Never mind former Navy Secretary Webbs' gross use of the fact that 1,400,000
anti-American Vietnamese died defending their country, while only 58,000 Americans
died, to demonstrate the tactical superiority of the U.S. armed forces. The
superiority was in technology: a limitless supply of bombers to drop explosives,
fire-bombs, and everything else.
He musters endless statistics to suggest that "average Americans" supported
the war. Really?
"...the eleven-week trial of my son Bob and the other Oakland Seven defendants
who had organized the week-long roving demonstrations of some ten thousand people
that sought to shut down the [Oakland, CA] Army Induction Center....The defendants,
their friends, associates, and families, including myself, were convinced that the
Seven would be convicted....
"When the jury was selected, I thought the defendants were finished. There was
a retired U.S. Marines colonel, who at one time had been second-in-command of the
Corps. In his time the Marines were very sparing with the rank of general. The jury
foreperson was a young man with top security clearance at Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory, where nuclear bombs are designed and laboratory-tested. But [defense
attorney Charles] Garry called a stunning array of character witnesses to present
the defendants' motivations. Garry actually convinced that jury that assembling
massive crowds to block access to the induction centr was a legitimate exercise of
freedom of speech under the First Amendment! Hatred for that war certainly ran
deep."
-- from my autobiography, Saying No To Power, p.416.
William Mandel
radman wrote:
> 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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