Vietnam Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Ramblin' with Roger

The Berrigans: Those Troublesome Priests

The Berrigans continued to be troublemakers, including in the anti-nukes movement.

When I first went to college in 1971, I was pulling away from my “traditional” Christian roots. At the same time, I was fascinated by two Catholic priests, the Berrigans, who were fighting against the Vietnam War in provocative ways.

Separately and together, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, with a coterie other, mostly Catholic, protesters, were involved in several antiwar activities. The Berrigans and seven others:

…used homemade napalm to destroy 378 draft files in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board on May 17, 1968. This group, which came to be known as the Catonsville Nine, issued a statement after the incident:

“We confront the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor.”

In retrospect, the trial of the Catonsville Nine was significant because it “altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards.”

And that surely included me, as I was one of 12 people who was arrested at an antiwar demonstration at IBM Poughkeepsie. What I failed to mention in that account, or in its follow-up were a few details.

Earlier that week in 1972 was a demonstration near the Kingston draft board, which I wrote about. What I FAILED to mention was that I slipped my draft card under the door. I realize that burning it would have been safer (smarter), but it was a Kilroy was here moment, which probably helped get me jammed up with my draft board later that year.

The other thing I just didn’t remember is that one of the books I lent friend Alice while she was in jail for eight days was The Berrigans, “the famous special issue of HOLY CROSS QUARTERLY with original articles…Now with additional essays.” It excluded only a piece by Father Andrew Greeley, who was critical of the Berrigan brothers and would not allow his piece to be reprinted.

I know that this was one of the books because I still have my copy. “Alice” is written in pencil on the front cover, and her full name printed in pen on the inside front cover.

Clearly, the Berrigans were huge influences in my life. Philip Berrigan and his wife, former nun Elizabeth McAlister, came to my college in the mid-1970s; they married in 1970, although the marriage was not revealed until 1973, as he was still a priest.

The Berrigans continued to be troublemakers, including in the anti-nukes movement. Philip died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 79. Daniel died on April 30, 2016 at the age of 94.

LINKS

Daniel Berrigan’s mea culpa

“His World Was Always Filled with Such Beauty”: Frida Berrigan on Her Uncle, Priest Daniel Berrigan

Frida Berrigan: Give Your Children a Conscience Instead of Material Possessions

The New Yorker: Postscript: Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016

Huffington Post: The Life and Death of Daniel Berrigan

Common Dreams: How Friends and Family Remember Daniel Berrigan

The Intercept: Daniel Berrigan, a Leader of Peaceful Opposition to Vietnam War, Inspired a Generation of Activists

New York Times obituary:

The Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, and poet whose defiant protests helped shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam War and landed him in prison, died Saturday [April 30] in New York City. He was 94.

The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in Southeast Asia when Father Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an intellectual star of the Roman Catholic “new left,” articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society.

Father Berrigan; his brother Philip, a Josephite priest; and their allies took their case to the streets with rising disregard for the law or their personal fortunes. A defining point was the burning of Selective Service draft records in Catonsville, Md.

Paul Simon – Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
Lyrics

In a couple of days they come and
Take me away
But the press let the story leak
And when the radical priest
Come to get me released
We was all on the cover of Newsweek

Memorial Day 2015: war is failure

“It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60.”

There was a time when I thought there were bad guys and good guys, and they were very easily distinguishable.

But now I think war is failure. Even a “just war” may be, at very best, the least bad outcome. And usually, just a bad outcome, with war profiteers (Blackwater, or whatever they’re calling themselves now). Pope Francis got it right this month: “Many powerful people don’t want peace because they live off war.”

Any American born since 1984 has spent at least half of his or her life with the country at war. My life percentage is only about 40%.

We go to war in Iraq. Some of us thought it was a mistake at the time. Others discover it later, realizing we were lied to. Now, the calls by some to go war with Iran ring hollow.

Unintended consequences of war: My Lai in Vietnam, Abu Gharib in Iraq, to name just two during my lifetime. I highly recommend Graphic Novels About Consequences and Horrors of War by Meryl Jaffe.

On this Memorial Day, I also suggest Demobilized in the USA: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement; I.F. Stone, the urge to serve, and remembrance of wars past:

Among the eeriest things about reading Stone’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia coverage, 14 years into the next century, is how resonantly familiar so much of what he wrote still seems, how twenty-first-century it all is. It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60. [Compare, for instance, Laos and Iraq.]

But if much in the American way of war remains dismally familiar some five decades later, one thing of major significance has changed, something you can see regularly in I.F. Stone’s Weekly but not in our present world. Thirteen years after our set of disastrous wars started, where is the massive antiwar movement, including an army in near revolt and a Congress with significant critics in significant positions?

If, so many years into the disastrous war on terror, the Afghan War that never ends, and most recently Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0, there is no significant antiwar movement in this country, you can thank the only fit of brilliance the national security state has displayed. It successfully drummed us out of service. The sole task it left to Americans, 40 years after the Vietnam War ended, was the ludicrous one of repeatedly thanking the troops for their service, something that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s or 1960s because you would, in essence, have been thanking yourself.

40 years ago: the fall of Saigon

I knew a guy, Michael, who almost certainly died from Agent Orange exposure in early 1982, just after his daughter was born.

S. Vietnamese in Da Nang struggle to climb aboard ships that will evacuate them to Cam Ranh Ba

I’ve been reading several news articles about the documentary ‘Last Days in Vietnam’, directed by Rory Kennedy, daughter of RFK, which revisits the fall of Saigon in 1975. If I get the opportunity, I’ll have to watch it.

I became actively opposed to the Vietnam war in mid-1968, as much because of a 1967 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. as anything.

Prior to that – I WAS only 15 -it was more that it was an American war, and I was an American, so I didn’t really need to think about it much.

After that evolution of thought, I actually LOOKED at how the United States, after France’s final defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, ended up in Vietnam, first with “advisers”. Then, after the lie that spurred the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964, there was a much-expanded presence in Vietnam, propping up one failed leadership in South Vietnam after another.

Only much later, I discovered how Richard Nixon sabotaged the 1968 Vietnam peace talks to get elected President, an arguably treasonous act, something that cost the United States an additional 22,000 lives, of the 58,000 US military killed, not to mention those tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who died needlessly.

So when the Americans effectively stopped fighting in January 1973, through a program called Vietnamization – read this and see if it reminds you of the US policy in Iraq this century – it led to the inevitable collapse of the South Vietnam government. “By the end of April 30th, South Vietnam was wholly under the control of North Vietnam who swiftly announced the creation of a united Vietnam. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.”

Yet I felt terrible about those South Vietnamese who were left behind, who undoubtedly felt the Americans would take care of them, but, for the most part, were not able to; an estimated one million people died after reunification. Moreover, I am fascinated by the normalization of relations between the US and a united Vietnam in the past three decades.

One of the legacies of the American involvement in the war the use of the defoliant Agent Orange. I knew a guy, Michael – a good friend of my girlfriend at the time – who almost certainly died from Agent Orange exposure in early 1982, just after his daughter was born. It took nearly another decade before the government acknowledged a link between the chemical and a number of neurological diseases.

Now the U.S. finally accepting responsibility for the devastating ongoing effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But is this funding just a way to get USAID in the door to meddle in the country’s affairs?
***
From 2015: SamuraiFrog revisits Good Morning, Vietnam.

From 2014: US Government sanitizes Vietnam War history.

From 2012: ‘Napalm Girl’: An Iconic Image Of War Turns 40.

40 Years Ago: October 1972 – The Draft Board

Since my draft number was so low (002), I thought I would be doing some sort of alternative service in 1973.

After getting a letter from the Selective Service, a/k/a, the draft board, indicating that I was reclassified 1-A (eligible for military service) over the summer, I filed an appeal. Though I was living in my college town of New Paltz, NY, I had to return to my hometown of Binghamton, NY.

There were three men on the draft board. The chairman said that his daughter talked about me all the time when we were in high school; I was president of student government and involved in the theater club, among other things. Did I remember her? I said, “Oh, yeah!” I had no idea who she was, at least by name, though maybe I would have recognized her by sight.

One guy said, after introducing himself, said absolutely nothing.

The third man was Garland Hamlin. This was a man I had known all my life. We attended the same church. His wife was organist at that church, and she had tried for about a year to teach me to play piano, so I had been in the Hamlin house dozens of times. I went to school with his two daughters. So I believe that he found it necessary to ask the toughest questions.

I know that he invoked Hitler. He wondered if a Hitler were attacking my mother what I would do. I said I would defend her, but that was different than initiating conflict by going to war.

Around the same time, I had to go for my military physical in Syracuse, NY, which I passed. even though I have a minor heart murmur which I’ve lived with since I was born; the doctor didn’t even notice until I had brought it to his attention.

It did take them a month to ascertain that I was moral enough to go to war. I was asked if had ever given money to a variety of groups, only two of which I had even heard of, the Communist Party of the USA and the Socialist Workers Party. I certainly spent some nominal amount on an antiwar button or two from the SWP, so I wrote yes re: them.

Finally, the word came from the draft board. I was reclassified 1-A-O, a conscientious objector available for noncombatant military service only. I’m sure it was vital that I had indicated my CO status when I had first registered for the draft a year and a half earlier. My thanks to Jean Hagopian, mother of my friend Amy, who was my informal draft counselor through this period.

Here’s the kicker, though. Since my draft number was so low (002), I thought I would be doing some sort of alternative service in 1973. But since the Vietnam war was winding down, and there were many older people whose temporary deferments had lapsed, they drafted NO ONE born in 1953 before the draft law ended on June 30, 1973. Moreover, on January 27, 1973, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird announced the creation of an all-volunteer armed forces, negating the need for the military draft. So all of that rigamarole had been for nothing, as it turned out.

Those were interesting times.

40 Years Ago: The Mining of Haiphong Harbor

Did I mention I was one of those arrested?

In April and May of 1972, the Nixon administration kindled a major controversy “when the president ordered the renewal of bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong (April 16) and the mining of Haiphong Harbor as well as other harbors and inland waterways in North Vietnam” [announced the evening of Monday, May 8]. This latter act kindled student protests all across the country, and certainly at my college, the State University College at New Paltz, NY, as we felt this had escalated the VietNam conflict.

The chronology on some of this is a bit fuzzy, but I know there was a demonstration in the village. Some folks drove about 5 mph on the New York State Thruway and were leafleting other drivers until a State Police escort put a kibosh on that action. I believe that was on Tuesday.

A bunch of us took a bus to the United Nations to attend a demonstration on Thursday, but the rented vehicle was so late that we missed the action. But a demonstration near the draft board in Kingston, NY was held on Friday, and the board closed in anticipation of our arrival, though it was a peaceful protest. The next day, the front page of the newspaper, the Kingston Freeman, had a picture of me and a couple of other people sitting in front of the building. The quality (or reproduction) of the photo was so poor, though, that I didn’t even recognize myself.

The pivotal event that week was a demonstration at IBM Poughkeepsie on Wednesday, May 10, which building something called the IBM 360. In 1972, the idea of computers programmed to help kill people was quite upsetting to many folks; think an early version of today’s drones. In any case, there were about 360 people protesting – I don’t know if that were actually true or apocryphal.

At some point, we were warned if we walked past a certain point, we would be arrested. It was almost a dare, in its tone. As it turned out, twelve people were detained that day. One guy was charged with disturbing the peace, and his bail was set at $50. Everyone else was charged with fourth-degree criminal trespass, much to the chagrin of the district attorney, who was seeking a stiffer charge; 10 of the 11 got out on $25 bail. The 11th, my friend Alice, had been arrested and convicted at a previous event, was fined $48, and had not paid it. Her bail was set at $250, and she opted not to pay it, and stayed in jail until the trial, eight days later.

Did I mention I was one of those arrested?
(To be concluded on May 17)