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Sunday, April 30, 2000
By Robert Dvorchak, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Fred Franks will never forget, just as none of us should, but he moved on long ago.
"With every other step I take, I'm reminded of Vietnam," Franks said.
Robert Dvorchak was drafted into the Army in late 1972, when American ground troops were essentially gone from Vietnam, and got an honorable discharge for serving in a reserve unit. He was a war correspondent for The Associated Press during Desert Storm.
We all lost something then. Franks, a native of the Reading area and a West Point graduate, lost his left leg to a grenade.
Maimed, with a piece of him lost forever in Southeast Asia, his uniform a target of spittle, Franks took the pain but never gave in. It was Franks, wearing an artificial leg, the first amputee to serve as an active-duty general since the Civil War, who commanded 1,400 tanks in the main attack against the Iraqis in Desert Storm.
"We didn't say it to each other, but I think we all felt that we're going to do it right this time," he said.
For many of those bloodied in the absurdity of Vietnam, the end was not the shameful evacuation atop the embassy roof in what was Saigon 25 years ago today. The final battle was fought in the trackless Arabian desert by warriors who carried the ghost of Vietnam in their rucksacks, warriors who knew firsthand the grim business of killing, bleeding and dying.
It may be of no consolation to the 58,202 names on a black granite wall, or to the scores of thousands who were crippled, castrated or emotionally scarred in America's longest war, but because of the carnage and blunders in the most divisive war since Appomattox, the combat casualties, though each individually tragic, were so few in Desert Storm.
Soldiers have a ritual on the eve of battle when they look inside and make peace with themselves. No need to take excess baggage with you into eternity. Would that we could all exorcise Vietnam.
Vietnam was America's black hole. It sucked in lives, souls, such a huge chunk of the public treasury that it brought the economy to its knees. It swallowed our innocence, replacing a blind faith with at minimum a healthy skepticism.
Presidents lied to us about Vietnam. They had lied to us before but we never knew it. They still lie.
We came to hate the men who led us into such a morass and lied to cover up their own blunders, men such as Robert McNamara, a car salesman foisted upon us as the best and the brightest, a man who now concedes he was wrong. His confession does not remove the blood from his hands. We hated Nixon and his gang of angels who gave us peace with honor and spit on the Constitution.
We lost so much of ourselves that we nearly self-destructed, finding in Vietnam the ultimate absurdity: We had to destroy the country in order to save it.
Colin Powell and H. Norman Schwarzkopf, both tempered by Vietnam, were among those who vowed, "Never again." They took what was wrong and fixed it, then said they would go to war only if the politicians knew what they were getting into and what they wanted the military to achieve.
No more incremental escalation or piecemeal fighting. No more arrogantly fighting a war without international authority. No nonsense about body counts. No more underestimating the enemy.
Powell expressed the new thinking as the policy of overwhelming force: "If you're going to send young men and women to die to achieve an objective, then, by God, give them every advantage to achieve it."
The sentiment was echoed by Chuck Horner, who flew more than 100 combat missions in the on-again, off-again Rolling Thunder campaign of Vietnam.
"I vowed that if I ever got in charge, I would not let such madness reign," Horner said in his book, "Every Man A Tiger."
"If you are going to kill someone, you better have a good reason for it. And if you have a good reason, then you better not play around with the killing. ... We lost in Vietnam because we were wandering in the wilderness of goals, mission and policy; and in the process we came to believe that burning villages and shooting old people was good."
Horner did take charge. He was the Air Force general who directed Instant Thunder, the 37-day air campaign that took apart the sophisticated Iraqi air defenses and blinded Saddam Hussein's army before a 100-hour ground war was fought in the open desert instead of in triple-canopy jungle.
Today's military is an all-volunteer professional force. Before 1973, military ranks were filled largely through the draft. The baby boomers called at first saw it as their patriotic duty, because the parents who lived through the Depression, World War II and a Cold War conflict in Korea told us it was the honorable thing to do.
When the ugliness of Vietnam revealed itself, young men were seeking college deferments, burning their draft cards and deserting to Canada to avoid the death machine consuming their comrades, who at the end were a disproportionate number of blacks and lower-class whites. Muhammad Ali said in 1966, "I ain't got no fight with them Viet Cong." And the highest court in the land said he was within his rights to refuse. Years later, Jimmy Carter said the same thing to all the draft dodgers who went to Canada.
One searing image is the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, decorated for fighting as hard as any American soldiers ever fought, coming home to throw their medals at Lyndon B. Johnson's White House.
They had seen his war. A domino so wobbly it could only be propped up with U.S. blood and dollars. A foe so elusive it took on the face of old men, women and children and ruthless soldiers in black pajamas and Communist uniforms. The gratitude of a country that spit on them or greeted them with icy indifference. They got the rawest deal anybody could get.
Only years later can we separate the warriors from the war, respect their sacrifice and forgive ourselves.
If you came of age during Vietnam: You saw race riots incinerate American cities. Heard late-night comics joke about bringing the troops home -- from Detroit. Saw middle-class white kids get their heads cracked for voicing dissent. Witnessed Martin and Bobby joining John in graves of the assassinated. Beheld astronauts -- military men -- plant the flag on the moon and say, "We come in peace for all mankind." Saw Jane Fonda climb into a Hanoi anti-aircraft gun being used to shoot down American pilots. Watched as four unarmed Ohio college students were killed by the National Guard -- and public opinion polls sided with the trigger-pullers. Heard long-haired, dope-smoking, peace-symbol-wearing hippie freaks bemoan the breakup of the Beatles. Saw the flag waved and torched. And went to see games at brand new Three Rivers Stadium.
Listen to the voices: There's light at the end of the tunnel. We had to destroy the village in order to save it. Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age. Kill 'em all, let God sort it out. G.I. Joe, meet My Lai. Beautify America -- get a haircut. America: love it or leave it. My country -- right or wrong. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? I ain't no fortunate son. Hell, no, we won't go. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Burn, baby, burn. All we are saying, is give peace a chance. The whole world's watching. Don't trust anybody over 30. Right on.
If you came of age during Vietnam, you could hear your mother cry when she learned her oldest son had been shot 13,000 miles from home. And you could see tears in the eyes of your father, the toughest man in the world, an immigrant's son who as a naval gunner fought kamikazes in the Good War, and hear him tell his other sons, "This is bull----. No more of you are going." And you could visit a wounded brother in the crowded wards of Valley Forge Veterans Administration Hospital and smell the sickening smell of the rotting flesh of fellow baby boomers wasted by war.
Joe Mobley, a Navy pilot, remembers that protesters on the Golden Gate Bridge dumped garbage on his aircraft carrier as he was being sent to Vietnam. That memory stayed with him when he was held for five years in a stinking Communist prison camp.
In Desert Storm, he captained the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, which saw pilots killed, aviators captured and crew lost.
"You can't fight a war without the support of the people back home," Mobley said.
Indeed, everybody who served in the Persian Gulf war was touched by the outpouring of letters, packages and the support of the Americans whose interests they were serving. For a brief shining moment, the image of America appeared like a mirage in the desert.
Gen-Xer Brannon Lamar, a new breed paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, saw that image when his comrades herded up the broken and beaten Iraqis and killed as few of them as they had to.
"When I saw the way our guys treated their soldiers, I was proud to be an American. Maybe we are different. Maybe we are the good guys," Lamar said. On his helmet, he had written: Haji don't surf.
And leathernecks like Mike Myatt, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division that retook Kuwait City, broke down and cried after the victory parades and welcome home that never materialized when he came back from Vietnam.
George Bush once proclaimed that the Vietnam syndrome had been kicked once and for all, buried in the sands of Arabia -- but not really.
What of the Gulf War Syndrome? That the outcome was indecisive because Saddam Hussein survived? That the war, the killing, didn't last long enough? That war leaves marks, even among victors?
And who of us grumbling about today's gasoline prices ever thinks that every barrel of oil is forever mixed with American sweat and blood?
The last war was too short; the one before that was too long. All glory -- if there is such a thing as glory in war -- is fleeting.
The lesson never learned is that war, another name for state-sanctioned killing, is the poorest way ever devised to settle a political dispute. Don't look for satisfaction in war, no matter how necessary or justified it may be.
And don't forget Vietnam. Accept it and let it go, but don't forget.
