The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War

Introduction

Introduction The 1960s and the first half of the 1970s—an era known as “the sixties” to most observers—has perhaps generated more mythology than any other period in American history. Over time, the standard paradigms of the sixties have become clichés. The scenario is familiar: The decade began with the highest of ideals and aspirations, as embodied by John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and the imagery of Camelot. It ended with Kent State, and then Watergate, and, finally, U.S. helicopters fleeing the rooftop of the American Embassy as Communist troops encircled Saigon. In between those two ends of the decade, a Civil Rights Movement ended American apartheid, the Cold War consensus collapsed in the jungles of Southeast Asia and the streets of the United States, a generation gap widened, a counterculture emerged, a predominantly middleclass New Left drifted left until it triggered apocalyptic confrontations in the streets of Chicago, and a youthful spirit of reform faded into the “me” ethos of the seventies. For years, historians, writers, and participant-memoirists accepted this version of the sixties without much question or variation. It proved to be a tidy way of summarizing a complicated time in American history. In recent years, sixties chroniclers have shifted their attention increasingly to the “neglected constituencies” of the period. Recently, the spotlight has slowly shifted away from figures who dominated the old sixties narratives —namely, members of Students for a Democratic Society and media pop icons such as Abbie Hoffman—to other activists who exercised just as profound an influence at the time but who have been ignored or deligitimized in most histories. These players include feminists, Chicano power activists, gay militants, American Indian Movement organizers, and antiwar veterans. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) is an organization that has rarely received adequate consideration in the standard sixties histories . The organization could boast everything that SDS claimed: tens of 1 thousands of members (at least on mailing lists); chapters in all parts of the country; sponsorship of social programs, such as drug counseling for poor veterans; and, by 1972, policy papers containing critiques of capitalism that surpassed SDS’s founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, in scope and sophistication. But VVAWers arrived at their radicalism in different ways from SDSers. Most VVAWers came from working-class backgrounds. Almost none went to Vietnam as radicals. The majority of VVAWers moved to the left as a result of their experiences in Southeast Asia and their subsequent politicization at home. In many respects, VVAWers and other activists of the early seventies confronted entirely different challenges from SDSers. While SDSers resisted the war during its early stages, VVAWers faced the more onerous task of making antiwar activism relevant amid Vietnamization and America’s increased reliance on the air war in Southeast Asia. SDSers questioned the contradictions of Cold War liberalism, while VVAWers attacked the legitimacy of Nixonian conservatism and paranoia. Women in many SDS chapters were expected to make coffee and do “shit work”; VVAW issued lengthy position papers condemning sexism and, by 1972, actively recruited women and asked them to serve in positions of power. SDS tapped into youthful idealism, VVAW resisted weary cynicism. The political and cultural icons of SDS’s age—the Black Panthers, Abbie Hoffman, Janis Joplin—were either gone or obscured during VVAW’s heyday, but the counterculture still resonated deeply in American society. The emergence of VVAW in the early seventies had a profound impact on the antiwar movement in the United States. VVAW transformed the movement by placing Vietnam veterans in the forefront of the nationwide struggle to end the Vietnam War. The organization attracted a broad spectrum of veterans: officers and GIs; desk clerks, combat veterans and bomber pilots; anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and Democrats. The film footage of veterans casting their medals and ribbons onto the steps of the Capitol in 1971 became a crucial rallying symbol for the antiwar movement , forever etching itself in the minds of millions of Americans. Moreover , VVAW filled a leadership vacuum in the movement, a void created during the late 1960s with the collapse of several key antiwar coalitions. At its height, VVAW attracted between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand members. The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War traces the evolution of VVAW, from its inauspicious origins as a six-man speakers’ bureau that began in New York City during the spring of 1967 to a mass 2 | Introduction [3.137.170.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...