Our Year of War Page 28

  Once more, as he’d done so many times since that first long day at Fort Bliss, Tom Hagel made the rounds. Dutiful finance clerks settled up back pay. A doctor went over Tom’s medical records, gave him a most cursory medical examination, and pronounced all well. A chaplain talked to him. A psychological interviewer—not a doctor, just some guy—questioned Tom, too.62 Apparently, Tom gave the right answers. The fellow initialed Tom Hagel’s checklist. Not crazy. He now had the paperwork to prove it.

  At the final stop on the line, a careful personnel specialist typed up Department of Defense Form 214, the military version of that infamous permanent record you’d always heard about in grade school. But a DD 214 was quite real. If you ever hoped to merit anything from the Veterans Administration, you needed that key document.63 To get it right, the typist checked each line of Tom’s records, verifying his rank, his training, his assignments, his combat awards, and his campaign ribbons. The three Purple Hearts got attention. Well they should.

  And then it ended. For the last time, Sergeant Thomas Leo Hagel walked out of a U.S. Army headquarters. He had a wallet full of money, a government-paid ticket back to Nebraska, and a long way to go. No hippies spit on him. And nobody turned out for a dress parade, either. He left the army as he entered it. Alone.

  On the way out, Tom heard a voice. He never saw the person who spoke. “Thank you for your service, young man,” someone said. “Now go have a good life.”64

  CHAPTER 11

  Ashes

  Our poor children. There seemed to be no middle crowd or ground. They were either violently for or violently opposed.

  KATHERINE VAN DEUSEN WESTMORELAND1

  Stay out of the middle of the street, the veteran sergeants warned the privates. The NCOS had been in this dangerous neighborhood before, and knew the deal. Even in darkness, it wasn’t safe out there. Flickering light from burning storefronts cast long shadows, but also served to silhouette men who didn’t watch where they walked. Snipers loved to pick off guys who wandered out in the open. So the wise heads spread the word. Use the buildings as cover. Move near them. And watch the roofs. Shooters lurked up there.

  Even under concealment of night, hugging the first-floor walls didn’t work too well, either. The file of rifle-armed troops worked deliberately from doorway to doorway. But they had to be careful. Bright flames licked out of gaping window frames.2 Avoid the light, men. The sergeants kept saying it. So the privates tried to thread the needle, near the structures, but not too near. Wary soldiers hopscotched in slow motion from one dim spot to another. None hesitated in front of the lit-up stretches.

  Oily smoke lingered at ground level, making it tough to breathe. The book told troops to don gas masks, but as usual in the oppressive summer, it was way too hot for that. Plus, who could see anything from inside the rubber mask? Rifles up, eyes raised, the soldiers coughed and stepped slowly, placing their boots with care. Smashed wood, garbage, and glass chips covered the broken sidewalks. Who knew what other unpleasant surprises waited underfoot? Experienced NCOs cautioned all. Take your time. Stay alert.

  Along both sides of the street, a long row of riflemen, a company of them, worked west. Here and there, dotted along the street, bashed automobiles squatted on flattened tires. Some of the wrecks flared up, too. Other cars sat askew on the cracked pavement, gutted and blackened, stinking of burnt gasoline.3 Like napalm. It smelled just like napalm.

  Overhead, a pair of helicopters kept watch. They wove between the columns of smoke as their crews looked down into the maelstrom of choking soot lit by golden spots of fire. Aviators called out sightings on the radio.4 Two men moving together one block south, paralleling the dismounted infantry column. One unidentified person on the next corner to the west—can’t tell if he’s armed. With the gloom of night and all the obscuration drifting in the summer evening air, any aerial reports at all amounted to a miracle.

  This wasn’t south Saigon, but Twenty-fourth Street in Omaha, Nebraska, on the evening of Tuesday, June 24, 1969. A month later to the day, three Americans returned from space. During their eight-day voyage, two walked on the moon for the first time in human history. The Apollo 11 astronauts thought they’d seen “magnificent desolation” and left it behind, a quarter million miles away from earth.5 But they were wrong. Just ask the citizens of ravaged North Omaha.

  IN THE WORDS of Chuck Hagel: “I knew what America had just gone through in 1968 when we were in Vietnam: the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the riots and upheaval.” But Omaha? The long hot summer of 1966 came first, then the in-your-face Wallace visit of 1968, the violence after King’s assassination, and now this. Times in Nebraska had changed, all right, and in the worst possible way. “It was a different place,” offered Chuck.6

  Yet in too many ways, North Omaha wasn’t different enough, and therein lay the true problem. National Guard sergeants knew exactly what to instruct their men to do because the older guys had been there in 1966 and in 1968. The riots came and went. People died. Shops and homes burned. Yet underlying conditions of poverty and discrimination persisted. In 1969, another dreadful incident sparked violence.

  Heat, overcrowding, and indigence characterized the Logan Fontenelle public housing complex, which crammed more than two thousand people into 550 small units. But after fifty-one years of hard use, the cookie-cutter brick housing and its neat grid of streets had long since degenerated into a trash-strewn hellhole. Plagued by criminals, dejected residents named it “Little Vietnam.”7

  In an alley in Little Vietnam on the warm afternoon of June 24, 1969, a nervous white Omaha police officer mistakenly shot and killed fourteen-year-old African American resident Vivian Strong.8 Word went around right away. A white cop shot a young woman. People gathered, and few argued for restraint. Instead, things escalated, and fast. Within an hour, neighborhood rabble-rousers smashed open liquor store windows. White-owned shops on Twenty-fourth Street ignited. Gunfire echoed across a ten-block area. For hours, unchecked mayhem ensued.9 As usual in these terrifying episodes, innocent law-abiding citizens found themselves caught up in the violence. No reasonable person in North Omaha or anywhere else condoned the death of Vivian Strong. But burning, looting, and shooting up the neighborhood only added to the pain. Yet it went on.

  The National Guard mobilized. Along with the Omaha police, the guardsmen had only too much experience in the Twenty-fourth Street community. It took three days to quell all the unrest. When the last fires flickered down to ashes, eighty-eight residents had been injured, sixty-six arrested, and fifty businesses torched, just under a million dollars in property damage.10 Looking up and down the ransacked streets of the business district, distraught citizens stared at the charred remnants of hardware stores, groceries, dry cleaners, restaurants, gas stations—all gone. Like Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta, and with some unwelcome “help” from uniformed Americans, North Omaha destroyed itself. Whether or not it would be saved remained to be seen.

  BY 1969, THOUGHTFUL OBSERVERS of the American urban scene believed that the worst had passed.11 Compared to the height of inner- city disorders in 1965–68, culminating in the nationwide swath of arson and bloodshed after the death of Dr. King, the Omaha disturbance of June 1969 barely registered. But people in Washington paid attention. As long as the headquarters of Strategic Air Command, mighty SAC, remained at Offutt Air Force Base, any dissension in Omaha topped the agenda at the FBI and the Pentagon. If the high tide of America’s racial strife had subsided, why did discontent endure in Nebraska?

  The standard excuse by municipal authorities pinned rioting on the usual suspects, which is to say the infamous “outside agitators.” From Watts 1965 to Chicago 1968, self-assured mayors and chiefs of police told themselves and their worried citizens that the local African American communities could be trusted, but imported activists showed up with money, guns, and bad attitudes. And then hell followed.

  In Omaha, right on cue, newly elected mayor Eugene E. Leahy invoked the traditional culprits.12 Of
course, that argument allowed city officials to avoid the more intractable conditions that brought on violence. In this case, an Omaha police officer’s fatal error set off long-building passions. If any distant manipulators could arrange such a thing, their powers bordered on the supernatural.

  Yet Omaha was tied so closely to the direction of America’s nuclear forces that those paid to think about the unthinkable had little choice but to consider the worst. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover recognized that Soviet KGB and GRU intelligence officers enjoyed unique skills and resources. They could well be behind the Omaha riot. Hoover studied reports of uniformed, armed Black Panther Party members standing guard in North Omaha during the June 1969 disturbance. Since the Wallace imbroglio in March of 1968, Hoover had ordered special interest in the Black Panthers of Omaha.13 The FBI chief suspected a Russian link, tied to designs on Offutt Air Force Base.

  Accordingly, Hoover promoted FBI efforts in Omaha to the top of the clandestine, quasi-legal domestic surveillance and preemption enterprise called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). This high-priority undertaking originated back in the Eisenhower administration. Along with full use of lawful investigatory measures, the FBI’s COINTELPRO relied all too often on warrantless searches, illicit wiretapping of telephones, interception of U.S. mail, and recruitment of undercover informants. When dealing with perceived threats to national security, the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution evidently could be honored in the breach. For J. Edgar Hoover and a number of U.S. presidents, the Cold War nuclear stand-off justified it all. By the 1960s, the Bureau paid special interest to student anti-war groups and militant elements like the Black Panthers.14

  Active as COINTELPRO had been under LBJ, things really took off under President Richard M. Nixon. When FBI director Hoover pointed out the hazards of possible Soviet-backed anti-government conspiracies, he found a very willing listener in Nixon. Both men displayed morbid suspicion of all entities with any trace of communist ties. They also had no love for white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but in the hothouse of 1969, the KKK carried little weight.15 But the Black Panthers? Those self-proclaimed revolutionaries deserved a long, hard look, and the most vigorous application of law enforcement.

  The disorder in North Omaha, right on SAC’s doorstep, seemed ripe for quashing. In his 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon ran on putting an end to this kind of rioting. He talked of providing “law and order,” a phrase lifted from the rhetoric of the odious George Wallace, but certainly in line with what almost all Americans, black or white, hoped to see.16 Nixon, buttressed by Hoover’s FBI, did a great deal for domestic order. Law sometimes suffered in the pursuit of public calm.

  The Black Panthers of North Omaha didn’t hide themselves. In the street clashes after the killing of Vivian Strong, the Panthers protected key locations, including the office of the Omaha Star, the African American community newspaper. Photographer Rudy Smith took their picture. Eddie Bolden carried a rifle with a bandolier of ammunition across his chest. David Rice and Edward Poindexter also stood there. All three men offered forbidding scowls and wore black berets. “They served a valuable community service that night,” said Smith.17 The Omaha Star sustained no damage.

  After the fires went out and calm returned, the Panthers moved to consolidate their role in the North Omaha community. They organized the Vivian Strong Liberation School.18 The little gathering, held in the group’s headquarters, aimed to raise consciousness among the youth. It attracted some interest from the neighborhood teenagers and a lot of notice from the FBI and the Omaha police.

  One instructor at the school, David Rice, described himself as a “blippy,” a black hippie who often spent time with a white girlfriend. Back in March of 1968, Rice found himself swept up in the unrest spurred by George Wallace’s visit. Rice earned some money working for the government-funded Greater Community Action organization, a product of President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty legislation. But that kind of job training and self-esteem building only went so far. Rice thought it to be a dead end. A poet, performance artist, and free spirit, the small, slight Rice didn’t match the typical profile of a menacing Black Panther. But he believed in the struggle for revolutionary justice at the expense of the Man. He concentrated on developing propaganda flyers, exhorting potential sympathizers, spreading the latest party line in the community, and maybe changing some minds.19

  Another teacher at the Vivian Strong Liberation School, Edward Poindexter, made a more immediate impression. Six feet, five inches tall, Poindexter exerted a presence, all right. Despite his imposing frame, he was soft spoken, and worked days as a post office letter carrier. A six-year U.S. Army veteran, Poindexter served in Germany, Vietnam, and then Fort Benning, Georgia. He believed racial discrimination denied him promotions. The Black Panthers gave him an outlet to go after such institutional injustice.20

  The FBI Omaha special agent in charge, Paul Young, took note of Rice, Poindexter, and the other Black Panthers.21 Running a small discussion circle grandiosely labeled as a liberation school didn’t mean much by itself. But if these guys tried anything else—sabotage, shootings, bombings—then the FBI would move. In the meantime, the Bureau fed information to the Omaha police. The men in blue had enough to keep busy already.

  THE OMAHA POLICE paid a call on Chuck and Tom Hagel one night. The brothers had nothing to do with the Black Panthers, but they did live together in a modest rental home in North Omaha, not too far (but far enough) from the squalid Logan Fontenelle housing project. They both attended the nearby University of Nebraska-Omaha, an institution that welcomed veterans. Chuck majored in history. Tom chose a pre-law curriculum, aiming to become an attorney. The GI Bill paid for college, but with no family largesse, both men worked. Chuck tended bar. Tom, like Ed Poindexter, worked as a mailman. And after a long day, the Hagel brothers liked to relax with a drink or two.22 Or more.

  One evening, the alcohol pulled the brothers over the dam. Well along in his cups, Tom started ranting about Vietnam. He pulled the pins and flung the loaded words like grenades. Foolish. Losing. False. Chuck tried to argue that the U.S. policy made sense, that South Vietnam deserved a chance to be free of communism, but the military strategy had been flawed. Tom went right back at his brother. Senseless. Immoral. Murder. Face to face, voices raised, hands clenched…

  Then came the punches. Chuck carried more muscle. Tom was taller and had the reach. And both hit hard. “We were in a fistfight,” Tom recalled, “smashing beds, knocking doors off.”23 They didn’t stop.

  The tumult alarmed a neighbor. An older person living nearby apparently didn’t care for indoor boxing. “Someone called the cops,” Tom said. Not long after, two taciturn Omaha police officers showed up at the front door, fortuitously still on its hinges.

  That sobered up the two Hagels. “We were immediately all buddy- buddy,” Tom remembered.24 Their hard-learned military courtesy shone through. Yes, sir. No, sir. Just a misunderstanding, officers. The police left. No harm, no foul—and no formal citation was issued.

  After the run-in with the law, the Hagel brothers learned not to talk about the war with each other. Mother Betty, remarried to E. J. Breeding, moved with Mike and Jimmy to Hastings, Nebraska. She categorically forbade any Vietnam fireworks when the two college students came home to visit. “Enough of this,” she commanded.25 Her word held. No first sergeant ever spoke with more authority.

  On campus, Chuck paid no attention to the student rebels clamoring about Vietnam. Tom agreed with many of the sentiments of the peace movement, but found the anti-war people to be ridiculous. He guessed that 10 percent really cared. “The rest, some dressed in their ‘regulation’ hippie uniform, were far too busy in the social-recreational activities,” said Tom. “I was particularly impressed by the individuals who verbally attacked ‘this filthy, capitalist system’—and then got into their Corvettes and drove off to rage in their fraternity houses.”26 Compared to the height of 1960s college activism, the shenanigans at Universit
y of Nebraska-Omaha hardly wiggled the needle.

  The university students lost interest in the war for a good reason. As with the dissipation of urban disturbances in response to the carrots of civil rights legislation and LBJ’s Great Society programs and the sticks of Nixonian “law and order,” plus the likes of COINTELPRO, so conscious government actions gradually reduced, and then removed, the major issue that made American campuses seethe. Nixon rose to the presidency promising to end the war in Vietnam and, coincidentally, the unfair and unpopular military draft.27 Upon inauguration, he acted immediately on both points.

  With regard to the Vietnam War, Nixon began troop withdrawals in the same summer that saw Americans walk the moon and Vivian Strong die in North Omaha. The first increment of 15,712 came from the 1st and 2nd Brigades of the 9th Infantry Division. Officially, regiments of ARVN soldiers took over security across the Mekong Delta.28 In reality, the communists continued to hold the countryside. Except for all those killed and wounded, ours and theirs, it was as if the Americans never showed up at all. You had to wonder what Chuck and Tom Hagel thought. But they didn’t dare discuss the war anymore.

  Nixon justified the pull out of the 9th Infantry Division as the opening round of “Vietnamization,” in which reequipped South Vietnamese forces backed by U.S. air and naval support would hold the line in country.29 Could the South do it? Nobody knew. But the pattern had been set. Every few months, another division’s worth of Americans departed. Each reduction lessened the need for draftees.

  As draft calls decreased, slowly at first, but faster over time, Nixon pressed the U.S. Armed Forces to transition back to volunteer recruiting, the usual method for most of American history. Nixon announced the plan to end the draft within the next few years. He also sharply curtailed almost all deferments, substituting a birth-date lottery for the vagaries of local Selective Service boards. The call-up numbers ramped down, nearly halving each year: 283,586 in 1969, 162,746 in 1970, 94,092 in 1971, 49,514 in 1972, and a final 646 in 1973.30 Except for those still being inducted, the draft ceased to be a huge bogeyman for many American males. Although most students still decried the war, the incentive to pour blood on military records, burn draft cards, or flee to Canada dwindled proportionately.