We learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering, cruelty, and comradeship. Most of all, we learned about death at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We lost it all at once, and, in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age. (Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War)
Fifty-three million Americans came of age between 1964—when passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution took place, authorizing a massive increase in U.S military presence in Southeast Asia—and 1975, the year when the war finally and ignominiously ended with the fall of Saigon into the hands of the victorious Communist North Vietnamese. During that 11-year period, fewer than three million Americans would be asked to serve, of which less than six percent would see actual combat.
In other words, more than 80 percent of those born in the aftermath of World War II, who came of age in the 1960s, did not participate in the principal event of their time. And yet, for all that, Vietnam remains the defining experience of an entire generation—a generation to which, by God’s grace and the accident of birth, I happen to belong.
Even for those who had nothing directly to do with the war, either because they were spared having to serve or simply refused to serve, the fact that it happened at all has been viewed by many as an ineffaceable stain upon the nation’s memory. Indeed, it became a kind of litmus test of loyalty for or against the nation that was waging it, especially for those of us old enough to be sent to this faraway country on the other side of the world, whose exact location on a map few of us at the time could have identified.
But for me, certainly, Vietnam has always been one of the two or three most formative and decisive experiences of my life. I say that because I was one of those few young Americans sent over there to fight it. And not a few of us would never come home again—nearly 58,000, to be exact. I know that because their names are inscribed on two black granite slabs in our nation’s capital, a grim reminder of their sacrifice, even as it has since become the most visited memorial on the National Mall.
That’s a lot of body bags to be sending back to the States, among which were the remains of friends I knew and loved. Not a week goes by that I do not think about them nor, despite the passage of all these years, continue to mourn their passing.
And, yet, I never wanted to go. I very much hoped that my student deferment would go on forever. But that was not to be. Thanks to the low number I drew in the Presidential Lottery my senior year of college, I realized soon enough that it would not be long before I’d be going off to war.
There was never any question that, when called up, I would refuse to go. Running off to Canada was simply not an option, for a couple of reasons. One, I was a patriot, which meant that I loved my country; and if she asked me to fight and possibly die for her, I would do so. Besides, I believed in the war. For me, and for a great many others at the time, the defense of South Vietnam seemed a noble and necessary endeavor, absolutely essential to the cause of freedom and the defeat of Communism, whose ambitions were to take over the world. Nor have I changed my mind on that score since.
The other reason, of course, was that my father, along with most of my uncles on either side of the family, had been soldiers, eager to serve in World War II. One of them, the fabled eldest son of a family of five brothers, was a pilot whose plane was shot down over Yugoslavia in the last year of the war in Europe. I never knew him, having been born two years after his death; but his widow became my godmother, while his two sons remained close and admired figures in my childhood. I don’t think I could have looked such men in the eye had I refused to serve.
And so I went to Vietnam, spending an entirely uneventful year in Saigon, a city that had once been regarded as “the pearl of the Orient,” so elegant and lovely were its buildings and boulevards. But that was during the French Occupation of Indochina, which ended embarrassingly in 1954 with the collapse of their colonial empire, so that by the time I arrived in 1970-71, the place had been ravaged by a great deal of misery and war. The poor and the dispossessed were everywhere, on whose sad faces the fear was palpable that at any moment the enemy would overrun the place.
In fact, by 1975, the combined force of the North Vietnamese Regular Army and brigades of Vietcong guerrillas had managed not only to surround the city but had effectively taken over—ending, in the most humiliating fashion, America’s presence in Southeast Asia.
The image of U.S. Army helicopters fleeing the U.S. Embassy from the rooftops, while frantic Vietnamese civilians struggled desperately to climb on board, is not easily forgotten, especially for those of us who had gone there thinking we were helping secure the freedom and safety of a beleaguered ally.
“So, Papa, what did you do in the war?” It was a question sometimes asked of me by my children when they were very young. I suppose I told them that I tried to win the damn thing, embroidering endlessly on how heroic I was in fighting off this or that battalion of the enemy. But they cottoned on soon enough to the fact that these were just tall tales told to amuse and divert. The fact is, I had very little to do with the war. My experience was not in the least comparable to that of Philip Caputo, save that we each happened to be in the same country, if not at the same time.
I was no warrior putting his life at risk. Rather, I was a clerk-typist assigned to a helicopter repair unit, who drove an occasional colonel or two around town in a jeep. The only war I witnessed was the one on television when I finally came home. And, like all the other returning servicemen, there were no parades to welcome us back. By then, of course, most Americans had grown so weary of the war that all anybody wanted was to see it end.
Which, not too long thereafter, is exactly what happened, leaving a nation more divided and disillusioned than ever, waiting for better days, I suppose. They would come, but not right away.
In the meantime, I do not repine. There were lessons to be learned in the year I spent in Vietnam, and I learned them. In fact, I’d do it all again.
I loved the historic political “set-up” for the Vietnam war of which I, too, was a participant. I was “of age” tho’ not draftable, since I was a female, RN, newly minted CRNA (nurse anesthetist) who watched nightly TV as the “body-counts” in Vietnam were announced. It was May,1969 and I simply couldn’t grasp the negativity of the reports…lack of medical care? So, in a search for truth, I joined the Army (not my first choice, but the only one to guarantee assignment to Vietnam). Six weeks Basic officer Training, one week of leave to condition my parents to the fact that we’d not see each other for a year (or, perhaps, never again). I flew out of Boston and into the war…..it was July4th. I was sent to the 312/91 Evac Hospital in Chu Lai which was very busy and had frequent VC rocket attacks. One of which blew up a ward and killed the Army nurse caring for patients, just weeks before my arrival. I could go on forever about that challenging year of life, danger, death and my own personal development! My 364 day tour was up and I came home, solo, proudly in uniform, to a country that cared not what sacrifices and accomplishments we had made in her name. I have never forgotten my military & medical folks (we still keep in touch the old way, by phone); never forgotten the sound of an incoming Medevac Mas-Cal, and never forgotten those patients that all of us remember. I am grateful to God for that year in someone’s version of hell. It made me who I am yesterday, today and tomorrow. We know pride is a sin….so, that makes me a Vietnam Vet sinner…because I am very proud of my service. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat!
I was born in 1978, thus three years after the Vietnam War ended. My dad was drafted for it, but rejected on medical reasons (they were legit – my dad was conservative and supported the military and would not have gotten out of it on his own).
I know this sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense but after everything I have read about it and the several decades prior, I am convinced that the Vietnam War was deliberately started, and deliberately lost, by Communist operatives in the US State Department. This was to make America look bad and weak, and make Communism look strong.
To start with, one must go back to 1948 and the Alger Hiss trial. I have read Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness” in its entirety, and am totally convinced of its veracity, and that Hiss was a Communist agent. One point that Chambers made was that Communists do not need to totally take over a department – they just needed a few people in key positions to manipulate and influence the department’s policy, especially given the natural liberal-bent of bureaucrats, even good intentioned ones. Hiss was third highest ranking member of the State Dept and drafter of the UN Charter. Senate investigations had concluded that the State and Treasury Departments were the two federal departments that were most likely most heavily penetrated by Communists (the Justice Department was probably too, considering that they destroyed evidence in the Hiss case and send J Peters back to Hungary without even an interrogation). When the Senate shut down its investigations of Communists it did not do this because it thought it found them all, but rather because it was embarrassed by McCarthy and the need to censure him. They almost certainly did not find all the Communists.
The State Department first tried to make the US look bad and weak in Korea. Because it was “not really a war” and UN action, the State Department had a great deal of latitude in conducting it. They sent over fresh Army recruits with minimal training, poorly equipped, and in insufficient numbers, hoping that the North Koreans would “steamroll” them. This almost happened. But then Congress got involved, and, not wanting to be embarrassed, ordered veteran Marines to be deployed (many WWII vets), and given the latitude to conduct their operations as they saw fit. They landed at Inchon, kicked butt, and the rest is history. The “set up to fail” attempt was thus thwarted in Korea. Also, contrary to popular belief, the Korean War was a success – not a draw. The original objective was to liberate South Korea, which the Marines did. If one changes the goalposts enough one can make any operation a draw or failure.
In Vietnam, the State Department would finally achieve its objective. The failure was initially set up by:
1. Hiring assassins to murder Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam at the time, and his family. Diem was a devout Catholic and very popular and good leader of South Vietnam. The VC would have had a tough time recruiting if he were still in charge. Ostensibly the State Department wanted him out of the way because he would not “play ball”, as he wanted to remain neutral and opposed Western interference just as much as he did Communism, but the real reason was to destabilize South Vietnam and provide fertile recruiting for the VC, with an unpopular US-backed “puppet government” of South Vietnam.
2. Ignoring the situation in Laos. The original agreement going back to the Eisenhower administration was that Laos was divided into three regions, one ruled by a “white prince” (US-backed), one ruled by a “red prince” (Communist-backed), and one ruled by a “pink prince” (neutral). But the State Department ignored Laos and diverted attention from it, allowing the Communists to quietly take over the entire country. The geography of Vietnam made it impossible for the North to invade the South, or the South to invade the North, and the situation was stable prior to the war (unlike that of Korea, which was an all-out invasion by the North into the South). But whomever controlled Laos had the ability to circumvent this geography and in fact infiltrate, if not invade the other.
The stage being set did not mean that the war had to happen. It still needed a spark. This was accomplished by the US State Department deliberately orchestrating the Tonkin Gulf incident. In his book “Tonkin Gulf” by Eugene Windchy, an intelligence agent during the Vietnam War, Windchy provides conclusive evidence that it was entirely orchestrated by the State Department, for the sole purpose of starting the war.
With the war now ongoing, it was time for the State Department to set up the failure. This was done by simply prohibiting the deployment of US Marines to Laos, in order to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail. Unlike with Korea, Congress could not easily order troops into Laos without a formal declaration of war, since it was a separate country (that fact did not stop the NVA and VC from using it as a conduit, though). An NVA general who defected after the war confirmed that had the US done this they would have almost definitely won the war. It would have been tough, as it would have required the deployment of 30,000 of the best Marines to the mountain-jungle terrain of the most backward country in East Asia, but it would have been possible.
As such, the US lost about 70,000 soldiers in the war, and millions of people of Southeast Asia were killed, all for the advance of Communism.
“That’s a lot of body bags to be sending back to the States, among which were the remains of friends I knew and loved. Not a week goes by that I do not think about them nor, despite the passage of all these years, continue to mourn their passing.”
I can relate to your statement above. What I find interesting about myself is that after my time in the military, working and raising a family I certainly thought about Vietnam occasionally, but Idid not dwell on it. After retirement I think of it every day, and of my many friends that were killed.
I too watched us ignobly abandon a war we refused to win, albeit 50 years later. I too stood on that ground, as a mechanic in a unit of brave young infantrymen who did what was asked and didn’t count the cost until they had already paid it in blood and time lost and all that comes with killing and dying. I too walked away with many lessons, by the grace of God. It always heartens a bit to be reminded that ours was not a unique struggle, and though our enemy may have been different, the enemy is always the same, and Christ is always the victor. Thank you for again tying together generations of those who have served.