Appendix T
DATE: Circa 1968
FROM: Recent Highschool Graduate
TO: Local Draft Board
SUBJECT: My Response To Your Induction Notice
Gentlemen;
After some Heavy Duty soulsearching and having read every book I could get my hands on1 about the History of French Indo-China, Communism, Conventional & Guerrilla Warfare, National Liberation Movements, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, Ngo Dinh Diem, Nguyen Van Thieu, the Geneva Accords of 1954, the Nuremburg Trials and any other subjects related (no matter how remotely) to the socalled "armed conflict" now raging between us and the Vietnamese I've come to the following conclusions:
1. General Douglas MacArthur hit the nail squarely on its head when he warned America to "Never get itself involved fighting a land war in Asia."
2. Even assuming (which, based on my analysis of the outcome I personally can't bring myself to do) our cause in the Korean conflict was a noble one, the result we attained by dividing that peninsula between two dictatorial regimes was at best the hollowest of "victories" and at worst a warning the Gunboat Diplomacy used for three centuries to "persuade" the average Oriental he is racially inferior to all white men was rapidly running out of steam.2
3. There are many causes for this quantum change in the colonial scheme of things by which we and the Europeans kept the "Yellow Peril" of Asiatic aspirations for global supremacy from spoiling our own (for the most part AngloSaxon) Manifest Destiny to rule the world. But, whether we like it or not, the principle reason why the Vietnamese have become a fly in the State Department's foreign policy ointment (or pain in the Pentagon's backside) is this: While Japan lost WWII it succeeded in demonstrating at Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Saigon and Java that the American, British, French and Dutch Imperial Tigers were in fact made from the flimsiest kind of paper.3
4. On a more down-to-earth level one need only glance at a map of the Pacific Ocean to see that logistically we are making the same mistake in Vietnam Napoleon made on his Triumphant March to (and Ignominious Retreat from)the Gates of Moscow, Hitler made at Stalingrad, the Italians made in Eritrea and, what should be particularly relevant for us, the British High Command made from that first skirmish at Lexington to their humiliating surrender at Yorktown. Is it really necessary for me, a humble highschool graduate, to point out the obvious truth that: All our long range supply capabilities notwithstanding; the proximity of China and the demonstrated capacity of the Vietnamese to move massive quantities of war materiels on bicycles, rickshaws and bamboo poles (not to mention their heads, shoulders, backs--and hands & knees if necessary) means we haven't a hope in hell of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish quagmire short of running up the white flag or "nuking the goddammed gooks into oblivion?"
5. If any additional evidence were needed to prove MacArthur's No Land War In Asia Rule, the fate of those 15,000 French Legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu couldn't be more persuasive--and/or ominous!4
6. By conspiring with the Saigon regime to prevent the democratic elections in 1956 by which, for the first time in their 2,200-year history, the Vietnamese could freely decide their own political fate5 the United States not only violated the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accord it had signed (or whose terms it at least "guaranteed") with the USSR and PRC--it betrayed the very principle (one Vietnamese one vote) for which young men like me are now being "asked" to risk our lives and limbs.
7. A legal issue of even graver implications arises from the means by which we are waging this most morally dubious of all the wars America has ever fought, namely: Do the atrocities we are (systematically or otherwise) committing in Vietnam constitute those "crimes against humanity" outlawed by the Nuremburg Tribunal? In my (albeit biased) judgment such practices as defoliation, carpetbombing, search & destroy missions, indiscriminate hootchburning, and gunpoint (or worse) interrogations are no less criminal in nature (if not quantitatively) than those carried out by the Wafen-SS and/or Wehrmacht in "dutifully executing orders" issued by what even the most jar-headed of Nazi Germany's General Staffers should have recognized was a Commander-in-Chief who had clearly crossed the line separating Sherman's doctrine of Total War from a policy of statesponsored genocide. And, as ludicrous as it might seem at first to compare our most altruistic of all nations with Hitler's Third Reich, before WWII would anyone have believed the Germany of Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, etc. was capable of doing what it did at Babi-yar, Auschwitz, Belsen-Bergen, Treblinka, etc.?
IN CONCLUSION, and for the facts, reasons & arguments set forth above, I must refuse to obey what I believe is your illegal, immoral and intellectually bankrupt Notice for me to Appear For Induction Into The Armed Forces Of The United States. By so doing I fully appreciate the consequences resulting from what is technically a violation of the Selective Service Act. And, like any other average American adolescent, while I would prefer to go on pursuing that happiness the Declaration of Independence talks about; in the noble tradition of our Founding Fathers I would rather sacrifice myself on the Altar of Liberty right here at home than do so in the rice paddies of some foreign land for a cause that dishonors the flag for which so many brave men have died.
Not that I'm entirely without some curiosity over how a jury of my peers would judge the "radical" ideas I have expressed in this letter when they are refined and articulated by what I expect will be a defense team comprised of America's most celebrated advocates in the fields of constitutional law, civil liberties, and the universal right of every man (or boy!) to resist the tyranny of a corrupt government no matter how unpopular his case might (at first) appear to be.
P. S.
In the event I am found guilty the prospect of doing time doesn't disturb me. A few years spent in some Federal penitentiary would allow me to continue this process of postgraduate selfeducation which, ironically, I might never have begun had it not been for the Vietnam war.
And, based on what little research I've already done on the autodidactical accomplishments of such celebrated "jail birds" as the Marquis de Sade, Henry Thoreau, Rosa Luxemburg, Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Malcom X, Mohandas Ghandhi, Vincent van Gogh (asylumized), Albert Speer and Anne Frank (fugitivized) my incarceration could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me and/or--who knows--an America in desperate need of some help in regaining the innocence it is losing in Vietnam?
_________________________
1Despite the shortage of "scholarly" research materials in my school and public libraries I was able to find a surprising amount of information relevant to this otherwise "arcane" topic by reading between the lines of what few articles I did find that shed a little light on this "nasty little war" no one seems very eager to discuss.
2 The fabric of Old World imperialism had already begun to unravel when we cut our ties with England in 1776. Nevertheless, as with that other "venerable institution," slavery, it took a long time for the truth to sink in that colonies cost more to keep than their "cheap" labor and raw materials are worth.
3 Which, according to Grolier's Encyclopedia is an "invention...attributed to a Chinese court official, Cai Lun, in about AD 105, although the Chinese had probably made paper from silk fibers even earlier. Cai Lun, however, was the first to succeed in making a paper from vegetable fibers--tree bark, rags, old fish netting. The art of making paper was kept secret for 500 years; the Japanese acquired it...in the 7th century and in 770 produced the first mass publication, a block-printed Buddhist prayer paper, of which 1,000,000 were printed." [the underlining is mine]
4 Contrary to what Gen. de la Croix de Castries says when defending his decision not to attempt a break out from the Viet Minh stranglehold on Dien Bien Phu most historians agree his name will be linked forever with that of George Armstrong Custer and Friedrich von Paulus for having been so completely outmaneuvered (and -smarted) by a numerically superior but unsophisticated force of "hostile aborigines." It remains to be seen whether Generals Westmoreland and Abrams will add their names to such a less-than-illustrious list.
5 The choice before them was to remain a divided country or reunify under the presidency of either Ho Chi Minh or Ngo Dinh Diem. Since the result of such an election would have been a resounding victory for unification, communism and Ho, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, Alan Dulles, manufactured (not unlike Johnson and his did in the Tonkin Gulf Affair#) an excuse for unilaterally abrogating the "free and fair" election provisions of the 1954 Geneva Accord.
___________________
#In the debate over the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (which passed by a vote of 98-2!) Senators Gruening and Morse raised (what should have been) some disturbing questions about the socalled "facts" surrounding the "alleged" Vietnamese attack on our destroyers. If the Gruening/Morse suspicions turn out to be justified all of the actions (including my induction notice) flowing from that Congressional Resolution will become constitutionally null & void.