Reblogged from what (not) to doc:

My look at the 2012 Sundance US Documentary Competition passes the halfway point with Kirby Dick’s powerful exposé of rape in the US military: THE INVISIBLE WAR …

The dark-skinned fifteen-year-old boy looked up at the two genial soldiers and wondered how to get clothes that fine.  Certainly nowhere near this drafty boarding house in the Bronck’s part of New York, with ocean winds chilling the bone.
William Apess had spent most of the past two months running. He’d lost his traveling companions, with whom he’d sailed from New England paying only with borrowed charm and fake war stories.  Apess didn’t know what to do now: his master swore he had another year left on his indenture, but he was done with being tormented by some Connecticut farmer who thought he could batter the half-Pequot Indian and half African man at will. He grinned when the soldiers offered him another drink, and again when they made their offer.
“By then I had acquired many bad practices,” Apess wrote 20 years later in his memoir A Son of the Forest. After a few drinks, the soldiers “told me about the war, and what a fine thing it was to be a soldier. I was pleased with the idea of being a soldier, took some more liquor and some money, had a cockade fastened to my hat, and went off in fine spirits.” Not that he was particularly interested in the new war. It was 1812, not the Revolution, and “I could not think why I should risk my life, my limbs, in fighting for the white man, who had cheated my people out of their land.”
Apess would go AWOL after six months of basic training on Governor’s Island and watching as a captured deserter was executed before trainees’ eyes, be tortured upon his return in mock “scalpings,” and operate a cannon in the unsuccessful invasion of Montreal all before he reached legal age. It would be decades still before Apess became famous in the Pequot land of Massachusetts for organizing a quiet revolt by the Mashpee Indians, and praised in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

In many ways, the War of 1812 was the first of what was often to come: wars begun by men without military experience for ever-changing reasons, feeding the development of events that became clearer casi belli, fued by underlying economic rationales even as the deep economic and human costs became clearer.

This “Second War of Independence” was paired with continued action against American Indians, most memorably by war-hero-turned-politician Andrew Jackson. As Jackson sparked the “removal” of Indian tribes to points far west, his successor would corral thousands of regular and militia soldiers into extending the nation throughout the continent. Slavery, that other original sin, awaited its own war while shaping these.

The Louisiana Purchase, a mixed-blessing gift from Jefferson, brought all of the original sins into sharp relief: “purchased without blood,” the new territory contained slaveholders and rebel slaves and so did the war that followed a decade later. Would the new territories – and those won in that other war, against Indian nations – be slave states?  What kind of armies and navies would “defend’ them?
Competing land claims would raise the first war costs/who pays fights, with war veterans and widows still pleading their cases before Congress while many vets poured out their harrowing war stories in land claims hoping for a piece of the promised future. Early mavericks — most of them battling Andrew Jackson, whose “Indian removal” strategy enacted what Jefferson had only warned of — included William Lloyd Garrison, whose early refusal of militia service prefigured his future as a scion of abolitionism; Revolutionary veteran Noah Worcester, founder of the first national pacifist organization the American Peace Society; Texas icon Davy Crockett, and the Hamlet of American expansionism, General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, one of many graduates of the brand-new West Point to play a role in this story. Others included cadets Thomas Ragland and Nicholas Trist, who helped lead one of the first mutinies at the Academy, and Edgar Allan Poe, who started as a civilian “Private Perry” to support his writing and would eventually be poking fun at another, the future conqueror of California General Winfield Scott.

Meanwhile, the only women to insert ourselves here is Nicholas Trist’s mother, Thomas Jefferson’s close friend Elizabeth, while we can only deduce soldier’s heart in mirror image from the fury of Andrew Jackson and from the hundreds of soldiers, both in Andrew Jackson’s naval wars and those on the frontier, who occasionally “deserted by squads.” Throughout, the pesky men of conscience, whether liberal vets like Noah Worcester or stick-in-the muds like Garrison, would keep moving the zigzag path further along.

The war’s immediate causes, contested for the past century by historians, were as simple and complex as described by historian Albert Klyberg: “impressment of sailors, British trade restrictions for Americans doing business with the Continent, an American desire to annex Canada, and British-inspired Indian uprisings in the West.” The first on that list, impressment, became in Congressional debates conflated with less tangible concepts of the new country’s “honor” and credibility. “If we now recede we shall be a reproach to all nations,” said Henry Clay, perhaps originating a now well-worn theme.

Uniformed dissent in this new war was surprisingly robust. In private journals, petitions and public campaigns, both officers and ordinary soldiers raised questions about the federalization of the armed forces and the wars’ sometimes brutal conduct. It is not that surprising that so of our resisters sprang from West Point, equipped by its Ivy League-style education as much to challenge authority as assume it.
“You will find a great variety of characters at the Academy but generally high minded young men and some of them quarrelsome and extremely tenacious of their honor,” Charles Peters told his brother-in-law Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of the founder of the Green Mountain Boys.

I promised more last time, so here are some mavericks, some eary CO’s, and the guys who pioneered the idea that “War costs. Who pays?” As my last (?) deadline on this book looms, pieces like this will come faster, I think. (At right: the cover of one of my book’s precursors, by the acclaimed Carl Van Doren — who narrated in much more detail than I could one of the first such rebellions.)

“ all being Volunteers”

The Continental Army was itself built upon a “revolutionary crowd,” the “mobs” who stomped on the Stamp Act and and threw tea into Boston Harbor.By 1775, the empire began to crack down, finally noticing that these “mobs” had gradually acquired more and more autonomy for themselves and their legislatures. Parliament enacted the Administration of Justice Act, under which a soldier who killed a rioter could only be tried back in England, out of sight of the colonists being suppressed.ⁱⁱ When four thousand nervous redcoats laid siege to Boston, one result was the “Massacre.”

The militia responded in kind on April 19, 1775, alerted by Paul Revere and his cohorts. A young Minuteman named Daniel Shays was among the 70 militiamenwho mobilized after the redcoats had set fire to homes and fields and most civilians to flee Boston.^v Shays was one of the many Irish immigrants that joined the call early, inspired to fight the same oppressors that had driven them across the Atlantic.

After Lexington and Concord, armed rebel supporters camped out at Harvard Square. Most were from already-existing state militias^vi from all the Mid-Atlantic colonies, come to defend Boston’s famous Minutemen and the towns’ “Committees of Safety.” It was this possibly-unruly lot that the First Continental Congress then declared an Army under the command of George Washington, a former British Army colonel from Virginia. Among the enthusiastic recruits at “Cambridge Camp” was young Daniel Shays, who was soon commissioned second lieutenant in the new Army.

A similar offer was being made to Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, and their Green Mountain Boys, who by then included a printer’s assistant named Matthew Lyon. Lyon had arrived in New-York from Ireland in 1765 (the week the Stamp Act was passed); after eight years of indentured service to the captain who’d brought him over, he started drilling with Allen and moved to the border area known as “New Hampshire Grants” (now Vermont). On May 10, the Boys flooded into the nearly-unguarded Fort Ticonderoga and seized it from the British; the ammunition inside helped end the siege of Boston and equipped the new army for the battles in New-York. Inspired by these victories and emboldened by Jefferson’s 1776 poetry, even more joined the fight.

The new Army was thus a loose coalition of regulars and state forces organized along regional lines. Commanders and newspapers alike lauded the “Maryland Line,” the Connecticut and New-Jersey Lines, the swelling forces of the western frontier in Pennsylvania. Some native allies were reported to join in: in Boston a local chief was quoted as “offering to raise a tomahawk” against the British, given the Bostonians’ solid treaty agreements. Benjamin Franklin, who’d spent the revolutionary spring in France, exulted in July: “The Tradesmen of this City were in the Field twice a day, at 5 in the Morning, and Six in the Afternoon, disciplining with the utmost Diligence, all being Volunteers.”

That “utmost Diligence” included immunity to the cause for desertion so often parodied in Voltaire’s Candide, that “Swiss disease” known as nostalgia^vii — at least according to Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Continental Army’s first physician. In letters, Rush exulted that the more they felt like a national army, the less subject they would be to the disorder now known as PTSD:

From the effects of the nostalgia, and the feebleness of the discipline, which was exercised over the militia, desertions were very frequent and numerous in his army, in the latter part of the campaign; and yet during the three weeks in which the general expected every hour an attack to be made upon him by General Burgoyne, there was not a single desertion from his army [.... which must be] ascribed to an insensibility of body produced by an uncommon tone of mind excited by the love of liberty and their country.^viii

Rush’s statement echoed Franklin’s vision of a Revolution waged by the “citizen soldier” defending his property, his religion, his rights, assuming that the new country would be free of the old country’s maladies. That assumption was, of course, premature.

“A nasty lot”

Also premature was the idea that America’s war for independence would be won purely by “citizen soldiers.” Undoubtedly citizens who believed in the the republic, soldiers were also far more likely to be poor, landless, and to have been conscripted or lured by the offer of a cash bounty. On January 17, 1776, six months after Congress declared the milling Cambridge militiamen an Army, the New-York Reader and Weekly Mercury printed this noted that Congresss had acted to set the rules:

That the Recruiting Officers be Careful to Inlist only sound, able-bodied men of at least 16 years of age; [.... ]that the soldiers will be Paid ten Shillings per week.[...] No bought indentured servants be employed on board the Fleet or in the Army of the Colonies, without the consent of their Masters.

Plans drawn up by Washington and the Massachusetts generals had envisioned a total strength of 20,000; by January, the ranks of the regulars were only at 8,000.^ix Even in the state militias, for which service was theoretically mandatory, many of 1775′s happy warriors preferred to then find someone to serve in their place.

In addition to trying to coax farmers and craftsmen from their livelihoods and families, recruiting officers also had to contend with the varied religious beliefs of the stubborn colonials. These included whole “Peace Churches” such as the Society of Friends (the Quakers), the German Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren. Twenty years earlier, seven Quaker conscripts had faced down a young British Army colonel named George Washington.

According to a 1760 narrative compiled by the Society of Friends, the Virginia objectors “were obliged to stand close by a deserter who was shot, the officer hoping that might shake their constancy, but the criminal behaving with an uncommon degree of fortitude and resignation it had quite the contrary effect.” ^x Impressed, the man who would soon command the new nation’s army told the young Quakers that “all he asked of them in return was that if ever he should fall as much into their power as they had been in his, they would treat him with equal kindness.”

By the time of the 1775 call-up, the official solution to this recruitment problem was to require objectors to hire a substitute. If, like that Virginia corps, they refused, the protocol was not kind; the peace churches have preserved accounts of their torments. These conscientious objectors (the term itself coined in 1650) were beaten, imprisoned, and their usually-minimal property seized by local militia and Continental Army commanders alike.

a surplus population

As famously observed by Fred Anderson, author of A Citizen’s Army: “Soldiers are a surplus population.” Especially as the glow of Lexington, Concord and the Declaration faded, recruiters offered bounties, which ballooned as the war wore on (from $1 in 1775 to $16 in 1778). They sometimes seized at a wavering recruit’s stray mark as a signature on a enlistment contract. Most enlisted men were men and boys with little or no property: For example, the Pennsylvania Line, whose 17,000 men and 143 infantry companies comprised one-fifth of the entire fighting force, listed in one of its regiments 23 shoemakers, 19 weavers, 12 carpenters, 93 farmers, and 42 other trades, some simply marked as “laborer.”

The Continental Army also drew in hungry teenagers, brand-new immigrants (not just the Irish of the Line but German and Dutch), indentured servants and former slaves.Current slaves were more likely to throw in with the British, especially after the royal governor of Virginia issued a promise of immediate manumission to all who crossed over.The latter issue complicated the efforts of anti-slavery officers both north and south, as when Washington aide John Laurens, a South Carolinian, wrote asking his father Henry, the president of the Continental Congress, to release his “able bodied men Slaves, instead of leaving me a fortune” so that he could turn them into his own black regiment, with whom “I am sure of rendering essential Service to my Country.” There was a man determined to expiate a sin all by himself.

While Henry Laurens refused his son’s request, many governors didn’t seem to distinguish much between new immigrants like Matthew Lyon or former slaves like Moses Shah of Massachusetts, a “negro soldier” who fought with Daniel Shays.Both Rhode Island and Connecticut raised entire regiments of African-American soldiers, who were promised equal payment with white soldiers in addition to their freedom. A 1778 strength report of the entire army showed 755 “Negroes” in fifteen different infantry brigades, almost definitely an undercount given the ability of many to “pass” as white.

Mingled quietly within those ranks was a fair number of women. Some were nurses like the iconic Mary Ludwig Hays, usually called “Molly Pitcher,” while others turned from helpmeet to battle buddy in the heat of battle: Margaret Corbin, manned a cannon to defend Fort Washington when her husband died (eventually receiving a soldier’s pension). The result of all this “passing” was an unexpectedly diverse army: one Pennsylvania captain wrote home to his wife of New England battalions, “Among them there is the strangest mixture of Negroes, Indians, and Whites, with old men and mere children, which together with a nasty, lousy appearance makes a most shocking spectacle.”

In state militias, Even among many of the junior officers — for whom militia service was a sort of local social and political club—the lack of early victory beat back urgency after the glow of the Declaration and early victories gave way to mud and blood. Such gentlemen increasingly exercised the option, built into most draft laws, of procuring a substitute, including John Adams, who declined militia service over and over, citing his sickly constitution.

Though motivated partly by need these soldiers were nonetheless firm believers in the cause, and held firm ideals about the sacred rights of the common man. They saw their enlistment contracts, agreements signed by free men as individuals, as documents of near-religious weight. When colonial governments failed to live up to their side of the bargain, either by attempting to retain soldiers past their commitment or failing to feed, clothe and equip them as promised, militiamen and regulars both often acted quickly. In New England, where local government consisted of committees and petitioning was a civic duty, soldiers formed committees, routinely petitioned their officers and their local officials, and occasionally went on strike. War costs. Who pays? .

Such committees began during the height of the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War. In 1763, Massachusetts militiamen dispatched to Quebec to fight the French staged “a most Horrible Mutiny,” which appears to have been actually a relatively genteel event, committees presenting petitions. One private wrote in his diary:

And so now our time has come to an end according to enlistment, but we are not yet got home nor are like to…. The Regiment was ordered out for to hear what the Coll. had to say to them as our time was out and we all swore that we would do no more duty here so it was a day of much Confusion with the Regiment.

These soldiers’ grievances were not always limited to terms of service or poor pay. Democratic ideals extended, for them, to the way units were commanded and structured, including the right to serve only under the commander who enlisted them. One company presented a letter explaining to the British why provincial soldiers would not be commanded by redcoats:

[Our] Army was a proper Organiz’d Body and that they by the Several Governments from whom these Troops were rais’d were Executors in Trust which was not in their power to resign, and, even should they do it, it would End in a DISSOLUTION OF THE ARMY as the Privates Universally hold it as one part of the Terms on which they Enlisted that they were to be Commanded by their own Officers and this is a Principle so strongly Imbib’d that it is not in the Power of Man to remove it.

The same sentiments stayed in force post-1775. In Massachusetts, Lt. Daniel Shays went home to Middlesex County and returned with 20 such recruits, each of whose agreement to enlist “was conditioned upon his being appointed captain.” ^xxii Such conditions placed on their enlistment by 18th-century grunts, who called themselves and their chosen officers “Executors in Trust,” stunned the British and General Washington equally. “A nasty lot,” the Virginian famously said of the New England militias.

Even after the Declaration, those “nasty” troops still felt perfectly entitled to respond to conditions in the field as they saw fit. After early successes at Fort Ticonderoga and Princeton, the Colonial Army began to lose battles in Canada and New-York, including the bloody battles of Manhattan’s Kips-Bay and Brandywine just outside Philadelphia. Fourteen Continental brigades and militias from all over could only content themselves with how many British had died.

The new Continental Navy, composed mostly of former privateers and political appointees, was also having a hard time under the command of soon-to-be-turncoat Benedict Arnold (though future hero John Paul Jones was already a star), way outnumbered by the empire. Its commodore Ezek Hopkins, his brother a signatory to the Declaration, was also deeply unpopular, especially aboard his own Rhode Island frigate the Warren. In February 1777, a handful of officers took a controversial action, composed a letter to Congress about Hopkins after he boasted of mistreating British prisoners and called the civilian Congress “a Sett or Parcel of Men who did not understand their Business, that they were no Way calculated to do Business, that they were a Parcell of Lawyers Clerks, that if their Measures were followed the Country would be ruined, and that he would not follow their Measures.”

Hopkins was quoted above by Capt. John Grannis, who testified about the petition to the Marine Committee of the Continental Congress about a month later, when Hopkins was accusing him and his co-signers in the petition of treason. His peers, said Capt. Grannis, were a trustworthy and diverse lot: “ John Reed is Chaplain and belongs to Middleborough, and James Sellers is Second Lieut of the Warren and of Dartmouth, both of Massachusetts Bay, Richard Marvin is Third Lieut and of Providence, George Stillman first Lieutt of Marines, Roger Haddock is Master of the Frigate and formerly was of New York..” and so on. In any event, he repeated at his conclusion:“I have been moved to do and say what I have done and said from a Love to Country, and I verily believe that the other Signers of the Petition were actuated solely by the same Motives.”

By then, Washington and John Adams had revised the colony’s Articles of War to conform more to the British code. While Adams was a fierce advocate of Hopkins, he couldn’t prevent Congress from removing Hopkins from his command while the charges were investigated; others, agitated that Grannis and others were suffering retaliation, wrote and passed the military’s first military-whistleblower law:

“That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”

“ it was contrary to the Divine Will for a Christian to fight”

The same Laws of War that penalized Hopkins also increased penalties for insubordination and threatening execution for desertion and mutiny,^xxvin response to desertion rates that hovered between 20 and 50 percent. Not all insubordination or desertion constitutes dissent, but when numbers of either rise it has often meant that something has gone badly wrong. For one thing, they were underfed and underclothed: neither Congress or the states wanted to admit the war would last long by budgeting for it. War costs; why pays? Desertion was easy, especially for those whose homes were near where they were fightingAnd sometimes, just sometimes, it happened because someone’s conscience could take no more.

Some even had that moment questioning the expansion of the colonies onto land inhabited by others. The most famous were “white Indians” like Simon Girty, Alexander McKee and George Elliot, who had lived in tribal communities before joining the new army but eventually deserted, after realizing their new nations’ plans for Indian lands. For them, the original sin was still growing and unforgivable.

Simon Girty, raised by Senecas after he watched his stepfather, John Turner, burned to the stake before his eyes in 1750, rejoined white society 20 years later. Joining the militia at Fort Pitt as a scout and interpreter, Girty the “white Indian” had never shunned native dress or the language of his childhood. In 1778, he began to doubt his homecoming, after he was ordered to march with 500 militiamen deep into the Cuyahoga River.

The mission, the notorious “Squaw Campaign,” failed for logistical reasons, militiamen taking their frustration out on the nearest villages afterward. At the end, one of them held “four women and a boy… of whom [only] one women was saved.” Afterward Girty ended his long, scattered military career, convinced that his fellow patriots were more interested in trampling on treaties than besting the British. After he went to Canada, his name remained frontier legend. And most of these young men had no Girty, knew Indians only as “savages” in an “empty” land. If they had grievances, it mostly wasn’t in opposition to war.

Still, those who did were visible. Veterans of the 1777 Battle of Brandywine might have remembered the young Jacob Ritter, the second-generation German immigrant from Maryland who during that battle had stood completely still amid mortars at Chadd’s Ford.

Ritter, who had recently enlisted after his Lutheran pastor spoke of “the propriety and necessity of coming to the defense of our country against her enemies,” had spent two days with his platoon building a battery against the British assault. But then, he wrote later, he was seized with the un-Lutheran conviction that “it was contrary to the Divine Will for a Christian to fight…I supplemented the Almighty that if he would be pleased to deliver me from shedding the blood of my fellow-creatures that day, I would never fight again. [...] Throughout the engagement I remained perfectly calm, though the bombshells and shot fell around me like hail.”In later years, the now-Quaker Ritter told young Friends that nightmares brought him back to that bloodied field.

To his fellow soldiers, as well as any watching him hold onto his never-fired musket, Ritter’s principled stillness may have looked like cowardice. Then as now, military authorities struggled with how to cope with these strange people, tending not to believe testimonies like Ritter’s from young men whose beliefs came purely from within.

As the war wore on, rendering the new nation’s currency worthless and enriching merchants who appeared to play with food supplies, a new brand of dissent emerged: a troop-created sort of civic action like that to which Matthew Lyon, for one, had already borne witness.

“The midling and the Poor will bear the Burden”

Enlisted militiamen and Continentals may not have cited Whig thinkers like the 17th-century British politician Algernon Sidney, who exalted a form of citizenship based on labor and personal valor over inherited privilege or the dread professionalism.^xxx But those ideas had filtered down through Thomas Paine, through Hobbes and Locke and the Declaration, crossed with the “moral economy” long seized by revolutionary crowds. In these soldier-rebellions, the new republicanism offered some less privileged men a new vocabulary in which to argue for redress.

Take that 1776 revolt among Matthew Lyon’s men: As Lyon told Congress years later, by mid-1776 he was in one of General Horatio Gates’ regiments as the army struggled to reorganize in the wake of defeats in Canada. Knowing that his own Green Mountain colonel, Seth Warner, was assembling his forces for the New-Jersey campaign, Lyon “set about enlisting my men, and immediately obtained my quota [...] But at this juncture application was made to the general, [who] was induced to order our party to march to Jericho, and take post at a certain house on the north side of Onion river, at least sixty miles in advance of the army towards Canada—from whence the army had retreated.”Lyon tried, he said, to get the attention of generals perhaps not as close to the land speculators seeking protection: “This letter was either neglected or followed by another with a fresh order for marching.”

Lyon and his boys packed up their muskets and headed north, the latter only revolting after they learned that 500 Algonquin and Iroquois warriors were preparing to attack, allying themselves with the treaty-honoring British. The men’s sense of being used in a commodities gamble was as real as their fear of being scalped: “The soldiers considered themselves sacrificed to the merest of those persons who bought the crops for a trifle, and wanted to get our party there to eat them at the public expense.”

By 1779, fears of similar profiteering helped engender perhaps the fiercest of soldiers’ protests— the “Fort Wilson Riot,” staged by the First Artillery of Philadelphia after Congressman James Wilson ignored six months of quieter civic action.

The tide was beginning to turn in the war, and the colonies had enjoyed victories in Philadelphia and a daring attack on Stony-Point, in upstate New York, in which Captain Daniel Shays helped reclaim West Point under Pennsylvania colonel “Mad Anthony” Wayne. But with crops burned, shipping damaged and many farmers and craftsmen in deep debt, state currencies were subject to intense inflationary pressure. Shippers and suppliers were thus able to create and exacerbate food shortages: future Treasury Secretary Robert Morris left grain stores in their ships at the harbor rather than release the grain for flour. Colonial currency was so depreciated that merchants were demanding silver for their goods.

To the militia, many of whom had fought at Brandywine, Princeton and on the Indian front, the shortages hit particularly hard, and they resented even more the wealthy families who’d been able to buy their way out of militia service.The militia’s “Committee of Privates” began to communicate with the State Assembly on May 12: “many of us are at a loss to this day what Course or Station of Life to adopt to Support ourselves and Families.” A broadsheet issued that spring sounds oddly contemporary but for its archaic diction:

the Midling and the Poor will still bear the Burden, and either be ruined by heavy Fines, or Risque the starving of their Families, whilst themselves are fighting the Battles of Those who are Avariciously working to Amass Wealth with the Destruction of their Community.

As their plea for price controls went unheard, the Germantown and Philadelphia committees met repeatedly. And on October 4, Captain Ephraim Faulkner put out a call for “All Militiamen” to join him marching toward the home of the privileged Wilson.

On October 5, scores poured into the city and joined Faulkner at Burns’ Tavern at Arch and 10th Streets. The militiamen gave three cheers at the City Tavern on Second Street, walking toward their more direct enemy, the half-century-old Mercantile Exchange. After shots were fired (unclear who shot first), the local police arrested 27 militiamen. The men only spent a night in jail, after townspeople (called “mobs” only by loyalist newspapers) surrounded both the courthouse and jail.

Afterward, citing the “apprehensions of great distress among poor house-keepers in this city, from the high price of Flour,” Pennsylvania President Joseph Reed asked the Assembly to order the distribution of one hundred barrels, with a “preference” being given “to such Families as have performed Militia duty, [especially] the Families of such Militia Men as shall serve on the present expedition.”

General Washington had just asked for additional troops for the next set of battles. With the pressure on, militias and the Continental Army continued to conscript pacifists, some of whom became the earliest noncombatant conscientious objectors.

Methodist minister Reverend Lee, when drafted in 1780, agreed only to drive the supply wagon: “I told him I could not kill a man with a good conscience, but I was a friend to my country, and was willing to do any thing that I could, while I continued in the army, except that of fighting.” After the militia arrived in North Carolina, Lee told the soldiers how he felt: “I began under the trees, and took my text in Luke xiii. 5. Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish…. Many of the people, officers as well as men, were bathed in tears before I was done.” Stand by your beliefs, brother.

Some continental and militia commanders learned to say the same, as had Washington in 1760. One young Quaker conscript had his claim dismissed by his “presiding officer” who told him that “you have not the cootermants” (meaning accoutrements, the extreme plain dress of many Friends). Upon seeing written documentation, “the officer now called for a shears that he might trim him: and so he cut off his capes and his lapels and sich a hair tail he had behind, and them said to him, ‘now you may go, now you look more like a Quaker.’”

The civilian laws guiding the behavior of these commands comprised the usual colonial patchwork. Pennsylvania, whose founder meant specifically to create a haven for oppressed sects like the Quakers, and Rhode Island were the most explicit in declaring members of such churches exempt from militia service. Rhode Island’s law said in part that no citizens ”shall be persuaded in his, their conscience or consciences [...], that he nor they cannot nor ought not to train, to learn to fight, nor to war, nor kill any person or person.”

 –

What follows: a cascade of dissent. But you’ll have to buy the book for it, including the soldiers-revolt led by Daniel Shays and how Matthew Lyon ended up in prison.

Wonder how those themes I identified earlier play out in an actual war narrative? So did my peer reviewers. even though I thought I was hitting people over the head with them…

Here’s the opening of chapter one of Ain’t Marching, with a somewhat-expanded musings about why these particular rebels made the cut. What do you think? Some longtime observers may note that I changed the tag  for one of those themes, leaving Jerry Maguire behind for the less-pop-culture-y War costs. Who pays?) Thanks to Greg Turner for the evocative photo, “This is What Revisions Look Like.”

Chapter One: A Military Born of Dissent

Lt. Matthew Lyon was just getting to sleep when he heard the shouts. “ Turn out! Turn out!”

Lyon opened his eyes and reached for his weapon, a light infantry “fuzzee” with tamped-down bayonet.Were the Algonkin attacking already? Had the spies been lying? He sat up and ran out the door of the hut, sweating. It was July 1776, and all the river breeze in the world couldn’t stop the heat from rising off his neck.

What Lyon saw, he had feared. Not the redcoats of the British, nor the tanned and paint-spattered skin of the 500-strong Indian warriors reportedly massing at the next hill: just the backs of his men in formation, and preparing to leave the camp forever. In some ways, the 26-year-old lieutenant couldn’t blame them.

This was not the mission he had promised when he got them to reenlist. Not here in Upper Canada, ordered to stay after Washington retreated and“guard” land owned by some rich men they didn’t know. Starving as they were, they told him, they would never buy corn at the owners’ war-inflated prices.

Nonetheless, he had orders. The Indians were coming. Lyon issued commands that turned to pleas. He himself, he told them, would rather suffer death than the dishonor of court-martial; wouldn’t they?

“All entreaties were ineffectual,” Lyon told the U.S. Congress 20 years later. “They declared they had been abused—there was no chance for their lives there…As they were going to take the canoe to the other side, they insisted on [the officers] going [with them], and threatened violence if we refused.”

The men submitted to arrest after the company was returned to Fort Ticonderoga, which many of them had helped seize from the British. Their court-martial was overseen by Gen. Horatio Gates, a rival of George Washington’s and a dear friend of John Adams – the same general who had ordered the company north, on behalf of his wealthy supporters who owned that land. Gates ruled that the men were to be publicly flogged, while Lyon was “cashiered” and given a wooden sword in place of his prized musket.

By the time Lyon told his story publicly, he was a member of Congress. Adams was president, and not there to hear him speak. But he was very familiar with Lyon and his newspaper, The Scourge of Aristocracy and the Repository of Important Political Truths. A few years after his testimony, Lyon would be one of the first Adams ordered clapped in prison, for the new crime of criticizing the Presithedent.

That Jericho mutiny happened before many had finished reading the Declaration of Independence – a document that mentions, as cause for action, both oppressive standing armies and their suppression of dissent. Many in the new country’s uniform saw such agitation as just another fundamental, newly-asserted right. And for nearly every touchstone in what is popularly phrased the American Revolution, you find men in uniform acting as the full citizens they had just been declared.

Like the “Committees of Safety” that evolved into state assemblies, soldiers mostly went about asserting their grievances like citizens: they formed committees, petitioned their officers, assigned the more literate among them as representatives. They did so during the so-called “French and Indian War,” when enlistees held their enlistment papers as golden; they did so in the new Continental Army, which was was in its own way composed of the armed mobs who’d assembled in response to Lexington and Concord. They did so during early naval battles, including the first known military whistleblowers in 1777; in 1779, marching on the house of the future Treasury Secretary to protest hoarding, just as the colonies had secured assistance from Continental Europe and the British retreated from Philadelphia, and an even larger contingent leaving their posts entirely in January 1781, after years of pleas for better supplies. A few found themselves newly members of peace churches, like new Quaker Jacob Ritter, or in exile, like Simon Girty, a “white Indian” Army scout who deserted rather than perpetuate an original sin.

In the fragile depression years after the British surrender, Revolutionary veterans generated the anti-banker protest known as the Shays Rebellion, while others spoke on behalf of conscientious objectors at the Constitutional convention, or started newspapers in stark opposition to the government they had helped found. By the time of Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800, the deciding vote in a deadlocked Congress was cast by Matthew Lyon, who chose to have the ultimate dissenting answer to the man who had imprisoned him in 1798.

As the mini-history above might suggest, of our core themes the most prominent is the one identified by Lt. Ephraim Faulkner and other Pennsylvania militiamen in 1798: “the midling and the Poor shall bear the burden.” Or, in less 18th-century diction, “War costs. Who pays?That was the heart of Shays Rebellion, the January mutineers, even the New England militiamen waving their enlistment contracts on weary British commanders.

Also key from the beginning: the very few moved by conscience to refuse to fight, whether experiencing a mid-battle insight or staking ground for the original “peace churches.” The latter were also among the few consciously protesting one of the country’s two main original sins, since Quakers also spent a fair amount of time witnessing against slavery. In the face of that original sin, we have soldiers of color at a time when their very existence threw out multiple challenges, a few also participating in explicit rebellions. As for the other sin, only murmurs in soldiers’ letters and desertion by a few half-breed “White Indians” signaled any problem with “claiming” formerly Iroquois or Pequot or Shawnee or Alachua land.

Mavericks were there in full presence, if not exerting as much muscle as later. We see our very first military whistleblowers in 1777, in the form of Navy sailors who violated the chain of command because their commander was torturing prisoners of war. The nation’s first veterans were not shy in supporting press that made trouble, including Matthew Lyon’s Repository. As for combat trauma, explicitly regarded by American physicians as a “European” disease unfit for their young patriots, signs of it are still detectable in some veteran diaries and after-war memoirs, especially by Quakers – the latter, of course, beginning their perpetual role as official extreme that opened up room for everyone else to ask questions, some telling the extremists Hold onto your beliefs, brother. By the end of the era, as newer wars approached, you could even see the Revolutionary veterans preparing guides for the ones to follow.

Next, more details about just a few of these stories, though I can’t reproduce the entire chapter. Do let me know what you think?

I’m in final revisions on the AMA book, so my focus here is shifting for the next five weeks or so; expect to see some musings on the book’s themes, and new stories getting inserted at the last minute. But I’m unlikely to be following the news quite so closely, and there will be silences.

In the meantime, seek out the movie above if you can. Between his traumatized World War II vet dad, his time at military school (see left),  and his proud history at GI coffeehouses, one can’t imagine someone better to provide this book with its title than Philip David Ochs.

This came up on a Google Image search for "conscientious objector." BIG problem.

I wasn’t the only one sunk when we read through this piece about the guy who almost tried another Fort Hood massacre.  Because he was AWOL, and one of us – someone who could have been me – helped him fill out a conscientious-objector application:

Like the soldier charged with killing 13 people in the shootings, Abdo is Muslim, but he said in an essay obtained by The Associated Press the attacks ran against his beliefs and were “an act of aggression by a man and not by Islam.”

Abdo was approved as a conscientious objector this year, but that status was put on hold after he was charged with possessing child pornography. He went absent without leave from Fort Campbell, Ky., during the July 4 weekend.

On July 3, he tried to purchase a gun at a store near the Kentucky post, according to the company that owns the store. Abdo told an AP reporter a week later that he was concerned about his safety and had considered purchasing a gun for protection, but had not yet done so.

I won’t comment on the child-porn charge except for a heavy sigh. But the rest sent me scurrying to my book, to make sure he wasn’t in it. And as a Muslim, he sullies the name of Muslim dissenters, too – like one guy who is, and who was one of the first:

At the very first wave in February Ghanim Khalil, a young Marine who had already served for four years at the Parris Island supply depot, had found his way to the podium among the 500,000 crammed into the New York City demo to shout that he would resist all efforts to deploy him. After he said his piece, Khalil received a warm hug from David Cline, formerly of the Vietnam-era Oleo Strut, who’d retired from 20 years at the post office and become the full-time President of Veterans for Peace.

The case raises far more pressing issues than my book, of course. GI counselors everywhere are wondering if they could have misjudged someone like Abdo, thinking he might be another dissenter of integrity like Ghanim Khalil.  In one Facebook discussion, Gulf War vet Jeff Paterson, said what most of us feel: “I would rather err occasionally on misreading someone’s future intent than to not help someene who needs it.” Still, it’s hard not to feel  betrayed, and many expressed that in that same discussion.

The mission of the advocates is, of course, somewhat different from mine, and yet the same: to see clearly and tell it with conviction. To the extent that Pfc. Abdo’s actions make it harder for anyone trying that for themselves or someone they know, it hurts us all. I think we need to offer the alternative vision.

Update: Iraq Veterans Against the War has issued a statement about Abdo, which I’m reproducing below. It’s going to take all of us to push back against people’s preconceptions.

The role of Jane Fonda in the Vietnam-era GI movement has always deeply intrigued me, but I had no idea she’d been turned anti-war after meeting deserters in Paris. The fuller story fascinates.

I’ve long known the “Hanoi Jane” stuff was a smear job. Now, in “The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi,” which she explicitly asked be reposted,  Fonda gives the fullest description yet of her role before her Vietnam trip as well as what happened to create the infamous photo.  It’s a story that deserves far, far broader circulation. And someday, I hope to talk to Fonda about the GI Rights Hotline.

I grew up during World War II. My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the Grapes of Wrath, his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day. I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn’t have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him. I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

For the first 8 years of the Vietnam War I lived in France. I was married to the French film director, Roger Vadim and had my first child. The French had been defeated in their own war against Vietnam a decade before our country went to war there, so when I heard, over and over, French people criticizing our country for our Vietnam War I hated it. I viewed it as sour grapes. I refused to believe we could be doing anything wrong there.

It wasn’t until I began to meet American servicemen who had been in Vietnam and had come to Paris as resisters that I realized I needed to learn more.

I took every chance I could to meet with U.S. soldiers. I talked with them and read the books they gave me about the war. I decided I needed to return to my country and join with them—active duty soldiers and Vietnam Veterans in particular—to try and end the war. I drove around the country visiting military bases, spending time in the G.I. Coffee houses that had sprung up outside many bases –places where G.I.s could gather. I met with Army psychiatrists who were concerned about the type of training our men were receiving…quite different, they said, from the trainings during WWII and Korea. The doctors felt this training was having a damaging effect on the psyches of the young men, effects they might not recover from. I raised money and hired a former Green Beret, Donald Duncan, to open and run the G.I. Office in Washington D.C. to try and get legal and congressional help for soldiers who were being denied their rights under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I talked for hours with U.S. pilots about their training, and what they were told about Vietnam. I met with the wives of servicemen. I visited V.A. hospitals. Later in 1978, wanting to share with other Americans some of what I had learned about the experiences of returning soldiers and their families, I made the movie Coming Home. I was the one who would be asked to speak at large anti-war rallies to tell people that the men in uniform were not the enemy, that they did not start the war, that they were, in growing numbers our allies. I knew as much about military law as any layperson. I knew more than most civilians about the realities on the ground for men in combat. I lived and breathed this stuff for two years before I went to North Vietnam. I cared deeply for the men and boys who had been put in harms way. I wanted to stop the killing and bring our servicemen home. I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences. Some boys shook constantly and were unable to speak above a whisper.

It is unconscionable that extremist groups circulate letters which accuse me of horrific things, saying that I am a traitor, that POWs in Hanoi were tied up and in chains and marched passed me while I spat at them and called them ‘baby killers. These letters also say that when the POWs were brought into the room for a meeting I had with them, we shook hands and they passed me tiny slips of paper on which they had written their social security numbers. Supposedly, this was so that I could bring back proof to the U.S. military that they were alive. The story goes on to say that I handed these slips of paper over to the North Vietnamese guards and, as a result, at least one of the men was tortured to death. That these stories could be given credence shows how little people know of the realities in North Vietnam prisons at the time. The U.S. government and the POW families didn’t need me to tell them who the prisoners were. They had all their names. Moreover, according to even the most hardcore senior officers, torture stopped late in 1969, two and a half years before I got there. And, most importantly, I would never say such things to our servicemen, whom I respect, whether or not I agree with the mission they have been sent to perform, which is not of their choosing.

But these lies have circulated for almost forty years, continually reopening the wound of the Vietnam War and causing pain to families of American servicemen. The lies distort the truth of why I went to North Vietnam and they perpetuate the myth that being anti-war means being anti-soldier.

Little known is the fact that almost 300 Americans—journalists, diplomats, peace activists, professors, religious leaders and Vietnam Veterans themselves—had been traveling to North Vietnam over a number of years in an effort to try and find ways to end the war (By the way, those trips generated little if any media attention.) I brought with me to Hanoi a thick package of letters from families of POWs. Since 1969, mail for the POWs had been brought in and out of North Vietnam every month by American visitors. The Committee of Liaison With Families coordinated this effort. I took the letters to the POWs and brought a packet of letters from them back to their families.

The Photo of Me on the Gun Site.

There is one thing that happened while in North Vietnam that I will regret to my dying day— I allowed myself to be photographed on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. I want to, once again, explain how that came about. I have talked about this numerous times on national television and in my memoirs, My Life So Far, but clearly, it needs to be repeated.

It happened on my last day in Hanoi. I was exhausted and an emotional wreck after the 2-week visit. It was not unusual for Americans who visited North Vietnam to be taken to see Vietnamese military installations and when they did, they were always required to wear a helmet like the kind I was told to wear during the numerous air raids I had experienced. When we arrived at the site of the anti-aircraft installation (somewhere on the outskirts of Hanoi), there was a group of about a dozen young soldiers in uniform who greeted me. There were also many photographers (and perhaps journalists) gathered about, many more than I had seen all in one place in Hanoi. This should have been a red flag.

The translator told me that the soldiers wanted to sing me a song. He translated as they sung. It was a song about the day ‘Uncle Ho’ declared their country’s independence in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square. I heard these words: “All men are created equal; they are given certain rights; among these are life, Liberty and Happiness.” These are the words Ho pronounced at the historic ceremony. I began to cry and clap. These young men should not be our enemy. They celebrate the same words Americans do.

The soldiers asked me to sing for them in return. As it turned out I was prepared for just such a moment: before leaving the United States, I memorized a song called Day Ma Di, written by anti-war South Vietnamese students. I knew I was slaughtering it, but everyone seemed delighted that I was making the attempt. I finished. Everyone was laughing and clapping, including me, overcome on this, my last day, with all that I had experienced during my 2 week visit. What happened next was something I have turned over and over in my mind countless times. Here is my best, honest recollection of what happened: someone (I don’t remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed. I got up, and as I started to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what had just happened hit me. “Oh my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes.” I pleaded with him, “You have to be sure those photographs are not published. Please, you can’t let them be published.” I was assured it would be taken care of. I didn’t know what else to do. (I didn’t know yet that among the photographers there were some Japanese.)

It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. But if they did I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it. Had I brought a politically more experienced traveling companion with me they would have kept me from taking that terrible seat. I would have known two minutes before sitting down what I didn’t realize until two minutes afterwards; a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever. The gun was inactive, there were no planes overhead, I simply wasn’t thinking about what I was doing, only about what I was feeling, innocent of what the photo implies. But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart. I have apologized numerous times for any pain I may have caused servicemen and their families because of this photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm. It is certainly painful for me that I, who had spent so much time talking to soldiers, trying to help soldiers and veterans, helping the anti-war movement to not blame the soldiers, now would be seen as being against our soldiers!

So Why I Did I Go?

On May 8^th, 1972, President Nixon had ordered underwater, explosive mines to be placed in Haiphong Harbor, something that had been rejected by previous administrations. Later that same month, reports began to come in from European scientists and diplomats that the dikes of the Red River Delta in North Vietnam were being targeted by U.S. planes. The Swedish ambassador to Vietnam reported to an American delegation in Hanoi that he had at first believed the bombing was accidental, but now, having seen the dikes with his own eyes, he was convinced it was deliberate.

I might have missed the significance of these reports had Tom Hayden, whom I was dating, not shown me what the recently released Pentagon Papers had to say on the subject: in 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, searching for some new means to bring Hanoi to its knees, had proposed destroying North Vietnam’s system of dams and dikes, which, he said, “If handled right- might…offer promise…such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do at the conference table.”[1] President Johnson, to his credit, had not acted upon this option.

Now, six years later, Richard Nixon appeared to have given orders to target the dikes—whether to actually destroy them[2] or to demonstrate the threat of destruction, no one knew.

It is important to understand that the Red River is the largest river in North Vietnam. Like Holland, its delta is below sea level. Over centuries, the Vietnamese people have constructed –by hand!– an intricate network of earthen dikes and dams to hold back the sea, a network two thousand five hundred miles long! The stability of these dikes becomes especially critical as monsoon season approaches, and requires an all-out effort on the part of citizens to repair any damage from burrowing animals or from normal wear and tear. Now it was June, but this was no ‘normal wear and tear’ they were facing. The Red River would begin to rise in July and August. Should there be flooding, the mining of Haiphong Harbor would prevent any food from being imported; the bombing showed no signs of letting up; and there was little press coverage of the impending disaster should the dikes be weakened by the bombing and give way. Something drastic had to be done.

The Nixon Administration and its US Ambassador to the United Nations, George Bush (the father), would vehemently deny what was happening, but the following are excerpts from the April-May 1972 transcripts of conversations between President Nixon and top administration officials.

April 25th 1972

Nixon: “We’ve got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack [of North Vietnam}…Now, by all-out bombing attack, I am thinking about things that go far beyond…I'm thinking of the dikes, I'm thinking of the railroad, I'm thinking, of course, of the docks."

Kissinger: "I agree with you."

President Nixon: "And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?"

Kissinger: "About two hundred thousand people."

President Nixon: "No, no, no…I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: "That, I think, would just be too much."

President Nixon: "The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?…I just want to think big, Henry, for Christsakes."

May 4, 1972.[3]

John B. Connally (Secretary of the Treasury):…”bomb for seriousness, not just as a signal. Railroads, ports, power stations, communication lines…and don’t worry about killing civilians. Go ahead and kill ‘em….People think you are [killing civilians] now. So go ahead and give ‘em some.”

Richard Nixon: “That’s right.”

[Later in same conversation]

Richard Nixon: “We need to win the goddamned war…and…what that fella [?] said about taking out the goddamned dikes, all right, we’ll take out the goddamned dikes….If Henry’s for that, I’m for it all the way.”

The administration wanted the American public to believe Nixon was winding down the war because he was bringing our ground troops home. (At the time I went to Hanoi, there were only approximately 25,000 troops left in South Vietnam from a high of 540,000 in early 1969) In fact, the war was escalating…from the air. And, as I said, monsoon season was approaching. Something drastic had to be done.

That May, I received an invitation from the North Vietnamese in Paris to make the trip to Hanoi. Many had gone before me but perhaps it would take a different sort of celebrity to get people’s attention. Heightened public attention was what was needed to confront the impending crisis with the dikes. I would take a camera and bring back photographic evidence (if such was to be found) of the bomb damage of the dikes we’d been hearing about.

I arranged the trip’s logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace talks, bought myself a round trip ticket and stopped in New York to pick up letters for the POWs.

Frankly, the trip felt like a call to service. It was a humanitarian mission, not a political trip. My goal was to expose and try to halt the bombing of the dikes. (The bombing of the dikes ended a month after my return from Hanoi)

The only problem was that I went alone. Had I been with a more experienced, clear-headed, traveling companion, I would not have allowed myself to get into a situation where I was photographed on an anti-aircraft gun.

The Spin

My trip to North Vietnam never became a big story in the Summer/Fall of 1972–nothing on television, one small article in the New York Times. The majority of the American public, Congress, and the media were opposed to the war by then and they didn’t seem to take much notice of my trip. After all, as I said, almost three hundred Americans had gone to Hanoi before me. There had been more than eighty broadcasts by Americans over Radio Hanoi before I made mine. I had decided to do the broadcasts because I was so horrified by the bombing of civilian targets and I wanted to speak to U.S. pilots as I had done on so many occasions during my visits to U.S. military bases and at G.I. Coffee houses. I never asked pilots to desert. I wanted to tell them what I was seeing as an American on the ground there. The Nixon Justice Department poured over the transcripts of my broadcasts trying to find a way to put me on trial for treason but they could find none. A. William Olson, a representative of the Justice Department, [4] said after studying the transcripts, that I had asked the military “to do nothing other than to think.”

But from the Nixon Administration’s point of view, something had to be done. If the government couldn’t prosecute me in court because, in reality, I had broken no laws, then the pro-war advocates would make sure I was prosecuted in the court of public opinion.

The myth making about my being responsible for POW torture began seven months after I returned from North Vietnam, and several months after the war had ended, and the U.S. POWs had returned home. “Operation Homecoming,” in February 1973, was planned by the Pentagon and orchestrated by the White House. It was unprecedented in its lavishness. I was outraged that there had been no homecoming celebrations for the 10s of 1000s of men who had done combat. But from 1969 until their release in 1973, Nixon had made sure that the central issue of the war for many Americans was about the torture of American POWs (the very same years when the torture had stopped!). He had to seize the opportunity to create something that resembled victory. It was as close as he would come, and the POWs were the perfect vehicles to deflect the nation’s attention away from what our government had done in Vietnam, how they had broken faith with our servicemen.

I became a target the government could use, to suggest that some POWs who had met with me while I was in Hanoi had been tortured into pretending they were anti-war. The same thing was done to try and frame former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whose trip to North Vietnam followed mine.

According to Seymour Hersh, author and journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and, later, the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal, when American families of POWs became alarmed at the news that there was torture in North Vietnam prisons, they received letters from the Pentagon saying: “We are certain that you will not become unduly concerned over the [torture] briefing if you keep in mind the purpose for which it was tailored.”[5]

But, according to what the POWs wrote in their books, conditions in the POW camps improved in the four years preceding their release—that is, from 1969 until 1973. Upon their release, Newsweekmagazine wrote, “the [torture] stories seemed incongruent with the men telling them – a trim, trig [note: this is actually the word used in the article] lot who, given a few pounds more flesh, might have stepped right out of a recruiting poster.”[6]

Once the POWs were home, the Pentagon and White House handpicked a group of the highest ranking POWs–senior officers, to travel the national media circuit, some of them telling of torture. A handwritten note from President Nixon to H.R. Haldeman says that “the POW’s need to have the worst quotes of R. Clark and Fonda” to use in their TV appearances, but this information shouldn’t come from the White House.[7] These media stories were allowed to become the official narrative, the universal “POW Story,” giving the impression that all the men had been subjected to systematic torture—right up to the end–and that torture was the policy of the North Vietnamese government. The POWs who said there was no torture in their camps were never allowed access to the media.

Not that any torture is justified or that anyone who had been tortured should have been prevented from telling about it. But the Nixon White House orchestrated a distorted picture of what actually occurred.

In my anger at the torture story that was being allowed to spread, at how the entire situation was being manipulated, I made a mistake I deeply regret. I said that the POWs claiming torture were liars, hypocrites, and pawns.

I said, “I’m quite sure that there were incidents of torture…but the pilots who are saying it was thepolicy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that’s a lie.”[8]

What I didn’t know at the time was that although there had been no torture after 1969, before then there had been systematic torture of some POWS. One of the more hawkish of them, James Stockdale, wrote in his book, In Love and War, that no more than ten percent of the pilots received at least ninety percent of the punishment.[9] John Hubbell, in P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, agreed, and affirmed the fact that torture stopped in 1969.[10]

When the POWs came home, some who had been there longest told the press how they clogged up prison toilets and sewers, refused to come when ordered, or follow prison rules. One of the most famous, Jeremiah Denton, said, “We forced them [the guards] to be brutal to us.”[11] I relay this not to minimize the hardships that the POWs endured, nor to excuse it– but to attempt belatedly to restore a greater depth of insight into the entire POW experience with their captors.

Still, whether any torture was administered to certain, more recalcitrant POWs and not to others is unacceptable. Even though only a small percent of prisoners were tortured by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, it wasn’t right. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s standards, torturing prisoners to get information is justified. It isn’t. Not ever. All nations must adhere to the Geneva Convention’s rules of warfare.

As anyone who knew or worked with me in those years knows that my heart has always been with the soldiers. I should have been clearer that my anger back then was at the Nixon Administration. It was the administration, in its cynical determination to keep hostilities between the U.S. and Vietnam alive and to distract people from the administration’s mistakes, who tried to use the POWs as pawns.

Addressing The Internet lies

By the end of the Nineties, even more grotesque torture lies began to be circulated about me over the Internet—the ones that continue to this day.

Let me quote a former POW, Captain Mike McGrath (USN Retired), president of the POW-NAM Organization. In a letter to Roger Friedman, at the time a columnist for Fox411, on Friday, January 12, 2001 (he gave Friedman permission to make the letter public) McGrath wrote:

Yes, the Carrigan/Driscoll/strips of paper story is an Internet hoax. It has been around since Nov 1999 or so. To the best of my knowledge none of this ever happened. This is a hoax story placed on the Internet by unknown Fonda haters. No one knows who initiated the story. I have spoken with all the parties named: Carrigan, Driscoll, et al. They all state that this particular story is a hoax and wish to disassociate their names from the false story. They never made the statements attributed to them.

In his letter, McGrath also said to Friedman that by the time I went to Hanoi in 1972, treatment of the POWs was starting to improve and that I “did not bring torture or abuse to the POWs,” but that one man [Hoffman], the “senior ranking man in a room full of new guys,” was tortured (“hung by his broken arm”) to make him come to the meeting with me. McGrath wrote:

Why one man (name withheld by request) was picked out for torture of his broken arm is unknown…

The answer is, it never happened!

Will what I have written here stop the myths from continuing to be spread on the Internet and in mass mailings to conservative Republicans? I don’t know. Some people seem to need to hate and I make a convenient lightning rod. I think the lies and distortions serve some right-wing purpose—fundraising? Demonizing me so as to scare others from becoming out-spoken anti-war activists? Who knows? But at least here, on my blog (and in my memoirs), there is a place where people who are genuinely interested in the truth can find it.

And here I just got my letter from David Coombs, basically refusing to discuss it – and I was trying to figure out if that was a coded request to honor what was left of his client’s privacy. Now, I feel that writing about this respectfully is the only way to show that respect. What do you think?

More later when I’ve finished reading the transcripts:  comments sorely requested. Was it Hemingway who said, “The writer’s job is to find out the truth and then write it. But that can be very difficult.”?

Actually, it’s a sign that IVAW gets it, in a very deep way.

Photo: New York Times

By “it” I mean the confluence of dissent-ingredients I’ve been tracking in my book, most especially the multifaceted effects of combat trauma. This week, a team at Fort Hood in Texas reported on what they saw:

-       We listen to the Military Police Sergeant talk about her soldier that is only 21 years old and after one deployment just can’t function any longer. He needs help and treatment, and their commander makes his every attempt to get help harder as opposed to easier.

-       We listen to the Medic Sergeant talk about the number of suicides and attempted suicides that no one is talking about.

-       We listen to the soldier on extra duty talk about being shot on his third deployment, needing to take pain relievers, running out of pills, taking his wife’s pills to get through the day, and then getting courtmartialed for taking the wrong medication.

-       We listen to the soldiers talk about their non-commissioned officers that are shaken and struggling with anxiety and memories but are gearing up to deploy again.

All of the above is often greeted with “Suck it up and drive on,” at least in the Army. To insist that the Pentagon do otherwise is actually quite a sucker punch to the machine that relies on obedience to that one instruction.

My friend Luis Carlos Montalvan, told TIME Magazine (published this week): “There are 18 suicides a day among veterans. I’d do anything to help prevent that tragedy.” We all know now that the numbers for active-duty guys are just as troubling. Luis and his amazing book (buy it!) are on a mission of essential if non-controversial service. Op Recovery, as I said to Camilo, is just as essential and potentially revolutionary. Dave Cline, founder of the Vietnam-era Oleo Strut, would have been proud of them.

Image: New York Magazine

About Bradley Manning, I mean. Among what he reveals: most of those folks holding “I am Bradley Manning” masks don’t know what the hell they’re saying.

Ever since the story began to break, I’ve felt more and more drawn to it as a writer and, yes, as a queer person (any way you want to hear that). As I told someone this morning on Facebook, Manning in so many ways encompasses so many of my themes, from PTSD to gender to whistleblowing, that I sometimes think I made him up.

This has especially been the case with gender stuff — in which dimension I’ve walked very gingerly. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my friends who’ve undergone gender transitions, it’s that only the person in question is entitled to talk about it. Period. Manning was out as gay, but relatively few pursued the clues pointed out by Gawker last year, such as Manning’s chat log saying that “my CPU doesn’t match the motherboard” or that he feared media exposure “as a man.”  Without Manning saying anything of the kind in public spaces, we all steered away from it, even though military intelligence didn’t seem to be (why else have the boy sleep naked in front of other soldiers?).

I didn’t even say anything after I watched the clip from PBS Frontline above, and told my wife that “the way Manning stands in that party, that’s a girl.” Only to my wife: it wasn’t mine to say. Still isn’t in some ways.

But now there’s this breathtaking piece in New York magazine, Bradley Manning’s Army of One.  Steve Fishman, the journalist, seems to be in about the same place I am with Manning, and traces what I call in my book the “this is for fighting, this is for fun” gender wild card – but in the process, he violates all my rules on respect for gender transitions.  In the process, he limns what I can only suggest – that even as in years past to even BE female OR gay in the military was inherently subversive, Manning’s outsider-self may have catalyzed a more profound kind of dissent.

Fishman may have decided that given the stakes — Manning in prison, loose talk of “treason” — he couldn’t do more damage than has already been done. I’m going to ask Manning’s attorney if he feels that way, too. And whether he’s going to make the argument in court that by helping catalyze the Arab Spring, Manning has already done more of his assigned mission (damaging Al Qaeda) than the  men who are calling for his head.