Jay Kalner
U.S. Army
Served July 1969 - July 1970
MP with the 716th Military Police Battalion
English teacher to the Saigon Military Police
If you could please give us your date of birth, full name, and where you’re from, that would be great.
Well, my name is Jay Kalner, and I was born July 7, 1946 I’m seventy-two years old. I was born in New York City and lived most of my life in Connecticut, where I went to school.
Did you enlist or were you drafted? How did you feel about it at first?
I was drafted out of graduate school. I had attended the University of Connecticut from 1964 to 1968, got my Bachelors degree, and then I started graduate school in economics at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1968. Later that year, I got a draft notice from my local board. They allowed me to finish the semester of graduate school that I was in, and then I had to report in February of 1969. And that’s where my military service started.
What branch were you in and can you explain to us how you got to that branch?
When I reported in February 1969, I had to go to the local railroad station and there were two drill sergeants there, one from the Army, and one from the Marine Corps. There were probably about fifty of us draftees in the room at the railroad station in the waiting area. The Marine representative took about twenty-five percent of the draftees with him, and those folks were headed into the Marine Corps. I was part of the group that went into the U.S. Army, and we were taken that day by bus to Fort Dix in New Jersey, which is where I began eight weeks of basic training.
How long were you in Vietnam, and when?
I’ll pick up from basic training. Toward the end of the eight weeks of basic training at Ft. Dix, I found out that I was going to military police school. That was to be done at Ft. Gordon, Georgia, near Augusta, Georgia, where they hold the U.S. Masters Golf Tournament. I was there to be trained as a military policeman for eight weeks. I took various courses ranging from the military code of justice, to learn how to do judo, to fire various weapons, etc. Each week there would be a graduating class of military police and prior to the time that I was due to graduate, the students were getting sent to Germany, and that’s where I thought I would end up. But with my class graduating, they started a new cycle and I was informed I was going to Vietnam. I had a period of leave of a few weeks before I was due to leave for Vietnam in July of 1969. During that period I got married and then I left for Vietnam in July of ‘69.
On the way there -- which was a 22 hour airplane ride with various stops along the way -- I had no idea where in country, in Vietnam, I would end up, or what kind of responsibilities I would have as a military policeman over there. It wasn’t until I arrived in country for a few days that I found out exactly what I’d be doing.
Piggy backing off of that, what were your responsibilities when you were there?
I learned that I would be doing typical military police work, and that I would be spending my time in Saigon - the largest city and capital of then South Vietnam. My duties for the first month that I was there was to be on duty for 12 hours, then have 12 hours off. Those were the work shifts. During that first month, I was guarding various installations, fully armed for 12 hours at time. I’d have a radio with me, and I’d be paired off in some cases with another military policeman, but just as often I’d be paired off with someone from the South Vietnamese army or from the police force in Saigon. That lasted for about a month. During that first month, when I was in the company office space, I saw on the bulletin board that they were in a real need for an English teacher to teach the Saigon police English.
I thought that might be interesting work, even though I didn’t know the Vietnamese language. I had quite a background in the French language and many of the police that I ended up teaching were French educated because they grew up when France was still the colonial power. So, I had four years of French and that was probably what made the difference in my unit choosing me to be a teacher. The next 11 months of my tour, I taught at the national police academy in Saigon, and that is where the Saigon city police were posted and took the classes that I and one other teacher taught. We were teaching them a vocabulary that would enable them to go out in joint patrols with American military police.
As you can imagine, in Saigon and other cities, there would be incidents from time to time that would involve American troops and South Vietnamese troops. It could be anything: it could be a fight over a bar girl, it could be some kind of argument that folks got into and there would be a need to break it up. We would have joint police patrols that would come to these kinds of incidents. So rather than to teach people like myself Vietnamese to deal with these incidents, knowing that we would only be there for a tour of a year, they thought it would be better for us to teach these Saigon police English. Many of them had some rudimentary English. When I had difficulty teaching them certain vocabulary, I’d use my French language experience. There are thousands of French and English words that are very similar, so I could convey what I needed to convey to these policemen. Basically, I was teaching them vocabulary that they would need in their police work. Words like: arrest, gun, suspect - you can gather from that the kind of lessons we would teach them. I was told to not wear my uniform when I was a teacher in the classroom. I’d have about 20 students, but many of them were the equivalent of majors, colonels - they were officers.
You can see from my uniform up there -- that I was a Specialist 4, which is the equivalent of a corporal. Certainly, I wasn’t an officer. They thought it would be a better picture to have me not being an officer in uniform teaching these students who were wearing their uniforms. So, I was told to wear civilian clothes. I carried a little authorization card in my wallet in case I was stopped, to show that even though I was an American GI, I was entitled to wear civilian clothes for my classroom responsibilities.
Just to add on a little to what I just discussed about the nature of my work as a military policeman over there, and ending up teaching English, I was fortunate that the developments led that way. Being a military policeman in a war zone could’ve been very different for me. I could’ve been not posted in a major metropolitan area like Saigon. I could’ve been out in the rural areas of Vietnam where a lot of the combat took place. Military policemen in those areas would normally do things like convoy duty. They would be in a vehicle in front of a convoy, and in the rear of a convoy. Typical guerrilla tactics used by the communists at the time would be to try to take out the head of a convoy, and the rear of a convoy so that there would be no way to go. They would be trapped. That was very dangerous work for military policemen. I didn’t know until my first few days in country that I would be in Saigon, and then later in that first month that I would be teaching. All throughout my career, there were pivotal places where I got somewhat lucky.
Can you tell us about some of the experiences you had with your students?
Yeah. I found it very fascinating to deal with my students. Once their English got to a point where I could carry on a pretty decent conversation with them, I would ask them at that point to write me a composition and entitle it “My Life.” Many of them were not born in South Vietnam. Many of them came from North Vietnam. You might remember from the history that you were exposed to in your unit on the war that the country was divided in the mid ‘50’s. The North would be the communist state, and South Vietnam would not have a communist government. But many people who were Catholic lived in North Vietnam at the time the country was divided, and at the moment of division, 800,000-1,000,000 Catholics fled North Vietnam to live in the South where they could practice their religion and have more freedom. Some of my students were part of that exodus and they wrote about leaving their cities, towns and villages in North Vietnam. Some of them leaving family members. Now it wasn’t always the case where an entire family made it from North to South, so they still had family members living in the North and you can imagine how gut wrenching that might be. And there were times later on where they would invite me to lunch. They took me to various restaurants in Saigon and I was exposed to some really fine Vietnamese cuisine, which to this day I still love and it’s my favorite cuisine. So I had many chances to go beyond just teaching them police vocabulary and working with American military police, I got to know them as human beings. And they’re beautiful people.
Do you think that shaped your opinions about the war in general?
Yeah. I went over to Vietnam really supporting what our government was doing because your first tendency, especially if you’re not familiar with everything, is to trust in your government that they’re doing the right thing. And that’s kind of the view I had when I went over, but I had many opportunities to read about Vietnam’s history, and our own foreign policy in the area. You learn a lot about after World War II was over, after the Japanese had pulled it’s occupation forces out and the French had resumed colonial control, and opportunities that Vietnam had to become independent. I learned an awful lot about how we were fighting this war. So my views about whether we were doing something really honorable changed 180 degrees by the time that I left. I felt it was a huge mistake. I felt that eventually when we learned that more than 58,000 Americans were killed, that it was a tragedy of unbelievable proportions. Most of the young men who were sent over there to fight were 18, 19, or 20 years old. And I found out later on that those responsible in the U.S. administrations who were sending our boys over there in many cases broke rules and sent 100,000 or more that were not even qualified to be in military service. Just so that manpower totals could be maintained. The metrics used on whether the war was being won or not, that were being used by administration officials to inform the American public - these metrics were nonsensical. American officers over there were told, “Continue to report body counts. How many did you kill today?” Those figures were, in many cases, imaginary. They had no credibility. Objectives in the war were nonsensical. To take a hill one day that might be believed to be important, and then it would be lost to the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong would take it over. It was not the typical kind of war where you kick the enemy out and you took ground and you kept advancing. It wasn’t that king of war at all. And it was the type of war also where those areas that you were shooting at, you weren’t completely confident that you were going after the enemy. You didn’t know who the enemy was in some cases. And you could see Vietnamese peasants during the day, and they’d smile at you, but maybe at night they would attack your base.
So it was a very difficult war to fight. Many American GIs over there felt that the South Vietnamese army, supposedly our allies fighting with us, were more interested in having us fight the war for them than they were motivated to fight the war themselves. So yes, when I came home I was convinced that we had made a terrible mistake, and that we should never fight another war like it again.
My question then, is did your mindset change while you were in Vietnam? And if so, how did that affect your work? I imagine if I were in that scenario, I’d be like, “I don’t agree with this, but I have to do it.”
Well, yes, my mindset changed during the year I was over there, for sure, as I’ve described. Even for troops on the field, they had a mindset that changed about whether they were really doing the right thing. So what you did in those circumstances, you started making a short-timers calendar. Each day, you check off a day and you’d say, “Well, 60 more days before I go home.” And then a month later, 30 days, it was called a short-timers calendar. What you were most interested in particularly if you were in the field, facing combat, was keeping alive, protecting the buddies that you made over there - because that was a real tragedy if you lost a buddy in combat. That would really affect you. And so that became your own personal set of objectives. You didn’t think about the grander, national objective of kicking the communists out because you’ve already experienced that this was not really going to be over any time soon, that there was nothing truly honorable about it, and the realization that what your opposition was really interested in, was having an independent country. They saw the United States in the way of that. As an individual American soldier over there, you’re concerned about your own safety and getting home. In my case, I had been married a couple of weeks before I went over. I wanted to get back, have my family life, and my career after the military.
How’d you feel about how the war was reported?
Well, I think that if you mean how it was reported by the media -- well I can talk about how the war was reported by the media as well as by government officials because more often than not, they didn’t mesh. American officials in the chain of command would try to report about how much progress was being made. They used the phrase, “We’re near the light at the end of the tunnel! We’re almost there!” The American public kept hearing that from the officials. Then we later found out from the Pentagon Papers, for example, that exposed a lot of what the government really thought about the war. What the presidents, Nixon and Johnson, felt about the war, what the Secretaries of State felt about the war, they knew that the war wasn’t going well. They lied to the American people. They lied to us really before major combat started in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. So, it was not a shining moment for the American government, whether it was the Democratic administration, or Republican administration that followed. We can thank the media for getting out there and doing their jobs. The really good reporters in the media didn’t just go to the briefings that the military officials would give the public spokesmen. They would get out into the field and talk to the soldiers who were actually fighting there. They may not have been officers. These reporters were getting the real truth of what was going on.
We may have touched on this previously or other speakers may have touched on it, but the real turning point was the Tet Offensive in 1968. Out of nowhere, the communists launched a major offensive throughout South Vietnam. Even though it was not a military victory for them, it was really a political victory in that we were so stunned at their ability to do this, that at home, the protest movement got energized against the war, there were massive demonstrations and the media really turned against the American government. From that point on until 1973 when the last American soldier was left, it was really an effort to get the war ended. The administrations at that point were just trying to get out in the most honorable way possible, and getting our prisoners of war back.
How was it coming home?
Well, that was a moment of joy for all of us who were coming home. One of the postcards that I passed around at the beginning was written to my parents on the way over [to Vietnam] in July ’69 and my state of mind saying that I didn’t know what to expect, where I would be, but I said I was confident. On the way home, we were all overjoyed. We got on that plane and it was a little weird because when we went to meet our plane, there were incoming planes of new GIs coming over to replace us. I don’t know if any of them ever made it back, but we got on that plane, and when we got out of Vietnamese airspace, the captain of the plane came on the intercom and said, “You have now left Vietnamese airspace,” and there was just a tumultuous cry of joy from the GIs on that plane returning home to the U.S. The stewardesses were so nice to us. We were so happy until, not on my flight back, but on others, when we touched down in either California or Washington state, there were groups of Americans who protested the war meeting our flights and calling us all sorts of names, much to the dismay of returning GIs. Being called things like baby killers and stuff like that as if we wanted to go over there in the first place. Many of us were drafted, so we were just doing what our government asked us to do. And I urge you, if you haven’t seen the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War, they have one woman interviewed who was one of these protesters that called returning American GIs these horrible names. In one of the final episodes, you can see her crying that she felt so guilty years afterwards about what she had done. And she asked for forgiveness. I really believe that the way many of us were treated was the reason that America had a guilt trip about how they treated Vietnam veterans. That’s one of the reasons I told you our motto for Vietnam Veterans of America is, “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.” So, in later years when we fought in Afghanistan, after 9/11, and in Iraq, when those troops came home after their tours, they were greeted more as heroes. And that really stemmed from the Vietnam experience.
It’s hard for me to understand, because when I was born, we always said, “Thank you for your service.” It would never be something like, “You’re a baby killer.” Do you think that the people who were calling you these awful things were misinformed? Or were they just so emotional?
Well, you can certainly see from today’s political climate how there’s always a danger of polarization where two sides become so ingrained in what’s going on, that there’s very little chance of compromise. That’s the way it was back in those days. It was not unusual to have protests during the Vietnam War in Washington where several hundred thousand people showed up between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. There were marches in the Pentagon, and protests outside the White House. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could look out their window and see protesters raising placards. There was bitterness on both sides. The administrations in the White House were bitter that things had got to that point in the country. It’s just... things can deteriorate to reach that.
How did your service affect the rest of your life?
I had mentioned this before, but briefly. I had expected, with my economics degree, to go on and have a career on Wall Street and work on financial affairs and the stock market. But my tour over in Vietnam, my first time really being out of the United States and seeing what went on, it just triggered my interest in foreign policy and international relations. Also, I had some courses in Russian history at the University of Connecticut which triggered my interest. My family lineage goes back to Russia, so I had a natural affinity to that. So I had decided to switch my career interest when I got back out of the army. I went to a different university, University of Chicago, which was one of the elite universities in this country, still is, and I pursued a graduates degree in international relations and Soviet foreign policy. During my two years there, getting my masters degree, I had a chance to interview with the CIA although I applied to literally scores of different organizations, government departments, and media positions to use my international relations background. That’s what I decided to get involved in and ended up working for the CIA which started in 1972 and went on for 35 years to 2007.
I loved your talk when you came to our Professional’s Day to tell us about working for the CIA. You mentioned the Pentagon Papers and that kind of opened my eyes. I never thought of it that way, that people who served in Vietnam would be affected by it. My question is, did you know anyone that served who read the Pentagon Papers? What was their reaction?
I don’t want to focus only on the Pentagon Papers because there were other journalists and academics that were writing during period of the war, that exposed the lies and mistakes that a series of American presidents and their administrations made. I would put most of the blame on the Johnson and Nixon administrations because there are actual lies that they told. It’s documented and I mentioned that the National Archives has a special exhibit that’s probably near its end now, but you can go there and actually listen to the conversations in the Oval Office where they’re telling lies about what’s going on and that things are not going well, they’re gonna lose the war, they’ll have to come home, that kind of thing. The Pentagon Papers was very important in the sense that it really reviewed thousands of documents that showed the mistakes and the miscalculations. I will say though, it did show that the CIA had made some accurate predictions that just got ignored or buried. One of the things that the American military did during the war, was to have a heavy bombing campaign of North Vietnam. Pretty much from the beginning, the CIA was telling our policy makers this was not gonna really work. It’s not gonna bring North Vietnam to change their positions during the negotiations. In fact, it steeled their will to keep fighting. There are other things in history that show that it could go the other way, like the Battle of Britain. They were subjected the first years of the war to heavy bombing, but it didn’t force them to surrender. It just steeled their will. The CIA was making that point. There are some others in the State Department who felt similarly, and wanted to use the negotiations to get out. It was really the Johnson and Nixon administrations that were the guilty parties here.
Served July 1969 - July 1970
MP with the 716th Military Police Battalion
English teacher to the Saigon Military Police
If you could please give us your date of birth, full name, and where you’re from, that would be great.
Well, my name is Jay Kalner, and I was born July 7, 1946 I’m seventy-two years old. I was born in New York City and lived most of my life in Connecticut, where I went to school.
Did you enlist or were you drafted? How did you feel about it at first?
I was drafted out of graduate school. I had attended the University of Connecticut from 1964 to 1968, got my Bachelors degree, and then I started graduate school in economics at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1968. Later that year, I got a draft notice from my local board. They allowed me to finish the semester of graduate school that I was in, and then I had to report in February of 1969. And that’s where my military service started.
What branch were you in and can you explain to us how you got to that branch?
When I reported in February 1969, I had to go to the local railroad station and there were two drill sergeants there, one from the Army, and one from the Marine Corps. There were probably about fifty of us draftees in the room at the railroad station in the waiting area. The Marine representative took about twenty-five percent of the draftees with him, and those folks were headed into the Marine Corps. I was part of the group that went into the U.S. Army, and we were taken that day by bus to Fort Dix in New Jersey, which is where I began eight weeks of basic training.
How long were you in Vietnam, and when?
I’ll pick up from basic training. Toward the end of the eight weeks of basic training at Ft. Dix, I found out that I was going to military police school. That was to be done at Ft. Gordon, Georgia, near Augusta, Georgia, where they hold the U.S. Masters Golf Tournament. I was there to be trained as a military policeman for eight weeks. I took various courses ranging from the military code of justice, to learn how to do judo, to fire various weapons, etc. Each week there would be a graduating class of military police and prior to the time that I was due to graduate, the students were getting sent to Germany, and that’s where I thought I would end up. But with my class graduating, they started a new cycle and I was informed I was going to Vietnam. I had a period of leave of a few weeks before I was due to leave for Vietnam in July of 1969. During that period I got married and then I left for Vietnam in July of ‘69.
On the way there -- which was a 22 hour airplane ride with various stops along the way -- I had no idea where in country, in Vietnam, I would end up, or what kind of responsibilities I would have as a military policeman over there. It wasn’t until I arrived in country for a few days that I found out exactly what I’d be doing.
Piggy backing off of that, what were your responsibilities when you were there?
I learned that I would be doing typical military police work, and that I would be spending my time in Saigon - the largest city and capital of then South Vietnam. My duties for the first month that I was there was to be on duty for 12 hours, then have 12 hours off. Those were the work shifts. During that first month, I was guarding various installations, fully armed for 12 hours at time. I’d have a radio with me, and I’d be paired off in some cases with another military policeman, but just as often I’d be paired off with someone from the South Vietnamese army or from the police force in Saigon. That lasted for about a month. During that first month, when I was in the company office space, I saw on the bulletin board that they were in a real need for an English teacher to teach the Saigon police English.
I thought that might be interesting work, even though I didn’t know the Vietnamese language. I had quite a background in the French language and many of the police that I ended up teaching were French educated because they grew up when France was still the colonial power. So, I had four years of French and that was probably what made the difference in my unit choosing me to be a teacher. The next 11 months of my tour, I taught at the national police academy in Saigon, and that is where the Saigon city police were posted and took the classes that I and one other teacher taught. We were teaching them a vocabulary that would enable them to go out in joint patrols with American military police.
As you can imagine, in Saigon and other cities, there would be incidents from time to time that would involve American troops and South Vietnamese troops. It could be anything: it could be a fight over a bar girl, it could be some kind of argument that folks got into and there would be a need to break it up. We would have joint police patrols that would come to these kinds of incidents. So rather than to teach people like myself Vietnamese to deal with these incidents, knowing that we would only be there for a tour of a year, they thought it would be better for us to teach these Saigon police English. Many of them had some rudimentary English. When I had difficulty teaching them certain vocabulary, I’d use my French language experience. There are thousands of French and English words that are very similar, so I could convey what I needed to convey to these policemen. Basically, I was teaching them vocabulary that they would need in their police work. Words like: arrest, gun, suspect - you can gather from that the kind of lessons we would teach them. I was told to not wear my uniform when I was a teacher in the classroom. I’d have about 20 students, but many of them were the equivalent of majors, colonels - they were officers.
You can see from my uniform up there -- that I was a Specialist 4, which is the equivalent of a corporal. Certainly, I wasn’t an officer. They thought it would be a better picture to have me not being an officer in uniform teaching these students who were wearing their uniforms. So, I was told to wear civilian clothes. I carried a little authorization card in my wallet in case I was stopped, to show that even though I was an American GI, I was entitled to wear civilian clothes for my classroom responsibilities.
Just to add on a little to what I just discussed about the nature of my work as a military policeman over there, and ending up teaching English, I was fortunate that the developments led that way. Being a military policeman in a war zone could’ve been very different for me. I could’ve been not posted in a major metropolitan area like Saigon. I could’ve been out in the rural areas of Vietnam where a lot of the combat took place. Military policemen in those areas would normally do things like convoy duty. They would be in a vehicle in front of a convoy, and in the rear of a convoy. Typical guerrilla tactics used by the communists at the time would be to try to take out the head of a convoy, and the rear of a convoy so that there would be no way to go. They would be trapped. That was very dangerous work for military policemen. I didn’t know until my first few days in country that I would be in Saigon, and then later in that first month that I would be teaching. All throughout my career, there were pivotal places where I got somewhat lucky.
Can you tell us about some of the experiences you had with your students?
Yeah. I found it very fascinating to deal with my students. Once their English got to a point where I could carry on a pretty decent conversation with them, I would ask them at that point to write me a composition and entitle it “My Life.” Many of them were not born in South Vietnam. Many of them came from North Vietnam. You might remember from the history that you were exposed to in your unit on the war that the country was divided in the mid ‘50’s. The North would be the communist state, and South Vietnam would not have a communist government. But many people who were Catholic lived in North Vietnam at the time the country was divided, and at the moment of division, 800,000-1,000,000 Catholics fled North Vietnam to live in the South where they could practice their religion and have more freedom. Some of my students were part of that exodus and they wrote about leaving their cities, towns and villages in North Vietnam. Some of them leaving family members. Now it wasn’t always the case where an entire family made it from North to South, so they still had family members living in the North and you can imagine how gut wrenching that might be. And there were times later on where they would invite me to lunch. They took me to various restaurants in Saigon and I was exposed to some really fine Vietnamese cuisine, which to this day I still love and it’s my favorite cuisine. So I had many chances to go beyond just teaching them police vocabulary and working with American military police, I got to know them as human beings. And they’re beautiful people.
Do you think that shaped your opinions about the war in general?
Yeah. I went over to Vietnam really supporting what our government was doing because your first tendency, especially if you’re not familiar with everything, is to trust in your government that they’re doing the right thing. And that’s kind of the view I had when I went over, but I had many opportunities to read about Vietnam’s history, and our own foreign policy in the area. You learn a lot about after World War II was over, after the Japanese had pulled it’s occupation forces out and the French had resumed colonial control, and opportunities that Vietnam had to become independent. I learned an awful lot about how we were fighting this war. So my views about whether we were doing something really honorable changed 180 degrees by the time that I left. I felt it was a huge mistake. I felt that eventually when we learned that more than 58,000 Americans were killed, that it was a tragedy of unbelievable proportions. Most of the young men who were sent over there to fight were 18, 19, or 20 years old. And I found out later on that those responsible in the U.S. administrations who were sending our boys over there in many cases broke rules and sent 100,000 or more that were not even qualified to be in military service. Just so that manpower totals could be maintained. The metrics used on whether the war was being won or not, that were being used by administration officials to inform the American public - these metrics were nonsensical. American officers over there were told, “Continue to report body counts. How many did you kill today?” Those figures were, in many cases, imaginary. They had no credibility. Objectives in the war were nonsensical. To take a hill one day that might be believed to be important, and then it would be lost to the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong would take it over. It was not the typical kind of war where you kick the enemy out and you took ground and you kept advancing. It wasn’t that king of war at all. And it was the type of war also where those areas that you were shooting at, you weren’t completely confident that you were going after the enemy. You didn’t know who the enemy was in some cases. And you could see Vietnamese peasants during the day, and they’d smile at you, but maybe at night they would attack your base.
So it was a very difficult war to fight. Many American GIs over there felt that the South Vietnamese army, supposedly our allies fighting with us, were more interested in having us fight the war for them than they were motivated to fight the war themselves. So yes, when I came home I was convinced that we had made a terrible mistake, and that we should never fight another war like it again.
My question then, is did your mindset change while you were in Vietnam? And if so, how did that affect your work? I imagine if I were in that scenario, I’d be like, “I don’t agree with this, but I have to do it.”
Well, yes, my mindset changed during the year I was over there, for sure, as I’ve described. Even for troops on the field, they had a mindset that changed about whether they were really doing the right thing. So what you did in those circumstances, you started making a short-timers calendar. Each day, you check off a day and you’d say, “Well, 60 more days before I go home.” And then a month later, 30 days, it was called a short-timers calendar. What you were most interested in particularly if you were in the field, facing combat, was keeping alive, protecting the buddies that you made over there - because that was a real tragedy if you lost a buddy in combat. That would really affect you. And so that became your own personal set of objectives. You didn’t think about the grander, national objective of kicking the communists out because you’ve already experienced that this was not really going to be over any time soon, that there was nothing truly honorable about it, and the realization that what your opposition was really interested in, was having an independent country. They saw the United States in the way of that. As an individual American soldier over there, you’re concerned about your own safety and getting home. In my case, I had been married a couple of weeks before I went over. I wanted to get back, have my family life, and my career after the military.
How’d you feel about how the war was reported?
Well, I think that if you mean how it was reported by the media -- well I can talk about how the war was reported by the media as well as by government officials because more often than not, they didn’t mesh. American officials in the chain of command would try to report about how much progress was being made. They used the phrase, “We’re near the light at the end of the tunnel! We’re almost there!” The American public kept hearing that from the officials. Then we later found out from the Pentagon Papers, for example, that exposed a lot of what the government really thought about the war. What the presidents, Nixon and Johnson, felt about the war, what the Secretaries of State felt about the war, they knew that the war wasn’t going well. They lied to the American people. They lied to us really before major combat started in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. So, it was not a shining moment for the American government, whether it was the Democratic administration, or Republican administration that followed. We can thank the media for getting out there and doing their jobs. The really good reporters in the media didn’t just go to the briefings that the military officials would give the public spokesmen. They would get out into the field and talk to the soldiers who were actually fighting there. They may not have been officers. These reporters were getting the real truth of what was going on.
We may have touched on this previously or other speakers may have touched on it, but the real turning point was the Tet Offensive in 1968. Out of nowhere, the communists launched a major offensive throughout South Vietnam. Even though it was not a military victory for them, it was really a political victory in that we were so stunned at their ability to do this, that at home, the protest movement got energized against the war, there were massive demonstrations and the media really turned against the American government. From that point on until 1973 when the last American soldier was left, it was really an effort to get the war ended. The administrations at that point were just trying to get out in the most honorable way possible, and getting our prisoners of war back.
How was it coming home?
Well, that was a moment of joy for all of us who were coming home. One of the postcards that I passed around at the beginning was written to my parents on the way over [to Vietnam] in July ’69 and my state of mind saying that I didn’t know what to expect, where I would be, but I said I was confident. On the way home, we were all overjoyed. We got on that plane and it was a little weird because when we went to meet our plane, there were incoming planes of new GIs coming over to replace us. I don’t know if any of them ever made it back, but we got on that plane, and when we got out of Vietnamese airspace, the captain of the plane came on the intercom and said, “You have now left Vietnamese airspace,” and there was just a tumultuous cry of joy from the GIs on that plane returning home to the U.S. The stewardesses were so nice to us. We were so happy until, not on my flight back, but on others, when we touched down in either California or Washington state, there were groups of Americans who protested the war meeting our flights and calling us all sorts of names, much to the dismay of returning GIs. Being called things like baby killers and stuff like that as if we wanted to go over there in the first place. Many of us were drafted, so we were just doing what our government asked us to do. And I urge you, if you haven’t seen the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War, they have one woman interviewed who was one of these protesters that called returning American GIs these horrible names. In one of the final episodes, you can see her crying that she felt so guilty years afterwards about what she had done. And she asked for forgiveness. I really believe that the way many of us were treated was the reason that America had a guilt trip about how they treated Vietnam veterans. That’s one of the reasons I told you our motto for Vietnam Veterans of America is, “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.” So, in later years when we fought in Afghanistan, after 9/11, and in Iraq, when those troops came home after their tours, they were greeted more as heroes. And that really stemmed from the Vietnam experience.
It’s hard for me to understand, because when I was born, we always said, “Thank you for your service.” It would never be something like, “You’re a baby killer.” Do you think that the people who were calling you these awful things were misinformed? Or were they just so emotional?
Well, you can certainly see from today’s political climate how there’s always a danger of polarization where two sides become so ingrained in what’s going on, that there’s very little chance of compromise. That’s the way it was back in those days. It was not unusual to have protests during the Vietnam War in Washington where several hundred thousand people showed up between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. There were marches in the Pentagon, and protests outside the White House. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could look out their window and see protesters raising placards. There was bitterness on both sides. The administrations in the White House were bitter that things had got to that point in the country. It’s just... things can deteriorate to reach that.
How did your service affect the rest of your life?
I had mentioned this before, but briefly. I had expected, with my economics degree, to go on and have a career on Wall Street and work on financial affairs and the stock market. But my tour over in Vietnam, my first time really being out of the United States and seeing what went on, it just triggered my interest in foreign policy and international relations. Also, I had some courses in Russian history at the University of Connecticut which triggered my interest. My family lineage goes back to Russia, so I had a natural affinity to that. So I had decided to switch my career interest when I got back out of the army. I went to a different university, University of Chicago, which was one of the elite universities in this country, still is, and I pursued a graduates degree in international relations and Soviet foreign policy. During my two years there, getting my masters degree, I had a chance to interview with the CIA although I applied to literally scores of different organizations, government departments, and media positions to use my international relations background. That’s what I decided to get involved in and ended up working for the CIA which started in 1972 and went on for 35 years to 2007.
I loved your talk when you came to our Professional’s Day to tell us about working for the CIA. You mentioned the Pentagon Papers and that kind of opened my eyes. I never thought of it that way, that people who served in Vietnam would be affected by it. My question is, did you know anyone that served who read the Pentagon Papers? What was their reaction?
I don’t want to focus only on the Pentagon Papers because there were other journalists and academics that were writing during period of the war, that exposed the lies and mistakes that a series of American presidents and their administrations made. I would put most of the blame on the Johnson and Nixon administrations because there are actual lies that they told. It’s documented and I mentioned that the National Archives has a special exhibit that’s probably near its end now, but you can go there and actually listen to the conversations in the Oval Office where they’re telling lies about what’s going on and that things are not going well, they’re gonna lose the war, they’ll have to come home, that kind of thing. The Pentagon Papers was very important in the sense that it really reviewed thousands of documents that showed the mistakes and the miscalculations. I will say though, it did show that the CIA had made some accurate predictions that just got ignored or buried. One of the things that the American military did during the war, was to have a heavy bombing campaign of North Vietnam. Pretty much from the beginning, the CIA was telling our policy makers this was not gonna really work. It’s not gonna bring North Vietnam to change their positions during the negotiations. In fact, it steeled their will to keep fighting. There are other things in history that show that it could go the other way, like the Battle of Britain. They were subjected the first years of the war to heavy bombing, but it didn’t force them to surrender. It just steeled their will. The CIA was making that point. There are some others in the State Department who felt similarly, and wanted to use the negotiations to get out. It was really the Johnson and Nixon administrations that were the guilty parties here.
