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Why did I volunteer to go to Vietnam? Thinking back, I
can't come up with a single, cut-and-dried reason for my
decision to go over and actively take part in the Vietnam
War. Idealism, coupled with boredom and a desire for
adventure, in addition to the realization that I had worn a
military uniform nearly every day of my life for ten years,
were all factors. Besides, military people are supposed to
fight in wars, aren't they? After all, aggressively waging
war is what the military is ultimately all about, the
misnomer ‘Department of Defense' notwithstanding.
Without doing a lot of analyzing about it, I had chosen the
military for a career, and I was on active duty when Vietnam
heated up. My country was involved in a war; where else
should I have been? There really wasn't any overwhelming
sense of patriotism behind the decision. It was another part
of the job I had chosen to do. I didn't leave home on a
mission with banners flying and trumpets blaring.
Without any braggadocio, I chose not to be an interested
observer from a safe distance. I considered it part of my
duty to help. My older brother felt the same way; a ‘Lifer'
like me, he also volunteered to go to Vietnam. We never
discussed it and he had already volunteered by the time I
made up my own mind to go. It's possible, though, that his
decision had some unconscious influence on me.
I
don't remember talking about patriotism or about fending off
the communist peril while I was, in the parlance of the
times, “doin' my thang” in ‘Nam. There wasn't much
altruistic concern for the plight of the downtrodden
Vietnamese peasantry on my part either, at least, not
initially. I had never so much as given them a passing
thought before arriving in their country. A measure of
empathy came later, after I got to personally know some of
the people. I did feel sympathy for the cruel toll the war
was taking on those locals that I knew. After helping load a
few of their bleeding bodies onto Medevac helicopters, I
couldn't help but feel sorry for them. With any luck, in a
finite amount of time, I would be returning home to relative
safety. This was their home.
As far as I remember,
nobody serving with me ever asked what the hell I was doing
on Trang-Sup. Most of the Americans I knew, both Air Force
and Army, were there because they wanted to be there – for
whatever reasons, we had volunteered to come. The Army
Special Forces people, in particular, had voluntarily
undergone long, arduous, specialized training in order to
perform their assigned mission. This is what they did, where
they wanted to be, and they were admirably well trained and
dedicated people.
As for me, except when we were
under attack and I manned a machine gun on camp defense, my
job as a radar repairman was pretty much the same as it
would have been had I decided to remain at that radar site
up in the Judith Mountains of Montana. Unlike the Army
people on Trang-Sup and elsewhere, my job didn't require
that I go out into a hostile environment searching for a
cunning and elusive enemy. It was bad enough that Charlie
came looking for me.
Of course, off-base life would
have been a lot more humdrum in Montana. Nobody would have
been lurking around outside the perimeter walls trying to
sneak in and murder us as we slept. Nobody would have
mounted repeated armed assaults on our compound with
malicious, lethal intent. Hopefully, nobody would have
occasionally aimed ‘Friendly Fire' in our direction.
Although at Lewistown, from time to time some apparently
myopic hunter back in the woods would fire on the blue Air
Force bus as it carried crew changes up and down the
mountain between the cantonment area and the radar. Perhaps
they mistook it for some wild kin of Paul Bunyan's ox. Also
on the plus side, the sanitary conditions in Montana were
vastly superior.
In any case, there I was at
Detachment 7 of the 619th Tactical Control Squadron, located
on Trai Trang-Sup, Tay Ninh Province, South Vietnam, in the
area designated as War Zone C. After a few months, I
inevitably began looking forward to getting my tour of duty
over with and going back home in one piece with all my parts
still attached and in reasonable working order. A few of my
compatriots, bless their dedicated souls, did decide to
extend their tours. I respected that decision. I also
declined to join them.
Life in Vietnam was dangerous,
noisy, nerve-wracking, and, for the most part, it smelled
pretty bad, to boot. People got wounded and maimed, and they
got killed, violently and a lot more messily than in those
war movies I'd seen. Life in Vietnam was also, at times,
just boring. No other way to describe it. Those were the
times when absolutely nothing was going on and there was no
place to go, especially during monsoon season. And, I had
never in my life imagined I'd ever consider 75�F to be cold:
certainly not when I was still in northern Montana. The
boring part was more like life was for me on that
mountaintop.
During the early part of my military
career, I served with veterans of both WW-II and Korea, and
I had heard words like ‘shell shock' associated with World
War II and the ‘Korean Conflict'. Despite having once been
stationed with a survivor of the Bataan Death March and
Japanese POW camps, I really wasn't fully cognizant of the
grievous and enduring mental wounds war can inflict on many
of its participants. I'm much more aware of that aspect of
war now. Like many physical scars, the evidence isn't always
readily apparent.
That's it; more than a little
simplistic, I know, but there's no mystery, no hidden
reasons, no search for glory. I wanted to see what war was
like. I also believed that I had some real obligation to be
involved in it, so off I went to both do my duty and see war
at first hand for myself. It was both more and less than I
had expected.
In the end, I found out what real war
is like. I definitely have decidedly mixed feelings about
John Wayne now.
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