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thedrifter
05-27-07, 07:06 AM
The lessons of Vietnam, applied to the war in Iraq
UD professor Ken Campbell's 'A Tale of Two Quagmires" looks at both wars from a Vietnam vet's perspective
By VICTOR GRETO, The News Journal
Posted Sunday, May 27, 2007

NEWARK -- Flat feet. Thick eyeglasses. Gangly at 6-foot-2 and 138 pounds.

Yet, young and inspired.

When Ken Campbell enlisted in the Marines in July 1967, two days after his 18th birthday, he didn't seem like great military material.

But he wanted to go.

"I joined the Marines because I wanted to go to Vietnam and come back a hero, and because I had seen every John Wayne movie," the University of Delaware associate professor of political science and international relations wrote in his book, "A Tale of Two Quagmires: Iraq, Vietnam, and the Hard Lessons of War" (Paradigm, $18.95).

He also wanted to earn the G.I. Bill so he could go to college.

His father, a working class, hard-line conservative who had died from cancer a year before his son enlisted, helped shape Campbell's adolescent point of view.

"I also figured the Marines would make me 'tough,' make me a 'man,'" he wrote. He wanted desperately to leave the row houses of the Hunting Park section of north Philadelphia, see the world "and do something exciting with my life."

Campbell got more than he bargained for.

Returning to an America torn apart by the war, his hard-edged conservative views slowly bled from the angry wound left by the war.

Campbell was not the only young Marine whose body didn't seem ready for war.

One of his boot camp comrades made it into the Marines without a trigger finger.

"They trained him to shoot with his middle finger," Campbell says.

Is this a metaphor? Is Campbell serious?

Yes, he's serious.

And angry. But not only about his years in Vietnam.

Campbell's anger, says his colleague, UD political science professor Joseph Pika, "is an issue of disappointment over the Iraq War. A sense of frustration, of 'Here We Go Again.' "

As Campbell, 57, details in his book, the "Vietnam syndrome" -- politicians' fear concerning "the centrality of public opinion and its connection to rising casualties in an ambiguous war" -- helped keep America out of another quagmire like Vietnam for 30 years.

Until, he argues, President Bush's administration used the trauma of Sept. 11 as an opportunity to deny the lessons of Vietnam.

Campbell is adamant that the Iraq War, now well into its fourth year, is a quagmire similar to Vietnam and from which America must extract itself as soon as possible.

His 134-page book chronicles his personal experiences as a preface to policy recommendations because, he says, he wanted to give readers a taste of a similar situation that is quickly receding into the past.

"I felt a sense of betrayal from Vietnam," he says.

The dehumanizing experience of war

Campbell's initial gung-ho attitude toward the Vietnam War was quickly tamed at Parris Island, S.C., where he trained.

"My post-Vietnam nightmares were never about being back in Vietnam; they were about being back on Parris Island," he wrote.

His hatred of the war, however, was based on the daily horror of seeing friends die, usually at the hand of snipers or from booby traps.

Campbell worked as a "forward scout artillery observer." He called in artillery fire to support a rifle company.

"When we would get letters from him, there would be shocking things about how risky it was and having friends die," said Campbell's older brother Gerald.

Campbell told his brother about the soldiers' tradition of leaving an ace of spades on dead Viet Cong soldiers because it scared the survivors.

"I had a printer make up 2,000 aces of spades and sent them to him so that his friends could do that," Gerald says.

It was all part of the dehumanization process that war engenders, Campbell says.

Toward the end of boot camp, one staff sergeant taught his Marines to use shotguns at close range during an ambush, "and to bring along machetes or hatchets to chop up the bodies of the enemy we killed."

Campbell's 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam began in February 1968.

His two best friends, also forward observers, were killed -- one from a booby trap, the other from a sniper.

During one two-week period, his company lost half of its men due to booby traps.

"We all grew to hate the war and just wanted to go home alive," Campbell wrote. "To most of us the war was a waste."

He and other Marines began wearing "UUUU" or "U4" on their helmets: "We are unwilling, led by the unqualified, to do the unnecessary, for the ungrateful."

Turning against the war was a long, unconscious process that had nothing to do with partisan politics, Campbell says.

"We were driven to this not because of the danger, but because of its senselessness," he says.

From college student to war protester

While on a tour of duty in the Mediterranean in late 1969, Campbell got a letter from Gerald, who was attending Drexel University in Philadelphia, learning how to be an insurance actuary.

"He was going to a November march on Washington," Campbell recalls. "He asked me if I would be offended."

Campbell was "blindsided" that his more conservative brother was marching against the war.

But it wasn't until Campbell returned home in February 1970 and digested the news of the invasion of Cambodia and the murder of four students on the Kent State campus that he turned politically against the war.

He wrote letters to President Nixon and two Pennsylvania senators to argue that expansion of the war was not a good idea.

Meanwhile, he attended Temple University on the G.I. Bill. He found that he felt "alienated" from student society and uninterested in its anti-war movement.

"I remember an angry young man," says Lynn Miller, an emeritus professor of political science at Temple. "Like lots of guys of his generation and vets at that point, he had been made angry by his experience."

Campbell soon joined the recently formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War -- the group led in part by Sen. John Kerry -- in the fall of 1970.

In April 1971 he joined many other vets as they threw away their medals and other military paraphernalia on the steps of the Capitol.

Campbell became so politically active that his grades suffered.

He started as an English major, but switched to political science.

"I had the most fun in those classes," he says.

He ended with a degree in history in January 1976 after he flunked a core political philosophy class. He hated the conservative professor who taught the class so much that Campbell used the final exam to write how much he couldn't stand the teacher's point of view.

He wanted to be a labor organizer.

Global affairs led him back to college

"I actually was from the working class," Campbell says.

He already had a job in a Germantown factory that made electrical harnesses for automotive equipment.

He helped "agitate for the union to take tougher stances on health and safety issues," he says. For the next five years, he continued to agitate, jumping from Pennsylvania factories and shipyards and jobs in Chester, Plymouth Meeting and with SEPTA in Philadelphia. After contracting bursitis and being out of work, he found a program that would train him to become a respiratory therapy technician.

He did that for three years at the now-defunct Metropolitan Hospital in Philadelphia before he realized he wanted to go back to school.

"During my lunch hours, I was the only one around reading Foreign Affairs," a quarterly journal of global current events and international relations.

By then he had met and married his wife, Kathleen Jenner, a nurse, and they had a child in 1980, Meagan.

He returned to Temple in 1983.

"He was much more channeled into a constructive direction. Less angry," Miller says. "He figured out that what he wanted to make of himself was a critic of policy he disagreed with, and that's exactly what he's done."

He earned his doctorate in 1989 and came to UD the following year.

Rejecting the extremes of both sides

As he's aged, Campbell has become a liberal centrist.

"I'm not blue or red, I'm purple," he says.

In his book, he rejects the lessons of the far left who want to overthrow capitalism and the far right, who advocate a more muscular foreign policy.

Instead, Campbell favors a combination of the lessons learned by conservatives who believe there are limits of power, liberals who argue the importance of international law and the military who embrace the Powell doctrine of garnering domestic support and overwhelming odds in the field before going to war.

Like most people, Campbell believed what we were told about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. But he still didn't believe the U.S. should invade Iraq.

"If invaded, Hussein might lob bombs at Israel," his reasoning went. "Israel would lob them back. Or, we'd have to do it for them for Israel to survive."

Invasion was thus a losing proposition for everyone.

Now, he knows there were no WMDs.

"Being fooled or lied to never crossed my mind," Campbell says.

For Campbell, the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq ultimately should teach Americans four lessons:

1. There are limitations to military force;

2. There is a continuing relevance to international law;

3. It is important to preserve U.S. constitutional law;

4. It is imperative to conduct a multilateral foreign policy.

Campbell's vision is unique, says Miller, his former professor.

"What I admire is that he used a youthful, traumatic experience as a grunt to build a career on and turn it into a constructive critical analysis of American foreign policy," Miller says.

The lessons of the past, Campbell says, must be re-taught to every generation. Today, he teaches mostly young people born in the mid- to late 1980s who are not familiar with the lessons or images of the past.

A simple case in point:

There are two pictures on the cover of Campbell's book. At the top is a pensive George W. Bush looking down toward his folded hands.

Under the book's title is another famous picture of a beleaguered man, his head pressed against his right fist, his left arm extended as though reaching out for help.

"Students thought the bottom picture was me," Campbell said. "I have this bald spot, though, and the man in the picture doesn't."

It's a July 1968 photograph of an agonizing President Lyndon Baines Johnson, evidently contemplating the quagmire that destroyed his presidency.

Ellie