Winning Hearts and Minds: One Man’s Journey to Vietnam and Back Towards Peace
Interviewer: Colin McDermott Interviewee: John Ketwig Date: May 30th, 2019 Instructor: Alex Haight
Table of Contents Interviewer Release Form …..…………………………………………………………….……………... 3 Interviewee Release Form ………………………………………………………………………………. 4 Statement of Purpose ………………………………………………………………………………..…... 5 Biography ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 6 Historical Contextualization: The Vietnam War:……...………………………….……………………... 7 Interview Transcription ………………………………………………………………………………..... 19 Interview Analysis ………………………………………………………………………………………. 65 Work Consulted …………………………………………………………………………………………. 71 Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………………………...… 73
Statement of Purpose
The purpose of this project is to gain a strong understanding of the origins and history of the
Vietnam war; including the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and its place in the anti-war movement. The Vietnam war is one of the most questionable and misconstrued wars in world history and deserves continuing study for lessons that can be applied going forward. My interview with Vietnam Veteran, John Ketwig offers the vital first-hand perspective of a person who was an American soldier in Vietnam and also an activist in the VVAW. Contained in this interview is the story of John Ketwig and the lessons he learned from his Vietnam experiences.
Biography
John Ketwig was born in 1948 and grew up in the Finger Lakes region of western New York. As a boy he was a fan of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan and had a special interest in automobiles. He graduated from high school and in anticipation that he would soon be drafted and assigned combat duty in Vietnam, instead enlisted in the United States Army with the hope of assignment elsewhere. In September of 1967, however, he was sent to Vietnam. Following his year-long tour in Vietnam, where he reports morale was generally low, he chose to complete his military service in Thailand, having escaped serious injury in Vietnam but witnessing death and destruction nearby. When returning to the United States he continued his passion of working with automobiles for various automobile manufacturers. Also upon his return to the U.S., he became active in the antiwar organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Ketwig recorded his recollections of his Vietnam years and their aftermath in a well received memoir,
“And a Hard Rain Fell, the title of which is based on an evocative Bob Dylan song from the
1960s, ”A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”
The Vietnam War
A since forgotten rock band who once played at Woodstock, Country Joe and the Fish, performed a sarcastic song whose lyrics went as follows: “And it’s 1,2,3, What are we fighting for?, Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam!” In some ways, this lyric captures the spirit of the times (the late 1960s) as youth who knew little about Vietnam or its colonial history got swept up into a distant war they were powerless to resist. Young people were not the only ones who struggled to make sense of the far-off war. Voters and politicians searched in vain for a way out of the war, which dragged on without clear direction throughout the 1960s. Thus, the Vietnam War proved to be one of the most controversial and divisive episodes in American history. Some people referred to it as a “conflict” but others resented that term saying it was a
“war” pure and simple. As John Ketwig, who fought in Vietnam, said in his memoir: “I don't plan to refer to the Vietnam ‘conflict’ LBJ saw it as a ‘conflict.’ To a pfc (private first class), 19 years old, that many dead guys earned it the title of ‘war.’”1 In addition to costing the country billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives it lead to the end of at least one presidents
(LBJ’s) career and changed the way many Americans and non-Americans viewed the United
States. For probably the first time in American history, large numbers of American soldiers came back from battle with opinions that no longer coincided with their government’s and with a willingness to express their dissent in public. Important newspapers posted damaging pictures and contradicted the government's statements, even describing the war in Vietnam as “a dirty, vicious war that Americans are caught up in in the swamps of South Vietnam” 2 and eventually many returning soldiers backed such statements with first-hand experiences explaining their
1 1. John Ketwig, ...and a hard rain fell (n.p.: Sourcebooks Inc., 2008), [Page 4].
2 1. Eyewitness Report, "The Strange War the U.S is Not Winning," U.S News and World Report, September 30, 1963, [Page 1].
strong disapproval of the government’s conduct of the war. As citizens tired of the war and returning soldiers joined their cause, the momentum grew behind anti-war movements all over the country and the gradually eroded of both support for the War and trust in the government and the politicians in it. Protests took place from college campuses to the steps of the United States
Capitol, itself. And, by the late 1960s when the tens of thousands of protesters were backed by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and not just students and youth, the government was forced to take the anti-war movement far more seriously. Together with a more sceptical mass media, the accounts of returning soldiers who publicly opposed the War changed the way the fighting in Vietnam was viewed throughout the world. Some of those soldiers (including one named John Ketwig) wrote about their experiences in and after the war. In order to understand the perspective of such a soldier, one of many who turned against the war and worked to end it, it is important to first understand how America got involved in Vietnam and how the war unfolded. The roughly twenty-year long American war in Vietnam had its roots in ignorance about Vietnam’s colonial past and America's arrogance and overconfidence in our military and technological superiority. The government promoted the idea that fighting in Vietnam was necessary to stop the spread of communism. The government ignored the corruption of the South
Vietnamese government and ignored the fact that many Vietnamese people agreed with the
North that the most important goal was to rid the county of foreign colonizers. So, in the U.S. the war was originally viewed by most people as a just war with America fighting alongside brave South Vietnam against North Vietnam and Viet Cong Guerrillas, with a clear theme of
“good against evil,” and “democracy versus communism.” But as the war steadily increased in intensity and the U.S. seemed to lose control as the war dragged on without victory, the lines between good and evil blurred. People began to question whether the government was telling the
truth about any aspect of the war. Frustration grew as the bloody war killed over 58,000
American troops and 250,000 South Vietnamese troops. Over 1,000,000 North Vietnamese and
Viet Cong Guerrillas were also killed. And tragically over 2,000,000 North and South
Vietnamese, Laos, and Cambodian civilians died and hundreds of villages were destroyed.3 It became harder and harder for Americans to see how the conflict could be brought to a successful end, as the North refused to quit even in the face of huge losses.
The people fighting the U.S. recalled how their small and poor nation, located on the eastern Indochinese peninsula was imperialised by the French in the mid-1800’s because of the land’s natural resources. Years later in 1940, France fell to Germany, allowing Japan to invade and cruelly exploit Vietnam. Seeing the opportunity to free Vietnam from outside rulers, Ho Chi
Minh, a popular charismatic political leader, left China for Vietnam after spending three decades in exile to lead Vietnam to independence from imperialism. The U.S. declined his requests for help in gaining independence from the French. In an attempt for the Vietnamese to defend themselves from both the French colonizers and the Japanese occupiers, Ho Chi Minh had formed the League for the Independence of Vietnam called the “Viet Minh.” The Viet Minh was founded on in 1941 to resist the French and Japanese forces to achieve independence for
Vietnam. The United States and the Republic of China at first assisted the Viet Minh in their efforts to fight the enemy Japanese occupiers. In July of 1945 an OSS (Office of Strategic
Services or pre-CIA) American team was sent to train Viet Minh troops. On this trip the men found Ho Chi Minh appearing as a “pile of bones covered with yellow dry skin” “shaking like a leaf and obviously running a high fever.”4 He was sick with malaria, dysentery, and assorted
3 1. The Vietnam War, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, PBS/ WETA, 2017.
4 1. Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (n.p.: Lyons Press, 2005), [Page 306].
tropical diseases. The men treated Ho Chi Minh and he made a quick recovery, returning to his fight for independence.
In 1945 Japan was defeated in World War II and completely extracted all its troops from
Vietnam. With Japan no longer occupying Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s forces, lead by Vo Nguyen
Giap, took control of the critical northern city of Hanoi. Following taking Hanoi, on September
2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared North Vietnam’s independence calling it the “Democratic
Republic of Vietnam.” Though unable to keep control of northern Vietnam, the French regained the south including its capital Saigon, lead by French-influenced emperor Bao Dai. Ho Chi Minh reached out to the Americans for collaboration using letters and telegrams stating in vain, ““your statesmen make eloquent speeches about . . . self-determination. We are self-determined. Why not help us? Am I any different from . . . your George Washington?”5 But Franklin Roosevelt, who was sympathetic to the anti-imperialist cause, was no longer in office (dying in 1945) and
President Truman's new administration never responded and in a fatal error chose to support
France’s regaining of imperial power following the end of World War II. Ho’s dream was stalled but not ended.
Ho Chi Minh’s North and Bao Dai’s South backed by the French, with limited American aid, fought back and forth until the North's victory in May 1954 in the battle at Dien Bien Phu putting an end to France's colonial rule. Following the battle at Dien Bien Phu, the international community held the Geneva Conference. The meeting included representatives from the United
States, the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. This resulted in the United States giving South Vietnam financial and military aid and helping the
5 1. James M. Lindsay, "Remembering Ho Chi Minh 1945 Declaration of Vietnam's Independence," www.cfr.org, last modified September 2, 2016, accessed December 10, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/blog/remembering-ho-chi- minhs-1945-declaration-vietnams-independence.
South form a new anti-communist government in opposition to the North, resulting in the United
States becoming even more involved across the globe in Vietnam, a place most Americans surely had never visited if they had even heard of it at all.
By 1955 the Cold War was in full swing as the United States broke off World War II ties with its former ally, the Soviet Union. As the Cold War intensified, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower gave United States’ full support to Dien Bien Phu of South Vietnam, quietly sending
American soldiers or so-called “advisors” to Vietnam to train and supply south Vietnamese troops. Following the arrests of more than 100,000 communist sympathisers over four years, in
1959 several northern attacks on the south occurred. As tension rose in Vietnam, President John
F. Kennedy sent more Americans to decide what was needed in the south. These early advisors recommended the United States increase military support to assist the South's army against the
Viet Cong and northern soldiers. By 1962 the United States had increased the amount of its troops by 8,000 more men. Within the following few years the United States had 82,000 combat troops stationed in Vietnam to assist the struggling south Vietnamese army and the U.S.
Government was calling for 175,000 more by the end of 1965. A major change in the American commitment to the war occurred in the summer of 1964, when the U.S. government accused the
North of attack on American naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. LBJ called for passage of a congressional resolution known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to justify expanding the war to retaliate against these supposedly unjustified attacks on our ships. Historians now believe that the attacks either didn’t occur at all and might have been misinterpretations of harmless propellor noises, not torpedos, or maybe were just the isolated actions of rogue officers. Either way, it now seems clear that the Resolution was based on falsehoods or incomplete information to justify American war expansion. All of this took place without any formal declaration of war by
Congress. Numerous bombing missions using giant B-52 aircraft were carried out to prevent
Viet Cong advancement. These bombings caused little to no damage to the northern forces, which continued to fight, but did kill thousands of civilians and destroy entire villages. The widespread destruction that the United States caused angered many of the southern Vietnamese, and helped the North characterize the war as a just struggle against American aggression, imperialism and terrorism. This resulted in thousands of South Vietnamese joining the North or at least failing to support the South: “Kill one enemy, but gain ten new enemies”6 is a way to describe how these bombings probably did more to harm the anti-communist fight than good for
America’s effort to win.
United States anti-war movements leading up to 1965 were mostly small peace demonstrations lead by college intellectuals and peace activists held on college campuses. The first large anti- Vietnam war protest was lead by students and faculty and took place at the
University of California at Berkeley. In the mid-1960s, many American people still backed the government's decision to fight against the spreading of communism. The government failed to keep citizens informed about the realities of the war and whether the U.S. was likely to prevail.
In fact, LBJ was reelected in a landslide in 1964 as the war was expanding. But in 1965, following the United States’ bombing campaign “Operation Rolling Thunder” the anti-war movement gained a great amount of support. More people began to criticize the war and to question critical decisions the government was making as the death toll mounted. Soon campuses all throughout the country had demonstrations organized by groups such as the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and others. Protests at the University of Michigan
6 The Vietnam.
included thousands of people protesting foreign affairs and the draft.7 Later that year on October
15 participants at a rally organized by the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam publicly burned a draft card for the first time. This event took place in New
York and drew crowds of 100,000 people. The card belonged to a young Catholic pacifist named
David Miller, who was imprisoned for two years for this act. Other protestors refused to be drafted and were sent to prison, angering many observers. Demonstrators were beaten and arrested too. Those harsh government responses only encouraged further anger at the government. At the start most anti-war dissenters were mainly seen as intellectuals, artists and so-called hippies, a subculture of peace supporting people. The war’s great costs continued to multiply and victory was nowhere in sight. The United States by 1967 had suffered 15,058 combat deaths and 109,527 wounded. There were 500,000 troops stationed in Vietnam. And the cost of the war now averaged $25,000,000,000 a year. The U.S government in attempts to cover up for the little progress made in the war reported inflated northern Vietnamese and Viet Cong death counts, and claimed to be winning the war while refusing to say when the final end would come. Negative assessments about the war were hidden by the government. Many historians believe the government deceived the American public in order to maintain the ability to continue the drafting of 40,000 men a month and to continue increasing taxes to pay for the endless war.
Soldiers coming back from Vietnam with the trauma of seeing many men dying and having the bitter feeling of defeat began to distrust the government for their statements of victory being near.8 News and negative images of the war spread like wildfire among the public. Images of piles of corpses (including women and children), mutilated bodies on all sides, and reports of
7 Michigan The World, "Resistance and Revolution," michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu, accessed December 10, 2018, http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit. 8 History.com Editors, ed., "Vietnam War," History, last modified October 29, 2009, accessed December 10, 2018, https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history.
massacres and countless civilian deaths caused outrage among the American people, leading to a massive demonstration on October 21, 1967. In Washington D.C 100,000 protesters assembled at the Lincoln Memorial, 30,000 of whom continued to the Pentagon later that day.9 The demonstration at the Pentagon turned into a faceoff between the protecting soldiers and U.S.
Marshals against the unarmed demonstrators resulting in the arrest of hundreds of the protesters.
That same year Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at Riverside Church in Upper
Manhattan addressing the U.S government's actions in Vietnam. He saw the war as taking away money that needed to be spent on poverty programs here at home and not wasted in war. He also focused on the war’s hypocrisy. Putting the war in context, MLK stated, “What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of
Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?”10 Comparing the American military’s attacks to the war crimes committed by the Nazis in World War II, MLK focused attention on the unfair number of African American citizens in the war and the treatment of African American troops being sent to Vietnam and their discrimination upon returning from the war. King observed that the war was being fought mostly by poor and minority draftees as corporations profited and the well-to-do stayed home.
“Statistics from the first three years of the war supported these complaints. African-Americans represented approximately 11 percent of the civilian population. Yet in 1967, they represented
16.3 percent of all draftees and 23 percent of all combat troops in Vietnam. In 1965, African-
9 History.com Editors, "Vietnam War," History. 10 Martin Luther King, "Beyond Vietnam" (speech, Riverside Church, Upper Manhattan, United States, April 4, 1967)
Americans accounted for nearly 25 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam.”11 As mentioned in an interview with Isiah Leggett for Matthew Mardirossian Oral History Project, the way the draft worked discriminated against poor people and minorities because wealthier and more educated people found various ways to avoid facing combat in Vietnam. Isiah Leggett states, “Many people who had the resources, the connections got deferments. If you had the connections, if you were determined enough and had the resources you went to Canada. Think of the poor African
American’s down in Mississippi and Alabama and all those places without the connections, without the money, who did not have the ability to do all those things.”12 The Vietnam draft was mostly of the lower class citizens and of those citizens a large percentage were African
Americans. The war came to be seen by many as “rich man's war, poor man's fight” meaning the rich had control of the orders given to the lower class soldiers.
By 1968 the Northern communist power planned and executed the Tet Offensive, an attack on 100 major southern cities in Vietnam. Though the North was eventually driven away the U.S southern forces suffered a great amount of damage and casualties. The news of the attacks made their way back to America and shocked the public who had been told victory was within reach. Now it became apparent that there seemed to be no chance the war was near an end. Following the Tet Offensive General Westmoreland requested 200,000 more troops, outraging a majority of the country who were becoming increasingly dismayed at the death of so many young Americans in what was looking like a lost cause and not a noble fight like WWII. A poll by Gallup prior to the 1968 election showed 50 percent of the population disapproved and only 35 percent approved of President Johnson’s management of the Vietnam war.13 President
11 Gerald F. Goodwin, "Black and White in Vietnam," nytimes.com, last modified July 18, 2017, accessed December 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/opinion/racism-vietnam-war.html. 12 Isiah Leggett, interview by Matthew Mardirossian, Mr. Leggett's office, Rockville, MD, December 14, 2016. 13 History.com Editors, "Vietnam War," History.
Johnson cut off bombing in the north and began to seek peace with North Vietnam. Johnson decided not to run for reelection. In 1968 Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected president of the United States after claiming that he was the best person to achieve peace with honor.
Facing the large anti-war movement, President Nixon attempted to subdue the protesters by trying to lower American casualties even while South Vietnamese casualties skyrocketed. This attempt to transfer more of the war’s burden to the South was named “Vietnamization.” Nixon pulled U.S troops out of Vietnam and instead sent more aerial attacks, supplying the south with more weapons, and training more southern troops. But peace was nowhere near achieved and death counts on both sides of the war continued with many slaughters causing death tolls to rise at an alarming rate. One slaughter in particular was very influential in increasing the strength of the anti-war movement. The My Lai Massacre, a killing of more than 400 unarmed civilians by the American troops in March 1968, became famous. Following the massacre hundreds of large scale protests occurred throughout the U.S and at this time the Vietnam Veterans Against the
War (VVAW) movement was gaining momentum, leading the largest and most important anti- war protests in the United States’s history. On November 15, 1969 250,000 to half a million
Americans arrived in Washington to peacefully protest America's involvement in the war. Anti- war politicians, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Charles Goodell gave speeches. There were musicians performing and singing John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.”
Over the next few years intolerance with the war in Vietnam grew. The U.S attempted to destroy northern supplies in Cambodia and Laos, a violation of international law triggered more protests including one on May 4 at Kent State where 4 students were killed by officials. And in
1971 the publication of the Pentagon Papers revealed the previously secret conducts of the war.
Causing many Americans to lose trust in the military and government. The VVAW held an anti-
war demonstration called Operation Dewey Canyon III. On April 19 Vietnam Veterans marched through Washington D.C arriving at the Capitol steps where they proceeded to throw medals, ribbons, and papers over the Capitol fence while being broadcasted on news networks all over the country. The New York Times called it, “the last, and the most emotional of the demonstrations this week by members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War...to tell the
Government and the nation about what many of them said had been the most profoundly shocking experience of their lives — the Vietnam war.”14 The protest hit close to home with many Vietnam Veterans due to the fact that for many of them the medals were their greatest accomplishments in life. But they would later state, they would do it all over again if they could.
In front of the Capitol Veterans calling out “You've been talking to us long enough, it's time you began listening."15 This powerful unique demonstration changed the way the war was viewed for all of America. Pro-war politicians had a hard time depicting the VVAW protests as hippies or unpatriotic slackers.
In May of 1973 as the United States troops left Vietnam in a chaotic withdrawal, the New
York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger, described the end of the war, "The U.S. emerges as the big loser and history books must admit this”16. Successive American governments were never able to muster the necessary mass support at home." By the time, the withdrawal occurred, the
United States had lost prestige, spent billions of dollars, lost thousands of men and suffered many soldiers left injured or missing. Historian Howard Zinn saw no way to sugarcoat matters, and stated, “It was the first clear defeat to the global American empire formed after World War
14 "Veterans Discard Medals in War Protest at Capitol," New York Times, April 23, 1971, [Page 1]. 15 Vietnam Veterans Against the War, "Vets' History: Operation 'Dewey Canyon III,'" VVAW.org, accessed December 10, 2018, http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=1656. 16 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, reissue edition ed. (n.p.: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2015),
II. It was administered by revolutionary peasants abroad, and by an astonishing movement of protest at home.” Following the victory of World War II the United States had a sense of invincibility but the Vietnam war exposed the limits of the U.S government’s power. “From a long-range viewpoint, something perhaps even more important had happened. The rebellion at home was spreading beyond the issue of war in Vietnam.”17 The Vietnam war taught the
American people to stand up and be heard and the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, for a while at least, seemed to cause the U.S. to have a more modest view about its ability to control events in far away countries. Many people also adopted a more skeptical view of government motives.
Groups such as the VVAW showed that there were limits to how long Americans would simply sit back and allow their leaders to conduct wars without any scrutiny. They took advantage of their first amendment rights to change events. They showed that patriotism does not mean blindly following the orders of leaders. Collectective action came to be recognized as a force that could be utilized in the right set of circumstances.
Interview Transcription
Interviewee/Narrator: John Ketwig
Interviewer: Colin McDermott
Location: Colin McDermott’s Home Washington D.C
Date: February 4th, 2019
17 Zinn, A People's,(chapter 18)
Colin McDermott: Alright, great. So I just want to give you a little background on me and what
I’m doing. My name is Colin McDermott, I live in Washington, DC, and I attend school at St.
Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland. Potomac, Maryland.
John Ketwig: Okay
CM:, and we, we’ve had a project called, Oral History Project. It’s for my junior year, and I chose to study the, of course, as you would know, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the
VVAW, and I wanted to choose a topic that I was interested in, but prior to studying it, had very little knowledge of it. So, this has been a really interesting journey learning about this and I’m very excited for this interview. I’ve been anticipating it for a while and. I’ve also had some time to get your book!
JK: [laughs] Okay, good
CM:And it’s, uh, pretty amazing. It’s really, it’s quite an honor to talk to get to talk to, uh, a successful author, so it’s really, it’s really cool for me
JK: Well, it’s my pleasure, I...I’ve been (doing?) this a long time and, uh, you know, I think there’s a certain story there that young people like yourself need to hear, so, yeah, let’s...you know! I’m overjoyed
CM: [laughs] This is so exciting
JK: (unintelligible) VVAW, that’s where the, uh, resistance to the war was, for the first time in the history of America
CM: Really, yeah
JK: And (unintelligible) soldiers protesting against the war that they had just come home from, so it’s, uh, a kind of, a very historic occasion
CM: (interrupting) Oh, absolutely. Extremely brave too, really, I mean, just, such a, I don’t know, I can’t even imagine, you know? Like, uh, in this world that we live in just...it’s just so cool to, you know, speak to someone who’s a part of that, so, it’s really...it’s pretty amazing. Uh, but, alright, we should begin. I would like to know, you know, a little bit, uh, about you and also just, you know, it’s good for the, uh, recording here. But, would you mind just, uh, saying your name and uh...
JK: Yeah, I’m John Ketwig.
CM: And also just a little bit of background, if you don’t mind me asking, what year were you born?
JK: [laughs] 1948
CM: Wow, that’s great, and what city and state did you, uh, grow up in, and where are you now?
JK: Well, I was born in Rochester, NY and grew up, uh, 25 miles south of there. If you look at the finger lakes in western New York, the farthest one to the west is Conesus Lake, and I grew up right on that until the end of my sophomore year of high school, when we moved over a little town called Avon. So I grew up in western New York. Pretty rural, uh, environment, but not far from the big city of Rochester. Today after a long chain of jobs and everything, I retired in
Bedford, VA.
CM: Mhm, Virginia.
JK: Halfway between Lynchburg and Roanoke.
CM: Yeah, I’ve been through there. I, uh, I’m a lacrosse player and I’m, you know, always traveling up and down the east coast…
JK: Woo!
CM: Cutting through Virginia, I’ve got a lot of friends who live there
JK: Woo! [laughs]
CM: It’s really pretty, it’s kind of a little America
JK: Yeah, if you get down this way, anyway [laughs]
CM: [laughs]
JK: (unintelligible) shake your hand
CM: Yeah, absolutely! It’s a shame I couldn’t, you know, we couldn’t do this in person, it would be really, it would be really special but this is great too. We got the technology on our side now
JK: [laughs] No
CM: [laughs] Also I just want to let you know that, you know, of course you have no obligation to, answer any questions, if you don’t feel comfortable answering. And you’re welcome to
(unintelligible) just, uh, ask, you know, or just move on, you know, that’s totally okay.
JK: I doubt that we’ll get into that
CM: So my first question would be, were you raised in a military family of any sort?
JK: (unintelligible) In World War II, my father was a bus driver, and they thought that it was important for him to take the workers to the factories and everything, and, uh, he did not have to
go to the, you know, go to war, so, there was very little. I had a couple of uncles that were in the, uh, military, but they didn’t have any real effect on me growing up...
CM: So how do you feel like that, uh, affected your views of the military? Do you think it played a role in maybe, you know, like, how- what was your sense when you were younger of, like, the United States Military and just war in general?
JK: To be honest with you, I don’t think it had any effect at all. When I was a little boy,
(unintelligible) my dad took me to the Army Navy store and I had a real genuine (unintelligible)
CM: [laughs]
JK: ...and a (unintelligible) canteen, and, uh, you know, we would go out and play Army all the time. I, uh, lived on kind of a farm, and we had plenty of opportunity to go out and play in the mud and everything
CM: [laughs]
JK: And, I will tell you ‘cause I think it’s very, uh, pertinent. When I was in high school, again, in Avon, NY, I got a job with a guy, uh, evenings after school and weekends and everything his name was George Stubley.
CM: George Stubley..
JK: And at that time, he was the only person in the world authorized to make hat-sized miniatures of medals. So when you got a general with all the ribbons and all that, he made hat- sized miniatures so they could try and fit ‘em on their chest.
CM: Really?
JK: (unintelligible) He had a big office and all kinds of files for various medals from all over the world, he was a collector, and we got requests from all kinds of people, it was nothing, in those days, everything was by letter, but it was nothing to open a letter and find that it was from a very well known general...
CM: [laughs]
JK: (unintelligible) ...or something, I would write to, uh, either, either I would write to get a hat- sized miniature, or “My medal’s getting old and the ribbon’s getting frayed, can you remake the ribbon for me?” and things, so, I did a lot of that., I didn’t do as much the work, I did a lot of, uh, polishing medals with steel wool and that type of thing…
CM: Wow.
JK: ...I opened the letters and put them in, you know, the in-basket and order and this and that, does he have a file with us? I’d take the file out and put the letter in it, and, you know, so I was,
exposed to some people who were very very into the military and, and had real history and everything. and I was, what’s the word, impressed…
CM: Some sort of admiration?
JK: Yeah, uh, I was not disrespectful to any of them whatsoever.
CM: Mhm.
JK: The draft started knocking on my door, and I had no interest in going whatsoever. I had long hair, (unintelligible), I was playing a couple “Yeah!” you know, and, playing in a couple of rock bands. And, uh, thought that any day now, we’d all get, uh, discovered and be America’s answer to the Beatles, and you know, I’m still waiting for that
CM: [laughs] perhaps..
JK: But, I, it was like, you want me? I was skinny as I could be, my, my adam’s apple was my physique, you know.
CM: [laughs]
JK: Uh, and I just had no interest in it. I was interested in hot rods, music, girls, you know, going to the other side of the world to be shot at by the Vietcong was way, way down my list.
CM: Sure, of course. Yeah, it’s very interesting to hear, I can completely relate with a lot of the things you’ve mentioned. I’m not quite as, uh, rockstar as maybe you were, but, you know, working on the guitar, I’m trying to get there
JK: [laughs] Guitar?
CM: I play a little bit. My sisters are, you know, big musicians, so I grew up in a very musical family, but…
JK: Cool. Some of your questions, you asked about, what going into the military, uh, what kind of attitudes did I find.
CM: Yeah
JK: And, my personal observation, I was in the military for two years and nine months, and I can tell you that in all that time, 95% of the people I met, anywhere, were, and I’m talking common, everyday guys, not generals and colonels and you know, (unintelligible)
CM: Right
JK: ...but everyday guys, we were all there against our will. Nobody really wanted to go to
Vietnam. Very, very few wanted to go over there,and shoot somebody or whatever motivation,
uh, there might have been, and, uh, boy, that was barest, barest minimum, let me tell you.
Everybody else was there against their will, was somewhat uncooperative.
CM: Mhm.
JK: [laughs] I mean, (unintelligible), it made for a very, uh, stressful, hard time.
CM: Sure, I can imagine. I feel, I think I have an understanding, you joined, you, uh, enlisted into the Army, correct? Is that too...uh, what was the motivation of that? Was that to avoid the draft?
JK: Well, yeah, the joke in those days was “Oh, you enlisted to beat the draft!” That’s right, you know.
CM: [laughs] hmm
JK: But it, the recruiters would tell you, and a lot of guys that had come back, uh, you know, high school people and like that came back and said, you know, “If you get drafted, you’re gonna be infantry.”
CM: Mhm.
JK: “If you enlist, you can get a guaranteed training that, if you’re lucky, might keep you out of it.”
CM: Wow.
JK: So I went to see the recruiter. It was absolutely obvious I was gonna get drafted, I was 1A, there was nothing to kick me out…
CM: Wow.
JK: And I went to see the recruiter and he said, “Well, uh, it’s not a bad thing! You’re gonna stay in a dorm, as nice as a college dorm, probably, probably send you to Germany, you get to see a little bit of Europe, you know, you’re gonna love it! It’s gonna be great.” Well, it didn’t quite work out that way.
CM: [laughs]
JK: But, uh, you know, for a lot of us, a lot of us. But I did, I enlisted to beat the draft, which is called a “draft induced enlistee” And the military has acronyms for everything, but they don’t use that one.
CM: Really?
JK: DIE, they don’t, they don’t want to call you D-I-E
CM: Mmm, that’s very, wow. Yeah, I know, to be honest, I didn’t ever really think of it quite like that, but that, I mean that’s, was that a common thing? Did you find that to be fairly common, a lot of people enlisting to, uh, beat the draft?
JK: A lot, a lot did. A lot did. Just, just to try and get your (unintelligible) and try to do something besides hump the boonies You know, maybe learn something that would, uh, benefit you when you got out of the Army and everything. You have to remember, first of all, I had scholarships. They weren’t enough to pay the bills, and I couldn’t, uh, couldn’t go to college, but, uh, all 95 or more percent of all the guys, uh, that I graduated from high school with went off to college, and it was just, uh, I was in all the college preparatory programs and everything, it was just assumed, well, you’re going to, to college. And, I, I needed to get something, while they were going on building their career and they were getting started with what they were gonna do with the rest of their life, and here comes the Army saying “We’d like you to go, like again, hump the boonies and, and plow around in the jungles in Vietnam”, wherever the hell that was, I didn’t even know where it was, you know. So, yeah. A lot of us were enticed to “get our
(unintelligible)” uh, and join up.
CM: Mmm, so before enlisting, what was your, what was your, uh, knowledge of, uh, Vietnam?
Did you know much about it?
JK: Very little, you know, the, the time came where the draft was knocking on your door, you began to get pretty interested, but there wasn’t a lot, uh, of information about it. I would go into
Rochester, there was a, uh, coffee house where a band called (Anya and the Lou Sons??) would play, and, uh, it seemed to be a place where, like, college kids and, and kind of beatnik-type, uh, before hippies there were beatniks.
CM: [laughs]
JK: And, and, so they all wore black, black turtleneck sweaters and berets and sat around with little candle on the table, and everybody played guitar and read their poetry, and there was some great conversations about “Do you know what’s going on over there?” and “Do you understand what this is all about?” and these guys knew what they were talking about.
CM: Mmm
JK: And, and yeah, I was very influenced by ‘em, you know. It’s a civil war, right? What are we doing interfering in it?
CM: Mmm
JK: And, uh, well, a little bit of knowledge is dangerous [laughs], you know, Colin?
CM: [laughs]
JK: And uh, so all that did was tend to screw my head up. When I got in the Army, I had those things in my head. I...by that time, there was some, uh, anti-war demonstrations and activity, and, uh, yeah, I, I had been influenced by a fair amount of that before I got there.
CM: Alright, were there, it’s probably hard to recollect, but what...do you recall any sort of specific statements or,, you know, stories that really influenced you, like a little bit of, um, you know, description of that?
JK: The biggest thing was talking about how Vietnamese people were fighting their government.
They had kicked the French out, and we had (unintelligible) the French economically,
(unintelligible) to a great degree, and then when they, the French left, Americans decided, well, we’ll just take up the fight, but, but they’re fighting against “communism”..
CM: Mhm...
JK: Uh, and I’ll say that in quotes, and, uh, you know, the average people were opposed to us being there as an invading army, and they were opposed to their very corrupt, very dictatorial government. There had been (unintelligible), this isn’t exactly answering your question, but I, I can’t remember all of the conversations…
CM: Mhm.
JK: But, uh, there was a Geneva Convention. In 1954, they said “Well, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna divide Vietnam,”, and I believe it was the 17th parallel, but I...don’t hold me to that. “And the north side of Vietnam is going to be under Ho Chi Minh and Viet Minh,” and the southern part was going to be under our guy, Diem. President Diem, and his brother...brother, brother in law? Brother! Nhu! N-H-U. Uh, I can’t remember the first couple of names. And, er, they were just (unintelligible) tyrants. And...and catholic! There was another brother that was a, uh, a bishop in (unintelligible). And they just did everything possible to, uh, advance catholicism and put down the buddhists, who were by far the majority, uh, and I mean, at the point of a gun, or, uh, you know. So they were extremely unpopular.
CM: Mhm.
JK: And we (buffering) that (unintelligible) There was a lot of stress. The deal was, that, uh, in
1956, after two years to make up their mind, uh, they would have an election, and reunite the country whichever way the election went, and it was obvious to everybody that 80% of the people there were gonna vote for Ho Chi Minh.
CM: Mhm.
JK: And so...we couldn’t allow the election to happen. And, our guy Diem said “No, we’re not gonna have an election”, and we backed him, and, broke the treaty that we and, and South
Vietnam had never signed, by the way.
CM: Mhm.
JK: And uh, you know, the, the, conflict started and it grew and grew from there. How much of that I knew going in, I’m not sure. I knew that, the people of Vietnam were opposed to the government they had in the south.
CM: Mhm.
JK: And were fighting to overthrow that and try to unite the country and make the country independent. I had certainly heard that loud and clear.
CM: So do you feel that the knowledge you had going in, you, you said it, it almost made it more difficult, the power of knowledge made going off a little harder. Did you ever consider, you know, like, alternatives of not, like, not going? And what exactly would those be?
JK: I did, but not very seriously. I was 18 years old, uh, had a younger brother, my parents lived in a small town in rural western New York, and if I had, uh, slipped over the border into Canada to make a new life, number one, at that time, uh, that meant you could never come back.
CM: Right
JK: That was, uh, if you did, you’d go to jail for a long time. But, leaving my family with what would be said in a small town, uh, how they would be treated and everything, I, I couldn’t do that to them. It was like, I’ll go and I’ll take my chances and, uh, you know.
CM: [laughs]
JK: I’ll see it for my own self and make up my own mind, but, uh, I don’t want to make anything hard for the family, so I’ll just do what I gotta do. I tried to get out of it any way I could all along the way, and, and just kept running into brick walls.
CM: Mhm.
JK: There was no way out, you know.
CM: Yeah, and, yeah. So, um, how did your, how’d your parents and family feel about you going off to Vietnam? Were they, were they against it? Did they support you? How was that?
JK: Well, they, they supported me. They were against it, you know, they…
CM: Mhm.
JK: We weren’t a family that talked about a lot of political things over the dinner table, but, uh, I knew that they did not want me to go to war.
CM: Mhm.
JK: And, uh, you know, they, they sent letters and boxes of cookies and all of those things and were supportive, but, uh, certainly did not, want anyone else to go either. And, and, as some of the things, uh, I discovered when I was in Vietnam and I wrote home, uh, I know that, uh, my father works in really strange hours, but my mother went to see our congressman and say “Look!
Look what my son’s telling me is going on over there! What can you do about this?” and uh, uh, somewhere, I have a letter that he wrote that “By gosh!” that the, uh, some high general said that our captain, who (unintelligible) in a bunker the whole time, never came out, uh.…
CM: [laughs]
JK: He had had dinner with him in the Saigon and he was an officer and a gentleman and, there was no basis to what I was saying whatsoever. Well, anyway. So the whole thing got dropped, you know. Uh, but my mother did try to bring it to somebody’s attention.
CM: Mmm when you’re sent out, when you’re sent to training, what was the, uh, how would you describe the morale? Like, you mentioned that, you know, uh, l-really high percentage of people, uh, were against it, but was that, was it talked about in the open, or was it really more of a, a hush?
JK: You didn’t talk about it in the open when the sergeant was there.
CM: [laughs]
JK: You know, but we all had a lot in common and uh, everybody was angry to be there, trying to make the best of it, uh, you know, and, and just, morale stunk.
CM: Mhm…
JK: I, I did basic training at Fort Dix in Jersey. Uh, I went in the Army on December 30th,1966.
So my whole basic training was January and February, and uh, cold and snow and, you know, terrible. Um, I’ll never forget the morning when it snowed, I’m gonna say a foot, and like five in the morning, we were all jousted out of bed. The uniform of the day was boxer shorts and combat boots.
CM: [laughs] Oh my goodness
JK: They had, they, they obviously were prepared for this, they had dustpans. And they handed us all dustpans, and we shoveled the entire parking lot with dustpans almost naked. And if you got a cold or sniffle or (unintelligible) sick call, boy oh boy. Uh, there was anything from KP duty to, you know. You were punished for it.
CM: Wow.
JK: Uh, being sick was destruction of government property and we can’t allow that!
CM: [laughs] That’s unbelievable
JK: So, I mean, no. There was no morale. Everybody hated where they were, hated where they were going, hated what, uh, was happening to ‘em. Um, but we were trapped! There was no way out, I mean, um [laughs] They took your clothes!
CM: Really?
JK: I-I-if you got in your own uniform and headed out the gate, they’d say “Where’s your pass?”
“I don’t have a pass” “Uh, well, you can’t go.” Uh, there was no way out! And, and, and what would you do? You, you try to get, hitch a ride and go home? Uh, they’d come find you. You know?
CM: Right.
JK: So, it was...morale stunk. It was not good. At all.
CM: Wow, so how would you get through the day? How would you make it enjoyable? What would, what would you and your, uh, your (unintelligible) do? Um...
JK: Most things were not enjoyable. Uh, January 17th (buffering) 1967 (buffering). And I, oh, happy birthday! For your birthday you get KP! So you had to go over, uh, to the mess hall at, I don’t know, 4 in the morning or something like that, and work all the way til 10 or 11 ‘o'clock at night (unintelligible), and it was drudgery. It was terrible. But, but…
CM: [laughs]
JK: That day, they sent me to set up the tables in the officer’s mess.
CM: Oh…
JK: Okay? They had a seperate place where they had, oh, tablecloths and little plastic flowers
...and, you know, it was a very nice atmosphere. And one of the things I had to do was fill up the sugar shakers and the salt shakers.
CM: [laughs]
JK: And I did.
CM: Oh…
JK: But I swapped them.
CM: [laughs] No
JK: (unintelligible) ...so if they put sugar in their coffee and salt...if they put salt on their potatoes it was sugar...and, you know, just little things.
CM: [laughs]
JK: That day, on the other side of the world, I learned much later, uh, a guy by the name of John
Lennon got the morning paper and read a little article in there about how there were, uh, so many holes in the road from Blackburn to Lancashire.
CM: Huh.
JK: And worked that into a pretty famous song in Sergeant Pepper’s...he had brought in the paper that day, I had a clipping of it somewhere…
CM: Oh, wow.
JK: (unintelligible)...but, yeah, uh, so you know, the world went on. You, you caught little...little tidbits of things. Um, one of the guys had a little pocket radio. Yeah, we were six to a room, and one of the guys had a pocket radio. Of course, we’re real close to New York City, so if the Sarge wasn’t (unintelligible, ruffling sound) around, we could listen to the rock and roll music, and you
know, news and what was going around in the world and all of that, and it’s just little things like that kept (unintelligible). Letters from home were important, and, uh…
CM: Mhm.
JK: You know. But the biggest thing was trying to remember that the world outside was still going on while you were going through all of this, but at home on, on the street you lived on, uh, everything was the same as it had always been (unintelligible), you know, but (unintelligible, buffering), it got more important as time went on, believe me
CM: [laughs] Yeah, what was your first reaction, um, upon arriving in Vietnam, and how did you get there?
JK: I...had to leave 30 days off before I went to Vietnam. Uh, flew down again, uh, to Fort Dix, uh, before I had been in a nice brick modern barracks.
CM: Mhm.
JK: Now I was in an old World War II wooden barracks, no windows, and uh, there were, the, pages over the lightbulbs and there were no mirrors, it was polished metal to try and shave and everything…
CM: [hmm]
JK: But no, you know, nothing that you could commit suicide by
CM: [laughs] Wow
JK: Honest to god, but it was a concern. Um, got out a plane at McGuire Air Force Base, um, flew, and, and it was a cargo plane with seats made of, like, canvas straps
CM: [laughs]
JK: So if you wiggled around right, you could get one cheek of your ass on one side and a strap in the other one on the other side and be almost comfortable
CM: [laughs]
JK: But they went up, and when they came down, it snowed in there, so they’d say “We’re going, we’re going to be...um...coming down now”, and he handed us blankets
We put blankets over and it snowed, we shook the blanket off ...it went from McGuire air force base in NJ to a base that I think is (.AMsdorf.) in Alaska. They said we had to do some maintenance on the plane and it's going to take a couple of hours, you guys gotta go in to the terminal, it's those lights over there...we’re in tropical weight uniforms and it's like zero degrees, so that was memorable.
From there we went to Yokota Japan and from there, we fueled there, and from there to Vietnam.
The back of this cargo plane lowered down like a ramp...you gotta be kidding me...got off the plane they had buses there to take us to the place where we would be assigned. The buses had screen mesh, little quarter inch squares, on windows and somebody said what’s this all about?.
They said we were going to be going through a Vietnamese neighborhood and that's to keep them from throwing in a grenade, and it was like, wait a minute. I thought we were there to save them, that we would be good for them, they don’t see it that way buddy. don't kid yourself, don't ever trust a gook, it started really early on. I don't remember anybody throwing anything particularly but … oh shit..
CM: Yeah, that feeling…
JK:...but. we can't even get a bus ride over to get assigned without being in danger…?
CM: that's Amazing...When you were there did you feel like you were making any kind of contribution to peace or democracy or for freedom? By fighting there?
I wrote some articles through an underground newspaper in Boston that was trying tell a little bit of what was going on… that was my contribution to peace. No, no, nobody knew why we were there, nobody bought the line “we were helping the Vietnamese People throw off the chains of communism, the brutality of communism.” The communists, or the enemy or whoever they were, never ever imagined brutality like we threw at that place, and so No, I didn't do anything
for my country..to make America stronger, safer, better,,,in any way other than a lot of people made a hell of a lot of money on our presence there. But I didn't contribute to any of that really.
I don't feel that wearing the uniform of the organization that I was with benefited the Vietnamese people... There was mass murder on a huge, huge scale and we were on the wrong side of it ... so.. that made it very, very hard to get up in the morning.
I was trained to be a truck mechanic, I got into doing bodywork and fenderwork and metaling and so I wasn't hunting down the goonies, looking down my rifle and shooting at people, there were occasions, but we were all part of it, you knew that what was happening, what you were seeing, you were on the wrong side, this wasn't right. And, you know, we were young and our parents had taught us right from wrong and a lot of things. When we saw the way the
Vietnamese were treated and the way we were told to treat them, and everything it was real hard
….. and we were treating them that way for their own good, it was very much the opposite. It was difficult, it was very difficult.
CM: And while you were in Vietnam, and I’ll put this in quotations “did you see any combat” ?
Were you involved, like, Could you share an experience of combat?
JK: Yeah, in November ‘67 it was all around and we had had rockets come in in the middle of the night and things like that, and I was scared shitless and everybody I think was.
CM: Understandably so!
JK: but the other part of it was I had been with some of these guys, a few of them from basic training, but a lot of them in my advanced training at Aberdeen Proving Ground in MD, so we had known each other for a while. And We were pretty close.because we were in it together..the great fear was that you would screw up and get one of your buddies hurt. I never thought of that before I got there. But oh man, And the last thing I wanted to do was cause anybody to get hurt.
And one day, and it was many days, they asked “does anybody know how to drive a truck?” and it was a like break in the routine and everything I said “yeah, I’ll drive a truck” and we knew that there was a really heavy stuff going on up (in Do Chao)…we knew the daily convoy was hauling supplies up there. But Ok if I am going to screw up I don't know how I’m gonna be in a real combat situation, if I’m gonna screw up, I can do it away from these guys I really care about.
That doesn't maybe make sense but that was my thinking at the time.
So I raised my hand and volunteered to drive and I was given a truck loaded with ammo. A deuce and a half, how do I describe that, smaller than an 18-wheeler, it wasn't a cab and a trailer, it was a solid truck, and I’ve got all this ammunition for the big guns. And off we go roaring up the road, a real narrow dirt road, the trees are banging the mirrors on both sides. And I had a guy that was assigned “I’m gonna be your shotgun”, “OK”, so he climbs in the over the other seat and off we go on this adventure. And you are trying to get all the speed you can out of this thing you possibly can, it wasn't a race car, and swerving through the mud and everything, and Colin,
I don't know how to describe the whole thing but the guy ahead of me had an 18 wheeler full of ammo and hit a mine.
CM: Oh
JK: and there was this explosion and you couldn't see anything and.. I don't know how it happened but I went through it and came out the other side. Windshield glass broke, there's a truck in front, i got stopped, my shotgun jumps out and he's in a ditch. And we were wondering whether we’re gonna to get shot at. And i'm thinking, what the hell was that, so I get down and there's some shooting and whatever, I never saw any bad guys but there's, there’s green stuff right in front of your nose, you couldn't see the end of your rifle. And when everything was quieted down and we had taken command of the situation, we walked back and the frame of the truck was over here and the engine was over there and there was this gigantic crater. How i'd driven through that i'll never know. And you know, there was a boot, whatever...and as happens in those situations, you can't stand there and have a funeral. Its.. get in the truck, we gotta go but
I can't see out of the windshield. It's no big thing...mud everywhere.
And we went to (Do Chao), it was just every kind of imaginable crap going on. there were mortars and rockets coming in like crazy, muds about knee deep, without exaggeration, just slop.
And they told us 10 boxes of shells per gun and you pull up and about 6 guys climb on and threw everything off and I say “wait a minute” I can only have 10. Don't park your truck you're done.
So I did and we wouldn't go back until the next morning, you climb in a trench with a bunch of guys… and the first question is have “you got a cigarettes”? well I got some, and well we spent the night, we had a couple of drinks and amazing stories. Out in the barbed wire, out in the tree line, 50-75 yards out, a fractured body is hanging in the wire and they had been attacked and those were Vietcong but there were American guys out there from a patrol, so they sent an
armoured personnel carrier, which is like a small kind of like a tank, and they went out to get them and it was amazing. they would open the back door a little bit, tie a rope around the guys ankle and go over to the next guy and drag these bodies through the the jungle because they couldn't get the door open enough to really get em in, and didn't have enough to get them in room in there. I was brought up on one of the Finger Lakes and to me it was like a string of a fish.
Long, long night, there was a lot of stuff going on. And in the morning, it was “OK saddle up were going back to {Plei Ku}.” And my shotgun had been assigned, they took him over to what they called “Graves registration.” He had to prepare American dead bodies to be boxed up to send home. This guy on the truck, he said “get me the fuck out of here!” I never saw him again but we made it back we didn't get ambushed again. Geez, there I was, I was a genuine Vietnam soldier by gosh by golly. You’d try and screw your head back on and go fix the truck.
CM: Wow, so did you get the sense, how did you feel about how long the war would last and how did the people with you feel, did you think there would be an end?
JK: We felt that we would never win the war. The Vietnamese people were opposed to what we were doing, we were opposed to what we were doing, that's 2 out 3, none of us, nobody wanted us there. We felt pretty strongly that we’re never gonna win this. We would talk in the evening and say, “Jesus Christ, do you know what's going on here or there, this isn't good.“
On the night of January 30th, was supposed to be a Vietnamese holiday Tet, like a New Years and there was going to be a big cease fire and you’ll probably see fireworks and all that, and they were going to be celebrating downtown and all that. In the middle of the night the sirens go off and we get off on the perimeter. You got your rifle and helmet and are waiting for an attack and word comes that every town, every city, everything in Vietnam is being hit all at once. We felt like it was Pearl Harbor, an enemy attack on the scale nobody imagined, nobody was ready for.
You will see if you get into Vietnam literature and that kind of stuff, a lot of guys: “Oh boy, we kicked the shit out of them, it was a huge defeat for the communists”, and all of that but it didn't feel like a huge defeat for them. For a couple of weeks anyway it was very rough,very ugly, very, very nasty.
And at that point that's where Walter Cronkite went on TV and said, it's just hard to believe that we’re ever gonna win this, if they can, after all this time if they can mount an attack like that, I don't see how we can ever win, and Lyndon Johnson says “Oh man, if I lost Walter Cronkite I lost everything.” That was January- February 1968. The last American troops got out of there in
1972 so an awful lot of people were there knowing we are not gonna win this and later on John
Kerry, who ran for president and was Secretary of State for Obama, John Kerry was with
Vietnam Veterans Against the War and went to Congress and testified and said “How are you going to ask a man to be the last person to die for the State?”. For me that wraps it all up. That's the way we were all feeling, let me out of here I dont want to be the last one.
CM: What was the reaction where you were to protests and people testifying, what was the general reaction to that. How did people feel about that?
JK: Mixed, and today they’re still mixed. There’s a lot of guys saying, “ I hate those protesters. I was there. They are marching down the street in Washington DC in protests and then they go over and get burgers and fries, and I gotta eat this shit in a can.” You know. So a lot of guys were very angry about all of that but a lot of us supported it very much. We actually had a wall locker, and on the door of my wall locker I had the famous picture of the hippy putting the flower in the barrel of a gun, and the National Guard on the steps of the Pentagon and all that. I had that picture on my wall locker. I will have it on the cover of the new book when it comes out in April, so there is a certain amount of “Ok, you told me your shit folks, now listen what I have say.“ And you might as you’re reading “And a Hard Rain Fell”….there's an awful lot of that.
Let me tell you from my point of view what I thought of you and your war. There were guys with peace signs and love beads, and all of that and there were guys with signs “kill’em all”, “let god sort them out”, “the only good gook is a dead gook”. Not a lot of that. But we were not antagonistic to each other. We were in it together, Some saw it one way and some another way, but all of us wanted to somehow survive and get the hell out of there, not hurt any of our buddies, just let me go home.
CM: What year did you return to the US states?
JK: That's a story, it's a one year tour of duty in Vietnam, I arrive in September of ‘67, as ‘68 was going on, Martin Luther King is assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Malcolm
X, they had all of the warfare in the streets at the Democratic Convention, and I was fairly convinced there was a civil war going on here. And I was wearing the wrong uniform. I didn't
want to be the guy holding the rifle with a bayonet at the steps --Pentagon against the protesters because i was on their side.
What do I do? I have 15 months to complete in the army when I get out of Vietnam, where are they gonna send me, where will i be next? I discovered there was an alternative. I put in for a transfer instead of coming home which not a popular solution with my parents. I went to
Thailand which was an R and R spot, big tourist attraction, gorgeous place and I would do a year there and would be too short with too little time to do in the army to reassign me so they would let me out 90 days early. This is a win win. I transferred to Thailand and got out of there in
September of 1969, out of the army. You have to wear your uniform home on the plane to get the cheaper rate but when you landed at the airport you were out, done, thank you very much.
CM: You mention you were wearing the uniform, did you have any encounters with people who saw you wearing the uniform? Were they positive, were they negative, were they thanking you or were they more against the uniform?
JK: I'm gonna say neither one, I know what you're asking me, did I get spit on or any of that kind of stuff and I will tell you that I don't believe that that happened much at all. Very, very, very minor. It's been blown all out of proportion. But coming home, I would find my seat on the airplane and sit down next to a guy and he would go to the stewardess and ask could he be moved somewhelse. And my way looking at that is that he didn't know what to say to me and I didn’t know what to say to him either. So that's fine. I would read a magazine and wait till the plane landed at home. No open antagonism or anything like that.
I processed out in Oakland CA, rode across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and flew home out of San Francisco Airport. 1969. We walked into the airport and if you ever wondered what a hippy was looks like, they were there. And “hey guys”, “hey man how are you, “ you know there was no antagonism whatsoever. That whole thing, we’d heard that some people might give you a hard time when you get home. That never happened to me or I don't know anyone, I know guys who will say it happened but the people I really know who are saying it straight say “I never saw any of that.”
There is a book if you wonder about that called Spitting Image, by a guy, a vet by the way, named Jerry Lankey, who heard all of this and took a couple of years in his life and investigated all over of America, and nobody in America produced a piece of film, a photograph, or a news article saying “a little incident happened at the airport today…”. There is no record of it happening whatsoever anywhere in America that Jerry has been able to find, and since his book came out a lot of guys have been trying to prove it really did but there’s no proof it really happened.
That rumor, that myth as I like to call it, came out when we were invading Iraq and Afghanistan and there was this thing that the government wanted to make us, the American people feel so guilty for the way we had treated the Vietnam veterans that we would be so nice to the Afghan and Iraqi veterans when they came home and that's where most of that story got spread around.
CM: So how would you describe your view of the hippies?
JK: I thought it looked like fun, lots of rock and roll, make love not war and all those kind of sentiments. i thought they had a lot to offer, but you know it was not a career choice. I came home and bought a car and had to make payments and then met a girl and there were marriage plans and things and I had to get up and go o work in the morning. So i couldn't be a hippy and couldn't be a protestor. There were a whole lot of things I just had to do. To be honest Colin, I spent the year in Thailand getting my head back together. Like a skin diver has to rise slowly or gets the bends, I had time to screw my head on and imagine walking down the street in my hometown. How is that going to be? What am I gonna say to people?
I knew there was one guy in my hometown that had his arm blown off and he had talked to me before I went in, and what do I say if i walk up to him and I got both arms knocked off ? And how do I deal with that ? And the time to think it through, to imagine how your gonna do this, and prepare yourself… A lot of guys, they were in combat in Vietnam and a chopper came in and said “Hey Smith, your time is up, lets go!” and you wave to your buddies as you jump on the helicopter. I talked to guys that processed out, got home and went to dinner at the family dining room table and had Vietnamese mud under their fingernails and their mother gave them a hard time “I taught you to wash your hands before you came to dinner” and it blew their minds…so I don't know…. Next question.
CM: Wow! Very interesting.
JK: It's hard to generalize about all these things
CM: But it's very interesting to hear your experience of it. So you mentioned that you were working when you returned so how did you get involved in the VVAW. ..Vietnam Veterans
Against the War?
JK: They were around far more in America than they were overseas but we were hearing about them and guys were getting underground newspapers and that kind of thing. And it was like, man, a lot of guys are protesting back in the states. Again, I came home and got involved in my future, I put Vietnam in a box on the shelf and said, “ that's the past”. That's like kindergarten and cub scouts and the junior prom. I got to look to the future. I can't focus on that. i gotta go forward. And I supported the protestors, I was against the war and so many things, but I did not become actively involved in VVAW until about 1984 when we were doing it again in Central
America with all this stuff from the Contras and Nicaragua. And that's when I joined up and got much more active.
CM: So what would you think the purpose of the VVAW was? What was the sort of goal?
JK: Well it was guys saying we need to tell the American people what's going on in their name.
What we’re seeing isn't right, it isn't humane, it isn't legal, it isn't moral. And we need to tell the
American people what's going on in their name and protest it and oppose it. Not just quietly go home and turn on the television and watch Archie Bunker. We need to really oppose it.
CM: So how would you really advance it, how would you oppose?
JK: Marching and I don't know ... they would occupy certain places like the Statue of Liberty and hang the American flag upside down from her crown. Little things like that. A lot of marches. You asked, the myth is that the hippies, the protestors, stood on the Vietnam veterans and all that. The truth is that the anti war movement welcomed anti war veterans and said “Man, what's it really like over there? Are we doing the right thing? Will you get up on the stage with a microphone and tell people that? “. So there was not antagonism, there was very warm and cozy relationship.
As time went on VVAW got involved in more and more outrageous, crazy things. At one point they, Jerry Rubin and Andy Hoffman and guys from VVAW, were involved. Went to the New
York Stock Exchange and they had real American dollars and Monopoly money American dollars and they threw it on the floor and all the guys down there working on the stock exchange just jumped down from their chairs and were rooting around on the floor like pigs in a trough trying to grab those dollars. Totally screwed up the stock exchange, things like that…. I thought it was funny as hell but the powers that be were offended.
So in 1971 VVAW put together a panel discussion, for lack a a better term, in Detroit, of all places, they wanted to reach working class Americans. So they planned this in Detroit. they had one place lined up and it fell through, second place fell threw, they ended up doing it in a
Howard Johnson’s motor inn. Suddenly there was no telephone service to that place, whatever guys coming down from Canada to testify couldn't get through. A lot of strange things. But about 120 I believe Vietnam Veterans Against the War, one after another, sat down at a mic at a
table and said “this is what I saw, this is what was going on over there, American people you need to know this is happening on in your name. I didn't want to be part of this. i didn't want to be there but I did not want to take part in things that were patently wrong,” And you can print out a couple books about it, the object of the game was to tell the American people. It didnt get alot of television coverage or newspaper coverage. But it was out there and the word was out.
So then the next thing that happens, and don't hold me on the dates, but i believe 1972 they decide to have a kind of a campout on the Mall in Washington, DC. And a lot of guys came for that. I believe the number was somewhere in the 50,000 range. The first thing that happened they were going to go over and lay wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery and the guy who ran the cemetery locked the gates and wouldn’t let them in. They did a lot to visit their congressmen.
And that type of thing. There came a new law, they had to get off the Mall. They got that turned around… somebody went to somebody and got that turned that around... you can stand on the mall but you can't sleep on the mall. There will be no sleeping. Some guys actually broke the rule. A lot of testifying. That's where John Kerry talked to the House UnAmerican Activities
Committee. I'm not exactly sure, but boy, did it make headlines. Then Dewey Canyon III, more than a thousand guys lined up, made a statement, and threw their medals back at the Capitol.
And what a photo that was. Some of the questions was, what was the big important event in
VVAW history and that was it. That was the most moving emotional thing that anybody ever put together.
CM: How did you hear about operation Dewey Canyon III? Did you hear it through the radio or people you know?
JK: Underground newspapers. There were a lot of them at the time. If you were around the hipper areas of the city and everything there were bookstands that had 20 different underground newspapers and this is what’s going on all over the country. It wasn't hard to find news of what the underground was doing.
CM: Right.
JK: That's a movement. That's what's hard I think for your generation to understand was this was a movement. It was a lot of us who had grown up as baby boomers. I do an awful lot with this in the new book. We came up after World War II and every authority figure in our lives, every parent, every teacher, every policeman, every clergyman, had just survived World War II.
Man’s inhumanity to man on a totally unprecedented scale and now we got nuclear weapons.
I was brought up in school “your generation has to do what no other generation in history has ever done. You have to solve the problems without resorting to war. Because now with nuclear weapons war is obsolete. Its unthinkable. We cannot let that happen.”
And you know, what was it, 18 months after I got out of high school I was in Vietnam. You know you lied to me.
As we were growing up. We were the first American army in history with portable radios. Before that in World War II, it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Saturday night with his Fireside
Chats and everyone gathered round a great big console radio in the living room and listened to what the president had to say. And we were out, whatever we did with rock and roll music coming through the radio. The first army with rock and roll music and the first with socially conscious music. The protest songs and all of that Blowing in the Wind and on and on and on. I encourage you to read Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a Changin. Fabulous, fabulous song.
That was like our anthem. You Know.
We were the first army in American history to have television. We were brought up on Howdy
Doody and Captain Kangaroo and, all of these things. And then after a little bit, it kind of got to
Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. And, you know, I was there maybe a little earlier than some guys, it got to the point of the Smothers Brothers..aah!...and they said things on television. What an influence! And as were being told in school “you gotta be up to date on current events, And, wow, look Alan Shepard rode a rocket into space and John Glenn circled around the world 3 times”. And we said “what was going on in Selma Alabama, beating up on all those people, siccing police dogs on the, hitting them with a fire hose? They’re American citizens asking to vote, whats going on here?” And so a lot of questions about things like that, our generation was primed to not accept the precepts of the Vietnam War big time, And I guess what happened, and there were protests and things in streets all over America, huge, huge numbers, and to me it was the most natural thing in the world. Yeah, we need to come back to this things and try and end it. I don't want my kid brother going over there. We gotta do what we can to end this.
Am I answering your question?
CM: You are nailing them! No, no, it's perfect I am so glad it's been more of a conversation rather than me reading off the questions. It’s gone great. So, i’d like to know, do you have any general advice for my younger generation when it comes to these military affairs overseas? Do you have any general advice for me?
JK: Hold on! I dont think its any better today then it was then. When we look at what ...you'll see things on television, this is Kabul in Afghanistan or this is Mosul, or this is in Syria, or Iraq, there’s just rubble, blown to shit. Millions of people are trying to get out of there. They are called refugees. Well oh geez, we don't want them. Well we blew up their home what are they supposed to to do?
I'm going to go on another tangent Colin. Pardon me but... You will notice that every once in a while something pops up in the paper, newspapers, I am sorry I still read the newspapers. But something pops up on the news on your telephone, about the suicide levels of veterans. And it’s a completely different topic of the active duty military. Both of them are experiencing suicide numbers through the roof. If you go down to Washington DC, right around the corner from you, look at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It has 58,350 names on it. Officially, sort of, it is accepted that over 200,000 Vietnam Veterans have committed suicide since coming home, if you talk to the people that are involved they’ll tell you the number is closer to 300,000. Un-freakin- believable. And you say what's that all about?
And it's still continuing with the Iraq war and Afghanistan war veterans. Veterans are coming home and they can’t live with themselves. You gotta read my new book. What I call the
American way of waging war is weapons and strategies or tactics that are so inhuman, so deadly, so effective, so terrible, so horrible, that the things you see... you come back home and your conscience gets the better of you. And you know I find it an absolute tragedy today in America, parents, it's tough for people like yourself. You get out of school you can't get a job, whatever, and the military says “ join us! We’ll give you some money for your college education” and it sounds so great. And parents from our generation are saying,”Oh no,oh please, there's got to be another way.” And they accept to a certain extent that if their son or daughter joins the military and goes off, that they will come home changed. They won't be the same. To me that's a travesty, that's,you know, oh my god. Don't you have a hatchet that can cut a couple of toes off so that you won't pass the physical ? There's got be a way to avoid putting yourself into something so horrible that you can't live with yourself?
I’m not popular with recruiters. I love to go and talk to high schools and colleges. I found out that after I talk, then they bring in the recruiters to tell the other side of the story. Let them take their best shot. I have a better understanding of what's going on than most of them do. It's a horrific thing. And it's not about to get any better. Oh, Trump may bring a few people home from
Syria, but we’ve got 800 bases, military bases around the world. The rest of the world’s countries combined have under a 100, combined. We are spending, rough numbers, 800 billion dollars a year on our defense budget and that doesn’t include the cost of VA benefits or any of that. We’re actually spending over a trillion dollars a year on militarism and war and all the weaponry, and this and that, and everything that's involved in this thing. What good has it done us? What can
we say we have accomplished? Our military has not won a single conflict since World War II.
Not one. And we’ve been in Afghanistan 17 years under 17 commanding generals. What’s wrong? What are they teaching at West Point? Do I want my kid to go out and march off and be all patriotic and everything, Excuse me, no. I think they are incompetent. And I think they are a great, great threat to world peace To, god knows, the countries that we go into.
If we go into Venezuela, oh my god, wait till you see the wreckage that we construe there. And it’s the same thing, the Venezuelans are trying to figure out what type of government they want.
Why do we have to go in at the point of a gun and tell them what type of government they have to have. Who are we to say that? Korea, Vietnam, you and go on and on... We bombed 7 countries last year. Seven. Doesn't make the paper a whole lot.
What the Pentagon has not learned, what America has not learned, is that if you bomb, beyond anything that has ever happened before, if you shoot everybody you can find that disagrees with you, you ready for this? it doesn't win hearts and minds. It doesn't win friends to our side and that's been the strategy year after year, war after war. They won't change the direction of things.
17 years, 17 commanding generals but one basic idea that's wrong and proven wrong. Vietnam proved it wrong. We bombed that country as one general said “back to the stone age.” The impression is, and i'll ask you but ...you’re familiar with a lot, a lot of bombing that went on in
Vietnam, right?
CM: Yeah, definitely.
JK: Did you know that 80 percent of that bombing did not happen up in North Vietnam but it was in the South and the POW’s got a lot of attention. But 80 percent in the South Vietnam. The two Vietnams together are the size of New Mexico. We dropped more explosives on Vietnam than was used in all of World War II, Europe and the Pacific combined. Eighty percent of it on that South Vietnam agricultural, terribly, terribly impoverished, poor peasant population and we just couldn't understand why they would side with the Viet Cong and fight against us. Well it was pretty obvious to everyday folks like ourselves that were there and watched what was going on and said, “this is wrong, this is crazy.” General Westmoreland said it was a wonderful chance to test our latest weapons. Well boy, did they test them.
CM: Wow, it's unbelievable. This has been a great interview, I have learned so much. We are at one hour and 23 minutes. I think that's about the length of my assignment. But one of your tangents you made some really great notes in that. Do you have any final messages? This will be heard by my fellow classmates. Do you have any messages for me and for them?
JK: Yeah. If you look at history, there are civilizations and countries that we look up to and say
“Wow”, the ancient Greeks with all of their literature and Socrates and brilliant people and philosophers. And the ancient Romans. Gee, they built aqueducts that brought water down from the Alps and all kinds of really great accomplishments. You can go on and on...there are people that we really admire for what they have the contributed to the world. Madam Curie, or Albert
Schweitzer, or I don't know, Lennon and McCartney, Mick Jagger, Beethoven. They are people that contributed and made the world a better place. There are also people and civilizations who went the other way. Nazi Germany exterminated 6 million Jews, Joseph Stalin in Russia
exterminated like 23 million of his own people. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after the
Vietnam war. I don't know how many, 2 or 3 million of their own people in the Killing Fields.
Absolutely horrible, terrible situations.
And people, Stalin and Hitler and you can go on down the line with those types of people. It seems to me that a country and its people have to decide do we wanna be constructive? Let's build a little a thing and put it on the top of a rocket, let a man walk around the moon and bring him back alive. That's pretty constructive. That was I think the high point of American history.
The development of technology in our country and in our time all around the world is very, very constructive. But the amount of emphasis that we put on, and I say emphasis, focus, dollars, research, thought, focused on finding better ways to kill or mame our fellow man, total strangers, so far outweighs the money we want to spend on education, health care, paving potholes, fixing rusting bridges and on and on and on. I don't understand it. I believe I may be naive, but I believe that we the people, one of these days are gonna insist that our government get away from all this militarism and destruction and focus on constructive things that we used to be the world’s leader in.
When I grew up in high school we were the benevolent country. Everybody wanted to come here, we had ships out sailing to impoverished countries taking care of their health care and teaching them how improve their agriculture. You don't hear anything of that any more. All we export now is death and destruction. I think we are reaching a point, Number 1, we can't afford it. We have 21 trillion dollars in national debt that young people your age are gonna have to deal with, and we have people that hate us all around the world. And you can't kill them all. We can't
make enough bullets to kill the people that oppose the way we’re going. Maybe there is a message there. Maybe we need to back up and go back to being benevolent and good for people and constructive and go back to the idea of the Peace Corps instead of space first and put weapons in space. And I think it would be a lot more promising. And that's my message. I just believe that getting along with people and being good to people will get you a whole lot further faster than putting a gun to their head and insisting they do this or that or you’ll kill them. People react to that in a negative way.
Interview Analysis
Oral history is just one of the tools in a historian’s toolbox and there isn’t complete agreement on its value. Other sources such as original documents and films or photographs provide possibly more “objective” information. Oral history, in comparison, offers a first-hand perspective on events and can assist by providing a more well-rounded and personalized understanding of the past. As voiced by Donald Richie, “oral history cannot be trusted as a primary source,”18 because most people have strong biases that affect their perception of reality.
Facts can get twisted or ignored. Richie warns that “no single piece of data of any sort should be
18 Donald Richie, "USING PRIMARY SOURCES: THE HISTORIANS' TOOLBOX," nps.gov, accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/ugrr/exugrr3.htm.
trusted completely, and all sources need to be tested against other evidence.”19 A good first hand observer is aware of these limitations and is careful to report events honestly, while recognizing that recollections are not fixed in stone and might be selective. As said by memoir writer Tobias
Wolff in his preface to his memoir, a kind of oral history but where there is no interviewer, This
Boy’s Life, “I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also, my mother thinks a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.”20 This quote shows the strength and limits to oral history, not just literary memoirs. Wolff highlights that sometimes the story being told, even if believed to be accurate by the teller, does not always coincide with another participant’s memory or possibly even with reality. He embraces the possible discrepancies. But as Wolff suggests, memoir, like oral history, is a recounting of first hand memory, and while not a sole source for history or capable of telling the entire story, still has value to help fill out a more complete and sensitive story of the past.
A prominent Vietnam War historian, Robert J. McMahon (the Ralph D. Mershon
Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at Ohio State University), has explained that the
Vietnam War historians did not follow the paths of historians of prior, more popular wars. He writes in Changing Interpretations of the Vietnam War in The Oxford Companion to American
Military History 1999): “Interpretations of the Vietnam War have departed significantly from typical patterns both during and after most of Americas previous wars. Instead of reflecting, defending, and bolstering official accounts of the war, as occurred with World Wars I and II, early historical assessments of the Vietnam conflict were for the most part highly critical of U.S.
19 Richie, "USING PRIMARY," nps.gov. 20 Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life: A Memoir (n.p.: Grove Press, 89),
policy.”21 McMahon cites “the broad agreement among early writers that the Vietnam War represented a colossal mistake for the United States, and that American policy was plagued persistently by errors, blunders, misperceptions, and miscalculations.”22 Many of these writers were influenced by their time with soldiers and hearing their stories from the battles that didn’t track the official government line. McMahon notes that, “The most widely read works on the
Vietnam War during the late 1960s and early 1970s. . .indicted government policy, often quite harshly. Those works presented a radically different version of the wars origins. purpose, and efficacy than that offered by Washington officialdom. Only in the late 1970s, following North
Vietnam's military triumph and the extended soul-searching it occasioned throughout the United
States, did a revisionist school of thought emerge. Ironically, the [conservative] Vietnam revisionists mounted a belated defense of the
American war effort, venting much of their anger”23 at liberals, who, “they insisted, wrongly considered the Indochina war to be unwinnable or—even more egregious from their perspective—immoral.”24 As discussed below, my interviewee Ketwig holds views that line up with the “liberal” anti war views of most historians and not with the conservative historians who argue that we could have and should have won the war and even that protesters and liberals were irresponsible and deserve some blame for the war being lost.
Shortly after graduating high school, John Ketwig -- in anticipation that he would soon be drafted anyway and assigned combat duty in Vietnam-- enlisted in the United States Army with the hope of assignment elsewhere. But in September of 1967 he was sent to Vietnam against his
21 Robert J. McMahon, "Changing Interpretations of the Vietnam War," english.illinois.edu, https://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/interpretations.htm. 22 McMahon, "Changing Interpretations," english.illinois.edu. 23 McMahon, "Changing Interpretations," english.illinois.edu. 24 McMahon, "Changing Interpretations," english.illinois.edu.
hopes. In his interview he describes many of his experiences and thoughts while and after serving. Upon arriving he faced eye opening hostility not the warm hero’s welcome he expected.
The locals’ disdain for the Americans was made apparent to him right away when he boarded the bus to take him and his comrades to their first in-country assignment. He described the bus as having screen mesh over the windows. He was shocked to find that the mesh’s purpose was to protect the soldiers from the very people they were supposed to be protecting, by keeping the
Vietnamese from throwing grenades through the window and into the bus. Ketwig looked on in disbelief. He says, “ I thought we were there to save them, that we would be good for them.” 25
This moment opened his naive eyes to the tension and misdirection in the Vietnam War and lead him to question the war’s purpose and his role in it. He describes the general morale among his comrades as frustration and confusion, “no, nobody knew why we were there. Nobody bought the line “we were helping the Vietnamese People throw off the chains of communism, the brutality of communism.”26 But due to the government’s hiding of the truth and releasing false reports on the war’s supposed progress, most of the American public in the early stages of the war trusted and stood by the United States government’s decision to “fight communism”.
They assumed that the government’s experts had good motives, knew what they were doing and would never lie to them. All of those beliefs came under attack during the war. Ketwig along with other soldiers wrote articles during the war in underground newspapers to attempt to expose the truth about the horrors in Vietnam and the incorrectness of the war. As the war went on many returning soldiers like Ketwig discussed first-hand experiences explaining their strong disapproval of the government’s conduct of the war. As citizens tired of the war and returning soldiers with credibility joined their cause, the momentum grew behind anti-war movements all
25 John Ketwig Interview, narrated by John Ketwig, 2019. 26 John Ketwig.
over the country and gradually eroded both support for the War and trust in the government and the politicians and corporations running it. Large protests took place throughout the country. And because these protesters were backed by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (which Ketwig joined) and not just hippies, students, and youth, the government had to take the anti-war movement far more seriously than previously. People like Ketwig and groups such as the
VVAW showed that there were limits to how long Americans would simply sit back and allow their leaders to conduct costly wars without any scrutiny. He highlights the idea that patriotism does not mean blindly following the orders of leaders. It means wanting and doing what's in the best interest of the United States and democratic ideals. And in this case, it meant working together to stop a costly and unjust war. But though the war ended not long after his return,
Ketwig and the VVAW remained involved in educating people about what went wrong and what went right during the Vietnam war years. Ketwig has dedicated most of his life to sharing his story and the lessons he learned about peace and war and government deception and violence. In his interview he states, “If you shoot everybody you can find that disagrees with you...it doesn't win hearts and minds. It doesn't win friends to our side and that's been the strategy year after year, war after war. They won't change the direction of things.“27 He emphasizes how this lesson is not only to be applied to the Vietnam war but current events as well. Ketwig believes it is very important for youth to learn these lessons and not be apathetic in order to prevent history from repeating itself.
After spending months researching and writing about the Vietnam War and the VVAW I was thrilled to hear that I would get to interview John Ketwig, an active member in the VVAW and well known author for his memoirs about the war. In our interview he was able to tell me
27 John Ketwig.
stories and teach me valuable lessons that I would've never got from a textbook or government documents. Our interview taught me the power of point of view, and through hearing someone talk about their first hand experiences in vital moments in history. I’ve learned from this oral history project that in order to even get near to getting a proper understanding of a war like this one you need to go further than text on paper. The very foundation of any events is the people involved. Hearing their side to the story provides extremely valuable information that couldn't be retrieved from anywhere else.
Work Consulted
Eyewitness Report. "The Strange War the U.S is Not Winning." U.S News and World Report, September 30, 1963, 1-6.
Goodwin, Gerald F. "Black and White in Vietnam." nytimes.com. Last modified July 18, 2017. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/opinion/racism-vietnam-war.html.
History.com Editors, ed. "Vietnam War." History. Last modified October 29, 2009. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war- history.
John Ketwig Interview. Narrated by John Ketwig. 2019.
Kerry, John. "John Kerry Testimony." Speech, UNITED STATES SENATE; COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, Washington, D.C., New Senate Office Building, April 22, 1971.
Ketwig, John. ...and a hard rain fell. N.p.: Sourcebooks Inc., 2008.
King, Martin Luther. "Beyond Vietnam." Speech, Riverside Church, Upper Manhattan, United States, April 4, 1967.
Leggett, Isiah. Interview by Matthew Mardirossian. Mr. Leggett's office, Rockville, MD. December 14, 2016.
Lindsay, James M. "Remembering Ho Chi Minh's 1945 Declaration of Vietnam's Independence." www.cfr.org. Last modified September 2, 2016. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.cfr.org/blog/remembering-ho-chi-minhs-1945-declaration-vietnams- independence.
McMahon, Robert J. "Changing Interpretations of the Vietnam War." english.illinois.edu. https://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/interpretations.htm.
Michiganintheworld. "Resistance and Revolution." michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu. Accessed December 10, 2018. http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit.
New York Times. "Veterans Discard Medals in War Protest at Capitol." April 23, 1971.
Richie, Donald. "USING PRIMARY SOURCES: THE HISTORIANS' TOOLBOX." nps.gov. Accessed April 30, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/ugrr/exugrr3.htm.
Smith, Richard Harris. OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency. N.p.: Lyons Press, 2005.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War. "Vets' History: Operation 'Dewey Canyon III.'" VVAW.org. Accessed December 10, 2018. http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=1656.
The Vietnam War. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. PBS/ WETA, 2017.
Wolff, Tobias. This Boy's Life: A Memoir. N.p.: Grove Press, 89.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. Reissue edition ed. N.p.: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2015.
Appendix 1
(Napalm Girl: Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken at Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972)
Appendix 2
(The Throwing of the Medals at Operation Dewey Canyon III)
Appendix 3
(The VVAW symbol)