Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (3 page)
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Authors: The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
Tags: #History, #United States, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #20th Century, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography
Like Cuba, Vietnam was of little actual importance to the United States. But as with Cuba, Vietnam's embrace of Communism would be a serious blow to American prestige. And it was argued that if Vietnam became Communist, other nations in Asia might also fall under Soviet influence, like a tumbling row of dominoes. At first Americans gave
their wholehearted support to South Vietnam in its struggle against the Communist North Vietnamese.
But in June 1963 several Buddhist monks burned themselves to death in protest against the brutally oppressive government of South Vietnam. Suddenly Americans began to wonder what they had gotten into. Perhaps the conflict in Vietnam was more complicated than it had seemed. Exactly what sort of government was the United States supporting in South Vietnam? As President Johnson intensified America's military presence with troops and arms, the antiwar movement intensified as well. For many of the young soldiers who went to Vietnam, the experience was baffling: They went into battle without really knowing what they were fighting for.
The way this war was fought was different, too. American GIs in Vietnam were not prepared to fight against smiling villagers who hid grenades behind their backs, or an army of snipers who fired on the Americans and then quickly dissolved into the jungle greenery. The GIs were supposed to be soldiers of democracy. But it wasn't at all clear that the government of South Vietnam had much support from its own people. What the people of Vietnam seemed to want most was a future free from domination by any foreign power, even the United States, which said it was trying to help them. For lack of any other cause, many American GIs fought for their fellow soldiers.
Larry Gwin, who was born in 1941, received a Silver Star for extraordinary heroism. He described the soldier's experience in Vietnam.
I
arrived in Vietnam in July of
'65
. I landed with a group of soldiers on an airstrip just outside Saigon. Walking out of the airplane, the heat hit everyone in my entourage simultaneously, and everybody started to sweat. The roads into Saigon were dirt, and en route we passed homes which were nothing but tar paper and aluminum shacks with pigs and chickens in every yard. I thought, “This is the Third World.” After an hour and a half, the school bus crossed a bridge into the teeming capital of Saigon. There were two traffic lights, and only one was functioning, so it was absolute bedlam between the jeeps, the trucks, the taxis, the buffalo carts, and the people on bicycles. Just before we pulled into headquarters, someone smashed a bottle against the bus. This person obviously didn't care about Americans and really didn't want us there. It was my first indication that maybe our presence wasn't quite as welcome as we had been led to believe.
I was sent to a base at An Khe to prepare for the arrival of fifteen thousand troops in mid-September. The troops arrived, and by early October had constructed a defensible perimeter around the base, and then we began
our operations. On the afternoon of the fourteenth of November, we heard that the first battalion was engaged in heavy contact at a landing zone code-named X-ray in the Ia Drang Valley. My company was quickly sent in, in three waves of six helicopters each. We lifted up over the tall trees of our landing zone and we could see the clouds of smoke drifting from Chu Pong Mountain, where we were headed. I thought, “Oh, my God, we're not going to fly into that mess, are we?”
The helicopter set me down in the midst of chaos. There were air strikes against the mountain, and the
pop-pop-pop
of rounds in the air sounded like firecrackers. I saw three or four Americans huddled around a tree saying, “Get down, get down, man, they're all around us.” I had been on the ground for all of ten seconds when a fellow jumped up next to me and said, “I'm hit, sir.” Carrying our wounded guy, we dodged and weaved forward for about a hundred yards until we got to where we could see the battalion commander's post. In between there was nothing but burnt grass, where napalm had killed some people, stacks of empty ammo crates, and bent and broken weapons scattered around. There was a row of American dead covered with ponchos, but we had to spring past it and get ready to fight.
On the morning of November 17 we received orders to move to another landing zone about three miles due north. We knew there were North Vietnamese in the area. The temperature was maybe a hundred, and everybody was exhausted because we'd been awake for two days and were weighed down with our equipment. We set up in a clump of trees, waiting for the other platoons to go around and secure the area. All of a sudden we heard some shooting from the vicinity of our first platoon. After two or three single shots, the whole jungle opened up in one massive crescendo of fire. It seemed that everybody I knew and everybody behind us was firing every weapon they had. We had run into the North Vietnamese, and they had attacked us immediately.
I remember jumping up to go to a tree for some cover when the firing got bad, and as I was looking at the tree, right in front of my eyes, this chunk of wood came out at me, and I realized it was a bullet and that it had almost taken my nose off. I crunched down in the grass and ran back to where my company commander and radios were. The guys I was with were all down in the grass, hugging the dirt. Since I was lieutenant and had to know what was going on, I stuck my head
up and saw about forty North Vietnamese soldiers coming across the grass at us. All I did was say, “Here they come,” and start shooting at them. Everybody got the message and we cranked out a lot of fire, killing all the North Vietnamese. I remember those were the first men I ever killed, and I remember each one of them very distinctly. But if we hadn't killed them, they would have killed us. The Vietnamese came back that night and killed a lot of our wounded lying in the grass. Most everybody I knew was dead, and the stench of the battlefield was just unbelievable. It took us two days to clean up our dead and wounded and get us out of there.
We lost 70 percent of our men in the battle. General Westmoreland came down for Thanksgiving a week later to congratulate us on what he called our “distinguished victory,” and as he did every one of us looked around and counted our losses. We thought, “Is
that
a victory, General?”
The Battle of Thanh Son 2 in May 1966 was a turning point for me. On the morning of May 6 we attacked a village complex surrounded by trees. We didn't really know what was behind the trees, because we followed a walking artillery barrage. It wasn't
until we got to the site that we realized we had devastated a village, killing many civilians. We saw children and little kids with their legs blown off and old couples under smoking wreckage. It broke my heart, and it broke the hearts of the guys I served with. I know after we left that village, none of us could talk and none of us could look back.
There was no point during my year in Vietnam when I realized that the U.S. had made a mistake and that we shouldn't have been there. But I also know in my heart that any American soldier who went to Vietnam didn't have to stay there long before he knew that there was something wrong with our presence there, either by the look in the Vietnamese eyes or in the way that we were treating them or what we were doing in the countryside.
In 1964 Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His efforts had helped convince Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and his moving speeches had brought many white Americans to his cause. But within the black community, impatience with the white establishment was growing, as well as impatience with King's turn-the-other-cheek leadership. Now, in the mid-sixties, other voices rose up, not from the
South but from the northern ghettos, asking: Why should we strive so hard to join a white community that doesn't welcome us? Why shouldn't we embrace our own heritage? The writings and teachings of Malcolm X offered a powerful alternative to King's message.
Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little (the X was his way of refusing the name given to his ancestors by white slaveholders), turned to the teachings of the black Muslim movement for guidance. He began to describe America in a deliberately provocative way, saying that southern whites were morally superior to northerners because at least they were honest about their racism. He mocked the image of the North as free. Preaching separation of the races, he urged African Americans to use the term
black
to describe themselves instead of the then common term
Negro
. Malcolm X's speeches set off alarm bells throughout white America.
“Black power” was the motto for activists who wanted to see more dramatic change in American society. To many, “black power” could only mean a black revolution intended to destroy the white establishment. With riots erupting in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia, and other cities across the country, it looked as though the violent racial confrontation Americans had long feared might finally come. When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, his followers picked up his banner and carried it onward.
Kwame Turé, whose original name was Stokely Carmichael, was born in 1941. His experience demonstrated why Malcolm X found so many willing listeners.
I
was with the first group to take trains from New Orleans as part of the Freedom Rides in 1961. It was a rough ride, because we were confronted by segregationists breaking train windows at every single stop until we got to Jackson, Mississippi, where the police arrested us for refusing to leave the white waiting room. We were sent to Hinds County Jail, and then, just to increase the pressure on us, a group of us were transferred to the Parchman Penitentiary on death row. The police were beating us and torturing us every night. I respected Martin Luther King for sticking to the nonviolence under all conditions, and I believed in it as long as it was effective, but if it wasn't working, then I decided that I would be throwing blows. By the time I walked out of Parchman Penitentiary, I was prepared to carry a gun in my work.
When I was growing up in Harlem, Malcolm X was there all the time, so I knew all about him and the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X presented a clearer, more direct political analysis, stripped of sentimentality, that saw the reality of the enemy we were fighting.
Since Malcolm X aimed his message directly at African Americans, he could touch us more deeply, while Martin Luther King's message also had to speak to white society. King would say, “What we need is morality,” while Malcolm would say, “What we need is power.” To Malcolm, nonviolence just meant that you're giving your cheek left and right to a man who has no conscience. He thought we needed an eye for an eye.
Malcolm X's assassination had a profound effect on us. After his assassination in 1965, those of us who really understood him made a conscious decision to pick up Malcolm's points and to build on them. We wanted to keep his philosophy alive. We decided to go into Lowndes County, Alabama, to use the vote as a means to organize the people. There was not one single black registered to vote there in 1965, yet 80 percent of the population in the county was black.
For three months before the arrival of election day, white terrorists sent out word that if any Africans went to vote, they'd be left there for dead. In order to encourage Africans to get out and vote, we let them know that young brothers and sisters were coming, armed, from the big cities to help out. I remember the Justice Department sent somebody to see me who said, “You know,
your people are bringing in guns. What are you gonna do?” I said, “We're gonna vote.” He said, “The whites are very upset about this.” We had already decided that we would not fire the first shot, so I said, “You tell them they've got the first shot, but we're voting.” When election day came, the people turned out to vote and not one shot was fired. For the first time, black citizens of Lowndes County felt they had exercised their political rights. They began to understand the power of politics.
Like much of America, Robert Kennedy, the former attorney general and now a U.S. senator, was changing his views on many different issues: the ongoing war in Vietnam, civil rights, the growing unrest among the country's young people. More and more people looked to him to challenge President Johnson to become the Democratic candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Many people were dissatisfied with the way Johnson had led the country since JFK's death. Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota who was against the war, was running for the Democratic Party's nomination, and in March of 1968 Bobby Kennedy also entered the race. Johnson, with so much of his own party against him, decided not to run again. Excitement was high; many Americans thought their troubles
might be over if they could get another Kennedy into the White House.
But in 1968 it sometimes seemed as if every hope was destined to end in tragedy. In April Martin Luther King Jr. appeared in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers. There, on April 4, America's greatest prophet of nonviolence was shot and killed. When the news broke, violence erupted all over the country, with riots, arson, and gunfire. Though the deep anguish at King's death was heartfelt, the violence that followed was a sad tribute to a man who had dedicated his life to peaceful change.
Robert Kennedy was boarding a plane for a campaign stop in Indianapolis when he heard that King had been shot. He was scheduled to speak at a rally in Indianapolis's black ghetto, but when he arrived the chief of police told Kennedy the city could not guarantee his safety. Kennedy ignored the warning and went anyway. The crowd waiting for him did not know King had been killed. They gasped when Kennedy told them. Then he appealed to their best instincts. “You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred and a desire for revenge,” he said. “We can move in that direction as a countryâ¦. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did â¦to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed â¦with an effort to understand, with compassion and love.” While the rest of the country burned, there were no riots in Indianapolis. There people took
their grief home quietly. Two months later Bobby Kennedy, too, became the victim of an assassin's bullet.