THE RUBBLE from the World Trade Center was still burning when the first so-called peace protesters took to the streets more than two months ago. Anxious to emulate the powerful coalition that pressured the United States to abandon Indochina three decades earlier, they would have us believe that our cause is unjust, our strategy illegal, and our goals unwise. Fortunately, to date they have been totally ineffective. The American people fully understand what happened on September 11 and why our government must respond decisively in self-defense after years of empty threats to hunt down and punish terrorists. Even within the academic community, criticism of the war effort is thus far subdued. But things can change. The public rallied around President Lyndon Johnson when he first ordered air attacks against North Vietnam: Between July and August 1964, LBJ’s approval rating shot up from 42 percent to 72 percent, and the Gallup Organization attributed it to his tough stand in Vietnam. But little by little, in the following years, that support was lost. War is by its nature a horrible thing, and we should not ignore the temptation for idealistic students, hoping to emulate the great protests of the 1960s, to be lured into the streets by radical faculty and peers. The Constitution quite properly protects the right of even uninformed and misled citizens to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances. But there is one thing we can do: We can educate our country about what really happened in Vietnam and about the actual consequences of the peace protests. For one of the great enduring myths from our tragic Vietnam experience is that the protesters were right, and that their courageous actions ultimately ended years of folly and brought peace to a troubled region. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the United States withdrew from Vietnam in the early 1970s, new information has emerged both in our own country and from the statements and writings of some of the leaders of Communist Vietnam. And although few people discuss it, it is now clear that on almost every major issue, the protesters of the sixties got their facts wrong. Indeed, at the time of the protests this was evident to anyone who made a serious effort to ascertain the truth. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Vietnam, and before entering the Army in 1968 I took part in more than a hundred teach-ins, debates, and other public programs where I listened to the protesters’ arguments. The litany never changed. Between 1965 and 1968 I debated several professors and radical leaders of the “New Left,” but few ever agreed to a return engagement. Even fewer bothered to change their spiel after I had demonstrated that their facts were wrong. On the few issues that were ever really debatable during the war, Hanoi has subsequently acknowledged that the protesters were duped. We were told that the United States first became involved in Indochina after World War II when it tried to reimpose French colonial rule, and that after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the United States conspired with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem to violate the 1954 Geneva Accords by refusing to hold free elections in July 1956. According to the protesters, our reason was simple: Even President Eisenhower had admitted that Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would have won the elections by 80 percent of the vote. Denied the free election they had been promised, it was alleged, South Vietnamese nationalists had no choice, given the repressive nature of the American puppet government, so in 1960 they formed the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam. Indeed, perhaps no issue was more hotly debated than the origins of the NLF, which the State Department insisted was a creature of the North Vietnam Communist party. Professors at teach-ins and senators in Washington disparaged this assertion, accusing the State Department of lying to the American people. Self-righteous peace activists also gleefully quoted NLF programs calling for peace, democracy, freedom of speech and religion, and other promises seldom associated with Leninist movements. And they told us, in contrast, that South Vietnam was a dictatorship holding 202,000 “political prisoners” and that anyone there who spoke out for peace was incarcerated in subterranean “tiger cages.” We now know–and those who bothered to look knew in the sixties–that each of these allegations was false. The “Pentagon Papers” documented the strong U.S. diplomatic opposition to the return of the French to Indochina after World War II, and French military officials complained that the Americans in Indochina were a greater impediment to their return than was Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh. And while the United States did begin assisting France in 1950 (after the fall of China and the invasion of South Korea), declassified records show clearly that our support was reluctant–motivated by the greater threat of Communist aggression–and that we continued to pressure France to transfer power to genuine Vietnamese nationalists. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, the United States, Great Britain, and South Vietnam opposed partition and called for U.N.-supervised elections to decide the future of Vietnam. The Communist delegations refused to accept effective supervision, and the United States and South Vietnam therefore refused to sign anything at Geneva and expressly reserved their freedom of action. The “Pentagon Papers” noted the wisdom of these decisions–a wisdom that was reinforced when bogus elections in North Vietnam consistently gave Ho Chi Minh at least 99.98 percent of the vote. Since Hanoi had a majority of the people, the non-Communist nationalists in South Vietnam had no chance in unsupervised elections. As for the famous Eisenhower quote, Ike was expressly talking about a possible election in 1954 (before Hanoi’s efforts to impose communism by force alienated millions), not between Ho and the highly respected nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem, but between Ho and French puppet Bao Dai, a playboy living on the French Riviera, who in 1955 lost in a landslide to Diem. We now know that the North Vietnamese Lao Dong (Communist) party decided in May 1959 to “liberate” South Vietnam, immediately opening the Ho Chi Minh trail and shipping supplies and soldiers south in clear violation of international law. We also know that American peace activists who confidently alleged to the contrary were simply deceived by Hanoi’s propaganda. We know this because General Vo Nguyen Giap, Hanoi’s defense minister throughout the war, bragged about the 1959 decision in a 1983 French television documentary. But anyone who bothered to examine the issue could easily have discovered that, three months before formation of the NLF was announced in Hanoi, the Third Party Congress in Hanoi passed a resolution calling for “our people in the South” to establish a “front” under Communist party leadership, and that entire paragraphs of the first NLF Program were taken verbatim from the Program of Hanoi’s own Fatherland Front. It is undoubtedly true that most Vietnam protesters were ignorant of these facts, but it is equally true that they made no serious effort to discover the truth once they were told that their government and its military forces were evil. Nor were there anything close to 202,000 “political prisoners” in South Vietnam (at least until the Communists seized power). That was but another of Hanoi’s many lies that vast numbers of American protesters willingly embraced. In 1974, about 6,000 of the total 36,000 prison population of South Vietnam were classed as “Communist criminals”–and they included terrorists who had blown up buses, extortionists who had threatened to murder family members of farmers if they refused to pay “taxes” to the Viet Cong, and other violent individuals whose crimes would have led to their incarceration in any civilized society. The infamous tiny “tiger cages” turned out to be nearly 10 feet tall, above ground, and completely protected from the elements. (I know, because I measured them in 1974 while on a congressional staff visit.) DON’T MISUNDERSTAND ME: I don’t doubt the sincerity of most who joined the protests to end the war. Like most large groups of people, the ranks of the protesters were diverse. A few were hard-line Leninists who knew well that they were trying to deceive the “imperialist” masses. But many more were college students and church members, every bit as patriotic as most Americans, who had been shocked into action after hearing an articulate antiwar speaker tell them some alleged “facts.” Indeed, thanks to the efforts of B.G. Burkett (“Stolen Valor”) and others, we now know that many of the alleged “veterans” who traveled from college to college, stirring up anger with shocking tales of having witnessed or committed war crimes in Indochina, were phonies who either never went near Indochina, or served not as Green Berets or SEALs but as clerks and mechanics. Put simply, they lied to us. Some protesters were so full of hatred toward “Amerika” that they voluntarily provided intelligence information to our enemies. In “Five Years to Freedom,” my late friend Nick Rowe wrote about his own reaction when a Communist party official came into the Mekong Delta camp where he was imprisoned and informed him that “friends” of the National Liberation Front in the United States had provided personal information that showed Nick had lied to them by concealing, among other things, his Special Forces training. The Viet Cong even had the names of his parents courtesy of the “peace movement.” Shortly after the 1968 Tet offensive, my sister-in-law received a telephone call–allegedly from Western Union reading an important telegram–that began: “The Secretary of the Navy regrets to inform you that your husband . . . was killed in action during combat operations in the Republic of Vietnam.” They even had my brother’s serial number right. In fact, he was fine; this was a little “prank” by anti-Vietnam activists hoping to get back at evil U.S. military families for their alleged “crimes against the Vietnamese people.” Other alleged “peace activists” represented Hanoi in dangling promises of special treatment and mail if relatives of U.S. POWs in Hanoi would speak out openly against the war. And of course we had the grinning Jane Fonda sitting in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun pretending to shoot down U.S. pilots, and making broadcasts to U.S. soldiers urging them to refuse to fight to avoid being tried as war criminals. Most peace protesters would certainly have been disgusted had they learned of such behavior. They were not intentionally evil; all they wanted was “peace” and an end to the killing. But they were incredibly ignorant of the realities of the conflict; they too willingly embraced Communist lies as the truth, and their protests had evil consequences. In May 1973 they persuaded Congress to make it illegal for the president to spend further money on military operations in Indochina. Ironically, by that point South Vietnam and the United States had essentially won the war in South Vietnam. The Viet Cong had ceased to exist as a meaningful force by 1970, the Easter offensive of 1972 had been decisively blunted, and South Vietnam controlled every population center and most of the territory that had been in Communist hands or contested five years earlier. When the United States finally decided to fight the air war seriously in 1972, our POWs in Hanoi observed firsthand that Hanoi’s will was broken. Hanoi returned to the Paris talks immediately, and a peace accord was signed in less than a month. Four months later, oblivious to the realities of Indochina and succumbing to pressures from ignorant demonstrators, a partisan Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by outlawing further U.S. resistance to communism in Indochina. In response, North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong gleefully announced that “the Americans won’t come back now even if we offer them candy,” and Hanoi sent virtually its entire army to invade and conquer its neighbors, in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter. I still recall the anxiety of fleeing Saigon at the end of April 1975 during the final evacuation because an angry U.S. Congress had refused to authorize the president to rescue even the Americans still in Vietnam. Most Vietnam “peace activists” no doubt still feel pride in having “ended the war.” They simply don’t realize that those whom they helped bring to power slaughtered more people in the first two years of “peacetime” following the “liberation” of Indochina than were killed during the previous 14 years of war, including an estimated two million in tiny Cambodia alone. Additional millions were consigned to a Stalinist tyranny that decades later continued to rank among the world’s worst human rights violators. But most Americans don’t know that, having tuned out Vietnam when American troops came home more than a quarter-century ago. Fortunately, modern Vietnam War scholars are finally getting the facts right. Even the Village Voice recently proclaimed that Vietnam was a “good” war. But we still have within our midst many who will not admit that they were duped by a clever adversary into preventing the United States from helping the free people of Indochina resist Leninist aggression. They refuse to recognize that their arguments were factually wrong, and that their protests were decisive in producing the slaughter or enslavement of tens of millions of innocent human beings. Now they again take to the streets, joined by a younger generation of equally clueless sign-bearers, determined to persuade us that we should not respond to terrorists who murdered thousands of our fellow Americans and promise to continue such attacks. They have a constitutional right to protest, which should be respected. But they don’t have a constitutional right to be taken seriously, and their batting average for getting the facts right–from Indochina to Central America to the Persian Gulf–is pretty close to zero. They are right only about this: War is a terrible thing. Let us not, by a policy of weakness and vacillation, encourage further slaughter of the innocent and give our new adversaries the victory we gave to the forces of tyranny in Indochina. Robert F. Turner is associate director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and co-editor of the forthcoming “The Real Lessons of the Vietnam War.” December 3, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 12
