thedrifter
03-18-08, 09:39 AM
Evans: Vietnam veterans and the truth about My Lai
By Thomas P. Evans, Guest columnist
GHS
Posted Mar 18, 2008 @ 12:18 AM
Like some rare alignment of the planets, the news in the next few weeks will be of special interest to many of us Vietnam vets. March 16 was the 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, the Connecticut Marine accused in the Haditha incident goes on trial in the next few days and a Vietnam War hero is the Republican front-runner for president of the United States.
Lessons learned: community college dropouts like William Calley should never be commissioned lieutenants in the U.S. Army; young musicians like Frank D. Wuterich who enlist in the Marines out of high school to play in the Marine Corps Band should never be made rifle squad leaders; and navy pilots like John McCain have a much better chance of being called heroes than do Marine or army riflemen.
For young people who don't remember My Lai, Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone has been in the planning stages of directing a film called Pinkville. The maps we used in Vietnam identified structures in villages by small pink squares, so soldiers sometimes called heavily populated areas like My Lai Pinkville. The movie would have assured that another generation of Americans be informed of how sadistic and terrible we baby killers were in that war, but the project was canceled in December because of the writers' strike.
"How can you Vietnam veterans live with yourselves?" a 24-year-old woman I shared an office with in the New Haven Police Planning Department asked me once in 1976. I've read her name in the newspapers in recent years. She is now well known in Fairfield County for working with the homeless, many of whom are the same veterans she once despised. I haven't yet been able to pick up the phone to thank her for what she is doing. Maybe some day I will.
In 1994, I decided to write about how the Vietnam War had affected my life. I took an expository writing course that year at the University of New Haven. Professor Paul Marx asked me if the undergrads in the course could interview me about my experiences in Vietnam. One question I knew was coming: What about My Lai? The other question I never considered before: Are the movies about the Vietnam War realistic?
It never occurred to me before then that the generation born after mine knew of that war solely by what they had seen in movies. And the only historic event they knew about that war was the My Lai massacre.
In 2000, I carpooled with Barun Gupta from my hometown of Shelton to IBM in Fishkill, N.Y. Barun had lived in the U.S. for 25 years and had just become a U.S. citizen. He was a manager at IBM, and held an MBA degree from Lehigh University. We had been commuting together about six months when my self-published memoir about being a Marine infantryman in Vietnam came out
"Is it true in the Vietnam War American Marines and soldiers raped and killed all the villagers, and burned their villages down?" he asked me one day. I was taken aback when I realized he was serious.
This past summer I was stopped by a local cop in a radar trap for going 50 in a 35 zone. I was wearing my red Vietnam Vet ball cap, and I argued about the $236 ticket with the cop, who was about 30 years old. He called two other police cruisers for backup. I'm sixty years old, and I wondered if I had been a WW II vet from the Greatest Generation, or an Iraq or Afghanistan vet recently home after a second tour, if the cop would have treated me the same way.
When the movie "Saving Private Ryan" came out 10 years ago, Tom Conti, the only other Marine infantryman Vietnam vet I've met in 35 years in the computer contract programming business, warned me not to see the film in a theater. He advised me to rent the DVD, so I could watch it in my living room and walk away from some of the more graphic battle scenes. Tom, who passed away a few years ago from cancer, had been a radioman who survived the horrendous battle for Hue City during Tet in 1968.
I've always been able to distinguish between reality and movies, and have never been particularly emotionally affected by films. But the scene that hit home in that movie was when the dying Tom Hanks character whispered something into Private Ryan's ear. As an old man, Private Ryan visited his captain's grave in one of the American military cemeteries in France. With tears in his eyes, he asked his wife if he had lived a good life.
We Vietnam vets are approaching old age now. We one-time teenaged grunts have been remembered for the most part for what those few soldiers did at My Lai on March 16, 1968. But if anybody wants to know if we have lived a good life - for the most part, we have.
Thomas P. Evans is a computer programmer who lives in Simsbury, Conn.
Ellie
By Thomas P. Evans, Guest columnist
GHS
Posted Mar 18, 2008 @ 12:18 AM
Like some rare alignment of the planets, the news in the next few weeks will be of special interest to many of us Vietnam vets. March 16 was the 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, the Connecticut Marine accused in the Haditha incident goes on trial in the next few days and a Vietnam War hero is the Republican front-runner for president of the United States.
Lessons learned: community college dropouts like William Calley should never be commissioned lieutenants in the U.S. Army; young musicians like Frank D. Wuterich who enlist in the Marines out of high school to play in the Marine Corps Band should never be made rifle squad leaders; and navy pilots like John McCain have a much better chance of being called heroes than do Marine or army riflemen.
For young people who don't remember My Lai, Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone has been in the planning stages of directing a film called Pinkville. The maps we used in Vietnam identified structures in villages by small pink squares, so soldiers sometimes called heavily populated areas like My Lai Pinkville. The movie would have assured that another generation of Americans be informed of how sadistic and terrible we baby killers were in that war, but the project was canceled in December because of the writers' strike.
"How can you Vietnam veterans live with yourselves?" a 24-year-old woman I shared an office with in the New Haven Police Planning Department asked me once in 1976. I've read her name in the newspapers in recent years. She is now well known in Fairfield County for working with the homeless, many of whom are the same veterans she once despised. I haven't yet been able to pick up the phone to thank her for what she is doing. Maybe some day I will.
In 1994, I decided to write about how the Vietnam War had affected my life. I took an expository writing course that year at the University of New Haven. Professor Paul Marx asked me if the undergrads in the course could interview me about my experiences in Vietnam. One question I knew was coming: What about My Lai? The other question I never considered before: Are the movies about the Vietnam War realistic?
It never occurred to me before then that the generation born after mine knew of that war solely by what they had seen in movies. And the only historic event they knew about that war was the My Lai massacre.
In 2000, I carpooled with Barun Gupta from my hometown of Shelton to IBM in Fishkill, N.Y. Barun had lived in the U.S. for 25 years and had just become a U.S. citizen. He was a manager at IBM, and held an MBA degree from Lehigh University. We had been commuting together about six months when my self-published memoir about being a Marine infantryman in Vietnam came out
"Is it true in the Vietnam War American Marines and soldiers raped and killed all the villagers, and burned their villages down?" he asked me one day. I was taken aback when I realized he was serious.
This past summer I was stopped by a local cop in a radar trap for going 50 in a 35 zone. I was wearing my red Vietnam Vet ball cap, and I argued about the $236 ticket with the cop, who was about 30 years old. He called two other police cruisers for backup. I'm sixty years old, and I wondered if I had been a WW II vet from the Greatest Generation, or an Iraq or Afghanistan vet recently home after a second tour, if the cop would have treated me the same way.
When the movie "Saving Private Ryan" came out 10 years ago, Tom Conti, the only other Marine infantryman Vietnam vet I've met in 35 years in the computer contract programming business, warned me not to see the film in a theater. He advised me to rent the DVD, so I could watch it in my living room and walk away from some of the more graphic battle scenes. Tom, who passed away a few years ago from cancer, had been a radioman who survived the horrendous battle for Hue City during Tet in 1968.
I've always been able to distinguish between reality and movies, and have never been particularly emotionally affected by films. But the scene that hit home in that movie was when the dying Tom Hanks character whispered something into Private Ryan's ear. As an old man, Private Ryan visited his captain's grave in one of the American military cemeteries in France. With tears in his eyes, he asked his wife if he had lived a good life.
We Vietnam vets are approaching old age now. We one-time teenaged grunts have been remembered for the most part for what those few soldiers did at My Lai on March 16, 1968. But if anybody wants to know if we have lived a good life - for the most part, we have.
Thomas P. Evans is a computer programmer who lives in Simsbury, Conn.
Ellie