Appy Interview Bonus Episode Transcript
Fri, May 23, 2025
00:00
Ruben Flores
Hello, I’m Ruben Flores, an assistant producer for A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance during the Vietnam War. We’re bringing you an extended interview with Christian Appy, who you heard in episodes one and three. Appy is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he does an excellent job of really laying the groundwork for the struggles and sentiments of Gi resistance, he’ll touch on the history of Vietnam, the quest of self governance and the ideals of American exceptionalism in the aftermath of World War Two.
00:30
Christian Appy
I grew up in just the wake of the Vietnam generation, and turned 18 the year the draft ended, and the year the final American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. But even so, I felt as the war was going on, the kind of the undertow of its moral and political pain, even though I felt quite safe from the war and lived in a community where I knew not one person who was fighting in the war, or even anyone who is deeply involved in the anti war movement. It nevertheless felt like a sharp moral turn for the worst for the country. And so when I went off to college, I actually felt a kind of moral obligation to learn things about the war that I just intuited but didn’t really have any fundamental knowledge about and that led me in graduate school to further pursue it. And I was also very interested in labor history and working class history. So it occurred to me that if I did a study of American soldiers who fought in Vietnam, that would be a kind of a working class history, and also would teach me more about the war, the actual hard realities of the war, than I would ever learn by reading official government documents or doing a kind of top down history of the war.
Bill Short
Could you give us some background on on the structure of Vietnam, the history of Vietnam prior to the French, and then go into the French involvement.
Christian Appy
One way of thinking about Vietnamese history is that it was a kind of 2000 year long quest for nationhood and independence. They had been ruled for more than 1000 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 and dominated and 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. Well, it took a long time, but there were moments of success throughout this long history, and 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 claiming 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.
Bill Short
Ho Chi Minh has always been considered a communist, but I think a lot of Vietnamese saw him more as a nationalist first and as communist or socialist second. And I know that during the end of World War Two, he actually tried to get an audience with Truman to get support from the US government to support the independence of Vietnam. Could you speak a little bit about that?
Christian Appy
Ho Chi Minh, first and foremost, was a great Vietnamese patriot. He had, as a revolutionary, many aliases, which he needed, because revolutionaries are subjected to arrest, to torture, and many died in French prisons. One of his aliases is Nguyen Ai Quoc, means “Nguyen the Patriot” and as early as World War I, as a young man, he was in Paris at that time, he was sort of traveling the world, but always focused on trying to learn ways to advance the cause of independence in Vietnam and at that time, at the end of World War I, Woodrow Wilson was gaining a lot of attention internationally in colonized countries by nationalists who believed what Wilson was saying about the right of self determination for all people was a doctrine that the West might make good on and that Wilson would advance.
05:28
As it turned out, it was really only so much rhetoric. Wilson did not believe that the colonized world of the global south as we call it today were ready for independence. He, you know, had a racist view that those people simply were not civilized enough to be granted self determination. So he was really just talking about the right for self determination among the former Austro Hungarian empire. And a very similar thing happened with the end of World War II, FDR like Wilson was advancing very attractive language about the right of self determination, especially in this document called the Atlantic Charter, which he and Winston Churchill signed in August of 1941.
06:19
It was to lay out a kind of set of ideals that might shape the postwar world. They were already imagining, of course, that victory would be inevitable, which is quite amazing, since it’s one of the darker days of World War II, even before Pearl Harbor Hitler had taken over most of Europe, the Japanese had taken over much of the Pacific. But they were imagining this inevitable victory. Well, the third principle of the Atlantic Charter calls for self determination for all countries. So 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 these cables and letters asking the President of the United States to make good on the promises of the Atlantic Charter and to recognize and support Vietnamese independence. Well, Truman didn’t even so much as respond to any of those messages, 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, so that by the end of the French Indochina War in 1954 the United States was paying for nearly 80% of the cost of that war. And when one country is paying other people to fight, we sometimes refer to the fighters as mercenaries. So in that sense, in a very real way, the French, the French Foreign Legion and the colonial fighters France sent from other French colonies like Senegal to fight against the Vietnamese revolutionaries they too were serving, as it could be said, American mercenaries.
08:16
Bill Short
I think a lot of Americans are confused. They think of Vietnam as being kind of like North Korea, South Korea, and think it is two independent countries, but in fact, it was one country. Could you explain a little bit from a historian’s point of view about the separation of the two and how it got divided?
Christian Appy
Yeah, many Americans believe that there had been a regional split in Vietnam that was kind of historic. Even Ronald Reagan famously gave a press conference in which he made the insane claim that before French colonial rule, there had been a North and a South Vietnam, Vietnam, although there had been efforts by these foreign rulers, from China through France to divide and conquer. Break it up and the French broke it up into three different pieces. The Vietnamese themselves regarded themselves as a single country. And in 1945 at the end of World War II, the Vietnamese had and 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. Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. The United States did not recognize that independence, but instead supported the French reconquest of Indochina, its Indochina colony, that after eight year bloody war, failed that effort to seize and retain its colony at the Famous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the revolutionary fighters under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and von Wen Jia surrounded this outpost and held its siege for months, and eventually the French were forced to surrender.
10:17
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. And one might have thought that since the Viet Minh, which stands for the League of Vietnamese independence, you would have thought that they had won and certainly fully deserved to have governance over all of Vietnam. They had successfully fought and defeated the French from one end of the country to the other, but the great powers decided otherwise, even the Soviet Union and China, who you might have thought, would have insisted upon the Vietnamese right to self determination and total, you know, unity and independence were afraid that the United States might enter militarily to do what the French had failed to do, 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, not into permanent countries, but into relocation zones, so that those who had sided with the French could either stay in the South or move to the South, and those who had sided with the Viet Minh independence fighters could stay in the North or move to the North if they had been fighting against the French in the South. But 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.
12:02
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. Eisenhower himself, in his own memoir, said he had intelligence reports estimating that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80% of the popular vote for a united Vietnam. So there was a democratic opportunity to really bring self determination to a single Vietnam in 1954.
12:48
And by blocking that election, that is what led to further and further involvement of the United States in this effort to create a permanent anti-communist South Vietnam and this bloody several decades of conflict.
Willa Seidenberg
Can you talk a little bit about what Vietnam meant to the colonialists, the French and the Americans in terms of its resources? I mean, I know that you know, Vietnam was seen as one of those countries in the domino theory that if, if you know, we prevent them from being communist. But what were other reasons that they may have wanted to have control of that country?
13:35
Christian Appy
Well, for the French, there were indeed significant economic motives for that colony, particularly rubber. Everyone’s heard about Michelin tires. Those were first, you know, made of natural rubber from Vietnam. It was not, however, a country like Indonesia with massive reserves of, you know, important metals. So for France as a whole, the country did not profit. It actually lost money on maintaining its Indochinese colony. But certainly planters, French planters, were making money, and certain French companies were making a significant amount of money, and the French even profited on opium controlled. Had a monopoly of opium dens throughout Vietnam. And so, as Ho Chi Minh put it in his declaration of independence, when he listed all his grievances against France, one of them was that they were poisoning the Vietnamese people with drugs and profiting off addiction. So there were material causes that sustained French Empire. I would say that the economic motives for the Americans who followed were not so much about the resources in Vietnam itself.
14:59
This is not like, you know the obvious economic motives in places like Iraq with great reserves of oil, but the famous domino theory, which most people have heard about, this idea that if one country goes communist, it’s inevitable that the neighboring country will also fall to communism, and eventually all of Southeast Asia would tumble. And what is not really noticed about the domino theory is that it’s not just a political idea or even a military idea. It is an economic theory, because the idea is, when once a country falls to communism, you are very likely to be, if you’re a Western capitalist country, denied access to those resources, to those workers and to those markets to sell goods into, you might be shut out. And Eisenhower was quite explicit about that in the 50s. And so the concern is, while we might not have a lot of hope about Vietnam resources. We certainly have our eyes on other parts of that whole region. And they were really thinking globally.
16:11
They were also worried about having trading partners for the most important of their new allies after World War Two in Asia, Japan. The economic concerns are inseparable from their ideological and political concerns about communism, that whole sort of Cold War orthodoxy of the 50s well into the 60s, was that we had to stand up to and contain the spread of communism all around the world, even in countries that we heretofore couldn’t find on a map.
Bill Short
The other thing that I’d like to have kind of clarified is the social structure of Vietnam. I know that the French government insisted that anybody who went through the higher education system of the French, they had to speak French. They were not allowed to speak Vietnamese. Diem himself was a Catholic. Diem was chosen because he was both anti French and anti communist. And could you, could you talk a little bit about that population? I think the population of the Catholic population of Vietnam was about 10% and about 90% was Buddhist. And I know a lot of the government officials who were running the country, were basically kind of what I would call Vichy Vietnamese. Could you, could you expand on that a little bit?
Christian Appy
Colonial powers, and I would include the United States in that depend on local elites to help them rule their country and advance their interests, that is, the colonizers interest, and to do that provide opportunities and education, and in the case of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was the leader that the United States helped put into place in 1954 during this temporary division of the country after the Geneva Accords. He was very attractive to American policy makers because he was fervently anti communist. Number one. Number two. He was Catholic, and the United States government often favored Asian Christians in this period and Diem in the early 50s, had actually spent quite a lot of time at Catholic seminaries in the United States, where he met very influential Cardinals and politicians like a young John Kennedy and Mike Mansfield, people who went on to form a group called Friends of Vietnam, which was really a kind of lobbying group for Ngo Dinh Diem.
18:48
Now only about 10% at most of Vietnam had converted to Catholicism under French colonial rule. The vast majority of Vietnamese were Buddhist. But with the support of Diem and all the millions and millions of dollars that went to bolster his rule, Catholics played a huge role in this South Vietnamese elite, both in government, in business and in the military. Indeed, some Vietnamese, realizing that top jobs and opportunities were really exclusively going to Catholics, converted so that they would have more life chances. This, of course, was deeply upsetting to the vast majority of Vietnamese, that this tiny Catholic minority had such control over them and were discriminating against Buddhists, which led in the early 60s, and again in the mid 60s, to these Buddhist uprisings, where they demonstrated quite graphically and powerfully their opposition to the American backed government.
20:05
Most famously in 1963 when a Buddhist monk immolated himself, set himself on fire on a street corner in Saigon as a protest of the American backed government. During the entire war, some 82 Vietnamese took their own lives through immolation, in opposition to that government. So what was so shocking, I think, to people who were paying attention back in the United States when they saw that horrible, horrible picture, was that this raised a new, very profound question. They may have heard that the government of South Vietnam, which we were supporting, was being attacked by Communist guerrillas out in the countryside, but now you have evidence in this photograph of Buddhists who were clearly not part of this revolutionary struggle. They were not insurgents, but they too, hated the government we were supporting, so that as early as 1963 raised this very profound question, can this government we’re supporting ever gain the sufficient support to defend off a takeover by the insurgents that were named the Viet Cong came to be known as the Viet Cong.
21:25
Willa Seidenberg
Can you talk a little bit about the Kennedy years? Because that’s really when we attribute the origins of our involvement in Vietnam.
Christian Appy
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. He understood what a hard war it would be to fight when you’re fighting against an enemy that has so much support among the people. But when he became president, like so many officials, he thought Americans could do it better than the French, that they would be more popular in Vietnam, that they weren’t so blatantly self interested in taking over the country. 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 re-election. It had not been so much time before his presidency that Democrats were blamed for losing China in 1949 because of the Chinese Revolution. Now you could rightfully argue that China was not ours to lose, and the government that we had been supporting also didn’t have the support of its people and was hopelessly corrupt in a police state, but to the political opponents who were saying that you were weak on communism. That didn’t seem to matter.
23:03
And indeed, Kennedy, when Kennedy ran for the presidency against Richard Nixon, who had been vice president under Eisenhower, Kennedy claimed that the Eisenhower administration had not been sufficiently tough in resisting communist gains, that Cuba had become communist on their watch, and that when he came into office, he Kennedy would be much more successful in waging the Cold War. So he was really campaigning as a hard line Cold War hawk, which is one of the reasons I think, when he was told by advisors in 1961 that if we did not step up our support for the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and did not begin to introduce more military advisors, the government would collapse and we would be accused of losing Vietnam. So during his presidency, he stepped up the number of American military personnel from 400 to 16,000 and 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 that were really basically fortified villages where it was thought the government could keep an eye on these people and prevent them from joining the guerrillas out in the countryside, that it would be effective in actually reducing the support of the Viet Cong. 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 government.
25:07
So what I would say about Kennedy, although there’s a lot of backward looking, what would you call it, nostalgia for the Kennedy years, and this willful desire to believe that had he not been assassinated, he would have gotten us out of Vietnam, and this whole horrible war would have been averted. Now you can’t replay history, so who knows what he might have done, particularly if he had been re-elected, maybe he would have felt more latitude to withdraw. But we can say with certainty that he put into place virtually every military and strategic tactic that on a more massive scale would be developed under his successor, Lyndon Johnson, and even on the morning of the day he was assassinated, he was still saying that our role in there to prevent the fall of Vietnam communism was essential, and gave no indication at the end that he was ready or willing to withdraw.
Bill Short
So when Lyndon Johnson took the reins of the presidency and referred to the Vietnamese as our “little brown brothers,” that we needed to support them, I think he said that actually about Diem when he met Diem when he was in the Senate. But he was the one who first introduced full divisions, the First Marine Division, the First Infantry Division, went in in 1965, and the precursor to that was the Gulf of Tonkin. That was a complete lie. But could you talk a little bit about the Gulf of Tonkin and how that is a very important benchmark to the escalation of the war?
Christian Appy
In 1964 this was a presidential election year, and 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, who promised instead that he would escalate the war and he would defeat communism in Vietnam, and accuse 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 that 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. 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.
28:40
Well, Johnson that night, this is August 4, just before midnight, went on television and told the American people that the United States sailing on the high seas were the victims of an unprovoked attack, and that the evidence of that attack was unequivocal. Now both of those claims were completely false. The most important lie was that this was an unprovoked attack on the United States. What Americans at the time did not realize is that for the prior three years, the United States had been engaged in a small covert war against North Vietnam. We had, under Kennedy, begun to drop South Vietnamese commandos into the North in hopes that they might gather intelligence, and even more, that they might stir up rebellion among the northerners against the communist government. That operation was a colossal failure, but nonetheless, it was an act of aggression by the United States, and there were other components of that war as well, including attacks on coastal and island villages in the north, again by South Vietnamese commandos trained and supported and equipped by 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. That’s exactly what those destroyers were doing in August of ‘64 and Johnson was not about to tell the American people about these US provocations. Instead, he ordered the attack of I think it was 66 warplanes to bomb targets in North Vietnam as a necessary retaliation, but it was a grossly more violent attack than this tiny little patrol boat chasing after a submarine, hardly a kind of Pearl Harbor pretext for war.
30:41
But what it did lead to is Johnson going to Congress the next day and asking for a Tonkin Gulf resolution that would authorize him to respond to any further acts of aggression and basically to do whatever he wanted. 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, many of them quite commendable and quite extraordinary. In that same period that he was escalating the war in Vietnam, he passed dozens and dozens of landmark pieces of legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 and the Voting Rights Act of ‘65
31:50
So it did do, however, this Gulf of Tonkin attack, that is to say, the US attack, bombing strikes on North Vietnam, and the resolution gave him an enormous bump in the polls. It was politically quite successful, and it did sort of answer the question about whether or not Johnson could stand up to the communists, and he went on to win this extraordinarily huge landslide victory that Autumn. But I would simply add that after that one time airstrike on North Vietnam in August of ‘64, he continued to campaign widely, sounding essentially like a peace candidate, again, claiming he not wanted a wider war, American boys not going, even as his own staff was planning escalations and drafting plans to initiate the ongoing and day to day bombing of North and South Vietnam and the introduction in early ‘65 of the first major division level marine and Army combat units. So in effect, the United States didn’t know it, but they were really voting for Barry Goldwater’s foreign policy, even as they were voting for Lyndon Johnson.
33:13
Willa Seidenberg
So interesting.
Bill Short
Yeah, that was the USS Lester Maddox. And wasn’t it also true that the Lester Maddox was within Vietnamese territorial waters when the patrol boats attacked, so they weren’t in international waters?
Christian Appy
Right, right.
Willa Seidenberg
So the Marines did land in Vietnam in 1965. When did the American public start thinking that this might not be the best thing to be involved in? In terms of When did the peace movement start to have its inklings, and how did that coincide with what was happening in the war?
33:54
Christian Appy
The American Peace Movement, which would eventually become the largest, most diverse and vibrant anti-war movement in our history, was long and developing. In the early ‘60s, it has to be said it was a very small movement. A movement, to be sure, of some very serious people who were raising fundamental questions about the justice and legitimacy of American intervention in Vietnam, 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 pragmatic terms: ‘can it be won at what cost in money and lives?’ And then too, as time went on, there were more serious political and moral reservations expressed, certainly within the anti-war movement, but even over time, more generally, in the population. ‘Are we doing more harm than good? Are we really carrying out the official claims of this intervention?’ That is to say, ‘are we really on the side of democracy? Are we really protecting the people of South Vietnam from external aggression?’
35:31
And these questions really began to surface in a major way in 1968, 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. They had been. 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, which you went in for the first time, out of the countryside into major urban areas. And the communists held the city of Hue for a month. A group of commandos actually penetrated the compound of the United States Embassy in the capital of Saigon. And Americans and television reports were seeing images of this devastating combat. In the ‘60s it was very unusual for an anchor at a major network news program to leave the studio. So when Walter Cronkite traveled personally to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive to report, that itself was attention getting. What was even more surprising is that he came to the conclusion that the war would continue, that it was a bloody stalemate, that there was no end in sight, that victory did not seem possible. When LBJ saw that report, he is reported to have said, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.’ So I don’t think Cronkite’s viewpoint, which was not that radical, he was just saying it was a stalemate, not that the war was immoral or we had to immediately withdraw. So for people that were already opposed to the war, it didn’t make much difference. But I do think that for people who were kind of on the fence, it was something that opened their ears to hear more criticism of the war and we’re asking a very basic question. You told us that the enemy was tiring and losing morale, and we’re winning. If that were true, how are they able to pull off this extraordinary offensive. You say that they failed, and we drove them back, and that was true, but in driving them back, look at the damage we did. We bombed the cities and created more civilian casualties. And in one significant town in the [Mekong] Delta, Bến 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, you know, ‘what happened? How did these people die?’ Well, it turns out they had died because of American bombing and artillery strikes. And the major’s answer was ‘it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.’
38:49
And that phrase, for many Americans, 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, and that maybe we were the external aggressor that was doing the most damage. It was a factor, I think, in LBJ’s thinking that the tide had turned, and he was in a very difficult electoral position, and just a few weeks later, as you know, he dropped out of the campaign. Those kinds of objections to the war, moral objections about the war’s legitimacy and justice only intensified with further revelations, like the revelation of the My Lai Massacre, which happened. The massacre itself happened on March 16, 1968 just at the tail end of that Tet Offensive 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. Some of them murdered in small groups, one, two or three others lined up by the hundreds, mowed down with machine gun fire. That massacre, it should be said, involved no return fire. The Americans on the ground in My Lai did not receive a single round of hostile gunfire.
Moreover, the American military covered it up by submitting an after action report, which actually claimed that this company from the Americal division had actually engaged in a successful firefight in the village of My Lai and killed 128 with only two American fatalities. So they invented this out of whole cloth. And yet, the more than three or four dozen officers that were part of this cover up succeeded in keeping its secret until a great American whistleblower, veteran Ron Reidenhauer, came home, and while he had not been at My Lai or participated in that massacre. He knew people who had, and he met them and got their stories. And when he returned, despite the advice of his many older male mentors, Boy Scout leaders and clergy and his own father, telling him that he should just let it lie. ‘It would only get you in trouble and wouldn’t do any good.’ He wrote a long, detailed letter to everybody in Washington he thought might be able to initiate an investigation. And that did finally happen. So 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 and were then released in major magazines and newspapers. That too really furthered the American, the growing American sense that the war was not only failing and not only too costly in American lives and money, but was morally unsustainable and unsupportable.
Willa Seidenberg
So you know, the United States was drafting soldiers during Vietnam. Could you talk a little bit about how the draft started and how it affected the prosecution of the war?
Christian Appy
The military, prior to the major escalation of Vietnam, had no problem recruiting a lot of people into its ranks. The media , all kinds of media, from Hollywood movies to television shows to comic books to educational curricula, reinforced this notion that not only is the United States the greatest country in the world, but that young people can actually contribute to making it even better. I think one of the reasons that President Kennedy touched so many Americans, including a lot of young Americans, is his invitation to try to serve America around the world, and there seemed at that time to be lots of examples. You could serve your country in the military. You could serve it in the Peace Corps. You could eEven musicians, young, famous musicians, the Beatles, were looked to as examples of how young people could change the world. Astronauts, there were heroes everywhere in that period, some of them dating back to World War Two, which young boys and young men of that era watched in war movies, doing heroic things and modeling what it means to be a man.
Bill Short
And the fact that our fathers didn’t really tell us very much about their war experience, it left this kind of mystique, this mystery about what it was to be an American and fight for this country. And I remember myself, and I know a lot of other people we’ve interviewed have done things like I would, go to the lower right hand drawer of my dad’s dresser when he wasn’t around, and pull out his Purple Heart and look at it and wonder how he got it, and why he got it, and would I get one? And you know, that in movies like The Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne, and a bunch of other war movies during the ‘50s, which were really popular, really kind of sank at home, that that all of us woulda had a responsibility to take part in the military at some point in their lives.
Christian Appy
Yes, so many Vietnam veterans talk about the importance of their father’s World War II generation and the example they set, even while they often didn’t share detailed stories about their experience, they clearly were marked by it. The draft system that was in place during the Vietnam War had been in place since 1948. It was the first peacetime draft in United States history, and a product of the rise of the Cold War. It was from the beginning a biased, class biased system increasingly so over time, in favor of richer and better connected young men, and making it, if not inevitable, far more likely that working class and poor Americans would be swept up by the draft. The most obvious class bias in the system were student deferments, which allowed people who were attending full-time four year colleges and universities to at least put off military service until later, and in most cases, those people could continue to avoid the draft after college by seeking and getting other kinds of exemptions. Even exemptions that you would think would advantage poorer people tended, in practice, to favor more privileged young men. I will talk in a second about physical exemptions, you would think that poor people with less access to regular medical care and good nutrition might have a higher portion of exemptible physical conditions, of which there were many. But in practice, if you went for your medical exam, pre-induction medical exam, if you had a letter from your private doctor documenting your chronic asthma, or, in the case of Donald Trump, your bone spur, or any number of other small and more significant physical problems, you would almost certainly get a medical exemption, meaning you would never, ever have to serve in the military, and certainly wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam. But if you went to the exam without that note and were lined up and the draft quotas were getting bigger and bigger by the month, you were often just rubber stamped. These doctors were not going to be too picky to try to question you or find evidence of medical problems. To give one graphic example. If you could afford to have braces put on your teeth, whether you needed them or not, that would keep you out of the military.
47:14
Or take hardship exemptions, you would think people who you know were poor would receive the lion’s share of hardship exemptions. But if you think about a single mom who has little or no income, who has a son who has the chance to go into the military and earn a monthly income, not much, 125 bucks, or whatever it is, it might actually improve her economic stature, standing. So it’s about the larger family, the hardship to your hardship to your family. There was a kind of a funny but really telling example during the war where a Hollywood actor named George Hamilton, who was making something like $17,000 a month, got a hardship exemption because he had been taking care of his mother in his Hollywood mansion. And if he went on to the military, there goes that, there goes that mansion, or $17,000 a month, so his family’s economic situation would actually decline. You know, the draft made it inevitable that there would be essentially a working class military and with rare exceptions, you know, like John Kerry or somebody volunteering. But most people didn’t volunteer. Most privileged people didn’t volunteer at the rates they did for, you know, more widely supported wars like World War II.
Willa Seidenberg
It was those events that led the United States to decide to conduct an air war, because they were drafting all these young men, and men were enlisting. They were fighting on the ground. And around 1970 right, they started shifting to an air war. Can you talk a little bit about that?
49:06
Christian Appy
When Nixon came to office as president in 1969 he was savvy enough politically to understand that the American public would no longer tolerate high numbers of American casualties. And 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 in Vietnam. And so by late 1969 that process is beginning, and very, very gradually, the troop levels begin to decline. But although Nixon was happy for the American people to believe that he was searching for a way to end the war and to find an honorable peace and lowering American casualties. 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 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. Not on a daily basis, as it had happened under Johnson, but periodically he would bomb the North too. So it was, you know some Americans just didn’t buy the idea that we were getting out of the war, and continued to protest. And I would say the dissent at this time is growing among the very group that could, first, in a firsthand way understand that the war wasn’t ending. That is to say active duty American troops and veterans, whose movement against the war, while it had begun and even the mid 60s, greatly intensifies in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
51:37
Bill Short
When you brought up the fact that US servicemen were starting to question the war as well. Could you speak about the impact of the soldiers who refused to fight, who worked on underground papers and coffee houses and such?
Christian Appy
Yeah, let me offer a little background. One thing I would like to say about the active duty troops who came to oppose the war is that many of them had joined the military, believing what they were told about the war, and wanting to do good, wanting to fight for their country for a good cause. Most of them were working class guys who came from families that had served in the military, very patriotic and went off to this war where they quickly discovered that they had been sold a bill of goods that their own experience made clear to them that the people of South Vietnam were not greeting them as liberators or as people who were bringing them the blessings of democracy, or even giving them protection from the aggressions and violence of war that the Americans were bringing most of the violence and putting their lives in peril, and the troops ordered to carry out these missions understood, how destructive their own military’s actions were for ordinary Vietnamese people, and they increasingly came to feel that they were being used and actually betrayed by what they had been told and being sent out into the countryside on these search and destroy missions, and felt as if they were being used as bait, because very hard to find these insurgent guerrillas, but they knew where the Americans were, and would find them often on their own terms, catching them in ambushes or attacking their static positions on fire bases out in the middle of the boonies. So American troops, I think even early on, were disillusioned about the war, but didn’t really act on it in open defiance, with open defiance and dissent until later, and that’s completely understandable.
And one thing that we have to remember is that this most extraordinary movement of active duty soldiers and anti-war veterans happened in an authoritarian institution, that is to say, the military, which has an endless number of ways to enforce obedience and to punish dissent. You know, everything from, you know, forced work and exercise to imprisonment, court martials, demotion, dishonorable discharge. I mean, you name it, nevertheless, I would say by 1970-71 you could find more acts of open defiance and dissent on an average American military base, as you would find on any American college campus. Or actually, one survey found that, I think it was ‘71 that more than half of active duty soldiers said that they had participated in some act of disobedience or dissent. And it took every sort of form from, you know, individual acts of disobedience to collective efforts to start anti-war newspapers to conduct boycotts hunger strikes, to form radical reading groups to wear anti-war insignia on uniforms, and most extremely, but not uncommonly, to actually refuse, to fight, to mutiny, to disobey direct orders to walk down this trail or search this tunnel. Even pilots, toward the end, were beginning to refuse combat missions over Vietnam.
55:38
Willa Seidenberg
Have you talked to many veterans who were actually in positions of command, who were dealing with soldiers who didn’t want to fight, or who were resisting in the field or during training or whatever?
Christian Appy
Yes, American officers, as the war went on, became increasingly concerned about the willingness of troops to carry out the orders. Late in the war, some troops were so disillusioned with the war and with their officers that they were willing to murder aggressive officers that became known as fragging. It was called that because the weapon that was typically used was a fragmentation grenade that, quote, unquote, left no fingerprints.
56:28
So that was an extreme measure, but it had, I think, an effect on officers who, themselves, were developing some reservations, many of them about the war and did not want to fight it as aggressively as it had been fought earlier, and would not take the same kind of risks. And so a number of officers that I’ve interviewed, who were generals and colonels, said that the biggest problem by 1971 was not presented by the enemy so much as you know how to manage your own troops and keep them going. And there was, I remember one comment that always stays with me, this General Cooper, who was a Marine commander, Charles Cooper, he said, ‘You know, when we were talking among the officers, we often said, you know, the other side, the enemy, they just care more than our guys. They have a cause. Whatever it is, I don’t really understand it, whether it’s that communist pap they’re being filled with or whatever, but they just, they just care more. They have a mission in there. They are incredibly disciplined,’ he said. So, you know, by contrast, there was this growing concern that they’re waging a war and who’s going to show up to fight it.
You know, one thing that has always struck me about the anti war movement within the military is that it has become a kind of secret history over the decades. And I think one of the reasons for that is in particularly in the Reagan years of the 1980s there was a quite concerted effort to demonize the anti-war movement in all its forms. And one way to do that is to suggest that, basically, the anti-war movement was a bunch of sort of cowardly, self righteous hippies who reviled the military and everyone who served in it, and then you had in the other side of this generation, these brave, patriotic, heroic men who went off to Vietnam and fought.
58:38
So that’s a completely distorted view of the movement on both sides, but it was very political effective, politically, and I think sort of it’s the effort to shame anti-war activism is very useful in a presidency that’s trying to ratchet up Cold War hostilities and wage proxy wars in Central America, and to demonize communism everywhere, and to argue that the war was a noble cause that should have been fought and could have been won, which is how Reagan perceived it. So for those reasons, I think we have forgotten, if we ever knew, that an extraordinary number of soldiers did, not only have feelings, bad feelings about their participation in the war, but acted upon those feelings and came home to participate in the anti-war movement, and did so in a way that was extraordinarily dramatic and captured the attention of the nation in a number of different demonstrations, particularly when hundreds of veterans lined up in front of the United States Capitol and threw away the medals and ribbons that they had received for valorous conduct in waging war in Vietnam. And would make statements where public statements denouncing the war and saying that they could feel no pride or honor in continuing to hold on to these awards.
1:00:06
Bill Short
How do you think the Kent State shooting affected Middle America with regards to the war, and in particular to the anti war activists?
Christian Appy
When Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia at the end of April in 1970 it was really as shocking as the Tet Offensive had been. Here we had a president who had been in some ways, promising that he was going to find peace with honor and slowly withdraw American troops, is now escalating and expanding the war into another once neutral country. And so there was an uprising of new anti-war energy everywhere, but especially on college campuses, where hundreds and hundreds of campuses not just protested, but shut down the university, went on strike. Two million students participated in these strikes all over the country, and so while it’s false to say that anti-war activism had not previously existed in Middle America this did demonstrate graphically—that is to say the protests at Kent State and the killing of four students and wounding of nine by National Guardsmen who fired on student protesters—that was demonstrated how widespread the movement was, and the violence was particularly shocking because it’s so vividly indicated that the violence of the war was really coming home to a leafy campus in Ohio in broad daylight, and and and the victims were white, middle class students. America, unfortunately was somewhat inured to the killing of African Americans, which happened 10 days later at Jackson State. And it happened, you know, previously, many, many times, but here, ordinary middle class, Middle American students were being killed.
1:02:15
And you know, Nixon had basically said they got what they deserved. And I think so for many Americans that was mind changing, that we had a president who was willing to persist in this war, expand it and continued to denounce as unpatriotic those who were opposing it and to assault American citizens. Yeah, I would say as well that while it might be a surprise to some people who still possess this, I think, false idea that there were pro-war veterans on one side and anti-war students on the other. I’ve met many military veterans, Vietnam veterans, who report that when they heard about the Kent State killings, that was as traumatizing as things they had heard and seen in Vietnam and really spurred them to get involved in anti-war activism. For Americans, I think that was striking, because you couldn’t dismiss these veterans as cowardly hippies. You know, these were people who had made the greatest sacrifice and decided that it had been wrong.
1:03:32
So they had a kind of moral authority that other members of the anti-war movement really didn’t. Largely because, you know, they were, many of them who were at campus based were protected from the war by student deferments and so forth. And so it did give, it did inject at a key time when a lot of other people in the movement were disheartened and and frustrated, and the war keeps dragging on, it infused a new level of energy and drama into the movement, and I think probably helped convince a lot of Americans who had been on the fence that something is deeply troubling about this war. I think a lot of older Americans too, and maybe older World War II veterans, they would maybe try to dismiss or criticize these younger veterans, but it troubled them. It troubled them that, what the stories were that they were telling.
1:04:32
Willa Seidenberg
And can you talk a little bit about the end of the war and how it came about?
Christian Appy
Well, the end of the war, we must remember, didn’t happen until 1975. 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. Terms in the Accords are quite vague about this, but it also allowed the North Vietnamese to keep its troops in South Vietnam on the promise that they would again not engage in an ongoing warfare.
1:05:45
I think most people who have studied the Paris Peace Accords were saying, would say that it basically made inevitable the final victory of the communist forces in Vietnam, because they certainly had not given up their long time goal of reuniting Vietnam in claiming genuine independence and in the South, the government that the Americans had backed was still receiving billions of dollars of American aid and weapons. And it did decline. And by 1974 that aid does start to decline, but the advance in 1975 of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong was 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.
1:07:07
So I would say that the withdrawal was really an acknowledgement that the American withdrawal in 1973 was an acknowledgement that really that there was nothing we could do to really make this history different. I do think that Nixon and Kissinger held out hope that somehow this regime would survive at least until the next election in 1976 and it is possible. Some people believe it possible. Daniel Ellsberg was one of them that Nixon had it not been for Watergate and the political damage that had done to him might well have renewed American bombing, not military ground troops, but would have renewed American bombing as early as the spring of 1973 because the Paris Peace truce didn’t hold for even until the ink got dry. There were renewed hostilities on both sides. Actually, initially, more hostility by the South Vietnamese military, while the North and the National Liberation Front, kind of held back to sort of see what was going to happen. But the fighting continued, increasingly, intensely in ‘73, ‘74 and ‘75 but, as I said, Nixon had been so discredited, he was eventually forced to resign in August of ‘74 and that’s when the Vietnamese knew, ‘well maybe now is the time to think about a final offensive, because we got Nixon out of the way, and we feel it’s a pretty safe bet that the United States is not going to re enter the war in force.’
1:09:00
So they really ratcheted up their effort to take over one province after another, and then so by early 1975 it was 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 via helicopter from the American Embassy in various safe houses around Saigon.
Willa Seidenberg
Yeah, wow. Really, that’s so interesting. I hadn’t really thought about how Watergate and Nixon’s resignation affected the negotiation.
Bill Short
That seems pretty obvious, but one of the things that I think that I’d like to hear your opinion about is post war, the Vietnamese use of re-education camps. And you know, I kind of liken this to the early days of Reconstruction in the South after our Civil War. And I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what really, what the re-education camps and re-education was all about. And I wonder if you have an opinion about how that impacted Vietnamese society.
Christian Appy
After the end of the war, the victors believed it necessary to, I don’t know how it actually translates, but I’ve heard the word detoxify used as one translation. Those people in the South who had affiliated themselves, had allied themselves with the United States, whether in the military or in the government, and therefore that they should be brought into these so called re-education camps to be indoctrinated with what the victors would define as patriotic commitment to national liberation and independence. And so it was a pretty brutal experience for the people who were imprisoned, even those who were lucky enough to have relatively small terms, some who were more defiant and stubborn spent many years in these camps and were made to do forced labor as well as endure hours of political indoctrination, often at night after the work was done. One of the things that they would routinely ask the prisoners to do is to write basically autobiographical statements about the errors and flaws of their past commitments and associations, and explain how and why they had changed their mind.
1:11:52
So, you know, I don’t think these kinds of things are unusual in the history of the world, history of warfare, that victors will seek some kind of reprisals, sometimes much more violent than re education camps. I mean, think you only have to go next door in Cambodia to see the genocide wrought there by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot. So unfortunately, to my mind, we don’t have a lot of Nelson Mandelas in the world, who you know, will seek truth and reconciliation, but not necessarily vengeance. So the fact that there so many hundreds of thousands of people who were subjected to re-education camp is one of the reasons why the refugee the Vietnamese American refugee community that came in the wake of 1975 and different waves tended to be, especially that first generation, deeply anti-communist, perhaps much more anti-communist than they were during the war, oddly enough, but understandably. I do think during the war, one interesting thing to consider is that in South Vietnam, it’s not true to say that everyone supported the Viet Cong or the National Liberation Front. Though they had a strong base of very fervent supporters. There’s no evidence they had majority support. That said, the South Vietnamese government had very thin support. And so what most the people in South Vietnam would say, by I would think ‘69 even Henry Kissinger, I’m sorry, even people who worked for Kissinger would have admitted, is that most people in South Vietnam would accept an end to the war, even under any leadership, as long as the war would end. They wanted the war ended. They wanted America out, and so they were willing to accept a communist leader, even if they had reservations about it. So but again, these refugees that came to United States felt completely betrayed, and I will say that in subsequent generations, and now we’re several generations out, Vietnamese students today and for quite a while, have been much more open to arguments about the war that take the position that the United States acted as the aggressor and that Vietnam could and should have achieved unification much earlier, and while it might have been a formerly communist government, who knows what prospects for reform might have happened far earlier than they did.
1:14:43
They do eventually start to reform themselves, at least in terms of the way they organized the economy, like China and the Soviet Union, Vietnam in the mid to late ‘80s does begin to lessen. Sort of command economy, control and open up some partnerships with entrepreneurs and eventually foreign companies, as China did. And so I would say, although they still call themselves a Communist Party, it looks very different from what it did during the war and in the immediate aftermath. And is, while I would say during the war, there was very little signs of corruption, they were very disciplined. Corruption in decades after the war did grow. And as if you follow the news, there have been some huge corruption cases recently in Vietnam, and a recent clamp down, it should be said on certain forms of political dissent, which has always been there but seems to be a particularly bad time right now, including the arrest and imprisonment of some really important Vietnamese environmentalists.
Willa Seidenberg
Well, I think it should be noted that Ho Chi Minh had died by the time the war ended and hardliners had taken over in North Vietnam. And when we were in Vietnam, we talked to quite a few people who were in support of the revolution and who did not want the re-education camps, because these were their neighbors and fellow citizens, and they really weren’t in favor of that kind of retribution, but the administrators from the North wanted to punish the people in the South.
Christian Appy
Yes, they called it. ‘They owed a blood debt,’ and you know, again, not to justify it, but that older generation of revolutionaries, you know, who virtually all of them had been imprisoned by the French, and the younger ones had been imprisoned by the South Vietnamese, with government with US support. And a number of them had been subjected to these infamous tiger cages, absolutely brutal conditions.
1:17:04
Bill Short
In some ways, it’s understandable that there would be retribution. I mean, I think it’s almost human nature to want to have people answer for their complicity with the oppression of the common Vietnamese. I mean, I often think of the Vietnamese who worked with the French. I kind of compare them, in some ways, to the Vichy French who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. And there was a lot of retribution against those French who collaborated after World War II
1:17:42
Christian Appy
Yeah, absolutely.
Willa Seidenberg
Just to close the loop on the history of the war, you talk about in your books, you talk about American Exceptionalism. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Christian Appy
American Exceptionalism is the faith, basically, that the United States is the greatest country on Earth that it is exceptional in its values, its institutions, its way of life, that it is an invincible and indispensable force for good in the world, that we’re always on the side of freedom, democracy, human rights and justice. It is a faith that goes all the way to the origins of the European conquest of North America, but it reached its high water mark, I believe, in the 10 or 15 years after World War II, where we emerged as clearly the greatest superpower in the world, and had to kind of, how would you put it, sort of national sense of not just power, but sort of self-righteousness about our virtues and our role as a world leader, and our right and responsibility to play that leadership role and to be a model for the rest of the world. So there was great confidence in that ‘50s and early ‘60s faith, along with the kind of universal idealism that the world wanted, that wanted our intervention around the world and our aid and support and counseling and tutoring. It was, and it was a very, it was a very broad faith in that period, and you could see it in it manifested itself in so many ways, including in ordinary high school textbooks that students read that made it seem as if the history of the United States is just one straight line of progress moving upward, and we may still have progress to be made, but that was inevitable, that that would happen, that we had saved the world from fascism.
1:20:04
And then with the intensification of the Cold War, that same sort of mindset transferred relatively easily. This idea that communism represented a very similar threat of world conquest, it was a kind of what in those days, was often referred to as red fascism, and that it was even more dangerous, perhaps because Stalin could be talked about as if he were Hitler with nukes. And so there was unfortunately, I think, vast exaggeration of the Soviet Union’s expansive desires and motivations, and this so it became ever more kind of conceived of as an existential conflict. They thought that we would be greeted as liberators, people who would bring them the blessings of democracy and self determination. But in fact, a great number of Vietnamese, and not even just those who sided with the communist led revolution against the American backed government in Vietnam, perceive the United States as what they would call Neo-colonialist, a new form of colonialist, maybe not like France in wanting to establish direct colonial rule over a formal colony, but to have control over this new country they were trying to create, called South Vietnam, and to control it, basically by proxy, somewhat indirectly, through a kind of handpicked American, handpicked Vietnamese ruler that obviously was profoundly unsuccessful for 21 years, the United States tried to build and bolster a government in South Vietnam that would eventually be able to stand on its own without the massive and ongoing infusion of American money and troops and the reason the United States failed in Vietnam was not for lack of arms or lack of lethality and destruction. God knows, the country was devastated. More than 3 million people were killed. The reason for the failure was that the government we supported never had the sufficient political support of its own people, and the communist led insurgents of the South and their allies in North Vietnam did capture the hearts and minds of enough Vietnamese around the cause of national reunification and independence to make the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government really inevitable once the the extraordinary military force of the United States withdrew.
Outro:
Thank you for listening to Christian Appy’s extensive historical context of the Vietnam War. Appy has written three books about the era including his 2015 release, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.
We’d like to leave you with Appy’s own reasons for why he runs the UMass Amherst Ellsberg Archive Project, because his words also apply to the listeners of this podcast:
“Now, more than ever, it is imperative that [we] engage the… public in the serious examination of our current crises and their historical roots. It is equally vital that we act on our understandings to advance change [and promote] education and action for peace and democracy”
… If you would like to listen to more of our episodes, please remember to subscribe on Apply, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. That way you will be notified when every new episode drops. As always, thanks for your support!
