Nancy Miller Saunders : They Tried to Tell Us

Vietnam veterans testify at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1972. Image is a screen grab from the film, Winter Soldier, produced by the Winterfilm Collective.
Winter Soldiers:
They tried to tell us

We as a nation did not want to know the horrible truth of what we asked our children to do in Vietnam. To acknowledge it was to admit complicity, to take responsibility for it.

By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2013

Forty-two years ago, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War tried to do what Nick Turse seems to have accomplished, judging by Jonathan Schell’s review of Turse’s book, Kill Anything that Moves, in The Nation and online at TomDispatch.com.

The veterans did not have access to the classified information or Pentagon reports Turse used to document the brutal horror the war really was as a result of government pressures. All the vets had were their personal experiences and DD214s (discharge papers that listed their assignments), which about 100 of them took to Detroit in the winter of 1971 for what they called the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI).

Every veteran who testified had to provide proof of service and whenever possible their testimony was corroborated by other veterans. VVAW was trying to tell the nation for which they had fought, killed, and sacrificed that My Lai was not an aberration, that it was U.S. policy they were ordered to carry out.

I was a member of the film collective, Winterfilm, that had come together to document the WSI, VVAW’s second major demonstration. Most of us had gotten to know the vets while filming their first action over Labor Day weekend 1970.

Video cameras had not yet come into their own for documentaries, so we were using 16mm film. Since the audio was taped separately, my job at the WSI was to take notes of the testimony so that our editors could synchronize picture and sound for our film, Winter Soldier. Thus, except for one panel, I listened closely to all three days of mind-wrenching testimony from men I had learned to respect.

In the process I saw the kind of documentation I needed to believe them. I looked at their firm, youthful cheeks, none completely hidden under beards. And then I looked into their eyes, which were those of old men who had seen too much grief in long lives.

I saw hardened combat veterans weeping on each others’ shoulders. I watched one veteran lean against a wall and slide down in moaning, “It’s no use. It’s no use.” And I watched other veterans kneel beside him, hold him, comfort him, and let him talk.

None of this was acting. Also none of it was the kind of documentation required to prove a point to those who were not there.

Winterfilm’s editors did their best to communicate this documentation while also including clips of the care VVAW took to confirm veterans’ stories before it would let them testify. In one debriefing a former Marine sergeant, Scott Camil, is being questioned while another Marine from his unit corroborates and adds to Camil’s stories.

But these debriefings were not credible documentation for those who did not want to believe that our troops -- our brothers and sons, friends and neighbors -- could possibly have done what these men were saying they had done and seen others do.

Therefore, the consensus had to be -- as veterans in cities around the country held their own WSIs -- that the men testifying were a handful of dangerous men, homegrown terrorists, a threat to national security. Either that or they were peaceniks smearing the reputation and dedication of our troops. Either way, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were not to be believed.

The Nixon administration saw them as a threat to its credibility. Twice VVAW’s exposure of military movements forced changes of plans. I can almost hear Nixon paraphrasing King Henry II: “Will no one rid me of these turbulent vets?”

Local and federal spies and provocateurs were infiltrated into VVAW. I knew two of them -- Bill Lemmer of Arkansas and Karl Becker of New Orleans. I personally saw both try to provoke the veterans into fights. I also saw FBI reports picturing VVAW as dangerously violent.

Six of VVAW’s Southern leaders, including Scott Camil, were indicted for conspiracy to provoke riots at the 1972 Republican convention, when VVAW had actually undertaken responsibility for keeping the peace among demonstrators at both conventions to avoid a repeat of the riots at the Democrats’ 1968 convention in Chicago just four years earlier. After two more defendants were added in a superseding indictment, they became known collectively as the Gainesville 8.

Lemmer and Becker were two of the FBI informers called by the prosecution to testify against the 8. Because I knew both of them, the defense attorneys hired me to help them with their cross-examinations of the two. Because the judge refused to admit the 8’s defense arguments -- that their plans were purely defensive, the result of information supplied by local and federal provocateurs -- cross-examinations to reveal the truth were crucial to their defense. The jury quickly returned a blanket acquittal.

The campaign against VVAW was revived during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign by the Swiftboat nay-sayers. The corroboration of Camil’s testimony they said was “proof” that Camil had been “coached.” Kerry’s interview with Pitkin, who had now turned against VVAW, was “proof” Kerry helped to slander our gallant troops

Despite condemnation of the Vietnam Veterans against the War, there seemed to be a national schizophrenia about the Vietnam War and its veterans. On the one hand they were our troops whom we should all honor for their dedication and sacrifice. On the other, they were “baby burners,” the villains in TV shows night after night. Scriptwriters no longer needed to provide motives for crimes the bad guys committed. All that was needed was a mention that a certain character was a Vietnam veteran and the audience knew he was the villain.

We as a nation did not want to know the horrible truth of what we asked our children to do in Vietnam. To acknowledge it was to admit complicity, to take responsibility for it. Peter Michelson, who attended the WSI, wrote in the February 27, 1971, New Republic,

As the testimony flooded over me for three days I kept saying, "I don’t want to hear this." I knew that what I was hearing was true; I knew it from other veterans, from published accounts, and from my own brother who had been there. What I was resisting were the ethical obligations that knowledge imposes. Like most people, I didn’t want to have to work out what I ought to do... I am afraid of what I ought to do.

[Nancy Miller Saunders is the author of Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers in which she tells of her years of working with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and includes stories entrusted to her by veterans to tell, which she lets them do whenever possible in their own words. Read more articles by Nancy Miller Saunders on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Nancy Miller Saunders : Idiots and Blinders

Vietnam Veterans protest the war at the Republican National Convention in 1972. Photo by Langelle.
Idiots and blinders:
Military 'intelligence' then and now

There is nothing new about such blindness to alternative possibilities. Forty years ago those of us who wanted to end the Vietnam War were the 'terrorists.'

By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2011

Are the developers of our intelligence operations idiot savants, brilliant in some areas and totally oblivious in others? (Think Dustin Hoffman in The Rain Man.) Or do they wear blinders to keep themselves from seeing anything other than what they expect to see?

Recently I learned that our military is “forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda” to post “confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.”[1]

Did anyone at the Pentagon think about all those jihadists who are not on the fence who might follow those “virulent” (i.e., venomous, contagious; deadly, noxious; poisonous, hateful)[2] orders? Tom Engelhardt did. In a recent Tomgram he asks in his title, “Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death?”[3] Scary thought.

Engelhardt compared this plan to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive’s (ATF) Operation Fast and Furious, which is either “an ambitious new strategy allowing Fast and Furious agents to follow the paths of guns from illegal buyers known as ‘straw purchasers’ through middlemen and into the hierarchy of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.”[4] Or, as the National Rifle Association (NRA) contends, it is a scheme to use ”the violence in Mexico as an excuse to promote gun restrictions.”[5]

Whatever the reason, according to the Washington Post, in the nearly two years of operation, more than 2,000 weapons (including AK47s) have been allowed to “walk” into Mexico. A U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed with one and fewer than 600 have been recovered.

There is nothing new about such blindness to alternative possibilities. Forty years ago those of us who wanted (among other things) to end the Vietnam War were the “terrorists.” The handful of Weather Underground bombers and a few other crazies got all of us branded as dangerous criminals. People worried that there would be even more serious riots at the 1972 national conventions than there had been at the Democrats’ 1968 convention in Chicago.

The RAND corporation did a contingency study of different ways the government could handle riots. These included declaring martial law, round-ups of activists, and even possibly canceling the election. News of these contingency plans made it into the news briefly.

Groups planning to demonstrate were making their own contingency plans to avoid rioting. Many provided training in passive resistance and asked the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), to provide internal security. They were combat veterans who understood violence, wanted no more of it, knew how to defuse it, and how to exert the necessary authority. And VVAW had a consistent record of nonviolent protests.

Capitalizing on fears of rioting, certain myopic officials within the federal government thought up a way to put riots to good use -- not unlike current ideas of aping al Qaeda to discourage jihadists and facilitating gunrunning to trace guns.

The Nixon administration put G. Gordon Liddy in charge of its convention plans. He obligingly developed his Gemstones, several “operations” named for gems and minerals, which he presented to Attorney General John Mitchell in the presence of White House counsel John W. Dean, III, and interim director of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) Jeb Stuart Magruder.[6]

G. Gordon Liddy was in charge of Nixon's convention plans. Image from PhilroPost.
Liddy later wrote that, Operation “DIAMOND was our counterdemonstration plan.” Calling demonstrations attacks, he wrote that he and his operatives would identify demonstration “leaders through intelligence before the attack got under way [his emphasis], kidnap them, drug them, and hold them in Mexico until after the convention was over... Leaderless, the attack would be further disrupted by fake assembly orders and messages, and if it ever did get off the ground it would be much easier to repel.”[7]

Magruder later described what he called an “awkward exchange” with his wife when he told her,

"[W]e may have to grab some of the radical leaders and take them to Mexico."

“How would they get back?" Gail asked incredulously.

“They might not get back," I said.[8]

Los Angeles police and FBI informer, Lewis Tackwood, added twists to the plot.

The plans entailed planting a number of agents-provocateur inside and outside the 1972 Republican Convention in San Diego... to provoke street battles with the police surrounding the convention hall, meanwhile agents inside the convention hall were to have planted explosives.

The intent...

...was to create a nation-wide hysteria that would then provide President Richard M. Nixon with the popular support necessary to declare a state of emergency; the government could then arrest all "radicals," "militants," and "left-wing revolutionaries.”[9]

Of all the perceived “terrorists,” Vietnam veterans were generally thought to be the most dangerous. They had the capability to launch attacks. They were popularly considered to be “baby burners.” The worst of all were veterans who denounced the war. They were traitors. They had to go. So VVAW was targeted. And I had a ringside seat.[10]

When 1972 began I was living with VVAW’s South-Central coordinator, Don Donner, at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. One of the local veterans, Bill Lemmer, insisted to me that the RAND study was not a contingency plan, it was a blueprint to round us all up and cancel the elections so that Nixon could remain president.

The next month he told another woman,

Just before the [Democratic] convention the VVAW leaders would be rounded up and held somewhere, possibly out of the country, and a lot of shooting and rioting would occur at the convention.

Then, "he and other people who were working with him would go to the convention disguised as VVAW and shoot leaders of the convention."[11]

Such was the plan. Fortunately the plotters were not dealing with either suicidal jihadists or drug cartels. They had blinded themselves to the fact that VVAW had consistently conducted nonviolent demonstrations. As numerous vets told me, they had seen enough of violence and its devastation. They were not going to contribute to it here at home. In the years I worked with VVAW I was frequently surrounded by enraged vets, and every time they found ways to face down the threat of violence and restore calm.[12]

Now here is what happened. The prophesized round-up did occur, but not in any way that we had imagined.

On May 5 the Republicans moved their August convention out of San Diego to Miami Beach, where the Democrats were holding theirs in July. Now all convention security planning could be consolidated in one place. And all of VVAW’s security planning became the responsibility of Florida coordinator Scott Camil.

At the urging of Louisiana state coordinator, Karl Becker, Scott agreed to host a security planning meeting in Gainesville, Florida, and to notify the local Florida coordinators. Karl was to notify the other state and regional coordinators. Scott, and later Texas coordinator, John Kniffin, reminded Karl to notify Don, not Bill whom they distrusted. Karl assured them that he would do so.

Later that month events took an ominous turn. On May 15 presidential contender George Wallace was shot in Laurel, Maryland. Four days later, May 19, a bomb exploded in the Pentagon.

Scott took his responsibility seriously, focusing on the Democratic convention. He would learn from it ways to handle the Republicans’ convention. He and his Miami coordinator worked with police and city officials to establish cooperation and to learn all they could of their security plans.

Among the things they learned was that the police were being issued automatic weapons, that Cuban exile groups were planning to provoke trouble with demonstrators, that the bridges between Miami and Miami Beach (which is an island) would be raised to contain any trouble, and that boats and aircraft would be patrolling the waters to keep demonstrators from escaping.

Meanwhile Don never heard from Karl. He knew nothing about the Gainesville meeting until the day before it started. It was too late for him to get there, but Bill Lemmer was on his way. The next day, after the meeting was underway, they learned that Lemmer was an FBI informer. From personal encounters with him, we knew he was also a provocateur. We tried all weekend to call and warn Scott. He never answered. All calls between our phone and his were blocked until the meeting was over.

As one attendee described Lemmer’s arrival, he “burst upon the scene, not wearing a red cape or carrying a bullwhip, but he had the presence of a red cape.” Texas coordinator John Kniffin explained that “Lemmer had just come from a demonstration in Washington, DC, and he was all hyped up about these troopers in black jumpsuits beating up women and bashing people and ‘this is going to happen in Florida [at the conventions] and what are we going to do about it?’”

Thus Lemmer set the tone for planning.

Members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) hold a peaceful demonstration outside the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. Photo by JP Laffont / Sygma / Corbis.
After the meeting Scott went to Miami to hold peace talks with Cuban activists. They refused to talk to him until a pair of police officers arranged for him to meet with Pablo Manuel Fernandez, who was more interested in trying (unsuccessfully) to sell Scott weapons than in talking peace.

The Democratic convention opened Monday, July 10. The Friday before that, July 6, FBI agents swept through the South from Texas and Arkansas to Miami and the national office in New York handing out subpoenas to more than 20 of VVAW’s southern leaders. All of them were ordered to appear in Tallahassee Monday morning. No exceptions.

That was the roundup. No grand jury can question so many witnesses in one day, yet those responsible for security at the Democratic convention had been corralled in Tallahassee, which is about as far from Miami as one can get and still be in Florida.

And the subpoenas were delivered so quickly that Scott and the others had no time to make alternative security plans for the convention. The round-up left the convention vulnerable to the provocateurs that Tackwood, Liddy, and Lemmer had talked about.

But the myopic planners had overlooked a critical fact about combat veterans. They cover for each other. Picking up the slack when buddies fell had kept them alive in war. It had become instinctive for them to fill in and move on. Thus the vets who did get to Miami kept things peaceful.

The day the convention ended, the subpoenas were dropped and six of the vets -- including Scott and John Kniffin -- were indicted for conspiracy to riot at the upcoming Republican convention. Two more men were added in a superseding indictment. The group became known as the Gainesville 8.

We would later learn that Karl Becker -- who had orchestrated time, location, and attendees at the meeting -- was an FBI informer; that the Miami police officers who set up the meeting between Scott and Fernandez were working undercover; and that Fernandez was a police informer who had been wearing a wire. We also learned that most of the information Scott had collected had been supplied by undercover police and FBI sources. VVAW had been set up, but avoided the trap.

I have to agree with the NRA that “American law enforcement agencies must never be allowed to make the situation worse “ -- which, but for VVAW, would have happened in 1972; which may happen with the cyber program to dissuade jihadists; and that has happened with ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious.

We deserve better.

Notes:

[1]Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, “After 9/11, an Era of Tinker, Tailor, Jihadist, Spy,” The New York Times, August 6, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/sunday-review/after-911-an-era-of-tinker-tailor-jihadist-spy.html?pagewanted=all.
[2]Definitions come, in order, from WordNet, an online lexical database for English http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn; my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary; The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
[3]http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/08/11/could-the-pentagon-be-responsible-for-your-death/
[4]Sari Horowitz, “A gunrunning sting gone fatally wrong,” The Washington Post, July 25, 2011 http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-anti-gunrunning-effort-turns-fatally-wrong/2011/07/14/gIQAH5d6YI_story.html
[5]Chris W. Cox, “The Big Question Of ‘Fast and Furious’: Who Knew?” America’s 1st Freedom, Vol. 12, No. 9, September 2011, p. 35.
[6]Liddy, Dean and Magruder all wrote of these meetings in their books, Liddy in, Will: the Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1980), pp. 182 & 196-200; Dean in Blind Ambition (Pocket Books, NY, 1977), pp. 73-78; and Magruder in An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (Atheneum, NY, 1974), pp. 192-195.
[7]Liddy, p. 197.
[8]Magruder, p. 248.
[9]Citizens Research and Investigation Committee and Louis E. Tackwood, The Glass House Tapes: The Story of an Agent-Provocateur and the New Police-Intelligence Complex (Avon, NY, 1973), pp. 41-2.
[10]]As I relate in Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers (iUniverse, Bloomington, IN, 2008) for which veterans gave me their personal memoirs, let me go through their files, and interview them.
[11]The woman was Barbara Stocking who entrusted to me her personal memoir and let me interview her for Combat by Trial.
[12]I tell of these instances in Combat by Trial along with explanations from veterans, often in their own words, and with descriptions of what it felt like to be in the middle of such rage and watching the vets handle it.
[13]Ibid., p. 288, I quote Bill Patterson from an interview I conducted with him, John Kniffin, and another veteran who attended the Gainesville meeting.
[14]Cox, op. sit.

[Nancy Miller Saunders was a member of Winterfilm Collective which documented activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She is the author of Combat by Trial and is a freelance writer living in the Arkansas Ozarks with her husband Budd Saunders.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Nancy Miller Saunders : Jane Fonda and the 'Home of the Brave'

Jane Fonda at the Oleo Strut GI Coffee House, Killeen, Texas, circa May 1970. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / Space City!
Jane Fonda and the 'home of the brave'

By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / August 11, 2011

"I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences." -- Jane Fonda

The same day Obama and the Democrats caved in to Republican Tea Party extremists on the deficit, I learned that the cable channel QVC canceled an appearance by Jane Fonda because of angry calls from extremists objecting to her anti-Vietnam War activities. It has been nearly 40 years since that war ended yet these Swiftboater-types still cling to hatred of her, much of which is based on lies and distortions.

Yes, the picture of her sitting and laughing on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun damned her in many people's eyes. But appearances can be misleading, which they are in this case as she explains in a recent piece, “The Truth About My Trip To Hanoi," posted on her blog.

Although one picture may be worth a thousand words, those words can be misleading as easily as they can be revealing. But rather than risk letting go of their hatred by listening to her explanations of what happened and why she went to North Vietnam, these Swiftboaters have clamped their minds shut around their hatred. One mistake in an otherwise exemplary campaign to stop an increasingly unpopular war and Fonda is condemned forever and always.

We claim in our national anthem that ours is “the home of the brave.” Is it, when our president and Congress knuckle under to extremists' threats to bankrupt the country? Is it, when cable channels let bullies frighten them out of letting a movie star peddle her latest book on an entirely different topic?

Where is the bravery in these cave-ins? Where is the bravery in our docile acceptance of such hateful extremism? We recently saw true bravery in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, where people fed up with corruption nonviolently withstood fierce attacks and toppled Hosnei Mubarak's regime. We are seeing it again in the streets of Syria where people are being gunned down for their nonviolent protests.

Jane Fonda is a brave woman who looked beyond her instinctive feelings that would not let her imagine the United States could ever fight an unjust war. But then she met and listened to active duty GIs and Vietnam veterans. She began to study that war and discovered what it was doing to the men being sent to fight it. She worked to find them help they needed.

When they asked, she spoke for them, using her celebrity to amplify their voices in an effort to get the American people to listen to what they had to say about what was being done in our name and to our sons, brothers, and neighbors. Only with knowledge -- not emotional assumptions, no matter how treasured -- can we correct our mistakes and maybe, just maybe, avoid making them again in the future. But, sadly, we have repeated them in Iraq.

Fonda also campaigned for an organization that was unprecedented in our history: Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Never before had U.S. combat veterans massed together to protest the continuation of the war in which they fought, but Vietnam veterans did just that, beginning in 1968.[1]

Two years later Fonda was working with VVAW and I found myself listening to the war's veterans after VVAW asked a group of us filmmakers to film their first two major demonstrations. They pointed out that they had the message and we had the means to broadcast it.

We put together four film crews to accompany VVAW and document the first demonstration, a RAW March over Labor Day weekend, 1970, from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.[2] (RAW stood for Rapid American Withdrawal from Vietnam.) Those of you old enough to remember that day may know that we risked being busted for crossing a state line to foment a riot, even though starting a riot was definitely not our intention.

Whenever possible VVAW used paradigms from the American Revolution to emphasize their patriotism and dedication to our founding principles. The route they chose was one some of George Washington's troops took to Valley Forge that memorable winter. In towns along the way, the veterans performed guerrilla theater in which they used volunteers acting as Vietnamese civilians to demonstrate their sanctioned brutality during the many search and destroy missions they had been sent on.

Image from the 1972 documentary film, Winter Soldier. Photo from Winterfilm Collective.
We filmmakers were with VVAW the entire weekend, even camping on the ground next to the veterans' encampment all three nights. We interviewed them, waded into the middle of their guerrilla theater to film it, and watched with growing admiration as they resisted provocation after provocation. They knew what violence is like and the damage it can do. They did not want to yield to it here at home.

At Valley Forge on Labor Day, VVAW staged a rally that began with more than 200 veterans making a moving entrance. Fonda was one of the speakers, again using her celebrity to amplify what the veterans had to tell their fellow citizens. She then left on a nationwide tour of campuses, introducing veterans to VVAW and recruiting volunteers for the next major action.

That second action was the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) in Detroit, Michigan, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, when more than 100 Vietnam veterans gave “straightforward testimony -- direct testimony -- about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorable result of national policy.”[3]

Contrary to extremists' accusations, VVAW carefully vetted the men it let testify. All had to have their discharge papers and IDs with them. Their testimony was checked against what other veterans knew, against documented evidence and whatever else the organizers could lay their hands on. We filmed the entire three days of testimony as well as related events and interviews with men who testified. Fonda financed us and attended the investigation, though she did not speak at it.[4]

The memories I brought away from the WSI are of haunted eyes of old men who had seen too much grief in already long lives -- as they looked at me from youthful faces. The contrast was proof of their stories. I remember seeing tough, war-hardened men break down and weep. I remember them hugging each other for mutual support. I remember listening to gut-wrenching testimony hour after hour for the full three days.

And I remember a love that spread from the veterans to include all of us who took the time to listen, to really listen, to what they had to say. This was a love far more powerful than any romantic love. It was the love of shared commitment.

Working on those two films with VVAW changed my life, much as I imagine listening to GIs and veterans changed Fonda's. Neither of us had to do what we did, but our hearts and souls had been touched. We knew, as few civilians did, why the war had to be ended. Its destruction had come home in the bodies and minds of those sent to fight it. Sadly there are people still trapped with the hatred necessary for war, necessary to make rational human beings kill other human beings.

I was so moved that I vowed to write the truths I learned about the war, about our national policy, and about the terrible toll it had taken on its veterans, and about the Nixon administration's efforts to silence and discredit VVAW. A number of veterans entrusted their stories to me to tell, much as others had trusted Fonda to speak for them.

In far subtler ways than the blatant lies and hatred used to vilify Fonda, I was hounded, intimidated, pressured, and threatened -- in attempts to make me shut up. The pressure was subtle, and friends to whom I turned for help told me to “stop being so paranoid” -- but some of the veterans stood by me. The first two people not directly involved with VVAW to believe me both had connections in the CIA, which suggests that I was not being paranoid. At times I was so terrified that I did stop... for a while.

The cumulative result of this harassment is that it took me nearly 40 years to finally keep my vow. Unable to find a publisher brave enough to work with me, I had to self-publish Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers.[5] All that interference would make another good book.

In a second book I would include the lessons I learned from the veterans about overcoming one's fears, about reaching down inside oneself to find the courage needed to continue, about the value of humor and laughter. And I would write about a man I met, Budd Saunders, a combat veteran who believed me -- although he was not a VVAW member or even a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Budd protected me, loved me, married me, and encouraged me to finish Combat by Trial. On our living room wall is a photograph of two of the veterans who most influenced me during those difficult years. One of them, Scott Camil, was hounded far worse than I was. He was framed several times, once for a capital offense (kidnapping), and he was shot in the back (the bullet barely missing his heart) by DEA agents when he refused to let them set him up on a drug deal.

Underneath their photograph I have pasted a quote from Scott: “If you let them demoralize you, then they're effective. If you don't, they aren't. That's up to you, not them.”

If enough of us keep such thoughts in mind, instead of clinging to our fears and wishful beliefs, we can rebuild our “home of the brave.” But it will take all of us finding the strength and courage that dwells within each of us to speak out against lies, distortions, and intimidation; to stand up to the corporate bosses who would squeeze us dry for their profit. And, above all, to stop letting hatred destroy us personally and as a nation.

References:

[1] Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have joined together in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).
[2] Different Sons , Bowling Green Films, New York, NY.
[3] Excerpt from the transcript of the opening statement to the Winter Soldier Investigation, January 31, 1971.
[4] Winter Soldier, Winterfilm, New York, NY; reissued by Millarium Zero, Harrington Park, NJ.
[5] Nancy Miller Saunders, Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers, iUniverse, Bloomington, IN, 2008.

[Nancy Miller Saunders was a member of Winterfilm Collective which documented activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She is the author of Combat by Trial and is a freelance writer living in the Arkansas Ozarks with her husband Budd Saunders.]

Also see:

• BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard: The Odyssey of Our Winter Soldiers / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : The Odyssey of Our Winter Soldiers

Nancy Miller Saunders' Combat by Trial:
Documenting 20th century 'winter soldiers'

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010

Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers by Nancy Miller Saunders. (iUniverse, Inc., 2008.) 591 pp, $34.95. Available at www.iuniverse.com.

Turning the Guns Around: Notes on the GI Movement by Larry G. Waterhouse and Mariann G. Wizard (Praeger, 1971). 221 pp., published at $6.95.

In 1971, my second husband and good friend Larry Waterhouse and I, through a fortuitous series of chances and choices, wrote a book on antiwar activity in the U.S. armed forces for a respected New York publisher. Turning the Guns Around: Notes on the GI Movement (Praeger) was researched and written entirely in four months to conform to a deadline occasioned by the failure of a previously contracted writer to deliver a manuscript.

Following Robert Sherrill's successful Military Justice is to Justice as Military Music is to Music (HarperCollins,1970), Praeger was eager to jump on the military dissent bandwagon, and to fill the hole in their spring line-up.

Turning the Guns Around gave 'em more than they bargained for. With chapter titles like, "Gen. Baconfat vs. the Red Menace" and "Today's Pig is Tomorrow's Bacon," and copiously drawing from the irreverent and often profane underground GI press of the day, we proclaimed the entry of activist grunts, swabbies, jarheads and/or flyboys, along with some servicewomen, into the ranks of revolution.

Drafted out of graduate school at UT Austin on November 25, 1969, Larry made no secret of his sympathy for Vietnam's National Liberation Front during induction and basic training. As a result, he spent his entire 14-month military career at Ft. Ord, California, near Monterey.

By the time I joined him the next summer, he'd made the transition from leadership in UT's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to leadership in the Ord chapter of Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM). The group rented a house off-post where off-duty soldiers could meet, hang out, and talk; published an erratic newspaper; and engaged in anti-war actions as well as solidarity actions with, groups like the lettuce-boycotting Farmworkers Union, protesting the enormous amounts of lettuce being served in Army mess halls.

We had each worked with individual anti-war vets in Austin, and with anti-war GIs somewhat through the Oleo Strut, an anti-war coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, near Ft. Hood, and knew from history the potential importance of rising dissent within America's armed forces.

Despite rising rapidly to a responsible and even rather sensitive position in Ft. Ord's payroll office, Larry never earned a stripe, remaining a proud buck private throughout his military servitude. His only bling was a Sharpshooter medal.

We signed our book contract at Christmas in 1970, in a Houston hospital, at the bedside of his Mom, who we thought might not live to see the book (she did). We'd flown to Texas on emergency leave when Gretchen had a heart attack, but tried to save money on the way back by delivering a "drive-away" car to Los Angeles. This became a marathon trip-from-Hell that landed us back in Monterey on Jan. 2, 1971, at about 4 a.m. I fell into bed. Larry put on his uniform and went to work.

An hour or so later he woke me with amazing news: he was being summarily, and honorably, discharged. Apparently the brass didn't want an active duty private authoring a book about dissent in the armed forces!

Back in Austin, we finished the book, found a place to live, figured out what was next in terms of employment and school, and along the way met and started working with a good-natured Army vet, Terry DuBose, to organize an Austin chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

It wasn't long, however, until we found ourselves in the best place organizers can be: not needed. By the fall of 1971, VVAW was an organization of, by, and for combat vets and their spouses, and Larry and I were politely asked to step out. We continued opposing the seemingly endless Vietnam conflict in other ways.

VVAW continued to emerge as a leading anti-war organization, especially as the beleaguered student movement imploded, until the war finally ended and the last U.S. troops came home.

Nancy Miller Saunders' memoir, Combat by Trial, tells VVAW's story not only from her point of view, that of a non-veteran "insider," but also, by skillfully interweaving the stories of veterans, government documents and vintage press reports, paints a collective memoir of a very crazy time. She was not, and does not present herself, as a VVAW leader, but was a trusted collaborator and confidante of many of VVAW's key players, especially in the Southern region, over several years.

The liberal film school graduate encountered VVAW as a member of Winterfilm, a collective documenting testimony at VVAW's first nationally-noted action, the Winter Soldier Investigation.

Held in late January and February 1971, WSI grouped combat vets by service and division to give public testimony about atrocities and war crimes in which they had participated, and/or had witnessed. The first panel was made up of veterans of the Marine Corps' highly decorated First Division that had been in Vietnam since 1965.

From painfully detailed testimony in this and subsequent panels a pattern of officially-sanctioned brutality over overlapping tours of duty emerged, demonstrating unequivocally that the recently-revealed massacre at My Lai had been no accident, and no particular exception.

Saunders describes the haggard, haunted, but still child-like men who made these bloody confessions, and her own growing awareness that these gallant, all-American boys had been maimed not only, all too often, in their bodies, but in their souls. VVAW's quest for an end to the war was at once a quest for their own healing, and for the healing of a nation.

Describing her journey, that of her then-partner, Arkansas VVAW coordinator Don Donner, and of VVAW as a whole from concerned patriots to targets of government intrigue, Saunders dips willingly into her own interpretations, but takes care to label them as such, urging readers to draw their own conclusions.

Her point of view differs from mine, for example, on the role of more radical anti-war groups, who she generally regarded then and now as "crazies" who drew attention from VVAW's powerful statements and needlessly endangered peaceful protesters. However, her own militancy was raised by threatening events and the intense persecution of VVAW. This internal shift, from being a total pacifist to someone who, on occasion, could not sleep without knowing that a loaded pistol was within reach, is powerfully evoked.

The book made me remember walking into the MDM house in Monterey for the first time and seeing the sandbags lining the walls to protect against occasional drive-by shootings. The story of her and Donner's reception by the New Orleans "Red Squad" gave me a chill; the Monterey police department knew of my arrival almost before I did.

If you are among those who can't imagine what led some anti-war protesters of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Black liberationists, to consider violence, this book is "must reading"! The short version: the U.S. government, through its willful lies, delusional fantasies, and brutally destructive acts, brought much enmity upon itself.

Turning the Guns Around. Dell paperback edition.
Those who read with interest in The Rag Blog about Federal Bureau of Investigation informer Brandon Darby and the impact of his unmasking will be fascinated with the story of VVAW's snitches. Even now, with the perspective of years and Saunders' deep research into FBI files, the motivations of such individuals remain obscure, but the VVAW experience demonstrates that this must be a secondary consideration.

Deliberately false "intelligence" was the result of a political program that aimed to destroy VVAW's credibility through accusations of planned violence and expensive trials, draining group resources. That this was accomplished, in part, through the testimony of paid informers and provocateurs worked eventually to bring in "not guilty" verdicts for most VVAW members charged with crimes, but the damage had been done. The question of how to defend against such betrayals remains open, and urgent.

In the biggest legal case, veterans were charged with conspiring to riot at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. The trial of the Gainesville 6, that then became the Gainesville 8, and of the "Forgotten 4," involved Austin's own "movement lawyers," most notably Cameron Cunningham for the defense.

Saunders recalls the bickering between and among defendants and defenders; between VVAW's southern regional leaders -- most of those accused in the case -- and its compromised national office; as well as the convoluted legal wrangling that led to complete acquittal in Gainesville -- but only after the RNC was over and Nixon anointed once more as the nominee.

Although Saunders and Donner were not active here, Austin VVAW's actions are amply chronicled, largely through Saunders' conversations with and letters from local leader John Kniffen, one of the Gainesville 8, as well as through her direct observations of VVAW actions in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and in Killeen.

Kniffin, a taciturn, wiry, former tank commander who did 32 months in-country, joined Austin VVAW in 1971, and became a force regionally, and then in national VVAW, where he demanded -- and got -- more democratic decision-making.

His recollections, and those of his widow, Cathy, who continues, after John's death from Agent Orange exposure, to work for veterans' rights, brought back vivid memories of actions here in which Larry and I participated, the most awesome of which was a gigantic outpouring of peace and justice forces at the official dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, attended by a Who's Who of U.S. imperialism, including then-President Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon.

While there are a few errors that old Austinites will readily spot (e.g., the University's West Mall is referred to repeatedly as the East Mall), it's also fun figuring out who certain unnamed activists must be, simply from their descriptions.

In what I believe to be an original contribution, using FBI and press reports, Saunders alluringly links dirty tricks played against VVAW with Nixon's Watergate burglary team. Offices and homes of VVAW members and attorneys were burgled, especially in Florida, where Nixon's plumbers were based; as in the better-known Washington, D.C. break-ins that ultimately brought down the President, only certain papers were stolen.

In the weeks before the 1972 national political conventions, both of which were in Miami, Florida leaders of VVAW were in discussion with Democratic Party headquarters -- one of the targets of Nixon's buggers -- about security for demonstrators ("nondelegates") who would attend. Democrats feared, and hoped to avoid, a repeat of the 1968 Chicago convention debacle, where anti-war youth had been clubbed through the streets on national television.

Was this discussion the reason Nixon bugged Democratic Party HQ? Did the same crew that burgled Pentagon papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsburg's psychiatrist's office burgle VVAW files in Gainesville? Did Nixon hope to tie national Democratic leaders to VVAW's alleged conspiracy to riot? While no conclusive proof is presented, "coincidences" of timing and personnel movement are compelling. Has anyone offered a more reasoned explanation of what Watergate was all about?

Saunders also presents evidence that on at least two occasions, VVAW's release of information gleaned from active-duty contacts (the anti-war movement within the military having continued to grow despite its own problems and persecutions) about U.S. troop and materiel build-ups prevented the war from being intensified on Nixon's watch, rather than eventually being abandoned. This seems a plausible enough reason for the vengeful, plotting Nixon to want the organization destroyed!

The collective nature of Saunders' memoir is its true strength. By giving free voice to the many vets who entrusted her with their papers, their unpublished memoirs, their own FBI files, etc., she avoids the self-centered quality common in such memoirs, while still allowing herself free voice.

She knows that no one person has the full story, and in fact not even a group of people such as she draws from see everything that happened around them and to them. Part of the immense satisfaction I found in the book came from seeing other views of events I had seen peripherally, in a time that seems both very long ago and strangely like this morning.

In a funny circle-of-life coincidence, a bus Terry DuBose drove with other veterans to Washington, D.C. -- a bus belonging to John Kniffin -- and wrote about in an epilogue for Turning the Guns Around, pops up in Nancy's book, stranded by the side of the road, from a completely different source.

DuBose electronically introduced me to Saunders and her husband, Budd -- a sometimes contributor to The Rag Blog from rural "Arkansaw" -- a year or so ago, which is how I heard about her book, and requested a swap. As a sometimes self-published author myself, I'm happy to recommend this Internet publication in overall quality and value.

You'll find as many typos in any book these days, and none of Saunders' are very off-putting. Spelling errors, etc., in sources quoted, add, in several cases, to the authenticity of her documentary. Saunders still sees life through a film editor's eye, and has a good gift both for description, especially of people and the places where action takes place, and for dialogue, as well as voluminous resources.

Turning the Guns Around was a snapshot of an emerging movement, a Rorschach blot of a moment. Combat by Trial is a deeper, longer, and more nuanced look at that same movement -- military opposition to U.S. military adventurism -- as it grew, rose, and fell in the 1970s.

Now it is rising again, in our younger brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, who have been to war in the cauldrons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Saunders doesn't shy away from drawing parallels between Vietnam and the "Afraq" conflicts, and I will not shy away from pointing out that Turning the Guns Around predicted these wars in some detail 39 years ago. Unlike some Vietnam-era memoirs, Combat by Trial has plenty to offer today's peace warriors.

[Mariann Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...