Making Peace with Vietnam

(First presented in 2015 at the “Vietnam 40 Years Later Commemoration” at the American Freedom Museum in Bullard, Texas; published that same week as a Focal Point Column in the Tyler Morning Telegraph, Tyler, Texas; then updated a bit for another presentation on March 18, 2023.)

“Thank you, Martha, for putting up with me and for bearing with me all those years when I went through my own personal struggles trying to “make peace with Vietnam.” – Dave Berry

By DAVE BERRY

I went to Vietnam in 1971, an enlisted man with a patch on my arm that said I was an “Official Army Correspondent.” That patch and an ID card from the Information Office, U.S. Army Republic of Vietnam (USARV) Headquarters allowed me “ride-along privileges” on dozens of military planes and helicopters and access granted far beyond my rank as I covered the winding down of what was AT THAT TIME America’s longest war.

That experience had a profound impact on my life, just as it has on more than two and a half million others who served.

In 2015, I was asked to be keynote speaker for what was billed as a “Vietnam 40 Years Later Commemoration” at the American Freedom Museum in Bullard, Texas. It was a wonderful event that attracted a large crowd to visit the museum, search out the names of friends on the Traveling Vietnam Wall, eat barbecue, listen to music, explore military equipment and listen to the buzz of helicopters flown in for the day… and we were there to honor a special group of veterans whose service had been overlooked.

I summarized that speech in a weekly column I wrote for the Tyler paper.

I called it: “Making Peace with Vietnam.”

Even our own government struggles to agree on the “official start” and the “official end” of the war. National Vietnam War Veterans Day is now “officially” commemorated on March 29, which this year (2023) is 50 years after March 29, 1973, when the last American combat troops (Military Assistance Command Vietnam, or MACV) stood down, leaving only U.S. Embassy personnel and Marine guards. This is now considered the end of the Vietnam War for America.

Our group came together for a 40^th anniversary event in 2015. We were remembering a date two years later – April 30, 1975, when the last Marine guards scrambled onto helicopters evacuating civilians as the American Embassy in Saigon was abandoned to the North Vietnamese.

That’s not what we celebrated. Our reasons for coming together after 40 years were much more complicated than that. We celebrated the lives of those who didn’t come home… and those who did. We gave ourselves permission to be proud of our Vietnam service.

This is an updated version of what I said that day:

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For more than four decades I was a journalist, and I still consider myself one. I have worked on newspapers in Kansas, Oklahoma and Kentucky, but since 1977 most of my work was on the Texas Gulf Coast, Dallas-Fort Worth and East Texas, where I retired in December 2014 after 20 years as an editor at the Tyler Morning Telegraph. I’ve been a writer, copy editor, photographer, columnist and newsroom manager. I started down that path in Vietnam.

I’m a Vietnam veteran. And I’m proud of that.

I was in Southeast Asia as a 71Q20, an information specialist for the U.S. Army – a combat correspondent during a part of the war when combat was winding down.

It was still a dangerous time, and Americans were still dying (another 3,000 were killed during my time there, and more than 1,300 died after I left. But the heavy fighting was ending, American combat units were pulling out, furling flags, packing gear, and heading home on a stream of Freedom Birds.

That was the “Vietnamization period,” and I was assigned to report on the transition of the war from an American war to a Vietnamese war, writing for military newspapers such as the Army Times, Army Reporter and Stars and Stripes.

When I am asked to represent Vietnam veterans, I am honored, but at the same time daunted by the thought. How in the world, can I do that?

• I was shot at and missed, but I was never in a firefight.
• I crisscrossed the country on a dozen planes and helicopters. I flew on a “firefly” lightship patrolling the wire, flew “nap of the earth” to stay under the artillery, and hitched rides on mail planes, Hueys, C130s, C123s and U21s… but we were never under fire.
• I sat with my camera atop the lead MP escort vehicle when our convoy drove up on an ambush… but an ARVN patrol coming toward us was hit first and lost four men dead alongside the road.
• On Christmas Eve, I chatted with bored bunker guards and slept on sandbags along the wire atop Nui Chau Chan Mountain high above Firebase Mace… then raced back the next day to interview Bob Hope, Jim Nabors, Miss America and Martha Raye.
• A three-shot burst from an AK-47 circled my head one night on guard duty at Long Binh, but my assailant slipped away unseen.    
• I toured a Montagnard village so deep in the Highlands outside of Qui Nhon they hadn’t seen an American in almost two years.
• I spent a week with MACV advisors at Phu Cat, flying out just days before an attack on the wire, and a week ahead of a monsoon that flooded the area.
• And I wrote of preparations for the return of American POWs – a top-secret operation that I found really wasn’t much of a secret.
• I wrote about ARVN Rangers, covered Montagnards and Regional Forces in training and photographed artillerymen firing on the NVA.
• I had tea with the general commanding Vietnam’s imitation of West Point where officers were trained.

I wrote about a Combined Arms live-fire exercise in Pleiku sitting in the open hatch of a Vietnamese tank… and almost lost my hearing when the crew fired off a round without warning.

I had arrived a day too late for “the big show,” which had been attended by top American and Vietnamese generals from Saigon, who watched as South Vietnamese troops, tanks, artillery, jets and helicopter gunships tore up the side of a mountain with “a million dollars worth of ordinance.” I said I was sorry I missed it, and a MACV lieutenant named Mike said, “No problem, we’ll do it again just for you.”

But, when enemy tanks were spotted just up the highway toward Kontum, the fighter jets and gunships were diverted from my private show, and… when 50 pre-dug mortar pits were discovered just outside the wire of our compound… we went on full alert, and I sat up all that night with a borrowed machinegun, waiting for a ground assault that never came.

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I’ve interviewed mechanics repairing shattered trucks, soldiers manning water stations, and officers delivering payroll to remote outposts and firebases.

I wrote about specialists monitoring communications, doctors patching up Vietnamese soldiers in a Saigon burn unit, a medical team that operated from behind a ring of sandbags to retrieve a live grenade from a soldier’s body, a chaplain trying to find homes for orphans, a Medal of Honor winner who wanted to be somewhere else, and an assortment of short-timers on their way home.

But I never went on a combat patrol, and that wise lieutenant I met in Pleiku talked me out of going on a night ambush with a Montagnard patrol.

Although I’ve visited the Vietnam Memorial at least a dozen times, I know personally only one of the 58,320 men and women whose names are inscribed on The Wall. William David “Bill” Hoffman was 18, a young Marine who died in Quang Tri Province, just a month after arriving in Vietnam. Those of us who knew him in Russell, Kansas, choose to remember him as a small-town grocery clerk with a smile for everyone.

I led a charmed life in Vietnam and came back whole and healthy. I was lucky. More than 150,000 others came home severely wounded, and we all know people afflicted with life-threatening diseases linked to Agent Orange. Marti has lost a few fellow Cherokee artists to it, and just last month, I lost John – a good friend and fellow journalist.

And Mike – a high school friend – is battling the same health issues that took the lives of every member of his Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol. So far, he’s winning. I am truly humbled when he thanks me for my service.

Mike and many others still struggle with harsh and bitter memories… and I know there is no way to totally forget or ignore the bad stuff. My hope is that after a half-century since our service we can ALL make peace with those memories and put them away, retrieving them only when needed.

I know… my experience was unique, solely my own, totally different than what others experienced. But I share something with all veterans. I grew up, came of age and became a man – however you describe it – in Vietnam.

I was a naïve kid off the farm in Kansas when I was drafted and sent off to war. My lottery number was 183; I was young and innocent; I had an unused college degree, and I didn’t want to be there. But Vietnam molded me, impacted me and shaped me.

It takes no effort at all to remember the smells that greeted me at Cam Ranh Bay, the sounds of traffic on Tu Do Street, the deadly buzz of a Spooky gunship working in the night, the chatter of women in the Nha Trang market, the crackle of an ambush outside the wire, the scream of a Phantom jet, the growl of a Cobra gunship or the rumble of a Chinook. They are all locked in my memory.

Some things – of course – are mine alone. During the alert at Pleiku, I made a friend – that MACV lieutenant named Mike, who taught me a bawdy drinking song. I played pool with an Australian private at Ba Ria. During the monsoons, I played football in knee-deep mud with Lou, Mike, Jim and Ernie.

I remember a warm night in Saigon, drinking Tiger beer in the Rex Hotel’s rooftop bar, listening to a Filipino band’s rendition of “Proud Mary.” I shared nuoc mam soup with South Vietnamese officers and a Jeep driver named Ben.

I got Bob Hope to sign the front of a 50-piaster note. But someone stole it.

And… I fell in love with the abandoned kids at the An Phong Orphanage in Vung Tau. I went twice, wrote a story and delivered two boxes of toys and gifts gathered by my sister back in Kansas. But after I came home, all I could do was mount a few of the photos I took on my wall and write columns expressing my hope those kids survived the war.

Last month (February 2023), my wish was granted when one of those orphans – a tiny, abandoned girl the nuns called “Baby Trang” – called from New Orleans. She had tracked me down online and wanted me to know she was okay. Her name is now Saran Bynum, a budding filmmaker who once worked with Queen Latifa and just finished a film about her childhood in the orphanage, leaving Vietnam as a four-year-old during Operation Babylift, years later in America tracking down through DNA the father who didn’t know she existed… then losing him again to the ravages of cancer caused by Agent Orange.

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You may share some of these memories: Big lizards and hot sand at Cam Ranh Bay; R&R in Bangkok, Pearl Harbor or Sydney; shark warnings at Nha Trang beach; children swimming in the black waters of the Saigon River; the thump of outgoing artillery; cold nights and big mosquitos in the Central Highlands; warm Pabst Blue Ribbon. “Dinky dau,” “Didi mau” and “10 Days and a Wakeup.”

And, though it happens rarely now, I still smile when I hear the whop-whop-whop of a Huey.

I was not a combat soldier. My weapons were a pen, a pad and the Pentax camera I bought at the PX. I carried an Army Colt .45 pistol and sometimes an M-16. But that wasn’t my job, and I never fired a shot off the gun range. I was an Army journalist… and I’m a Vietnam veteran.

All our experiences are different. Some had it rough; some less so. But all of us shared a common experience. We went to war. We didn’t know what that meant until we got there. I had no orders when I reported to the 90th Replacement Depot at Bien Hoa. I could have ended up anywhere. But I was lucky.

None of us knew how our war – our 365 days – would play out, whether we would come home, what we would be called upon to do, and how it would change us.

But we were all changed. None of us came home the same person we were when we left. Our lives since the war have been about how successfully we used what we experienced.

I celebrate the fact that I am a Vietnam veteran. I didn’t always. At one time in my life, my motto was: “I’ve been Shot at and missed, Shit at and hit, Fired and Laid Off. What more can they do to me… send me back to Vietnam?”

Today, I look back with pride and consider it part of what makes me the person I became. But it’s just one of the many experiences over a lifetime that went into making my life what it is. Vietnam does not define me. It is not all that I am, but it is a major part of who I am. For I am many things… a son, a husband, a father, an employee, a journalist, an adventurer, a citizen, a photographer, a leader, a writer, a friend… and a VETERAN.

I am one who can look back and say with pride that I went to Vietnam and did my job the best I could … then picked up my life and somehow made it work.

I salute every veteran of every war (our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters).

A few years ago, I helped escort seven different flights of World War II and Korean War veterans to Washington – part of an East Texas Heroes Flight program to take veterans to our nation’s capital. I pushed wheelchairs, laughed with them on the bus, cried with them at the Changing of the Guard, gave them their space at the World War II Memorial, helped a submariner find a picture of his submarine at the Navy Museum, recorded their stories at the Marine Memorial, and tried not to intrude as they traced with their fingers the images in the granite wall at the Korean War Memorial.

Back home, I wrote about them, met their families, visited with them at the veterans home, saluted them on special days, and went to some of their funerals.

I told as many of their stories as I could, awe-struck by how much they downplayed their personal contributions and 70 years after their war still find it hard to talk about. And despite what you think, not a single one of them got a tickertape parade.

I told them how important it is to tell their stories to their children and grandchildren. I urged that group of Vietnam veterans back in 2015 to tell their stories as well… and I told them it was time for us to look at ourselves – veterans of the War in Vietnam – and be proud.

I’m not a war hero, and I feel inadequate comparing my experience to others who had it much worse. I salute and thank all of you, whatever your role, whatever you did, whatever you experienced. And, I salute the men and women whose names are on that wall, many who never had the opportunity to take their lives beyond their teenage years. They are your friends – and they are forever young.

We are the ones who came home… who took what we saw, what we learned, what we experienced – the good and bad, the euphoria and the exhaustion, the laughter and the pain… and used it to build new productive lives, careers and families.

This week, America’s involvement in Vietnam is 48 years distant. Our war… our 365-day piece of that conflict, took place even farther back, 50 or 60 years for some. Most of us are retirees, grandparents and citizens who have experienced much in the years since.

We’ve seen several more generations of men and women serve in our nation’s armed forces, fighting in a dozen other inhospitable parts of the world… going back for tour after tour, doing what their country demanded of them. They proudly wear the uniform and fill whatever role they’ve been given – from truck driver to fighter pilot, cook to demolition expert, deckhand to interpreter, combat marine to tank commander, finance clerk to military policeman. Coming home, they face many of the challenges we faced, and many more that we didn’t. I think we can say, “We’re there for you.”

I’m PROUD of them. And I’m proud of us. I’m a Vietnam veteran. It’s not all that I am, but it helped in a big way make me who I am. And that’s enough.

I salute you all. Thanks for listening.

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Top photo: I call this photo “I’ve Got Your Back.” It’s taken from behind the “Three Servicemen” statue that guards “The Wall” (Vietnam War Memorial) in Washington, D.C. “I’ve Got Your Back” hangs in the American Freedom Museum in Bullard, Texas; the Watkins-Logan Veterans Home in Tyler, Texas; the Vietnam Veterans of American Dogwood Chapter in Palestine, Texas; and in the VFW Hall in Russell, Kansas, in honor of Bill Hoffman.