Daniel Redwood Interviews: David Cline, President, Veterans For Peace

"A Responsibility to My People"

by Daniel Redwood

David Cline is national president of Veterans For Peace and also a long-time member and coordinator of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. During his tour of duty in Vietnam, he was wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star for bravery, the Combat Infantryman Badge and other Vietnam service medals. He is permanently disabled from his war wounds.

After his return to the United States from Vietnam, Cline joined the growing antiwar movement. While still on active duty, he marched in several protest demonstrations and helped produce the underground GI newspaper, Fatigue Press, at Ft. Hood, Texas. After his discharge, he stayed in Texas to continue organizing GIs and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1970.

He also has many years of involvement in the labor movement as a rank and file activist, shop steward, and local officer in the Bakery & Confectionary Workers, American Postal Workers, and Transport Workers unions.

Cline is the co-founder and president of the Jersey City Vietnam Veterans Memorial Committee, which dedicated a memorial in 2001 for the 65 local men who died in the war. He has lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, for over 30 years and is the father of a 28-year-old daughter, Ellen, and an 18-year-old son, Daniel.

Web Resources:

Veterans For Peace: www.veteransforpeace.org
Vietnam Veterans Against the War: www.vvaw.org
Veterans Against the Iraq War: www.vaiw.org

When did you serve in the military and what led you to join?

I was drafted into the U.S. Army a week after I turned 20, on January 15, 1967. At the time I joined, I really didn’t think too much about politics. My dad had been in World War II, and my grandfather had been in World War I, so I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. I received my draft notice when I was 19, but I had been hit by a car when I was 18, and my leg had been broken. For my draft physical, I went in to the draft board on crutches with a full-length cast on, so I got a six-month deferment. I was drafted when that deferment ended.

What in your military experience affected you most deeply?

Being in the war zone. I was an infantryman with the 25th Infantry Division. I was in Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry, Manchus. I got to Vietnam at the end of July ’67, and I was in operations Cu Chi and Tay Ninh, in the area they called the Iron Triangle, and then up by the Hobo Woods, and over by Nui Ba Dinh, the Black Virgin Mountain. We were in sweeps, we were on ambushes, we were on roadblocks.

You know, when I went to war, I went over there believing the United States, what they were telling us. In this country, they were telling us we were going over to Vietnam to help the people of South Vietnam fight to defend freedom and democracy from Communist aggression.

I went over to Vietnam on a boat, and I remember that on our way over we used to discuss this. When I took AIT (Advanced Infantry Training), it was at Fort Polk, Louisiana, at Tigerland. I remember buying a magazine in the PX called Ramparts, which had a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., against the war in Vietnam. I remember reading that and we discussed it among ourselves, some of us. We had our little group, you know. So we’d always go back and forth. Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the wrong thing? We were aware of the voices of dissent. So I remember sitting on the boat going across the South Pacific and we’d have these discussions on the deck at night, because there was nothing to do on this boat but watch the flying fish off the bow. And we’d always end up saying, "Let’s hope we’re doing the right thing, ’cause that’s where we’re going."

What happened when you arrived in Vietnam?

When we got to Vietnam and they sent us to our unit, they sent us over in what they called ’packets.’ Just as in Iraq right now they have these shortages of manpower, back then they had the same situation, where a lot of battalions were down to three companies because of rotations and casualties. So they were sending packets of 125 men to each battalion, to reconstitute a Delta Company. And when they sent us there, they sent us to Cu Chi and they had these indoctrination sessions. They set up baseball bleachers and they’d have these sergeants who had been in Vietnam for three tours. They’re going to tell you how to stay alive, and here’s the real deal, and all that good stuff. One of the first things they told us was, "Everything they told you in the United States, forget that shit. You can’t trust any of these [Vietnamese] people, any one of them could be your enemy. They put ground up glass in Coca-Cola and sell it to you, they have razor blades in their vaginas." They had all these stories they would tell you. That they’re not really people, they’re ’gooks’ and ’dinks.’ Any sense of mission that you had was blown away by that. And then I had a 12-month tour of duty to face.

I was not brought up as a guy that would rebel against the system. I was just a working class kid from Buffalo. I thought life was about chasing girls, drinking beer, and listening to rock and roll. There wasn’t really that much rebellion to it. It was like, "Yeah, I’m bad," but I was just like a J.D. [juvenile delinquent], you know? The thing that changed me the most was the last battle I was in.

Where was that?

I was wounded three times in Vietnam. The first time was on August 30, 1967, at a battle called The Horseshoe. I took a round in my upper left back. It went through my flak jacket, hit my front ribcage, and then bounced back and exited my lower back. It caused my left lung to fill with blood and collapse, and I was actually reported dead. I had to lay in a rice paddy with morphine; I could go into a whole story on that. But 45 days after I was wounded, I was sent back to my unit, because they had developed medical techniques in Vietnam to stitch wounds inside instead of on top, so they heal quicker. So I was sent back to my unit.

In fact, Bob Hope came to my hospital bed in Vung Tau Hospital, a little south of Saigon. He told me how I was doing a good job, while I’m high on morphine. And then two weeks after that I was sent back into the bush. The second time I was wounded, I took a small piece of shrapnel in my shoulder, which was a minor wound. They just took out the shrapnel and sent me back into the field. Then the last wound I received was on December 20, 1967, at a place called Bo Tuc, which is up in what they call the Parrot’s Beak, up by the Cambodian border.

See, prior to the Tet Offensive, the Vietnamese used a strategy of drawing the American units out to chase the North Vietnamese units. At that time the U.S. military, [General William] Westmoreland, and [President Lyndon] Johnson, were essentially denying that there were any Viet Cong left. And even though there were intelligence reports coming in that all these Viet Cong units were amassing, they had us out in the jungles chasing the head of the North Vietnamese operation.

At about two in the morning, a mortar attack began and all of a sudden we started getting overrun by North Vietnamese coming in charging like a human wave. They overran the position next to ours. They were firing RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and in the position next to ours, they had an M-60. They took our machine gun out, and they overran it, and all of a sudden we saw this guy coming down from that position toward us. This was two in the morning, remember. There were three of us in the foxhole. We would dig foxholes and put sandbags on top of them for protection from mortar fire . . . We saw this guy coming toward us, but we couldn’t tell if he was one of our guys or one of them. So he’s coming around to our hole, and I was sitting at the entrance to the hole. I was sitting cross-legged on the ground, and I had pointed my M-16 up to the entrance of the hole. All of a sudden I saw the front side of an AK-47 sticking in my hole, and all of a sudden I saw a muzzle flash. This was all within a second, you know? The guy stuck his rifle in and pulled the trigger, and I pulled my trigger. I took a bullet through my right knee, and I passed out from the round hitting me, from the impact of the bullet. I came to a second later, and we could hear them yelling in Vietnamese about 30 meters in front of us. I thought we were dead for sure that night.

Who saved you?

The two guys I was with were black guys named Jamison and Walker. Walker started laying down protective fire, and Jamison pulled me out and threw me on his back, and we pulled back to the platoon CP [command post], which was further back in the perimeter. They stuck me in a foxhole there, I crawled down in the hole, and they gave me a bottle of Darvons. I lay there all night eating Darvons to kill the pain, because my knee was shattered.

The Vietnamese overran the artillery and set the artillery rounds on fire, and they were blowing up all night, and they were charging holes. It was like the end of the movie, Platoon. It was hell on earth. I swear to God, that was the only night in Vietnam where I thought I was dead for sure. In the morning when they pulled me out of the foxhole to medevac me out, they put me on a stretcher. They carried me over to the guy who had shot me, and he was dead. He was sitting up against this tree stump with his AK across his lap and three bullet holes across his chest. And the sergeant says to me, "Here’s the gook you killed. You did a good job." Because in our unit, they used to have a big thing about ’confirmed kills.’ It used to be that if you had a confirmed kill, and the guy had an automatic weapon (not a semiautomatic, but an automatic weapon like an AK), they would give you a three-day in-country pass. So this was a confirmed kill. In battles, mostly we’d get hit and we’d blast away, and then we’d find bodies later, and nobody knew who killed them. We all killed them. But this one was definitely my kill. I looked at this boy who I had killed and he was about my age.

How did you feel?

I didn’t feel any sense of pride or any sense of "fuck you." What I thought was that I wondered why he was dead and I’m alive. It was just pure chance. That’s what struck me the most, that it was just pure luck that I was still alive. Look, I used to be praying to Jesus and everything to save me, but I kept getting wounded so I stopped praying to Jesus. I was just trying to make it through, one day at a time. So I look at this guy dead there, and I started to wonder if he had a girlfriend. I wondered how his mother was going to find out about this. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was doing was refusing to give up on his humanity. Later on in therapy, I learned this.

Then I was sent to the hospital in Camp Zama in Japan. At that time, if you had asked me what my politics were, I’d have said, "Old men send young men to fight wars, and it’s bullshit." You know, let Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson go kill each other. But when I was in the hospital in Japan, I had a cast on my leg for almost six months because my knee had been shattered. They put it on there to try to fuse the bones back together at the knee joint. So I’d go in my wheelchair down to the library, because I’ve always been into reading, and I found this book in the Army library called The New Legions, by Donald Duncan.

I remember Donald Duncan. When I was at college in Buffalo in the 1960s, he was the first military man I ever heard speak out against the war in Vietnam.

He was a Green Beret who had done several tours, and then he got out and said that we’re fighting on the wrong side, essentially. So I read that book, and that’s where I began to develop a political consciousness, because everything he said made sense to me: that the peasants don’t want us, that we’re supporting these corrupt generals and landlords, and what kind of foreign policy are we advocating? At that point I decided that I had a responsibility when I came home to tell people what I had experienced and what I thought was the real deal.

They tell you to go home and try to put it behind you, but no one puts it behind them. We pretend. We think we’re going to go home and buy a new car and think we’re going to just be the guy that was gone for a year. You know? So at that point I decided to become involved in the antiwar movement because I felt that (and this was really a personal thing for me), I knew that they were going to send my buddies over there. Back in those days, if you didn’t go to college, you would get drafted about a year and a half after you got out of high school. Most of my friends were from a community where we weren’t going to college, they would go get a job. And I have a brother who’s a year and a week younger than me. So I looked at it and realized that they’re going to get my brother, they’re going to get my friends. So the way I look at it, I’ve got a responsibility to my people. That’s how I was looking at it: my people, my community.

So you joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)?

I joined VVAW when I became acquainted with them in 1970. But at this point I was still in the Army. I became involved in an underground paper at Ft. Hood called The Fatigue Press. I was involved in a number of activities including antiwar demonstrations and anti-riot control. They used to call it "Garden Plot." They had used troops from Ft. Hood in Chicago for the riots, the rebellions that took place after Martin Luther King was assassinated. When I went to Ft. Hood they were training us to be used to go to Chicago for the Democratic Convention of 1968.

There was a GI coffeehouse called the Oleo Strut, off-base in Killeen, Texas, near Ft. Hood. The name comes from the shock absorber on a helicopter. The original concept of the coffeehouse was to be a free space, a shock absorber from the Army. Anyway, I went down there and met the people, and that’s where the paper started. Actually, the first thing I did against the war when I came back from Vietnam was with my brother Bruce. He had received his draft notice, and he asked me what I thought, and I said, "Bruce, it’s all lies." I was on convalescent leave, in a full-length cast. Bruce refused to cooperate with the draft, and at one point they were down at the Unitarian Church taking sanctuary. I went down to join them and stayed there, and made public statements against the war. My brother, Bruce, became one of the Buffalo Nine. They were draft resisters.

You did this while you were on active duty. There was some real personal risk to that.

Hey, my attitude was … they used to tell you, "if you don’t do this, you’re going to Vietnam, if you don’t do that, you’re going to Vietnam." Well, I was back from Vietnam, so that had sort of lost its juice to me.

Later, when I got out of the service, I stayed in Texas as part of the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse staff, and in 1970, guys from Austin came up organizing the VVAW, and that’s when I joined.

I want to fast-forward a little to ask you about Veterans For Peace, the organization of which you’re now president. When was it formed and what is its mission?

Veterans For Peace was formed in 1986. We have a five-fold statement of purpose: to educate the public to the true costs of war, to work to restrain our government from intervening in the domestic affairs of other countries, to work for nuclear disarmament, to seek justice for veterans and victims of war, and to work for the abolition of war. It was initially started in response to the Reagan wars in Central America. Since Vietnam, every time there’s been a new remilitarization of America, there’s been a reaction among a certain percentage of veterans opposing it. Sort of like "the lessons of Vietnam." So it was formed in ’86. I became active in the group in the late ’80s, and I’ve been president for the past four years.

Veterans For Peace has how many chapters?

There are 108 or 109 right now, and I would say about 75% of them are active. We’re almost up to 4000 members now, which is not huge, but it’s an organized group. I’ve also stayed active in Vietnam Vets Against the War, which still has an organization, and actually it’s growing again.

In what way do veterans have a special role to play in debates on issues of war and peace?

America has been relatively safe from war since the Civil War or the Indian Wars, depending on where you want to draw the line. There has not been a war on American soil since Wounded Knee. Of course, the Civil War was really the big one. Every war after that has been a foreign war. When we go into war, we send our young men off to fight, and most people are subjected to propaganda, and they don’t really see what goes on in war. This is true not just in imperial wars, but any war. Even World War II. I used to tell my dad [a World War II veteran] that war sucks, but if I had to fight in one, I wish I had a cause to fight for. So in a certain sense, veterans bring the reality of what war really means. And oftentimes, quote "patriotism" is used as a way to silence us and keep that quiet from the people. People have to hear it. We, having experienced it, know what we are talking about.

The other thing is, that I don’t care what anyone says about them [Vietnam era antiwar protestors] spitting on us, that’s all bullshit.

I was active in the peace movement at that time and I never witnessed any such thing, or anything vaguely approaching it. Nor would it ever have occurred to me, or any of the activists I knew, to even think of doing such a thing. We wanted to reach out to the military and in many cases we did just that. We understood you were our brothers.

It’s all an urban myth, a postwar revisionist urban myth. There was animosity between veterans who were pro-war and protestors, no question about it. Those were turbulent times. But the idea that people were spitting on us is nonsense, man.

It’s rewriting history for current political purposes.

I have a letter. I used to write to my parents when I was in the war. I didn’t tell them about the sex or about smoking pot, but I did tell them about the killing. In one letter I told them that the best friends we have are the people who are protesting the war, because they’re trying to stop us from being sacrificed for politicians’ lies. I still believe that. The best friends we had were those people who were objecting to American foreign policy based on Johnson’s and then Nixon’s lies.

But to go back to the point you asked about. Having experienced wars, veterans can bring that reality back home and take it out of the realm of video games and Rambo movies and Bush speeches. The other side of that is that the antiwar movement is constantly being blasted as being against America, unpatriotic, against the servicemen. They’re always trying to make it like any dissent is un-American. Veterans who speak out provide protective cover for the peace movement in general.

In that regard, how do you feel about the role that the presidential candidates who are Vietnam veterans, John Kerry and Wesley Clark, have played in this current presidential campaign?

I’ve been very disappointed with John Kerry’s position on Iraq. I think that to a certain degree, he’s broken faith with the commitment he made to his brothers back in 1971. But at the same time, I intend to vote for Kerry and support Kerry. I think that bringing that issue up has some resonance among certain sections of the population, because we have an administration that’s full of chickenhawks. You know, [avidly pro-war] people who avoided military service. And the pundits are even worse. Rush Limbaugh, he got out of the military because he had anal cysts. Go figure!

There’s a whole long list of them.

Like Cheney, he had ’other priorities’ during Vietnam. Bush was AWOL for a good period of time. To some of us, we see that as being a big contradiction. We served, they didn’t. To a broader portion of the population, there’s always been a certain amount of amnesia about Vietnam. After the war ended, people didn’t want to deal with it and learn from it, they wanted to forget it.

That’s why we went into the good-time ’80s, the disco era. Like, let’s forget about that ugly period where we had racial strife, and an antiwar movement, and killing students and bodies coming home. Let’s sniff some coke and dance the night away.

Has the war in Iraq brought all of this back to front and center?

I can tell you that for a lot of veterans it’s brought it front and center, and I think that for increasing numbers of the American public, it has as well. After the 1991 Gulf War, Bush Senior and others identified what they call the Vietnam Syndrome, which to them is the reluctance of the American public to support military adventures that can’t be justified by legitimate national defense, protection of our nation. They have been constantly working to break that down. What we call revisionist history, that’s the real purpose of it, to try to convince you that we should be the kick-ass motherfuckers on the block. In 1991, Bush Senior said we had kicked the Vietnam Syndrome after the Gulf War, because it was a three day war and total victory.

But the reality is, the Vietnam Syndrome is deeply ingrained in our generation. You and me, we’re the same generation. Really, we have been sort of the backbone of raising questions. Among the younger people, they haven’t been able to get a lot of headway because of movies, video games. There’s been a lot of cultural assault on young people with violence, and the idea that we’re superior to other people. Not so much that we’re better because we’re white; that’s sort of behind us. But that we’re a democracy, they’re no good, Saddam Hussein’s a bastard, everyone’s a bastard, we’re all good guys, they’re bad guys. You know, everything’s black and white. But there’s a Vietnam Syndrome alive today that is beginning to reassert itself.

How might today’s American military be more of a force for good?

First off, most people in the military I believe to be honorable people. I don’t believe most people are sadistic, murderers, or anything like that. I think most people go in for a combination of reasons. Patriotism, wanting to serve the community, and also economic reasons. Wanting to get some better education. Today we have, in fact, what I would call an ’economic draft,’ where those who come into the military are people from rural, poor, and working class communities, people who don’t really have access to college benefits. Today you’ve got to go to college. If you want to make yourself better, if you’re a kid in the ghetto, say, and you’re doing well in school, and your options are working at the Burger King, slinging cocaine on the corner, or joining the military, I would join the military.

Makes sense.

To a degree, the military has become an upward-mobile job program for a number of poor and working class youth. As to how the military could play a positive role in the world, here’s an example: I used to work with the National Guard in Newark, New Jersey on Homeless Veterans Stand Downs. I don’t know if you know it or not, but one third of the homeless males are veterans.

Actually, I did know it. I read it on the Kerry for President website, where he’s talking about his plans to help homeless vets.

There are lots of reasons: psychological, substance abuse, bad luck. But the fact of the matter is, there’s a lot of homeless veterans. So we have these Homeless Veterans Stand Downs, this is a national movement. You might want to go to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, at www.nchv.org. Stand downs are one- to three-day gatherings where you bring homeless veterans together, provide them with some meals, some clothing, some resources, and you also bring in all the social agencies that can help them rehabilitate themselves. They go on all around the country. We used to do them in Newark. The National Guard would do the cooking at these events. They’d bring in military cooking trailers (a long semi that’s a mess hall), they’d cook the food, and we’d feed these guys. Ever since September 11, the Guard pulled out because they gave them other priorities. But they were really playing a positive role in assisting their brother veterans.

Beyond that, I think there’s a big problem with military culture in this country. I think there’s been an escalation of ’militarism as a positive culture.’ And really, I’ve always been in favor of a small standing army. I think you need an army; I’m not a pacifist. And I also think there have been some interventions where you could say the United States is at least trying to stop a worse thing from happening.

What’s an example? Kosovo? Haiti?

Originally they went into Haiti with a positive mission, but it turned ugly pretty quickly. The United States turned a blind eye to Rwanda. Earlier, it turned a blind eye to Cambodia. In Somalia, we went in ostensibly on a humanitarian mission, but we ended up deciding we were going to rearrange the society. If you saw the movie Black Hawk Down, or better yet if you read the book, you know what went down there. I think our nation would do better to stand down and try to cooperate with other people in the world rather than decide that we’re the people who are God’s gift to the world. The Republican neocons work on this program called the Project for the New American Century, and the vision they hold is that we are the sole superpower, we are the source of enlightenment, so we should recast the world in our image. Now that reminds me of Vietnam.

Bill Ehrhart, who’s a poet from Philly, a Vietnam vet, wrote a couplet called "The Invasion of Grenada." It’s a short couplet, that goes something like, "I didn’t want a bridge across the Delaware River called the Vietnam Memorial Bridge/ I didn’t even want that black gash in the ground in Washington/ What I wanted was a simple recognition that the world was not black and white/ And it’s not ours." I may not be quoting it exactly, but that’s the essence of it.

I want to ask you about the Iraq torture scandal that’s unfolding. Any thoughts you have on that, and how America can try to deal with the enormity of what we are learning?

It amazes me that at the same time these right-wing people like wintersoldier.com and Veterans Against Kerry, and all of these right-wing pundits, are attacking Kerry for what was SOP [standard operating procedure] during the Vietnam War, when he testified in front of Congress in 1971. They’re attacking him, saying he was besmirching the name of American fighting men, while at the same time we’re seeing the beginnings of the same cycle happening again.

And they’re defending it.

Some people say an Iraqi life is not worth an American life. I say a human being is a human being. And if you think you’re a force for good, then you should uphold humanity. It has always been the practice of the U.S. military whenever any kind of abuse, torture, atrocities, or war crimes come out . . . there’s an old expression, "Shit rolls downhill." So what they try to do is to turn it into "a few bad eggs" or "a few bad apples." They don’t want to talk about the policies driving it, how far up the chain of command it went, or anything like that. The root cause of the situation in Iraq is Donald Rumsfeld’s disdain for the Geneva Conventions, that he expressed after the invasion of Afghanistan when they started detaining people at Guantanamo and said they’re not POWs.

At that point they basically said, "Fuck the Geneva Conventions." There are reports about how he used to go around the Pentagon criticizing and attacking people for saying that we have to uphold the Geneva Conventions. This is the logical result of that. And it’s not just in Iraq. There’s a report that’s been out since August 2003 about abuse in Afghanistan. This is the end result of government disdain for human rights, government disdain for the Geneva Conventions, and for this idea that we’re going to straighten everything out by military force. We’re not going to straighten any of this out by military force.

Sometimes you’ve got to hit somebody, I believe that. Sometimes you have to defend yourself and sometimes you have to take people out. I live in the New York City area and I worked for the Port Authority, which ran the World Trade Center. I used to be a union officer. The head of labor relations for the Port Authority, who I used to hate, was killed in that attack. I used to hate him, but that doesn’t mean I thought he should die. On the one hand, when 911 happened, I wanted to just strike out at the people who did that. I used to have dreams, man, where I had Osama bin Laden in my rifle sights. But at the same time, there’s more to this than just that. To wage a war on terrorism, you have to identify who your terrorists are and go after them. That’s police work and it’s sometimes military. I mean, hell, if you want to take down the Mafia, you don’t bomb the hell out of Sicily and take it over. You know what I’m saying? What we’ve done [in Iraq] is take over Sicily.