Good Read Especially Vietnam Vets & Era Vets!

Since 01-01-11

 

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Subject: Fwd: Good Read Especially Vietnam Vets & Era Vets!

 

In a message dated 1/1/2011 5:50:07 AM Eastern Standard Time, btcusn@cox.net writes:


 

Subj: Good Read Especially Vietnam Vets & Era Vets!
Date: 1/1/2011 5:50:07 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: btcusn@cox.net
Sent from the Internet
 

I am forwarding this excellent essay on the Vietnam experience- authored by Sen. Jim Webb(D-Va.), His contrast of the Vietnam military with the WWII "greatest generation" military is  fascinating- especially the point that it was the 'greatest generation' who sent us to 'Nam.
I am personally one of those vets who believed the war was worth fighting and one which we could have won if permitted to do so.

Heroes of the Vietnam Generation
By James Webb


http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/heroes-of-the-vietnam-generation-by-james-webb-please-take-the-time-to-read/blog-379241/

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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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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 startling

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 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 incompletely 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 is 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 of 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 of

reward, not for place of for rank, but in simple obedience to duty, as they

understood it." Who suffered loneliness, disease, and wounds with an

often-contagious elan. And who deserve a far better place in history than

that now offered them by the so-called spokesman 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 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 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 he 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. Ridgelines 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 the 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 ridgelines

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 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 wounded, the first platoon commander was killed, the

second platoon commander was wounded twice, and I, commanding the third

platoons fared no better. Two of my original three-squad leaders were

killed, and 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 of 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 barley out of

high school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their year in

hell and he 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 the 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 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.

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YNCS Don Harribine, USN(ret)