The war that America could never win? Opposition, dissent and the Vietnam War

It is almost his turn. Romo looks at each man stepping to the microphone to say a few words before turning and hurling their medals, ribbons and dogtags at the Capitol, stood behind a quickly constructed fence to keep protestors out. Many curse the government, others apologise, and one limping man throws his cane. Rejecting these symbols of bravery is a powerful display of how the war has no meaning. Romo says of his medals: “These ain’t shit!” This day, the veterans capture the spirit of a massive movement, in which millions fight against a war America cannot win.

Why was US involvement in Vietnam opposed?

US involvement in Vietnam had not always been so strongly opposed, with dissent before 1965 confined to colleges. In a time of Cold War politics, the Americans held to the ‘Domino Theory’: the fear that if one country fell to communism then its neighbours would follow. In 1954, Vietnam had been divided in two and since then, the ruling communists in the North had tried to unify the country. Add that to instability in the South as the communist National Liberation Front (the NLF, but better known as the ‘Viet Cong’) looked to overthrow the government and it was inevitable that US foreign policy would dictate that assistance – in the form of thousands of ‘military advisers’ – must increase.

"If we quit Vietnam tomorrow, we'll be fighting in Hawaii and next week we'll have to be fighting in San Francisco," warned President Lyndon B Johnson. Then, when two US destroyers were (allegedly) attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in August 1964, the resulting Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave LBJ authority to escalate involvement without declaring war.

Although public opinion sided with the government in 1965, and stayed favourable for years, dissent became evident from the outset. People’s attitudes towards the Vietnam War differed immediately from previous conflicts, where early days were dominated by propaganda and patriotism. Instead, anti-war sentiment bloomed from, or connected with, other social movements of the 1960s. It was a time of counterculture, civil rights activism and the exploration of freedoms.

So as the bombings of North Vietnam got underway (Operation Rolling Thunder), organisations like Students for Democratic Society headed marches, while ‘teach-ins’ at dozens of campuses discussed the justification and morality of the war. A similar idea would spring up later near military bases – called ‘GI coffeehouses’ – for disgruntled grunts.

In late July, LBJ changed the war irrevocably by announcing an immediate increase of troop levels from 75,000 to 125,000, on the advice that aerial superiority had done little to hinder the communist guerrillas. Putting boots on the ground, however, meant doubling the draft to 35,000 a month, which young men refused by burning their draft cards. Opposition to the draft would intensify as anger spread at the system’s unfairness, with it affecting the poor and African American populations hardest. Those who did enlist faced a conflict of attrition – being bogged down in jungles and guerrilla assaults by the Viet Cong. Firepower caused the deaths of many North Vietnamese and VC, as well as civilians, but for the people back home, the main images in the media would be of American body bags.

• Listen | Lynn Novick describes the making of an epic documentary series on the conflict in Vietnam, which she co-directed with Ken Burns

Flower power

By 1967, as half a million men and billions of dollars poured into Vietnam, disillusionment had turned the protests into a global movement. Marches took place around the US, as well as London, Paris and Rome, and featured prominent figures. On 15 April, Martin Luther King joined 400,000 in a march in New York; the President’s trip to Los Angeles on 23 June was met by a massive riot; and on 21 October, 100,000 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC. Here, and before clashes with soldiers at the Pentagon, the famous photo of hippies putting flowers into the barrels of rifles got snapped.

LBJ went from the president who signed civil rights legislation to the man killing Vietnamese civilians

For LBJ, he went from being the president who signed civil rights legislation to the man who was killing Vietnamese civilians with toxic chemicals, like ‘Agent Orange’ and napalm. He cancelled public appearances, knowing everywhere he went he would be met with the chant: “Hey, hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” Things only got worse the next year.

On 31 January 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched strikes against more than 100 military and civilian targets, including the Saigon headquarters of US forces commander General Westmoreland and the Embassy. Although the Tet Offensive caught the troops by surprise and ended with a bloody three-week battle for the city of Hue, South Vietnam, it ultimately became a tactical US success. But it did not matter, as Tet was a media catastrophe. How could the enemy pull off such a daring offensive? How could the war nearly be over, as the government insisted? Had the army been weakened? High casualty numbers, negative news stories and images from Tet – notably the filmed execution of a Viet Cong suspect – shocked Americans and led to major changes.

Westmoreland, Time's Man of the Year in 1965, had to be replaced, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned and LBJ suspended the bombing of North Vietnam. With Americans feeling betrayed by their government, the President's popularity tumbled, with one poll stating 50 per cent of Americans did not approve of his handling of the war. When broadcast behemoth Walter Cronkite described Vietnam as a "stalemate", LBJ responded: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

Sure enough, LBJ announced he would not seek re-election that year, a huge win for the anti-war movement. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August became a target for the Yippies (a radical youth group), who put forward a pig, Pigasus the Immortal, as candidate to mock the state of politics. Clashes with police resulted in the arrests of a group of activists, the ‘Chicago Seven’, whose five-month trial created a cause célèbre.

Any expectation of the new president being a ‘dove’ rather than a pro-war ‘hawk’ was lost when Richard Nixon won the election on a promise to achieve an “honourable end” in Vietnam. He even asserted that a “silent majority” of Americans still supported the war. That said, he knew public opinion had shifted, so he introduced a policy of phased troop withdrawals and started to hand over responsibility to the South Vietnamese army. President Nixon called it “Vietnamization”.

• Read more | Dien Bien Phu: the battle that split Vietnam

Although a popular move, complete withdrawal would take three years, so morale among the men left behind collapsed. Drug abuse, desertions and ‘fragging’ (killing their own officers) rose, while racism and violence towards the Vietnamese worsened. As accusations of atrocities spread, those returning from their year-long tour of duty faced an angry public, with the more radical protestors spitting at them and calling them ‘baby killers’. Soldiers joined their own anti-war groups, like Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The war ongoing, demonstrations not only continued, they got bigger. A couple of months after Woodstock, some 2 million workers, students and children stopped what they were doing on 15 October 1969 to participate in rallies around the country. The Peace Moratorium proved to be the largest demonstration during Vietnam – its success saw the event repeated a month later. Nixon incurred further wrath in December by introducing a draft lottery, the first since World War II. He hoped it would make the system fairer, but it inspired a new wave of protests and thousands of men either to flee to Canada or head to college for deferment.

• What if JFK had lived?

Slaughtered support

With so many groups protesting for so many reasons, the movement fragmented. Several defining events, though, served to unite people in the final drive to end the war. In late 1969, news of the My Lai Massacre – complete with uncensored photographs – broke. On 16 March 1968, Charlie Company from Americal Division’s 11th Infantry had been sent to the hamlet of My Lai, believing it to be full of VC or their sympathisers. There they raped, mutilated and slaughtered as many as 500 unarmed women, elderly and children. The atrocity only stopped when the passing Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between the troops and surviving civilians. The revelations of the massacre and its cover-up caused further outrage. Supporters of the war had long claimed moral authority over the evils of communism; the My Lai Massacre weakened that position.

My Lai also galvanised many veterans, who felt just as betrayed and disgusted, into actions such as the Winter Soldier Investigations, where they gave accounts of war crimes. The most symbolic gesture they could carry out, though, would be throwing away their medals earned in what they saw as an immoral war, which almost 1,000 veterans (including Barry Romo) did in 1971.

My Lai was not the only secret to hit the headlines. Demonstrations erupted after news broke of Nixon’s clandestine bombing and invasion of Cambodia – far from bringing the war to a close, it appeared he had expanded operations. At Kent State University, Ohio, on 4 May 1970, members of the National Guard opened fire on a gathering of students, killing four and wounding nine.

Nixon callously responded to the shooting by saying, "When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy," which, alongside the photographs of the aftermath, again caused uproar. The following day, 450 colleges went on strike.

War is over

Distrust in the government's message had grown since Tet, but this 'credibility gap' turned into a ravine on 13 June 1971 when the New York Times published the first instalments of the so-called Pentagon Papers. The leaked top-secret study detailed US activity in Vietnam since the 1940s, and revealed that successive presidents had deceived the public – LBJ, for example, had planned escalation as early as 1964. Nixon tried to stop publication, but a Supreme Court decision sided with the newspapers. The movement had reached its zenith and public pressure was too great. Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and Nixon – whose attention turned away from Vietnam as he became embroiled in the Watergate scandal – went on to end the draft and, in January 1973, he signed the Paris Peace Accords.

The US entered Vietnam a global superpower intent on defeating communism, invincible and righteous. They left abjectly humiliated, with more than 58,000 Americans dead and feeling the effects for decades, be it from a crippled economy, veterans suffering from psychological trauma or an established distrust in the government. The very word ‘Vietnam’ has plagued US foreign policy arguably to this day. Yet the war came to be defined in another way – by people standing up and holding their leaders to account. And they sometimes paid a terrible price to prove that a war could no longer be won without enough public support.

Jonny Wilkes is a freelance writer specialising in history

This article was first published in the September 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed