Liberation Radio

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the Apartment Bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the documentary In the Studio, the programme that investigates the creative process.

0:48Hello all you happy defenders of freedom out there in VC land. This is the second front radio prepared by the American... This is the work of the artists Nyung Nguyen and Esther Johnson. It's called Liberation Radio, and it's their response to a war that was never truly declared, despite being one of the most painful and consequential conflicts of the late 20th century, the war in Vietnam.

1:17My name's Matthew Sweet. I'm a historian and broadcaster. I'm not really an artist, but I've been working with Nguyen and Esther on a project that tells a story about Sweden, Vietnam. and the USA. So I am Esther Johnson and I'm an artist and filmmaker. Jog my memory, how did all this happen? Well yourself, myself and also Nhoang, we all met at a British Council supported R &D trip to Vietnam in which we were introduced to various different cultural organizations, artists, filmmakers, all in the hope that this kind of cultural exchange would initiate some kind of new creative collaboration. My name is Nhung Nguyễn and I'm an artist and sound designer based in Vietnam.

2:10I knew nothing about it until Matthew told me about the deserters but back then I read quite a few artist calls from VOVs of Oasis Vietnam about the the original Liberation Radio station in 1962. And that was the story, the narrative from the Vietnam Missiles I didn't know anything about. In the studio is about what artists do, so I want to tell you about what we did. The project is called Liberation Radio. It comprises a number of elements, historical primary sources presented in vitrines and as a slideshow, a sound installation that surprises visitors as they walk around the gallery, a hand-sewn banner and a black box in which filmed sequences are projected on a screen and sound elements buzz and crackle from an old radio.

3:02It all started with some tapes of interviews that I recorded in 2015 for a book about Americans who, in the 1960s and 70s, refused to fight in the war in Vietnam. Deserters is the catch-all name for these men, though some of them would more properly be called draft resistors as they made their refusal before they received the call to fight. Between 1964 and 1972, 2.2 million US citizens were drafted into the war that the Americans called the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese call the American War. The conflict killed nearly 4 million people, Vietnamese civilians and Vietnamese and US combatants. For most of the world, the war was the defining moral and political issue of the age.

3:52You were for it or against it. And for the men whose stories we've tried to tell, that position led to a momentous, life-altering decision. Until President Carter declared an amnesty in January 1977, deserters could be court-martialed and jailed. So where did they go? Many moved over the US border to Canada. Two countries in Europe, though, were prepared to grant them humanitarian asylum, Yugoslavia and Sweden. But as Yugoslavia was a communist country, the vast majority, a thousand or so, chose the Swedish option. In Sweden, the deserters were a cause celebre, a political and social phenomenon, and for some, a social problem.

4:36Here's one of them, the late Rod Huth, speaking in 2015. about his decision to desert in 1968. I didn't intend to do anything against the government, but a series of events that happened that year, I was beginning to doubt my government. John F. Kennedy was shot. Soon thereafter, his brother, Bobby Kennedy, was shot, and Martin Luther King was shot. And I didn't feel the sense of security that I had before. And I went to the local branch, it was near UCLA, and asked them about what the possibilities were for political asylum in another country. They said they couldn't tell me about how to do it, but they could direct me to a library that they had, which had all the information I would need.

5:23It explained how to go to Canada, from there to Sweden or to Yugoslavia. I didn't want to go to a communist country, certainly, so I chose Sweden. I made my way to Canada, took a flight and went to Copenhagen, and then ultimately the Stockholm. He was one of my interviewees for a book, Operation Chaos, which I published in 2019. It's about how the deserter movement was surveilled and infiltrated by the CIA and the psychological impact that had on those in it. The lives of these men, some content, some haunted, all shaped by a difficult decision they made at a young age, continues to fascinate me.

6:04And it's led me, Anne Young and Esther, to create Liberation Radio, first staged in Hanoi in 2021, now restaged at Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. Just before our opening night, Esther was putting the finishing touches on a large, eye-catching red and yellow fabric banner. I just need to heat up a little bit. Oh, you're crying, Esther. Am I crying? Not really crying. It's the emotion of it. Was I crying? Got a watering eye? Yeah, watering eye. How strange. Well, this is an important moment, this, because for days and days now, you've been hunkered down and stitching. What have you been stitching?

6:45So I've been stitching a two metre wide banner. Before we put it up on the wall. We need to do some steaming, but it's not steaming very loudly. You do the work. Right, let's go. Let's go. One of the deserters who remembers that time well became a collaborator in the show. His voice and his story are part of the work and part of all the public events that went with it, like this interview that we did in front of an audience. And this, as I'm sure some of you in the room know, is Vincent Strollo. Tell us how you came to Sweden, Vincent. How I came to Sweden? Got in my car. I was in Landstuhl, Germany, working in a hospital and I was going to be sent to Vietnam.

7:33So I hopped in my car with a friend, drove first to Copenhagen and then to Sweden, and I've been here ever since. The short version. The longer version tells how Vince, like many of his fellow GIs in Sweden, joined the American Deserters Committee and how a group of them got in contact with representatives of communist North Vietnam. We went to the consulate of the Vietnamese and we asked them if we could go to Vietnam and fight for the Vietnamese. but they said that was a bad idea. They were offered a counter-proposal, given a tape machine on which to make propaganda radio programmes to persuade other GIs to desert.

8:13And I'm very happy that they thought it was a bad idea but they suggested making these tapes. The tapes featured pop music, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and political messages, deserters urging GIs to follow their decision and get out of the war. These tapes were then transported by diplomatic bag to Hanoi, where they were played out on a station called Liberation Radio, hence the name of our show. Nobody knows what happened to those tapes, but the scripts of the programmes survived in Stockholm, and Vince agreed to re-perform them for us. Hello all you defenders of freedom out there in Viet Cong land.

8:51This is the Second Front Radio by the American Deserter Committee in Stockholm, Sweden, and broadcast it to all. Unite and organise, refuse to fight, go home to live. Only you can end this war. Deserters are heroes. We were also curious about the Vietnamese journalists, whose job it was to play them out on air, often under bombardment. And in Ho Chi Minh City, I met Hang Nguyen, who was one of the voices of the state during and after the war, through broadcasts aimed at US troops in the country and calculated to turn their opinion against the war. You are listening to the Liberation Radio, broadcasting from South Vietnam.

9:34That's it. Would you have ever said your name on air? Yes, after that. Can you do it for me? Go on, I know you can do it. I am Hung. I will tell you a story about some victories of the Liberation fighters. in an area to Zomot or something, province. That's it. It was fascinating to talk to her, to hear the language she still uses that speaks of a communist state at war, the references to the enemy as puppets, for instance. So where was the office? That is the secret. No, actually, when I was recruited to the Liberation Radio, They broadcast in something called the revolutionary base in the liberated zone or even in the occupied zone by the puppet administration.

10:36But they did secretly. They broadcast some news. I myself sometimes read the news, the call on the American GIs and also on the puppets to put up their arms, to return to the family. and we used the songs to encourage them to return home, to assure them that they will not be reprised. There would be no reprisals. They wouldn't suffer if they handed themselves in, gave themselves up. Yeah, that's it. And having recorded this material, I gave it over to Esther and Nguyen, who made it into a film. So the process for this, there were several steps and layers. So we had the audio interviews. Then we had the materials in the archive, which are old style record cards on which are beautiful objects in themselves.

11:34And we have facsimiles of those within the exhibition. Those are the original cards in which the scripts were written. and I'm really interested in this mixing of materials from the time, how they can be re-performed now, mixing that with memory of something that perhaps, how does all of that work to offer an alternative narrative of this story? So we've got this audio collage of points of view of a historical event and a view on that event from different points in time and Nhoang edited this material into this kind of an audio collage with a mixture of field recordings that both you, Matthew, took some field recordings here in Stockholm.

12:24Nhoang and myself had some audio recordings of places and atmosphere recordings from Vietnam and then mixing these elements. And the final other audio element, it's a script that you wrote, Matthew, that imagines the sort of really dramatic element of the story.

12:53This is the part of the project that expresses some of the strangeness of the times and the deserter's experiences. Men who deserted while on leave in Japan had to call a special phone number to reach an academic at Tokyo University who would send them to safe houses from where they could be smuggled out of the country on fishing boats to the Soviet Union. It was very cloak and dagger. And, of course, the USSR was happy to use these men for its own political purposes. Deserters who came this way were presented on Russian television as heroes. It was good propaganda for the Soviet Union. Two actors, Lisa Bowerman and the late, great David Warner performed this script for us.

13:39The code word is sanctuary. The code word is Stockholm. Mother. Mother country. Liberation. Liberation Radio. We first put on the show in 2021 in Hanoi at the Manzi Artspace. While the audio was broadcasted to a small analog radio, an audience could choose to sit in a tall wooden booth in the central area of the exhibition space or to stand near the projector screen to experience the artwork. Beheron. Deserter. Enemy village. Court marshal. Traitor. And we had so good feedback, mostly from young people who didn't know anything about the war at all because they were born very long after the end of the war in Vietnam.

14:43And also those working as the journalists for the newspaper and television and radio, they didn't know this very interesting story. Maybe I think they knew some of them deserted, But they didn't know that the desirters also work on radio programs for the original liberation radio station in South Vietnam. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.

15:33What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Matthew Sweet and this programme is about Liberation Radio, an exhibition project for INDEX, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm. In the show we have vitrines full of radical literature from the period, some of which are American cartoon strips that depict North Vietnamese communists bombing South Vietnamese villages with napalm and carrying out atrocities. So you see these comic drawings and it's a person kneeling in front of a boat.

16:23Isabella Sharda is the co-director of the Index Gallery. Looking at an American man in a beret and this person is saying, help us, they beat us and destroyed our boat, give us food, friends. Then there's a very disturbing image of the same American soldier and in the background you see a woman kneeling beside another woman under a broken cart and one of them saying, the red, I begged them, I asked for mercy. And then they obliterated the village with napalm bombs. Not all elements of artistic process are completed by the artist. With this show, we hope that putting it on would attract the interest of those whose lives have been caught up in the story and that happened on the opening night.

17:15A draft resistor whose name I'd seen in documents from the 1970s turned up out of curiosity. Stephen Wentworth. I haven't had contact with these people for 20, 30 years. I was just curious also to see who was there and to re-establish connections. I was totally unaware of it, but my daughter told me about it. She keeps up to date on events like that. And what impression did it make on you?

17:51You go back in time. It was fascinating to see all these people, all these old people. So tell me about the ADC. Could you explain what it is? The primary activity was to collect funds to help other deserters come over, provide information to the troops in West Germany. The people just wanted to hang out and smoke a little dope or whatever. One of the ones who were very political active and wanted to make a statement. I hung out with the political side rather than the wasted side. That political side was very serious, wasn't it? We should say that there were several people who probably would have thought of themselves as revolutionaries.

18:38Yeah, there were. It was quite a broad spectrum. I was sort of in the middle. I had Trotsky leanings at the time. So what impression did Sweden make on you? I arrived at Stockholm at seven in the morning in the beginning of January, and it was pitch black. and I was tired and I got a room at the YMCA and I woke up at 2 and it was pitch black. I said, what the hell? It was cold and snowy, but it was very pretty. So I played tourist for about a month before I really settled down, so to speak. So what point did you kind of declare yourself to the authorities? Actually, I was quite lucky in that respect because I was trying to locate the ADC office.

19:28So I went to tourist information. They gave me an address, and I went there, but those people weren't there. So I was back going through the phone book at the central station, and a guy walked up to me who was a member of the ADC. He saw that I was looking for a driver, and then they told me what to say and what to do with the police. So they prepped me for the police meetings so that I could be considered a genuine humanitarian refugee. Once the show had been running for a few weeks, we scheduled a movie night. We decided to screen a film about the war in Vietnam, but not any of the ones that you're probably thinking of that are about the experiences of combatants.

20:10This one is called Deserter USA. It was released in Sweden in 1969 and its casts were drawn from the ranks of the ADC, DC, the American Deserters Committee. It's an uneasy mixture of documentary, espionage drama and agitprop film. Deserter USA captures these young men as they build new lives after making the decision to seek asylum in Sweden. Vince and I introduced the screening and on that night something remarkable happened. One of the stars of the picture turned up out of the blue, bringing his sons, Steve Gersheter. He and Vincent both had their faces on the poster. They hadn't seen each other for 56 years.

20:54So we're going to screen the movie. One thing I really hoped when we put this exhibition together was that there were going to be some people who were involved in this story, whose lives have been touched and shaped by the story that we're trying to tell here. I'm totally delighted to say, and I'm looking at a man on the front row here who walked in this evening and I thought, hello, this man looks right. I've got an instinct about who this man is. And amazingly, one of the leads, really, of Deserting USA, Steve Gersheter, just walked in through the doors. OK, I really was trying to go under the radar.

21:38Like I always have. I was here maybe a month and a half and eventually they let me out but I couldn't take anything with me to make it look like I wasn't coming back so I had very little, I had some t-shirts and a pair of socks and I traveled to England and from England I took a train to Denmark and then up to Sweden and then I was here a month and a half and they said to me you would be great in our film.

22:13But the script we just received, we had nothing to contribute. So hold that in mind, that the words I'm speaking about my experience, it has nothing to do with my experience. It's so amazing that you're here. Thank you. I mean, I'm so moved by it, to be face-to-face with you. That's moving to be moved.

22:41It had much the same effect on me. There were young Steve and young Vincent and all their old comrades, restored to life and youth, playing versions of themselves in a film that aimed to present their story to a particular political end. And their present selves, over five decades later, sitting on hard chairs in a Swedish art gallery in an installation that aimed to convey something of their experience. When the film ended, I gave the mic to Steve. He talked in Swedish to the audience, told them about his decision to desert. As he waited to be called up to fight, he said, he was working in a bowling alley on a military base, and he saw something in the eyes of the men returning from war that persuaded him to go instead to exile in Sweden.

23:31and he was extremely unsentimental about Deserter USA. He considered it a work of propaganda. And in that moment, it seemed to me that his speech in a language that I don't really understand and his subsequent conversation with Vince was the end to which the show had been working. I always worked with the social part of it, helping people come here, helping them find places to live, and that I enjoyed. And I learned how the world works, and since then I haven't been active politically, but I've been active very locally. That narrative that they put into my mouth, I've incorporated it into myself, because for me it was important.

24:11This is the way I live. And of course it can be used in a very negative way. Propaganda can be both negative and positive, of course. I'm really glad that you said what you said, because you admit that you were given something that you incorporated. And that I also incorporated. But after a month or so, I thought, nah, maybe it's not the definition of the world. And eventually I withdrew. I think most of the guys that left here, that's what happened. They incorporated themselves into Swedish life. Here's my oldest son. you learn to use the family you have a family, you have to work you have to find a profession you have to interact with the people here but also the protest becomes living a life that is respectful, reasonable staying out of trouble and surviving contributing, so I pay back my dues and I've never got a political asylum no, nor did I But I did it anyway.

25:25Could I ask you both just one thing? Tonight you've watched yourselves, your younger selves, on the screen tonight. You were different people then. If you could walk back into that film and say something to that boy we saw on the screen, what would it be?

25:47This is going to work out fine.

25:52Yeah, I agree. Just, you know, keep on fighting. Thank you both very much indeed. Thank you.

26:08You've been listening to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service with me, Matthew Sweet, and the artists Nguyen and Esther Johnson.

26:26If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.