Interview with Maxwell Padon, History 150 Spring 2023, Conducted Noah Padon, March 14, 2023.

Overview to Interview: 

Due to on-going conflict, the Vietnam War started in 1954 and ended in 1976. Prior to the United States becoming involved, the war was being fought between the Southern Vietnamese and the Northern Vietnamese. In 1965, the United States officially joined the war, which unfortunately led to the deaths of over 58,000 American troops. The Southern Vietnamese troops needed support from another military due to the power of the North Vietnamese army. The US had a policy of intervention during the Cold War, trying to prevent other countries from turning to communism.

The US slowly expanded their intervention and this gave rise to a counter movement of protest against the war. After graduating from university, my grandfather enlisted into the army and served up until the Vietnam War. Throughout his career as a government employee, he was able to experience the protests and movements regarding the Vietnam War, watching as a historical movement of social change happened right before his eyes. My grandfather, who has witnessed first-hand the social aspect of the Vietnam War through his military work and his government job, tells his story from his own perspective about the social conflict revolving around the Vietnam War. Throughout the interview, and by answering the questions provided, my grandfather gives his personal opinion on specific moments from the Vietnam War.

Biography: For this Oral History Interview, I  interviewed Maxwell Padon on the effects of social change relating to his personal experience with the Vietnam War. Maxwell was born in South Charleston, West Virginia on March 29th, 1941. After graduating from his local high school, he was accepted into the University of West Virginia and attended the university for four years with a focus in a degree in History. After graduating from the university, he enlisted into the army and served up until the Vietnam War, but never fought in Vietnam because he was stationed in different countries. After his service, he changed his occupational path and settled down and found a government job in civil service in Washington, DC. The aspect of social change I want to focus my interview on relates to the political conflict and societal change as a result of the Vietnam War, focusing specifically on my grandfather’s experience with the war due to his experience with the demonstrational protests and also his time serving in the army. I will be interviewing my grandfather in-person during spring break.

Noah Padon 0:01
Hello, my name is Noah Padon, and today I will be interviewing my paternal grandfather about the Vietnam War. So let’s get to the first question. So for the first question, can you describe what your first feelings and emotions were like when you originally heard about the political conflict surrounding the Vietnam War?

Maxwell Padon 0:25
Well, there wasn’t much controversy about our being in Vietnam, and no real anti-war demonstrations as long as our involvement there was very limited. When we had special forces troops there in small numbers, there wasn’t a lot of controversy. It wasn’t until we began sending in larger numbers of troops, and the draft was increased, and people were being drafted to go to Vietnam, that much of the anti-war movement really, really had got started. And I’m not sure exactly when that was, I’d say maybe in the early 60’s, maybe. I was in the army, and I was in the Army Intelligence School. And we began getting reports about an intelligence that was coming out of Vietnam. I remember clearly about 1960, late 64, 1965, when, and it was classified information at the time, but when we were beginning to talk in the class I was in that the first Northern Vietnamese regular army troops had been identified in South Vietnam. Up to that point, we were mostly fighting in South Vietnam fighting against Viet Cong, Southern Vietnamese, mostly who were a Guerrilla army, irregular forces. But in 19, late 64, early 65, we identified the first regular army, North Vietnamese Army unit in South Vietnam. So as we began to put in more troops, and that was done under President Johnson, and as the troops increased, and people began to be drafted to go, there was resistance against the draft and resistance against people going into Vietnam. I was in Germany from 1966 to 1968. And there was a movement within the Army, there were people within the army who were not happy about the idea of going to war. And that is in being in actual combat. And so there was some resistance movement within the Army. I didn’t have much involvement with that. I did some investigations of people who were peripherally involved. But it wasn’t until after I got out of the Army in 1968, and came back to the states and went to work for the government as a civilian, that I began to see larger and larger demonstrations. I never had a lot of direct involvement with those demonstrations. I was around some of them. I remember one in particular that illustrated to me how the news media were manipulating the coverage of the war. I was going to the State Department on business. And as I went in, I saw a small group of people gathered around, and there were some television cameras, and I wondered what was going on. So I wandered over to take a look at it before I went in to do my job. Excuse me. And what I found was, there were maybe two dozen, maybe maybe three dozen people who were there with signs and demonstrating and chanting. And there was a news camera and a television news camera there. And they were pushed right into the middle of the group. And if you know how a wide angle lens works, and they were using a wide angle lens, they were right in the middle of the group so you could see people all around it. And it wasn’t much, nobody was paying much attention to it. And I went on to work and when I went home that night. I turned on the national news, and I saw television footage from that demonstration, and you could, it look liked there were 1000 people, because you could see nothing but people around it filling up the picture. And because of the wide angle lens, and because the television camera had pushed right into the group, if he pulled back, you would have been able to see the small size of the group. But you couldn’t see that from this news cast. It looked like there were hundreds of people, jostling the camera, the cameras bouncing around, because the cameraman could not hold it steady. And that was a clear manipulation of the news. And that, it was looking as if there were hundreds of people out there demonstrating. But in fact, there were maybe a couple of dozen, and nobody was paying much attention to it. I didn’t have much, much direct involvement, even after that. I was on the periphery, maybe a couple of demonstrations at some point. When I was I was working out in the Midwest, and as part of my work, I was going to college campuses on a regular basis. And I would see some people protesting here and there. But it just wasn’t much of a, much to me, except that I was monitoring some of those things on the college campuses, because there were government recruiters or government officials who were going to visit the campuses. And so we wanted to kind of take the temperature on the campus before they went to make sure that they were going to be safe, that they wouldn’t be dangerous demonstrations. That was to be safe for them to go in and do what they had to do there on the campus. And then, you know, I went overseas. I went and left the states in 1972. And I was gone for five years, and I was out in East Asia. I went to Vietnam several times, mainly passing through Vietnam on the way somewhere else. And I saw some aspects of the war that was going on there. Although I was really only generally in Saigon. And I did spend a weekend down in Kanto one time, which is in the Delta region down south. But no, not much in the way of anti-war things there. I was on the day that Saigon fell and Vietnam fell and everything went down the tubes. I listened to that on a single sideband radio, kind of a shortwave radio. I was sitting in Northern Thailand in a place called Chiang Mai. And the day that happened we were listening on the radio as people were evacuating, calling for help, and giving and telling them what was going on around them. And that was the day that Vietnam actually fell. And we evacuated all the Americans we could out of Vietnam, most of the American troops had been pulled out by that time already, which is one reason that the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong were able to come in so easily, although, frankly, there wasn’t much Viet Cong left. It was mostly North Vietnamese Army, regular army troops for that time. The Viet Cong was pretty much wiped out in an attack they did that was called the Tet Offensive. And it got a lot of publicity here in the States because they even got close enough to attack the American Embassy in Saigon. And the one faction promoted that as a fact that we had lost the war there in Vietnam and that we needed to pull out. In fact, the Viet Cong attacks were almost wiped out after the Tet Offensive. There was no regular, there was no active large Viet Cong unit. Almost all the fighting after that point was done by the North Vietnamese Army.

Noah Padon 9:43
Okay, so for the second question, I’m going to ask you, can you talk a little bit about the controversy surrounding the draft and also the relevance of individuals resisting military service by applying for CO status, conscientious objector?

Maxwell Padon 10:04
Well, there were more than one way of avoiding the draft and some people avoided the draft. There were people who had genuine philosophical objections to serving in the military in a position where they might be, in having to kill someone else. And there were people who carried that objection to the point where they felt that even serving in the military went against their religious or mainly religious backgrounds, people such as Quakers. And then there were people who may, and I think the main largest number of people who wanted to avoid the draft were because they did not want their lives disrupted by having to leave college, if they had a student deferment or had to leave whatever they had, to leave their family, they just didn’t want their life disrupted. They also, most of them did not want to live in the conditions that one was, the military was living in Vietnam, and mainly, they didn’t want to take a chance on being killed or injured. There were people, and the people who had genuine religious objections to serving could apply for conscientious objector status, it wasn’t that easy to obtain. And just getting conscientious objector status did not necessarily mean that you wouldn’t go into the military. There were many people who felt they had an obligation to serve the country, but objected to killing. And so they went into the military and non combat jobs. And some of those non combat jobs were as dangerous or more dangerous than being a combat soldier. Many of the conscientious objectors served in units as medics, they were unarmed. And they performed dangerous jobs in combat, and many of them were true heroes in saving, saving the other soldiers. Most of the people who wanted to avoid the draft, not because they had some deep religious or philosophical objection, but just because they were afraid to go or because they didn’t want their lives disrupted, could not qualify for conscientious objector status. And so they avoided the draft in other ways. Some of them faked medical reasons, sometimes that was successful, and sometimes it wasn’t. There certainly were instances of people being able to use political influence to get out of the draft. A lot of people had managed to avoid going to Vietnam by joining the National Guard or the Army Reserve, on a, in a system where they had to serve six months active duty and then after that they had another five and a half years of service that they were owed in either in the National Guard or the Army Reserve. And then there were people who fled the country, that way many draft dodgers went to Canada. There were people who deserted the army. People who were in Europe, mainland Germany, for example, who would get orders to go to Vietnam, and they would instead desert and generally go to Sweden, or one of the other Nordic countries, but mainly Sweden because it was a neutral and they would not deport the people.

Noah Padon 14:15
Okay, so for the third question, what was your experience regarding the sudden increase of the American people’s involvement in participating in social movement protests and demonstrations?

Maxwell Padon 14:30
I think that the demonstrations increased slowly over the years. As more troops were sent to Vietnam and more dead bodies came back, there were more and more people who joined the anti-war movement. And more and more people became involved. There were a couple of things that, major events that sparked great interest, news coverage, and probably brought more people into the movement. A big factor was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, in Chicago, became known as the Days of Rage, where many, many people showed up for anti-war demonstrations, they were not happy with the Democratic Party, who they were nominating. There were some people in the Democratic Party who were indeed anti-war, it was a turbulent convention, turbulent time when the state is on the streets with 1000s of people demonstrating rioting, committing violence, and went on for some time after that, actually, because there were the Chicago seven, seven people in particular who were arrested and put on trial. So that kept things in the news. These, those seven were particularly prominent anti-war demonstrators. Then in 1970, there was an anti-war demonstration on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. The National Guard was brought in to try to suppress that. And students began to approach and attack the National Guard troops who probably panicked a little because they were heavily outnumbered, and they began shooting with result that there were four students killed and nine, who were wounded. And that was the first time ever that students had been killed in an anti-war demonstration. That also had a big effect on the movement. Then, as I said, the movement grew and became it became more violent. There were not just demonstrations, but there were bombings and continued for some time, there were bombings every day throughout the country. Although the news coverage of that didn’t cover everything that happened. There were things like transmission, electrical transmission towers in the West that were bombed. I left the country, I was serving overseas and in foreign service. And so I missed a lot of what was happening here in the United States in the period of 72 to 77.

Noah Padon 18:11
How did the media play an important role in the movement of the war? And how has the media’s involvement in relation to war changed today?

Maxwell Padon 18:21
Well, I’m not sure. I have a biased outlook because I was not a fan of the anti-war movement. And I’ve felt that the media coverage at the time was biased against the government position and against the war. After the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite, also often known as the most trusted man in media, and most trusted man in news, announced his program, that what a debacle the Tet Offensive was, and it was clear that we couldn’t hold the country. But the fact is that the Tet Offensive was essentially what had wiped out the Viet Cong. And so we were actually in a stronger position than we were before after the Tet Offensive. As I said before, after the Tet Offensive, almost all the fighting was done by regular troops of the North Vietnamese Army. So it became a war between conventional armies rather than a regular movement as it was before where there were irregular troops and guerrilla troops that were fighting the war. And I think a lot of that had to do with the coverage. I was in the army with a fella who had been actually in the Air Force before and in Vietnam and he said he was walking across Tan Son Nhut airbase one day. And he looked over and he saw something kind of odd. There was a truck parked, and there was somebody running circles around the truck. And he thought that was kind of odd. He wondered what it was. So he went over and looked. And so he got a little closer, he realized this guy that was running circles around the truck, running hard, then he was coming back, and he was ducking down behind the front of the truck, the cab behind the engine, looking over it. And he saw he had a microphone, he was talking to the microphone. And then he saw there was a camera, a cameraman too. And he thought it was odd, but didn’t think too much more about it until a couple of days later, he saw on the national news, there was broadcast for American troops in Vietnam. The same guy, running, ducking down behind the truck, he was sweating. He was breathing hard. He was looking over the truck talking into his microphone. Only now there were automatic weapons firing, and explosions from shells in on the soundtrack. That of course, had all been dubbed into the recording after the fact. Because there was no, no firing around. That guy’s name was Dan Rather. And there were a lot of, in Vietnam, there were journalists who really wanted to see what was going on and go out in the field with troops, and live with the troops. But most of them had a tendency to go out, get some camera shots, a couple of interviews, and then head back to the safety of Saigon where they were living a pretty good life. I don’t know about media handling, the more now in the history. I think you get different views, different people doing that, you know, it’s hard to write history. Within 30 or 40 or 50 years of an event, you don’t really see the historical significance and get the details until many years afterwards, some say 100 years, you can’t really write history until 100 years after an event. I think people’s views have changed to the war. I think there are a lot of people who believe that we probably shouldn’t have been there. But since we were there, we should have done more than we did. I certainly felt that way. I thought we weren’t really trying to win the war. We sacrificed a lot of troops, particularly pilots, combat pilots, going in to bomb areas in North Vietnam that had been bombed before that had no strategic or tactical value. We were just dropping bombs in places where they weren’t. They were having no real effect. And we were not bombing things that we could have done if we wanted to really do some harm and put an end to the war. But that’s my viewpoint. And I do have a you know, it’s one sided, there are other views, people who have other views. Certainly people who are involved in the anti-war movement have different views. I had a radio program on a commercial radio station when I was in college. And one of the people I interviewed was a famous folk singer, now has just retired, named Joan Baez, and Joan Baez was a prominent anti-war activist. And I have probably more respect for her than most others because after the war, after it fell, the North Vietnamese took over South Vietnam and killed many many people where the living conditions were so bad that people were trying to escape from South Vietnam any way they could and there was a group called the boat people who left in any kind of watercraft they could to get out and risk their lives getting to some other country to get to Thailand or anyplace else they could to get out of South Vietnam. She was the only one of the anti war activists who said, maybe she made a mistake. Maybe people were better off under the north, or under the South Vietnamese political regime as bad as it was. And it was bad. It was an autocratic dictatorship. Maybe they were better off under that than they were under the North Vietnamese.

Noah Padon 25:24
Regarding the American people, do you think the American nation became closer because of the protests and demonstrations happening?

Maxwell Padon 25:33
Absolutely not. It was a very divisive time. There are people in the anti-war movement on the far left, tend to carry out a lot of violent demonstrations. They disrupted the country, families were split. And it was a very, very divided time in the country. And there was people on the right. Were not not tolerant of these people. Consider them, you know, the hippies, you probably don’t know that term hippies. But they were people who were in a counterculture movement, that became even before the war was prominent. But they became a big part of the anti-war movement, although not so much the violent ends of it. There was organized resistance in this country. And in fact, there was a concerted effort in this country, among some to overthrow the government, it was a small group, a violent group, and ultimately had little success. But they certainly, they certainly were disruptive. And people had pretty strong feelings about this, I’d say there weren’t lots and lots of people in the middle, you were either very anti-war, or I wouldn’t say pro war, but they were certainly against the anti-war movement. And much of that was there were people who felt maybe we shouldn’t be in Vietnam, but they felt an obligation to support the country. There were many people who believed that the reason we were in Vietnam was that if Vietnam fell, then the other countries in Southeast Asia would also fall, that Burma, particularly Thailand, and Laos, would become communist. In fact, Laos did fall, and there was a communist regime. The Thai government held, and well largely with the support of the United States government, defeated the communist insurgency there in Thailand. But it was a, it was a divisive time in the country.

Noah Padon 28:32
While employed just outside of Washington, DC, can you recall any specific experiences you encountered with the anti-war protests that took place in this area?

Maxwell Padon 28:45
Well, as I said earlier, the only one that I can recall, where I had really close observation was the one at the State Department. And that was probably about 1969, or 70, somewhere in there. And then when I came back to this area I left, I left in 1969. I was gone for a couple of years. I came back in 1971. And I was here a very short period of time, there were demonstrations going on. I remember there were big demonstrations down at the Pentagon from time to time. I don’t remember whether that was before I came back, when I was here, when I left. I mainly saw those through news coverage. If there were large demonstrations. I tried to avoid those unless I had some official reason for being in the area and I generally didn’t. So you just tried to avoid those things because you could. You just avoided the trouble. That’s all it was. And so if there were big demonstrations and streets were blocked or something there were usually police routing you around those and disrupted traffic, but you just avoided them. And so I really, really wasn’t involved directly with any large demonstrations. What I saw, I generally saw on television, I could, I would have seen the same thing I would have been in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Chicago, or Miami, I would just see things on the news, and I did not have any direct involvement with those.

Noah Padon 30:43
Explain how your feelings and emotions about the United States involvement in Vietnam changed over time due to the anti-war activities?

Maxwell Padon 30:53
Well, I don’t think my feelings were affected that much by the anti-war activity. They didn’t change my view of the war certainly. I thought that we prosecuted the war badly. I thought we were doing better before we put in huge numbers of troops. We were doing a pretty effective job with small numbers of intelligence personnel and with special forces units that were going in that were working with, for instance, the Moulton yards, and the Hill People with various tribes with local people, helping them fight the communist insurgency. I thought that we probably were more effective doing that than pouring in large numbers of troops. Pouring in large numbers of troops, we were using a conventional army to fight unconventional troops. And that often doesn’t work that well, number one, number two, by pouring those large numbers of troops, we began taking more casualties. And that increased the feelings in the States against the war, you can’t really, in a democracy, you can’t prosecute a war, unless you have public support. And the public support for our being in Vietnam began to erode. And, and I think one reason it eroded was because of the large number of troops that we had in there, who were an increase to the number of casualties, and I thought that was a mistake. So I don’t think my feelings about the war either at that time, or since, have been affected by the anti-war activities. More than more of my observations of how the war was conducted, what happened, looking back and seeing mistakes, that I think that maybe we’ve made from both a tactical and strategic view. So I thought, a lot of the people in the anti-war movement were genuine, they had genuine feelings against that war, or maybe any war. A lot of them really were young, they didn’t really understand the politics of the matter, or the global implications, but they were sincere in their beliefs. Some of the people were, when there was, as I said, a radical element that was really wanting to overthrow the country. And the Vietnam War was only a part of that. But, that was a small dedicated group, the weathermen group broke off from the larger anti-war movement, and pretty much devoted themselves to violence. But that was a very, very small number of people. However, there was, I mean, there was, there was an active insurgency in this in this country. The Black Panthers, that was kind of the precursor of the sort of Black Lives Matter movement, they had tended to be on the violent side, they did some good things, and they had some good aims. But some of those people were using it as a cover for doing other things. Including gathering money, but there’s been not much change about that, with any of these movements. And, you know, they were using stolen army equipment, radio equipment and encrypted communications, stolen arms and ammunition from armories here in this country, using them to commit robberies, raising money for the revolution for the cause. But you’re talking about a small percentage of the people who were involved in the anti-war movement. Many people in this country didn’t feel all that much, all that strong one way or the other. They just went about the way of living their own lives. But as I said, when you start having a lot of casualties that brought more people directly involved, decrease the public support for for the war.

Noah Padon 36:30
As a result of the war’s effect on the American society, how did the controversial actions the United States military during the Vietnam War changed the way you viewed the government in media?

Maxwell Padon 36:43
Well, I don’t know that it changed my views a whole lot because I had a pretty realistic view of both government and the media. Certainly, things have changed over the years mainly because of the changes in communication and the way we communicate. So we are no longer are limited to three networks with nightly news, all pretty much at the same time, and people either watched NBC or CBS or ABC, then now we have multiple sources of information through the internet through streaming services through satellite television. So we’re not limited to those, those three sources of information, the mass communication through television at least. However, we’d had a much, much more robust news media when it came to newspapers, both national newspapers, like the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but local newspapers and when I grew up, we had two daily newspapers in the city where I grew up, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and newspapers were the primary source of news, certainly of detailed news in depth and analysis, and that sort of thing. Newspapers, daily newspapers and weekly news magazines, all of that’s pretty much gone by the wayside now. However, we have things that are much more immediate, because of the rapidity of communication these days. The other side of that is that the rapidity of communication is much more prone to being first rather than being right. And so a lot of the information that comes out initially is wrong, and hasn’t been investigated thoroughly, and hasn’t been analyzed. So we have many more sources of information these days, which makes it a little bit harder to sort things out sometimes. But it’s certainly better, I think, than only having those major sources of the major news media that we had during the Vietnam era where there were fewer, fewer streams of information that were coming. The controversies in Vietnam, were over sometimes tactics, sometimes over misbehavior, there was the Mỹ Lai massacre where American troops essentially, murdered/massacred a Vietnamese village. And attempted to cover that up. But eventually it was uncovered. And the news media played a part in that, it was uncovered and people were punished for their actions, maybe not as severely as, as they should have been. There were other atrocities, always in the army, in the war, and more atrocities always on all sides. There’s an old saying, as a matter of fact, I think I have a book but that title, good truth is the first casualty of war. So a lot of times we don’t really, aren’t able to sort out what happened until years later. As I said, it’s that history is written not by the current people, or even their descendants, but you know, a couple of generations down the line, people begin to get to the truth of what really occurred. I think that one of the things about the news media and the military, is that in Vietnam, the military pretty much tried to keep reporters out of what was going on. But at the same time, they were given pretty much free rein so they could see pretty much what they wanted to do and go where they wanted to most of the time. But at the same time, the army, the military high command, worked very hard at giving them the picture that they wanted to see there. One of the problems in Vietnam is that the president of the time, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was so heavily involved that he was making not just strategic decisions, but tactical decisions, sometimes allegedly down to the platoon level as to where people would go and what they would do, you can’t run a war that way. There were politicians that were concerned about public support. And so they were trying to hold down casualties not just to hold down casualties, but because of the political implications. We, we fought the war in such a way, that when we had large numbers of troops there, the tour was 13 months. So people would go into Vietnam, they’d be there for 13 months and then come back. Then they might go back on another tour or maybe even multiple tours over the years, but the the draftees, the lower ranking guys, even who enlisted sometimes, they went in, they did 13 months, and they went out. And when you put people into a situation like that, that they know that they have 13 months to go. There first, and most important thing that comes to mind is, you know, going home and surviving. And so when you get to 10, or 11 to 12 months, people have a tendency to make their primary motive of getting to that 13th month. There is a story, probably apocryphal, but maybe true about a Frenchman who had been out in Indochina, in that area for decades, talking to an American military man. And by that time, we had had large numbers of troops in Vietnam for a decade. And the Frenchman said to the American, the problem with you Americans is you don’t have any experience here. You don’t know the society. You don’t know the people, you don’t know the country. And the American said, What do you mean, we’ve been here for 12 years? The Frenchman’s reply was No, you’ve been here one year 12 times. And that’s kind of what happened. We didn’t send people in to stay. A lot of the commanders came in and did their 13 months too. They didn’t really know what was going on. People were learning all the time. Now, we did start sending people back from multiple tours. And that made some difference. But it wasn’t like World War Two where we had troops in Europe. And they knew they probably weren’t really going to go home until they defeated the Nazis and the Germans. And they went in with that mindset. In Vietnam, an awful lot of people went in with a mindset of I’ve got to keep my head down for 13 months and then I can get the hell out of here. It’s different ways of looking
at things.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai