By Nazarul Islam | USA

People born six decades ago, have seen this iconic picture. An American helicopter perches atop a building as would-be evacuees clamber up a ladder to the roof. They’re desperate to flee Saigon, capital of a doomed South Vietnam, before it falls to the communist troops advancing somewhere out of shot below.

A Dutch news agency photographer, Hugh van Es, snapped that picture from his office balcony, on 29 April 1975. The roof belonged to a nearby apartment building where senior CIA staffers were based. It was not the US Embassy, though that’s how it’s been misremembered ever since. Exactly half a century later, van Es’ shot remains engraved in memory as the defining image of how America made its exit.

It also points to something more. In the decades after 1945, the helicopter became the embodiment of the United States’ nimble superpower modernity, descending from on high to bring salvation, or vengeance.

Presidents had ducked under the rotating blades to be buzzed from the White House lawn to Camp David, to decide the fate of nations.

Aerospace corporations kept thousands at work in places such as Fort Worth, Texas, the home of Bell Helicopter, which made the UH-1 Iroquois, nicknamed the ‘Huey’. It was one of those Hueys up on that the Saigon roof – at one point, Bell was making 150 every week.

Imagine a movie where war came to America itself? And, imagine a scenario where the Soviets nuke the largest cities, amidst chaos business leaders are busy planning to pile into choppers and flee to the luxury bunkers awaiting them beneath a popular location in the countryside.

When young protesters rebelled against what they saw as their authoritarian, militaristic elders, those same authorities retaliated by sending in the choppers. In August 1968, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago became a fortress. Outside, furious, thwarted left-wing activists demanded a say in the selection of the party’s candidate for president.

Mayor Richard Daley sent in baton-wielding cops – and ’copters. In No One Was Killed, his book-length report on the mayhem that followed, the journalist-novelist John Schultz detected the shadow of the hated war in Asia looming over the protesters below:

Overhead, a helicopter hummed up and down the length of Michigan Avenue from the Hilton to 18th Street, playing its searchlight on the crowd rushing north and on the alleys. Perhaps the helicopter was radioing information to the [National] Guard and the cops, but mainly it was there to frighten, to intimidate. Everyone in the crowd knew that in Vietnam a machine gun could be working away behind the searchlight.

America’s film director George Shultz, is angrily shaking his fist at the cop behind the bulb, imagining him ‘curling his lip at my affront, fingering a trigger and saying, “Oh, what I could do, buddy boy, oh, yes, what I could do”’.

Likewise, nine months later, to disperse huge campus protests at Berkeley, Governor Ronald Reagan dispatched the National Guard. They surrounded the students, while a helicopter swooped in past the university bell tower, pumping out tear gas.

No wonder that, by 1970, such images had come to symbolize implacable, centralized force. In EL Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel, the military-industrial complex is described as ‘highly visible’. On a dystopic Californian plain, the protagonist watches a mysterious dark green helicopter track back and forth across the sky all day, ‘its compressions beating the white air till it’s thick’.

Around this time, the US military formalized its long-standing practice of naming its helicopters after Native American tribes (Iroquois, Apache, Chinook) and leaders (Black Hawk). This was reportedly meant to invoke American history while evoking the aircrafts’ stealth and speed. It also underlines the power of the state that was commissioning them. It’s not hard to imagine what the 19th-century federal government would have done with Apache helicopters to actual Apaches.

All the same, these images are more ambiguous than they seem. Helicopters may have left John Schultz feeling powerless as he stared up from the ground, but finally it’s just another person up there, trying to control a tiny, vulnerable vehicle. The helicopter is irreducibly hubristic. It is this that makes it such a potent symbol of the image America presents to itself, and to the rest of us. It hovers, all-powerful, over everything, but sometimes seems a shot away from calamity.

The historian Christian Appy has pointed out that it was helicopters, rather than the far more destructive B-52 bombers, that came to symbolize America’s war in Vietnam. But this is not just because they were incessantly visible over Vietnam itself, and on television: it’s because they embody both sides of the US intervention – omnipotent, and impotent. In Chickenhawk, his bestselling memoir of his year spent flying Hueys early in the war, Robert Mason recalls watching a Viet Cong soldier with a rifle hopelessly trying ‘to take on our entire air-assault battalion, machine guns blazing’.

He also describes the intense fear induced by flying low, his ‘chickenshit’ commander hunched low in the seat beside him, and how other Viet Cong fighters took out US pilots – such as Mason’s successor – by shooting vertically through the cockpit from the ground.

This duality was captured in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, in another spin on these images that are seared into the collective memory. The ascending Wagnerian strings of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ are blasted from a helicopter convoy as it swoops in across the sea, effortlessly wiping out scurrying Vietnamese peasants. Yet as soon as one of the choppers lands, a Vietnamese woman runs up and throws in a grenade. And of course that photo from the Saigon roof was only partly an image of American power. It also signified defeat.

More dispiriting images followed. In 1980, with Apocalypse Now still in cinemas, President Carter sent commandos from the Delta Force special missions unit to carry out ‘Operation Eagle Claw’. This was a bid to rescue American diplomats being held hostage in Iran. Three of the eight helicopters malfunctioned. The mission was aborted, in the course of which another crashed into a cargo aircraft, killing eight servicemen.

Three years later, under Ronald Reagan, Delta Force landed in another debacle. ‘Operation Urgent Fury’ was a plan to invade Grenada on the dubious premise that this small Caribbean island, a member of the British Commonwealth, had become a ‘Soviet-Cuban colony’, and a Launchpad for terrorism. At one point, Delta Force descended in daylight in Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks, struggling through anti-aircraft fire at point-blank range on a mission to liberate political prisoners – only to find the prison empty.

Overall, the invasion amounted to something of a political triumph, but, as Reagan’s biographer Max Boot writes, it ‘suffered from many of the same dysfunctions as Operation Eagle Claw’. As if to rub the point in, Robert Mason’s groundbreaking account of the Viet Cong shooting US pilots had touched down in bookstores just weeks before.

By far the most devastating such incident arrived under President Clinton, in October 1993. US forces operating with the United Nations in the war-torn Somalia capital Mogadishu attempted to capture an insurgent leader who had ordered the ambush of a peacekeeping convoy. Once again, Delta Force led the operation in Black Hawks – which had become a focus of Somalis’ anger towards the UN forces. According to the New York Times, even when they weren’t visiting deadly force from the air, their rotors ‘whipped the roofs of whole neighborhoods’.

The operation, ‘Gothic Serpent’, was a disaster. A soldier fell to the ground from 70 feet up. One Black Hawk crashed; another was shot down. Two Delta Force snipers, deployed by helicopter to secure one of the crash sites, were among the 18 Americans killed. The mutilated body of a US soldier was dragged through the city streets. A helicopter pilot was captured. Images of both men horrified Americans back home: it felt like Vietnam all over again.

After Saigon fell, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that America’s ill-fated intervention ‘was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed “the mightiest power on earth”’. Yet that was not shattered by what happened in Iran, Grenada and Somalia. Instead, the image of American power that had once spooked many on the 1960s left began to spook many more in the 1990s, this time on the political right.

When America won the Cold War, it lost its unifying enemy. The ‘New World Order’ that emerged instead felt to some Americans less like victory than defeat, shaped as it was by globalization, disappearing jobs, the closure of defense manufacturing plants, and then the ascent of Bill Clinton to the presidency: a man they cast as a Vietnam draft-dodger, hell-bent on confiscating patriots’ guns. In reaction against all this, and the violent resolution of sieges at Waco and elsewhere, a large-scale militia movement emerged, some of whose leaders had served in Vietnam.

The beliefs that shaped the movement varied from the extreme right to a much more general discontent, but some of those involved harbored a remarkably detailed vision of imminent tyranny, in which a treacherous federal government, in cahoots with the United Nations, would carve up the republic.

This was an early sign of the worldview that has now come to dominate US politics, with its fears of a phantom ‘deep state’, rooted in unease about the federal government’s power. In the 1990s, the image that crystallized this fear was a sinister apparition on the skyline: the unmarked black helicopter.

Read: Reviving Islamic Discourse and Rationalism

____________________

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

The post Images tell the real story first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Justin Brummer

In the early 1970s, an obscure Louisiana-based country singer called Bob Necaise released ‘Mr. Where is Viet-Nam’. In the song, Lil Gary Dee, a ‘little boy not yet four years old’, asks:

Mister where is Vietnam?

Is it very far away?

I want to see my daddy

Will you take me there today?

By December 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, the US had 3,205 military personnel stationed in Vietnam. By the end of the 1960s, this enigmatic country would become the most controversial issue facing the US, dividing society, debated in Congress, demonstrated for and against on the streets – and documented in song.

Vietnam has been called ‘the First Television War’. But, as Billboard magazine reported on 4 June 1966, ‘few conflicts have evoked such a spate of musical production’. As the magazine revealed, well over 100 Vietnam records had been released since that January alone. Fifty years on, more than 5,000 songs have been recorded about the war, forming an international conversation about a conflict that tore apart the fabric of politics, society and culture. With the US divided between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, music became a powerful communication tool for both sides.

‘How many kids did you kill today?’

In the war’s early stages, protest songs voiced the concerns of a minority movement. Most Vietnam songs released during Kennedy’s presidency articulated a reluctance to be drafted. In 1962, the Californian folk duo Goldcoast Singers released ‘Please Mr. Kennedy’, with an unambiguous message to the president: ‘I don’t want to go’. Fewer than 80 American deaths were recorded between 1956 and 1962, compared to over 16,000 in 1968 alone.

One of the earliest notable protest songs of the JFK-era was published in the New York folk magazine Broadside on 20 September 1963, two months before Kennedy’s assassination. ‘Talkin Vietnam’ by Phil Ochs criticized the government for ‘training a million Vietnamese, to fight for the wrong government, and the American way’. It also attacked South Vietnam’s Catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem for his one family rule and suppression of the majority Buddhist population: ‘families that slay together, stay together’. However, songs that focused solely on opposing the Vietnam conflict were uncommon until 1964.

The turning point was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. On 10 August, Congress passed the resolution authorizing President Lyndon B. Johnson to send hundreds of thousands of troops to maintain a non-communist South Vietnam. As US troop levels increased from 59,900 to 448,800 between 1965 and 1967, songwriters directed their anger at the president.

Distrust of LBJ was expressed by folk singer Tom Paxton in ‘Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation’ (1965). Paxton satirized the president’s actions: ‘though it isn’t really war, we’re sending 50,000 more’. In ‘Hey, Hey LBJ’ (1967), Bill Fredericks, backed by a group of children, asked ‘how many kids did you kill today?’. Jacqueline Sharpe, a prominent folksinger and social activist, mocked the administration’s stubborn insistence on sticking to its objective in her song ‘Honor Our Commitment’ (1966), ‘even if the world goes up in the smoke of a mushroom cloud’.

On 30 April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr delivered a speech, titled ‘Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam’ at the Riverside Church in New York. It was later released by a Motown Records subsidiary. King pressed home the relationship between Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement, pointing to the ‘cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room’, as well as the killing of ‘little brown Vietnamese children’. King was not the first person to express this view. Nina Simone released ‘Backlash Blues’ in March 1967:

You send my son to Vietnam

You give me second-class houses and second-class schools

Do you think that all the colored folks are just second-class fools?

For decades, Civil Rights groups had struggled with accusations of being unpatriotic and communist, leaving many black artists to tread cautiously. King’s public move against the war opened the flood gates. Dozens of songs by black musicians drew comparisons between Civil Rights and Vietnam, including activist Matt Jones who refused to fight in ‘Hell No! I Ain’t Gonna Go’ (1970), telling his audience that ‘the Vietcong just like I am’.

In 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated attacks against the South, infiltrating the US Embassy in Saigon. Following the Tet Offensive, public support for withdrawal from Vietnam increased from 19 to 55 per cent. The horrors of the war were becoming unignorable. The US dropped 388,000 tons of Napalm B on Indochina between 1963 and 1973. A jellied gasoline mixture, it stuck to skin, causing severe burns when on fire. A group of active-duty GIs from Idaho, called the Covered Wagon Musicians, offered an unflinching picture of the war in ‘Napalm Sticks to Kids’ (1972):

We shoot the sick, the young and lame

We do our best to kill and maim

Because the kills all count the same

Napalm sticks to kids

With public support for the war waning, withdrawal became a big issue in the November 1968 presidential election. Most candidates supported some form of withdrawal as songs began to emphasize the war’s length, military failures and growing fatality rate. Bob Seger attacked the political system in 2+2 = 2 (1968): ‘it’s the rules not the soldier that I find the real enemy.’

Fuelled by anger, a politically conscious anti-Reagan punk movement grew internationally. Over 100 songs used Vietnam as a case study to criticize US interventions in Grenada, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Vietnam continued to be compared to other conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Richard Nixon won the election and soon became the focus of protest. Three key events raised pressure on Nixon. Each of them inspired records. The first was the ‘Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam’, a mass demonstration which took place across the US on 15 October 1969, followed by a march on Washington on 15 November. Native-American folk artist Buffy Saint Marie released ‘Moratorium’ in 1971, in which she highlighted the increasingly diverse demographics of the protest movement in the early 70s:

Yes, soldier it’s for you

We’re riskin’ all we have

We’re nailed and jailed the same as you

Our lives are up for grabs

The second was the Kent State demonstration on 4 May 1970, which protested Nixon’s Cambodia incursion, an attempt to cut off North Vietnam’s supply routes to the South via its neighbor. Four students were killed by the Ohio State National Guard. That the war’s brutality had reached American soil shocked the nation. Within weeks Crosby, Still, Nash & Young released ‘Ohio’, placing blame firmly with the government. It was just one of more than 50 songs released about Kent State.

Third, in 1971 the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study on the history of the war, commissioned in 1967, was leaked to the New York Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The papers revealed that the public had been misled about the war’s progress. The resulting news coverage inspired Texas band Bloodrock’s ‘Thank You Daniel Ellsberg’ (1972):

I wanna thank you Danny boy

For what you said and done

You’ve stricken from all the pages

But you don’t know that you’re the one

After the Tet Offensive and the subsequent turn in public opinion, commercially minded record labels became less afraid of releasing strong anti-war songs, for example Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ (1970) on Motown. By the 1970s, anti-war songs came from a range of backgrounds and perspectives and permeated popular culture. Anti-war sentiment even spread into the traditionally conservative country genre. John Wesley Ryles’ single ‘Kay’ (1968) featured ‘two young soldiers’ who tell the singer how they ‘hate that war in Vietnam’, while the wounded veteran in George Kent’s ‘Mama Bake a Pie’ (1970) pointedly says:

Yes sir it was worth it for the old red, white and blue

 And since I won’t be walking, I suppose I’ll save some money buying shoes

But for every protest song decrying the war’s pointless brutality, there was another side to the story. 

The Silent Majority?

Anti-war sentiment fuelled a large discography, but so did anti-communist sentiment. Opinion polls showed vast support for presidential policy across the Heartland and Southern states, in areas with ties to agriculture and religion. Patriotic songs supporting the government and troops filled the country charts and radio stations from the JFK to the Nixon eras of the war.

Jimmy Jack’s ‘Battle of Vietnam’ (1964) described the need to stop ‘the Commie charge’ in Vietnam and ‘keep it free’. In 1965 The Lonesome Valley Singers released ‘It’s All Worth Fighting For’, which articulated Dwight Eisenhower’s Domino Theory. The country group sang:

I guess there are people who think we should go ahead and give Vietnam to the enemy

But then what country would they demand next?

We’ve got to call a halt to this transgression somewhere

And it may as well be here in these jungles of South Vietnam

The US flag was an important symbol in patriotic songs. In Hank Snow’s 1966 ‘A Letter From Vietnam’, the narrator vowed he would do his best for ‘old glory, the red, white and blue’. And, like the flag, previous conflicts were often alluded to as patriotic symbols. In ‘What’s Come Over This World’ (1965), Billy Carr sang how

My brother fought in Korea,

My daddy in World War Two,

Now there’s a war in Vietnam,

And there’s a job we must do

On 16 March 1968, 300-500 civilians were murdered by US troops led by platoon leader Second Lieutenant William Calley in the south Vietnamese villages of My Lai and Song My. The My Lai Massacre became one the war’s most controversial events and inspired over 90 songs. But most of them supported Calley.

One of the most interesting of these was ‘Thank God, Calley Wasn’t Black’ (1973) by James Armstrong. The song defended Calley’s actions, but pondered what his fate may have been if he was an African-American. Would the public have been so lenient?

The most well-known song defending Calley was the ‘Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley’ (1971), by Terry Nelson, which sold over one million copies. But the massacre also became a symbol of an unjust war. The sleeve of Yoko Ono’s ‘Now or Never’ (1972) featured a horrific photograph of bodies in a ditch taken by army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle. It was one of the most graphic images to appear on a Vietnam War record.

A significant number of pro-war songs were directed at the war’s protestors and the perceived laziness, permissiveness and pacifism of the ‘Flower Power’ hippie generation. Jan Berry, member of the surf rock duo Jan & Dean, mocked the ‘Universal Coward’ (1965):

He just can’t get it through his thick skull

Why the mighty USA

Has got to be the watchdog of the world

Else that greedy USSR

Will bury us from afar

And he’ll never see the missiles being hurled

The narrator of Jack Sanders’ ‘The Vietnam Blues’ (1965), composed by Kris Kristofferson, comes across a ‘strange looking bunch’ of protestors gathering signatures to send a ‘telegram of sympathy to Ho Chi Minh’. The veteran feels ‘down right sick’. As the anti-war movement grew in the late 60s, a large number of records were recorded in support of Nixon. On 3 November 1969, the president had given a speech: ‘to you, the great silent majority: I ask for your support’. Written in response, George Jay’s ‘The Real Silent Majority’ (1969) expressed a desire to ‘unite with you in your search for an honorable peace’.

‘Now I’m 1-A’

According to the Veteran’s Administration, of the 3.5 million people who went to Vietnam, 2.2 million did so via the draft. The experience is reflected in hundreds of songs. ‘1-A’ was the classification for those eligible for service, a recognized phrase sung by Richie Kaye in ‘Here Comes Uncle Sam’ (1965): ‘I’m through with school, now I’m 1-A, I got a letter, they are taking me away’.

The line between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ was clearly demarcated in songs relating to the draft. While Steppenwolf praised the ‘courage’ of the ‘Draft Resister’ (1969), Smiley Smith released the single ‘I Wish I Had a Draft Card’. Merle Haggard noted that ‘we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street’ in ‘Okie From Muskogee’ (1969). Originally composed in jest, it became one of the most popular patriotic songs. In one of the standout novelty tracks, Chicago group Seeds of Euphoria advised LBJ in 1967: ‘Let’s Send Batman to Viet Nam’.

Draft inequality was a major theme. Gary Laster emphasized in ‘A Drafted Minor’ (1969) the absurd legal discrepancies affecting those drafted: draft age: 18; voting and drinking age: 21. Creedence Clearwater Revival confronted the inequality between the rich and poor in ‘Fortunate Son’ (1969), inspired by President Eisenhower’s grandson, David, who avoided the draft by joining the reserves.

Many songs also focused on the impact of war on those left behind. Some of these were sentimental: from the early 60s, many ‘soldier boy’ themed songs appeared, including ‘Your Heart Belongs to Me’ by The Supremes in 1962. Each holiday season galvanized sentiment on the home front and over 70 Christmas songs were written about the war. But not every song about absent soldiers was sentimental. Many artists were not shy about confronting the unethical activities of serving soldiers on furlough. The Soul Patrol’s ‘Saigon Strut’ (1968) described GIs visiting prostitutes on the famous Tu Do Street in Saigon, while ‘What’s Been Going On in Viet Nam’ (1968) by Ginger & Jean is told from the point of view of a veteran’s wife who discovers her husband has fathered a child abroad.

War is Over?

The North Vietnamese Army captured Saigon in April 1975. US military involvement in Vietnam was over, but the war continued to reverberate throughout American society. Almost half of the Vietnam War song discography was released in the postwar period.

The first wave of songs appeared between the 1973 peace agreement and the fall of Saigon. Many American songs of this period focused on returning prisoners of war. As part of the Paris Peace Accords, 591 POWs returned to the US in ‘Operation Homecoming’, an event celebrated in Funkadelic’s ‘March to the Witch’s Castle’:

February 12th, 1973

The prayers of thousands were answered

The war was over, and the first of the prisoners returned

Needless to say, it was the happiest day in up to thirteen years for most

For others, the real nightmare had just begun

That nightmare referred to the experience of returning veterans trying to readjust; that the war’s end had terrible consequences for those in South Vietnam who had fought with the Americans was largely overlooked. Only a few records addressed the Vietnamese refugee crisis: ‘The Boat People (A Song of Hope)’ by Canadian jazz singer Dick Maloney, for example.

The 1980s saw a revival of interest in the war. The Reagan-era saw a wave of nationalism that attempted to overcome ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. Applied to veterans, it referred to feelings of guilt or shame about the war, influenced by the domestic climate they had returned to. Reagan spoke about this on 18 August 1980: ‘For too long, we have lived with the Vietnam Syndrome. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died. They deserve our gratitude, our respect and our continuing concern’.

Two prominent themes dominated the new batch of songs. First, the attempt to overcome Vietnam Syndrome; second, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, characterized by shell shock, flashbacks and nostalgia. The Charlie Daniels Band released ‘Still in Saigon’ in 1982. The song is told from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran:

The ground at home was covered in snow

And I was covered in sweat

My younger brother calls me a killer

And my daddy calls me a vet

The completion of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Wall in Washington DC in 1982 led to over 30 songs of remembrance as Americans sought to come to terms with the war. Hawks and doves remained, but the names of more than 58,000 Americans killed became heroes, as sung by Michael J. Martin & Tim Holiday on ‘Who Are the Names on the Wall?’

But the 1980s was also the decade in which the long-term negative health effects of Agent Orange, a herbicide used in Vietnam to deprive the North Vietnamese guerrillas of concealment and food, became apparent. Peggy Seeger released ‘Agent Orange’ in 1982:

We’d fly above the trail all day and clouds of poison spray

I never thought that chemical would take my life today

But I just found out this morning, the doctor told me so

It killed me in Vietnam and I didn’t even know

Fuelled by anger, a politically conscious anti-Reagan punk movement grew internationally. Over 100 songs used Vietnam as a case study to criticize US interventions in Grenada, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Vietnam continued to be compared to other conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

The Vietnam War inspired songs on a scale never seen before, or since, and not just in the US. Performed by men and woman of different ethnicities and nationalities, the astonishing breadth of opinions from all levels of society reveals the changing nature of responses to the war. Aided by the development of the portable tape recorder, General Edward Lansdale captured hundreds of songs in Vietnam on tape, performed by US soldiers, Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians. Returning home he identified popular music’s central place in the experience of the war: ‘all along we have been historians without meaning to be. These tapes tell the story of a human side of war.’

____________________

Justin Brummer is founding editor of the Vietnam War Song Project and has a PhD on 20th-century American history.

Courtesy: History Today (Published on 25 Sep 2018)

The post The Vietnam War: A History in Song first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam

On Jan. 17, 1942, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. was born in Louisville, Ken. Clay would go on in life, to have an incredible career in the brutal sport of boxing. However, his position as one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century extends far beyond his 56-5 record in the ring.

Obviously, Cassius Clay’s life symbolized the struggle of African-Americans in the United States. But Cassius Clay – aka Muhammad Ali – also symbolized the true triumph of the United States in the Cold War. The young republic did not defeat a foreign enemy so much as it, through the lens of Muhammad Ali’s life, defeated the racism that had characterized much of the world prior to the end of World War II.

Born into Kentucky’s Upper South society, Cassius Clay grew up in a segregated society that had two sets of laws, one for first-class citizens and one for second-class citizens. In that America, class citizenship was determined by skin color rather than by, say, religion or income or family land-holding status. At the age of 12, he took up boxing to help keep him out of trouble and 10 years later he was the world champion of his sport.

That was the year 1964, a time of great racial strife in the United States.

It was also the heyday of the Cold War, a nearly 50-year struggle for power between the liberal-capitalist United States and the socialist Soviet Union. The struggle was real (as the kids say today). The United States and its allies were losing, too, at least in the realm of ideas. The Soviet Union was funding groups that would today be considered progressive—anti-racist and anti-capitalist—around the world.

Beyond doubt….One of the sticks that Moscow used to beat the West with was racism in the United States, especially in the officially segregated South.

It is doubtful that most of the African-American groups who took part in the struggle for liberty were funded, or even indirectly influenced by Soviet propaganda. The clear, powerful contrast between black and white in the United States was enough for most African-Americans to take part in the Civil Rights revolution.

And yet Soviet propaganda had pestered Washington, and Moscow wasn’t wrong. The American diplomatic corps, which lives in a different world than most American citizens, was sensitive to the fact that the South was explicitly racist and, if anything, Moscow’s propaganda regarding American racism helped turn the tide in favor of reform in the place that needed it most: the seat of the federal government.

With Washington’s help, African-Americans got their political liberties back after century-long hiatus (black Americans got their political liberties after the Civil War but those liberties were slowly rolled back as Washington tuned its focus elsewhere).

My readers would deem it unfair to portray Washington as the leading actor for reform, though. The federal government helped, but it was people who stepped up to make the change actually happen. One of those remarkable human beings was Cassius Clay. After he won the world boxing title in 1964, Clay announced publicly that he had changed his name to Muhammad Ali and that he was a member of the Nation of Islam. Cassius Clay was Ali’s “slave name” and it would no longer apply to the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

This announcement rocked the white establishment and helped bring the fight that African-Americans were fighting to the rest of the world.

Just imagine: a black American from Louisville’s segregated slums changing the world with his talents and his God-given ability to think for himself. How American!

Standing up for justice had its drawbacks, too. It always does. The name change and the alliance with the Nation of Islam put Muhammad Ali in the crosshairs of factions that earnestly believed that racial segregation was good for the republic.

It was unfortunate for the American nation as a whole, when Ali refused to go to war in Vietnam he was stripped of his title and sentenced to five years in prison (though he never saw the inside of a prison cell). Ali publicly, candidly spoke about the hypocrisy of not only the draft, but the war itself.

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 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,” he had asked.

Ali’s stance against the Vietnam War cost him his world titles, and he was robbed of the prime years of his athletic life (25-29). Because he refused to join the armed forces, no state would grant him a boxing license and he was stripped of his passport.

Still, this didn’t stop him from speaking out against the war and against the racist policies of governments throughout the republic. In 1971, Ali was allowed to return to boxing and he fought Joe Frazier in the first of three legendary matches.

Muhammad Ali took the sport of boxing and, by extension, the struggles of black Americans global, fighting title bouts in Manila and Kinshasa. Although the Civil Rights Act passed through the federal government’s entire system of checks and balances, racism lingered and Ali’s mere name bore testament to the long road ahead for the African-American community.

As a tolerant, more enlightened human being it is hard for me to acknowledge the positive role that the federal government and the socialist Soviet Union played in helping African-Americans achieve more liberty, but I cannot argue with facts. It is also worth pointing out that competition makes everybody better.

Without a Soviet Union pointing out that black Americans were treated poorly in the capitalist United States, it is difficult to imagine political or economic progress for blacks in the republic. After all, it’s hard to find any examples of a society where long-oppressed minorities like African-Americans have so many opportunities and so much to live for, even taking into account some of the perceived negatives they live with, and less extreme segregation.

The fact that the United States of America has been able to achieve a modicum of racial progress is a testament to the greatness that can be achieved by self-governance in the goal of liberty. Muhammad Ali, who eventually dumped the Nation of Islam and embraced Sunni Islam, is indeed a lesson in greatness, and not just in the realm of sport. Muhammad Ali took advantage of the little freedom he had, and dared to make everybody around him a little freer, too.

And this made Muhammad Ali, one of the 20th century’s greatest Americans.

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Cassius Clay or Muhammad Ali—Choose your Champ! first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Sherry Buchanan

I stood on the front porch of the modest stone house in Quang Binh Province in the north of Vietnam looking at the splendid Trường Sơn Mountains on the horizon where the young Nguyễn Thị Kim Huế had served during the Vietnam War (1965–1975). In a spirit of reconciliation, forty years on, I had traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to explore not only the other side of the war, but its gendered side. A handsome woman, tall and slim, arrived to greet me. She invited me in to talk about her harrowing days defending the Trail where she had served as the leader of a majority-female platoon between 1965 and 1967.

The Trail was the military supply route ferrying fighters, weapons and rice from Hanoi to communist supporters in South Vietnam. NLF forces were fighting against U.S. and South Vietnamese government forces opposed to the reunification of the country promised in the 1954 Geneva Accords that ended the First Indochina War (1946–1954).

The Vietnam War is remembered in the United States as a macho war fought mainly by men. It was anything but. Women fighters in North Vietnam played a key role in stopping the most intense bombing in modern times. The U.S. Air Force and Navy dropped over 7 million tons of bombs over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, more than twice the total of U.S. bombings over Europe and Asia during World War II. In South Vietnam, women helped defeat of U.S. and South Vietnamese ground and air forces. Yet, fifty years on, the history of the women who defeated a superpower, while celebrated in Vietnam, remains largely unrecognized and undocumented in our history of the war.

Nguyễn Thị Kim Huế was one of one hundred and thirty eight thousand Youth Volunteers. Some enlisted. Most were drafted. Aged between 17 and 24, the all-female and mixed-sex units were stationed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to defend the military supply route against the U.S. air war. A further 1.7 million women over 24 joined Women’s Union militias to defend their homes, villages, and towns. They built trenches, repaired bombed roads, transported ammunition, and shot down U.S. planes bombing bridges, roads, and towns. In South Vietnam, an estimated one million women, known as the Long-Haired Army, fought directly with the National Liberation Front (NLF) – the Viet Cong to us -serving as snipers, spies, ammunition carriers, medics and cultural troops. The NLF co-founder and deputy commander was the female revolutionary Nguyễn Thị Định (1920–1992).

An expert markswoman, Nguyễn Thị Kim Huế was stationed with her platoon on the Mu Gia Pass, the most dangerous stretch of the Trail network. A month after she enlisted in 1965, the U.S. unleashed Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam intended to interdict transportation routes and stop the spread of communism.  Youth Volunteer brigades were in charge of decommissioning unexploded bombs to keep the truck convoys moving south. They detonated the explosives at close range without the benefit of remote controls. They moved earth with shovels and wheelbarrows to fill the bomb craters. They transported ammunition between Trail stations and they served in the People’s Army’s anti-air defense units posted along the Trail.

Nguyễn Thị Kim Huế remembered the April 1966 bombing when more than half her team perished. The U.S. Strategic Air Command B-52 bombers dropped some 600 tons of 500 and 750-pound bombs during the first strike alone, “the largest bombing operation since World War II.”

“We had to rebuild the road every day because there were so many bombs… The worst B-52 attacks were in 1966. In my platoon, out of sixteen, ten were killed,” she said.

“Were you wounded?” I asked.

She parted her hair to show me the deep scar shrapnel had left on her skull.

“Were you afraid?” I asked

“No. Fear of what? You live once and you die once,” she replied.

As Nguyễn Thị Kim and her platoon carried out dangerous work in a dangerous place, they lacked basic necessities. She described how she looked after her team, trying to make an inhumane situation bearable. “The war was hard for women,” she said.

The young women had left home for the first time to take up their posts in the malaria-infested jungle of the Truong Son Mountains where they lived in caves and underground tunnels. To keep her team from going hungry on meagre army rations, she bartered with the villagers for a few chickens and pigs and one cow. To increase the women’s comfort, she obtained a change of clothes from headquarters. To alleviate period pain, they gathered medicinal plants in the jungle. For protection, when the U.S. began dropping “people-sniff” bombs—tree-like heat-sensor bombs that detected body movements in the jungle— they built individual bomb shelters by the roadside. After the bombings, she searched for teammates buried in the explosions to give them a decent burial.

“Many died because rocks fell on them. We used shovels because I was afraid a digger would cut [my teammates’] bodies into pieces. After a few days, we sniffed the soil. There was no smell so we knew there were no more body parts to find. I didn’t want to let them die naked.”

Almost all veterans were haunted by memories of friends who had been blown up, of picking up body parts, and of burying them without knowing which part belonged to.

Yet Vietnamese women military leaders, fighters and peacemakers are largely absent from our history, their role relegated to a few paragraphs, and their contributions not seriously documented. A notable exception was even The Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (Wiley, 1998), a scholarly treatment by Karen Gottschang Turner with Phan Thanh Hao.

Recording and teaching the other side of war, while a step towards peace through our understanding of the other side, may appear to disrespect America’s veterans and the fallen. Obviously, from the American perspective, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong women fighters were enemy combatants. Yet, even women soldiers who were allies in our twentieth century wars have only recently joined the pantheon of history. The 800,000 women who served in the Soviet Armed Forces in World War II, were recently given a place in history thanks to Svetlana Alexievich’s ground-breaking The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin 2015) which won the Nobel Prize for Literature (First published in Russian in 1985, it appeared in English translation thirty years later in 2015.)

Women soldiers, I suspect, are marginalized because they serve mainly in “support” rather than combat roles. Ho Chi Minh, Stalin and Churchill introduced the draft for women only when they were needed to “replace” men fighting on the frontlines. We tend to record and reward frontline combat for the number of Killed in Action (KIAs) or its equivalent. Support roles, ostensibly exposed to a lesser degree of violence, are generally considered less worthy of military medals and honors even though support roles can be as heroic. In any event, North Vietnamese women, although drafted into roles behind the lines ended up on the front lines of the U.S. air war that targeted the whole of North Vietnam, obliterating coastal towns into as many little Dresdens (and beyond into Laos and Cambodia) from the East Sea to the Truong Son Mountains.

Women’s place in history is further minimized by patriarchal attitudes. Most historians, journalists and commentators who covered and wrote about the Vietnam War from our side are men. U.S. popular culture did even worse. The majority of Hollywood films on the war—180 of them—portray Vietnamese women as prostitutes, rape victims—I would rather say survivors—or, if fighters, as sociopathic killers.

Without glamorizing war or women warriors, the fighting women of North and South Vietnam played a key military role in defending their families, land, and country. They helped defeat two superpowers—the French in 1954 and the Americans in 1975—whose armed forces were made up primarily of men. Along with the best of them, they were brave, they were expert markswomen, they performed heroic acts rewarded with honors and medals by their government, and displayed exceptional leadership qualities. They provided their teams with food, clothing, medicine and a decent burial, a holistic approach to be emulated in the military today.

After the war, Vietnamese women veterans were equally prominent as peacemakers. At the 1973 Paris Peace talks, Nguyen Thi Binh (1927–), who negotiated on behalf of the Viet Cong, was credited for advancing the peace process thanks to her diplomatic skills. The women veterans I talked to held no personal animosity against the U.S., although many believed the U.S. had a responsibility to compensate Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and unexploded ordnance.

Even though they were once enemy combatants, North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese women veterans deserve an important place in our history of the Vietnam War.

________________________________

Sherry Buchanan was the editorial page features editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels and a columnist with the International Herald Tribune in Paris, London and Hong Kong. She is an independent publisher and a University of Chicago Press author of books on the Vietnam War including Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers’ Engravings and Stories 1964—1973 (2007), Mekong Diaries (2008) and On The Ho Chi Minh Trail: The Blood Road, The Women Who Defended It, The Legacy (2021). She is a regular commentator on global affairs. She has a BA from Smith College and an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Courtesy: History News Network 

The post The Women Who Won the Vietnam War first appeared on Sindh Courier.