There weren’t many female war correspondents in Vietnam, and none more intrepid than Gloria Emerson (1929–2004) of The New York Times. Refusing to be confined to the fashion pages where she began her career, she convinced her editors to let her travel there in 1970 and ultimately won a George Polk Award for her reporting. Though she also covered conflicts in Gaza, Nigeria, and Northern Ireland, it was Vietnam that she returned to in her book Winners and Losers (1978)—a wide-ranging, intensely researched, and very personal account of the war’s complex aftereffects. It won a National Book Award.
In the passages that follow, Emerson offers intimate portraits of two very different antiwar activists. One, a member of the Emma Goldman Brigade, looks back on the “die-ins” and other protests she and her friends organized in and around New York City as “lots of fun”: it was a time of intense friendships, creativity, risk-taking, and disruptive thrills. Opposition gave her a sense of purpose she now feels less keenly. The other, a veteran not only of combat in Vietnam but of the Mississippi civil rights movement before that, finds he has returned to a country in which people are either unable or unwilling to comprehend the horrors he has witnessed. The war has profoundly altered both of their lives, and both—like Emerson herself—are frustrated by the indifference they now encounter. This is perhaps Emerson’s fundamental claim: American military technology has become “so advanced that we kill at a distance and insulate our consciences by the remoteness of the killing.” One task of the antiwar writer is simply to make people care about war at all.
IN New York nothing worked like a liver. Jill Seiden Mahoney found out that if you mushed the liver on bandages, it made stains that looked like seeping, untreated head wounds. It looked ghastly and the smell was repulsive, which was fine. The liver was useful for the “die-ins,” the name for reenactments by the antiwar movement of Vietnamese villagers receiving brutal injuries from American weapons, chemicals, bombs.
Mrs. Mahoney, who was single then, and her friends made up what they called the Emma Goldman Brigade, in honor of the anarchist. Before they demonstrated, the Brigade went to some trouble to make their faces look as if they had been scarred in the war. Their favorite method was to use a mixture of oatmeal, ketchup and liquid make-up foundations, which they put on their faces after twisting their skin with strips of Scotch tape. The effect was exactly what they wished: shocking.
The targets of their protests were often business corporations; in the spring of 1972 it was the ITT Building on Park Avenue. The ten women in the Brigade, dressed in black pajamas, with the liver-stained bandages on their heads and their faces deformed, rushed into the lobby when it was crowded in the morning with people coming to work. The first thing they did was to put up posters of wounded Vietnamese children on the marble walls.
“Then we started dying, we started our blood bath. We threw Baggies which had red stuff in them. We were screaming, yelling, dying, very dramatically. Here’s the sick part: the janitors started ripping down the posters of those fucked-up hurt little babies. After fifteen minutes the police came. They seemed sort of scared of us,” she said. “We were rolling on the floor; it was all they could do to get us to stand up and shut up. Each of us had a flair for drama and we were trying to imagine what it would be like for a Vietnamese woman under bombs. We had fun. It sounds childish to say that now, but it was exhilarating. That day we felt we were in control. If you’re rolling on the floor, screaming, nobody wants to get near you. When we finally limped out, some people applauded.
“I never knew if they applauded because they enjoyed the show or because we were leaving or they thought they were brave,” she said. “It was meant to disrupt; everybody was talking about us. Energy that might have been used in their jobs that day was going into talking about our demonstration.
“Oh, sure, I know that it is said that doing things like that alienated people. But look, any action will alienate somebody. You have to expect it.”
In the sixth grade in P.S. 104 in New York, she knew that her IQ was over 130. Her parents were not surprised. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, she worked for an advertising agency, Cunningham & Walsh, in the city. “I was a Jewish princess,” she said.
In the streets young people were passing out pamphlets denouncing the war in Vietnam, and from them she learned about it.
“I would take time off to go to antiwar demonstrations; it shocked some people, who called me a Communist. The antiwar movement was personally and socially fulfilling and it was lots of fun. I miss it very much but I’m glad the war is over. I miss the commitment and the urgency—the commitment to selflessness. When it happened I thought we were all just the greatest, as a group certainly more generous than the people in the advertising agency.”
In those days she often wore a T-shirt saying “The East Is Red, the West Is Ready,” while her friend Coke, an unusually pretty blonde, wore one saying “The Vietnamese People Are Not the Enemy.” Both women did not care if people stared at their ample chests; they wanted the T-shirts to be read.
Some of their exploits were daring: ten of them bought tickets, at fifteen dollars apiece, to attend and disrupt the National Women’s Republican Club lunch in March 1972, which honored Patricia Nixon as the Woman of the Year. It was crucial for them to look like ladies. They obliged.
“Everybody still had one good dress,” Mrs. Mahoney said, who wore a pink-and-brown suit from Saks Fifth Avenue. Coke even had a fur coat which she had stopped wearing; it was skunk. The plan of the Emma Goldman Brigade was for five of them to release the rats they were carrying with them, healthy rats that had been secured from laboratories so no one could accuse them of using animals that might spread disease. They were always careful about small things like that. It went wrong in the lobby: a man she calls John Finnigan of the New York Red Squad, who was watching radicals, stopped seven of the women from going into the ballroom. Three of the rats had to be released in the lobby. Inside, Mrs. Mahoney, who did not have a rat, rose and in a strong voice spoke against the war, saying nothing—on the advice of a lawyer—that was either treasonous or obscene. Then she left, leaving the ladies at her table, who were Republicans from Westchester County, in an unpleasant, if not agitated, state of mind. Two more rats were released in the ballroom, causing some consternation, but the lunch and ceremony continued.
“The antiwar movement made a difference in me and in everybody who participated. I think if there had not been such a movement, they might have nuked Vietnam off the face of the earth,” she said. “It forced people to recognize what was going on or to become totally, unnaturally, blind.”
It still puzzles her why other people do not understand very much, do not even know that GVN meant the Government of Vietnam in Saigon, that DRVN meant the north, or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, that ARVN was the army in the south.
“They can tell you someone’s batting average from 1948, or who hit the big homer in the 1932 World Series, but they don’t know the difference between the NLF and the NFL.”
The blindness, as she called it, always surprised her. On the day of the Emma Goldman Brigade’s die-in in the lobby of the ITT Building, it was raining. The group worried that the rain might wash off some of the mess they had put on their faces. It was decided to take taxis.
“We were totally mutilated. None of us were recognizable,” she said. “We got into two cabs at Fifty-third and Third. In each cab one person had to sit in front, so the drivers had to see what we looked like. We told them where we wanted to go and they didn’t say a word. Remember how we looked and what we wore, and besides that, we all smelled, it was the oatmeal and the other stuff. We smelled horrible. Neither driver said a word, or even did a double-take. And in one newspaper, I think it was the Daily News, they described us as ‘slovenly hippies.’ They just thought we were dirty.”
The Emma Goldman Brigade did not hold together but the women have stayed friends. Her marriage in September 1973 to Peter Paul Mahoney peeled apart. They had met in the antiwar movement, gone through the hard days before and during the Gainesville trial, endured all of it, only to find out how different they were. In those days she saw him as a valiant fellow who stood out for her among all the other veterans going to war against the war.
Even when the war ended and she needed a job, Mrs. Mahoney was not one to jump over her principles. She now works for a small trade magazine, having refused to consider better-paying jobs related to the military-industrial complex, the stock market, or the manufacture of foods or consumer items she thinks are dangerous. She does not want to ever contribute in any way to the misery of any people.
She will not eat bacon or frankfurters because they contain nitrates. She is even beginning to cut back on pastrami. She will not eat canned tuna fish because she deplores the killing of the porpoises caught in the tuna nets and she thinks the waters are filthy. She is quite specific about insect parts and rodent hairs in some American chocolate. When she has time she makes her own cosmetics, but she hardly wears any.
There are no regrets, just a tiny afterthought.
“The Brigade should have used indelible red ink for blood,” she said, “instead of Rite-Dye.”
FOR a while there was a name for the rage and guilt felt by Vietnam veterans who had been in combat. It was Post-Vietnam Syndrome, or PVS, a label for an incapacitating guilt and anger that the survivors experienced. But in Kansas City a large and affable fellow who still wore his GI boots with the shrapnel hole in one heel didn’t think the PVS stuff was that special. He insisted on calling it Post-Vietnam Struggle, not Syndrome. His name was Randy, he had been a medic with the Wolfhounds, a unit of the 25th Infantry Division. He had gone to Vietnam—not wanting to—because prison seemed much worse.
“I was in Mississippi in 1964 working with SNCC and I had the same situation. When I came back I’d say ‘Wow, wow, man, the dogs jumped on these people and the sheriff’s patrol beat us and blah-blah’ and pretty soon people would say ‘I went to a party last night,’ ” he said. “You could have the Post-Black Mississippi Struggle or the Post–East Harlem Struggle or the Post-Prison Struggle. It’s being put in a situation you don’t understand and that nobody else you like or relate to can understand either. You say ‘I saw this brain laying there in the dirt and somebody put a cigarette package inside the skull to take a picture’ and people answer ‘I have a date tomorrow’ or ‘I got laid last night . . . ’”
He was nonviolent, Randy kept saying. He had not wanted to carry a weapon in Vietnam, but that was a hassle, so he did.
“The first firefight I shot up all the ammunition I had in about three or four minutes. Somebody had to come down and tell me to quit shooting. It’s pretty hard to be Gandhian unless you’ve had a lifetime of training. I fired all the time, I fired at anything.”
He thought he had been a good medic, he always tried his best. Sometimes things went very wrong. Once when the unit called in artillery because they wanted white phosphorus to hit some enemy bunkers, the shells fell short—he said the company that made them probably saved millions of dollars by shorting the powder, an ounce to every shell—and the Willy Peter, as they called it, came in about two hundred yards from their own position.
“One guy caught a great gob of it in the chest and he fell down screaming. I ran over, but I didn’t know whether to shoot him with morphine and let him die happy or try and dig it out with a knife real fast. But it was burning through his chest cavity so fast that with one hand I was trying to scrape it off and with the other hand I was shooting him full of morphine. He kept screaming. The morphine took effect in twenty minutes and he lived about forty minutes.”
In Kansas he was able to get a job with the Head Start program working in different areas with Indians, then migrants, then on career development programs. He worked with the local antiwar groups, he gave speeches and he showed his slides from Vietnam, but there were never any of the American dying. He was always too busy to stop and take pictures when there were American casualties. Or he didn’t feel like it. After a while it became so ordinary to see their own dead that the soldiers stopped seeing them at all and were even able to eat their C-rations not far from corpses, for they had to eat somewhere. One morning in the war he had been out with men minesweeping a road when they discovered some Americans who had been ambushed. The faces of these men had been deformed, although he did not know whether it was done by a machete or an entrenching tool, the military name for a shovel. It was a precaution taken by the VC, he thought. None of the living felt sick or swore revenge.
“Maybe they did it that way to save ammunition; we used to go around and do it with a rifle, making sure everyone was dead,” he said. “We had no reaction. After the first two or three you didn’t pay any attention, unless, of course, it was a friend.”
The dead man he remembered was a Vietnamese who was beginning to stiffen a little. A GI stamped on his hand to open it and then wrapped the fingers around a beer can and raised the dead man, an arm around him, to pose for a photograph. A colonel had seen it, been furious, and said leave that body alone you sadistic son of a bitch.
“But those colonels, they were as much a cause of it as anyone else. They didn’t give you a pass unless you killed so many people—then they came out and gave you hell for doing stuff like that,” he said.
On a trip to Washington, D.C., he had gone to see Congressman Richard Bolling, a powerful Democrat from Kansas City, first elected to the House in 1948, a World War II veteran who for years had been active in national veterans’ groups. The congressman was unmoved by the encounter. “He wasn’t really curt with me, but what he was saying was that I didn’t represent the large majority of veterans. He didn’t want to hear me out. And as far as me having any strength to do anything about the war, I could just go back to Kansas City and forget about it. I guess he was right.”
He was thirty-four years old when he told all this: none of the veterans are young men any more, although it is hard to picture them as old men with wide waists and empty eyes. There had been discouragements, Randy said, the huge changes had seemed close, then not come closer at all, but even the people in the war-against-the-war could not have forgotten all that they learned.
“Look at me, yes, look at me. There is no way I’ll buy the American dream again. I’ve seen what we’ve done to people. I see what we do to people in prisons, I’ve seen it in Vietnam, I’ve seen it in the civil-rights movement. I mean you’re never going to sell me that shit again. That’s all there is to it. There were a lot of people clubbed in Chicago who said the system is all screwed up and who are now driving Cadillacs and working as IBM salesmen. But they had experience, they got some foresight into the system. That’s never going to be purged; it has a carry-over that is never going to be taken away from them.”
Others are not so sure. Again and again there is someone to say we have always been people who dropped the past and then could not remember where it had been put.