Wisconsin Public Television
Transcript: "Looking Back, Two Days in October "

The following program is made possible in part by the Evjue Foundation. The charitable arm of the Capital Times.

Clark Welch:
I’m Clark Welch. In October, 1967, I was the Company Commander of Delta Company, 2/28th Infantry, in South Vietnam.

Jane Brotman:
I’m Jane Brotman. And in the fall of 1967, I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Consuelo Allen:
I’m Consuelo Allen. And in the fall of ’67, I was five years old. I’m the daughter of Lt. Col. Terry Allen and Jean Allen.

Maurice Zeitlin:
I’m Maurice Zeitlin. And I was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1967.

Dave Iverson:
I want to thank all of you for being here on this October afternoon, some nearly 40 years after the events that are described in the film. One of the things that seemed so clear in watching the film, and in watching all of you watch the film, is how near to the surface so much of this still is, whether you’re a former protester or policeman, a former soldier or a surviving family member. It’s close. What’s closest to you, Consuelo Allen? What stays with you all this time?

Consuelo Allen:
I think the loss is so profound. And it doesn’t ever get better. But also, for me, the commitment that everybody had to what they were doing, or what they were trying to do to save people, or to save, you know, what our vision of our democracy was.

Dave Iverson:
On both sides?

Consuelo Allen:
On both sides. And I think that’s what I came away with. You know, it’s a profound thing to ask of any member of this country to say, you know, can you stand up for what you believe in. And sometimes, that’s extremely muttled. And I love what you had to say, saying that you know, you had the luxury of standing up. And that the men were doing what they were asked to do. And I really appreciated that, and that they didn’t have a choice. And I think that, you know, I would hope that all the Black Lions who see that understand that.

Dave Iverson:
You’ve been away from this campus for nearly 30 years. When you come back, does it all come back?

Maurice Zeitlin:
No, no. It’s a different place completely. It doesn’t. The film made it come back, certainly. And talking about it made it come back. And especially, listening to what the other—the men who fought that war had to say about it made it all come back.

Dave Iverson:
What comes back for you, Clark Welch? What’s close, still, about October of 1967?

Clark Welch:
The profound loss. The profound loss. And today, to hear that both sides did their duty. Yeah, both sides did their duty. But the profound loss. The two events that are coincidental, but cannot be compared. How many protesters spent overnight in the hospital? How many? Not many. We had 64 killed. The profound loss. Profound loss. And I went to breakfast this morning with Consuelo. And as we walked across a piece of the campus, and it’s beautiful. You have a beautiful city. And wouldn’t we have liked to have been here. Yeah, it would’ve been nice. But just the profound loss my guys that—To see the pictures of—Not many of my soldiers had wives. So, the survivors were sisters. Pinky Durham, a man who was killed, his younger sister. I saw the pictures over there. I saw Diane Sikorski’s picture over there. I see them every day. The profound loss.

Maurice Zeitlin:
Well, if I could just say, this thing about profound loss. You see, I guess the difference, still, between you and me, is that I felt it as a profound loss at the time. The entire war was a profound loss. I had friends who were drafted.

Clark Welch:
Working class?

Maurice Zeitlin:
Yeah, I grew up in a working class neighborhood.

Clark Welch:
No comparison.

Maurice Zeitlin:
Everybody was an auto worker’s kid.

Clark Welch:
No comparison.

Maurice Zeitlin:
Of course, I’m not comparing it. What I’m saying is, we were trying to stop that profound loss. And that’s the difference.

Dave Iverson:
Rather than to go through those arguments again. And again, we can tell how present they are. Let me ask instead, a different—Let me ask you, Jane Brotman, a different version of the same question. Which is, what do you take from that time? What stays with you, that you learned from that time that is present to you now, in October, 2005?

Jane Brotman:
Well, there’s so many things that I take from that experience. One is that it was an awakening for me. It was one of these events that happens in your life that is like a seminal event that just changes you completely. What I take from it is that it was like someone opened the windows and allowed me—I had been very, very closed when I first came to campus, to hearing any alternative points of view about the war, which is embarrassing to admit, but it’s the truth. And one of the things that I feel very grateful for about being on this campus, and being at Dow, is that it created a kind of crack, in that it allowed for an opening. It has allowed me to hold, to this day, a sense of feeling that these issues of war and peace; how we’re going to live together in our country with each other; how we we’re going to live with other peoples in the world. Issues of poverty, social justice, that all of those things are very dear to my heart and very important to me. And that those are things that I need to be educated about and that I need to act on in an active way as people did at Dow.

Dave Iverson:
You say, in the film, that prior to the events that are portrayed, "If my government said we needed to be in Vietnam, then we needed to be in Vietnam." So, was that the awakening, then, that happened, that you began to look differently at government? And is that something, in turn, that has stayed with all of you since that time, that you look at government in a new way?

Jane Brotman:
Absolutely. Because it wouldn’t have occurred to me that my government could lie to me. I mean, it just wasn’t even an option at the time before Dow. But I feel—I guess, what I want to share is that one of the things I feel very proud of about Dow and the anti-war movement is that it somehow expresses a real commitment of caring about what’s going on in the world, what’s going on with government or, you know, the important issues of the day, and a commitment to learning about the issues of the day and to participate if one feels one needs to oppose a particular governmental policy.

Dave Iverson:
Is that one of the lessons? Is that something the two of you share, even though you side on different sides?

Clark Welch:
I’ve been nodding my head. Yes, I did go into Vietnam that if my government sends me, they’re right. Or, even another edge to that, if my government sends me, they may not be right, but I’ll go anyway because my government sends me. I challenge authority. And I told the men, when I was in the Army, I told the men who worked for me to challenge me if they thought I was doing something wrong. Just because it comes down from up there, it’s not right. And I do carry that with me.

Dave Iverson:
Maurice Zeitlin, how transforming was it for you, in terms of how you viewed government?

Maurice Zeitlin:
It would take three hours... (all laugh) I have this difficulty, which is that I understand in the most profound way that there is no comparison between the risks that we took and the dangers that we were in and what the fighting men were involved in. I’ve never suggested there was any comparison. But on a small scale, as you see, the students, as a result of a non-violent, peaceful, sitting at a building, many of them were injured, 65 sent to the hospital. One of them was blinded for life. One of the young women had a miscarriage. What you learned was that you can’t be a citizen if you’re not willing to take risk. And I think an entire generation of Americans became citizens of their country for the first time. What Jane is talking about is that she wasn’t a citizen. She was just living in this country and making assumptions about the country, and good ones, in fact, the kinds of assumptions we all had made.

Dave Iverson:
And the common denominator, it sounds like you’re saying, of becoming a citizen is an awareness that there’s a price to be paid for that.

Maurice Zeitlin:
Absolutely. You can’t be a citizen and not take risks.

Dave Iverson:
One of the things that becomes clear in the film, and you’ve both talked about how different those experiences were, and that they were not comparable. But one thing that occurred to me watching the film that is similar, I think, between what happened on the campus of the University of Wisconsin and what happened in Vietnam is a sense that things can spiral out of control; and that in a sense your leader, your father, Terry Allen and your leader, Bill Sewell, shared something, that they were both in situations that spun out of control, that they were under enormous pressure from people above them; and that they, in the end, made decisions that probably were not right. Did you feel that watching this film?

Consuelo Allen:
Oh, sure. But what struck me most about both—And you know, yes, I’m connected to my father. But the idea that a decision was made on both their parts and neither—They had a moment, and they didn’t change it. And we don’t know what went into that. I don’t know if my father was tired that day. I don’t know whether or not General Hay said, "No, this is the way you’re going to go today." But what struck me beyond the fact that they were close in age, it seemed to me, is just how how haunted they both seemed.

Dave Iverson:
Is that, then, part of what Vietnam cost us? Major Jim Shelton says in the film that he’s not ready to give up on Vietnam. But he goes on to say, "I can’t accept the death of my buddies as not being worth something." How do you come to that question about what those deaths were worth, the death of your father, the death of the man you saw in the film?

Consuelo Allen:
Well, I don’t think anybody should ever lose anyone. I mean, I just don’t think it’s, um... You know, I can’t count my loss more or less than Mr. Lam’s family or his wife’s family.

Dave Iverson:
The Vietnamese soldier we see in the film.

Consuelo Allen:
Yeah, I can’t—It’s not possible for me to do that. And I—It’s a void. And there’s no call or cause for that, ever ever.

Clark Welch:
Consuelo and I went with David Maraniss back to Vietnam when he was doing work on preparing his book. Consuelo and I spent a lot of time with Captain Lam, who had 200 men shooting at us on the last day, and with Colonel Triet, who had 1,200 men shooting at us on the last day. I went back again a few months ago to there. Captain Lam and Colonel Triet are my good friends, my comrades. I mean, we were happy to see each other. It’s incredible. To answer the—Wars are terrible. And people get killed in wars. And we should never, ever—I agree with her. And I agree with all three of you. It is not worth one death. We should resolve it by other means. Now, that’s what people go to your university for. The universities aren’t doing very good.

Consuelo Allen:
We still have wars.

Clark Welch:
We still have wars. And we have wars—We should have wars only as a last resort, when other means have failed and failed and failed. Then, and only then, you turn the warriors loose, you let loose the hounds of hell. And thousands, millions of people get killed. But only after the resolution by other means, other means, other means, other means.

Dave Iverson:
Jane Brotman...

Clark Welch:
But we don’t do very well at that.

Dave Iverson:
Jane Brotman?

Jane Brotman:
You know, I think what’s so amazing about this film is that it just really brings home the sense of how horrifying war is and what’s really at stake. You know, we hear about war on TV. We hear about the war in Iraq. We heard about the war in Vietnam. And after a while, you become numb. But a film like this brings it all back. And one of things I just wanted to say to Clark is that I think that when—I would ask you that given you are aware of how horrifying war is—You’re more aware of it than I, because I’ve never been in a war, you have. Wouldn’t you think that it would be very, very important for people to, when a government asks its people to go to war, do you think it’s important for people to not just blindly go to war.

Clark Welch:
Absolutely.

Jane Brotman:
But to really be educated about it.

Clark Welch:
Absolutely.

Jane Brotman:
To see if they agree. And if they don’t agree, what should they do?

Clark Welch:
Absolutely. Well, what should they do depends on who they are. I don’t want to talk about the war that’s going on now, and how we went into that for all the right reasons and now we seem to be there. But the President of the United States should be, you know, the best, most brilliant man in the country. The Congress, who gets us into wars, Congress got us into the Vietnam war. Only two people in Congress voted against the Vietnam war. What the hell is wrong with them? People must know where democracy don’t work. The people must know.

Dave Iverson:
What did Vietnam cost us? We talked some about the loss of life. But what did Vietnam cost us, Jane Brotman?

Jane Brotman:
Well, it cost us, I have to say the loss of life, because that’s so present. But I think it cost—Well, it cost me a certain kind of innocence. And it cost... Actually, I don’t know. I think that there was a cost, but there was also, because there was an awakening, it also gave something to us that is very valuable.

Dave Iverson:
And let’s talk then, some, about what can still be gained from that time and about the experience that you had going back to Vietnam and finding the place where your father died. And your mother wrote a poem about that; and if you were able to find the place, to be able to read that poem. And if I may, I just wanted to read a few words from it, which is, "May your footsteps where blood was found turn that ground to wide forgiveness and heal and free those left behind.” So, is there something, Consuelo Allen, that we can still gain from Vietnam, that sense of a wide forgiveness that crosses the divides that are right here between us?

Consuelo Allen:
Well, the important thing about that day, for me, was when I met Colonel Triet. He said something that he had said to Clark earlier. And he looked at me and he said, through the interpreter, "No one won that day." And I think that that’s what is so important and why we were able to meet on common ground the way that Clark and I were with him. I mean, this man was responsible for my father’s death. But you know, nothing’s happened. The Vietnamese still have Vietnam. And we are left, all of us, with a sense of loss. But what has been gained is the sense that no one won. And if we don’t stand up; and if we don’t take note of that; and if we don’t look at what the larger picture is of what it means to be who we are, and not blindly accept what is going on, then we will have lost that gift. And I know that, you know, Jim’s unwilling—Jim Shelton is unwilling to accept that what we did there was without cause. I agree with that. But I agree that I think that my father died to ensure our questioning of citizenship, and our questioning of what it means to be an American. You know? And I think that he probably died wondering that. But the question was asked.

Dave Iverson:
And that’s what can be gained, a fuller sense of what it means to be an American.

Consuelo Allen:
Yes.

Dave Iverson:
Which takes us, in a way, Maurice Zeitlin, to what you also say at the end, about doing our duty as Americans. How did that time inform, finally, each of your sense of duty, each of your sense of what it means, now, in October of 2005, to be an American?

Maurice Zeitlin:
Well, I have to say I’m a hell of a lot more pessimistic about what it means to be an American citizen. The level of mediocrity and cowardice, and timidity and plain ordinary lying to the American public from the top of our government has never been worse, even in the worst days of Vietnam.

Dave Iverson:
And what’s your duty in response to that?

Maurice Zeitlin:
My duty is to say that, as I’m saying it now, minimally. And to try to confront it in whatever way we can. And I think that’s every American’s duty and responsibility. And the moment we stop doubting the men and women in authority and thinking they must know; they know things we don’t know rather than the other way around, we abandon it, our duty, as citizens.

Dave Iverson:
Duty.

Clark Welch:
A hard question. I get asked that at home when people find out that I was a soldier for a long time. And, "What do you do now?" I vote every four years. Jesus Christ, surely it’s more than that. I talk to kids. I talk to my kids. I talk to high school kids. I talk to soldiers. I try to keep track of my soldiers. My duty is to remain informed so that I can vote every four years. But it’s more than that. I write letters to my Congressman. We can never do again what we did then with an ill-informed Congress, the arrogance of the Pentagon, which we still have. We still have. So, my duty, I would like to say this is my duty, and I’ve done it, and look what happened. But all I can tell you, I think that’s my duty. And I’m not sure what good it’s doing.

Dave Iverson:
What about your sense of duty, Jane Brotman, and your sense of reaching across those divides from long ago, and the divides that still exist today?

Jane Brotman:
One of the things I felt while watching the film was, I remembered how hard it was for the two groups that were polarized to talk with one another. And I felt this tremendous sense of sadness at how hard it was then to talk to each other. And it just feels so much better to be in this room, and to just feel that, you know, Clark Welch and I can talk to each other without, you know, screaming at each other. And to feel his, our common shared humanity.

Dave Iverson:
Consuelo?

Consuelo Allen:
I think that what’s very important at this point, for me, and for the next generation coming up, is not forget the loss that we’ve had of so many lives, and that what could come as a result of not questioning what’s happening. And you know, it’s not popular at a dinner party to say, you know, I think that this is not right. And it was very jarring to me the other day to be listening to the radio and hearing a news story about different stories in Chicago. I was there last week. And they’re called "War Stories." And one of the stories was a small town, different families talking about, well, I don’t believe that we should be there, but so-and-so’s mom is serving over there. And she’s missing her daughter’s first day of kindergarten. And these people who are being interviewed said that they didn’t believe it was right, but they would never protest. And I think it’s important to honor patriotism and honor protest, because that’s what our country was founded on. And as soon as we abandon that, we have abandoned the precepts of what this country was founded on. And until we acknowledge that both require conviction and both require sacrifice, then we’re not going to see the fruits of that kind of labor. And that labor, hopefully, will always be peace. That’s my hope. Always.

Dave Iverson:
I want to thank you all for coming to Wisconsin, to Madison, on an October afternoon, to talk about that moment in time and where we are today. Thank you all very much. I’m Dave Iverson. Thanks for watching Looking Back Two Days in October.

This program was made possible in part by the Evjue Foundation. The charitable arm of the Capital Times.