I groaned inwardly, looking at the floor and holding on to the top of my head, stunned that he would really be doing this. In seconds he was standing before me, sticking the diploma into my face as if it were a pointer. He began yelling at me, sky-high with the emotion of a dream that I was already beginning to take for granted. I had just been selected for a scholarship to the University of Southern California, and in a year would be off to the Naval Academy. But this simple piece of paper had been my father’s unreachable fantasy for nearly three decades.
What was he telling me? What was he screaming in his moment of triumph, as dozens of others watched in amusement and mild puzzlement?
“You can get anything you want in this country, and don’t you ever forget it!”
Yes, I thought, swallowing back my cynicism in the face of his raw energy. Even if it takes two hundred years.
There was little that the upperclassmen at the Naval Academy could teach me about military leadership when I reported to that institution in the summer of 1964. Leadership, he had told me time and again, was simple. Forget the textbooks. You can make somebody do something, or you can make him want to do something. Who would you rather work for? I had watched my father for a lifetime, learning both from his example and from the wisdom of his mentorship. And every time I told myself how much I hated the regimen and the numbing routine of Annapolis—which was almost daily for four years—I would also give myself a humility check. For how quickly would he have traded twenty-six years of night school for four years of this?
But hard times were coming, for him, for myself, and for a lot of others who shared our history and our traditions. The Vietnam War put the brakes on the Scots-Irish ascendancy that had begun with the outbreak of World War II. In the coming two decades, the traditional notions of military service as well as the very foundations of what it meant to be an American would take a terrific beating. The Scots-Irish, whose ethos has always been so closely identified with patriotism and respect for military service, would serve in great numbers during this war and in a historic anomaly would, in many cases, be ostracized from many academic and professional arenas as a direct result of their service.
During the summer of 1964 the two most glaring issues on which disagreement had been simmering between the Scots-Irish Jacksonians and the emerging radicals erupted into public view concurrently, with the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to a full-scale war in Vietnam. And it was above all the war in Vietnam that allowed the radicalism that had been spawning for two decades in academia and the professorial journals to burst forth as a political movement that would challenge many of the basic presumptions about American society.
For the Scots-Irish Jacksonians, Vietnam was a real and often brutal war, one in which a high percentage of their sons and brothers fought. As two examples among many, the South had by far the highest casualty rate during the war, a rate 32 percent higher than the Northeast,
1
and the Scots-Irish stronghold of West Virginia had the highest casualty rate of any state. This service, and these casualties, were occurring at a time when the draft laws gave liberal exceptions to those who remained in college, and when the more advantaged members of the age group were actively counseled on how to avoid military service. Only 11 percent of the draft-eligible males in the Vietnam age group actually went to Vietnam, and only 33 percent served in the military at all. To have one’s life interrupted for years at an early age, and then to return not only without honor but also shouldering the blame for all the supposed evils of a war that others avoided, is the formula for long-term societal disability. And this is exactly what occurred.
Contrary to popular mythology, the baby boomer generation was far less liberal than the media images of the day seemed to portray. As Michael Lind documents in his book
Vietnam: The Necessary War
, “Few American students in the sixties were radical. At the height of the antiwar movement in 1970, only 11 percent of American college students identified themselves as ‘radical or far left.’ ”
2
These numbers became magnified in the mind-set of most Americans and over time impacted heavily on the respect shown to those who had served. Small though it was, the radical movement that opposed the war was heavily represented in major academia, where it affected the minds of an entire generation of intellectually gifted students and also had a wide and lasting impact on other institutions, such as major media and the arts, through which Americans historically have gained emotional insights and formed their opinions. And the ever-growing unpopularity of the war allowed the radical movement to expand its reach to a large number of well-meaning Americans who simply wanted the war to end, and to develop alliances with an array of political groups whose causes went much farther than the conflict in Vietnam.
Despite the political misfeasance that characterized the course of the war, it is important to remember that the causes that brought the United States into Vietnam were not unsound. Forty years ago Asia was at a vital crossroads, moving uncertainly into a future that was dominated by three different historical trends. The first involved the aftermath of the carnage and destruction of World War II, which had left its scars on every country in the region and also had dramatically changed the role that Japan played in East Asian affairs. The second was the sudden, regionwide end of European colonialism, which created governmental vacuums in every second-tier country except Thailand and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines. And the third was the emergence of communism as a powerful tool of expansionism by military force, its doctrine and strategies emanating principally from the Soviet Union.
3
The governmental vacuums created by Europe’s withdrawal from the region dramatically played into the hands of communist revolutionary movements, especially in the wake of their takeover of China in 1949, for unlike in Europe, these were countries that had never known Western-style democracy. In 1950 the partitioned country of Korea exploded into war as the communist North invaded South Korea, with the Chinese army joining their effort six months later. Communist insurgencies erupted throughout Indochina. In Malaysia the British led a ten-year antiguerrilla compaign against Chinese-backed revolutionaries. A similar insurgency in Indonesia brought about a communist coup attempt, also sponsored by the Chinese, which was put down in 1965.
The situation inside Vietnam was the most complicated. First, for a variety of reasons the French reversed their withdrawal from their long-term colony after World War II, making it easier for insurgents to rally the strongly nationalistic Vietnamese to their side. Second, the charismatic, Soviet-trained Ho Chi Minh had quickly consolidated his anti-French power base just after the war by assassinating the leadership of competing political groups that were anti-French but also anticommunist. Third, once the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953, the Chinese shifted large amounts of sophisticated weaponry to Ho Chi Minh’s army. The Viet Minh’s sudden acquisition of larger-caliber weapons and field artillery such as the 105-millimeter howitzer abruptly changed the nature of the war and contributed heavily to the French humiliation at Dien Bien Phu. And fourth, further war became inevitable when United States–led backers of the incipient South Vietnamese democracy called off a 1956 election that had been agreed upon after Vietnam was divided in 1954.
In 1958 the communists unleashed a terrorist campaign in the South, followed later by both guerrilla and conventional warfare. Within two years, Northern-trained terrorists were assassinating an average of eleven government officials every day. President John Kennedy referred to this campaign in 1961 when he decided to increase the number of American soldiers operating inside South Vietnam. “We have talked about and read stories of 7,000 to 15,000 guerrillas operating in Viet Nam, killing 2,000 civil officers a year and 2,000 police officers a year, 4,000 total,” said Kennedy. “How we fight that kind of problem, which is going to be with us all through this decade, seems to me to be one of the great problems now before the United States.”
4
The United States entered the war reluctantly, halfheartedly, and with a confused and ineffective strategy. But its leadership felt morally and politically compelled to do so, and even such major newspapers as the
Washington Post
initially supported the effort. The U.S. recognized South Vietnam as a separate political entity from North Vietnam, just as it saw West Germany as being separate from communist-controlled East Germany, and just as it continues to distinguish South Korea from communist-controlled North Korea. And South Vietnam was being invaded by the North just as certainly (although with more sophistication) as North Korea had invaded South Korea.
There has been little historical recognition of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the ground. Dropped onto the enemy’s terrain twelve thousand 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 that the Vietnamese communists admit to losing 1.4 million soldiers, compared to South Vietnamese losses of 245,000 and American losses of 58,000. And those who believe that it was a “dirty little war” where 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 Marines died in Vietnam as in World War I, three times as many as in Korea, and there were more total casualties (killed and wounded) for the Marines in Vietnam than in all of World War II.
That the war was pursued with honorable intentions does not mean that those who conceived and implemented our strategy deserve any prizes. My own father, who had defined for me the notion of loyalty, became disgusted with Defense Secretary McNamara’s so-called “whiz kids” after being assigned to the Pentagon in 1965.
When I was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1968, he was working on a highly classified program he could not discuss openly, but which I later learned was a satellite linkup from Vietnam to Washington, giving civilian leaders full daily oversight of the war. Watching firsthand the Johnson administration’s dissembling to the Congress and disrespect of military leaders, he urged me more than once to go into the navy, find myself a nice ship where I could, as he so often put it, “sit in the wardroom and eat ice cream,” and not risk myself as a Marine on an ever-deteriorating battlefield. Once I did receive my orders for combat, my father put in his papers to retire from the air force, telling me he “couldn’t bear to watch it” while still wearing a military uniform. Sitting at the kitchen table in his government-issue quarters at Andrews Air Force Base, fighting back the temptation to break the law and share classified information with me, he was ferociously intense, this man who had found his life’s calling by flying bombers and cargo planes and perfecting the art of shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles. And he was telling me, as a father and a military professional, that this strategically botched war was not worth my life.
Finally he found the words that communicated his unease without violating his oath of office. “Do you realize Lyndon Johnson is going to know you’re wounded before your division commander does? And do you know what that says about the ability of the American military to fight a long-term war?”
He was wrong. Lyndon Johnson never knew I was wounded, because by then Richard Nixon was running the show.
My professional career in writing and government is entirely accidental. At the age of twenty-two my dream was to become a general officer in the Marine Corps. Had I not been wounded, I would never have gone to law school. And had I not gone to law school, I would never have fully comprehended the disdain that many of the advantaged in my generation felt for those who had fought in Vietnam, or the ingrained condescension of the nation’s elites toward my culture. And had I never been exposed to this unthinking arrogance, I would not have begun the journey of discovery that, over three decades, finally led to this book. And so, in an odd way, it can be said that I owe all of this to Ho Chi Minh, and to Richard Nixon’s post-Tet campaign offensive of 1969.
I was fully prepared for what awaited me in Vietnam. At the Naval Academy, I became one of six finalists for the position of brigade commander despite having less than stellar grades, and was one of 18 in my class of 841 to receive a special commendation for leadership upon graduation. At the grueling Marine Corps Officers’ Basic School in Quantico, I had graduated first in my class of 243, scoring 99.3 in leadership and also winning the Military Skills Award for the highest average in the areas of physical fitness, marksmanship, land navigation, and military instruction. Few things in life have come as naturally to me as combat, however difficult those days proved to be. And conversely, few things have surprised me so completely as the other world I entered a few years later when I arrived at the Georgetown University Law Center.
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
magazine 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 antiwar rallies that culminated in the Moratorium march on Washington. The My Lai massacre hit the papers and was seized upon by the antiwar 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.
5
I spent my tour in the An Hoa basin southwest of Da Nang, where the 5th Marine Regiment was in its third year of continuous combat operations. 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.