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Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War
Part of counterculture of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War
A demonstrator offers a flower to military police on guard at the March on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967
Date	28 January 1965 – 29 March 1973
Caused by	United States in the Vietnam War
Goals	End of military conscription Withdrawal of troops from Vietnam
Resulted in	Disruption of military conscription Lowered military morale End of the Johnson presidency Voting age lowered to 18 Withdrawal of troops and aid

Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began with demonstrations in 1965 against the escalating role of the United States in the Vietnam War. These demonstrations grew into a broad social movement over the ensuing several years. This movement informed and helped shape the vigorous and polarizing debate, primarily in the United States, during the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s on how to end the Vietnam War.

Many in the peace movement within the United States were children, mothers, or anti-establishment youth. Opposition grew with participation by the African American civil rights and second-wave feminist movements, Chicano Movements, and sectors of organized labor. Additional involvement came from many other groups, including educators, clergy, academics, journalists, lawyers, physicians such as Benjamin Spock, and military veterans.

Their actions consisted mainly of peaceful, nonviolent events; few events were deliberately provocative and violent. In some cases, police used violent tactics against peaceful demonstrators. By 1967, according to Gallup polls, an increasing majority of Americans considered military involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake, echoed decades later by the then-head of American war planning, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.^[1]

U.S. military involvement in Vietnam began in 1950 with the support of French Indochina against communist Chinese forces. Both military involvement and opposition escalated after the Congressional authorization of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August of 1964, with U.S. ground troops first arriving in Vietnam on March 8, 1965. Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States in 1968 on the platform of ending the Vietnam War and the draft. Nixon began the drawdown of U.S. troop presence in April 1969. Protests spiked after the announcement in April 1970 of the expansion of the war into Cambodia. The Pentagon Papers were published in June 1971. The last draftees reported in late 1972, and the last U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam in March of 1973.

Background

Causes of opposition

The draft, a system of conscription that mainly drew from minorities and lower- and middle-class whites, drove much of the protest after 1965. Conscientious objectors played an active role despite their small numbers. The prevailing sentiment that the draft was unfairly administered fueled student and blue-collar American opposition to the military draft.

Opposition to the war arose during a time of unprecedented student activism, which followed the free speech movement and the civil rights movement. The military draft mobilized the baby boomers, who were most at risk, but it grew to include a varied cross-section of Americans. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War was partly attributed to greater access to uncensored information through extensive television coverage on the ground in Vietnam.

Beyond opposition to the draft, anti-war protesters also made moral arguments against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, preceding the later Quaker protests but "just after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the Service Committee bought a page in The New York Times to protest what seemed to be the tendency of the USA to step into Indo-China as France stepped out. We expressed our fear that in so doing, America would back into a war."^[2] The moral imperative argument against the war was especially popular among American college students, who were more likely than the general public to accuse the United States of having imperialistic goals in Vietnam and to criticize the war as "immoral."^[3] Civilian deaths, which were downplayed or omitted entirely by the Western media, became a subject of protest when photographic evidence of casualties emerged. An infamous photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shooting an alleged terrorist in handcuffs during the Tet Offensive also provoked public outcry.^[4]

Another element of the American opposition to the war was the perception that U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which had been argued as acceptable because of the domino theory and the threat of communism, was not legally justifiable. Some Americans believed that the communist threat was used as a scapegoat to hide imperialistic intentions, and others argued that the American intervention in South Vietnam interfered with the self-determination of the country and felt that the war in Vietnam was a civil war that ought to have determined the fate of the country and that America was wrong to intervene.^[4]

Media coverage of the war also shook the faith of citizens at home as new television brought images of wartime conflict to viewers at home. Newsmen like NBC's Frank McGee stated that the war was all but lost as a "conclusion to be drawn inescapably from the facts."^[4] For the first time in American history, the media had the means to broadcast battlefield images. Graphic footage of casualties on the nightly news eliminated any myth of the glory of war. With no clear sign of victory in Vietnam, American military casualties helped stimulate opposition to the war by Americans. In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky reject the mainstream view of how the media influenced the war and propose that the media instead censored the more brutal images of the fighting and the death of millions of innocent people.

Polarization

If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam."

— Martin Luther King Jr., 1967^[5]

The U.S. became polarized over the war. Many supporters of U.S. involvement argued for what was known as the domino theory, a theory that believed if one country fell to communism, then the bordering countries would be sure to fall as well, much like falling dominoes. This theory was largely held due to the fall of Eastern Europe to communism and the Soviet sphere of influence following World War II. However, military critics of the war pointed out that the Vietnam War was political and that the military mission lacked any clear idea of how to achieve its objectives. Civilian critics of the war argued that the government of South Vietnam lacked political legitimacy or that support for the war was completely immoral.

The media also played a substantial role in the polarization of American opinion regarding the Vietnam War. For example, in 1965, a majority of the media attention focused on military tactics, with very little discussion about the necessity for a full-scale intervention in Southeast Asia.^[6] After 1965, the media covered the dissent and domestic controversy that existed within the United States, but mostly excluded the actual view of dissidents and resisters.^[6]

The media established a sphere of public discourse surrounding the Hawk versus Dove debate. The Dove was a liberal and a critic of the war. Doves claimed that the war was well-intentioned but a disastrous mistake in an otherwise benign foreign policy. It is important to note that the Doves did not question the U.S.'s intentions in intervening in Vietnam, nor did they question the morality or legality of the U.S. intervention. Rather, they made pragmatic claims that the war was a mistake. Contrarily, the Hawks argued that the war was legitimate, winnable, and part of benign U.S. foreign policy. The Hawks claimed that the one-sided criticism of the media contributed to the decline of public support for the war and ultimately helped the U.S. lose the war. Author William F. Buckley repeatedly wrote about his approval of the war and suggested that "The United States has been timid, if not cowardly, in refusing to seek 'victory' in Vietnam."^[4] The hawks claimed that the liberal media was responsible for the growing popular disenchantment with the war and blamed the western media for losing the war in Southeast Asia as communism was no longer a threat for them.

History

Early protests

Early organized opposition was led by American Quakers in the 1950s, and by November 1960, eleven hundred Quakers undertook a silent protest vigil – the group "ringed the Pentagon for parts of two days".^[2]

Protests bringing attention to "the draft" began on May 5, 1965. Student activists at the University of California Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft board, and forty students staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States. Another nineteen cards were burnt on May 22 at a demonstration following the Berkeley teach-in.^[7] Draft card protests were not aimed so much at the draft as at the immoral conduct of the war.^[8]

At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft age were actually conscripted, but the Selective Service System office ("Draft Board") in each locality had broad discretion on whom to draft and whom to exempt where there was no clear guideline for exemption. In late July 1965, Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted per month from 17,000 to 35,000, and on August 31, signed a law making it a crime to burn a draft card.

On October 15, 1965, the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam in New York staged the first draft card burning to result in an arrest under the new law.

Gruesome images of two anti-war activists who set themselves on fire in November 1965 provided iconic images that demonstrated how strongly some people felt that the war was immoral. On November 2, 32-year-old Quaker Norman Morrison set himself on fire in front of The Pentagon. On November 9, 22-year-old Catholic Worker Movement member Roger Allen LaPorte did the same in front of United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Both protests were conscious imitations of earlier (and ongoing) Buddhist protests in South Vietnam.

Government reactions

The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the U.S. government. On August 16, 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigations of Americans who were suspected of aiding the NLF, with the intent to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupted the meeting, and 50 were arrested.

Shifting opinion

In February 1967, The New York Review of Books published "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", an essay by Noam Chomsky, one of the leading intellectual opponents of the war. In the essay, Chomsky argued that much responsibility for the war lay with liberal intellectuals and technical experts who were providing what he saw as pseudoscientific justification for the policies of the U.S. government. The Time Inc. magazines Time and Life maintained a very pro-war editorial stance until October 1967, when in a volte-face, the editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan, came out against the war.^[9] Donovan wrote in an editorial in Life that the United States had gone into Vietnam for "honorable and sensible purposes", but the war had turned out to be "harder, longer, more complicated" than expected.^[10] Donovan ended his editorial by writing the war was "not worth winning", as South Vietnam was "not absolutely imperative" to maintain American interests in Asia, which made it impossible "to ask young Americans to die for".^[10]

Draft protests

In 1967, the continued operation of a seemingly unfair draft system, then calling as many as 40,000 men for induction each month, fueled a burgeoning draft resistance movement. The draft favored white, middle-class men, which allowed an economically and racially discriminating draft to force young African American men to serve at rates that were disproportionately higher than the general population. Although in 1967 there was a smaller field of draft-eligible black men, 29 percent, versus 63 percent of white men, 64 percent of eligible black men were chosen to serve in the war through conscription, compared to only 31 percent of eligible white men.^[11]

On October 16, 1967, draft card turn-ins were held across the country, yielding more than 1,000 draft cards, later returned to the Justice Department as an act of civil disobedience. Resisters expected to be prosecuted immediately, but Attorney General Ramsey Clark instead prosecuted a group of ringleaders, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., in Boston in 1968. By the late 1960s, one-quarter of all court cases dealt with the draft, including men accused of draft-dodging and men petitioning for the status of conscientious objector.^[12] Over 210,000 men were accused of draft-related offenses, 25,000 of whom were indicted.^[13]

The charges of unfairness led to the institution of a draft lottery for the year 1970 in which a young man's birthday determined his relative risk of being drafted (September 14 was the birthday at the top of the draft list for 1970; the following year July 9 held this distinction). However, popular anti-war speculation that most American soldiers, as well as most of the American soldiers killed during the Vietnam War, were draftees was discredited in later years, as the large majority of these soldiers were, in fact, confirmed to be volunteers.^[14]

Developments in the war

On February 1, 1968, Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer suspected of participating in the murder of South Vietnamese government officials during the Tet Offensive, was summarily executed by General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the South Vietnamese National Police Chief. Loan shot Lém in the head on a public street in Saigon, despite being in front of journalists. South Vietnamese reports provided as justification after the fact claimed that Lém was captured near the site of a ditch holding as many as thirty-four bound and shot bodies of police and their relatives, some of whom were the families of General Loan's deputy and close friend. The execution provided an iconic image that helped sway public opinion in the United States against the war.

The events of Tet in early 1968 as a whole also remarkably shifted public opinion regarding the war. U.S. military officials had previously reported that counterinsurgency in South Vietnam was being prosecuted successfully. While the Tet Offensive provided the U.S. and allied militaries with a great victory in that the Viet Cong was finally brought into open battle and destroyed as a fighting force, the American media, including respected figures such as Walter Cronkite, interpreted such events as the attack on the American embassy in Saigon as an indicator of U.S. military weakness.^[15] The military victories on the battlefields of Tet were obscured by shocking images of violence on television screens, long casualty lists, and a new perception among the American people that the military had been untruthful to them about the success of earlier military operations, and ultimately, the ability to achieve a meaningful military solution in Vietnam.

1968 presidential election

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson began his re-election campaign. Eugene McCarthy ran against him for the nomination on an anti-war platform. McCarthy did not win the first primary election in New Hampshire, but he did surprisingly well against an incumbent. The resulting blow to the Johnson campaign, combined with other factors, led the President to announce that he was pulling out of the race on March 31 in a televised speech. He also announced the initiation of the Paris Peace Negotiations with Vietnam in that speech. Then, on August 4, 1969, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy began secret peace negotiations at the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris.

After breaking with Johnson's pro-war stance, Robert F. Kennedy entered the race on March 16 and ran for the nomination on an anti-war platform. Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, also ran for the nomination, promising to continue to support the South Vietnamese government.

Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

In May 1969, Life magazine published in a single issue photographs of the faces of the roughly 250 or so American servicemen who had been killed in Vietnam during a "routine week" of war in the spring of 1969.^[10] Contrary to expectations, the issue sold out, with many being haunted by the photographs of the ordinary young Americans killed.^[10] On October 15, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people took part in National Moratorium anti-war demonstrations across the United States; the demonstrations prompted many workers to call in sick from their jobs and adolescents nationwide engaged in truancy from school. About 15 million Americans took part in the demonstration of October 15, making it the largest protest in a single day up to that point.^[16] A second round of "Moratorium" demonstrations was held on November 15 and attracted more people than the first.^[17] Over half a million people rallied in Washington, D.C., while about 250,000 rallied that day in San Francisco. The Washington demonstration was preceded by the "March against Death" on November 13 and 14.

Hearts and Minds campaign

The U.S. realized that the South Vietnamese government needed a solid base of popular support if it were to survive the insurgency. To pursue this goal of winning the "Hearts and Minds" of the Vietnamese people, units of the United States Army, referred to as "Civil Affairs" units, were used extensively for the first time since World War II.

Civil Affairs units, while remaining armed and under direct military control, engaged in what came to be known as "nation-building": constructing (or reconstructing) schools, public buildings, roads, and other infrastructure; conducting medical programs for civilians who had no access to medical facilities; facilitating cooperation among local civilian leaders; conducting hygiene and other training for civilians; and similar activities.

This policy of attempting to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, however, often was at odds with other aspects of the war, which sometimes served to antagonize many Vietnamese civilians and provided ammunition to the anti-war movement. These included the emphasis on "body count" as a way of measuring military success on the battlefield, civilian casualties during the bombing of villages (symbolized by journalist Peter Arnett's famous quote, "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it"), and the killing of civilians in such incidents as the My Lai massacre. In 1974, the documentary Hearts and Minds sought to portray the devastation the war was causing to the South Vietnamese people and won an Academy Award for best documentary amid considerable controversy. The South Vietnamese government also antagonized many of its citizens with its suppression of political opposition through such measures as holding large numbers of political prisoners, torturing political opponents, and holding a one-man election for President in 1971. Covert counter-terror programs and semi-covert ones such as the Phoenix Program attempted, with the help of anthropologists, to isolate rural South Vietnamese villages and affect the loyalty of the residents.

Increasing polarization

Despite the increasingly depressing news of the war, many Americans continued to support President Johnson's endeavors. Aside from the domino theory mentioned above, there was a feeling that the goal of preventing a communist takeover of a pro-Western government in South Vietnam was a noble objective. Many Americans were also concerned about saving face in the event of disengaging from the war or, as President Richard M. Nixon later put it, "achieving Peace with Honor." In addition, instances of Viet Cong atrocities were widely reported, most notably in an article that appeared in Reader's Digest in 1968 entitled The Blood-Red Hands of Ho Chi Minh.

Opposition to the war from Vietnam veterans

However, anti-war feelings also began to rise. Many Americans opposed the war on moral grounds, appalled by the devastation and violence of the war. Others claimed the conflict was a war against Vietnamese independence or an intervention in a foreign civil war; others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear objectives and appeared to be unwinnable. Many anti-war activists themselves were Vietnam veterans, as evidenced by the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Later protests

In April 1971, thousands of these veterans converged on the White House in Washington, D.C., and hundreds threw their medals and decorations on the steps of the United States Capitol. By this time, it had also become commonplace for the most radical anti-war demonstrators to prominently display the flag of the Viet Cong "enemy," an act which alienated many who were otherwise morally opposed to the war.

Characteristics

As the Vietnam War continued to escalate, public disenchantment grew, and a variety of different groups were formed or became involved in the movement.

African Americans

African-American leaders of earlier decades, like W. E. B. Du Bois, were often anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. Paul Robeson weighed in on the Vietnamese struggle in 1954, calling Ho Chi Minh "the modern day Toussaint L'Overture, leading his people to freedom." These figures were driven from public life by McCarthyism, however, and black leaders were more cautious about criticizing U.S. foreign policy as the 1960s began.^[18]

By the middle of the decade, open condemnation of the war became more common, with figures like Malcolm X and Bob Moses speaking out.^[19] Champion boxer Muhammad Ali risked his career and a prison sentence to resist the draft in 1966. Soon, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became prominent opponents of the Vietnam War, and Bevel became the director of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The Black Panther Party vehemently opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam.^[20] At the beginning of the war, some African Americans did not want to join the war opposition movement because of loyalty to President Johnson for pushing Civil Rights legislation, but soon the escalating violence of the war and the perceived social injustice of the draft propelled involvement in antiwar groups.^[20]

In March 1965, King first criticized the war during the Selma march when he told a journalist that "millions of dollars can be spent every day to hold troops in South Vietnam and our country cannot protect the rights of Negroes in Selma".^[21] In 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) became the first major civil rights group to issue a formal statement against the war. When SNCC-backed Georgia Representative Julian Bond acknowledged his agreement with the anti-war statement, he was refused his seat by the State of Georgia, an injustice which he successfully appealed up to the Supreme Court.^[22] SNCC had special significance as a nexus between the student movement and the black movement. At an SDS-organized conference at UC Berkeley in October 1966, SNCC Chair Stokely Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in ghetto rebellions of the era had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August 1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, SDS's first Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power emboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appears to have originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"^[23]

On April 4, 1967, King gave a much-publicized speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" at the Riverside Church in New York, attacking President Johnson for "deadly Western arrogance," declaring that "we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor".^[21] King's speech attracted much controversy at the time, with many feeling that it was ungrateful for him to attack the president who done the most for civil rights for African Americans since Abraham Lincoln had abolished slavery a century before. Liberal newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times condemned King for his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, while the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People disallowed him.^[24] The "Beyond Vietnam" speech involved King in a debate with the diplomat Ralph Bunche who argued that it was folly to associate the civil rights movement with the anti-Vietnam war movement, maintaining that this would set back civil rights for African Americans.^[24] This speech also showed how bold King could be when he condemned U.S. "aggression" in Vietnam; and this is considered a milestone in King's critiques against imperialism and militarism.^[25]

King, during the year of 1966, spoke out that it was hypocritical for Black Americans to be fighting in Vietnam, since they were being treated as second-class citizens back home.^[25] One of his arguments was that many white middle-class men avoided the draft by college deferments, but his greatest defense was that the arms race and the Vietnam War were taking much needed resources away from the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty.^[26] To combat these issues, King selected a strategy of rallying the poor working-class in hopes that the Federal Government would redirect resources toward fighting the War on Poverty.^[27] King used the statistic that the U.S. government underestimated the cost of the 1967 war budget by $10 billion, which was five times the poverty budget.^[28]

Black antiwar groups opposed the war for similar reasons as white groups, but often protested in separate events and sometimes did not cooperate with the ideas of white antiwar leadership.^[20] They harshly criticized the draft because poor and minority men were usually most affected by conscription.^[29] In 1965 and 1966, African Americans accounted for 25 percent of combat deaths, more than twice their proportion of the population. As a result, black enlisted men protested and began the resistance movement among veterans. After taking measures to reduce the fatalities, apparently in response to widespread protest, the military brought the proportion of blacks down to 12.6 percent of casualties.^[30]

African Americans involved in the antiwar movement often formed their own groups, such as Black Women Enraged, National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union, and National Black Draft Counselors. Some differences in these groups included how Black Americans rallied behind the banner of "Self-determination for Black America and Vietnam," while whites marched under banners that said, "Support Our GIs, Bring Them Home Now!".^[31] Within these groups, however, many African American women were seen as subordinate members by black male leaders.^[32] Many African American women viewed the war in Vietnam as racially motivated and sympathized strongly with Vietnamese women.^[33] Such concerns often propelled their participation in the antiwar movement and their creation of new opposition groups.

Artists

Many artists during the 1960s and 1970s opposed the war and used their creativity and careers to oppose the war visibly. Writers and poets who were opposed to involvement in the war included Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and Robert Bly. Their pieces often incorporated imagery based on the tragic events of the war as well as the disparity between life in Vietnam and life in the United States. Visual artists Ronald Haeberle, Peter Saul, and Nancy Spero, among others, used war equipment like guns and helicopters in their works while incorporating important political and war figures, portraying to the nation exactly who was responsible for the violence.

Filmmakers such as Lenny Lipton, Jerry Abrams, Peter Gessner, and David Ringo created documentary-style movies featuring footage from the antiwar marches to raise awareness about the war and the diverse opposition movement. Playwrights like Frank O'Hara, Sam Shepard, Robert Lowell, Megan Terry, Grant Duay, and Kenneth Bernard used theater as a vehicle for portraying their thoughts about the Vietnam War, often satirizing the role of America in the world and juxtaposing the horrific effects of war with normal scenes of life. Regardless of medium, antiwar artists ranged from pacifists to violent radicals and caused Americans to think more critically about the war. Art as war opposition was quite popular in the early years of the war, but soon faded as political activism became the more common and most visible way of opposing the war.^[34]

Asian-Americans

Many Asian-Americans were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. They saw the war as being a significant action of U.S. imperialism and "connected the oppression of the Asians in the United States to the prosecution of the war in Vietnam."^[35] Unlike many Americans in the anti-war movement, they viewed the war "not just as imperialist but specifically as anti-Asian."^[36] Groups like the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), the Bay Area Coalition Against the War (BAACAW), and the Asian Americans for Action (AAA) made opposition to the war their main focus.

Of these organizations, the Bay Area Coalition Against the War was the biggest and most significant. BAACAW was "highly organized, holding biweekly ninety-minute meetings of the Coordinating Committee at which each regional would submit detailed reports and action plans."^[37] The driving force behind its formation was anger at "the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong Harbor." The organization supported the Japanese Community Youth Center, members of the Asian Community Center, student leaders of Asian American student unions and others.^[38]

The BAACAW members consisted of many Asian-Americans, and they were involved in antiwar efforts like marches, study groups, fundraisers, teach-ins and demonstrations. During marches, Asian American activists carried banners that read "Stop the Bombing of Asian People and Stop Killing Our Asian Brothers and Sisters."^[39] Its newsletter stated, "our goal is to build a solid, broad-based anti-imperialist movement of Asian people against the war in Vietnam."^[40]

The anti-war sentiment of Asian Americans was fueled by the racial inequality that they faced in the United States. As historian Daryl Maeda notes, "the antiwar movement articulated Asian Americans' racial commonality with Vietnamese people in two distinctly gendered ways: identification based on the experiences of male soldiers and identification by women."^[41] Asian American soldiers in the U.S. military were many times classified as being like the enemy. They were referred to as gooks and had a racialized identity in comparison to their non-Asian counterparts. There was also the hypersexualization of Vietnamese women, which in turn affected how Asian American women in the military were treated. "In a Gidra article, , Evelyn Yoshimura noted that the U.S. military systematically portrayed Vietnamese women as prostitutes as a way of dehumanizing them."^[42]

Asian American groups realized that to extinguish racism, they also had to address sexism as well. This, in turn, led to women's leadership in the Asian American antiwar movement. Patsy Chan, a "Third World" activist, said at an antiwar rally in San Francisco, "We, as Third World women our militant solidarity with our brothers and sisters from Indochina. We, as Third World people know of the struggle the Indochinese are waging against imperialism, because we share that common enemy in the United States."^[43] Some other notable figures were Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama. Both Boggs and Kochiyama were inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and "a growing number of Asian Americans began to push forward a new era in radical Asian American politics."^[44]

Many Asian-Americans spoke against the war because of the way that the Vietnamese were referred within the U.S. military by the disparaging term "gook", and more generally because they encountered bigotry because they looked like "the enemy".^[45] One Japanese-American veteran, Norman Nakamura, wrote in an article in the June/July issue of Gidra, that during his tour of duty in Vietnam of 1969-70 that there was an atmosphere of systematic racism towards all Vietnamese people, who were seen as less than human, being merely "gooks".^[45] Because most white Americans did not make much effort to distinguish between Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans, the anti-Asian racism generated by the war led to the emergence of a pan-Asian American identity.^[45]

Another Japanese-American veteran, Mike Nakayama, reported to Gidra in 1971 that he was wounded in Vietnam. He was initially refused medical treatment because he was seen as a "gook" with the doctors thinking that he was a South Vietnamese soldier (who were clothed in American uniforms). Only when he established that he spoke English as his first language was he recognized as an American.^[45] In May 1972, Gidra ran on its cover a cartoon of a female Viet Cong guerrilla being faced with an Asian-American soldier who is commanded by his white officer to "Kill that gook, you gook!".^[45]

There were also Asian American musicians who traveled around the United States to oppose the imperialist actions of the American government, specifically their involvement in Vietnam. "The folk trio 'A Grain of Sand' ... consisting of the members JoAnne 'Nobuko' Miyamoto, Chris Iijima, and William 'Charlie' Chin, performed across the nation as traveling troubadours who set the antiracist politics of the Asian American movement to music."^[43] This band was so against the imperialistic actions of the United States, that they supported the Vietnamese people vocally through their song 'War of the Flea'.^[43] Asian American poets and playwrights also joined in unity with the movement's antiwar sentiments. Melvyn Escueta created the play 'Honey Bucket' and was an Asian American war veteran. Through this play, "Escueta establishes equivalencies between his protagonist, a Filipino American soldier named Andy, and the Vietnamese people."^[43]

"The Asian American antiwar movement emerged from a belief that the mainstream peace movement was racist in its disregard to Asians ... Steve Louie remembers that while the white antiwar movement had 'this moral thing about no killing,' Asian Americans sought to bring attention to 'a bigger issue ... genocide.' ... the broader movement had a hard time with the Asian movement ... because it broadened the issues out beyond where they wanted to go ... the whole question of U.S. imperialism as a system, at home and abroad."^[46]

Clergyedit

The clergy, often a forgotten group during the opposition to the Vietnam War, played a large role as well. The clergy covered any of the religious leaders and members, including individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. In his speech "Beyond Vietnam," King stated, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."^[47] King was not looking for racial equality through this speech but tried to voice for an end to the war instead.

The involvement of the clergy did not stop at King. The analysis entitled "Social Movement Participation: Clergy and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement" expands upon the anti-war movement by taking King, a single religious figurehead, and explaining the movement from the entire clergy's perspective. The clergy were often forgotten though throughout this opposition. The analysis refers to that fact by saying, "The research concerning clergy anti-war participation is even more barren than the literature on student activism."^[48] There is a relationship and correlation between theology and political opinions, and during the Vietnam War, the same relationship occurred between feelings about the war and theology.^[48] This article was a social experiment finding results on how the pastors and clergy members reacted to the war. Based on the results found, the clergy did not believe in the war and wished to help end it.

Another source, Lift Up Your Voice Like A Trumpet: White Clergy And The Civil Rights And Antiwar Movements, 1954–1973 explains the story of the entire spectrum of the clergy and their involvement. Michael Freidland is able to tell the story completely in his chapter entitled, "A Voice of Moderation: Clergy and the Anti-War Movement: 1966–1967". In basic summary, each specific clergy from each religion had their own view of the war and how they dealt with it, but as a whole, the clergy was completely against the war.^[49]

Draft evasionedit

The first draft lottery since World War II in the United States was held on December 1, 1969, and was met with large protests and a great deal of controversy; statistical analysis indicated that the methodology of the lotteries unintentionally disadvantaged men with late year birthdays.^[50] This issue was treated at length in a January 4, 1970 New York Times article titled "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random" Archived November 4, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.

Various antiwar groups, such as Another Mother for Peace, WILPF, and WSP, had free draft counseling centers, where they gave young American men advice for legally and illegally evading the draft.

Over 30,000 people left the country and went to Canada, Sweden, and Mexico to avoid the draft.^[13] The Japanese anti-war group Beheiren helped some American soldiers to desert and hide from the military in Japan.^[51]

To gain an exemption or deferment, many men attended college, though they had to remain in college until their 26th birthday to be certain of avoiding the draft. Some men were rejected by the military as 4-F unfit for service failing to meet physical, mental, or moral standards. Still others joined the National Guard or entered the Peace Corps as a way of avoiding Vietnam. All of these issues raised concerns about the fairness of who got selected for involuntary service, since it was often the poor or those without connections who were drafted. Ironically, in light of modern political issues, a certain exemption was a convincing claim of homosexuality, but very few men attempted this because of the stigma involved. Also, conviction for certain crimes earned an exclusion, the topic of the anti-war song "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie.

Even many of those who never received a deferment or exemption never served, simply because the pool of eligible men was so huge compared to the number required for service, that the draft boards never got around to drafting them when a new crop of men became available (until 1969) or because they had high lottery numbers (1970 and later).

Of those soldiers who served during the war, there was increasing opposition to the conflict amongst GIs,^[52] which resulted in fragging and many other activities which hampered the US's ability to wage war effectively.

Most of those subjected to the draft were too young to vote or drink in most states, and the image of young people being forced to risk their lives in the military without the privileges of enfranchisement or the ability to drink alcohol legally also successfully pressured legislators to lower the voting age nationally and the drinking age in many states.

Student opposition groups on many college and university campuses seized campus administration offices, and in several instances forced the expulsion of ROTC programs from the campus.

Some Americans who were not subject to the draft protested the conscription of their tax dollars for the war effort. War tax resistance, once mostly isolated to solitary anarchists like Henry David Thoreau and religious pacifists like the Quakers, became a more mainstream protest tactic. As of 1972, an estimated 200,000–500,000 people were refusing to pay the excise taxes on their telephone bills, and another 20,000 were resisting part or all of their income tax bills. Among the tax resisters were Joan Baez and Noam Chomsky.^[53] Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Anti-Vietnam_War_movement
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