Chapter 6:   A Common Language

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The `54 communist victory in northern Vietnam, coming as it did on the heels of a UN/Sino-Soviet standoff in Korea, highlighted their threat to freedom in the Far East. Our effort to stop them in the name of freedom highlighted the hypocrisy of our repressive practices, like the laws and customs that kept African-Americans "in their place," on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Our fights abroad for freedom in the abstract therefore served as a driving force for concrete change at home. But the principle of freedom that we were defending with our commitment to South Vietnam would have lost its meaning everywhere if it was lost in Vietnam.

Sure enough, when our pledge to the security of that fledgling democracy became "a war and peace issue" which wiped South Vietnam from the map, the principle of freedom went with it. To characterize our war effort as a mindless adventure was to relegate the principle of freedom in JFK’s inaugural address to mindless rhetoric. Since it was so characterized by the moderators of the Vietnam debate who survived South Vietnam’s demise, the intellectual framework for discussing our responsibility for the defense of liberty in general no longer existed.

In other words, the language of the debate that won the war for a police state in Indochina, killed all honest public discourse in America on fighting oppression anywhere. In that now familiar language of words and pictures, freedom was what Hanoi, "the legitimate government of Vietnam," fought for, freedom from foreign interference in Vietnam’s affairs. By logical extension, the North’s invasion of the South across the DMZ and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia could not have been called, "foreign aggression." Allied attempts to stop them could be.

So labeled by American doves was Operation Dewey Canyon, the last ARVN/American raid on an NVA supply base in Laos. Because of the heavy ARVN losses and their disorderly extraction under fire, it was also labeled a fiasco by our media-before anyone learned what it accomplished. Dewey Canyon delayed the full-scale communist offensive that many of us in the field were expecting that spring until the following spring. If the doves had gotten their way, there would have been no raid in Laos and far fewer allied troops in South Vietnam would have lived to see the Easter of 1971.

Little note was ever taken of Saigon’s 70,000 non-American allies who were in South Vietnam to help repel North Vietnamese aggression against the South. Similarly, little was made of the fact that South Vietnam’s 900,000-man army did the bulk of the fighting throughout the war. That fact was further obscured by Nixon’s so-called "Vietnamization" policy, which was nothing more than a pullout of American ground forces who were no longer essential to South Vietnam’s defense. It was our command and control capabilities that required so many of us when the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, was still in disarray. The NVA’s edge in experience was offset by American ordnance and air power and the tactics that the ARVN were trained to use which relied on them to repel aggression from the North.

The idea that Hanoi could not be a foreign aggressor went back to 1959 when Ho Chi Minh began his campaign to unify Vietnam under totalitarian authority with the infiltration of troops into the South. These troops, together with the ones who stayed in the South when Vietnam was split in two, were the Viet Cong. Between `59 and `65, Hanoi ran with the line that the Viet Cong were South Vietnamese guerrillas fighting a civil war. Our bombing of their lifelines in Laos and Cambodia thereby became an extension of the argument that we had no business in Vietnam. That is, if we hadn’t been in Vietnam the Viet Cong wouldn’t have been in Laos and Cambodia.

Ho wisely denied having any of his troops in South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia when Johnson called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops in 1965. He understood, as Hitler understood, that the strategic value of a lie is not in getting people to believe it, but in getting the right people to behave as though they did. For opinion leaders strongly motivated to behave in ways that may conflict with a past, present or future reality, belief and the desire to believe are usually indistinguishable concepts. Even if a supporting pillar in the architecture of their desired belief is a lie that cannot support its weight, they will change their rationale to rebuild one that can.

When Hanoi could no longer deny the NVA presence in South Vietnam, the history of the `54 Geneva peace accords underwent a major modification in "teach-ins" against the war and in the media. We started hearing about one Vietnam, divided by the United States and the conspiracy to cancel free and fair elections that would have reunified it under Ho Chi Minh, the George Washington of Vietnamese independence. The reality of the Uniform Code of Military Justice gave way to myths of American Army commanders motivating their men to murder civilians in exchange for cheap radios. Accidental bombing victims became deliberate targets. American brutality and ARVN cowardice became the norm, and black American soldiers became witless victims and perpetrators of a racist war against other people of color.

Stars of the peace movement behaved as though they believed it all. They had to or they couldn’t call themselves peace activists any more than people who didn’t act as though they believed in the Gospels could call themselves Christians. When their facts fit their conclusions, we heard the facts. When they required adjustment, they got adjusted. When they had to be forgotten, they were forgotten. These were the substrates of the language spoken by the media in 1975 that made foreign aggression in Laos or Cambodia applicable only to the defeated and departed United States.

United Vietnam could now wage a war of genocide in Laos against the Hmong, an ethnic group who had previously been able to resist them. Had it ended there, that would have been bad enough. But how could it have ended there when the lessons of Vietnam told anyone, anywhere to do what he willed with his arms and armies as long as he didn’t threaten vital American interests directly? Indonesia could invade East Timor and do what it willed with the people of that newly independent country. Libya could do likewise to Chad, South Africa to Southwest Africa, etc. They could and did do those things with no fear that their actions could trigger a massive, sustained response by the greatest military force on earth, the American news media.

Between 1975 and `83, the idea that the left was right about Vietnam’s civil war made for strange international reporting. Argentina’s civil war got more ink and air time than all of the concurrent wars of aggression in the world combined. The tortures and disappearances engineered by its right-wing leaders got so much more press than those of Vietnam’s leaders that any attempt you made to compare them would have made you sound ridiculous.

Regardless of what the Vietnamese Communists did to prove themselves enemies of freedom, few people could challenge them without being labeled racists or fools. Unless your name was Howard K. Smith, co-anchor and commentator for ABC news, or Ben Wattenberg, ghostwriter for John F. Kennedy and occasional host of PBS specials, you couldn’t begin. None of the networks’ old hands or new hires or stars of the future, including Smith’s Vietnam veteran son, Jack, shared his views on the war. So it was with Wattenberg, who was no more a bigot or a fool than Howard K. Smith—who was no more a bigot or a fool than you.

Therein lay the tyranny of the language. How could those who didn’t know you judge your character or your capacity for rational thought except by the words you used to express yourself? If words that linked the peace movement to communist oppression were assigned exclusively to right-wing racists and fools, that’s what you would have sounded like if you tried to use them. Communication requires a common language. With the language of the debate now the language of history, there was only one message it could convey about the American role in Vietnam: The enemy was us.

Every branch of Vietnam-related subjects grew from the same trunk, and words like aggression, peace, justice, enemy, war crimes, and conscience all had meanings firmly attached to those branches. So, whatever your question or comment when Jane Fonda’s "Coming Home" and the drowning of 300 Vietnamese refugees off the coast of Malaysia put Vietnam back on the media’s speaking agenda, the reply was the same. Even the reasons for people fleeing by the tens of thousands with only a 50/50 chance of getting away got the same answer: The enemy was us.

That was supposed to be "the truth about Vietnam," which made anything else something less than true and anyone who said it something less than knowledgeable or honest. Or someone other than a person of conscience. More about "people of conscience" later. For now, I’ll just say that they were doves—the ones who would have stopped Dewey Canyon if they could have—the one’s whose nightmares about Indochina ended when mine began.

When the Vietnamese boat people stories and hints of genocide in Laos and Cambodia began to seep through the cracks of the media’s wall of silence, the smell of blood seeped into my dreams. They were variations on the same theme. Frankly, I don’t recall many of them in the detail I related in The Authorities, except for those involving National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg or Cokie Roberts, in place of my friend Jack.

The trip wires for those dreams were, in retrospect, quite apparent. What I dreamed night after night, I lived day after day. I saw and heard enough through our small window on the world outside to know that the Vietnam example of giving peace a chance was killing more people than the war did.

How anyone could doubt that it was going on defied my understanding, but the fact was, believers were rare. When I did find one, more often than not, he or she couldn’t have cared less. With rare exception, the common bond between the believers who didn’t serve in Vietnam was their bitterness that Americans had died for "those people over there."

Most of the black believers were more specific. They were bitter that black Americans died for "those people over there." They were angry at "them" for coming over here and taking jobs away from "us" and openly contemptuous of me for not caring enough about "our own." Color was again king in America. It was killing "us" in disproportionate numbers because there weren’t enough of "us" in the country with the wherewithal to fight it.

Oddly, that racist crap about not being concerned for blacks is what I got from Jack, the least racist white man I knew. I worked with him in the Ford Design Center on Oakwood Ave., across the street from Greenfield Village, from 1978 to 1980 and respected him as much as anyone I had ever met. Jack was a brilliant painter whose work reflected his own nightmares of war, social injustice, white racism and the evils of the Vietnam War he attributed to white racism. In his eyes, mass murder was one of those issues.

Any mention of wholesale killing in Vietnam pushed all of Jack’s antiwar buttons at once. You couldn’t get near the subject without going back to the war. If you said it was still going on, as I did, you were living in the past and not competent to talk about the present. To hear the experts on NPR tell it, which both of us did, the 40,000 Vietnamese troops in Laos were strictly defensive. The boat people tragedy had other explanations that led back to the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA. The NVA\Khmer Rouge attacks on each other proved the fallacy of a monolithic communist threat.

To Jack, the idea that a black man—and a Vietnam veteran at that—could be as upset as I was about what Indochinese communists might be doing to other Indochinese was a sure sign of war guilt denial.

He felt the same way about my attitude toward Jane Fonda, with whom he could find no serious fault and no rational grounds upon which anybody else could. Picturing her enemies as the media did—enemies that any tolerant, intelligent, compassionate human beings would want to claim as their own he sometimes forgot that I was one of them.

On one memorable occasion in 1979, we were smoothing the surface of a clay model Escort when he casually mentioned his admiration for Jane. The first thing I thought of when I heard her name was Dennis Hammon. Then I thought of the POWs I saw with her on TV and the MIAs like Dennis that I didn’t see. I thought of her pleas to end the bombing of people we saw through her camera crew’s lens in Hanoi and her silence as her war buddies, with no one to stop them or see them do it on TV, were exterminating others.

How many others? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? What was the civilian body count between them and the Pathet Lao they were working with in Laos? And what about their border fighting with Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge? How many civilians did they and would they kill between them to further their goals when nobody was looking?

I smelled blood stretching from Oakwood Avenue to the South China Sea. The odor nearly spun me off my feet. When I recovered, I turned to Jack and blasted his popular heroine, calling her trip to Hanoi seven years earlier a propaganda mission whose success made her an accessory to genocide.

My strong feelings were answered by his. He shook with anger at my use of the word "genocide," calling up images we shared of the war from television: tortured VC suspects, child victims of B-52 strikes half buried in rubble—victims of our attempted genocide. Peace activists like Jane who suffered so much abuse from our racist right were the only true American heroes of the war because they ended it. He was willing to concede that the new Vietnamese authorities weren’t perfect, human kind being what it was, but he could not see how they were doing anything to their people that could begin to compare with what we did.

Jack’s regard for me was as a proud father for a son whose moral values agreed with his. My attitude on this one subject genuinely confounded him. I could see it in his eyes: With all of my knowledge and experience, why couldn’t I admit that the war was a mistake and learn from it like everybody else with a brain and a conscience? Didn’t I trust him enough to know that he would forgive me for my part in it—that he already had forgiven me? How could I be so wrong about something so obviously wrong and not know it?

He put down his modeling tools, went to the sink in the back room, slapped some water on his face and returned to apologize for the way he had talked to me. He made me ashamed of how I had talked to him.

To know the man was to know how much he valued civility. One of his trademark expressions was, "civilized people can disagree without being disagreeable." In his eyes he had not behaved like a civilized man. Neither of us had. He wanted to put it right, to agree to disagree while the killing continued unchallenged, and change the subject to one that we could laugh about. Jack and I found a lot to laugh about. We were friends.

I was ashamed of how I had behaved toward him. I was ashamed of being ashamed. I couldn’t get the smell of blood out of my nostrils, and I could not agree to disagree without agreeing to let it go on and on and on... I wanted to strangle somebody and I couldn’t do that either.

When I asked in total frustration why he thought I was saying what I was about genocide in Indochina, he paused. After giving it some thought, he said, "You fought in Vietnam. When the war ended the way it did, it was probably hard for you to admit that you were wrong. I can understand that. I think you’re looking for a way to justify what you did...."

Justify what I did in Vietnam? What I did was survive. Jack could not have understood how hard it was for me to justify that.

Later that afternoon I tried talking to another Vietnam vet who I knew had seen more combat than I had. He made a joke out of it and walked away. Different people have different ways of coping with stress; maybe that was his. God knows I could have used one that day.

Unknown to the public, Vietnam veterans were doing themselves in left and right. That night before I closed my eyes to sleep, a handy firearm could have made me one of them. T’was a consummation devoutly to be wished. For in that sleep of death the nightmares I couldn’t wake up from would have been over. The down side, which left me with no real choice, was my recent responsibility of single parenthood. So the nightmares went on... and on....

To know where Jack was coming from in what he said to me, you have to understand that he was incapable of being untruthful or deliberately unkind. He was, as a point of honor, giving me an honest answer to an honest question. It was just that he had a blind spot when it came to seeing anything about Vietnam vets or Indochina that wasn’t big news in the media.

The Vietnamese slaughter of the Hmong was not big news. Delayed Stress was unheard of. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia hadn’t happened yet. Stories about the boat people had more to do with where they went than why they left-more to do with Thai pirates and Malaysian refugee camps than the Vietnamese gulag and New Economic Zones where nothing grew. Little was being said about the Khmer Rouge and next to nothing about the Pathet Lao.

If anyone could have gotten Jack to look at the little things that added up to what had to have been happening in Indochina, he would have been on my side. But I was in no position to do it and those who stood on the platforms of power from which they could were not inclined to.

You don’t find many people in one lifetime who are as intelligent, as compassionate, as tolerant, as insightful and as sensitive to issues of conscience as Jack. But the marvel of getting such people to see through their moral and intellectual blind spots is something you will not often find in one lifetime either. A talent beyond my means was needed to get him to look at evidence that pointed to a wider scope of killing in Indochina than he could see and hear through the eyes and ears of our media elite.

I made clay model cars, the same as he did. I don’t think he was ever able to look past my profession, let alone my "unreasonable" attitude toward Jane Fonda, to what I was seeing in Indochina as an event and an example of things to come. It’s no wonder my conversations with him eventually made their way into my worst dreams.

We were getting our daily news about the rapidly changing situation in Indochina from the same sources, but I was putting it together with all that I’d learned in 17 years of digging. The difference that made in our perceptions was impossible for him to calculate. He couldn’t see what I could see and I couldn’t show him as long as he refused to look at Vietnam from my point of view. We were liberal Democrats divided by a common language that made me and my position on Vietnam an irreconcilable contradiction in terms.

Jack didn’t change his point of view long enough to see mine because he couldn’t. He tried hard to make sense of my stubborn insistence that the war wasn’t over and the Vietnam example of giving peace a chance was essentially the same as the Munich example. He listened attentively, asked questions and paraphrased what he thought I was saying to see if he got it.

He never did.

Not all issues under all circumstances fall on polar ends of the line between them. Jack knew that. Yet, as soon as I said anything close to what a right-winger might have said, he responded to me as though I were a right-winger. If I said anything close to what a white racist might have said, he responded to me as though I were an Oreo—or a white racist. And when I said something close to what a fool might have said, he didn’t take the time to consider the difference there either; he responded as though I were a fool.

When you think, "close," remember: liberal and conservative, good and evil, dead and alive are closest at the point of divergence. Where you go from there is what makes the difference—180 degrees worth of difference.

Jack could never move close enough to the center of a moral dilemma to see the good and evil on both sides of the line and choose the least evil—which is what you do when you choose to fight a war. TV coverage of Vietnam included, repeated and omitted images of war and hopes of peace that he could conceptualize in no other way. The idea that television had shown him the war enabled him to recognize its power to turn people against it without recognizing that such an outcome was as much a part of the war as the outcome of a fire fight. He was, therefore, able to see television as a tool for preventing another Vietnam but not as an enemy weapon for winning one.

That was the mind-set I was up against in trying to get people like Jack to see the killing that wasn’t being shown on TV and the killing to come that couldn’t be shown until it had come. When no amount of evidence and logic could move him past a point of hopeless confusion, he urged me to write a position paper. I’ve been struggling with the language to do it ever since.

To keep this in historical perspective, you should know that I was still struggling with the language when I wrote the previous two paragraphs on the 5th of October, 1993. On that day, Somali warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid was credited with a military victory after displaying one dead and one captured American on CNN news. In a 15-hour battle with U.S. Army Rangers two days earlier, Aidid’s forces shot down two American helicopters, killed 12 American soldiers and wounded over 70 others. Six were listed as MIA and one was known to have been captured because Aidid booked him to appear, against his will, on CNN to talk about the killing of innocent civilians.

The physical injury done to Aidid’s forces was not investigated and could not be followed up on or exploited because we didn’t have enough forces under American command and control to do it. But the smiles on the faces of the people in Aidid’s camp dragging the body of a dead American soldier through the streets, attested to their psychological victory. They had every reason to be jubilant, knowing that their record of the event would be CNN’s and the debate in America about our military involvement in Somalia would be over when it hit the airwaves.

In no time, every visual news medium in the country was showing the pictures of the dead soldier and the captured one. Radio had only to mention them for everyone who had seen them once to see them again. Politicians used them to demand withdrawal of our troops, a former POW in Vietnam, chief among them. Some were asking the president, as they did in Vietnam, to admit our involvement was a failure and withdraw as quickly as possible. Some were suggesting, cynically, that we declare a victory and get out right away.

Other members of Congress and media pundits were seeking clarification of our mission. Putting aside Aidid’s murder of 24 UN peace-keepers, the 300,000 murdered Somalis and the 3,000,000 who were at risk before we stepped in to save them from Aidid and gangsters like him, they wanted to know why his arrest was so important. Some were looking at the Somalis we killed in trying to get him and asking why we hadn’t stuck to feeding the hungry. Others, looking at the hatred of Aidid’s clan toward the Americans, counted the American dead and asked, "Why did we bother to do anything?"

Somali dead, described in the media as coming in "by the truckload," were listed in the hundreds with no attempt to distinguish between soldiers and civilians. The fact that the Rangers completed their mission successfully when everything else went to hell and they should have all been killed in the attempt escaped our media’s notice. They did notice the fact that some American military planners screwed up in their intelligence gathering and planning that cost the Rangers so dearly. They noticed the capability of Aidid’s rag-tag militia to inflict heavy casualties on one of America’s finest fighting forces. When you add up what was noticed and subtract what wasn’t, you get a one-man victory over the entire American Army.

The idea that some avuncular old guy in Africa can defeat the whole United States Army sounds so stupid that you can’t get smart people to think about it. That’s what I meant by "something close to what a fool might have said," and why my argument with Jack about CNN’s first lady, Hanoi Jane, is as relevant to the future as it was to the past. Neither of us had ever heard of Mohammed Farrah Aidid. But one can reasonably assume that he had heard of Hanoi Jane and the usefulness of TV as "a tool for preventing another Vietnam." Anybody who can look at that tool from Ho Chi Minh’s point of view will see a weapon. Anybody who knows the lessons of Vietnam will know how to use it as one-even an avuncular old guy in Africa.

No Americans in their right minds want another Vietnam. All would-be Ho Chi Minhs do. That binary fact working through the dynamics of how American pollsters, politicians, pundits, GIs, ex-GIs and their families affect and are affected by the media gives the would-be "Hos" all the cards they need to win. They all know that, if they play the politician card and the pundit card well enough to get top billing on CNN, they will spark a congressional debate over "another Vietnam." When that happens, all they have to do is survive long enough for our media, their pollsters, a few anti-war combat veterans and all of the dead ones to do the rest.

The particulars vary but the pattern does not. Right now, your past is my future, so whatever is going to happen to Aidid and his followers from my point of view has already happened from yours. But we have enough of the past in common to know that thousands of Kuaities kidnapped by Saddam and tens of thousands of Iraqis murdered by him meant a lot less to the American people than welcoming our troops home. We know that the lives of 3,000,000 Somali civilians against 30 American soldiers is not as easy for Americans to accept as the possible loss of 30,000 American soldiers for a cheaper tank of gas. And what can we say about the value of Bosnian lives? There, the issue of "ethnic cleansing" vs. armies that might give ours a real fight has persuaded us that genocide is the better part of valor.

Speaking from the past (October, `93) I don’t know whether Aidid’s defeat of the United States Army was made permanent by another of our cowardly retreats under threat of American combat losses. I do know that it could have been if he played his cards right. If Saddam Hussein hadn’t been so greedy and inept and looked so bad on television compared to our military commanders, he could have won "the mother of all battles," the battle of American public opinion. He could have had Kuwait, a chemical warhead delivery system, a nuke or two and won the war against us before we knew we were in one.

Most people never figure out what war is because they think they already know. They think that it’s something they can see in progress on television without being a part of it. They think that it’s something that they cannot be a part of if they are not shooting and being shot at with something that looks like a weapon. Television and radio don’t look like weapons. Words and pictures don’t look like deadly projectiles and explosive ordnance. A language of words and pictures that directs the flow of ideas and emotions about American military power away from the moral responsibility to use it appropriately as a matter of principle does not appear to be an ambush.

The devil does, indeed, have power to assume a pleasing form. You don’t have to be an expert to know that a literal or figurative booby trap is only effective if it looks benign; the ambush you are most likely to walk into is the one that looks like the best way to go.

Working out a definition of war that took these crucial elements into account was the first thing I had to do in preparing my position paper on Vietnam. I found at the root of all wars peace terms that someone couldn’t live with, competing interests which may or may not be legitimate but could, none the less, be generically expressed as "injustice." Justice is what people fight for. Not in the abstract sense of fairness, but in the practical sense of having the power to administer a system of justice or to be "fairly" represented by one. That is the "why" of wars and why "peace" has to mean "peace terms" with the necessary application of power to enforce them.

War is a literal and figurative trial by combat between contestants with conflicting claims of justice to determine which claim will prevail.

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Copyright © 1994 by Jasper Garrison

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