Ap u. S. History syllabus matthew S. Garrett Washington County High School
Primary Document Excerpts—“Voices of a People’s History of the United States”
Download 413.34 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- SNCC, Position Paper on Vietnam (January 6, 1966)
- Muhammad Ali Speaks Out Against the Vietnam War (1966)
- Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam” (April 4, 1967)
- Larry Colburn “They were Butchering People” (2003)
- Tim O’Brien “The Man I Killed” (1990)
- Maria Herrera-Sobek “Untitled” (1999)
- Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
|
Primary Document Excerpts—“Voices of a People’s History of the United States” Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party “Petition Against the War in Vietnam (July 28, 1965) In McComb, MS, in July 1965, civil rights activist in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party circulated and published this petition—one of the first against the war in Vietnam. Here are five reasons why Negroes should not be in any fighting for America:
SNCC, Position Paper on Vietnam (January 6, 1966) SNCC also spoke out in early 1966 against the war in Vietnam, seeking to connect the issues of racism at home and the war in Asia SNCC assumes its right to dissent with the United States foreign policy on any issue, and states its opposition to United States involvement in Vietnam on these grounds: We believe the Untied States government has been deceptive in claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming for the freedom of colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the US itself. We, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have been involved in the black people’s struggle for liberation and self-determination in this country for the past five years. Our work, particularly in the South, taught us that the US government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression with its own borders. We ourselves have often been victims of violence and confinement executed by US government officials. We recall the numerous persons who have been murdered in the South because of their efforts to secure their civil and human rights. . . We know that for the most part, elections in this country, in the North as well as the South, are not free. We have seen that the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act have not yet been implemented with full federal power and concern. We question then the ability and even the desire of the US government to guarantee free elections abroad. We maintain that our country’s cry of “Preserve Freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask behind which it squashed liberation movement which are not bound and refuse to be bound by the expediency of US cold war policy. We are in sympathy with and support the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to US aggression in the name of the “freedom” we find so false in this country. We recoil with horror at the inconsistency of a supposedly free society where responsibility to freedom is equated with the responsibility to lend oneself to military aggression. We take note of the fact that 16 percent of the draftees from this country are Negro, called on to stifle the liberation of Vietnam, to preserve a “democracy” which does not exist for them at home. . . Muhammad Ali Speaks Out Against the Vietnam War (1966) In 1964, shortly after becoming the world heavyweight boxing champion, the boxer Cassius Marcellus Clay (named after a white abolitionist by that name) took the name of Muhammad Ali, renouncing what he called his slave name. Two years later, the outspoken fighter caused outrage in the media when he petitioned for military exemption from military service in Vietnam and then, when denied, refused to be drafted. As a result of his protest against the war, Ali’s battle against the sentence went to the US Supreme Court and was not reversed until 1971. In 1966, Ali Spoke in Louisville, KY, his home town, about the reasons for not fighting in Vietnam. Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people of the world. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion [Islam], my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. . . If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my own people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years. Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam” (April 4, 1967) A number of civil rights leaders urged Martin Luther King, Jr., not to speak out on the growing intervention of the United States in Vietnam, but he said he could not separate the issues of economic injustice, racism, war, and militarism. In a speech he gave in the Riverside Church in New York, exactly one year before his assassination in 1968, King articulated his opposition. A small section is included here. . . .Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program [The Great Society]. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then cam the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destruct suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. . . . . . Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are pain the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours. Larry Colburn “They were Butchering People” (2003) On March 16, 1968, a company of US infantry entered the village of My Lai, and although they did not receive a single round of hostile fire, methodically slaughtered some five hundred Vietnamese peasants, mostly women and children. The freelance journalist Seymour Hersh heard the story, but the major media ignored his efforts to publicize it. Finally, in December 1969 Life magazine carried Ronald Haeberle’s horrendous photos of GIs pouring automatic fire into trenches where Vietnamese women, babies in their arms, crouched in fear. The military arrested Lt. William Calley, a platoon leader at My Lai, who had ordered the shootings. Many officers were involved in the incident and then the cover-up, however, only Calley received a jail sentence. His life sentence was diminished to five years by the intervention of President Nixon. He served three and a half years under house arrest and was then released. In the following recollection, Larry Colburn, a helicopter door-gunner, who with his pilot, Hugh Thomspon, came upon the scene and stopped some of the killing, tells his story. We weren’t pacifists. We did our job and when we had to kill people we did. But we didn’t do it for sport. We didn’t randomly shoot people. In our gun company it was very important to capture weapons, not just to legitimize your kill, but psychologically it was easier when you could say, “If I didn’t do that, he was going to shoot me.” We flew an OH-23—a little gasoline-engine bubble helicopter. We were aerial scouts—a new concept. Instead of just sending assault helicopters they’d use our small aircraft as bait and have a couple gunships cover us. Basically we’d go out and try to get into trouble. We’d fly real low and if we encountered anything we’d mark it with smoke, return fire, and let the gunships work out. We also went on “snatch missions,” kidnapping draft-age males to take back for interrogation. We did that a lot in 1968. On March 16, we came on station a little after seven a.m. The only briefing I got was that they were going to put a company on the group to sweep through this village. Normally, we’d go in beforehand to see if we could find enemy positions or entice people to shoot at us. It was clear and warm and the fog was lifting off the rice paddies. On our first pass we saw a man in uniform carrying a carbine and pack coming out of a tree line. Thompson said, “Who wants him?” I said, “I’ll take him.” So he aimed the aircraft at him and got it down low and started toward the suspect. He was obviously Viet Cong. He was armed, evading, and heading for the next tree line. I couldn’t hit him to save my life. We worked that area a little more but that was the only armed Vietnamese I saw that day. After that we started working the perimeters of My Lai-4, -5, -6 and I remember seeing that American troops came in on slicks [helicopters]. We got ahead of them to see if they were going to encounter anything and we still didn’t receive any fire. It was market day and we saw a lot of women and children leaving the hamlet [village]. They were moving down the road carrying empty baskets. As we went further around the perimeter we saw a few wounded women in the rice fields south of My Lai-4. We marked their bodies with smoke grenades expecting that medics would give them medical assistance. When we came back to the road we started seeing bodies, the same people that were walking to the market. They hadn’t even gotten off the road. They were in piles, dead. We started going through all the scenarios of what might have happened. Was it artillery? Gunships? Viet Cong? The American soldiers on the ground were just walking in a real nonchalant sweep. No one was crouching, ducking, or hiding. Then we saw a young girl about twenty years old lying in the grass. We could see that she was unarmed and wounded in the chest. We marked her with smoke because we saw the squad was so far away. The smoke was green, meaning it’s safe to approach. Red would have meant the opposite. We were hovering six feet off the ground not more than twenty feet away when Captain [Ernest] Medina came over, kicked her, stepped back, and finished her off. He did it right in front of us. When we saw Medina do that, it clicked. It was our guys doing the killing. The bodies we marked with smoke—you find yourself feeling that you indirectly killed them. I’ll never forget one lady who was hiding in the grass. She was crouched in the fetal position. I motioned to her—stay down, be quiet, stay there. We flew off on more reconnaissance. We came back later and she was in the same position, right where I’d told her to stay. But someone had come up behind her and literally blew her brains out. I’ll never forget that look of bewilderment on her face. Around ten a.m. [Hugh] Thompson spotted a group of women and children running toward a bunker northeast of My Lai-4 followed by a group of US soldiers. When we got overhead, [Glenn] Andreotta spotted some faces peeking out of an earthen bunker. Thompson knew that in a matter of seconds they were going to die, so he landed the aircraft in between the advancing American troops and the bunker. He went over and talked to a Lt. Brooks. Thompson said, “These are civilians. How do we get them out of the bunker?” Brooks said, “I’ll get them out with hand grenades.” The veins were sticking out of Thompson’s neck and said to Andreotta and me, “If they open up on these people when I’m getting them out of the bunker, shoot’em.” Then walked away leaving us standing there looking at each other. Thompson went over to the bunker and motioned for the people to come out. There were nine or ten of them. We had a staredown going with the American soldiers. About half of them were sitting down, smoking and joking. I remember looking at one fellow and waving. He waved back and that’s when I knew we were okay, that these guys weren’t doing anything to us. No one pointed weapons at us and we didn’t point any weapons at them. Thompson called Dan Millians, a gunship pilot friend of his, and said, “Danny, I’ve got a little problem down here, can you help out.” Millians said sure and did something unheard of. You don’t land a gunship to use it as a medevac, but he did. He got those people a couple miles away and let’em go. I think he made two trips. We flew over the ditch where more than a hundred Vietnamese had been killed. Andreotta saw movement so Thompson landed again. Andreotta went directly into that ditch. He literally had to wade waste deep through people to get to a little child. I stood there in the open. Glenn came over and handed me the child, but the ditch was so full of bodies and blood he couldn’t get out. I gave him the butt of my rifle and pulled him out. We took the little one to an orphanage. We didn’t know if he was a little boy or little girl. Just a cute little child. I felt for broken bones or bullet holes and he appeared to be fine. He wasn’t crying, but he had this blank stare on his face and was covered in blood. The only thing I remember feeling back then was that these guys were really out for revenge. They’d lost men to booby traps and snipers and they were ready to engage. They were briefed the night before and I’ve heard it said that they were going in there to waste everything. They didn’t capture any weapons. They didn’t kill any draft-age males. I’ve seen the list of dead and there were a hundred and twenty some humans under the age of five. It’s something I’ve struggled with my whole adult life, how people can do that. I know what it’s like to seek revenge, but we would look for a worthy opponent. These were elders, mothers, children, and babies. The fact that the VC [Viet Cong] camped out there a night is no justification for killing everyone in the hamlet. Compare it to a little town in the US. We’re at war with someone on our own soil. They come into a town and rape the women, kill the babies, kill everyone. How would we feel? And it wasn’t just murdering civilians. They were butchering people. The only thing they didn’t do is cook’em and eat’em. How do you get that far over the edge? Tim O’Brien “The Man I Killed” (1990) After being drafted, Tim O’Brien served in the army from 1969 to 1970. In 1990, he published a damning account of the war, The Things They Carried. Here is a section of the chapter “The Man I Killed” His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back into three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this would that had killed him. He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead, almost dainty young man. He had bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers. His chest was sunken and poorly muscled—a scholar, maybe. His wrists were the wrists of a child. He wore a black shirt, black pajama pants, a gray ammunition belt, a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand. His rubber sandals had been blown off. One lay beside him, the other a few meters up the trail. He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe near the central coastline of Quang Ngai Provenience, where his parents farmed, and where his family had lived for several centuries, and where, during the time of the French his father and two uncles and many neighbors had joined in the struggle for independence. He was not a Communist. He was a citizen and a soldier. In the village of My Khe, as in all of Quang Ngai, patriotic resistance had the force of tradition, which was partly the force of legend, and from his earliest boyhood the man I killed would have listened to stories about the heroic Trung sisters and Iran Hung Dao’s famous rout of the Mongols and Le Loi’s final victory against the Chinese at Tot Dong. He would have been taught that to defend the land was a man’s highest duty and highest privilege. He had accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly, though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter. His health was poor, his body small and frail. He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night, lying on his mat, he could not picture himself doing the brave things his father had done, or his uncles, or the heroes of the stories. He hoped in his heart that he would never be tested. He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always, even when he was asleep. “Oh, man, you fuckin’ trashed the fucker,” Azar said. “You scrabbled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin’ Wheat.” “Go away,” Kiowa [Tim’s friend] said. “I’m just saying the truth. Like Oatmeal.” “Go!” Kiowa said.
Maria Herrera-Sobek “Untitled” (1999) In this poem, the poet Maria Herrera-Sobek writes about the much-neglected experience of Chicanos and Latinos in the Vietnam war. Like blacks and other people of color, Chicanos faced racism from their officers, and were often assigned the most dangerous positions. They also were among the most active opponents of the war, pointing out the hypocrisy of the US government’s claim to be bringing “democracy” to Vietnam. “Untitled” We saw them coming in funeral black bags body bags they called them eyes locked forever they were our brown men shot in a dishonest war Vietnam taught us not to trust anyone over thirty for they had the guns and the power to send our boyfriends fathers, brothers off to war while they sauntered in lily white segregated country clubs a bomb planted in our minds a bomb exploded in 1969
Watts, East Los Black Panthers Brown Berets Drank the night and lighted up the sky with homemade fireworks the war had come to roost in our own backyard made in the USA guns turned inward and shot our young Dead in the streets Dead in the battlefields Dead in the schools and yet a plaintive song Crashing against the crackling explosion of a Molotov cocktail. insisted
“We shall overcome.” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) At first SDS tackled domestic issues. In the summer of 1964, SDS volunteers moved into poor urban neighborhoods and organized residents to fight for jobs, better housing, schools, and community services. By the fall of 1964, SDS had organized chapters on nearly 50 campuses around the country. Then a new issue loomed-the war in Vietnam. At its December 1964 national convention, SDS members voted to protest the war by organizing a march on Washington for the following April. Because United States involvement in Vietnam was still limited to military advisers and aid, opposition to the war remained muted. No one expected more than a few thousand marchers. Then President Johnson began to escalate the United States commitment to South Vietnam. When Johnson ordered the large-scale bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 and sent in the first combat troops, the antiwar movement mushroomed. Some Americans felt betrayed by Johnson, whom they had considered a peace candidate in 1964. SDS now led a crusade to end the war in Vietnam. Within a single year, the ranks of SDS had swollen to more than 150 chapters with 10,000 members. That spring (1965) also helped organize several university teach-ins. The first teach-ins took place at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. On March 24, 1965. Shortly after the first United States ground combat troops landed in South Vietnam, more than 3,500 students and professors jammed into 4 lecture halls. They sang folk songs, analyzed United States foreign policy, and debated the war until dawn. In the following weeks, similar teach-ins sprang up at campuses across the nation. Tom Hayden outlines the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) views on the ills of society. . . . American society is being destroyed by its unrepresentative government. The politicians who control the White House and Congress do not respond to glaring social needs or to the outcries of millions of people. Democracy is reduced to the sorry event of people trooping to the polls every four years to vote for candidates who offer no serious choice. Our taxes, blood and national honor are being poured out in the hopeless Vietnam war, while the violence in our cities exposes the real depth of our unsolved problems at home. Faced with a worldwide cry for human rights, from Vietnam to our nation’s slums, top American politicians seem able to reply only with negative and self- defeating violence. But the violence of suppression solves nothing. The problems cannot be avoided or bombed away. In 1960 and especially in 1964, the American voters supported peace in Vietnam and social reform at home. Since then leading scholars, religious figures, artists, even certain generals and businessmen have protested the war; the Senate leadership of both parties has criticized the President; opinion surveys show a large minority opposed to the fighting; nearly all of America’s allies have registered their opposition; world public opinion condemns the US as the aggressor in Vietnam. Yet the warmakers continue to escalate. Their domination of policy grows. For a century American society has endorsed racial equality. But in 1968 a virtual race war is in the making. Since open rebellions broke out nearly four years ago, no social and economic answer has been put forward. The basic response of the government has been to violently suppress the rebellions then let evil conditions go on as before. Rotten housing, schools and jobs are the continuous lot of black Americans. Neither hard work in the cotton fields, nor politics, nor labor organizations, nor nonviolent demonstrations have made the American promise become a reality. The problems of Vietnam and racism affect all Americans. Our country’s future peace and honor depend on a successful resolution of these two problems. Hatreds and divisions are being created which will take generations to end. America is becoming an ugly and insecure place to live. The country lacks the commitment to deal with racism, and cannot afford to anyway because of its preoccupation with Vietnam. Because our social imagination is blighted by these investments in violence, our life as a whole is degraded in countless ways. Cities are unlivable. Television is a wasteland. Medical needs are not met. Mental problems go unattended. . . Download 413.34 Kb. Share with your friends:
|