US Vietnam vets share lessons from the war
by William Ickes
Vietnam veterans were the first to fight a war that the United States did not win and many returned home with doubts about what they had been sent to do and those who had sent them.
Their perceptions were shaped in large part by their proximity to the Vietnamese, the strength of their convictions upon deployment and the reasons for the war.
Of the more than two million Americans sent to Vietnam, 1.6 million faced combat and more than 58,000 died.
Hundreds of thousands suffered long-term effects but most came home to quietly resume their lives and in many cases to volunteer to help others.
US Navy Captain Jim Mulligan, a North Vietnamese prisoner of war for almost seven years, including "more than 42 1/2 months in absolutely solitary confinement," returned with his beliefs intact that he had taken part in "the hot part of the Cold War" with China and Russia.
"They couldn't shake me, I knew what I believed in, and that's the way it was and that's the way it is today," Mulligan, now 88, told AFP.
His time in solitary included 26 months as part of "The Alcatraz Gang", 11 particularly defiant prisoners, many of them pilots, held in cells measuring 31.5 square feet (2.9 square metres) in Hanoi, "right downtown, right in the middle of their command structure."
- No doubts -
"I never had any doubts whatsoever," Mulligan insisted, though he questioned US decisions to suspend bombing in 1968 and to withdraw troops in line with the January 1973 Paris Peace Accord which led to his release.
"We can win all the battles, but we can't control what happens" later when "politics rears its ugly head," the carrier pilot said.
Mulligan said it was a wave of heavy bombing in December 1972 that finally set him free.
"The night the B52s came I said to (cellmate) Harry Jenkins, pack your bags, Harry, it's the B52s, we're going home, and 10 days later everything stopped. And 60 days later we were home."
Others serving alongside South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) soldiers quickly realized they lacked faith in their mission and leaders, many of whom were corrupt.
Alex Brassert, a US Army major assigned to Vietnamese units that defended the railway network, was on an operation early in the war with 1,000 ARVN troops in Bien Hoa, near what was then known as Saigon.
As they approached a Vietcong-controlled village, the mission commander told his men to set up a heavy machine gun and fire some bursts, "so they'll know we're coming," to "just scare them away," Brassert said.
"About then I decided these guys are never going to make it," he told AFP, while noting the communist forces also prevailed because "they had the people behind them, we didn't."
An ARVN lieutenant also told Brassert: "We have no reason to fight," that there was no "logic" to it.
- 'No business being there' -
Army counterintelligence specialist Larry Kolp added: "As soon as I got used to the way things were going and learned the attitude of the ARVN troops, I decided that we had no business being there. They didn't want us."
Back in the United States, veterans were often shunned and sometimes spat at by a public worn down by the growing death toll and horrific images of burning villages.
Lee Thorn, a munitions loader on the USS Ranger, said he was "ignorant and gung-ho" when he shipped out, but that his outlook changed following heavy bombing of the Haiphong oil depot in September 1966.
After the air strikes, Thorn projected aerial reconnaissance films to the carrier's pilots and "what I saw in the combat movies I showed four times was the setting of massive fires throughout the city of Haiphong."
He returned to study at the University of California at Berkeley and, with a dozen other veterans, formed a group they called Veterans for Peace.
- 'Blaming it all on us' -
But they felt at odds with the anti-war movement on campus and tended to keep to themselves.
"Everybody was talking about the war, and I didn't know what ... they were talking about. It didn't sound like the war I knew. And they were blaming it all on us," he remembered.
Thorn and Mulligan later began helping to build schools in developing nations.
During his volunteer work in Laos, Thorn was befriended and later "adopted" by a Laotian family, a gesture he said "was really very helpful for me."
Brassert married a Vietnamese woman he met the first day he was there and with whom he has three daughters.
Kolp told AFP: "I grew to understand that we have to pay attention, as citizens, to current affairs and politics in order to elect representatives with some hope that they will make good decisions."
Mulligan and his wife Louise, who never lost hope for him during his detention, have four surviving sons, 17 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
He declineed to "dwell on" his ordeal as a prisoner of war, preferring instead to help build schools in Haiti.
"I try to make a small difference in a troubled poverty-stricken world," he said.