I’ve been thinking long and hard all day about what I wanted to write about for Veteran’s Day.
As I was running a couple of backups after the hard drive recovery operations earlier this week, I happened to stumble upon this picture that came from a set of slides that my father had taken whilst he was serving in his first of two deployments to Vietnam in 1967.
When I saw it, I instantly knew the story I wanted to share with you dear readers.
If you knew my father at all, you knew that he was very proud to have served his country in the United States Army.
There was the flag that flew near the door of his house in Port Orange, his various vans through the years were usually adorned with bumper stickers from Special Forces and the 82nd Airborne (indeed, I believe the first Latin phrase I ever learned was “De Oppresso Liber” which was the motto of Army Special Operations).
But if you really knew him, he rarely spoke about the day-to-day activities of operating in a forward-deployed Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit in Vietnam where being shelled by the Viet Cong/NVA was often made easier by those honkin’ huge red cross symbols on the top of the surgical tents!
Most of what I knew of his tours of duty in Vietnam came from what I could hear late at night as he’d be thrashing about in his waterbed yelling and trying to fight off enemies infiltrating his camp or reliving some horrific battle or more often receiving and providing medical attention to the wounded from units operating even closer to the front lines than they were.
The morning would come and other than the obvious effects of fatigue from getting very little sleep and certainly nothing approaching rest, he wouldn’t admit to anything being at all wrong even when asked directly.
In fact, his usual answer of “I’m doing super” became a bit of a code between us…it meant “I’m not doing well but that’s my problem and keep your nose out of it!”
Keep in mind that this was well before Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was an acknowledged mental condition that needed thoughtful and caring treatment which is *NOT* how it was handled in the Army (or indeed any branch of service) in the 1970s. If a soldier was suffering from PTSD, the advice was generally along the lines of “suck it up, soldier” or “tape an aspirin to it” and just get on with the job.
I’m glad that the Pentagon eventually wised up and realised PTSD as far more of a pervasive issue and the care standards have improved greatly. Better late than never!
But from an early age, I took to heart the notion that those “veterans” who talk a lot and claim loudly that “they were in the sh*t” more often weren’t closer than half a hemisphere away from the real action. The ones who really had been there and had experienced the horrors of war up close and personal more often than not didn’t want to speak of the experiences at all.
So you might well imagine my shock when my father decided one day out of the blue to share this story with me after dinner one evening. To this day, I have no earthly idea *WHY* after many years of silence he decided to talk about it other than maybe I’d finally gotten old enough or less angry and stupid enough that he felt he could trust me with it.
After all, with all of his time spent in Special Ops with a clearance well above my nonexistent one, he was always a firm believer in the “Loose Lips” paradigm.
Maybe he figured the silence just didn’t matter anymore.
Dad’s unit had gotten some intelligence that the Viet Cong/NVA was heading their way to attack the village of “friendlies” next to his MASH unit’s encampment.
The intel weenies didn’t think that this VC unit had the nuts to attack the MASH unit itself knowing they’d likely end up on the very wrong end of the encounter.
The VC objective was to remove the support the villagers provided to the soldiers in the camp much like the character Ho-Jon from the TV series “M*A*S*H”.
Now, the term “friendlies” is kind of ironic because there was really no group of civilians in the country who was particularly thrilled with being caught between two actively warring adversaries. “Friendly” in this context meant that the villagers hated or feared the other guys more than they hated or feared you.
The gentleman in that picture is a prime example of this: he was suspected to be VC but he was willing to work for whoever paid him the most. He wasn’t obviously VC during the daylight but after dark, all bets were off and he’d just as likely slit your throat as to look at you if the money was right.
So the VC are on the way to exterminate this village that the Americans would rather keep amongst the living and there’s only a few hours before they’re due to arrive and start the killing.
The rules of engagement were that if the VC attacked the Americans, the Americans could defend themselves. But if it was VC versus villagers, the Americans were to stay out of it unless the VC blew through the village and reckoned they might go for double or nothing.
Someone figured out that there was a third option to observe the rules of engagement to the letter and also save their village of friendlies from being slaughtered.
It turns out that not too far away, there was another village full of people who were the VC’s “friendlies” and that they had a habit of occasionally causing problems for Dad’s unit and his neighbour village.
So a few guys went up the trail a bit in the jungle to the fork in the trail approaching these two villages and switched all the signs on the trees round.
I know, it sounds really stupid like something you’d see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon!
But keep in mind that back then, there was no such thing as GPS satellite-based navigation and there were very few roads through the jungles of Vietnam and whatever maps of the trails that were available to the VC weren’t terribly accurate for precise navigation.
A few hours later, the VC arrive in the other village and slaughter everyone in sight and burn it to the ground.
Sometimes desperate and potentially stupid solutions work in a war zone.
Apparently, the VC never bothered to check if they were in the right village and clearly whatever protests their “friendlies” might have made fell upon deaf ears.
I imagine the VC commanders were probably very pissed to learn that the VC unit had wiped out their village rather than the one they were sent to destroy but as far as Dad knew for the rest of that tour, they never made another attempt on “pacifying” the village that survived and were content to just lob mortars over the village and into Dad’s camp on a regular and routine basis.
This Veteran’s Day finds us involved in two “hot” wars…supporting the Ukrainian’s brave defence of their country against the Russian invasion and now the war between Israel and Hamas that’s raging in the Gaza Strip after Hamas invaded Israel and killed or kidnapped many Israelis.
Right now, American troops have not been called to fight in either of them but that may well change as the situation on the ground changes.
And should the call come, the men and women of our armed forces will go and do the job that must be done with honour and bravery as they always have done and always will.
Those of us who have never served can never truly understand the horrors that one can encounter in war and that sometimes decisions must be taken that will end someone else’s life, perhaps many thousands of them or more.
On the battlefield, it’s a full-time job just trying to survive and carry out the orders one has been given.
And sometimes that’s going to involve making hard decisions that have real consequences, especially for those caught in the middle of the conflict who may have no idea that their fate was sealed through forces they had no control over.
I think that’s what Dad was trying to tell me with that story he shared with me so long ago.
To all who have served and who serve their country with honour every day, thank you for standing on the wall and volunteering to do the job. May “We The People” be ever worthy of your efforts and sacrifice.
