The Turning

A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War

Andrew E. Hunt

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780814773307
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

The anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States is perhaps best remembered for its young, counterculture student protesters. However, the Vietnam War was the first conflict in American history in which a substantial number of military personnel actively protested the war while it was in progress.

In The Turning, Andrew Hunt reclaims the history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that transformed the antiwar movement by placing Vietnam veterans in the forefront of the nationwide struggle to end the war. Misunderstood by both authorities and radicals alike, VVAW members were mostly young men who had served in Vietnam and returned profoundly disillusioned with the rationale for the war and with American conduct in Southeast Asia. Angry, impassioned, and uncompromisingly militant, the VVAW that Hunt chronicles in this first history of the organization posed a formidable threat to America's Vietnam policy and further contributed to the sense that the nation was under siege from within.

Based on extensive interviews and in-depth primary research, including recently declassified government files, The Turning is a vivid history of the men who risked censures, stigma, even imprisonment for a cause they believed to be "an extended tour of duty."

1
The Highest Form of Patriotism

In the summer of 1967, J. Edgar Hoover, the aging director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, received a memorandum from FBI field agents in New York City concerning the formation of a new organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The agents described it as a loose-knit, “non-membership organization” based at 17 East 17th Street in New York City.¹ As the group’s name indicated, participants consisted of Vietnam veterans, thus amounting to “possibly the first antiwar group formed by veterans of an American war still being waged.”² The impetus behind VVAW, Hoover was told, dated back to the spring of 1967. On April 15, 1967, a group of Vietnam veterans in New York City had marched from Central Park to the United Nations building in the massive Spring Mobilization demonstration against the Vietnam War. The ex-servicemen gathered with three-hundred thousand other people to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s impassioned speech condemning the Vietnam War. A month and a half after the protest, six of the veterans met in New York City to form VVAW. Field agents assured Hoover that the group would be the subject of “an instant case” to “determine whether the organization is a target for Communist infiltration.”³

Hoover categorized the case as part of the bureau’s sweeping Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) investigation of New Left groups. Accordingly, agents collected information about the antiwar veterans and monitored their activities. A thorough, two-month investigation of VVAW resulted in a confidential, sixteen-page FBI memorandum, issued at the end of October, announcing that there was no “evidence that the [Communist Party] or any other subversive organization directs, dominates or controls the VVAW or that it has been a target for CP infiltration.”⁴ Agents concluded that the group had only one chief goal: to end the war in Vietnam. Still, perhaps sensing the potential damage that such a group could inflict, Hoover ordered agents to continue monitoring VVAW. He was not convinced that just because the organization was not communist dominated, it did not constitute a threat.⁵

Tens of thousands of demonstrators began assembling in New York’s Central Park on the chilly, overcast morning of April 15, 1967, for what was called “The Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam.” Under the close scrutiny of plainclothes police officers and the media, a crowd of young men, including a uniformed ex-Green Beret, gathered in the southeastern corner of the Sheep Meadow and burned two hundred draft cards, formally launching the draft resistance movement. Meanwhile, a steady stream of protesters continued to fill Central Park. By noon, they were ready to leave the park and follow a route through the streets of Manhattan to the United Nations building.⁶

An estimated three-hundred thousand people participated. Never before had such a large crowd met to protest the war. Two years earlier, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had organized the first large-scale antiwar demonstration in Washington, which had attracted more than twenty thousand protesters. The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) had sponsored a similar gathering in November 1965 that drew thirty thousand people. The peace movement had declined the following year. The biggest demonstration in 1966, the November mobilization, drew only fifteen thousand marchers in New York City. The Spring Mobilization, however, bolstered by Martin Luther King Jr.’s presence, revived the ailing peace movement.⁷

By all accounts, the gigantic crowd in Central Park was diverse. Marchers included housewives, grandparents, children, businessmen, high school teachers, priests, nuns, university professors, a small bridal party, African Americans, whites, Hispanics, and a Native American contingent. Young people seemed to be everywhere, some with long hair, others dressed conservatively. Local chapters of SANE, Women’s Strike for Peace (WSP), and Clergy and Laymen Concerned (CALC) were represented. Planning for the demonstration began in the fall of 1966, and the huge crowd in Central Park exceeded the expectations of the organizers. “The mobilization was so vast and amorphous,” wrote a Quaker demonstrator, “that one could get a host of different reports on it from as many different individuals.”⁸

Hundreds of veterans, nearly all of World War II and Korean War vintage, gathered at the southern end of Central Park. The veterans, members of an organization called Veterans for Peace in Vietnam, carried signs bearing antiwar statements such as “Vets Demand Support the GIs, Bring Them Home Now!” and “Cease Fire Now! Negotiate with the NLF.”⁹

Veterans had participated in earlier antiwar protests, but the large number at the Spring Mobilization was unprecedented. Just a few years earlier, antiwar veterans were rarely seen at demonstrations; prowar organizations, such as Veterans of Foreign Wars, attracted far more veterans than the fledgling antiwar protests. On October 30, 1965, more than twenty thousand people had marched down Fifth Avenue in a prowar parade sponsored by the New York City Council, the American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars. The parade proved to be a somber event in which thousands of participants “counted to cadence” as they marched. The Johnson administration, encouraged by the protest, hoped that this and other prowar rallies would help solidify public support for the war. The administration later helped organize prowar parades, including one on May 16, 1967, which attracted more than twenty thousand enthusiastic demonstrators.¹⁰

When veterans took part in protests, their participation was usually isolated and minimally reported. In January 1966, fifty veterans from World War I, World War II, and the Korean Wars participated in a “Veterans March to End the War in Vietnam,” at the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield, where they held a “speak-in.” The earliest veterans’ group to call for peace in Vietnam was the Ad Hoc Committee of Veterans for Peace in Vietnam, which ran a full-page ad in the November 24, 1965, New York Times, endorsing the November 27 antiwar march in Washington. When President Johnson ordered the resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam on February 1, 1966, following a temporary pause, the Ad Hoc Committee staged a demonstration that drew seventy-five veterans. Approximately one hundred veterans from various wars returned their medals and discharge papers to President Johnson on February 5 in protest against the war. During the summer of 1966, a small organization known as Veterans and Reservists Against the War, based primarily in New York, organized a march from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to Washington, D.C., that attracted some forty people. The march received little media attention.¹¹

These early veterans’ protests paralleled similar, though more highly publicized, actions within the military. At a time when the antiwar movement was still in its infancy, dissent within the armed forces was isolated and risky, often carrying penalties of dishonorable discharges and imprisonment. In November 1965, Lieutenant Henry Howe was arrested and later court-martialed for attending an antiwar protest at Texas Western College. The following year, three soldiers fresh from basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, refused to serve in Vietnam. The Fort Hood Three, as they came to be known, declared, “We want no part of a war of extermination.”¹² The three privates announced their plans to file a lawsuit challenging their orders on the grounds that the war was illegal. The actions of the Fort Hood Three attracted journalists, as well as federal agents. The government launched an all-out campaign of harassment against the men and eventually imprisoned them in the Fort Dix, New Jersey, stockade. The Fort Hood Three were court-martialed and jailed for two years. Yet their determination in the face of adversity inspired antiwar activists to organize rallies from New York to Berkeley. In October 1966, army doctor Captain Howard Levy was similarly court-martialed in a much publicized case for refusing to go to Vietnam to train Green Beret (U.S. Army Special Forces) medics. Military and government officials were beginning to realize that such cases attracted considerable media attention and provided inspiration for the growing antiwar movement.¹³

Antiwar Vietnam veterans were difficult to find in the mid-sixties. Like most Americans, veterans strongly supported the president’s policy in Vietnam. Those who questioned the war remained cautious. Many were subject to recall for six years after joining the military and feared retaliation for resisting publicly. They sought examples of ex-soldiers who returned from Vietnam and became outspoken opponents of the war. One of the first and most influential Vietnam veterans to embrace antiwar activism was Donald Duncan. In September 1965, Duncan resigned from the United States Army to devote his energy to the peace movement. Duncan had an impeccable record as a soldier. His decade-long career in the army included eighteen months in Vietnam in the elite Green Berets and four medals for bravery. But, in March 1965, Duncan refused a field promotion to captain, and, in September, while under consideration for the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit (the first enlisted man in Vietnam to be nominated for the Legion of Merit), he resigned from the army. On returning to civilian life, Duncan joined the effort to end the war in Vietnam.¹⁴

Duncan used his unique status as an ex-Green Beret to legitimize his resistance to the Vietnam War. A few months after Duncan resigned from the army, Ramparts magazine, the Berkeley-based leftist monthly, named him its military editor. Duncan appeared on the cover of the February 1966 issue in full dress uniform, with a green beret crowning his head. Ironically, he bore a striking resemblance to Sergeant Barry Sadler, whose single “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was a big hit in 1966. In a piece he wrote for Ramparts, Duncan presented a thoughtful indictment of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, based on his experiences. He wrote of Special Forces officers murdering Vietnamese prisoners, documented racist attitudes within the U.S. military toward South Vietnamese allies, drew attention the growing support for Viet Cong guerrillas among peasants, and described the pain of watching his buddies die for a futile cause. “The whole thing was a lie,” he concluded. “It’s not democracy we brought to Vietnam—it’s anticommunism.… Anticommunism is a lousy substitute for democracy.”¹⁵

In addition to his duties as military editor of Ramparts, Duncan became a full-time activist, touring the country, spreading the antiwar gospel at protests, debates, college campuses, fairs, and Veterans’ Day parades and on radio and television programs. His actions, including a series of articles he wrote for the New York Times, attracted media attention. The activist David Dellinger wrote that he was “inspired” by Duncan’s “heroism” and “courageous patriotism.”¹⁶ Meanwhile, the growing antiwar spirit among the nation’s youth encouraged Duncan. “When I returned from Vietnam I was asked, ‘Do you resent young people who have never been in Vietnam, or any war, protesting it?’” Duncan wrote at the time. “On the contrary, I am relieved. I think they should be commended.”¹⁷

Other veterans joined the antiwar movement. On January 28, 1966, a group of veterans, mostly of World War II, gathered in Chicago and formally founded Veterans for Peace in Vietnam. The idea behind Vets for Peace originated at the November 27, 1965, antiwar march in Washington, where the World War II veteran Ed Bloch, wearing a faded Marine Corps uniform with a bronze star and purple heart, led a contingent of protesting veterans. “No one is better qualified than veterans to make the public aware that it is patriotic to oppose the war in Vietnam,” declared the members of the new organization.¹⁸ In the group’s first show of strength later that month, several hundred veterans of the Korean War and the two world wars led an antiwar parade of more than twenty thousand demonstrators. The organization expanded rapidly, and, within two years, it boasted thriving chapters across the country and scores of members. The ranks of Vets for Peace consisted mostly of World War II and Korean War veterans, with relatively few Vietnam veterans joining.¹⁹

By 1967, Veterans for Peace published its own newspaper, Veterans Stars and Stripes for Peace, a slick publication aimed at veterans and GIs. Veterans for Peace members kept busy. They organized rigorously, recruiting new members everywhere and attracting an impressive list of high-ranking officers, including retired Rear Admiral Arnold E. True of the United States Navy and retired U.S. Army General Hugh B. Hester. In spring 1966, Vets for Peace joined the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, the largest antiwar coalition in New York City. The blue Veterans for Peace garrison caps and “Vets for Peace” signs became familiar and increasingly widespread at demonstrations. Even the most pugnacious hawkish hecklers backed off when crowds of Veterans for Peace members, with their aging war uniforms and numerous medals, marched past. Like Donald Duncan, Veterans for Peace members used militaristic symbols (uniforms, arm stripes, medals, Armed Forces—style Vets for Peace caps, the title of their newspaper) to reinforce their opposition to the Vietnam war. Moreover, Veterans for Peace provided cohesion for vets of varied political shades. Members ran the gamut, according to the Veterans Stars and Stripes for Peace editor Donald Mosby, from “card-carrying communists” to “ultraconservatives.”²⁰

When Veterans for Peace officers learned of plans for the April 15 Spring Mobilization, they placed advertisements in the New York Times encouraging veterans to attend. It was expected to be the largest antiwar protest ever. The evening before the event, an activist created a banner with bold letters that proclaimed, “VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR!” The following morning, organizers rushed the banner to the Veterans for Peace members, hoping that Vietnam veterans would show up at the protest.²¹

Some did. One Vietnam veteran who went to the demonstration was twenty-four-year-old Jan Barry,^* who had dropped out of West Point in 1965 because of concerns about a war that “made no sense whatsoever.” Barry was working as a free-lance journalist and employee of the New York Public Library at the time of the Spring Mobilization. A few weeks before the protest, he overheard some of his fellow employees at the library, mostly students, discussing an upcoming antiwar march. The young veteran was troubled by nagging doubts about whether he should participate. While opposed to the war, Barry was not certain whether he was “prepared to go join whatever this crazy stuff was that was ‘the peace movement.’” He changed his mind after he saw a sarcastic Veterans for Peace advertisement in the New York Times inviting veterans to the demonstration. The ad featured a quotation from President Lyndon Johnson that declared, “The bombing will end when the other side is ready to take equivalent action.” Beneath the president’s quote, Veterans for Peace announced, “We appeal to North Vietnam, if they really want peace, to stop bombing the United States, or else get the hell out of Vietnam.” Barry was i...