The war that everyone wants to bury will not go away. The end of this month marks the 20th anniversary of Saigon’s fall to the communists, sealing America’s bitter defeat in Vietnam. For many of the 2.6 million veterans who served there, McNamara’s book, “In Retrospect” (414 pages. Times Books. $27.50), excerpted in NEWSWEEK April 17, ignited painful recollections. Dr. Byron Holley, a former battalion surgeon, told me that when he first heard about the book, “I felt a sense of rage beginning to well up deep inside me, a rage I have worked hard to suppress over the last 25 years.” Like many veterans, Silva argues that McNamara should have spoken out when he first realized his mistake. “If he felt how he did in 1967,” Silva asks, “why didn’t he confront the establishment right then?” But as old soldiers struggle to come to terms with the war, some have learned to forgive. “It is time for the generation who served in Vietnam, and the loved ones of those killed there, to welcome home our leaders who caused the war,” says Patrick Graves Jr., a West Pointer who did two tours of duty as an infantry commander.
I spent five years in Vietnam between 1965 and 1971. Commanding U.S. infantry in the field and advising South Vietnamese troops, I was wounded four times, decorated often. I saw America’s young men, many entrusted to my care, march into a meat grinder. The troops soon discovered the truth: “This war is unwinnable,” they said. “Let’s get out now.” But no one in authority listened. None of the generals I spoke to seemed to care about the human wreckage. They were into career, body counts and glory. The war changed my life forever; it made me lose faith in my country, its leaders and institutions. By 1971, 1 could no longer be part of the killing machine. I took retirement while I was still the youngest full colonel in the U.S. Army and left for Australia, where I lived in selfexile for nearly two decades. I wrote a book about war (“About Face”) and got over Vietnam.
Many vets didn’t. Brian T. (Tim) Grattan remembers bow eager he was to go to Vietnam as a young infantry officer in early 1963. He thought it would be “great combat experience, which was one of my main motivations as a professional soldier.” He says he and other young volunteer officers-Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, William Carpenter-read everything they could find about Vietnam, including Frenchman Bernard Fall’s prophetic “Street Without Joy.” After a tour of duty advising South Vietnamese troops. (;rattan came home telling people: “It’s a nice little civil war, but it’s a bottomless swamp.” He wrote cautionary reports, but his superiors seemed to pay no attention. “I truly felt additional U.S. troops were not the answer to ’their war’,” says Grattan, now a developer in Montana. “My feeble attempts to fight from within the system went unnoticed.” In mid-1967, lie gave up the struggle and resigned.
Raphiel Benjamin, a New Mexico radio]ogist who served in Vietnam:is a combat medic, thinks U.S. policy was morally blind. “We backed a [South Vietnamese] government that was neither democratic nor honestly elected, and we supported it against a nationalist movement not unlike our own American struggle during the War of Independence,” he says. “Uncle Ho wasn’t perfect, but there must have been something to make the Vietnamese support him.” Benjamin claims “we have continued to ignore our ideals and principles in places like Mexico, Nicaragua and Guatemala. When will we learn,” he asks, “to believe in ourselves and have faith that democracy works?”
Bill Clinton claimed last week that McNamara’s book vindicated his own youthful opposition to the war. But many of the veterans I spoke to weren’t appeased by McNamara’s mea culpa. “I was in Vietnam after Mr. McNamara realized the war was unwinnable.” said Lawrence Tahler, an infantry platoon leader in 1968-69 and now a Phoenix businessman. “My men and I went out in the boonies to fight Viet Cong, to get wounded or killed-to what end? Once the leadership knew the war could not be won by military means, didn’t they owe it to the country to immediately make adjustments so that more lives wouldn’t be wasted?”
“McNamara didn’t get it in the ’60s, and he still doesn’t get it today,” charges James Mukoyama Jr., now a major general in the Army Reserve. “In addition to all his admitted failings as a statesman and presidential adviser, he still doesn’t recognize his basic failure to mobilize the nation’s reservists. Had they been called up, the American people would have been involved earlier, and their voices would have made the government back off.” The decision not to call up the reserves was mainly a political judgment by Lyndon Johnson. Mukoyama seems to be on more solid ground when he argues that McNamara, as defense secretary, bore much of the blame for mistakenly “applying World War 11 tactics in Vietnam, by using concentrated firepower in a guerrilla environment. We grunts paid for it and still wait for his apology,” he says.
I myself cannot condemn, McNamara. Good men died because of my own bad orders. I’m glad McNamara had the guts to finally tell the truth, but like many other vets, I wish his call to conscience had occurred in 1967. Instead. he confused loyalty to his president with a higher loyalty to the country. He kept his mouth shut and clearly failed in his duty. If he had spoken out in 1.967, hundreds of thousands of Americans and Southeast Asians might have escaped death or injury.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Many of the American generals who commanded brigades and divisions in Vietnam have told me that they, too, are filled with guilt and wish they had sounded off at the time about the hopelessness of the war. Others, including Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the principal military architect of the war, have revised reality, just as they hid the truth a generation ago. They now claim that the U.S. military won every battle, but the American press, politicians and people lost the war. That is a lie, and McNamara helps to expose it.
In 1966, 1 told the army chief of staff, Gen. Harold Johnson, that I thought the war could not be won. A year later, I gave Westmoreland the same blast. Did Johnson or Westmoreland tell McNamara? No. They continued to feed the death machine, at least in part because it was good for the army. War means big budgets, more brigades and divisions, and a chance to win your spurs. Not one serving general or admiral sounded off in public. It was the only war they had, so they went along to get along. My beef is not with McNamara, but with his military advisers, who refused to stand up and be counted.
So far, not one serious postmortem on the war has been undertaken by the Pentagon (though the leaked “Pentagon Papers” told part of the story). Had one occurred, it might have prevented some of the mistakes we made in Somalia, which were almost identical to those of Vietnam: excessive dependence on firepower and technology; a failure to understand the enemy; lousy intelligence, and arrogance on the part of war leaders from the White House to the Pentagon to generals in the field who again and again ordered the undoable. For most of the over 40 gang who suffered in the trenches, or agonized in the protests against the war, Vietnam will last as long as we do. McNamara’s book is an important step toward understanding what happened, and it may help some of the walking wounded to move farther along the heating path of forgiveness. And that’s good for America’s collective soul.
