We were highly trained regular volunteers, who had long been indoctrinated to kill a "Commy for Mommy." (Picture from Byrd Achives)
"...we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools."
When he took office, President Johnson made two promises with respect to Vietnam: he would not "lose" the war and he would not send "American boys" to die there.
"I stood up to screaming patriots, and burned my draft card. I protested and marched, screamed and cried, told my generation to stop, don't go, this was wrong. I ended up a C.O. (conscientious objector) doing two years of bedpans, not smoking dope in Canada. I think that I, and those like me, are the true patriots, the true dissenters, who tried to stop 50,000 of our generation from coming home in bags."
"Whoever you may be, men, women, children, old or young, whatever your religion or whatever your nationality, if you are Vietnamese, rise up to fight the colonialists, to save our country. He who has a gun, let him fight with a gun; he who has a sword, let him fight with the sword; he who has neither gun nor sword let him fight with spades, with pickaxes, with sticks. Let no one stay behind or outside the patriotic struggle against the colonialists."
In the first nine months of 1967 alone, varieties of highly toxic crop defoliants (most of it Agent Orange) were sprayed on 965,006 acres of land.
"I was the last of the eighteen year olds faced with the question of the draft. You remember that they put all our birthdays into one huge hopper, spun it around and began selecting who would go to Nam."
By 1966 free fire zones were enlarged to areas of several square miles within which saturation bombing by B-52s or shelling by massed artillery cleared the land and made it uninhabitable by either NLF troops or the local peasantry. It was this decimation of the land, more than anything else that filled the refugee camps in the safe areas near Saigon and other cities.
My brother and I were the children of my mother's clients. She never told us their names. She just said that they were both killed in the war. One father died in a helicopter accident, the other was ambushed while crossing a bridge. She told the same story to all of our neighbors, but even as a child, I sensed that she was lying.
Virtually no senior commanders spend time with the grunts to learn the true nature of the war. Most of us are isolated from the fighting men—not unlike the French, British and German senior brass of World War I.
Only other mothers who have lost a son or daughter in combat can ever fathom the pain and suffering produced. The death of my brother in 1969 sent my mother into a tailspin of despair that she has never recovered from.