Project Reflection:
This interview was a real shock to me, mostly because of our veteran, Bernard, and his views on war. In all honesty, when we were setting up on the day of the interview, all I could think about was how my group and I were going to be sitting in the room with him, listening to a bunch of anti-war stories. He’d tell us about how horrible war was and how we should never go into war because of its scarring effects. But Bernard started talking about his patriotic duty to his country, and how he felt that we shouldn’t have left Vietnam like we did, because we promised them our help. He made it clear that he wasn’t as heavily involved in field work and fighting as many others, and that it may have had something to do with his perspectives, but said that he would do it again if that’s what needed to be done. This was a very startling and new thought to me, a veteran actually being ok with going back to war. Through these words I spent the next several days really considering how I’ve been socialized to be anti-war and how my views might not be as original as I would have expected. It truly opened me up to a new perspective on war that I needed in order to view war fairly.
The most interesting thing that I learned in the veteran interview is about Bernard’s views on anti-war protesters. He of how he felt that they probably ended the war sooner. He didn’t like it though, how we left them when we said we would help them. He thought that we should have carried out our promise, being America. Although we may have had difficulties with support towards the latter part of the war, we should have finished what we had started.
The interview can be used in several ways. It can be used as a documentation, to be preserved for future generations. It can also be used as an argument for a specific side or point of view in a debate in the merits of war. As a historian though, I can analyze it and study his points so that I can better understand them. If I can better understand then I can develop my own thoughts and perceptions more fully. This leads to more questions and more answers which will potentially lead to more growth. Questions open a door to answers and ideas that we would have never even considered before and allow us to grow personally in many ways.
I believe that the most valuable parts of the project were the interview itself and the group work involved. The interview was very valuable because this way others can understand what he felt, and maybe they’ll feel the epiphany that I felt when I heard what he had to say about war. It makes you think and challenges your beliefs, for better or worse which helps strengthen your perspective overall, whether supporting one that you already had or challenging that belief so that you can find facts to support what you believe. The group work was also very valuable though. The others in my team, Kaylee and Cameron tease each other often so I believe that there was growth there. Also, no matter that the circumstances, working with others is a valuable skill that always needs working on and I believe it definitely helped myself as well.
While it is a publically accepted truth that the August 2nd attack on the U.S.S. Maddox was unprovoked, there are still many gaps that this explanation fails to fill: things like the reason why we went to war and why a country would attack one so much larger than itself without reason. I believe that these gaps can be filled though if we look at it from a different perspective: that we did provoke the attack through covert militarized operations.
One of the most widely spread convictions about the Gulf of Tonkin incident is that the U.S.S. Maddox was legally resting in those waters when a Vietnamese vessel sailed out and fired torpedoes at them. Days later, it was also claimed that the U.S.S. Turner Joy was also attacked. “Whereas naval units of the Communist regime in Vietnam, in violation of the principles of the UN and of international law, have deliberately and repeatedly attacked US naval vessels lawfully present in international waters…” (Document 1) These are the words of Congress on August 7, 1964, just five days after the first attack. These are the words that they used to allow President Johnson to increase our involvement with Vietnam. They announced this to the public and so the public had no choice but to believe them or form their own speculations that may never be proven or disproven. Similarly, this was announced by President Johnson: “We have learned at a terrible and brutal cost that retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace… Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. This then, my fellow Americans, is why we are in Viet-Nam.” (Document 5) These are very good reasons, supported by the attacks on the gulf. However, reading closer, it is found that the date reads July 28, 1965, almost an entire year after the attacks. People were wondering why we had gone to war and it took them this long to get out a speech about why we were going to war. Yet if the attacks really were unprovoked, then they shouldn’t have had to make these announcements, or rally support from the people. Only if they didn’t want to spread the story much or there was untruth to it would they still need this explanation.
We rushed immediately into war following those attacks without thinking and needed a reason once we had. An unprovoked attack would be a very good reason. However, people continued to wonder. Shortly after the attack, Elie Able, an NBC-TV journalist, held an interview with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. This was Dean’s answer when asked what explanation he could find for the unprovoked attack: “Answer (Dean Rusk): Well I haven’t been able, quite frankly, to come to a fully satisfactory explanation… it’s very difficult to enter into each other’s minds across that great ideological gulf. I can’t come up with a rational explanation of it.” (Document 2) He states himself that there would be absolutely no satisfactory answer for an unprovoked attack on the Maddox. There is no reason why one country should attack another without reason, let alone a smaller country attacking a superpower country that was much larger than itself. Most governments would view that course of action as near suicide for them unless the felt that they had very strong countries backing them up. Even still though, there was no reason that the public official could find or was willing to admit for them to attack.
“LBJ: There have been some covert operations in that area that we have been carrying on- blowing up some bridges and things of that kind, roads and so forth. So I imagine they wanted to put a stop to it. So they... fired and we responded immediately with five-inch [artillery shells] from the destroyer and with planes overhead…What happened was we’ve been playing around up there and they came out, gave us a warning, and we knocked the h*** out of them.” (Document 3) These are the words of President Johnson as he talked to Robert Anderson (a former Secretary of the Treasury), the day after the attack and a day before the White House began publically announcing that the attack was, in fact, unprovoked. If nothing else convinces, this does. This is very separate from that story and is all the more convincing when the speaker and the time that these words were spoken are taken into consideration. This is the story that fills in the gaps. If it was announced publically that the retaliation the US took against Vietnam was over-the-top, there would be no support for a war movement. Although later reasons for war were found, like stopping the communist spread to other countries, these were the first words spoken about the incident, and must bear further speculation, by both historians and the public itself now that we’ve had time to look back and reflect upon that war.
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