My plans were to run the clock out and leave. Other Americans would still be here. Others would continue to mount operations, forays into Laos, rescue flights, and reinforcement missions. Vietnamese and Americans were killed or wounded every day, every day that I counted down to my escape. I will admit that somewhere in a very small part of my conscience I wondered if, fundamentally, in the most basic part of my humanity, the right thing would be to stay and see Operation Lam Son through, for as long as it took. Seeing bodies coming back from Laos, with dead ARVNs strapped to the floor of Hueys, with blood covering the floor of the ship, and then the body taken out on a stretcher, and the blood hosed away, was enough to enrage some part of me. But was it enough? There was a chance that rage would replace self-preservation, and the only way to counter this was to not look. If the greater part of the American people could look away, why couldn’t I?
What solidified my conviction was hearing a speech by Nixon, I am sure written by someone of his political staff, also not present in Vietnam, to the effect that “the Vietnamese people have taken up the burden of their own freedom,” or something like that — a completely uncaring lie concocted to beguile the voters into thinking that some sort of plan was working. And I can remember that I felt even more strongly, stronger than I had ever felt before, that I was on my own. I felt that duty and honor and country were all secondary to taking care of my own skin.
So, what did I do? Let me answer with a question.
20
What would you do?
First the draft. Would you obey a notice from the United States government to stop your life at home, forestall your plans, leave your family and friends, leave the many comforts and privileges of American life, leave your ideas about personal accomplishment and reward, leave your desires for wealth and property? Would you do all this because you trusted people in power? Would you even question what they were telling you to do? Would you obey or object or refuse when you sensed that you were chosen by a draft system and a draft board that exempted your contemporaries still in college, or others they were trying to protect?
Could they make you into a soldier? Would you accept forced military training? Would you present yourself to obey orders and training making you into a trained killer? A killer of people you didn’t know and had no quarrel with? In a country you had never heard of? To eradicate an economic system like communism, something you had only the faintest knowledge of and didn’t care about? Would you be able to tolerate being yelled at by drill sergeants and others, made to perform idiotic and archaic military drills? Could you stand being, in effect, ostracized by an American culture that was dead set against the war and everything you were doing? The cultural message came through loud and clear in music, in daily journalism, in political posturing, in movies and television. Could you stand the loneliness of the training bases hundreds of miles from home with only the companionship of other men equally lonely and miserable?
What would you decide if you were told to do an irretrievable act, something violent and deadly? What if you had to shoot someone? A supposed enemy? What would you do if the logic of enemies came forward? The logic of enemies, my own term, is that if you don’t shoot the enemy, he will shoot you. This argument is exactly mirrored on the other side. It exists with its own internal unanswerable mechanics. You are not attacking. You are defending. You have the right to defend. You and the enemy are both defending.
Things worth considering: The decision to pull the trigger and kill an enemy soldier, to hear the gun, to see him grimace and fall, and to know that you had killed someone would make a line across your life. You would be a different person. You would instantly, and from that time forward, be capable of all manner of things you did not think you were capable of. You were now part of that uneasy fraternity of people who had killed another person.
But who would you be defending? Obviously, you would be defending, or helping to defend, your fellow soldiers. But you would be defending more than that. You would be defending the commanders of your unit who had gotten you into the firefight, or at least failed to get you out of it. You would be defending the command structure over them. You would be defending everyone, in my case up to General Abrams and Ellsworth Bunker, the vicious old US ambassador to Vietnam, back in Saigon safely at the embassy, conferring with the president of Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, whom I was also defending, and so on up a list of people in the American government including Richard Nixon.
Could you push back against a future of being internally haunted by the question Why am I doing this? Could you summon the bravery — or the internal resistance — to simply refuse to be part of the whole idiotic theater of the war? Could you agree that it really was the universal soldier who really was to blame, as the song said? And that unless you did something you were the universal soldier?
Or would you be like me? Planning a secret internal defense against all the doubt and discomfort of protest and wanting simply to not stand out and not be seen as different. It is not the soldier’s job to think, but they do it anyway.
In Vietnam, at some point a soldier inevitably sensed that the army itself was damaged beyond repair, and from then on he was no longer a soldier. He was simply a person in a horrid situation that had to be suffered until a solution or an escape came along. The draftees in Vietnam, and even some of the regular career officers and non-coms, may have been guilty, probably the wrong word, of retreating, secretly, selfishly. Retreat is after all a tactic.
And then there is the question of who was responsible, who was in charge. Was anyone? Commanders, from General Abrams on down, may also have been guilty of abandoning the mission, of turning their backs on the possibility of victory. They could have said, look, we can’t win. But they never said that. They could argue that they were doing their duty. But they had a duty not to use the lives of their soldiers in pursuit of defeat. What they did not do was loudly make the point that the war should be abandoned. In this decision there was still a small element of their own self-preservation. I would also argue that they were paralyzed by the realization that, with all these people, all this money, and all these weapons, there would be no success, no stalemate, nothing that even had the outward appearance of a worthwhile conclusion. There would be only embarrassment, loss, bitter dissolution, and more endless waste. If the fates showed any mercy the disaster would happen quickly and they, the US, the country, could get on to the next thing. It would require a huge amount of energetic pretense. But if the Wehrmacht could do it, if the defeated Japanese could do it, if the countless defeated armies in human history could do it, then we could do it. Anyway, we had no choice.
21
So, what I did was I left Firebase Matthew and the ongoing violence of Operation Lam Son. I flew back south to Phuoc Vinh, and from there to Bien Hoa. I had my papers showing that I had been in Vietnam a year and had fulfilled my obligation. Not only was my time in country done, but as I said, my time in the army was nearly over. With DEROS orders in hand I made my way to the 90th Replacement Depot near Tan Son Nhut, Saigon’s airport. I spent three lonely nights there, watching the planes take off for the States and writing home that I would be there soon. The letters would not get home before me, but I didn’t care. I was added to a roster of men scheduled for return, some of whom were happy, but not as happy as they thought they might be. The prevailing mood was one of relief, of having survived where others didn’t. The three days moved slowly. I also noticed that there was anticipation for what return would mean. What we had all looked forward to for the year in the war was now real, with everything that went with it — unemployment, survival, disappointment, and the discovery of what had happened to family, wives, and children in our absence. Some people would be happy to see us, but maybe not as many as we thought. It was no secret — this was not going to be a glorious return. We were not returning heroes. We were returning to a defeated country regardless of how the definition of defeat was now reconstructed
. There would be no parades, no welcomes, no special benefits. With some luck we could blend into the background of American life and not talk about Vietnam unless someone asked, or even then.
Each soldier waiting to return home carried his entire folder of orders, assignments, units, disciplinary actions and punishments, health, and in some cases wounds and treatments. All on paper. There were several men on my plane who were bandaged, had limbs bound up, and some were on crutches. Some were weak and had to have assistance getting on the bus to the airport. Even after all this time and experience there was evidence of racial separation, which I thought was amazing and sad.
I was the only officer on the plane so I was detailed to carry the manifest of names and units. The plane was a private carrier, Air America or Flying Tiger or something. Again, a private company making money off the war. No alcohol was permitted. Eighteen hours of sullen, rather miserable flying without even the slight relief that booze would have provided, again proving the army’s ability and inclination to make anything that was already miserable and boring even more so.
22
We landed at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco at a little before midnight. Most of the troops on the plane took off for the city and a good time. Some stood in wonder that they were actually back. Some stood in line for telephones to call home. I turned in my rosters and other paperwork and then wondered what I would do. My wife was in Denver with our baby son at her parents’ house. So no one was there to meet me.
There was a tradition in the army that when you returned from the war zone you qualified for a supposedly quintessential American meal — steak, fries, and for dessert strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. I had heard about this and wanted to see if it was true. I made my way to the air force mess hall, open, as many air force mess halls are, around the clock. It was a large place with several hundred tables. It was empty except for me. Almost as empty as I felt. I took a chair and waited.
A cook stuck his head out of the kitchen.
“You want your meal?”
“Yes.”
He disappeared and after about twenty minutes reappeared. He set the steak platter and the dessert bowl on the mess line counter.
“Get yourself a tray,” he said and disappeared again.
* * *
—
I cannot say that I got nothing for my military time. I returned a serious person, much more so than I was before. And I am now receiving Social Security with a few additional dollars for being a veteran. I got some medals, a Bronze Star and an Air Medal. The Bronze Star either means that I did something of which I am not aware, or means that the Bronze Star means nothing.
It is also the case that I gained, without actually getting shot, some knowledge of what war is like. This allows me to read bloody sections of history and strife not as abstractions but as scenes I can clearly picture. I never sought this knowledge, but now that I have it, I am stuck with it. In addition, I can more accurately judge, and in most cases dismiss, the claims made by the shallow and rotten politicians who seek fame and renown on the backs of credulous soldiers. This knowledge does not make anyone happy, but neither does most other wisdom. Maybe it just adds to the accuracy of a person’s self-direction and judgment as life situations present themselves. I think I trust much less, and in some cases not at all. I accept almost nothing on face. I am not grumpy or rude, but I can almost immediately detect a lie or a half-truth or an opportunistic claim or an abstraction paraded as something real. And I often detect a lie, sadly, even when there isn’t any. This is not an advantage.
On a more practical level it means that I can meet the cowards of the right and the fools of the left with a simple stare and a few words of cold dismissal. Of course, as you can tell, I enjoy doing this, and seize every opportunity.
I have some distant brotherly feelings for my fellow Vietnam War veterans, but I have avoided get-togethers or veteran organizations, and this book is a rare storytelling session for me.
I have some young friends who are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Some are horribly wounded. It occurs to me that Vietnam draftees had one advantage that today’s voluntary enlistees do not have. Draftees during Vietnam knew that the situation was going to be miserable and ultimately awful, whereas the volunteer army today has to find all that out.
I learned, and I think most veterans learn, that making people or nations do something by bombing or sending in armed troops usually fails. People are disobedient in direct proportion to the armed attempts to make them obedient. The more troops the less chance of lasting success. The armed forces have two jobs — to kill people and to blow things up. The usually young men and women who compose them are often repulsed by orders to do either of those things. Armies do not — WHAM — win hearts and minds. If there is any discipline at the start of wars it dissipates as the soldiers themselves become aware of the pointlessness of what they are being told to do.
I came back in 1971 and immediately needed a job. The war was dying, and the US economy declined along with it. I got a job teaching school, which I did for about ten years. I think I was a good teacher, in part because I compared my American students with the children who grew up in Vietnam during the war. I don’t know exactly what effect this comparison had on my attitude toward my students, but I think I was more realistic and maybe more demanding than I would have been otherwise. Without the slightest pause I rejected the theoretic claptrap that was offered by the education schools. I was not a disciplinarian, but I could see that the concocted abstractions of psychologists and sociologists when applied to public school students were little more than handy excuses for failure. This makes me sound to the right politically, but I am not. I simply distrust abstractions. Being successful, or even secure, in the United States — the sad, silly United States — requires a hard-eyed evaluation applied daily, to everything.
A war can provide a realistic attitude and a knowledge of what human existence actually is, of what can be expected, and how much you can trust your fellow citizens and your nation. This is hard to teach. I wanted to do it while teaching, but I kept these thoughts and statements at a minimum. It was not my job or wish to create cynics before it becomes absolutely necessary. I got some understanding from my high school students. Some accepted and adopted my gloomy attitude, but others thought I was simply an adult and therefore not to be credited.
After I had been teaching for a few years a student, not knowing what he was asking, asked me if I had killed anyone. I was a little shocked that anyone cared. But if you are going to discuss the war, or any war, with the idea of warning another generation about the slide into conflict, you should tell the whole story.
I didn’t shoot anyone that I knew of. But it was true that I shot at them, or somebody. Some people I couldn’t see. In several instances, in contacts with the ARVN and in the rubber plantation with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and other firefights where confusion and fear were in control, I fired with everyone else. I had no idea where the bullets went, and perhaps they did hit another human being. I don’t know, and it’s just a little comforting that I don’t know. Of course, I knew what I was doing. I knew what bullets did, and I knew that just being in a trap of circumstance wasn’t enough of a justification.
We are now about two full generations from the ignoble closing of the fighting between the United States and Vietnam. Amazing changes have occurred. You can now buy garments and products of decent quality made in Vietnam. China, the former wellspring of Marxist and Maoist forces, is now as capitalist as can be. If there is another war it will be a world war. No one will escape. Scientific destruction will be unchallenged, and this country will call for soldiers, as usual, young men and women. The more than fifty-five thousand dead in the Vietnam War will seem like a pittance by the time it’s over.
As time goes on and I get older, I am more haunted by my own history, with more questions today than yesterday. I
can say that writing helps, and if you’ve read this far, you have my thanks. What the Vietnam War meant is still a mystery. What lessons can be learned are clouded by interpretations, even if some lessons should rightly be ignored. We may not know what the war meant, but we do know that it meant something. Still, the history is frightening. We can hear what Mao Tse-tung may have said when he was asked what the French Revolution meant.
He said, “It’s too early to tell.”
And if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, nothing will.
Lieutenant Dangerous Page 15