Arts of War on the Web

On July 14, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released more than 1,000 pages of previously classified testimony and transcripts from heretofore  secret, closed 1967 and 1968 meetings and hearings dealing primarily with the Vietnam War.

The Committee chair, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), said the panel released the material because it sheds “light on an important period of American history and all of its lessons. It is incredible to read through these papers and hear the voices of many of the Senate’s giants wrestling with Vietnam and all its complexity at a time when many of us, including some of us on the Foreign Relations Committee today, were serving as young officers in Vietnam living out those very same questions in a personal way.”

Most of the discussions during the closed sessions focused on the war, including the circumstances surrounding the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident and the subsequent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the authority to use force in Vietnam and which led to the massive American troop commitment beginning in 1965

The Foreign Relations Committee staff, after investigating the incident, prepared a report accusing then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (above) of misleading the committee in testimony by claiming unequivocally that American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin were the victims of unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats.

Some Senators, including Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, were outraged with what they saw as McNamara’s willful deceit.  “If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world,” Gore said, “the consequences are very great.”

Among the other topics covered in the papers are the Pueblo incident, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the impact of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the soaring economic costs of the Vietnam War.

The volume was put together by Donald A. Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office. The transcripts and other papers were declassified through general procedures and reviewed by the Department of State, the Pentagon, CIA, and National Security Agency. A link to the testimony and transcripts is available at the committee’s home page.

Lana Noone, who took part in the famed 1975 Vietnam War humanitarian effort, Operation Babylift from its earliest days, will give a talk on that subject  on Sunday, July 25, at The Museum at Bethel Woods in Woodstock, New York.

Noone and her husband will tell their dramatic story with photographs, music, art, and more. Operation Babylift was the code name for the April 3-26, 1975, evacuation of thousands of orphans and other children from South Vietnam to the United States and other countries as Saigon was falling to the Vietnamese communists in the chaotic last days of the Vietnam War. For more info on Operation Babylift go to Noone’s informative web site.

The next speaker in the museum’s Vietnam Speaker Series will be retired Army Gen. Willma Vaught, who will give a talk August 8 on “Answering the Call: Women in the Military during Vietnam.” Gen. Vaught is the President of the Board of Directors of Women In Military Service For America, the organization that honors all women since the American Revolution who have served their country.

Paula J. Caplan—the Harvard University clinical and research psychologist, author, playwright, actor, and director—has in recent years taken an interest in the psychological repercussions of combat among veterans. That interest’s latest manifestation is her new play, War & Therapy.

Caplan wrote the play with the input of war veterans who contacted her after an op. ed article she wrote, “For Anguished Vets: The Listening Cure,” appeared in The Washington Post in September of ’04. In that article Caplan made a case that there are other ways aside from psychotherapy to help veterans suffering emotionally from war-time trauma.

“We sent many Vietnam and Gulf War vets behind psychotherapists’ doors to deal with their anguish, and we’ve come to think it’s the best thing to do,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, in our over-psychologized society, we’ve also come to think that it’s the only thing to do.

“We’ve failed to learn what the vets of previous wars have taught us — that although therapists clearly help some soldiers, there is only so much emotional damage from war they can fix.”

Instead, Caplan said that the military should work on emotional problems “on the battlefront” and as soon as troops get home. She also believes that all Americans should “shoulder a bit of the burden of helping our soldiers and our returning civilians with their reentry into ordinary life back in the United States.”

How?  By letting “returnees say they were scared and let them know that’s not crazy. We must also allow them to tell proud war stories when they want to. When they wish to talk, we must find non-psychiatric, non-pathologizing opportunities for them to do so openly, while also supporting them if they choose to see a therapist. And when they need silence, we must respect that, too.”

Everyday citizens, she said, “must accept the social responsibility of telling returnees not only that we will listen but that we will listen for as long as they want to talk about how it felt to be over there and how it feels to be back. We need to tell them not to censor themselves for fear of upsetting us, offending our sensibilities, making us feel helpless to help them or making us angry at them. ”

The play, which centers on a therapist (played by Caplan) and a troubled veteran, is directed by Aaron Frankel. It will be part of the Washington, D.C., Capital Fringe Festival from July 20-25 at 612 L Street N.W. For tickets ($15) and information, go to the Capital Fringe website, or call 866-811-4111.

The play’s dates and times are: Tuesday, July 20 at 10 p.m.; Thursday, July 22 at 6 p.m.; Friday, July 23 at 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, July 24 at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, July 25 at noon.

Vietnam Veterans of America has maintained a clearinghouse of information about state and local Vietnam veterans memorials since the mid-1990′s. We have information about scores of memorials in every state at the national office in Silver Spring, Maryland, including memorials that many of our chapters were instrumental in building.

The information is open to VVA chapters and to the public for research purposes. To make an appointment, call 301-585-4000 ext. 160 or email mleepson@vva.org

We also have been running a feature in The VVA Veteran in recent months by Vietnam veteran Al Nahas, who has documented some 85 memorials around the country for his book Warriors Remembered. Watch for his tribute to the Ponca City, Oklahoma, POW/MIA Memorial in the upcoming July/August issue.

Another Vietnam veteran, Michael Walsh, who lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., has been doing yeoman work documenting state and local Vietnam veterans memorials around the country. An excellent recent article in The Washington Post chronicled Walsh’s quest to visit and photograph memorials in all fifty state. So far, Walsh has been to 27 states and his photos and info on about a hundred memorials are on his blog, which he calls “A Means to Heal.”

It’s a safe bet that just about every American who took part in the Vietnam War heard tell during his or her tour about a renegade G.I., usually an African-American, living among, and fighting for, the Viet Cong. Those stories had the taste, feel and smell (metaphorically speaking) of urban legends, Vietnam War style.

On the other hand, it turns out that there is compelling evidence that at least one black American solider, McKinley Nolan (above), did go over to the other side in 1967. Nolan, who grew up in a rural area of Texas, joined the Army in 1965, a year after he got married. He went AWOL in Vietnam sometime in 1967, and reports soon surfaced that he joined a VC unit, married a Vietnamese woman, and that they had a child.

Nolan’s trail went cold until 1973 when reports surfaced that he and his Vietnamese family were living with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The trail went colder still in 1977 during the Cambodian Holocaust when McKinley Nolan and his family disappeared near Chamkar Caffee Village in Cambodia. His American wife Mary and the rest of his family has not heard anything from him, or from the U.S. military or government, in all those years.

In 2005, Vietnam veteran Dan Smith on a trip back to the former war zone, ran into an African-American man in his age bracket in Tay Ninh City. When Smith (above) asked the man his name, he mumbled something that Smith believes was “McKinley Nolan,” and then disappeared. That brief chance encounter opens the new riveting, intriguing documentary The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan (Corra Films), which is making the rounds—and winning accolades—at film festivals across the nation.

The film, directed by Henry Corra, begins with Smith, who was seriously wounded in Vietnam and also suffered emotionally after his tour of duty, relating the tale of the strange meeting in Tay Ninh. Then Corra’s cameras capture Smith’s emotionally charged visit to McKinley Nolan’s wife Mary and other members of his family in the spring of 2007 in Washington-on-Brazos, Texas.

The story then moves to October 2008 when Corra (a protégé of the great documentary filmmakers David and Albert Maysles) and company accompanied Smith and McKinley’s brother Michael on a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. Corra’s entourage included a translator and the journalist and author Richard Linnett (The Eagle Mutiny), who had been following the McKinley Nolan story for a decade.

Linnett “told me that Lt. Dan Smith was traveling to Texas to tell the Nolan family of his recent sighting of McKinley in Vietnam,” Corra says on the film’s website. “I asked if I could be there with my camera. Immediately when I first met Smith and the Nolans a bell went off in my head where I knew we were about to embark on a life-changing journey together.”

The heart of that journey took place during the Vietnam-Cambodia trip. In Vietnam, the family met several former Viet Cong, who told them tales of their brother, including, they said, the fact that he killed two or three MP’s before he went over to their side. The Americans also met McKinley’s Nolan’s stepson, a Vietnamese man, who accompanied the group to Cambodia.

In Cambodia, Smith, Michael Nolan and company found several former Khmer Rouge fighters who knew Nolan and his Vietnamese wife. The Americans then went to the remote area where Nolan and his Vietnamese family were last seen in 1977. After talking to the Cambodians, the Americans were all but convinced that McKinley Nolan, his Vietnamese wife and their child were killed by the Khmer Rouge during the time of the Cambodian “Killing Fields.”

One of the most arresting scenes in the film is the site of a Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command helicopter descending under Michael Nolan’s watchful eye in January 2009 at a recovery site set up by JPAC where they believed McKinley Nolan was killed. The fact that this occurred certainly was the result of the family’s visit in September 2008 with their member of Congress. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who told Mary and Michael Nolan that she would get on the case. Corra captures the scene in Jackson Lee’s office very well.

The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan is a first-rate production. The cameras bore in on the faces of the film’s players relentlessly and effectively. The story spins out slowly and picks up steam every step of the way.

My only problem, a relatively minor one, was Corra’s use of war-time footage to give the story more heft. Too often, he chose images that didn’t fit the narrative—-most egregiously, two iconic pieces of film, ARVN Gen. Loan’s execution of a VC prisoner on the street in Saigon during Tet of ’68, and the shots of recently napalmed South Vietnamese children. Most of the other war-time footage fits into the narrative; those two did not.

Aside from that small misstep, The Disappearance of McKinley is a superb documentary that deserves to be widely seen.

Ceremonies today in scorching Washington, D.C., marked the completion of the restoration to its original finish of the “Three Serviceman” statue at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The $125,000 project was set in motion by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the National Park Service this spring.

The reason: The statue had suffered from more than two decades of weather beating and the well-meaning hands of millions of visitors. The original bronze finish had turned prominent parts of the sculpture—primarily the mens’ faces, arms, hands and weapons—greenish-blue.

The statue, by Frederick Hart, was dedicated in 1984, two years after The Wall was dedicated. The restoration was done on site by New Arts Foundry of Baltimore, under the direction of two artists who had worked with Hart. The National Park Service, which maintains the Memorial and its grounds, contributed $25,000 toward the statue’s restoration. Many corporations, veterans organizations and individuals also contributed to the statue’s restoration.

Jeff Stein, the former editor of The VVA Veteran, today writes the “SpyTalk” blog on the Washington Post web site. His latest column, headlined “Nixon-CIA Spy Ploy in Vietnam Backfired, New Records Show,” deals with new information about the 1970 Cambodian incursion–new and enlightening information about how Nixon and his Vietnam War guru Henry Kissinger operated.

As Stein–who served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Vietnam–notes, Nixon and Kissinger, his national security adviser, “deliberately ‘leaked’ word to North Vietnam that U.S. forces planned to invade Cambodia, in a failed attempt to intimidate Hanoi into retreat.”

That info came from recently declassified data in a new volume of Foreign Relations of the United States, the official State Department history of the era. The news was unearthed by Merle Pribbenow, a retired CIA expert on Vietnam who found hitherto undiscovered documents in State Department records.

Stein quotes Pribbenow as saying that the idea behind Nixon and Kissinger’s psychological ploy “was to make the North Vietnamese believe that they had obtained advance knowledge of a planned U.S. operation in order to frighten them into pulling their forces back. The end result was that, not only were the North Vietnamese not frightened out of doing what Nixon wanted to scare them out of doing, Nixon unintentionally gave them advance warning of what the U.S. was about to do.”

What’s more, Stein notes,  “the ploy, in short, ended up foiling Nixon’s main goal for invading Cambodia: to annihilate Hanoi’s command post for staging attacks on South Vietnam.”

There was an interesting feature article in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago about Tim Page, the iconoclastic British photographer who made his reputation for his fearlessness (some say recklessness) covering the Vietnam War.

Times reporter Seth Mydans accompanied Page into Cambodia in June on the latest of his many post-war missions to try to find the remains of the photo-journalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who disappeared in 1970 looking for Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

Page, 66, who  received a severe brain injury from a mine explosion in Vietnam, led the visit to a village where he believes Flynn (the son of Errol Flynn) and Stone were killed and buried. “I don’t like the idea of [Flynn's] spirit out there tormented,” Page told Mydans. “There’s something spooky about being M.I.A.”

It’s fitting that Oliver Stone’s newly mustachioed face makes him look sort of like a South American politician.  That’s because his just-out documentary, South of Border, is an up-close and admiring look at a group of South American politicians.

It will come as no shock to anyone who is aware of Stone’s politics and his film-making to learn that those politicians, including Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, lean solidly to the left. Or that Stone’s documentary is being torched by conservative media.

That’s nothing new for the screenwriter, director and filmic provocateur who has roiled the political waters with many of the more than two dozen movies he has written, produced or directed. That list includes Salvador (1986), Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), Nixon (1995) and W (2008).

The former 25th Infantryman’s  latest feature film is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.