Heroes of the
The rapidly disappearing cohort of Americans that endured the Great Depression
and then fought World War II is receiving quite a send-off from the leading
lights of the so-called 60's generation. Tom Brokaw has published two oral
histories of "The Greatest Generation" that feature ordinary people
doing their duty and suggest that such conduct
was historically unique.
Chris Matthews of "Hardball" is fond of writing columns praising the
Navy service of his father while castigating his own baby boomer generation for
its alleged softness and lack of struggle. William Bennett gave a startling
condescending speech at the Naval Academy a few years ago comparing the heroism
of the "D-Day Generation" to the drugs-and-sex nihilism of the
"Woodstock Generation." And Steven Spielberg, in promoting his film
"Saving Private Ryan," was careful to justify his portrayals of
soldiers in action based on the supposedly unique nature of World War II.
An irony is at work here. Lest we forget, the World War II generation now being
lionized also brought us the Vietnam War, a conflict which today's most
conspicuous voices by and large opposed, and in which few of them served. The
"best and brightest" of the Vietnam age group once made headlines by
castigating their parents for bringing about the war
in which they would not fight, which has become the war they refuse to
remember.
Pundits back then invented a term for this animus: the "generation
gap." Long, plaintive articles and even books were written examining its
manifestations. Campus leaders, who claimed precocious wisdom through the
magical process of reading a few controversial books, urged fellow baby boomers
not to trust anyone over 30. Their elders who had survived the Depression and
fought the largest war in history were looked down upon as shallow,
materialistic, and out of touch.
Those of us who grew up, on the other side of the picket line from that era's
counter-culture can't help but feel a little leery of this sudden gush of
appreciation for our elders from the leading lights of the old counter-culture.
Then and now, the national conversation has proceeded from the dubious
assumption that those who came of age during Vietnam are a unified generation
in the same sense as their parents were, and thus are capable of being spoken
for through these fickle elites.
In truth, the "
In fact, they are much like the World War II generation
itself. For them, Woodstock was a side show, college protestors were spoiled
brats who would have benefited from having to work a few jobs in order to pay
their tuition, and Vietnam represented not an intellectual exercise in draft
avoidance, or protest marches but a battlefield that was just as brutal as
those their fathers faced in World War II and Korea.
Few who served during
The most accurate poll of their attitudes (Harris, 1980) showed that 91 percent
were glad they'd served their country, 74 percent enjoyed their time in the
service, and 89 percent agreed with the statement that "our troops were
asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in
Nine million men served in the military during Vietnam War, three million of
whom went to the Vietnam Theater. Contrary to popular mythology, two-thirds of
these were volunteers, and 73 percent of those who died were volunteers. While
some attention has been paid recently to the plight of our prisoners of war,
most of whom were pilots; there has been little recognition of how brutal the
war was for those who fought it on the ground.
Dropped onto the enemy's terrain 12,000 miles away from home,
Those who believe that it was a "dirty little war" where the bombs
did all the work might contemplate that is was the most costly war the U.S.
Marine Corps has ever fought - five times as many dead as World War I, three
times as many dead as in Korea, and more total killed and wounded than in all
of World War II.
Significantly, these sacrifices were being made at a time the
What is a hero? My heroes are the young men who faced the issues of war and
possible death, and then weighed those concerns against obligations to their
country. Citizen-soldiers who interrupted their personal and professional lives
at their most formative stage, in the timeless phrase of the Confederate Memorial
in
Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Spielberg, meet my Marines.
1969 was an odd year to be in
Richard Nixon entered the scene, destined for an even worse fate. In the An Hoa Basin southwest of Danang,
the Fifth Marine Regiment was in its third year of continuous combat
operations. Combat is an unpredictable and inexact environment, but we were
well led. As a rifle platoon and company commander, I served under a succession
of three regimental commanders who had cut their teeth in World War II, and
four different battalion commanders, three of whom had seen combat in Korea.
The company commanders were typically captains on their second combat tour in
The Basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in
In the rifle companies, we spent the endless months patrolling ridgelines and
villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed wire, hot
food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would fit inside one's
pack, which after a few "humps" usually boiled down to letter-writing
material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small transistor radio.
We moved through the boiling heat with 60 pounds of weapons and gear, causing a
typical Marine to drop 20 percent of his body weight while in the bush. When we
stopped we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for toilets. We
slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hootches,
and when it rained we usually took our hootches down
because wet ponchos shined under illumination flares, making great targets.
Sleep itself was fitful, never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months
at a time as we mixed daytime patrolling with night-time
ambushes, listening posts, foxhole duty, and radio watches. Ringworm, hookworm,
malaria, and dysentery were common, as was trench foot when the monsoons came.
Respite was rotating back to the mud-filled regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days, where rocket and mortar attacks
were frequent and our troops manned defensive bunkers at night. Which makes it kind of hard to get excited about tales of
We had been told while training that Marine officers in the rifle companies had
an 85 percent probability of being killed or wounded, and the experience of
"Dying Delta," as our company was known, bore that out. Of the
officers in the bush when I arrived, our company commander was wounded, the
weapons platoon commander wounded, the first platoon commander was killed, the
second platoon commander was wounded twice, and I, commanding the third
platoons fared no better. Two of my original three-squad leaders were killed,
and the third shot in the stomach. My platoon sergeant was severely wounded, as
was my right guide. By the time I left, my platoon I had gone through six radio
operators, five of them casualties.
These figures were hardly unique; in fact, they were typical. Many other units;
for instance, those who fought the hill battles around Khe
Sanh, or were with the famed Walking Dead of the
Ninth Marine Regiment, or were in the battle of Hue City or at Dai Do, had it
far worse.
When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with me, I am
continually amazed, for these were mostly recent civilians barely out of high
school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their year in hell and
then return. Visions haunt me every day, not of the nightmares of war but of
the steady consistency with which my Marines faced their responsibilities, and
of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of constant danger. The salty, battle-hardened 20-year-olds teaching green 19-year-olds
the intricate lessons of the hostile battlefield. The
unerring skill of the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar
villages and weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick certainty when a fellow Marine was wounded and needed
help. Their willingness to risk their lives to save
other Marines in peril. To this day it stuns me that their own
countrymen have so completely missed the story of their service, lost in the
bitter confusion of the war itself.
Like every military unit throughout history we had occasional
laggards, cowards, and complainers. But in the aggregate, these Marines were
the finest people I have ever been around. It has been
my privilege to keep up with many of them over the years since we all came
home. One finds in them very little bitterness about the war in which they
fought. The most common regret, almost to a man, is that they were not able to
do more for each other and for the people they came to help.
It would be redundant to say that I would trust my life to these men. Because I already have, in more ways than I can ever recount.
I am alive today because of their quiet, unaffected heroism. Such valor
epitomizes the conduct of Americans at war from the first days of our
existence. That the boomer elites can canonize this sort of conduct in our
fathers' generation while ignoring it in our own is more than simple oversight.
It is a conscious, continuing travesty.
Former
Secretary of the Navy James Webb was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star, and
Bronze Star medals for heroism as a Marine in
Courtesy: http://www.jameswebb.com/articles/americanenterprise-heroes.html