By late December 1971 I was already calling myself a revolutionary. This was not quite three years since my return from Vietnam, less than two and a half after being discharged from the TB ward at Valley Forge Army hospital in Pennsylvania. Most of that time had been divided between a desultory stint in Graduate School at New York University, and a passionate commitment to the antiwar movement. My protest activities had put me at the strategic center of a campaign led by two New Left radicals, Jeremy Rifkin and Tod Ensign, neither of whom had served in the military, to bring former combatants like myself into the Movement by giving public testimony about atrocities committed by American units in Vietnam.

That organizing, the subject of an earlier memoir, Vietnam Awakening,² was the best schooling I’d ever had. Never had I been a more willing student, nor - in my till then twenty-six years - a more disciplined and willing worker. With a low B-average after years of private education I’d been pegged an underachiever. As for employment, most of it part time over summers or in college, I am chagrined to admit that I’d gotten fired more than a few times, twice for sleeping on the job. Till Vietnam my vague ambition was to become a diplomat, not from any interest in history or states craft, but more tenuously drawn from an ease with modern languages and the sensual pleasures of an undergraduate year in Rio de Janeiro.

The Vietnam War literally changed my life. What I’d seen in Vietnam angered me deeply. The antiwar movement provided an outlet for that anger, even if some portion of its intensity derived, not from the war alone, but from the classic Freudian origins of one’s mere existence. What is relevant to this account, however, is that by submerging the disturbing experiences of Vietnam into a well-grounded routine aimed at confronting the architects and apologists of that war, I had begun to construct a solid identity for the first time in my life. My pre-war personality had a ambivalent, drifting quality. By the end of 1971 I was no longer a detached and apathetic bleeding heart. I had become a partisan of the American Left, a right-on revolutionary small ‘c’ communist.

A whole generation of New Leftists consumed by their opposition to the Vietnam War had come to define themselves in similarly provocative terms. As a state of mind this pretense was not entirely delusional. Only those activists most unhinged from material reality believed the United States was living in a genuinely revolutionary moment. But revolutionary zeal had become rampant throughout the politicized youth culture. The axiomatic beliefs shared by many - perhaps most - radicals within this loosely knit, endlessly factious collectivity called the Movement - always capitalized - held that the American political system was a sham, and that capitalism as a viable engine to achieve social and economic justice had been totally discredited. Equally in disrepute was liberalism, the idea that the system could be reformed at a steady and gradual pace, an ideological wolf in sheep’s clothing presenting a more comforting appearance for maintaining the status quo. Aim the first blow at the liberals Chairman Mao had advised his own revolutionary cadres; our group wasn’t Maoist, but we shared that sentiment.

In the Movement we were known as CCI, short for Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam. Founded in the wake of public dismay that followed the revelation of the My Lai massacre in November 1969, CCI’s goal was to elevate popular awareness to the much greater scope of American atrocities in the war zone. Over the ensuing two years we’d had an amazingly good run, terrific coverage in the press and electronic media, with our two major accomplishments, a National Veterans Inquiry and the rump Dellums War Crimes hearings on Capitol Hill, the subjects of books from mainstream publishers.³

We never did convince most Americans beyond radical veteran and Movement circles that war crimes committed by our troops were both widespread and a de facto consequence of the manner in which the war was being conducted, primarily against South Vietnamese civilians. CCI had claimed that American war crimes were a matter of policy inherent in U.S. tactics: saturation bombing, free fire zones, forced removal of non-combatant civilians and destruction of their villages, and the systematic use of torture in the interrogation of detainees and prisoners, among others. Looking back I suppose that the most important contribution CCI made to the collective antiwar effort was to provide a forum for disaffected GI’s like me who’d had their heads turned around in Vietnam and were inclined to tell that story to anyone on the home front willing to listen.

By late 1971 the war crimes issue was a dead letter. Nixon had temporarily succeeded in demobilizing the antiwar movement with his policy of Vietnamization, the gradual withdrawal of American ground forces which, because victory now depended on the U.S. backed Saigon regime to battle on without American infantry, the press gruesomely described as “changing the color of the corpses.” It was a savvy political move. Clearly what had come to bother most Americans about the Vietnam War was its utter endlessness, not least the endless images on the nightly news of GIs being stuffed into body bags and brought home in flag draped coffins.

And still the war raged on with a full complement of American air and naval fire power at an intensity that was virtually undiminished despite the overall reduction in U.S. troops. Moreover, the field of hostilities would actually expand when both Laos and Cambodia, where covert war had been carried out for years, were openly invaded by American forces or their Army of South Vietnam allies. Far from “winding down,” from the Movement perspective the war had merely shifted into a phase that was likely to confuse, if not palliate, the mounting opposition among many so-called Middle Americans whose exhaustion with Vietnam had become a political obstacle to the Nixon administrations hallucinatory dreams of “keeping” Indochina, and sustaining the puppet regime in Saigon.

The Movement, as I say, was in the doldrums. A letter dated December 23, 1971 to a friend in Australia where I’d spent several weeks on a antiwar speaking tour earlier that year, captures something of the ennui momentarily deflating my own spirit. I wrote:

Here’s what’s new, more of less, in my life. CCI still in existence, but in low priority status. Watershed on the war crimes issue. Air war not real enough to excite American public, what with economic crisis. Many groups trying to reorientate... Am now into a regularly scheduled Marxist study group... beginning to develop a methodology for practice that is germane to unique American conditions. Oh well, I figure I’ve got at least 50 years to devote to the task! Several of us are trying to put together a Men’s Consciousness Raising group to deal with the question of sexual repression and roles from the male perspective. Many feel a great need for more sensitive support especially from our male comrades. Sorry this is so cut and dry. Xmas season always depresses the hell out of me. Love/struggle. [signed] Michael.

After the major antiwar mobilization of April 1971, which had included the now legendary veteran encampment called Dewey Canyon III, CCI’s principal organizers, Rifkin, Ensign and I, had spent several months meandering around the New Left political landscape looking for new direction. That fall we’d attended the founding sessions in Chicago of the New American Movement, which would in time help form the Democratic Socialists of America, a left wing caucus operating within the Democratic Party, which is not to imply one-sidedly they were working “within the system.” But neither Tod, Jeremy nor I were ‘join the party’ types.⁴

Independently, we had floated a set of project ideas that sought to extend our outreach among GIs and veterans and maintain a continuity of sorts with our efforts of the past months. In July 1971 we’d proposed that Representative Ronald Dellums of Oakland, California, who’d chaired our war crimes hearings in April, sponsor another round of inquiries around “racism, repression and militarism within the U.S. armed forces.”