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Lasting Repercussions of the Viet Nam War
I had some ideas about the Vietnam War before I started to take a course about it my junior year of college. My exposure to the War during grade school was fuzzy at best, though I knew that much of the music my parents listened to reflected anti-war sentiments. I did not know anyone who had fought in Vietnam, and my parents only mentioned it in passing, mostly to say how thankful they were that the war ended the year my father came of age to fight. High school history classes taught me nothing; invariably, we would cover the Revolutionary and Civil Wars ad nauseam, then run out of time and squeeze everything post-1945 into a frenzied two-week period. In college, Vietnam was only mentioned as part of the Cold War strategy or as an example of realist strategies at work. But I never really knew what happened, what decisions were made, why America lost, and, most importantly, how it affected the lives of so many Americans. The class at USC covered almost all these angles; I learned about Johnson's four major decisions and why he made them, I learned about the anti-war movement in the U.S. and why it floundered. Yet there was more to know, more to learn, and hundreds of thousands of voices to be heard - the voices of the veterans themselves. I looked to the Internet to find veterans of the war who were willing to speak with me about their experiences. I interviewed seven people in total; two of those seven men gave me especially candid, touching, and horrifying accounts.
Fred Salanti had studied in a Jesuit Seminary for two years to be a priest when he felt compelled to fight for his country in Vietnam. Trained in the army, he was recruited by the CIA upon his arrival in Saigon. "I was told that I no longer worked for the military but was now assigned to the CIA, to a program called Project Phoenix.I was told that I would live in a village with 18 men who were ex-VC and would carry out the war, fighting the Viet Cong infrastructure" (Salanti).
As part of Project Phoenix, Salanti was required to destroy sympathizers of the North Vietnamese via assassination squads, intelligence nets, and torture. His most vivid memory of the war is being forced to shoot two VC guerrillas that kept bribing the local police to let the mescape. The guerrillas had put a $25,000 bounty on his head. "I realized I couldn't keep turning them in. I had to eliminate them. I was about a half mile from an American Fire base, they were having a USO show with Connie Francis singing over loudspeakers, while I shot these Vietnamese in the head....Brains blew over my clothes and in my hair and face....It was so surrealistic that it has been a frequent nightmare for 30 years" (Salanti).
Salanti's homecoming, like so many other veterans, was hardly welcoming. He tells of being put on a plane with other unknown soldiers and going from a war zone to Los Angeles in 20 hours. Once home, he could not relate to anyone. People harassed him for fighting in the war. "I spent two years in Vietnam thinking that I was doing good to come back to spitting and yells of baby killer. That might not have meant much to normal soldiers but in my job, I literally was a baby killer so it struck a lot closer to home" (Salanti). Salanti says that he is now anti-social, lives out in the woods alone, and suffers from physical disabilities caused by Agent Orange. Despite this, he says that "if was 1966 again and I was 18, I would enlist again....War is hell. Not a fun place. But under the right conditions it is necessary" (Salanti).
Glynn Clark tells a different tale. In 1969, Clark was enrolled at Louisiana State University, where he played football, dated a great girl, and made good grades. Right before Thanksgiving of that year, the national draft lottery was televised. "I remember sitting in the football dormitory TV rooms watching it happen. My birthday was picked number 5" (Clark). Clark spent the next few weeks trying to pull strings and appear unhealthy enough to not be sent to Vietnam. Nothing worked, however. "I felt totally defeated, resigned, and very lost" (Clark). He thought about going to Canada, but he finally decided that he had had a good life so far and could easily afford to devote two years to his country.
Clark was assigned to an ARVN Rangers unit that was to "seek out, report, and evade NVA movements" (Clark). His unit was also involved in ambushes. Six months into his stay in Vietnam, his pregnant girlfriend wrote him a letter, breaking off their relationship. Four months later, he was hit with rocket fragments that ended his chances of ever playing football again. "I survived with no wife, no daughter, no football, and an anger that was not completely dissolved till I reached about 35 years of age" (Clark).
Clark's homecoming was "frustrating, full of perplexities, confusion, and questions....I was alone, sad, hurting emotionally, and angry" (Clark). He lived irresponsibly until a veteran from World War II, a deputy of the jail Clark was serving time in for selling marijuana, actually listened to what he had to say and offered the understanding that "only someone that had been there could give....He was the first person to actually say thank you to me for serving my country" (Clark). After this, he returned to college and finished his engineering degree, "never to look back again" (Clark).
Despite the different routes that both men took to get to Vietnam and the varied roles that each played within the military, the stories of Fred Salanti and Glynn Clark are remarkably similar. Taken together, their accounts echo what so many American men must have felt and experienced during their time in Vietnam and after. �
Both speak of having repeated nightmares after their return. Both speak of the estrangement they felt from their family and friends. Perhaps most poignantly, both speak of feeling that they lost their innocence in Vietnam. "I left an 18-year-old kid and came back an 81-year-old veteran," writes Salanti. Clark's statement on the subject is eerily similar: "I was 20 and a very old man." I have already had a longer adolescence than either of these men; both were back from Vietnam by the time they were twenty, and I will be 21 in one month. I cannot begin to imagine what my life would have been like if I had spent the last year doing what these men had to do - seeing the deaths of Vietnamese children, burning villages to the ground, watching my friends die. Nothing in my life thus far begins to approach suffering of this nature. Like Glynn Clark before his birthday was chosen, my life now is carefree, happy-go-lucky, at times even trivial. My outlook on the world is both idealistic and na�ve. These men had their worldviews changed by their experiences in Vietnam. Steeped in the liberal-conservative consensus of the fifties and more mindful of their own personal lives than of the lives of millions of people a half-continent away, they were forced to face both the horrors of war itself as well as the ostracism by being part of an unpopular war at incredibly young ages. As Clark says, "I was raised in a John Wayne world." By the time they returned, they were such changed people that they could not even connect with their families. "I had problems relating to anybody. I didn't see my family for 15 years," writes Salanti. Similarly, Clark reports that he and his family experienced "long spans of silence."
The Vietnam experience was traumatic enough without the backlash experienced once the veterans returned home. "No Vietnam Veteran was treated fairly. Not by their own families, friends, or others," says Clark. I have not had to make a choice as grave as whether to fight an unpopular war for a cause that I do not support, but I have learned that people should not be disrespected and reviled for supporting their country. In the end, it was the policymakers' and the President's decision to send troops to Vietnam. These people are elected into office and given the charge of making these decisions. According to men like Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson, Americans were in danger if Vietnam fell to Communism. With hindsight, their mistakes are evident. But they may have been right. People like Fred Salanti and Glynn Clark may have very well protected the lives and livelihoods of average Americans. At any rate, that is what they were asked to do. They could have died in this pursuit, yet the people that shunned them and vilified them neglected to see the service that these veterans provided. As Clark so aptly put it, "Never, never, make the war the responsibility of that individual solider, sailor, airman, or marine, for that responsibility is not theirs, it is yours!"
As stated above, the decisions of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon are the ultimate causes of the carnage and destruction of Vietnam. The policies they set forth required American men and women to sacrifice their youths and their lives for what was considered to be a paramount cause to ensure America's safety. The information that led to these decisions was often incomplete or biased; the motivations behind these decisions are often unclear. But the responsibility falls with them. And, for many people, the responsibility for losing the war also goes to the politicians. "We elect people who promise us the nectar of the gods. They get elected. They make decisions for politically expeditious reasons - to get elected again. They do not get elected for doing what is best for our country 10, 15, or 20 years down the road" (Clark). Clark also claims that the media played a role in the perception of the war and who was to blame. From my own readings and knowledge of the activity of the media during the 1960's and 1970's, it does indeed seem like a clear and complete report of both the war and the demonstrations against the war never emerged. In the future, the press should take care to report unbiased facts from both or all sides of an issue. More importantly, the public should be wary of basing their opinions and actions on incomplete reports. Certainly, people should make sure to take all accounts into consideration before disparaging their comrades.
The Vietnam War affected many facets of American life, but the most profound effect was on the individuals who devoted their lives and innocence to what was perceived to be an honorable cause. These veterans should be respected for their sacrifice, and a true effort should be made to hear their stories and learn from them. One of the most striking aspects of the interviews I conducted was that almost all the men reported that virtually no one had asked them about their experiences in Vietnam until I approached them. There is a wealth of information in these veterans, information that could help the following generations understand the Vietnam War and perhaps prevent another war of such a catastrophic nature from ever occurring again.
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