by Pham Binh
Dave Cline, a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and president of Veterans for Peace, passed away September 15.
His loss is hard to bear even for those such as myself who were not very close to him on a personal level. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard this must be for his family.
His loss is hard to because he was such a fine human being, a warm, radiant, down-to-earth stand-up working-class guy with a great sense of humor and an unbelievable dedication to the fight for social justice. His activism spanned almost four decades after returning from combat in Vietnam. I had the pleasure of working with him on and off again starting in 2002 at various anti-war demonstrations and events when it became clear that the Bush administration was going to risk the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis by invading Iraq.
His third combat wound in Vietnam led to the beginning of his political transformation. Before that traumatic event he “thought life was drinking beer, chasing girls and listening to rock and roll.” Shortly before the Tet Offensive in 1968, Dave was involved in a night time firefight near the Cambodian border. He saw someone approaching his foxhole but held his fire until he saw the barrel of an AK-47 and a muzzle flash. He opened fire, killing the Vietnamese soldier.
The next morning, someone congratulated him, saying, “here’s the gook you killed.” But to Dave, he wasn’t a “gook.” He began to wonder: did that man have a girlfriend? What about his mother? And he realized that he had lived while the other man died only because of pure, dumb luck.
Dave was hospitalized in Japan for the injuries he suffered in that fight. In the hospital, he picked up a book by anti-war Vietnam vet and Green Beret Donald Duncan called “The New Legions,” which helped turn him against the war he once fought.
After returning from Vietnam, Dave threw himself into the burgeoning anti-war movement and helped establish the Oleo Strut coffeehouse next to Fort Hood to do anti-war work among active-duty troops. An oleo strut is a shock absorber for a helicopter, and that’s what what the coffeehouse was for troops returning from Vietnam and for those who were questioning or opposed to the war. This approach to doing political work - providing comfort and a social outlet in addition to politics - was one of the things that separated Dave and many anti-war veterans from the rest of the anti-war movement and the American Left.
At the coffeehouse, there was radical literature, bands played shows, and Dave helped publish a GI newspaper there. He also met Jane Fonda, whose Fuck the Army (FTA) tour traveled to Fort Hood and other bases around the world to entertain anti-war military personnel. At this time he also helped found and lead Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
At some point in the 1970s, Dave moved to New Jersey, worked at various jobs with the NYC Port Authority and became a union activist. Like most combat veterans, he struggled with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and went through a few marriages.
Despite personal difficulties Dave may have faced, he fought the good fight. He fought the Veterans Administration for proper care and benefits for all Vietnam vets; he fought for both American and Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange; he fought against America’s murderous intervention against the Central American revolutions in the 80s fearing that it would turn into another Vietnam; he stood up against the attack on Panama, the Gulf War, and intervention in Somalia in the early 90s; he opposed the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999; he traveled to Vieques to show his solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico in their fight to stop the U.S. military from using it as a practice range; he organized against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; and he organized a Veterans for Peace caravan to bring relief to New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and neglect by every level of government.
The thing that kept Dave going throughout the years, I think, was his desire to stop anyone from having to go through what he and millions of Americans and Vietnamese had to go through in the Vietnam war. That’s what kept him motivated through the ups and downs of movement activity. That’s what gave him the fire and the passion that came through in his hoarse voice whether he was speaking at a large anti-war rally or to a dozen middle and high school kids.
It was this deep, personal level of commitment to the cause that made him so dear to everyone he worked with, spoke to, and had an impact on. It was why he had little patience for the sectarian, ideologically-motivated infighting or ego-tripping that he saw between groups that ostensibly were on the same side of the issues. He felt that fighting over trivial issues, nitpicking, and sneaky maneuvering within the Left strengthened and aided the enemies of working people, soldiers, and people of color. He felt that getting overly-involved in ideological debates meant losing sight of the people whose lives are put in harm’s way every day all over the world by the system.
Despite his hostility to what he would call ideology, Dave was a socialist. He wanted a fair, just, and equal world without wars, insurance companies running rampant, and war profiteering. His genius was in being able to make these complex ideas relevant and compelling to any audience he spoke to, whether they were political or not, by humanizing them in terms of his own life experience. Imperialism wasn’t some lifeless abstraction about the concentration and centralization of capital reaching its highest point of development. For Dave, imperialism was about people’s lives being destroyed in a hail of gunfire, bombs, and napalm, it was about Agent Orange crippling veterans and their children decades later, it was about rich people sending poor people to die for money and power, and it was about veterans not getting anything but the shaft by the government that sent them to kill or be killed for no good reason.
Dave Cline will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him. The best way we can honor him is by continuing his fight to get all of our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately, making sure they get the care they deserve when they get home, and fighting for a world where there are no more wars for power and profit.
by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
I first saw and met Dave Cline when he limped through the front door of The Oleo Strut coffeehouse in September, 1968.
The Army had released him from hospital, even though they had not been able to heal the wounds that he would deal with for the next 39 years.
I was the Vietnam Vet-in-residence among the civilian staff then. My apotheosis about Vietnam had happened 4 years earlier, when I was a participant in the Tonkin Gulf “Incident” - the lie that created the war in Vietnam. Little did I know on August 4, 1964, but there was an ally out there on the South China Sea, Lt (jg) Fred Gardner, Assistant Gunnery Officer on the USS Turner Joy - one of two destroyers “attacked” that night - Fred ran down from the gunnery tower to his CO and informed him that “the only target out there is the Maddox.” Four years later, Fred would take the money paid him for writing the (awful) movie “Zabriskie Point” and fund the GI antiwar coffeehouse movement with that paycheck, and he and I would talk about that night before I left to go to Killeen Texas that July and staff The Oleo Strut. (Just so you know, while Fred was convincing his CO not to open fire, FT2 Dave Johnson - my good friend from USN firefighting school while we awaited transport to WestPac the year before - was manning the fire control tower of USS Maddox and telling the Commodore “the only target out there is Turner Joy, sir” as he refused the order to open fire three times; Dave was court martialed and reduced to FTSN for “failure to obey a direct order” in September 1964. There’s a bit of history that needs to go in the books; hearing his story was what “turned” this reporter - more Vietnam history not in the books. Imagine what would have happened had one opened fire and sunk the other.)
Soon after his arrival, Dave was the main anti-war organizer on-base. Whenever an officer gave him shit for what he did, his response was “What are you going to do - send me to Vietnam?” Stopped them every time.
Dave became the soldier editor of our “underground” newspaper, “The Fatigue Press.” I was then and am now a professional writer and journalist, and I remember many times doing “all nighters” down in Austin, working over the stuff submitted, getting it onto those @#$%$#@!! mimeograph sheets, and getting it done. Dave could curse for ten minutes without repeating himself when we had to deal with that fershlugginah mimeo machine (those who have been in the military will know what a wonderful thing that was).
As Dave Zeiger has told his story, after my wife and I left the Strut in December 1968, Dave and we parted company, for the kinds of idiot reasons Dave Zeiger points out. While Dave Zeiger was working on Sir, No Sir! (in which I appear for a whole 25 seconds - I timed it) he put Dave Cline and me back in touch. We hadn’t talked in 30 years, and when we did, it was like the last time we had talked was yesterday. That was Dave. I was glad to be back to being his comrade these past four years.
As a writer who has had the opportunity to write historically about some Real American Heroes, I would compare Dave Cline with my old friend, the late Richard H.”Dick” Best. History knows Dick Best as the guy who changed the tide of battle at the Battle of Midway by sinking the Japanese carrier “Akagi.” He really did change the course of history, and create the world you and I (the readers of this) grew up in (the world where the United States won the Pacific War), but for Dick, he always believed the greater service he gave his country was as the Librarian of the RAND Corporation, where he helped Daniel Ellsberg publish “The Pentagon Papers.” He believed that was his great service to the true America he believed in all his life - more important than changing the course of the Pacific War.
Dick Best and Dave Cline were - as individuals - about as different as men could be, but they were both the same guy: American Patriots willing to sacrifice everything for what America really is. Both gave up their health for the rest of their lives as a result of their ultimate act of sacrifice for their country, and both learned from that what was truly important and worth sacrificing for.
It was a privilege to know both of them and my life is better that I coulf call both good friends.
BTW: many of you may not know this, but Dave Cline was the character Charlie Sheen played in the movie “Platoon.” He was remembered by his squad-mate Oliver Stone, upon whom he made as memorable an impact as he did with the rest of us. The movie character may have sat up and looked out the helicopter as he left; but Dave Cline lay on a stretcher taking 7 pints of plasma on his way to the first MASH. I learned this direct from my friend Oliver Stone when he and I were in competition for whose “vet-writ” Vietnam script would be the first to make it to screen (and history declared the winner) 23 years ago.
by Michael McPhearson
Executive Director, Veterans For Peace
David Cline passed away early September 15, 2007. Most of you know that David was a giant in the veteran’s anti-war and peace movements. A national coordinator and long time member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War as well as former President of Veterans For Peace, David was a crucial part of the explosion in VFP’s growth and led us in our planning and actions as we have resisted the invasion and occupation of Iraq. David was a giant among people who motivated all of us to action by modeling leadership and providing inspiration.
David was my boss, mentor, friend and I loved him. He recruited me into VFP by simply being the person he was, a veteran working for peace. There are few people outside of my family whose death means such a loss to me personally. There are few in our nation whose loss means so much to our movement.
A quote David loved so much guided his thoughts and actions. He carried it in his wallet so that he could whip it out to motivate us at any time. Of course he also had it memorized.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglass
David Cline, we salute you!
