The Vietnam War

We are great fans of the documentaries of Ken Burns, have seen just about all of them. This is his latest, ten parts, eighteen hours of film that can be very hard to watch. I guess no male of my generation should review this series until after he has answered the question, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy-O? Short answer: Hell no, I didn’t go. And I’ve never been ashamed of it for one second.

I was not a draft dodger. I was not a draft evader. Those were both illegal. I was a draft avoider, which is a whole different thing. I never did a single illegal act, though I decided early on that, if it came to it, I would go to prison rather than be inducted. I rejected going to Canada. I’m an American, for better or worse (and these days, it’s almost always worst), and I intended to stick it out.

So what did I do? Put simply, I out-bureaucrated them! During my second year at Michigan State University a traumatic emotional experience led me to lose interest in going to school. I flunked out, by the simple strategy of no longer going to classes, except for The History of Cinema. The SSS wasted no time in revoking my precious II-S classification and re-listing me as 1-A, which could be a death sentence. And was, for over 50,000 soldiers. Even before I could go home at the end of the term, I was ordered to report for a pre-induction physical in Detroit. I had to spend the night at the Detroit airport, and then took the physical. I was immediately found to be fit enough to die for Lyndon Johnson’s masculinity.

I went home, and then went on the road, hitchhiking. Lots of young people were doing that in those days. And so began a game of “which cup hides the little pea?” With a draft board in Michigan, a home address in Texas, and an actual address at four different places in San Francisco, in Hudson, New York, in Marin County, in Winnipeg, Canada, and other places, the mail had a hard time catching up with me. So I didn’t get my draft notice for a little over two years. So long as it hadn’t reached me, I had done nothing wrong.

But it couldn’t last. With my Greetings! notice in my hand, I arrived at the induction center in Oakland, California, expecting to be taken to jail in a few hours. And here something genuinely crazy happened. There were anti-war protestors outside the place (this at six AM on a chilly morning) handing out leaflets. And one of them gleefully told me what was happening. The commanding officer of the center was so totally outraged by these leaflets that he determined none of them would ever enter his domain. I was advised to hold the leaflets prominently in my hand when I entered. An MP would order me to surrender them.

Here’s where I wish I had said “Go fuck yourself!” But the MP was too intimidating. I just told him I would not give them to him. So I was taken to a small room and five or six very large sergeants crowded around me, looming, frowning, all but smacking their fists into their palms. It was clear that they would like to pound the shit out of this hippie freak. I was told to sign several forms saying I had refused to give up the leaflets. I did as I had been advised outside, which was to never sign anything! The clerk or whatever he was signed them in my place. Totally illegal, but they were counting on me not knowing that. See, I was still a private citizen, an American citizen, and they couldn’t order me to do fuck all! I was told to go home and the District Attorney would be contacting me soon. Total, pure bullshit. The D.A. had no interest in prosecuting me, because there simply was no case. I had broken no law.

That gained me another couple of years. After that, I found half a dozen other ways to fuck them over, filing endless appeals to bullshit exemptions. Then the draft lottery happened and I had an iffy number. Might have to go, might not. But not long after that, I turned 26. So fuck you, Lyndon! I beat you! Suck on that!

Before finally getting to the film, I have to add that I have the deepest respect for those who fought, those who died, those who were permanently disabled. I went to plenty of anti-war rallies but I never insulted the soldiers. I never called anyone a baby-killer, never spit on a guy in uniform. And again, I do not feel the slightest degree of guilt that they went and I didn’t. They had the same options I had, and if they had been cleverer they could have avoided the killing machine, too. And I didn’t come home to Mom in a body bag, or missing an arm or a leg or my balls. And that’s how I wanted it to be. Amen.

So, after all that, how was the series? Outstanding, as all of the Ken Burns documentaries have been. Simply amazing. Very hard to watch in places, but worth the mental agony. I don’t think it told me much that I didn’t know … but it put it all together, and reminded me of many things I had forgotten. In particular how Johnson and then Nixon brazenly lied to the American people, time and time again. They both knew we were never going to “win” this war, and yet they kept sending boys into the meat grinder. It was sobering to hear Nixon, on the celebrated Oval Office tapes committing multiple felonies by promulgating criminal conspiracies. Any D.A. in the world would have had an easy job of convicting the motherfucker. No one did, of course, because Ford pardoned him.

The other striking thing was the interviews with the Vietnamese people, from both sides of the DMZ. The Ken Burns style for events more recent than the Civil War is to interview a lot of people who were there, and it is particularly compelling in this war. The South was betrayed by us. The North was pounded mercilessly by us. What you will be impressed by is that all the Vietnamese soldiers, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, North Vietnamese Army, and Viet Cong, had stories so similar that they could have come from either side. Except for one thing. The NVA and the VC had it much harder than our boys. I do not mean at all to belittle the hardships and suffering our soldiers endured … but they never had napalm dropped on them, roasting them alive. Our soldiers had beer and good food and a warm place to sleep, most of the time. They had R&R in Hong Kong. They had lovely whores in Saigon. The VC had a handful of rice and a pair of flip-flops and a maze of rat-infested tunnels to live in. Our enemies died at a rate many times our rate of casualties. And yet they never gave up, though they were just as shit-your-pants terrified as our own troops, who describe the horrors of sacrificing a lot of men to take a fucking hill with a fucking number, only to abandon it … and then be ordered by incompetent assholes like General Westmoreland to take it again. Insanity. Total insanity.