Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 17:28:49 EST
From: SendMeHack@aol.com
Subject: HEROES of the VIETNAM Generation
HEROES 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 fathers' service by emulating it, and largely agreed with their
fathers' 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 lan. 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 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, criss-crossed 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.
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