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Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War by Richard Stacewicz
The Vietnam War cut deeply into the lives of an entire generation of Americans. It left an indelible mark on those who took part in it and spawned an antiwar movement more popular and passionate than any other in U.S. history. In all that has been written about the war up until now - about the policies that drove it, the experiences of the American soldiers who fought it, and the dreams of those who opposed it - rarely do the worlds of the Vietnam veteran and the antiwar demonstrator come together. Yet in a small but articulate organization known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the two made common cause. Winter Soldiers recovers this moving chapter in the history of the Vietnam War era. Bringing together the voices of more than thirty former and current members of the VVAW, oral historian Richard Stacewicz offers an eloquent account of the impact of the war on the lives of individuals and the nation.
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First published November 1, 1997
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November 8, 2022
This book is a collection of interviews of members of the Vietnam Veterans against War.
After they were on active duty in Vietnam, they had come to believe that they and the American people in general had been betrayed by the country's leaders, and this sentiment is reflected in their thoughts. Their interviews cast light on different sides of the Vietnam conflict and the protest movement. Some of them focus on the traumatizing experiences on the front lines, others on the love that they had developed for the Vietnamese people, and yet others on what it was like to be part of the VVAW at home.
For me, one of the funniest and most memorable interviews was that of Ann Hirschman, a medical nurse and VVAW activist. She answered a question that I have been curious about: was the police as relentless with the veterans as it was with the student activists of the sixties and seventies? According to Hirschman, no, the police did not attack the VVAW because it was "pretty daunting." However, a personal animosity developed between Ann and a member of the New York red squad, the anti-left group in the police department. That policeman, John Finnegan, pretended to be a CBS reporter, and she liked to out him, telling people that he was a cop. "He used to get all crazy," she writes, and he tried to bust her for everything from practicing medicine to rioting, resisting, and obstructing. In general, though, the VVAW had it much better than the SDS, the Weathermen, and the Black Panthers.
Speaking of the Panthers, I was surprised to read in the interview of JMC that "We [the veterans] worked a lot with the Black Panthers." Although the VVAW did not embrace the militancy and violent tactics of the Black Power groups, they had found a common language with the black radicals, who, according to the same interviewee, accepted the veterans more than they accepted other white groups.
Notably, the VVAW members had a much wiser approach to protesting and getting support from the American public. One interviewee, who used only initials, criticized the "Berkeley radicals," whom he saw talk to people "about imperialism, capitalism, [and] all that bullshit." He, and other veterans, scoffed at those speeches. Although they had read enough to be well-informed about what the students were saying, they knew that this was not the right approach to winning the people over. It was patronizing and condescending to tell people how to live their lives. According to the interviewee, at some point the veterans spent more time fighting the student radicals than doing actual work because the rich white kids' cramming of ideology down people's throats made Americans turn away from the protest movement.
A paragraph from the interview of LT caught my attention. It was interesting to read someone underscore that the VVAW members were not non-violent by nature, but had chosen to be non-violent because this was reasonable and effective. However, being non-violent, not snapping, required a conscious effort. The veterans vented. "We talked about blowing up fucking train tracks, but we didn't do it." This demonstrates how much more maturity and self-control they had than the student radicals.
Tracing the soldiers' different roads toward disillusionment was also useful. Most stories that I have read before this book were written by people who had volunteered to go to Vietnam and had been eager to fight only to realize that war was not like in the movies. These interviews showed a different perspective, though. There were many men who were raised believing that one had to rebel when he or someone else was mistreated. Even in Vietnam, such men did not lose their ability to think critically. They questioned their commanders' orders and quit fighting as soon as they could.
Some of the most raw depictions are in the interviews of Army medics, which is not surprising. Jack McCloskey wrote that "Vietnam had robbed me of one of the greatest human dignities a person can have – that's the ability to cry." He cried after the first Marine he treated died. He cried the second time that he witnessed a death, and the third. However, he eventually stopped crying – and getting emotionally attached to people. To him, the anger and the alienation that many veterans felt when they came back from Vietnam were not insanity. They proved that the veterans were sane because this was how a sane person would react to the situation. I find his perspective enlightening.
There are also many interviews that chronicle the incompetence of commanders, the jarring experience of killing a person, and other ugly aspects of a military conflict. If you have not read memoirs of Vietnam veterans before, you will find a lot of new information here. The interviewees were protesters against the conflict, who had become disillusioned with the government's policy and the fighting, so their stories are free from attempts to glorify war and preach patriotism.
WINTER SOLDIERS is an exceptionally great collection. It is equipped with a helpful chronology, and the interviews are organized in chronological order, from enlistment in the military of the interviewees to training, to fighting in Vietnam, to protesting against the Vietnam conflict. This book is a brilliant history of the VVAW – comprehensive, personal, and interesting.
After they were on active duty in Vietnam, they had come to believe that they and the American people in general had been betrayed by the country's leaders, and this sentiment is reflected in their thoughts. Their interviews cast light on different sides of the Vietnam conflict and the protest movement. Some of them focus on the traumatizing experiences on the front lines, others on the love that they had developed for the Vietnamese people, and yet others on what it was like to be part of the VVAW at home.
For me, one of the funniest and most memorable interviews was that of Ann Hirschman, a medical nurse and VVAW activist. She answered a question that I have been curious about: was the police as relentless with the veterans as it was with the student activists of the sixties and seventies? According to Hirschman, no, the police did not attack the VVAW because it was "pretty daunting." However, a personal animosity developed between Ann and a member of the New York red squad, the anti-left group in the police department. That policeman, John Finnegan, pretended to be a CBS reporter, and she liked to out him, telling people that he was a cop. "He used to get all crazy," she writes, and he tried to bust her for everything from practicing medicine to rioting, resisting, and obstructing. In general, though, the VVAW had it much better than the SDS, the Weathermen, and the Black Panthers.
Speaking of the Panthers, I was surprised to read in the interview of JMC that "We [the veterans] worked a lot with the Black Panthers." Although the VVAW did not embrace the militancy and violent tactics of the Black Power groups, they had found a common language with the black radicals, who, according to the same interviewee, accepted the veterans more than they accepted other white groups.
Notably, the VVAW members had a much wiser approach to protesting and getting support from the American public. One interviewee, who used only initials, criticized the "Berkeley radicals," whom he saw talk to people "about imperialism, capitalism, [and] all that bullshit." He, and other veterans, scoffed at those speeches. Although they had read enough to be well-informed about what the students were saying, they knew that this was not the right approach to winning the people over. It was patronizing and condescending to tell people how to live their lives. According to the interviewee, at some point the veterans spent more time fighting the student radicals than doing actual work because the rich white kids' cramming of ideology down people's throats made Americans turn away from the protest movement.
A paragraph from the interview of LT caught my attention. It was interesting to read someone underscore that the VVAW members were not non-violent by nature, but had chosen to be non-violent because this was reasonable and effective. However, being non-violent, not snapping, required a conscious effort. The veterans vented. "We talked about blowing up fucking train tracks, but we didn't do it." This demonstrates how much more maturity and self-control they had than the student radicals.
Tracing the soldiers' different roads toward disillusionment was also useful. Most stories that I have read before this book were written by people who had volunteered to go to Vietnam and had been eager to fight only to realize that war was not like in the movies. These interviews showed a different perspective, though. There were many men who were raised believing that one had to rebel when he or someone else was mistreated. Even in Vietnam, such men did not lose their ability to think critically. They questioned their commanders' orders and quit fighting as soon as they could.
Some of the most raw depictions are in the interviews of Army medics, which is not surprising. Jack McCloskey wrote that "Vietnam had robbed me of one of the greatest human dignities a person can have – that's the ability to cry." He cried after the first Marine he treated died. He cried the second time that he witnessed a death, and the third. However, he eventually stopped crying – and getting emotionally attached to people. To him, the anger and the alienation that many veterans felt when they came back from Vietnam were not insanity. They proved that the veterans were sane because this was how a sane person would react to the situation. I find his perspective enlightening.
There are also many interviews that chronicle the incompetence of commanders, the jarring experience of killing a person, and other ugly aspects of a military conflict. If you have not read memoirs of Vietnam veterans before, you will find a lot of new information here. The interviewees were protesters against the conflict, who had become disillusioned with the government's policy and the fighting, so their stories are free from attempts to glorify war and preach patriotism.
WINTER SOLDIERS is an exceptionally great collection. It is equipped with a helpful chronology, and the interviews are organized in chronological order, from enlistment in the military of the interviewees to training, to fighting in Vietnam, to protesting against the Vietnam conflict. This book is a brilliant history of the VVAW – comprehensive, personal, and interesting.
February 4, 2015
The traditional view of veterans, fostered by such organizations as the VFW and the American Legion, is that they are all conservative, pro-military, and pro-war. I've never really believed that. The World War II veterans I knew growing up, including my father, did not glorify war, and were not all conservatives (though they tended to get more conservative as they got older); they felt that they did a job that needed to be done in defeating Nazism, but that there was nothing great about war per se; militarism and glorification of war was what the other side was about, was what they had been fighting against. Most of them never joined any veteran's organization, and those who did were motivated more by the social aspects than by the politics (my Dad once said he didn't join the VFW or the Legion because he didn't drink).
This book is about an organization of veterans at the other end of the political spectrum: the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). It is hard to overestimate the impact that VVAW had on people my age at the time, not because of anything they said or did, but just because they existed. By the time I was starting college in 1970, the government had basically given up trying to pretend the US was fighting for democracy in Vietnam; their final argument was essentially a macho one, if you didn't support the war you were a just a coward who was afraid to fight (which always made me think of little boys on the playground). And then here were these veterans, who had been there, who had fought and come back with medals and citations, and they were saying the war was wrong and being active in the antiwar movement. Nevertheless, I never knew much about the organization; and by the time I began to be political, they had become a different sort of organization altogether.
The book is an oral history; that is to say, it consists of interviews with the veterans and their supporters who were actual participants, with a minimum of connecting comment, rather than being one author's viewpoint. The viewpoints are quite diverse. In the first chapter, they talk about their early lives and why they went to Vietnam to begin with. It was interesting that so many of them were conservative, from military families, who had been in the Young Republicans, worked for Goldwater, etc. (Although a fair number were Democrats as well.) Most of them were volunteers, not draftees. They believed the rhetoric, that they were defending the South Vietnamese against foreign aggression, that we were the good guys. They expected to be welcomed as liberators. These were the soldiers who felt most betrayed when they got there and found that the Vietnamese people didn't want them, that they were more afraid of the South Vietnamese dictatorship than of the Viet Cong. The second chapter is about their experiences in Vietnam, the disillusionment with the war, the racism, the ineptness of their officers, and the things that were being done by the military. The remaining chapters describe the founding of VVAW, the early actions, the "Winter Soldier" hearings, Dewey Canyon III (probably their high point), the repression by the government, and the subsequent divisions, the Maoist (RU/RCP) takeover and virtual collapse of the organization, its ultimate reorganization around the Agent Orange issue and the later lives of the members interviewed. It ends with a summary by the editor.
It's hard to cover this book in a short review, there is so much information here. First, the information about the war itself, which has been forgotten by most people and "revised" by the conservatives.There are interviews with people on all sides of the split; I think it was to the VVAW leaders credit that they began to understand the connections between the war and other aspects of American society, and unfortunate -- though understandable, given the small size and factionalism of the US left -- that they tried to turn VVAW itself into a kind of political party or multi-issue movement, leaving behind and losing much of their membership in the process. The role of the Maoists in this was tragic; why the VVAW leaders were attracted to RU, probably the most dogmatic, Stalinist, ultraleft and just plain inept group on the left at the time, I find difficult to understand. I was very interested to learn about the influence of VVAW on active duty GIs in Vietnam and elsewhere; the kind of activities they carried out in various cities; and especially on the fact that so many of them remained as activists up to the time this book was written in 1997.
I wish that more of the younger generation today was aware of the facts of Vietnam and what was learned about the nature of our government and the mass media; it seems to have all been forgotten, which is probably why we're in Iraq today. In looking for this book, I saw that there is a "Winter Soldier" organization today of Iraq War veterans.
This book is about an organization of veterans at the other end of the political spectrum: the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). It is hard to overestimate the impact that VVAW had on people my age at the time, not because of anything they said or did, but just because they existed. By the time I was starting college in 1970, the government had basically given up trying to pretend the US was fighting for democracy in Vietnam; their final argument was essentially a macho one, if you didn't support the war you were a just a coward who was afraid to fight (which always made me think of little boys on the playground). And then here were these veterans, who had been there, who had fought and come back with medals and citations, and they were saying the war was wrong and being active in the antiwar movement. Nevertheless, I never knew much about the organization; and by the time I began to be political, they had become a different sort of organization altogether.
The book is an oral history; that is to say, it consists of interviews with the veterans and their supporters who were actual participants, with a minimum of connecting comment, rather than being one author's viewpoint. The viewpoints are quite diverse. In the first chapter, they talk about their early lives and why they went to Vietnam to begin with. It was interesting that so many of them were conservative, from military families, who had been in the Young Republicans, worked for Goldwater, etc. (Although a fair number were Democrats as well.) Most of them were volunteers, not draftees. They believed the rhetoric, that they were defending the South Vietnamese against foreign aggression, that we were the good guys. They expected to be welcomed as liberators. These were the soldiers who felt most betrayed when they got there and found that the Vietnamese people didn't want them, that they were more afraid of the South Vietnamese dictatorship than of the Viet Cong. The second chapter is about their experiences in Vietnam, the disillusionment with the war, the racism, the ineptness of their officers, and the things that were being done by the military. The remaining chapters describe the founding of VVAW, the early actions, the "Winter Soldier" hearings, Dewey Canyon III (probably their high point), the repression by the government, and the subsequent divisions, the Maoist (RU/RCP) takeover and virtual collapse of the organization, its ultimate reorganization around the Agent Orange issue and the later lives of the members interviewed. It ends with a summary by the editor.
It's hard to cover this book in a short review, there is so much information here. First, the information about the war itself, which has been forgotten by most people and "revised" by the conservatives.There are interviews with people on all sides of the split; I think it was to the VVAW leaders credit that they began to understand the connections between the war and other aspects of American society, and unfortunate -- though understandable, given the small size and factionalism of the US left -- that they tried to turn VVAW itself into a kind of political party or multi-issue movement, leaving behind and losing much of their membership in the process. The role of the Maoists in this was tragic; why the VVAW leaders were attracted to RU, probably the most dogmatic, Stalinist, ultraleft and just plain inept group on the left at the time, I find difficult to understand. I was very interested to learn about the influence of VVAW on active duty GIs in Vietnam and elsewhere; the kind of activities they carried out in various cities; and especially on the fact that so many of them remained as activists up to the time this book was written in 1997.
I wish that more of the younger generation today was aware of the facts of Vietnam and what was learned about the nature of our government and the mass media; it seems to have all been forgotten, which is probably why we're in Iraq today. In looking for this book, I saw that there is a "Winter Soldier" organization today of Iraq War veterans.
August 3, 2025
VERY thorough. Over 400 pages of first hand account of Vietnam veterans. Very interesting to read the various perspectives which lead to anti war sentiments. Also, one of the interviewees was mention in one of my crim law cases, where burglary must include entry into the property! Whoa!
January 22, 2019
I honestly believe that some books choose their readers. This book was one of them. I found this book at the Smithsonian museum bookstore, on sale for 3.99. You better believe I snatched it up and ran. What a deal! This book is fascinating and heartbreaking of all these men and women's struggle to stand up for what they believed was right. Stacewicz clearly loved his subjects and the drive to get this story told.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews