Twenty-five years ago this spring, the United States was a much different place from the one I had left in the summer of 1966. During the ride home on a civilian airliner, I felt a continuing sense of wonder and of joy. Dozens of fellow servicemen on board the plane experienced a similar sense of pleasure. We were all heading back to “The World.”
It was all quite a contrast to a ride back to the States for leave two years earlier in an Air Force C-141 cargo plane. No comfortable reclining bucket seats. No attractively put-together stewardesses as we were wont to call them in that era before gender neutrality set in. No, in 1967 the seats were folding canvas rectangles. They faced in toward the center cargo area. For hour after hour, except when a merciful sleep took awareness away for a time, we sat and looked at stacks of aluminum coffins. In them were men who had been brothers- in-arms until very recently. Now they were names on the ever- mounting list of losses from the Vietnam War. That kind of grim situation makes one ponder long and hard about his own mortality.
Luck and circumstance were such important factors in that war that seared so deeply into the national consciousness. Either directly or indirectly, the draft sent tens of thousands of young men into infantry platoons in the Army and Marine Corps. For those who served in the Navy, two groups in particular were at frequent risk—aviators and the men of the brown-water navy in the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta. For the rest of us, the dangers were relatively infrequent, because neither the North Vietnamese nor the Vietcong mounted a navy to challenge us. The hours were long, the work demanding, and the separation from loved ones painful. But at least we had the satisfaction that we were contributing to something important and worthwhile.
A real irony of the situation is that we who were close to the war geographically were awfully far away in terms of our understanding of the overall picture. At sea we received only abbreviated wire-service reports by radio-teletype. When in port in places such as South Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, or Korea, our main source of news was the heavily filtered Pacific Stars & Stripes. We were not exposed to the litany of Stateside viewpoints growing ever more strident in their opposition to the war. Armed Forces Radio told of the antiwar demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, but neither radio nor newsprint had the capacity to convey the impact of the events that took place there. In 1978 one of the television networks ran a tenth-anniversary program about the convention. Only then, seeing the videotapes for the first time, did I really get a sense of the deep divisions the war had wrought in American society.
In a way, it was helpful that we didn’t really know how things were back home. The human psyche can deal with a difficult job more readily if there is at least the comfort of accomplishing something. Steve Coonts’s novel Flight of the Intruder (Naval Institute Press, 1986) weaves a powerful message into its story of A-6 crews bombing Vietnam in the early 1970s. He describes the futility and bitterness experienced by those who felt that their sacrifices and efforts were not going to achieve any real purpose. At least we who were there earlier than Coonts did not have his type of frustration added to the burden.
And so it was that the airliner flew to California one awfully long April day that included a trip across the international dateline. Back to the land of the superhighways. Back to television—now in color rather than black and white. The first three Super Bowls had been played while I was gone. A wacky show called “Laugh-in” was all the rage. It took a day or two to adjust to the fact that the people who served customers in various businesses were Caucasians; I’d been used to seeing Orientals in that role for nearly three years. Styles had changed. I’d never seen a man with a ponytail until I spotted one riding a bicycle down a street in San Francisco. A woman in San Francisco’s airport was wearing an outfit that left very little to the imagination. Above all, patriotism no longer equated with supporting the nation’s war effort in far-off Southeast Asia. Indeed, even though I didn’t fully appreciate the depth of the antiwar sentiment, I realized that the military had become a sometimes-unpalatable taste in the mouths of many Americans.
We still had the old service dress khaki uniform in those days, and I well remember the distinct feeling of self-consciousness that I felt while wearing that uniform out in public in the spring of 1969. That memory has lingered for years as Vietnam veterans have lamented the fact that we were not welcomed home. By family and friends, of course. To an ever-increasing portion of the public, however, we were visible reminders of a policy conceived of worthy ideals, gone terribly wrong in the execution. But the deeply ingrained thought patterns die hard. It took me longer than most to “get it,” as the saying goes, about the futility of our struggle. Having reported aboard a ship in Long Beach, I was part of a crew preparing for deployment back to Vietnam. I was ready to go, because I still believed. One night I ran into an officer’s wife on the steps of the Long Beach Officers’ Club. She said it was time to bring the troops home. I was taken aback that someone in a service family would share the sentiments of the antiwar crowd. Twenty-five years later, I now know that she was right.