reference to the past discussion, one of the key ways of talking about what has gone on, what is the harm of the war, is to have the faces and the voices of individual people and we're fortunate to have tran te wan was an agent or an survivor will be part of agent orange survivor who will be on the panel this afternoon. we have nguyen fu will be talking about an effort of projetc renew to clear the landmines and unexploded ordnance. and we have van lai who himslef is a victim of exploding unexploded ordnance. i also want to take a moment to mention two people who are not part of the book but who played a key role in helping to organize this conference and particularly the panel of wednesday afternoon. that is terry province and john mcauliff from the vietnam peace peace commemoration committee. now it is a great pleasure to introduce chris appy. he is a professor, historian at the university of professor of massachusetts amherst. he is best known for three of his books on vietnam, "american reckoning: the vietnam war and our national identity", "patriots: the vietnam war remembered from all sides", and "working class war: american combat soldiers in vietnam". but he is also has made a great contribution for having organized events such as this with a three-week display of the waging peace in vietnam exhibit at the university of massachusetts involving folks from the five colleges there and large numbers of students and my hat is off to him. >> thank you very much. it is a great honor to speak to you today and i want to thank everyone involved in putting this exhibit together and hosting these events and i think it documents the dramatic and inspiring story of the greatest movement of antiwar g.i.s and veterans in u.s. history, and by doing so, it helps recover a virtually secret history. wyatt's secret is an important -- why it's a secret is an important problem. michael gave a good brief explanation for that. the short answer is that in the decades after the war but beginning during the war, primarily by people like richard nixon's vice president, spiro agnew, there's a quite successful effort to demonize the antiwar movement and to reduce the most vibrant and diverse movement, antiwar movement in our history to this very nasty and reductive stereotype of a bunch of arrogant, elitist, unpatriotic cowardly campus-based draft dodgers who undermined the heroic and brave efforts of u.s. soldiers. that imagery, i'm afraid, has powerfully endured. and has served not only to stigmatize future antiwar struggles but has produced in us a kind of reflexive obligation to express our abiding gratitude for those who serve in the military that actually discourages all of us as citizens to asking the kind of critical questions about the wars they are being deployed to fight. what i most want to talk about today is a lesson or an example we can find in the g.i. movement. that is perhaps most relevant to our own time, and that is simply this. we need to remember people are capable of changing their mind on issues of fundamental importance, and not only that, but acting on their new convictions, boldly and at great risk. there is, i'm afraid, a conventional wisdom today that we are rigidly and permanently divided into these entrenched camps, and that no one is capable of changing their mind. i have to admit, it does feel a bit that that may be the case when we thing about certain elected public officials. but i think we should be deeply skeptical of this conventional wisdom. after all, even in our own century, millions of americans have changed their minds about the wars that seemed to be endless. as long ago as 2006, polls indicate a majority of americans had concluded that our wars in iraq and afghanistan had been mistaken. is my believe that the public is often more willing to change its mind, and more progressive, actually, that our elected leaders. and so, perhaps even now, below the radar of the media, there are, in fact, for example, many devout christians, who are concluding that they can no longer support such an utterly profane president. but one thing is certain, that if you go back to the early 1960's, i do nothing anyone would have predicted the g.i. and to our movement that began to arise the g.i. anti-war movement that began to arise by the late 1960's and early 1970's. it was a time when millions of active-duty soldiers engaged in every imaginable form of dissent and defiance and resistance to military authority in vietnam. and they did so at enormous risk of harassment, demotion, punitive reassignment, physical punishment, court-martial, impressment, and in many stockades, they were subjected to what can only be called torture. and in many as well were subjected to a lifetime, lifetime of bad paper -dishonorable discharges. the other thing to really remember is the great majority of gis who protested the vietnam war, did not enter the military with antiwar politics. it was a working-class movement, by and large. most of them came from communities where there was deep support, at least for the military. and, as with most of the country, a deep trust that the government could be relied upon only to send its troops overseas and support of democracy and freedom and human rights. a belief, in other words, that was broad in the culture, but perhaps especially in many of the communities from which american soldiers were recruited and volunteered, a deep belief in american exceptionalism, at the core of which was the idea that the united states has always been and will remain the greatest force for good in the world, always the good guys in history. when one of the most remarkable things that happens in vietnam, and not just among those who were moved to engage in into our politics in the g.i. movement, but a major shattering of faith, a sense of betrayal, by the government and military, and it's really not too hard to understand why. because what soldiers in vietnam experienced, sometimes within n hours of arrival, is that they were arriving in country not as liberators, to save a people and to defend freedom and democracy. they quickly understood that they were there to support a government that was something like a police state. and the people they were engaged with, particularly in the countryside, did not regard them as liberators, but as hostile invaders and occupiers. and they clearly were not there to protect them from external aggression, but were themselves doing the lion's share of aggression. not saving them, but destroying their villages and, often enough, the civilians who populated them. because, as you know, the chief measure of success in vietnam was not the territory secured, or the people protected, but the amount of bodies amassed that could be labeled enemy killed. the other thing they noticed, quickly, is that the adversaries were far more successful than they were at gaining the fervent dedication and support of the population. that they, in other words, were engaged not just in a bloody military endeavor, but one that ultimately depended entirely on the political support of the people. and that the government they were charged with bolstering and supporting never succeeded in winning the sufficient support of its own population. so let's consider the experience of one veteran. a man named george evans, who served as an air force medic at a hospital in cameron bay in the late 1960's. he grew up in pittsburgh. at the age of six, before and after school, he helped his father deliver blocks of ice to his poor and working-class neighbors. this was in the 1950's and early 1960's, at a time when if you watch television or magazine ads, you would have thought every american owned a shiny new refrigerator. and they in pittsburgh were delivering blocks of ice. so, george was a savvy and streetwise kid. he understood that the american was beyond the grasp of most other people that he knew in his neighborhood. at the same time, -it so in that sense he could be very critical-he knew of life in these neighborhoods. he knew that employers and bosses could screw you and that the future was not sort of set before him as something that would inevitably lead to a better life. but when it comes to the military and foreign policy, as he later came to realize, he was a complete believer. i did not know there was a bad war, he concluded sometime later. he said, i was raised in a family and neighborhood of extreme patriots. my father was the commander of his vfw post and i got to go to the club and hang out with the veterans. i was their little mascot. he especially loved flag day and also veterans day, when they would all go out to the military cemeteries and he would help set the flags and the plaques. imagine how beautiful it looked to a kid to see hundreds of graves in a geometric pattern, all with shining bronze plates and flags waving in the wind. you just can't imagine or exaggerate the pull of the military on kids from neighborhoods like mine. everything you had seen or heard her whole life made it seem inevitable and right. but all of that faith was shattered when he went to vietnam, and he very soon came to realize that the country i was from was not the country i thought it was. there were a number of experiences, but the one that was most decisive and changing his mind was a day when he was working in the hospital and a senior nco said, go clean up the behind the curtain. george was a medic so he opened up the curtain and saw on the table the body of an eight-year-old or nine-year-old vietnamese boy. and his job was to sponge him down. while he was at it, a vietnamese woman burst through the curtain, hysterical in grief, clearly the mother, at least as george perceived it, and began to pound him on the chest in her grief. and then he quickly realized there was another body one curtain over he had to clean, who was the brother, a few years different in age. he did his job and soon after realized these two vietnames boys had been run over by vietnamese boys had been run over by an american military truck driver. worse than that, they had been playing a kind of game, gambling on who could kill a vietnamese kid. and they called it " hockey". this was obviously a key moment in his political development. he said, i felt betrayed and really angry. and that sense of betrayal is pervasive in these accounts. but, you know, just because your faith is shattered, does not mean that you'll come up with a new faith, doesn't necessarily mean you will engage in political action, that you will develop new convictions to try and struggle for a new world. he was a victim of what some psychologists would call moral injury, which is a deep wound to the conscience. a wound to your sense of what's right, to your morality. more technically as defined by the psychiatrist jonathan shea in a book called achilles in vietnam, it is a deep moral sense of betrayal, caused by authorities considered or once considered legitimate. and that certainly characterized george's sense. but then, it also has to -- you have to move beyond that sense of betrayal to have confidence that it's worth moving in a new direction, even if you do not think it may affect change that you are going to act to try to recover from that moral wound by acting on your strongest moral convictions, and in that sense, rebellion and activism can be a way of healing conscience, both in a political sense but also in a psychological and theoretical sense. among the first people to recognize this was the psychiatrist named robert j lifton who back in the early 70's worked with a lot of anti-vietnam veterans and purchase grated participated in rap groups and wrote a book called, home from the war. he observes that these antiwar veterans, although they clearly suffered a deep sense of moral injury, and even guilt, deep guilt about being made complicit in wrongdoing, that they were able to get beyond that, in large part, because of their political activism, to try to reconstitute a morally-centered life. so george evans was one who did move in that direction. at first he did that believing he was acting only by himself. he stopped cutting his hair and shaving and started making antiwar posters that he would put up in the bulletin board in the hospital and then eventually defied a direct order, which got him threatened with a court-martial. "it was as if i had become a different person", he remembered. "i was saying these things i never would have said before. at the time, i thought my small defiance was isolated. i did not realize it was a tiny splintered amid an uprising among soldiers". eventually, he did get a sense he was part of a much bigger movement, but another point i would make is there is in all movements, especially this one, a ripple effect. one act is a rock in the middle of a pond that spreads out. other people hear about it. it can take root, not necessarily right away, but years later. there were many veterans who share george evans's feeling but did not join in then and there. but they felt the same convictions. think of many those in this room know, brian wilson. he wrote a memoir called blood on the tracks. he developed antiwar convictions while in vietnam but didn't get engage in those politics then. but years later in central america sat down on the tracks at the concord naval weapons station in the bay area to block a munitions train from sending its lethal weapons to central america when the u.s. was involved. protests on tracks dated back to the vietnam war. the train would stop. there would be interest. there would be an arrest. the train did not stop. he lost both legs and 19 bones were broken. he managed to lived and is still a lifelong peace activist. there were millions of minds were changed during the 1960's. most americans supported the war in the early 1960's. in 1971 1% of americans thought it was a mistake. 71% thought it was a mistake and a majority thought it was immoral. because we are celebrating in a sense the 50th anniversary of the events of the fall, 1969, i did want to say a bit about a man whose testimony is part of the exhibit. he was interviewed and photographed and has a long, interesting story. i will tell the part that involves the moratoriums of the fall of 1969. david was at a base sometimes known as bearcat, in a small communications occasions unit small commute occasions unitsmall communications unit. one guy came back from r&r in hawaii and shows a big cut out from the new york times. it was the petition that had been signed by 1346 active-duty gi's protesting the war and calling for participation in the moratorium. it included the name of dave cartwright and 30 of his colleagues. they got together and said we should do something here, in vietnam. at the very least we will take our black boot strings and tie them around our arms as a black armband and get the word out to some of these other units. they said, let's not bother the mp's. they will not be affected. so we do not tell them. at that base, the mps, one of the responsibilities was to control the pa system, the sound system. they would turn on recording of reveille in the morning. without telling the mps, ever but he wakes up on this base and the mps had put on recording of jimi hendrix playing the star-spangled banner. as you know, this is that subversive version of the star-spangled banner. then they started driving around the base figuring out how any people are participating. there was 100% participation in his unit and in another unit 100% participation. there was half participation among the engineers because their co threatened them at gunpoint literally, if they do not do their job. so everybody else got the day off except for the engineers. but the engineers got the day off because somebody sabotaged the bulldozers. so that whole base had shut down. there is one other thing that inspired him. that maybe i will sort of, almost close with. chi minh died in 1969, and one thing that changed his mind is he came back from this all-night duty, and the young vietnamese women were hired in most military bases to shine boots and make beds and that kind of thing. "i came in the night patrol, hooch, i noticed the house girls were unusually quiet, and one was crying. i thought for a minute one of the guys had given one of them at bedtime or something, and i kept asking them, what is wrong? finally, " chi minh died." "so what? he is a communist." she knew the whole rap, during the earlier period one-third was for the revolution, one-third did not care, and one-third backed the british. in vietnam, 70% supported him. everyone loved chi minh. she compared the vietnamese war against imperial domination to what had gone against the british. that conversation shocked me. there she was in our barracks and to the revolution. until then, i had not known the vc firsthand. here was this woman who shined our boots and that our laundry, and all of a sudden, i realize she was who we were supposed to be fighting against. i realized right then that the u.s. was on the wrong side of a terrible war." so i take great inspiration from these stories, because i think it does demonstrate that people are capable of changing their mind, and it may yet happen when none of us could predict it. so thank you very much. >> when preparing the exhibit and the book, i also came across the interview and the photograph of dave blalock, thanks to phil short, and i was astounded, because i had worked with dave blalock for a year at the g.i. coffeehouse in anniston, alabama, 1970, and he never told me that story. and the reason he never told me that story is because there were so many incidents while he was there in vietnam of resistance, that to him, it was just another one, but still short and his wife, lois, sat dave blalock down for a four-hour interview, and they were able to elicit some of these stories. one of the advantages of being a person of my age is that over the years, i have gotten to meet so many terrific folks involved in the social justice movement, and i think of three of them, three women, who particularly meant something to me as i was growing up. one of them is someone i worked with in mississippi. fannie lou hamer. a lot of you heard of her. i was fortunate to work with her. there was another one who, there was no way for me to meet, because she was in vietnam and then in paris. and i was in mississippi, new york, alabama, i was in massachusetts, and that is madame bin, who was a great hero of mine, and fortunately, three years ago, when i went to vietnam and received the assignment to make this exhibit, and turn it into a book, i was able to photograph her, a portrait, part of a series i had been doing. there is a third woman who meant so much to me during the 1960's and 1970's, and i always regretted never having met her, and that is cora weiss. i had something to do with inviting her here today, we've talked a lot on the phone in the past couple of months, and i am so pleased that cora is here. cora was the only woman among the eighth national organizers of the moratorium demonstrations of 50 years ago. cora was one of the founders of the women's right for peace. cora was a long time supporter of the g.i. antiwar movement. cora has a special place in the history against the war of having set up a women to women organization. she might tell you about it, if we are lucky. between women in the u.s. and women in vietnam that led to the exchanges of mail and information between folks here and their families, the p.o.w.'s, and then eventually brought three of them back to the united states. cora is now the president of the hague appeal for peace. cora is indefatigable. am i saying it at all correct? amazing. and here she is. thank you. >> you should never believe a word you hear. hi everyone. i am sorry to come between you and lunch. it won't bend. sorry about that. >> it will bend to our will. >> so it has been 50 years and how many wars ago. who here is a veteran of any war? and there have been quite a few. veterans? well, i am glad you are here. the new logo in the moratorium had far more in common than in conflict. first, it was m and m. we each had four cochairs, and each had one woman. marge at the moratorium and me. and there were only four women of the 12 speakers on november 15. that is a gender point that i will leave with you. that sometimes never has changed. but there are other similarities. a person asked about using moral values. we had a lot of moral people. david and sam brown went to theological seminaries. marge went to see a convent with nuns. stuart meachum was a devout quaker. even dave studied at union theological seminary. and cochair of the correctness got king mobilization demonstration. the first mobilization was largely a project of aj musty, who was a minister who called for a just and warless society. but if you ask anyone who went to either or both october 15 and november 15, they would just say about both of them, "we were calling for an end to the war in vietnam and ignored the differences." with one exception. the mostly men of the new mobe were considerably older than the mostly men of the moratorium. the reason it was called the new lobe in 1969 was to distinguish itself from the old mode of 1966 by becoming broader and less radical, and we pledged ourselves to legal and nonviolent tactics. at the time it was called the largest peace march of the organization, twice the size of the moratorium, which had a police count of 2500. the much younger people today who are appealing for ways to reduce the climate crisis out number us many times over. thank you to emails, social media, and greta thuneberg. david hawk, a moratorium cochair, was on the steering committee of the new mode. but here is the difference the moratorium did not get tear gassed. how many people were at november 15? so you know about that. that's a lot of people. some who did not distinguish between new mobe and moratorium were prisoners of war in hanoi at prison. commander eugene was the commanding officer of the navy fighter squadron when he was shot down and captured. he listened to world news and knew all about the moratorium days against the war in vietnam. he was referring to both october and november 15. even the professor appy referred to the moratorium's. so it was a common expression. just as the two events were called moratorium days, so worthy activities of sane, which called for the abolition of nukes, and the freeze, which is just that, freeze but not abolishing nuclear weapons, a freeze. is david here? you can tell david had referred to him. david was the executive director of sane. so the huge disagreements, the fighting, the arguing among some of the adherence to either group meant nothing to the majority of the demonstrators. you were in the moratorium whether it was october or november, and you were in the freeze whether you were for abolition or not. who here knows that george washington university will receive $12.5 million over five years for its stewardship of the nation's nuclear stockpiles? part of the 50 universities getting money for nuclear weapons. we cannot forget about that. mobilizing van depended on grassroots organizing. no emailed, no social media, no cell phones our telephones were not called land lines. we did not go around doing this. they were easy to tap. i remember once telling frank siebert of the state department to tell his guys to stop bugging, wiretapping or phones. he said it wasn't the state, it was the pentagon or one of the intelligence agencies, thereby guaranteeing, confirming that indeed, we were being tapped. my memory of 1969 is also fixed on the vietnamese movement for both north and south vietnam who were invited to canada by the voice for women. women's strike for peace brought a contingent to meet the enemy. they could not come into our country, of course. we got to meet a journalist, who later became a diplomat at the u.n. we met on july 4, our most patriotic holiday, at a farm just over the border. beautiful day, licking ice cream cones together. we talked about our families, our lives. we became very good friends. and before we parted, she invited me to put together a group of three women and come to vietnam. it was july. i told her we couldn't do a thing until after the november 15 new mobe antiwar demonstration, and on november 16, we started to plan. madeleine douglas from california, taylor, from strike for peace from philadelphia, and i got ready to leave children and husbands. no one mentioned the bombing. stewart meachum, dick fernandez, richard faulk and i met to discuss how to stop nixon from using the capture pilots as a pretext for perpetuating the war. when americans flew over the north, they bombed villages and rice paddies them everything. they were also shot down, and the pilots who parachuted were captured and taken prisoner. the nixon administration claimed, with possibly good reason, that the pilots were being tortured, and of course, in war, that's always a possibility, and nixon wouldn't stop the bombing until the vietnamese stopped the torture and released the men. of course, if they stopped to the bombing, they wouldn't have prisoners of war. families of the missing men, missing because only a few new who was dead or alive, joined the nexen campaign. stuart meachum came up with a suggestion that since nearly all families had no idea if their pilot sons, fathers, or husbands had been captured, killed, or were missing in action, we should offer to find out by letting them write a letter once a month and receive a letter from home in return. we created the committee of liaison with families of soldiers detained in north vietnam. it was called coliafam for short. we brought our proposal the women -- vietnam, the closest thing to an organization in the country, so we would not be arrested under the logan act. we brought hands full of letters from families to be distributed to those who were pilot prisoners, and because of the news m and m, moratorium and mobilization demonstrations, we were received with considerable kudos. upon our departure, 10 days later, we were handed 138 letters from pilots, from p.o.w.'s. for many, it would be the first time that they found out their family was alive. we also brought the news that men could write. everybody was a man. i mean, they were only men at the time. there was no gender balance in the military, and we did not ask for it. we also brought the news that the men could write one letter a month and receive a letter of reply a month, and i asked if the content and the frequency of them getting a package approved, and they were. that was a successful civil society initiative, which embarrassed our government. we, not the government, found out who was alive in a vietnamese prison camp by the simple humor and act of exchanging mail. we're told it was a first in the history of warfare. the mail exchange depended on sending three americans every month during the remainder of the war to hanoi, some to laos, with mail and carrying mail back. dick fernandez, who is here today, was one of the mail carriers and a member of the board of liaisons. one of the pilots who benefited from this hand delivered mail delivery service was wilbur, and commander wilbur's message, delivered on thanksgiving day, a copy of which i have copied or listened, tapped by the cia, so thank you, cia, for this. commander wilbur's message, delivered on thanksgiving day, 1969, said, "i thank you for your patriotic efforts on behalf of peace and happiness. the vietnam moratorium day proved that the people in my homeland are still united, and the subject is the immediate restoration of peace in viet nam. i am grateful to tom wilbur for the writing of a book about american military detainees in viet nam from 1964 to 1973. he would be with us today but for a bad back." that unique mail exchange arrangement was carried out by three american women with the women's organization of the "enemy state". in august of 1972, dave bellinger and i were called to come to paris and were told the vietnamese wanted to make a peace gesture, which -- and would we go to hanoi and bring home three detained pilots? with the mother and wife of two, the wife and parents of the third, were persuaded by the military not to have anything to do with us, dave dellinger, richard faulk, oga charles, the mother of another, and i, invited peter arnett of the associated press and took off for hanoi. read about it in the "waging peace" book, which i recommend. i tell that story because, again, of the importance of civil society in making peace during conflict. actually, it was jody williams, the nobel laureate, who called civil society "the third world power." people move policy, mere mortal people make change. look at the civil society uprisings around the world today that all started as nonviolent calls for democracy, economic decency, and against corruption. the violence that is happening is because of repressive measures by police, but i maintain there is a conscience in this world, and it is on its feet. so how is mobilizing in 1969 different from today? a lot of new communication technology has two consequences or results. on the one hand, you can reach tens of thousands, maybe millions of people at the same time, with the same message. on the other hand, you leave out a lot of folks over 70. well, maybe over 85. >> we don't tweet. following the inauguration of the current occupant of the white house, we saw the emergencies of the siloization of social issues. first, there was a huge women's march, which was terrific, and had the diversity of people and issues. but then we got to black lives matter, a call for gun control, the march on immigration, all the marches i think on the saturdays of that year were a single issue. but we also learned new language. i mean, is that the first time i heard the word "binary"? i think. and latinx, latinx, i am told by my grandson. then we found that mostly young people mobilized around one existential threat against to the future of humanity and the planet, the climate crisis. there is no doubt that climate has an impact and continues at a faster speed to destroy lives in mother earth, but i only wish that everyone can see that it is not the only existential threat. we are also threatened by nuclear weapons, and if we understand the climate and nukes are apocalyptic twins, which i think bob clifton also point, as you referred to him before, and we should educate ourselves about these both of these threats, so that we will do more to have a future for everyone. the recipe for a good life has many ingredients. so, too, does the recipe for a safe, sane, and secure future. so i think we need a more holistic view of what makes for peace. we need more ways to continue to mobilize, not rely only on social media. we need to integrate peace education, which is teaching for and about human rights, equality, development, sustainable development, traditional these practices, and climate protection into the curriculum of all schools from pre-k through university. we need to prepare students to run for office. from school boards to every level of governance. we need to protect and improve the only world government we have, the united nations. we need to think and behave multilaterally. when he to become multilingual. we need to continue to do everything you're already doing, from producing incarceration, increasing mental health, raising the minimum wage, reducing the military budget, making suffered universal, and so much more. i dream, and nothing happens unless first a dream, said stephen sondheim. i dream that we will one day live in a nuclear-freelance, of solar power, wind power, and people power, and enjoy a quality of all kinds, decency, justice, and peace. and as our poet, eve merriam, has writen, our great-great-granddaughter will get up and ask, "mommy, what is war? " (applause) hello. we have now an
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