“Did you kill any babies, Bruce?” As we lay in bed on New Year’s Eve 1970, this is what the girl asked who a friend had introduced me to when I returned from Vietnam a couple of months before. I got up and drove home in the snowy streets from Queens to Brooklyn. I didn’t even try to date another girl for almost a year after. But, I moved past it and didn’t dwell on that night.
Some returned soldiers and Marines had worse experiences and some had better and almost all just blended back in after an initial adjustment. Studies show that most were more successful in their lives than their non-serving peers. But, what the major media and liberal opinion-setters painted was an image, usually grossly ignorant and mendacious, of a mentally and morally scarred Vietnam veteran. The purpose was to reduce support for the US commitment to South Vietnam. It took several decades before this image from the Left was reversed and due pride in veterans’ service returned to America. Yet, that erroneous and harmful image of Vietnam veterans still lingers in many minds.
Aside from the opprobrium poured upon us Vietnam veterans from the Left in the pop culture and academia, the goal of our war was lost and we had little reason to exhibit pride in the outcome of our service as millions of IndoChinese were murdered by the conquering communists in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The perfidy of so many of our Senators and Congressmen, and the indifference of most opinion-leaders, only deepened the alienation from authority, and increased the vulnerability to the anti-Vietnam messagers.
That’s what the fall of Saigon has to do with the life paths of Vietnam veterans.
Rarely do two books appear on widely different aspects of the Vietnam War which based on meticulous research weave an understanding of the still confusing Vietnam War that, as Paul Harvey used to say, tells us “the rest of the story.”
One book is a must-read breakthrough based on new Vietnamese sources who were the prime actors during the course of the war between North and South from the 1973 Paris Accords to the 1975 fall of the South. Almost all other Vietnam books concentrate on the US performance in Vietnam and the period before US troops left Vietnam, and are light on Vietnamese sources. To really understand the fall of South Vietnam, this book is indispensable. It is also essential to appreciate the incredible bravery of South Vietnamese defenders.
The other book is an 8+ year labor by a history professor too young to have served who sympathetically delved into the lives and psyches of hundreds of Vietnam veterans from New York City. Although unfortunately his publisher’s edits left the book somewhat tilted with anti-war vets, these two seemingly disparate subjects are closely intertwined.
The US loss of will and desertion of pledges to South Vietnam cascaded after Watergate but actually began earlier in the one-sided pressuring of Saigon to accept the destruction-seeded Paris Accords so the US could withdraw “with honor”. The demoralization of our homefront and the escalation of calumny heaped by the Left and most of the major media on our veterans, and the life-long impacts on them, were the rotten fruit of our failure to fully use our military resources during our heavy involvement in the war and, then, our dishonor in breaking our pledges of support as the essential bulwark to South Vietnam’s survival.
George J. Veith’s Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam 1973-1975 is endorsed by Henry Kissinger: “The courageous men and women of South Vietnam, who fought for their country’s freedom, have long needed a chronicle. Veith’s book fills that need. It deserves to be widely read.” Veith fills a glaring void in history of the Vietnam War with new access to high-level North Vietnamese documents and to South Vietnamese military leaders.
Veith, just as many surviving South Vietnamese military leaders, lays heavy blame at the door of South Vietnamese strategic faults in 1975 and a military built on the US model that was denied the necessary logistics and supplies to make it work. But, Veith asks the key question: “Why did Hanoi succeed in 1975 when it had failed in 1972?” when South Vietnamese forces and US airpower decimated the North Vietnamese offensive.
The key missing ingredient in 1975 was the denial of the promised US supplies and airpower to turn back the well-supplied and armed communist onslaught. (See the above link for the memoir of the South Vietnam Special Envoy Bui Diem to the US as he vainly begged for US help in 1975: “…an urgent necessity into a matter of life or death. The continued existence of my country was now to play out its final act in the halls of the US Congress.”)
The demoralization within many South Vietnamese forces without adequate supplies was palpable during 1975, while that of the North Vietnamese vaulted as supplies poured in from the North despite the Paris Accords. A few defeats of the South Vietnamese in the geographically crucial Central Highlands led to a cascade of defeats and setbacks unto the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon. Most South Vietnamese forces fought valiantly and often turned back North Vietnamese forces. But, lacking in supplies and logistics the scattered defensive South Vietnamese positions were largely isolated from backup and coordination while the North Vietnamese were able to concentrate forces on a series of targets. The cut-offs of supplies and backup from the US that had been promised in 1973 destroyed South Vietnam’s ability to protect itself. The North Vietnamese knew they had to strike quickly and with overwhelming might in 1975 before South Vietnam, as other Asian nations, began to prosper in connection with the West and be fully capable of self-defense. The anti-war elements that came to dominate Congress after Watergate provided the strategic opening for the North.
Veith’s book offers an almost day-by-day detailing of the military campaign that is unique, interwoven with details of the two Vietnams’, US, and international political context. It is the most complete and rare description and tying-together of the battlefield nitty-gritty and the grand strategy that any reader of history could hope for. It is too late for the millions of casualties in IndoChina of the communist takeovers, and the encouragement that, for example, it gave Russia to take over and destabilize Afghanistan for which Afghanis and we are still paying. So, the ultimate value of the book is whether enough will take its lesson to heart and action in not again having the US irresponsibly bug out.
The second book is Philip Napoli’s Bringing It All Back Home: An Oral History Of New York City’s Vietnam Veterans. (Don't waste your time looking for author intent, Bob Dylan fans. The title was not the author's.) For disclosure, Philip Napoli is an Assistant Professor of history at my alma mater Brooklyn College. He approached me in 2004 for interviews about my choice to join the Marine Corps as an enlisted man after graduating Brooklyn College and my experiences after. Over the years I got to know him well as a deeply feeling individual concerned about the misrepresentation of Vietnam vets in the pop culture as “baby killers”, John Kerry’s characterization of acting like the hordes of Genghis Kahn, drugged out psycopaths, losers, and so on.
For Veterans Day 2007, Phil Napoli penned the following for a blog I wrote at:
Let me put it simply: These interviews have afforded me the privilege to become acquainted with some of the finest people I have ever met in my life. These men and women are intensely committed to their communities, public-service oriented to an extraordinary degree, and have greater moral integrity than many, many of my peers….
…the stunning thing for me has been to find that so many of these men and women (despite whatever trouble they might have had earlier in their lives) have found ways to create for themselves, in the language of psychologist Erik Erikson, generative lives. They have struggled through their pain and healed their scars, and done things. In whatever way they have elected to do so, these Vietnam veterans contribute, give back, and make the world around them a better place to live in. Vietnam veterans are an active, important and productive segment of American society.
Oral history is subject to much criticism as poor history, more a bunch of anecdotes suffering the vagaries of memory than verified details combined into a scholarly narrative. But, as Napoli writes in his “A Note On Method” at the end of his book, “Instead, [oral history] looks for the meaning of events…it reveals the shape and structure of individual memories and what those memories share…” Napoli continues, oral history “insists that the competing voices of historical actors cannot and will not resolve into a single story with a solitary meaning.”
Professor Napoli intensely interviewed over 200 New York City Vietnam veterans. The publisher reduced the number presented to about 20, and most were then or since anti-Vietnam veterans, many associated with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (a group that never reached more than several thousand out of the 2 ½ million of us who served in Vietnam, a group whose Executive Director and many members never served in Vietnam, and which was tightly intertwined with the most radical pro-Hanoi protest organizations in the US). Their stories are “dramatic”, moreso than the veterans who returned and didn’t protest nor go through deep angst or substance troubles, and didn’t exaggerate the negatives of their experiences in Vietnam. So the publisher, whose goal is to sell books, apparently selected those stories. My story which was part of the book draft went into the garbage can icon. I actively supported the US involvement in Vietnam, returned as a civilian to Vietnam in the Summer of 1971, returned to graduate school, succeeded in corporations and my own company. So, apparently, did others go into the garbage can icon for not being dramatic enough, or perhaps not ideologically appealing to the editor. The publisher commonly seeks out bookcover endorsements. One such is Marilyn Young, who romanticizes the Viet Cong in her anti-Vietnam war book.
Similarly, much of Professor Napoli’s professional background explanations and interpretations that can be expected of a serious scholar can be assumed to have also hit the garbage can icon, likely to make the book more appealing to a mass audience by removing academic underpinning. But, that leaves the book too much a series of tales by malcontents of a certain political stripe, rather than “competing voices.”
These two faults undermine the worth of this oral history in presenting the diversity of experiences. I know Phil Napoli’s integrity and decency so, although like any author he would take responsibility, the faults most likely lay on the publisher’s desktop.
Regardless, Napoli succeeds admirably in showing that the veterans did not fit the stereotypes of the pop culture and did reach successes in their lives and peace in their hearts. That is the common story achieved by this oral history.
Whether a Vietnam veteran of opposite political leanings or non-political, most Vietnam veterans were disheartened by their service in Vietnam having little lasting impact for freedom and their service being disregarded and criticized at home. A natural reaction was to feel bitter. Many of the Vietnam veterans in the book are Jewish (like myself), hardly a representative sample of Vietnam veterans, and all are New Yorkers (like myself), hardly representative and subject to more intense pop culture negativity toward the war than elsewhere in the country. However, they were not pop culture stereotypes, nor were their millions of comrades who served in Vietnam.
Any Vietnam veteran reading Phil Napoli’s book will feel the brotherhood with those selected for inclusion in the book, not because of politics but because of the shared experiences that can only be felt by disappointed comrades in arms.
If Professor Napoli’s book is chosen by any college for its annual Common Reading, as it should be, young students will, of course, be influenced by the left-tilt of the narratives. But more important – especially if faculty-led discussion does not lapse into “victimology” but is an informed understanding of the feelings of war veterans at near the same age as the college students – the college students will gain more valuable exposure to real life than from the more removed politicized screeds the students are usually subjected to. Although most faculty have never fought for more than a parking space, there are many Iraq and Afghan war veterans on our college campuses who are well qualified and more competent to lead such discussions.
Now, we need oral histories in English of the South Vietnamese soldiers who managed to survive the sad fate of hundreds of thousands of their compatriots through execution, torture, concentration camps, and more, continuing to today in official discrimination, lack of jobs or services at the hands of the conquerors from the North. Their bravery and reputations also require rehabilitation.
