Part One—The Vietnam War In Retrospect

July 16th, 2009  |   

In speaking about the start of World War I, someone is quoted as having said that it was “ the war to end all wars.”

What a lie that turned out to be.

U.S. Senator Hiram Warren Johnson had it right when he said in 1918, the year the war ended, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”

Truth, as you well know, is as slippery as a fish just pulled from a river. It has a variable side to it. Ask the fellows in the boat, and the guy who caught the fish and let it slip out of his hands back into the water, how big that fish-that-got-away was. After testimony has been given, only the fish will know the truth.

Two weeks ago Judy and I traveled to Lexington, Virginia, for a five day course offered by my alma mater, Washington & Lee University. The course was entitled Vietnam: A Retrospective.

This was a course unlike Alumni College courses. You can study Beethoven, Lincoln, and the world of Jane Austen, and keep some distance from the subject matter. But when the word Vietnam enters the curriculum, with some forty participants, most of which were in some way directly involved in the Southeast Asian conflict, an emotionally charged element creeps into the schedule. The study becomes more than a book.

It was the word retrospective that lured me back to Lexington, the final resting place of General Robert E. Lee, who once said  “ It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it.”  My intention was to use the five day course to surface my thoughts and feelings about that terrible war in Southeast Asia, and my connection with it.

I was enticed back to the Shenandoah Valley so that I could wrestle with the muscular tentacles of that war. That war has been like a monstrous octopus, refusing, over the years, to release me from the grasp of its slimy sucker-bearing arms.

Three days after the course ended, Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and an architect of the Vietnam War, died.

 In 1995, McNamara wrote a book in which he said that he was “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war. It was a mistake, he said. It was a costly mistake, It was a mistake, I would add, that cost the lives of 58,228 American troops, and some 2 million to three million Vietnamese who paid for this war with their lives.

Mr. McNamara’s book, strangely enough, is entitled:  “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.”

Jonathan Schell has written, “whatever else civilization may be, it is surely intercourse between past, present and future. Without the past to guide it, judgment about the future is reduced to clueless conjecture, and without informed judgment about the future, we wander lost in the present.”  I would add to this observation: does being lost in the present deny us some redemption for past mistakes and some direction for the future, because we have avoided contemplative retrospection?

I was given time for retrospection. Now, back home, I’d like, by way of a three part series, to connect and share thoughts about the past, present and future through the lens of retrospection, observation and prognosis. I hope that this will be more than personal indulgence, but rather an opportunity for readers to do their own retrospective reflection.

What Did You Do During The War, Gramps?

The question posed to the class at the very first session was this: “ What did you do during the war, Gramps? ” It was a clever way to get us started talking about our lives back during the war —   the longest war in the history of the United States.

That question couldn’t have been more appropriate since I had just left Jesse and Eva, my grandchildren who had come to Charleston from Minneapolis for a visit. It is a question we should all have to muster up the courage to ask about our lives: What will our grandchildren say about us, if anything, after we die?

It is a question that could have been posed by adults across the generational gap that existed after the Civil War. What did you do, Gramps? Or a question posed after the Civil Rights battles of the sixties and seventies. What did you do, Gramps? Or the question could be phrased in a more threatening way: “What didn’t you do, Gramps?”

In June of 1958, within a three week period, I played in an all star lacrosse game in New York, graduated, got married, went on a honeymoon to Canada, and reported for duty as an infantry officer at Quantico, Virginia. Within a little over a year, having been stationed in California with the Fifth Marines, I took a pregnant Judy to live with her parents in Batavia, New York, as I prepared to deploy to a marine base in Okinawa.

On January 21, 1960, I talked with Judy on the phone. She said her doctor had given her every indication the birth was not imminent. That was good news because I had been promised that I could stay stateside for the delivery, if Stephen hadn’t arrived when our ship sailed from San Diego. I could fly to Okinawa and avoid the three week trip.

The next morning I got an early morning call. Stephen had arrived. I shall never forget Judy’s apologetic voice on the phone as she said she just couldn’t hold off his arrival.

I bought cigars for friends, caught a cab, a bus, an overnight flight, and finally arrived over snow, by bus, in Batavia. I hightailed over to the hospital to see Judy and Stephen. In those days I had to don a mask and put on a gown in order to hold my son.

The saddest day of my life was when I stood on the ship, a week later, and watched San Diego disappear. Three weeks later our ship docked in Okinawa, and I began a 13 month tour of duty that would connect me forever with the war in Southeast Asia.

Did You Ever Kill Anyone, Gramps?

I think it may be hard for people sending their children off to war to understand that they are sending them off to kill people. Likewise, men and women sent off to war don’t really comprehend that fact. That is, until they have to pull the trigger.

All the training I did with protective gear and padded pugil sticks was a game, like an athletic contest. It was preparing me to kill a man with a bayonet. But I never thought about that.

Time spent on a firing line shooting a rifle at targets was another game, like I’d played at a shooting gallery on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland. It was preparing me to kill a human being designated by my nation as my enemy. But I never thought about that.

Creeping and crawling through the woods in an exercise called “an attack of a fortified position” was like the war games I’d played with toy rifles as a kid. It was preparing me to lead my platoon into battle  –  a battle with real bullets in which people, me included, might die. But I never thought about that.
 
I never thought about these things until my battalion boarded the aircraft carrier, the USS Ranger, and set sail for Vietnam. It was 1960 and Ngo Dinh Diem was president of South Vietnam. The intelligence we were given, along with battle orders and ammunition, was that we were to be helicopter-lifted into Saigon to protect and possibly evacuate U.S. military advisors because of an impending coup by elements in Diem’s military.

Our troops had been promised new weapons if they had to face possible combat. But no new weapons were issued. Instead, our troops were allowed, if they felt dubious about their weapons, to go to the fantail of the ship and test-fire their weapons. The USS Ranger must have tilted a bit as all the troops rushed sternward and fired away.

Hitting the rack after a steak and potatoes dinner, I laid there as my thoughts wandered.

Who were these Vietnamese I might have to shoot? We had been prepared for battle in Laos. President Eisenhower would tell a soon-to-be-elected President Kennedy that Laos was “the cork in the bottle of the Far East, if Laos is lost to the free world, in the long run we will lose all of Southeast Asia….You are going to have to put troops in Laos, with other nations if possible — but alone if necessary.”

Laos, in other words, was the key domino in the game of falling dominoes played against Communism –  a game I had bought into  –  a bogus lie I came to learn. Lying there in my rack on the USS Ranger, I thought about Judy back home playing with Stephen in the blow-up pool I had sent him from Japan. I though about her in bed and I wanted, as I had so many nights overseas, to be there to hold her.

In the morning, our battalion was loaded onto a smaller ship and we returned to Subic Bay in the Philippines. There would be no helicopter ride into Saigon, no killing. Diem had withstood the attempt to out him.

Two years later, with the help of our CIA, Diem would be overthrown, and President Kennedy would begin moving more troops into Vietnam. Presidents Johnson and Nixon would send more and more troops, up to half-a-million, and Americans would watch from a distance as they fell like dominoes.

Who Was The Enemy, Gramps?

In his book, “ The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien writes poignantly, with a dash of understandable anger, about his Minnesota hometown neighbors whom he feared if he had chosen to run to Canada instead of shipping out to Vietnam. The words sting.

He writes that he “detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simple-minded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand  – the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and farmers, the pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the fine upstanding gentry out at the country club  –  They didn’t know the first thing about Diem’s tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the colonialism of the French  –  this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading –  but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons.”

The ancient Chinese warrior Sun Tzu said that before going into battle, you must know your enemy, for if  “you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.” And then he says, “ If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

We did not know the man from North Vietnam who was designated as our enemy –  Ho Chi Minh. We did not know of his love for Thomas Jefferson and his desire early on in his life for the liberation of his country from colonialism  –  like our revolutionary zeal to break from British colonial rule.

Later studying about Ho Chi Minh, well after the Vietnam War, I learned a fascinating piece of history about him that dated back to the aftermath of World War I. It linked him with President Wilson as well as African-American leaders from the United States.

At Versailles, where the peace talks were held after the war, Ho Chi Minh respectfully requested independence for his country. Wilson ignored him. His request was denied. That exclusion of Ho Chi Minh resulted in Vietnam being parceled out to a long list of colonial powers that finally ended up with the U.S. inheriting the war from France. 

At the same time, Wilson, born in Staunton, Virginia, down the road from Washington and Lee, also excluded black leaders, like W.E.B. Du Bois, who had come to Paris attempting to get African-American, and Pan-African issues included in the conversations that led to the Treaty of Versailles and the search for a lasting peace. 

I find that interesting and ironic thinking of President Johnson who was eventually torn between searching for a peaceful solution to the war in Vietnam, while also struggling with the issues of race and poverty here at home. The old guns and butter dilemma.

That struggle continues as President Obama tries to conduct another quagmire-of-a-war in Afghanistan, while trying to address domestic issues which still plague us around poverty and race.

The tragedy of Vietnam, and all wars, is that we do not learn about the history, culture and people we fight until after the slaughter is over. We don’t know the enemy until we win the war, or in the case of Vietnam, we lose the war.

One of our staff for the course was a man who was a child in Hanoi when the war took place. Some of his relatives and family friends were killed. When asked how he could forgive Americans for having done so much damage, he replied that holding onto anger would only destroy his future.

I leaned over to Judy after that observation, and said to her that this man from Hanoi, our former enemy, had surely embodied the forgiveness that Jesus taught. It seems clear to me that when Jesus said to love your enemy, he meant for us to know our enemy so well that we shouldn’t have to kill him, and lose in the gunfire all sense of who we are as human beings.

And Were You Involved In The Antiwar Activities, Gramps?

I was not drafted. I joined the Marine Corps. Frankly, I didn’t want to play soldier in college with military classes, drills and summer training. I decided to commit myself to a concentrated term of service after graduation with what I thought was the best of the military services.

When it comes to the draft, it is clear to me that without drafting students, there would have been only a trickle of antiwar fervor. Yes, the number of casualties, the cost and the length of the war were important, but the folks who volunteered to go to the streets played a very significant role in deciding the outcome of the war.

General Lewis B. Hershey was the Director of Selective Service System, administering the draft. He was the man who was hated by antiwar folks and who President Nixon finally dismissed because he became a primary focus of draft resisters.

Hershey was obviously not bothered by the fact that war with Vietnam was never declared by Congress. His comment?  “I’ve lived under situations where every decent man declared war first, and I have lived under situations where you don’t declare war. We’ve been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.”

I think that our nation should move toward a system of national service, a draft for military service or civic service. If we had had such a draft in place, Iraq would have been impossible to sustain because of the resistance it would have engendered.

When I got out of the Marine Corps, I entered Virginia Seminary and three years later became an assistant on staff at the old historic church, St. Anne’s, Annapolis. My primary work was with students at the U.S. Naval Academy, and St. John’s College, along with work in the neighborhood just outside the church doors, a basically poor, black district.

It was there in Annapolis that the guns and butter struggle helped mold my life in relationship to the Vietnam War, and other wars to follow. It was with those midshipmen preparing, upon graduation, to deploy to Vietnam, and the St. John’s students writing their conscientious objector applications, in the shadow of that black neighborhood, that my soul was stretched and the dye cast for what would become my eventual resistance to the Vietnam War.

In the next edition of Notes,

I will say more about the antiwar resistance.

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