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Vietnam
Mar 1, 2023 14:28:00 GMT -5
Dub likes this
Post by Cornflake on Mar 1, 2023 14:28:00 GMT -5
I was exchanging emails with a friend today about how the cover of this month's Arizona Attorney magazine indicated that there was a story about Vietnam. In his response he made this statement:
"I was talking to a NAU [Northern Arizona University] professor of retirement age a few years ago. She was talking about the Kent State shooting and what an effect it had on her. She asked what I was doing when Kent State happened. I told her I was preparing my platoon to go down Highway 9, through Khe Sanh to Lao Bao to cut NVA supply lines, which is what the students were properly protesting. Nobody was asking our opinion. She said she had never met anyone before who had actually fought in Vietnam. I said she had just never met anyone who talked about having fought, and I wouldn't have, except she asked.
He and I had already talked about Vietnam several times. I learned it was not his favorite subject.
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Vietnam
Mar 1, 2023 15:41:25 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by coachdoc on Mar 1, 2023 15:41:25 GMT -5
My best friend as I graduated collitch was a Vietnam vet. It scarred him.
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Vietnam
Mar 1, 2023 18:50:47 GMT -5
Post by Village Idiot on Mar 1, 2023 18:50:47 GMT -5
I was a kid in school. Vietnam was something that was just there. Like the weather report or waking up in the same bed to the same people. It was there when kids my age were born and there until we were 13 and around when boat people started joining us in school. It was constant chatter among adults, and Life Magazine along with its photos seemed to be everywhere. That Napalm girl, naked and fleeing with other children in absolute terror is my age. That's the photo that caught the attention of us kids. At nine we weren't able to grasp what was going on in Vietnam no matter how many times someone explained it. Nine year olds aren't built for that. But the facial expressions of kids the same age is something all children can understand. That photo explained a whole lot to us. And our collective hearts did a big thump.
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Post by Marshall on Mar 1, 2023 18:51:56 GMT -5
We live charmed lives who have never been in war.
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Vietnam
Mar 1, 2023 20:31:15 GMT -5
Post by Village Idiot on Mar 1, 2023 20:31:15 GMT -5
Yes.
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Dub
Administrator
I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
Posts: 19,916
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Vietnam
Mar 1, 2023 20:36:44 GMT -5
Post by Dub on Mar 1, 2023 20:36:44 GMT -5
I have friends who were in Vietnam. They never talk about it either.
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Post by jdd2 on Mar 1, 2023 20:40:24 GMT -5
Can remember my brother just having gotten back ranting some about kent state, when where he had been in vietnam, for the most part, they were not allowed to have bullets.
I graduated HS in '70, the following january 20th I was in the army--tho I enlisted, ...since my draft number, drawn a couple few months before, was all but a single digit, and I didn't want to get drafted into the marines, let alone be a simple rifleman.
Two years before ('68 as I'm sure most know) it was King and then RFK only a couple months apart. Then the chicago dem convention in august, and the killing of fred hampton and mark clark the next year there. Sprinkle in the watts riots a few years before, the antiwar protests (also the SDS), some bombings, protests against Dow chemical, etc, etc, etc.
People who look at the US today and think it's falling apart, hell in a hand basket, or on the verge of civil war, should maybe have a look back at that time.
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Post by millring on Mar 1, 2023 21:05:03 GMT -5
All three of my brothers were drafted during the war. They all opted to enlist in the Air Force. It seemed to hold out the hope that actual combat could be avoided. It worked out for the older two. Not for Barry. I'll never know whether the alcoholism that plagued him was a direct result of a bad time in Viet Nam along the front lines (radio corp). He held down a job he hated, married three times, couldn't seem to rise above the circumstances that seemed to follow him around. A few year back I called him. We hadn't talked in some time. He's retired now. He found himself a rental cottage out in the country, away from the city that had beaten him down for sixty years. He said, "I get it that the family doesn't really understand my life -- is maybe even a little appalled at its simplicity, and wonders how I get by. I admire them all in the fact that they have played by the rules, amassed their retirement nest eggs, and look to finishing out their years in the same relative comfort they've enjoyed from their labors. It just didn't work out that way for me. But I get by. I live simply. I haven't used any propane yet this year. I'm burning wood that I gather from the surrounding countryside. You won't believe it (knowing me), but my neighbors have taught me how to put up some of my own food. Next year I'm going to hunt with them so I can maybe have some venison in the freezer. I fish." He continued. "Have you ever been watching a movie when the full screen is just beautiful landscape, horizon to horizon, and it looks so inviting you say to yourself, man, wouldn't that be the PERFECT place to live? Well, just last week I was splitting firewood. I was taking my time, working at a leisurely pace. I'd split a log or two and stack them on the growing pile by the back door. And occasionally I'd look up -- part resting, part keeping track of the dogs as I watched them playing and hunting the field across the road.... ...and I suddenly looked beyond the dogs. I looked at the full screen of my beautiful view from horizon to horizon. And it just then dawned on me. I'm there."
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Post by Cornflake on Mar 1, 2023 21:23:55 GMT -5
"I have friends who were in Vietnam. They never talk about it either."
The same guy who sent me the quoted email went to Vietnam a decade back. Shortly after he returned, he asked if we could have lunch. We did. It was obvious that he needed to talk to someone about all this so I basically shut up and listened.
Overall, he was very glad he went. He and the group he was with met with some vets from the north Vietnamese army. They agreed that they didn't take the war personally. They were doing what they had to do. The visit triggered a few bad memories but not many. He always had the option of opting out of an event but never did.
This guy is part of my weekly Zoom breakfast. The last time the war came up, we found that three guys had been in Vietnam. He was so willing to talk about it that he was afraid he was blabbing.
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Vietnam
Mar 1, 2023 21:26:31 GMT -5
Post by Cornflake on Mar 1, 2023 21:26:31 GMT -5
PS: By contrast, my next door neighbor has gotten so irate at my last couple of references to the war that I won't raise it again.
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Vietnam
Mar 1, 2023 23:25:19 GMT -5
Post by Marshall on Mar 1, 2023 23:25:19 GMT -5
My brother-in-law was in the Air Force. Flew F4 Phantoms. I didn't realize till recently when I overheard him talking to another Vet he met, that he (B-I-L) had dropped Napalm. Just part of the job.
He's a good man. Became an airline pilot for Eastern, then Southwest. He's retired. And hangs with a lot of ex-military types. Most of them are pretty far Right. But Charlie doesn't buy into all that gung-ho militaristic stuff.
Like I said, he's a good man.
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Post by coachdoc on Mar 2, 2023 0:39:14 GMT -5
My dad was army air force during WWII. He was a navigator in a large bomber. Said he was glad he didn’t meet any of the folks his bombs killed. He was one of the bombers in the Dresden fire bombing and in the first bomber over Normandy beach on D-Day. After one mission he came back with over 200 holes from shrapnel in his plane. Met my Mom in London. She worked for the British Air Force as a radio operator. She and Dad woke up one morning after a particularly noisy night to find half their hotel was missing. I’m glad they made it through the war in one piece.
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Post by RickW on Mar 2, 2023 10:01:40 GMT -5
My wife’s dad was an army officer in Italy in WWII. A kinder, more gentler man you cannot imagine. He couldn’t talk about it, and it pretty much ruined him. He tried to kill himself, and the doctor told him to talk to someone. I wasn’t around then, he opened up to my brother in law, who said, it was unbelievable what he went through, what he saw.
And there’s good old Vlad Putin sending his young men and women in to die horrifically in the Ukraine now, for as piss poor a set of reasons as have ever been given for a war. We never learn.
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Post by billhammond on Mar 2, 2023 10:20:46 GMT -5
Because my duty stations during my four-year Navy stint were East Coast-based and on land, I was only vaguely connected with the war itself. My communications with ship and shore stations were more aligned with Cold War stuff, like tracking Soviet subs during my year in Iceland. Still, there was always the sense of importance to what we were doing, that it mattered to those comrades-in-arms who were in battle or close to it. "Losing" my young adulthood (age 19-23) to military service, in retrospect, was one of the best things that ever happened to me. All the cliches -- discipline, maturity, motivation, travel, camaraderie -- came home with me in 1973, and I enrolled in college with plenty enough money (thanks, GI Bill) and energy to do well academically and socially. And eventually become the lump of crap I am today!
p.s. Plus a 25% veteran's discount at Culver's!
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Post by TKennedy on Mar 2, 2023 11:45:52 GMT -5
I had an exemption for med school but everyone was getting drafted after internship and I planned on it. They cancelled the Dr. draft a few months before I finished my internship in 1972.
I was glad at the time but looking back now I know it would have been good for me.
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Vietnam
Mar 2, 2023 11:52:19 GMT -5
Post by billhammond on Mar 2, 2023 11:52:19 GMT -5
PaulK -- Where were you stationed other than Hawaii?
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Post by Cornflake on Mar 2, 2023 12:59:19 GMT -5
By the way, one vet explained to me that discussing the war doesn't evoke particularly painful memories for him. It just that most people have nothing in their experience that allows them to understand a discussion of the war, so the discussion is fruitless.
I think that was my brother's view. He was a vet. Once I was with him when a fellow he was chatting with turned out to be a vet. They started talking very freely and were only stopped by time constraints.
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Vietnam
Mar 2, 2023 15:06:03 GMT -5
Post by RickW on Mar 2, 2023 15:06:03 GMT -5
By the way, one vet explained to me that discussing the war doesn't evoke particularly painful memories for him. It just that most people have nothing in their experience that allows them to understand a discussion of the war, so the discussion is fruitless. I think that was my brother's view. He was a vet. Once I was with him when a fellow he was chatting with turned out to be a vet. They started talking very freely and were only stopped by time constraints. I believe that many would be horrified by what they heard, and it seems, (I have no experience with this, being Canadian and not a vet,) that the Vietnam vets found themselves quite often vilified on their return to the US. It would take only once for that to happen to make me keep my mouth shut. Our daughters, as I think most of you know, are adopted Chinese kids, two of them as babies in China. Our youngest was talking to a fellow university student who was Chinese, who was freaked out at what had happened to Morgan, walked away and never spoke to her again. That was more than enough for my daughter to not talk about it so freely anymore. I can imagine what it would be like coming back from the horros of war, and being accused of being a murderer and baby killer.
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Vietnam
Mar 2, 2023 15:06:46 GMT -5
Dub likes this
Post by jdd2 on Mar 2, 2023 15:06:46 GMT -5
I had a cousin, deceased as of a couple years ago, Denny L.--maybe a year or two older than my older brother. Small town boy, on the wild side, always hunted and had guns, occasionally shot .22 pistols in his basement (for target practice...). Not the college type at all., Grew up in in Farmington, IL. Kind of a town that time forgot, and even today a static population of 2,500 (and very much white). For his part time job there, before the military, he worked at the town's funereal home, and tho I never heard specifically, probably started as a go-fer, sometimes driver, and eventually or as a part of it all along, handled bodies. He eventually became a photographer in a different, slightly larger downstate illinois town, and that was a common interest of ours, so we had something to talk about when we sometimes happened to come together.
Anyway, to avoid being drafted and the worst of vietnam--shooting and being shot at--he opted to enlist in the navy, where he became a corpsman, a six year stint. For a while he was on a ship (or two?), but then they sent him to vietnam. He was never anywhere near any fighting, never carried a gun (was undoubtedly where he was not allowed to), and might never have heard a gun go off or an explosion while there, and hey, he always worked there in air-conditioning.
I guess due to his background, for his tour there they put him in a kind of mortuary, processing bodies, cleaning them up and doing what they could to them before shipping them back to the US. So yeah, while he never saw any 'action', he definitely saw the results of it.
If you've seen the documentary Heart and Minds, he was not an interviewee, but he's listed in the credits as a source of some kind.
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