NOTES
Introduction
1. For many readers, this sentence will bring to mind white students. But it is important to note that white students were not the only ones who gave up their lives in protesting the War. In addition to the four white students at Kent State University in Ohio, black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were also killed. In addition, four people were killed during the Chicano moratorium.
2. We understand that language often carries the baggage of war, imperialism and racism. We want to acknowledge that “Vietnam” is much bigger than a U.S. war; it is also a people, a culture, a land, and an era. We refer to the U.S. war in Viet Nam as “the Vietnam War.” We call the country “Viet Nam.” Acknowledging that “America” is a large continent made up of many nations and cultures, we use the term U.S. Americans to refer to citizens and residents of the United States. However, rather than require everyone to follow our unusual and admittedly awkward rules, individual authors use whatever spellings and terms they prefer in their chapters.
3. Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
4. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
5. Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998).
6. Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), p. xiv.
7. David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.173.
8. Ibid. p. 171.
9. The speech is accessible at whitehouse.gov.
10. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2003).
11. David Anderson, p. 113.
12. Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, Letters from Mississippi (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
13. Clark Dougan and Samuel Lipsman, The Vietnam Experience: A Nation Divided (Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1984), p. 63.
14. For information on Chicano and Native/American Indian resistance to the Vietnam War, see: Lorena Oropeza, Raza Sí!, Guerra No!: Chicano protest and patriotism during the Viet Nam war era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), also Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996).
15. Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?: Black Freedom Struggles & the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq, John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 242.
16. Tavis Smiley and David Ritz, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014).
17. “Which Way Home?” radio interview with Asian American veterans by Gina Hotta, 1991, available on soundprint.org.
18. Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu, eds., Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment, (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2001).
19. Tram Quang Nguyen, “Caring for the Soul of Our Community: Vietnamese Youth Activism in the 1960s and Today,” in Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment, eds. Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu (UCLA, 2001), p. 288.
20. Philipps, p. 254.
21. Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). See also: Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1984), p. 361.
22. David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (New York: Anchor Press, 1975).
23. Melvin Small, “Bring the Boys Home Now! Antiwar Activism and Withdrawal from Vietnam—and Iraq,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 3 (June 2010), p. 551.
24. According to Mary Hershberger, the idea to form a committee to carry the mail first emerged out of discussions between North American and Vietnamese women at an international meeting in Canada; see Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2003). The proposal to set up a clearinghouse for prisoner mail delivery occurred after several years of cultivating trustworthy relationships with the Women’s Union and other officials in Vietnam. For information about the Committee of Liaison with Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam based on interviews with Cora Weiss, see Judy Tzu-chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
25. Hershberger, 2003. Hershberger says that pressure from the State Department prevented black civil rights activists including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King from going to Viet Nam during the War.
26. In 1969 and 1971, meetings held in Vancouver and Montreal between one thousand North American women and a small group of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian women enabled the antiwar movement to express itself in terms of sisterhood, motherhood, and families. In tandem to these meetings, the PRG’s iconic representative, Madame Binh, was able to build international support for the Vietnamese struggle for liberation on the basis of the shared experience of women around the world. For a discussion of the impact of the antiwar movement on U.S. feminism, see Wu, Radicals on the Road.
27. The only woman involved in the Paris Peace Accords, Madame Binh represented the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). Soft spoken and petite, she became an international icon and a symbol of Viet Nam’s struggle for independence.
28. According to Ngô Viñh Long, four decades since the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty, “the problems of reconciliation and accommodation are still extremely pronounced. He argues that Viet Nam’s “military victors” need to turn their attention to the growth of civil society and the rule of law. See: Ngô Viñh Long, “Military Victory and the Difficult Tasks of Reconciliation in Vietnam: A Cautionary Tale.” Peace & Change 38, no. 4 (October 2013): pp. 474–86.
29. Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
30. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Kerry. Testimony before the subcommittees of the U.S. Senate (April, 1971).
31. David Steigerwald, “Teaching the Antiwar Movement: Confronting Popular Myths, Teaching Complexity,” in Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War, eds. John Day Tully et al. (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), pp. 202–222.
32. Bao Phi, Song I Sing: Poems. (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2011). See also, Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014).
33. James Max Fendrich, “The Forgotten Movement: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement,” Sociological Inquiry 73, no. 3 (August 2003): pp. 338–358. Fendrich points out the scant attention given by social scientists to the antiwar movement. This is not to diminish the many excellent analyses provided by other researchers, many of which we list in the Resources section.
1. Seeing Vietnam With My Own Eyes
1. Nguyen Thi Binh, Family, Friends, and Country: A Memoir by Nguyen Thi Binh, trans. Lady Borton (Tri Thuc Publishing House & Phuong Nam Book Co., Ltd., 2015).
2. Viet Nam Time Travel, 1970–2013
1. Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi (New York: Noonday Press, 1968).
2. John McCrea, “In Flanders Fields.”
4. The People’s Peace Treaty
1. The authors of this chapter were members of the 1970 National Student Association (NSA) Peace Treaty delegation to Vietnam.
2. Tom Wells, The War Within, America’s Battle Over Vietnam (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 397.
3. Ifshin later became general counsel for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign committee, and an attorney and lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel causes. He died in 1996.
4. Greer went on to play a crucial press role for the Bill Clinton presidential campaigns. He also worked on campaigns by Barack Obama, South African President Nelson Mandela, Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom and President Horacio Cartes in Paraguay.
5. Ngô Viñh Long, “Legacies Foretold: Excavating the Roots of Postwar Vietnam,” in Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, eds. Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 16–43.
6. Mam was later charged with “treason” for his part in the Saigon student protests of 1970, and was imprisoned for two years. He was released soon after the Paris Peace Accords were signed.
7. In 1967, an expose in Ramparts magazine revealed that the CIA had been funding and manipulating the NSA for at least 15 years. It’s extremely ironic that only three years later, the same CIA was spying on the NSA. A 2009 PhD dissertation by CUNY historian J. Angus Johnson on the history of the NSA reveals that the CIA’s infamous MHCHAOS program investigated our 1970 People’s Peace Treaty trip to Vietnam, and that the FBI spied on at least two members of our delegation, Mark Wefers and David Ifshin. See https://studentactivism.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/johnston-diss-5-81f.pdf. In addition, delegate Becca Wilson learned that the FBI tailed her for at least several months during 1971, after her return from Vietnam. See her accompanying essay in this volume. According to researcher James Kirkpatrick Davis, the FBI not only spied on, but conducted dirty tricks to discredit another member of our delegation, Keith Parker. See Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement, by James Kirkpatrick Davis, Praeger, 1997, pages 189-191.
8. This passage is from a transcript of the Nixon White House tapes. The transcript is available at the Nixon Library’s online database, www.nixonlibrary.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/wspf/491-014.pdf.
9. Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American ordeal: the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 316.
10. James A. Henretta, Rebecca Edwards, and Robert O. Self, America: a Concise History, Combined Volume (New York, NY: Macmillan), 842.
11. www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-confirms-nixons-vietnam-treason.
12. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Macmillan, 2013).
5. A Pacifist in the War Zone
1. Quảng Nam Province was split in two, creating Quảng Tín province in the southern part of Quảng Nam so it would be easier to pacify. After 1975, Quảng Tín was absorbed back into Quảng Nam Province, as it was before 1965.
2. When Quảng Tín became absorbed back into Quảng Nam, Tam Kỳ was no longer the provincial capital.
6. Journeys to Remember
1. Dana Sachs, “Small Tragedies and Distant Stars: Le Minh Khue’s Language of Lost Ideals,” in Crossroads–An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 13, no.1 (1999): 1–10.
2. Le Minh Khue, “The Stars,” in The Stars, The Earth, The River (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press), 20.
3. Ibid., 186.
4. The Catonsville Nine: Investigation of a Flame. Lynne Sachs, Director. With Tom Lewis, Daniel Berrigan, Marjorie Melville, John Hogan, Mary Murphy, and Tom Melville. 2001. www.investigationofaflame.com/.
5. www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/agent-orange.
7. From Hanoi to Santa Barbara
1. Before she joined the National Liberation Front, Nguyen Thi Chau had been a deeply engaged student antiwar activist in Saigon. As a result she had suffered a long sentence in the Tiger Cages, the Thieu regime’s notorious torture chambers. When we met her, she had become an NLF hero, legendary among fellow prisoners because of her ability to sing even while being tortured.
9. Voices of Veterans: The Endless Tragedy of Vietnam
1. Chuck Palazzo cites the website “Monsanto and Vietnam University of Agriculture Collaborate to Develop Talents in Agricultural Biotechnology.” http://monsantoblogcom/2014/10/13/monsanto-and-vietnam-university-of-agriculture-collaborate-to-develop-talents-in-agricultural-biotechnology/.
10. Unwanted Memories Erased in Electroconvulsive Therapy Experiment
1. Newspaper headline about new techniques of manipulating human memory from the Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2013.
2. My essay appeared in a book titled The New Left: A Collection of Essays, edited by Priscilla Long, 1969, Porter Sargent Handbooks, p. 130.
3. www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/f-bomb-flap-didrU.S.sia-snoop-senior-u-s-diplomat-n24316 (accessed April 4, 2015).
4. www.vietnamwar50th.com (accessed April 4, 2015).
5. New York Times, May 1, 2014.
11. Connecting the Dots
1. Find this important document at http://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC3_scans/REDOOO3.continuing.crime.black.imprisonment.pdf.