David Bolling: Ali and Me and Vietnam

By David Bolling

Muhammad Ali and I had only two things in common. We both thought he was The Greatest, and we both refused to go fight in Vietnam.

Ali’s refusal in 1967 led to a guilty conviction for draft evasion that was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. He never served time in prison.

Neither did I, because I also declared myself a Conscientious Objector, but unlike Ali, I had a Quaker background, Quakers have a noble, if sometimes simplistic, commitment to pacifism, and it was relatively easy to be granted CO status.

The Indiana Draft Board that had to approve my status – three curmudgeonly veterans who might have served in World War I and weren’t shy about suggesting I was a coward, a traitor and un-American – said they hoped I would have to do my two years of alternative service emptying bedpans in a veteran’s hospital.

That didn’t happen either.

I’ve never considered myself a pacifist, and I like to think that my refusal to serve in Vietnam was not an act of cowardice but of honor, since under no circumstance imaginable could I picture myself accepting the illogical, immoral and dishonest argument for refighting a war the French had just recently lost. Then as now, domestic politics drove the decision to go to war. Too many members of both Houses of Congress, along with Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, feared being labeled soft on communism if they didn’t support intervention in what was essentially a north-south civil war born in the power vacuum when French colonial occupation ended.

American politicians naively believed that a row of totalitarian dominoes would fall across Southeast Asia if the communist Vietnamese weren’t defeated. Back then I was in my early 20s and thought I knew better. And I was fortunate enough to land a job with a Quaker lobby organization on Capitol Hill, where I spent my two years of alternative service walking the halls of Congress, writing research papers and speeches, working (however feebly) to stop the insanity of that war.

Now, almost exactly 50 years after the fall of Saigon and the frantic evacuation of the last U.S. helicopter from the roof of the CIA building on April 30, 1975, after finally going to Vietnam and crawling on my hands and knees through one of the famous Cu Chi Vietcong tunnels and traveling the country with my family from north to south, I still know better, as do a vast majority of Americans. It’s not hard.

In my college years I was blessed to be a student of one of the foremost East Asia historians in all of academia, a man named Jackson Bailey, who pioneered avenues of foreign study in Japan and opened my eyes to the history of Vietnam and its centuries-long struggle against Chinese hegemony. I also had the benefit of a college term at the University of London and the perspective of a British Foreign Service officer with years of experience in Southeast Asia and firsthand service in Vietnam.

And finally, I had access to a pioneering CBS News correspondent and family friend, David Schoenbrun, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow and the only American correspondent inside the ill-fated French garrison during the 1954 battle at Dien Bien Phu when the French were soundly defeated by the Ho Chi Minh-led Viet Minh soldiers and driven out of Vietnam.

Schoenbrun told the story of having witnessed a contingent of Viet Minh moving a heavy truck down a jungle trail when the truck got stuck to its axels crossing a flooded stream. “I thought that was the end of it,” Schoenbrun once told me, “it seemed impossible to free the truck. But then, within an hour people came pouring out of the jungle, maybe a hundred. They lifted that truck out of the stream and on its way. And I immediately thought, there’s no way anyone is going to defeat these people.”

And nobody did.

Today, as countless Americans who have been there in recent years will testify, Vietnam has made an astounding comeback, rising out of the ashes of war, the carnage of carpet bombing, the poisonous legacy of Agent Orange, and the ruinous policies of its nascent communist government, to ride a free market economy toward national prosperity.

It is still a single-party communist dictatorship with a muffled press, but its unified population is over 100 million, its per capita GDP in 2023 was $4,282 USD and the annual growth rate of its economy was 7.1 percent in 2024. 

More importantly it is at peace, after losing what the Vietnamese government estimates to be some 3.4 million soldiers and civilians, although other independent estimates range from 1.1 million to 3.8 million.

These numbers do not count war deaths in Cambodia of perhaps 300,000, and in Laos of as many as 115,000.

And none of these estimates include the Cambodian genocide conducted by Cambodian dictator Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, that has been estimated at between 1.5 and 3 million civilian deaths, with a most reliable estimate around 2.4 million. Many analysts and historians have concluded that the rise of Pol Pot was significantly enhanced, if not caused, by U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war, with direct civilian and military deaths from that campaign of at least 200,000.

The only truly reliable combat casualty figures to emerge from the Vietnam war are the 58,281 U.S. soldier deaths, 153,372 wounded in action and 1,584 missing in action.

Of course, every human loss reverberated through families, communities and cultures, multiplying and magnifying the losses. Did the United States gain anything of value from all this? Perhaps a painful lesson? A lesson all but forgotten by the time of Afghanistan?

With your indulgence I would like to share some further insights from my recent experience in Vietnam (and Cambodia) in the issues ahead.