On Vietnam

'Nearly everyone felt the need to express their views on all wars to me, starting with mine. "I found myself thinking, I ate the shit sandwich, you didn't, so please don't tell me how it tastes."

- CPT Cole, US Army

This is a quote I live by, and feel is most appropriate for the age. But you can hear the “But”. But Vietnam was a commentary that I had since learning about it in High School, and well, gotta say how I feel about that war, even though it ended a year before I was born. (1976). I know about the Soviet-Afghan war, of course, and knew about that attempt by the Soviets in trying to win that war in some manageable way. It’s easy to critique a war that you never served in, or how people assume that Marines know all about war, when recently in the GWOT era, they really didn’t do as much as other elements of the US military. But that’s an opinion and not a fact. I don’t think Marines are slouches, but as a sister service, I have to get some digs in, because I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t. I respect the service and am good friends with a couple of Marines, and it has always been more or less good company to me.

But this isn’t about the Soviet-Afghan war, but of the Vietnam War. My opinion was formed in High School and was largely negative, at least for the elements on the ground. The air war is always romanticized as something grand, and maybe it is; we learned a lot about air combat, new techniques and procedures, and improvements in technology and the like. But as a former Soldier, I focus on the ground war in general. I can’t say all were crazy, but a lot of Vietnam vets came back mentally fucked up, and that’s the cost of any war, not just the Vietnam War. As I read about Vietnam and the various elements I read about, the narrative is that I don’t think we did a good job leading the war, all in all. Needless to say, it was unpopular at home, and in some cases, rightfully so. I don’t think it’s right to massacre civilians, as we’re seeing now with Israel and Lebanon, using white phosphorus on civilian targets.

But what’s interesting is that they were more concerned about the “body count” there than about achievable goals. It was never about learning from mistakes (though the Marines did a better job with the CAP program, where they embedded with locals to reshape the narrative), but rather about the body count. I don’t know where that came about; maybe policy desired to show the enemy that we can kill without impunity or some such metric. All it did was give returning vets nightmares and other mental health problems that were exacerbated by a government that didn’t give a shit about the people, just the body count that needed to be “won” each day. So the service members adapted, and killed anybody (such as the famous My Lai incident) that seemed to be within the objective area, and therefore a civilian became an insurgent casualty. I know that we carried an AK-47 looted from somewhere, just in case we had to lie to people in Iraq, in case we needed a photo. Thankfully, we never did that, and I feel better knowing I didn’t commit a war crime either.

So it happened, and the emotional cost of the war is still evident today. There’s a comic I see on Facebook called “In Country” that seems to capture the vagaries of life in the war there. Again, I don’t like to critique, as I don’t like other civilians telling me what my wars were like, when they could have joined up just as easily as I did. But again, while some may laugh and point at those who suffered mentally (my Dad was one who served a tour as an MP and never took the time to see a therapist, as frankly he needed somebody to talk to besides shitting on me) as a way of “getting back from what you did over there.” A lot of left-wingers mock MAGA members who finally see through the bullshit of Trump, and I feel that we shouldn’t laugh at them completely. I mean, got it, you were delusional and now seeing the truth, but Vietnam vets still have the psychosis and nightmares of what they did. In a way, it’s good, as said, but it’s hell when you can’t escape your own mind. I know, as I’ve had a couple mental health crises and didn’t quite enjoy them as somebody thought I would (particularly the woman I harassed), or think that I was enjoying being cruel. I don’t think most Vietnam vets got the chance to have a system to find themselves in a better spot, and like my Dad, had little confidence in the VA to accurately help them.

So I got it out, my critique of a war that I never remotely served in, but have book knowledge, and not the necessary street knowledge to know what it was truly like there. Again, I don’t like people critiquing me on my conduct (especially since I didn’t commit any sort of war crime), but you just have to read about the experiences, and feel that in some way I do have a “right” to say something about a war that was, all in all, perhaps the most controversial in US history. At least in my view.