No Escaping Parallels to Vietnam
by Dave Griffiths
On Memorial Day, I went to the observance in our little town. It was a fine occasion, with people of all ages showing quiet respect for the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice, putting themselves in a position to cut their lives short in defense of values we hold dear.
The sense of community was palpable, and that made me proud.
Then I went home and reread these words from the Maine Sunday Telegram (May 28):
"Many Marines have complained to journalists that they conduct repeated sweeps through villages to drive out the insurgents, who then reappear when the insurgents leave. That has bred a sense of frustration among troops fighting a difficult war with no real end in sight."
It was about murders allegedly committed by U.S. Marines, but the same words could have been written about troops in Vietnam dealing with Vietcong who melted back into the jungle after a firefight and peaceful looking "villes" that harbored some of the fiercest fighters American forces have ever faced.
That's what war does. It brutalizes young warriors who, no matter how intense their training, find themselves so frustrated with guerrilla warfare and the hatred they encounter in the civilian populace that they see everyone, even children, as the enemy.
I find myself spending way too much time thinking, even obsessing, about the parallels with Vietnam, because I spent 10 months there with the Army's 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. And I lost some friends.
One was a young Texan named Jim Cartwright who wandered into a Claymore ambush (trip wire-activated mine array) that he had set the night before.
The other was Bruce Stephenson, my 19-year-old recon sergeant who was peppered with shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade that hit the armored cavalry assault vehicle in which I normally sat behind a .50-cal machine gun. The day Bruce died, I was on R&R in Bangkok.
I touch those two names every time I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
Then I reread another paragraph from the same Maine Sunday Telegram article, quoting Mike Turner, a retired Air Force colonel who was recently a planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government."
At those highest levels are a puppet-master vice president who "had other priorities" when Vietnam and the draft loomed, and a tough-talking Texan who, thanks to LBJ's reluctance to call up Guard units for Southeast Asia duty, avoided hostile fire. Our current commander-in-chief posed for pseudo-brave fighter jock photos, but family and political connections gave him the chance to live out a full life.
Here's what keeps me awake and mumbling to myself, and trying hard to keep from sounding like a middle-aged crazy living in the past when I'm around younger people:
Didn't it mean anything that Jim and Bruce and 50,000-plus other Americans died in a war that we lost? What about the lessons learned in Vietnam? Are those lives wasted? Will we ask the same thing about the next generation of fallen heroes in Iraq?
War is not a natural state for humankind. War does not solve problems. It just creates bitterness and draws hundreds of billions of dollars from the national treasury and kills innocent men, women and children. And, like the Marines in Iraq, it can make our fighters something less than human when they're under unbearable pressure, the kind you can't train them to cope with.
I've seen it before. At one point in Vietnam, I remember getting angry with some soldiers who were cutting ears off the enemy dead and displaying them as souvenirs. The perpetrators were not sadistic terrorists. They were everyday American kids, just like the youngsters we're sending to Iraq.
Published on Thursday, July 13, 2006 by the Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine) |
