Forgotten Patriots By Walt Curtis "It was a family tradition^ for sure. My dad was real proud of being a soldier fighting in WWII. He got a bunch of medals and stuff. I grew up watching dohn Wayne and Victory at Sea.” What is a patriot? It is someone who loves his or her country. • One definition holds that it is a person who is willing to defend it and die for it if need be. Is such a person foolish? Is he or she simply prop; agandized? Nowadays, it is old-fashioned to love your country. It is simply not chic, to think of picking up a rifle and fighting for the native ground upon which you, your friends, family and community live. Are contemporary Americans spineless? If we were fighting with Solidarity in the streets of Warsaw, would we be willing to die to stop the Russian tanks? It seems to me the American people have become ciphers, comfort-loving blips in the technocratic state. Our conditionally reflexive preference is Star Wars or PacMan to any life-and-death struggle in the real world. Can robots, sniffing bionic cocaine, be programmed to enjoy the ambiguous pleasure of free choice? Of course, the weaponry is terminal today. If the super powers fight, it’ll be with nuclear weapons. Sophisticated long-range computerized rockets. Possibly the end of the world will come about in such a war. No wonder a clear-headed person hesitates to endorse militarism. Each year billions and billions of dollars are spent on an insane, wasteful defense budget. But still I wonder about patriotism. Do American veterans from the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam deserve our respect? They were willing to lay their lives on the line. Many got maimed, physically and mentally. Others watched their buddies get blown to bits. The veterans of the Vietnam War have suffered the worst from recent anti-war feeling. And from bad faith on the part of the U.S. government and the patriotic warmongers who sent those guys to Vietnam in the first place. We’ve tried to hide this blackened, bloody kettle of recent history. Throw it in the garbage can, along with the poor unfortunate devils who were young or stupid enough not to run away to Canada, or drop acid and stay up all night for the next morning induction physical, or who couldn’t say they were “queer” or social misfits. So the army accepted them. They went to ‘Nam and got their lives, their souls, their beings blown apart. Why have so many veterans committed suicide? They’re having nervous breakdowns, marital problems. Some are winos and drug addicts. Many have become radicalized by our society’s and our government’s indifference to them. They want to see the capitalist state eliminated — which meddles however it can to protect profits — and defeat the aspirations of ordinary people for shelter, food, health care and education. A world with a decent future. Vietnam vets thought they were fighting for those kind of ideals. Today they are filled with rage, bitterness, despair, and recrimination. It’s time those of us who didn't go to Vietnam listen to what they have to say. Maybe it will help to heal their wounds, maybe it won’t. Nonetheless we owe them that respect and compassion. A Conversation With Dennis / spoke with Dennis, a special forces combat veteran of Vietnam. He’s a solid-looking guy, in his mid-thirties. From the Bronx, of Italian-Irish background. You wouldn’t know it because he seems a tad bit “macho,” but this guy is an aspiring serious musician. I asked him why music. “The army made me do such crazy insane things. Now I’m studying something with purpose, form, and meaning.” After two years of preliminary training, Dennis went to Vietnam at the age of 20. In December of 1967. (According to the Vet Center statistics, he was near the median age of 19.2 years for Vietnam veterans.) I asked him why he went into the service. He replied, “I went in for a variety of reasons. I think the main overall one was the Hemingway thing, to prove myself a man. Secondly, there really wasn’t much else to do. I was in college, but I dropped out. I joined the army to be a paratrooper. I wanted the thrill and excitement, the training to be a bad ass. “It was a family tradition, for sure. My dad was in World Wtr II. And my uncle who I grew up with and lived with was a Korean War vet. My dad was real proud of being a soldier, of fighting in WWII. He got a bunch of medals and stuff. I grew up watching John Wayne and Victory at Sea.’’ “You have to remember most of the soldiers,” Dennis made a significant point, “were working-class people. Some middle-class people. And very few, though I did encounter some, upper-class enlisted men. In retrospect, most of the guys who fought in Vietnam were from the working class.” Dennis was a special forces team medic. They were having a high casualty rate, in this top-secret outfit. It was called “the Command and Control Project” (C and C). Part of SOG Special Operations, and they got their orders directly from General Westmoreland. “When I got to ’Nam, they told me it was strictly voluntary. But when they handed out my assignment, they said you’re going to C and C. We had the highest casualty rate — 50 percent of our guys were either killed or wounded so they couldn’t function as soldiers.” The operations entailed getting on helicopters and flying into Laos. Sometimes they did terrorist actions, such as bombing villages and dropping poison gas on the trails. “We rolled out fifty-five-gallon drums, from helicopters — filled with a real contaminating gas that completely disabled somebody,” Denny confessed. “It was a real nasty kind of gas too; it kind of clung onto the bushes, so that three days later if a guy walked by and rubbed against the bush he’d get sick. “It was a violation of the Geneva Convention. This was in 1967-68. When we went on these operations, we never carried any identification. We used special helicopters without American markings.” Most of their job was reconnaissance. They’d sit off the Ho Chi Minh Trail and get information. They were not supposed to make contact. They were supposed to gather information on the numbers of the North Vietnamese Army. “We weren’t supposed to be in Laos at that time. President Johnson was denying that American troops were there. It was funny,” Dennis laughed. “I was reading my hometown newspaper from New York saying we're not in Laos. Then I’d get in the helicopter. Bye, bye!” Dennis’ secret special forces unit was located at Khe Sanh, next to a 5,000-man Marine base. It was right on the DMZ. Unfortunately, Dennis had arrived at the notorious Tet offensive of 1968. He said, “We were dug in, being bombed by artillery daily. The North Vietnamese Army surrounded us with 60,000 troops. The Marines fought bravely and well, but the odds were overwhelming.” What was happening was a decisive six- month-long battle of the entire war. “The U.S. strategists in Vietnam had no understanding of how the war worked. They were using principles of warfare that didn’t fit the situation.” The American high command seriously considered using tactical nuclear weapons to relieve the pressure on Khe Sanh. “When did you begin to realize some of this? Did you begin to doubt the heroism of the war?” I asked. “It started turning around for me two months after I got there. First of all, we were getting beat. The NVA surrounded Khe Sanh, and they were trying to take us. And we weren’t doing anything about it!” Dennis confided. The military brass didn’t send any help, partly because the Tet offensive was erupting all over Vietnam. “What got me — we knew this could have been the decisive battle of the war, and we didn’t do anything.” The U.S. military ineptitude bothered Dennis. “But that coupled with my friend’s brains in my hands,” he said. “Another time, three friends of mine were standing in a trench, and a bomb landed right on top of them. We picked them up with shovels. These were buddies.” “And the dead bodies, Walt. The dead bodies were everywhere,” he went on. “Months later we’d find the Clinton St. Quarterly 35
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