Was Vietnam “a war between classes in America”? — Article-Rebuttal (FYI)
January 2nd, 2009 From
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>Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 09:19:18 -0500 (CDT)
>From: “Louis R. Coatney”
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>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>Subject: Was Vietnam “a war between classes in America”? — >Article-Rebuttal (FYI)
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>
>As requested:
>
> >From Macomb, Illinois:
>
> An edited version of my following article appeared a week ago,
>yesterday, in the Quad Cities papers. It was written in reaction to a
>statement to college students by our Congressman, which epitomizes
>racialist/classwar history and politics being espoused and practiced
>nowadays–even in the White House–to the detriment of historical truth
>and justice. This is a classic example of how false history can be put to
>political misuse. In any case, racial/class politics is a very sharp and
>slippery two-edged sword.
> If you read my article and reference the statistics following it,
>you will see that the Congressman’s statement represents neither the
>truth about Vietnam veterans/dead … nor about his own district.
> The student reporter (Lisa M. Lipscomb) signed a copy of her article
>in my presence on June 27th, over a month after its publication–and after
>discussing her article over the phone with me and then meeting with me,
>to do so. She told me she taped the speech. Having read a preliminary
>draft of my article, she understands the importance of this issue … and
>the importance of her report being truthful and accurate. The COURIER’s
>telephone number is 309-298-1876.
> Thank you for your time and consideration of this issue.
>
>Louis R. Coatney, 626 Western Ave., Macomb, IL 61455
> 309-836-1447 (msg, but I cannot afford to return long dist. calls.)
>
>
> VIETNAM A WAR BETWEEN THE CLASSES IN AMERICA?
>
> by Lou Coatney, Macomb, Illinois
>
> On May 5th, Congressman Lane Evans gave a speech about the
>Vietnam War to Western Illinois University history and political
>science students and faculty here in Macomb. It was taped and then
>reported by student journalist Lisa Lipscomb in the May 7th WESTERN
>COURIER. In her words, Evans described Vietnam as “a war between the
>classes in America, and it was fought mostly by poor blacks,
>Hispanics, and working class whites.” A photo caption described Lane
>as a “Vietnam War veteran.”
>
> The COURIER has a primarily university student readership of
>about 10,000, and it strives for high journalistic standards. I was
>sure Lane is, like me, a Vietnam era veteran: someone who served 2 or
>more years active duty during Vietnam but was not there. However, the
>specific description of Vietnam as a class war is rankly Marxist
>jargon, which I hadn’t expected of Lane and which isn’t validated by
>those I knew who served and died over there. (I also remember pro-
>Vietnam “hard hat” construction workers in the streets, confronting
>antiVietnam demonstrators, on the TV.) So, to be fair to Lane, I took
>the time to investigate before reacting.
>
> Lane’s Quad Cities office confirmed he had been stationed in
>Okinawa but not sent to Vietnam, because his older brother was already
>in SE Asia, and law allows only one brother to be risked in a war zone
>at a time. I am reluctant to think Lane intentionally tries to pass
>himself off as a Vietnam veteran, so I assume the significant little
>word “era” was just overlooked or not understood. However, Lisa
>firmly stands by her report that Evans described Vietnam as a war
>between America’s classes and races and did so in the words she used.
>
> This is one of the most vicious lies about Vietnam being taught
>to our young by the intellectual Left, in its continuing effort to
>discredit our attempt to defend the Indochinese–and to escape its own
>primary guilt for the holocaust which occurred after our abandonment
>of them. It also fans the kind of race and class anger and strife
>from which the Marxist Left politically profits.
>
> OBJECTIVE FINDINGS
>
> For the past five years, objective evidence has been out that
>although there was some inverse relation between family income and
>Vietnam combat deaths–and the dead “fought” most of all–it was *not*
>large enough to justify characterizing the Vietnam War as one social
>class or race victimizing another. (OPERATIONS RESEARCH, Sep-Oct92.)
>Although the MIT research team found “economic class” easier said than
>defined, it discovered that the black deaths’ percentage was actually
>lower than the percentage of those of military age at the time who
>were black.
>
> The team observed, “If untrue, the belief that affluent citizens
>were conspicuously missing from the Vietnam war dead is harmful to all
>Americans. It demeans the sacrifices of the wealthy by implying that
>such sacrifices were nonexistent. It demeans the sacrifices of the
>nonwealthy by suggesting that, manipulated and misled, they shed their
>blood in a conflict which the privileged and influential were
>unwilling to shed theirs.” They concluded, “As of now … the
>available information supports the proposition that, in terms of the
>bereavement it brought to America, Vietnam was not a class war.”
>
> The report was attacked by James Fallows, an ATLANTIC MONTHLY
>editor, in April 1993. (As a student, Fallows gained fame for his
>article about tricks he and Ivy League friends used to dodge the
>draft. He was at Oxford soon after Clinton, then became a Carter
>speechwriter, and has now taken editorial control of U.S. NEWS & WORLD
>REPORT, purging its staff.) The researchers defended their work in
>the August issue, wherein Fallows (naturally) took the last word,
>endorsing a book by Christian Addy promoting the class-war charge.
>
> However, in Spring 1995, two ARMED FORCES & SOCIETY journal
>reports affirmed that race or class bias had not been significant
>enough factors to term Vietnam a class war. Using occupation and
>level of education data for veterans’ fathers, Thomas Wilson found
>some decreasing likelihood of service the higher the father’s
>education and the more “professional” his occupation, but that
>military service was distributed, overall. However, he did find that
>the very highest (but numerically minute) strata–the intellectual/
>professional elite–fell sharply in fair service.
>
> Allan Mazur randomly sampled race and educational attainment data
>from the Center for Disease Control’s 1985-86 Agent Orange survey of
>Army Vietnam veterans, who included most of the draftees over there.
>Mazur found that Vietnam service was evenly distributed, generally,
>except (again) in the very highest educational strata, and he found no
>race bias at all. However, the CDC survey didn’t include officers,
>who would have raised the education average significantly.
>
> In other words, members of the intellectual elite spearheading
>antiVietnam agitation–as eventually occurred at Augustana and WIU–
>are now turning around and using *themselves* to claim the service was
>class- and race-biased! This is classic guilt projection, and Fallows
>now publicly supports the draft as being democratizing. However, why
>should anyone who came into their draft boards chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho
>Chi Minh/NLF is gonna win!” be allowed in uniform? Enough of our
>young officers were shot in the back–“fragged”–as it was.
>
> Also: military survival was often determined by your performance
>in the services’ exhaustive aptitude tests–how useful you could be in
>technical roles other than combat. (Ignoring my warnings, many of my
>fellow inductees got drunk the nights before our tests.) Early in the
>war, black casualties were 20%, until Rev. King protested and racial
>restrictions on combat service were imposed. So willful race
>discrimination did occur, but to blacks’ favor. *Should* race, rather
>than objectively tested potential (or unit choice), have decided who
>was sent into combat–even considering a few states’ substandard
>education?
>
> PERSONAL REMEMBRANCES
>
> In any case, articles this year in VIETNAM magazine have also
>rejected the charge of serious race/class bias in the Vietnam War,
>investigating individual backgrounds of names on the Wall. This
>validates my own remembrance: all three kids from my Rock Island
>Senior High School Class of 1964 who were killed in Vietnam–John
>J., Tom L., and Tim B.–were white middle class. Their families
>all worked, to be sure, but they weren’t poor.
>
> All I can remember of John is an eager sense of humor and a ready
>laugh. Tom was a shy, good-natured kid all of us held in affection.
>My earliest memory of Tim was vying (unsuccessfully) with him and Bill
>L. for a toy truck in our church nursery. Tim was a determined
>competitor and achiever–in debate and student senate, for example–
>and he was fiercely proud of his dad (who was a Rock Island councilman
>and small business owner) and of his grandfather (who had been a Rock
>Island mayor). He believed in our people and our country, and he
>wanted to become a positive part of our future. If Tim had survived
>Vietnam, he’d very likely be in the Congressional seat Lane Evans now
>occupies instead.
>
> And their families were shattered by their deaths, utterly.
>
> I was told that at least one of the three confided to someone,
>while he was home on emergency leave, how wrong he felt the Vietnam
>War was. Nonetheless, he went back … dutifully … and died.
>
> After official overoptimism and civil strife, his disillusionment
>was shared by almost everyone. In fact, if the World War I
>generation had bungled World War II as badly as that war’s generation
>mismanaged the political and military planning and leadership of
>Vietnam, there would have been no V-E or V-J Day. However, the mass
>communist exterminations of Indochinese which had been predicted and
>which America was trying to prevent did indeed occur after we
>abandoned them. And the cruellest irony of all about Vietnam is that
>the war there–and the cause so many had died for–was apparently won,
>only to be then politically betrayed over here. (See LOST VICTORY, by
>the mysteriously deceased former CIA director William Colby.)
>
> MOTIVES AND AMENDS
>
> Lane has attained much for our district, thanks partly to his
>loyalty to Bill Clinton. However, Clinton and his supporters are
>desperate to downplay or vindicate the President’s antiVietnam
>agitation as a student–we still don’t know what he was doing behind
>the Iron Curtain, back then–and his avoidance of military service,
>and they are prepared to go to any extreme to discredit the war’s
>ethical motives and conduct. Smearing Vietnam as an American class
>and race war is a fast, easy, headline-grabbing way of doing this, but
>it is factually wrong and cruelly unjust. Many of our surviving
>Vietnam veterans were spit upon with contempt as they returned–see
>Bob Greene’s book HOMECOMING. This class war slander is just one
>more, intellectual way for the Left to spit … on the dead, now, too.
>
> Lane Evans has always strongly cared about and supported
>veterans’ fair compensation and needs, and he speaks up for those he
>feels have been mistreated–Agent Orange and Persian Gulf Syndrome
>victims, for example. However, truthful history and a fair, faithful
>remembrance are no less important. Indeed, the Truth is the war
>memorial that counts most … for the future.
>
> Maybe Lane Evans just didn’t know the findings on this issue, but
>he should have investigated such a hurtful and angering charge,
>himself, before he unleashed it. I would think, to try to undo the
>harm of his own spreading of this lie, he at least owes a public
>retraction (in the COURIER and wherever else) to the truth … as well
>as to those we all owe so much … and those who cared about them.
>
> We down-staters in this district realize that Quad Cities
>political machines and media largely decide our Congressmen. So, I
>ask Lane’s QCs friends and supporters to urge him to have the courage
>to admit he was wrong on this issue and wrong for saying what he did.
>
>***
>
>(Lou Coatney volunteered for the draft in early December 1966. His
>written testimony about the Smithsonian’s “Enola Gay” exhibit was
>included in U.S. Senate Hearing 104-40.)
>
>***
>
> The database of the Wall–the Vietnam war memorial in D.C.–is up
>on the Web at
> www.cpeq.com/~wall/
>
> Number of deaths listed for the Illinois Quad Cities–the principal
>urban area in this Congressional district–were: Rock Island–18,
>Moline–21, East Moline–3, Milan–3, Silvis–2, Andalusia–1,
>Coal Valley–1, Green Rock–1, Colona–1, Barstow–0, Carbon Cliff–0,
>Hampton–0, Taylor Ridge–0.
>
> All 51 are listed as white/”Caucasian”–one of them having an
>Hispanic name. (I think I should mention I do find one black
>serviceman listed among the VN dead for Davenport, Iowa, on the other
>side of the Mississipi.) There were 32 Protestants, 14 Catholics,
>2 Mormons, and 3 who did not declare a religion. 17 were Army
>draftees–which corresponds to statistical samples that 70% of the
>VN dead were “volunteers.” However, once drafted, some inductees then
>enlisted to get into a specialty they thought would be less likely to be
>used in Indochina or to get training in a technical skill which they could
>use back in civilian life. 35 were Army, 12 were Marines, 2 were Air
>Force, and 2 were Navy.
>
> The downstate cities and towns in our Congressional district I have
>checked so far are: Aledo–7, Monmouth–4, Galesburg–6, Knoxville–1,
>Roseville–1, Macomb–4, Bushnell–3, Colchester–1, Quincy–14,
>Warsaw–1, Viola–0, LaHarpe–0. All the dead were white/”Caucasian,”
>except for a young Marine from Monmouth who was black. Another young
>Marine from Monmouth has an Hispanic name. With all the small towns
>left unchecked, the total is probably well over 100. Aledo was/is a
>small town.
>
> It should be noted that these by-city listings are of residence
>at time of death. Someone who had changed his home residence listing
>after high school, for example, would be listed there, not necessarily
>where he grew up. This seems to be the case for one of my high school
>classmates whose name is so common (and information about him so
>scant, anyway) that I haven’t been able to identify him among the VN
>dead at all. (“Johnny, we hardly knew Ye” is too true.) It would be
>helpful if someone someday listed the last high school attended, for
>them.