Crossfire

Crossfire

Vietnam War, 1961-1975

In this article Michael Mello writes about giving amnesty to the people who refused to participate in the Vietnam War.

Mello, Michael A.

Mello, Michael A. "Crossfire." Mary Washington College Bullet, April 19, 1976, Michael A. Mello Papers, 1957 - 2008, Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington.

HIST 298, University of Mary Washington

1976-04-19

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Fredericksburg, VA

                       - Richard Nixon in 1973

One could rightly ask why anyone would bother to write now in favor of amnesty for those who refused to take part in the Vietnam war. The answer is simply that the question has not yet been adequately settled, and this is as good a time as any to put it behind us. Former President Nixon assured the country in 1972 that any discussion on amnesty would be inappropriate until 1) The war was over 2) The POW’s were home 3) an accounting of the MIA’s was underway and 4) the conscription of Americans into the military against their will had ended. All of these conditions have been met for almost five years: all of Vietnam has gone Communist and the Ford Administration is considering recognizing the Hanoi government. He repatriation of the exiles remains the last great problem of the war.

The academic community, indeed the world community as a whole, remembers with pride those few “good Germans” who refused to participate in Hitler’s plans for extermination. The only Germans who are today considered respectable are those who defied the government when it went mad, those who deserted their SS units rather than take part in the destruction of Liddice or the leveling of the Warsaw ghetto: it is as difficult to find a Nazi in Germany today as it is to find a hawk in America. But, while those “good Germans” are seen as patriots in the highest meaning of the word, the small army of Americans who chose exile over what history may regard as our country’s Waterloo, are vilified and hounded as cowards and still forced to stay away. We welcome South Vietnamese Army General Trang si Tan, a master torturer; we welcome Saigon Police Chief Dang Van Quang, who gained international noteriority when he summarily executed a bound Viet Cong prisoner during the 1968 Tet offensive; we welcome Ngo Cao Ky, who initiated and supervised the infamous Phoenix Program which carried out the murder of 20,000 South Vietnamese political dissidents. Yet, America’s borders are closed to Terry Samuels and Lindy Blake, whose only crime was to have a conscience when a national conscience was nonexistent. They ask not for mercy – for they have committed no wrong – but rather they ask for justice. Total, absolute, unconditional amnesty should be granted to all of those who refused to fight in America’s biggest mistake.

It would not be the first time: George Washington pardoned those who took part in the Whiskey Rebellion. Perhaps more relevant to the issue before is now is Andrew Johnson’s blanket amnesty of all Southern rebels who participated in America’s most costly wart: 600,000 men died in the Civil War. Johnson issued his Universal Amnesty Declaration on Christmas Eve 1868:
“I, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States…do hereby proclaim and declare unconditionally, and without reservation to all and to every person who directly or indirectly participated in the later insurrection or rebellion, a full pardon and amnesty for the offense of treason against the United States; or for adhering to their enemies during the late civil war, with restoration of all right, privileges and immunities under the Constitution.”

Why, if amnesty can be granted for the serious crime of armed rebellion, should it be denied to men who are motivated by opposition to a war that they felt was unjust?

There are those who would call the draft dodgers and deserters cowards, but it is never cowardly to stand on moral grounds against the general view. To leave the country of one’s birth, to place oneself in voluntary exile in a strange land with customs and language foreign to him is a difficult and painful situation. They were not cowards, even though the Pentagon tried to make us think that this was the case: “inquiries made by field commanders and research teams reveal that relatively few soldiers claim the Vietnam war as a motivating factor for desertion. The major causes of desertion, true today as they were in previous wars, are personal problems and the inability to adjust to regimented life.” This statement ignores the fact that in each successive year of the Vietnam conflict since 1967, the year of deserters leapt by tens of thousands: in in 1967, roughly 44,000; in 1968, 54,000; in 1969, 70,000; in 1970, 84,000; in 1971, 100,000. Official Pentagon figures place the total number of deserters from August 1964 to December 31, 1972, at 495,689. This figure is almost 300 per cent greater than the desertion figures of WWII and Korea combined. It is not reasonable to assume that the soldiers in Vietnam had so many more “personal problems” than did their counterparts in America’s other recent wars. Vietnam’s deserters are not cowards; the real cowards in this war are those who were involved in atrocities, who knew the grim truths, but remained silent. They are the cowards to their responsibility to humanity.

There are those who do feel that to grant amnesty would somehow dishonor those who fought and died in Vietnam. This wrong party: since when is it the responsibility of the exile to offer any explanation to the wounded or the families of the dead? It is the government’s job to do that. The men in the Kennedy, Johnson and the Nixon Administrations who signed the troop increase orders and formulated the war strategy that left our fighting men so exposed to their enemy, must justify their deeds to those who paid the price for them in blood: McNamara, Lodge, Ball, Rusk, Helms. To deny amnesty would not confer any more meaning on the 55,000 American dead: amnesty would, perhaps show that there is still a shred of honor left in our system. It would commit this country to define the lessons of the war: for, until we understand these lessons, there is nothing to prevent the same thing from happening over and over again. Universal amnesty subsumes repatriation with the acceptance of responsibility for the war. Conditional amnesty offers repatriation without guilt, a return to acceptance of business as usual. Further, conditional amnesty assumes that Congress or the President or the V.A. has the moral standing to judge the conscientious decision of Vietnam’s resistors. No public official who served in the executive or legislature during the twelve years of war, has any such moral understanding.

Further, to assume that those who fought are against those who didn’t is simply not borne out by the facts: for example, the most vital element in the antiwar movement during the last two years of the war were returning veterans. There was a powerful message in their protest: the special bitterness of the antiwar veteran comes from his realization that he was sent off to risk his like and kill for an illegitimate cause. Also, opponents of amnesty assume that the families of the dead, wounded and captured will be opposed to amnesty. This may or may not be true: we just don’t know. They have not been polled. But it is inappropriate to assume that they would be against amnesty; 1962 Kennedy amnesty hearings revealed some fascinating testimony: Mrs. Valerie Kushner, the wife of a prisoner held in captivity since 1968, pointed out that “POW’s and war exiles (are) both unwilling exiles. We cannot expect to make whole the body of America if we amputate from her flesh so many of her sons.” And Robert Ransom, whose son Mike was killed in Vietnam in 1968, testified “… the untenable position into which we have forced these men is responsible for their predicament today. These are our sons, and we need them back. They did not deserve what we have done to them. It would be most gratifying to me if I felt that I could have contributed in some great measure toward the granting of the broadest kind of amnesty – one without penalties and conditions. I would consider it to be my personal Mike Ransom Memorial General Amnesty Bill. That would have pleased him.

It is said that amnesty would undermine the military as an institution by encouraging draft evasion and desertion in the future.

But in 1971, one out of every four Americans who enlisted in the armed forces deserted, and it would be difficult to prove that the deserters were motivated by expectation of amnesty. Thus, the concept of patriotic sacrifice was destroyed by Vietnam policies long before there was any talk of amnesty. The cause might be right before men willing risk their lives for it. The U.S. Constitution provides the procedure whereby the country can be taken into a war by its leaders: by this method, the America people – via their representatives – can pass judgment on the validity of the cause and whether or not it is worth sending young men to die fighting for. The viability of the military has always been maintained – and always will continue to be maintained – so long as this Constitutional procedure is followed. The exile phenomenon arose because we were dragged secretly into war; med died under the constitutional joke of the Tonkin Gulf Revolution; men were told to die for a game theory called the domino theory. The real question concerning the draft in the future is: Draft of what? If young men are to be drafted for further Vietnams, then such a draft would be unviable. So long as the war-making procedure is followed, the military will remain sound, whether or not amnesty is granted for the Vietnam exiles.

The dodgers and deserters were not evil; they were not cowards; they were ordinary citizens whose consciences could not permit them to take part in a war such as Vietnam. They broke the law, but who has been the supreme law breaker in the era? America did not declare war in Vietnam, but it was responsible for the Nuremburg Tribunal, at which it ratified a host of crimes entitled crimes against humanity – extermination, enslavement, deportation and other atrocities committed against a civilian population. After twelve ears of American involvement in Vietnam, there are over 1,000,000 civilian casualties and 6,000,000 refugees in South Vietnam. One fourth of the entire population of Cambodia was dislocated after three months of our invasion there. Laos has the honor of being the most heavily bombed country in recorded history. And to the American guilt for Hiroshima, Magasaki [Nagasaki] and Dresden, Nixon added the saturation bombing of Hanoi and Harphong on, ironically, the birthday of Jesus Christ [December 25, 1972], the Prince of Peace. Three months later, we withdrew with “peace and honor.”

The tactics we employed in Southeast Asia – free-fire zones, massive bombing of highly-populated cities, system extermination of dissidents, the “Strategic body count – are crimes and violations of international law whether the U.S. does them or Nazi Germany does them, and we cannot lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we ourselves will no abide by. So let us not hear any longer this selective application for the respect of the law invoked for the exile, but not for his government. If the exiles were right and Vietnam, was wrong, then our leaders should recognize it, admit it and, of course grant amnesty. But if the dodgers were wrong and the war was right, they have suffered enough: exile in itself is a self-imposed alternative to service. For the government to add still more penalty is a cruel act of cowardice on the part of that government, an act contemptuous of the past, and proof enough that we have progressed very little since the Senate passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by a vote of 98 to 2. In that event, our 55,000 dead have surely died in vain. I ask everyone to open your hearts to the words of Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season and time to every purpose under the heaven…a time for killing, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.” We have had our time of killing, now. The leaders of the United States found it necessary to destroy much of Vietnam in an effort to break the spirit of Ho Chi Minh and other Communists in Southeast Asia. ThJ5 spirit remained unbroken despite B-52 saturation bombing, napolm-raids, free-fire zones and body counts, remained unbroken and prebailad, but the American spirit was left in shambles. In our narrow-minded attempt to interfere in a civil war, we inadvertently caused a civil war of our own. This civil war will never be over until the people of the United States decide to heal the wounds allowing everyone to come home.

Only when all of the victims of the war are allowed to make the trip home will we have any semblance of a peace with honor.

“The Southerners are our brethren. They are part of ourselves. They are bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We have come together and now, after having understood what the feud was, the great apple of discord removed, having lived under the Constitution of United States, they (the Southern rebels) have asked to live under it in the future.” – Andrew Johnson in 1866

“I had to obey the rules of war and my flag.” – Adolf Eichmann

“My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty.” – Franz Stangel, Commandant of Treblinka

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