Vietnam Veterans Day

Fifty years? A half-century? You’re kidding, right?

Apparently not. I was surrounded by a crowd in Phoenix for a film festival showing of “Platoon” and the turnout was impressive. But these weren’t the standard showbiz groupies who haunt such events. This was a bunch of aging guys who simply wanted to recognize one of their own on National Vietnam Veterans Day. Sadly, it all came as a surprise to me. My phone told me it was 29 March but I had simply forgotten the significance of that day for me and millions of others who survived one of our nation’s most divisive and controversial military campaigns.

“This one is special,” the guy wearing a cap featuring the insignia of the Army’s vaunted 1^st Infantry Division said. “After fifty years you find yourself thinking about what it took to survive the surviving.” There it is, my man. There it most certainly is.

When I had a few moments away from the crowds, I contemplated my own multi-tour experience during the Vietnam War years. Why, I wondered for yet another time since those dark days, did I keep going back when I didn’t have to, and most of my fellow veterans were scrambling to avoid a repeat performance in Vietnam? It took a lot of years to figure it out and face the facts. Garrison duty after living out on the adrenaline-charged razor’s edge of the combat experience, just seemed pointless and petty. I considered myself a pro, and a pro needs to play. So, I volunteered for another turn at bat in the Greater Southeast Asia War Games.

There was that. And eventually, I came to also realize that in strange ways, I enjoyed that wild, feral existence. It wasn’t fun, but it was an ongoing challenge to beat the declining odds of survival. My combat experiences allowed me a superlative opportunity to observe at close range all the best and all the worst in people on both sides of the firing line. It allowed me to collect those observations and eventually use them in later creative pursuits. For me, in a lot of ways, the long, hard experiences at war were enlightening and invaluable.

Our war came to an uncomfortable and controversial end fifty years ago with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The half-century since that infamous collapse was brutal psychologically for many of us. We often found ourselves wondering if all the pain and suffering were worth it. No clear-cut winners being celebrated with victory parades. Seemed like half the nation turned away from us back then, embarrassed or angered by the lives lost and national treasure expended in a failed conflict. The other half didn’t know what the hell to say, so they said nothing. The silence was deafening for a lot of us. And way too many went into a self-imposed isolation. We refused to talk about it or even denied that we’d served in Vietnam. That led to a swivet of vile canards and misperceptions about Vietnam Veterans.

You know the stereotypes well. Supposedly our combat outfits were shot through with social rejects. Fighting the war on the pointy end of the bayonet were Tyrone the drug dealer or Cletus the slack-jawed yokel. Turns out more than three-quarters of us who went to Vietnam were from middle-class, stable backgrounds with high school or higher-educational backgrounds. We were mostly just common guys asked to do some very uncommon things. And despite all the angst and protests at home, more than two million of us went to Vietnam and did those extraordinary things with little appreciation provided or expected.

Those of us who made it back from Vietnam were often portrayed as ticking time-bombs, seething with resentment and discontent that threatened to boil over into violence. We were damaged goods, often drug-addled and unable to get on with life the way our veteran predecessors did following World War II or Korea. It was a truckload of bovine excrement, but we mostly ignored it. We got over it eventually. Most of us slowly crawled out of the closet and found ways to talk about our experiences at war, purge the bitterness, and stand tall for having served in Vietnam.

Some went avidly, some went reluctantly, but we went when the nation called. That nation had confused the war with the selfless warriors who fought it but we forgave them somewhere along our journey. It’s called surviving the surviving, and us Vietnam Veterans know all about that. We also know some truths about our war that makes it a bit different from earlier conflicts. Just to clear the air, I did some statistical digging with the help of some dedicated researchers from The Vietnam Veterans Project.

Ours was a war often without clearly defined frontlines and rear echelons. Among those of us who spent a year or more actually in Vietnam during the war years, somewhere between 40 to 60 percent saw combat, provided close combat support, or were regularly exposed to enemy attack. And for Army or Marine infantry the action was comparatively unrelenting. Infantrymen in the Pacific saw about 40 days of combat in the four years of WWII. Grunts in Vietnam averaged about 240 days of combat during a one-year tour. That’s mostly down to the helicopter that made us mobile, agile and hostile—not to mention exhausted.

Vietnam Veterans represented just under ten percent of our generation and we took a beating. When the butcher’s bill was finally tabulated after 10 years, one out of every ten men who served in country was a casualty. More than 58,000 were killed in action while 304,000 were wounded. Due to the nature and experience of the enemy we were fighting, those wounds were often more brutal and debilitating than what previous combat veterans experienced. Amputations and crippling wounds we experienced in Vietnam ran some 300 percent higher than what was experienced by American forces in World War II.

War sucks. It has ever been so. The folks who fought in world wars and in Korea can testify to that, but they’ve mostly had their say at this point. Maybe it’s time to consult with our surviving Vietnam Veterans. Maybe we’d hear some precautionary tales about seemingly endless wars without clear and achievable objectives. We’d likely hear about broken promises and diminished national prestige. With 50 years of hindsight and analysis available, it would be a good time for something like that. At long last, many of us are in a talkative mood.

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