Posted by
landerson in
Lane's Blog on
07 28th, 2010 |
no responses Hi Friends,
I will tell a true story but an anonymous one.
My friend was drafted into the infantry in the late 60s and deployed to Viet Nam. He had grown up in a small and simple town in Texas and had spent much of his youth loading and shooting small caliber rifles. His favorite was the 222 and the army gave him a 223, which he promptly mastered. In Viet Nam he experience the many horrors of war as a combat infantryman would but shortly before he returned his unit was over run by a large force of North Vietnam regulars, well trained and well armed and led by a colonel. His unit fell into disarray but his training paid off and he methodically destroyed the enemy. He has a belt buckle with the colonel’s insignia and was awarded the bronze star with cluster. His tour ended weeks later and he returned to Texas where he initially joined the VVAW. When he saw that they had adopted the dress and conduct of the hippies, though, he dropped them Likely the idealization of the North Vietnamese and General Giap by some in the VVAW was also problematic as he had witnessed them torturing US soldiers, as many of our combatants did. Since it appeared to him that the VVAW had nothing to do with peace, he joined the peace corps and served in the Middle East with them. That is all I will tell of his story except a recent visit. We went on a fishing trip together with one of his sons. As he drove I brought up Viet Nam and his citations. He talked about his entire tour, not just the incident that won him his bronze star and refered to a friend that had been “cut up” by the enemy. I asked more about that and he recounted the capture and torture of a young comrade. It was not the first time I had heard about this but his son from the back seat remarked “Dad, you never talked about that!”
Sometimes being against the war is not enough and being against only one side is supporting war. I plead guilty to dressing like a hippy sometimes when I was VVAW in Phoenix in 69 and 70. I was just hoping for some of the “free love” I had heard about. The people who thought up Sea Dragon, the mission I served with in North Vietnam should have been tortured (that would likely be McNamera and Johnston) but not our draftees! The Viet Cong and NVA both had long records of war crimes, including the murder of prisoners (almost all enlisted captured) and torture sanctioned from the top (Giap wrote about the rationale). In Los Angeles I discussed this with a woman who was a journalist in VN and she admitted to real admiration for Giap and his policies. I can understand this if you support a machavellian approach to war for if I were to personally fault Giap for his use of torture and the “human wave” strategy that caused the death of about a half million of his combatants and allies (we were responsible for most of the other million civilians), Giap would likely have said, as he did in other situations, that it is true but irrelevant, it succeeded!
In solidarity, R. Lane Anderson, Asiatic Destroyer Squadron DESRON 9, USN Vietnam 1967 and 1968
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