On April 5, 1962, the morning I thought would be my last day in the army, I met our company clerk in the unit orderly room at Fort Benning, Georgia. As we shook hands, he said this was also his last day in Delta Company; his next duty station was Saigon, South Vietnam.
Though I was only twenty, I had served a year in South Korea and had visited Japan. I had also excelled in high school geography, but I had no idea where South Vietnam was. Before going home, I went to the post library and found Saigon in an atlas. I wondered why we had troops there, even clerks, but then I put it out of my mind. I was headed for civilian life. I had more important things to think about.
I wasn’t alone in my ignorance and apathy. In the early 1960s, before the low-level insurgency in Vietnam’s rural provinces blossomed into an enormous shooting war, in the period when only a few thousand US soldiers were in South Vietnam, few Americans were aware of the fighting there and fewer could have found Vietnam on a map.
There was plenty to distract us. This was the dawn of the civil rights era, when bold Freedom Riders, blacks and whites together, rode interstate buses into the Deep South in defiance of segregation laws. A time when black students staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters across the South. A time when black churches were burned and bombed. A time when many African Americans heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for nonviolent protest and others listened to Malcolm X and sought racial justice by any means necessary.
The sixties also spawned a sexual revolution. Birth control pills became legal for contraceptive use in 1960. Suddenly, men and women no longer waited for marriage to experiment with sex. Within a few years, millions of mostly young Americans were enjoying sexual freedoms that often shocked and offended their parents.
It was also the era when millions of young people began experimenting with marijuana, LSD, peyote, psychedelic mushrooms, and other consciousness-altering substances. In just a few years, many of them would be in Vietnam, where marijuana was cheap and readily available.
According to Jeremy Kuzmarov, author of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009) and an American history professor at the University of Tulsa, serving in the war did not cause American soldiers to begin using drugs: many were smoking, snorting, injecting, or swallowing mind-altering substances before they joined the military.
And most of all, during the early sixties, millions of young Americans fell in love with rock ’n’ roll, with its beat, its seditious lyrics, and its shaggy-haired outlaw artists who expressed the frustration, loneliness, alienation, and anger of youth. Americans who came of age during the Great Depression—the generation that defeated fascism and built the interstate highway system, the atomic bomb, the Hoover Dam, and a great deal more—never grooved on rock ’n’ roll, sensing in its rhythms not a cultural revolution but taboo racial overtones. Even more than sex and drugs, rock music widened the divide between the Greatest Generation and their children, a generational gap like few before.
Few outside Washington thought much about South Vietnam either, even though during World War II the United States had important interests in Vietnam. While France was battling Nazi Germany, Japan invaded France’s Indochina colonies—present-day Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In a few weeks the French surrendered, and Germany ceded Indochina to its Japanese ally as a prize of war. Those subtropical, agrarian regions were rich in rice, rubber, tea, coffee, and minerals and were strategically positioned at China’s back door at a time when China was fighting both a Communist revolution and an invading Japanese army.
For decades prior to World War II, the United States had enjoyed a brisk trade with Japan in scrap steel and raw petroleum, but Japan’s seizure of Indochina led the United States to embargo both commodities. Since Japan’s oil stockpiles could fuel a naval war for only one year, they attacked the enormous American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, hoping for a knockout blow. Thus the spread of World War II into the Pacific was partly the result of events in Vietnam.
World War II included covert operations in south China and in Tonkin—as North Vietnam was then known—by agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Ho Chi Minh, a French-speaking Vietnamese nationalist, and Vo Nguyen Giap led a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese and sought American help. A small team of OSS officers was inserted by parachute into Tonkin’s mountainous border area with China. Their mission: advise and support Ho and Vo in their fight against the Japanese. The OSS arranged for some arms and ammunition to be parachuted to the guerrillas. When the OSS team was withdrawn, they told their superiors the United States should do much more to help Ho and Vo.
But the US government declined to provide additional help, so Ho accepted arms and other aid from Chinese communists fighting both Japan and the Chiang Kai-shek regime. At the end of the war, when Germany and Japan surrendered separately, France sought to reestablish control over its former colonies. Ho begged the United States to press France to allow the people of Indochina to determine their own political fate.
France, however, is America’s oldest ally. Bled white by the Nazi occupation, France’s factories and transportation networks were in shambles, and France expected its Indochina colonies to help fuel the recovery of its national economy. It came as no surprise when French president Charles de Gaulle threatened to leave NATO and expel NATO’s Paris headquarters unless US president Harry Truman supported France’s fight to regain control of its Indochina colonies. America had become actively engaged with covert efforts to stop the Soviets from building an iron curtain across Eastern Europe. Communist guerrillas were fighting to take over Greece, and Truman, seeking to keep the Allied coalition together, acceded to de Gaulle’s demands. Because of Ho’s wartime embrace of the Chinese communists in their joint struggle against the Japanese, anti-communist elements in the US State Department and Congress declared him a communist and decided Ho could not be trusted.
The French returned to Indochina, to their mines, plantations, and other economic interests, and Ho’s guerrilla army, the Viet Minh, turned its efforts against them. For several years, US support for the French in Indochina offset 70 percent of France’s war effort, but France was eventually defeated by this peasant army. As part of the 1954 Geneva Accords, France agreed to withdraw from its former colony and to split the country along the seventeenth parallel until formal elections could be held to determine future governance. Under French rule there had been three autonomous colonies; now Vietnam became two countries, with North Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. Roman Catholics and many affluent Buddhists headed south—as did some of Ho’s guerrilla cadres, who became known as the Viet Cong.
The Catholic refugees were mostly an educated group whose interests were more aligned with the West than with their countrymen. They were aided by well-connected American and French Catholics who saw not only business opportunities but also a chance for more converts to Christianity. Within months, Ngo Dinh Diem, a devout Catholic, was elevated to power over the South, brushing aside its Buddhist majority and refusing to sign the 1954 Geneva agreements. Insurgency grew in the South, and a few thousand and then tens of thousands of US advisors were sent to train the South Vietnamese military to defend against the spread of communism from the North. Diem’s inept, corrupt, and brutal regime ended in 1963 with his murder during a military coup that was carried out with tacit CIA assistance. Over the next seventeen months, a succession of coups, failed coups, and government reorganizations kept the Saigon government in a perpetual state of flux, a vacuum eagerly filled by the Viet Cong.
In August 1964, a US warship was collecting radio intelligence in the Gulf of Tonkin, along the coast of North Vietnam, and reported an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, which supposedly triggered an extended battle between the torpedo boats and the warship and supporting US aircraft. Two days later, a second American ship in the same area reported a similar attack. In a 2003 documentary film, former secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara admitted the first attack may have happened, but there was no shooting, no sea battle, no US aircraft involved. The second attack was a Department of Defense fabrication.1 Nevertheless, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for war powers in Vietnam and was rewarded with authority to deploy US troops, aircraft, and ships in and around both Vietnams.
In February 1965, a Viet Cong battalion attacked the US Army base at Camp Holloway, near Pleiku, in the Central Highlands. Eight GIs were killed and 126 wounded.
In June 1965, cocky, flamboyant thirty-four-year-old Nguyen Cao Ky, commander of the South Vietnamese Air Force, assumed power as prime minister.2 Ky knew that tens of thousands of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops had infiltrated South Vietnam through the mountainous Central Highlands. When he saw his own generals were unable to stop them, he realized his country was in danger of being cut in half at its narrow waist. Military defeat would follow, so he appealed to President Johnson for more US troops.
Johnson sent the Third Marine Division and its supporting air wing to Da Nang on the northern coast and the army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade to Bien Hoa Air Base near Saigon. He also ordered the newly formed and untried First Cavalry Division (Airmobile) to pack up its fifteen thousand men, their weapons and equipment, including 437 aircraft, and go to Vietnam.
In August 1965, First Cavalry troops boarded transport ships and departed from East Coast ports, bound for South Vietnam’s South China Sea port of Qui Nhon. Converted World War II aircraft carriers followed the troops, carrying most of the division’s helicopters.
Simultaneous with these departures by sea, a 1,030-man First Cavalry advance party flew out of Warner Robins, Georgia. Their mission was to seize an abandoned dirt airstrip near the Song Ba River, midway between Qui Nhon and Pleiku, and clear the adjacent jungle to disperse the division’s helicopters. On August 27, the first of the advance party’s fifty C-130’s landed on that nine-hundred-foot dirt strip and disgorged a rifle platoon.
Minutes later, a second C-130 landed. It carried jeeps with machine guns and recoilless rifles, long-range radios, operators, and the command group.
Armed with an M-16 rifle and a camera, I accompanied the command group. For the next twenty-eight days everyone from Brig. Gen. John M. Wright Jr., the assistant division commander, to me, the lowest-ranking private, spent our daylight hours clearing the dense, triple-canopy jungle that abutted the landing strip. We had machetes, shovels, axes, handsaws, and flamethrowers. Building the world’s largest helicopter landing field without heavy equipment was backbreaking work.
I did not have to be there. I did not have to go to Vietnam. I had fulfilled my military obligation by serving three years and two months active duty, all of it as an infantryman, between 1959 and 1962, followed by three years in the inactive reserve. In March 1965, having realized US combat troops would soon be in Vietnam, I reenlisted as a private (three stripes being the cost of my three-year hiatus), armed with a silly and precarious plan to land a berth as a combat photographer and “see the elephant” through a camera viewfinder long and well enough to launch a career in photojournalism.
I also had deeply personal reasons for reenlisting: my parents had thirteen siblings between them. Neither they nor any of their siblings nor their siblings’ spouses, who were all children of European immigrants, had fought in World War II. Only my father’s youngest brother, Bill, had served in uniform, but the war ended before he finished aviator training. America had been good to my family, and I felt an obligation to contribute. At least five of my cousins felt as I did and enlisted in the army, marines, or air force.
I didn’t want to miss what I knew would be the greatest adventure of my generation, and I didn’t think I would live into old age anyway. None of my grandparents had lived to see fifty, and my uncles, who were approaching or barely beyond that milestone, were in poor health.
In hindsight, my thinking was very mushy.
Against all reason, I succeeded in the first part of my plan. In July 1965, Maj. (later Lt. Col.) Charles Siler, the division public information officer, plucked me from a doomed rifle platoon3 and made me his photographer and later his press chief. Over a fifteen-month period, I accompanied elements of all nine infantry battalions into the field on combat operations. Ditto for the recon squadron, all division artillery battalions, and most of the combat support outfits as well. I worked with the cream of the international press corps. I earned air crewman’s wings and a few colored ribbons. I stopped a piece of shrapnel. I saw the elephant, and I saw it through a camera lens.
Ultimately the success of my plan derailed it. It was never my idea to become the indispensable man, but by May 1966 I again wore sergeant’s stripes. Six months later I was offered an appointment to infantry second lieutenant. I would not learn for another thirty years how lucky I was: the army and the marines together awarded only sixty such appointments, and most went to helicopter pilots and Special Forces noncoms.
The offer was a personal validation. Eight years earlier, as a seventeen-year-old high school senior, I had won an appointment to West Point but was four inches short of minimum height. A year later, as an eighteen-year-old specialist 4, I had competed for and won one of a hundred annual presidential military academy appointments for active-duty soldiers—but I was two inches short. In early 1962, I applied for officer candidate school, but I was an inch too short and wasn’t allowed to take the entrance exam.
Accept a direct appointment? Yes, indeed. And nobody asked how tall I was.
Two years later I accepted a promotion to captain and agreed to extend my term of service indefinitely at the pleasure of the president.
The last US combat troops left Vietnam in 1973. My service under President Richard Nixon ended in August 1974, and I returned to civilian life and a precarious but stimulating career as a self-employed journalist.
US Army Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, serving with the OSS during World War II, was the first of many thousands of American fighting men to die in Vietnam. After the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, Dewey led a team gathering intelligence and searching for missing American pilots. On September 26, 1945, he was shot at a roadblock by a Viet Minh guerrilla who mistook him for a Frenchman.
Between 1964 to 1975, about 9.7 million Americans served in uniform, a little less than 10 percent of our male generation. Two-thirds of them were volunteers, and together they comprised the best-educated army our country had ever sent to war. Some 2,709,918 Americans actually served in Vietnam—on land, in its waters, or in the skies above them. More than 58,000 of these men and women were killed, a little over 2 percent of those who served in-country. Sixty-one percent of the dead were twenty-one years old or younger.4
About a quarter of the men and women who served were draftees, conscripted by the Selective Service System that until nearly the end of the war operated under rules favoring the affluent over the poor and whites over minorities, allowing the privileged to avoid the draft. Before 1965, many National Guard and reserve units were as much a uniformed fraternity as a component of national defense. New applicants were unofficially restricted to friends and relatives of members and former members. It’s no surprise that when the first combat troops left for Vietnam, many chronically understrength guard and reserve units filled up within weeks. Nevertheless, personal, political, or business connections could still shoehorn a well-connected youth into an overstrength reserve unit. Every Major League Baseball team and many NFL teams protected their top talent by pulling political strings to get them into National Guard or reserve units, where they would be safe from the perils of combat in Vietnam. Only a handful of major league players saw the combat zone.
There were other ways to avoid the draft. While few working-class Americans of that era had a family doctor, the more affluent could sometimes persuade a personal physician to write a letter stating their son suffered from a condition that precluded military service. Some doctors coached their patients in ways to fail a draft physical; a few went so far as to prescribe medication that allowed them to present a disqualifying medical symptom.
Scholarship students and those affluent enough to afford four years of college and graduate school often escaped the draft through successive deferments. Until Congress eliminated most graduate school deferments, thousands remained enrolled until they were considered to be too old to serve or the war ended. Deferments for those studying for religious ordination remained in place throughout the war years, and many affluent men enrolled in a divinity school with no intention of serving as clergy. Every man who went on an overseas mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was exempted from the draft.
Three-fourths of the American troops in Vietnam were volunteers, though many had enlisted in the hope they might get better or safer duty than a draftee. In practice, the route by which a soldier entered service mattered much less than what skill sets were needed at that moment. My best friend in high school, Kenneth Dean Smith, was drafted at age twenty-five. An accomplished photographer, he was trained as a mortar gunner. In high school, Ken took a typing class and wisely reminded his superiors of this fact at every opportunity. In Vietnam, he served with distinction as an infantry company clerk.
The gulf between those whose only choices were between military service, prison, or exile to Canada or Sweden and those whose circumstances allowed them to pursue a promising civilian career path grew wider as the war wore on. A handful of those who evaded military service launched careers that in later years brought them into positions of national prominence and authority. For many who fought in Vietnam, this wound never healed.
From beginning to end, many Americans supported the war. Patriotic and fervently anti-communist Americans insisted it was a fight that had to be won. Many Catholics supported their Vietnamese coreligionists who were overrepresented in the Saigon government. But as the war went on and the draft’s unfairness became more apparent, and as thousands upon thousands of men came home in caskets, many Americans turned against the war. In 1971, the New York Times published information from a trove of stolen classified documents that revealed long-suppressed information about the war, its origins, and its conduct. The Pentagon Papers made it plain the Johnson administration had lied early and often about the war, and the Nixon administration was no better in this regard.
On April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell to the victorious North Vietnamese Army, David Brinkley, NBC’s widely respected evening news anchor, broadcast a commentary from Arlington National Cemetery, the thousands of graves behind him calling silent attention to the terrible cost of the Vietnam War. “America did not lose this war,” Brinkley said, “because we never tried to win it. Instead, we tried to help our ally, South Vietnam, until we decided not to.”
Whether the Vietnam War was a colossal mistake, a noble cause, or something else, for decades the patriotism and personal sacrifice of the men and women who fought in this war were largely ignored by the American public. More than a few returning soldiers were vilified as baby killers and war criminals, including me, by no less than Norman Mailer. The wounded and broken among us were shamefully ignored by our countrymen and government. Our individual struggles to reintegrate with society were magnified by merciless media attention. For decades, a staple character in Hollywood films was the crazed Vietnam veteran. If a Vietnam veteran assaulted his wife, if another was homeless and mentally ill, if a third was arrested for a crime, then every Vietnam veteran was assumed to be dangerous, demented, or damaged in some way. The kindest labeled us as soldiers of a lost cause.
In the November 13, 2015, issue of the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Neil Sheehan, who had reported from the 1965 Ia Drang valley battlefield, wrote:
It always galls me when I hear or read of the men who fought the Second World War as “the greatest generation.” On the first day of the battle [of Ia Drang], Nov. 14, [1965,] . . . C (“Charlie”) Company [of the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, was assigned to defend] the south and southwest sides of the [battalion] perimeter. . . . None of the officers and men of the company had ever seen serious combat before. Shortly after dawn the next morning, hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers . . . rose out of the elephant grass and rushed C Company’s foxhole line, seeking to overwhelm it. When the fight was over, Charlie Company had ceased to exist. Of the approximately 100 men who had seen daybreak, fewer than 40 were not wounded. There were gaps in the foxhole line where the dead and wounded lay. But the North Vietnamese attackers never [broke] through that line in sufficient numbers to threaten the battalion position, because the men of C Company, First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, fought and died like the young lions they were.
They, and so many others who fought in Vietnam, were as great as any generation that preceded them. Their misfortune was to draw a bad war, an unnecessary war, a mistake by American politicians and statesmen, for which they paid.5
If Vietnam was a lost cause and “a bad” and “unnecessary war,” that was hardly the fault of those who left homes and loved ones behind to fight for objectives that a lawfully elected government chose to pursue. Nevertheless, the false and misleading generalization persists that Vietnam veterans are a legion of broken soldiers, sailors, and marines, a lost generation, warped and wounded by wartime experiences and rejected by the greater society.
Only now, some fifty-five years after the first of our fighting men went off to that war, is it possible to see the real accomplishments of America’s Vietnam generation. Like our parents, the so-called Greatest Generation, our efforts have transformed America in myriad ways: America is immeasurably richer, fairer, and better because of the Vietnam generation’s contributions.
In the following pages, you will meet some Vietnam veterans, men and women who sacrificed for their country, who returned to a nation that turned its backs on them, and who nevertheless went on with their lives, made further sacrifices and important contributions to their families, to their communities, and to the commonweal. We are living proof that the Vietnam generation is every bit as worthy of respect and admiration as the generations that preceded us.
Marvin J. Wolf
Asheville, North Carolina
April 2019