My blog posts for Monday about May brought the trolls out. There were two broad categories. The largest group were men who hated Vietnam and anything to do with it. The other much smaller group felt I had been morally compromised because of my apparent friendship with May, a prostitute. I don’t know May’s story. I remember hearing over and over that some of the prostitutes had chosen that life to save their brothers. There was a draft in Vietnam, and young men were being called up to serve. If you happen to have an attractive sister, she could join a brothel, and you wouldn’t have to serve. The level of corruption was unbelievable. The province chief, a military officer, had his hands in every bar and brothel in his province. The bars and brothels were all owned by people with “connections.”
The second group of trolls and the larger group hated Vietnam. I was assigned to go to Vietnam in 1964. When I got there, there were still Christian missionaries. You didn’t get combat pay unless you actually fought. Those who actually fought were outnumbered by over twenty others who did all the work to support them. The people who pushed paper around. The supply people and even “Graves Registration.” Graves registration people took care of the dead. I say that because my time in Vietnam was very different than the men and women who came after me. Unfortunately, they saw it in large groups in an attempt to change what was already lost.
I was in Da Nang when the Marines started to land in early 1965. I watched as the planes arrived ahead of the landing at Red Beach full of kids. They seemed young to me because I was 24. When all this started, we thought we might be abandoning Vietnam. We had seen the LSTs in the Da Nang harbor. It was clear even to a very junior enlisted man that we had lost the war. We watched the planes land and then went to Red Beach to watch the amphibious landing. We all wondered why we were wasting all the material and men’s lives in a failed attempt to prop up a ridiculously corrupt government.
Within a couple of weeks of arriving in Vietnam, six of the men I had trained with were dead. I told the story before. You might get lost in the antique glitter of the French in Saigon. It was beautiful with all wide boulevards, but you soon saw things like “Cherry Alley.” Where children were rented out for sex. It didn’t make sense at first because they were obviously police around. It slowly began to dawn on all of us that this place was like nothing we understood, and yet…
As we got to know the people of Vietnam, we saw their struggle to live. They wanted the same thing as we want. They wanted to raise their children and have a happy marriage. They did not want to see us or the Vietnamese Armed Forces, or the VC. We only meant one thing to them – death and destruction. I am sure those who came after me saw the same things. They might have been young but soon were 90 and trying to escape using booze or drugs. With that said, I don’t blame the trolls!
