My Country is the World edited by Luke Stewart

My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements Against the Vietnam War (Haymarket Books, 400 pp. $65, hardcover; $29.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle), edited by the historian Luke Stewart, is an extensive look at the antiwar movement of the late 1960s, concentrating on the leadership of one man, Staughton Lynd.

Lynd (1929-2022) actively opposed America’s involvement in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1970, especially in New York and Washington. His efforts peaked in the months after a December 1965 trip he made to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, founding member of Students for a Democratic Society, and Albert Aptheker, a historian and member of the Communist Party of the United States.

A professor at Yale University, Lynd believed that the U.S. went to war in Vietnam because of a foreign policy established by a group of privileged people who felt their manhood threatened by any challenge to American power.

Lynd’s wife Alice, who often worked beside him, seemed most comfortable being involved in draft counseling. Those who took part in that work were well aware of the painful irony that for every young man they helped avoid conscription, another one would be drafted and likely be sent to Vietnam.

Lynd started working for Civil Rights in the South before moving to opposing the war in Vietnam. From 1965-67, many considered him to be the leading American voice against the war. This volume collects his major writings, speeches, and interviews during this time.

In February 1965 the Lynds wrote to the IRS stating they would stop paying the percentage of their income taxes that went to the Defense Department. Lynd said he instead favored the U.S. paying massive reparations to the Vietnamese people.

Lynd considered the fighting in Vietnam to be the result of a civil war, and not a question of foreign aggression that should be stopped by military intervention. He moved from opposing the war to trying to end it and called for the creation of a War Crimes Tribunal.  

“This country is presently waging an undeclared war so evil and so dangerous that the imagination can hardly comprehend it,” Lynd declared at a protest meeting in Carnegie Hall. He went to Hanoi in an effort to encourage peace talks. While in Vietnam he said the war was “immoral, illegal, and antidemocratic.” The trip resulted in having his passport revoked, losing his job at Yale, being marked by the CIA as “the notorious national peace leader.”

Lynd later became a critic of the antiwar movement’s tactics and strategies. That resulted in a permanent split with his good friend and another leader in the movement, David Dellinger. Lynd then began to move away from national antiwar activity, becoming more involved in the labor movement.

The records gathered here are an important accounting of the early years of the American antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. Just as important to me is editor Luke Stewart’s lengthy, informative essays that make up the book’s chapter introductions.

This book will help to balance out many a Vietnam War library.

–Bill McCloud

Marching to a Silent Tune by Gerald R. Gioglio

Gerald Gioglio’s Marching to a Silent Tune: A Journal from We Shall to Hell No (ACTA Publications. $19.95, paperback) is a compelling book. This Vietnam War era memoir is a well-executed scholarly effort worthy of a graduate thesis. It also is a deep dive into the psyche of a newly drafted soldier coming to grips with his Catholic upbringing and its conflicting demands as he goes through Army Basic Training and Infantry AIT with an assignment to Vietnam in the offing.

Gioglio, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, began questioning the morality of war based on his upbringing, as well as military life in general. He describes Basic and AIT as dehumanizing and degrading, with drill instructors belittling him and his fellow trainees as they try to turn them into trained Viet Cong killers. 

Throughout the book Gioglio poses a series of italicized questions and observations that read like a psychologist’s footnotes from a counseling session. It’s almost as if he’s falling back on his religious training to define the unwholesome challenges he encounters in the military.

This confused and unhappy soldier finally decides that the solution to his inner turmoil is to become a Conscience Objector and to seek a discharge from the Army on that basis, thus avoiding being deployed to the warzone and forced to take the lives of enemy combatants.  Spoiler alert: Jerry Gioglio eventually gains CO status, is discharged, and joins Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

This is a book suffused with deeply held beliefs and is a worthwhile read—perhaps a necessary read.

–Tom Werzyn

What a Trip by Susen Edwards

What a Trip (She Writes Press, 424 pp. $17.95, paper; $9.49, Kindle) by Susen Edwards is a coming-of-age novel set during the Vietnam War. Edwards is the author of a young adult novel; this is her first fictional offering for older adults.  

The story is set in the late 1960s and centers on red-haired Fiona, who is just one year out of high school. She and her best friend Melissa are “smitten with Janis Joplin,” drink Southern Comfort, and smoke cigarettes and pot.

Melissa believes in black magic and thinks her pregnancy was caused by a spell a girl put on her so her boyfriend would break up with her. Meanwhile, Fiona breaks up with her boyfriend and wishes she had “a writer boyfriend who adored her.”

Fiona lives on the East Coast and is in her first year of college. She’s concerned that her new boyfriend Jack might bea more pro-military than she is. On the other hand, she says that he’s “great in the sack.” Then she meets Mike, who tells Fiona: “You’re one far-out chick,” and brings her antiwar thinking into sharper focus.

The two girls get Tarot readings, leading them to buy their own decks and start giving readings. At a party Fiona meets a guy just back from Vietnam. She and Jack break up and she hooks up with Reuben, who wants to be a writer. In typical sixties drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll fashion, it doesn’t take long for these young women to move from one man to another.

Reuben opposes the war in Vietnam and he and Fiona take part in big antiwar demonstrations. Reuben becomes more and more certain that when the time comes he will slip into Canada instead of reporting for military service. He expects Fiona to go with him.

The novel takes place during a time when popular music played an especially important part in the lives of young people. At the back of the book Edwards includes a playlist of songs she mentions in the story—tunes by Joan Baez, Country Joe and the Fish, the Rolling Stones, and others.

What a Trip seems to be aimed at a female readership. It’s deserving of an audience of people who want to know more about what it was like to come of age in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, AKA “The Sixties.”  

–Bill McCloud

I Refuse to Kill by Francesco Da Vinci

Francesco Da Vinci’s I Refuse to Kill: My Path to Nonviolent Action in the 1960s (Sunbury Press, 294 pp. $34.95, hardcover; $9.99, Kindle) is an interesting, informative look at one man’s lengthy battle with his Virginia draft board in the sixties. Da Vinci is an L.A.-based journalist and speaker. Over the years his photographs have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time.

In telling the story of his efforts to be accepted by the Selective Service System as a Conscientious Objector Da Vinci relies on journals he wrote in between 1960 and 1971. He writes that he remembers when he was 15 hearing President Kennedy’s call “for my generation to become active citizens and make the country better.” Inspired by JFK, he became interested in politics.

Da Vinci says his family would appear outwardly to be an all-American one, yet he can’t remember either of his alcoholic parents ever hugging or kissing him. A third-generation pacifist, he writes that he believes war is “never justified, no matter how glorified and propagandized.”

A politically precocious teenager, Da Vinci wanted to take part in the 1963 March on Washington, but his parents didn’t allow him to go. He dutifully registered for the draft at eighteen, a time when he was becoming interested in the Civil Rights movement and the protest music of the time “with its messages of social justice and peace through nonviolence.”  

As he prepared to begin college, he showed up at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, and soon began studying the Vietnam War in depth. In college he began thinking about giving up his student deferment and officially becoming a Conscientious Objector because of his moral beliefs about war. He realized that if his request was not approved it would mean he likely would go to prison.

Sickened by the war’s “relentless violence shown on TV,” he applied for C.O. status guided, he writes, “by a non-religious but spiritual philosophy.” After he graduated from college Da Vinci’s draft board rejected his claim. He felt very strongly that he was not dodging the draft, but was facing it in his own way. He went on to fight with the draft board over his classification for the next three years.

Da Vinci

Francesco Da Vinci seems to be almost a Forrest Gump-like character as he meets or comes close to raft of celebrities, including Neil Armstrong, Joan Baez, Bob Hope, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Paul Newman, and Rosa Parks. He includes an amazing collection of “you are there” photos in the book, mostly ones he took.

In his book, he also sets out the history of the concept of declaring oneself a Conscientious Objector. He uses his own experiences to try to explain why some people are willing to place their freedom in jeopardy in order to live a life based strictly on what their conscience tells them is right. This is an important story, and one that should be neither ridiculed nor ignored.

The author’s website is irefusetokill.com

–Bill McCloud

The Vietnam War 1956-75 by Andrew Wiest

Andrew Wiest’s The Vietnam War, 1956-1975 (Osprey, 144 pp. $20, paper; $9.99, Kindle) is a great book. I recommend it to anyone seeking an overview of the Vietnam War and the era during which it took place. This concise very readable book was first published in 2002 and has been updated by the author. Reading it reminds the reader that the era was a trying time domestically in the United States as the struggle for social change reached a critical moment.  

Vietnam War veterans will be pleased to find that this book is an honest and accurate account of their war. However, we Vietnam veterans are a clear minority in today’s America, and the war is half a century behind us. Consequently, the desired readership should be the generations who have come after us and have no memories of the war.  

For them in particular I believe that Andrew Wiest—a history professor and the founding director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society at the University of Southern Mississippi—captures all the important factors of a complicated conflict and its impact throughout the world. Beyond the often brutal battles and the high number of casualties, the reader learns how costly, in the long term, the war was for Vietnam’s environment, its economy, and its people. The same factors also have had a crippling impact on Cambodia and Laos.   

Wiest is the author of two Vietnam War books, Vietnam’s Forgotten Army and The Boys of ’67. The Vietnam War includes a section on how returning American veterans suffered in many ways in a society indifferent—if not hostile—to their service, which further exacerbated problems once known as the Vietnam Syndrome. Interestingly, as the book mentions, this was also true for Australian Vietnam War veterans when they returned to their country where the war was very unpopular. 

Wiest explains why many Americans came to distrust their government as a consequence of the war when it became clear that from the beginning the American public had been misled and lied to. Additionally, Wiest shows how the conflict had a deeply negative impact on the U.S. military in the years after the war, particularly the U.S. Army. As many of us serving in the aftermath of the war experienced, the Army in the mid 1970s was broken and in need of significant repair.  

All of this and more is covered in this outstanding book; it is well worth reading and sharing with younger generations.

–John Cirafici

Like Boy Scouts with Guns by Roger S. Durham

Roger Durham’s memoir, Like Boy Scouts with Guns: Memoir of a Counterculture Warrior in Vietnam, (McFarland, 302 pp. $35, paper; $21.99, Kindle) is a change of pace for him. While his previous books deal with the Civil War and other military history topics, this one focuses on his 1970-71 tour of duty in the Vietnam War.

In his revealing Introduction, Durham sets out his views of the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture and highlights people’s attitudes, motivations, and stereotypes. He explains that his book is about “the men who fought the war while opposing it.” However, throughout the book, there is little mention of opposition to the Vietnam War. He spends much more time describing recreational drug uses, including accounts of him and his buddies getting high just about every day.

In the late sixties Durham attended college as a way, he says, of avoiding the draft. But he flunked out and was soon drafted into the Army. He spent 16 months in Vietnam attached first to the 18th Engineer Brigade at Dong Ba Thin, then with the 35th Engineer Group at Cam Ranh. He writes about his three R&Rs to Sydney where he found his way to a counterculture commune, made a few friends, and continued his drug use.

Throughout his enlistment, Durham was singled out for his ability to type, which landed him in safe, rear-echelon jobs. His father had persuaded him to take a typing class in high school and Durham thanks him for guiding him away from danger.

After returning to The World, Roger Durham went back to college and earned a degree in history. Upon graduation, he put that degree to good use. Ironically, even though he opposed the Vietnam War and flouted Army regulations, he went to work for several state and federal agencies, and wound up spending 24 years operating U.S. Army base museums.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in learning about recreational drug use among the troops in the Vietnam War in the early seventies.

–Bob Wartman

Jacobo’s Rainbow by David Hirshberg

Can the mystical Jewish demon, the Golem, save the lives of two Army medics in the jungle during the Vietnam War? Did you know that there were Jews living in India for many centuries? Or about people known as “Conversos” who, since the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, have lived outwardly as Catholics but secretly observe Jewish rituals in private, including in communities in the Southwestern United States?

If you read David Hirshberg’s novel, Jacobo’s Rainbow (Fig Tree Books, 352 pp. $15.49, hardcover; $1.99, Kindle), you will find the answers to all of these questions.

In the book the pseudonymous Hirshberg tells how the Jewish people have had to be resilient in resisting anti-Semitism for millennia. The novel is set in Vietnam during the war and at fictional university in New Mexico where a student free speech movement and antiwar protests converge.

The anti-Semitism of a student leader affects some Jewish students who are part of the movement. One thing leads to another and then one of the young Jews is arrested and a judge gives him a choice of going to jail or getting drafted. He chooses the latter and is sent to Vietnam where he undergoes heavy combat. I served in the rear in that war, so I can’t address the accuracy of the book’s combat scenes, but they seem a bit out of sync with the real deal.

In addition to the in-country action, a lot happens on campus as students face off with the college administrators and the police. Plus, we get tepid romances between some of the characters. Ultimately, there is an answer to the question of whether justice will prevail among the book’s characters. 

As someone who is Jewish, who served in the Army in Vietnam, and also was involved in the antiwar movement, I found the depictions of both to be interesting, but not riveting. It is likely that this book will appeal to some Jewish readers. Whether it will be attractive to a broader audience remains to be seen.

— Bruce I. Waxman

Conscientious Objector by Wayne R. Ferren, Jr.

The words “conscientious objector” are at once are a label, a category, a frame of mind, a belief—and a designation that can well cause a wounded war veteran to stiffen his spine. Conscientious objector status, classified 1-O by the Selective Service System during the Vietnam War, was granted to tens of thousands of  American men during the war. Nearly 55 percent of them completed alternative civilian service.

Wayne R. Ferren, Jr., the author of the memoir, Conscientious Objector: A Journey of Peace, Justice, Culture, and Environment (Archway, 538 pp. $44.95, hardcover; $33.99, paper; $8.99, Kindle), is a self-described hippie. Ferren writes that he has “a firmly professed primal faith, neo-pagan, and new-age bases for my beliefs, as well leanings toward Buddhism and Transcendentalism,” although he was raised as a Methodist.

His book contains more than 425 pages of text, along with 60 pages of endnotes. It follows Ferren from his 1948 birth to the present, and seems at times to be a peripatetic ramble through his life. An early interest in geology propelled him to study the interconnectedness of the earth and its systems. He takes us through his school years, where he began to form his anti-conflict beliefs, and his future involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 60s and early 70s.

Throughout the book Ferren regales the reader with his thought processes and how he went about securing his much-sought-after CO designation from the Selective Service. He even includes copies of copy of the paperwork involved, intertwining those passages with the story of his life and times as a “hippie activist.” There are a few factual errors, but the writing and editing of this book are well done.

As a Vietnam War veteran, I found myself reacting to Ferren’s story with a much kinder eye than would have been possible for me to do 50 or so years ago as the ensuing years have both blunted and sharpened my perceptions of the antiwar movement and those who took part in it.

Which is why I recommend this book as maybe it’s time to see the other side of the coin.

–Tom Werzyn

I Ain’t Marching Anymore by Chris Lombardi

On their course through life, most people devote themselves to causes. Some are good; some not so good. Journalist Chris Lombardi discovered her cause in sixth grade after reading U.S. Army Dr. Howard Levy’s Going to Jail and learning to her disappointment that America incarcerated prisoners of conscience.

While a college junior in 1982, Lombardi wrote a play about Vietnam War draft resisters called Too Many Martyrs, the title of a Phil Ochs protest song. She also worked with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and met many Vietnam War veterans. Those relationships led her to write I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters & Objectors to America’s Wars (The New Press, 320 pp.; $27.99, hardcover; $12.51, Kindle), again using an Ochs title.

Lombardi’s work has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and ABS Journal. In I Ain’t Marching Anymore, her first book, Lombardi investigates American military dissenters, including conscientious objectors, from before the Revolutionary War to 2020 in a dozen chapters. I first read the chapters “1965 to 1980” and “1980 to 1991” to determine what Lombardi had to say about the U.S. military during and after the draft. In the Vietnam War chapter she provides a dramatic picture of the accumulation of tensions, in and out of the service, during the conflict.

She also writes about antiwar activities that were new to me. For example, in 1969, with information from like-minded Reservists, a few Vietnam vets captured two of three tanks in the middle of Philadelphia’s Broad Street, delaying their transit from an armory to a shipyard. She has nothing but good things to say about Vietnam Veterans Against War, Jane Fonda, and John Kerry.

On the opposite side, she shows the near impossibility of becoming a conscientious objector while on active duty. Most who tried did not even get to the stage of filling out the form, she says. “I had six COs: two are in jail and four are back on the line,” a battalion commander boasted. Lombardi reminds us that Gen. William Westmoreland originally labeled the My Lai killers as just a couple of bad apples.

She sees the design of the post-conscription military as an armed Peace Corps with new opportunities for women. Military recruiters sold enlistment by emphasizing job skills, cash bonuses, and escape from bad neighborhoods. Those enticements, she says, were designed to lessen the internal dissent that took place in the last years of the Vietnam War. During the 1980-1991 period, Americans fought in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama during which there were brutal actions against civilians. In other words, little changed—and then along came the first Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Lombardi’s chapters covering recent decades make captivating reading. I found myself agreeing, disagreeing, and questioning her analyses. Her portrayals of Chelsea Manning, Leigh Winner, and other 21st-century war objectors would make good television documentaries. She praises Iraqi Veterans Against War. She seems to be saying that current antiwar activities reflect a strong political appeal, lessening the impact of morality. All of her writing is interesting.

National Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, Manhattan, April 15,1967

The first half of the book, which covers the Revolutionary War to the war in Vietnam, offers arguments about both objections to war and about race relations. She presents these years more like a history lesson than an antiwar debate. The U.S. Army’s heartless subjugation of Native Americans during Westward expansion, Mexicans during our war with them in 1846-48, and Filipinos during the Spanish-American War have a familiarity that still persists.

In writing I Ain’t Marching Anymore, Chris Lombardi examines dissent in a manner that glorifies those who object to war as much as the public generally glorifies the nation’s most heroic warriors. I strongly recommend that high school and college students read her book as part of establishing a value system for life.

Maybe a few older people can also learn from her.

The book’s website is https://aintmarching.net

—Henry Zeybel         

Battle Green Vietnam by Elise Lemire

Elise Lemire’s Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press, 248 pp. $45, hardcover; $35.99, Kindle) is a detailed look at a relatively little-known antiwar protest held over Memorial Day weekend in 1971 by members of the New England Chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Lemire, a Literature Professor at Purchase College at the State University of New York, conducted more than a hundred interviews with veterans and civilians who took part in the event or were opposed to it, and did a vast amount of research into archival materials. She has done a great job pulling all of that material together and tells a very interesting, readable story.

The protesting veterans considered the importance of place and performance for this demonstration to both focus, and magnify, what they were trying to say. They carried out their peaceful protest on Revolutionary War battlefields in Massachusetts enacting guerilla-theater war atrocities with toy rifles terrorizing innocent “civilians.”

The antiwar veterans believed that traditional ways of affecting change would not bring about the end of the war fast enough and so they needed to make a bold statement to try to make that happen. They walked almost a hundred miles to make the public more aware of their reasons for calling for an immediate end to the war.

Elise Lemire

The marchers wore jungle fatigues and carried toy M-16 rifles. They used battlefields where the Revolutionary War began: Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. They chose to do Paul Revere’s famous ride, as mythologized by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in reverse, marching from Concord to Boston.

The idea was to suggest that the U.S. needed to reverse its course in the Vietnam War. They saw this as a patriotic act to warn the American people about what their government was up to in Southeast Asia. Along the way the veterans drew crowds, made speeches, engaged in acts of civil disobedience—and were charged with trespassing,

Lemire also provided a good, concise history of VVAW, and also explains how the U.S. became involved in the Vietnam War, the role the New England colonies played in the Revolutionary War, and the meaning of using obelisks to represent war dead.

Lemire brings the story of this three-day-long demonstration to brilliant Technicolor life. It’s a story that well deserves that treatment.

The book’s website is battlegreenvietnam.com

–Bill McCloud