Opinions

Vietnam War has a long reach -- 50-plus years and counting

The New York Times is running a series on the Vietnam War under the headline "Vietnam 67," accompanied by the brief introduction: "Historians, veterans and journalists recall 1967 in Vietnam, a year that changed the war and changed America."

Casting a year in the light of its 50th anniversary is a storytelling device. In the spring of 1967, historians, veterans and journalists could look back 50 years to 1917 as "a year that changed the war (WWI) and changed America." Some of them did. In 1967, many WWI veterans were younger than I am today.

It's unlikely that 1967 changed America or the war any more than 1966 (when 385,000 American troops were in Vietnam) or 1968 (when Richard Nixon was elected president).

I arrived in upstate New York as an Ithaca College freshman in the fall of 1963, expecting to graduate in 1967, which I did. While change was underway for me, the election of young, dynamic John F. Kennedy in 1960 had not changed the country as much as President Kennedy's admirers predicted.

The early '60s were in good measure a continuation of the '50s, especially in foreign policy, where World War II cast a long shadow. The danger of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which had threatened the world since the late 1940s, was Kennedy's foremost international concern as it has been for his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis vividly illustrated the danger.

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At the beginning of 1962, while the missile crisis took shape, the United States had about 3,200 advisers in South Vietnam and the American dead had barely crept into double digits. Several of the younger, exceptionally talented advisers still would be in Vietnam 10 years later, something neither they nor their countrymen could have imagined.

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When South Vietnamese Buddhists rioted against the repressive government of Ngo Dinh Diem during the summer of 1963, southeast Asia was down the list of American foreign policy concerns. It was still down the list in early November 1963 when a bloody military coup, which Kennedy approved, overthrew Diem.

At home, JFK faced the same domestic challenges as Ike, particularly segregation, racial discrimination and the presence of 40 million or more Americans, black and white, mired in poverty whom activist author Michael Harrington sympathetically described in his best-seller "The Other America," a short book the president and Washington policymakers read and discussed, sometimes in embarrassment, sometimes in shame, as they pondered constructive action.

Popular culture, which consumed far more of Americans' time and money than politics, had yet to emerge from the shadow of the '50s. In 1963, the list of recording artists with hits included numerous '50s stars — Tony Bennett, Al Martino, Brenda Lee, Nat King Cole among others. It would be awhile before Jimi Hendrix could be heard demanding "Is this tomorrow or just the end of time?" as he ripped through "Purple Haze."

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The Berkeley free speech demonstrations, which also were a protest against the conformity capitalistic institutions imposed on mass society, did not occur until late 1964, about the same time as Sam Cooke's moving "A Change is Gonna Come," was recorded and released.

A change did come, and for me it came to my reading habits after the Vietnam War began appearing on the front page of newspapers. I started reading about "the domino theory," a brilliantly incisive if flawed metaphor that warned Americans the United States could lose Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand to communism — as China had been lost in the late '40s.

Yes, I still dug into the texts professors assigned: The poetry of Alexander Pope, the prose of Samuel Johnson, the musings of philosopher Arnold Schopenhauer and the social analysis of 19th-century Russian radical Alexander Herzen. But I made time for critics of the war. My reading list included I.F. Stone, Bernard Fall, Norman Mailer, various Catholic Worker essayists, and the frustrated, retired generals and admirals who had concluded the war could not be won as the Johnson administration was fighting it.

I soon drifted into dorm room debates about the war and the draft, teach-ins featuring prominent experts on Southeast Asia and former advisers to the Vietnamese government, anti-war mobilizations and marches (including a march in Manhattan during which a red-faced man on the sidewalk screamed at a woman with a toddler just ahead of me on Broadway: "Your kid looks like he's hopped up on LSD" — a twofer that allowed the screamer to condemn both anti-war activism and drug use.)

Correspondence with my dad, who was in Fairbanks, didn't change me, but it did confirm what I had begun to think about Vietnam. Fabian, a World War II vet, believed our involvement in Southeast Asia was a catastrophe in the making. At one point he wrote to me — on the back of a football betting sheet from the Horseshoe Cigar Store — "You one of them revoltin' students William F. Buckley is complaining about? I sure hope so."

I was a fortunate son, reading about the war, demonstrating against the war, receiving my father's support — and not fighting the war.

"A feeling is widely and strongly held that 'the Establishment' is out of its mind … that we are trying to impose some U.S. image on distant peoples we cannot understand, and that we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths. Related to this feeling is the increased polarization taking place … with seeds of the worst split in our people in more than a century."
— John McNaughton, assistant to Robert McNamara, as quoted by Stanley Karnow in "Vietnam: A History"

By the time I received my sheepskin, I was cynical about my former hero Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had brought liberalism with a big L to the White House after trouncing Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Cynical enough to laugh when Johnson was caricatured by the left-wing press as that deranged prisoner of the Pentagon, Loony Bins Johnson.

A friend of mine, who covered his car with "All The Way With LBJ" bumper stickers during the '64 election, maintained hope for Johnson. My friend was convinced that if he and I broke into the White House and smoked marijuana with the commander in chief, the biggest change of all was gonna come. While press secretary Bill Moyers stared at the leader of the free world — and us — in disbelief, the president, joint in hand, would look pensively out the window as he conceded, "You boys are on to something." Then he would pick up the telephone and tell Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to pass the word through the American chain of command. "Uncle Sam is done napalming rice paddies. Put the war machine in reverse. Tell Saigon we're going home."

My friend and I had succumbed to a fantasy, one we didn't play out. Johnson, McNamara and most of the elected and unelected rulers of our country had succumbed to a fantasy, buttressed by hubris, they did play out — if they imposed enough military force, advanced technology and willpower on the Vietnamese communists, unequivocal victory would be theirs.

By the spring of 1967, as I began to take the last of my final exams, close to 500,000 American troops were in Vietnam, and Gen. William Westmoreland, the highest-ranking military man on the ground, was asking McNamara for an "Optimum Force" of 678,000 troops to destroy the enemy. By this time, 11,000 Americans had been killed.

I can see the faces of the four men I knew who died in Vietnam.

Two attended Lathrop High School in Fairbanks with me, one was a teammate on an American Legion baseball team and one I met in the spring of 1968 on a beach near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He was a tall, handsome, good-humored officer dating a girl I knew at Ithaca College.

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He was about to ship out for Vietnam, bidding farewell to his sweetheart. When the war entered the conversation, he smiled and looked into the distance.

A month later, he was dead.

Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@alaskadispatch.com.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com. 

Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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