I Did Not Go To Vietnam

Today is the sixty-sixth anniversary of D-Day, and the Greatest Generation is rapidly dwindling. We understand that fascism needed to be stopped, and we rightfully thank the many Americans who made it happen.

Few Americans would disagree with that sentiment. Or this one: Had Hitler's racism been confronted before his war machine was fully revitalized, he may have been stopped cold shortly after seizing power in 1933.

Hindsight is beautiful. We can and do learn from it at times.

That said, if you have followed this blog with even passing interest, you understand that I believe war is folly. Barbara Tuchman’s history of war, The March of Folly, is a fine book, its title catchy and to the point. Wars, even the necessary ones, are folly.

Rudimentarily, we know why wars happen. We know they spring from inhumane impulses and ignorance. We know the corrupting nature of avarice and the geopolitical realities that propel conflict. We know that the lust for power is systemic, and that unrestrained nationalism plays a role.

At this late date, we understand the psychology of war.

But none of that sufficiently explains the neocolonialist impulse that sprang from post-World War II realities, particularly in the U.S. and Russia.

That impulse sat in front of us like a meal of strychnine laced with rat poison, yet we bit it off and chewed it down to a swallowable mass.

France clung to Indochina, and was routed by a people seeking the ideal we supposedly fought for in Europe--actual freedom.

The hypocrisy was astonishing to Graham Green, worthy of a novel, The Quiet American. Greene had seen the brutality of the French close-up in Vietnam, reporting for the London Times and Le Figaro. In creating quiet Alden Pyle, the naive and privileged American, Green wasn't about to let American treachery off the hook in 1955.

A decade later, the U.S. was in the shit up to its eyebrows in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands, South Vietnam.

Only fifteen at the time, I wasn't there. My brother, however, had served in Vietnam, in 1963 and 1964, building landing strips near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam. At the time, his unit couldn't return fire when in-coming mortar rounds crashed inside his Marine battalion's position. You see, America was not yet officially in the war, although Americans were being killed.

Ia Drang changed that.

After I graduated from high school, in 1969, I moved to Ashland, Oregon, to attend college and play football. My school counselor had suggested I nab a deferment and go to college instead of joining the Air Force, which had been my vague plan before I talked to him. He had asked me why I was considering the Air Force, and I had told him the truth. I saw it as an alternative to the draft and the Army infantry.

I was not fully aware at the time that Air Force—and Navy—enlisted men were also dying in Vietnam.

We studied current events in 1969. My instructor never went into detail about the war. He was a cheerleader, certain that crushing communism and blocking the falling dominoes in Southeast Asia was the right course. To please him, I wrote a paper on the evils of communism. I parroted his views, and he loved it.

I didn’t believe any of what I'd written, because I had no idea what the hell I was talking about.

My teacher had not done me a favor by accepting my weak, uninformed effort, but I doubt even he understood what was happening.

It turned out I was as naive as Greene's Alden Pyle about Vietnam. Here's what I knew about Vietnam. I knew I didn’t want to end up dead.

I have another example of how naive I was about the war. My mother hid a scary fact from me—actually, she simply lied to me. The entire time my brother was in Vietnam, she told me he had a desk job in Okinawa.

Maybe she wanted to believe that herself.

My mother did not want me to worry, for she worried enough for both of us.

My brother did ship back to Okinawa, unscratched, just before the Battle of Ia Drang Valley, in November, 1965, when the killing in Vietnam escalated. When he left the Marines a year later he didn’t return to our small Oregon town, except to visit briefly before settling in the San Francisco area.

By the time I visited him in Fremont, south of Oakland, California, in 1972, he was married and the father of a baby girl. But something was wrong.

We stood in sharp political contrast. I had been radicalized in college and I hated the Vietnam War. My brother hated war protesters.

Thus began a long stretch of hostility between two brothers, born six years apart, but separated by a war and rapidly changing American culture.

I looked for a long time for the root meaning of our differences. I had become politicized in the middle of a great cultural change. When he joined the Marines in 1962, there were a few hundred American advisers in Vietnam, and any number of Alden Pyles. At first, what they were doing there promised to be a short-term job.

That the U.S. thought it might supplant the French and save capitalist imperialism in Southeast Asia was, of course, folly. Few Americans knew it, however. Six short years later, even Lyndon Johnson knew that many high school counselors in small town America considered Vietnam a quagmire and were advising their students to stay clear of it if they doubted the cause.

Mine had, without tipping his hand. All he said was think about it. That was enough.

I did not get drafted and go to Vietnam, or join the Air Force.

I did not suffer a pang of patriotism and volunteer to save America from communism.

I feared war--not communism.

I couldn't see the rationale for sending nineteen year-olds off to fight a war that was not clearly just.

I did not go to Vietnam because I did not want to kill people for a cause I knew nothing about.

I did not go to Vietnam because I did not want to be shot at for a cause I did not understand.

I did not go to Vietnam because I did not believe the cause was just.

Sadly, my fortuitous time was a tragic time for many young men in my cohort. As is this time, for many other young men and women. They are soldiers now... and young.



TS


P.S. The rain let up as I finished this entry. Happy days!