I was there Lucian, the year before in’67, for basic training and then jump school after AIT at Ft. Gordon, after that I was at Ft. Bragg for special forces for another year before going to VN and fighting with the 75 Rangers. It was fucked up alright, I stayed clean the entire time I was in VN, not because I didn’t like to get high, but because I wanted to stay alive, so close so many times. We ran reconnaissance for the 173rd and were never among friendlies. I can’t speak for the officers because I didn’t really know them, but for the rest of us, we fought for each other because the government didn’t have our backs and we would have probably been VC if we had been born there. And that is why the Russians are totally screwed, the Ukrainians will never surrender their land, every inch is dear to them and they have good memories. I think you’re right, it is a lot like VN, we are on the right side this time, the equipment has gotten deadlier and the Russian’s have lost, in less than a year, more than we did in twenty. I am transported there in my mind all of the time, the images we see are just a fraction of the reality, it’s hell on earth there, unremittingly, 24/7. However we can help them, we need to do it, we owe it to their humanity, they need to outlive Putin, the Russians will kill him, when they finally figure out what he has done to them.... And all because of one man. The karma he is earning is going to be an order of magnitude greater than the harm that he has caused.
Reading this story 55 years after I was drafted in 1968 is painful and emotional for me. I was 24 year old college graduate and refused to accept a commission. I was a war resister in college and when I got my draft notice I went to Montreal, Canada with six other guys. We finally reasoned that dodging the draft and never seeing Greenwich Village or our families again was going to be tougher than the Army so we went back to NYC for induction. We knew that in 1968 16,000 Americans were KIA and many more seriously wounded. I was “lucky” to be injured in RVN(required Republic of Vietnam) training and lost most of my hearing in one ear and was not deployed(but they also wouldn’t discharge me). I’m glad I didn’t get killed or kill anyone. Some of my pals were killed in combat and to this day I suffer mostly from survivor guilt. During my “service” I was physically a soldier but mentally AWOL. Most of the basic training draftees I saw were black, brown or poor whites who couldn’t qualify for college deferments. They mostly became infantrymen led by predominantly white officers. In 1969, during a class at the Army Intelligence school taught by a West Point captain, he said it took 50 American troops to by neutralize one Viet Cong who unlike the Americans were highly motivated to defend their country. We immediately knew then that the war was a disgusting mistake and that we would lose. Thank you Lucian. I truly appreciate your writing.
This brilliant essay needs to be in a textbook used to teach expository writing, and your essays should be collected and published.
For a while a college buddy, J. Houston Gordon, was assigned to represent Calley. Much later when I asked him about it, his response fit into your essay. Rusty wasn’t the problem as much as the Pentagon. Share the punishment....
When the guys came back to school in 1972-75, I was someone who would listen to their stories. I knew they were true because none of those guys could make that shit up. Only the most horrific remained in my memory, and I choose not to tell them.
Bravo Lucian. In a week of losing rock and cultural heroes, you remind us of who they really are without ever using the word.
One guy from the neighborhood gang I grew up with had been drafted right after graduation from high school and ended up in Vietnam. I met him years ago and he was all messed up, a prime example of PTSD. I bought him lunch and tried to talk to him but he was already gone, you could see it in his eyes. Just before he left he said to me “You’re lucky you didn’t go there, you didn’t miss nothing. Everything was fucked up over there, everything!” That’s the last I saw of him and his sister told me later that he died of an overdose, but he was really another casualty of that stupid war…
Excellent piece indeed - I save every column you write (and Cleaver's too)..... I think George Santayana said it best, though it has been attributed to Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
Another great pice, Lucian. War is hell alright. But when you're young (and foolish) you think of going to war as exciting - a great adventure, I know I was looking forward to it as a British soldier in 1951 being told our infantry training had been extended from 16 weeks to 32 weeks for Korea. I didn't know how lucky I was when at the last minute they sent us to Egypt instead. We had been attached to a Scottish regiment (The Seaforth Highlanders) stationed at Edinburgh Castle. We heard later 50% of them never came back. I did have a 6 week reprieve though, a theater group in the Edinburgh festival had asked for some guys to play soldiers in a medieval play and I was one of the lucky ones selected. We were excused all duties during those six weeks. Of course the other guys were livid when they had to get up at the crack of dawn awaken by the Scottish pipers while we'd lounge around in bed for another couple of hours. All I had to do in the play was put a m noose around a prisoners neck. . Bi Ut again, the thought of actually going into battle would be a very scary thing for me today, If the leaders of great nations like Putin were expected to lead their men into battle like the kings of old, I doubt there'd ever be any wars.
Basic at Fort Campbell, Ky,April '69 MOS 11B (Combat Infantryman)Bused to AIT at Fort Polk, La Home of the Combat Infantryman for Vietnam as the sign said when you entered the North Fort that had been closed after WWII and revived for Vietnam training. Sad incident during the bus ride as we stopped in a rural town in Mississippi and none of the Black guys would get off the bus the talk being they could get hung in Mississippi. It was a short stop (30' maybe) Some of us got hot dogs for the guys who stayed on the bus. I was 19 from a small town in Wisconsin and had never experienced that form of racism before, I had a lot to learn. Most of us had orders for Vietnam by August '69 Just before we graduated we got our orders changed as we where told that we were part of Nixon first troop withdrawal as Lucian mentioned yesterday, announced in June 69. Most of the troops were happy about it but some were a little disappointed, you don't train for 18 weeks to go and then find out you weren't. Luckily our lead Drill Sgt had already done 2 tours in Vietnam and he told us flat-out you are going to get there because you've got to much time left in your service obligation. You're all going to end up in general replacement pool and probably end up there anyway. So I was sent to Fort Carson, Co as a replacement infantryman in 5th Div (Mech) which was the permanent Division stationed there except, they had one brigade serving in Vietnam at the time. Because I had 2 years of college and knew how to type I got assigned to 3rd brigade HQ S-1 as clerk where I was lucky enough to meet a young Lt LKTIV through the Staff Sgt I worked for in S-1. In March '70 I got orders for Nam and ended up in the 101st Airborne Div, as an infantryman, and in July '70 I ended up on a Firebase named Ripcord which turned into a lesser known version of Hamburger hill and surprisingly not very far from where Hamburger hill took place. The 101st was forced to abandon the Firebase on July 23 under siege. Google it and read the Ripcord Association version and not just the Wikipedia version.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand (1979-81) I met or saw many more or less resident Vietnam vets hanging out at bars in Patthaya or Bangkok, and they made me sad. They had either never left, or spend most of their time in Thailand for a bunch of reasons but mostly because they said they felt more comfortable there. Their friends and family back home either hated veterans, or they just never asked him about his experience--or quickly changed the subject. Too painful, or they felt too ignorant about the war, or the world outside their hometown, to even ask curious questions.
And of course, many of those guys were addicted--to heroin, alcohol, and the company of prostitutes and bar waitresses. They felt like somebody there. They felt like nobody back home.
Once, while waiting for a delayed flight in Bangkok, I met a veteran at the airport and struck up a conversation. I had read "The Politics of Heroin in SE Asia", and other eye-opening books relating to the war, and I had lots of questions. His eyes welled up with tears. He said nobody back home every asked him much of anything. And he had a lot to say.
I made it a point after that to always ask veterans about their experience if they gave me an opening, to keep asking if they seemed to want to talk, and to let them change the subject if they wanted to.
I saw how the war had killed and/or messed up the lives of so many Americans, and many more Vietnamese. And Cambodians, let's not forget them.
Sometimes, as I lay reading in a hammock in my Thai village, I would look out over the coconut palms and I could so clearly visualize the terror of US bombers appearing overhead... it gave me nightmares for years. And I didn't even suffer through any of that, though I heard terrible stories when I worked at the Khao I Dang refugee camp along the Cambodian border...
I spent my youth in the shadow of my father and grandfather ( veterans of ww1 & 2) who seldom spoke, but always felt it would be my duty to serve. I used to drill my three brothers in small unit tactics on the farm. I was a little too young for Vietnam. What bothered me most (knowing we were there for all the wrong reasons, Fire in the lake) was all the waste of lives. Young men dedicated to service, sacrificed for nothing. Countless Vietnamese killed for nothing. All these people distorted. Sad, sad Sh*t. Then to see it repeated again and again...
There is another side to the Vietnam war apart from its sheer stupidity, and that is that the burden of fighting was so unevenly distributed. If you were someone warming a chair in some college, as long as you kept your grades up and avoided unfavorable attention from college administrators, you could sit out the war. If you lucked out and joined the National Guard, or the Army Reserve, you too could sit out the war with reasonable assurance that your one weekend a month of active duty, and two weeks ANACDUTRA in the summertime would spare you the misery and anxiety of a Vietnam posting. We were the favored few, and we knew it. I dropped out of the Army ROTC in 1965, and at the time, cadets had been enrolled in the inactive reserve. I was offered the option of leaving the Army Reserve, which I declined, expecting to be called up for Basic Training at some point in the near future. For reasons I cannot fathom, the Army forgot about me for about two and a half years, which by that time meant that I was in the middle of my first year in law school. Two years earlier, I had written a letter to the USAR Personnel Office, which I believe was in St. Louis, inquiring what my status was. Within a month or so I received a letter back telling me to sit tight, and they will get back to me. In February 1967, I received an official letter telling me to report to the Sacramento Army Depot, where the local Army Reserve unit trained. I showed up as directed and they looked at me and asked, "Where is your stuff?" I explained my situation and the next thing I knew, I was scheduled to report to Fort Ord, California, the following May. I went to the Law School Dean at UC Davis, and he wrote a letter on my behalf requesting a delay in my arrival at Fort Ord at the end of the academic year. Following the July 4 holiday, I arrived as directed at the reception station at Fort Ord. Consequently, I had spent half of my tour of duty waiting for the Army to tell me what they wanted me to do. Three years later, I received my Honorable Discharge as a sergeant E-5. My MOS was 11B40.
The most salient memory I have of those early years, from Basic Combat Training (BCT), and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) was that Army Reserve and National Guard were generally kept separate from troop units composed primarily of draftees. In the sense, we were the 'favored few'; consequently, there were no disciplinary problems within our company, and unit cohesion seem to be pretty good, even though individual members of our training companies came from California, Texas, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts I buddied up with some guys from Massachusetts, and we had a grand time together. I was the local kid who provided the lodging and tour guide service when we all went to San Francisco on a three day pass between BCT and AIT. These were Irish Catholic guys who had heard marvelous things about San Francisco topless bars. I didn't want to disillusion them by telling them that those places were as boring as hell. We did get to look in on the circus that was going on in the Haight-Ashbury District during the so-called 'summer of love' there on that weekend in September.
When we got back to Fort Ord, we left behind the large steel and concrete buildings that served as our barracks during BCT, and we found ourselves in the much older wooden barracks that had been erected back in 1940. We also found that our training cadre was not the high caliber drill sergeants that we had in Basic Training; instead, the NCOs were combat veterans who had completed their one-year tour of duty in Vietnam, and were marking time until their enlistments were time expired. Among the training cadre, there were people with unstable personalities who should not of been placed in positions of authority at all. The NCOIC of our AIT training company, a buck sergeant named Blye, brandished his loaded handgun at a group of us inside a Ford utility van the morning after we finished a 12-hour shift of overnight guard duty prior to going on an afternoon pass. I won't go into the details right now except to say that this nut job could easily have killed somebody in that van. At the time of the incident, there were approximately 10 of us crowded into that van. We also learned afterward that this particular NCO had been up in the family area earlier that day, waving his pistol around in a threatening manner. By the following afternoon, this particular fellow was on a plane to Vietnam. There was, of course, an official investigation of the incident which is probably somewhere in the national archives.
As for our cohort, there were some different people in our group who had done their BCT elsewhere, but found themselves assigned to a Light Infantry MOS. One fellow was a young man from Los Angeles who was bitterly bemoaning the fact that he had to be there, and he could be out making money instead of marching in the ranks with the rest of us. The guy was an obnoxious prick, and he earned himself in Article 15 nonjudicial punishment for screwing up during the two hour shift that each of us had to pull at one point or another doing fire watch and those old fire trap barracks buildings. All he had to do was to wake up the next guy who was supposed to take his place and he couldn't even do that competently. We knew what was going on in Vietnam, and that some of us might end up having to go there. The complainer had been lucky enough to find a slot in an Army Reserve unit, and was making a total ass of himself at a time, and under circumstances, where our individual fates were determined by forces we could not control. He apparently came from a wealthy background and he had a sense of entitlement that blinded him to the realities of life he was now having to live. Apparently, no one had told him that he needed to straighten himself out come because he could've ended up with a less than honorable discharge, or an Undesirable Discharge (UD) attesting to the fact that the guy was a total asshole. I would've punched in the spin code (SPN) numbers myself on this guy on his DD 214.
Years later, I found myself on the six-month TDY for my official post in the Office of Chief Counsel, within the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, in Washington DC, and detailed off to the White House, officially the Executive Office of the President, to serve on President Gerald R Ford's Presidential Clemency Board that was tasked with dealing with the negative fallout from the Vietnam War, specifically the soldiers who deserted or went AWOL, and those relatively fewer men who refused induction into the armed services, and who were convicted of violating the criminal provisions of the Selective Service Act. It was from that perspective that I got an in-depth look at how the military justice system work, or failed to work, as so often happen. At one point during that tour, I had 13 people working for me as lawyers, law students, and paralegals, turning out the paperwork necessary to complete our assigned tasks. Thousands of files, and sadness and heartbreak in all of them. Case disposition standards were nonexistent to start with, and changed daily as the civilian board gained experience and wised up about the way soldiers could get themselves in trouble. As this was a Republican administration, there was the usual posturing and pontificating about what an applicant for clemency would need to do to gain a so-called 'clemency discharge' which offered nothing in the way of veterans benefits. Zero. And as for alternative service, that was run by the Selective Service System. Most of the applicants said 'Fuck it' and went on with their lives. Although technically fugitives from justice, the Army stopped looking for them years before.
Jimmy Carter cut the Gordian Knot by setting up a one-stop absentee discharge processing operation at Fort Benjamin Harrison, near Indianapolis, Indiana, that processed them out within 24 hours of their arrival. Over and done with.
From a policy standpoint, the President's initiative was a total failure for reasons I mention, and others that I won't go into at this time. Anyone interested in that era, and what we did there, should read a book that was written by two of the civilian lawyers who headed up this effort. The book's title is Chance and Circumstance, The Draft, The War and the Vietnam generation by Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978). It's a good read, the charts are well conceived, and the lessons of that era bear repeating. Since those years, we've had an all volunteer military that has seen action in three other wars, two of them failures.
That book, CHANCE AND CIRCUMSTANCE, clearly demonstrates that the USA is not a classless society. Your parents' circumstances 95% of the time will determine your future; connections with the ruling class help a lot., and may even save your life.
Excellent book. I have read it several times and still own it. As a UC Davis student at the time, they were after me because I was down several credit hours. I managed to escape with the help of the rather extensive support system that existed at the time.
Leigh your comment reminded me that for a while, during the height of the war in 1969, I was a plainclothes Army intelligence agent in the states. One rather odd assignment was to travel to induction stations to interview draftees and take Sworn statements from those who claimed on the required “loyalty oath” that the they were members of subversive organizations believing that would disqualify them from military service. Of course they were lying when they checked off almost every box on this already obsolete form which contained many organizations that no longer existed. Sympathetic and understanding how they feared induction, I would tell them that 1) I was stepping out of the room for a smoke and 2) that when I returned if they still insisted on making those claims I would have to draw up a sworn statement for them to sign and that they would still be inducted that day. I also told them they would never get a security clearance and that they could wind up in the infantry where you didn’t need a security clearance. 100% of them tore up the original oath and filled out a new one with no boxes checked.
All of the young men I interviewed were somewhat sophisticated and white. I too. at the time, felt that I was saving a life but years later realized they would be replaced by some poor kid from the farms or inner city.
The deferment system with its implicit and explicit favoritism was the rot that killed the system. Some sort of draft system is needed for national defense and to keep us all on the same page.
I am someone who both won and lost in that system; five college deferments but ultimately drafted anyway upon graduation at age 24. Not really a joke but if it were not for the Vietnam War I wouldn’t have a college degree.
it's funny. "For What It's Worth" is definitely Steve Stills's great moment, even if it came early in his career. and the tune became more and more resonant as people got wiser and wiser to the war. the really funny thing is that it was actually written about some ridiculous riots on the Sunset Strip that pretty much nobody remembers anything about.
art is funny like that.
great piece, Lucian. great response, Tom. a little rage goes a long way with you two guys.
Sorry, David, but I remember. Pandora’s Box. LA County Sheriff’s patrols. Joni Mitchell singing: “I’d even kiss a Sunset Pig, California Comin’ home”. Ken Kesey’s bus and the Merry Pranksters. “Can you pass the Acid Test?” If you were there, you remember where the Garden of Allah was where “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” There are many Angelinos of a certain age who remember well.
sorry back, Stephen. I was obviously speaking as a New Yorker. if I'd lived there, I'd almost certainly be able to quote conversations I'd had in the middle of it. but I didn't even get there to VISIT until 1977, during a period in which I'd had my driver's license revoked. I realize this sounds like the punchline to a Rodney Dangerfield joke or something. I assume we're talking '66 or '67, right? I still love that first Buffalo Springfield album.
Possibly, though, the genesis of a song like that was all the turmoil including in previous years, not just in LA.
"I loved the way she said `LA.'" --- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Btw Never trust didactically deployed excerpts from Kerouac to diminish his skill as a writer and thinker, he contradicted himself out of spontaneity and refusal to be dogmatic in the worst sense of the term.
But seriously, those songwriting/performing guys were paying attention, might well have just seized on the particular (LA "riots") to generalize it? Turbulent times for sure.
absolutely right about Kerouac. I think that, pretty ironically, the book that made him a literary star (and undid him as well) is "On the Road," which isn't even really a part of his long autobiographical sequence of novels and which I don't like anything as much as most of the others. for some reason, I remember my favorite novel in the sequence was "Desolation: Angels."
For me, the ultimate anti war song is “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” c. 1967 by Phil Ochs. I will never forget this lyric; ...It’s always the old to lead us to the wars, It’s always the young to fall
I was just a kid in the late sixties but I love alot of these songs mentioned. For me the one is black Sabbath's war pigs... Geezer butler's lyrics get right to it not much nuance
The crowd shots in the Woodstock footage are, well, what they are—I look, and no time has passed. That's what people are *supposed* to look like. Friends, one by one, letting the generation's dream go left me reeling.
for those of us talking about our favorite songs from that era, I want to recommend a great cd compilation of records many of us were unaware of and shouldn't have been. it's called "A Soldier's Sad Story: Vietnam Through the Eyes of Black America 1966-73." the reason we've never heard a lot of these is pretty self-explanatory. and so many of these 24 songs are like gut punches. if anybody has a collection of anti-Vietnam War songs, that collection is woefully incomplete without this.
Wow, just Wow! Lucian you have nailed it completely. I was MACV-SOG 68-69 97Bravo (you can look it up). I sensed from day zero we were totally fucked. All these stories in the comments bring it all back.
The Russians are so fucked. I think it will be the end of the "Russian Empire" and it will all fall apart back to before Peter the Great.
So we, the longhaired college collective, crowded into buses and trains and headed to Washington DC to further the Wake Up Call to Congress and the American people.
Most of us were between 18 and 24, not to die, but to rally and raise our voices. We wore Lt Calley masks and viewed him as a pawn in the game.
And then, those who hadn’t been arrested, returned to our campuses, having done our duty, in a fight we knew was just beginning.
We were fighting our own inertia and the government’s vested interests, many of which were tied to the military industrial complex.
That battle is still raging and the battle for equity is just getting started.
Calley got off with "house arrest". Nixon pardoned him from even that benign punishment---right-wingers were very upset about Calley's conviction. Mass murder and only Calley is punished.
Because Calley's brother Company, Bravo, was murdering civilians a few miles away, there cannot be any doubt that the Battalion C.O., LtCol. Barker, gave an order to his company commanders to kill every civilian they encountered. He was shot down in his helicopter just days after the slaughters which prevented any investigation of him. Calley's Company Commander, Capt. Medina was never charged. So, this little punk Calley, who was terrified of Capt. Medina, supposedly just went off on his own in defiance of Medina and Barker. Not one chance in a million that Calley would do that; but a 100% chance he would kiss any superior's butt.
I was there Lucian, the year before in’67, for basic training and then jump school after AIT at Ft. Gordon, after that I was at Ft. Bragg for special forces for another year before going to VN and fighting with the 75 Rangers. It was fucked up alright, I stayed clean the entire time I was in VN, not because I didn’t like to get high, but because I wanted to stay alive, so close so many times. We ran reconnaissance for the 173rd and were never among friendlies. I can’t speak for the officers because I didn’t really know them, but for the rest of us, we fought for each other because the government didn’t have our backs and we would have probably been VC if we had been born there. And that is why the Russians are totally screwed, the Ukrainians will never surrender their land, every inch is dear to them and they have good memories. I think you’re right, it is a lot like VN, we are on the right side this time, the equipment has gotten deadlier and the Russian’s have lost, in less than a year, more than we did in twenty. I am transported there in my mind all of the time, the images we see are just a fraction of the reality, it’s hell on earth there, unremittingly, 24/7. However we can help them, we need to do it, we owe it to their humanity, they need to outlive Putin, the Russians will kill him, when they finally figure out what he has done to them.... And all because of one man. The karma he is earning is going to be an order of magnitude greater than the harm that he has caused.
Reading this story 55 years after I was drafted in 1968 is painful and emotional for me. I was 24 year old college graduate and refused to accept a commission. I was a war resister in college and when I got my draft notice I went to Montreal, Canada with six other guys. We finally reasoned that dodging the draft and never seeing Greenwich Village or our families again was going to be tougher than the Army so we went back to NYC for induction. We knew that in 1968 16,000 Americans were KIA and many more seriously wounded. I was “lucky” to be injured in RVN(required Republic of Vietnam) training and lost most of my hearing in one ear and was not deployed(but they also wouldn’t discharge me). I’m glad I didn’t get killed or kill anyone. Some of my pals were killed in combat and to this day I suffer mostly from survivor guilt. During my “service” I was physically a soldier but mentally AWOL. Most of the basic training draftees I saw were black, brown or poor whites who couldn’t qualify for college deferments. They mostly became infantrymen led by predominantly white officers. In 1969, during a class at the Army Intelligence school taught by a West Point captain, he said it took 50 American troops to by neutralize one Viet Cong who unlike the Americans were highly motivated to defend their country. We immediately knew then that the war was a disgusting mistake and that we would lose. Thank you Lucian. I truly appreciate your writing.
This brilliant essay needs to be in a textbook used to teach expository writing, and your essays should be collected and published.
For a while a college buddy, J. Houston Gordon, was assigned to represent Calley. Much later when I asked him about it, his response fit into your essay. Rusty wasn’t the problem as much as the Pentagon. Share the punishment....
When the guys came back to school in 1972-75, I was someone who would listen to their stories. I knew they were true because none of those guys could make that shit up. Only the most horrific remained in my memory, and I choose not to tell them.
Bravo Lucian. In a week of losing rock and cultural heroes, you remind us of who they really are without ever using the word.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. Wow.
One guy from the neighborhood gang I grew up with had been drafted right after graduation from high school and ended up in Vietnam. I met him years ago and he was all messed up, a prime example of PTSD. I bought him lunch and tried to talk to him but he was already gone, you could see it in his eyes. Just before he left he said to me “You’re lucky you didn’t go there, you didn’t miss nothing. Everything was fucked up over there, everything!” That’s the last I saw of him and his sister told me later that he died of an overdose, but he was really another casualty of that stupid war…
Excellent piece indeed - I save every column you write (and Cleaver's too)..... I think George Santayana said it best, though it has been attributed to Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
Another great pice, Lucian. War is hell alright. But when you're young (and foolish) you think of going to war as exciting - a great adventure, I know I was looking forward to it as a British soldier in 1951 being told our infantry training had been extended from 16 weeks to 32 weeks for Korea. I didn't know how lucky I was when at the last minute they sent us to Egypt instead. We had been attached to a Scottish regiment (The Seaforth Highlanders) stationed at Edinburgh Castle. We heard later 50% of them never came back. I did have a 6 week reprieve though, a theater group in the Edinburgh festival had asked for some guys to play soldiers in a medieval play and I was one of the lucky ones selected. We were excused all duties during those six weeks. Of course the other guys were livid when they had to get up at the crack of dawn awaken by the Scottish pipers while we'd lounge around in bed for another couple of hours. All I had to do in the play was put a m noose around a prisoners neck. . Bi Ut again, the thought of actually going into battle would be a very scary thing for me today, If the leaders of great nations like Putin were expected to lead their men into battle like the kings of old, I doubt there'd ever be any wars.
Basic at Fort Campbell, Ky,April '69 MOS 11B (Combat Infantryman)Bused to AIT at Fort Polk, La Home of the Combat Infantryman for Vietnam as the sign said when you entered the North Fort that had been closed after WWII and revived for Vietnam training. Sad incident during the bus ride as we stopped in a rural town in Mississippi and none of the Black guys would get off the bus the talk being they could get hung in Mississippi. It was a short stop (30' maybe) Some of us got hot dogs for the guys who stayed on the bus. I was 19 from a small town in Wisconsin and had never experienced that form of racism before, I had a lot to learn. Most of us had orders for Vietnam by August '69 Just before we graduated we got our orders changed as we where told that we were part of Nixon first troop withdrawal as Lucian mentioned yesterday, announced in June 69. Most of the troops were happy about it but some were a little disappointed, you don't train for 18 weeks to go and then find out you weren't. Luckily our lead Drill Sgt had already done 2 tours in Vietnam and he told us flat-out you are going to get there because you've got to much time left in your service obligation. You're all going to end up in general replacement pool and probably end up there anyway. So I was sent to Fort Carson, Co as a replacement infantryman in 5th Div (Mech) which was the permanent Division stationed there except, they had one brigade serving in Vietnam at the time. Because I had 2 years of college and knew how to type I got assigned to 3rd brigade HQ S-1 as clerk where I was lucky enough to meet a young Lt LKTIV through the Staff Sgt I worked for in S-1. In March '70 I got orders for Nam and ended up in the 101st Airborne Div, as an infantryman, and in July '70 I ended up on a Firebase named Ripcord which turned into a lesser known version of Hamburger hill and surprisingly not very far from where Hamburger hill took place. The 101st was forced to abandon the Firebase on July 23 under siege. Google it and read the Ripcord Association version and not just the Wikipedia version.
I remember you in BN HQ. Good days at Carson. Good memories, and for me some not so good ones. Luc
This breaks my heart all over again.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand (1979-81) I met or saw many more or less resident Vietnam vets hanging out at bars in Patthaya or Bangkok, and they made me sad. They had either never left, or spend most of their time in Thailand for a bunch of reasons but mostly because they said they felt more comfortable there. Their friends and family back home either hated veterans, or they just never asked him about his experience--or quickly changed the subject. Too painful, or they felt too ignorant about the war, or the world outside their hometown, to even ask curious questions.
And of course, many of those guys were addicted--to heroin, alcohol, and the company of prostitutes and bar waitresses. They felt like somebody there. They felt like nobody back home.
Once, while waiting for a delayed flight in Bangkok, I met a veteran at the airport and struck up a conversation. I had read "The Politics of Heroin in SE Asia", and other eye-opening books relating to the war, and I had lots of questions. His eyes welled up with tears. He said nobody back home every asked him much of anything. And he had a lot to say.
I made it a point after that to always ask veterans about their experience if they gave me an opening, to keep asking if they seemed to want to talk, and to let them change the subject if they wanted to.
I saw how the war had killed and/or messed up the lives of so many Americans, and many more Vietnamese. And Cambodians, let's not forget them.
Sometimes, as I lay reading in a hammock in my Thai village, I would look out over the coconut palms and I could so clearly visualize the terror of US bombers appearing overhead... it gave me nightmares for years. And I didn't even suffer through any of that, though I heard terrible stories when I worked at the Khao I Dang refugee camp along the Cambodian border...
Powerful...you have more to tell, I hope.
I spent my youth in the shadow of my father and grandfather ( veterans of ww1 & 2) who seldom spoke, but always felt it would be my duty to serve. I used to drill my three brothers in small unit tactics on the farm. I was a little too young for Vietnam. What bothered me most (knowing we were there for all the wrong reasons, Fire in the lake) was all the waste of lives. Young men dedicated to service, sacrificed for nothing. Countless Vietnamese killed for nothing. All these people distorted. Sad, sad Sh*t. Then to see it repeated again and again...
We brats of that era knew the war was not going well, but, also knew we would serve.
Welp. I would nominate this for a Pulitzer in the relevant category, if I had a vote.
There is another side to the Vietnam war apart from its sheer stupidity, and that is that the burden of fighting was so unevenly distributed. If you were someone warming a chair in some college, as long as you kept your grades up and avoided unfavorable attention from college administrators, you could sit out the war. If you lucked out and joined the National Guard, or the Army Reserve, you too could sit out the war with reasonable assurance that your one weekend a month of active duty, and two weeks ANACDUTRA in the summertime would spare you the misery and anxiety of a Vietnam posting. We were the favored few, and we knew it. I dropped out of the Army ROTC in 1965, and at the time, cadets had been enrolled in the inactive reserve. I was offered the option of leaving the Army Reserve, which I declined, expecting to be called up for Basic Training at some point in the near future. For reasons I cannot fathom, the Army forgot about me for about two and a half years, which by that time meant that I was in the middle of my first year in law school. Two years earlier, I had written a letter to the USAR Personnel Office, which I believe was in St. Louis, inquiring what my status was. Within a month or so I received a letter back telling me to sit tight, and they will get back to me. In February 1967, I received an official letter telling me to report to the Sacramento Army Depot, where the local Army Reserve unit trained. I showed up as directed and they looked at me and asked, "Where is your stuff?" I explained my situation and the next thing I knew, I was scheduled to report to Fort Ord, California, the following May. I went to the Law School Dean at UC Davis, and he wrote a letter on my behalf requesting a delay in my arrival at Fort Ord at the end of the academic year. Following the July 4 holiday, I arrived as directed at the reception station at Fort Ord. Consequently, I had spent half of my tour of duty waiting for the Army to tell me what they wanted me to do. Three years later, I received my Honorable Discharge as a sergeant E-5. My MOS was 11B40.
The most salient memory I have of those early years, from Basic Combat Training (BCT), and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) was that Army Reserve and National Guard were generally kept separate from troop units composed primarily of draftees. In the sense, we were the 'favored few'; consequently, there were no disciplinary problems within our company, and unit cohesion seem to be pretty good, even though individual members of our training companies came from California, Texas, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts I buddied up with some guys from Massachusetts, and we had a grand time together. I was the local kid who provided the lodging and tour guide service when we all went to San Francisco on a three day pass between BCT and AIT. These were Irish Catholic guys who had heard marvelous things about San Francisco topless bars. I didn't want to disillusion them by telling them that those places were as boring as hell. We did get to look in on the circus that was going on in the Haight-Ashbury District during the so-called 'summer of love' there on that weekend in September.
When we got back to Fort Ord, we left behind the large steel and concrete buildings that served as our barracks during BCT, and we found ourselves in the much older wooden barracks that had been erected back in 1940. We also found that our training cadre was not the high caliber drill sergeants that we had in Basic Training; instead, the NCOs were combat veterans who had completed their one-year tour of duty in Vietnam, and were marking time until their enlistments were time expired. Among the training cadre, there were people with unstable personalities who should not of been placed in positions of authority at all. The NCOIC of our AIT training company, a buck sergeant named Blye, brandished his loaded handgun at a group of us inside a Ford utility van the morning after we finished a 12-hour shift of overnight guard duty prior to going on an afternoon pass. I won't go into the details right now except to say that this nut job could easily have killed somebody in that van. At the time of the incident, there were approximately 10 of us crowded into that van. We also learned afterward that this particular NCO had been up in the family area earlier that day, waving his pistol around in a threatening manner. By the following afternoon, this particular fellow was on a plane to Vietnam. There was, of course, an official investigation of the incident which is probably somewhere in the national archives.
As for our cohort, there were some different people in our group who had done their BCT elsewhere, but found themselves assigned to a Light Infantry MOS. One fellow was a young man from Los Angeles who was bitterly bemoaning the fact that he had to be there, and he could be out making money instead of marching in the ranks with the rest of us. The guy was an obnoxious prick, and he earned himself in Article 15 nonjudicial punishment for screwing up during the two hour shift that each of us had to pull at one point or another doing fire watch and those old fire trap barracks buildings. All he had to do was to wake up the next guy who was supposed to take his place and he couldn't even do that competently. We knew what was going on in Vietnam, and that some of us might end up having to go there. The complainer had been lucky enough to find a slot in an Army Reserve unit, and was making a total ass of himself at a time, and under circumstances, where our individual fates were determined by forces we could not control. He apparently came from a wealthy background and he had a sense of entitlement that blinded him to the realities of life he was now having to live. Apparently, no one had told him that he needed to straighten himself out come because he could've ended up with a less than honorable discharge, or an Undesirable Discharge (UD) attesting to the fact that the guy was a total asshole. I would've punched in the spin code (SPN) numbers myself on this guy on his DD 214.
Years later, I found myself on the six-month TDY for my official post in the Office of Chief Counsel, within the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, in Washington DC, and detailed off to the White House, officially the Executive Office of the President, to serve on President Gerald R Ford's Presidential Clemency Board that was tasked with dealing with the negative fallout from the Vietnam War, specifically the soldiers who deserted or went AWOL, and those relatively fewer men who refused induction into the armed services, and who were convicted of violating the criminal provisions of the Selective Service Act. It was from that perspective that I got an in-depth look at how the military justice system work, or failed to work, as so often happen. At one point during that tour, I had 13 people working for me as lawyers, law students, and paralegals, turning out the paperwork necessary to complete our assigned tasks. Thousands of files, and sadness and heartbreak in all of them. Case disposition standards were nonexistent to start with, and changed daily as the civilian board gained experience and wised up about the way soldiers could get themselves in trouble. As this was a Republican administration, there was the usual posturing and pontificating about what an applicant for clemency would need to do to gain a so-called 'clemency discharge' which offered nothing in the way of veterans benefits. Zero. And as for alternative service, that was run by the Selective Service System. Most of the applicants said 'Fuck it' and went on with their lives. Although technically fugitives from justice, the Army stopped looking for them years before.
Jimmy Carter cut the Gordian Knot by setting up a one-stop absentee discharge processing operation at Fort Benjamin Harrison, near Indianapolis, Indiana, that processed them out within 24 hours of their arrival. Over and done with.
From a policy standpoint, the President's initiative was a total failure for reasons I mention, and others that I won't go into at this time. Anyone interested in that era, and what we did there, should read a book that was written by two of the civilian lawyers who headed up this effort. The book's title is Chance and Circumstance, The Draft, The War and the Vietnam generation by Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978). It's a good read, the charts are well conceived, and the lessons of that era bear repeating. Since those years, we've had an all volunteer military that has seen action in three other wars, two of them failures.
That book, CHANCE AND CIRCUMSTANCE, clearly demonstrates that the USA is not a classless society. Your parents' circumstances 95% of the time will determine your future; connections with the ruling class help a lot., and may even save your life.
Excellent book. I have read it several times and still own it. As a UC Davis student at the time, they were after me because I was down several credit hours. I managed to escape with the help of the rather extensive support system that existed at the time.
No one has really addressed what you experienced.
I was a staff officer in the US Army Recruiting Command when the shift to a Volunteer Force was underway.
Every day we would review files compiled on young Americans arrested on various charges. When I said No I was saving a life!
Leigh your comment reminded me that for a while, during the height of the war in 1969, I was a plainclothes Army intelligence agent in the states. One rather odd assignment was to travel to induction stations to interview draftees and take Sworn statements from those who claimed on the required “loyalty oath” that the they were members of subversive organizations believing that would disqualify them from military service. Of course they were lying when they checked off almost every box on this already obsolete form which contained many organizations that no longer existed. Sympathetic and understanding how they feared induction, I would tell them that 1) I was stepping out of the room for a smoke and 2) that when I returned if they still insisted on making those claims I would have to draw up a sworn statement for them to sign and that they would still be inducted that day. I also told them they would never get a security clearance and that they could wind up in the infantry where you didn’t need a security clearance. 100% of them tore up the original oath and filled out a new one with no boxes checked.
All of the young men I interviewed were somewhat sophisticated and white. I too. at the time, felt that I was saving a life but years later realized they would be replaced by some poor kid from the farms or inner city.
Exactly, I read countless police reports, every kid busted for pot got my NO.
My favorite police report reads:
The suspect came into my ocular presence...wish I had copied that!!!
“my ocular presence”. Thank you for that phrase. Can’t wait to find a context to use it and impress people!
Your last paragraph sums up the moral problem: Someone was going to go in their place; who and from where. Chance and Circumstance...
The deferment system with its implicit and explicit favoritism was the rot that killed the system. Some sort of draft system is needed for national defense and to keep us all on the same page.
I am someone who both won and lost in that system; five college deferments but ultimately drafted anyway upon graduation at age 24. Not really a joke but if it were not for the Vietnam War I wouldn’t have a college degree.
Wow. Devastating truths. Thank you, Lucian.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCrSXkJY
For What It's Worth --- Buffalo Springfield
it's funny. "For What It's Worth" is definitely Steve Stills's great moment, even if it came early in his career. and the tune became more and more resonant as people got wiser and wiser to the war. the really funny thing is that it was actually written about some ridiculous riots on the Sunset Strip that pretty much nobody remembers anything about.
art is funny like that.
great piece, Lucian. great response, Tom. a little rage goes a long way with you two guys.
Sorry, David, but I remember. Pandora’s Box. LA County Sheriff’s patrols. Joni Mitchell singing: “I’d even kiss a Sunset Pig, California Comin’ home”. Ken Kesey’s bus and the Merry Pranksters. “Can you pass the Acid Test?” If you were there, you remember where the Garden of Allah was where “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” There are many Angelinos of a certain age who remember well.
sorry back, Stephen. I was obviously speaking as a New Yorker. if I'd lived there, I'd almost certainly be able to quote conversations I'd had in the middle of it. but I didn't even get there to VISIT until 1977, during a period in which I'd had my driver's license revoked. I realize this sounds like the punchline to a Rodney Dangerfield joke or something. I assume we're talking '66 or '67, right? I still love that first Buffalo Springfield album.
Possibly, though, the genesis of a song like that was all the turmoil including in previous years, not just in LA.
"I loved the way she said `LA.'" --- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Btw Never trust didactically deployed excerpts from Kerouac to diminish his skill as a writer and thinker, he contradicted himself out of spontaneity and refusal to be dogmatic in the worst sense of the term.
But seriously, those songwriting/performing guys were paying attention, might well have just seized on the particular (LA "riots") to generalize it? Turbulent times for sure.
absolutely right about Kerouac. I think that, pretty ironically, the book that made him a literary star (and undid him as well) is "On the Road," which isn't even really a part of his long autobiographical sequence of novels and which I don't like anything as much as most of the others. for some reason, I remember my favorite novel in the sequence was "Desolation: Angels."
For me, the ultimate anti war song is “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” c. 1967 by Phil Ochs. I will never forget this lyric; ...It’s always the old to lead us to the wars, It’s always the young to fall
Phil Ochs, live concert:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rVTBCtYjoY
I was just a kid in the late sixties but I love alot of these songs mentioned. For me the one is black Sabbath's war pigs... Geezer butler's lyrics get right to it not much nuance
great song, especially when June Tabor sings it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udgyhKzbKzk
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFzCmAyOp8
Eric Bogle, live in concert, what a freakin' heartbreaking beautiful song --- Gallipoli, a disastrous blunder etc. etc.
freakin' heartbreaking beautiful song
Gotta add Country Joe and the Fish to this collection—"I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" of course.
Yup.
https://youtu.be/3W7-ngmO_p8
Thank you, MaryPat! (I was feeling lazy.)
Thank YOU. I had to hear it again, feel 18 again. Believe our generation might have made a difference
The crowd shots in the Woodstock footage are, well, what they are—I look, and no time has passed. That's what people are *supposed* to look like. Friends, one by one, letting the generation's dream go left me reeling.
for those of us talking about our favorite songs from that era, I want to recommend a great cd compilation of records many of us were unaware of and shouldn't have been. it's called "A Soldier's Sad Story: Vietnam Through the Eyes of Black America 1966-73." the reason we've never heard a lot of these is pretty self-explanatory. and so many of these 24 songs are like gut punches. if anybody has a collection of anti-Vietnam War songs, that collection is woefully incomplete without this.
Thank You.
Wow, just Wow! Lucian you have nailed it completely. I was MACV-SOG 68-69 97Bravo (you can look it up). I sensed from day zero we were totally fucked. All these stories in the comments bring it all back.
The Russians are so fucked. I think it will be the end of the "Russian Empire" and it will all fall apart back to before Peter the Great.
I have to go do my anti-PTSD meditation now.
Please keep writing this stuff, it helps.
My Father in law was USAF detached MACV-SOG 5th (via CIA) flying helicopters in Cambodia/Laos 70/71.
Thank you.
So we, the longhaired college collective, crowded into buses and trains and headed to Washington DC to further the Wake Up Call to Congress and the American people.
Most of us were between 18 and 24, not to die, but to rally and raise our voices. We wore Lt Calley masks and viewed him as a pawn in the game.
And then, those who hadn’t been arrested, returned to our campuses, having done our duty, in a fight we knew was just beginning.
We were fighting our own inertia and the government’s vested interests, many of which were tied to the military industrial complex.
That battle is still raging and the battle for equity is just getting started.
While I didn't go to DC, like you, I considered Calley a pawn, and was furious that no one higher up on the chain of command was ever charged.
Calley got off with "house arrest". Nixon pardoned him from even that benign punishment---right-wingers were very upset about Calley's conviction. Mass murder and only Calley is punished.
Because Calley's brother Company, Bravo, was murdering civilians a few miles away, there cannot be any doubt that the Battalion C.O., LtCol. Barker, gave an order to his company commanders to kill every civilian they encountered. He was shot down in his helicopter just days after the slaughters which prevented any investigation of him. Calley's Company Commander, Capt. Medina was never charged. So, this little punk Calley, who was terrified of Capt. Medina, supposedly just went off on his own in defiance of Medina and Barker. Not one chance in a million that Calley would do that; but a 100% chance he would kiss any superior's butt.
This is the most extraordinary column I've read in quite some time.
You hit the nail on the head and hammered it into the wood but good.
It should be given to every single cadet at West Point, every single officer, and any commander in the Army.
Your father and grandfather, anyone who has ever fought in a war would applaud you.
Thank you.
(former Army brat. Born at Ft. Benning.)
Now Ft. Moore.
Thanks for the reminder. It's going to take some getting used to. I hope that doesn't invalidate my birth certificate! :)