Like many of my fellow Vietnam Veterans, I am the son of a WWII veteran and grew up summers on Sabattus Lake listening to my father, my uncles and fellow vets talk about their WWII experiences over card games on Friday and Saturday nights. The conversations were never about the war itself but rather about the brotherhood they experienced and it was their stories that represented my call to service during Vietnam.
After my commissioning from the ROTC program at the University of Maine, I attended the Officer Basic Course at Fort Sill, OK and was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas and volunteered to be sent to Vietnam, assuring that I would get my choice of units, the First Cavalry Division.
This is my retrospective on Vietnam and I offer no apology for my story, it reflects my recollections and opinions.
I understood that Vietnam was a follow-on to the French war intended to restore its Indochina colony. When the French effort failed and they withdrew, President Kennedy carried on the conflict, not as a territorial objective, but as a defensive act against the spread of international communism. This political objective was known in the 60’s as the Domino Theory.
I can’t offer a good bubble gum explanation for the outcome of our misadventure in Vietnam. It wasn’t the fault of the media, it wasn’t the fault of the anti-war movement, it was in fact the failure of our political and military leadership to manage the war in an appropriate fashion.
The national will to first fight and then win the war was never developed. President Johnson’s fear of losing support for his Great Society programs and the upcoming election resulted in his failure to mobilize the will of America. There was no declaration of war, there was no mobilization of the Reserve Components but there was a desire to get out quick. When the war ran long, the public became understandably irritated, then annoyed and finally acted. The national will never collapsed, it was never developed.
We fought the wrong enemy, the Viet Cong (VC). The American public thought we were conducting offensive operations, search and destroy, when in fact we had adopted a defensive posture and were not willing to take the war to the enemy’s main force, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). We mistakenly identified the VC as the enemy center of gravity, spent years hunting them down as the public support ebbed away and in 1973 watched bitterly from afar as the NVA, not the VC, overran Saigon.
Retired Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote in his 1995 book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, “The US policy was terribly wrong and we owe it to future generations to explain why”.
We, those of us who fought and the American public, were failed by several political administrations who kept the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) out of all major policy discussions on Vietnam. The JCS, they lacked the courage to push back and are equally culpable in my mind.
Ironically, we were never defeated on the ground but even though that is true, it is also irrelevant given the final outcome.
On every occasion I have had in the past two decades to talk with Maine’s Congressional delegation I have reminded them that the cost of sending America’s young men and women to war can not be measured in supplement budget dollar totals, or even measured in the number of them killed or wounded, the cost will be measured in caring for those you send to war for the next 60-70 years. Choose your battles carefully!
Despite the loss of 58,158 men and women in Vietnam, 61% of whom were under 21 and 1000 who died on their first day in country, my anger over my experiences in Vietnam and disdain for the Government of the 1960-70s has subsided and I remind my fellow Vietnam veterans as often as I can, we were “guilty” of only one thing during Vietnam, raising our right hands and swearing to support and defend the Constitution. We didn’t get a vote on where we were sent or what we were asked to do!
Anyone who has served in combat has discovered the following basic truth during our tours and I quote from War by Sebastian Junger, “The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you but the shared commitment to safeguard one anothers’ lives is non-negotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire and the experience of it changes a person profoundly”.
It is my opinion that the shared commitment to safeguard, read die, for one another is an emotion many of us can never replicate at home and explains the difficulty many have in re-entering our society. But that’s a story for another day.
1968-1969 was in fact my best year and my worst year.
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