What did he mean? While watching Ken Burns’s brilliant documentary about the Vietnam War the other night, I was struck by the comment of a former Special Forces officer who served there in the early stages of our involvement. He still looked and sounded like the formidable Green Beret who had served as an advisor to the ARVN (South Vietnamese army).
“I found I was at my best at war,” he said, with a troubled look. Trained to kill people, whom the government defined as enemies, he was undoubtedly good at his profession. Upon reflection, he apparently concluded that those skills may have been wrongly applied in Vietnam, that those in authority had misled him and many others to believe it was a war against communist expansion rather than a fight against Vietnamese nationalists seeking independence.
Unlike other occupations, professional soldiers develop skills necessarily destructive in their application. Without war, they are unable to apply those skills and test themselves. Combat becomes a critical opportunity to demonstrate proficiency. It is the fulfillment of their training. Without it, there is less recognition or opportunities for advancement. It explains why military professionals think in terms of military solutions.
Teachers teach, doctors practice, builders build, and salesmen sell, but warriors can only train unless ordered into harm’s way. To be effective, they must trust leaders who determine when the national interest is threatened. Having been trained to obey and not to challenge authority, they have no recourse but to “do their job.” We rightly honor them for their fidelity and bravery, and we blame those who misuse them.
The old soldier in the documentary may have regretted his participation in that war, but he had no choice. He met his obligations while the misguided leaders who sent him there did not. As the film so eloquently points out, it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong purpose. Thousands of Americans were killed as were millions of Vietnamese, but to what end? We lost and what did it matter? All the predictions about “dominoes falling” to communism were wrong.
My own brother came back angry and bitter from his service in Vietnam along with an abiding distrust in government. He enlisted in 1966 believing it was a war against communist aggression. Once there, he saw the suffering of the Vietnamese people and realized what was happening to their country could in no way justify our involvement. His youthful idealism was crushed by the experience.
Have we abused our power elsewhere? During our westward expansion, we drove Native Americans into the dark recesses of “their” country. The Mexican-American War helped us expand into the southwest and to the Pacific. The Spanish-American war gave us Puerto Rico and the Philippines, where we fought a lengthy guerrilla war against native nationalists seeking independence. More recently, there are our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the former going on interminably with no satisfactory end in sight. Did we not learn anything from the experience of the British and Russians in that forlorn country? Our invasion and occupation of Iraq, in retrospect, was unwarranted.
The obvious lesson is that once in, it’s difficult to control and hard to get out, particularly now, when more often than not there is no clear-cut victory. War, even ill-advised, becomes its own justification. Having invested blood and treasure, we cannot lose. The promise of victory at least permits us to rationalize our investment.
The old soldier in the documentary likely saw and did things he now regrets. Had they occurred in a just war, a necessary war, he could at least accept them as the nasty part of a noble undertaking, as could his brothers who fought in World War II. However, we should never minimize the courage and sacrifices of those who fought the wrong war. The ignorance, deception, and mendacity of those who sent them does not diminish their service. Fault lies with those who “reason why” then send the young to “do or die.”
James W. Dolan is a retired Dorchester District Court judge who now practices law.
