"You bet your goddamn dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our
sons for the country," said a firefighter whose son was killed in action.
"Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right
connections, you don't end up on a firing line over there. I think we ought to
win that war or pull out. What the hell else should we do - sit and bleed
ourselves to death, year after year?" His wife jumps in to add, "My husband and
I can't help thinking that our son gave his life for nothing, nothing at
all."
These may sound like voices from the present, perhaps from grieving parents who
have taken up Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas as she visits her ailing
mother. Actually though, they come from 1970, and their lost son died in
Vietnam.
In recent weeks, as American casualties in Iraq continued to mount and
opposition from military families has grown, as Ohio families mourned their
dead and Cindy Sheehan's story would not go away, I kept remembering the many
people I had interviewed about a similar moment during the Vietnam War, a time
in 1968 when millions of Americans who had trusted their government to tell the
truth about a distant war and believed it was every citizen's absolute duty to
"fight for your country" began to turn, like a giant aircraft carrier slowly
arcing in another direction, began to doubt, question, and finally oppose their
nation's policies.
Many voices of the Vietnam era are long forgotten or were never clearly heard,
especially those of people such as the firefighter and his wife. In their
place, we have a canned image of Vietnam-era working-class whites as bigoted
hard-hats, Archie Bunkers all (as in the famed 1970s television sit-com All in
the Family), super-patriotic hawks who simply despised long-haired
protestors and supported their presidents.
In that stereotype lies a partial, but misleading, truth. Many working-class
families were indeed appalled by the antiwar movement of those years. "I hate
those peace demonstrators," the same firefighter said. But his hostility did
not make him a hawk. He was furious because he saw antiwar activists as
privileged and disrespectful snobs who "insult everything we believe in"
without having to share his family's military and economic sacrifices. In
virtually the same breath, however, he said about the war of his time, "The
sooner we get the hell out of there the better."
In fact, poor and working-class Americans were profoundly disaffected by
Vietnam. A Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that the less formal education
you had, the more likely you were to want the military out of that country: 80%
of Americans with grade school educations were in favor of a US withdrawal from
Vietnam; 75% of high school graduates agreed; only among college graduates did
the figure drop to 60%.
In Vietnam itself, the mostly working-class American military of that era,
formed by an inequitable draft, made its opposition to the war increasingly
clear as the fighting dragged on. By late 1969, demoralization and resistance
within the armed forces was endemic. Desertions were beginning to skyrocket;
drug use was becoming rampant; avoidance of combat routine; outright mutiny not
unusual; and hundreds of officers would be wounded or killed by their own
enraged troops. By 1972, the military was in shambles. It is now largely
forgotten that the US pulled out of Vietnam not just because of domestic
opposition to the war, but also because it no longer seemed possible to field a
functional, obedient army.
Ohio 1968: Is this war worth another child?
Such levels of opposition did not come out of the blue. They had long histories
deeply embedded in that endless war. By the mid-1960s, for instance, many
hard-fighting and disciplined American soldiers were already embittered by
their commanders' war of attrition that had them "humping the boonies" as
"bait" to draw fire from an elusive and dangerous enemy who then determined the
time, place and duration of the vast majority of firefights. They often viewed
their officers as ticket-punching "lifers" who sought promotion by jeopardizing
their troops in an effort to post the highest possible enemy body counts, the
chief measure of "progress" back in Washington. GIs, who might risk everything
to save a buddy, increasingly came to view the war itself as meaningless. "It
don't mean nothin'," they commonly said.
In the face of rising opposition, presidents Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon
sought to rally - in Nixon's famous phrase - the "silent majority" in support
of the war, not by explaining the need for ever-more sacrifice, but by
demonizing critics who, it was said, threatened to turn America into a
"pitiful, helpless giant". Though the Nixon administration, unlike the present
one, did not have its own media machine constantly available to attack its
enemies, Nixon often sent out his vice president, Spiro Agnew, as an attack dog
to vilify student protestors ("effete corps of impudent snobs") and the media
("nattering nabobs of negativism").
The cynical courting of "Middle America" may indeed have exacerbated class
tensions, but in the end it proved incapable of overcoming the rising tide of
outrage among families who believed they were bearing the greatest burden in a
war that lacked an achievable or worthy purpose. Already, in the long months
after the Tet offensive of January 31, 1968, when as many as 500 Americans were
dying every week, the most basic of all questions was beginning to well up from
the heartland: is this war worth the life of even one more of our children?
You could see it, for example, in Parma, Ohio a working-class neighborhood near
Cleveland that ultimately lost 35 young men in Vietnam. On Memorial Day, 1968,
the Cleveland Press, a newspaper previously known for its strong support for
the war, ran a startling front-page feature by reporter Dick Feagler under the
headline: "He Was Only 19 - Did You Know Him?" It was about a Parma boy named
Greg Fischer who had just died in Vietnam.
I learned about the impact of that column from Clark Dougan, now an editor at
the University of Massachusetts Press. For Clark, the news of Greg Fischer's
death hit like a hammer because he had known the 19-year-old. They were
classmates together at Valley Forge High School where the school's principal
often came on the intercom to ask for a moment of silence because yet another
former Valley Forge student had died in Vietnam.
When he read the story, with its heartbreaking details, including the letter
Fischer had left behind to be opened "if I don't come back from Vietnam",
Dougan recalls, "I understood how easily it could have been me. Like any kid
who had grown up in the fifties there was a certain allure to the military. But
my parents hadn't been able to go to college and they were determined that I
would. So I had gone off to this cloistered college while Greg was going off to
die in Vietnam. The article was really asking, how many more people like Greg
are we willing to waste? It reflected a feeling that was spreading all over
working-class communities like Parma. That was the moment when 'Middle America'
really turned against the war."
Ohio 2005: The chickenhawk war
The author of that article, Dick Feagler, is still on the job. Thirty-seven
years later, he writes for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, now lashing out at the
war in Iraq, at those who have "a bland, nitwit allegiance to the blood and
death as if the carnage in Iraq were some kind of Olympic sport". As in 1968,
so now in the Ohio heartland, where the burden of death once again falls heavy,
the war makes ever-less sense to those most involved. Concern for the
well-being of Americans in uniform goes hand-in-hand with the rising dissent.
Like many other Ohioan columnists, Feagler often couples his attacks on the war
with prayers for the troops, even telling readers how to send care packages and
letters of support.
Underlying the two moments - May 1968 and August 2005 - is the fact that, once
again, our wartime sacrifices fall disproportionately on the working class and,
with US deaths approaching 2,000, and thousands more soldiers and Marines
horribly wounded, a recent CBS poll found that 57% of Americans now believe the
war in Iraq not worth the loss of American lives. Another poll showed that only
34% support President George W Bush's handling of the war, just two points
higher than the comparable figure for Johnson after the Tet offensive.
As in 1968, so in 2005, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has pointed
out, "The loudest of the hawks are the least likely to send their sons or
daughters off" to war. Bush continues to call the war a "noble cause" and "the
central front in the global war on terrorism", even though 60% of Americans
have come to believe that it has made them less safe.
His five-week-long vacation is only the most obvious symbol of the obscene gulf
in safety between the advocates of the war and its victims. That gulf is at the
very heart of a growing disaffection in places like Ohio, where earlier this
month 20 Marines from the same Reserve unit (3rd Battalion, 25th Marines) were
killed in Iraq within 72 hours. That unit is headquartered in Brook Park, Ohio,
a working-class suburb adjacent to Parma, and the losses included 14 men from
Ohio, bringing the state's total fatalities to more than 90.
Sam Fulwood, another Plain Dealer columnist, responded to these losses by
recalling Bush's 2003 "bring 'em on" taunting of the Iraqi insurgents. "Two
years ago, tucked in the comfort and safety of the White House's Roosevelt
Room," wrote Fulwood, "the president challenged 'anybody who wants to harm
American troops'. John Wayne couldn't have said it with more cowboy swagger.
'Bring them on'." As Fulwood concludes with a stridency rarely seen in
Midwestern newspapers until recently, "The chickenhawk got his wish."
Now, for the first time, not just in Ohio but all over the country, media
outlets are beginning to raise a previously forbidden question: should we
withdraw? As the Cincinnati Enquirer framed it on August 7, in response to the
local casualties, "Do we seek revenge? Do we continue as usual? Or do we
leave?" The last question, once asked only in a whisper, if at all, is suddenly
being voiced loudly and urgently. And when it was raised by an antiwar Iraq war
Marine veteran named Paul Hackett, running as a Democrat in a special election
for Congress, he came within two percentage points of winning in a district
east of Cincinnati that had given Bush a whopping 64% of its votes in November,
2004, and has elected a Republican to the House of Representatives almost
automatically for the past 30 years.
In presidential elections, Ohio is often spoken of as a "bellwether state". It
may turn out to play the same role when it comes to America's wars. What we are
witnessing in Ohio and elsewhere is a real sea change in public opinion being
led by people with the closest personal connections of all to the president's
war. Disillusionment has soared not only because of mounting casualties and the
obvious lack of progress in quelling the Iraqi insurgency, but also because the
military is strained to the limits keeping 130,000 troops in Iraq. Many
thousands of Americans are in their second tours of duty with third tours
looming.
During the Vietnam era, Johnson decided to rely almost exclusively on the draft
and the active-duty military to fight the war, hoping to keep casualties (and
so their impact) largely restricted to young, mostly unmarried, and powerless
individuals. The Reserve forces, he understood, tended to be older, married,
and more rooted in their communities. Now, the Reserves and the National Guard
make up half of US combat forces in Iraq, a figure that has doubled since early
2004. This increasing reliance on the Reserves only serves to accelerate
antiwar resistance among military families.
Soldiers, veterans and their families have, as they did in the early 1970s,
once again moved to the forefront of a growing, grass-roots struggle to end an
unpopular war. Cindy Sheehan's impassioned opposition to the war has not only
gained extraordinary media attention but seems to have ignited a genuine
outpouring of public support. Many who may have feared that public opposition
to the war could be taken as unpatriotic or unsupportive of American troops,
have been emboldened by Sheehan's example to demand that her son's death, and
all the others, not be used to justify further bloodshed in a war that cannot
be convincingly justified by an administration distant from their lives and
their suffering.
Christian Appy teaches history at the University of Massachusetts and is
the author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam and
Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides, which can be ordered by
clicking
here.
