INTRODUCTION
A Generation Goes to War
Enduring Vietnam is about the generation that grew up in post–World War II America and about their war. During the 1960s, and likely even more so as the years have passed, many of them would reject the ownership implicit in calling the American War in Vietnam “their war.” But it was that generation’s war. As youngsters, most joined older generations in supporting it at the outset and, still essentially as youngsters, many finally served in it. If not always eagerly or even willingly, they served. They may legitimately deny responsibility for starting the war—their parents’ and grandparents’ generations did that for them—but they cannot deny that this war marked them profoundly. And they marked the war. It was Their War. This generation is often called the baby boomers, a description that I use descriptively but somewhat reluctantly when considering this subject, since there is something light and flippant about the title and there was nothing light and flippant about their war.
My primary focus is on those members of the generation who served in Vietnam. Describing their experience requires an overview of the American war, a framing of that engagement. Within this framework I provide a more detailed focus on the spring of 1969. I tell the story of some of the men—and women—who died there in that spring during the intense combat that preceded an explicit shift in the war’s assumptions, objectives, and rhetoric. These personal stories illustrate my strong belief that accounts of war need to be more than critical analyses of national presumptions and strategic goals, and more than studies of the tactics, objectives, and results of the conduct of the military operations on the ground. These are all essential parts of the story of war. But they often neglect the human experience—and the human cost. While some Americans were intensely debating the Vietnam War, other Americans were fighting it—and dying in it.
I have sought primarily to understand and to tell the story of those Americans who were the war fighters, perhaps a half million or six hundred thousand men over eight years of regular ground war, approximately 25 or 30 percent of the more than two and one half million U.S. troops who served in Vietnam. As the war went on, increasingly they were baby boomers. These men—and the women who served with them in medical or other combat support specialties—were fully and not peripherally a part of their generation. And they were on the ground for their generation’s war.
In addition to these combat troops, there were roughly two million Americans who served in noncombat missions, and their contributions and service were substantial. They worked to sustain and protect the fighting force and to advance the overall mission of support for the South Vietnamese government and people. And many of them served in vulnerable posts or took on exposed assignments that could at any time have subjected them to an attack by the enemy.
Over ten million baby boomers served in the armed forces in the 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly 27 million young American men reached eighteen, draft age, between August 1964 and March 1973. More than 2.2 million of them were drafted and 8.7 million enlisted in military services. Nearly 10 percent of the men in that generation went to Vietnam.1 As the war went on in the 1960s, draftees as a proportion of those serving in the military increased. But the majority of those who served enlisted, willingly as volunteers or less willingly in response to or in anticipation of a draft call. Most were not deployed to Vietnam but were posted elsewhere at U.S. bases or at sea. They too served when called, were always on standby for Vietnam deployment, and their service is a part of their generation’s account.
The images of the 1960s that resonate today are of Woodstock, youthful rebellion, of a generation leading protests against the war, against authority, and against convention, embracing new musical sounds considered revolutionary, of a time remembered romantically as the decade of “Peace and Love,” of the Beatles and of the Age of Aquarius, and, indeed, of times that truly were a-changin’. But it is necessary also to remember that for many of that era there is also a powerful memory of the thump-thump-thump of helicopters flying over the hills and treetops of Vietnam and the smell and feel of rice paddies or of humid jungle.
More young Americans in the ’60s died in Vietnam, over 58,000, than went to jail for refusing to serve in the military or moved to Canada to avoid serving. This book is about the experience of those who served—not to impugn those who protested what they believed was an unnecessary or unjust war, one that was sometimes immorally cruel in its execution. After all, it turned out that they were largely correct. But there is more to their generation’s story—and their generation’s war—than that. For the baby boomer generation not only challenged the war, they also experienced it. And that experience, on the ground in Vietnam, was far more complex and more nuanced than persistent stereotypes of atrocities committed, of mutiny and fragging and antiwar activities in a haze of drugs. Each of these images came to have some basis, especially in the last years of the war, but by no means can they stand as fair generalizations of the conduct of most of those who served.
The American War in Vietnam was a powerful force in American life. But for most Americans it was more metaphor than experience. “Vietnam” was a word used to describe a policy, an engagement, to refer to a distant, mysterious place. Vietnam represented an unpleasant activity occurring on behalf of the United States. It represented something increasingly considered negative in the decade of the 1960s.
A friend recently returned to Vietnam to see again the places where he fought in late 1968 and early 1969. He particularly wanted to visit the rice paddy where a close college friend and hockey teammate, Billy Smoyer, died. He shared with me his reflections on this as well as an exchange he had with a high school classmate, whom I then contacted. The veteran observed that “my story is one small paragraph in that much larger history of our generation at war that was, for many only part of our ’60s upheaval.” His high school friend wrote him:
Your time in ’Nam resonates with me, quite deeply. Like many of our generation, Vietnam was at the center. From 1965 to 1975, Vietnam seemed (to me) the black hole around which that decade floated. The music, the protests, the drugs, the clothing, the long hair, the changes in academic curricula, the attitudes towards the “Establishment,” Chicago in 1968, Watergate, Nixon, Nixon’s resignation, LBJ not running for re-election, McGovern, free speech, Woodstock, Altamont, rights for Blacks and women, environmental concerns, open sexual mores … seemed to float around the darkness that was Vietnam. Like many, I spent a number of years making sure I did not go to ’Nam.
Educational and then a medical deferment enabled this man to avoid serving in the military. He continued his education and then began a lifelong career as a high school English teacher. But “then, in the late ’70s, the dark hole that was Vietnam began to almost haunt me. In trying to understand who I was, and what those ten years meant and how they formed and informed me.” He devoted himself to learning more about Vietnam—but always with the recognition that like the blind men trying to define an elephant by touch, it is hard to ever truly know this “black hole” that touched and haunted all of his generation.2
Certainly all Americans knew about the war in Vietnam at the time, but only a small percentage truly knew it. Politically, culturally, morally, the war—and its images—overwhelmed the period. And it assuredly was a war on which all Americans came to have an opinion. They based their views on their understanding and assessment of the wisdom and, for some, their judgments about the morality, of this major war. These opinions seldom were informed by the experience of the generation that was engaging in this war. And in truth, most who experienced Vietnam and have since spent a lifetime reflecting on it would acknowledge that they did not truly “know” their war with all of its sectors and layers and varieties and “need to know” compartments.
By focusing on the American on-ground experience, it is not my intention to obscure or challenge the sharp criticism of the assumptions, judgments, and, yes, the deceit that led the United States into that war. The war was conducted with ambivalence and uncertainty, conditions exacerbated by very general and shifting objectives, and by restraints and conflicting instructions from Washington based upon political rather than military calculations. Senior policy makers never provided an honest public assessment of the war’s progress and its costs. In the field, the war officially entered into on behalf of the Vietnamese was carried out too often with indifference toward the residents of the country or even with willful cruelty in which the noncombatant Vietnamese civilians were innocent casualties. It would be shameful to minimize these things, just as it would be slanderous to many good men to suggest that all American troops behaved as indifferent or willful thugs.
As a number of critics then and scholars later have agreed, among the baby boomer generation, the burden of American military service and even more specifically of combat service was not equitably shared. The sons of blue-collar families, African American, Hispanic, and Native American young men were disproportionately out in the jungles of Vietnam. And while many, increasingly more as the war went on, were not eager to serve, it was also the case that not all were there as reluctant draftees. These young men were often serving because of their sense of patriotism and obligation, of what many considered their responsibility; some served because they hoped that military service could expand their future opportunities. Despite the inequities, a large part of an iconic American generation served there—and served well. If it was largely a blue-collar war, it surely was not uniformly one. College students and college graduates were also on the front lines. And by no means only as officers.
Enduring Vietnam is not a war story, but it is a story of war experiences focusing on the American ground war in Vietnam that took place from 1965 to 1973—the period in which U.S. troops were in the country engaging in combat with Communist forces. The war in Vietnam unambiguously became an American War by the summer of 1965. If there was a history that explained the steps that led to this engagement, this was not a history that made it inevitable. The World War II generation that was assuming positions of leadership in American public life came into these roles seared by their war and committed to avoiding any repetition of what they considered the mistakes that led to it. Unfortunately, their steps to avoid a repeat of World War II moved the nation to another war, and one that was very different from their own experience.
The American War in Vietnam was never only, or even primarily, about Vietnam. The rhetoric in the 1950s and ’60s described the American commitment there as a recognition of responsibility to protect democracy and to save an imperiled nation. Nonetheless, the conflict essentially was about international tensions that appeared to be playing out in Vietnam. The cold war, with the United States and its allies competing with the Soviets and the Chinese, shaped much of the American strategy in Vietnam. Combat operations on the ground were aimed more at drawing lines and making statements, about perceptions and consequences in a larger global context, about establishing negotiating markers and bargaining chips, than they were military operations with an immediate—or even a clearly defined—military goal.
Domestic politics also influenced the rhetoric and the promises that framed this war. Presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon, including Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, based their decisions partly on domestic political considerations. At their best, actions taken as a result of sensitivity to the political interests and wishes of constituents can be examples of democracy at work. At their worst, they can be illustrations of cynicism and manipulation. Unfortunately, in the case of this war, many steps showed leaders at their worst. Finally, too often the decision to fight in Vietnam was personalized, was reduced to a flexing of personal muscle, of individual machismo and national strength. Lyndon Johnson’s insecurities, his insistence on showing his toughness, his manhood, surely played out here, as did John Kennedy’s resolve to demonstrate that he had the maturity and strength to face down Communist leaders.
The diplomatic and the political developments, the broader global context, and the public perceptions of the war are critical elements in understanding it. They all revolved around “Why are we in Vietnam?” which politicians and their constituents increasingly asked after 1965. While there had been opposition to the war from the outset, within a few years the war became increasingly a focus of public concern and public dissent, and of growing cynicism about the purported purpose of the war and skepticism about the official narrative of its rationale, its conduct, and its costs. Of course, many still question why the United States went to war in Vietnam. And “no more Vietnams” is an assertion made without any sense of a need to explain what it means. Ongoing debates focusing on the Vietnam experience pretty consistently describe it as a mistake—a mistake in commitment or a mistake in execution. Or both.
As important as these analyses of the war were and are, they and the debates around them can be reductive. They focus on diplomacy and politics, on interpretations of meaning and consequences, and they wrestle with conduct and morality, with assessments of the judgment of leaders. At this macro level, the accounts too readily generalize the actual experience of war. The war on the ground becomes background rather than foreground. Wars are easier to start—if not to end—if they are considered abstract dramas about slights or presumed threats or strategic goals built upon principles projected to distant places. Then those engaged in them can be reduced to general descriptive categories and faceless units and numbers (“A marine company today engaged…” “Twenty-five soldiers were killed when…”).
After all of the conversations about origins and strategies and political consequences, wars are about combat, what in recent times is sometimes glibly called “boots on the ground.” Most of the decision makers and debaters can at best only imagine that experience. And typically they describe it with numbers or anecdotes, selective numbers and anecdotes that best support their intellectual or political position.
While some scholars have focused on the Vietnamese history of this era, a critical and often missing dimension of Western narratives about the American War in Vietnam has to do with the Vietnamese experience. If the war was fought basically as a result of a cold war competition that transcended Vietnam, it was nonetheless fought on Vietnamese ground. It was not another “world war.” In fact, the major East-West competitors in the cold war strived to contain it. But fundamentally it was a war in which Vietnam was the local arena for a worldwide contest. Yet a critical part of the war’s rationale had to do with the imputed aspirations and motives of the Vietnamese, North and South.
Explanations about the American War in Vietnam typically have focused on the Vietnamese as cruel ideological aggressors, ambitious and manipulative political leaders, or innocent victims, but seldom treat them as active participants shaping their own drama. The critics of the war especially came to consider the South Vietnamese as victims and their leaders either as American puppets or profiteers and narcissists victimizing their own people—corrupt, incompetent, and undemocratic. In fact, they also were driven by their own political and personal goals. The South Vietnamese vision was not simply one choreographed in Washington.
And the North Vietnamese leaders, in the popular narratives, were seldom understood as engaged participants, strategic and manipulative with their own agenda. Instead, they were bloodthirsty instigators who were the tools of Chinese and Soviet masters of a Communist threat. Or else they came to be seen as little more than hapless victims of American airpower who were only seeking to have their own nation. Of course, the North Vietnamese were far more than merely passive victims. They too fought a cruel war, and their leaders were actively involved in framing their own objectives and strategies. They too had an agenda, and they did more than react to American initiatives. They too could be hypocritical and cynical. And they were determined.
The Vietnamese civilians, North as well as South, truly were caught up in an extended global struggle that often dominated, but never negated, their own conflicts with historical, cultural, and religious roots. The civil war in Vietnam was not a singular fight about ideology, even if cold war cheering sections deemed it a surrogate for that. Many conflicting tensions and aspirations, rooted in religion, ethnicity, geography, history, and personal ambition, played out as well.
Those living in South Vietnam, the main combat arena, found themselves caught between contending forces that often were at best indifferent to the suffering of the noncombatants. This plight was destructive and senseless, from South Vietnamese and U.S. “resettlement” programs that removed entire villages from their historic homes, to American and South Vietnamese military or their agents executing suspected enemy supporters, destroying villages or, in extreme cases, massacring people such as at My Lai. There was no respite, no safe ground, in the South Vietnamese countryside, as revealed by accounts of North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) forces executing civilians they suspected of engaging with the “enemy” in places ranging from isolated villages to the city of Hué during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This ancient city became a massive killing ground for government officials and presumed Saigon sympathizers. And North Vietnamese treatment of South Vietnamese military and civilian officials, or those alleged to be supporters of them, following the fall of Saigon in 1975, is a gruesome story.
The Vietnamese were more than background, more than a tragic Greek chorus, hovering over the Americans fighting in their country. After all of the arguments seeking to support political and moral positions, after all of the sweeping generalizations and exaggerations, the American War in Vietnam was marked by high numbers of innocent victims. Of course, that is true of any war, but the best calculations are that a million or more Vietnamese civilians died between 1965 and 1975 as a result of the war. Some have tripled that figure.3
The American War largely was a war without front lines. It was built around small-unit actions intended to surprise the enemy or lure them into attacking. And battles were not so much won as they were concluded. Temporarily concluded. The objective was to kill enough opponents to dissuade the enemy from continuing the war. These kinds of activities do not lend themselves readily to standard war story narratives, to tally sheets listing battles won. In the accounts of great battles in American military history, there are no examples from Vietnam.
Absent tangible military goals, it was hard to produce tangible military results. So the great debates during the war—and since then—about its conduct have often focused on the metrics that the military and their civilian leadership developed to measure “progress.” Winning hearts and minds is not a measurable result, at least not one that generates periodic scores and tallies. The U.S. military was more sophisticated than the stereotyped image of an obsession with “body counts” suggests, but it surely used these as it struggled to find the real light at the end of the long tunnel. Vietnam had no benchmarks remotely comparable to those of the army sweeping from Normandy and on to Paris in the summer of 1944. There were no headlines shouting of territories won, of happy villagers cheering their liberation. There was no iconic flag raising such as at Iwo Jima in 1945.
In the late 1960s, the growing dissent against the American War in Vietnam focused on costs and consequences. Critics increasingly pressed the case for recognizing moral costs and moral consequences. As the scale of U.S. involvement grew, and the nature of the fighting intensified, as the war in Vietnam became the American War in Vietnam, so did the volume of reports and accounts from that country. These led to increasingly negative public attitudes toward the war and, for some, perceptions of the men fighting it.
The popular depictions of the soldiers and marines on the ground changed from 1965 to 1970, from original views of heroes in the jungle fighting to protect democracy. Certainly from 1965 onward, this narrative shifted as more Americans came to be critical of or at least uncertain about the wisdom of the U.S. buildup and expansion of combat operations. In order to mobilize the forces for this expanded engagement, the Pentagon needed to increase significantly the number of men drafted. This meant that draftees constituted a growing part of the U.S. forces just as American casualties increased markedly. As there were more draftees among the killed and wounded, some common perceptions of the troops deployed to Vietnam moved from heroic freedom fighters to innocent young men dispatched to fight a mistaken war, a cruel and tragic war.
Finally, by late 1969, especially following the public disclosures of the My Lai massacre of several hundred Vietnamese civilians in March 1968, some accounts depicted the Americans no longer as victims but as eager perpetrators of the war, perpetrators often high on drugs. Although neither innocent victim nor cruel participant was a majority public view, these nonetheless often were dominating ones. Each was a condescending and grossly distorted generalization.
Among the more than 2.5 million American servicemen and -women in Vietnam, some may have fit easily into one or another of the stereotypes, but surely most did not. Many of those who served may have been unwilling, but they did not consider themselves hapless victims nor were they racist psychopaths. They came home quietly and stepped aside quickly, except perhaps for those who joined in antiwar activities. Most did not join in the protests, even those who shared some of the views of the group. Even though the American War in Vietnam likely had proportionately as many individual acts of courage and bravery and sacrifice as any other war, there was relatively little enthusiasm for publicizing these accounts—or, revealingly, perhaps even less interest in hearing them. The result was a hard and impersonal war narrative with few publicly celebrated military heroes, and an often difficult and lonely homecoming. U.S. Army lieutenant William Calley, convicted of leading the massacre at My Lai, is the most recognized name of those who served in the field in Vietnam. Most Americans would be hard-pressed to name even one person who quietly and honorably served. This compounds the tragedy.
For those who served there, Vietnam was a pretty basic world in which they focused on survival as a daily goal. Participants in all wars do that, of course, but in Vietnam it became harder to project this personal goal, to imagine the daily experience, within a broader and grander set of military objectives serving critical national needs. Except for a brief period at the beginning, the American War in Vietnam lacked a nationally endorsed feel-good, big-story narrative in which the personal accounts could fit and be warmly embraced by a grateful nation.
Today, there is a substantial library of solid scholarly studies that enrich our knowledge of this war and its consequences. My understanding has been significantly enhanced by this literature. But I have turned often to the fictional accounts of the war—the informed fiction written by men who themselves fought in it. Vietnam veterans such as Karl Marlantes, Tim O’Brien, and Jim Webb are significant contributors. Webb’s Robert E. Lee Hodges, Will Goodrich, and the indomitable “Snake”; Marlantes’s Waino Mellas and the trials of Bravo Company; O’Brien’s Norman Bowker and Kiowa and Paul Berlin—all of these characters helped me to understand better what it was like on the ground in Vietnam. These men, along with my many interviewees, encouraged me to describe the human face, the remarkable human adaptability, the tragedy, and even the humor that generation managed to find in a very cruel experience.
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Enduring Vietnam is about the American War as a generation of Americans experienced it, with a close-up focus on the transitional spring of 1969. The four years following the introduction of combat troops in March 1965 marked a period of expanding troop levels and increasing combat operations. These years were marked by an attitude of resolution and a sense of purpose. They began with certainty and optimism, then witnessed the decline of these sustaining attitudes. Here, “enduring” describes an experience encountered. In the next four years, the United States steadily drew back from Vietnam. Those on the ground endured in a war that for most Americans quickly was sapped of confidence and optimism, of energy and purpose.
Beginning with the enemy’s Tet Offensive in January and February 1968, Americans at home and in Vietnam were surprised when the North Vietnamese regulars and the National Liberation Front irregulars mounted a massive attack on American installations. The fact that Americans and their allies turned back these attacks, defeating the Communist forces, never quite compensated for the surprise. And for the remainder of that presidential election year, the drama of Vietnam was upstaged by, and perceptions about the war were fully incorporated into, the drama of politics. All of the candidates talked about Vietnam. And if their policy remedies were seldom clear, it seemed evident that voters expected the United States to change the objectives or the conduct of the war. The next year, the newly inaugurated President Nixon did—though his goals were as ambiguous, his unspoken objectives as cynical, as those of his predecessors.
By the spring of 1969, for those on the ground, the terms, the equivocal goals, and the common understanding of the war clearly had changed. This had been more of an evolutionary process than an abrupt shift. But the markers of the shift were clear. When President Nixon announced in mid-May 1969 that the United States was not seeking a military victory in Vietnam, this was not really a change in objectives; it was a public acknowledgment of military limits. This restraint was only implicit earlier, and it had gone largely unnoticed in the face of a fair amount of confident saber rattling. These more limited ambitions would be underlined when the Pentagon told the American military command in Vietnam to avoid any sustained battles such as the just completed fight for Hamburger Hill.
These developments, combined with the June 1969 decision and public announcement to shift more of the ground combat to the South Vietnamese Army, described as “Vietnamization,” and the concurrent initiation of a drawing down of American forces in the country, portended the end of the American War. So the last four years, from 1969 to 1973, saw a different perception of the war. The troops in those years found it even harder to understand their mission and nearly impossible to ennoble it. At some level, a sense of national need and noble purpose may be necessary conditions for anyone to volunteer or to accede to go to war. By 1969, the national narrative seemed to lose all pretense of grandeur.
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Chapters 1 and 2 describe the time of transition in the spring of 1969 in the United States and in Vietnam. Americans at home celebrated Memorial Day without quite knowing how to incorporate a controversial war into the national commemoration. As they wrestled with the meaning of the war, for many it was at most a distraction. On the ground in Vietnam, the battle for Dong Ap Bia, known by the American soldiers who fought there as Hamburger Hill, a place that was grinding them up, became a part of the debate over the war and added little to a national sense of optimism. That battle encapsulated within an eleven-day window many of the elements of the American War: elusive tactical goals, unexpected sustained resistance from disciplined and tough enemy forces who seldom followed the American expectations, American troops who despite those surprises fought with courage, and a growing controversy in the United States about the need for the battle. All of these factors filtered into a broader debate back home.
Following this introduction to the changing ground of 1969, I describe how the United States and the postwar generation of young Americans found themselves fighting this war. The cynicism of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the growing American hostility toward the war had been preceded by—perhaps exacerbated or even caused by—the worldviews that dominated the twenty years from 1945 to 1965. This had been a time of a growing and genuine fear of the threats posed by the cold war. And it was a time that America viewed itself as a strong, resolute, optimistic, generous, and self-sacrificing leader in a threatening world.
Chapter 3 describes the political, cultural, and diplomatic assumptions that marked American life in those years. None of these made involvement in Vietnam inevitable even if the dominant leadership of the country defined their initiatives as clear lessons of history, of necessary assumptions of commitments, and of resolute responses to challenges faced.
The context is important, for it framed the world in which this generation grew up, one of presumed threats and assumed responsibility. Chapter 4 describes this understanding of the world. The baby boomers did not suddenly drop into Vietnam. They grew up in a nation in which the draft had always loomed and leaders and teachers warned them of their need to be prepared to defend their country. Many members of this generation took this responsibility seriously. As criticism of the war increased and as many young people protested it, it is remarkable that even as enthusiasm for the assignment waned, many still stood up to serve.
Chapter 5 describes what it was like to serve in Vietnam in those early years of the war. The development of a major American military presence with the infrastructure to support it is a dramatic story—and one that underlines that this now was the American War. Those men and women deployed there seldom found Vietnam evoking memories of the World War II narratives with which they had grown up. The nature of this war and the environment the men and women faced had little relationship to their expectations. They did assume their assigned roles—even as they held on to many aspects of the society they had left behind temporarily. You could take them out of American culture, but all of the military training could not take their culture from them. This was the generation of the ’60s.
By the election of 1968, Americans had wearied of the costly struggle in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive the previous winter seemed to underline that the war would not have a quick and successful resolution. A brief transitional section describes the political shake-up that resulted in the election of Richard Nixon and the steps he took to defuse the war politically. It would prove to be a time of transition that would eventually mark the end of the American War.
Chapters 6 and 7 provide a detailed look at the time that was the hinge for this changeover. In the thirty days before President Nixon’s June 8, 1969, announcement of Vietnamization and drawdown, the American War in Vietnam stayed on its aggressive course before abruptly shifting to adapt to the changing ground of political realities and the adjustments in war aims and strategies in Washington. Chapter 6 tells the stories of some of those who served during this transition. It is enriched by their own accounts, which recall the experience of a war that was different from their parents’ war. And different from the war they had expected. The details of their daily lives and their struggles and sacrifices and frustrations defined their war.
Chapter 7 describes the process of homecoming. Serving in Vietnam involved a regular term of deployment and of rotation home. This chapter focuses on the human cost of the war for those Americans who served and for those who waited for them. Not all who came home did so whole of body. And some came home in aluminum military coffins. Some, still missing in action, never came home at all.
Chapter 8 describes the second half of the eight-year American ground involvement in Vietnam. These were the Nixon years, years in which politics, international and domestic, shaped tactical operations. In a complex global contest, the military role was more to threaten or to punish and less to gain and to secure. The war began with military activities accelerating even as their strategic purposes were often nonmilitary. The war ended with a deceleration of military activity and with most operations serving as feints to secure nonmilitary goals. Or as muscle flexing or punishment aimed at achieving political resolutions. In its final years, the American War became even harder to explain and a much harder war to serve in. Nonetheless, and despite a real deterioration in traditional military discipline, the troops continued to serve well and to die in a war whose purpose on the ground was reduced to survival.
Chapter 9 summarizes the enduring experience of Vietnam for the generation that served there—and their country’s enduring negative image and embarrassed memory of it. The persisting images and stereotypes have tangible sustained consequences for the veterans. Both in the haunted national consciousness and in the troubled memories of those who served, “Vietnam” is a story that has no end. And in this phase, “enduring” shifts from a verb to an adjective. Americans were never as hostile to the veterans of the Vietnam War as the legends suggest. And they have never become as warm toward them, or as comfortable with them, as the narrative promises. The reconciliation has been—and remains—complicated. Support for veterans of this war evolved from perfunctory to platitudinous.
Serving in Vietnam was of course a burden. Despite popular tales of romance and heroic and often bloodless drama, serving in any war is a burden. But perhaps unlike any other American war, having served in this war also became a burden. It is hard ever to feel pride for serving in your nation’s war if it is always described as a negative example, as a war that should not have been fought—or, if fought, should not have been fought the way that it was. Or should not have had the embarrassed conclusion that it did. It is hard to express pride to those who were not there if the most commonly remembered event of the war was the massacre of civilians at My Lai. So the veterans of Vietnam tried to fade quietly back into American society.
While I have learned a great deal from studies and from published accounts of the Vietnam War, much of my discussion of the combat experience is based upon published and unpublished reflections and on interviews with men and women who were part of that experience, with a primary focus on those who served in Vietnam in the spring of 1969. I am grateful to the more than 160 individuals who agreed to be interviewed. For some it was the first time they had talked about their role in their war.
They often did so because they shared my interest in telling the story of those who were there and who never returned except in a military coffin. Of course, the narrators’ own stories themselves became a critical part of this account. The interviewees are not a random cross section of those who served in Vietnam. Because I was seeking to talk to those who had served with men who had died, I have a highly disproportionate number of combat veterans, army and marine ground troops, infantrymen, the “grunts.” Sometimes described as the tip of the spear, their experiences relate most directly to the realities of war. I have used their personal reflections and accounts as essential components of a larger story.
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It might be appropriate to offer a brief personal note regarding my own experience and my purpose here. I served in the Marine Corps for three years, enlisting at age seventeen in 1957. I didn’t serve in Vietnam and never engaged in any combat activity. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, and as a new faculty member at Dartmouth College beginning in 1969, I came to have an increasingly critical view of the war, its shifting and unclear objectives and the costly engagement. My criticism was directed at policy makers and not at the troops on the ground. Since 2005, I have been involved in activities supporting veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And since 2009, my work as a historian has focused on understanding better the experience of veterans of American wars.
My 2012 book Those Who Have Borne the Battle: A History of America’s Wars and Those Who Fought Them represents this focus. While writing that book, I was struck again and again by the positive views Americans had of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars compared to those who had served in Vietnam. This book is a follow-up effort to better understand—and to introduce—the Vietnam veterans and their war.
Enduring Vietnam is at one level a history of the Vietnam War. As a professional historian depending largely on scholarly studies, memoirs, accounts, and contemporary media, I have taken care to try to tell this story accurately and well. But on another level, this book offers an opportunity for those who served there, and some of their families, to tell their story. This is history at a personal level. Of course, there is nothing more personal than war and its costs. My goal is to fit these elements into the broader history of that war while also using them to illustrate and to make personal that history. And finally this book represents some of my own reflections, informed by my career and work as an academic historian, a scholar, and influenced by my own experiences as a veteran and as an activist on behalf of veterans. Vietnam Veteran Bernie Edelman wrote, “Perhaps because we have been so long caught up in arguing the wisdom of the war, as a nation we have only belatedly come to recognize the sacrifices of those who were sent to fight.”
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On Veterans Day in 2009, I was honored to be invited to speak at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. It was a cool, rainy morning, and the audience included a number of veterans of the war and the families of those who died there, including a group of Gold Star Mothers sitting in the front row. I could not presume to speak for them, but I could attempt to speak to them. I talked about some people whose names were on the Wall, telling the stories of Michael Lyden and Billy Smoyer. I recalled that just a few months earlier my wife, Susan, and I had visited the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer at Normandy, where “we walked among the graves for some time, reading the names … We thought of lives cut short and of dreams unrealized and wanted to know more about them.”
I concluded my remarks, standing in front of the Wall that then had names of more than 58,000 American servicemen and -women who had died in Vietnam:
Casualties of war cry out to be known—as persons, not as abstractions called casualties nor as numbers entered into the books, and not only as names chiseled into marble or granite.
… We need to ensure that here, in this place of memory, lives as well as names are recorded. Lives with smiling human faces, remarkable accomplishments, engaging personalities, and with dreams to pursue. We do this for them, for history, and for those in the future who will send the young to war.
This book is not a compendium of memories; it is a work of history that seeks to understand why America in the 1960s sent its young to war, to remember who the Vietnam generation was and how they had grown up, to reflect on why this generation served and sacrificed in a war that drifted in purpose and declined in public support. Finally, I focus on the human face, the human cost, of war. It is a cost that by no means is paid in full when the shooting stops. Enduring Vietnam is a study of a generation and of those who served and sacrificed.
Copyright © 2017 by James E. Wright
Maps copyright © 2016 Trustees of Dartmouth College
