Boston Publishing Company - The American Experience in Vietnam: Reflections on an Era

REFLECTIONS ON AN ERA

THE EDITORS OF BOSTON PUBLISHING COMPANY

This edition published in 2014 by Zenith Press, an imprint of Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc., 400 First Avenue North, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA. First edition, The American Experience in Vietnam by Clark Dougan and Stephen Weiss, published in 1988 by Boston Publishing Company, Inc. Much of the narrative text of this edition and the historical research that informs it is based on the first edition.

2014 Boston Publishing Company, Inc.

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Digital edition: 978-1-62788-497-6

Hardcover edition: 978-0-76034-625-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The American experience in Vietnam / the editors of Boston Publishing Company. -

[Zenith press edition].

pages cm

Earlier edition has statement of responsibility: Clark Dougan, Stephen Weiss and the editors of Boston Publishing Company ; pictures selected by Kathleen A. Reidy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7603-4625-9 (hc w/jacket)

1. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--United States. 2. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Pictorial works. I. Dougan, Clark. American experience in Vietnam. II. Boston Publishing Company.

DS558.D66 2014

959.7043373--dc23

2014013529

Zenith Press

Editorial Director: Erik Gilg

Project Manager: Madeleine Vasaly

Art Director: James Kegley

Layout Designer: Kall Design

Boston Publishing Company

Publisher: Robert George

Managing Editor: Carolyn Medeiros

Senior Writer and Photo Researcher: Nick Mills

Senior Editor: David Shapira

Research Assistant: Michele Tezduyar

On the cover: An unidentified soldier from Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, Americal Division, during a firefight in the Hiep Duc Valley, 1969.

A young Marine private waits on the beach during the Marine landing at Da Nang.

I arrived in Da Nang, South Vietnam, in August 1969 as a first lieutenant in the US Marine Corps trained to fly the A-6 Intruder, a state-of-the-art all-weather jet aircraft widely considered to be the most capable combat aircraft the US had deployed to Vietnam. As long as I could remember, I had wanted to fly airplanes, particularly jets. It had taken more than two years of rigorous, competitive training to achieve my goal. Even so, when I left Cherry Point, North Carolina, for Vietnam, I knew very little about the war I was about to join.

Once in-country, I flew 118 combat missions over the next year. Most of my flights occurred at night, providing close air support for US Marine infantry fighting in the heavily vegetated, mountainous regions of I Corps; we also provided air cover for the Armys 101st Airborne Division. Close air support is a Marine pilots primary mission, but we also flew missions far to the north, more than a thousand miles round trip, patrolling the borders of China and North Vietnam in search of truck convoys carrying supplies and munitions to the battlefields in South Vietnam. As a Marine pilot I also spent time with the Marine infantry in the bush coordinating air-ground operations, and with the Navys Combat Information Center aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger stationed just off the coast.

My brother, Ken, also served in Vietnam. He was a Marine infantryman with 3/3/M on the Rockpile, Con Thien, and on Mutters Ridge during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Ken endured some very difficult times during the height of Tet in areas that were hotly contested. He returned home from Vietnam only to die a young man from the effects of Agent Orange. His son was born with hydrocephalus, a birth defect likely caused by the chemical. My generations Vietnam experience, I learned, would not end with us; it would be passed to future generations as well.

These very different roles and experiences that my brother and I encountered gave me an unusual perspective on the war, along with a mix of very strong emotions, primarily frustration. Whereas most US troops saw only a narrow slice of the fighting in one particular region of the country, I saw the war from the air, the ground, and the sea, in the north as well as the south. Witnessing the war in this way, I soon began to draw my own conclusionswe had been assigned an impossible task. The enemys supply lines were too scattered, its ground forces too difficult to find and fix, and its stationary military targets too limited in number to be effectively interdicted from the air. Most of North Vietnams supplies came from beyond its borders, mainly the Soviet Union and China. There was a steady source of supplies flowing down a vast network of roads to an enemy that was difficult to distinguish from the local population we were expected to protect.

Corporal Ken George, Mike Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, on the Rockpile, July 1968.

One mission in particular seemed to epitomize the futility of it all. I had flown up to the Chinese border on an Operation Barrel Roll mission in search of truck convoys rolling across Chinas border bound for North Vietnam and onto the Laotian branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I managed to hit two trucks. I had flown a multimillion-dollar jetthe most technologically advanced aircraft in the American arsenalon a thousand-mile round-trip bombing run, and all that I accomplished was to destroy two trucks. Meanwhile, hundreds, if not thousands, of other trucks rolled across the border driving along impossible-to-detect dirt roads protected by six-thousand-foot karst mountain ranges and large amounts of Soviet anti-aircraft artillery. There appeared no way to prevent the southward flow of supplies and munitionsin short, there seemed no way to help our Marines on the ground fighting a well-equipped and determined enemy hidden in the triple-canopy jungles of I Corps. I began to feel that the war was unwinnable.

The mind copes in many ways. I stopped looking at the big picture and the politics of it all. Instead, I looked at the little picture; I focused on helping the kids in the jungle, as we often referred to the younger ground troops, by giving them the best air support we could, either as pilots or as forward air controllers. Give them the support they needed, get them home safe, and then get ourselves home safe: that became the mission. And the fact that my brother had been one of those kids, though we were not allowed to serve in-country at the same time, only intensified that feeling.