When I returned to New York, I didn’t see Vietnam the same way. I thought of the twenty-year-old kids dead and their families destroyed, all because of egos and miscalculations at the top. I had a lot on my mind, and it took a long while to sort out my feelings.
I resumed my life as a merchant mariner, although I remained on the beach for a couple of months before putting out to sea again. I sailed on a coastwise tanker, back and forth from the Gulf Coast to New England. Since the ship didn’t travel to a foreign port, I was not obligated to sign a contract, which allowed me to quit at any time. I did just that one day in New Orleans.
I tried to figure things out in New Orleans, but, as much as I loved that town, it was airing the same nightly news broadcasts as in New York, dominated by coverage of the war and the protests against it.
Demonstrations against the war or the draft were erupting on campus after campus across the country. These reports disturbed me, and when I searched for news of the troops in Vietnam, I usually found the soldiers’ combat stories buried deep in the pages of the newspapers or late in the TV news. The media rarely seemed to show how patriotic our troops were or how low their morale was, though they did report on the high rate of drug use among them.
What they gave was body counts. They’d present the number of casualties suffered on both sides like it was a football score: “Enemy dead, 346; US casualties, ‘only’ 25.” It was as if we were winning a game, not sacrificing the lives of our young soldiers—or theirs. GIs’ obits would be little more than blurbs in the paper. If you were lucky, they would provide a name, age, and the high school from which he had recently graduated. Was he an only child? A budding scientist? A future baseball star? A young father? Was he the one who made his squad laugh in grim moments? They died before they’d even begun to live. It’s not as if the public forgot them; Americans never found out enough about the boys to remember them.
Even now, so many of the 58,307 names (including those of 8 women) on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s Wall of Faces website don’t have stories to go with them. It was left to family and friends to keep the votive candles burning.
It begged the question “Was it worth it?” That question gnawed at me and was affecting my very identity. I decided to travel to County Cork, Ireland, where my grandmother Abina Donohue had grown up before she immigrated to America at the end of the eighteen hundreds. Something about those rolling green farmlands in County Cork gave me peace and enabled me to see the whole world—the world beyond my neighborhood. Coverage of our war and our protests didn’t dominate the news on their “telly.”
What did dominate their news was Ireland’s Troubles. It was ironic to be in Ireland at this time. I realized my relatives were in a similar situation to the Vietnamese. In Vietnam, a large percentage of the population was determined to expel the last of the foreign armies that had occupied their land off and on since 111 BC. The Chinese, the French, and the Japanese during World War II—when Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh independence forces helped us in our war against Japan, only to have us agree to hand back Vietnam to the French after VJ Day—and now we Americans had all taken turns ruling that slip of a country.
The Irish were occupied for nine hundred years, but only by the English, who took away the Irish people’s lands, their right to practice their religion, their right to vote. They let their children starve during the Great Famine, and now, in the late 1960s, the sectarian violence and political fighting in Northern Ireland was heating up. My relatives talked of little else. It was hard not to do a compare and contrast in my mind, to wonder, What’s the difference?
The difference, of course, is that the Irish were not Communists. But now, half the clothes I see in stores have “Made in Vietnam” tags on them. We do business with China; hell, we borrow money from Chinese billionaires. We’ve loosened our embargo a bit in Cuba. With Laos and North Korea, those are the last five countries on the planet to still call themselves Communist, but other than North Korea, they barely qualify. Don’t they all come around to a market economy eventually? Many of them peacefully?
I was spurred to go to Vietnam by the sight of antiwar demonstrators in Central Park protesting against my friends from the neighborhood who were serving in the military. Having served overseas in the marines myself, I could only imagine what my buddies were feeling as they heard what was going on in letters from home or from new recruits. Meanwhile, they were facing down terror and being harassed when they returned home.
I had felt that what the protesters were doing was un-American. In fact, I felt they were traitors. I felt that they were taking advantage of our American rights, without paying for those rights. What other country would allow its citizens to protest against its own army in the field, waving our enemy’s flag? They were calling our own loyal citizens murderers, while those members of the armed services were endangering their lives—sacrificing their lives—in defense of our allies, just as our fathers and uncles had done twenty-five years earlier in World War II. I felt they were stabbing our own in the back.
While I was in Vietnam, what I was seeing did not jibe with the official reports out of our military command or out of Washington. After I stood outside the US embassy as a very few heroic boys fought and died to take it back, and General Westmoreland held a presser after it was safe to come out, making his statement about “the enemy’s well-laid plans” going “afoul,” it made me question the official line.
If the plans were well laid and Westmoreland knew about them, which he did, and he knew that five cities had been attacked twenty-four hours before Tet launched, why didn’t he have more than four marines and two army MPs guarding our embassy and consulate compound in Saigon? Or his own headquarters at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where MPs were overwhelmed by a VC battalion? Why weren’t more combat-ready troops armed and on real alert in the 120 cities and bases when the offensive launched in earnest? With half the South Vietnamese army on vacation for the holiday truce? On that moonless night, 246 American boys would die, the deadliest day in the war.
Westmoreland kept asking for more and more boys to be sent over, when South Vietnamese President Thieu didn’t even have a draft for South Vietnam’s own eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, like we did, and the South Vietnamese did almost nothing to draft evaders, especially rich ones. My friend Bobby Pappas was drafted away from his wife and baby, only to see four of his officers killed together in the same hootch. Tommy Collins, who lost his closest friend during Tet, suffered severe exposure to Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant containing dioxin that the US dropped on the jungles to strip away the enemy’s coverage and food supply. Kevin McLoone was rocketed and mortared for days in hellish Chu Lai with the Americal Division, south of Da Nang. And Ricky Duggan, who landed in Vietnam at age nineteen on the Fourth of July, would engage in 153 combat assaults, including a firefight in the Central Highlands that lasted six days after an entire North Vietnamese regiment surrounded them, armed with Russian and Chinese machine guns that shot a thousand rounds per minute. During Tet, Rick was sent to the haunted A Shau Valley and to Khe Sanh, LBJ’s and Westmoreland’s obsession.
Westmoreland wanted more boys like Inwood’s Tommy Minogue, who died throwing his body over his commander and the platoon’s only radio operator so he could call for help that would save the rest of the platoon. Tommy wouldn’t make twenty-one.
Gradually, I began to see that the protesters, however disrespectfully, were at least trying to stop this madness. They weren’t acknowledging that so many young men were doing what they truly believed was their duty—to their country, their family, their neighborhood. They weren’t acknowledging that the soldiers were patriots, that they were heroes. We, in turn, didn’t see at the time that the protesters loved our country, too. What they didn’t like was our leadership. They were trying to stop more boys from being killed for somebody else’s legacy. After what I’d witnessed on my journey, I could definitely agree with that.
If there is one thing that I learned as a result of my Vietnam experience is that government—all governments for that matter—are not to be trusted. Many politicians lie when it serves their interests. That knowledge served me well in the work I went into, representing the Sandhogs Union, construction trades, and other union workers, and trying to secure support for jobs and legislation from elected officials in New York City, New York State, and Washington, DC. I can’t bring back the boys who died, but I can help their brothers and sisters. I hope I’ve done a little bit of good.