[Peace-discuss] Urban(a) legend

[C. G. Estabrook]

In the recent discussion of the Urbana City Council's anti-war resolution,
a story was accepted by both sides that needs refutation.  It appeared in
various forms, usually in the assertion that no one wants US military
personnel today to come home to be spat upon, jeered, or called "baby
killers" -- as (everyone agreed) happened in the Vietnam War.  Setting
aside the accuracy of the baby-killer charge (given that the American
military demonstrably killed babies because the war was an assault on the
recalcitrant population of South Vietnam, who wouldn't accept the regime
the US had picked out for them) -- we should note that the charge that
returning soldiers were mistreated is largely specious.  Of course it
cannot be said that it never happened, but there are at least two aspects
of the Vietnam War at home that tell against it.

First, the anti-war movement in the late '60s and '70s worked hard to make 
connections with active-duty soldiers in order to promote resistance to
the war.  Coffee shops and other meeting places near US military bases
were established by groups within the anti-war movement to provide
opportunities for soldiers to discuss what the US was doing in Southeast
Asia.  Such activities were coordinated through a group called FTA (Free
the Army/Fuck the Army).  And that was only a small part of a range of
activities from draft counseling to active support for resisters within
the military.  The draft undoubtedly made people more aware of the
connections between those in and out of the US military.

Second, the most serious excoriation of American soldiers came from the
political Right, who blamed drug-addled draftees for not being willing to
fight.  And there was of course some truth to the charge. Although it
hasn't found its way into the history books, it's widely known that the US
army in Vietnam mutinied.  What was called (remarkably enough) the
"Vietnamization of the war" by the Nixon administration -- it meant that
US soldiers were withdrawn -- became necessary because the US
expeditionary force was in revolt.  As early as 1968, American ground
troops were refusing to go on patrol and threatening gung-ho officers with
"fragging" (rolling a fragmentation grenade under the bunk of an officer
regarded as endangering his men).  By the early 70s, the revolt was
general; joined with the growing anti-war movement at home, it convinced
the US leadership that the popular resistance of the Vietnamese people
couldn't be defeated directly.  (That, by the way, is why a new draft is
unlikely today: the US command, like the French before them, learnt that a
colonial war in Southeast Asia couldn't be fought with conscript troops;
that's why they want a "volunteer" army for colonial wars in Southwest
Asia.)

There has of course been a strenuous effort for more than a generation to
re-write and misrepresent the history of "the Sixties" and of the anti-war
movement of those years.  The conscious campaign of right-wing reaction in
the US, dating from the late 1970s, as the economy turned down (Nixon's
was the last liberal administration), has been largely successful.  Many
people in the US believe a highly mythologized version of the Vietnam War
and the resistance to it.  It's important for us, as we work with a level
of dissidence that is now as great as it ever was during the Vietnam War,
to combat lies and misapprehensions.  The myth of the mistreatment of
returning soldiers is one or the other.

Regards, Carl

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  Carl Estabrook
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
  office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466   
  <www.carlforcongress.org>
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