“‘I Quit!’: The Vietnam War and the Early Antiwar Activism of Master Sergeant Donald Duncan.” Revue française d’études américaines 2/147 (2016) : 100-116. (original) (raw)

Soldiers against the war in Vietnam: The story of aboveground

Serials Review, 1991

Haines is a communication researcher who writes about film and television portrayals of the Vietnam War and veterans. He was drafted in 1969 and took part in the GI Resistance to the war in Vietnam. He lives in Sacramento, California. "Tell us about the plan to burn down barracks buildings at Fort Carson." The army intelligence officer wasn't keeping notes during the interrogation, so I figured the gray room had a microphone hidden somewhere, recording my answers. My cover was blown, and here I sat in my dress uniform, summoned to explain my role in the publication of Aboveground, an antiwar paper directed at soldiers stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. Aboveground was the brainchild of my buddies, Tom Roberts and Curt Stocker. Intelligence officers had already questioned Roberts and Stocker, and now it was my turn. A couple of my articles, written under the name "A Fort Carson GI," rested on the table. The intelligence officer sat directly across from me, and the articles were spotlighted by a single bulb that hung from the ceiling. "I need to know about the plan to set fire to the barracks," he repeated. "I don't know anything about setting fire to barracks," I said. "I understand how you feel about the war, but these barracks buildings are tinder boxes-do you realize that men could die?" "I know the buildings are very unsafe, sir." "But you won't cooperate." "As far as I know, there is no plan to set fire to anything at Fort Carson, sir." I wondered how much he knew. A few weeks earlier, somebody actually suggested that we do just that-torch a few barracks. The suggestion came from a GI during a meeting at SOLDIERS AGAINST Tim WAR IN VIETNAM-SPRING 1991

The Enduring Literary Legacy of the Vietnam War

Ed. D. Quentin Miller. American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017

The Vietnam War cast a long shadow over U. S. society and culture while it was being fought overseas, and it has cast an even longer one since it was lost over 40 years ago. The struggle over the significance of this fact and its adequate interpretation has not yet ceased. The initial reaction after the fall of Saigon in 1975 was one of collective shock, trauma, denial, and deferral; for several years, Vietnam was neither a topic for discussion nor for academic research. It was swept under the carpet, together with the veterans, who were – more or less explicitly - blamed for losing the war, stigmatized as ‘baby killers’ and drug addicts, and often generally marginalized. Only towards the end of the 1970s did the war begin to surface again in private and public discussions; they focused on a wide variety of topics and employed various approaches, yet they all, one way or other, emphasized the uniqueness of the Vietnam experience, both with regard to traditional "war stories" and to mythical American self-concepts. The 1980s witnessed what was probably the most intense discussion of the heritage of the Vietnam War and also illustrated the continuing divide in attitudes towards the lost war and those who fought it. The controversy around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D. C., in 1982, clearly showed the diverging political and ideological views of what symbolic message the monument was supposed to send. When the U.S. hostages from Iran were welcomed home with a ticker-tape parade in 1981 – a public acknowledgment that Vietnam Veterans up to that point in time had not received – veterans deeply resented this; only in 1984 were they given a bittersweet ticker-tape parade in New York, and many thought this was too little, too late. Similarly, the passing of the Amerasian Homecoming Act in 1987, giving children born from U. S. and Vietnamese parents legal U. S. citizen status, was a rather delayed acknowledgement; the arrival of about 25,000 Amerasians following this regulation made Americans aware of yet another consequence of the war that had been kept quiet for too long. In popular culture as well as in politics and academia the decade sees strong revisionist movements developing parallel to continuing critical investigations. Not until 1982 does the first scholarly U. S. study of American Vietnam War literature appeari. Differing opinions and explanations still abound, and every new military involvement of the U.S.A. abroad since 1975 has conjured up the ghosts of Vietnam. They overshadow presidential election campaigns, color the “culture wars” of the 1980s, spawn paramilitary journals like Soldier of Fortune and concomitant paramilitary groups, and have become quite pervasive in video and online games, on YouTube, and on blogs. Over 2.6 million Vietnam War veterans continue with their civil lives as best they possibly can and hold jobs across the complete spectrum of professions. Many of them, and with them their families, are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), trying to come to terms with an experience that includes youthful idealism turned into disillusion, anger, and frustration.

Dissent as Therapy: The Case of the Veterans of the American War in Vietnam

Most of the fiction that was produced by soldier-writers after the American War in Vietnam has been characterized as therapeutic, with its main objective understood to be healing the wounds caused by the traumatic experience of war. This approach has tended to individualize the experience of particular soldier-writers and to conceive of their fiction as a substitute for psychoanalytic therapy, hence cancelling, in the same maneuver, its political agency. By emphasizing the individual process of overcoming "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," the critical work analyzing the production of these authors has, intentionally or not, obscured the larger political project by which these writers were literally putting their bodies on the line. In their physical and psychological fragmentation, those bodies became the locus of the struggle to establish a new definition of national identity, at a time when the concept had become unstable to say the least. The aim of this article is to return to the fore an emphasis on the politics of dissent in the study of US Vietnam War cultural production.

The Anti-Vietnam War Movement: International Activism and the Search for World Peace

The Vietnam War provoked global controversy. What began during the early 1960s with a handful of critics expressing their opposition to a conflict largely unknown outside Southeast Asia grew into an issue driving protests around the globe – allowing protestors to become transnational in an era that augured the contemporary age of globalization. By the late 1960s opposition to the Vietnam War crossed national, class, and gender lines, not just in the United States, but internationally. This chapter argues that opposition to the Vietnam War was truly global. Opponents of the war in diverse locations shared a range of motives: some emphasized the human cost of the conflict; others rejected the American-led effort to thwart Vietnamese nationalism or challenged the draft which swept up millions of unwilling young men in a conflict that was damaging America’s global credibility and authority. Another unifying factor amongst these seemingly disparate movements was their shared understanding of a new type of citizens’ participation and democracy, and a vibrant, productive debate concerning the meaning of, and the best ways to bring about, “peace.” Conflicting meanings were ascribed to the term, ranging from peaceful calls for negotiations between the warring parties, and demands that the United States and its allies withdraw their forces from Vietnam, to provocative, often violent calls for a victory for the nationalist-communist forces.

McNamara and the civil war at home

Orbis, 1995

McNamara and the Civil War at Home by Angelo M. Codevilla T oday there is no longer any doubt: the Vietnam War was indeed a civil war-among Americans. To be sure, North Vietnam (aided by the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China) attacked and conquered South Vietnam. In the process, it set up the National Liberation Front, a puppet insurgency that foreigners so inclined took to be the main antagonist to the government of South Vietnam (and of which nothing has been heard for twenty years). But the outcome of the war never hinged on the "hearts and minds" of Vietnamese villagers caught in the crossfire. Nor did it hinge on clashes between Soviet-manufactured and American-manufactured military equipment. Rather, it hinged on struggles among Americans at home, above all on the evolution of the mentality of American elites. In short, the Vietnam War came to be less about what way of life would predominate in Southeast Asia than about who, and whose values, should rule in the United States of America. That is why, although the shooting in Vietnam stopped two decades ago, the sniping over Viemam shows no signs of abating in America. The passing of a generation, and indeed the passing of the Soviet Union, have changed neither the attitudes nor the cast of characters on either side of this American civil war. The reason is that Vietnam was only a catalyst for the revolution of mores and priorities we now call the sixties. That revolution happened above all in the hearts, minds, and habits of our liberal elites. As the revolution progressed, they drew ever sharper distinctions between their sophisticated, broad-minded, and overwhelmingly secular selves and their patriotic, dutiful, and generally religious fellow Americans-many of whom came in turn to look upon the liberals as enemies of domestic virtue and as too friendly with foreign enemies. At the height of the war, the country of Vietnam was a piece of some value-a bishop, perhaps, or a knight. Today, it is merely a pawn in the ongoing American struggle over which group's values and lifestyle are to be publicly celebrated and which are to be publicly scorned. Thus, when Robert McNamara published a book apologizing for his having been "tragically wrong" about Vietnam, he did not abandon the side he had chosen thirty years ago. Rather, his contrition was for not having cast