The Vietnam War Revisited

– Revisiting the Vietnam War –

During 2018, I posted thirty-five blogs addressing the history, the controversies and the myths surrounding one of the most misunderstood wars in our history.

Vietnam was a war that divided the nation and influenced our national psyche and mindsets that persist into the present wars in the Middle East. Wars we have difficulty winning definitively and exiting with defined victory.

Sound like Vietnam?
Are there historical parallels? 
What lessons have we learned?

If you missed my blogs or wonder what we have learned or not learned, I invite you to read them on my website.

I wrote them for the purpose of education. Half our population was not born during the turbulent era- the 1960’s – and have no clue.

The memory has faded for many others who lived through that period. Because of faulty memory, I wrote a book to help them RECALL Vietnam and its aftermath at home. The toll it took on our society, not only in lives lost or injuries suffered, is depicted in the novel and my blogs.

Whether you agree or disagree with my opinions in the fictional historical narrative, I guarantee you will learn something important about this history and gain some insight about how our government’s decisions affected our military’s tactics and strategies during three administrations- JFK, LBJ and Nixon.

Did we win?

Please read RECALL and make your call. I made mine. We won the war militarily, but lost it politically.

I explain why I reached that conclusion in my Introduction to RECALL and why I bothered to write my characters’ story over fifty years later. I excerpt part of that of my novel’s introduction below.

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I thought about Vietnam periodically for almost fifty years before deciding to write my characters’ story. I wanted to try to figure it all out while I had time to conduct some basic research, and still recall most of the details. I served over there as a flight surgeon, but experienced only a fraction of what the real fighters did. I could “see the tree, but not the rainforest.” I served, they fought.

This story is about them, not me. I never had to wade through the rice paddies, tangled vines, or elephant grass to fight in thick rainforests. I never encountered giant anthills taller than a man in the triple canopy jungles they fought in, or slept out in the monsoons, like most of our troops and my protagonists. I never got shot down, never went out on platoon missions, or experienced close- quarter combat, ambushes, or surprise artillery attacks. My USAF experience was limited mostly to air evacuations, not the down- and- dirty stuff they encountered. I flew in and out of the battleground above the fray. Therefore, I rely on their experience and my research to fill in the big picture, and to find a message in it all somewhere.

Later, in the following decades upon my return, I witnessed the war’s detrimental sociologic fallout in San Francisco, up close and personally. The protagonists’ story is well worth telling, and I chose to relate it in a fictional narrative for personal reasons to protect privacy rights. It’s a legal thing, let’s be realistic.

As the Mark Twain quotation goes, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” I
couldn’t make all this up … that would require too vast an imagination. I left graphic parts out. War is nasty and, believe me, there is no need to go there. I’ll leave it for you decide what is fiction and what is fact. I won’t go there either. That’s my disclaimer, let the chips fall where they may. Believe what you will. There’s room for other interpretations of the Vietnam experience. This is theirs and mine.

Why bother to write about a war that brings up negative connotations fifty years later? Because there are so many misconceptions, so many lessons unlearned from the Vietnam experience. Hopefully, the younger generations can learn from my generation’s mistakes, rather than repeat them. That’s the take- home message and my purpose in relating my characters’ saga.

As a final sad reflection, many of those who served over there forty to fifty years ago still consider Vietnam a military victory, but acknowledge it as a political loss, a defining foreign- policy failure. At the height of the war, North Vietnam regulars (NVR), and the Viet Cong (VC), launched one of the largest military campaigns of the war. Named after “Tet”— the Vietnamese New Year—the 1968 Tet Offensive resulted in the loss of almost 4,000 Americans, but more than 58,000 of the enemy. Think about that statistic a moment. The enemy suffered as many killed in one year of warfare than the U.S. did in ten years. Furthermore, no major cities were lost in South Vietnam during Tet. Sound like a successful campaign?

Most would define these impressive statistics as a victory. Nevertheless, regardless of the overwhelming superiority of the numbers in our military’s favor, the ’68 Tet Offensive was the pivotal political and social turning point against America’s involvement in Vietnam. Our body- bag tally and the public’s negative perception of the war became more important than the staggering sixteen- times- greater, enemy body- counts in the ultimate test of conflict resolution—war.

In retrospect, American public opinion actually was the first domino to fall in 1968, not Vietnam.

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I hope this excerpt will prompt you to read RECALL.  It has 50 reviews averaging 4.6 out of five stars.

Click here to buy RECALL on Amazon.