As the South’s politicians, press, and public debated the wisdom of going to war in Vietnam, southern soldiers served, died, and won Medals of Honor in Vietnam in numbers substantially exceeding Dixie’s share of the nation’s population. This participation reflected the region’s devotion to its military tradition; intense concern for patriotism, honor, and manhood; and depressed economic conditions. Although the experiences and responses of southern warriors generally coincided with those of other American troops, they often did so in a more pronounced fashion. Similar to the South’s political figures, southern soldiers repeatedly played a central role in important decisions and events and, therefore, merit attention in this account. General William Westmoreland commanded US forces from 1964 through 1968 and helped devise the military’s flawed ground strategies. Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. “Hal” Moore led his air cavalry battalion against North Vietnamese regulars in the epic 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley, a confrontation with significant, long-term implications. National Guard troops from Moore’s hometown of Bardstown, Kentucky, were among the small number of guard units that saw action in Vietnam, and they endured the war’s single most costly combat losses for a guard contingent. Two southerners, Lieutenant William Calley and Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, were key actors during the My Lai massacre, the most infamous American-inflicted atrocity of the war. And Jim Webb and Gustav Hasford, both southern marines, wrote much discussed novels based on their combat experiences.
Any examination of southern service in the war zone must include women, African Americans, and Chicanos. Women went to Vietnam voluntarily as members of the military and in nonmilitary capacities such as the Red Cross. Both their motives for going and many aspects of their experiences often resembled those of southern men. Although Dixie’s black soldiers shared many of these motives and experiences, issues of race, both within the United States and during their tours of duty in Vietnam, produced more divergent involvements and responses. As was true of African Americans at home, black soldiers confronted race-related challenges and discrimination, ranging from poverty, substandard education, and all-white draft boards in the United States to combat assignments, standards of dress and appearance, and discriminatory military justice and discipline in Vietnam. Southern Chicanos, primarily from Texas and far less numerous than southern blacks, endured similar discrimination based on race, class, and lack of educational opportunity.
In his excellent book Working-Class War, Christian G. Appy has argued that class, rather than geography, was the most influential predictor of who would go to Vietnam and serve in combat. Eighty percent of Vietnam soldiers had no more than a high school education. Reflecting their working-class status, most had neither the inclination nor the means to pursue higher education and with it a deferment from the draft or a more favorable, noncombat assignment in the military. Appy estimates that the enlisted portion of the US forces in Vietnam was approximately “25 percent poor, 55 percent working class, and 20 percent middle class, with a statistically negligible number of wealthy.” They were also young, averaging nineteen years of age versus twenty-six in World War II. Significantly, Appy asserts that “rural and small town America” may have lost more of its sons in Vietnam than inner cities or blue-collar suburbs. Appy also observes that soldiers “came from neither cities, suburbs, nor small towns but from the hundreds of places in between,” such as Talladega, Alabama, with a population of around 17,500, one-fourth of whom were African Americans. With its predominantly working-class population and approximately only one-third of its men having graduated from high school, Talladega lost fifteen soldiers in Vietnam, three times the national average. By contrast, Mountain Brook, a wealthy Birmingham suburb with virtually no blacks and a high school graduation rate of 90 percent, lost none.1
Without disputing Appy’s emphasis on class, the fact that the South remained the nation’s poorest and most rural section during the 1960s and early 1970s argues for also applying a regional approach and against deemphasizing geography. Although the South had made great economic strides after 1941, Dixie’s per capita income in 1960 was still only two-thirds the national average of $2,216. By 1960, 58 percent of southerners (an increase of 20 percent since 1940) lived in cities; but here again, the South lagged behind national norms. In 1960, only five of the nation’s thirty largest cities were in the South, and all of them had significantly lower population densities than major urban areas in other regions. Therefore, the South’s comparatively poorer, more rural young men were, even by Appy’s criteria, more likely to serve and die in Vietnam. These demographic considerations, when added to the region’s military tradition, exuberant patriotism, sense of duty and honor, and faith-based aversion to communism, explain why southerners went to Vietnam in numbers that significantly exceeded Dixie’s proportion of the national population. The eleven states of the former Confederacy plus Kentucky provided 30 percent (884,000 of 2,926,000) of the soldiers who served in Vietnam, even though the South was home to only 22 percent of the nation’s population. As noted above, southerners also died and earned Medals of Honor in similarly disproportionate numbers. Approximately 27 percent (16,437 of 58,220) of the military deaths and 28 percent (68 of 256) of Medal of Honor winners came from among the region’s warriors.2
Diverse motivations led southern soldiers to war in Vietnam. Many were simply drafted or enlisted under the threat of the draft. For example, when faced with the draft, Dr. Timothy Lockley explained his decision to enlist in the air force: “I didn’t mind serving my country but I’ll be damned if I was going to die for it.” Other, blue-collar youth were unmistakably “working-class” warriors who either lacked the funds for college or could see no value in the experience. Raymond Wilson from near Birmingham “knew damn well” he was going to be drafted. So he enlisted with the hope of a preferable military assignment, and “the next thing you know you end up in Vietnam.” Voicing the political naïveté of so many of his contemporaries, Bob Foley recalled, “I felt like . . . your parents will fuck you over, but your country won’t do you wrong. It [the war] must be a good cause if we’re sending people over there. I felt like maybe it was a good cause. . . . I knew I didn’t much want to go, but there was really no choice.” With equally limited choices, poor blacks and Chicanos could see the military as a way to escape poverty and racism and perhaps find a better life. Charles Richardson minced no words: “I went to Vietnam to escape Selma.” And Charles, a Mexican American whose family picked cotton in South Texas, sought to “get away,” since “it didn’t seem like I’d go anywhere else in my situation.”3
Young southerners generally subscribed to the official Cold War explanation that the United States was fighting to halt North Vietnamese communist aggression and to preserve a “free, democratic . . . society” in South Vietnam. They had also imbibed the nation’s “victory culture,” which prompted young American men to see war and themselves in the romantic and heroic images of Audie Murphy or John Wayne triumphing over evil enemies. J. Houston Matthews, a marine from South Carolina, was “intrigued by what I thought was the glamour of war.” For young men who had grown up in the nation’s most vocally patriotic region, the call of duty also proved compelling. As one Tennessee army officer explained, he had come to view “this type of service as a duty and obligation” and even worried that he “might miss . . . the action.” Marshall Paul from Lubbock, who served in both the airborne and special forces, declared, “Part of me just flat out wanted an adventure”; but he also sought to “experience war at the lowest, . . . grittiest level,” to “prove to myself that I was a man.” Another Tennessee soldier appropriately added a religious dimension: his “primary reason for fighting was to keep the country [South Vietnam] free. So that they would have the option to become Christians.”4
Dixie’s military tradition reinforced all of these motives. Max Cleland from Lithonia, Georgia, spoke for many. During World War II, his father and four uncles from both sides of the family had volunteered to fight Hitler; and Cleland “loved the idea of being a soldier”; flourished as an army ROTC cadet at Stetson University in Deland, Florida; and extended his army obligation to do his “duty” in Vietnam. Larry Gwin, a Yale graduate, also sought an ROTC commission that would lead to service in Vietnam. Gwin “went because my father had gone, and his father before him, and before that, my great grandfather, who’d fought for the Confederacy. . . . I was intrigued . . . by the . . . question of how I’d measure up in combat—a question that would not have concerned me, I’m sure, if I hadn’t been aware of my father’s proud service in the ‘Good War.’”5
Prominent southern devotion to honor, manhood, patriotism, and military tradition were evident in Dixie’s professional soldiers. William C. Westmoreland, a native of South Carolina and the commander of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), between 1964 and 1968, has been aptly described as coming “close to embodying the perfect image of the southern warrior.” In his report on the war, Westmoreland emphasized the “appreciation and respect” he had gained in the 1930s for West Point’s “code of ethics” as exemplified in its “honor system.” Westmoreland also warmly endorsed Robert E. Lee’s assertion that duty was the “sublimest word in our language.” Following his second year at the academy, Westmoreland visited his great uncle in South Carolina. Since the cantankerous Confederate veteran had fought for Lee at Gettysburg and Appomattox, the young cadet hesitated to tell his uncle that he was attending the school that had trained “Grant and Sherman.” After a long pause, Uncle White replied, “That’s all right, son. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson went there too.” Thirty years later, southerners retained no such ambivalence regarding the US Military Academy. As Westmoreland served as commandant of cadets in 1961, a student of the entering class of 1966 observed, “the people of rural Arkansas accorded West Pointers something close to demigod status.”6
Certainly Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, the commander of US troops at Ia Drang in October–November 1965, had exhibited no such ambivalence. In 1940 Moore, then seventeen, moved from his home in Bardstown, Kentucky, to Washington, DC, to enhance his prospects for an appointment to West Point. While working in a US Senate office two years later, he secured his coveted endorsement from a Georgia, rather than Kentucky, congressman. Moore later recalled having been “raised right in the South” with “Yes Ma’am, No Ma’am,” which enabled him to impress the “nice southern lady” who turned out to be the Georgia congressman’s sister. Perhaps even more than Westmoreland, Moore personified the southern warrior. Rejecting the common practice among US commanders in South Vietnam of observing troop maneuvers and battles from a helicopter, Moore opted to “lead from the front.” He deemed it essential “to get on the ground” with his “troops to see and hear what was happening.” It was “too easy to be crisp, cool, and detached at 1,500 feet; . . . too easy to make mistakes” that were “fatal” to the soldiers “far below in the mud, the blood, and the confusion.” Moore recognized but brushed aside the danger: “Any officer or any soldier for that matter, who worries that he will be hit, is a nuisance. The task and your duty come first.” The colonel demonstrated these convictions when General Westmoreland summoned him to Saigon for a briefing in the midst of the fighting at Ia Drang. Moore, who had flown into the battle on the first helicopter, refused to leave his troops: “I made it very clear that this battle was not over and that my place was with my men—that I was the first man of my battalion to set foot in this terrible killing ground and I damned well intended to be the last man to leave.”7
Numerous southerners echoed these attitudes and added others. From a military family, Richard C. Ensminger joined the marines with a belief in “God and country” and the conviction that it was his “duty to go over there and fight for my country.” George Riels, a Mississippian who like Ensminger lost a leg in the war, agreed that going to Vietnam was “the patriotic thing to do.” Although he had not especially wanted to go to Vietnam, Manuel Valdez, from Texas, had looked up to his father “because he had been a soldier” and was “very impressed with the pride marines seemed to take in themselves.” Being from a typically southern family influenced Houston Matthews; but like so many other Americans growing up in the 1950s, he was drawn by “the glamour of war, John Wayne and all that sort of thing.”8
A far smaller number of southerners, much to their surprise, went to war in 1968 when their reserve and guard units were activated. Prior to the communist Tet Offensive in South Vietnam in early 1968, President Johnson had consistently ignored the military’s calls to activate the National Guard and reserves. He feared that doing so would undermine his efforts to minimize public and political unrest at home and to prevent direct Soviet or Chinese military involvement in Vietnam. Therefore, until April 1968, the guard and the reserves had served as refuges from the draft and service in Vietnam. This changed abruptly when Johnson responded to Tet by activating 24,500 men, some 600 of whom were members of the Kentucky National Guard, 138th Artillery, Second Howitzer Battalion, based in Louisville, Kentucky, and neighboring small towns. Jerry Janes from Bardstown, whose young men made up Battery C of the battalion, spoke for the overwhelming majority of the guardsmen when he recalled, “I just couldn’t believe it. . . . In all honesty, I joined the Guard to beat the draft. I thought I could serve six months and then be home, a weekend warrior situation, . . . and possibly stay out of Vietnam.” Sam Filiatreau had felt “secure in the fact that I was in the Guard unit, and I thought I was protected.” Although he had not been “anti-Vietnam,” Filiatreau certainly had not wanted “to go there.” But once called, he “felt patriotic. I felt that it was our duty to be there.” Interestingly, not all of the Kentucky guardsmen responded this positively. By 1968, after nearly 37,000 American deaths in Vietnam, little military or political progress, and widespread disaffection at home, more than one hundred of the battalion members sued to block the unit’s activation and deployment to Vietnam. Although a leader in the legal challenge declared the group sought only “to present the background of why our call-up was illegal” rather than “to oppose the war in Vietnam,” the objective of avoiding the fight was apparent. Their response was hardly surprising or unique.9
Significantly, southern women, who were not subject to the draft and, therefore, went to Vietnam by choice, echoed many of the men’s perspectives. Duty, patriotism, curiosity, adventure, and the opportunity to escape domestic gender constraints beckoned. Nancy Randolph, an army nurse from Ravenscroft, Tennessee, had originally enlisted in return for the military paying for her final year of nursing school. Once on active duty as a lieutenant, she decided, “If I was . . . the true army nurse that I should be . . . , I needed to go to war just like everyone else,” since “the army and soldiers needed me.” She was also “curious” and drawn to the fight and the “glory” associated with being a combat nurse. Brenda Sue Castro, the daughter of an Alabama coal miner, joined the Army Nurses Corp in 1967 because she “wanted to go to Vietnam.” With “American men . . . being shot and killed in a foreign country,” Castro believed “American women should be there to take care of them.” Becky Pietz, who went to Vietnam as a Red Cross social worker, derived her “patriotism” from her middle-class Richmond family, which traced its roots to Robert E. Lee. Like so many southern men, she was “drawn” to the military. She too had been seduced by “Audie Murphy and John Wayne movies”; “even if you’re a girl,” she recalled, there was the attraction of being “a hero somewhere.” In grand southern tradition, she sought the approval of her father, who responded when he learned Becky was going to Vietnam, “Well, if I had a son I’d expect him to go.” Karen K. Johnson, whose father had been killed in World War II, pronounced her induction into the Women’s Army Corp “the proudest day of my life. . . . I was gung-ho and I was doing it for my father.” Lola McGourty joined the Army Nurses Corps in 1967 after graduating from Northwestern State University to escape the boredom of Shreveport, Louisiana. Cheri Rankin, a Floridian, went to Vietnam as part of the Red Cross SRAO (Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas) Program, more commonly known as “Donut Dollies.” Rankin was specifically concerned about her marine brother, who was serving in Vietnam, but more generally sought “adventure” and an understanding of “what was going on” in Vietnam. Although Rankin sensed that the “war was wrong,” she hoped to support the troops.10
In contrast to southern white women, Dixie’s African Americans, especially the men, had dramatically fewer options. Like blacks nationally, southern blacks were far more likely than their white counterparts to be drafted, to serve in combat, and to be wounded or killed. Between 1965 and 1970, blacks constituted just over 11 percent of the nation’s draft-eligible men. During that period, the percentage of African Americans drafted ranged from 13.4 to 16 (1967 and 1970) of the total number of draftees. For example, African Americans comprised 23.7 percent of the population of Shreveport, Louisiana, and 41.3 percent of the town’s draftees. In 1965 black soldiers manned 20 percent of the combat slots in Vietnam, and in 1965 and 1966, they suffered 25 percent of the battlefield deaths.11
Class and black poverty went far toward explaining these numbers. Like the South’s poor whites, southern African Americans possessed few of the resources that enabled middle- and upper-class whites to avoid the draft. For example, only 5 percent of blacks nationally went to college during the Vietnam War, and percentages were even lower in the South. Race compounded the likelihood of blacks serving in Vietnam. In 1966, African Americans comprised 1.3 percent of draft boards nationally, and six southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) had no black board members. Reform of this structural bias was halting. In 1968, three blacks were appointed to boards in Alabama, fifteen in Georgia, and thirty-five in Arkansas; but two years later South Carolina had only six black board members and Mississippi had none. Within this skewed institutional structure, some white southern draft board members were overtly and aggressively racist. Jack Helms, who headed Louisiana’s largest draft board from 1957 through 1967, was a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan and characterized the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) as a “communist inspired anti-Christ, sex-perverted group of tennis short beatniks whose sole purpose is to cause strife in our beloved land.” Civil rights activist Julian Bond observed, “Each draft notice begins: ‘Friends and neighbors,’ but none of my friends are on my local draft board.” Indeed, he might have characterized the board members as enemies, as his board chairman referred to Bond as a “nigger” and admitted that he had “always regretted” that the board had “missed [drafting] him.” Southern draft boards caught many other civil rights workers whose challenges to Dixie’s racial practices and institutions clearly earned them induction notices.12
African Americans’ inability to join reserve and National Guard units compounded the inequalities of the draft since access to reserve and guard units essentially served as safe alternatives for middle-class whites. Although this unfairness was true nationally, it was especially apparent in the South. As the war got under way in 1965, Alabama, with 30 percent of its population black, had fourteen African American guards. Georgia had three. Four years later Mississippi, composed of 42 percent African Americans, had enrolled one black among the state’s 10,365 guard slots.13
Responding to these economic and racial conditions, southern blacks also went to war for diverse reasons. Commissioned and noncommissioned military careerists, much like their white contemporaries, viewed the war as a patriotic and professional obligation. Colonel Fred Cherry, who had grown up as one of eight children in rural Virginia, had joined the air force in 1951 to become a pilot. Marine sergeant major Edgar A. Huff, the first black marine to gain that rank, had been earning $1.40 per day when he joined the corps in Birmingham in 1942. Navy captain Norman A. McDaniel from Fayetteville, North Carolina, had earned his commission in ROTC at North Carolina A&T in the mid-1960s and voiced this sense of duty. Upon learning in early 1966 that he would be flying missions over North Vietnam, McDaniel “felt good, really proud to be part of it. The Communists were attempting to take over South Vietnam. I felt that we had a good cause.” African American women careerists acted from similar motives. Doris I. “Lucki” Allen had graduated from Tuskegee Institute and joined the army in 1950. An intelligence specialist, Allen volunteered for Vietnam duty in 1967 because she was a “soldier” and the “country was at war.” She also believed she had an “expertise that was needed . . . that my intelligence would save lives.” Pinkie Houser, the youngest child of an Alabama cotton farmer, reenlisted for six years as a personnel sergeant in the army in 1968 in return for assignment to Vietnam. It was what Houser “had to do” since she did not believe she was “serving” her country adequately through her work at Fort Knox.14
Other, primarily younger, black enlisted men more closely represented the bulk of southern African American soldiers who served in Vietnam. Charles Strong, the son of migrant workers in Florida, was drafted when he could not raise the twenty-seven dollars needed to enroll in junior college. Strong had no clear opinion on the war but considered “two years in the service” preferable to “five years in prison.” Moreover, he had a duty and an obligation, having “enjoyed a whole lot of fruits” of American society. Reginald “Malik” Edwards from Louisiana was the first person in his family to graduate from high school, but he had no money for college: “I only weighed 117 pounds, and nobody’s gonna hire me. . . . So the only thing left to do was to go into the service.” He chose the marines because they were “bad”; they “built men. Plus just before I went in they had all these John Wayne movies on every night.”15
Edwards’s references to building men and John Wayne were consistent with the assertion that the “U.S. military was selling manhood during the Vietnam War, and African American men were eager to buy.” Lewis Lowe II, whose Alabama parents had to sign for his enlistment in the marines at the age of seventeen, acted on a similar “John Wayne complex.” While admitting his naïveté and demonstrating the military’s appeal to black manhood, Terry Whitmore was more blunt. He admitted to being a “dumb motherfucker” when he graduated from high school in Memphis in 1966, wondering what “Sam [would] want with me. A nobody. Just a poor-ass black on the block. Sam doesn’t even know I’m alive.” Whitmore promptly learned otherwise. Facing the draft, he opted for three years in the marines, “the real military,” rather than any “cheap imitations.”16
Bill Henry Terry Jr. from Birmingham quit high school and enlisted at the age of nineteen. Terry recognized he could not go to college and would almost certainly be drafted, but he also envisioned the military as the career through which he could support his wife and young son. Robert L. Mountain from Georgia naively left Savannah State College to realize his dream of playing trombone in the army band. He ended up in Vietnam as an army mortar man. In a declaration that could have been substituted for that of Bob Foley, the white Alabamian, Luther C. Benton III from Portsmouth, Virginia, went to Vietnam “to see what the war was all about. And I thought that if we were there, then it must be right. We have to stop Communism before it gets to America. I was just like all the other dummies.”17
Mexican Americans in South Texas were, like African Americans, more likely to be poor, to have received substandard education, and to have little chance of going to college. They also faced discriminatory draft boards overwhelmingly composed of whites. Therefore, they too were more likely to be drafted or to enlist under threat of the draft. Most simply accepted this fate, but many did so with the hope also held by poor southern whites and blacks that the military offered the prospect of upward social mobility—a way up and out—and greater equality. Where else, asked one “cotton picker,” could he have the “freedom” to tell “white people what to do”? The majority of Mexican Americans also believed, as S. B. Sanchez, a Texan, wrote from Vietnam, that the United States was a “great country” and that all Americans should be ready to “bear arms . . . to defend our freedom and heritage.” Last, but certainly not least important, “warrior patriotism” was a central facet of Mexican American culture. Roy Benavidez, who was wounded in Vietnam, explained, “It was important to me to prove that I wasn’t afraid of anything, much less anybody.” When Douglas MacArthur Herrera challenged this ethos and refused orders for Vietnam, his father, a proud World War II veteran, was aghast, since no Herrera had ever “refused to serve his country.” The elder Herrera was convinced their family would “never live it down” and would “probably have to move out of Texas to get over the embarrassment and humiliation.” The impact of these economic and social conditions and Mexican American attitudes was devastating. Chicanos composed 10–12 percent of the population of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas but incurred nearly 20 percent of those states’ casualties in Vietnam from 1961 through 1969. The figures for Texas were even worse: 22 percent for January 1961—February 1967 and 25 percent for December 1967–March 1969.18
Upon their arrival in South Vietnam, southern soldiers, like their fellow American comrades, confronted a vastly different climate and culture. Despite coming from a warmer climate than most of their US counterparts, they too complained of the intense heat. Ann Powlas, an army nurse, recalled that it was “hot and humid in North Carolina” but “nothing compared” to what greeted her as she deplaned at Tan Son Nhut air base. The Vietnamese people and culture were even more foreign than the tropical climate. Although southerners had just left some of the poorest parts of the United States, they were shocked and appalled at Vietnamese living conditions and lifestyles. Again, like other Americans, southerners repeatedly commented on the stench that derived variously from mixtures of diesel fuel, animal and human waste, and cooking or rotten fish. Marine rifleman William U. Tant remembered landing at Danang on Christmas 1967: “It was hot, it stunk. I guess it was the buffalo crapping in that dirty rice paddy water. . . . And I thought, this is for real and I realized I didn’t really want to be there. I wanted to be home in Alabama, pulling corn for my daddy.” Ted A. Burton, an army medic from Tennessee, had a similar experience while riding in the back of a truck near Bien Hoa. Burton saw “pigs and hogs” running “through the houses,” and “about the first thing” he noticed “was a woman walking along the side of the road” who “just pulled up her britches leg and went to the bathroom. It was the stinkingest place I ever experienced. It was nasty. I didn’t know what to think. I . . . never knew nothing like that existed.” Pinkie Houser was equally appalled to find that the poverty-stricken Vietnamese ate fried roaches, dogs, and rats.19
American soldiers received virtually no training for interacting with Vietnamese civilians in this exceedingly alien country and culture. To do so in the midst of a guerrilla war in which US troops had great difficulty distinguishing the Vietcong from the remainder of the population produced a range of responses. Some Americans ended up hating all Vietnamese. Houser explained, “I shouldn’t hate them but again I think I have reason to because of the war.” A Tennessee veteran agreed that he “hated” not just the enemy but South Vietnamese generally. He complained that while the United States “was over there fighting the damn war for them,” the South Vietnamese were “lazy” and “wanted somebody to wait on ’em, take care of ’em.” While he and other US troops fought the war, the apparently ungrateful South Vietnamese were “spittin’ at us, throwing rocks at us.” A former Florida soldier agreed that the US allies “didn’t want us in Vietnam—they didn’t even want their own country. They wouldn’t fight for it.”20
Other southerners, while maintaining appropriate vigilance, even distrust, toward South Vietnamese civilians, had much greater sympathy for their plight. According to one Texan, “The trouble is, no one sees the Vietnamese as people. . . . Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you do to them.” Lieutenant John S. Candler from Atlanta recognized “those poor people were caught in the middle.” They just “wanted . . . to be left alone by us, the NVA, and the VC so they could farm their rice.” Another southern officer agreed, “They didn’t care who ran the government. . . . The important things in their life [were] their water buffalo, their children, and their ancestors that were buried in that area.” A Tennessee trooper concluded, “They’re people just like us. Wanting to live, . . . wanting to be happy.”21
Dixie’s soldiers were especially concerned about the children caught in the war zone. One officer remembered the children in an orphanage near Duc Hoa who were “so deprived and pitiful, they kinda tugged at your heartstrings.” Manny Valdez used his “spare time to work with children in friendly villages. . . . They were brown-faced; they reminded me of my brothers and sisters and cousins.” Southern nurses had a similar response. Eunice Splawn from Spartanburg, South Carolina, recalled that “you could lose your heart” to a wounded child, but she also warned there were others who could not be trusted. They would “absolutely rip the watch off your arm” or even “come up to you and throw a Molotov cocktail.” Children, like their parents, were caught between the Vietcong and their adversaries.22
Southern soldiers had no such ambivalent response to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN). Some agreed with General Westmoreland, who believed that the South Vietnamese soldiers were “doing their best” and had “progressed to a point” in 1967 that enabled the general to “visualize a U.S. withdrawal strategy.” Southerners who shared Westmoreland’s assessment pronounced the ARVN “good soldiers,” especially those with the “proper training,” but most of Dixie’s troops offered far less positive characterizations. They viewed the ARVN as noisy, undisciplined, untrustworthy, “lazy bastards” who were “not too keen on combat” and “would probably run” rather than fight. A Tennessee veteran recalled that the best allied soldiers he encountered “were the former Vietcong that worked for our side,” and a marine from the Volunteer State declared that he would “as soon shoot” the ARVN as the “bad guys” since he at least knew what the latter were “gonna do.” Without disagreeing with these scathing indictments, other southerners acknowledged that the young South Vietnamese soldiers had little idea what they were fighting for. All the common ARVN soldier understood was “that he was separated from his family” and likely to die for no clear cause or reason. By 1968, ARVN troops “were tired. . . . They didn’t care.”23
In contrast, southerners recognized that the Vietcong and NVA cared deeply. After watching a wounded Vietcong woman with a gunshot wound to the stomach walk off of a mountain near Danang, William Tant concluded, “If the women are this tough, how in the hell are we going to beat the men?” The North Vietnamese reminded this Memphis marine of his conception of “the old southern [Confederate] troops. . . . They was fighting for a cause they believed in and they just wasn’t going to give up.” Numerous other southern soldiers agreed. Louisiana lieutenant Richard A. Sones considered the NVA forces he opposed in the Plain of Reeds between Saigon and the Cambodian border to have been “patient. . . . well equipped . . . well disciplined” and prepared to “fight to the very end.” He was especially impressed by the enemy soldiers who hid “by lying under water, flat on their backs, breathing through a reed.” If the blast from a US air-boat blew them out of the water, “they would come up fighting.” It was “the most incredible sight” Sones had ever witnessed and led him to doubt that “you could ever find another army that disciplined.” Charles Strong, an army machine gunner, described an equally compelling story of an NVA soldier, “the bravest dude I had ever seen,” who held out in a tunnel for two hours despite numerous shrapnel wounds. He refused to “give up. . . . This man was willing to die for what he believed in.” Marine lieutenant Joe Biggers marveled similarly at a wounded enemy soldier tied to a tree so as to continue fighting to the death. These opponents were truly “hard core,” willing to “do anything to win.” Although less well trained and far less well equipped than the NVA, the Vietcong were elusive, skilled at camouflage and constructing booby traps, excellent marksmen, and also “terribly dedicated”—“very sneaky, . . . dirty, . . . tenacious.” A Tennessee veteran added another critical consideration: “Our enemy had been practicing war for a hell of a lot longer than we had. . . . They grew up at on-the-job training. . . . Hell, you were in their back yard. . . . They knew what it was all about.”24
Like their motivations for going to Vietnam and their impressions of their Vietnamese allies and enemies, southerners had diverse experiences in the war zone. Marine rifleman William Tant from Memphis captured this diversity perfectly when he observed, “Vietnam was not one war. It was a bunch of nasty little wars.” As was true for Americans overall, southern foot soldiers experienced the most intense combat. Dixie’s ground pounders repeatedly complained of a lack of sleep and exhaustion. Both officers and enlisted men reported that they regularly slept no more than four or five hours per night. Lieutenant Richard F. Timmons from Alabama was up three or four times during the night to check on his troops before rising at 4:30 A.M. for the day. Lieutenant John Robbins never turned in for the night “until everybody had a place . . . below the surface of the ground.” Richard C. Ensminger, a marine forward observer, recalled that he was “fortunate to get four hours of sleep a night” and that he often became “so tired” that he “started to act by instinct alone” in a war that had “become a sort of perpetual-motion killing machine.” Richard Sones, a platoon leader in the Mekong Delta, sometimes went “24 to 36 hours without even sleeping.”25
Long, hard days were not confined to those in the field. Army nurses routinely worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, and twenty-hour days were not uncommon. During Tet 1968, Brenda Sue Castro labored for “seventy-two straight hours without a break” at the Eighth Field Hospital in Nha Trang. Even the Tennessee army officer who helped oversee food distribution to one hundred thousand soldiers from the 504th Field Depot at Cam Ranh Bay worked twelve-hour days, six and a half days per week. At both recreation centers and on trips to fire bases, the Red Cross “Donut Dollies” regularly put in ten-hour days. Regardless of duty assignment, virtually all US soldiers stationed in country, even those on the large bases, “felt under . . . threat all the time.” As one officer observed, the enemy could launch mortars and rocket attacks against “our compound, even . . . the mess hall,” while his unit was “having noon chow.”26
With these long hours and the constant threat came the horrors of combat, injury, and death. Paul Aton, a Kentucky private who died in Vietnam, told his father in a July 1968 letter, “Combat isn’t like it is in the movies or TV. We get dirtier. . . . When you get hit there is a lot of blood and the men fight Hard on both sides, harder in real life though. . . . When you hump you sweat . . . in the movies you don’t see any sweat. Or here people don’t just die like flies. They have to fight to fall and they don’t give up. . . . War is hell.” Other soldiers remembered wearing the “same boots, the same shirt, the same pair of pants, the same socks,” during the first three months in Vietnam, or regularly spending sixty days in the field interspersed with only three days to “stand down” in the rear area.27
While in the field, the prospect of injury and death was ever-present. Some soldiers, like Paul Aton, did not survive. Others, such as George Watkins from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, or George Riels from Petal, Mississippi, survived but were horribly wounded. Watkins lost both eyes and both legs to a land mine, and Riels lost his left leg and was partially paralyzed after being shot. Even those who escaped such devastating injuries hardly returned unscathed. Their emotional scars could be exceedingly debilitating. Lewis Lowe, a black marine demolitions expert from Alabama, endured the incalculable stress of searching on his hands and knees for deadly booby traps and checking the internal organs of dead comrades for enemy-planted explosives. Mike Hill, a navy corpsman, recalled the “blood smell” and his stiffened, blood-soaked pants feeling like “cardboard”; and Ted Burton, an army medic who spent virtually all of his year in the field, believed “a good medic cared about his buddies and he got to them no matter what was happening.” Robert Strong asked, “Can you imagine walking around policing up someone’s body? . . . Maybe you find his arm here, his leg over there. Maybe you have to dig up someone’s grave.”28
Army nurses were also horrified at the injuries and deaths. A twenty-two-year-old Tennessee woman with no prior intensive care training confronted “total care patients” with “gross infections.” The young soldiers were “mutilated” but still conscious. She “ended up being their nurse, their mother, their sister, their girlfriend, their wife,” and the “emotional attachment . . . was just tremendous.” Brenda Sue Castro was similarly appalled by the formerly “healthy, ordinary kids . . . who were being blown apart,” and Pinkie Houser, a personnel officer, could not forget the terrible “smell of human flesh burning” as the limbs of American amputees were incinerated behind the hospital.29
Killing another human being was particularly traumatic. David Disney, a Kentucky soldier, described his first kill, a Vietcong who had gotten through the wire and was crawling toward Disney’s bunker: “God Dad I didn’t want to kill him, I shot the M-60 with a long burst and he fell. Dad I cried like a baby after it was all over.” Our captain “shook my hand and said I did a great job. Is killing great?” Manuel Valdez refused to follow orders to “eliminate the prisoners” his squad was holding near the DMZ in 1967. Still, “bodies were scattered throughout the village. Women and children were spared, for the most part. . . . Vietnam was a very brutal war that hardened a lot of people to the value of human life.” Robert Strong agreed and added that the brutality could make a soldier into “an animal” who began “to like to kill.” In retrospect, Strong was appalled that he could have “walked over” an NVA body and said, “‘That’s one motherfucker I don’t have to worry about.’ . . . It made me feel good to see a human life laying down there dead.”30
Religion was a prominent feature in the responses of many southern soldiers to these experiences. After being shot with a paralyzing round, the “first thing” George Riels did was “pray. I wasn’t no saint, but I was a Christian and was saved . . . and I read the Bible almost every night. I just turned it over to God” and declared, “Lord, it’s in your hands.” Ben Purcell, an infantry officer captured in South Vietnam and taken to Hanoi, where he survived sixty-two months of captivity (including the repercussions of two escape attempts), endured because of the “love that I knew Anne had for me and our children, and the love that I knew Christ had for both of us.” Fred Cherry, a fighter pilot and the senior African American POW, cited a similar Christian faith: “No matter how rough the tortures were, no matter how sick I became, . . . I would just pray to the Supreme Being each morning for the best mind to get through the interrogations, and then give thanks each night for makin’ it through the day.” For another black POW, Captain Norman Alexander McDaniel from North Carolina, the nearly seven years’ captivity tested his faith. After several years of fervent prayer and continued imprisonment, he asked: “Lord, why am I here? Why do you do this to me when I’ve been trying to do right all this time?” Following additional prayer and reflection, McDaniel decided he might not return to the United States “in the flesh, alive.” He came to understand “the children of God were not exempted from the trials and tribulations” of life. Thereafter, he decided, “if they take my mortal life, I’m still okay.” Houston Matthews, whose faith led him to become an Episcopal priest following his service as a marine rifleman, also questioned “the whole idea of war and why God could let these things happen.” Unlike McDaniel, he “didn’t feel that God was doing something terrible to us, but rather that we were doing something terrible to each other.” As with McDaniel, his faith prevailed. Following an injury in which he lost an eye and a leg, Matthews believed his “spiritual side . . . allowed the emotional and psychological sides of me to be healed.”31
Race and racial attitudes were also integral to southern soldiers’ responses to service in Vietnam. Although one Tennessee soldier declared “as far as racial discrimination, the only race that was considered inferior were the Vietnamese,” the tensions among Americans were also evident. In the throes of combat, American whites and blacks generally cooperated and worked effectively together, as the mutual pursuit of survival rendered the battlefield a “place of relative equality.” Away from the battlefield, their interactions were often far more tense and conflicted, especially after 1968 and Reverend King’s assassination and as the war slowly wound down and many more politically radical blacks were sent to Vietnam. African Americans bridled at southern whites flying Confederate flags, the frequency of racial slurs, and, in the wake of King’s death, the spectacle of anti–civil rights white soldiers donning Klan dress at Que Viet and burning crosses at Cam Ranh Bay. One black soldier declared he should fight under the “American flag” rather than having “to serve under the Confederate flag, or with it,” and another believed “some stupid people are still fighting the Civil War.” Black soldiers also contended with an overwhelmingly white officer corps, a military justice system that led to African Americans being more frequently charged and imprisoned, and the reality of blacks seeing combat in numbers that exceeded their proportion of the American population. Southern whites in turn complained of African American clannishness, the brothers’ use of elaborate black power salutes and handshakes, blaring soul music, and posters depicting Malcolm X or black fists.32
Within this general framework, interesting and provocative individual relationships and reactions developed on both sides of the racial divide. Some of these interactions conformed to long-standing patterns of southern race relations. A white soldier from Louisiana informed Sergeant Allen Thomas Jr. that he would not “take orders from a nigger,” and a Mississippi trooper told Thomas, “For a nigger you’re a pretty good guy. If you were white we could be friends.” Other interactions were more positive. Marine first lieutenant Archie “Joe” Biggers from Colorado City, Texas, found that “southerners at the first sign of a black officer being in charge of them were somewhat reluctant. But then, when they found that you know what’s going on and you’re trying to keep them alive, then they tried to be best damn soldier you’ve got.” Two white southerners confirmed Biggers’s perception. William Tant recalled the esteem in which he held Levi Jones, his black staff sergeant: “I probably have more respect for that man . . . than any man I’ve ever met in my life, which is ironic, me being from Alabama and supposed to be prejudiced.” Shortly after Reverend King’s assassination in March 1968, Sergeant Philip Woodall, a member of the 101st Airborne, wrote to his dad in Memphis recounting the death of his black lieutenant, Gary Scott, from Rochester, New York. Woodall confided, “He was a fine man, a good leader.” While the United States mourned the death of Dr. King, Woodall would “mourn the deaths of the real leaders for peace, the people who give the real sacrifice, people like Lt. Scott.”33
On an even more basic level of daily interaction, black and white southerners sometimes revised their racial perspectives. Robert Strong from Florida grieved when Joe, “an all right guy from Georgia,” was killed. Joe “talked with that ‘ol dude’ accent” and came off as “a redneck, ridge runnin’ cracker. But he was the nicest guy in the world.” During time away from the front, Joe tended to drink and “go around the brothers and say, ‘Hi there brother man.’” When the black soldiers immediately bristled, Strong intervened and assured them “Joe was all right” even though “his accent was just personal.” Charlie Earl Bodiford, a marine machine gunner from Alabama who “had been brought up with that line between blacks and whites,” also moved beyond his initial prejudices. Bodiford’s response was stereotypical when his black squad leader came into his tent, lay down, and put his head on the Alabamian’s stomach. Bodiford screamed, “What the hell is this? I’ll tear your ass out of its frame. . . . I ain’t your goddamn pillow.” His black squad leader replied, “No problem, man,” and left. Another white, who had observed the clash, suggested, “That might be the same dude who saves your ass someday.” After some reflection, Bodiford agreed and recognized “there was no racial trouble in the company,” that everyone “was going to eat the same C-rations . . . and we didn’t have any room for trouble.”34
This reality of no room for trouble was particularly evident to Colonel Fred V. Cherry from Virginia and Lieutenant Porter A. Halyburton from neighboring North Carolina when they were thrown together in a North Vietnamese POW camp. Halyburton, a navy navigator in a 4F4B Phantom fighter, was shot down on October 17, 1965; five days later, Cherry, the USAF pilot of an F-105, suffered the same fate. Cherry was the first African American POW. In late November, the North Vietnamese put these two American flyers together in the same cell in Cu Loc Prison in southwest Hanoi. They lived together for the next eight months. Their captors told Halyburton, “You must care for him. You must be his servant”; and Cherry believed that the Vietnamese did this purposefully, expecting to exploit the anticipated friction between the black and white soldiers, who could not “possibly get along.” There were initial tensions. Cherry suspected that Halyburton was a “French spy” meant “to bleed me of information.” Having encountered no black pilots or officers in the navy, Halyburton needed time to be sure that Cherry’s story was genuine. After several days of trading probing questions, the two built mutual trust.35
Both men were in terrible condition as they began their time together. Although Halyburton had far fewer physical injuries, “the constant interrogation and indoctrination” had taken a toll, leaving him “about at the end of my rope.” Cherry had endured the same regimen, but his plight was significantly worsened by the extensive injuries he had suffered while parachuting from his plane—including a broken shoulder, wrist, ankle, and ribs and extensive infections that followed a nonsterile operation.36
Completely contrary to North Vietnamese expectations, the two southerners proved crucial to one another’s survival. Halyburton credited Cherry with turning his “life around.” Upon seeing the black officer, he said to himself, “God, this guy’s in a lot worse shape than I am and he’s not complaining.” Having been in isolation and “out of touch with other people,” Halyburton had begun “to feel pretty sorry” for himself, but “taking care of Fred gave me a sense of purpose outside of my own survival.” Indeed, the union was “liberating” and moved Halyburton toward the idea of a POW “brotherhood” in which the prisoners “would do anything for each other.” Cherry, in turn, had no doubt that the white navigator was “responsible” for his survival. Over their eight months together, Halyburton shared his food with Cherry, used his clothes to cushion the terrible sores all over Cherry’s body, took Cherry to the slop bucket, and literally washed him from head to toe. When they were separated after those eight months, Cherry endured the “most depressing evening of my life.” He had “never hated to lose any body so much” in his “entire life.”37
Although service in Vietnam fostered respect and even friendship among individual southern whites and blacks, the war experience yielded no such general transformation in southern society. Unlike in the aftermath of the two world wars, no returning black veterans were murdered while still in uniform, but they hardly returned to a suddenly more accepting South. In 1967 a white Alabamian interviewed in Vietnam declared he would “rather go into battle” with blacks “than anyone else,” but he also admitted that once back home he would have virtually no interaction with African Americans. Black veterans often experienced southern responses more hostile than the absence of social interaction. After service in the infantry, Roosevelt Gore returned to live and work in his hometown of Mullins, South Carolina. When he attempted to shoot pool in the Mullins Grill, the owner informed him, “Niggers ain’t allowed to come in here,” and he was promptly arrested and charged with inciting a riot. Another black veteran in uniform stopped at a roadside café en route to Fort Bragg, only to be denied service at this ostensibly “private club.” When he asked if that designation was a way to exclude “black people,” the proprietor admitted, “OK, we don’t serve niggers.” An all-white VFW post in northern Kentucky refused to accept Sergeant Allen Thomas as a member, directing him instead to join a black post. Retired sergeant major Edgar Huff encountered even greater hostility after he settled in Hubert, North Carolina, near Camp Lejeune. As he, his wife, and some friends sat on the patio of the Huff house, four white marines drove by and threw white phosphorous grenades at the house and cars. A naval investigator later told Huff the attackers said they “didn’t understand how a nigger could be living” in such a nice house, “sitting out there eating on a nice lawn, under the American flag” the sergeant major flew daily.38
Just as southerners had served in diverse capacities in Vietnam, they also had varying reactions to the war and its personal impact. Virtually all would have agreed with Ernest Peoples, a helicopter pilot from Beaumont, Texas, who concluded, “A person cannot go through a war, . . . and live with death every day and not be affected by it.” Captain Rodney R. Chastant from Mobile concurred in an October 1967 letter to his parents: “As I read your letters, I am a normal person. I’m not killing people, or worried about being killed.” Brenda Sue Castro asserted that the war had caused “every Vietnam nurse” she knew to grow “old before her time,” and Ann Powlas, a navy nurse from North Carolina, regretted that “you never really fit in again.” For Chastant, who died in battle three days after writing home, the impact was profoundly physical. Other southern warriors, such as George Watkins and George Riels, lost their sight or limbs. Still others simply lost weight. Richard C. Ensminger went to Vietnam weighing 235 pounds and returned at 175, “all solid muscle and red clay dirt.” Robert L. Powell’s physical transformation was comparable, 230 pounds to 170. But even for those who survived seemingly unscathed physically, the emotional toll could be far reaching.39
Most southerners took pride in their Vietnam service. Two army officers were representative. William D. Poynter from Arkansas considered his missions “important and vital to the U.S. Forces” and felt “very successful and proud” of his service even though the war’s outcome was akin to a “bad dream.” Joe N. Ballard, an African American platoon leader, was similarly chagrinned over the North Vietnamese victory but felt no “embarrassment about participating”; to the contrary, he “was quite proud to have served in Vietnam.” Southern enlisted men echoed these sentiments. James Bussey from Childress, Texas, and his family members were “very proud” of his service, that he was “a soldier and a veteran”; and Manny Valdez refused to “get involved in weighing the good and bad of the war” but “was proud that I had fought for my country.” Barry Campbell, a Kentucky infantry soldier, had given “110 percent the entire thirteen months and six days” and returned home with “no regrets at all, and if I had to do it again tomorrow I wouldn’t even hesitate.”40
For those who assessed the war’s good and bad more closely, most would have agreed with John Candler, who opined, “Our intentions were good, . . . just as good as they’ve been in most other wars.” George Riels concurred that the United States had intervened “for a good cause.” Even Jane Hodge, a nurse from North Carolina, who conceded that being “in Vietnam might not have been right,” “knew” that caring for American soldiers was entirely justified. Not all southerners agreed, and those who viewed the war less positively were often more outspoken and more vocal. Phil Woodall, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne, spoke to the war’s seeming pointlessness. He wrote his dad, “The country is no gain that I can see. . . . We’re fighting, dying, for a people who resent our being over here. The only firm reason I can find is paying with commie lives for U.S. lives.” Lieutenant Marion Lee Kemper, a marine platoon leader, was even more derogatory in summarizing “an abortion called Operation Jackson” in September 1966: “It was ‘very successful’ since we managed to kill a few probably innocent civilians, found a few caves and burned a few houses, all in a driving rainstorm.” A Tennessee noncom concluded that simply coming “back alive” made him “a winner.” Vietnam had been “like a bad marriage. Whatever the price, just pay it,” and get out. William S. Norman, a black naval officer from Virginia who served three tours, rose to the rank of lieutenant commander, and worked for Secretary of the Navy Admiral Elmo Zumwalt as a special assistant for minority affairs, asked far more probing questions by 1969 about the war’s origins and the rationale for US involvement. While agreeing with US policymakers that “there was Communist aggression from the North,” he deemed it “less clear” that the war was “a matter of Chinese or Soviet orchestration” as opposed to “the North and South going at it in a struggle for unification” or a “war of national liberation.” Given this ambiguity regarding the role of containment in Vietnam, Norman began to doubt whether the “war was worth the American effort,” the destruction, and the deaths in support of an “increasingly corrupt” South Vietnamese government.41
The bulk of southern soldiers, like residents of Dixie more generally, were convinced that the war could and should have been won. Donald L. Whitfield, an Alabama machine gunner, may have expressed the most unvarnished white southern perspective when he claimed, “White Americans, can’t nobody whip our ass. We’re the baddest son of a bitches on the face of this earth.” How then was the North Vietnamese, Vietcong victory to be explained? Southern warriors, both black and white, offered an array of explanations, most of which invoked variations on the “stab-in-the-back” theme. Fred Cherry asserted that the United States should have bombed “the military targets early [in the war]. . . . The war just went the way it did because the military was not allowed to win it.” William Norman agreed that the United States had fought in “a half-hearted way,” and a host of southerners elaborated. Some agreed with Cherry on the need for “saturation bombing” of the North in 1965; others emphasized the “restrictions” imposed by the “politicians back in Washington” concerning not just bombing targets but also the rules for firing on the enemy or pursuing the NVA and VC into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam.42
Southern officers found military personnel policies frustrating, even self-defeating. Richard Timmons, the CO of an infantry battalion, decried “the continuous conveyor belt of people coming and going,” which inhibited training and assessing his troops. Linwood Burney agreed after serving under three battalion commanders in a year. He believed it took “two or three months . . . to understand” their orders and intentions. Timmons also criticized the higher commands for being too “damn worried about management and poor resources” and too focused on “math formulas.” They needed to study “what causes soldiers to do their jobs. . . . how . . . you make those young studs hang with you whenever things fall apart.”43
Numerous southern soldiers also joined the majority of their neighbors at home in condemning antiwar protestors and men who avoided the fight. Protestors, they believed, had weakened the war effort by helping convince the US government not to provide the necessary materials. Demonstrators who carried NVA flags or desecrated the American flag “were aiding the enemy” and “killing . . . Americans.” Opponents of the war had pressured the United States “to walk out and have a no-win policy.” Pete Hendricks, a North Carolina fighter pilot, considered the protestors “lesser creatures” who had “failed” to meet their responsibilities to their country. The most bitter southern warriors would have lined the “draft dodgers” and “Jane Fonda . . . up against a wall” and shot them. But, as was the case with the general southern public, some soldiers were far less harsh. Many had no strong reaction—“I don’t remember having an opinion. I guess we were too scared”—or credited the demonstrators with recognizing that the war was a “wasted enterprise” the nation needed to end. Others believed that it took “a lot of guts” for dissidents to go to Canada or Sweden and potentially forfeit US citizenship and their futures. John Candler Jr. offered a thoughtful and ambivalent afterthought: “I can’t fully forgive the guys who got out of it. What right did they have to decide not to go over there? On the other hand, if the war was a wasted effort, and if the American people were not behind it, you’ve got to wonder, are the guys who went to Canada the smart ones? . . . In retrospect they may look like they made the right moral decision because of the way we conducted the war and let it be lost.”44
General William Westmoreland, easily the most important southern officer in the Vietnam War, agreed with Dixie’s troops that American soldiers should take “unmitigated pride” in their service since “it was not they that lost the war.” The conflict had not been “lost on the battlefield,” and “the record of the American military services of never having lost a war [was] still intact.” After Westmoreland graduated from West Point in 1936 as the class first captain, the academy’s highest honor, there followed distinguished service in World War II, important associations with Generals James Gavin and Maxwell Taylor, and stints at the Pentagon and as superintendent at the US Military Academy from 1960 to 1963. He was considered one of the army’s three top generals on the eve of major US military intervention in Vietnam, when Johnson and McNamara made him the MACV commander in January 1964. In addition to his exemplary record and Taylor’s endorsement, Westmoreland gained favor with Johnson as a fellow southerner and with McNamara because of his organizational skills, efficiency, and Harvard Business School degree, qualities that led some to dub him the “corporate general.”45
Westmoreland’s handling of the war has elicited intense criticism, prompting one author to brand him “The General Who Lost Vietnam.” According to this critique, Westmoreland used his broad discretion as commander to adopt the disastrous US attrition strategy, with its emphasis on search-and-destroy operations and body counts, and to neglect the task of training the ARVN and implementing pacification measures such as rooting out the VC infrastructure and attracting the loyalty of the rural South Vietnamese through civic action projects. While not entirely without merit, such criticisms are overly harsh. Westmoreland actually devised his basic strategies with the input and approval of the JCS and the US Pacific Command (CINCPAC) and, like the bulk of his US military contemporaries, favored the “American way of war” with its emphasis on offensive operations and the use of technology to destroy the enemy’s military capacity. The general understood the need for training the South Vietnamese military and pursuing pacification and instituted these programs along with aggressive efforts to find and destroy the VC and NVA. But pacification was always a secondary, complementary strategy. In addition to his preference for aggressive, offensive operations, the general worried appropriately that the American public would not tolerate an overly long war. Repeatedly asking, “How long have we got to win the war?” he believed that pacification would require too much time and American patience. Westmoreland also fought the war with significant structural impediments. For example, he had no access to the National Guard or the US Army Reserve; could not invade North Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos; had no authority over the ARVN; and did not have command over US air assets in Vietnam. Even more important, this focus on Westmoreland and various US strategies ignores the weakness of the South Vietnamese polity and military; the abilities and commitment of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong; and the physical, climatic, and cultural environment in which the war was fought—in short, the Vietnamese side of the equation. Collectively, these factors rendered the war virtually unwinnable, regardless of US strategies.46
That said, as US commander for four years, Westmoreland cannot be absolved of all responsibility for the American debacle in Vietnam. He, like Johnson and most Americans, had too much faith in US military power and technology and the military’s ability to achieve political ends through the use of force. The general also demonstrated little affinity or understanding of the Vietnamese, North or South, and their all-important cultural traits, historical experiences, aspirations, even failings. Despite his attention to pacification, nation building, and improving the ARVN, he, again like most US military leaders, believed that security had to be established in South Vietnam as a prerequisite to realizing these programs. Achieving this security for the South Vietnamese peasants reinforced his commitment to the American way of war and made search-and-destroy missions and massive use of American firepower the US military’s priority. Along with this priority came the devastating impact on both US ground soldiers and civilians in North and South Vietnam, an impact that often undermined the other two strategies in the South. Through his positive, but erroneous, estimates of US progress in Vietnam, Westmoreland also helped President Johnson mislead the American public, especially during late 1967. Indeed, the general’s underestimation of North Vietnamese and Vietcong strength and incorrect judgment that the principal communist threat was being directed at Khe Sanh contributed directly to American surprise and disillusionment in response to the Vietcong Tet Offensive launched in early 1968.47
None of these personal misjudgments appeared in Westmoreland’s interpretation of the war’s outcome. Instead, he laid the loss at the feet of others and demonstrated that he recognized neither limits on US power nor the importance of local circumstances. He sought to salvage his military reputation and personal honor, voiced the interpretation of much of the professional military, and expressed many of the “revisionist” arguments for how the war could and should have been won. Rather than calling for a declaration of war and instructing the American public on the gravity of the military situation and the need for sacrifice, President Johnson had downplayed the war and misled the nation. The media had also undermined the war effort. In Westmoreland’s opinion, American reporters had lacked the requisite understanding of military matters and emphasized the “negative” and “sensational” aspects of the war rather than portray events accurately. These flaws led the media to misrepresent the US—South Vietnamese victory in repulsing the 1968 Tet Offensive and to devote little attention to “pacification, civic action, medical assistance, the way life went on in a generally normal way for most of the people much of the time.” American protestors had further weakened the war effort. By signaling American divisions and “weakness” and a lack of national resolve, they encouraged the North Vietnamese and “helped prolong the war.” And the American public more generally lacked the understanding and patience required to sustain and win a war of pacification.48
All of these nonmilitary facets of Westmoreland’s classic “stab-in-the-back” explanation were important, but he reserved the most scathing critique for Johnson, Secretary McNamara, and other civilians in the White House and Department of Defense. Lacking respect for the military’s knowledge and experience, LBJ, McNamara, and civilian bureaucrats had micromanaged the war, denied him the necessary forces, and squandered opportunities for potentially decisive strikes against the VC and North Vietnam. Overall, Johnson and his advisors had, in Westmoreland’s opinion, limited the war in two crucial respects. First, the president’s gradual escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam, restrictions on eligible targets, and periodic bombing halts had allowed the North Vietnamese to preserve their fighting capacity and to escape the “excruciating pain” that would have led to US-dictated negotiations. Second, by placing Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam off-limits for sustained ground operations, LBJ and McNamara had allowed the enemy to retain sanctuaries critical to their survival.49
Unlike Johnson and McNamara, who deemed the limited war necessary to avoid a potential nuclear exchange with the Soviets or ground war with China, Westmoreland harbored no such apprehensions. The Sino-Soviet split and the internal turmoil accompanying China’s Cultural Revolution rendered these fears unfounded, even “paranoid.” The general further asserted that he had been denied the troops needed to implement his strategic vision properly. Despite having an American force of some five hundred thousand at his disposal at the height of the war, Westmoreland lamented never having “enough troops to maintain an American, Allied, or ARVN presence everywhere all the time”—a luxury few commanders have ever possessed. In his most debatable claim, he maintained that US military progress by the fall of 1967 had left the “North Vietnamese . . . in a position of weakness” and that a desperate Hanoi had gone “for broke” in mounting the Tet Offensive in January 1968. In the wake of the unsuccessful communist campaign, Westmoreland sought additional troops to exploit “the enemy’s defeat” and destroy North Vietnam’s “will to continue the war.” To have combined a rapid, forceful response with activation of the US Army Reserves would, Westmoreland declared, have sent an unmistakable “message” to Hanoi that the United States “intended to get the job done with dispatch.” Alas, the general’s troop request was blocked by the “cut and run people” in Washington. Thus, while attributing the US loss to shortcomings in the American public, press, and civilian leadership, Westmoreland accepted no personal responsibility and admitted to no errors of judgment or execution.50
Another southern officer has fared much better in postwar assessments. Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. “Hal” Moore from Bardstown, Kentucky, became one of the most celebrated officers from the Vietnam War, based on his stellar leadership of the Seventh Battalion of the Eleventh Cavalry during the savage battle in the Ia Drang Valley in mid-November 1965. Moore, a 1945 West Point graduate, had served in Korea and later in the 1950s had taken an active role in the development of “air mobility” while working for General James Gavin at the Pentagon. In April 1964 Moore was given the command of a battalion in the newly created Eleventh Air Assault Test Division, which evolved into the Eleventh Cavalry. Moore and Sergeant Major Basil Plumley spent the subsequent fourteen months training their troops for Vietnam with the goal of creating the “absolute best air assault infantry battalion in the world, and the proudest.”51
When Brigadier General Richard T. Knowles, the assistant division commander of the Seventh Cavalry, called for an operation into the Ia Drang Valley to locate and attack North Vietnamese soldiers in the area, Moore’s unit was selected. Indicative of the careful planning that complemented Moore’s rigorous training and strict discipline, the colonel had begun reading books on Vietnam long before his deployment, and he and Plumley had carefully walked several of the battle sites in the Pleiku region, where the Vietminh had routed the French. With the mission to “find and kill the enemy,” Moore personally flew over the Ia Drang Valley and designated LZ X-ray as the landing zone that would best accommodate the helicopters ferrying his roughly 450 soldiers to the battle. On November 14, 1965, Moore also rode into X-ray on the first chopper. He did so for three reasons: First, he would get a ground-level look at the LZ and could modify the flight and landing plans as needed. Second, Moore would be on the ground with his troops “to see and hear what was happening” and to gather the information necessary for his “instincts to operate correctly.” Third, the colonel deemed it critical that he and Plumley accompany the first 80 US troops, who could be badly outnumbered until the remaining Americans arrived over the subsequent four hours.52
Moore’s concern was well founded, as he and his troops confronted not the anticipated NVA regiment of approximately 1,500 but three regiments, which at times outnumbered the Americans by 12 to 1. With the buildup of US ground troops after July 1965, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the NVA, sought an opportunity to test his charges against the American forces and their imposing technology and equipment. Upon landing, Moore immediately reformulated his battle plan, sending one company west toward the massive Chu Pong mountain adjacent to the LZ to probe for the enemy and deploying a second company in a defensive posture to block a possible NVA assault. These initial decisions, which could not have been made from a helicopter overhead because of the dense vegetation, prevented the LZ from being overrun before the arrival of the other US soldiers.
After an initial period of quiet, the North Vietnamese launched what became a brutal three-day battle. Moore and his troops, with massive artillery and air support, repulsed the attack, which included human-wave assaults, NVA soldiers strapped into trees for better firing lines, incredible noise that exceeded anything Moore had experienced, blinding smoke and dust, intense heat, and extreme shortages of water. After four hours of sleep on November 13 before the operation began, Moore directed his soldiers for the next forty-eight hours without rest. Major General H. R. McMaster has asserted that Moore’s preparation, intelligence, courage and composure under fire, and “adaptive” leadership were decisive. Consistent with his initial actions, Colonel Moore continued to dispatch patrols to detect enemy positions and resisted the temptation to send critically needed soldiers to aid one US platoon that had been cut off and pinned down by the North Vietnamese.53
Several of Moore’s other decisions during the battle provide insight into McMaster’s assessment and the colonel’s genuine concern for his men. When medivac helicopters refused to land in the midst of the fighting, Moore personally stood up and directed the landing of Hueys coming to haul out the wounded. After the first day’s fighting, Moore and Plumley walked the battalion’s perimeter to check on the men and boost their morale. When General Westmoreland summoned Moore to Saigon for a report in the midst of the battle, Moore refused to leave his men. On the last morning after the battle’s conclusion, Moore accompanied his men to ensure that no one was left behind or unaccounted for as they searched for the final three missing soldiers. Once safely back to base camp, Moore and Plumley ensured that their men received clean clothes and hot food; and Moore circulated among the troops, “shook every man’s hand, and thanked them personally.” He also sought out and thanked the artillerymen and helicopter pilots, without whom he and his battalion would not have survived.54
Based on the body count and the NVA’s withdrawal, Moore and his troops counted the battle at X-ray a victory. According to Moore’s calculations, the NVA had suffered 634 deaths, 1,215 wounded, and 6 prisoners. Seventy-nine Americans were killed, and 121 were wounded. When X-ray was combined with the one-day battle at LZ Albany on November 17, in which the NVA mauled the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, killing 151 Americans and wounding another 121, the enemy also declared victory. Significantly, of the 305 Americans killed in the Pleiku campaign in October and November 1965, of which X-ray and Albany were a part, 122 were from the American South.55
The two sides had drawn differing conclusions from the first battle since Dien Bien Phu in which the NVA had massed at division strength. Having confronted the NVA’s training, discipline, and zeal, Moore recognized that the United States was fighting “a people who had no more give in them than the wild Scots-Irish frontier folk of Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky and Texas” and that he and his men faced “an enemy who is going to make this a very long year.” Moore and General Kinnard both perceived the difficulty of fighting an enemy who could retreat to sanctuaries in Cambodia, which the NVA regiments had done following LZ Albany. Subsequent analysts have also observed that the NVA had decided when to initiate and end the fighting, the type of initiative the enemy would maintain for the remainder of the war. In contrast, General Westmoreland concluded that the 3,561 NVA killed versus 305 US deaths, a kill ratio of 12 to 1 during the Ia Drang campaign, demonstrated the viability of his attrition strategy—that the United States could wear down the North Vietnamese and Vietcong.56
General Giap and his subordinates concluded the exact opposite. The North Vietnamese had purposely sought to test their troops against the United States and its obvious technological superiority. Giap and his military commanders at Ia Drang judged the battles at worst a draw, but a draw they had survived and from which they had learned important tactical lessons, such as the “Grab them by the belt buckle” approach, in which the closer NVA fighters advanced on Americans, the less effective US artillery and air support would be. The NVA also emerged convinced that they would outlast the United States in a limited war, and they were correct.57
Like Colonel Moore, the National Guard unit from his hometown of Bardstown, Kentucky, endured a harrowing experience in Vietnam. Activated in April 1968, the Second Battalion of the 138th Artillery shipped out to Vietnam in late October. After several weeks of in-country training and an assignment along Highway One south of Da Nang, Battery C was moved to Fire Base Tomahawk, a few miles farther south, in the spring of 1969. Described as “just a bad hill” by one of the Kentuckians, the fire base had been “cut out of the side of a giant hill.” The saddleshaped encampment was surrounded by high ground on three sides and was further compromised by a railroad tunnel at the bottom of the slope. Appropriately apprehensive, Battery C and a platoon from the 101st Airborne assigned to protect the guns dug in. The 120 artillerymen and their paratrooper protection “never stopped working on their bunkers.”58
They also deemed a major enemy assault virtually inevitable. Voicing the group’s concerns, Jerry Janes asked simply, “When will they hit us?” And Don Parrish remembered talking about “how difficult it would be to defend” Tomahawk against the NVA. They were both prescient. By early summer, Battery C, a highly skilled and efficient unit, had been weakened as some of its original members were transferred and sometimes replaced by troops with drug problems or less diligent work habits. When the expected attack did not materialize, the daily regime of “fire your missions, drink a little beer, watch movies, sleep,” and fill sandbags became “routine.” The troops may have become complacent. When the heat, the routine, and the lingering anxiety seemed to be taking a toll on morale, the guardsmen decided to have a cookout. Using a three-ton truck, Parrish led an expedition on June 8 to a nearby food supply depot and returned with an ample supply of pilfered hamburger patties, hot dogs, beer, and ice. That evening, on June 8, 1969, the 150 men on Fire Base Tomahawk had a barbecue, followed by the showing of a James Bond movie in the maintenance tent. The evening ended prematurely when a driving rainstorm made it impossible to hear the movie.59
Eleven days later, on June 19, the men returned to the maintenance facility to watch Bonnie and Clyde, only to be greeted by another downpour. The rainstorm not only interrupted the movie but also made it difficult to hear or see the NVA soldiers who were grouping outside the base for an attack or the virtually naked sappers who were beginning to maneuver and cut through the concertina wire around the base’s perimeter. Between 150 and 180 North Vietnamese penetrated the perimeter, where they pummeled the Americans with rocket-propelled grenades, satchel charges, and AK-47s. Nine US soldiers were killed, five of them guards, and another thirty-nine Americans were wounded. While losing at least twenty-five to thirty men, the North Vietnamese destroyed three howitzer artillery guns, an ammunition storage area, five trucks, and three jeeps. Only David Collins’s search for late-night chicken soup, which led him to find “gooks in the mess hall” and to alert the other Americans, and the enemy’s use of the wrong color flare to summon reinforcements avoided far greater losses.60
The battle ended at dawn when the NVA retreated in the face of American helicopter gunships and other choppers dispatched to carry out the dead and wounded. Seeing the battlefield on June 20, Tom Raisor expressed “Disbelief, Shock, Numbness. . . . I took one look and thought we had probably lost half our men. . . . Everybody was sort of stunned, people were running around trying to identify bodies, who was wounded, where they had been taken. . . . You were just thankful you were alive.” After treatment for a concussion, Raisor was given the agonizing assignment of body escort to accompany Jim Moore, who had not survived the attack, back to Bardstown. Moore’s death and Battery C’s losses constituted the National Guard’s single deadliest battle during the Vietnam War, and southerners again played a central, if very costly, role.61
A southern officer was a central figure in still another illustrative battle, this time in the hotly contested A Shau Valley. Captain John D. (Dave) Blair IV arrived at the A Shau Special Forces camp, located southwest of Hue and about five miles from the Laotian border, on February 9, 1966. He and his team of eight other Americans were charged with training and conducting operations with some two hundred South Vietnamese civilian irregulars under the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDGs). These operations were aimed at obstructing North Vietnamese infiltration into the South. In an area Blair remembered as “probably the most God-forsaken place on earth,” the compound rested on the valley floor amid thick elephant grass and adjacent to ridge lands covered with dense jungle vegetation. A “drizzly low ceiling” made resupply and air support difficult, further compromising the site’s strategic viability. Blair recalled that the camp sometimes went two or three weeks without any resupply, leaving the allied forces to eat rice balls and meat from their small herd of cattle.62
Although the local Vietcong presented no serious threat, Blair quickly recognized that the NVA forces were determined to destroy the special forces camp and to establish uncontested control of the valley. I Corp headquarters denied his request for reinforcements, but the CO of the Fifth Special Forces Group dispatched Captain Sam Carter and another 200 South Vietnamese CIDGs, who arrived on March 7. Blair and Carter commanded a force of 435, 17 of whom were Americans, when the NVA attacked on March 9.
Beginning at about 4:00 A.M., two NVA regiments pounded the camp with intense mortar and artillery fire, while sappers periodically attempted to breach outer defenses with bangor torpedoes and wire cutters. At dawn, the shelling stopped, and the enemy broke through the south wall of the compound. “Mass confusion and pandemonium” and virtually hand-to-hand fighting ensued. No US artillery batteries were in position to offer aid, and cloud cover hampered air support. As the battle raged on March 9, one F-4 jet crashed, and a C-74 helicopter was shot down; but air force sky raiders provided effective support, catching one NVA battalion in the open, and one helicopter was able to extract thirty of the US—South Vietnamese wounded. The US-CIDG forces survived the onslaught, but as the most intense fighting subsided in late afternoon, Blair counted only fifty troops both able and willing to fight, and they were running very low on ammunition. Even after collecting ammunition and grenades from the dead, his forces had only about twenty rounds per person and a total of ten grenades. The NVA resumed shelling the compound at dark and launched another ground assault around midnight. Blair and his troops again survived and weathered another attack the next day, when either subversion or sheer fright prompted a portion of the CIDGs to allow an NVA penetration. During the afternoon of March 10, sixteen helicopters were sent to evacuate the survivors. Blair and Carter remained behind in the compound to divert the enemy’s attention and draw fire while the others moved to the landing zone. When the helicopters encountered withering fire and a portion of the CIDGs panicked and attempted to force their way onto the choppers, only sixty men were flown out of A Shau. Now Blair and Carter sought to hold out until nightfall and hoped for further relief. This “relief” came through an order to try and break out of the compound the next morning and move to a designated LZ.63
Achieving this tactical movement was complicated by Blair’s conflict with a marine lieutenant colonel whose helicopter had been shot down. The colonel and his crew had survived, and he technically became the ranking US officer at A Shau. The marine aviator, who Blair decided was “out of his element,” declared that there would be no subsequent rescue attempts and that the survivors should head overland to Thailand. Blair refused and instead moved his forces, almost all of whom were wounded, to the ridgeline overlooking the camp. The next day the marines, including the colonel, followed Blair and his men off the ridgeline and back into the valley, where the marines were extracted. The five remaining Americans and their Vietnamese charges continued to maneuver around the valley during March 11 and 12, when the last of them were lifted out. Blair and the other four US soldiers were picked up on March 12.64
Blair, who at one point had gone three days without sleep and two days without water and fought on despite being wounded in the initial attack, admitted to having been “naïve”: “I knew a bad battle was coming and quite frankly it never crossed my mind those guys might whip us.” After only 188 of the 435 (and 12 of the 17 Americans, all of whom were wounded) survived and the camp was destroyed, he readily acknowledged the enemy had prevailed. The number of estimated enemy killed was 1,000 to 1,200, but they had asserted their dominance in the A Shau Valley. In his first experience being the target of such devastating fire and facing such dire prospects, Blair had performed admirably. He concluded that after you “resign yourself” to likely dying, “you get over being afraid . . not that you don’t try to survive.” But, he continued, well-trained and disciplined soldiers, like the US Special Forces, “keep fighting, . . . in spite of the wounds, in spite of the casualties,” and seek “to make it as costly as possible to the enemy.” This was precisely what Captain Blair had done, and even the lost battle had positive outcomes. Blair decried “fighting set piece battles in unfavorable conditions,” and an MACV assessment of the A Shau defeat agreed. No other special forces camps would be “just abandoned to their fate” without proper support and preparation.65
Two southerners were also at the center of the My Lai massacre, the worst American-inflicted atrocity of the Vietnam War. Second Lieutenant William L. (Rusty) Calley, who had been born and raised in Miami, Florida, commanded the First Platoon of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Twelfth Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division, which was responsible for killing more than five hundred unarmed women, children, and old men at My Lai 4, a hamlet in South Vietnam’s Quang Nai Province, on March 16, 1968. The only member of the US military successfully prosecuted, Calley was ultimately convicted by a military court of the premeditated murder of twenty-two Vietnamese noncombatants and sentenced to life in prison. His trial from November 1970 through late March 1971, his subsequent appeals, and his ultimate pardon by President Richard M. Nixon caused great consternation in the United States generally and the South particularly.66
Southerners, given their majority support for the war and the military as an institution, strongly supported Calley and, like most Americans, presumed that My Lai was a terrible aberration. Several southern soldiers and recent scholarship have suggested that My Lai was not so anomalous but that US technology and overall strategies killed far more Vietnamese civilians. Terry Whitmore from Memphis recounted a fall 1967 mission in which his platoon followed their captain’s orders to “level” a hamlet. The platoon burned the thatched huts and killed all the animals and people, even the children. Two southern marine forward observers spoke to the “body count” as a way of gauging progress and to the lethal impact of American technology. In a letter to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger Jim Waide asserted, “With our air power and artillery, we killed, maimed and rendered homeless thousands of civilians. . . . This . . . assured that the rural Vietnamese civilian population would hate us.” After calling for air and artillery strikes on a South Vietnamese village, Richard Ensminger recalled that the place was “flattened . . . in less than five minutes. . . . It was a godlike display of power” that left “a burning, smoky ruin of straw and bamboo huts” with “parts of human and animal bodies scattered all around.” To the issue of US technology, Ensminger added, “every marine unit in my battalion” was charged with meeting “a quota” of killed VC or NVA soldiers—“It was a meat quota. A lot of civilians who got killed were called VC.” In a recent searing book entitled Kill Anything That Moves, Nick Turse has provided an extended and convincing investigation that confirms the experiences of these southern warriors and examines how US technology and policies such as the body count, search-and-destroy, and free fire zones led to the deaths of as many as two million Vietnamese civilians.67
From the shameful My Lai incident and the more general impact of the American war on Vietnamese civilians, a southerner emerged as the “forgotten hero” who conformed much more closely to the South’s concern for honor and duty. Like Calley, Hugh C. (Buck) Thompson was born in 1943, but in Atlanta. He soon moved with his family to Stone Mountain, Georgia, where he was raised, went to high school, and worked on the family and neighboring farms. When Buck was seventeen, his dad accompanied him, as he had done with his older brother, to enlist in the US Navy Reserve. Both brothers were expected to serve in the military as their father had done and continued to do in the reserves. After completing his stint in the navy from 1961 to 1964, Thompson ended one unsatisfying year as a funeral director in Stone Mountain by joining the army and going to Warrant Officer School to become a helicopter pilot.68
On the morning of March 16, 1968, he, Larry Colburn, the door gunner, and Glenn Andreotta, the crew chief, were flying over My Lai in a small scout helicopter with the mission of drawing fire and thereby locating the enemy for attacks by Huey helicopter gunships. By 10:15 A.M., after flying over the area for more than two hours, Thompson and his crew had drawn no fire and spotted only one draft-age Vietnamese man. Instead, they saw dozens of bodies scattered around the hamlet—“infants; two-, three-, four-, and five-year olds; women; very old men; but no draft-age people whatsoever.” When they observed a “ditch full of bodies,” Thompson and his crew reluctantly concluded that the operation had gone terribly wrong. At approximately 11:00 A.M., Thompson landed the helicopter in an effort to aid wounded Vietnamese. His efforts yielded only a verbal confrontation with Calley in which the lieutenant made it clear that actions on the ground were his “show” and that Thompson should “mind his own business.” As the chopper lifted off to resume its scout duties, Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta were horrified to see US troops firing into the ditch and summarily executing additional unarmed Vietnamese.69
After another fifteen minutes in the air, Andreotta saw several members of Charlie Company chasing three Vietnamese. Thompson’s immediate response was to land the helicopter again, this time between the US troops and a bunker into which the fleeing Vietnamese had crawled. As Thompson jumped out of the helicopter, he ordered Colburn to cover him and fire on the American ground troops if they “open up on me or these people.” Fortunately, the other Americans backed away and did not threaten Thompson, who coaxed a total of nine terrified Vietnamese out of the bunker. He now faced a different dilemma: “I couldn’t just leave them there, because there was no doubt in my mind that they would have been killed.” Unable to fit them into his small helicopter, he called two members of his unit who were piloting the gunships for the morning’s mission. While one Huey pilot covered them, the other made two trips to ferry the Vietnamese several miles away from My Lai. Thompson and his crew quickly lifted off after the departure of the second group of refugees, only to see movement in the ditch filled with bodies. Thompson landed a third time, and Andreotta pulled a small child covered with blood and muck from the mass of dead bodies. Thompson then flew the traumatized little girl to a close-by Catholic hospital in Quang Nai.70
Following the completion of the day’s mission, Thompson returned to the unit’s base area at LZ Dottie and reported to his platoon leader that members of Charlie Company had committed “mass murder” by “rounding . . . up” and “herding” unarmed Vietnamese into “ditches and then just shooting them.” Thompson subsequently provided the same information to a colonel at the LZ Dottie command post, but his outrage and courage were soon lost in the army cover-up by the commander of the Americal Division. Only in June 1969 would Thompson be summoned to Washington, where he provided the critical eyewitness account of the massacre to the Office of the Inspector General and picked Calley out of a lineup. In the interim, Thompson had completed his tour in Vietnam in August 1968 after his copter was shot down, and he suffered a broken back. When called to Washington, he was serving as a flight instructor at Fort Rucker, Alabama.71
Ironically, Thompson’s confrontation with Calley and members of Charlie Company led to trouble with Congressmen Mendel Rivers and F. Edward Herbert, who sought to discredit Thompson and derail the army’s investigation and prosecution of Calley and others. Despite such efforts, Thompson has been aptly termed a “hero” by Colburn since the pilot was the “ranking man,” the “man in charge.” William Eckhardt, the military lawyer who oversaw the army’s prosecution of those charged with offenses at My Lai, lauded Thompson’s “moral courage” and described his actions as an example of “something good” in the midst of a day of “human tragedy,” and the official US Army inquiry concluded, “If there was a hero of My Lai, he was it.” Thompson proved decidedly uncomfortable with such accolades. He rejected the status of hero, responding that he was only doing his duty. In response to the question of why he took these singular actions, the humble southerner replied, “I can’t answer that. There’s nothing special about me. I was raised in a small town in Georgia. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that what was going on wasn’t right.” Thompson embodied a compelling, if hardly a vocal or flamboyant, example of the South’s commitment to duty and honor.72
The role of duty and honor in the Vietnam experience was also a central facet of novels written by two southern marines. Jim Webb both personified and celebrated the South’s “warrior tradition.” Although he was born in Missouri in February 1946, the son of a career air force officer, his grandfather, Robert E. Lee Webb, the family’s “strong citizen-soldier military tradition,” and Webb’s southern Scotch-Irish ancestry firmly establish his southern roots. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1968, he opted for a commission in the marine corps and finished first in a class of 243 in Marine Corps Officers Basic School. He then earned the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Star medals, and two Purple Hearts while serving as a rifle platoon leader and company commander in the An Hoa Basin west of Danang. Since leaving the marines in 1972, he has graduated from Georgetown Law School and served as counsel to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, assistant secretary of defense, secretary of the navy, and US senator from Virginia; has traveled widely as a journalist and business consultant; and has written prodigiously.
Like so many other southerners, Webb deemed the war winnable. He cites Johnson’s refusal to require competent, middle- and upper-class people to serve in the military, LBJ’s failure to invade North Vietnam or to properly utilize strategic bombing, press misrepresentation of the war, and domestic protestors for the US defeat. The former marine also considered the war justifiable. He has characterized Vietnam “as probably the most moral effort we have ever made,” since the United States “fought for purely ideological reasons,” to contain communism. From Webb’s perspective, the war’s true immorality derived from America’s failure to maintain its “moral and political commitment” to South Vietnam and to ensure “that those millions of people” had “the same opportunities as a culture that we have.” Having served and been wounded in a war he believed had been lost unnecessarily, Webb, the veteran and southerner, was particularly disturbed by what he considered attacks on the honor of US soldiers. He had gone to Vietnam out of duty to country—“because I was a lieutenant and that was the war and I trusted my government. . . . I didn’t fight in Vietnam because I thought the war was right. I fought . . . because I was a unit commander. I felt I was the best they were going to get, and that’s where I belonged.” To duty, Webb added honor, since “giving your life in a war is the ultimate irretrievable gift to your culture.”73
His determination to celebrate the southern military tradition and to “restore a sense of honor to the record of servicemen in Vietnam” drove Webb’s writing of his first and most acclaimed novel, Fields of Fire, which was published in 1978. Indeed, the southern military tradition and devotion to duty, courage, and honor define Robert E. Lee Hodges Jr., the novel’s protagonist and Webb’s alter ego. Hodges, descended from Scotch-Irish ancestors in the Virginia and Tennessee backcountry, belonged to a family whose forebears fought in every American war from the Revolution on, and his father died at the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Demonstrating the unmistakable southern concern for tradition and family history, Hodges’s grandmother instructed him in the family lore and the military exploits of the Hodges “Ghosts,” which he was obligated to emulate. Hodges learned that “man’s noblest moment is the one spent on the fields of fire” and vowed to “fight because we have always fought. It doesn’t matter who.”74
As Hodges prepared to embark for Vietnam, “he believed in God but most of all he believed in his father and the other Ghosts. God was all the way in heaven, but the Ghosts were with him everywhere he walked. . . . If there had been no Vietnam, he would have had to invent one.” The young lieutenant was destined for the marines and their demands “because endurance involved pride and pride was honor and he was nothing if he did not retain his honor.” Although Hodges “did not relish facing North Vietnamese guns for a year . . . Vietnam was something to be done with, a duty. Not for Vietnam. For honor (and a whisper saying, ‘for the South’).” And, perhaps most of all, “for the bench seat in the town square” where he could sit and swap war stories with the honored survivors of previous American wars.75
Described by one of his soldiers as actually embodying the marine corps’ recruiting objective of “Leaders of Men,” and as a “goddamn grit” who “don’t give anybody any shit and . . . don’t take any shit off anybody,” Hodges learned his craft well in Vietnam while always making the welfare of his men the first priority. He had no patience for “stateside shit,” readily contested orders from superiors that seemed illogical or to endanger his platoon, and expressed regret that one of his men shot and missed when surprised by a dishonorable marine major who put personal advancement and medals before the grunts’ well-being. As his tour progressed, Hodges believed he had secured a place among the family’s ghosts, and he agreed with Snake, his bravest and most competent subordinate, who found “nobility” in the “pain, the brother-love, the sacrifice” experienced in Vietnam, none of which existed “back in the bowels of the World.”76
Hodges’s honorable behavior was not confined to the battlefield. After suffering wounds from a booby trap, he was flown to Japan to recuperate. Recovered and on his way back to Vietnam, the lieutenant was briefly quartered on Okinawa. While there, he reunited with Mitsuko, the beautiful woman to whom he made love as he awaited the final leg of his first journey to Vietnam. Hodges sought Mitsuko out, proposed, and married her after humbly asking her parents for their blessing. Despite his marriage and love for Mitsuko, Hodges declined a friendly major’s offer of a safe assignment on Okinawa and returned to his unit in Vietnam. Duty called, and he missed the “purity” of his “relationship” with his comrades. Thereafter, the ever-gallant warrior and fearless leader died while attempting to save the life of Goodrich, a member of his platoon.77
Webb employs Goodrich, the antithesis of Hodges and the southern warrior ethic, to drive home his themes of honor, courage, and duty. Goodrich, a Harvard dropout, had come to Vietnam, unlike his draft-dodger friends. But once there, the man the others referred to derisively as the “Senator,” “Harvard shit bird,” and “college Turkey,” was appalled at the death and destruction, at the “complete randomness” of the war, at the senseless “futility of what they were doing,” at the “killing and being killed” with no change “beyond the tragedy of the immediate event.” Goodrich, who repeatedly froze during firefights, ultimately vowed “to maintain his own standards, to preserve a sense of sanity” amid chaos, and reported six of his fellow platoon members for the revenge killing of two Vietnamese prisoners. Goodrich’s final battlefield failure led directly to Hodges’s death and the Senator’s loss of both legs.78
Back home in New England, Goodrich told his dad he was “all fucked up” both physically and mentally and that his war would “never be over.” When he resumed classes at Harvard, he felt no kinship for his fellow students after “his exposure to minds unfogged by academic posturings.” Nor was he drawn to his professors, who struck him as “vaporous intellectuals.” Although he realized that he had never completely identified with his military comrades, he had gained a far greater respect for and understanding of them. Goodrich lectured fellow students that soldiers placed in impossible situations and directed “to kill for some goddamned amorphous reason” were acting in “utterly logical” ways. It was not “murder” or “even atrocious”; it was simply “a sad fact of life.” And when invited to speak at an antiwar rally, he infuriated his audience by berating them for “PLAYING . . . GODDAMNED GAMES. . . . HOW MANY OF YOU ARE GOING TO GET HURT IN VIETNAM? I DIDN’T SEE ANY OF YOU IN VIETNAM. I SAW DUDES, MAN. DUDES. AND TRUCK DRIVERS AND COAL MINERS AND FARMERS. . . . WHERE WERE YOU? FLUNKING YOUR DRAFT PHYSICALS? WHAT DO YOU CARE IF IT ENDS? YOU WON’T GET HURT.”79
Like Jim Webb, Gustav Hasford responded to his marine corps service in Vietnam from a distinctly southern perspective, but the two soldiers and authors shared little else in common. Born in November 1947, Gus Hasford grew up near Russellville in Winston County, Alabama. From this rural southern upbringing he derived a typically southern love of place and heritage. But when he looked back to the Civil War, he reveled in stories of a great-great-grandfather who had refused induction into the Confederate Army while displaying the same opposition to slavery as the majority of residents of Winston County—in short, the same “freedom-minded contrariness” that Hasford subsequently championed in his novels.80
Hasford dived into writing at an early age. At fourteen, he was writing stories for two local newspapers and published a piece in Boys’ Life; at fifteen, he edited his high school paper; and at sixteen he founded and edited three issues of Freelance, a literary magazine that he financed with advertisements and a loan from his uncle. At eighteen, when faced with the draft, he enlisted in the marines and, based on his experience with the high school paper and Freelance, was made a military journalist. Following an uneventful state-side posting, Hasford requested and received assignment to Vietnam. He served in the First Marine Division Infantry Services Office outside Danang, writing puff pieces on the war and marine actions, and later in Phu Bai, where he helped cover both fighting in Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive and the operations that broke the NVA encirclement of Khe Sanh. During his ten months of service, he was wounded once and earned the Navy Achievement Medal with a Combat V.
Hasford’s postmilitary life was tumultuous. He held a variety of jobs, including security guard and editor of a porn magazine, and for a time he lived in his car while writing the twenty-three drafts of his first novel, The Short Timers, which was published in 1979 and became the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s movie Full Metal Jacket. Hasford’s contributions to the screenplay earned an Oscar nomination in 1988, but that same year he was convicted and served a six-month jail term for having “stolen” some ten thousand library books from across the country and the world. After all the books were returned and Hasford was freed, he published The Phantom Blooper (1990), but he also began to drink heavily and developed diabetes. In January 1993, at the age of forty-five, Hasford died alone in a hotel room on the Greek island of Aegina.
Just as his military service and postwar professional life differed markedly from Webb’s, Hasford presented a decidedly different fictional portrayal and interpretation of America’s Vietnam War. Hasford’s central character and alter ego, James T. Davis, or Private Joker, was also a southerner, hailing from Russellville, Alabama. Like Hasford, Joker was a marine combat journalist, but unlike Webb and Hodges, he systematically sought to avoid responsibility and promotion and found nothing beyond the grunts’ service and sacrifice honorable about US foreign policy and the war. Joker spends most of the first novel as a marine journalist, his assignment to “convince people that war is a beautiful experience,” to demonstrate that “Nam is an Asian Eldorado populated by a cute, primitive but determined people. War is a noisy breakfast food . . . War can give you better checkups.” His stories were “paper bullets fired into the fat black heart of Communism . . . to make the world safe for hypocrisy.” Toward the end of Short Timers, Joker is busted from journalist to grunt; and as The Phantom Blooper begins, he is captured by the Vietcong and spends much of the second novel as a captive in a VC-controlled village on the Laotian border.81
Neither Hasford nor Joker considered the war particularly honorable or winnable. At various points, Joker declared that “a tour of duty in the military service of your country is like being put into a chain gang for the crime of patriotism”; that his country let him go “to Vietnam a military virgin, too dumb to do anything but draw fire”; and, standing over his father’s grave, “I didn’t want to go; I did it for you.”82 Once deployed to Vietnam, Joker decided that “getting killed over here is a waste of time,” and he worried that “what you do, you become,” that he was being “caught up in a constricting web of darkness”; that in “an unnecessary war, patriotism is just racism made to sound noble”; and that he was “ashamed to call myself an American. America has made me into a killer. I was not born a killer—I was instructed.”83
That he judged the war unwinnable no doubt contributed to Joker’s disillusionment. He denounced the South Vietnamese as worthless allies and instructed another grunt, “Anytime you can see an Arvin you are safe from Victor Charlie.” Although the South Vietnamese troops ran “like rabbits at the first sign of violence,” they were neither cowardly nor stupid. They had simply been “drafted by the Saigon government, which was drafted by the lifers who drafted us,” and they recognized the futility of fighting the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. By contrast, Joker respected the NVA as fellow grunts, as “brass-balled little hardasses . . . the best light infantry since the Stonewall Brigade.” The VC were not “Asian mutants” like the South Vietnamese he met as a marine, “not those sad, pathetic people with a cloned culture and no self-respect, greedy and corrupt, ragged shameless beggars and whores.” Rather, the Vietcong are “proud, gentle, fearless, ruthless, and painfully polite.” The Americans could not defeat an enemy who had achieved the “ball-busting, monster victory” of maintaining the Ho Chi-Minh Trail against the “greatest aerial bombardment in history,” an enemy who was “too real, too close to the earth.”84
Joker, like Hasford, traced the futile US involvement in Vietnam to American moneyed interests. “Gangsters” had taken over the government and made war “a serious business” and killing the Vietnamese and others “our gross national product.” This mindless foreign policy had left America “alone” in the world, under the illusion that the answer to any international problem was to “simply send in the Marines.” Both during his captivity and cooperation with the Vietcong and upon his return home after being freed by American marines, Joker opted to “secede” from the “Viet Nam death trip.” He had not “defected” to the communists, since communism was “boring and does not work”; rather, he had “joined the side of the people against the side of governments.” He had endeavored to defend the “Confederate Dream” and its “desperate and heroic attempt to preserve from federal tyrants the liberty bequeathed to us by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.” And in even more revealing southern commentary, Joker declared upon his return to Winston County that the “South” had been the “American Empire’s first subjugated nation.” As a “defeated people,” residents of Dixie had been cured of their “quaint customs, quilting parties, barn raisings, and hog killings . . . and made . . . over into a homogenized replica of the North.” Bereft of its culture, the South had become a “big Indian reservation populated by ex-Confederates who are bred like cattle to die in Yankee wars. In Alabama there is no circus to run off to, so we join the Marines.”85
Webb’s and Hasford’s contrasting responses to the war embody some of the varied reactions of southern soldiers. Despite their general devotion to God, country, patriotism, and honor, Dixie’s warriors emerged from the conflict and its agony with many of the same scars and much of the same ambivalence as other Americans. Former POW Benjamin H. Purcell may have best summarized the overall perspective of the South’s troopers, a perspective endlessly repeated by Dixie’s prowar majority. Purcell harbored no doubts about the war’s validity. Stopping “the spread of Communism throughout Indochina” was “worthwhile, but we went at it piecemeal and with civilians making decisions on military operations.” The retired army colonel deemed it “immoral to send a man into combat without a clear mission to win.” Reflecting the veteran’s reluctance to admit that he might have sacrificed so much for no clear gain, Purcell concluded hopefully that despite the “terrible price” paid by both the United States and the Vietnamese, the “war was not without some benefits. It raised the sensitivity of all the people of America to the horrors of war . . . and they realized that war is not a way to settle international disputes.” Max Cleland’s succinct appraisal, “We’re losing our ass to save our face,” coincided more closely with the minority of southern dissenters.86
Other southern soldiers were even more conflicted regarding Dixie’s warrior tradition. William A. Brinkley, a Kentuckian who commanded an armor company, confessed that he “got no satisfaction out of combat. . . . It’s not something that I want to do again.” Rather, his “greatest satisfaction” came from “going into a fight and coming out with nobody wounded or killed.” Lemos F. Fulmer Jr., a fellow armor officer from Selma, agreed, finding greater gratification in saving a “fellow soldiers’ life” than in “any of my tactical successes.” Black army specialist Robert Strong also made the troopers’ welfare his first priority in his far more graphic and disillusioned “wish” that “the people in Washington could have walked through a hospital and seen the guys all fucked up. Seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds got casts from head to toes. . . . Dudes got legs shot off and shit, got half their faces gone.” Larry Gwin, who survived the carnage of LZ Albany in November 1965 while serving as an army lieutenant and earned a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart, cautioned, “If anybody thinks it’s good to go to war, they’re crazy.” Nor should people “talk about the glory of war because there is none. War sucks. . . . America’s got to learn from its mistakes as well as its moments of pride, and it has got to be very careful when it chooses to send American kids to fight a war without really knowing if it’s worth it.” Helicopter pilot Ernest Peoples from Beaumont, Texas, who was shot down five times and had little patience for such discussions, voiced the aggrieved perspective of so many southern and US veterans by agreeing with the inscription on another vet’s baseball cap: “If you ain’t been there, shut the fuck up.”87
Like Warrant Officer Peoples, southern soldiers were repeatedly at the center of the action in Vietnam. General Westmoreland had a profound influence on the war’s overall direction and tenor. Other southerners, such as Dave Blair, Jim Webb, and Hugh Thompson, had an equally profound and revealing impact, but in a much smaller corner of the conflict. Even southern warriors such as Gus Haford, who did little in combat terms other than survive and observe, have augmented an understanding of Dixie’s military relation to the Vietnam War. That understanding was not confined to the experiences of southern men, as Dixie’s women have afforded enlightening recollections of their reasons for going to Vietnam and the travails of service there. Issues of honor, patriotism, and manhood were particularly prominent as southern men went to, fought in, and returned from the war. As might be expected, some southern soldiers met the often exaggerated regional standards of honor and courage; others, most conspicuously William Calley, failed miserably. The interaction of southern whites and African Americans serving in Vietnam furnished another regional vantage point for assessing the war—one that ran the gamut from KKK garb and Confederate flags to the forging of greater respect and life-saving support, although this respect had little impact on domestic southern race relations. Responses to the war were quite diverse, ranging from pride in service to bitterness and alienation; but the distinct majority of southern soldiers, like their neighbors, family, and political leaders, deemed the war to have been winnable. Only the misguided “stab-in-the-back” decisions of civilian leaders or the demoralizing antiwar actions of cowardly protestors and mistaken congressmen and senators had prevented the United States from employing its vastly superior power to realize a military victory. Indeed, the proper use of US military power, especially air power, was a critical component in the debate over the war’s conduct in 1967.