Bringing It All Back Home (31 page)

14

LEADERSHIP: VINCE M
C
GOWAN

As Neil Kenny's story demonstrates, returning Vietnam veterans would in some cases be rebuffed by the very institutions meant to support them—like the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Many men I interviewed echoed Kenny's sentiments and experiences.
The New York Times
ran a story on October 14, 1974, about the sense of rejection that many veterans felt. According to the article, at three o'clock in the morning, thirty-five veterans huddled around a fire in an open trash can, drinking coffee, sleeping, and sharing sandwiches in front of a veterans assistance center in downtown Brooklyn. The men had been waiting over fifteen hours in hopes of meeting with a caseworker. A twenty-four-year-old veteran from the Bronx told the papers, “I fought in the war for two years and no one gives a damn.” According to statistics cited in the story, about 25,000 of the 330,000 Vietnam veterans living in New York City were unemployed, with 7,000 of them on welfare. “It seems like we are still fighting, except this time it's for our dignity,” said one veteran, wrapping himself in a sleeping bag.
1

The lawyer, author, and Vietnam veteran Eric Dean disputes the “abandoned and abused veteran” theme in veterans' narratives, asserting that Vietnam veterans were in fact welcomed home no less warmly than veterans of earlier wars.
2
The difficult issue, however, is not the behavior of the majority of the American population, although there was probably greater variation in attitudes than Dean allows. As the Bacolos' story made clear, the real issue is that many veterans
believed
, and continue to believe, that they were not treated well. As Bernard Edelman put it:
We were not welcomed home into the arms of a grateful nation.

That perception is more important than any number of “welcome home” parades or the dollar amount of veterans' benefits received.

Eventually, some veterans realized they would have to fight for the recognition and services they believed their due. It was a relatively young generation of men who would come forward to serve as leaders of the emerging veterans' community, especially in New York City. One veteran who stands out in this regard is Vince McGowan, the founding president of the resurrected New York City United War Veterans Council. For McGowan, leadership was a natural outgrowth of his military experience. He describes himself this way:

I can figure it out, I can actually make it happen; it is a situation, and I will deal with it, right? I would never ask somebody to do something I won't do, and that includes work today or any of the jobs that I have had.

Born in 1945, at St. Clare's Hospital in Manhattan, McGowan grew up with his family on Forty-Ninth Street and Ninth Avenue, in the neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen. His mother ran a tearoom on Sixty-Fifth Street in the area now dominated by Lincoln Center. (At the time the neighborhood was called San Juan Hill.) Later the family moved to 143rd Street and Broadway, an area heavily populated by German Jews. He attended All Hallows and Cathedral High Schools before ending up at Lincoln High School. He joined the Marine Corps at age seventeen.

McGowan says he joined, in part, because of the Kennedy assassination.
That really pissed me off
, he says. Kennedy was killed November 22, 1963. McGowan was in Parris Island for U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training by January 1964. He admits, however, that the Kennedy assassination was also something of an excuse. At the time, he remembers feeling as though he lacked purpose in his life,
spending more time getting out of trouble than doing anything that's good.

He broke out of that by joining the Marine Corps. As a fairly independent young man, McGowan had spent his summers wandering the beaches at the Jersey shore or the Rockaways in Queens, finding unoccupied bungalows to sneak into and spend the night. Because of this independent streak, he feels that his parents couldn't have stopped him from joining the military; he was about to leave home anyway, one way or another.

McGowan took his tough New York City attitude into the Marine Corps and did very well there, earning the Dress Blue Award for the outstanding new Marine in his platoon. He loved it. He found it rigorous, but the discipline was good for him. Because of the award, McGowan had his choice of duty stations. He chose sea duty, ending up on the USS
Little Rock
, a guided-missile cruiser. He traveled all over the world, above the Arctic Circle, across the equator, and through European waters. McGowan says:
I saw parts of the world that I would have never seen otherwise
.

He has chipped ice off a ship's mast in the Arctic, experienced hurricanes out at sea, and had other
life-altering experiences that every young man and woman should have the opportunity to experience.

Promoted to sergeant, McGowan ended up in Vietnam in 1966.
You know, all you had to do was say, “Yeah, I'll go,”
he says. While his decision to go to Vietnam seems to lack drama, his arrival there certainly didn't.

First assigned to replacement duties, McGowan was sent to the outpost at Ban Me Thuot, the capital of Dak Lak province. He recalls the arrival by helicopter.

They were being overrun, and I was in the number two helicopter. The first helicopter coming in got shot down, and I'll never forget watching that. I'm in the door and I'm in charge of about fifteen guys, and that thing gets hit and just disintegrates.

From the air, he could see the battlefield and the Special Forces camp. It had a concrete bunker on the top of a knoll with clear fields of fire. There was barbed wire around the perimeter. As they came in, they could see the battle. His unit landed on one side of the hill as the enemy was coming up the other side. It would turn out to be one very long day and night, but the lessons learned would stay with him for life.

We got filled in on the line with the Special Forces guys and the indigenous soldiers that they had, and we held for the night until relief came the next day. That was my first experience with actually having to live-fire against a very determined enemy. It teaches you a lesson. Never assume that what you're doing is going to work. Always act as if it is on the brink of failure, because it is. And be prepared to have to adjust as you're going down.

Perhaps fine-tuned by his New York City upbringing, he learned quickly to trust his instincts for survival. As fierce as the firefights were, McGowan also came away from Vietnam incredibly impressed with the spectacular beauty of the landscape.

I recall one time we were lost. In order to figure out what we wanted to do, me and another guy climbed to the top of the tree. [We got] to the top of this tree and got to the top of the canopy and just looked out across this unbelievably beautiful valley to try to figure out where the hell we were. You had to get up to something high, because when you're down there, it's like being in a basement with no lights on. Like I said, it was beautiful, but it was dangerous. I'll never forget the water coming down from the top of a mountain. We were crossing streams that had boulders moving on the bottom of them. The force of the water was so terrific that [there were] boulders underwater, around your feet.

But he also remembers the physical labor involved in just getting around the countryside.

It would rain hard up there, and all of a sudden you'd get flash floods, but the easiest place to travel was down at the bottom of this ravine. You always ended up at the bottom of this goddamn thing because gravity is taking you down it and it's easier [to walk down hills than up]. You keep on pushing up and you're whacked and your arms are getting tired and you're pulling yourself up on these vines and the ants are running down your arms, leeches … [and it's] hot—hot—suffocatingly hot, and you're all dressed up in your bulletproof vest, and you're carrying your seventy pounds of stuff, grenades and rifles and M79s …

McGowan's family had emigrated from Ireland within living memory. He had heard the stories of how difficult rural farm life was. He understood, in a way many American soldiers did not, the Vietnamese villagers.

My family are farmers, you know; I remember a story my grandmother told me about the Black and Tans [paramilitary forces that worked to repress Irish nationalists] coming to take the young men. [Families] used to hide them out in the fields. I arrived in Ireland as a military guy, the one time I met them, and that brought up stories. We'd sit around at night and talk about it. So you know, then I go to Vietnam and I'm looking at these people, and they are dirt-poor. Whatever they are eating they just grew or caught; there's no electricity, no refrigeration, there's none of that stuff. So, I'm not that far [away from it]. There's no disconnect for me.

As a result, McGowan identified intensely with his next assignment. Before American combat involvement in the war, the Vietnamese government had tried implementing local defense initiatives. One such attempt was known as the Strategic Hamlet Program, in which Vietnamese farmers would be moved off their land, out of their homes, and into a centralized location. The thinking was that it would be easier to defend these centralized communities and keep the population safe, rather than trying to protect scattered individual hamlets.

The Vietnamese Communists made propaganda out of the initiative, charging that South Vietnamese civilians were being rounded up and put into the equivalent of concentration camps. The Strategic Hamlet Program gave way to another plan: squads of Marines called Combined Action Platoons (CAPs) would be sent out to the villages, where they could have access to elected officials or village representatives. The job of the Marine Corps was to develop an indigenous national guard, a ready defense force.

McGowan's CAP unit was assigned to protect a small hamlet that was just outside another, somewhat larger, town that was being guarded by a second unit of Marines. At one point, McGowan likely saved the lives of the men in the second unit.

I was out on patrol with my platoon, and we set up in an ambush position, and I could hear these guys coming. All of a sudden there were like fifteen guys coming down the trail. There must have been thirty of us in an L-shaped ambush position.

But McGowan's instincts told him something was wrong, and he refused to allow his squad leader to begin the ambush. They would soon discover that the men coming down the trail were not Vietcong; they were a patrol of American soldiers from nearby Fort Page. As a result of the incident, McGowan's squad leaders reported to the captain that McGowan was afraid. He had failed to carry out his order to ambush anyone coming down the trail. Because he was a relatively new guy, the question became, who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time—McGowan's squad or the men coming out of Fort Page? In the end, they learned that the men coming out of Fort Page had patrolled the wrong pattern. To prove it, McGowan had to take the captain and his officers back to the position of the ambush.

We walked across these sand dunes; it's five miles. This is not a walk in the park. And those sand dunes are big, and you've got to have strong legs to plow through them. But you have to prove your point. I mean, you can't take these things lying down.

Being proven right helped McGowan advance.
The result is that I became the commanding officer of a Combined Action Platoon as a sergeant.

McGowan is enormously proud of his service in the Combined Action Platoon. He had the men he needed, the necessary weapons, and the authority to use them. And as a New Yorker, he wasn't going to mess around. The success of his unit is documented in Bing West's book
The Village
. It is a history of how small-unit tactics worked in Vietnam.

We were the first successful CAP unit. We took the territory. We had elections. We got rid of the corrupt officials. The regional defense forces that we developed, the 350 guys, were able to protect themselves. They were able to hold the line and put up a fight, account for their weapons, instill discipline in their ranks from leaders who were not susceptible to corruption. That's how we define success. People wanted us.

I actually burned the police chief's house down. He wasn't getting the message. Here was a guy who, every time we would bring in either the load of cement to fix the school or whatever, he would fix his well, build his house, buy a second herd of ducks, with the American money. When he finally lost his house, he got the idea that we were very serious about that. And it gets to that level; I mean, it always gets back to the street area, you know, how things happen in the toe-to-toe world.

At twenty-one years old, McGowan had three stripes and was in charge of 350 men. He had no education for the job, just street smarts and his experience as a Golden Gloves boxer in New York City.

I think I got a lot of it from living in New York. It's one of the reasons that I chose to raise my sons here. I think that this environment can give you a lot of tools, if you're willing to engage, if you're willing to extend yourself.

After leaving the Marine Corps, he worked first for the Rand Corporation, in Guatemala and southern Mexico. (McGowan declined to tell me more about this period of his life.) Later he returned to the United States and operated a bar in Southern California, which, according to McGowan, was a lot of fun in the early 1970s. A social guy, he found he liked operating nightclubs and bars. By 1973, he had returned to New York. He owned and ran a place called McGowan's Alley on the West Side of Manhattan.

I put an after-hours club in there that was the hottest after-hours club in the city. We had a lot of fun. I actually had Bruce Willis as a bartender for a while in one of the clubs that I had.

Despite being social, there were moments he felt alone.