I knew Chuck and Tom Hagel long before I met them. In the terrible year of 1968, young men like them lived in my suburban neighborhood west of Chicago. When their time came to serve, they went. We’d look for their faces when the camera scanned the crowd on the USO Bob Hope Christmas Special on television. Their fathers, like mine, fought in World War II or Korea. Their mothers showed us snapshots of bright-green jungles, thin foreign people in black pajamas, and loose-limbed young men in faded fatigues, smiling into the camera, Schlitz beer cans in hand. When they came home, they didn’t talk about it. They took jobs or went to college. They moved on. I never heard of PTSD. And I never met a draft dodger.
You could make a powerful case, and many have, that the four most formative eras in American history were the Revolution and founding, slavery and the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II, and the sixties and Vietnam. Of those, the last is surely the most discussed and least well understood. We’re probably too close to it to sort it out completely.
Still, I think I owe it to Chuck and Tom, and to all the Vietnam veterans, most notably the officers and sergeants who led me when I joined the U.S. Army in the 1970s, to try to figure out what the hell we did to our enemies and ourselves in Vietnam and at home. This book is my attempt, through the story of Chuck and Tom Hagel, to explain the lasting significance of the tumultuous events of the Vietnam War and 1960s America. I’ve worked hard to get it right. Wartime sergeants, like the Hagels and my own father, measure officer types by one hard standard: Do they know the real deal? I think I do. The Hagels certainly do.
Fifty years after Tet, Vietnam remains very much with us. I believe that many Americans, especially younger ones, do not realize the full import of this divisive war abroad and the contentious era at home, in particular the decisive events of 1968. We continue to repeat the same errors and miss the same opportunities. I know. I lived through just those bloody mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. We see our past, but we don’t understand it, even when men like Chuck and Tom Hagel plead with us to do so. It’s past time to come to terms with Vietnam and the sixties. That’s why I wrote Our Year of War.
Daniel P. Bolger
Lieutenant General
U.S. Army, Retired