There was honor in Vietnam, but a lack of wise, compassionate leadership

Orlan Love, a Vietnam War Navy veteran, delivered this speech on Memorial Day 2018 at the Quasqueton Cemetery. The remains of more than 200 military veterans repose in the cemetery, the final resting place for 66 Civil War veterans.

Love, a Quasqueton native, retired in 2016 after 25 years as a reporter for The Gazette. He continues to write an Outdoors column for the newspaper. Here are his remarks:

Earlier this year we observed the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. It ended with the fall of Saigon, which the victorious North Vietnamese communists promptly renamed Ho Chi Minh City. To the victors belong the spoils. We lost.

It is fitting now to recall the war in which most of the active members of our Legion post served. Many of us are already buried in this cemetery, laid to rest with military honors lovingly provided by their post mates. We’ve seen how this goes. We’ve been around long enough to bury all our brothers from World War I, World War II and Korea. My advice: Enjoy us while you can.

Two and one half million Americans served in the military during the Vietnam War. One in 10 were killed or wounded. Nine hundred ninety seven were killed on their first day in country. The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in a one-year tour of duty, which compares with 40 days’ combat in four years for infantrymen in the South Pacific during World War II.

Here in our hometown we felt the pain acutely when Pfc. Richard Payne, fighting with the 5th Marines, died Dec. 20, 1967, on his 20th birthday; when Pfc. Cecil Olsen, fighting with the Army’s Americal Division, died Jan. 8, 1971, three days after his 21st birthday; when 20-year-old Pfc. Don Kremer of Aurora, an East Buchanan classmate also fighting with the 5th Marines, was killed Dec. 2, 1968.

The Vietnam War was the centerpiece of a turbulent decade of unprecedented social unrest and upheaval — a decade that included a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, assassinations, protests, riots, the ignominious slaughter of innocents at My Lai. Not to mention sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and the first moon landing.

In 1966, in the final days of the age of innocence, Orlan Love graduated from high school, rocking a crew cut, having never seen a peace sign or smelled burning marijuana, naively thinking the seemingly sensible effort to train South Vietnamese soldiers to resist a communist takeover would certainly be accomplished before it affected him.

By 1968, however, under the leadership of escalator- in-chief Lyndon Johnson, U.S. intervention in a southeast Asia civil war had morphed into a full-blown war that claimed 16,899 American lives in that year alone.

After the Tet Offensive, which we won by the body count standard, the tide of public opinion turned against the war. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite opined that the war could end only in stalemate, and, as if to second the notion, LBJ announced he would not seek re-election.

By then words like napalm, Agent Orange, body bag, body count, My Lai, booby trap and credibility gap had entered the vocabulary. "Credibility gap" described the public's perception of the disconnect between the Johnson administration's optimistic narratives of progress and the mounting evidence of a protracted and costly war.

The war provided protest worthy material for the writers of protest songs. Country Joe McDonald underscored the war’s central fault when he sang at Woodstock: “Well, it’s one-two-three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me. I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam. And it’s five-six-seven, open up the pearly gates. Ain’t no time to wonder why. Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.”

Those lyrics crystallized what was wrong with the war. Our leaders simply couldn’t make a good case for it. What to do about it — strive for a deferment, apply for conscientious objector status, defect to Canada, enlist, wait for the draft — troubled the conscience of everyone already facing the physical and emotional dangers of war.

For us veterans of that war, there was no glory. No welcome home ceremonies. No expressions of gratitude from the citizens of a nation that had been divided by our longest and least popular war.

Government officials repeatedly deceived the American public about the prospects for victory, in effect prolonging the bloodshed long after more realistic and less politically motivated leaders would have faced the truth and cut their losses.

That deception became manifest in 1971 with the publication of parts of a leaked copy of the Pentagon Papers — a 7,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War based on classified documents. The principal architect of the war, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in his 1995 memoir, wrote: “We were wrong, terribly wrong.” Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, later wrote that Vietnam was “a tragic national experience.”

The war should have ended in 1968, when LBJ tacitly acknowledged we couldn’t win it. But in an effort to secure “peace with honor,” as Nixon put it, the war continued for another five years of incalculable pain, loss and suffering. And for what? So politicians could save some face and the war industry could rack up more profit.

There may have been no glory in service during the Vietnam War, but there was honor. We were there for the right reasons even if our country was not. And our fellow Americans, many of whom reviled us at the time, have come to appreciate that fact.

I still recall my last day aboard the attack carrier USS Midway in August 1973. The DJ on the ship’s radio station announced the following song goes out to HM2 Orlan Love, who is going home tomorrow. It was by one of my all-time favorite bands, The Who, and its refrain seemed fitting at the time and still does: “Then I’ll get on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again.”

Going forward I pray that our fighting men and women get the wise and compassionate leadership they deserve.