My Story
In a recent Ted Talk, Julia Galef spoke on the ability to make judgments about happenings in the world. She said making good judgments is a function of mindsets, and there is a difference between the mindset of a warrior and a scout. In her view, the warrior uses motivational reasoning to make some ideas win and others lose, while the scout approaches the task of knowing with more of an open mind to see what is going on as clearly as possible.
Her talk reminded me of my experience in Vietnam as an Infantry officer. I arrived “in-country” on May 5, 1966 and assumed the role of rifle platoon leader with the Third Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. We were engaged in a field operation called “Paul Revere” west of Pleiku in the Central Highlands. Our mission was to block any infiltration of NVA troops moving along the Ho Chi Min trail and to interfere with their supply lines.
Ten days after I took over as the leader of the second platoon of Company B., we were ordered to spring a hasty ambush south of LZ 290 to lure the enemy into a trap so that we could find out how closely our forces were being watched. We surprised two Viet Cong spies and an NVA soldier, and two of those agents were captured. I never found out whether the information gathered from those spies was useful to our cause, but the incident did confirm the fact that the enemy dispatched scouts to gather ground intelligence vital to its success.
When we returned to base camp at the beginning of June, I read an article in Time magazine carrying the official line from the Pentagon that a strong military build- up of American fighting forces was necessary to win the War. It also said the campaign against the enemy was proceeding effectively and that 400,000 troops were expected to join the fight by the end of 1966.
At the time, I had no way of recognizing that this assessment was a product of what Julia Galef would label as motivational reasoning. Soldiers, especially those on the field of battle, need to follow a plan of attack with single mindedness, and at that point in the War the prescription for success was more troops, more arms and more time to validate the strategy developed higher up in the chain of command.
Fifty years have gone by since I returned from Vietnam, and based upon my experience there it is quite clear that the enemy knew more about us than we knew about them and they were willing to apply maximum force to achieve the goal of a unified country. They were committed, as John Keagan the military historian said, to fight down to last man or woman standing, and they also knew that insufficient political support at home in America would force us to retreat.
My story is not over. When I returned to the States in April of 1967, I went straight to Washington where Senator Muskie’s office helped me secure an internship at the U.S. Department of State. I was subsequently hired by the Vietnam Bureau of the Agency for International Development where I joined a team of management analysts studying the effectiveness of pacification workers. We interpreted information gathered from field reports, but we had no way of independently evaluating the soundness of the data.
In November 1967, I attended special briefings delivered by General Westmoreland’s top brass who were looking for support from Congress to proceed with their military strategy and pacification initiatives. They showed us a map of Vietnam that represented the state of security “in-country.” The map identified only two small sections in red, one in Mekong Delta and the other near Khe Sanh, areas considered to be “hot” and not in the firm grip of American hands.
I viewed the map with great skepticism, even though the Generals said that one of the largest computers in the world at that time crunched the numbers in Saigon to back up their contention that we were getting the job done. The massaged data was gathered from field reports supplied by pacification workers and other military officials who knew good reports made them look good in the eyes of their superiors.
It is not so much that they lied outright about the relative state of security in the countryside of Vietnam, they just didn’t bother to inquire too deeply into the matter. They probably looked out the window of their office in broad daylight, and seeing nobody in black pajamas on the street, they declared their village safe and the people therein loyal to the Government of the South.
It was scarcely two months later that the whole of Vietnam blew up like a bomb. I am sure that the intensity of the Tet offensive had a seriously destabilizing effect on our internal affairs as riots broke out when Martin Luther King was assassinated in March of ‘68 and Bobby Kennedy was shot in June.
Those false reports shaped my life and forced me to reconsider. Even though I was inspired by President Kennedy and the liberal spirit of the 60’s to develop a career in government service, I knew I needed to leave Washington. I went to Syracuse University in 1969 to continue my graduate studies in public affairs. During that time I consulted with a psychiatrist because I had reached the point in my life where disillusionment drove me to dig deeper for self-knowledge that would give me a stronger place to stand going forward.
One of my diversions included scouting trips to midcoast Maine riding up and down the peninsulas as I considered breaking a vow that I made about never moving back to Maine. On one of those trips, I changed my mind after reading a copy of Maine Times. I fashioned a life here of my own choosing that did not follow a straight line, just as many Mainers have traditionally done to make a living and lead a different way of life.
In 1988, I started a consulting business which allowed me to work with business owners who appreciated conversations that illuminated questions of management style and opened up more space for effective action. Unlike the Generals in charge during the Vietnam War, who refused to look beyond the metrics and see the stalemate, the people I came to know were not reluctant to examine how the personal equation often accounts for the creation of, as well the solution to, problems.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War