Unsung Heroes

They were the enemies the White House had most reason to fear. Heroes twice over, they went off to Vietnam and won Silver Stars and Purple Hearts for their physical bravery and then came home and demonstrated a different kind of courage at the forefront of the antiwar movement.

They became the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the government’s abuse and slander of the other peace marchers sounded puny and unpersuasive when used against them. Anyone who saw the April 1971 photographs of veterans throwing their medals through a fence at the foot of the Capitol in Washington will not forget the rage and pain in their faces.

In his essential new book, “Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement,” Gerald Nicosia re-captures that moment:

“One of the most famous photos, of Marine Capt. Rusty Sachs, showed this burly former helicopter pilot bawling like a baby as he prepared to fling his deceased comrade Roger P. Harrell’s Silver Star over the wire fence--after having dedicated his return of medals to both Harrell and another lost comrade, Robert Cramer, whose needless death he was symbolically laying at the feet of the U.S. government. But even this photo, one of the hardest to look at because of the absolutely raw human emotion it portrays, speaks of a hope also. If warriors themselves could renounce war, these photos seemed to say, then perhaps war was not a scourge the human race would have to bear forever.”

Nicosia lays out in detail the frustration that had been building toward that moment of renunciation. He recalls that his own doubts had arisen at the age of 15 or 16, when he heard a priest defending the war in Vietnam to his congregation because it was a “good thing to kill Communists.”

At that point, like many of the men whose transformation he charts, Nicosia believed that communism was evil. Even as his doubts about the war grew, he was torn between heading for Canada and heeding his father’s advice to do his duty to his country. When the draft law expired, he was spared a decision but found that he could not evade the tensions that marked his generation.

The war finally ended in April 1975, with the evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon. But Nicosia, by then a graduate student at the University of Illinois, kept running into Vietnam veterans who were still fighting the war he had missed.

First came W.D. Ehrhart, a poet like none other--lean, muscular, partially deaf and badly scarred at jaw and neck by a North Vietnamese rocket that had almost sheared off his head. Ehrhart was still years away from writing his searing memoir, “Vietnam: Perkasie,” about his journey from his hometown in Pennsylvania to the Vietnam jungle, and had not yet acquired a reputation as one of the war’s finest poets. But his angry monologues about what he had seen in Vietnam left Nicosia feeling that he was “watching a man wrestle with his angel--but whether it was a good angel or a bad angel was hard to tell.”

Resolving that question set Nicosia on a journey that lasted some 25 years, with a pause for him to produce “Memory Babe,” his well-received biography of Jack Kerouac. Now, in “Home to War,” he gives us a comprehensive history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, from its inception through court cases involving Agent Orange as recently as two years ago; his time and commitment show up on every page. Nicosia returns to April 7, 1967, the day a 23-year-old vet named Jan Barry Crumb fell in line with a protest demonstration in New York City. He marched with a small group of men, none in uniform, who raised a homemade sign, “Vietnam Veterans Against the War!”

On that day there was no such organization, just the banner. But within two months, Jan Barry had lopped off his surname and made the VVAW a reality. The group attracted extraordinary men, and one strength of Nicosia’s book is his sympathetic vignettes of the early leaders:

* Carl Rogers was one of the many all-American boys who went off to Vietnam--”of average height, slender, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and extremely articulate.” Rogers had played Curly in his high school’s production of “Oklahoma!” and had been named the champion square-dance caller at the Ohio State Fair.

But, in Nicosia’s happy phrase, Rogers also “had a conscience with a loud voice.” Although his own tour at Cam Ranh Bay had passed uneventfully, reading the historian Bernard Fall’s account of the French failure in Indochina proved to him the folly of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. When he saw a Viet Cong corpse with its ears cut off as GI souvenirs, he dedicated himself to stopping the war.

* Sheldon Ramsdell, an advertising executive at Union Carbide and an active member of the Gotham Young Republican Club, had not considered himself a Vietnam veteran because he had only been stationed on the fleet carrier Bennington in the Tonkin Gulf early in the war. But Ramsdell had watched his best friend, a pilot, die in a fireball as his plane bounced off the deck while landing and had seen five other crewmen burn to death when a crate of napalm was accidentally dropped down their hatch. Back home, Ramsdell suffered from disturbing flashes of those memories; years later, psychiatrists called his affliction post-traumatic stress disorder.

He joined the VVAW after he saw a protester burn his draft card in New York’s Union Square in the summer of 1967. But Ramsdell’s true awakening came the next year, when he watched Chicago police club demonstrators at the Democratic Convention.

When Jack Perkins of NBC asked his opinion about the police using tear gas, Ramsdell lashed out at the kind of colleagues he had known at Union Carbide: “The fat old men with the shiny suits and the big cigars did it their way.” He scandalized his family by dropping out of his comfortable life to become a radical activist for VVAW.

* And then there was Al Hubbard, a black Air Force veteran of both Korea and Vietnam and at least 10 years older than most other veterans. With his afro and goatee and his connections to the Black Panthers, Hubbard was a welcome recruit for those organizers who knew they had to reach out to the African American and Hispanic grunts whose numbers were growing on the battlefield. Hubbard took the VVAW from a coterie with the limited purpose of bringing the boys home to an ambitious service organization that was committed to social change.

By the time Richard Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia in 1970 and National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State, VVAW was poised to welcome the rush of new recruits. In the five months after Kent State, membership jumped from 600 to 5,000, with more than a dozen chapters around the country.

From that point, Nicosia meticulously re-creates memorable milestones from the VVAW crusade. Operation RAW--Rapid American Withdrawal--had 200 Vietnam veterans conducting mock search-and-destroy missions along the 86-mile route from Morristown, N.J., to Valley Forge, Penn., in order to bring home to the American people the effect those tactics were having on the Vietnamese.

Carrying toy M-16 rifles, the vets trussed up civilian volunteers as roughly as they had treated Viet Cong suspects and forced them down the road, knocking them to their knees when they didn’t respond to interrogation. All the while, they yelled, “We ain’t got no time--rip him off! Kill him!”

Along their route, they passed out leaflets with a chilling message:

A U.S. infantry company just came through here

If you had been Vietnamese--

We might have burned your house

We might have shot your dog

We might have shot you ...

We might have raped your wife and daughter

We might have turned you over to your government for torture

We might have taken souvenirs from your property

We might have shot things up a bit ...

We might have done ALL these things to you and your whole TOWN!

If it doesn’t bother you that American soldiers do these things every day to the Vietnamese simply because they are “Gooks,” THEN picture yourself as one of the silent VICTIMS.

HELP US TO END THE WAR

BEFORE THEY TURN YOUR SON INTO A BUTCHER ...

or a corpse.

But the vets had to conclude that their guerrilla theater changed few minds. Nicosia quotes one female onlooker, who remarked, “if they wanted to protest, they could look a little bit nicer.”

Nor was their most publicized action--the three-day Winter Soldier Investigation that began Jan. 31, 1971--an unqualified success.

Bertrand Russell had already lent his name to an International War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm and Copenhagen that claimed that, in the 20th century, only the Nazis had exceeded the brutality of Lyndon Johnson’s war against the people of Vietnam. But few American GIs had traveled to Scandinavia to give firsthand testimony. Winter Soldier would be different from the Lord Russell inquiry and harder to dismiss.

The name was inspired by Thomas Paine’s words during Washington’s winter of despair at Valley Forge: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country, but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Some of Nicosia’s most dramatic pages show how Winter Soldier was put together amid strains between many veterans and Jane Fonda and her adviser, Mark Lane. Because Fonda was paying the bills, she won the arguments, including the decision to move the hearings to Detroit, a site she considered somehow more authentic than Washington, D.C.

For those who sat on the floor of the hearing room in Detroit’s Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, Winter Soldier proved unforgettable. A former Marine named Scott Camil testified about “slitting old men’s throats and the abominable sexual torture and murder of a female Viet Cong suspect.”

By the time some 125 combat veterans had testified, no one in the room could doubt the truth of the horrors they had described. Seeing a film of the event some time later, Jane Fonda seemed to realize for the first time that the antiwar crusade was not theater, not simply an occasion for Mao jackets and raised fists. It was life and death. Nicosia records that she understood, at last, the GI witnesses at Winter Soldier were testifying less to indict their country than to heal their own psychic wounds. “I just never knew,” she said. “I had no idea. I just didn’t understand.”

But the move to Detroit had been a mistake. The Detroit News questioned the authenticity of the veterans who testified, the East Coast newspapers stayed away and the local stringer for The New York Times said he had found nothing newsworthy because “this stuff happens in all wars.”

And yet, VVAW thrived. One member, John Kerry, who became a senator from Massachusetts, had found the testimony shocking but irrefutable. Bert Pfeiffer of the University of Montana used the forum to make the first public report on the dangers of Agent Orange. Hugh Hefner donated a full-page ad for the VVAW in Playboy, and its membership began to include GIs still serving on active duty in Vietnam. Graham Nash, the musician, wrote a song, “Oh! Camil (the Winter Soldier)” that began, “Oh! Camil, tell me what did your mother say/ when you left those people out in the fields/rotting along with the hay?”

Nicosia may have been tempted to end his book at its halfway mark, when the last Marines abandoned Saigon in 1975 and Americans could no longer deny what the veterans had been trying to tell them about the war’s futility and waste.

Readers will be pleased that he resisted that temptation, because peacetime did not bring an end to the VVAW’s battles. Outraged by the shabby treatment the vets received, Nicosia documents their ongoing struggle against Washington and the Veterans Administration. Readers will be introduced to the remarkable “Shad” Meshad and Leonard Neff at the Wadsworth VA Hospital in Brentwood, where psychiatrists and social workers were confronting wounds that could not be treated with bandages and splints.

Although Nicosia takes sides, he seems to treat all of the antagonists fairly--the Victor Yannacones, Ron Kovics, Bobby Mullers and Rick Weidmans who devoted themselves to building on Jan Barry’s wobbly foundation.

A time may come when veterans must once again unite to protest government actions they have witnessed that strike them as wrongheaded or inhumane. Nicosia has provided a detailed blueprint for how such a movement can succeed.

Readers may disagree, however, with the moral Nicosia draws from his story: that history “is made by individuals who convince the world they have more power than they actually do.” But his book has already shown us that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War had the one power that mattered most--call it heart, guts or moral outrage--and they had it in abundance.