Exit Strategy of Vietnam War

RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY

NEW BRUNSWICK

AN INTERVIEW WITH STUART J. FREEDMAN

FOR THE

RUTGERS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES

WORLD WAR II * KOREAN WAR * VIETNAM WAR * COLD WAR

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY

SHAUN ILLINGWORTH and

SANDRA STEWART HOLYOAK

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY JUNE 13, 2006

TRANSCRIPT BY

DOMINGO DUARTE

SH: You talked about coming back home. You finished your six months at Monmouth, then … SF: Right back to practicing law. SH: You said you had very few aftereffects, a few bad dreams, nightmares, that kind of thing. You talked about some of the ridiculous things that you saw. When did you start to become more politically active? After a year in-country, how has the world changed for you? SF: Well, as I said, coming back and seeing the waste and putting it in context, when you come back, first, … coming back, and then, being exposed to the rhetoric that was around, and you see that the … body counts were one body, but that was one arm, you know, … each piece of body counted as a kill, you knew we couldn't have killed that many enemies. We would have killed the peninsula, you know, six times over if you would have believed some of the body counts you would have got, whereas, our body counts, … you know, those were real people. … It didn't make any sense to me at that point. I was mature enough to know and it didn't equate to any kind of patriotism that I'd misguidedly held or at least thought it was fitting in, because, you know, we all had this image of Korea, or we had this image of World War II and that was my image of what the fight would be. SH: Over here, as you said, you had no doubt about doing your job. SF: Yes, and then, you change, and I don't know if you changed there. I mean, it gets silly while you're there, because your daily aim is only to make it through the one year, and improve your lifestyle and, basically, stay alive, and see what you can do for your men and, you know, that is kind of the way it filters down, and do the job that they give you at the time, because you're not going to be in open rebellion. … That's not going to help anybody, but it was after coming back and it probably took a month, month-and-a-half. It probably also set-in to me; well, of course, I didn't do it … when I came back, because I had the six months in Fort Monmouth and that was, probably, also trying, seeing the Martin Luther King thing and seeing them place the troops … in the city and getting ready to go into the Newark riots … and seeing all of those things coming back in. … I want to make, you know, clear when I kind of went into an anti-war thing; I was really out of the Army, you know. … I don't know when those demonstrations were. I think, mostly, we marched in them to meet nice girls. … I was there with a couple of these dentists and doctors who had served in the Second Surgical. You know, we figured, "Well, you know, might as well meet some liberal people, you know, … meet some well-educated people." [laughter] … We tried to find the Columbia contingent, never could, and we ended up, it was the first time I had Szechwan Chinese food. SH: Who were you marching with? Were you marching with a contingent? SF: Well, we tried, we tried. It was supposed to be a march of professionals. … It was a massive demonstration in New York City for professionals and they were coming from all over. So, we were supposed to meet up with them. There were supposed to be young professionals, or something like that, meeting at Columbia University. We never found that group. So, we did a little bit of milling around and I think we ended going to a Chinese restaurant, then, we went

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down to Fifth Avenue to see more. … That was probably the end of my organized anti-war activity, you know, kind of, against the war, but I always felt, after that point, I mean, it was absolutely silly. I said, … "If they ever called me back or if they ever wanted me to go into Reserve units, after what they had done, for what I thought was, had become, … purposeless, I was not going to do that." I was not going to go into another Reserve unit. They could do anything that they wanted. I just never joined a Reserve unit and, finally, I got a letter from the Army in the mail that said, "You're out of the Army," you know, "You're discharged, honorably discharged." … Guys kept calling me and they were from all these nifty Reserve units, which I guess I could have stayed in and really been in trouble, because, now, they're taking fifty … and fifty-eight-year-old guys, I see, in Reserve units going over to Iraq and Afghanistan. No, there was something, and I can't tell you what made it happen then, but it just kind of happened, you know. I maybe became more political, in that sense. I probably wasn't that political. I was probably, … like, an Eisenhower-Republican, and then, a Rockefeller-Republican, going over, and then, coming back, I was anti-war. I don't know what I was, and I was starting to relate to more people like Kerry, who I didn't know personally, I don't really remember the dialogue, but as a person. … I remember the anti-war dialogues happening, but I don't remember the individuals who were doing it, but they seemed to make more sense and they articulated many times … what I was feeling and what then tied to my Vietnam observations. [Editor's Note: Mr. Freedman may be referring to the "Winter Soldier Investigation," sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a three-day event (January 31-February 2, 1971) in Detroit in which over one hundred veterans and more than a dozen civilians testified about their experiences in Vietnam from 1963-1970. The event was filmed and released as the documentary Winter Soldier in 1972.] SH: Did you join that organization? SF: No, no, no. I've been pretty non-political, as far as organized protests. The most organized thing was, my wife called me up last summer and told me that there was going to be … the Cindy Sheehan rally around the country, you know, that kind of generated from the death of her son in Iraq, … and that they were doing one in Caldwell. … I was coming home that night and … I said, "Okay, well, good, I'll have bail money." I always remember that, and then, I thought about it, and I have about an hour drive home, and I said, "You know, … if I don't say something now; I should have probably said it more then." So, I did. I put on my veteran's cap and I went down and stood with a lot of Quakers and we held candles. … They took our picture and it was in the front page of whatever the local paper is in the Caldwells and West Essex, and it turned out to be that our law office is involved in a related matter. You know, there were 1800 of those demonstrations, spontaneously, around the country and there was one in Flemington. It was only in Flemington that they arrested the organizer for demonstrating without a permit, and I've said it with credit to my law office, … we got assigned it by the American Civil Liberties Union. So, we're defending the guy that got arrested for doing it. … You know, it was kind of silly. We could have told him not to do it, but, I guess, you know, I kind of feel good about it. I was thinking about joining the Veterans for Kerry in the last campaign, because, I really was, you know, there's a point; … early on, it became apparent that we were doing this war [the 2003 war in Iraq] on a bundle of hot air, you know. … WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] and all that kind of stuff wasn't around and we'd been sold a bill of goods. I mean, I kind of, like a lot of Congressmen in the beginning, said, "Oh, my God, if they really have it," but, you know, then,

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you figure they have it. But, as the stuff started to come out, it didn't turn up, and it didn't make any sense going in alone, either, because I'd watched carefully the last Gulf campaign. I was always interested in the Powell Doctrine and, in the First Gulf War, and it seemed to be a textbook example of how to do one of these things. I mean, go around the world, build this coalition, get massive troops, build up, you know, and produce an army in a short time, which shows you that you have the capabilities of doing it. I mean, we mustered all those National Guard and Army Reserve troops and managed to get, what? about more than 300,000 Americans over there in a matter of a couple months, and another 150,000, you know, extraneous Brits and Arabs and other people, and to not do it in this kind of, you know, situation, and then, … do it on the cheap, makes no sense at all. So, I mean, I'm no Jack Jacobs. He makes a lot of money going on television, commenting about, you know, what's wrong in the structure, but I know enough about it, from my history readings and from my little hands-on stuff, that … it's not a way to fight a war. It still isn't a way to fight a war. SH: From the time you returned from Vietnam and the New York demonstrations, did you begin to reflect more about it over the years or did it only come to this point after the Iraq War began? SF: Well, that brings it all back. It comes up, occasionally, I mean, when you see other things. SH: What about when they dedicated the Vietnam Memorial in Washington? SF: I didn't go down for that, but it's a kind of moving thing, when you visit there. You know, I've been there, a couple of visits, took my kids down. They have a wonderful traveling exhibit of that, by the way, that somebody has. It's one-third the size and they brought it around New Jersey last summer. It was in Livingston and a couple other towns. … You can walk, down in Holmdel, and look at the names of, you know, guys who, in theory, are all hometown kind of guys. As I said, I didn't have anyone under my direct command who died, thank God, during that time. I had a couple, you know, injuries and some other stuff. … Maybe, to some degree, my memory, as you could tell from today's episode, you remember the funnier, the easier things to remember. … Was it a terrible experience over all? It was something very, very different, that I don't know quite how to explain, that you're not really prepared to do, so, you try to fit it into neat, little bottles that you understand. You try to fit it into realms of what you know, and you try to … make a hootch into a home and you try to take your time off and play baseball on a, you know, rice paddy field. … There's really no way to kind of say, "What am I doing in a bunker when they're rocketing, shooting rockets at me?" which is a unique feeling [laughter] that you don't forget, you know, but I don't know how to duplicate that. … I think it was just part of, in my case, maturing, and I don't think it made, thank goodness, a major change in my life, which it has for a lot of people, and I thank the Lord for that. … A lot of that, as I said, was because I got out of An Khe the day before, you know, the rockets came … and the rocket that landed in front of me in Chu Lai was a dud and … not a live round, and it would have changed the whole course of what, you know, my perception of, you know, the war was in my own life. … I met my wife after the war, I raised my children after the war, so, they weren't a product of that era. They ask about it. They ask about how you relate it to current events. I think … the service and the time in the service is a maturing event. It's a worthwhile event, because you do get to see a great, far greater, cosmopolitan view of the world, different races, different … parts of the country, people, … how they view you and how you view them. It makes you a broader

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person. It's probably a higher price to pay than you wanted to; [laughter] I probably could take a bus trip around the nation, you know, or go to summer camp, but I never went to summer camp. I always joke about that. I said, "So, that was my summer camp, you know. Fort Bragg was my first summer camp that they sent me to." … I just have difficulty saying what it did or what monumental changes it wrought in my life. It would be easy to say, "There were monumental things," and, "No, I changed my life because of that." It didn't. I knew I was going to be a lawyer. … I thought a little about politics, but I never bothered after that, frankly. I never thought the system was good. I'm becoming more political as I get older, I guess, only because I feel the country's heading in the wrong direction. … I'm not sure whether that's just this incumbent administration or not, but I worry about those things. I worry about the economic future of the country. I worry about my Social Security, but, more and more, I worry about your Social Security, [pointing to Shaun]. … I worry about my kids saddled with the debt of the Iraq War, and I'm not sure how they're going to fit into the world. … I do know, if anybody listens or gets any message out of this, that before you really commit this country and its young men, and now women, to be in a position where they're going to die or be maimed or even be psychologically changed, you had better think a lot harder than we're thinking now. Because, … to take that burden upon yourself, as an elected or appointed official, has got to be the greatest burden, you know, that you're going to face in the world, and … it is wrong to do it cavalierly, with an attitude of, "Oh, they're just dead-enders," or, you know, "To be the cornerstone of democracy in the Middle East, and we're going to do these kinds of things," or, "He's a bad person." … It is a monumental commitment that you take the burden of a whole country on, both in real life, as well as economics. We'll go down on an adventure now that we're going to be paying for in my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren's time. Vietnam had a little more participation, a little more participatory experience. Even Gulf I was a little more participatory. Guys, you know, they marched them out and they marched them back and they gave them a big parade, and so and so, which was nice; more than we got after Vietnam. Only now are people starting to honor the Vietnam veterans. … There is just too much at stake in making these decisions, and it makes me think far more politically. I've been thinking far more politically, and … feeling far more helpless in many respects, that you don't make that much of an influence on our government. You probably do have to organize. You probably do have to speak as united groups and get together. … I've been on a couple forums over in Eagleton, [a political science research center at Rutgers University] which I discovered, much to my dismay, only a few years ago, and they're wonderful. When I was a political science major, I never availed myself of it and there have been a couple of administration representatives or ex-administration representatives to appear there who talk about … their experiences of 9/11 and what that changed in their life, but, if you're sitting in Washington and you see 9/11, it doesn't really change your life. I mean, yes, it changed the life of some 9/11 widows. I mean, that's the prime example. These administration guys, that didn't change their life. They had the preconceived message, but it's a war where we're all very detached. I read about it, and I get upset by reading about it in the newspaper. My tax bill is probably lower now than it was. You know, I make a nice living, not a great living, but, for some strange reason, I probably pay less taxes than I did before, but I know it's wrong and I know people in the service. You can't commit those same people over and over who, unfortunately, just happened to be in the military services. My partner's son, he just took him down to enlist. He flunked out of college, or just dropped out, and he's twenty years old and decided that his next career move was that he wanted to be a combat medic. … His father had talked him out of it three times, enlisting, and, finally, he said he

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couldn't talk him out of it. The kid is twenty. So, he took him down. He took him to sign the contract and, of course, you know, … you're never sure you're going to get the thing that they want, and I said, "Gee, how can you do that today?" … He says, "I feel that same kind of a way." … My sons-in-law and my daughters are all of an age now, are all in their thirties, so, they're beyond that kind of thing. I would feel terrible if my kids were subjected to that risk of service. SH: What about a national required service? SF: Oh, that's got to be one answer. I mean what I said to David Frum, … he was the famous speechwriter [for President George W. Bush] who wrote the, what, the "Triangle of Evil?" … What do they call that? SI: "Axis of Evil." SF: "Axis of Evil," yes. Supposedly, he wrote the speech. So, he was at Eagleton and I said, "You know, you're running this war on the cheap. I mean, if you're going to do this, let America participate; have a National Service, have 'the Draft.' Yes, a lot of guys ducked it in Vietnam, but at least everybody was aware of the war. It became a part of your life, if you were of that age. … If you were a parent or if you were a child or you were a grandparent, you were aware and you were participating and, now, … if you want to, you could throw this thing really aside and let the burden rest on a small number of people, and you're buying a lifetime on a credit card. You're doing foreign policy on a credit card, and not your credit card, your kids' credit cards and your grandkids' credit cards … and, worse than that, you're doing it on somebody else's life and somebody else's limb." So, it's probably the most undemocratic war we have fought. I'm not great for armies. Yes, there's a professional army. … That's fine, as a standing army, but, when you have to fight something like this and it's supposedly a national commitment, you know, but … they say it's politically inexpedient to do it. I don't know, maybe something like Israel has, "Everybody goes into service." If they don't go into the military, we've got enough things to do in teaching corps and things like that that you could send kids to do. … You don't need National Guard units to build a silly fence down in Arizona. You could have, like, the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps], if you remember history, that kind of stuff. So, kids will do that. Most kids get out of college at that age, it's not a huge burden, you know, one year or a year-and-a- half, eighteen months, of service or something, you know, Peace Corps kind of thing, some kind of national required service. At least everybody's in the same boat; it's a big, leveling, democratic kind of thing. I don't know any family; I mean, I really don't know any service families, other than, I mean, I know Guardsmen and Reservist families, but I don't know any professional service families now. So, I don't know how it's striking them, but, to me, it's just got to be an awful thing, because … you signed up and it was a five-year commitment. You're going to do three of them, three separate tours, over there? They don't even know when they're coming back in a year. They try to do them in a year, but they don't even know. So, I just don't understand that. Plus, I just don't see why. I see less justification. Well, in a way, Vietnam had, really, no purpose. I mean, we had a bad theory there. We thought it was a "Domino Theory" and it turned out not to be anything close to that. So, we lost Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia stood like a brick. So, you know, it didn't really matter, and now that we're doing tourist bus tours in Vietnam. You know, for some reason, I just can't get myself to go back. … I just

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vietnam war/Nixon Strategy files20151128_14195579.pdf