Opinions from This Combat Veteran of the Vietnam War

          As I watched the morning news, a story about an anti-war protest in Washington, D. C. grabbed my attention.  There was an element of humor to this protest, which was led by a chorus of grandmothers, as they sang a catchy song that claimed that Bush’s motivation for going to war in Iraq was revenge for an attempted assassination on his father. I am usually very uncomfortable watching Americans denigrating our President on T.V., but this seemed harmless, so I watched a while longer.  

          And then she appeared: the person whom most Vietnam veterans think of as a traitor, Hanoi Jane.  There she was, once again, on T.V., protesting another war, and it was as though forty years had disappeared.  I just can’t help it; her actions and words enraged me then, and they enraged me again today, as I believe they infuriate the vast majority of those millions of men and women who served our country in the military during that tragic era.  Before I could seize the remote and change the channel, my ears caught these words, “We have not learned the lessons from Vietnam!”

          Although I have a hard time saying this, after I calmed down and considered what she had said, I found I happen to agree with her.  Besides the obvious fact that Ms. Fonda has learned nothing from her Vietnam War experiences, and from the forty years of castigation and loathing she receives every day from Vietnam veterans, I know that her idea of the important lessons from Vietnam (we were wrong to go there; we must leave at all costs; etc., etc.) are much different from mine.  Have we learned the important lessons of the Vietnam War?  That remains to be seen, but I fear that we, as a nation, have not.  We are beginning to see symptoms of our ignorance of the naked truths that emerged during that era in our history.

          So what are those important lessons that we must learn from the Vietnam War?

          Lesson #1:  To a large degree it was television images and news stories that spelled doom for the people of South Vietnam, beginning early in the war and blossoming during the Tet Offensive of 1968, and then continuing inexorably until the tragic end in 1975.  Stories from the “front lines” often focused on mistakes made by the American military; even those stories that told of our battle victories were skewed by the “mounting casualties” and images of body bags and coffins being loaded on airplanes; many stories portrayed the South Vietnamese military as inept (in some cases well deserved, but in many more cases not accurate at all).  Those stories were certainly damaging to our efforts, but I believe that the TV and print journalists covering American anti-war protests were the most damaging; they were heard around the world, giving rise to the image of an “unpopular war.” 

          The worst example of this occurred in March, 1968, toward the end of the infamous Tet Offensive.  General Vo Nguyen Giap, the leader of the North Vietnamese Army, in the depths of despair over the defeat of his army, learned about Walter Cronkite’s famous pronouncement outside the Citadel Fortress of Hue.  This revered journalist departed from reporting facts, and made an observation that he believed “The light at the end of the tunnel is getting dimmer.”  His pronouncement indicated that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a huge defeat for American and South Vietnamese forces at the hands of the NVA.  Even though that statement was proved wrong within days – as we learned that the South Vietnamese people did not rise up and join Ho’s revolution, and that his army and the Viet Cong were decimated – it was heard around the world, and believed by many to be the absolute truth.  It was easy to believe, because our casualties had been high, but nothing could have been further from the truth.   

          In his memoirs, General Giap admitted that the NVA had been militarily defeated during the Tet Offensive.  Their defeat was so devastating that Giap feared they would not be able to continue the fight; but then he heard those words, and saw the images of Americans burning their flag and spitting on their soldiers, and he took hope. 

          It took another seven years (and took tens of thousands more American lives in the process) but we eventually left. 

          In my mind, in my soul, the worst images from the Vietnam era played out later on the floor of the U. S. Congress, where our leaders voted to betray our ally, South Vietnam, and we abandoned them to their fate.  Those images were underscored by the images of enemy tanks rolling into Saigon in the spring of 1975, as a nation was destroyed by the infamy of the United States of America.  My internal thoughts were then, and are today, “What was the point of all that death and destruction?  For what did my men fight and die?”  That is Lesson #2, and it seems clear that we have not learned it.  If we abandon Iraq now, not only will that generation of veterans suffer, but we as a nation will suffer.  We will have earned the reputation of a people who have limited courage, and limited endurance.  Future enemies will know that we won’t stay around too long, and they can do their worst and just hang on, and we’ll eventually get disinterested and leave.

          Please understand that I do not question anyone’s right to protest.  That freedom of speech, of dissent, is one of the cornerstones of our Constitution; freedom of expression is one of our most important freedoms.    My concern is that Jane Fonda and others (including many of those serving in our Congress today) are sending absolutely the wrong messages to our nation and to the world.

          Should we have gone to Iraq?  I don’t know, and I don’t think any of us will know for a long, long time.  Trying to figure that out just makes my head hurt.  I wish I had the certainty of those who can absolutely state, with complete conviction, that this is an “illegal war” and that we have to leave, immediately, whatever the cost.  Just consider that today, sixty-five years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the debate about the origins and necessity of our involvement in that war and its prosecution continues.  There are today those who question FDR’s motives at the beginning of World War II; did he know that Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked, yet stayed silent because he wanted to go to war?  There are those who question the necessity of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan.  My point here is not to continue those debates, but to point out that nothing in war is absolutely clear.  History will provide us with those answers, but they will be a long time arriving.

          Lesson #3:  Perhaps the most important lesson from the Vietnam War is that despite the fact that America sent huge numbers of its troops to fight there, our leaders seemed to do everything it could to limit their effectiveness.  At its peak, American troop strength climbed to over 500,000 young men and women in harm’s way.  But the Commander in Chief through the Chain of Command often dictated strategies and tactics that diluted our strength through overly restrictive Rules of Engagement, Restricted Fire Zones, and the designation of air targets that were sometimes just plain ludicrous. 

          Politically motivated ebbs and flows of American firepower hampered our capabilities and killed our own soldiers.  Our air forces could easily have severaly damaged or destroyed North Vietnamese air power, but frequently they were not allowed to bomb North Vietnamese air fields.  As an infantryman who fought on the ground in South Vietnam, I can attest to the fact that we felt vastly superior to our enemy who were never able to mount an air offensive against us.  American politicians occasionally unleashed air power on North Vietnamese targets “to send messages,” and then stopped the bombing when North Vietnamese diplomats agreed to go sit at the bargaining table.  This theme was repeated frequently – the bombing stopped, negotiators started talking, and very little was accomplished until the North walked out of the talks.  Military power should not be used to “send messages.”  It should be used to destroy our enemies, to protect our soldiers, and to end wars.

          Rules of Engagement are established to avoid “collateral damage.”  In my experience, however, the Rules of Engagement forced upon me and my fellow Marines and soldiers during the Vietnam War did little to avoid these horrible consequences of war.  Ultimately in war, innocents die and homes and churches and businesses are destroyed.  In Vietnam, the ROE did more to kill American soldiers and Marines, did more to destroy our faith and trust in our political and military leaders, than they did to save innocent lives.

          Lesson #4:  As a Vietnam Veteran, I squirm when I hear people say, “Oh, I certainly support our troops, but I’m against George Bush and the war.”  You are entitled to say what you want, but please understand one thing:  those serving in harm’s way do not feel supported when you say things like that.  They believe that you are saying that because it makes you feel better, and that your support is not true – it’s hollow.  State your beliefs, but actions speak much louder than words.  Protest the war, but if you truly want to support our troops, write a letter to a young American serving overseas; send a care package; find a military family whose father or mother, son or daughter is serving overseas and ask what you can do to help them; meet them when they return from the combat zone and shake their hand, and say, “Thank you for your service to our country.”  If you can’t find the time or the heart to do something like that, then please just shut up, and stop telling me you support our troops.  They don’t believe you, and I don’t believe you.

          My only predication about this war is that if these protests get out of hand, and people begin attacking our men and women in uniform as they did in my era (several in that chorus of grandmothers had signs that said, “March on the Pentagon!”), you will all see something rather amazing.  You will see an entire generation, my generations of veterans, rise up and stand between you and them.  We will not allow you well-intentioned but misguided folks to create another generation of disenfranchised veterans.  Go protest on the capitol mall; denigrate our President in front the world, if you feel so strongly about it.  If the war ends dishonorably, we will all suffer as our nation will suffer, but so be it.  But we will not allow this evil to take hold of our young people who have only served their military and country during a very difficult time.  They are to be respected, honored, and thanked, and truly supported.

          I am a combat veteran, and I truly abhor war because I have seen it, tasted it, smelled it and lived it, up close and personal.  During my thirteen months in Vietnam where I served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps, I saw horror and death on a daily basis.  I saw young men who rose up and met our enemy, who fought and died, under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.  Yes, I also witnessed the aberrations, the dark underbelly of war, when the madness overwhelmed an individual’s ability to discern between right and wrong, but in my experience those were very rare occurrences and were always dealt with quickly and harshly by our command.  On the other hand, I saw nearly every day the “honorable” event, the young PFC, shaking with fear, knowing full well that death was near, stand up and attack the enemy who was trying to kill his buddy, and who, in too many cases, went home in a body bag to a family who mourned him forever, and a nation that had rejected his noble service and tried to forget about him as quickly as possible.  As I think back on those dark days, I find that I am proud of my service to our country, and if called upon I would do it again.

          Over the past four decades, much has been written and many movies have been produced about that horrible war that took so many of our generation to their graves, to long-term care for their terrible wounds, and to the unfathomable depths of depression for those of us who “survived” without wounds, struggling with the internal anguish that lives on in us today.  But our generation’s body of literature mostly deals with the horrors of combat, and with the aberrations that inevitably are spawned in war; it fails utterly to focus on another sinister tragedy of that war, the part played by civilian Americans.

          I wish there was some way for our people to speak their minds without giving hope to our enemies, but I don’t see how it can be done.  In particular, I wish that our political leaders could voice their dissent quietly because the world is listening.  I hope those who protest and speak against our President will learn from our generation and understand that the “magic” of instant worldwide telecommunications provides Osama bin Laden and his dirty minions with the ability to watch TV, and if this trend continues, he and his murderers will listen, take heart, hang on, and continue their murderous ways.

          I am a student of history, and I write history; I absolutely believe in the famous utterance of George Santayana, a great American philosopher who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  As a nation, I fear we are at risk today, because we have not learned the important lessons of history – lessons that should be obvious to anyone who studies history – the truly important lessons from the Vietnam War.

Nicholas Warr – January 28, 2007