04.06.2008
Vietnam and the US armed forces revolt
Jim Moody looks at rebellion in the ranks of the US military and shows the lessons for today
National liberation forces in Vietnam staged an audacious military offensive against the US occupiers in early 1968 to coincide with the start of the Tet spring festival. Its audacity and support impressed many ordinary GIs, who began to realise that their enemy was not the Viet Cong, but the US military machine and what it represented.
Propaganda from the US side had from the early 1960s portrayed American involvement in Vietnam as selfless assistance to South Vietnam’s government resisting aggression from the North. Unsurprisingly, the reality was different. The Vietnamese struggle against French colonialism in Indochina (which also included Cambodia and Laos) earlier in the 20th century continued unbroken against Japan when its armed forces invaded during World War II, and resumed against French reoccupation post-war.
From its foundation in exile in 1930, the Communist Party of Vietnam and previously the CP of Indochina (PCI), led the struggle for national liberation, working openly as the Viet Minh from 1945. It kept its tutelage by every means available, principled and unprincipled.1
Viet Minh forces defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva conference that year temporarily divided the country in two at the 17th parallel, pending all-Vietnam elections. But, as only France and the Viet Minh had signed the Geneva accords, the USA claimed it was free to intervene and establish its separate puppet regime in the south, headed by Ngo Dình Diem, a former mandarin. Taking up France’s dishonourable baton, the USA assumed responsibility as regional policeman. From 1960, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (or, usually derogatively, the Viet Cong) set about the task of ridding Vietnam of the puppet government and its US backers.
US military goes in
A coup against Diem in 1963, followed by another in 1964, led to a US decision to throw out the Kennedy doctrine of leaving the fight against ‘the communists’ to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Using the pretext of what many have alleged was a black ops attack on the USS Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin, the US Congress gave president Johnson executive power to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia without declaring war. For starters, North Vietnam was bombed from US aircraft carriers, to cow its government into ceasing support for the NLF.
From March to December 1965, the number of US troops deployed in Vietnam rose from 3,500 to 200,000. The US presence in South Vietnam reached major proportions on the back of universal conscription (the draft): larger and larger draft quotas drew ever greater numbers of young men into the US war machine. By mid-1965, monthly draft calls had increased from 17,000 to 35,000. Even so, the first acts of GI rebellion were small, though nonetheless significant. Probably the first incident occurred in November 1965, when Lt Henry Howe took part in a small civilian peace protest in El Paso. Lt Howe held a placard reading, ‘End Johnson’s fascist aggression’, for which he was court-martialled and given two years’ hard labour at Fort Leavenworth.
Also among early protesters were three privates at Fort Hood, Texas, who refused to go to Vietnam in June 1966. In the statement they issued to the press, David Samas, James Johnson and Dennis Mora made clear that, “We have been in the army long enough to know that we are not the only GIs who feel as we do. Large numbers of men in the service either do not understand this war or are against it ... The Viet Cong obviously had the moral and physical support of most of the peasantry who were fighting for their own independence.”2 Upon court martial, each got three years hard labour.
Other individual acts of resistance followed, mostly by leftists who had been drafted into the armed forces. Ronald Lockman refused to go to Vietnam, using the slogan, “I follow the Fort Hood Three. Who will follow me?” Captain Howard Levy would not teach medicine to the Green Berets. And captain Dale Noyd refused to give flying instructions to prospective bombing pilots. In April 1967, five GIs held a ‘pray-in for peace’ inside Fort Jackson, SC: two who ignored a direct order to stop praying were subsequently court-martialled.3
Tet Offensive
Events in Vietnam itself were to provide the turning point for the ordinary US serviceman and servicewoman. In the early hours of January 30 1968, combined forces of the (NLF) and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) launched the Tet Offensive (Tet Mau Than) or Tong Cong Kích, Tong Khoi Nghia (General Offensive, General Uprising). It took the US forces in South Vietnam completely by surprise. Its three phases lasted until September 23 1968, though its major second phase concluded at the end of May.
Initially, a total of 80,000 NLF and PAVN troops hit over 100 towns and cities, 36 of them provincial capitals, as well as 72 of 245 district towns, and Saigon, capital of the puppet state in the South. It was, in fact, the largest military operation conducted by either side up to that date. Although US forces eventually largely regained lost ground, fighting continued in the former imperial capital of Hue for a month and around the US base at Khe Sanh for twice that long. Pre-Vietnam, the US army had been considered the best the country had ever put into the field. So its setbacks in 1968, even if temporary, were salutary and marked a watershed militarily, but, more importantly, politically and psychologically. Despite this, the full military might of the USA was for over eight years exerted to win the war against the Vietnamese people: 400,000 ground troops in nine divisions and four brigades at the height of US involvement.
It is accepted unproblematically by contemporary writers and those writing subsequently that the 1968 Tet Offensive marked the start of the GI rebellion. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had been founded the year before by veterans who marched together on the Spring Mobilization to End the War in New York City, but, although its membership later grew into the tens of thousands, for the first few years it struggled to get more than a few hundred members. The bulk of the early forces’ opposition to the Vietnam war was sporadic and only loosely coordinated.
Leading up to this period of collective opposition to the war, the breakdown in morale among US military personnel in the field was illustrated vividly by the frequent reports of ‘fragging’ (ie, other ranks’ violence, often fatal, against NCOs and officers), as well as increasing marijuana and hard drugs use. Only occasionally, of course, could there be actual protests organised in combat zones. A rare exception was during the 1969 moratorium mobilisations, when US journalists in Vietnam reported anti-war protests, which involved wearing black armbands on patrol, collecting petition signatures, boycotting a Thanksgiving dinner and an incident of leafleting in Saigon in uniform.
Meanwhile, spontaneous actions continued, some so public that they could not be ignored. In mid-1969, a whole company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, a rifle company from the 1st Air Cavalry Division refused to advance down a dangerous trail; over a 12-month period the 1st Air Cavalry refused combat 35 times. In 1968, 27 army prisoners refused to work after guards murdered a fellow prisoner in the San Francisco stockade: what became known as the Presidio Mutiny.
Organising against the war
Two prongs of GI organising began to develop. At the end of 1967, Fred Gardner had launched the GI coffee house movement by establishing the United Freedom Organization (UFO) in Columbia, SC as an alternative to the officially-sanctioned United Service Organizations (USO).
Only days after the Tet Offensive started in February 1968, UFO proved its worth to the anti-war movement when 35 soldiers at nearby Fort Jackson promptly held a silent protest outside the post’s chapel. Later that year, Gardner set up the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas and Mad Anthony Wayne’s in Waynesville, Missouri - both adjacent to army bases. Similarly situated coffee houses elsewhere around the USA followed, though not always without problems: apart from occasional ‘brass’ harassment, two were attacked - a bombing and machine gun fire respectively.
The coffee house movement provided off-base venues for recent draftees and returning Vietnam veterans to meet and share experiences. Apart from their important cultural work, they enabled GIs to begin organising beyond the immediate, physical reach of NCOs and officers.4
The other, and more important, organising strand that emerged within the armed forces was the explosion of on-post print publications. It is estimated that there were around 300, some lasting for only one or two issues, but others having extended runs over years. As with any serious attempt at organising within military structures, not only were stringent regulations against in-service propaganda and protest an obstacle, but the ordinary course of military life itself caused problems. Activist cores developed, only to decline due to transfers. Depending on the level of organising that came to their attention, the top brass would intervene and sometimes try to deal with activists and dissidents by transferring them for non-operational reasons. However, that often proved a two-edged sword to the forces as a whole, since the transferred activists were then able to restart their activities in virgin territory, which they often did.
This flowering of anti-Vietnam war propaganda within the armed forces was a patchy affair. Even so, there was no mistaking the verve and elan, in the face of risk, of those involved in producing and clandestinely distributing these publications. The papers themselves were produced all over the USA, as well as within large US bases abroad, especially in Germany and Japan. At the start of the Tet Offensive in early 1968 there were no more than 10 forces’ papers of the GI press. But already by that autumn there were twice as many, the number doubling again by the following spring. A peak of 90 or so papers was maintained from the spring of 1970 to the end of 1971. While activists in the army and marine corps had always published the majority of the GI press, by spring 1972 the number of air force and navy titles was almost on a par.
Among the hundreds of GI papers published, the first GI-run anti-war paper launched by returning GI Jeff Sharlet was one of the most successful. Vietnam GI, published in Chicago, already had a print run of 30,000 copies by autumn 1968. With the help of sympathetic army unit mail clerks, the paper circulated surreptitiously, but widely, in Vietnam, where it was free to GIs.5 Other papers included The Ally (Berkeley, California; about 40 issues); Fatigue Press (published from the Oleo Strut, near Fort Hood, Texas; circulation up to 5,000); FTA (one of the first edited entirely by GIs, appeared June 1968 to autumn 1972); Ultimate Weapon (Fort Dix, NJ; edited by security protocol officer Allen Myers, a member of the Young Socialist Alliance); Gigline (Fort Bliss, Texas; circulation 2,500 by 1971); Semper Fi (Iwakuni, Japan; published continuously 1970-75); Voice of the Lumpen (Frankfurt, Germany; affiliated with the Black Panther Party); FighT bAck (Heidelburg, Germany; largest GI paper in Europe, with 18 issues to April 1974).6
Revolt in the ranks
As protest grew and many became involved in activism in the early 1970s, administrative dismissal from the services began to be utilised more frequently. As a result, half a million servicemen and servicewomen received less than honourable discharges, preventing many from receiving GI benefits and resulting in difficulties in subsequent civilian employment.
Demonstrations of serving soldiers took place at several bases. The socialist-influenced American Servicemen’s Union (ASU), set up in 1967, was able to organise early protests at Fort Benning and Fort Sill. Fort Hood’s first demonstration took place in Killeen in July 1968. Around 100 black soldiers from the 1st Armored Cavalry Division held a meeting against racism and to protest at their potential use against civilians demonstrating at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, ultimately leading to fears of untrustworthiness and to troops not being used. Active duty personnel became more involved and GI involvement in demonstrations near their bases became larger as the 1970s rolled on.
By 1970, 65,643 had deserted from the US army. At the height of the war one GI went Awol every three minutes. In fact, a Pentagon study found that 64% of chronic Awols during the war years were enlisted men; and a high proportion of these were Vietnam veterans. Fraggings had resulted in 209 deaths in 1970, more than double the number of the previous year, when 96 died. Because of a lack of willing witnesses, only 10% of attempted fraggings were going to trial. About 80% of troops in Vietnam used an illegal drug and by 1972 more than 30% of combat troops were on smack.
Sailors and air force personnel became involved in anti-war actions. With the running down of ground troop numbers as the 1970s advanced, the air war was elevated to pole position in the Pentagon’s schema to win the war. The Christmas bombings of 1972 saw US bombers attack Hanoi and Haiphong under Operation Linebacker II. But, while many civilians were killed, the US operation failed to soften up the Vietnamese arrayed against them. The parallel ‘Vietnamisation’, whereby puppet forces were to take up the mantle laid down by withdrawn US ground forces, was a phantom of US imaginations, and failed dismally.
A petition circulated aboard the USS Coral Sea, while it was docked in California before a tour of bombing duty off Vietnam, was signed by over a thousand of the 4,500 crew. It read: “We, the people, must guide the government and not allow the government to guide us! The Coral Sea is scheduled for Vietnam in November. This does not have to be a fact. The ship can be prevented from taking an active part in the conflict if we, the majority, voice our opinion that we do not believe in the Vietnam war. If you feel that the Coral Sea should not go to Vietnam, voice your opinion by signing this petition.”
This led to a Stop Our Ship (SOS) organisation; demonstrations to halt sailing; and 300 men from the ship leading the autumn anti-war march in San Francisco. The SOS movement spread to other attack carriers, including the USS Hancock and the USS Ranger.
Heavier naval involvement in the war also led to serious acts of sabotage. In 1970, the USS Anderson was prevented from leaving San Diego for Vietnam by nuts, bolts and chains dropped down the main gear shaft; cases against sailors were dismissed for lack of evidence. In June 1972, the USS Ranger was disabled. The next month, two aircraft carriers were put out of commission by sabotage; a massive fire swept through the admiral’s quarters and radar centre of the USS Forestall, causing over $7 million dollars’ damage; and while the USS Ranger was docked at Alameda, California, its engine reduction gears were wrecked at a cost of $1 million, delaying its sailing for three months. No-one was punished.
Pilots began to refuse to fly missions over Vietnam; many of those that took to the skies loosed off their weapons harmlessly into the sea.
Certainly a crucial aspect of the growing protest over Vietnam in the armed forces was that more and more it involved enlisted men and women. Due to the growth of the anti-war revolt within the armed forces, the military’s leaders had become convinced that a professional army, navy, marine corps and air force was needed to replace conscripted services. In fact, this was one of Nixon’s programme points in his 1968 presidential election campaign. And once the Gates Commission had reported in 1970, Nixon’s administration oversaw a cosmetic ‘liberalisation’ of the armed forces’ internal regimes in preparation for its rebirth as an all-volunteer force.
Many were the public discussions at the time about how a conscript and thus citizen army, harking back to the American Revolution, was preferable to a professional army, etc. However, those advocating ‘professional’ (ie, volunteer) armed forces won the day and the draft ended in June 1973.7 This development did not stop opposition to the Vietnam war, though: discontent in the forces just shifted exclusively to the enlisted men and women. While only available many years later, contemporary officially-commissioned assessments of the level of GI revolt made painful reading for the US administration at the time.8
Black protest
In proportion, whites proved more able than blacks to evade the draft through deferral, often for educational reasons. Even before the draft ended in 1973, the USA’s poorest, including disproportionate numbers of black men, had tended to volunteer for the armed forces as a way of gaining a trade and generally levering themselves out of civilian dead ends. In fact, despite forces’ propaganda claims to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of those who joined up were not trained in skills usable in civilian life.
Many black soldiers ended up on the most dangerous combat and patrol duties. Realisation of this and the radicalisation of black draftees and volunteers, thanks to the pervasive black power movement and groups such as the Black Panthers, meant that black GIs figured prominently in the GI anti-war movement. Black troops were at the centre of the military prison rebellions at Da Nang and Long Binh.
Once the Vietnamese had shown their mettle in the 1968 Tet Offensive, US official propaganda started to lose its impact. Especially given the growing strength of the anti-Vietnam war movement back home in the US. Many soldiers, sailors, marines and air force personnel began to realise that they could stop the war machine. As Bertolt Brecht said:
General, your tank is a powerful vehicle.
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think ...9
It became impossible, in part thanks to the armed forces revolt, to defeat the Vietnamese people, despite the US being a far better and far more heavily armed antagonist.
Instead of winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Vietnamese, the US state was losing the hearts and minds of its own military personnel. Therefore, to some considerable degree, its was members of America’s own armed forces who helped force the administration to the Paris conference negotiating table, which led to its final humilating withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973.
Some US armed forces personnel are today drawing lessons for the Iraq debacle from what their comrades did in Vietnam. One example earlier this year was a repeat of the Winter Soldier testimonies from 1973, when participants declared their involvement in US war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam. Many more lessons can be drawn from the Vietnam conflict, of course, not least for those members of the British armed forces involved in war in others’ countries.
In the words of US anarchist Kevin Keating, “The military is never a hermetically sealed organisation. Our rulers know all this. Our rulers know that they are vulnerable to mass resistance, and they know that their wealth and power can be collapsed from within by the working class women and men whom they depend on. We need to know it, too.”10
Notes
1. Despite having been previously allied with them in a united front, the PCI targeted Trotskyists for elimination from July 1940. At that time, Nguyen ai Quoc (aka Ho chi Minh) reported to Comintern: “As far as the Trotskyists are concerned, concessions are out of the question. We should do everything to unmask them as fascist agents. They must be politically exterminated.” Between 1945 and 1951 PCI activists systematically assassinated every Indochinese Trotskyist they could. Justifying the slaughter, the PCI central committee’s organ urged them on: “At Nam bo, they [the Trotskyists] demand the arming of the people ... and the completion of the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution, with the aim of splitting the national front and provoking opposition from the landlords to the revolution” (Co giai phong October 23 1945).
2. Reprinted in FHT Defense Committee The Fort Hood Three New York 1966.
3. ‘1961-1973: GI resistance in the Vietnam war’: libcom.org/history/vietnam-gi-resistance
4. D Cortright Soldiers in revolt: the American military today New York 1975. Republished as Soldiers in revolt: GI resistance during the Vietnam war Chicago 2005.
5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Sharlet_%28Vietnam_antiwar_activist%29
6. For a near-complete list, see D Cortright op cit appendix B.
7. In 1980, Congress reinstated the requirement that young men register with the Selective Service System. Although penalties for non-register appear draconian, no-one has been prosecuted for this since 1986.
8. HC Olson, RW Rae Determination of the potential for dissidence in the US army Virginia 1971; and RW Rae, SB Forman, HC Olson Future impact of dissident elements within the army on the enforcement of discipline, law and order Research Analysis Corp, Virginia 1972: http://stinet.dtic.mil
9. Last three verses of From a German war primer.
10. ‘1968-1972: Harass the brass: some notes toward the subversion of the US armed forces’ The Bad Days Will End winter-spring 2001-02.
