Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister

10. After the War: Human Rights in Vietnam

210 Felon for Peace lawyer would never be permitted to do. That is, as a practicing attorney, I can see important political and practical reasons why people in court for civil disobedience would not want to be represented by an attorney (precisely as I argued long before I became a lawyer myself). One of the things I enjoyed about my work with AFSC was being able to be a resource person for other organizations and groups working for left-wing causes. Over the years, I provided nonviolence training to many organizations, including groups planning civil disobedience against apartheid in South Africa, against U.S. support for the contras in Nicaragua, against nuclear weapons, and, of course, against civilian nuclear power plants. On one occasion I was invited to give nonviolence training to a group of Brown University students planning to get arrested in an anti-apartheid demonstration. Everyone in the group introduced themselves to me, but by first name only. It was only several hours into the session that I realized that the slight blonde woman in the group who had introduced herself as “Amy” was Amy Carter, President Carter’s daughter. Shortly after getting out of jail after the Seabrook occupation, I left for Asia with Russ Johnson. Our first stop in Asia was Bombay, where we were the guests of Daniel Mazgaonkar, a Gandhian activist. Daniel arranged for me to deliver a lecture on the nonviolence movement in the United States at the Mani Bhavan, the Gandhi Museum in Bombay . The audience largely consisted of elderly Gandhian activists, many of whom had known the Mahatma during his lifetime. (This was not a good thing; it betokened the inability of the Gandhian movement in India to attract new people.) The focus of my talk was the importance of the Seabrook demonstration as a turning point in the nonviolent movement in the United States. Seabrook, I said, was the first time outside of the civil rights movement that we had succeeded in having large numbers of demonstrators both accept nonviolence philosophically and, as a practical matter, actually engage in a significant degree of nonviolence preparation before participating in an action. 211 10 After the War: Human Rights in Vietnam AS THE LIBERATION FORCES opened their final offensive in the central highlands of Vietnam in March 1975, and refugees started streaming south, President Ford said that the people of Vietnam were “voting with their feet,” fleeing Communism. The president’s subtext was clear: the Vietnamese fear and hate the Communist tyrants, and the United States had been right in Vietnam all along. The war would be over in a matter of weeks, but Ford’s comments were the opening salvo in a new battle, the battle to interpret the lessons of Vietnam for Americans. In fact, there were at that time multiple factors accounting for the flood of refugees that filled the screens of American televisions and the front pages of American newspapers. Some refugees were in fact fleeing Communism. The first provinces and cities to be liberated—Pleiku, Kontum, Ban Me Thuot—were all in the Central Highlands, the part of Vietnam where many Catholic refugees from the north had settled in 1954. They had come south at the time of the Geneva Agreement that had ended the French-Indochina War (1945–1954) in response to a massive propaganda effort that had emphasized the alleged anti-Catholic sentiment of the Communists. “The Virgin Mary has gone south” was one of the slogans from that time. These Catholics were deeply antiCommunist : they had fled Communism once twenty years earlier, and in the spring of 1975 they were genuinely frightened of what might happen to them under a new régime. But many more of the refugees were fleeing because they feared American and South Vietnamese bombing. Throughout the long years of the war, whenever a city or province had “fallen” to the other side, the U.S. Air Force had devastated the city or province with ærial bom- 212 Felon for Peace bardment. The United States euphemistically called the policy “area denial ”—the bombing was a means of denying territory to enemy forces. This had happened in Hue at the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968, in Quang Tri in 1972, and was happening already in Ban Me Thuot in 1975. In other words, the great bulk of the refugees were not fleeing from...