VLVL(4) Vietnam

[pynchonoid]

Good post, Toby.  My question, in January '73 at
Oakland Army Base when they came through the facility
grabbing clerks, cooks, and carpenters  to send to
Vietnam that day, was the same as yours:   Why should
I go today if the Vietnamese are taking over? 

I've always had a soft spot for the soldiers who die
or get wounded after the time when it is clear that a
war is "over" -- gratuitous, the _All Quiet on the
Western Front_ scenario.

I'm what they call a Vietnam-era veteran, since I
managed to avoid that particular re-assignment detail
and was able to proceed as ordered to Korea.  Although
I did collect monthly combat pay during my tour of
duty there because of the attacks -- shootings from
the north across the nearby border  -- that continued
to occur the whole time I was there.

--- Toby G Levy <tobylevy at juno.com> wrote:
> Am I the only Vietnam vet on the list?  I went over
> in the beginning of
> July 1971.  Vietnamization was the buzz word in the
> newspapers then. 
> Everything was being turned over to the South
> Vietnamese and the
> Americans were being phased out.  So why was I
> going, I asked myself.  I
> was drafted and had no desire to fight for my life
> halfway around the
> world.  So I wrote a letter to Nixon, saying that
> how could the Americans
> be phasing out when every seat on the plane coming
> over was full?  I got
> a letter back from a general telling me about
> "rotation" and other b.s. 
> I wrote back to the general and a colonel answered
> my letter.  That was
> far enough down the chain for me.  I served my time,
> stayed out of the
> bush and came home in one piece, except for the fact
> that my fiance
> dumped me while I was over there.

I had spent many months, after I received my draft
induction notice (I was in the last group of draftees,
one of the lucky 25,000 or so who were drafted in '72,
as a result of the first draft lottery drawing),
exploring the possibility of claiming conscientious
objector status.  The best advice I got, from the
ladies at Grailville in southern Ohio where I spent a
couple of those months, was not to claim CO status if
I didn't truly fit the criteria. I finally decded that
I wasn't a CO, that I would go ahead and let them take
me because I wasn't ready to run away to Canada with
the prospect of having to stay there forever, although
I did tell my father (who was a WWII hero -- he won
the Navy's Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal
multiple times each flying divebombing missions
against Japanese) that if I got orders to go to
Vietnam in a combat capacity, I would desert. When we
got to boot camp at Fort Ord, Monterey (on the other
side of Monterey Bay from the house in Aptos where
Pynchon did some work on Vineland), we were told by
our Vietnam combat vet drill sergeants to learn it all
and we might have a chance to survive when we got to
Vietnam, because that's where we were headed.  A week
or so before the end of boot camp, the US changed its
policy and stopped sending draftees to Vietnam, you
had to volunteer to go, an honor that I declined. A
huge mob of volunteers who were going through boot
camp at the same time as me had in fact volunteered to
go to Vietnam, from boot camp they went to rifleman
school, and on to Vietnam in the fall of '73 to spend
one-year tours.

> 
> By 1973 Watergate was the rage, and Vietnamization
> was really taking
> place.  The last handful of troops that left in 1975
> was there only to
> protect the US embassy in Saigon and not to fight.

Not to bandy words, but some of them did fight off the
Vietnamese  who tried to climb aboard the helicopters
that were taking their American employers to safety. 

> As Pynchon said, 
> 1973 was the year that the war ended for Americans.

...if not for all the American soldiers.


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