We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (24 page)

While we are certain there are no good wars, we are not so naive as to believe that there are no necessary wars. The greatest war in the history of mankind, World War II, is the best example of a necessary war. It had to be fought to beat back forces and ideas so malignant and aggressive that they threatened the extinction of entire races and nations and would not be stopped by anything less than total war and total defeat, no matter the cost. That cost between 1939 and 1945 included nations on both sides brought to their knees by war’s destruction as well as the deaths of some 60 million human beings.

Even so great a war began as a small affair on September 1, 1939, when the German army attacked neighboring Poland and the world stood by uneasily and did nothing as a smaller nation was overwhelmed and enslaved by a much larger one in a rehearsal of all that was to come.

We Americans have been the most fortunate of people. In our history only our own Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War have actually been fought on our soil. We have, historically, been slow to go to war, and even then only when attacked directly or when our interests were threatened. We entered World War I—which virtually wiped out a generation of British, French, and Germans—only for the final two years. We entered World War II for the final four years and only after being attacked by Japan. Fewer than 300,000 of the 60 million dead were American. The Korean War took the lives of more than 1 million Koreans but fewer than 50,000 Americans died there. In Vietnam it is estimated that more than 1 million died in the ten years of the American war; 58,256 of them were American. In the Persian Gulf War fewer than 300 American troops were killed, many of them by so-called friendly fire—American tanks or Bradley Fighting Vehicles mistakenly targeted and attacked by American warplanes or American helicopter gunships.

Because of this the brutal reality of war for the great majority of Americans is abstract, almost theoretical. That and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, our great Cold War enemy, which left the United States as the reigning and only superpower, may well have given us the idea that war isn’t all that bad a solution to nagging problems in troublesome places, and therein lies great danger. This kind of thinking and some spectacular bad judgment led President George W. Bush and his advisers to turn their backs on the idea that we only go to war when attacked or our national interests are directly threatened, as in the Persian Gulf in 1990–1991, and they declared that we would pursue a new policy of preemptive war. We will no longer wait patiently for clear provocation but strike first to nip a perceived potential problem in the bud. We have, to date, only one case history of preemptive action to study and everything we know about it only underlines and argues the need for extreme caution and answering all those pesky questions before acting.

That case history is the Iraq war. In the fall of 2002, with the Bush administration prematurely celebrating victory in toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan and putting al-Qaeda terrorists on the run and seemingly hell-bent on invading Iraq, I gave serious thought to the issues and kept coming back to these questions: Why? Why Iraq? Why now? Why us? What do we gain? What are we risking?

With all that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were telling the American people, I could find no satisfactory answers to my questions and no good reason to go to war with Iraq. Their new doctrine of preemptive military action ran counter to American principles and American history. With very few exceptions—the war with Mexico in the 1840s and the Spanish-American War in the 1890s come to mind—Americans don’t start wars. We have to be pushed into wars. Now we were being pushed into a war by our own elected civilian leaders and the question was still: Why?

I listened carefully to the voices urging us to fight and the reasons they gave for doing so and they just didn’t add up. The president was not a man of the world like his father. He seemed to have little knowledge of and little interest in foreign affairs and history, especially the long, violent history of the Middle East. Joe was fond of quoting an old Bengali proverb that seemed to apply equally to this situation: “There are a thousand roads into Bengal but no road out.” There was little doubt in my mind that our soldiers and Marines—now a professional all-volunteer military—could again take down the army of Saddam Hussein, much as they did in one hundred hours in the Persian Gulf War. But then what? How would we find the road out of Mesopotamia and how many bodies of American soldiers would line its sides?

My military service began as World War II was ending. My first war was Korea, which began with an American diplomatic mistake when Secretary of State Dean Acheson failed to mention South Korea as one of the places we cared enough about to fight for in a speech the Russians and Chinese heard loud and clear. Korea ended in a draw and cost the lives of 50,000 American troops, some of whom died under my command on bleak, frozen hills with names like Old Baldy and Pork Chop that in the end were worth little or nothing.

My next war was Vietnam, where my battalion had the dubious honor of fighting the first major battle against the regiments commanded by a man who later became my friend. That war dragged on for ten long years and ended with a hasty withdrawal just ahead of defeat. More than 58,000 great young Americans were killed and another 300,000 were wounded, and for what? It was the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people. Three American presidents were entangled and trapped in that debacle.

Now another war loomed and my antennae quivered. My instincts told me Iraq was another mistake; that another American president was marching us off into the quicksand even as his lieutenants made the rosy and ignorant predictions—which come easily to those who have never worn a uniform and never heard a shot fired in anger—of just how swift and successful it was going to be; how little it would cost us in both lives and money; and how great an achievement it would be to topple a brutal dictator and plant democracy in the heart of a volatile region where it had never flourished before.

Joe worked in Washington covering military and national security affairs. He had just finished a brief one-year tour as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department. His bullshit detector was quivering even more furiously than my antennae. I told Joe and others that it was my estimation that Iraq was not worth the life of even one American soldier; that we were about to become entangled in yet another war that could only end badly. Even worse, this new adventure of the president and his men would draw troops and resources away from the vital mission of finishing off al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden—the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks on America and killed more than 3,000 innocent people on our soil—in Afghanistan. If history proved anything it was that you never left unfinished business in Afghanistan. Just ask Alexander the Great or Queen Victoria or Leonid Brezhnev, who all suffered bitter defeat in the bleak mountains and trackless deserts of that wild country.

That was my answer in the fall of 2002 before all this began. It is still my answer in the fall of 2007, when more than 160,000 American troops soldier on in a seemingly endless war in Iraq that has, to date, cost the lives of 4,000 of those troops and left more than 60,000 of them wounded or injured. The short and sweet war the president and his men envisioned six years ago has cost us $500 billion to date, and there are estimates that the true cost if it ended tomorrow may exceed $2 trillion. Even at that it has been fought on the cheap by an Army and Marine Corps far too small for the job at hand, with training and equipment never intended for this kind of war. The deployments of these great young men and women on two, three, and four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan have worn them and their families down, just as they have ground down the tanks and Humvees and helicopters and aircraft so vital to their mission.

We are into the sixth year of this unnecessary war and our military is on the verge of breakdown. The demands of Iraq have eaten up our strategic reserves and we now have no forces available to cope with emergencies in a world made far more dangerous and hostile to the United States by Mr. Bush’s misadventure. I remember with sorrow how low our Army sank in the wake of the withdrawal from Vietnam and how hard and costly it was to repair and rebuild that Army into the vibrant and competent force that swept Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army out of Kuwait in less than a week in 1991.

Those who brought us to this war with such certainty about how easy and quick it would end should be assigned to write long essays on these words from Erasmus:
Dulce bellum inexpertis
(War is delightful to those who have no experience of it). George W. Bush should have old Erasmus’s words carved over the entrance to the planned $500 million Bush Presidential Library in Dallas. War is never easy or cheap. Never. When any political leader thinks of starting one he should first seek advice from those who bear the scars and memories of combat and the wives and children of the fallen who live their lives with forever broken hearts.

In the spring of 2005 I traveled to West Point to make my final address to the Corps of Cadets, sixty years since my own graduation and departure from those brooding gray granite walls that loom over the Hudson River. I thought of the thousands upon thousands of fresh-faced young lieutenants who had the virtues of
Duty, Honor, Country
burned into their hearts in this place before they marched into the pages of history during two long centuries of our nation’s wars. I knew that some of the most recent graduates had already returned from Iraq to rest under new white marble tombstones in the West Point Cemetery, and I grieved for them.

In that farewell talk to the Corps, whose ranks filled Eisenhower Hall, I spoke of the hard duty at war that awaited them and of the lessons in leadership distilled from my own years of service and time in combat. I told them that of all the tenets of leadership, the greatest of them all was love—that they must love the soldiers they lead more than self, more than life itself. In a long question-and-answer session following my speech I was asked about Iraq and about then Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. In this place—where cadets live by a code that says they never lie, cheat, steal, or quibble—I was bound to speak the truth as I knew it.

The war in Iraq, I said, is not worth the life of even one American soldier. As for Secretary Rumsfeld, I told them, I never thought I would live long enough to see someone chosen to preside over the Pentagon who made Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara look good by comparison. The cadets sat in stunned silence; their professors were astonished. Some of these cadets would be leading young soldiers in combat in a matter of a few months. They deserved a straight answer.

The expensive lessons learned in Vietnam have been forgotten and a new generation of young American soldiers and Marines are paying the price today, following the orders of civilian political leaders as they are sworn to do. The soldiers and those who lead them will never fail to do their duty. They never have in our history. This is their burden. But there is another duty, another burden, that rests squarely on the shoulders of the American people. They should, by their vote, always choose a commander in chief who is wise, well read in history, thoughtful, and slow—exceedingly slow—to draw the sword and send young men and women out to fight and die for their country. We should not choose for so powerful an office someone who merely looks good on a television screen, speaks and thinks in sixty-second sound bites, and is adept at raising money for a campaign.

If we can’t get that part right then there will never be an end to the insanity that is war and the unending suffering that follows in war’s wake—and we
must
get it right if we are to survive and prosper as free Americans in this land a million other Americans gave their lives to protect and defend.

EPILOGUE

T
he Ia Drang brothers in arms and the families of many of those who fell in our battles still gather each year on Veterans Day in Washington, D.C., and in smaller gatherings around the country of veterans of particular units.

In 2005 for the fortieth anniversary of the battles we pulled out all the stops and some 1,200 Ia Drang veterans, families, friends, and supporters came together for a celebration and dinner in the nation’s capital.

These reunions of the brothers are filled with joy, sorrow, and healing but each year, as the years march on, there are a few more familiar faces missing, a few more no longer there to stand up when the roll is called and shout out their name, rank, unit, and where they fought in the Ia Drang.

In the winter of 2007 many of us proudly gathered at the White House to see President George W. Bush hang the blue ribbon and gold medallion of the nation’s highest award for heroism above and beyond the call of duty around the neck of one of our own, Lt. Col. Bruce Crandall, Ancient Serpent Six. The same president had hung the same medal around the neck of Crandall’s wingman and good buddy, Maj. Ed “Too Tall to Fly” Freeman, six years before. Another president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had awarded the Medal of Honor to then Lt. Joe Marm in 1966.

Our story—once almost lost to history—has been told in a best-selling book and a widely acclaimed movie and in countless documentaries and feature articles in a hundred hometown newspapers. Surely, some ask, the passage of the years and the recognition of your deeds in battle have brought closure and healing and peace to all of you? Would that this were true but it is not.

The memories of young men dying and suffering and killing in the horror of hand-to-hand combat in the tall elephant grass under the burning tropical sun are as fresh in our minds as yesterday. Just ask Bill Beck or Clinton Poley or Jon Wallenius or any of us. Ask those who lost a loved one in that valley—ask Barbara Geoghegan Johns or Col. Glen Kennedy or Delores Diduryk—if time really heals all wounds.