A Question of War: What Is it Good for?

Daniel Cano 

Note: After watching the destruction of a once beautiful country, Ukraine, I decided to revise a past La Bloga post, exploring this writer's personal experience with war and its aftermath.                                                                                                         

A Time for Peace

                                                                                                                      

                                                                                    1.

     It was a cool spring day in Santa Monica, California, as I walked across campus where I’d been teaching before my retirement. A colleague approached from the opposite direction. A few nights earlier, I’d run into him at a local movie theater. We’d both been there to watch the film, the Last Days in Vietnam, directed by Rory Kennedy, youngest daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. At the end of the movie, Ms. Kennedy answered questions from the audience. The film disturbed me, so I didn’t hang around to hear her talk.     

     My friend, a Cornell grad and zealous 1960s anti-war protester, had spent a summer in Ho Chi Minh City where he taught English to Vietnamese students. Vietnam had seeped into his consciousness. He had read my book Shifting Loyalties, inspired by my year in Vietnam. We’d spent many hours talking, over coffee, about the 1960s politics, the anti-war protests, the war, the Vietnamese people, and culture. We’d formed an unlikely alliance.

                                                                                  

Chicanos at war

     On this particular day, he waved me towards him and asked how I’d liked the movie. I told him I was disturbed by the images, even after all these years, mostly South Vietnamese trying to escape the northern mongrels at the city gates, not unlike the recent chaotic flight of Afghanis from the throes of the Taliban.

     I couldn’t exactly put my finger on the exact reason for my dismay. Honestly, much of it was simply reliving the experience and sensing emotions I believed I had locked away a long time ago, memories I’d worked through with some friends at the Veterans Administration in West Los Angeles.

     My friend told me he’d asked Rory Kennedy to screen her movie on campus, for students and faculty, even if Vietnam was a distant memory for most. She agreed. He asked if I’d say a few words of introduction before the screening.

     I appreciated the thought, but I declined. I’d had enough of war, writing, and talking about it. I was one of the few Vietnam veterans on the faculty. It had been nearly twenty years since I published the stories about my time in Vietnam. They’d been difficult to write, reliving tragic experiences that had lain dormant for so many years.  

     When my book was published, I’d driven across California participating in readings, panels, and lectures. I began receiving letters from Chicano veterans, expressing their gratitude for the slim book, telling me how appreciative they were that I’d given a voice to their stories. Family members of veterans would come up to me offer their thanks. I received a letter from a Latina who told me her father had been killed in Vietnam when she was a child. She never knew him. After reading my book, she said she felt closer to him, understanding what he might have experienced.

     Then there was an incident in one of my classes as I taught Charley Trujillo’s book Soldados, my own book, and Jorge Mariscal’s Aztlan in Vietnam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War. A Vietnamese American student raised her hand, and said, shyly, “I never knew Mexican-Americans had fought in Vietnam.”

     Her words rocked me. Maybe, they shouldn’t have. The media had pretty much ignored the contribution of Mexican veterans, not only in Vietnam but in Korea and WWII, as well. In his book the Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw failed to mention the sacrifices of Chicano veterans, even though they received more Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group during the war.

     He didn’t even mention the name of Marine Pvt. Guy Gabaldon, a Chicano from Bellflower, CA, who, in the Pacific, over the course of a month, single-handedly accounted for the capture of more than 1000 Japanese soldiers, the most enemy ever captured by an American in any war. For his efforts, Gabaldon received the Silver Star, yet hardly a word from the media once he returned home, his daring exploits conveniently forgotten. A movie finally did appear, an Anglo in the lead role, no mention of Gabaldon.

     I called my friend and told him I’d reconsidered.

                                                                    The Introduction 

     Good afternoon, and welcome. My name is Daniel Cano. I’m a faculty member here at Santa Monica College, and I’d like to say a few words before you begin watching Rory Kennedy's film, the Last Days in Vietnam.

     In 1969, I received my discharge from the Army, where I’d served in Vietnam with the 101^st Airborne and stateside with the 82^nd Airborne, two divisions with distinguished military histories, including a legacy among Chicano paratroopers who’d served honorably since the inception of both divisions.

     I tried to regain my footing in civilian life. The county was in turmoil. America protested the war in the streets, on college campuses, and in the home, disillusioned Vietnam veterans often leading protestors. They’d received no welcome home parades, nor did they expect them. Once discharged, we struggled to assimilate into society, many never did.

     To avoid the Vietnam stigma, I grew my hair long and enrolled in community college. Like other Vietnam veterans from my hometown, I rarely talked about the war. It was as if we’d gone away for a couple of years, returned, and were back in the neighborhood. "Hey, where you been?" a high school buddy asked me.

     It didn’t matter how many masks I donned, how long I grew my hair, how hard I labored at work or in school, or how many substances I abused, the war was always there, the albatross around my neck.

     Sometimes I’d wake before dawn, remembering the name of another location in Vietnam. I'd leap from my bed and go into the garage where I'd nailed a large map of Vietnam to a wall. I'd mark a new location with a colored thumbtack, the map a collage of reds, blues, greens, and yellows. While in-country, it had always been another plane, another convoy, another helicopter, and another mission, death in our wake, both theirs and ours. Dubbed by the media -- the “Nomads of Vietnam,” we rarely saw our base camp. 

     Since I couldn’t put the war behind me, I immersed myself in it, reading whatever I could about the land, people, history, culture, and politics -- always searching, I suppose, for the war’s elusive justification. 

     At the time, we still had troops in Vietnam, and, as a young veteran, barely 21, I heard rumors of drug use, racism, refusal to obey orders, and fragging going on, over there. No one sacrificed except those who served and their families. 90,000 people filled the Rose Bowl to watch UCLA play USC. I thought of my friends still in the jungle. 

     Then came April 29^th, 1975. As I sat in my living room, I watched the news reporting the fall of Saigon, the chaos on the streets, mayhem at the embassy, and the desperation of the last helicopters leaving the rooftops. My emotions ranged from depression to anger, from bitterness to betrayal, and, I thought, what a waste it had all been, the loss of friends, of so many young lives -- for nothing, absolutely nothing.     

     The opening of T.S. Eliot’s "Wasteland" came to mind, “April is the cruelest month….”

     Then there was the voice of the young Vietnamese student in my class who had said, “I didn’t know Chicanos had fought in Vietnam.” 

     I think about the first American captured by North Vietnam, Everett Alvarez, an Air Force pilot from San Jose, California, who spent eight years in Hanoi military prison, the second longest term of any American. Then there was the last American serviceman to leave the country, Marine Sgt. Juan Vasquez, who wouldn't board the final chopper out until all his men were safely aboard.

     As our government's lies surfaced, I became so jaded. I refused to vote, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or to hold my hand over my heart during the National Anthem. I hid Vietnam in a cardboard box: the souvenirs, photos, medals, and citations. I didn’t want my son or any of my nephews seeing them and glamorizing war. I never wanted to see another Cano in uniform.

                                                                               3.

     My generation had been bred to hate communism. We hid under desks in elementary school as protection from the atomic bomb the Soviets were sure to drop. Our television news reported East Germany was being turned into a prison camp and Slavic countries were being crushed under communist rule. Politicians told us communists planned to rule the world and confiscate our property, our religion, and our rights as a free people. 

     Was that the war’s justification – communism? If that’s true then why then did Nixon open relations with communist China, after it armed Korea and North Vietnam, responsible for the lives of so many Americans? Why had the communist Soviet Union, East Germany, and Baltic countries collapsed under their own weight? Why do we trade with Vietnam and talk of opening relations with Cuba (finally)?

     Why did we kill two million Vietnamese, more civilians than soldiers, and sacrifice nearly 60,000 Americans and bring so much pain to hundreds of thousands more? And what of the terror wrought on Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador under the auspices of salvation from communism? Today, except for the House of Saud, we are more indebted, financially, to China than to any other country.

     Everywhere I turned, I saw the reminders: Tet, Kent State, The Chicano Moratorium, My Lai, Hearts and Minds, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.

     In 1995, past Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara published his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. The word “Lessons,” leaped out at me, as if the slaughter in Vietnam had been a scholarly exercise. Essentially, the point of McNamara’s book was to say: “Sorry. Looking back on it, we made a terrible mistake.”

     A terrible mistake? By 1967, when I left Vietnam, McNamara, Washington, and the Pentagon knew the war was wrong, immoral, and unwinnable. To his credit, though late in coming, McNamara told President Johnson the truth. It was time to end the war.

     Instead, Johnson, worried about losing the next election for being soft on communism, continued sending young Americans into those steaming jungles, like tossing wood into a fire. For speaking out, McNamara found himself gone as Defense Secretary and reassigned to the hinterlands, heading the World Bank. Americans began questioning the war.

     Nixon had promised to end the war if he won the presidency. After he took office in Washington, instead of pulling out troops, he continued to escalate the war, setting our bombers loose on Cambodia and Laos. When the North still didn't relent, Nixon, privately, threatened to use nuclear weapons. When he heard Nixon was considering the use of nuclear weapons, Daniel Ellsberg, a one-time hawk, working at Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, decided to release parts of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, proving Washington's lies about Vietnam, including its reason for entering the war.

     The Papers showed how, historically, South Vietnam had, flat-out, rejected Washington's offer to send troops to Vietnam. Our government threatened to cut the rogue dictator's funding. The South relented and accepted U.S. troops, fearing it would escalate the war and destroy the country, and, probably, expose the "take" of corrupt politicians.

     For eight more years, the slaughter continued, each U.S. administration fearful of “pulling the plug” and being labeled soft on communism and possibly losing the next election to the opposing party; all the while, young Americans were falling in horrible ways. The media hid the savagery from the American public.

                                                                                4.

     A few years ago, as I walked through a local bookstore, I noticed a title glaring up at me from the rack -- The Tiger Force: A True Story of Men at War. I thought...the Tiger Force, and the memories came flooding back.

     My unit, A battery, 2/320^th Artillery, had supported a recon platoon from the 1/327 Infantry, called the Tiger Force, guys we admired, wild, insanely brave men (many kids), who’d go into the jungle in small teams to observe enemy movement but often ended up initiating contact with much larger forces. A creation of Colonel David Hackworth who tried convincing the generals: the only way to fight a guerilla war was with a guerrilla army, and not the stodgy, large-scale WWII style military operations.

     I bought the book, took it home, and read that from June through October 1967, in the Song Ve River Valley, the Tigers had self-destructed and executed an untold number of innocent villagers in the most heinous ways. They turned rice paddies and farms into blood-soaked fields, making the Manson families’ murders look like child’s play. And it hadn’t been a secret. The officers knew but did nothing to stop them, in fact, in some instances, encouraged it, anything to increase the ever-important “body count.”

     That’s when I was there, June through October 1967. We’d been in the Song Ve Valley during Operation Oregon, a mission some called “Rawhide” to remove all villagers from their ancestral homes and into relocation camps, a plan many villagers rejected, part of the “hearts and minds” policy, to win over the people. It did the opposite. It turned them against us.

     Of course, at the time, we knew none of this. We were ignorant of all military strategy and just followed orders, waiting for the next fire mission.

     Some evenings, at the end of a long day, the Tiger Force, in their dark tiger-striped fatigues and floppy hats, would come humping out of the jungle and into our battery area for a little security and much needed sleep. By dawn, the next day, they’d be gone, in the jungle, sometimes, 30 days straight, with no respite, hot meals, or showers, enough to drive any man insane.

     The Tigers called in artillery strikes. It was our battery firing the high-explosive and white phosphorous rounds that burned and destroyed villages, simply because the villagers hid, came out in the day to work their farms, and ignored the order to relocate.

     My hands had removed the shells from the canisters and handed them to the gun crews who loaded the rounds into the Howitzers and sent them on their fiery way into those rural settlements. Do I carry the blood of these villagers on my hands? Am I like Robert McNamara, saying, “Well, in retrospect, I was just following orders”? It hasn’t been so easy to pass it off as a lesson learned.

     In their book, the writers described a Chicano Tiger, Manuel Sanchez, one of the few experienced Tigers in the platoon (many had been killed or rotated home), who said of one murder he witnessed, “It was cold-blooded. The man had no weapon, and he offered no resistance.” Sanchez “believed…that when soldiers cross the line in the field ‘bad things happen.’” Karma?

                                                                             5.

     My year in Vietnam was nearly up. I’d survived. I caught the afternoon chopper out of the field, and, in an hour, I was in the rear area, enjoying beer and a movie. At approximately 2:00 AM, as I slept, the VC and North Vietnamese overran the battery. Among the dead, Wayne Podlesnik, a Pennsylvania boy who had slept by my side for nearly a year. Wayne must have woken to the sounds of mortar and gun fire. In the confusion, he ran out of the hooch, probably seeking the security of the nearest gun section. After the smoke cleared, they found his body on a hillside, a bullet from an AK-47 in the back. He hadn’t made it far. 

     Another friend, a big, hearty Chicagoan, Sgt. Nathaniel Dabon, happy at the recent birth of his new child, rushed into the middle of the battery area as a mortar round landed near him. There wasn’t much of him to recover. In 101st Airborne lore, it would become known as the “Battle of Sad Hill,” the guns leveled to fire at point blank range.

     The next morning, a friend, Big Tom, a Wyoming cowboy, shook me awake to tell me the news. He wanted me to meet him at the infirmary, I guess, to see which of our friends was still alive. Outside my tent, it was chaos, choppers landing and taking off, jeeps and trucks racing around, and men running wildly. A jeep stopped in front of me, a small wagon attached carrying a pile of enemy dead, their eyes distant, their bodies shredded. I decided not to go to the infirmary.  

     I gathered my bags and hitched a ride on a three-quarter pick-up to the local airbase in Chu-Lai, where I’d catch a hop to Cam Ran Bay, and back home.

                                                                            6.

     For Vietnam veterans, the War is not abstract nor theoretical, not like it was for technocrats and politicians in Washington. It isn’t an academic problem. It’s as visceral as a fist to the jaw. That’s why it is difficult for many of us to talk about it, or to think about the horror of war without thinking of ourselves in it.

     As I watched, Rory Kennedy’s film, “The Last Days in Vietnam,” I had I hoped I might find the justification for the war, but no, nothing, not even in the faces of those Vietnamese desperately seeking escape at the American Embassy, nor on the faces of the South Vietnamese throngs waving communist flags to welcome the conquering Viet Cong and North Vietnamese victors into Saigon, traipsing over the scattered uniforms discarded by South Vietnamese Army.

     What Kennedy’s film captured was the U.S. betrayal of a corrupt South Vietnamese government unable to rally the support of its own people. What I hoped she'd show, along with the fleeing throngs, was the reunification of a country fighting foreign occupation for more than 1,000 years, or the psychological wounds of another generation of veterans still grappling with questions about war, or as the song said, “What is war good for? Absolutely nothing.”