One day I’m in the mud and muck of a monsoon. Our unit is informed we have an hour to gather personals, hand over M16s to the armorer and muster by the administrative hut. We are driven onto the Chu Lai airstrip where a Braniff passenger plane, complete with miniskirted stewardesses, arrives to take us back to the States. It’s the only commercial aircraft I’ve seen in Vietnam. Also the only miniskirts. We breakfasted while refueling in Alaska, then flew on to Rhode Island and our stateside base. The next day, I’m reading the Sunday newspapers as the train pulls into Grand Central. The real warriors suffered from PTSD. I was happy to settle for culture shock.
This is National Vietnam War Veterans Day, marking 50 years since the last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam. These days, people send notes of appreciation, come up to me and say, “thank you for your service,” They use terms such as “hero,” and “warrior.” I was neither. Nor were most of my uniformed buddies. Lots of the folks doing the appreciating weren’t born when my cohort was stationed in South Vietnam. At the time, Americans held mixed opinions about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. I was called a lot of things by the opponents of our escalating war effort, none of the terminology praised my personal attributes.
I spent the war zone part of my enlistment attached to MCB 71, a Naval Construction Battalion. CBs were basically builders. Others did the destroying, we maintained the airstrip and the roads.
Our home base was Davisville, R.I. You could board the train and ride from Providence to Manhattan in a few hours. Suggestion, word passed, unofficial, but a serious consideration, best not to wear your uniform off base. Protesters and the like. When I’d meet up with civilian friends. I had the shortest hair in the crowd.
There were many ways to experience the war.
One involved handling administrative tasks in relatively safe territory, well below the Demilitarized Zone. Another featured the boonies, haunted terrain filled with nasty potential. A supply petty officer, spending most of my days issuing replacement parts, I hurt my ankle jumping for cover. That was the only injury I sustained in-country. My cousin miraculously survived being blown just about to bits by an IED. He’d been assigned to the boonies
Stateside, fathers vs. sons, protesters, draft resisters, patriots and hardliners, staged competing actions, flag burnings, civil disobedience and parades. Our government offered endless claims that victory was just around the light at the end of the corner. The corner turned out to be downstream, at the far end of an ever telescoping tunnel.
A walk through Davisville could get enlisted men free donuts and coffee courtesy of the Salvation Army, or entrance to the YMCA’s military facilities. Here, you might see notes inviting soldiers and sailors to dine with local families. A friend of mine took up an offer and spent a turkey dinner listening to his hosts trying to talk him into deserting. They’d help him get to Canada, right then and there. He declined.
I knew a recruit who had legitimate second thoughts about participating in the conflict. A storefront anti-war counseling service assured him he could apply for and receive Conscientious Objector status. Just look up the regulations. Follow the procedures. Only the regulations were mysteriously missing from the various sets of Uniform Regulations binders that he consulted. The counselors pressed him to no avail. The advice my buddy had received came from naïve sloganeers. You could find them on both sides of the equation — people who had strong opinions based on sketchy information.
Being in the middle of a war zone taught me little or nothing about the war’s historical context, the politics that had gotten us into combat, or even our military strategy. What I took away was that with few exceptions, the people with whom I worked — war is a job — were decent young men from modest backgrounds with uncertain prospects. Being in uniform was where fate, not patriotism, had landed them. They had few long-term goals. Life was dealt with on a minute to minute basis.
Half a million of us participated. More than 50,000 American military personnel perished. Several million Vietnamese, civilians and military, died. Since my discharge in 1970, while continuing my education and winding my way through the decades, I’ve encountered very few people who fought in Vietnam. We were not a cross-section. We were a particular set of individuals, called upon to actualize the objectives of those who claimed to know best.
Kraus was awarded the Bronze Star. He is the author of “You’ll Never Work Again In Teaneck, N.J.,” a memoir.
