Introduction to Vietnam

I didn't know about the Vietnam War until my first year in college ('64). My first objection was on the grounds that any war is immoral. I met a Vietnam vet (my first). He was in a Marine recon unit and he was very damaged. He had been given a medical discharge but he had serious post-traumatic stress symptoms that weren't being recognized or addressed.

So many memories...I had friends who loaded ammunition onto ships because it was a good paying job for students. I remember sometimes crying as the C-5s flew over my house out of Travis AFB filled with soldiers and came back filled with coffins. I also remember my mother telling me... that the government wouldn't get involved in the war if it wasn't necessary and that it would never lie to the people.

A couple years later, I was at the airport and saw a kid in dirty fatigues and a blank stare. After sitting across from him for a while, I asked him what he was doing. He said he had been sent home on family emergency leave because someone had died. He said that he couldn't remember where he lived, what plane he was supposed to catch or who had died. He had been in a muddy foxhole the day before with people dying all around him. They had picked him up by helicopter, transferred him to a plane and expected him to be able to adjust. It was surreal. He was going home for 3 days to bury someone and then fly back into the jungle and just continue the war. Anyway, a couple friends and I contacted the Red Cross and started a small group of volunteers who would meet soldiers at the airport, make sure they knew why they were coming home, talk with them a bit, make sure thay got some clean clothes and try to give them some space to go through changes.

Some people still think that the government was unaware of the dangers of agent orange in 1965. A friend of mine brought back poloroid snapshots of beautiful jungle before and after the planes came over spraying. After the spraying, there would be bare dirt with dead tree trunks standing. They would spray villages they knew were full of only women, children and old people. The people in those villages would die horribly. My friend got sent home and discharged because he had leukemia. The government wouldn't pay his medical expenses. It ruled that he had "undiagnosed leukemia" when he joined the military. He was a pilot. Tom died in 1966. I watched his father, a WWII fighter pilot, have a change in view of the government from flag-waving pride and patriotism, to disbelief, to anger, to despair.

Select this to read [the Whole Story].