Heros of Vietnam

[JRtheSTAR]

Subject: [thefew] H E R O E S of the VIETNAM


The recent post with the story 'My Heart on the Line' asked questions and
made observations about the N. E. elite view of military service and the
true nature of the composition of this country. It reminded me of an
article by our fellow Marine, James Webb, over a year ago. It is worth
repeating every year or so -- so here it is.
C.K.
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H E R O E S of the VIETNAM Generation
By James Webb

The rapidly disappearing cohort of Americans that endured the Great
Depression and then fought World War II is receiving quite a send-off from
the leading lights of the so-called 60s generation. Tom Brokaw has
published two oral histories of "The Greatest Generation" that feature
ordinary people doing their duty and suggest that such conduct was
historically unique.

Chris Matthews of "Hardball" is fond of writing columns praising the Navy
service of his father while castigating his own baby boomer generation for
its alleged softness and lack of struggle. William Bennett gave a
startlingly condescending speech at the Naval Academy a few years ago
comparing the heroism of the "D-Day Generation" to the drugs-and-sex
nihilism of the Woodstock Generation." And Steven Spielberg, in promoting
his film "Saving Private Ryan," was careful to justify his portrayals of
soldiers in action based on the supposedly unique nature of World War II.

An irony is at work here. Lest we forget, the World War II generation now
being lionized also brought us the Vietnam War, a conflict which today's
most conspicuous voices by and large opposed, and in which few of them
served. The "best and brightest" of the Vietnam age group once made
headlines by castigating their parents for bringing about the war in which
they would not fight, which has become the war they refuse to remember.

Pundits back then invented a term for this animus: the "generation gap."

Long, plaintive articles and even books were written examining its
manifestations. Campus leaders, who claimed precocious wisdom through the
magical process of reading a few controversial books, urged fellow baby
boomers not to trust anyone over 30. Their elders who had survived the
Depression and fought the largest war in history were looked down upon as
shallow, materialistic, and out of touch.

Those of us who grew up on the other side of the picket line from that era's
counter-culture can't help but feel a little leery of this sudden gush of
appreciation for our elders from the leading lights of the old
counter-culture. Then and now, the national conversation has proceeded from
the dubious assumption that those who came of age during Vietnam are a
unified generation in the same sense as their parents were, and thus are
capable of being spoken for through these fickle elites.

In truth, the "Vietnam generation" is a misnomer. Those who came of age
during that war are permanently divided by different reactions to a whole
range of counter-cultural agendas, and nothing divides them more deeply than
the personal ramifications of the war itself. The sizable portion of the
Vietnam age group who declined to support the counter-cultural agenda, and
especially the men and women who opted to serve in the military during the
Vietnam War, are quite different from their peers who for decades have
claimed to speak for them. In fact, they are much like the World War II
generation itself. For them, Woodstock was a side show, college protestors
were spoiled brats who would have benefited from having to work a few jobs
in order to pay their tuition, and Vietnam represented not an intellectual
exercise in draft avoidance or protest marches but a battlefield that was
just as brutal as those their fathers faced in World War II and Korea. Few
who served during Vietnam ever complained of a generation gap. The men who
fought World War II were their heroes and role models. They honored their
father's service by emulating it, and largely agreed with their father's
wisdom in attempting to stop Communism's reach in Southeast Asia.

The most accurate poll of their attitudes (Harris, 1980) showed that 91
percent were glad they'd served their country, 74 percent enjoyed their time
in the service, and 89 percent agreed with the statement that "our troops
were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would
not let them win." And most importantly, the castigation they received upon
returning home was not from the World War II generation, but from the very
elites in their age group who supposedly spoke for them.

Nine million men served in the military during the Vietnam war, three
million of whom went to the Vietnam theater. Contrary to popular mythology,
two-thirds of these were volunteers, and 73 percent of those who died were
volunteers. While some attention has been paid recently to the plight of
our prisoners of war, most of whom were pilots, there has been little
recognition of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the ground.
Dropped onto the enemy's terrain 12,000 miles away from home, America's
citizen-soldiers performed with a tenacity and quality that may never be
truly understood. Those who believe the war was fought incompetently on a
tactical level should consider Hanoi's recent admission that 1.4 million of
its soldiers died on the battlefield, compared to 58,000 total U.S. dead.

Those who believe that it was a "dirty little war" where the bombs did all
the work might contemplate that it was the most costly war the U.S. Marine
Corps has ever fought-five times as many dead as World War I, three times as
many dead as in Korea, and more total killed and wounded than in all of
World War II.

Significantly, these sacrifices were being made at a time the United States
was deeply divided over our effort in Vietnam. The baby-boom generation had
cracked apart along class lines as America's young men were making
difficult, life-or-death choices about serving. The better academic
institutions became focal points for vitriolic protest against the war, with
few of their graduates going into the military. Harvard College, which had
lost 691 alumni in World War II, lost a total of 12 men in Vietnam from the
classes of 1962 through 1972 combined. Those classes at Princeton lost six,
at MIT two. The media turned ever-more hostile. And frequently the reward
for a young man's having gone through the trauma of combat was to be greeted
by his peers with studied indifference or outright hostility.

What is a hero? My heroes are the young men who faced the issues of war and
possible death, and then weighed those concerns against obligations to their
country. Citizen-soldiers who interrupted their personal and professional
lives at their most formative stage, in the timeless phrase of the
Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, "not for fame or
reward, not for place or for rank, but in simple obedience to duty, as they
understood it." Who suffered loneliness, disease, and wounds with an often
contagious élan. And who deserve a far better place in history than that
now offered them by the so-called spokesmen of our so-called generation.

Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Spielberg, meet my Marines.

1969 was an odd year to be in Vietnam. Second only to 1968 in terms of
American casualties, it was the year made famous by Hamburger Hill, as well
as the gut-wrenching Life cover story showing the pictures of 242 Americans
who had been killed in one average week of fighting. Back home, it was the
year of Woodstock, and of numerous anti-war rallies that culminated in the
Moratorium march on Washington. The My Lai massacre hit the papers and was
seized upon by the anti-war movement as the emblematic moment of the war.
Lyndon Johnson left Washington in utter humiliation.

Richard Nixon entered the scene, destined for an even

[JRtheSTAR]

worse fate. In the An
Hoa Basin southwest of Danang, the Fifth Marine Regiment was in its third
year of continuous combat operations. Combat is an unpredictable and
inexact environment, but we were well-led. As a rifle platoon and company
commander, I served under a succession of three regimental commanders who
had cut their teeth in World War II, and four different battalion
commanders, three of whom had seen combat in Korea. The company commanders
were typically captains on their second combat tour in Vietnam, or young
first lieutenants like myself who were given companies after many months of
"bush time" as platoon commanders in the Basin's tough and unforgiving
environs.

The Basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in Vietnam, its torn,
cratered earth offering every sort of wartime possibility. In the mountains
just to the west, not far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese
Army operated an infantry division from an area called Base Area 112. In
the valleys of the Basin, main-force Viet Cong battalions whose ranks were
80 percent North Vietnamese Army regulars moved against the Americans every
day. Local Viet Cong units sniped and harassed. Ridge lines and paddy
dikes were laced with sophisticated booby traps of every size, from a hand
grenade to a 250-pound bomb. The villages sat in the rice paddies and tree
lines like individual fortresses, crisscrossed with trenches and spider
holes, their homes sporting bunkers capable of surviving direct hits from
large-caliber artillery shells. The Viet Cong infrastructure was intricate
and permeating. Except for the old and the very young, villagers who did
not side with the Communists had either been killed or driven out to the
government controlled enclaves near Danang.

In the rifle companies, we spent the endless months patrolling ridge lines
and villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed wire,
hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would fit inside
one's pack, which after a few humps" usually boiled down to letter-writing
material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small transistor
radio.

We moved through the boiling heat with 60 pounds of weapons and gear,
causing a typical Marine to drop 20 percent of his body weight while in the
bush. When we stopped we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches
for toilets. We slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hootches, and
when it rained we usually took our hootches down because wet ponchos shined
under illumination flares, making great targets. Sleep itself was fitful,
never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time as we mixed
daytime patrolling with night-time ambushes, listening posts, foxhole duty,
and radio watches. Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, and dysentery were common,
as was trench foot when the monsoons came. Respite was rotating back to the
mud-filled regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days, where
rocket and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned defensive
bunkers at night. Which makes it kind of hard to get excited about tales of
Woodstock, or camping at the Vineyard during summer break. We had been told
while in training that Marine officers in the rifle companies had an 85
percent probability of being killed or wounded, and the experience of "Dying
Delta," as our company was known, bore that out. Of the officers in the
bush when I arrived, our company commander was wounded, the weapons platoon
commander was wounded, the first platoon commander was killed, the second
platoon commander was wounded twice, and I, commanding the third platoon,
was wounded twice. The enlisted troops in the rifle platoons fared no
better. Two of my original three squad leaders were killed, the third shot
in the stomach. My platoon sergeant was severely wounded, as was my right
guide. By the time I left, my platoon I had gone through six radio
operators, five of them casualties. These figures were hardly unique; in
fact, they were typical. Many other units; for instance, those who fought
the hill battles around Khe Sanh, or were with the famed Walking Dead of the
Ninth Marine Regiment, or were in the battle for Hue City or at Dai Do, had
it far worse.

When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with me, I
am continually amazed, for these were mostly recent civilians barely out of
high school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their year in
Hell and then return. Visions haunt me every day, not of the nightmares of
war but of the steady consistency with which my Marines faced their
responsibilities, and of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of
constant danger. The salty, battle-hardened 20-year-olds teaching green
19-year-olds the intricate lessons of that hostile battlefield. The
unerring skill of the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar
villages and weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick certainty
with which they moved when coming under enemy fire. Their sudden tenderness
when a fellow Marine was wounded and needed help. Their willingness to risk
their lives to save other Marines in peril. To this day it stuns me that
their own countrymen have so completely missed the story of their service,
lost in the bitter confusion of the war itself.

Like every military unit throughout history we had occasional laggards,
cowards, and complainers. But in the aggregate, these Marines were the
finest people I have ever been around. It has been my privilege to keep up
with many of them over the years since we all came home. One finds in them
very little bitterness about the war in which they fought. The most common
regret, almost to a man, is that they were not able to do more for each
other and for the people they came to help. It would be redundant to say
that I would trust my life to these men. Because I already have, in more
ways than I can ever recount. I am alive today because of their quiet,
unaffected heroism. Such valor epitomizes the conduct of Americans at war
from the first days of our existence. That the boomer elites can canonize
this sort of conduct in our fathers generation while ignoring it in our own
is more than simple oversight. It is a conscious, continuing travesty.

Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver
Star, and Bronze Star medals for heroism as a Marine in Vietnam. His novels
include The Emperor's General and Fields of Fire.




--

Semper Fidelis

[USMC-FO]

This is a great piece of writing and a terrific summation to much of what our particular, and unique Marine generation feels and believes, or at least those that I hang with and admire. I had not seen this previously, and I admire Webb tremendously, so it was great to read this. Thanks "JR" for posting it.

Semper Fi and Happy New Year!

[mardet65]

JR:
Thanks for posting this. It is comparable to the "Gettysburg Address" as it would have been written had Abraham Lincoln actually participated in the battle. Mr. Webb's last paragraph makes a strong point which most Vietnam Vets have known for years; The only difference between us and the american veterans and patriots that came before is in the minds of the fickle, elite media representatives who appointed themselves the spokespersons for our generation, and who while recognizing the valor and sacrifice of our fathers continue to purposely ignore these same virtues in us.
I will share this with every veteran I know.

[montana]

JR
thanks