"- our current forces are far better than the conscript army in Vietnam.."
I've heard this same type of statement from Rumsfeld and others. It implies that our failure to "win the war in Vietnam" can be attributed in part to the fact that the people fighting in Vietnam were "draftees" or, as you referred to us, "conscripts."
You couldn't be more wrong. My unit was an army unit in the jungle and we fought NVA regulars with years of fighting experience. They were deadly fighters, they knew the jungle, they picked their times and places to ambush us, they were dug into bunkers that were a part of the jungle and they killed a lot of us. But they weren't better than the "conscripts" that are now negatively compared to the "all-volunteer" army.
Some of us had some college education but some of us couldn't read or write. Some of us came from cities and some came from farms or mountains. Most of us in the jungle were about 20 years old. An "old man" was someone over 24. Most of us were drafted. We were southerners, northerners, easterners and westerners.
We stayed in the jungle for months straight carrying what we needed for survival on our backs. Once in a while we had a 4-5 days of rest on an LZ. LZs were the "front" in most people's minds but for us that was RxR.
We were supposedly "led" by a captain and three lieutenants, but the reality was that all they did was to tell us where to go. We knew a lot more about the jungle and the NVA than they did, we were up front while they were sheltered in the middle of the group and there were a lot of leaders among us. We did the how of it, and when we were in firefights one of us was usually directing the battle.
All the "career" military men were in the rear because we were getting killed all the time and they knew it. As much as they would have liked to get their military records punched up with combat experience, many of them wouldn't take such extreme risks. Some units were totally wiped out. Some units like ours which were usually at a 50-60 man strength in jungle, lost 50 men DEAD over the course of a one year's tour.
We were wet a lot of the time during the monsoons season. In the dry months we sometimes couldn't get scheduled resupplies and we went without water in the jungle's oppressive heat. When we found it we sometimes drank water that would make a maggot choke, and we were grateful to get it. We pulled leaches off our bodies and we were often suffering from jungle rot, ringworm, prickly heat rash, and insect bites so numerous that they would sometimes swell your face.
We were hungry most of the time because we couldn't afford to carry the weight of enough food. None of us was fat.
We never had a single minute in the months we spent in the jungle when the jungle might not erupt with deadly bullets from a few meters distance. We never fully slept, we never, ever relaxed, and once we went "jungle" we kept an emotional distance from each other even though we were like family in other ways. When one of us got shot up really badly, but not fatally, and was medivaced out in pain and leaking blood, we shook our heads and said, "that lucky bastard," and we meant it because he was going to LIVE.
And we went up the NVA trails into certain ambushes KNOWING that there was death waiting up the trail and thinking that maybe this time the first few guys could cheat it. Some of us did, some of us didn't, but we kept cutting ahead through the jungle and going up those trails into ambushes. And we killed a whole lot more of those deadly, tough NVA than they did of us, because we were that good.
We killed in a war that many of believed was a criminal waste of good men. We killed because we had to. But regardless of our belief in the war, we did it well and with courage.
And some of the ones that survived the whole year were really special. Men who used their noses to sniff out ambushes, men who could listen to leaves falling through the jungle, men who never let their thoughts interfere with their instincts. Men so quick and deadly that your eyes couldn't have followed their movements in the first seconds of a firefight.
Those are the "draftees and conscripts" whose abilities you, Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney gently belittle. But then none of you were there, were you? None of you saw the bravery and toughness of those draftees who were the fighting men of Vietnam. And none of you saw them do impossible tasks over and over and often die doing them.
And none of you saw the hatred of many or most of the everyday S. Vietnamese we were there to "help." None of you truly understand that little brown men and swarthy Arab men are more like us than not when it comes to protecting their land and their tribe.
And none of you will yet admit that the mission in cases like Vietnam and Iraq must be very modestly defined or it will be doomed to failure. Because you can talk all day about what's best for the Iraqis but your opinion doesn't mean spit to most of them. But then none of you will die there, nor will most of YOUR kids, will they?
Fighting a real war. That's the kind of thing that would make a man like George W. Bush review his decisions to see whether he made a mistake. But then he likes to golf, doesn't he, and there's only so much time in the day. |
