Other common beliefs about public opinion on the Vietnam war are also false. Educated people were more likely to support the war, not less. There is not as much data on the subject, but draft status did not seem to affect opinions on the war."
Posted on 07/30/2010 10:43:10 AM PDT by SMARTY
My friend sent me this:
Heroes of the Vietnam Generation
By James Webb
The rapidly disappearing cohort of Americans that endured the Great Depression and then fought World War II is receiving quite a send-off from the leading lights of the so-called 60s generation. Tom Brokaw has published two oral histories of "The Greatest Generation" that feature ordinary people doing their duty and suggest that such conduct was historically unique.
Chris Matthews of "Hardball" is fond of writing columns praising the Navy service of his father while castigating his own baby boomer generation for its alleged softness and lack of struggle. William Bennett gave a startling condescending speech at the Naval Academy a few years ago comparing the heroism of the "D-Day Generation" to the drugs-and-sex nihilism of the "Woodstock Generation." And Steven Spielberg, in promoting his film "Saving Private Ryan," was careful to justify his portrayals of soldiers in action based on the supposedly unique nature of World War II.
An irony is at work here. Lest we forget, the World War II generation now being lionized also brought us the Vietnam War, a conflict which today's most conspicuous voices by and large opposed, and in which few of them served. The "best and brightest" of the Vietnam age group once made headlines by castigating their parents for bringing about the war in which they would not fight, which has become the war they refuse to remember.
Pundits back then invented a term for this animus: the "generation gap." Long, plaintive articles and even books were written examining its manifestations. Campus leaders, who claimed precocious wisdom through the magical process of reading a few controversial books, urged fellow baby boomers not to trust anyone over 30. Their elders who had survived the Depression and fought the largest war in history were looked down upon as shallow, materialistic, and out of touch.
Those of us who grew up, on the other side of the picket line from that era's counter-culture can't help but feel a little leery of this sudden gush of appreciation for our elders from the leading lights of the old counter-culture. Then and now, the national conversation has proceeded from the dubious assumption that those who came of age during Vietnam are a unified generation in the same sense as their parents were, and thus are capable of being spoken for through these fickle elites.
In truth, the "Vietnam generation" is a misnomer. Those who came of age during that war are permanently divided by different reactions to a whole range of counter-cultural agendas, and nothing divides them more deeply than the personal ramifications of the war itself. The sizable portion of the Vietnam age group who declined to support the counter-cultural agenda, and especially the men and women who opted to serve in the military during the Vietnam War, are quite different from their peers who for decades have claimed to speak for them. In fact, they are much like the World War II generation itself. For them, Woodstock was a side show, college protestors were spoiled brats who would have benefited from having to work a few jobs in order to pay their tuition, and Vietnam represented not an intellectual exercise in draft avoidance, or protest marches but a battlefield that was just as brutal as those their fathers faced in World War II and Korea.
Few who served during Vietnam ever complained of a generation gap. The men who fought World War II were their heroes and role models. They honored their father's service by emulating it, and largely agreed with their father's wisdom in attempting to stop Communism's reach in Southeast Asia.
The most accurate poll of their attitudes (Harris, 1980) showed that 91 percent were glad they'd served their country, 74 percent enjoyed their time in the service, and 89 percent agreed with the statement that "our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win." And most importantly, the castigation they received upon returning home was not from the World War II generation, but from the very elites in their age group who supposedly spoke for them.
Nine million men served in the military during Vietnam War, three million of whom went to the Vietnam Theater. Contrary to popular mythology, two-thirds of these were volunteers, and 73 percent of those who died were volunteers. While some attention has been paid recently to the plight of our prisoners of war, most of whom were pilots; there has been little recognition of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the ground.
Dropped onto the enemy's terrain 12,000 miles away from home, America's citizen-soldiers performed with a tenacity and quality that may never be truly understood. Those who believe the war was fought incompletely on a tactical level should consider Hanoi's recent admission that 1.4 million of its soldiers died on the battlefield, compared to 58,000 total U.S. dead.
Those who believe that it was a "dirty little war" where the bombs did all the work might contemplate that is was the most costly war the U.S. Marine Corps has ever fought-five times as many dead as World War I, three times as many dead as in Korea, and more total killed and wounded than in all of World War II.
Significantly, these sacrifices were being made at a time the United States was deeply divided over our effort in Vietnam. The baby-boom generation had cracked apart along class lines as America's young men were making difficult, life-or-death choices about serving. The better academic institutions became focal points for vitriolic protest against the war, with few of their graduates going into the military. Harvard College, which had lost 691 alumni in World War II, lost a total of 12 men in Vietnam from the classes of 1962 through 1972 combined. Those classes at Princeton lost six, at MIT two. The media turned ever more hostile. And frequently the reward for a young man's having gone through the trauma of combat was to be greeted by his peers with studied indifference of outright hostility.
What is a hero? My heroes are the young men who faced the issues of war and possible death, and then weighed those concerns against obligations to their country. Citizen-soldiers who interrupted their personal and professional lives at their most formative stage, in the timeless phrase of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, "not for fame of reward, not for place of for rank, but in simple obedience to duty, as they understood it." Who suffered loneliness, disease, and wounds with an often-contagious elan. And who deserve a far better place in history than that now offered them by the so-called spokesman of our so-called generation.
Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Spielberg, meet my Marines. 1969 was an odd year to be in Vietnam. Second only to 1968 in terms of American casualties, it was the year made famous by Hamburger Hill, as well as the gut-wrenching Life cover story showing pictures of 242 Americans who had been killed in one average week of fighting. Back home, it was the year of Woodstock, and of numerous anti-war rallies that culminated in the Moratorium march on Washington. The My Lai massacre hit the papers and was seized upon the anti-war movement as the emblematic moment of the war. Lyndon Johnson left Washington in utter humiliation.
Richard Nixon entered the scene, destined for an even worse fate. In the An Hoa Basin southwest of Danang, the Fifth Marine Regiment was in its third year of continuous combat operations. Combat is an unpredictable and inexact environment, but we were well led. As a rifle platoon and company commander, I served under a succession of three regimental commanders who had cut their teeth in World War II, and four different battalion commanders, three of whom had seen combat in Korea. The company commanders were typically captains on their second combat tour in Vietnam, or young first lieutenants like myself who were given companies after many months of "bush time" as platoon commanders in he Basin's tough and unforgiving environs.
The Basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in Vietnam, its torn, cratered earth offering every sort of wartime possibility. In the mountains just to the west, not far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese Army operated an infantry division from an area called Base Area 112. In the valleys of the Basin, main-force Viet Cong battalions whose ranks were 80 percent North Vietnamese Army regulars moved against the Americans every day. Local Viet Cong units sniped and harassed. Ridgelines and paddy dikes were laced with sophisticated booby traps of every size, from a hand grenade to a 250-pound bomb. The villages sat in the rice paddies and tree lines like individual fortresses, crisscrossed with the trenches and spider holes, their homes sporting bunkers capable of surviving direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells. The Viet Cong infrastructure was intricate and permeating. Except for the old and the very young, villagers who did not side with the Communists had either been killed or driven out to the government controlled enclaves near Danang.
In the rifle companies, we spent the endless months patrolling ridgelines and villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed wire, hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would fit inside one's pack, which after a few "humps" usually boiled down to letter-writing material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small transistor radio.
We moved through the boiling heat with 60 pounds of weapons and gear, causing a typical Marine to drop 20 percent of his body weight while in the bush. When we stopped we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for toilets. We slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hootches, and when it rained we usually took our hootches down because wet ponchos shined under illumination flares, making great targets. Sleep itself was fitful, never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time as we mixed daytime patrolling with night-time ambushes, listening posts, foxhole duty, and radio watches. Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, and dysentery were common, as was trench foot when the monsoons came. Respite was rotating back to the mud-filled regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days, where rocket and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned defensive bunkers at night. Which makes it kind of hard to get excited about tales of Woodstock, or camping at the Vineyard during summer break.
We had been told while training that Marine officers in the rifle companies had an 85 percent probability of being killed or wounded, and the experience of "Dying Delta," as our company was known, bore that out. Of the officers in the bush when I arrived, our company commander was wounded, the weapons platoon commander wounded, the first platoon commander was killed, the second platoon commander was wounded twice, and I, commanding the third platoons fared no better. Two of my original three-squad leaders were killed, and the third shot in the stomach. My platoon sergeant was severely wounded, as was my right guide. By the time I left, my platoon I had gone through six radio operators, five of them casualties.
These figures were hardly unique; in fact, they were typical. Many other units; for instance, those who fought the hill battles around Khe Sanh, or were with the famed Walking Dead of the Ninth Marine Regiment, or were in the battle of Hue City or at Dai Do, had it far worse.
When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with me, I am continually amazed, for these were mostly recent civilians barely out of high school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their year in hell and he return. Visions haunt me every day, not of the nightmares of war but of the steady consistency with which my Marines faced their responsibilities, and of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of constant danger. The salty, battle-hardened 20-year-olds teaching green 19-year-olds the intricate lessons of the hostile battlefield. The unerring skill of the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar villages and weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick certainty when a fellow Marine was wounded and needed help. Their willingness to risk their lives to save other Marines in peril. To this day it stuns me that their own countrymen have so completely missed the story of their service, lost in the bitter confusion of the war itself.
Like every military unit throughout history we had occasional laggards, cowards, and complainers. But in the aggregate, these Marines were the finest people I have ever been around. It has been my privilege to keep up with many of them over the years since we all came home. One finds in them very little bitterness about the war in which they fought. The most common regret, almost to a man, is that they were not able to do more for each other and for the people they came to help.
It would be redundant to say that I would trust my life to these, men. Because I already have, in more ways than I can ever recount. I am alive today because of their quiet, unaffected heroism. Such valor epitomizes the conduct of Americans at war from the first days of our existence. That the boomer elites can canonize this sort of conduct in our fathers' generation while ignoring it in our own is more than simple oversight. It is a conscious, continuing travesty.
************ ******* Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star, and Bronze Star medals for heroism as a Marine in Vietnam. His novels include The Emperor's General and Fields of Fire.
Amen, to your post
Welcome home, and thank you for your service.
RVN 69-70
Dad was a career military from 1966 to Gulf war and was in Da Nang in 1968-1969. His comments:
1) LBJ was a micro manager, severely mishandling the war
2) Walter Cronkite should have been FIRED immediately after his remarks about TET....TET was a bloody but big US victory...the viet cong NEVER recovered
3) Whenever Nixon carpet bombed the hell out of the north, all fighting stopped in the south.
4) the US won the war and the invasion of the South after our pullout was an old fashioned Warsaw pact invasion. The Democrat party let the Vietnamese hanging in the wind.
5) Every anti-war protester has the blood of both many south Vietnamese and Cambodians on their hands
God bless every one of you
Thank you for posting this.
This is a dead-on, accurate description. He really nailed it.
I’m a former USMC field radio operator, 81 mortars forward Observer, tunnel rat. Lima, 3/26, 1968-69, including months spent in Arizona Territory (the An Hoa basin he writes about)
We started one operation with 243 men in Lima Co. Three weeks later we had 90 to 95. 40 KIA, the rest wounded, malaria, dysentery, dengue fever, leptospirosis, hookworm, etc.
You must have nine lives!!
I can’t believe what military people endure in the name of duty and honor and without self-aggrandizement or complaint.
Two days ago, I was cleaning a file and found my father’s discharge papers from his army air force service in the second war. I knew he saw action but I did not know all the places by name and all the health concerns he had at the time.
He was strong and silent about everything and did not ever think of himself or his service as unique. He is gone now, but it brought tears to my eyes.
Senator Webb (D) Virginia trying to remind everyone that he's a warrior and not a democrat. But, by the very fact that he IS A DEMOCRAT he continues to undermine a follow on generation of Marines.
I honor him for his service then and I spit on him for his service now. His is the party of traitors, but it was the easiest path for him to get elected so he took it.
Semper Fi,
TS
Pretty much my combat experience. And when we came home, we all went about our lives that we were quite thankful to still have. The other half of our generation have spent their lives trying to justify their self-serving decisions and personal inadequacies.
Amen to that. I can't get over Webb being such an a$$hat during and after his election: refusing to shake the President's hand, all but saying "Bush lied people died", etc. He sold his soul to the Left in every way. He fought the communists in Vietnam and now works hard to bring communism here to the states. Disgraceful.
God just has a different time set to call me home. We had 5 radio operators killed in my company. Me, never hit! Though I did goof off at 1st Med Battalion for 13 days after being medevaced with a fever of 105.6.
Probably fried my brain... that explains a lot, so says Mrs BN!
Dittos to what Webb said about Vietnam vets “91 percent were glad they’d served their country, 74 percent enjoyed their time in the service”.
My time in the Corps and especially in Vietnam was one of the very best things that has ever happened to me. And I have lived a life FULL of very good things.
“For those who have fought for it, life bears a savor the protected will never know!”
God is good!
Why did radiomen have such a high casualty rate? I would think you could better avoid the bullets if you didn’t have to shoot back.
As a squad radioman in B Co. 4/12th Infantry 199th Light Infantry Brigade 1967-68. I can with all due experience report that walking with a 20 Lb radio and spare batteries and a 5 ft. antenna waving over your head, that radiomen were a constant first target of enemy fire. Destroy the communications and you cut the eyes and ears from the enemy. An infantry radioman carried a rifle, full ammo load and participated in the firefight and definitely shot back. He was an infantryman first and radioman second.
Who are my heros?
Drew Dix (SFC, later, Major) US Army, Nice guy, still lives here in Alaska.
Roy P. Benavidez MSgt, US Army
Ed W. “Too Tall” Freeman - an Army aviation legend
Phill Shriver, CW4, US Army aviation, 3 tours in RVN and one hell of a nice guy
The pilots that flew the “Covey” missions on the border
I’m sure other have thier heros as well.....
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
Walking around with the radio on your back and a big ass antenna above you gives the enemy a mighty good target, bad the guy your following too since the RTOs usually walkd right behind the Platoon leaders or platoon sergeants.
Shrew, I couldn’t agree with you more. Webb is against the 2nd amendment, except for when he carries.
You’re welcome. The only movie I have ever seen of the Vietnam Era that really accurately depicts the radiomans role and casualty rates was ‘We Were Soldiers’. That movie shows them dropping like flies. Other Heliborne Assault grunts I have talked to think that movie was the most realistic portrayal then any of the other combat films depicting that period. Kind of like WWII vets participating at Normandy have told me ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was spookily accurate during the beach battle. My father was a mine clearing engineer on Omaha beach and told me the movie was like he was there again.
Larry Thorne
Hal Moore
Basil Plumley
and my squad leader the late Terry Weldon.
Other common beliefs about public opinion on the Vietnam war are also false. Educated people were more likely to support the war, not less. There is not as much data on the subject, but draft status did not seem to affect opinions on the war."
Given that the MSM influence was shameless superimposed on public opinion, I never paid any attention to samples and statistics.
Besides, the Liberals who lied about their connection to the murder of Diem, etc.... were not likely to be honest or accurate about anything else.
Maybe that’s just my personal cynicism.
It's funny you should mention that movie. I'm almost 40 which means I was leaving my diapers when America was leaving Vietnam. I hated the 80's movies about Vietnam (Platoon, Casualties of War, Apocalypse Now) because I thought our servicemen (even officers!) were good people, not doped-up criminals that raped everything in sight and loved war for all the killing you get to do. My dad served in the Navy in Korea. He wasn't like that, and he told me the guys on the ground he supported with the Iowa's guns weren't like that either.
We Were Soldiers was a huge eye opener for me because the portrayal of American servicemen matched what I had seen and heard about our Gulf War troops. Another big dose of reality came through when I read The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War. I had no idea how effectively you guys fought, no idea that we had the war won (twice!), no idea how hard the Left in Washington stabbed the RVN and our servicemen in the back. Jaw dropping history that I had been unaware of in my adult life.
Anyway, just had to share that experience with you, and say "Thanks".
1. Communications is VERY important in combat.
2. The radio operator was usually close to:
a) an officer leading his unit, coordinating with adjacent units and higher headquarters, getting intel info
b) a forward observer calling in artillery or mortar fire
c) a forward air controller calling in close air support (bombs, rockets, strafing fire
d) the helo support team, coordinating medevacs, resupply, etc.)
If the enemy can take out the radio/radio operator/officer/FO he succeeds in doing MORE damage our ability to fight than if a single rifleman were the target. The one possible exception is the heavy machine gunner. I knew two assistant machine gunners who wer deaf in one ear because their gunner had been blown away with an RPG (rocket propelled grenade).
In a firefight, troops get as far away from a radio operator as possible. While going through field radio operator’s school we learned that some of the radios weighted up to 96 lbs. Noticing that most of the guys in the class were my size (5’8”, 155 lbs), I asked S/Sgt Lopez, “Why don’t you get some BIG guys to carry these?”
His answer? “Oh, you guys are smaller targets!”
Good replies!
We Were Soldiers was right on in many ways.
I had to keep popping my head up to see where the last set of mortar rounds landed, then work with the FO to adjust fire. We made sure we moved a lot and moved FAST and not in straight lines.
Kinda like Wile E. Coyote going from rock to rock.
Of course, when you dropped down behind a paddy dike, everyone started rolling away from you as soon as they noticed your radio. Kinda made you feel unwanted! :-)
The antennae.
One of the great myths that the media has been pushing for decades, is that of an anti-war generation of youth.
Those youth were the biggest supporters of the war and they also voted for Nixon in 1972.
LOL! Interesting stuff - thanks.
I was a student at Kent State Univ. at the time. The professors were shamelessy biased and a certain element (so impressed with these guys or else sucking up to them for whatever reason) went along with them like toadies.
I dated returned vets who were students there. NOT one of them ever went along with the ‘I hate America’ campaign or maligned the Military in ANY way. Mostly, they just quietly went about their studies and then got out of there. It is interesting to note, none of the vets associated with the wormy little radical types.
Abbie Hoffman, b. 1936
Jane Fonda, b. 1937
Jerry Rubin, b. 1938
Tom Hayden, b. 1939
Most of the kids in my high school in the early and mid 1960s were pro-America in the Vietnam era, and this was a pretty middle-of-the-road locale in central NJ.
The media really played a role in turning the tide of popular opinion against the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They had no particular love for LBJ late in his term but when it a done deal that Nixon was going to be President, the media's hatred of Nixon took the form of pinning the war on him and making as many people hate the war as possible, because it would damage Nixon. At least, I have often wondered if this wasn't the real dynamic at work when the media turned on the US war effort.
I was given the opportunity to vote on the design of the VN Memorial, The Black Hole, I voted that the design stank of defeat, Webb headed the committee.
Sorry, that was in response to the previous post.
Remember LT never walk in front of your RTO.
Yes. 1950s or earlier.
The children of the sixties gave us...disco. ;-)
We share many things - after looking at your about page...
Put your bars on the underside of your collar points.
Never point at anything like you are giving directions/orders.
In the bush, don’t let anyone call you “Sir” or salute you.
Stretch the coiled cord on the radio handset allllllll the way out when using it to talk on your operator’s radio.
I was in the 12th evac and I ran across the LT that I gave that advice to. Me; What happened to you? LT; I didn’t follow your advice. We were all slick sleeves in the field.
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