Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War (4 page)

Of course I was going to be there for the March on the Pentagon. By the spring of 1967, we felt that momentum was going our way. The ever increasing draft calls, the invasion of Laos, and the canceling of college deferments had set off a huge backlash against the war among the young people and more and more their parents. Dr. King had just denounced the war in the harshest terms yet. I had journeyed up to New York for a rally and heard him say “this war is a blasphemy to everything that America stands for. Our young men are being sent to die in a conflict that supports an illegal and corrupt government that is despised by the very people it purportedly represents.” That was music to our ears.

On that beautiful April morning I was so proud to see that we were at least 100,000 strong as we gathered on the Mall and in East Potomac Park, I was among people who was asked to speak to a group before we marched. I made my remarks brief and simply reminded them that we were doing God’s work, I truly believed that, but I was surprised at the angry tone of many of the other speakers, especially the young people, I don’t think God’s work was on their minds when we streamed across the Memorial and 14th Street Bridges to confront that five sided temple of war, the Pentagon. It was ringed with soldiers with fixed bayonets there to protect the great building from the disgrace that would occur if even one of us were able to as much as touch its great walls. Our numbers were so large that we easily filled the huge parking lots and surged up to the entrances, if not for the sight of the bayonets on the end of the rifles of the soldiers, we might have rushed the doors right then and there. Instead there was a stand off, if the other side would not move, neither would we. “Peace now, we will not be moved!” we chanted, and then the word quickly passed that we should all sit down to further show them that we could not be deterred. Somebody brought around a case of Coca-Colas and passed them out, just like at a church picnic.

As the time passed, our chants changed. “Throw down your weapons,” we shouted to the young men in uniform protecting the building, “desert the death machine.” Then as we felt bolder we started to chant in unison “Nixon come out, you can’t hide!” and then alternated it with “Face the people!” Then shortly after twelve noon a helicopter lifted out of the great building’s center courtyard and flew off to the east across the Potomac into the city. “He’s gone!” people began to shout, we had no evidence, but we believed that Nixon was on that helicopter and that he had fled from us-the American people who had come to demand that he end his unjust war. And he had fled from our righteous wrath. We climbed to our feet and hugged one another in a victory embrace. I saw some people doing dances of joy. For a brief moment I believed we had won, all one hundred thousand of us had done it. There in the parking lot of the Pentagon, surrounded by black, white, yellow, young, middle-aged, old, rich, and poor, we had come together on that beautiful spring day, under a deep blue sky, and by force of will, we had changed the course of history. It should have been one of the greatest days of our lives

Then at mid-afternoon, men with bullhorns appeared behind the line of soldiers and announced that we must begin to disperse immediately, that Martial Law had been declared. I couldn’t believe it, Martial Law in Arlington, Va.! In a moment our euphoria disappeared and angry determination took its place. “We will not be moved! Peace Now!” became our cry. Someone told me to look behind us and far over the heads of the marchers I could barely see that something was going on. I could make out the army green canvas of troop transport trucks. A wave of apprehension swept over the crowd. What we didn’t know at the time was that a large contingent of US Marshals, FBI Agents and regular Army Troops had been assembled at Fort Myer, adjacent to the Pentagon, and that they had now moved into position behind us. Once they had deployed, the men with bullhorns announced that we had one last chance to disperse.

The crowd’s mood began to turn very ugly, they began to shout obscenities at the troops and then they began to throw things. I don’t know who started it; later there would be accounts of demonstrators attempting to rush one of the entrances and I definitely believe there were FBI plants among the marchers, put there with orders to do something to provoke a violent response. Then again, people do things in a mob that they would never do by themselves. The clean cut young man, who had been standing next to me, snatched the Coke bottle I had been drinking from out of my hand, and hurled it at the building. It smashed impotently against a second story window, as futile a gesture as I have ever seen. I tried to berate him for what he had done, but nobody’s voice could be heard over the din by now. I didn’t have to be told that things were about to turn from ugly to nasty and it was a very good time to leave. I guess my courage had run out, I’d heard all the great arguments for civil disobedience, but I just couldn’t sit there and take a night stick upside the head for my principles.

By now the forces of law and order had all the provocation they needed, they formed a wedge and plowed into the crowd that was massed in front of the river entrance, that caused the demonstrators to turn upon the troops, fights broke out everywhere and more than a few skulls were cracked by rifle butts. It was madness, total madness no matter which way I turned, but I got caught up with group of people that was trying to make their way out of the parking area. I remember being terrified that I would fall and be trampled-some unlucky souls were that day. The group I was with reached the edge of the parking lot just as they began to fire tear gas into the out of control crowd; somewhere close by came the sound of gunshots. It had thinned out enough for me to start running now, right past a squad of US Marshals and joined a band of demonstrators scaling the wall at Arlington Cemetery; it was the only route of escape. Once on the other side, we sat down on the green grass in front of all those crosses and hugged each other and cried uncontrollably. From on the other side of the wall we could hear the screams and shouts of the battle we had left behind; even in the supposed safety of the National Cemetery we could smell the acrid scent of the tear gas. Then a long haired boy ran by and said that the Army was rounding everybody up, mass arrests and if we didn’t want to find ourselves in a detention camp we’d better move our asses. My compatriots whom had made it over the wall with me consisted of a few college kids from Columbia University, a couple of social workers from Philadelphia and a Professor of Law from Harvard; not a one of them looked like they had any idea what to do. We were more than beaten, we were crushed, but I wasn’t about to spend one minute in anybody’s detention camp; it was time to put some distance between us and that place. So I told them that if they wanted to get out of there, then they’d better follow me. We hiked down to the Memorial Gate where I’d planned to catch a bus, but a half dozen police cars pulled up just when we arrived, so I told my band of brothers that we’d better keep moving. Had to walk all the way across the Memorial Bridge to the Lincoln Memorial before we caught a bus, I thought the law professor would have a heart attack before we made it. We agreed that it would be best if we got out of the city as fast as we could, there were rumors that there would be a house to house sweep to round up anybody involved in the Peace March. My new friends spent the night with me at my house near Baltimore; to this day we still send each other Christmas Cards.

The “Riot” at the Pentagon was front page news across the country, over 15,000 marchers were arrested, and most of them were held over night at Griffith Stadium where the Washington Senators played at the time. The government justified its actions by asserting that the First Amendment did not protect us since such demonstrations were illegal acts. At first, most of us in the anti-war movement thought that the over reaction by the Administration’s thugs would backfire against them, there were a series of supporting demonstrations across the country in the weeks ahead, but many of them were just as ruthlessly suppressed. Many colleges closed down for the remainder of the school year. My friends in the Coalition experienced severe paranoia that spring. Suddenly there were rumors that we were all under surveillance by the FBI-everybody was sure the phones were tapped-so we ran down the street to use the pay phone at the Shell Station on the corner. I came in one day and found them in a panic because the Government was about to suspend the Bill of Rights and round up all peace activists. I tried not to give in to my fears, much less the fears of others and I refused to listen all that suspicion, years later I learned that I shouldn’t have been so blasé: two of the Coalition’s inner circle, including the group’s secretary, were paid informants for the FBI; they had files on all of us.

By the late spring of 1967 it was obvious to any fool that the country was badly split over the war with neither side about to give an inch. That path to peace and justice I believed we had been turned away from was going to be much harder to get back on than I had ever thought, but I still believed that we were going to get back there. The longer the war drug on, the higher the casualty lists grew, the more the war touched the sons of the small towns and the suburbs, the more the public grew disillusioned. It would take time, but Johnson and Nixon could not fight a two front war, one against the people of Vietnam and another one in America against their own people. I told my friends at the Coalition that we must not give in to our fears and paranoia if we wanted to triumph in the end. Then in June, we learned that our worst fears were nothing compared to reality and that we would never be able to find our way back to that upward path we had once followed with such great hopes.

Travis Smith
: A lot of us had fooled ourselves into thinking that the war was almost over in March 1966; we had just about wiped out the NVA and VC in Binh Dinh province and had run the survivors all the way to the Cambodian border. We were patrolling Highway 19 without seeing hide or hair of the enemy. Some guys were talking about what they were going to do for Christmas back home. Sgt. O'Mara told them to shut the hell up because nothing happens until it happens and until then keep your mind on the job you were doing in the here and now. He was right on the mark, the Commies came right back as nasty as they ever were. They called it the Great Spring Offensive.

With the North Vietnamese counterattacking like they did, morale went down the toilet. The most awful thing about it was the way Charlie was able to infiltrate areas we had cleared and lie low until it was time to strike. Suddenly there was no front; they were coming at us from every direction. The Cong were able to hide in villages, towns, farms or just blend in with all those damn refugees that were always on the roads. The most galling part was the fact that you couldn’t tell the enemy from the people you supposedly were there to save and most of the good people of South Vietnam didn’t give a shit that you were there put’n your ass on the line for them. Twenty-two guys in the 223 Battalion were blown up in their barracks when the ammo dump at An Khe was taken out by a demolition team that got inside the perimeter by pretending to be beggars going through the garbage pile. We knew the locals had to be in on what was going on and we didn’t forget it. All Vietnamese were potential enemies and were to be treated as such, that’s what every cherry should have been told on his first day in country. It never bothered me to see a village burned to the ground; that meant there was one less place for the Cong to hide. Scorch the earth, it worked for the Russians against the Nazis. Some terrible things went on, but what we did wasn’t half as bad as what the North Vietnamese did to their own people, they found mass graves of civilians in every area we liberated. A lot of fools back home tried to blame American soldiers for what happened at Dak To and Khe Sanh and things like that, but it’s a damn lie

These developments only accelerated the rate of deployment of American troops; the airliners were landing almost around the clock at Da Nang and Cam Ranh by the summer of ‘66. Talk about green soldiers, it looked like they had recruited exclusively from every high school in the country, and they hadn’t restricted themselves just to the senior class. Despite the cutbacks in college deferments we didn’t see many frat boys walking patrol in the bush. I was only a couple of years older than most of those kids, but they looked at me like I was their grandfather. We got a lot of them as replacements in my unit-silent, intimidated kids, with nothing more than peach fuzz on their faces. Almost all of them had been swept up in the draft, the Army wasn’t picky when they had huge quotas to fill over night, as long as the recruit appeared able bodied and could sign his name. One of those cherries, named Ernie Spivik, wound up in my rifle team and his story was typical of most of them. He was from just outside Evanston, Indiana and both of his parents were drunks; just a high school dropout, with no prospects and desperate to get the hell out of small town Indiana. So he walked into the recruiter’s office, filled out the papers, passed the physical, got a bartender from the road house across the street to forge his father’s name (for a $5.00 fee), and he was wearing green.

With just six weeks of basic and two months short of his 17th birthday, Ernie touched down at Da Nang-one more Eleven Bravo-and within a week he was riding patrol with us on 19. Things had got real hot in our area again after the Spring Offensive; constantly taking sniper fire. A guy’s no good until he has some experience in battle, so the cherries were always put up front on every patrol. That may seem irresponsible and cruel and it did get some of them killed fast, but it also taught most them how to stay alive, and just as important, keep the rest of us alive. It’s a real bitch for on the job training, but we have to be able to depend on each other. On his second day in the unit, Ernie was sitting next to me when we took sniper fire just outside An Khe. The kid pissed his pants and tears rolled down his cheeks, but when ordered, he stood his ground and returned fire with his M-14, which is a hell of a lot more than some other cherries did on almost the same stretch of road about a year earlier.