Those Who Have Borne the Battle (26 page)

One veteran remarked, “A lot is said about the Vietnam Memorial and how it has helped the nation heal wounds. Well, many Korean War vets have healing to do, too. This will help. This will let some of the feelings out—not just feelings of fear in combat long repressed, or resentment at a lack of recognition, but also great feelings of pride in what they'd done.”
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I visited the memorial early in the morning in late September 2010. There were three stands of flowers at the far point of the figures. All were from Korean organizations, remembering and thanking. At the far wall behind an American flag were some flower arrangements from Korean War veterans groups and one marked simply, “Beloved Dad.” No one else was there at first, but then a tour group on a bus arrived. The group was Asian, and I approached a tour leader and asked where they were from. She said they were from a place near Shanghai, China, and were very interested in the Korean War.

In 1998, in preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of this major American military action, the United States Congress designated the Korean engagement as a “war.” It had evolved from “police action” to the “Korean Conflict,” but now it would finally be called what those who had been there always knew that it was.

One marine veteran of the Chosin Reservoir was persuaded to go visit the memorial in 1996. His wife said he never talked about the war, but he would often waken at night screaming. He spoke of standing at the memorial some forty-five years after the epic battle: “As I stood by one of the statues for my wife to take a picture of me, I placed my hand on the shoulder of the statue and looked into its face and I saw the expression that I saw 45 years ago on the faces of fellow comrades. Tears came into my eyes, and my hand and arm began to tremble; for a few seconds I was back in Korea on the front line, a scared young man 21 years old, letting myself remember for the first time since the war what it was all about. I had shut out of my life most of the events that occurred during my war days.”
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I have been struck at how little the Korean War is a part of national policy or even scholarly discussions about the United States in the post–World War II world. There is a line that follows from Korea to Vietnam
to Afghanistan to Iraq that needs to be filled in and underlined. I do not include the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, in this thread because it was not a sustained war: it was a war with clear objectives, quickly accomplished, followed by a demobilization of the reserves, the Guard, and other forces called up for this campaign. It fitted a classic model of war as policy in this regard. In contrast, Korea was the first of four
sustained, multiyear
wars that responded to presumed or implicit threats against the United States. In Korea and Vietnam the Cold War objectives of containing communism controlled; the presumed threat was ideological. In Iraq the threat was less ideology and more of an aggressive dictator who needed to be stopped as a presumed threat. The decision to send US forces into Afghanistan was in response to a direct action, the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on September 11, 2011. The war that has followed, however, has been less explicitly justified as the need to respond to 9/11. It has rested more broadly upon presumed threats to the West.

Since Korea the United States has engaged in Asian land wars ranging from East Asia to West Asia. Although each of these wars began with some clear political objectives, only in the case of the Gulf War of 1991 were the military objectives clear, and only in that case did withdrawal follow the meeting of these objectives. These wars have not had formal declarations of war that would have provided some crisper sense of political consensus on the purposes. Since Korea, the United States has engaged in Asian land wars without territorial objectives. There have been no territories to take and to hold. Beginning with Korea, the wars have all been marked by political constraints on the use of military force. Adrian Lewis summarizes it this way: “During the Korean War a significant but unnoticed transition in the American way of war took place. In 1951 as the war became a stalemate, the American citizen soldier Army stopped employing offensive strategy, stopped employing the Army's traditional campaign-winning doctrines. The Army assumed a strategic defense, and airpower became the primary offensive arm.
The citizen-soldier Army of the United States would never again fight a major war with offensive strategy and doctrine.
” Lewis argues that these new types of wars were “culturally un-American” and that defensive “wars of attrition in a ground war would never be acceptable to the American people.”
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Since Korea, all of the extended military engagements have been marked by imprecise and changing objectives. In Korea the UN determined to stop North Korean aggression of the South; then in September 1950, caught up in the forward momentum of MacArthur's command, the international force determined to defeat North Korea and unify the peninsula; then in the spring of 1951, American and UN leaders recognized that victory would require a higher price and impose a greater risk than anyone from the West at least was prepared to pay, so the UN entered into negotiations that ended up dividing the warring parties over matters that had no relationship to the original objectives of the war.

Since Korea, each extended war has witnessed a fundamental shift in public enthusiasm and support for the engagement. Each war was marked by early support that subsequently declined. The nature of the wars, beginning with Korea, has meant that understanding of the mission and support for the troops depended upon some ambiguous premises and soft assumptions. That is why the Korean War experience is a history from which we could learn much. But it has been the missing chapter, the absent lesson. It is hard to learn much from that which we ignore and forget.

Even someone as sensitive to these issues as President Eisenhower worried about Indochina and reminded Winston Churchill that they needed to remember history. But it was not a full history. The old general, just a year following the Korean armistice, omitted this recent history when he said, “We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time.”
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During his presidency, Eisenhower would resist American military involvement in Vietnam; his successors would not, and many key officials involved in initiating and overseeing the Vietnam War also forgot Korea. Or they selectively recalled what they considered key elements of the Korean experience.

There is much history in the Korean War. It is necessary to learn this history in order to learn from it. As the marine veteran at the Korean War Memorial had shut much of the war out of his life, in many ways the Korean War has been shut out of our nation's narrative. This has resulted in forgetting the veterans and in forgetting their war. Forgetting those who
fought is insensitive and inappropriate; forgetting about the war and the nature of the war is negligence. Veteran T. R. Fehrenbach concluded his reflections on Korea by pointing out, “It is while men talk blithely about the lessons of history that they ignore them.” Of Korea, he simply noted, “The lesson of Korea is that it happened.”
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O
N MARCH 8, 1965, elements of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived at Da Nang, South Vietnam, from Okinawa. They were the first combat troops sent to Vietnam other than in an “advisory” role. Philip Caputo was part of this first detachment. He would write of his feelings that day, “For Americans who did not come of age in the early sixties, it may be hard to grasp what those years were like—the pride and overpowering self-assurance that prevailed. Most of the thirty-five hundred men in our brigade, born during or immediately after World War II, were shaped by that era, the age of Kennedy's Camelot. We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth.” Caputo and his marines were full of confidence and purpose. “So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good.”
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In the summer of 1965,
Look
did a feature story on a young marine who had come into Da Nang a month after Caputo. The magazine described it as “a report on fresh youth thrown into a dirty war.” The article featured David Beauchemin, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who had recently celebrated his nineteenth birthday in the jungle around Da Nang. He had learned to cope with jungle rot, high temperatures, insects, and with snipers and guerrilla attacks. A visiting general had assured him and his men that their enemy was “intellectually inferior and readily beatable.” His battalion commander had a more nuanced view, insisting that they needed to win over the people in order to win the war. So Beauchemin
and his squad worked with local civilians, providing medicine and food. He and his friends were angry to learn of antiwar protesters back in the United States. He was upbeat and committed to his assignment, insisting, “We're here to stop the Communists before they get to our own country. Today, it's here. Tomorrow, it could be home. I'd rather fight here.”
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Many Americans, a strong majority, shared Private First Class Beauchemin's view. He received thirteen hundred letters after the article appeared, including one from the president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson. President Johnson wrote, “The history of our nation glows with the sacrifices of young men like you. What you are doing is a bitter but necessary task that demonstrates to the forces of tyranny that free men will defend their liberty, whatever the cost.”
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All of the later controversy about the Vietnam War needs be understood in the crucial context of the late 1950s and early 1960s: very few key American policy makers questioned the basic Cold War assumptions that were leading them to this war. Scholars continue to debate the run-up to the war even today. Assessing these decisions is not my purpose here. My interest is in the ways in which these assumptions were projected onto the troops who were asked to assume responsibility for them.

Nearly fifty years later, it is hard to look at the developing war in Vietnam without wanting to shout the confident shout of hindsight, insisting that American leaders think through and share publicly the goals and means and likely consequences. But we need to understand that hindsight in the early 1960s was the hindsight
of
the early 1960s, framed by the experience of that generation. And as had been the case in Korea, the Munich analogy was a powerful lesson that for many framed the problem.

There was a heavy sense of historical determinism that marked this generation. This, along with the burden of exceptionalism and of destiny that Caputo—and John Kennedy—described, narrowed the perceived options. Political leaders shared a belief that Munich provided a clear policy directive rather than a school-yard understanding that it is best to stand up to a bully. School-yard lessons are not history lessons, and in any event, neither provide blueprints for national decisions on war or peace.

The Cold War hung heavily over these years. Vietnam needs to be understood as part of this pervasive worldview—and this general fear. In
the early 1960s in Berlin and in Cuba, as well as in Southeast Asia, it surely seemed that the Soviets and the forces of international communism were threatening what the United States considered the “free world.” This was a generous description applied typically to any noncommunist regime in a binary, polarized world. President Dwight Eisenhower had argued that Southeast Asian countries posed a series of potential falling dominoes that communist aggressors could topple with “incalculable” consequences.

When he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, John Kennedy was on his way to deliver a speech in which he would argue that Americans “dare not weary” of their task of assisting those threatened by communist aggression. He was prepared to identify nine “key” countries for this pending test. Vietnam was first on this list.
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Because of earlier commitments and treaties, Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson believed that the challenge in Vietnam as well as Laos and Cambodia posed a test of American “credibility.” Since the 1940s, the United States had pledged to work with allies and friends to “contain” communism. And finally there were those who read from the Korean War experience a validation that the United States could stand up to Asian aggression. As Richard Nixon would later assert, “The Vietnam War was the Korean War with jungles.”
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As had the earlier war in Korea, the war in Vietnam tested some basic historical assumptions about the way in which the United States mobilized for war. Policy makers took the traditional idea of the citizen soldier taking up arms temporarily to defend the Republic against enemy aggression and extended it to a defense against presumptive aggression and ideological challenge. They argued that these battles on behalf of little-known nations on distant Asian battlefields were essential in order to defend the American Republic.

This was a difficult case to make. In the absence of declarations of war that articulated goals and purposes, these Asian wars assumed a more elusive mission and became subject to political interpretations. In these conditions, the war in Vietnam seemed more discretionary, based on policy
makers' judgment and calculations and presumptions. Not a good circumstance for a sustained war. As a result, for many the idea of whether to put on a uniform and go off to war seemed more optional, or at least it became less a shared responsibility.

Several months before he sent combat troops into Vietnam, President Johnson had written privately to his old friend Georgia senator Richard Russell, describing Vietnam as “the biggest damn mess I ever saw.” Johnson believed he was caught in the middle: “I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out.”
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This frustration and ambivalence would mark Lyndon Johnson's frame of mind regarding the war—even as he agreed to escalate it gradually and even as he publicly defended it as proof that “free men will defend their liberty.”