Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 19, 1993                   TAG: 9309190085
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: HAMPDEN-SYDNEY                                LENGTH: Medium

VIETNAM WAR OPPONENTS PONDER HOW AND WHY COUNTRY FOUGHT

Early on in the war, "I began to doubt whether the people running the war knew what they were doing," McCarthy said during a panel discussion at Hampden-Sydney College. The gathering examined the war 20 years after the troops came home.

McCarthy said his opposition to the war was crystallized by discussions the then-senator from Minnesota had in the late 1960s with then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk and then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

McCarthy's surprisingly successful anti-war presidential primary campaign in 1968 is credited with hastening then-President Johnson's withdrawal from the race.

McCarthy criticized the Johnson administration's reliance on "body counts" and "kill ratios" to describe the war's progress, and called the military bureaucracy corrupt and the draft policy unfair.

William Crandell, a former national director of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, said his opposition grew out of his experience during two years of battle.

The infantry lieutenant volunteered for service in Southeast Asia from 1965 to 1967. The Purple Heart recipient said he did as he was expected to do in Vietnam - he killed and ambushed, then watched as the same was done to his fellow soldiers and friends.

But he had a change of heart after returning home, and by 1970 was an avowed opponent of the war, Crandell said.

At a July 4 parade, he marched to demonstrate against the war.

"Imagine what it feels like to fight for your country and be thrown out of the Fourth of July parade because of what you want to say," Crandell told an audience of students, faculty, Vietnam scholars and others.

"What is the point of being the home of the brave if it is not the land of the free?"

Crandell went on to write several war-related books and was director of the New York State Vietnam Memorial Foundation.

Former Sen. George McGovern said a visit to a Vietnam hospital clinched his own opposition to the war.

McGovern said he regarded anti-war activism as an emblem of democracy at work.

The 1972 Democratic presidential nominee said the United States made two central mistakes during the war. First, the United States tried to prop up puppet governments in Southeast Asia that lacked popular support, McGovern said. And through wide bombing across the countryside, the U.S. made enemies of the people it was trying to protect, he said.