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.

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[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....”

Paragraphs after the Wars 2: NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BUY A BEER

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

                 - George Orwell,  From the essay “In Front of Your Nose,”  first published in the London Tribune, March 22, 1946. Reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1968.

    

     We need to look at how we look at things.

     A few years ago, at the Fishtrap Writers’ Conference at Wallowa Lake, Oregon, I met a woman who had married a young man when she was fifteen and he was not much older. She was pregnant. He joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. She had written that story and presented it to the assembled writers.

     We were talking outside. “Dean,” she asked, “how do they do it? How do they get you guys to sign up for... this?” She spread her arms wide to include all that was going on that week in the conference: the theme was the Vietnam War.

     I opened my notebook to a clean page, wrote

                                            

INFANT ry

and showed it to her. She turned pale: “I never noticed that.” Her husband had been a combat engineer in a Marine infantry division.

     Merriam-Webster Online dates the origin of the word “infantry” to 1579, from both Middle French infanterie (modern French is the same; so is German) and Old Italian infanteria. (Spanish is infantería.) The citation continues: ‘from infante, boy, foot soldier, from Latin infant-, infans...Date: 1579’

     I looked up infant, the root word of infantry. Merriam-Webster says:

Etymology: Middle English enfaunt, from Anglo-French enfant, from Latin infant-, infans, from infant-, infans, adjective, incapable of speech, from in- + fant-, fans, present participle of fari to speak....

     Too young to speak, old enough to die for his country. As I was reading the dictionary entries, I recalled a story told to me at Chu Lai by my friend Sgt. Angelo Walters, who’s mentioned in some of the stories above. He told of being at the side of a mortally wounded buddy during the Korean War, who said to Joe with his last breath: “I’m not even old enough to buy a beer.”

Paragraphs after the Wars

Paragraphs after the Wars (1)

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.       

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us.

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.    

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other conveniently assigned evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest religious and political beliefs.

     These are the ones we are willing to fight over, the ones which inspire us the to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters--to war over. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle.

     Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.

     This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially religion and patriotism-is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END

AMMAN, JORDAN: MARCH 1991

     It was there, in that room on the outskirts of Amman, that we first heard about the Rodney King incident, where several Los Angeles cops had been videotaped beating King past the point of submission, just a day or two before. We had not been watching CNN, but the rest of the world had, including these angry Arab men.    

   

     It seemed to me that the men in business suits had been quietly deferring to the man in the brown Arab robe and white kafiyeh. He was fully as fluent in English as the others. Now, as he spoke, he first expressed amazement that we hadn’t heard of Rodney King. Then his voice rose to a shout and his finger pointed angrily across the room at me. I assumed that because I was a journalist and perhaps also because I was clearly the oldest male in our group, that somehow made me even more personally culpable for crimes against his people than the younger members of our group.

     He gave vent to his rage: “You! You have no respect for human beings other than yourselves… you don’t even respect your own! Your police beat this black man as if he were an animal… you fight a war against Arabs without even coming out on the field like men(26), you sit in an air-conditioned bubble and push buttons and kill Iraqis from a distance without even knowing who they are... but the whole world knows who YOU are, except you! You do not know who you are! You have no idea of the consequences of what you do in the world! What do we have to do to get your attention - blow up buildings in New York?”

(26)As he spoke, I remembered a brief flurry of news stories about a tidy method the U.S. had developed for overwhelming Iraqi soldiers sheltered against the Allied ground attack in trenches along the Saudi/Iraqi border.

     A helicopter gunship and a bulldozer worked together: the gunship pinned the Iraqi infantry down in the trench as the bulldozer came along and buried them, alive and dead. One U.S. official, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the helicopter’s gun camera tape, denied the request, saying “If that got out we’d never fight another war.” He seemed to think that was a bad idea.

ALONE IN LAOS

     I was alone in southern Laos. Manyon had crossed the Mekong to Thailand; I was headed back to Phnom Penh for a flight to Saigon and another to the States. Fall semester would be starting soon.

     I'd come to an unmarked crossroads and taken the wrong fork. I was lost. All I saw was a narrow road and two walls of jungle that nearly closed out the sky above it. No humans, no peasant huts, not even a blown bridge or an abandoned guard shack. I walked the road. Finally a large building of weathered boards came into view. I stepped onto its high porch, halloed. No answer. The building was open, but no one was around. It seemed there hadn't been anyone around for a long time, though it was clean and in good repair. There was no hint of what the building had been used for. Maybe meetings, maybe classes... I couldn’t tell.

     Looking through an open window, I saw the only evidence, besides the building itself, of human presence: a life-size, nicely framed, official portrait of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

from the chapter ALMOST A COWBOY

     After a field was mowed, the freshcut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two and a half foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again. 

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done. 

BANNING

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twenty‑four hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night.

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."