Ep 3 : GI Resistance During the Vietnam War

Willa Seidenberg  00:06
Hello and welcome to A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. 

Music: Fixin’ To Die Rag, Country Joe McDonald 00:12

Willa Seidenberg  00:39
I’m Willa Seidenberg.

William Short  00:40
And I’m Bill Short. In this episode, you’ll hear how misunderstandings, government lies, and Cold War politics led to the disastrous U.S. war in Vietnam.

Willa Seidenberg  00:58
If you don’t know much about the war in Vietnam, this episode will give you some important background about how we got into the war and how it was waged.

William Short  01:21
That’s Vietnam in 1989, the first trip I made back to Vietnam since I had been a soldier there 20 years before. At the time, the U.S. still had a trade embargo against Vietnam and no diplomatic relations. Most Vietnamese thought I was a Russian. They couldn’t imagine an American being in Vietnam that early.

Willa Seidenberg  01:44
And because the U.S. and Vietnam didn’t have diplomatic relations, we couldn’t even make a phone call to Vietnam. So, during the weeks that Bill was in Vietnam, I had absolutely no contact with him, And, once the two countries re-established diplomatic relations in 1995, many more veterans started going to Vietnam. Sometimes they just wanted to experience the culture of Vietnam rather than only know it as a place of war.

William Short  02:14
And they want full closure by going back to Vietnam to know and understand the people they may have fought against. 

(02:40) In 1969 after being court martialed for refusing to continue on combat operations, two U.S. military policemen drove me by jeep to the stockade in Long Binh. My base camp was about 40 miles from the stockade. As a Jeep drove through the countryside, I saw for the first time the small villages that Vietnamese people lived in. I hadn’t seen that before, because everywhere I fought was considered what we called a free fire zone, meaning the forest, the jungle, the Michelin rubber plantation I worked in, if anything moved, you shot it. We didn’t check IDs. We didn’t stop people to interrogate them. It was assumed that everybody in that area was enemy soldier. So I didn’t really meet Vietnamese firsthand, like some GIs did by patrolling local towns and villages. Seeing the people in the villages for the first time up close was shocking to me, the destruction and the poor condition that all of the Vietnamese people were living in really hit me hard. It was at that point that I decided that at some time in the future, I didn’t know how or when, but at some point, I wanted to come back to Vietnam to make amends for what I had done in taking part in the war against the Vietnamese.

Willa Seidenberg  04:04
Yeah, I remember how much you wanted to get back to Vietnam to make good on that promise. And you got that opportunity exactly 20 years after you’d been a soldier.

William Short  04:14
That first trip back in 1989 was with Boston artist C. David Thomas. David started the Indochina Arts Project as a way to have dialog between Vietnam and the United States through the arts. We hoped the exchange would encourage the United States to end the trade embargo against Vietnam. I went back again in 1990 with David to wrap up the selection of Vietnamese artists for our exhibition As Seen by Both Sides. In 1991 I made a solo trip to Vietnam to photograph the country. I met many Vietnamese war veterans and people who had fought in other ways against the U.S.

Willa Seidenberg  04:57
We started going together to Vietnam in 1993. We made three trips to interview and photograph the Vietnamese who were once considered America’s enemy. We interviewed 90 people all the way from the Chinese border in the north to the Mekong Delta in the south. We heard some absolutely incredible stories of soldiers, political prisoners, doctors, student activists, journalists and politicians, as well as families who suffered from the U.S. bombings. People are surprised when they go to Vietnam that the Vietnamese welcome Americans and particularly combat veterans. 

William Short  05:43
Yeah, when I first met Vietnamese, they’d say, “Oh, how wonderful. You’re an American coming back to Vietnam, we should get together and talk and have tea.” Then I would tell them that I had been a soldier. They’d say, “Oh, you were a soldier. In that case, maybe we should get together and drink some beer.” And then I would fess up and tell them, “Well, I was actually in combat here in Vietnam,” there’d be kind of a long pause, and then they would look at me and say, “In that case, we should drink whiskey.”

Willa Seidenberg  06:11
Yeah, I remember you had to drink a lot of whiskey and do a lot of toasts.

William Short  06:17
And a lot of beer.

Willa Seidenberg  06:18
And a lot of beer. The stories of hardship and survival we heard from the Vietnamese were extraordinary. We even got to interview the singer songwriter Trinh Cong Son, known as the Bob Dylan of Vietnam.

Music: Nối vòng tay lớn, Trinh Cong Son  06:34

William Short  06:47
This song of his is about the unity of the Vietnamese people. Here are the words to what you just heard: The cities are united with faraway villages. The dead are united with the living. We are united with each other by the smiles on our lips. Another person we interviewed was Nguyen Khuyen. He was the editor of the largest English-language newspaper in Vietnam. We spoke to him in 1993 in the busy offices of Vietnam News. 

Nguyen Khuyen  07:28
You see myself, I have seen four wars in my life.

William Short  07:33
Khuyen told us, as a Vietnamese citizen, born in 1936 his life had been full of wars — with Japan, France, the United States and Cambodia.

Nguyen Khuyen  07:43
So the main line of my thinking is people should be left alone to lead their own lives. 

Chris Appy  08:08
One way of thinking about Vietnamese history is that it was a kind of two-thousand-year-long quest for nationhood and independence.

Willa Seidenberg  08:19
That’s Chris Appy, who you heard in the first episode. He’s a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and the director of the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy.

Chris Appy  08:32
They had been ruled for more than a thousand years by the Chinese. They had been invaded by the Mongols, re-invaded by the Chinese. French imperialists arrived in force in the 19th century, then ruled the country for some 80 years, and throughout this whole long history, the great heroes and legends of Vietnamese history really all focused on this long effort to rid the country of foreign rule and to establish genuine independence. 

Music: Liberation March. 09:08

Chris Appy  09:29
The Americans when they arrived, first in support of the French, mostly with money and arms and not so much personnel. But then in the mid ’50s, with more and more American advisors and eventually ground troops. In the ’60s, the Vietnamese, by and large, perceived the Americans as part of this much longer history of foreign intrusion in the effort to dominate their country, whereas American policymakers were always climbing to the public that we were arriving in Vietnam with clean hands, without the taint of colonialism that had made the French presence there so distasteful to so many. They thought that we would be greeted as liberators people who would bring them the blessings of democracy and self-determination.

Willa Seidenberg  10:41
GIs that were sent to Vietnam quickly realized the American military did not respect the Vietnamese or their culture. Paul Cox was a Marine who was stationed in Vietnam. 

Paul Cox  10:53
These people had been on this land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The same family would have been on the same plot of land for many, many, many generations, and their ancestors were buried there. I mean, as little as I understood, I knew, Buddhists cared a lot about their ancestry, and taking care of the graves is an important thing. And then we treated them with no respect.

William Short  11:14
That lack of respect was obvious to me. Soon after I arrived in Vietnam, we were practicing shooting M-79 grenade launchers and our practice targets were Buddhist gravestones. That was a shock to me. I grew up in a family that respected the memory of the dead and blasting away at gravestones seemed sacrilegious to me. I told the sergeant who was running the operation that I thought this was all extremely disrespectful. He told me, “Well, it’s just gook shit. Why should you worry about it?” I responded that I refused to fire at those gravestones. So he said, “Okay, just fire in the empty field and we’ll call it a day.” 

Chris Appy  12:03
Many Americans believe that there had been a regional split in Vietnam that was kind of historic. The Vietnamese themselves regarded themselves as a single country.

Nguyen Khuyen  12:13
Long before the French arrived, we had been one country. Any partition was only artificial. We speak the same language. We could not leave the job unfinished, no, because we had paid great prices in terms of lives. Just one thing, independence and reunification of the country

Chris Appy  12:46
In 1945 at the end of World War II, the Vietnamese had enjoyed a brief moment of national independence. The United States had actually briefly allied itself with the Vietnamese struggle against the Japanese which took over Vietnam, as it did almost all of the Pacific Asia region, and Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. The United States did not recognize that independence, but instead supported the French reconquest of Indochina, and that after an eight-year bloody war, failed that effort to seize and retain its colony at the famous Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Archival News Report:  13:37

Nguyen Khuyen  13:44
I had my own visit for liking to see the French defeated. Because when I was in primary school, my friends and I used to fight French children, and we like it to meet those French children. So I like growing up French being defeated as well. 

Chris Appy  14:05
It was at that moment that a conference was being held in Geneva that took up the issue of what to do about Vietnam with the French surrender. 

Archival News Report:  14:18

Chris Appy  14:27
One might have thought that since the Viet Minh, which stands for the League of Vietnamese Independence, certainly fully deserved to have governance over all of Vietnam, but the great powers decided otherwise. Even the Soviet Union and China were afraid that the United States might enter militarily, and they were seeking a sort of more peaceful coexistence at that moment with the United States, so they agreed with this Western idea of temporarily dividing Vietnam north and south.

Archival News Report   15:05

Willa Seidenberg  15:09
And the South came under the control of Ngo Dinh Diem.

Archival News Report:  15:13

Willa Seidenberg   15:18
Diem was backed by the CIA, which helped him lead a propaganda campaign to convince Catholics in the north that they would face religious persecution by the communists if they stayed. And so between six and 800,000 people migrated from the north to the south. Diem and the United States hoped it would give him an edge in upcoming elections.

Chris Appy  15:44
The key principle established at Geneva was that in two years’ time, that temporary division would end and there would be a nationwide election to vote for a single government of Vietnam. That election was never held because the government in South Vietnam, backed by the United States, and with the blessing of the United States, decided, not to hold those elections, convinced, as they were, that if a free and fair election were conducted, and there’s every sign that it would have been free and fair, because it would have been overseen by an international commission, that had that election been held, Ho Chi Minh would have won overwhelmingly. Ho Chi Minh, first and foremost, was a great Vietnamese patriot. One of his aliases. Nguyen Ai Quac means Nguyen the Patriot. 

Music: The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh, Ewan MacColl with the London Critics Group   16:37

Chris Appy  17:00
In that brief moment of Vietnamese independence at the end of World War II, Ho Chi Minh sent various messages to the Truman administration, seven in all, asking the President of the United States to make good on the promises of the Atlantic Charter. 

Archival News Report  17:15

Willa Seidenberg  17:26
The Atlantic Charter was an agreement signed in 1941 by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It supported the right of occupied peoples to choose their own government. Now, FDR was sympathetic to the Vietnamese quest for independence, but his successor, Harry Truman, didn’t even respond to any of Ho Chi Minh messages.

Chris Appy  17:53
And made clear through his actions, one of which was almost immediately to use merchant marine ships to ferry French soldiers back to Saigon in 1946 and then by 1950 the United States was beginning to give massive military and financial help to the French.

Willa Seidenberg  18:15
Can you talk a little bit about the Kennedy years? Because that’s really when we attribute the origins of our involvement in Vietnam.

Chris Appy  18:26
When John Kennedy was a senator in 1954 he actually made a moving speech in Congress saying that it would be a really horrible mistake for the United States to intervene directly to try to save the French.

Archival audio: John F. Kennedy  18:43
I therefore believe that before the United States moves in in any degree, that independence must be granted to the people, that the people must support the struggle. Because unless, as I said, that support is forthcoming, any intervention by the United States bound to be futile. 

Chris Appy  18:58
But when he became president, like so many officials, he thought Americans could do it better than the French, and he also believed that if Vietnam did become a communist nation, his political reputation would be so tainted he would not be able to win reelection. It had not been so much time before his presidency that Democrats were blamed for losing China in 1949 because of the Chinese revolution. So during his presidency, he stepped up the number of American military personnel from 400 to 16,000.

Archival audio: President John F. Kennedy  19:42
We are out there on training and on transportation, and we are assisting in every way we properly can, the people of South Vietnam, who were the greatest courage and with the under under danger, are attempting to maintain their freedom.  

Chris Appy  19:59
While he claimed publicly that they were there just as advisors and not engaged in combat, they were, in fact, went out on military operations. They were American pilots dropping napalm and bombs on South Vietnam. Kennedy also initiated the use of chemical defoliants. He also inaugurated the forced displacement of thousands and eventually millions of Vietnamese from the countryside into what were called then strategic hamlets, where it was thought the government could keep an eye on these people and prevent them from joining the guerrillas out in the countryside. It largely did the opposite. It so alienated and antagonized the people who had been thrown off their ancestral land that they were all the more likely to join the insurrection against the American-backed governments.

William Short  20:54
We’re going to pause here to give you some important terms. When Vietnam was split at the 17th parallel, the NVA, or North Vietnamese Army, became the official standing army of the communist-backed north the National Liberation Front, or NLF, operated in the South, but was allied with the North. Americans often referred to the NLF guerrilla fighters as the Viet Cong, which basically means Vietnamese communists. Initially it was considered a derogatory nickname, but over time, all sides adopted its use. The Americans were allied with the South Vietnamese government and its military force, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, usually referred to as ARVNs.

Archival News Report:  CBS News, Walter Cronkite  21:59
Here is a bulletin from CBS News in Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting. 

Willa Seidenberg  22:14
When President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22 1963 Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the reins of the presidency Just a year later, he faced reelection.

Chris Appy  22:29
Johnson was campaigning on the promise that he wanted no wider war in Vietnam and that he was not going to send American boys 10,000 miles away from home to fight a war that should be fought by Vietnamese boys. However, he was facing a hawkish opponent in Republican Barry Goldwater,

Archival Audio: Barry Goldwater  22:53
And we must make clear that until its goals of conquest are absolutely renounced and its relations with all nations tempered communism, and the governments it now controls are enemies of every man on earth who is or wants to be free.

Chris Appy  23:14
Who promised and said that he would escalate the war, and he would defeat communism in Vietnam, and accused Johnson of being weak and caving in on foreign policy. So Johnson was looking for an opportunity to demonstrate that he was tougher on communism than his opponent was accusing him. He had the perfect pretext to do that in August of 1964 when three small Vietnamese patrol boats chased after an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Archival News Report, Universal Newsreel  23:48
Swift and sure has been us retaliation for communist PT boat attacks on the high seas. This is the Maddox, one of the two destroyers that were attacked while patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, near North Vietnam. 

Chris Appy  24:01
The destroyer fired first, actually at those three advancing patrol boats and disabled them, but one of the patrol boats got off at least one torpedo which missed the destroyer, and no damage at all was done to the destroyer. No sailors were even injured. But that led Johnson to think that this might be an opportunity to attack North Vietnam briefly, to show his strength, especially after two days later, there was some evidence that maybe a second attack by Vietnamese patrol boats against another American destroyer had happened. Johnson that night. This is August 4, just before midnight, went on television and told the American people.

President Lyndon Johnson  24:45
As president and commander in chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United. State ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply. 

Chris Appy  25:12
The most important lie was that this was an unprovoked attack on the United States, and these destroyers that were out there in the Gulf of Tonkin, far from sailing innocently on international water, they were on intelligence gathering missions hoping to pick up signals that were prompted by these coastal attacks by the South Vietnamese. Johnson was not about to tell the American people about these U.S. provocations. Instead, he ordered the attack of I think it was 66 warplanes to bomb targets in North Vietnam as a necessary retaliation. But what it did lead to is Johnson going to Congress the next day and asking for a Tonkin Gulf resolution. 

President Lyndon Johnson  25:56
I have been given encouraging assurance by these leaders of both parties that such a resolution will be promptly introduced, freely and expeditiously debated and passed with overwhelming support. 

Chris Appy  26:14
It was a blank check. It was one of many examples of Congress abdicating its constitutional responsibility on decisions of where and whether the United States goes to war, that is to say, to vote up or down on a declaration of war. Johnson did not want a declaration of war because he didn’t want the debate that that would stir up, and he hoped that the ongoing violence in Vietnam would be kind of off-stage and ignored by the public so he could focus on his major priorities, which were domestic reform. And the resolution gave him an enormous bump in the polls. It was politically quite successful. 

Archival News Report   26:57
An overwhelming mandate is handed to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who becomes 36th President of the United States, the man who is thrust into Office through the hand of tragedy captures an overwhelming percentage of the popular vote. 

Willa Seidenberg  27:10
So, the Marines did land in Vietnam in 1965. When did the peace movement have its Inklings, and how did that coincide with what was happening in the war?

Chris Appy  27:22
The American Peace Movement, which would eventually become the largest, most diverse and vibrant anti-war movement in our history, was long and developing, but it wasn’t really until the deployment of the Marines in ’65 and the serious spike in not just the overall number of American troops in Vietnam, almost 200,000 by the end of 1965, but the serious rise in American casualties. It was only then that a growing number of Americans began to wonder about the war, first in kind of pragmatic terms, can it be won at what cost? Questions really began to surface in a major way in early 1968 with the Tet Offensive, which was this coordinated surprise, communist led attack against major capitals and military bases throughout South Vietnam, for which the United States and South Vietnamese military were completely unprepared, and so too was the American public.

Archival News Report  28:41
Just after midnight their time, a band of Viet Cong raiders blew up a power installation and attacked two police stations in Saigon. It all amounts to the most ambitious series of communist attacks yet mounted spreading violence into at least 10 provincial capitals. 

Chris Appy  28:55
The American public had been told throughout the prior year that the war was going well. Progress was being made. The enemy was tiring. The end of the war is in sight. Only to have this extraordinary attack for the first time, out of the countryside into major urban areas. And the communists held the city of Hue for a month.

Archival News Report: CBS News   29:21
Having to undergo heavy, small, armed mortar fires.

Willa Seidenberg  29:25
That’s Walter Cronkite reporting from the city of Hue. At that time, the CBS anchor was considered America’s most trusted news person. After Cronkite returned from Vietnam, he delivered a stunning commentary at the end of one of his broadcasts. 

Archival News Report: CBS News, Walter Cronkite  29:42
For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate, but it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

Willa Seidenberg  30:14
Here, we want to warn listeners that this next part contains graphic descriptions of massacres.

Chris Appy  30:30
One significant town in the Delta, Ben Tre, a reporter went and discovered that there were something like a thousand civilians dead and sort of stacked up on the streets of that town and asked an officer on the site what happened. And the major’s answer was, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” And that phrase became a kind of truth-telling about the contradictory nature of the entire war, that we were destroying the very country we claimed to be saving from external aggression. Those kinds of immoral objections about the war’s legitimacy and justice only intensified with further revelations, like the revelation of the My Lai massacre which happened March 16, 1968, in which 500 Vietnamese civilians, most of them women, children, babies and elderly men, were murdered by an American infantry company over a span of some four hours. 

Archival News Report   31:43
The villagers’ version of the incident was given by survivors yesterday. They said a patrol of a hundred Americans stormed into the hamlet, drove all the residents out of their huts, then opened fire with automatic weapons.

Chris Appy  31:56
The Americans on the ground in My Lai did not receive a single round of hostile gunfire. Moreover, the American military covered it up until a great American whistleblower, veteran, Ron Ridenhour, came home, and while he had not been at My Lai, he knew people who had. Some 18 months after the massacre, it became a front-page story all over the world with graphic, horrifying photographs that had been taken on the scene by an army photographer.

William Short  32:31
That army photographer was Ronald Haeberle. He went there to take photos of what he thought was going to be fighting between soldiers of the 23rd Infantry Division and a Viet Cong battalion. When he landed, Ron says he heard lots of outgoing firing, but no enemy incoming fire. 

Ronald Haeberle  32:50
Walking down through the rice paddies, I happened to notice a whole group of people that were under guard. They were guarded by about two or three soldiers, so I figured they’re gonna hold the people there for questioning. So walked a few more steps onward, and all of a sudden, I started hearing firing. Looked over my left shoulder, and there are people getting up, running away, that soldiers were firing into the group of people. There were civilians. They weren’t the enemy. It was just complete carnage going on there. Everything was being wiped out — old men, women, children, babies, pregnant women. It’s just amazing what happened there.  [unintelligble] what was going on, every place we go through the village, all we’re doing is finding bodies all over the place. 

Music:  The Ballad of My Lai, Matt McKinney  33:32

Ronald Haeberle  34:04
I would be here today if I tried to stop it, believe me. A lot of soldiers if they they object, some objected  about doing so and didn’t even shoot, but they just kept quiet. I mean, it’s a whole different game over there. Your life is really, it’s in danger. 

William Short  34:22
Ron used his personal camera to take some color photographs of the massacre. More than a year later, and after he was discharged from the army, he gave the photos to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The images were released in newspapers and magazines, and soon the entire world knew of the carnage at My Lai. Although 12 people were charged with crimes in connection with My Lai, the only person convicted was Lieutenant William Calley.

Chris Appy  34:58
Nixon came to office as president in 1969.

Music: Nixon’s the One, Connie Francis  35:05

Chris Appy  35:18
He was savvy enough politically to understand that the American public would no longer tolerate high numbers of American casualties.

William Short  35:32
In 1968, there were nearly 1,400 American soldiers killed each month, and the South Vietnamese Army was losing more than 2,300 a month.

Chris Appy  35:42
So early on in his presidency, he announced a program that became known as Vietnamization. The idea was that as the United States amped up its effort to train the South Vietnamese military and increase its numbers, it would be able to slowly lower the number of American troops. 

Archival Audio: President Richard Nixon  36:05
In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace under the new orders, the primary mission of our troops is to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume the full responsibility for the security of South Vietnam.

Chris Appy  36:30
He himself remained completely dedicated to the goals of the war, to preserving this anti-communist regime. And so even as he gave the appearance of sort of lowering the lethality of the war, it was actually increasing because he was intensifying the bombing and expanding it into Cambodia. He begins the secret bombing of Cambodia within six weeks of taking office. The bombing in Laos had been going on since 1964 but he expanded it to other parts of Laos and greatly intensified it. He also intensified the bombing in South Vietnam and secretly began bombing in the north.

Willa Seidenberg  37:16
Most families in the cities in North Vietnam evacuated to the countryside so they could escape the bombing, but many people, like Nguyen Khuyen had to remain in Hanoi to do his job. 

Nguyen Khuyen  37:30
It was all very eerie. I just stayed at my place of work, translating on my typewriter, just waiting for the first siren. Then we went back into this bunker and emerged again, and maybe during break, we got out into the street, but taking care to see that wherever we are heading for would be provided with manholes so that at the least sign of aircrafts coming, we could have somewhere to hide. 

Willa Seidenberg  38:10
Khuyen’s family stayed more than 30 kilometers away from Hanoi. Khuyen would bicycle out to see them at night for a very short visit. Then he’d bicycle all the way back before the bombing started in the morning. Despite these hardships, Khuyen could still laugh when he told us the story about the birth of his first daughter, who was born in a bomb shelter. 

Nguyen Khuyen  38:34
I was working, and I was told that my wife had given birth to my daughter. It was eight in the morning, and normally that was the time for bombing. So I rushed up on my bicycle, and on the way, I had to duck into shelters two times because two air raids had been going on in succession. And when I came to the maternity home, a nurse came up, and I was directed to a bunker, and I found my wife and daughter. I praised myself for my ability of keeping intact a bouquet of white roses for my wlfe and daughter, despite the two times I had to duck into the shelter,

Chris Appy  39:39
The American direct role in the war ended in January of 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which called for a standstill cease fire in Vietnam and the return of American POWs and allowed the government in South Vietnam that the United States had supported to remain in place, with the provision that it would be followed soon by a coalition government. But the advance in 1975 of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong turned into an extraordinary rout, and the troops of South Vietnam were shedding their military uniforms and boots, and the tanks from the North were just roaring down and surrounding the capital. So by early 1975 it was over, except that the American ambassador, Graham Martin, was so delusional that he wouldn’t order an orderly and timely evacuation until the very, very last minute, in which the only way out was, you know, via helicopter from the American Embassy and various safe houses around Saigon.

Archival News Report  41:02
As evening approached, Ambassador Martin emerged to join the others in making the flight to an American aircraft carrier some 40 miles offshore.

William Short  41:15
Americans call April 30, 1975 the fall of Saigon. The Vietnamese call it the liberation of Saigon, which they later renamed Ho Chi Minh City. So we have some current-day parallels which I think are important to acknowledge. One is the war in Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Speaker 7  41:44
Russia overnight launched its long-anticipated attack on Ukraine, striking military posts across the country.

William Short  41:51
I feel there’s a relationship between me and the Russian soldiers. I was an invader of Vietnam and the Russians are invaders of Ukraine. I sympathize greatly with those Russians who are forced to fight in Ukraine, because that’s at a greater cost of saying no than I ever faced. Likewise in Gaza, the Israelis are trying to bomb the Palestinians back to the Stone Age. Vermont Senator Peter Welch saw the same parallels when he spoke on the Senate floor. 

Senator Peter Welch  42:20
Netanyahu’s strategy in Gaza is reminiscent of that famous quote of an unnamed U.S. major in Vietnam who said it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. That’s what’s happening to Gaza. It won’t work here as it didn’t work there. 

Willa Seidenberg  42:46
Next time on A Matter of Conscience.

Donald Duncan  42:49
I mean, just knowing how patently fabricated this was, I just tried to look at a lot of things more carefully.
Howard Levy  42:57
So he just gives me the order, and I said, Good, I refuse. Now, what are you gonna do? 

Willa Seidenberg  43:02
We’ll hear the stories of Donald Duncan and Dr. Howard Levy, two of the earliest and most high-profile GI resisters. 

William Short  43:24
This podcast is independently produced with crowdsourced funds. We thank the dozens of people who donated, and you can join them by going to our website, amatterofconscience.com, you will find a glossary of terms and show notes for this episode, as well as photos. You can also hear a longer interview with Chris Appy.

Willa Seidenberg  43:45
This episode was written, edited and produced by Willa Seidenberg, along with Bill short and Polina Cherezova. Dylan Purvis is the Associate Producer. Our assistant producers are Ruben Flores and Aubrey Jones. Many thanks to Country Joe McDonald for giving us permission to use his song as our theme music. Original arrangements are by Danny Seidenberg. Sound Design by Polina Cherezova. We thank the Kazan McLean Partners Foundation for their generous support. Our fiscal sponsor is the International Documentary Association. Thanks also to Denise Abrams, Bill Belmont, Sam Short, Susan Schnall and Veterans for Peace and David Zeiger. Christian Knudsen is the web designer. And finally, our heartfelt thanks go out to all the veterans who shared their stories with us.