Where the Textbook Ends: Vietnam

There was something oddly innocent about me the day I left for Vietnam. I was insulated from the spirit of the Sixties by the fortress walls of West Point. 

In a strange paradox, or was it inertia, the New York Times was delivered to our dorms every day. And because I read it religiously, as even mentioned by my room-mate Bruce Peltier in my year book, I was acutely aware of the outside world but deeper down I was detached from my own generation. 

Some of my hometown friends took time off after college to do the European tour. As a reward for not dropping out or for not burning down their dormitories, or not burning out their grey cells with LSD, parents financed their hitchhiking escapades across Europe or their Eurorail passes to soak up the world’s cultural capitols. As part of their initiation into adulthood, they travelled the world under their own steam by courtesy of their parents’ checkbooks. Others simply went to Canada to avoid being drafted for the war.

Mine was a voluntary tour of duty in Vietnam courtesy of Uncle Sam. 

My family and friends asked why - but I felt Vietnam was my moment. The time my country called was today. My time was now. I had just completed four years of education and training to become an officer of the United States Army all paid for by the American taxpayer. I was part of the long gray line. How could I not go to war?

After airborne and winter ranger training, after a quick stop in Miami to get married to Nancy, I found myself in the middle seat with destination to Saigon. When we landed in Anchorage to re-fuel, I ached to stretch my legs. I inhaled the frozen air of our fiftieth state. Reality was totally breached by the endless, barren tundra. I was at the extremities of the planet, as far from the surf of North Miami as geographically possible. I couldn’t imagine being any farther away from home. But I was wrong. Vietnam was another world away. It all became too real as soon as the pilot turned out the lights upon entry to the Vietnam airspace. When I next climbed out of the belly of that plane on the darkened Saigon airstrip, I realized we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

My body was trained. My mind was tuned. I was well-rehearsed in the West Point repertoire of battle. As long as we stayed inside those well-drilled protocols, my educated instincts, my mental programming were all sharp and poised for action. But no amount of training could have prepared me for the surrealism of Vietnam.

I believed that West Point, Airborne and Ranger School with its endless patrols in the swampland of Florida had put me properly in the picture. I knew my role in the picture we were going to make. But they were clearly shooting another movie when I landed at Tan Son Nhat twenty miles outside Saigon. This wasn’t a John Wayne double feature. It was more like “Apocalypse Now’ by Francis Ford Coppola.

The script I had been handed at West Point came apart at the seams under fire. Mike Tyson was right about one thing. Every man has a plan until he gets hit. No soldier should venture out into the field without a thorough understanding of Moltke's maxim: "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."

There are movies about the war I cannot watch. Platoon. Deer Hunter. Coming Home. Born on the Fourth of July. Mostly because they are too Hollywood, too hollow, too coated with cliché. And others because they scratch some of the marrow in my bones. They dust off old memories of fire bases near the DMZ, the omnipresent helicopters, and having to deal with heroin-addicted soldiers in my platoon. What they don’t talk about is the beauty of the country, the kindness and strong spirit of the people. 

The war was intensely complex. 

I was not a gung-ho, my country right or wrong soldier. We were all to a certain extent ambushed by Vietnam. There’s no screen or bumper sticker that will capture it.

When I introduced myself to Jane Fonda at the annual amfAR Fundraiser in Cannes as a Vietnam vet, you could see the muscles tighten in her jaw and her body language retract. But I did not judge Fonda forever by her errors in judgment over the war. I don’t tend to form permanent judgments on people. She was very wrong about the anti-aircraft seat. Most people regard Vietnam as a mistake. Fonda compounded that mistake by putting the onus for it on the men and women who made the sacrifice. I have not demonized Jane Fonda for her poor judgment. But it is also true that I we do not own a complete set of her workout videos.             

Firebase Nancy – my first assignment - ironically, the same name as my wife at the time – was in the middle of nowhere, somewhere south of Danang. It had already achieved its place in history by becoming the site of the first use of chemical weapons. I made my mark there on my very first week. I was reprimanded for evacuating a soldier from the field. My take was this man was suffering an epileptic seizure. I did not hesitate to have him airlifted out. Following protocol. The condition this man suffered from, as it turned out, was heroin addiction. In a war zone, it's a little difficult to stop and evaluate the difference between a medical seizure and heroin overdose. Three days later I was summoned and dressed down by my commanding officer, some four hours away, for wasting assets, risking Army equipment, airtime, and the lives of our men on a non-combatant injury. It seems I had squandered resources on a “dope head.” I was warned not to repeat that error in judgment again.

I accepted the authority of my superior officer and pledged that I would not make that “error in judgment” again. I saluted, I left and from that day on I followed his order. But following my superior’s authority did not mean I followed his thinking. Because I could not help wondering:

Was that boy from Omaha a heroin addict when he joined up next to the Dairy Queen in the Shop Rite mall? Was he shooting up on the front stoop of his granddad’s battleship gray porch across from the cornfields? He and his buddies may have drunk out of brown paper bags on those peeling stoops. When they had too much the local tavern keepers cut them off. Their older brothers would offer an arm and wives and mothers standing akimbo would collect them to make sure they got enough sleep to get to work and start up again tomorrow.

There was nobody to cut that young man off in Vietnam. I wasn’t supposed to airlift that soldier out because it was a waste of army resources. The medics had the stuff to right him from an epileptic seizure. But there was nothing in that medic’s bag, that would have tamed this heroin-induced spasm. I’m not blaming the Army for the boy’s addiction. But I would have loved to have airlifted him right back to his grandfather’s cornfield. 

At the moment, I was being reprimanded, a power and determination began to build inside me to never ignore or discriminate against someone in need of life-saving support. I waited until I left the Army and some years went by and then I violated that order by helping to save lives every chance I got. I have devoted part of my life to support initiatives who get medical help to people all over the globe without prejudice and without judgment. We don’t ask about a person’s politics or religion when we deploy HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and anti-stigma messages get them clean water as part of the Staying Alive Foundation. We don’t ask a child about whether its mother is a drug addict before we immunize him or her as part of GAVI. Part of my determination was born out of the order that day to leave a fellow soldier in the field.

Agent Orange is a symbol of so much of the residue of Vietnam. The Army doesn’t officially recognize it. The VA will treat Vets with the symptoms of agent Orange, but they’ll never diagnose it. The herbicides are connected to at least twenty different illnesses, including lymphoma, prostate and lung cancer. Countless vets walk around today with its effects marbled through their bodies. Yet the Army denies it. Hundreds of thousands of gallons were sprayed indiscriminately. Its wartime advantages were not clear even then. Da Nang airport, near where I was based, remains heavily contaminated, even to this day.

During the second part of my tour, I was selected as a general’s aide du camp. As part of my duties I saw the weekly reports of Vietnamese casualties being sent up the chain of command. We were in a war of attrition, and every commander in the field knew it. They were encouraged to submit body counts, which were the metric Washington turned to calibrate the war's success. This was the oldest form of man's mathematics. Today you killed so many of us; tomorrow we will kill more of you. We switched from capturing key terrain assets to killing as many of the enemy as possible. This was our dashboard.

The End of Authority

Fragging was also not on the syllabus at West Point. There was no lecture about how soldiers in Vietnam were killing their own officers. No diagram of the mental trajectory from the mind of an enlisted soldier to the arc of the M-67 grenade he catapulted into the tent of his own unit leader at night. There were no illustrations about how to investigate such a crime and how the soldiers would testify the next morning.  We were not given statistics about how common these acts of mutiny and murder were. There was no workshop on how to describe the lieutenant’s demise to his next of kin. For that matter, I don’t think anybody mentioned that the lifetime career of most second lieutenants was about the same as a fruit fly.   

It would not be long before I had my first lesson in fragging, its aftermath within miles of where I had slept the night before. It would not be the last murder of an officer by his men while I served in the Army. Fragging was adamantly denied by the higher ups, but among the men it was a dark, open secret. Among the officers, it became the worst nightmare: to be killed by your own men as you slept.  Hundreds of incidents of fragging took place against hundreds of officers in Vietnam. Authority did not save them. 

The curriculum at West Point was not updated to include fragging. It would have signaled to the young minds who were starting their moves up the officer ladder that the entire system of authority on which the Army hierarchy was founded was susceptible to disintegration from inside the ranks. Fragging was a threat not simply to those particular officers but to the entire scope of the armed forces. It was the ultimate threat to everything West Point stood for.

And yet had fragging been on the syllabus, it might have taught young men who aspired to lead troops about the limits to the authority they were about to assume.  Authority, as mighty as it sounds, only goes so far. Authority can be bestowed on you in a formal ceremony. You can lose it in a second. Order your men to leave their positions and when they witness their brothers getting mowed down the next time you voice an order, your men begin to resist the authority conferred on you. Because in addition to authority, an officer must be a master of leadership and accountability. 

Authority must be backed up by motivation, inspiration, and example. Nothing rings as hollow as authority that is not supported by personal example.  Nobody knows “by the book” better than a soldier. But a leader, the man or woman in authority, cannot be bound by the book. Every book, no matter how masterfully composed, was written about yesterday. A leader must have yesterday’s book in his back pocket and then write his or her own new chapter about today, to add a footnote to the textbook of war, business, or politics.

You might think that witnessing this savage betrayal at the impressionable age of 22 would have planted the seeds of paranoia deep inside me. But I have not spent my career looking over my shoulder. The lessons of the military in Vietnam teach you to lead from the front and stand side by side with your men. The lessons also teach you to be the first on the battlefield and the last to leave. And further to be the last to take credit and the first to take blame. Authority, in its most meaningful form, is not merely appointed, but earned and constantly renewed; not merely from your superior officers or upper management in quarterly reviews, but from your colleagues, your peers, and your team.

You will surely never encounter fragging at your corporate headquarters or your co-op board meeting, but none of us is exempt from the threat of subterfuge from within. However, no corporation is immune to psychological fragging. This can be especially true in certain industries, like media for example.

H.R. Mac Master, President Trumps replacement for Michael Flynn, knows how to speak truth to power. In his vigorously argued landmark book on the fractures of force in Vietnam, Dereliction of Duty, Mc Master makes clear that pushback is not a breach of loyalty; it is instead a responsibility, a standard of loyalty and service. A soldier is as accountable to push back as he is to obey and advance his troops. Pushback isn’t an infraction; it is a force democratic authority, requires from its senior officers in the field. Thanks to Mc Master, the subject has become integrated into the new West Point syllabus. As I observed in Vietnam, body counts fail as a realistic dashboard in most conflicts. In a small fight, you can keep fighting until you entire vanquish the enemy. But in a large war, such as Vietnam, it becomes irrelevant. We were never going to kill everybody in Vietnam.

Part of leadership is not merely respecting one’s superiors, but respecting the superior knowledge of one’s subordinates. The best guide to war I had was my platoon sergeant.  On his second tour, Sergeant Osbourne, 36, was a swaggering bundle of good instincts out of Kankakee, Illinois. He knew a lot more about how to stay alive than I did. He had lived and breathed what I was supposed to understand off the mark. His instincts were much smarter than my brain. He was my subordinate in rank and authority but he was my superior in experience and power. No Fodor’s Guide to war in Vietnam, no catechism or FAQs devised by the top brass could have surpassed what Sergeant Osborne had acquired and stored under his Army helmet. He was my living textbook, and I studied it daily. 

I could have asserted my rank and taken charge Day One without him, but would I have seen Day Two? Would my unit have been compromised by my lack of expert power? So, I did what any good officer or executive should do: I submitted myself to his good counsel. He tutored, I learned. What good is authority unless it is backed up by experience and power? It doesn’t matter what authority has been vested in you, by whom, you better locate the best source of Knowledge, power and Experience and take voluminous notes.

Over time, I was ready to take the reins from my Sergeant. These transfers of authority are never smoothly transacted, but incrementally, Sergeant Osbourne yielded and the day came when I took charge. It was an awkward dance during those first few weeks. A dance of survival.

Vietnam was the juncture at which the country abandoned its shared burden of arms. Our nation called out to its citizens for service and duty, not for a job. Our fighting force represented every state and class. Families on every street knew the risk of war. Conflicts were announced by the one percent but were fought by a hundred percent of the citizenry. In the post - Vietnam era the same one percent calls the shots, and a mere one percent of the country reports for duty. The democratic roots of Americans rising up to fight as a people has been replaced by an increasingly remote and exhausted quasi- mercenary force.