My
Pentagon Regret
James Carroll
May 28, 2019
Tom Dispatch; Common Dreams
Earlier this month, the USS Abraham
Lincoln carrier strike group -- the massive aircraft carrier itself
with its dozens of warplanes and thousands of sailors and marines, a guided
missile cruiser, and four destroyers -- suddenly began to make its
way from the Mediterranean Sea into the Persian Gulf, heading for the
waters off Iran. Pentagon sources spoke of ominous
but unspecified threats. The U.S. military moved into a showy state
of readiness, with reports that a force of up to 120,000
troops might be mobilized and sent to the Middle East for a possible
future war with Iran.
In the Trump era, such American saber
rattling, especially by hyper-hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton,
feels so unnervingly routine that it might not have even made me sit up. Then I
read that the latest Middle East deployment included a task force of -- god
save us from memory! -- B-52s, the massive strategic bombers dating from
the 1950s that wreaked such havoc in the first great war of my
adulthood: Vietnam.
Even as that now-ancient national trauma
popped back into my mind, I chastised myself. Not every provocative U.S. naval
deployment in sketchy waters off some distant coast is a set-up for
a replay of the Gulf of Tonkin, that war-igniting North Vietnamese
“attack” on U.S. destroyers that never was. I reminded myself as well that just
because Bolton is sounding the alarm doesn’t mean his counterparts in Tehran
are harmless or that Donald Trump, who years ago warned against a
president launching an attack on Iran to win a future election, would be
willing to go there. Why, oh why, I kept asking myself, won’t that antiwar
trick knee of mine stop jerking?
The Ghost Bomber Flies Again, or 12
Drummers Drumming
But B-52s? I just couldn’t get them out of
my mind. How could those aged monsters with their massive swept-wings, eight
pylon-mounted engines, and 70,000-pound payloads of bombs still be flying?
B-52s were brought into service in the 1950s
as the emissaries of an orgasmic,
potentially civilization-destroying nuclear assault against hundreds
of cities in the Soviet Union and communist China. Thank god, it never came to
that, but then the B-52 was reconfigured as the ultimate instrument of carpet-bombing
in Vietnam, leveling vast numbers of mile-square “target boxes” across that
land. Its crowning performance, however, didn’t come until near that war’s end:
the “Christmas bombing” of 1972. From December 13th to December 29th, over the
mythic 12 days of Christmas, like so many drummers drumming, wave after wave of
those strategic bombers were sent against previously off-limit
targets in and around the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. It
would prove to be the biggest heavy bomber assault since World War II.
Then an antiwar activist and a priest, I was
among those who, as soon as we heard about the bombing campaign, assumed our
country was engaged in a war crime of the first order -- a modern Guernica, as
the French newspaper Le Monde put it. Events would prove us
right and, yes, the B-52 has haunted me ever since. That’s why the news of its
latest provocative deployment against Iran takes me back across the years to a
set of as-yet-unreckoned-with mistakes -- ones that are distinctly the property
of the Pentagon, but also, given the U.S. wars that followed, the American
people. That’s why, as recent events began to unfold, I found myself returning
to what I still consider my own mistake rooted in the absurdity of that distant
moment almost half a century ago, one that I suddenly felt a need to revisit.
The 12 Days of Christmas
The story begins with that Christmas
bombing. Here’s my best recollection of what happened. Less than two months
before it began, just ahead of the presidential election of 1972, Richard
Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, announced that, when it
came to the Vietnam War, “peace is at hand.” In that way, he gave his
president, if not a partridge in a pear tree, then at least the means to
smother Democratic antiwar presidential candidate George McGovern that
November. And a Washington-Hanoi peace accord had indeed been agreed to in
Paris in October only to break down in December. At that time, the reelected
president ordered the most savage bombing campaign of an already savage war,
dispatching more than 100 B-52s to drop high explosives on, among so much else,
the Bach Mai Hospital in the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. Once
again, civilians were being killed by American flyers.
At that point in the war, as a member of the
Catholic wing of the peace movement, I had been an organizer of numerous
antiwar demonstrations and a participant in a handful of civil disobedience
“actions,” but something in me snapped on first hearing news of that barbarous
burst of yuletide violence. I experienced a jolting urge to escalate myself and
immediately thought of a good friend in Washington, another Catholic antiwar
organizer and priest, as firmly committed to nonviolence as I was but less in
the grip of timidity. He, too, was enraged by the Christmas bombing. “Let’s do
something about it,” he said.
The week before Christmas, I travelled from
Boston to Washington to join him in shaping a response. By the time I got
there, he had already gathered a few other activists, most of whom I knew. I
trusted them. We were all old hands at antiwar protests (with small-potato
arrest records to show for it). None of us, however, had engaged in the serious
kinds of law breaking that had sent other Catholic pacifist-protesters off
for significant prison terms. Yet all of us were appalled by the ongoing
Christmas bombing, which, for us, felt like a new kind of draft notice.
Our collective urge seemed clear enough:
Stop the war! Shut down the Pentagon! The question was: How? Inspired by a
plain-spoken fellow whose father had been a teamster and who had
himself been a trucker, we were soon hunched over maps of the roadways ringing
the Pentagon. A patchwork of clover leafs and ramps brought traffic into its
two massive parking lots that accommodated almost all of the 20,000 workers who
daily filed into the largest office building in the world. Its five sides
enclosed five concentric rings, 17 miles of corridors. Because one of its sides
fronted on Arlington National Cemetery and another on the Potomac River, automobile
traffic generally flowed in from just two main arteries. Most of those
thousands of vehicles passed, morning and night, through a single complex
interchange, “the mixing bowl.” A pair of Y-shaped crossings then funneled
vehicles into the parking lots, each with its own choke point.
Shut down the Pentagon? Here perhaps was a
way to do it: somehow block the traffic at one or more of those congestion
points at the height of the morning rush hour and so stop its workforce,
however briefly, from showing up to run the American war machine.
A Plunge into the Absurd, or 10 Lords
A-Leaping
I recall feeling like I’d been dropped into
another reality as I listened to my co-conspirators improvise strategies for
blocking those critical roadways, grand designs that seemed so much less
cockamamie once our trucker chum took charge. He had determined that I-95, the
highway adjacent to the Pentagon, was under construction. Large trucks were
already ubiquitous in the area. His idea: we would join them and who would even
notice? In short order, we had a plan. He still possessed his “CDL” -- a
commercial driver’s license -- which would allow him to rent a set of dump
trucks with which we could then deposit something on the highway, shutting
things down in the most literal way possible.
It tells you everything about that moment
that his plan left us effervescent, even though in any other time it would have
seemed imprudent at best and lacking even a modicum of common sense at worst. I
then returned to Boston where, within hours, the fantastic unreality, the folly
of that plan seemed, to my relief, obvious. No way would it go forward.
As the days passed though and the bombing
continued, my Washington-based conspirators began working all too seriously to
make it real. Soon, a half-dozen rental dump trucks had indeed been lined up; a
demolition contractor, happy to avoid landfill fees, had agreed to load them
with concrete debris; and a date had already been set -- the last week of
January -- for six teams of us to do practice runs. January 30th was then
settled on as D (for “Dump”) Day.
The plan: six dump trucks, each manned by a
pair of protesters wearing hard hats and safety vests, would simultaneously
roar up to pre-arranged sites. At a synchronized stroke of the clock, the “flag
man” would leap out to halt oncoming vehicles at a safe distance, while the
driver would flip the tailgate release, raise the bed, and offload several tons
of concrete chunks and rubble onto the two key choke-points of the mixing bowl
-- enough, that is, to block the entrance ramps to those immense Pentagon
parking lots. We would then leap back in the trucks and speed away.
After making a beeline back to the rental
lot and leaving the trucks, we would rendezvous at the Jefferson Memorial.
There, we would await the police. A friendly lawyer had already warned us that
we could be charged with anything from a misdemeanor civil infraction --
blockage of a public passageway -- to (gulp) criminal conspiracy to commit
sabotage in a time of war. The police would know to come for us because we
would have scattered copies of our manifesto around the rubble piles and it
would include the time and place of our projected surrender. A call would also
be made to the Washington Post, explaining that we were the ones
who had created the massive traffic jam then spreading across northern
Virginia. The manifesto was to be headlined “Stop the Bombing!” All well and
good until, that December 29th, the Christmas bombing stopped. But that didn’t
stop us: we would simply headline the manifesto, “Stop the war!”
By the time I was briefed on the latest
iteration of the plan by phone, 11 others had already agreed to take part. I
swallowed hard, took a deep breath, cleared my calendar for the last week of
January, and said I was in.
Peace with Honor?
But events outran us. By mid-January, peace
talks had resumed in Paris between Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. On
January 23rd, President Nixon went on television to announce that a
peace deal had been agreed to. A ceasefire was to take effect at once and U.S.
combat operations halted. North Vietnam recognized the legitimacy of the South
Vietnamese government in Saigon. That government, in turn, accepted zones of
communist control in the south. American prisoners were to be released. The
Nixon administration claimed the Christmas bombing -- those days of drummers
drumming -- had forced the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table, a
case of ends justifying means if ever there was one.
In fact, however, that ceasefire would not
hold. Savage fighting would continue for two more years until the Communists
finally overran Saigon in April 1975. Still, the U.S. would no longer be a
direct combatant. Vietnamese suffering would, of course, continue. For
Americans, however, it would prove to be the ultimate
not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper ending. Still, an ending it was.
I recall that moment not as one of joy but
of profound relief that the American war was finally over. But I must admit as
well that, for me, there was also a sense of deliverance from the coming action
at the Pentagon. Only with this turn in the story could I acknowledge to myself
the depth of dread into which the prospect of our quixotic plan of
faux-sabotage had plunged me.
After watching Nixon’s peace announcement on
television, I called my buddy in Washington and he promptly shocked me to the
core. He assured me that the president was, as ever, obviously lying. The deal
would never hold. The U.S. would soon gin up its war machine again. “Don’t be a
sucker, Jim,” he insisted. And, of course, our dump-demo at the Pentagon was to
take place as planned. In fact, the dummy runs with the trucks were about to
start. Nonplussed, I pushed back. “Our demand,” I insisted, “is to stop the
war. How can we go through with this when that’s exactly what they’ve done?”
But he wasn’t having it and promptly put his
ace on the table. “You signed up, Jim!” he said.
In the end, only three of the original dozen
plotters, including that one-time trucker, saw the thing through. The rest of
us dropped out and, though concrete rubble was indeed dumped on an access road
to the Pentagon, there was but one measly truckload of it left at a potential
chokepoint around 7:30 that D-Day morning, a pile far too small to block even
that one road. Other drivers simply swung around it, hurling curses at what
they took to be an incompetent construction crew. The few manifesto-flyers
strewn about were quickly lost in the wind.
When, having returned the truck to the
rental lot, the three would-be saboteurs called the Washington Post and
showed up at the Jefferson Memorial ready to be arrested (or interviewed),
neither police nor reporters appeared. Not even the morning radio traffic
report mentioned anything out of the ordinary around the Pentagon. When my
friend went back to the scene of the crime that afternoon, as he later told me,
all evidence had already been swept away.
To my surprise, I was left feeling guilty
and sad -- and so finally acknowledged the obvious to myself, though not to
him: the entire project had been ridiculous from the get-go, Mahatma Gandhi
meets the Keystone Kops. And doing it after the American war ended would only
have emphasized the absurdity of it all (had anyone noticed). That such a mad
action was conceived during the penultimate madness of those grim Christmas
bombing days laid bare the madness with which, by then, that war had infected
us all.
The War That Began With a Lie Ended With
a Lie
In reality, the terms Hanoi agreed to that
January were identical to those it had accepted in Paris in October (except for
certain sticking points on which the Americans, not the North Vietnamese, gave
way). As American negotiator John Negroponte later reportedly put it, we
bombed them “into accepting our concessions.”
If the Christmas bombing had any purpose at
all, it was, by means of such a brutal display, to pressure U.S. ally and South
Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu into accepting a peace treaty he had not
been party to. In other words, the American war in Vietnam, which had begun
with a lie, was now ending with a lie. President Nixon
had promised “peace with honor.” Now, the Paris agreement was going
to deliver a final betrayal of the country’s South Vietnamese allies, who would
soon enough be crushed.
In the end, however, the Christmas bombing’s
true purpose wasn’t to change the North or even convince Thieu to sanction the
deal. It was simply to deliver 12 days of unprecedented violence, a pure spasm
of hate and vengeance, a summary act of mass murder directed at an enemy that
had refused to be defeated -- simply because it refused to be defeated.
As I recall all of this now, so many decades
later, feelings of guilt and sadness swamp me once again, especially as, in the
wake of that Christmas-tide spasm of bombing, my friendship with my Washington
buddy would never be the same again.
The Last Antiwar Action, à la Doonesbury
If the Christmas bombing was the last direct
American military action of the Vietnam War, it is likely that the overlooked
single rubble-dump on that road near the Pentagon was the final antiwar protest
of that era. And if its memory haunts me, it’s undoubtedly because I can
finally see that I was wrong not to join that foolish act of fake sabotage.
After so many years of mass antiwar actions that were truly meaningful, even
those six dump trucks -- those six geese a-laying their concrete debris on
those access roads that morning -- would undoubtedly have had little more
impact than that one pathetic dump did. Had the Christmas bombings been
ongoing, the Pentagon engine of violence, generally on a kind of autopilot in
those years, would surely have continued to purr along. The last anti-war
action, if noticed at all, would, at best, have been laughed at. If the Washington
Post had taken notice, it would have been in Doonesbury.
The difference would have been in me. I
would have actively refused to accept at face value the Vietnam War’s last lie:
that those B-52s had brought home a victory of any kind. If I feel
differently now, it’s because of the nearly 50 years that have passed since
that moment, the equivalent of a cumulative song whose lyrics would have been
one lie a-laying after another: that, even with the Soviet Union gone, the U.S.
still needed a hair-trigger nuclear arsenal; that NATO must expand, encroaching
on Russia; that the threat of terror after 9/11 was existential and endless;
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or even a program to produce them);
that there’s no alternative to a new Cold War with China; and most recently,
that the Iranians, thanks to their threatening actions, are bringing us to the
edge of another incipient conflict.
To engage in a futile act of war protest, as
my friend did then, was still to have refused to be fooled. It was to have done
something. As he steered a lumbering dump truck into that Pentagon mixing bowl,
I and countless others like me, whether out of hope, fear, or mere exhaustion,
were busy detaching ourselves from an unfinished business, an unfinished duty:
to actively resist the unjust violence being perpetrated or threatened in our
names (and not just in Vietnam either).
During these last 18 years of forever
war across significant parts of the planet, such detachment has, in fact,
been a striking mark of American life, while policies conceived in, and pursued
from, the Pentagon have again and again unleashed havoc -- both in an
increasingly rubble-strewn Greater Middle East (and North
Africa) and in a Europe increasingly overrun by the desperate
refugees from our wars. As American military leaders have failed even
to come close to winning those wars (mission accomplished!), our politicians,
right to left, have similarly failed to stop them -- have, in fact, often only
encouraged them -- even as the wicked futility of such eternal violence has
become ever plainer.
Yes, many Americans
have come to disapprove of those forever wars, but what
have we citizens actually done about them? Have we been waiting all this time
for a mode of prudent protest to emerge? Looking for a reasonable way to
object, for a realistic method of civic dissent to miraculously appear? Or have
we merely been so many swans a-swimming, not caring enough, paying enough
attention, to have become half-crazed, as my old friend was so long ago by the
ongoing madness of the acts of our government?
Now, those ancient, ghostly B-52s are
threatening to fly in yet another possible war in the Middle East, even as the
Pentagon’s lies keep coming. Yes, that building has five rings, but they’re
hardly golden (as that Christmas song has it). The U.S. war machine keeps
chugging along, spitting lead. What can stop it? I ask this, regretting the day
I had a chance, however laughable, to lend a hand in putting an obstacle -- if
only a bit of rubble, if only for an hour -- in its way.
My three friends -- those three French hens
of that Christmas moment -- acted. I declined to do so when still a young man,
because it seemed too absurd to me at time. Here’s something far more absurd,
so many years later when I’ve become an old man: America’s unending crimes of
war have come to feel utterly routine. In our moment, John Bolton’s bloody
mischief continues to unfold and even a peep of actual public protest is
missing in action.
My foolish friend died long ago. Otherwise,
I would call my former fellow turtle dove this very moment and assure him that
he was right, that I was wrong, and I would fervently apologize.
James Carroll, TomDispatch regular and
former Boston Globe columnist, is the author of 20 books, most
recently the novel The Cloister. His history of the Pentagon, House
of War, won the PEN-Galbraith Award. His Vietnam War memoir, An
American Requiem, won the National Book Award. He is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook.
Copyright 2019 James Carroll
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment