50 years of Vietnam Memories: Arriving in July 1970

 

50 years of Vietnam Memories: Arriving in July 1970

OK, off to Vietnam in July 1970.  That was 50 years ago and I've processed lots of thoughts about the Vietnam Conflict/ War in the interim.  I'm pleased to have served in Vietnam. 

 

My reflections are through a lens of awareness that 58,318 names, including twenty of my West Point classmates, representing those who died as a result of their service in Vietnam, are engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ("The Wall").  I have an array of books about Vietnam to try to better understand it from multiple perspectives.  Some are enlightening.  Some are troubling.  Some, such as Visions of War, Dreams of Peace -Writings of Women in the Vietnam War, edited by Lynda Van Devanter and Joan A. Furey (poetry) can be gut wrenching.  Here is an excerpt from Mellow on Morphine by Dana Shuster in 1967:

                                  "...Mellow on morphine, he smiles and floats

                                    above the stretcher over which i hover

                                    I snip an annular ligament

                                    and his foot plops unnoticed into the pail,

                                    ....His day was just starting when his hootch disappeared

                                    along with the foot and at least one friend...

                                                                                                                                      

 

In another book In Retrospect, the late Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, laments, "This is the book I planned never to write.... I want to put Vietnam in context.          

    We of the Kennedy and Johnson  administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation.  We made our decisions in light of those values.

    Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.  We owe it to future generations to explain why."

We arrived in Saigon after a very long flight, the last leg starting in Japan.  As we descended, I noticed what looked like a large section of countryside pockmarked with small bomb craters, which actually were graves in  a huge cemetery, I noticed as the lower altitude afforded a better focus.  Several buses transported the 200 or so Army men who had shared the flight from the landing strip around or across a part of Saigon via a rubber tree plantation to Long Binh where we would get our unit assignments at the Replacement Depot (or something like that- excuse the 50 year old fog).

I remember filing out some forms asking about assignment preferences that would accompany my personnel file and official orders for service in Vietnam to be reviewed as my unit assignment was decided.  I expressed a preference for assignment in an aviation role with an Engineer unit, since I was an officer in the Corps of Engineers.  I then waited in a bar with many other members of my flight school class for the listing of names and assignments as they were posted on a bulletin board.  Several of my fellow pilots were assigned to the !st Cav and we drank a toast to the Cav.  After a short while of wondering, my name showed up on a list as the only one assigned to the 18th Engineer Brigade in Cam Ranh Bay.  I laughed and drank another Budweiser, assuming that I would spend the year with the Engineers based at Cam Ranh Bay, which probably had some level of creature comfort.
  Some US Army pics at Cam Ranh Bay 1970-71

Here are the first pictures I took in Vietnam.  Just getting adjusted.