So many people forget in the afterglow of the success of Operation Desert Storm how true this really was. My father was active duty Air Force (1965-88) and was in DaNang from April 28, 1970 to April 27, 1971. When he returned in 1971, they had to sneak him out back out of uniform due to fear of attacks by protestors. His barracks was bombed (mortared? I don't know, he doesn't talk about it - ever) with the epicenter in the room next to his. He was by no means in the front lines, but stray bombs and missiles don't care.
What little I know about his time over there is from my Mom, who has said it was bad when he returned and he (for years) drank like a fish, going through a case of beer every weekend. But whenever this "thank you for your service" stuff began - which I'm guessing was sometime either in the late 90s or perhaps right after 9/11 - he had no use for it whatsoever. He's better now, and he doesn't want anything from anyone, but Mom said he once mused, "where was this in 1971, when I went and somehow came home the enemy, was somehow worse than the Viet Cong, worse than the protestors who blew up buildings when I never fired a shot?"
So he's pretty cold to a lot of the stuff. At some point he made whatever peace he was capable of making with whatever happened. And one thing people don't really grasp is that back then - in the 70s and well into the 80s - the military routinely kicked out members with chronic PTSD who sought counseling as being "mentally ill." And things were so bad (and poor) in the US in the 1970s that there was as reluctance to get any kind of help out of fear of losing what little you had left. (Mark Bowden points out near the end of "Guests of the Ayatollah" that even post-Iranian hostage crisis it was not yet known the necessity of psychiatric counseling upon return from a great trauma).
He's never talked about it with me, ever. He never mentions he was in Vietnam, it comes up in the context of when he's asked. He doesn't wear those Vietnam hats you see on the grizzled veterans with ponytails at the VA, literally never talks about it. Occasionally if there's a movie on with a Vietnam scene, he may watch it and more often than not it's, "They don't know what the hell they're talking about."
But the esteem and morale of the military was awful for much of the time during my life that he was serving. The other thing that sank their hearts was the failure of the hostage rescue operation in Iran in 1980, just a reminder that they couldn't do much to stop evil. (In a cruel irony, one of the soldiers involved in that was the best friend of my across-the-street neighbor when it happened).
I know a lot of people were upset with GHW Bush for not going all the way to Baghdad to capture Saddam in 1991. My dad was not one of them, and neither were most of the Vietnam guys. He pointed out that if we did destroy Saddam, we'd be running the government of Iraq and getting Americans killed for the next 25 years - and that regardless of his lunacy, he was respected by Arabs as a strong guy who could keep civil war or an interloper from sinking his country into a quagmire.
Oh wait, that's pretty much what happened when we DID capture Saddam in 2003, even if it wasn't 25 years.........
