The impulse for writing my Vietnam military experience was prompted while driving through St. Peter MN in 2010. Driving alone through the city that day was the first time I had gone that way in long time and as I drove past the old Nicollet County Court House on Main street I had a vivid flashback of 45 years earlier walking up the court house steps to learn my fate with the local draft board and participation in the Vietnam War, which began the most profound experience of my life. 

What I will relate is as honest a recollection of my Vietnam War (referred as Vietnam hereafter) experiences as I remembered them 40 years after the fact. My goals have been to write factually what happened to me while serving in the US Army without intentional exaggeration or shock value. When I put forward an “opinion” I will state it as such, otherwise it’s a fact, or a fact for me and not necessarily for everyone who served.

I do not claim to remember exactly all the dates or events chronology or even to any universality of my experiences; if you served in combat you have your own history and you won’t need mine to add creditability or legitimacy to yours and vice versa. On some subjects what I relate will come across as harsh and sound like I’m anti-military or even anti-war. Neither could be further from the truth but I also will not sugar-coat my feelings on what I “perceived to be” deficiencies and failures of the Government, the Public and my fellow service men. This is a highly detailed personal memory, during the year in Vietnam I had a lot of uninterrupted time to contemplate my existence. 

I carried almost no personal possessions except my dog tags, a waterproof billfold holding for some unfathomable reason, my social security card and college ID (I could still think) and nothing else to remind me of home. Mentally/psychologically I steeled myself not think about the future as I didn’t think my chances of surviving were high enough to plan a future.

This overwhelming focus was on existence, plus a good memory for detail and an interest in what was happening helped me write my experiences at a very detailed level, maybe more than many readers would like but it was this “detail” that fascinated me most, i.e. trying to make sense of how we organized, logistically supplied and why we used the tactics we did.

Prior to writing this I had not read any other firsthand account of Vietnam combat experiences that might influence my writing. I was aware of the Iraq & Afghanistan infantryman experiences from C-Span interviews but they were all 40 years after my experience. I did learn from these Iraq & Afghanistan interviews that the weapons and technology changed but the combat/firefights were all very similar to Vietnam and I could just as easily have been an infantryman in early 21st century wars as in Vietnam. 

The politics of the 1960’s are as important as the War and cannot be separated. To this day I and the country live with the consequences of that war. Almost every foreign crisis since then has quickly referenced Vietnam, the multitude of mistakes there and the warning not to repeat them.

My opinion the Vietnam War fiasco lies squarely with the Department of Defense (DOD) Generals (the age-old indictment for all failed wars) at the State Department strategists who conflated a foreign civil war with world communism hegemony and the CIA’s inaccurate North Vietnam intelligence assessments regarding their motivation and capabilities.

The generals couldn’t get WWII thinking out of their heads, it was inconceivable to them that a 3rd world backward country could stand up to US military might, they just couldn’t see the real nature of the conflict.

Lastly I think our Government and the Military didn’t respect or gauge correctly the enemy’s willingness to prevail and in fact vastly underestimated them until it was too late.