Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 24)

Approaching Tet

It’s amazing how often miss-truths or someone’s personal opinion gets printed in newspapers. On Friday, General Patrick Brady, who received the MOH in Vietnam and whose service I honor, did an Op-Ed in the San Antonio Express-News. Most of his facts are, basically, correct; his conclusions are suspect.

General Brady writes The American soldier was never defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam; our defeat came from the elite in the courtrooms, the classroom, the cloakrooms and the newsrooms, from cowardly media-phobic politicians and irresponsible, dishonest media and professors from Berkeley to Harvard. This is old, hackneyed warmed-over crap. To start with, no, we did not win every battle in Vietnam. Several outposts were totally over-run by the NVA and/or the VC. Ipso facto: we did not win those battles.

Hamburger Hill? Yes, the enemy quit fighting and left. We left. Dak To? The enemy quit fighting and melted back across the borders into Cambodia and Laos. They came back. Khe Sanh? We won by enduring a shitload of rocket and mortar fire without getting all the Marines there killed? And then, the enemy stopped and left. Not exactly a victory at Khe Sanh, Not a loss, I guess, but certainly not a victory. You can't declare victory unless you know what the people attacking you want and that you kept them from achieving it.

But General Brady is right. The Americans and most of the ARVN fought well during the Tet Offensive and the North did not achieve any of the objectives it set for itself. A clear American victory. BUT…

Why did the media react the way they did? And let’s be clear about this, not many people in the media ever called TET an American loss. What seems to have happened back when Patrick Brady was a young man is that the MACV generals led by General William C. Westmoreland, only a short while before Tet 1968, had been boasting in news briefings that the VC were on the run and could not mount a credible offensive anywhere. The media duly repeated that on television and in newsprint. Is it any wonder that Walter Cronkite said “I thought we were winning this thing” when the VC rose up all over the country, attacked most of the cities, occupying many of them, and stayed in Hue for weeks after Tet?

If anyone caused the media reaction to Tet, it was General Westmoreland and his cadre of sycophantic, yesman generals.

And the assertion that history professors call Tet a military loss is patently absurd. They do, frequently, call it a public relations loss. That's absolutely correct.

Between Christmas and Tet at the 330th, we started translating message after message indicating that there was going to be an attack in Saigon, an attack in Tay Ninh, in Nha Trang, in Pleiku, in Kontum, in. . .well, every South Vietnamese city and town you can imagine. The messages even said when the attacks would take place: Tet, 1968. We were amazed: listening to MACV’s comments and reading messages from the NLF. There was a strange sort of disconnect here…someone was living in a fantasy world. We didn’t believe the first few translations we made, but as stuff poured in from all over the country, we became believers.

We sent reports and messages to MACV, to the White House, to every responsible official. Other intelligence units were sending similar messages. We were totally ignored because the generals followed their misguided beliefs of “VC on the RUN” instead of their intelligence units. In hindsight, the VC should not have attacked on Tet. They believed their own mythos, too: that the rest of the Vietnamese in the South would rise up and assist them. And so, they attacked. And they were killed in huge numbers. After Tet, what William Westmoreland had said before Tet was correct: they could no longer manage a credible offensive anywhere in the South. So, we won but not as decisively as we should have; we were not as well prepared as we should have been.

I sympathize with General Brady and appreciate his service. He’s obviously a true believer and speaks the truth "as he sees it," but true believers can't always see beyond their own preconceived notion of truth.

On the night of Tet, we retired to our palatial bunkers, but...that’s the subject for the next blog entry.

Just a Few Notes about Vietnam (Part 23)

Between New Year's Day and Tết Nguyên Đán

I have been thinking about poetry while thinking about the time between the western New Year and Tết Nguyên Đán, Between January 1, 1968, and Tet, 1968. And, as with most of us, I have been thinking, always, at least a little, this week, about the economy, which I won’t talk about anymore. Unlike most of us, I have also been re-reading Bruce Weigl’s Song of Napalm this afternoon and I thought, well, yes, there it is. I, also, thought about what’s happening today and how I might have to put off retirement for five additional years (okay, I did talk about it again)...but poetry, poetry is about deeper concerns than this year’s economy or at least it is for me.

"Put off retirement." The phrase reminds me of the way we used to refer, and I regret this, pejoratively, to NCOs who were career men back in Vietnam: “Lifers” and “Beggars.” That was unkind of those of us who were tourists and draftees in the Army then and now seems even worse than unkind. Language, word choice, what we call a man or a thing, is always important. Poetry helps us think of words and word choice in new ways. I have been told (and were I a true scholar would look for the evidence) that the racist term “Gook”—much used on both the VC and our allies, the ARVN in Vietnam—actually comes from Korea.

There’s a story, of sorts, behind that: When the first ship bearing American soldiers landed in Korea, the Korean people on the docks shouted a phrase that sounded like “me Gook.” The Americans purportedly thought they were shouting “me Gook,” “I am a Gook,” and started calling them that. This is an absurd example of the reflexive and a bilingual joke since the Korean word for “American” sounds like “me Gook” and is similar to the Vietnamese word for the United States: “My Quoc.” Probably all of that is absurd and there is an even better reason.

Why absurd? Mostly because the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word back to 1935 in the Philippines:

“1935 Amer. Speech 10 79/1 Gook, anyone who speaks Spanish, particularly a Filipino.
“1947 N.Y. Herald Tribune 2 Apr. 28/6 The American troops‥don't like the Koreans—whom they prefer to call ‘Gooks’—and, in the main, they don't like Korea.”

Poetry. Poetry is essential stuff. Poetry makes us, takes us, helps us consider new places, new concepts, encourages us to revisit the condition of being human. Oh, it may make us laugh, may turn us from gloomy thoughts, but somehow, poetry takes us deep down into places we have never been have and perhaps never wanted to go, fills us with almost inexpressible joy or exposes us to a reality we might have preferred to avoid.

It is not always EASY because life is not always easy, and for the same reasons, it is not always pleasant; it does not fit on a Hallmark card. Weigl reminds me, whenever I read his poems, that sometimes the thickets of our lives are deep, dark and gloomy. Frost is right: “The woods ARE lovely / Dark and Deep” and, yes, “[we do] have promises to keep,” but Weigl forces us to realize that we should not ignore the Dark and Deep part of that beautiful poem, and that, yes, “The lie [hidden behind the beauty of the words] works only as long as it takes to speak / and the girl runs / only as far as the napalm allows.” I will not share more of Weigl’s poem except that “…Nothing / can change that, she is burned behind my eyes / and not your good love and not the rain-swept air / and not the jungle-green / pasture unfolding before us can deny it.”

I am, I suppose, avoiding writing about what happened between the two New Year’s days: ours and theirs. Nothing of what most people would consider “poetic” happened in those days. We worked, we slept, we taught at our little school, we hitched rides downtown or not. We were bored a whole lot. We kept up with the news. We read in the newspapers, saw on television, that General William C. Westmoreland thought the VC were in retreat, that they would be unable to mount any kind of sustained attack again. And we began to translate some odd messages.

Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 22)

There was simply no time to relax when we got back to the 330th and, at the same time, things seemed more and more boring. Most of the military action had settled down. A few ambushes here and there. I’m sure that was anything but boring for those being ambushed. We alerted the 4th ID to a few of them, briefed a colonel or two on what was happening around the Mang Yang Pass, taught at the school, walked or hitched downtown, read book after book (I finished the novels and poems of Thomas Hardy), dodged small red tornados. Christmas was coming soon and we had a truce for that day and a truce for the last day of January, the Lunar New Year.

But we did start getting some odd messages shortly after Christmas and those were not even encrypted. Someone announced that a provisional revolutionary government (PRG) had been established in An Khe, a shadow government for the RVN government in that town, a kind of government in waiting. Shortly after that, similar messages were sent north from Qui Nhon and Ban Me Thuot, from Dak To and Kon Tum, and then from hamlets and villages all over the Central Highlands. Frankly, we had no idea of what all that meant.

With hindsight, in February and March, we became pretty confident that the establishment (or apparent establishment) of all those PRGs (hamlet, village, city, province levels) had something to do with one of the stated goals the NLF and North Vietnam had for the upcoming Tet Offensive of 1968: to encourage an uprising of people from all over the southern region. If an uprising did occur, they might well have wanted an organization ready to step in. A moot point since no uprising occurred.

As for us: we kept slogging through messages pretty blindly. Other units were translating similar messages in their regions. If such shadow NLF governments were truly being established (and I don’t know that that actually happened because if it did those governments were ignored in 1975 after the tanks rolled into Saigon), then the NLF, in the months prior to Tet, had established a vast network of PRGs all over the South. As for me, I just worked. Allen just worked. Richard just worked and Jim and Will and the whole cast and crew in the Operations Tent on Engineer Hill. We all went to the office, put in our time, and got paid.



We worked. We played: on the Hill and downtown. I spent much of my downtown time chatting with kids on the dusty red streets of Pleiku, usually fairly close to the market on Le Loi Street and the intersection of two major highway: 14 And 19. I had purchased both a Yashika Mat 120 and an inexpensive Minolta SLR, 35mm camera. Allen Hallmark bought a Minolta 101, a really fine camera for its day. He became an exceptionally fine photographer, eventually becoming a newspaper photographer in Medford, Oregon.

One of the things I liked about the Yashika was that it had one of those fake 90 degree lenses that allowed me to point the camera one direction and take a picture to the right. Almost all of the pictures in this blog were taken with that camera and most of those were of the children of Pleiku. These were the people, those children, who were most affected by the war, by our having gone to Vietnam. Most of them seemed cheerful in spite of everything, but their eyes could be hauntingly sad and hurt.

The Things We Leave Behind

War children. None of the ones in the photographs had known anything but war since they were born. Many of them were children of American soldiers and Vietnamese prostitutes, children with no futures.

Always the children. Chocolate bars
in World War II. Pictures with GIs.
Dirty, crying, doing what they have to.
We helped make them what they are.

They grow up in war zones, sacrifice
childhood, parents. Yet, somehow,
they survive. And the war, too: it
is always there: in their lips, their eyes.

We came to Vietnam by ship or airplane. Most of us put in a year, marked days off our short-timer's calendars, chalked up the experience to our youth, and left. We returned to whatever we had meant to be or had discovered we would become. The children? They remained, grew up, made whatever they could of what remained of their lives. We know the children of American GIs and Vietnamese prostitutes suffered terrible discrimination problems. The Vietnamese, after all, are no less racist than are we Americans.


It is much too easy to wash our hands of everything, to come up with some idea of this or that, some way to evade responsibility. “It was their war; we just went in to help.” “The dominoes were poised to fall.” “They shot at two of our ships.”

Excuses! We play huge board games with the lives of real people and real people are the game pieces. When an American soldier dies, a whole group of people (parents, relatives, friends) dies a little bit with him or her. When a Vietnamese, Iraqi, Afghani, Somali, Serb soldier dies, another group of people dies a little bit at the same time. John Donne said it best:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.