Vietnam

[Michael Yates <mikey+@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        The local paper has been running a series of articles on Vietnam to
mark the 25th anniversary of the ending of the war.  Today's article
featured a Vietnamese doctor, Nguyen Thi NgocToan, an expert on Agent
Orange.  Leaving a life of relative privilege in Hue, she joined her
brothers in the Viet Minh 55 years ago at the age of 15.  She began her
training in medicine in a field hospital, helping in operations
underground with little in the way of drugs and leeches clinging to her
legs.  She was at Dien Bien Phu and married her husband in a bunker
after the battle.  After the war against the French she became a mother
and a doctor.  After the war with the US began in earnest, she worked in
a hospital and began to notice the birth defects later identified as
caused by Agent Orange.  Her hospital was bombed during the infamous
Christmas bombing in 1972.  Here she also occasionally treated U.S.
prisoners of war.  (It really is offensive for people here to consider
John McCain a war hero.  Here is a man who dropped bombs on civilians,
whose life was saved by a Vietnamese peasant who risked his own life to
do so, whose injuries were treated by his enemies, and who has the nerve
to say he was tortured.  He should have been summarily executed.)

        After the war's end in 1975, Dr. Nguyen's son was killed in a train
wreck on a bridge weakened by U.S. bombing.  She was distraught but she
was comforted at a meeting by an elderly couple who lost all seven of
their children in the war.  Not long after, her husband, a famous
general in the NVA (pictured at the side of General Giap at the fall of
Saigon), died of liver cancer, probably caused by his exposure to
defoliants during the war.  Today she continues her researches into
Agent Orange and her service to the people.  Courteous and gentle, she
thinks that if the American knew about the effects of Agent Orange they
would pressure their government to do more about it.

        I first became interested in the war in Vietnam as a college
sophomore.  Two young men visited my college campus to debate the war.
They had burned their draft cards and were facing possible prosecution.
At first, I criticized them, but after listening to them, I came to
respect their decision.  As the war heated up and my high school
classmates started to come back from the war, I became more critical of
U.S. policy.  I became a full-fledged and angry opponent of the war by
graduation in 1967 and then as a graduate student.  When Lyndon Johnson
announced that he was not running for reelection, I ran out into the
street from my rooming house room and went to a bar to celebrate.  I got
into a violent argument with a soldier home on leave.  I was drafted in
my second year of graduate school.  I did not want to go, but I was not
yet a communist and did not have the courage to go to Canada or to jail,
either of which would have devastated my parents. So, I went to see a
draft counselor at the university. He was a biology professor and at
first was hostile to me because I was not a draft resister.  I appealed
my draft status and while this was pending, I finished the term. I lost
my appeal and was drafted for a second time.   Luckily my local draft
board did not draft people in the middle of a semester, so I made it to
the end of the school year in spring of 1969.(At one point, a Dean at
the college, a colonel in the Army Reserve and a gung-ho militarist
failed to send the draft board notice of my student status. A board
member who knew my grandfather called and told him that the form had to
be at the board office in 24 hours.  My parents could not reach me
because I was at a friend's after a night of dope smoking and drinking.
They called the Economics Department and spoke to the Department
Secretary.  This wonderful woman hired a taxi to deliver the Dean's form
60 miles to the draft office.  Maybe she saved my life.) The biology
professor then helped me to file a class action suit against the draft
on behalf of all graduate students.  I remember typing the brief myself
to save money.  The draft board then reclassified me and gave me back my
appeal rights.  I appealed again, lost again, and was drafted a third
time.  I was scheduled to go to Fort Jackson in South Carolina.  My
academic advisor suggested I try to get a teaching job and get a
deferment that way.  I thought this would be impossible because I did
not even have an MA yet.  However, fate smiled on me and I got a job at
a branch campus of my university.  They were as desperate for a teacher
as I was for a job.  I told them I could teach anything and I lied about
the MA. They hired me for a pittance, but at lest I did not have to go
to war.

        As a new teacher, I used my classroom wherever possible to propagandize
against the war.  I read everything I could about Vietnam.  I came to
see the Vietnamese liberation fighters as truly heroic.  I read that the
Vietnamese still honor two sisters who led a struggle against the
Chinese 1000 years ago.  I knew that the U.S. could never defeat such a
people.  I fervently hoped that the Vietnamese would defeat the U.S.
forces.  More than anything else the war in Vietnam moved me far to the
left and has helped to keep me there ever since.  The one thing I can
just not abide is anyone suggesting that the war protests were wrong or
apologizing for them in any way.  Or for that matter criticizing the
Vietnamese in an uncomradely way for what has happened since the war.
If I could I would personally execute Kissinger and all of the other war
criminals who maimed and slaughtered the Vietnamese people and continue
to do so.  I have had occasion to teach a number of Vietnamese
students.  I always feel shame when I see them in front of me.

        I have probably posted the following story before.  I apologize if I
have.

Michael Yates

         "Mobilization"

        For the most part, we go along living without thinking much about the
world around us.  Things just seem to happen without rhyme or reason.
My parents knew that people like themselves were not quite the same as
people who had a lot more money, but they didn't reflect very deeply as
to why this was so.  They might say "the little guy always gets it" or
"the rich get richer" or as my mother often said, "tutte matte"
[everybody's crazy].  These bits of folk wisdom help people rationalize
their circumstances, though they don't explain anything.  Naturally the
powers that be do not mind the mutterings of the poorer classes, as long
as they do not lead to any actions.  And these same powers do all  they
can to create a thick layer of fog between social reality and the
truth.  They do this through their control of and influence over the
mass media, advertising, the government, and the universities.

        Sometimes, however,  something so shocking happens that it tears away
the veil that hides the truth, exposing reality in all of its brutality
and compelling people to take action.  In my parents' generation it was
the Great Depression, which revealed the inner workings of the
"invisible hand" and showed the horrors of which the market system was
capable.  The rhetoric of individualism and free choice quickly rang
false, and working people began to organize collectively to stop their
suffering.  In my era, the Vietnam War served as the exposing agent.
The myths surrounding the origins and history of the United States came
under scrutiny, and it was revealed that our nation was not now  and
never had been the knight in shining armor it had been portrayed to be.
We saw the war on television and read about it in the mainstream media,
which despite their unwillingness to probe very deeply, still could not
hide the crimes being committed by the United States.  Our soldiers
bombed Vietnamese hospitals, assassinated civilians, and massacred
innocent villagers.  They also killed their own officers, refused to
obey orders, and deserted.  Returning soldiers told us what they had
done.  Kids from my hometown came back mentally dead and addicted to
drugs.  One marine told me how he had refused an order from his sergeant
to kill a young girl running across a field.  Another came back insane;
I remember one night when he calmly asked me to go with him to confront
and perhaps kill a guy we knew who had drugs but wouldn't give him any.
Those who studied the sordid history of the war began to take a critical
look at other aspects of U.S. history, from the American Revolution to
slavery to the labor movement to the Cold War to the oppression of
women.  They began to uncover a hidden history which they then used to
construct alternative theories of our society.  Their new knowledge
formed the basis for their escalating confrontation with the government
over the war.

        Opposition to the war was not confined to the elite private and public
universities, although it was slow to reach the backwaters of Johnstown,
Pennsylvania.  Today Johnstown is a shell of its former self, but in
1969 it was still a prosperous mill town.  Townspeople, including most
workers, were conservative and patriotic, and this was true also of the
campus community.  In 1970 I was asked to attend a meeting of
supervisors from the Bethlehem Steel plant in which they were discussing
civil rights legislation.  What a band of bigots!  They believed that
black people were being given special advantages by the new laws.  I got
into an argument within 30 minutes.  One man asked me if SDS [Students
for a Democratic Society-an important radical student group] was
agitating on campus.  I said that I could only wish that they were,
which did not endear me to the group.  All that our campus had managed
was a peaceful demonstration against the war during the great anti-war
mobilization in the Fall of 1969.  My war veteran students were upset
that I had canceled class in support of the national protest, and I
noted with dismay that I was the only teacher who did.  Later a history
professor and former army colonel was so incensed over my anti-war
remarks to the student newspaper that he confronted me in public and
said that he had been personally insulted by my comments.  With the
arrogance of righteous youth, I suggested that perhaps the best way for
us to settle our differences was with a duel.  Some of the students who
were sympathetic to my views began to sneak radical literature into his
faculty mailbox.

        The highlights of our protest were a recitation of the names of the
U.S. soldiers killed in the war and a reading of anti-war poetry by the
Spanish instructor.  Some of the poems were in Spanish, so the teacher
had handed out mimeographed pages containing the translations.  We were
sitting on benches underneath the flagpole, a tiny minority of students
and a couple of faculty.  I remember being moved by the reading of the
names and the poems.  I had been learning about the Vietnamese, and I
grieved for their suffering and wished with all my heart that they would
defeat us as they had the French.  I hated everyone responsible for the
war, and I hoped that Johnson, Westmoreland, and all of the other war
criminals would die horrible deaths.  I yearned for the courage to run
the Vietcong flag up the pole, and I wondered why, to placate my mother,
I had not had the courage to speak against the war in the park in my
hometown.  I hardly noticed that a group of students, some of them my
own and all of them veterans, were approaching our group.  They rushed
us, grabbed the poetry translations from our hands and ripped them up.
Then just as suddenly they were gone.

        On a bulletin board in my office there is a faded and yellow newspaper
clipping.  It was taken from an old issue of the now defunct Guardian
newspaper.  The headline says in large bold letters, "Victory in
Vietnam."  My students no longer have any idea what the headline means.
But it means a great deal to me.  It honors the victory of the
Vietnamese in the war.  And I honor the Vietnamese people by keeping it
on display.  It serves as a reminder to me that this most horrible war
was my greatest teacher, for through it I came to understand the world,
including the world of work, more clearly, more radically, and, I hope,
with a more humane spirit.