In the middle of the 1960s, I joined the peace movement against the Vietnam War, or as it was commonly called by the Vietnamese, “the American War” or the “Resistance to America War.” It was a quick conversion, largely attributable to the fact that I faced the universal military draft when my college deferment ended. I had a pass, but the war came to my peers who did not go to college.
My escape was an illusion. I could not evade the pain and sorrow of war as my high school friends and neighbors died or returned home, never to be whole again. I had gone to college, they had gone to war — the injustice was obvious but went unmentioned at the wakes and funerals I attended. I needed more time to act on these new awakenings.
My conversion hastened during my freshman year at Northern Illinois University when I joined a small peace rally in front of the college union on a crisp fall afternoon. A speaker read from President Eisenhower’s revealing memoir where he succinctly explains why the U.S. rejected the Geneva Peace Treaty ending the French colonial war to maintain their exploitation of Southeast Asia. The U.S. was the only global power that refused to sign the agreement ending a war that was mostly paid for by the U.S.
Eisenhower claimed that if national elections prescribed in the treaty had been held in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist and communist hero of Vietnam would have received 80% of the vote. Stating the obvious and not so obvious, he stressed that Vietnam would become a communist country, thereby ending American access to markets and raw materials so vital to U.S. interests.
Creating, funding, and arming South Vietnam became the American response. Eventually, almost 3 million U.S. men and women would fight in Vietnam, 59 thousand would die, and over 3 million Vietnamese would perish in a war where the U.S. dropped more bombs than in all of human history until then.
Upon graduation, I commenced my career as a high school teacher of history at Proviso East. Vietnam, the war of my generation, demanded a special dedication. My mission — to help my students see through the fog of history, which predictably leads well-intentioned people over and over to accept lies and distortions to justify the death war brings.
Much later, in 1992, I nervously visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. An educator friend with me remarked, “I had such contempt for these guys.” In tears I cried, “I loved these guys; they were my neighbors and friends.” More shock followed. John Duffy is on the wall twice. As I related to my students every year, I was in the war, the war at home. My name is on the wall but it was not me. The proverbial “there but for good fortune” never would ring more true. My college deferment, so inequitably gained, lasted until I graduated in 1969. Then I got a high number in the first draft lottery, started to end the racial and class inequities of the Vietnam draft. More good fortune followed — I and my new wife Pat would not move to Manitoba.
My Vietnam Wall sojourn prompted a fuller understanding of a principle I learned from Vietnam veterans like the late Oak Park resident Bill Davis, a founder and leader of the anti-imperialist peace organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War: “Love the warrior, hate the war.” It was a lesson Bill and other veterans instilled annually when they came to my classroom to help students see through the fog of history, to allow them to doubt, to have a chance to examine historical evidence that might create a dissonance to the too-frequent unquestioning support of war so dominant in our national psyche.
Unfortunately, once again, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and so many other wars, the dominant national media offers little help in critically understanding the historic roots of the indefensible death, destruction, and suffering in Ukraine we witness daily. Instead, the “manufacturers of consent,” as Noam Chomsky aptly calls them, stand at attention. They unquestionably repeat the administration’s messaging with a mix of truth, lies, distortion, and hypocrisy, reducing Ukraine’s death and destruction to the psychotic, imperial aggression of Putin — in a war they insist the U.S. has no responsibility in bringing about.
The fog of history sadly continues.
John Duffy, a longtime Oak Park resident, taught at Proviso East, Hinsdale Central, National Louis University, and Northwestern University over his 49 year career in education.
