Documentarian Ken Burns hopes his 10-segment, 18-hour examination of the Vietnam War will spark the kind of conversation that will, at long last, give closure to the “most consequential, divisive and controversial events in American history.”
He has set himself a a high bar. Even his co-creator, Lynn Novick, said of the war: “There’s no agreement among scholars, or Americans or Vietnamese, about what happened, the facts, let alone who’s fault, let alone what we’re supposed to make of it.”
Still, the series has kindled intense interest among millions of Americans, those who sweated through it “in country;” those who lived through it from a safe distance; those who protested against it in countless American streets and those who sleep-walked through it, too busy to bother.
Vanity Fair calls this PBS project sponsored by a dozens of foundations and individuals “as good an occasion as we’ve ever had for a level-headed national conversation about American’s most divisive foreign war.”
For the past 50 years, I’ve never once seriously tried to make sense of my service there from November 1967 to November 1968. How does one make sense of the insensible?
For most of the walk up to this life altering event, I was in college studying or working part-time to help pay the tuition bills. Vietnam would catch my attention when a Buddhist monk would set himself afire in protest of the Diem regime.
As I creeped closer to graduation day, my focus sharpened. I read those war stories with greater intensity. It finally dawned on me that I would soon have skin in the game.
Where did I stand in the war? What did I think of its morality? Was it worth fighting for? Truth is, I wasn’t smart enough to wrestle meaningfully with those questions. I just accepted the inevitability of service without so much as a moment’s consideration of the options.
Out of the sheltering arms of a student deferment, I was draft bait. So I enlisted. As a college graduate I was given a chance to attend officer candidate school, which would take two years and ten months of my 21-year-old life, ten months of enlisted service, two years commissioned.
I guess I saw it as the price of admission.
It was a role of the dice, contrary to Einstein’s observation that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” In my case, God sent me to artillery school instead of infantry, which, I thought, would give me a better chance of survival should I be sent to Vietnam. Then I learned that second lieutenants in the artillery routinely served as forward observers with a life expectancy of about 20 minutes.
With the war much less an abstraction, all my thoughts turned to questioning its logic, as did the thoughts of my OCS classmates. We soon discovered we were all peaceniks. What are we doing here? How crazy is this stinking war?
We chose as our march-to-mess song, “Where have all the flowers gone, ” a haunting anti-war folk song. Either the training cadre didn’t get it or didn’t give a damn. We were in with no honorable way out.
The day we were commissioned, the officer in charge read out our orders. “Walker, Korea. Chotsky, Germany. Bostwick, Italy. Clifton, Fort Bliss, Texas.” That meant the other guys would never see service in Vietnam and I would get another set of orders about eight months later guaranteeing it.
I had married my wife, Peg, and despite the rigors of Army life, we found ourselves soon to be parents.
Predictably, a month after my daughter was born, those orders came through. Now the dice were rolling wildly. Would I be attached to an Infantry company as a forward observer or get some other less life-altering assignment?
Bingo. I won the lottery. I was on my way to Ham Tan, a tiny village hard by the South China Sea, a reputed Viet Cong R-and-R site and home to B Battery First of the 83rd Artillery. Our mission was to shoot harassment and interdiction rounds at targets called down from headquarters. The idea was to keep the enemy off-balance.
Though we were virtually alone out there, it was safe, almost mind-numbing work. And too good to be true. In mid-December, the brass apparently discovered an underused asset in B Battery’s four eight-inch guns. Dismantle Ham Tan and hit the road.
We reached our new home a few days before Tet, the Viet Cong offensive so vividly shown in the Burns/Novick documentary. The artillery’s three basic missions, “move, shoot and communicate” were put to the test. We were dispatched to I Corp, the northernmost military region. We helped “liberate” Hue and “shot, moved and communicated” all the way to the DMZ.
The dice kept on rolling seven for us. By any measure, we should have suffered major casualties. We suffered not one. We had exchanged the creature comforts of Ham Tan — cooked meals and cold showers — for the C-Rations and grime associated with moving and shooting. But we suffered no close-up killing.
Facing the prospect of danger and the inconvenience of life in a combat zone, you look for and find silver linings. In my case, it was developing what would become a lifelong friendship with my fellow fire direction officer and winning the daily C-Ration lottery. I was one of the few who liked the much-loathed Ham and Lima Beans offering, so I never went hungry.
For reasons I never understood, headquarters liked to rotate officers from forward positions to more protected ones. I spent my last two months in country at Camp Eagle, the 101st Division’s I Corps base.
I got good and drunk the night before my time was up, boarded the chopper out the next day and 36 hours later was home with my wife and now year-old daughter. Viet Nam was over for me, even as it roared on for thousands of others who, unless the dice rolled wrong, would find it to be over, too.
Some would leave it behind, barely ever thinking of it. Others would keep a piece of it always front and center, all would live with the observation of novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the much lauded “The Sympathizer.”
“Every war is fought twice, one in fact and another in memory.”
Burns and Novick have done a masterful job of reconciling both. The war in fact is over. Now the work of memory begins.
Doug Clifton, a resident of Fort Lauderdale, is a former top editor of The Miami Herald and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.
Based on your experience, what would you want people to know about the Vietnam War? Write us at .
