Elise Lemire - Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston

The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston

Elise Lemire

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

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ISBN 978-0-8122-5297-2

For Eli

On November 12, 1969, in a cable to a small antiwar news agency in Washington, DC, independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the situation in Vietnam was far worse than Americans realized.

Lt. William L. Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname Rusty, Hersh began in an explosive article that thirty-five newspaper editors around the country would decide to run the next day. Young Rusty had committed an unfathomable act of barbarity in a war the worlds most powerful military had still not managed to win against a country the size of California. After initially looking the other way, the Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968.

While the public was stunned to learn what had happened in the residential area the American military mistakenly called My Lai, many of the men who had fought in Southeast Asia were not. In January 1971, a New York Citybased antiwar Vietnam veterans group convened hearings in Detroit about the sickening regularity of American atrocities. Over one hundred Vietnam veterans from across the United States showed up to testify.

We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims all killed in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us, explained an Ohio veteran who had led a rifle platoon in the same division as Lieutenant Calley. Continuing to read the organizers opening statement to a packed hotel auditorium, the veteran condemned the entire military for the massacre and for the murder of so many other Vietnamese people on what the gathered antiwar veterans believed was an unprecedented scale. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division, which inevitably resulted in My Lai, were the policies of other Army and Marine divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lieutenant Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide.

The federal government had sold the Vietnam War to the American public at the height of the Cold War as a necessary means of stopping the spread of communism from Vietnam to the rest of Asia and across the world. But American soldiers sent out to find and engage the enemy on what the military callously named search-and-destroy missions quickly discovered that instead of encountering the ill-equipped communist enemy they had been told to expect, they were met at every turn by fierce freedom fighters willing to do anything to liberate their homeland from the American invaders. The veterans testified that after months in the field losing GI after GI to sniper attacks and booby traps while under pressure from American military officials to increase the daily body count, or number of enemies killed, American troops were dangerously on edge and utterly broken in spirit. Often choking back tears, they insisted that murdering civilians, torturing enemy soldiers, and desecrating corpses were regular, if not daily, occurrences. Over the course of three days, the veterans built their case that My Lai, as the crime came to be called, was no unusual occurrence.

But while Americans had proven themselves willing to read the extensive press coverage of the horrors unleashed over the course of four hours on March 16, 1968, they were not prepared to hear that war atrocities were, in the veterans military parlance, standard operating procedure. The same journalists who spent months covering Hershs revelations ignored what the veterans in Detroit had to say. America seemed to be suffering from what the antiwar veterans frustrated national spokesman identified as atrocity fatigue.