Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  The war in Vietnam limped on. The North Vietnamese backed down, checked their calendars, and awaited the final U.S. farewell. Bombs still dropped. Men still died. Nixon allowed shallow cross-border incursions into Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971. Neither worked. By 1972, the refurbished North Vietnamese, to include tanks and heavy artillery, charged south in force, took terrain, and held it. ARVN could not eject the communists. And America lacked the stomach to do anything that stuck. Nixon tried overtures to the Soviet Union. He broke decades of strict American sanctions and visited Mao Zedong’s Red China. He unleashed B-52s full of conventional munitions to rain death on Hanoi at Christmas of 1972.31 None of it mattered. Only the U.S. withdrawal clicker counted. Both Hanoi and Washington knew it. Vietnam would soon be in the rearview mirror, a screw-up, a fiasco, a horrific mistake, never to be repeated.

  One-time B-24 bomber pilot Senator George McGovern ran against Nixon in 1972 and lost—did he ever, humiliated in a forty-nine-state rout. The South Dakotan ran on the slogan “Come Home America.”32 But for all his foreign policy intrigues, Nixon was already there. A country that had dared to go to the moon, declare war on poverty, and bear any burden in the Mekong Delta gave up on every bit of it. Come home America.

  But as the Hagel brothers learned in Omaha, home wasn’t what it used to be.

  THE TELEPHONE RANG at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, November 16, 1969. Both Hagels rose early, but not on Sunday. This couldn’t be good.

  It wasn’t. E. J. Breeding sounded gruff, choked up. Jimmy Hagel had died in a car crash. Breeding asked Chuck and Tom to come to Fullerton, Nebraska, to identify the body.

  James Joseph Hagel dead? It didn’t make sense. “It seemed so bizarre,” Chuck said. “Tom and I went through what we did, and came back in good shape.” Now this. Their youngest brother, only sixteen, achieved top grades and quarterbacked the football team at St. Cecilia Catholic high school.33 But if Vietnam taught the brothers anything, they’d learned that it could all go in an instant. For Jimmy, it had.

  After the sad trip to Fullerton, the brothers and their stepfather talked to Nance County sheriff Richard Shepoka. His police report covered the facts. After midnight, Jimmy Hagel drove his vehicle through a country road junction. The sixteen-year-old missed the turn and piled into a ditch. The automobile flipped. Three other high schoolers, one from Hastings and two from Columbus, suffered whiplash and abrasions, but made it out okay.34 Just like a bad night near Binh Phuoc: there it is.

  Betty didn’t take it well. After the funeral, she began drinking, rivaling Tom on intake. It went on for a few months, but after a while her religious faith won out. “Maybe God’s testing me,” she thought. She checked into rehabilitation and never touched another glass of alcohol. In admiration, son Chuck wrote proudly: “She hit things straight up.”35

  Chuck took after his mother. Jimmy’s death might have made anyone rethink the last few years, especially that long twelve months with 2-47th Infantry. Not Chuck Hagel: “I never regretted it, never looked back, never thought about it.” Like his mom, Betty, he’d made his choice and lived with it. “Once you made the decision, you go forward.”36

  Tom, however, followed his father’s less sure route. Like Charles Dean Hagel, Tom never missed a day of school or work. And like his father, in the evening, Tom often found himself sitting in a tavern and pounding ’em down. “If anyone said anything to me, I’d just go crazy,” he said.37 Dad Charles at least had the American Legion, and other men who understood, even though few words passed between them. Tom lacked even that.

  Anyone who sees combat—not just hanging around in the theater of operations, but real fighting—will experience post-traumatic stress. It’s baked into the cake. Gruesome wounds, arbitrary cruelty, and chance encounters with mortality all combine to generate an inordinate degree of psychological pressure.38 Whether that stress manifests itself as a disorder, PTSD, depends on the individual, the immediate group (family or unit), and society as a whole.

  In Tom’s case, he took his battle experiences very hard. Jimmy’s shocking accident only underscored the dark forebodings of horrid things half glimpsed, searing macabre scenes, and unrelenting survivor’s guilt. Even with a pretty strong upbringing, those last few empty weeks in Vietnam did Tom no good at all. The Hagel family, Chuck in particular, had no desire to hear about combat or talk about it. Tom’s older brother shared almost all of Tom’s most awful moments in country. Yet Chuck didn’t want to discuss those disquieting matters. He would have to reach a reckoning with his own hard memories in the decades to come. But in the years right after Vietnam, Tom’s older brother settled on denial. He homed in on school, on work, and, as he put it, moved forward, not looking back, but “all about tomorrow.”39

  And the army? Well, the random individual assignment policy torpedoed unit cohesion, atomizing the band of brothers. Coming and going to war alone bred PTSD like the Mekong Delta rice paddies bred mosquitoes. The U.S. Army of that era, run at the highest levels by World War II veterans who should have known better, took no ownership of this psychological wasteland.40 The military saw it as an individual weakness, not an institutional challenge, even as the era’s prevalent personnel policies sped the evil plow.

  As for American society, most turned their backs on Vietnam veterans like Tom. Neither Hagel dealt with outright hostility in Nebraska, even on the university grounds where some self-styled peaceniks abided. But indifference did its own harm. At a university social gathering, when a faculty member asked if he had served in combat, Tom answered. From those around Hagel, “there was just, simply, silence. Everyone got real uncomfortable.”41 People looked off into the distance. They refused to go there. But Tom had done so, whether or not these students cared to acknowledge it.

  In the end, Tom sorted himself out. He drew on enough innate character to do it. He took up veteran counseling, helping guys secure benefits. Next came working with the mentally challenged. Leaning left politically, Tom took his convictions well beyond words. He consistently worked with and represented the downtrodden, the powerless, and the forgotten. Tom started law school in Lincoln. The booze dried up. And the nightmares grew less frequent.42 The terrible visions never wholly disappeared. But the inner angst faded the more Tom Hagel looked out.

  Chuck Hagel, for his part, also faced outward. He drew on his education at Brown Institute of Radio and Television and applied for a job at Omaha radio station KBON. Chuck became an on-air host. When management switched to call letters KLNG and tried a new all-talk format, his long interests in history and politics made Chuck the natural choice to handle the current events show. “It was a great experiment,” Hagel said.43 And it paid, too.

  Talk radio in 1970–71 hadn’t yet degenerated into today’s all-too-common swamp of sharp-edged, opinionated hooting and hollering. Although on the conservative end himself, Chuck interviewed people from across the political spectrum. He let them talk, and allowed callers time to express themselves, too. Among those Chuck interviewed, former governor Frank B. Morrison, a Democrat, made a strong impression.44 It intrigued Chuck that after losing a senatorial bid in November of 1970, the former governor had chosen to serve as the Douglas County public defender. Morrison sure as hell didn’t do it for the meager salary. The three-term governor’s dedication to public service also impressed Tom Hagel, who saw the self-effacing pragmatic liberal as a role model.45

  As it happened, Frank Morrison’s tenure as public defender would begin with a bang. The calendar indicated that the turbulent 1960s had ended. But from the disheartened populace of racially divided Omaha, the cruel decade demanded one more blood sacrifice. Frank Morrison would be right in the middle of it. And this time, white society in Omaha, the Hagels among them, could not avert its gaze.

  NORTH OMAHA AGAIN—2:23 a.m., August 17, 1970, and few warm fuzzy things unfolded in that sullen area at that unholy hour. The dispatcher notified a unit to respond to trouble at an empty house. Three other police cruisers in the area closed in, too. On a summ
er night in a crime-ridden community, numbers mattered.

  When four policemen entered the abandoned structure, a bomb detonated. Officer Larry D. Minard died; the other three were injured.46 Anguished people from up and down the block, many in pajamas, gathered to offer condolences, prayers, and tears. None of the residents had any inkling who emplaced the fatal device.47

  The city cops had no clues, no tips, and no idea of how to find Minard’s killer. But the FBI knew. Thanks to COINTELPRO, the Bureau had a human source inside the North Omaha Black Panther cell. “We have excellent informer coverage of the Panthers,” the FBI man said. So the Panthers did it. That tracked with trends seen in other cities. The FBI had seen a very similar dynamite bombing on May 13 at a police station in Des Moines, Iowa.48

  But then the FBI representative threw a curve ball. “And our key source advises us that two white males were observed running from the scene shortly before the blast.”49 Two white males? Student radicals? Russians?50 The Omaha police superiors took it all down.

  Despite the otherwise uncorroborated lead about two white men, the balance of the FBI’s information, some of it gathered by highly questionable methods, pointed right to the Panthers. The militants had bomb-making expertise—the device was pretty elementary—and access to materials, and the national Black Panther Party included many belligerent elements with track records of similar attacks. The local Omaha chapter alleged it had quit the Black Panther Party, and in mid-1969 rebranded itself as the National Committee to Combat Fascism. That fooled nobody, not even the members. Key figures in the chapter remained Ed Poindexter, deputy chairman, and David Rice, deputy minister of information, both well known to the FBI and Omaha police.51 On the morning of August 17, 1970, law enforcement officials agreed that Poindexter and Rice must be part of the bombing.

  If they hoped to avoid suspicion, the two Panthers said and did all the wrong things. Although Poindexter and Rice held government jobs, as a postal carrier and anti-poverty counselor respectively, each spent hours regaling various North Omaha citizens, expressing utter contempt for the United States, Nebraska, and city governments. Law-abiding neighbors all heard the usual Panther slogans. “Freedom by any means necessary!” “The power of the people is found in the gun.” “Off the pigs!”52 That last one sure didn’t help when Omaha police started questioning people in the neighborhood.

  It took almost six days to unearth a witness willing to finger Rice. Once that occurred, the police raided Rice’s home, which also served as the headquarters for the National Committee to Combat Fascism, complete with a large identification plaque helpfully mounted over the door. The law enforcement team recovered fourteen sticks of dynamite, four blasting caps, a six-volt battery, and pliers. Forensic examiners tied the pliers to residue from the bomb that killed Officer Minard. In addition, when the police arrested Rice, then Poindexter, they found dynamite residue on their clothing, although none on their skin.53 Game. Set. Match. The police assumed they had their bombers.

  The pair’s trial began with ill portents. Proceedings started on an incongruous date, April 1, 1971, and at an unfortunate place, the venerable Douglas County courthouse, site of Omaha’s first major race riot in 1919. The senior Douglas County public defender, former governor Frank Morrison, assessed the judge as fair and the jury of eleven whites and one black as about the best possible in Omaha at the time. But he also would have preferred a change of venue. “I’m convinced they just set out to get some evidence on Rice and Poindexter ’cause they didn’t like the way they talked,” Morrison observed.54 Much of the city, white and black, followed the proceedings. Those interested included KLNG talk-show host Chuck Hagel, who covered the trial for his station. Pre-law student Tom Hagel also followed the proceedings with interest. “We were very aware of it,” Chuck said later.55 So were most people in Omaha, black and white.

  Both Rice and Poindexter pled innocent and insisted they did not construct, plant, or direct setting the bomb. Defense attorney Frank Morrison didn’t know about the FBI informant’s supposed sighting of two white guys. All evidence from COINTELPRO remained unacknowledged. The physical evidence and some witness statements proved very compelling. Former governor Morrison did what he could. But the outcome was never really in doubt.

  The jury deliberated four days. They found both Poindexter and Rice guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced both men to life in prison. Rice (who renamed himself Mondo we Langa) died in the penitentiary in 2016. Poindexter continues to serve his time and maintain his innocence.56

  Frank Morrison stayed at it, filing appeals that emphasized technical failings. In support of the Douglas County public defender, the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (including Tom Hagel) and even Amnesty International all took up the cause of the pair they titled the “Omaha Two.” When other events in the 1970s revealed the extensive scope of COINTELPRO, subsequent Freedom of Information Act petitions exposed some of the FBI’s machinations surrounding the case.57 For those convinced the system is rigged and the Man will always find a way, the Rice-Poindexter case offers an object lesson.

  From the perspective of the local citizenry, black and white, the case ended the cycle of riots and violence in North Omaha. The Black Panthers disbanded. Former members drifted into oblivion, remembered, if at all, as the grainy subjects in stark photos from another era. Racism didn’t go away, but outright segregation did. While there’s been undeniable progress, North Omaha today remains less affluent and more violent than other neighborhoods in the city.58

  The Rice-Poindexter trial affected both Hagel brothers. As he finished law school, Tom followed the course charted by former governor Frank Morrison, standing up for those unable to stand up for themselves. While offering no excuse for cop killings, he strongly believed that those accused deserved a fair trial. As a public defender in Lancaster County, Tom decided to do his part even when it got really sticky. “He had these real toughies that people just felt like hanging,” his mother recalled.59 Not on Tom Hagel’s watch—he spoke up for them all with passion and skill. By his lights, America demanded equality before the law and due process. As he’d done in Vietnam, Tom waded right in there.

  As for Chuck, although he embraced the Nixon-era law and order ethos more fully than his brother, he also believed in fairness. People in America were innocent until proven guilty, and had a right to an impartial trial. Many years later, as a U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel took action to release to the public more than a thousand pages of FBI documents related to the Rice-Poindexter investigation.60 Political pundits, especially those on the right end of the table, wondered why a conservative Republican legislator would get embroiled in such a mess. But anybody who really knew Chuck Hagel wasn’t surprised at all.

  “LOOK WHAT’S FLYING OVER IT NOW.”

  Tom pointed to the Binh Phuoc pole, the same one that stood there in 1968. Chuck glanced up. A red banner with a yellow star fluttered in the warm breeze.61 The flag belonged to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

  That standard did not get there by accident. The North’s tank battalions and infantry regiments stormed Saigon one fine spring only six years after Tom Hagel departed Binh Phuoc. Those victorious NVA troops didn’t wear black pajamas or skulk in the underbrush. They brushed aside the ARVN, hapless to the last, and rolled right down Highway 1 like they owned the place. As of May Day, 1975, they did.62

  On that sunshine-drenched, humid afternoon of August 14, 1999, professor of law Tom Hagel and his brother, U.S. senator Chuck Hagel, walked their former firebase. They did so as guests of the politburo in Hanoi. The next day, Senator Hagel represented the United States at a ceremony at the new American consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. Except for some Vietnamese Communist Party hacks and the authors of official correspondence, the population still referred to their city as Saigon.63 They always would. All the reeducation in the world couldn’t erase that traditional name.

  For three days, the Hagels visited their old haunts. With them went some
escort officers from the U.S. Army, a Vietnamese “minder” (after all, they were communists), and Brad Penner and his able video production team from Nebraska Educational Television Network. Cameras and microphones captured hours of discussion, as well as a few staged interviews and ceremonial events. Thirty-one years on, the sights, sounds, and smells of Vietnam brought back many memories. When edited and aired on Nebraska public television as Echoes of War, the half-hour documentary told quite a story.64

  In the film, both brothers seemed relaxed and happy: Tom the self-deprecating academic with his trimmed salt and pepper beard, Chuck the optimistic political leader, husky and smiling, shaking hands all around. Although the two men were in their fifties, they exuded health. Tall, forceful, alert, and vigorous in short-sleeve shirts, they both looked like they could shoulder up M60 pig machine guns and go tramping off through the bush. When accompanying U.S. Army officers pulled out maps, operational reports, and unit radio logs, both Hagels lapsed immediately into grunt-speak. The two former sergeants knew their business, and the Hagels’ depth of recall caught a few of the young officers by surprise. The earnest active- duty types hadn’t seen enough combat, if any, to grasp just how deeply ingrained those searing experiences can be.

  Aboard a tidy Vietnamese minibus, Chuck and Tom traveled all across the 9th Infantry Division’s former area of operations. At one halt, they walked through a village on the edge of the Binh Son rubber plantation, not far from where they were wounded in both the March and April 1968 firefights. The blue-trimmed white motor transport carried them around the perimeter of Long Binh Post, converted by the not-so-communist Vietnamese to a commercial warehouse complex. In south Saigon, they went right down bustling Route 320, to the Y-bridge, through Xom Ong Doi, to the Y-bridge, and on to Xom Cau Mat, all heavily contested during Mini-Tet. In south Saigon, the brothers dismounted and noticed how little had changed in those once deadly streets. Tom pointed to former sniper posts on the roofs. Chuck nodded knowingly. And finally, they stopped at Binh Phuoc.65