student history class
Questions about the Vietnam War
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 22:19:30 -0400
To: Kate Kolbert-Hyle
Subject: Re: Questions about the Vietnam War
From: John Judge
Subject: Questions about the Vietnam War
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 21:10:41 EDT
From: Kate Kolbert-Hyle
To: John Judge
We are studying the Vietnam War in history class. For an English
assignment we have been asked to find somebody involved in the
Vietnam War to answer questions and reflect on their experiences.
You can answer any, all or none of the questions as i can
understand it might take awhile. If you'd rather reflect on a
specific experience that would be just as good. Thanks so much for
your help and if you have any questions let me know!
1. Were you involved in the Vietnam War?
I was involved WITH the Vietnam war, as was almost all of my
generation and other generations that came before us, in one
way or another. The war became a national question because it
made young men face questions about their social duties and
sense of alienation that had built up since the 1950s. The
war also brought social costs at home, guns instead of
butter, thousands of deaths, and eventually a recession.
Those who fought the war became increasingly alienated with
it as well, due to the nature of the weapons, the high levels
of civilian deaths (90%), and the lack of clearly defined
military objectives. It became a war of attrition (reducing
the numbers), not only of the "enemy" but of the Vietnamese
people.
The war did tremendous damage to Vietnam as well, and what
was once the rice-producing capitol of the world now imports
most of its rice. Horrible ecological damage resulted from
the bomb craters (26 million in a country the size of Rhode
Island), the chemical spraying and de-forestation, the
breakdown of barriers between salt and fresh water, loss of
topsoil which irreversibly hardens the clay soil beneath
(called laeterization), the deaths of many natural species
and types of plants and the normal interaction of the
different levels of the ecology there.
The Vietnamese people are still being poisoned by chemicals
in the water and soil, have high rates of birth defects
(25%), are still harmed by unexploded bombs in the soil, and
have never been given any reparations or help following all
the destruction. So, yes, I was very involved with the war
and with those who fought it or refused to. I read all I
could about it starting in the early sixties, and collected
information all through the war years.
Had you fought in the military before?
I was never in the military and also never fought outside the
military, either. I have been a pacifist my whole life. Even
before I knew a word for it I refused to fight with fists or
any weapon. This was in part because my mother became a
pacifist after WWI, but decided that Hitler had to be fought
during WWII. She worked for the Pentagon, as did my father
and my aunt. But, she never let me have toy guns or weapons
as a child, and she taught me how to deal with people without
fighting with them. When my father tried to teach me to box,
and I refused, my mother backed me up and said that was not
the way to solve differences.
2. Was there a possibility that you were going to fight?
There was a possibility that all young men in my generation,
what is now called the post-war (WWII) baby-boomers, might be
called to fight by the draft or Selective Service System. I
would never have fought, or used a weapon. I had even been
confronted with weapons and still to this day shun them, even
a fist. I certainly had no reason to want to use weapons on
people living 17,000 miles away who I did not know save by
reading books about their history.
I had a student deferment, which meant as long as I was in
college I would not be drafted. When that ended, I had a very
low lottery number based on my birth date (#14), and I was
sent a "1-A classification" by my draft board in 1969, the
summer after graduation from the University of Dayton (UD).
There was a very good chance I would be given orders to
report for induction into the military.
Almost all of us faced this situation until we turned 26, or
until the lottery started in the late 60s. If you had a high
lottery number (anything over #195 out of the randomly
numbered 365 days of the year) you knew you would probably
not be called. Every year you were not called it became less
likely you would be, because that year's young men would all
have to be called before they came to you, as well as any
other years younger than you. Most of us sweated what would
happen and most of us did not know what would. I already knew
that if called I would refuse to go and fight, so I risked
going to jail if forced to that decision.
3. If not, how did you avoid the draft. If so, what was the
drafting system?
Actually, I was a draft counselor from 1965 on, and helped
many young men facing that situation. I learned the Selective
Service law and what rights people had for appeals and
deferments or exemptions. I helped them once they decided
what they wanted to do or why they did not want to be
drafted. Some avoided, some resisted, some went into the
military anyway. Not all those who resisted went to jail,
only a very few actually went to court, and less to jail.
Usually the boards or courts would find some other
classification for them, assign them to civilian work, or
just ignore them because they had enough other men to take
their place.
The system when I turned 17 and registered was the system in
place since WWII. Once you registered they sent you a
classification form which you filled out with any claims you
had about reasons you should be exempt or deferred (delayed
from being called up and drafted in).
In those days, the Pentagon would figure out how many men
they needed each year, in advance (that was actually my
mother's job to project those figures for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff from information she was given), and call five times
that number to be sure. Half would flunk a physical, as I did
in Cincinnati. One quarter would get deferments or
exemptions. 10-15% would refuse to appear. Then they were
back to the 20% of the total they needed.
The draft back then worked by taking the projected numbers
each month that my mother figured out and dividing them up by
state (population) and then by draft board, a monthly quota
they had to meet out of their pool of eligible registrants.
This sometimes led to boards who easily met the quota being
lenient about claims and objectors, or those who could not be
harsh. Some boards granted every objector application and
hardship claim, others never gave a one, like my board in
Falls Church, Virginia which was mostly retired military
officers.
4. If you were involved in any anti-war activities what were
your actions?
I decided from my reading and studies that our role in the
war in Vietnam was wrong in 1964. I came into UD with that
idea, but no idea what to do about it. Most people did not
even know where the country was at that point, or even that
we had troops there. My first anti-war action was to help
form a campus group called UD Students for an Informed
Campus, and we did three things:
1. We went out for a weekly silent vigil against the war in
front of the Student Union at noon on Wednesdays, the
one hour when nobody had classes during each week, so
most of the students were out and saw us, and more and
more students and faculty joined us over time. We got
the idea from a newspaper clipping of students in
Berkeley, CA doing the same thing.
2. We started a petition to get rid of mandatory ROTC for
all freshmen and sophomore males, and my roommate in the
dorm and I were the first two students in the history of
the school let out of ROTC because of our moral beliefs.
We also did a demonstration at the annual review of the
ROTC troops by the President of the school, Fr. Roesch.
They got quite upset that we would hold up a sign saying
"Voluntary ROTC Now" at such an important event. So they
brought Dayton cops, campus police, and military
intelligence agents from Wright Patterson air force base
to stop us. The Dean of Students tore our sign in half,
a Marianist brother. They even tried to force us to go
to a psychiatric interview afterwards, but the faculty
that went out with us made them stop that.
The picture of our sign being torn made national news
and embarassed the university. They told the ROTC troops
that if we lay down on the field to step on us. I was
spied on by other Air Force intelligence agents in my
classes, probably because my mother was so high up at
the Pentagon.
It also upset them that I would leave my ROTC class at
ten till noon on Wednesday and wear the uniform to the
silent vigil against the war. The local newspaper had a
picture of a few of us in uniform with anti-war signs.
They made a special rule for me that I could come to
class in suit and tie instead, and skil drills. Fine by
me.
Finally, they let me out altogether and had me take a
health course instead. Eventually, we got so many
freshmen to refuse to go to ROTC class that they dropped
the rule. Students angry about that issue and others
eventually took over the Adminstration Building and the
school had to take us seriously and change.
3. We began a table inside the Student Union every day to
educate other students about the war and what we thought
was wrong with US involvement there. Sometimes we got
heckled, but we stood our ground. Over time, the
majority of the students and the country came to see the
war as wrong, including many of the veterans. I
eventually began another table with some friends to do
draft counseling. Eventually I counseled and helped tens
of thousands of young men on and off campus facing the
hard choices of the draft, then GIs who were AWOL who
found me, and then returning veterans with their own
sets of survival problems.
In that sense, I feel like I have been in all four
branches of the military on several tours. I will never
forget the stories I heard from Vietnam veterans about
the horrors of that war, nor will it end for them. More
Vietnam veterans killed themselves after coming home
than died in the war, three times as many before the VA
cut off the statistics.
I demonstrated against the war, wrote and spoke out in
public, helped to organize a student strike at UD against
when the war spread into Cambodia, went to national
demonstrations and meetings, and eventually worked for or sat
on the national boards of groups like Central Committee for
Conscientious Objectors, National Council for Universal and
Unconditional Amnesty, National Council on Agent Orange, The
National Committee Against Registration and the Draft,
Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization
(I helped to found their National GI Project and organized
5,000 active duty GIs who were against the war inside the
military). We did a weekly radio show for three yeas with
VVAW veterans on WYSO, an alternative station in Ohio.
Were they successful?
Yes and no. We certainly educated the public and changed the
opinion of 85% of the United States population against the
war by 1968 and onwards. I worked against that war for so
long that I got nostalgic about it. It was a major part of my
life and my thinking. Helping the GIs and veterans helped me
understand more about the military and the nature of war and
what it does to people.
Eventually, the Vietnamese played the largest role by
refusing to give into the US invasion of their country. They
credited the GI resistance movement with stopping the war as
well. Finally, the Pentagon had to choose between having a
war on the ground or having a military they could control,
and they took the troops home and used bombs instead, and
paid the corrupt rulers of South Vietnam to fight the war
instead.
Finally, as my mother was told to plan it, the US involvement
in the Vietnam war ended ten years after it began, with
57,500 American dead and nearly 3 million Vietnamese dead.
Vietnam gained the independence it wanted in the first place.
America learned a lesson. The lesson is that not all wars are
good wars, and that people have a right to decide whether
they can fight in them.
This is a lesson they hope we will forget. But, having worked
with GIs during the Gulf War and even today, I know we will
not entirely forget. Napoleon once said, "If my men could
think, they would not fight". Even since 9-11 there has been
no major rise in enlistments. I felt that my counseling work
was successful because I knew it made a difference, if only a
sense of support, to the young men and women I spoke to. I
didn't always get justice or victory, but it could have been
much worse had I not been there to help.
Why did you feel so strongly about not fighting the war?
For me it was a moral issue. The war was illegal, immoral,
unconstituional, genocidal, and without any rational basis.
Some could ignore the war, or support it with little cost to
themselves, but most took a position. It divided the country
in some ways. The old values of unquestioning patriotism, and
doing your "duty" had carried over from WWII. The draft was
seen as a "fair" way to divide up the burden of war among a
large population, but it never was. Blacks made up 65% of the
draftees and even higher percentages of the front line
troops. They died in numbers well above their percentage of
the ranks.
I grew up in a time when you were not supposed to question
the government or the military, but having grown up in a
community of CIA, NSA, DIA and Pentagon employees, I knew the
government would lie. I had known that since the U-2 spy
plane incident, when a plane went down in the Soviet Union
and the government had to admit they were lying about not
spying on the Soviets. It was the first in a long string of
lies told about communism and the cold war, and the wars that
came out of that period.
Many things happened that made people suspicious and angry,
including the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm
X, Martin Luther King and many local political organizers
over the years, as a result of FBI and CIA spying on them and
disruption of their rights.
People used to say "America, love it or leave it" and we
would respond "fix it or forget it". In my view it is those
who cannot tolerate dissent who should live outside
democracies. They want us to be so happy we have rights that
we never use them I guess.
Some tried to claim that they were fighting and dying over
there so I could have the right to protest. I told them that
no Vietnamese person ever tried to stop me from exercising my
rights, and that I never gave them sanction to kill in my
name.
What upset me then and now is that there was and is no direct
democratic process by which people can decide if they want
the country to be at war. Some argued that after having lost
a certain number of troops there we had to keep fighting so
that they would not have died in vain. To me that made as
much sense as cutting your fingertip off in a lawnmore and
honoring it by going up to the elbow. I wanted the killing
and the dying to stop, on both sides, and I knew in my heart
the war was wrong.
Were you involved in any protests or rallies?
Too many to count, including organizing them. In the mid-90's
I organized A Day Without the Pentagon to highlight the cost
of the military for just one day and what that could mean to
social services. More recently I have helped to organize a
candlelight vigil by hundreds of people following 9-11, and
an anti-war demonstration of 3,000 people here in DC on
September 30 last year. The only way to retain rights like
assembly, free speech and petition or dissent is to use them.
I have never been or done anything violent in my protests,
nor would I condone it from others. Practicing democracy
between wars is like being a vegetarian between meals.
5. There are many people who are conscientious observers, or
Quakers who chose not to fight in the war. What is your take
on this? Did you know anybody who did this? What was the
opinion on this policy in the eyes of other citizens?
I was myself a conscientous objector, or war objector, though
not a Quaker. There are some historic peace churches that
shun war, but many objectors came from all sorts of religious
backgrounds, or were atheists like myself. I believe most
people do not realize they are conscientious objectors until
after the war, when they cannot integrate what they have been
asked to do with their deeper conscience, morals and sense of
themselves. A few of us have the privilege of knowing that
before we agree to fight.
I highly recommend a new book called On Killing, The
Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by
Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. The author tells how they have to
train out the natural reluctance of people to kill each other
close up in war, and that they never retrain them to put that
brake back on.
I think that people have an absolute right to conscience, and
believe that it should extend not only to all war, but to
particular wars and even particular actions during a war as a
legal grounds to refuse or be reassigned or discharged from
duty.
There are already over 1,000 Israeli resisters in the
military ranks there who will not fight in the current war. I
worked with others years ago who would not fight in Lebanon,
and with South African men who refused to fight against Black
Africans in apartheid wars.
I support the right to refuse and to organize by troops,
because I think it is the most effective way to curb those
who are intent on war and make profits from it. I think wars
should require full public debate and referendum before being
fought, and that anyone should have a right to say no to
them. I do not believe in conscripted duty, through draft
boards or through poverty and lack of educational or
employment opportunities.
I do not think war in this century has any possible positive
outcome given the nature of international relations, global
connectedness and the nature of weapons today that make
civilian deaths likely and make combat troop deaths into the
real "collateral damage" of war.
The world is too interconnected now to destablilize it with
war, and violence solves nothing it just replicates itself.
War is a dead end. I knew thousands of conscientious
objectors and still work with their national organizations
like Center on Conscience and War here in DC.
There is a good PBS film out about the WWII objectors now,
"The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It". Some
stations refused to show it. With each new war we have to
fight again for the rights of conscience. The Gulf War
refusers were treated worse than the WWI objectors. They were
beaten, shackled, denied hearings and sent to the front.
Thousands were locked up in makeshift prisons in Saudi for
refusing to fight. There are already GIs in large numbers
seeking to get discharged because of the current war. There
will always be those who say no.
President John F. Kennedy once said, "I long for the day when
the conscientious objector holds the same respect in society
as the warrior does today". I still go into the high schools
here with veterans on Career Days to counter the military
recruiters, give students the real story on risks in the
military, and not just combat. I also provide them
information on civilian alternatives.
I did draft counseling for so long that I had a dream I was
doing it and remembered the sign on my table in the dream.
The next day I drew it and my friend Kathe painted it for me.
It was a picture of long lines of cows going between fences
into the Acme Meat Packing Company. One cow has gotten its
front legs up over the fence and is looking out with a big
grin. The word bubble says, "You mean there's an
alternative?"
6. What was the spirit of the country back at home? Did friends
of yours have strong opinions about actions that were being
taken by the government?
The spirit changed over time, from confusion to dissent to
contention. Eventually people took sides and had strong
opinions towards each other. I tried to work with people no
matter what they believed or had done, many would not cross
those lines. Lots of objectors disliked anyone in uniform and
vice versa. The war split along family lines, friends, lovers
(like my college sweetheart who could not comprehend why I
cared), and employers or teachers. There were
counter-demonstrators at times and nasty police. I got
punched now and again, or knocked over by a police horse.
I would have felt much worse had I known that the war was
wrong and remained silent. Some also had educated strong
opinions and others just had opinions. That used to frustrate
me, and led to my choosing to draft counsel instead of
running an anti-war table. I saw many more young men facing
the hard decisions and got to help them think that through. I
had friends who went to jail or Canada, who left town over
the draft or the FBI chasing them around, or who were
anguished over the choice.
7. Were any of your friends fighting in the war?
Not many, but I knew a few, and found an old high school chum
on the Vietnam Veterans wall, a list of the names of those
who died. On the other hand, many GI's and veterans I
counseled or organized became friends, and some still are.
Many of the anti-war veterans I knew are now dead, lots of
drink, drugs or suicide, haunted until the end.
8. How was the media responding? Did you here of news instantly?
Did it take a long time to hear of the deaths that were
happening?
Actually, the media was right on the scene. Eventually the
daily body count, theirs and ours, seemed to be the only
criteria for judging the war and whether we were winning.
Peter Jennings pointed out in the early 70s that if you added
all the press reports of Vietnames killed, the whole county
would have had to die twice. In some ways, the media helped
to end the war by showing it up close.
Since Vietnam, corporate mergers and ownership have ended
some of that independent reporting, and the government now
refuses to let the media see the front lines. General
Alexander Haig said it hurt morale for the troops as well as
here at home. He knew that the vast majority of people if
asked about going to war would vote not to. He called that
the "lowest common denominator of public opinion" and said
you couldn't "base a foreign policy on it". I wish they had.
Ernest Hemingway said, "If you want to have a war, don't ask
the infantry and don't ask the dead."
Now the press are little but distant cheerleaders for the
wars, and the wars haven't gone on quite so long because of
the technology, and the lack of any equally armed country
opposing us, for there are none.
Sometimes, even then, the press went along with censorship
and covered-up deaths. They failed to report on a ten-year
war we waged in Laos and Cambodia, which involved billions of
dollars, bombs and body bags. But it was "secret". A good
book about it is Sideshow, Kissinger, Nixon and the
Destruction of Cambodia (William Shawcross, Simon and
Schuster, 1979). The returning disaffected veterans got
press, which made a tremendous difference in attitudes. They
could tell us we had never been there, but the sincere and
outraged veteran was harder to discount.
The press also eventually released the Pentagon Papers, a
secret study of the war that showed how corrupt and dishonest
the decision makers had been. Now the memoirs confess it,
like Robert McNamara's or even General Westmoreland's final
report which ackowledged that the southern Vietnamese did not
want US troops to come in, but we went in anyway. I still
remember news anchor Walter Chronkite crying on the air when
his son was beaten to death in the Marine Corps barracks at
Camp Pendleton. "If your son goes to Vietnam, write to him,"
he said. "If he goes to the brig at Pendleton, pray for him."
9. Do you have any specific stories or memories from the war
era?
I do and some I can't tell, like the guy I knew who got out
of the draft using peanut butter in a way nobody had before.
Mostly I remember the veterans's stories and the GIs, doing
things to hold themselves together in a world that either
blamed them for fighting, blamed them for losing, or more
often just didn't care.
I tried to stop people from going to Canada, because many of
them didn't have to go that far, but they were desperate. I
found out things about what war is really like that I will
never forget, including men who had to kill their officers
just to survive the next day.
Later, I got to hear the stories of the Vietnamese people,
and also the stories of the women on both sides. There was
another wonderful documentary on PBS about them recently
called [We] "Regret to Inform" which is how the notices start
to families of soldiers killed in action.
The most powerful documentary for me is still "Vietnam
Requiem" (1983) which interviews five Vietnam veterans in
prison, who never committed a crime before they went into the
service. It still warms my heart like nothing else when
soldiers refuse to fight and tell the truth about war.
I remember an old Wizard of Id cartoon about the palace guard
telling the king that they were surrounded by demonstrators.
"Call out the troops!" the king said. "But, sire," the
soldier replied, "it is the troops!"
When militaries change countries change and can for a while
hope for democracy again. Now your generation has to face
hard choices once more and make informed decisions and make
democracy work. It's never easy. If you pay attention you
will have your own stories to tell.
I had hoped that what we learned from Vietnam might stay with
us as a society, but some of it has not. I had hoped I would
never have to see young people face those choices again, but
they did and do. I don't know what is harder, finding out the
truth or following your heart, but you always have to do
both.
Thanks for the chance to answer these questions. If you have
others let me know. Sorry I missed your deadline, I worked
all day and night Thursday and I am just rolling off to bed
now before starting another day. In the morning I'm heading
up a discussion circle at a social forum here about peace and
how to get there. As always, peace and justice is the only
way.
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