It’s a quiet Memorial Day here in Kansas City. The quietness of the day has given me time to reflect on my one year tour of duty in Vietnam. I went there in 1965, not long after the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” brought America there in earnest.
I’m not thinking of anything particularly heroic that I did. I just did my job. But, all these years later (it’s been 60 years), the memories of that year and the years that followed until Saigon fell to the communists in 1975 have become more meaningful to me.
During the year I was there, for example, a young soldier named Milton Olive earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for the extraordinary valor it took for him to lay down his life for his platoon buddies. His unit was pursuing Viet Cong soldiers near a village called Phu Cuong when an enemy soldier threw a grenade that landed close to Private Olive and two or three other members of his platoon. Private Olive grabbed the grenade, pulled it in to his stomach and fell to the ground. The blast that followed killed him, but his buddies were saved. The posthumous citation honoring his courage read, in part, “Pfc. Olive’s extraordinary heroism, at the cost of his life above and beyond the call of duty, are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.”
I’ve heard a few naysayers say that Private Olive’s action on that day had little or nothing to do with heroism. It was pure instinct, they claim. Good Lord, how stupid could they be? Men like Milton Olive don’t jump on live grenades instinctively. If instinct had motivated his actions that day, he probably would have run from the danger and left any response to his buddies. NO, NO, a thousand times NO! Milton Olive was motivated by love for his buddies and courage that folks like the naysayers could never fathom.I’m sure
I’ve heard a few naysayers say that Private Olive’s action on that day had little or nothing to do with heroism. It was pure instinct, they claim. Good Lord, how stupid could they be? Men like Milton Olive don’t jump on live grenades instinctively. If instinct had motivated his actions that day, he probably would have run from the danger and left any response to his buddies. NO, NO, a thousand times NO! Milton Olive was motivated by love for his buddies and courage that folks like the naysayers could never fathom.I’m sure
That type of heroism wasn’t uncommon during the Vietnam War. Between 1965, when the war began in earnest, and 1975 when the conflict ended, 269 Medals of Honor were awarded to American military personnel for their heroic efforts. As the old adage goes, “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.”
I’m sure there are Vietnam veterans still around who knew fellow soldiers who were cut from the same cloth as Milton Olive.
Beyond the images of flares lighting up Vietnam’s night sky or the “thumps” of ordinance raining down from the sky, my bitterest memory of the Vietnam war was the pit of despair that overwhelmed me when Saigon fell to the communists in 1975. At that time I was attending college, thanks to the GI Bill. As I watched the news reports of North Vietnamese tanks rumbling down Saigon’s wide boulevards, I was sick at my stomach. Close to 60,000 American soldiers had died, thousands more were wounded. I put that bitterness into the form of a sonnet I wrote titled “A Sonnet to the Fall of Saigon.” The fourteen lines of that sonnet follow:
“The pearl of Southeast Asia calls from far across the sea
“Come to Saigon, come to Saigon round eyed man”
And men of western contemplation now devise their fatal plan
“Go to Saigon, go to Saigon, heed the plea.”
“Oh Saigon, gentle Saigon, I’ve approached your beauty rare,
But in haste I’ve touched your flowing saffroned robe
Oh Saigon, gracious Saigon. precious pearl across the globe
Was it fate or was it faith that brought me there?
I came a man of metal while you stood as one serene
I left by knowledge broken, with a vision not to be
Who was robbed of beauty then, oh Saigon, you or me?
Oh Saigon, bitter Saigon, restore my youth unseen
For I’ve cast my life as pearls before the swine
Whose the dying now, oh, Saigon, yours or mine?”
The futility of it all. Brave men dying while too many of their leaders like Robert McNamara were using the conflict to secure important “gigs” at the World Bank or Henry Kissinger, the architect of “Vietnamization,” was declared a genius.
Thankfully, I have largely reconciled myself to this conflict these days. All I have left is shards of memory. I’m now on what I think may be the final stage of my journey to the “city whose builder and maker is God.”