those days before 1^st MarDiv units in my area were issued M16s, one man from each infantry squad would be issued a selector for his M14, and be designated that squad’s automatic rifleman. As far as I knew, neither Captain Love nor the First Sergeant who had just now called for an automatic rifleman to move up knew that I, a stranger to their company as of that morning, had the selector on my rifle. Since the detail was a pickup group of guys who had volunteered to return to the well for water, no provision had been made to include specific weapons in the group, because Tho An was considered secured. No matter. The order applied to me because I had a selector, and if nobody else present knew this, I did.

49 Actually there were 16 Marines including Howard, and two Navy Medical Corpsmen. That night, they were all Marines. See Wikipedia, “Jimmie E. Howard.”

stepped outside our radio shack shortly after four in the morning, I saw flares and tracers from the firefight off to the west, still at its height.

     One man standing near me at the well in Tho An had been hit; I had not. Some people find Jesus, or some other holy being, in similar situations. Others, even in the same group, have that connection violently and forever severed. I was among the latter. The 23-year-old who had

prayed his final childhood prayer the night before looked around for his Christian God during the firing at the well 

and saw that such a being either did not exist or was very, very far away. This was because I was doing something

which I suddenly saw to be wrenchingly, brutally wrong, while acting precisely on my values as a Christian, a patriot, and a United States Marine. 

   

     When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while guarding the  women and children and the old man at the well in Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through 

Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war, through 

some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death – that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned.                                            

     More importantly, because of what I unlearned.

     

     Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.” 

     I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk.

  I get itchy and edgy whenever anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.”

   Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons (50).  I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American 

Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. (Yes, I too am painfully aware that that great document conveniently left out women, people of minority races...in fact, everybody but propertied white males. What, and whom, it left out constitutes the task currently before us. That task is monumental, and many of us worry whether we’ll ever succeed.) 

50 Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.

WOMEN

      Women, and their children with them, have always been lesser beings in human societies.                   

     This is wrong.      

     Women are not the least of us; women are the best of us. A woman has carried in her body for most of a year, before we ever drew breath, every human being who ever lived. Most of our literature has dealt with the deeds, heroic and otherwise, of men, because it has been written mostly by men. But no noble sacrifice in battle, no crossing of formidable mountain ranges or uncharted oceans, matches the quiet (yet sometimes noisy!) heroism of what women do and have always done to give us life, and to keep us alive.

     I’ve come to this: if the world is destroyed, men – in their unceasing quest for power and/or wealth (which is increasingly becoming the Greatest Power) - will destroy it.

    If the world is saved, women – like Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi and Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, like Graça Machel and many others in Africa, like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Malalai Joya in Afghanistan, Arundhati Roy in India, like the Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, like ordinary women all over the world who simply struggle to keep their children alive in the face of men’s abandonment and depredations - will save it.

     In her wonderful Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the Iranian professor of English literature Azar Nafisi writes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as conducting a “war against women....(56)” She also notes 

that during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, Iran used child soldiers to clear minefields ahead of tanks by walking over them. P.W. Singer, in Children at War, quotes Khomeini as saying that the children’s sacrifice in that war was “helping Iran to achieve a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country(57).” Singer also notes that the young boys walking over mines wore keys around their necks “to signify their pending entrance into heaven.” A military history website lists the ages of those Iranian volunteers who cleared minefields by walking over them as “from only nine to more than fifty(58).”

     Divine country. 

     

56Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008, p.111

57 Singer,Children at War.Op. cit., p. 22.

58 http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iran-iraq.htm

     Just now I am remembering lines from the “Rifleman’s Prayer” we learned in boot camp:

To God and Country, Home and Corps

     Let me be faithful evermore.

                                   Amen(59)

     It will anger some that I draw a parallel between U.S. soldiers and their Nazi enemies wearing GOTT MIT UNS 

belt buckles. Or a similar parallel between us Marines being marched to chapel in boot camp to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” led by a chaplain with officer’s insignia

on one point of his shirt collar and a cross on the other, and Islamist extremists who call our soldiers “infidels” and “crusaders.” 

.    But that’s my point. “Divine country” says it all: 

Your country will send you to war. We will give you a reason. The reason may or may not be true, or it may be a mixture of some truths and some outright lies. But the truth or falsity of those reasons is not your concern. Your job is to do what you’re told, without question, attack the people we tell you to attack, and risk or give up your life as you do this. Your country thanks you for your sacrifice. If you do not come home alive, we will thank your mother. We will give her a folded flag and a prayer to replace you.

59 From the Marines’ “Rifleman’s Prayer.” See above, p. 79    

SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB

SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB

     Young men are the warriors. Young men populate the realm of interpersonal force in human affairs. It begins with simply possessing more muscular strength than other people, and combines with a natural male propensity to use that strength in play, in sports(41). But it is when this

natural exuberance becomes commingled with and

motivated by what I call “big ideas,” that young men become the masters of killing that they become. 

     Among “big ideas,” I include all politics, nationalisms, ideologies, and religions. Especially patriotism and religion. 

     Deadliest of all is the combination of patriotism and religion. That is how we slaughter our young.

     And once a young man who is inspired by a big idea becomes armed with anything from a machete to a machine gun, and organized into groups who believe and act as units, then we have the bloodbath that is history as we know it.

     My use of the etymology of the word “infantry” is neither accidental nor incidental. It screamed at me from my experience: growing up in the McCarthy years, being 

raised an American boy in the Pacific Northwest, the 

episode with my stepdad and the Marine recruiter in the 

41 I audited a course in ancient Greek language in graduate school at University of California, Santa Cruz, so I could follow translations of some of the classics, especially Homer and Plato, in the original Greek. During the 10-year Trojan War, at least once when the warriors were taking a break from the fighting, they did so by having athletic contests, including boxing and wrestling. In the Greek, there was hardly a distinction between “warrior” and “athlete.” Soldiers have always come from among athletes.In Vietnam, we played football at my outfit in Chu Lai.

gun shop in Klamath Falls, Oregon; Marine Corps training 

and service; the Vietnam War; journalism travels in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Costa Rica,

Honduras, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, Israel; my summer of study in Leningrad and Prague...: everywhere I saw young men with weapons inspired by, or pushed by, or controlled by, “big ideas” fed to them by older men.

    I have come to see this parade of young men and boys with weapons as being moved around like chess pieces – okay, pawns – because I was one of them. My experience in Vietnam, and the other places I’ve seen the face of war, forced me to see this eternal column of armed boys

and men as something abnormal, monstrous, insane. It is all the more insane because of its normalcy and frequency. In the early stages of my own involvement, I saw our silly, grotesque parade of boys and men burdened with our hardware of canvas and steel as being just another noble but tragic chapter in the march of human history, as I had seen it most intensely during the “Adeste Fidelis” march(42) in advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton in 1962.


42 See earlier post, "Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis," in Archive.

STRUCTURE OF THE WEB

STRUCTURE OF THE WEB

     There is a web of male kinships and values and desires that determines how and why boys grow up to become warriors, when and how we go to war, what stories we tell and how we tell them when we return from war, how we age as men and warriors, and how old men come to the decision to send their sons, or the sons of others, to war.      The structure and workings of this web are so simple, so obviously present before us, among us, and within us, that its importance eludes us. We stare in bafflement right past the most screamingly obvious and important reason why armies meet in war: that such armies, and the official bodies which raise, fund, and direct them, are made up predominantly of men.

     This male web is of blood and spirit: father and son, brother and brother, uncle and nephew, boy and boy, man and man, coach and athlete, veteran and recruit, corporate executive and junior assistant, pastor and parishioner.

     It is a web of values: be strong, be brave, be loyal, dominate, prevail, achieve, build, destroy, survive. These values are built around a certain covenant which exists among men at war. 

     The many versions of the covenant that existed between me and the other Marines during the firefight at the well in the village of Tho An, and among all fighting men in all wars, always, are the common threads of the most important stories that old men tell to young men, or tell among themselves as boys eavesdrop, from the corner of the room or from the next table in a small-town diner, with a kind of attention they never show in school.

     That covenant is the web's highest value. It is also the core value of our nation.

     The web is above all else a web of male desires: this is the man I want to be, this is how I want to be seen by other men, by women, by children, by history. These are the deeds which I want to be remembered alongside my name. This uniform is my badge of courage.

     And the nation itself is a male entity. That is how patriotism got its name. Nations are founded by males, led by males who, at least until recently in the case of the United States, were elected as much because of their war records as their civil leadership abilities - or who, as in the cases of Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, must struggle mightily to overcome the taint of not having served, or of less than valorous service. 

     This male-centrism is also the animating force in our culture. It is the real story in any war movie, cowboy movie, TV-series cop show, adventure movie, "buddy" movie. Themes of national security, the fight against crime, good versus evil are rational overlays - in national political life and in cultural artifacts like movies or television shows - over the emotional core of men fighting for, dying for, seeking the approval of, the other men in their group. Next in importance comes the approval of women, children, parents - society at large.

GIRLS AND BOYS

                                                              GIRLS AND BOYS


    So now we have children killing children, children raping children(51), usually goaded by adult male leaders – sometimes in pursuit of political goals, sometimes by religious, nationalistic, or tribal loyalties; sometimes by simple greed. Greed is often mixed with the other motives. 

51 I am particularly thinking of Democratic Republic of Congo, where a deadly stew of mineral wealth, tribal loyalties and intertribal hatreds, rebel groups from Congo and from neighboring Rwanda, and the flourishing practice of voluntary and forced recruitment of child soldiers who at times are permitted, even encouraged, to rape; and the culture which stigmatizes women and girls who have been victims of rape, even if they are pregnant. See Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/publication/9331, p.4; also Amnesty International USA: http://amnestyusa.org/children/child-soldiers/stories-from-children-associated-with-fighting-forces.

also http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/notes-from-a-young-american-in-congo-rape-continues/ by Amy Ernst

     There are also girls in the ranks of child soldiers. The Human Rights Watch report “You’ll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia” takes its title from this:

    Ángela, who joined the guerrillas at twelve, had a story that became disturbingly familiar as Human Rights Watch conducted its interviews:

  I had a friend, Juanita, who got into trouble for sleeping around. We had been friends in civilian life and we shared a tent together. The commander said it didn’t matter that she was my friend. She had committed an error and had to be killed. I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn’t hit her. So I shot again. The grave was 

right nearby. I had to bury her and put dirt on top of her. The commander said, “You did very well. Even though you started to cry, you did well. You’ll have to do this again many more times, and you’ll have to learn not to cry.”(52)

52 Human Rights Watch, copyright © 2003 http://www.hrw.org. p. 73. The report was written by Sebastian Brett, senior researcher in the Americas Division.

     
     Women, and their children with them, have always been lesser beings in human societies.                   

     This is wrong.      

     Women are not the least of us; women are the best of us. A woman has carried in her body for most of a year, before we ever drew breath, every human being who ever lived. Most of our literature has dealt with the deeds, heroic and otherwise, of men, because it has been written mostly by men. But no noble sacrifice in battle, no crossing of formidable mountain ranges or uncharted oceans, matches the quiet (yet sometimes noisy!) heroism of what women do and have always done to give us life, and to keep us alive.

     I’ve come to this: if the world is destroyed, men – in their unceasing quest for power and/or wealth (which is increasingly becoming the Greatest Power) - will destroy it.

    If the world is saved, women – like Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi and Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, like Graça

Machel and many others in Africa, like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Malalai Joya in Afghanistan, Arundhati Roy in India, like the Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, like ordinary women all over the world who simply struggle to keep their children alive in the face of men’s abandonment and depredations - will save it.

Paragraphs After the Wars 3 - TONKIN: WHAT WE DIDN'T KNOW

     My buddies and I – some of us – call our younger selves “young and stupid.”

     There’s some of it: we were young. And if not stupid, then ignorant of the ways of the world, of what we were signing up for, of the reasons behind our reasons for enlisting, and behind the reasons our elders gave us for joining.

     In the case of my war, we didn’t know that Ho Chi Minh and his top commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, had been our allies in World War II against the Japanese, and repeatedly asked President Truman to remain allied with us([1]). This fact and others about the war’s origins have caused me to believe strongly that we need never have fought the war that killed 58,000+ of us and 3 or 4 million Vietnamese.

     We didn’t know that SEATO([2]) (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), the alliance that “asked for our help in Vietnam”, had been created at the urging of our own government([3]), in the person of President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles([4]), a devout Christian and anticommunist - and an early supporter of Adolf Hitler. Dulles had been instrumental in overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran (1953, Mohammad Mossadegh([5])) and Guatemala (1954, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán([6])). In 1958, attending the inauguration of Mexico’s new president Adolfo López Mateos, Dulles was quoted as saying “The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests([7]).” His brother Allen Dulles was head of the CIA during those years.

     We didn’t know that the second “Tonkin Gulf incident” – the one that Lyndon Johnson told the American public took place on August 4, 1964, the one we went to war over, the one he used to stampede a nearly unanimous (533-2) Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving him virtually unfettered war powers and giving the world ten years of war - did not even happen. This is according to James Stockdale([8]), squadron commander of the A4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flying cover for the U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy([9]) on that August 4^th, when my Naval Gunfire team of Marines was sent immediately into the area along with a battalion of infantry, a battery of artillery, and all the supporting units and supplies([10]).

     We also didn’t know that South Vietnamese naval personnel, using U.S. patrol boats, intelligence, and targeting, had been conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast since February of that year, carrying out a covert action program named OPLAN34A([11]). The program was planned and directed by the CIA and the Pentagon, under close supervision by the White House. Nor did we know that the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were part of the DeSoto intelligence-gathering mission, one of the duties of which was to “electronically simulate an air attack to draw North Vietnamese boats away from the commandos” who were attacking the North Vietnamese islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu as part of OPLAN 34A([12]), though the United States denied any connection between the destroyers and the PT boats, or with the PT boats themselves, or between the United States itself and the attacks against the Vietnamese coast.             

     All those claims were false.    

     They were false, but truth wasn’t part of their purpose. Their purpose was “plausible denial,” a phrase which I wouldn’t learn until years after the war was over, but the reality of which I would begin to be acquainted with during the course of the war. Plausible denial was the government’s practice of lying about its decisions and policies and practices. These lies were sometimes believable, in the absence of accurate information; or they were more or less transparent, but not immediately provably false. Thus they worked: the public spotlight was a fleeting thing, and by the time – often, after years had passed – some enterprising journalist or congressman dug up an uncomfortable truth and made it public, the public’s interest had moved on to a newer crisis. That was how the system worked. And it did work: the war went on. And on.         

     Perhaps the biggest void in our understanding of the causes of the situation we Marines and sailors were entering that fateful August of 1964 was in our awareness of election year politics in the United States. I cast the first vote of my life in a presidential election by absentee ballot from the deck of the USS Cavalier in the waters of the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin([13]). I voted for Barry Goldwater. I was a newly promoted Marine Corporal, I didn’t trust Lyndon Baines Johnson, and I was ready to go to war to protect my country and her ally from the Communists. Goldwater seemed the better choice: a warrior himself([14]), and a straight talker. Now I doubt that a Goldwater victory would have made much difference: Goldwater, like Johnson, seemed blind to the fact that Ho Chi Minh was primarily a patriot. The opening sentence of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence which Ho had proclaimed to a crowd of 500,000 people in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, was this: “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The quotation marks are Ho’s; he was deliberately borrowing from his hero Thomas Jefferson([15]), in our own Declaration. Ho might have been a formidable ally to the U.S. in Southeast Asia, and on the evidence, quite sincerely wanted to be. When Truman repeatedly refused his friendship([16]), he certainly became a formidable opponent. No matter: he was a communist. Ho was a communist, and France, a United States ally during WWII, wanted her former colony Indochina – including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos - back. Truman sided with the colonialists instead of the small Asian nation seeking independence from its colonial master much as the Americans had sought independence from England two centuries before.

---

[1] See http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history/bc_1964_prewar/first_indochinawar_1945_1954.htm1945.htm; also Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross; also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/series/pt_01.html

[2] It wasn’t just my outfit that was “taught” about SEATO. See my chapter "Mangbuk," in Archive.

[3] But it was presented to us, aboard ship on the way to Vietnam, as the reason we were going. See my chapter "Going Over," in Archive.

[4] http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/10126-SEATO.html; also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles

[5] See Michael Streich, “Kermit Roosevelt and the Iranian Coup of 1953: How the CIA Toppled Mossadegh and Put the Shah in Power”: http//modern-us-history.suite101.com/article.cfm  Kermit Roosevelt was a CIA officer, and Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson. On the coup, he worked closely with John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, along with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the general who led Allied forces in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991. Also see All the Shah’s Men, John Wiley & Sons, 2003 by former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer.

[6] For an excellent book on the 1954 Guatemala coup, see Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer. Revised and Expanded Edition, Harvard University Press. Kinzer has been a hero of mine since I first read Bitter Fruit, then shortly afterward crossed journalism paths with him in northern Nicaragua in 1983. (We did not meet.) See above, p.403. Allen Dulles had been on the board of directors of United Fruit Company, the main beneficiary of the Guatemala coup staged by President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers.

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles

[8] VADM James Stockdale and Sybil Stockdale, In Love and War. There are also two lengthy interviews with Stockdale, which I found very informative, available on the Internet: One is at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/stockdale; and there is a 9-part interview with Stockdale at academyofachievement.org.

[9] On August 2, the Maddox was on a DeSoto Patrol just off the coast of Vietnam. Both the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were mentioned immediately by name to us on August 4 when word was passed hurriedly through our squad bay in the Philippines to get our gear aboard ship: “We are going. Now... some place called the Gulf of Tonkin....” Also see John Prados: “Essay: 40^th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident”: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAAEBB132/essay.htm. Dr. Prados is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive, and has written more than a dozen books on national security and intelligence issues.

[10] Jack Jennings, whose article is quoted in note 12 below, was “cargo officer on the USS Chemung (AO-30)...”, the oiler that refueled our troop transport USS Cavalier in the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin told me in an email (July 29, 2009) that “there must have been a couple hundred ships involved. They cleared Japanese ports as well as Subic Bay within a few minutes and all headed for the Tonkin Gulf.”

[11] See Jack H. Jennings and Tran Do Cam, “Operation 34A and the Nasty Class PT Boats,” http://www.mrfa.org/Operation34A.htm. Both authors were officers in Oplan34A, Jennings with USNR and Do Cam with the South Vietnamese Navy. Both saw duty in PT boat units conducting raids against the North Vietnamese coast. Jennings also points out here that Operation 34A grew out of covert PT boat actions against the North Vietnamese coast put in motion by President John F. Kennedy, a PT boat commander himself during WWII, before his assassination in 1963.

[12] Prados, “Essay: 40^th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” p. 3. See note 9, above.

[13] We were never completely sure. We’d been told as we left the Philippines that we were going to the Gulf of Tonkin, and some days later, I remember our ship traveling south from our original position off the beach of Vietnam, to arrive on station off Danang. Our superiors were never specific. A common expression of ours was “We’re mushrooms: they keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit.”

[14] Goldwater had been a U.S. Army Air Force transport pilot during WWII, flying routes in much of the world, including the famous “hump,” crossing the Himalayas to resupply Allied forces in the China-Burma-India theater. He retired as a Major General in the Air Force Reserve. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater

[15] http://rationalrevolution.net/war/collection_of_letters_by_ho_chi-.htm

[16] In a letter to President Harry Truman dated February 16, 1945, Ho reminded Truman that his Viet Minh soldiers had fought on the side of the Allies against the Japanese, and pleaded for US support against the French colonizing. The letter (see note 15, above) was never answered.

Also http://www.ena.lu: In a telegram to Truman on February 28 (12 days later), Ho notified Truman of the return of French troops to Vietnam and of their intention to take back control of the government from Ho and his provisional government. “I therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence....”