My little high school in Livermore Falls lost its first serviceman in Vietnam in 1964. He was a rugged farm boy who enlisted in the Marines and he was killed in action “somewhere over there” with a funny name. I remembered him as a very tough upper classman in phys ed class and like so many others he died way too young.
In 1965 I went to Farmington State Teachers College but there was always something on the nightly news about Vietnam. Soon a tight end from our high school football team was the next friend to die over there. He was a door gunner on a Huey. That was followed by the death of a Jay man who was killed when he armored personnel carrier rolled over a land mine. Another one died when a RPG took out his truck. A college friend and good basketball player lost his right leg to a land mine. A star athlete from Wilton Academy was killed when his chopper was shot down. The war was always close to us.
At first I was ambivalent about the war. My dad was one of four brothers who fought in World War II in the Pacific and in Europe. I had two younger brothers who enlisted in the service. Meanwhile I was protected for 4 years from the draft with my 2-S deferment. Some of my friends who were drafted and survived Nam came back and told us about fire fights, booby traps, ambushes, snipper bullets and sappers. Many others came back home and never talked about the war. Some still carry their emotional scars some 40 years latter. And my question was always “Why this?”
This guerilla war in Nam seemed to march on for month after month. At UMF we talked about draft quotas, body counts, flag-draped caskets, patriotic posturing and anti-war demonstrations, flag burning, tear gas, napalm and agent orange–it all seemed so unreal, so close and yet so far away. The war divided us and polarized our country. No one seemed to know why we were fighting, or how long the war would last. Nixon was looking for a victory but the rest of America just wanted it to all end.
News came back that another friend had been killed. The last time I saw him was when we were picking up bales of hay for a dairy farmer and he spoke of enlisting in the Marines. Other friends who wanted to avoid combat enlisted for “non-combat jobs” in the other services with the intention of bypassing any chance of being sent to Vietnam. The economy was booming but the costs of fighting a war against a tenacious and determined enemy was taking its toll on the spirit of Americans at home too.
I hoped the war would be over before I graduated with my BS degree in Education in June of 1969. It wasn’t. I was drafted into the Army in September and reported to basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey. I had never been around so many people of color and suddenly my America seemed to be a much larger nation with a great variety of men from all 50 states.
By then I evolved politically and was firmly against the war, but I zipped by lip. I needed to be a good soldier and with God’s help I was determined to survive my 365 day tour of duty in Nam. I was assigned to the 5th of the 4th Arty Battalion in Quang-tri. QT was up in northern part of South Vietnam near the 1954 demilitarized zone (DMZ).
The November rainy monsoon season was in full swing when I got there. Heavy rains pounded the corrugated tin roofs of our hootch. We were on the northern perimeter of this big base camp, and our guard bunker looked across flooded the rice paddies just beyond rows of concertina wire. There was a mud everywhere and at night it seemed rather chilly. My friend Pee-Wee died here on guard duty one night right outside our hootch.
Our 155’s self-propelled howitzers were stationed at firebases stretched along the DMZ to the border with Laos and then they were strung along the mountain tops southward towards the 101 Airborne at Phu Bai. We were stationed less than a dozen miles south the DMZ. Quang-tri was a noisy neighborhood with fixed wing aircraft arriving and departing, mostly in the daylight. Heavily armed convoys rolled out in and out of the field. It seemed like the Hueys were constantly ferrying troops and supplies out to the field and back. But it was the big guns that startled us the most. When they fired heavy rounds to support our infantry we knew that somebody nearby needed our artillery support. I prayed for the wounded soldiers who returned in the Medievac choppers.
We were always busy at the Met Station and those 10 months went by very quickly. Mail delivery from the states was erratic but I tried to write frequently to my new wife but there was not much to say about the events around us. We wrote the word free on the envelope where the stamp was supposed to be.
In the spring of 1971 faraway political powers decided to give the ARVNs (the Army of South Vietnam and our “allies”) a chance to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. The 5th Mech was ordered out of Quang-tri and we convoyed up Highway 9 and into the mountains to Khe Sang to re-establish a base camp at the old air strip. Years earlier US forces were surrounded there by the NVA and was under siege for over a month. It seemed like we were driving up into a giant ambush, but it was the ARVNs who were badly humiliated this time.
The NVA were tenacious fighters and years of fighting against us had hardened them to seek victory over the US and our ARVN allies. I will never forget images of the terrified ARVN troops hanging out the skids of the Hueys as they fled the NVA just across the Mekong River in Laos.. Pictures of our routed allies even made it to the front page of the Army Times. This would be a preview for the collapse of Vietnam in 1975.
After that fiasco, the 5th Mech stood down and I was reassigned to DaNang and then I got a 2 week drop and orders for my Free Bird flight home. I flew from Quang tri to Da-Nang to Cam Bay to Seattle. There I picked up some civilian clothes and stashed by jungle fatigues in a dipsy dumpster. It had been a long time since I had worn blue jeans and sneakers. I flew non-stop on a new DC 10 and enjoyed the scenery of the cross continental trip to Logan in Boston.
As my wife and I drove up I-95 and back into Maine I wondered why no one was guarding the bridges. Many times I would wake up at night wondering who was on guard duty. It took be awhile before I could relax and feel safe again in the wonderful woods of Maine. I did everything I could to forget all about it.
Although I look back fondly on my military service I became convinced that not all wars are winnable. I joined the Veterans for Peace and still support them. I continue to question this country’s unrelenting quest to destroy others with our sheer military might. I think our leaders should be more respect of other people, and try winning their hearts and minds of people everywhere rather than beating them into submission. We should strive to live in peace and harmony with all people around the world. We should also accept the premise that not all wars are winnable.