Many Americans were now bored or wearied by the war and grew inattentive until the last day of April 1970 when U.S. forces were sent into Cambodia but found no one there to fight. The president said the invasion was not to expand the war but to end the war in Vietnam. Some of us felt that everything he said was in a demented code. Going into Cambodia with GIs on an armored personnel carrier, I heard them marvel at how clean, how pretty, the countryside was. They did not believe me when I said that Vietnam was once as lovely, for they felt it had always been a scarred, rutted, vile place.
At home, the Cambodian invasion, although limited, caused the last great convulsion of protest, the deadliest of all the antiwar commotions. On the campus of Kent State in Ohio, National Guardsmen, in panic over a harmless demonstration, opened fire, killing four students and wounding 11. My paper wanted the reaction of the troops in Vietnam so I talked to one exhausted platoon that had just come in from a long sweep. But the news did not matter for they were beyond shock. One boy needed to speak and then did: “I want to go to school.”
In those last years of the war it was the U.S. Army, not the “enemy,” that gave our military command trouble it had never expected. The troops wrote “F–k the Army” on their helmet liners, smoked marijuana and then found heroin much better, wore love beads and peace symbols and black-power bracelets woven of boot laces, and were not subservient to their officers. I don’t mean to say that the entire army in Vietnam mutinied or took drugs, but enough enlisted men did to cause alarm at the highest levels. many soldiers called their officers “lifers,” a term of utmost contempt, and in a few instances even killed them, though the number of these murders will never be known. “Fraggings,” these deaths were called, because fragmentation grenades were often used to get the job done.
One reason for their anger was the awareness, a long time in coming, of who was used up in the war, and it was hardly ever the sons of prosperous men. A lot of them knew they were the surplus kids, the ones who didn’t know how to get deferments, and whose parents wouldn’t complain to a congressman if they were hurt or killed. Believing themselves to have been raised in a classless society they did not know exactly how to put this grievance into words so they told you other things. One soldier repeated what his father, a World War II artilleryman, said before he left for Vietnam. “Suck it up,” the father said.
It was a group of Vietnam veterans who gave the last angry blow to the war and I loved them for it. Nearly a thousand of them, many wearing their old uniforms, went to Washington, D.C., and set up a campsite near the Lincoln Memorial. Those with medals threw them on the steps of the Capitol building, as if these decorations, so coveted by soldiers, were now a contamination. Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, John Kerry said it was their hope that Vietnam would not be “just an immoral and obscene memory. but rather the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.” But so many men were sewn so tightly inside the war, unable to lift themselves out of it, that they stayed silent and knew years of grief and pain.
At home, some of the young wanted to nail down the ’60s to keep the passion and the defiance going a little longer. On the ground, South Vietnamese soldiers were sent into Laos to. cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as if it were a big asphalt highway, and they were slaughtered by the North Vietnamese or broke and ran. This was to be the final proof that Vietnamization really worked. Interviewing some of the survivors of Lam Son 719, I thought I was seeing shell shock close up. It was so awful to hear how they deserted that even my interpreter had to stop to collect himself.
In 1971, excerpts of the Pentagon Papers were published in The New York Times, and elsewhere: a 7,000-page top-secret study of the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, a record of ignorance and deceit and arrogant judgments. The war in Vietnam ground on, even when Nixon went to China.
And then the long Shakespearean drama called Watergate, which began with a break-in and ended with a disgraced president who had risen from the dead so many times before. in a hunger for heroes we found them: two young reporters on The Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the story and wrote every inch of it until the end. And there was Sam Ervin, an old Democrat from North Carolina, who chaired the Senate Watergate Committee proceedings and embodied something fine and decent. We learned about “wire” men who planted tapes and bugs, about an enemies list of prominent Americans who were to be hounded, about burn bags and “deep-sixing,” or destruction of evidence. We learned about the long-secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia. We learned that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, was corrupt. We learned that Nixon, re-elected in a landslide in 1972, had the presidential offices bugged and taped, and it was these tapes that led to his new death.
When Nixon resigned at last and took off, there were those who said it was a victory for the republic. Jonathan Schell wrote of the long reach of the Founding Fathers: “In a sense we didn’t save the system–it saved us.” It was nice to think so, but the idea seemed almost quaint later on.
We were released from the choke hold of the war: a peace accord was signed, the last American troops left South Vietnam and 591 POWs came home and were invited to dinner by President Nixon, who knew one last night of rapture while in office. Later he was pardoned by the new president, Gerald Ford, which The New York Times called “an unconscionable act.” The war seized us one more time: early in 1975 the revolutionary forces attacked the south and moved so quickly that even their own commanders were surprised by their success. Da Nang fell without a fight after pandemonium that Goya should have sketched. Today even a student knows the story told in the old photographs of people climbing to the roof of the U.S. Embassy, -struggling to get out on a chopper. As Frank Snepp, the CIA’s chief strategy analyst in Vietnam, wrote in his remarkable book, “Decent Interval,” although 1,373 American personnel and journalists, 5,595 Vietnamese and 85 “third country nationals” were evacuated, left behind were many more Vietnamese who worked for the Americans and the intelligence dossiers that identified those on our payrolls. The government sued Snepp for his book and succeeded in confiscating all royalties and putting him under a permanent prior restraint on all future writing.
Perhaps the war was always going to end as it did. On April 30 the North Vietnamese reached the capital and Saigon was theirs.
What was never expected, and could hardly be believed, was how the victorious Khmer Rouge forces emptied the entire Cambodian capital city, Phnom Penh, and forced an entire population to the countryside to labor and starve. The deaths went to a million until the Vietnamese, for their own reasons, invaded Cambodia and told the living to go home. Hundreds of thousands walked or crawled or were carried to the border of Thailand.
Holed up in New York, I was reading Shelby Foote’s great trilogy of the Civil War and swerving toward the English poets of World War I. The lines hammered inside my heart were from Isaac Rosenberg’s poem “August 1914.” “What in our lives is burnt/ In the fire of this?” he wrote. More and more people I knew were drifting away as if in the ranks of a huge dreamy retreat. A friend said: “I’m living on a different plane now and can’t pay attention to specifics.” But some specifics were splendid: the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt welded by President Jimmy Carter; his human-rights policy too. But when the imperial Shah of Shahs, our protege in the Middle East, was deposed in Iran in 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeini reigned, this decent man went down in flames. After fundamentalists held more than 60 Americans from the U.S. Embassy in Teheran as hostages, our own citizens grew incensed. A civil war in Nicaragua ended in 1979 when President Anastasio Somoza, whose family had so viciously ruled for 43 years, was deposed. Only a psychic could have seen any connection between our hostages and the enemies of the new Sandinista leaders in Nicaragua, but a criminal conspiracy called Iran-contra was just ahead.
My last struggle was this: how to honor the dead in Indochina, and our own, yet move beyond them so I could go on living. Homage had to be paid to the Chileans murdered after the coup that led to the death of their president, Salvador Allende. He was a marked man in the Nixon-Kissinger ledger. Perfectly nice people told me Vietnam had been good for my career and thought that I was smiling at them.
When I think back over those 10 years it’s a shift in power that stands out. We started out the ’70s with the power pretty much as it had been–in the presidency and the business community. In the first five years of the decade that power shifted to the media and the noncommercial elements of society. The primary example is the supersaturation of television during the Watergate hearings. They had profound implications, but the Senate Hearing Room was outfitted with lights and cables for the cameras. It was a giant media phenomenon. I had not understood that until I saw it. Those lights were very hot, very bright for me as a witness. But they were very necessary to television.
