02/18/15 – Christian Appy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our guest today is Christian Appy, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts and the author of three books about the Vietnam War, including the most recent, American Reckoning, The Vietnam War, and Our National Identity.
He's got this article at TomDispatch.com, Honor the Vietnam Veteran, Forget the War.
And you can also find it at AntiWar.com under Tom Englehart's archive name there.
Welcome to the show, Christian.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And a very important article.
Now, me, I was born right after the war was over, so I think I was raised pretty much during that era where people were taking Gerald Ford's advice, as you talk about here.
Just forget that whole thing ever happened, everybody.
There were a couple of movies that came out in the 80s, that kind of thing.
But it seems like, well, like George Carlin said, we left a few women and children alive in Vietnam, and we just haven't felt good about ourselves since.
And so people just wanted to kind of block out the story because they couldn't deny that it was a war America lost, so they just wanted to forget it.
And yet, as you explain in your article here, that's had severe consequences for how we've lived ever since.
Yeah, we really have never had anything close to a full reckoning with what we did in and to Vietnam, though we came as close as we ever have during the war itself.
By the late 60s and early 70s, I argue in this book, I think more than at any other time in our history, we began to fundamentally question this idea of American exceptionalism, which at its heart really is not simply the idea that we're superior to other countries, but that we are forever and always a force for good in the world, that we're always the good guys in history, we're always on the side of democracy and freedom.
And the heyday of American exceptionalism came really just before the Vietnam War.
It, of course, goes deep into our history, but I think one of the reasons that the movements of the 60s were so intense and so dramatic and the anti-war movement so unprecedented in its size and its diversity is that for that generation coming of age in the 50s, raised on this notion of American exceptionalism, the fundamental contradictions between what they'd been told and what was being exposed by the war was just profound, and it really did lead to this kind of national identity crisis for the good, in my mind.
I think the problem with the post-war period is that, as you alluded to, there was a kind of willful amnesia, and not only that, not only the forgetting, but a way of kind of repackaging the war to try to turn it into really an American tragedy.
So that was a way for us not to think about what happened in Vietnam, but to sort of lick our own wounds.
And you grew up in the Reagan years, I guess.
He wanted us to rebuild everything he thought had been destroyed by the war, which was our national pride, our patriotism, and most especially our power.
So that became sort of one of the new focuses of it.
That's interesting what you say about kind of the level of dissonance that the kids who'd grown up in the 50s and all the kind of leave it to beaver stuff that they were raised on versus the reality where now people are so kind of jaded that even all these wars are no more honorable than Vietnam.
Everybody pretty much knows it, but they're not nearly as upset about it.
Yeah, I think that's right.
There is a heightened level of sort of cynicism and a feeling that this war machine really has kind of a life of its own, is almost impervious to human control or any kind of fundamental change.
It is true that back in the 50s and early 60s, polls showed that an incredible majority of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing.
And by the 1970s, that had fallen to about a third, even a quarter, and it sort of stayed there since.
So, yeah, you're right.
I think Americans are fed up with all these wars, and the polls have shown that since about 2006, has wanted to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but there's nothing like the movement there was in the late 60s.
All right, now, I'm sure you have a lot of points to make about the Americanizing of the tragedy.
We were the ones who suffered the most from that, but I'd just like to highlight kind of my angle on that, of being a kid of the Reagan years and learning about Vietnam as an American tragedy, exactly as you say there, that only helps.
It's actually more effective dehumanizing propaganda for the Vietnamese and the Laotians and Cambodians and other victims of the war because it's just implicit that when there's a war where millions of people die, and yet all the grown-ups, and you're a kid, and all the grown-ups only talk about how hard it was on the Americans, and that just sort of subtly implies it's the excluded middle you're sort of left to figure out for yourself, that I guess life really is cheap over there, or at least if I'm from here, I don't need to consider the value of life over there.
All I need to know is really, even if it turns out it was a bad policy decision later on, as long as you're dressing up in green and you're killing because Uncle Sam says so, then it's not in violation of the thou shalt not kill rule.
It's not wrong.
It's not bad.
And the victims, the Vietnamese victims, I mean, they don't even enter into the equation.
So it's almost like they're not even insects.
They're just invisible.
They're born as ghosts.
Yeah.
I mean, if we had suffered the same casualties proportionate to our population, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would include about 20 million names rather than nearly 60,000.
And the other thing to keep in mind is that about half those names would be civilians, women, children, and old men.
But, yeah, to get to your point, I think that by the 1980s, the culture had kind of decided that the veterans were not only American veterans, Vietnam veterans were not only the key symbol of the war, but actually its greatest victims.
And, indeed, I think a lot of Americans, particularly younger Americans, were persuaded that the most shameful thing about the war was the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans when they came home.
Now, there's a truth to that.
I mean, I think that Vietnam veterans were treated horribly, but the chief abuser, I argue, was the government.
First for lying to them about the origins of the war, and then sending them to this faraway country where they were regarded not as liberators but as foreign invaders.
And then when they came home, not giving them the services and the support that they needed.
And corporate America also fell down by not hiring and training veterans as much as they should.
I think they were kind of scared off by this.
In the 1970s, there was a kind of media, another big corporation.
Major media often portrayed Vietnam veterans as wacko, drug-addled, and violence-prone.
So there was that.
And even the traditional veterans' organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars did not offer a welcoming hand to returning veterans.
But here's the odd thing.
I'm sure you sort of picked up on this in the 80s when you were growing up.
Many people argued that the people most responsible for the shameful treatment of Vietnam veterans were the anti-war movement.
And this idea surfaced that the anti-war protesters liked nothing more than to kind of line up at the airport and scream at returning veterans and call them baby killers and spit upon them.
So these stories are not only wildly exaggerated, but in some ways kind of wholly invented in my mind.
But it is a very good way of demonizing the entire anti-war movement and also forgetting that Vietnam veterans themselves, many of them, especially toward the end of the war, both active-duty soldiers and returning veterans were a vital part of the anti-war movement.
And toward the end of the war, actually, they were so disaffected that they were deserting in just completely unprecedented numbers, turning on their own officers, avoiding combat, sometimes flat-out mutinying.
So I honestly think that one of the reasons Nixon finally started to reduce the level of troops was that it was increasingly hard to have a real fighting force over there.
I'm sorry, I've got to stop you right here.
It's Christian Appie.
He's written some books about Vietnam.
And this one is at TomDispatch.com.
Honor the Vietnam veteran.
Forget the war.
And we'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Christian Appie about this article at TomDispatch.com and at AntiWar.com.
Honor the Vietnam veteran.
Forget the war.
And, well, we still got a lot to cover here, but where we left off, it was the mythology of hippies just lining up to spit on soldiers and call them baby killer and how that was the worst thing that happened in the entire Vietnam War.
And it's funny, Christian.
I seem to remember that there was some newspaper went and tried to go back and find any actual documented case of that happening, and they couldn't find a single one.
But on the other hand, I've met people who swear that that happened even to them or near them.
They saw it happen or something like that.
Certainly, we've all heard it a million times, even though it sort of kind of doesn't make any sense.
I mean, I guess one or two whacked out hippies somewhere who just completely have their priorities misplaced or something, screamed something.
But for crying out loud, I mean, it's not like we're talking about a different species of American.
We're talking about the same people now who 99.99999% of anti-war people don't ever take that stance, at least not publicly, to condemn the soldiers because that undermines the whole point, which is that the domino theory is a lie, dummy, et cetera, et cetera, which is the real argument, not that it's the greatest sin to join the army, which is, you know, I agree, but it's beside the point really when you're arguing the case for or against the war.
And unfortunately, I think that we've gone so far in the other direction to reflexively thank the troops for their service.
I mean, that's what we've been instructed to do now for decades.
And it's really often too often used as a club to quiet dissent.
And I also think it's a completely empty gesture that really requires nothing of us.
We can just sort of thank the troops and then go back to being completely oblivious to the wars they're fighting.
I think it would be much better to ask people that are in the service, hey, tell me about your service.
What's going on over there?
And I've interviewed hundreds of veterans over my life, and one of the things I've found regardless of the political stance of Vietnam veterans, they could vividly tell you through their own personal experience how fundamentally crazy the war was and how different it was from the way it was being justified by the policymakers.
You know, over there to protect democracy, what democracy?
This government in Saigon isn't close to being a democracy.
Protecting the people, we're just going around the country on hunting expeditions trying to build up a body count.
We're not really protecting anybody.
So, you know, they could really see through that.
I think if we talked to veterans about Iraq and Afghanistan, we'd hear a lot of similar stories.
Yeah, well, and even from soldiers who don't dissent, the first thing you'll hear is, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just a job.
You know, I've known soldiers, that's what they say about it.
They don't go, oh, you're so welcome for serving you.
Oh, boy, did I serve hard over there.
They're not like that.
They go, it's just a job.
Same as anything else only I kill people for politicians, but otherwise, you know.
So, you know, it's very hard, you know, outside of like Fox News or whatever to find soldiers who are actually on that high a horse about what they've done.
You know what I mean?
Right, right.
Even if they're not dissenters, you know.
Right.
Anyway.
So now, of course, the Pentagon has launched this commemoration of the Vietnam War.
I don't know how you can really commemorate a war that, you know, at least at the time, as I say, back in the late 60s, everyone except for a few people like Henry Kissinger thought it was an unmitigated disaster.
But sure enough, the Pentagon has, with $65 million approved by Congress, launched this 13-year-long series of events.
And you can go to their website and it lists the goals.
And the number one goal of this commemoration of the Vietnam War is to, and you could predict this, thank Vietnam veterans, honor Vietnam veterans for their service and sacrifice.
That's number one goal.
Number two, honor those people on the home front who supported the war.
Obviously, no commemoration of the anti-war movement.
And maybe the most bizarre of all, the third goal is to honor and recognize the contributions to science and medicine that the war brought us.
Plus, it was great for the tombstone industry, too.
Or that or the improved forms of napalm and cluster bombs.
And of course, working with paraplegics and that sort of thing.
Well, let's talk about the cluster bombs for a minute.
There's a great documentary called Bombies about, and I think it's mostly about Laos.
But this is a history all through, you know, ever since that war, all through and ever since in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, where there are, I don't know, I think last I heard it was 600 and something people killed every year on average.
By these undetonated, not quite dud, bomblets.
The bombies, they call them.
And then, of course, the Agent Orange.
We always hear about Agent Orange disease in terms of the American GIs.
But what about all the people who got to live there?
How many of them have died of bladder cancer since?
Yeah, the cluster bombs are classic anti-personnel weapons.
They're designed not to destroy structures, but only to kill and maim people.
They're dropped in a big bomb.
And then once that big bomb explodes, hundreds of sort of baseball size bomblets, those little bombies, they explode.
And they then shoot out in every direction hundreds of little steel pellets or what they finally developed are these dart-like, they call them flechettes, made out of fiberglass, which made them undetectable by x-rays.
Not that the Vietnamese had many x-ray machines, but they would burrow into your body and not necessarily kill you, but create great suffering and require other people to take care of you.
And then, as you say, a significant percentage of those little bombs didn't explode.
So that even decades, right to the present day, a farmer might run into one or a kid might find one and pick it up and be terribly wounded or even killed.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed since the war by unexploded ordnance.
There is actually a big effort to try to clean it up.
There's an extraordinary Vietnam veteran named Chuck Searcy who's been working with lots of Vietnamese, has lived in Hanoi for decades.
And he runs something called Project Renew, which is worth supporting because they are really trying to find these things and get rid of them.
Yeah, it's a heroic effort.
And, you know, if there's an actual legitimate use for the U.S. Army at all, it might be go back to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in force to go clean up the mess that they left behind.
And, you know, maybe stop by Fallujah, too, although I don't know about that one.
Yeah, well, you know, a lot of Vietnam veterans have done just that.
It's kind of an unknown history of genuine efforts to reconcile with former enemies and do all kinds of cultural exchanges and, you know, setting up medical clinics and things.
So if anything positive has come out of the war, you know, that may be it.
And can you talk about the effect of Agent Orange and Red and Blue and the rest of the chemical warfare?
Yeah, we started dropping chemical defoliant as early as 1962.
And it's worth remembering that we dropped them on South Vietnam.
That was that was the country we claimed to be defending and protecting.
I just add to that we actually bombed dropped four times more bombs on South Vietnam than we dropped on North Vietnam.
Four million tons, making South Vietnam by far the most bombed country in world history.
But the defoliants were designed to to destroy trees and therefore to destroy the hiding places, the cover of the communist led insurgents in the south, these southern guerrillas that we call the Viet Cong.
And it contained dioxin, which is one of the most toxic substance that we've ever created.
And, yeah, it gets into the water, into the food system and into the bodies of people.
And while the science of it is still not completely agreed upon, it clearly has been the cause of everything from birth defects to certain kinds of cancer to sort of even milder things like terrible skin rashes and things like that.
But it's horrific.
We finally stopped it, you know, but not until nearly just before the end of the war.
So, yeah.
Now, your article, Christian, to wrap up here, we're about out of time, actually.
Well, it's a it's a kind of real quick yes, no sort of a question.
You start your article about the kids that take your class.
And when you tell them about Vietnam, I'm curious whether they think you're a damn liar or what.
Can they even believe that this stuff is true as bad as it is when they've grown up completely without this story?
Yeah, I think many do.
I actually think that there's a generation that is very curious about this.
They thought they don't know much, but they know they don't know much.
And therefore, they're a lot more curious than you might imagine and actually shockable.
They can be stunned.
All right.
That's Christian app.
He's at Tom Dispatch dot com.
Honor the Vietnam veteran.
Forget the war.
Thanks so much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
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