Racing Back to Vietnam

by John Pendergrass

  Phuong, a very common name in Vietnamese, is one of the main characters in the Graham Greene novel The Quiet American. Greene’s Phuong is a beautiful Vietnamese woman who takes care of an older Westerner with skill and devotion, all the time looking after her own interests. I was glad to have a Phuong of my own to advise me while traveling around Vietnam.

  Greene, already an established novelist at the time, was serving as British war correspondent in Saigon in the early 1950s when he wrote The Quiet American. The story is set near the end of the First Indochina War, the last gasp of French colonialism. In the novel, the two main characters, Fowler and Pyle, compete for Phuong’s attention. Like many Vietnamese, Phuong is quite adaptable, able to handle whatever the war brings. Fowler, the older man, is a jaded, cynical British journalist who derides the naivety and idealism of Pyle, the titular quiet American. Pyle, a CIA operative, is searching for a better answer for Vietnam, something other than communism or colonialism, a so-called Third Force.

  The Quiet American is a tangled tale of love, espionage, and murder that has twice been brought to the screen and has never been out of print. When I first read the novel in high school, it was widely viewed as anti-American. Many now view the novel as a cautionary tale that the United States chose to ignore. I remember it as a story full of moral and political ambiguities. Greene, as he often does, raised many uncomfortable questions, but provided few answers.

  The Quiet American portrays the Saigon of the early 1950s. My first trip to the city came twenty years after Greene; I returned most recently another four decades later. Saigon has since become Ho Chi Minh City and the French names have given way to Vietnamese, but much of Greene’s Saigon, my Saigon, is still identifiable today.

  The main route, Dong Khoi, leads from the Saigon River past the grand hotels. Though Greene spent much of his stay at the Majestic Hotel, it’s the Continental Hotel that claims to be the spot where he wrote at least part of The Quiet American. I took the elevator to the second floor of the hotel, where a metal plaque identified room 214 as Greene’s room. Much of the hotel, such as the high ceilings, old fans, and brass doorknobs, looks unchanged. Out on the street side terrace, it’s another story. I remember screens of chicken wire strung on the terraces of the various hotels to protect from grenades tossed from a passing motorbike. Acts of terrorism were a daily of life during the war. Saigon is safer today, but no less exciting.

  A walk past the opera house on Lam Son Square leads to Notre Dame Cathedral. Built by the French in the late 1800s, the church has a few scars from the war, but otherwise looks much the same as it did forty-five years ago. Roman Catholicism took a beating under communism, but around seven percent of the country still remains Catholic.

  Walking anywhere in Ho Chi Minh City is a pleasure. It’s a vibrant city in constant motion. The Vietnamese are a proud, energetic, intelligent and hard-working people. They are friendly and easy-going, respectful of their elders, and anxious to help foreigners. The war has been over for four decades, and the future looks bright for the country of Vietnam.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  LOOKING BACK

  Researching and writing this book has been a very meaningful experience for me. I am in my seventies now, and I have an undeniable awareness of the passage of time. Sometimes it seems that somewhere along the way, I’ve misplaced twenty years of my life. A lot has happened in the last seven decades, but I have precious few recollections of some major events. My time in Vietnam was one of those milestones that had disappeared into the fog of life. I am happy to reach back nearly a half-century into the past and reclaim the year that I spent at Da Nang.

  More than 2.5 million Americans served in the Vietnam War. When some veterans came home, the war came with them. I was fortunate; I was able to move quickly from the world of combat back into civilian life. I rarely thought about the war. I had left Vietnam and it had left me.

  The general public seemed just as glad to be done with the long war. Less than a year after I left Da Nang, a peace treaty was signed and the POWs were released. America was finally finished with Vietnam.

  Even though the war had been a major event in my life, I seldom had the opportunity to look back. Since few of my friends had served in the military, I was close to only a few veterans and I rarely ever crossed paths with anyone who had flown fighters in combat. My identity had changed. I was no longer a flight surgeon or an F-4 backseater. I was an ophthalmologist.

  As the years slid by quickly, my recollections of Vietnam stayed mostly positive. The mind has a remarkable ability to suppress painful memories—plus, I’ve always been a cup half-full type of guy. Since I wasn’t burdened by the war, I felt no need to romanticize or demonize the conflict. I moved on with my life, and each year the memories of Da Nang faded a bit more.

  But as the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached, things changed. I began reading and remembering, looking at old photographs, talking with other veterans, rummaging through forgotten letters I had written from Vietnam. Anniversaries give us a reason to reminisce, an excuse to delve into the past. My interest in the conflict grew; the personal experiences of other veterans became more interesting to me. When I encountered a patient in my office who had served in the war, I had to hear his story. More than anything, attending my fighter wing reunion made my days in Vietnam come back alive. Many of the things I did at Da Nang now took on a clarity and a meaning that were absent during my tour.

  When I left Vietnam, I had no mixed emotions; I was happy to be done. I had no desire to ever come back. But if you are wise, you try to learn from your past. I am a richer man for having revisited my year in Vietnam and I’m a better person for having returned to a country that I yearned to leave from the very first day I arrived.

  I’m probably not unique. For most people who went to Southeast Asia, their military service was a defining moment in their life. Regardless of your role in the conflict, you saw a lot of things that you’d never seen before. The Vietnam War was a poorly-conceived, ill-defined conflict fought on the other side of the planet. Some people drew a better lot than others, but everyone, to a certain extent, was in the same boat. We were all plucked from the safety and prosperity of American life and dropped into a land of poverty and violence. There was a sense of unity, togetherness, and shared adversity. You became part of a brotherhood of Vietnam veterans.

  Wartime elevated the experience of each day. Serving in Vietnam had a perverse attraction; life became brighter, more intense, and more meaningful when you introduced the risk of losing it. Life was more fragile, injury and death could arrive quickly, nothing was definite. Being forced to confront fear and accept the challenges of combat also brought certain rewards. If all went as planned, your fear gave way to courage and the sense of being fully alive. For me, Vietnam was a lifetime of high drama concentrated in one year, a great adventure that was fascinating, frightening, and fulfilling.

  Flying in an F-4 Phantom raised the stakes greatly, but it also increased the rewards. The possibility of failure—getting shot down, killed, or imprisoned—made the eventual success that much more gratifying. Each combat mission brought a sense of happiness and relief that came from accepting a dangerous challenge and having had the strength to endure. The relief always far outweighed the satisfaction.

  In life, the people you meet along the way are what give your journey its shape and color. I still see fighter pilots in a bold, vivid way: intelligent men, skilled and courageous, who acted gracefully in the face of danger. These men had a sense of adventure and preferred action to reflection; they were exactly who they claimed to be. I flew only a fraction of the missions that the regular F-4 crews flew, but it was more than enough to appreciate their valor and sense of duty.

  When I first came to Da Nang, I was unsure of my role in the squadron. As a flight surgeon, there were few rules to guide me. I was an outsider, a man who brought little to the table other than a desire to be part of the team. The idea of flying combat missions in a fighter was
a little vague and outlandish, but full of promise and mystery. My squadron generously included me in its missions, I was recognized as one of the boys by the boys themselves. I always considered the opportunity to fly as more of a reward than a duty.

  Looking back, it’s easy to be romantic about the Vietnam War, but it’s even easier to be a little cynical. By the time I came to Da Nang in 1971, the irrationality of the conflict was already apparent. It had been a long, bloody six years, and the war had been pushed to the backburner by American society. The ground war was winding down, and peace with honor was alleged to be just around the corner. The air war continued, but the rules of engagement had eliminated any real chance of victory.

  Today, there’s little that everyone can agree on about the Vietnam War. The motives of the United States for intervening in Vietnam were exemplary. We went to Southeast Asia for the purpose of containing communism, our efforts made with the best of intentions. Communism was no imaginary threat; under Stalin and Mao, tens of millions of people had been beaten, starved, or worked to death, if not outright killed. The Cold War was real and the Vietnam War, much like the Korean conflict, was a difficult-to-avoid proxy war. Although the United States, fighting for a good cause beside a weak, corrupt ally, eventually prevailed in the Cold War, the postponement of the communist takeover in Vietnam came at a high price.

  Looking back today, it’s easy to see how our country became mired in an unwinnable war. From the start, the conflict was burdened with numerous heavy-handed restrictions and poorly-defined military objectives that made military victory, at least in the usual sense of the word, impossible to achieve. Initially, everyone seemed to agree that North Vietnam was the enemy and that the communists had to be prevented from taking over South Vietnam. Yet President Johnson’s response was a weak Rolling Thunder air campaign with a gradual escalation and frequent pauses, a strategy that proved to be ineffective. Because of the fear of Chinese or Soviet intervention, no invasion of North Vietnam was permitted. The North had an agrarian economy that depended on supplies from their communist allies that came mostly by ship through the port of Haiphong, but until 1972, the harbor was off-limits to bombing or mining. Although most of the men and materiel from North Vietnam traveled south via the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, U.S. troops were forbidden from entering the country in any significant numbers.

  Anyone serving in the military prefers a war with clear and tangible goals. Our strategy in Vietnam was to try and convince the enemy that they couldn’t win. The North Vietnamese never got the message.

  The United States involvement in Vietnam mostly ended by 1973. Our POWs came home, and our nation was glad to end a painful chapter in our history. There were no drum rolls or fanfare; the public had long ago stopped being emotionally involved in the conflict.

  Nearly a half-century later, an honest reckoning shows that the bad far outweighed the good. What remains is a terrible sense of waste; a tragedy for both sides. The fifty-eight thousand U.S. deaths; the many thousands wounded; the men still MIA; the millions of Vietnamese killed and wounded; the legacy of Agent

  Orange and unexploded ordnance…

  War has the ability to make fools of everyone.

  I consider myself lucky to have spent a year in Vietnam. I was fortunate enough to fight the war mostly from high in the sky, shielded from the possibility of human contact. Down below, Americans were killed and wounded. The Vietnamese on both sides fought, reproduced, suffered, and died. I was the fortunate son, I went home after a year and left the war in Vietnam.

  In those twelve months, I accumulated a lifetime of experiences. I learned more about service, sacrifice, and camaraderie than I have ever learned. Vietnam showed me the reality of war, it left me less innocent, more aware of the imperfect world we live in and its flawed leaders.

  It’s often difficult to make sense of life in a war zone. Why do some people die and some people live? War gives life in so many ways, but it more often takes it away. The great losses of the conflict cast a certain shadow over the Vietnam War, but they do not diminish the bravery and courage of the men who served. I have only praise and regret for those lives cut short. I honor their sacrifice.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The years have blurred, altered, and erased many of my memories of Vietnam. While researching and writing this book, I sometimes found that things I once thought to be true were incorrect. Since facts can grow murkier with the passage of time, I have relied on objective, contemporaneous sources as much as possible in writing this book, resisting the urge to reinvent my year at Da Nang.

  Living in a foreign land away from the people you love is the worst part of going to war. Since there was no telephone or internet, the most important part of my day at Da Nang was mail call. During my year in Vietnam I wrote more than one hundred and fifty letters—mostly to my wife, but also to my mother. Both of them were wise enough to keep those letters, something that I failed to do on my end. My letters home capture many of the details of my tour at Da Nang and provide an accurate account of my feelings about the war.

  When I left the Air Force, I kept a copy of my flight records that covers all but my last month at Da Nang. My career as an F-4 Phantom backseater is there in black and white. I can tell when I flew, to a certain extent where I went, how long the sortie lasted, and even the tail number of the aircraft I flew in. Unfortunately, the name of the pilot in the front seat is not part of the record. Many of these men I remember well, others I recall by their first name only; some are simply a nameless face.

  The Gunfighters, the men of the 366th TFW, helped me in so many ways. I thank them for including me in their circle. The 366th TFW has a long and distinguished history dating back to World War II. The wing holds an annual reunion, attended mostly by veterans of the Vietnam conflict. These gatherings were a valuable source of background information about life at Da Nang. I was able to clarify and confirm many of the details of my year in Vietnam. If enough people remember something from the past in the same way, it is probably true. If I asked a dozen men something, such as the location of the mess hall, and all twelve told me that it was just opposite the dispensary, I could be sure that that detail was correct.

  I conducted more than thirty interviews with fighter pilots, backseaters, and other men involved in fighting the war. Quite a few of them spent a career in the Air Force and are experts in various aspects of aviation. I was able to relearn many of the finer points of flying as a GIB in an F-4 in combat, and I also picked up much that I never knew. When I left Da Nang, I left flying completely. Since Vietnam, all of my time in the air has been spent as a passenger in commercial aircraft. I honestly feel that there has never been anyone who logged more than fifty combat missions in a fighter aircraft who knows less about flying than I do.

  Since I’m no expert on flying, I’ve tried to keep descriptions as simple as possible. I’ve used miles per hour (mph) rather than the more commonly employed nautical miles (knots). Instead of talking about pounds of fuel used by an aircraft, I have spoken in gallons.

  No one forgets a war they were part of. Over 2.5 million people served in Vietnam, and each one of them has a story; most are anxious to share their experiences. I received help from many sources at every stage of researching and writing this book.

  A special thanks goes to Joe Dunaway and his family. Joe had a distinguished career as a USAF fighter pilot, including a year with the 4th TFS at Da Nang. He volunteered and was chosen for the Stormy Fast FAC program, one of the most dangerous challenges a fighter pilot can face. Joe helped me understand much of what I did as a GIB. He was kind enough to answer endless questions about flying, as well as taking the time to review parts of my book. His wife Dotty and his son Brian gave me valuable insights into the challenges the family of a fighter pilot faces.

  I owe a special debt to Ken Dahl, a man who spent much of his Air Force career in the backseat of an F-4 Phantom. Ken helped me remember where all the buttons, switches, knobs, levers, tubes, wires, and such
were located in the rear cockpit. After talking with Ken, I was better able to reconstruct the details of my duties as a GIB.

  I want to thank Dori Bond LeBlanc for sharing the story of the loss in combat of her brother Ron. Dori had just turned seventeen and returned home with her first driver’s license when she learned that her older brother, who she adored, was MIA. Ron’s remains have never been found. She and her family have lived for decades without knowing exactly what happened on September 30, 1971.

  Mahlon Long was kind enough to describe the details of his rescue from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Long’s OV-10 aircraft was shot down just prior to the launch of the Easter Offensive in 1972. He was saved from certain death or captivity by the brave SAR crews who flew and manned the Sandys and the Jolly Green rescue helicopters. I knew him as an A-37 pilot in my first Air Force assignment and was surprised and delighted to see him once again on his return to Da Nang after a successful rescue.

  I am indebted to Ed “Tex” Stiteler and his organization, Vietnam Battlefield Tours, for helping me learn about the ground war in Vietnam. Tex is a decorated Marine Corps veteran who was wounded in action while serving in Vietnam from 1966–1967. He later joined with several other veterans to form a non-profit organization dedicated to providing reasonably-priced and professionally-staffed tours of the battlefields of Southeast Asia. I never had to face the dangers and challenges that the men in the field encountered. I give thanks for their courage and sacrifice.

  I thank Sara Priebe for once again, as she did with my first book, providing excellent maps to accompany my story. As a backseater in an F-4, I spent a lot of time before, during, and after each mission scrutinizing maps. This may have been where I first developed the almost compulsive need to know where I am whenever I leave home. I’ve always felt there should be a law against publishing a history or travel book without maps. Sara’s skillful work should help everyone better understand the terrain of Southeast Asia.