Name: MO E-mail: (Not Available) Subject: Re: The Vietnam Experience
I`m glad you brought that up. Whatever I did as work for about 20 years
after I came home, I hardly ever saw or met another Vietnam vet. And on
the rare instances I did, they were either lying about serving in Nam or
else they were in some way different job assignmnet than I was (Infantry.)
The point is, it seems like I was always looking but never finding.
Everytime I would cross paths with some guy who looked roughly the same
age as me I would ask if he`d been to Vietnam. I`m not sure why. Maybe I
needed to swap war stories, or more likely I needed to confirm that what
I`d been through was not just a real bad dream. Anyway, for that many
years I lived in a mystery; Where did they all go?
Then in 1992 I fell
into a job that took me on the road across and around the entire U.S. of
A., and on that tour I made it a point to meet with Vietnam vets whenever
time allowed. Over time it came to surface why I had been looking for
them. In the presence of other combat vets, I finally felt the comfort
there is to actually relax. Finally it seemed like someone had my back,
someone who I could trust even if bullets started flying. It didn`t matter
if they had battled in Quang tri or Phu Bai when I was in the Ashau or Tam
Ky. What mattered was hard to describe and the uninitiated still wouldn`t
know what I was talking about anyhow. They walked the walk and talked the
talk, but more importantly they knew the code of honor and brothership
right down to the last heartbeat. In a few words, it was always a real
good feeling to hang with the war stained men who went through the same
side of hell as I did. Over all it was enough to give me the electrical
charge it took to put this website together. If I never do anything else,
I`m glad for this. Welcome home to all you grimey bastards, and thank you
for standing at my shoulder in the rain of a real bad war.
The
last line of our story has changed over the years, so let me straignten
that out herein. We sacrificed the high side of fifty eight thousand
troops. North Vietnam lost way over three million. No matter what computer
you use, it doesn`t tally as a loss for our side, not by a long shot. And
even worse, to say we lost is a slap to the face of all those who perished in battle
fighting in blind obedience in responce to the summon of America at war or
the `call of duty` as it was called at the time. I wish I could force
upon all Vietnam veterans the pride that they deserve to walk with even as
the more modern history books and articles beat them down. Screw those
writers. They know not what of which they speak. If there is really a need
to write of true U.S. military failures they can always update the story
of George Armstrong Custer in his `Last Stand` battle at The Little
Bighorn in 1876. There`s one we did lose and deserved to. Case in point,
the battle cry of my own infantry regiment was `Geronimo!`. Custer`s name
was never so inspiring.
