Uplifting Stories of our Veterans and Military

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Comment by Rex on December 23, 2010 at 4:07pm

Another story about our Marines .

Heroes of the Vietnam Generation
By James Webb

 

          The rapidly disappearing cohort of Americans that endured the Great Depression and then fought World War II is receiving quite a send-off
from the leading lights of the so-called 60's generation. Tom Brokaw has
published two oral histories of "The Greatest Generation" that feature
ordinary people doing their duty and suggest that such conduct was
historically unique. 

          Chris Matthews of "Hardball" is fond of writing columns praising the Navy service of his father while
castigating his own baby boomer generation for its alleged softness and
lack of struggle. William Bennett gave a startling condescending speech
at the Naval Academy a few years ago comparing the heroism of the "D-Day
Generation" to the drugs-and-sex nihilism of the "Woodstock
Generation." And Steven Spielberg, in promoting his film "Saving Private
Ryan," was careful to justify his portrayals of soldiers in action
based on the supposedly unique nature of World War II. 

          An irony is at work here. Lest we forget, the World War II generation
now being lionized also brought us the Vietnam War, a conflict which
today's most conspicuous voices by and large opposed, and in which few
of them served. The "best and brightest" of the Vietnam age group once
made headlines by castigating their parents for bringing about the war
in which they would not fight, which has become the war they refuse to
remember. 

          Pundits back then invented a term for this animus: the "generation gap." Long, plaintive articles and even books
were written examining its
manifestations. Campus leaders, who claimed precocious wisdom through
the magical process of reading a few controversial books, urged fellow
baby boomers not to trust anyone over 30. Their elders who had survived
the Depression and fought the largest war in history were looked down
upon as shallow, materialistic, and out of touch. 

          Those of us who grew up, on the other side of the picket line from that
era's counter-culture can't help but feel a little leery of this sudden
gush of appreciation for our elders from the leading lights of the old
counter-culture. Then and now, the national conversation has proceeded
from the dubious assumption that those who came of age during Vietnam
are a unified generation in the same sense as their parents were, and
thus are capable of being spoken for through these fickle elites. 

          In
truth, the " Vietnam generation" is a misnomer. Those who came of age
during that war are permanently divided by different reactions to a
whole range of counter-cultural agendas, and nothing divides them more
deeply than the personal ramifications of the war itself. The sizable
portion of the Vietnam age group who declined to support the
counter-cultural agenda, and especially the men and women who opted to
serve in the military during the Vietnam War, are quite different from
their peers who for decades have claimed to speak for them. In fact,
they are much like the World War II generation itself. For them,
Woodstock was a side show, college protestors were spoiled brats who
would have benefited from having to work a few jobs in order to pay
their tuition, and Vietnam represented not an intellectual exercise in
draft avoidance, or protest marches but a battlefield that was just as
brutal as those their fathers faced in World War II and
Korea. 

          Few who served during Vietnam ever complained of a generation gap. The men who fought World War II were their heroes
and role models. They honored their father's service by emulating it,
and largely agreed with their father's wisdom in attempting to stop
Communism's reach in Southeast Asia . 

          The most accurate poll of their attitudes (Harris, 1980) showed that 91 percent
were glad they'd served their country, 74 percent enjoyed their time in
the service, and 89 percent agreed with the statement that "our troops
were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington
would not let them win." And most importantly, the castigation they
received upon returning home was not from the World War II generation,
but from the very elites in their age group who supposedly spoke for
them. 

          Nine million men served in the military during Vietnam War, three million of whom went to the Vietnam Theater. Contrary to popular mythology, two-thirds of these were volunteers, and 73 percent of those who died were volunteers. While some attention has been paid recently to the plight of our
prisoners of war, most of whom were pilots; there has been little
recognition of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the
ground. 

          Dropped onto the enemy's terrain 12,000 miles away from home, America 's citizen-soldiers performed with a tenacity
and quality that may never be truly understood. Those who believe the
war was fought incompletely on a tactical level should consider Hanoi's recent admission that 1.4 million of its soldiers died on the battlefield, compared to 58,000 total
U.S. dead. 

         *** Those who believe that it was a "dirty little war" where the bombs did all the work might contemplate that is was the most costly war the U.S. Marine Corps has ever fought - five times as many dead as World War I, three times as many dead as in
Korea, and more total killed and wounded than in all of World War II. ***

          Significantly, these sacrifices were being made at a time the United
States was deeply divided over our
effort in Vietnam . The baby-boom generation had cracked apart along
class lines as America 's young men were making difficult, life-or-death
choices about serving. The better academic institutions became focal
points for vitriolic protest against the war, with few of their
graduates going into the military. Harvard College , which had lost
691 alumni in World War II, lost a total of 12 men in Vietnam from the
classes of 1962 through 1972 combined. Those classes at Princeton lost
six, at MIT two. The media turned ever more hostile. And frequently
the reward for a young man's having gone through the trauma of combat
was to be greeted by his peers with studied indifference of outright
hostility. 

          What is a hero? My heroes are the young men who faced the issues of war and possible death, and then weighed those
concerns against obligations to their country. Citizen-soldiers who
interrupted their personal and professional lives at their most
formative stage, in the timeless phrase of the Confederate Memorial in
Arlington National Cemetery , "not for fame of reward, not for place or
for rank, but in simple obedience to duty, as they understood it." Who
suffered loneliness, disease, and wounds with an often-contagious elan.
And who deserve a far better place in history than that now offered them
by the so-called spokesman of our so-called generation. 

          Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Spielberg, meet my Marines.
1969 was an odd year to be in Vietnam . Second only to 1968 in terms of
American casualties, it was the year made famous by Hamburger Hill, as
well as the gut-wrenching Life cover story showing pictures of 242
Americans who had been killed in one average week of fighting. Back
home, it was the year of Woodstock , and of numerous anti-war rallies
that culminated in the Moratorium March on Washington . The My Lai
massacre hit the papers and was seized upon by the anti-war movement as
the emblematic moment of the war. Lyndon Johnson left Washington in
utter
humiliation. 

          Richard Nixon entered the scene, destined for an even worse fate. In the An Hoa Basin southwest of
Danang, the Fifth Marine Regiment was in its third year of continuous
combat operations. Combat is an unpredictable and inexact environment,
but we were well led. As a rifle platoon and company commander, I served
under a succession of three regimental commanders who had cut their
teeth in World War II, and four different battalion commanders, three of
whom had seen combat in Korea. The company commanders were typically
captains on their second combat tour in Vietnam , or young first
lieutenants like myself who were given companies after many months of
"bush time" as platoon commanders in the Basin's tough and unforgiving
environs. 

          The Basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in Vietnam , its torn,
cratered earth offering every sort of wartime possibility. In the
mountains just to the west, not far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the
North Vietnamese Army operated an infantry division from an area called
Base Area 112. In the valleys of the Basin, main-force Viet Cong
battalions whose ranks were 80 percent North Vietnamese Army regulars
moved against the Americans every day. Local Viet Cong units sniped and
harassed. Ridgelines and paddy dikes were laced with sophisticated booby
traps of every size, from a hand grenade to a 250-pound bomb. The
villages sat in the rice paddies and tree lines like individual
fortresses, crisscrossed with the trenches and spider holes, their homes
sporting bunkers capable of surviving direct hits from large-caliber
artillery shells. The Viet Cong infrastructure was intricate and
permeating. Except for the old and the very young, villagers who did not
side with the Communists had either been killed or driven out to the
government controlled enclaves near Danang. 

          In the rifle companies, we spent the endless months patrolling ridgelines and
villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed wire,
hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would fit inside
one's pack, which after a few "humps" usually boiled down to letter
-writing material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small
transistor radio. 

          We moved through the boiling heat with 60 pounds of weapons and gear, causing a typical Marine to drop 20
percent of his body weight while in the bush. When we stopped we dug
chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for toilets. We slept on the
ground under makeshift poncho hootches, and when it rained we usually
took our hootches down because wet ponchos shined under illumination
flares, making great
targets. Sleep itself was fitful, never more than an hour or two at a
stretch for months at a time as we mixed daytime patrolling with
night-time ambushes, listening posts, foxhole duty, and radio watches.
Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, and dysentery were common, as was trench
foot when the monsoons came. Respite was rotating back to the mud-filled
regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days, where rocket
and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned defensive bunkers
at night. Which makes it kind of hard to get excited about tales of
Woodstock , or camping at the Vineyard during summer break. 

          We had been told while training that Marine officers in the rifle
companies had an 85 percent probability of being killed or wounded, and
the experience of "Dying Delta," as our company was known, bore that
out. Of the officers in the bush when I arrived, our company commander
was wounded, the weapons platoon commander wounded, the first platoon
commander was killed, the second platoon commander was wounded twice,
and I, commanding the third platoons fared no better. Two of my original
three-squad leaders were killed, and the third shot in the stomach. My
platoon sergeant was severely wounded, as was my right guide. By the
time I left, my platoon I had gone through six radio operators, five of
them casualties. 

          These figures were hardly unique; in fact, they were typical. Many other units; for instance, those who
fought the hill battles around Khe Sanh, or were with the famed Walking
Dead of the Ninth Marine Regiment, or were in the battle of Hue City or
at Dai Do, had it far worse. 

          When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with me, I am continually
amazed, for these
were mostly recent civilians barely out of high school, called up from
the cities and the farms to do their year in hell and then return.
Visions haunt me every day, not of the nightmares of war but of the
steady consistency with which my Marines faced their responsibilities,
and of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of constant
danger. The salty, battle-hardened 20-year-olds teaching green
19-year-olds the intricate lessons of the hostile battlefield. The
unerring skill of the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar
villages and weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick
certainty when a fellow Marine was wounded and needed help. Their
willingness to risk their lives to save other Marines in peril. To this
day it stuns me that their own countrymen have so completely missed the
story of their service, lost in the bitter confusion of the war itself. 

          Like
every military unit throughout history we had occasional laggards,
cowards, and complainers. But in the aggregate, these Marines were the
finest people I have ever been around. It has been my privilege to keep
up with many of them over the years since we all came home. One finds in
them very little bitterness about the war in which they fought. The
most common regret, almost to a man, is that they were not able to do
more for each other and for the people they came to help. 

          It would be redundant to say that I would trust my life to these men.
Because I already have, in more ways than I can ever recount. I am alive
today because of their quiet, unaffected heroism. Such valor epitomizes
the conduct of Americans at war from the first days of our existence.
That the boomer elites can canonize this sort of conduct in our fathers'
generation while ignoring it in our own is more than simple
oversight. It is a conscious, continuing travesty.

 

Comment by NavyDads Admin (Paul) on December 15, 2010 at 9:29am

I guess the lesson would be to not steal anything and then trip and fall in front of four Marines !! 

 

And BTW Rex...figured out (took me two days) how to get that vid posted in the Video area......

Comment by Rex on December 15, 2010 at 9:24am

When you play with the bull you are going to get the horn LOL

 

ust have been one hellva fall!!!

J

 

 

T4T's has good people working for it

 
>                   Poor Guy! Bet he never knew what hit him!! Another of life's finer lesson!  Mess with the Best - Get what you DESERVE
>
>                   Marine Stabbed by Suspected Shoplifter
>
>
>                   November 27, 2010
>
>                   Associated Press
>
>                   AUGUSTA, Ga. - A U.S. Marine reservist collecting toys for children was stabbed when he helped stop a suspected shoplifter in eastern Georgia.
>
>                   Best Buy sales manager Orvin Smith told The Augusta Chronicle that man was seen on surveillance cameras Friday putting a laptop under his jacket at the Augusta store.
>
>                   When confronted, the man became irate, knocked down an employee, pulled a knife and ran toward the door. Outside were four Marines collecting toys for the service branch's "Toys For Tots" program.
>
>                   Smith said the Marines stopped the man, but he stabbed one of them, Cpl. Phillip Duggan, in the back. The cut did not appear to be severe.
>
>                   The suspect was transported to the local hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, possible broken ribs, assorted lacerations and bruises he obtained when he fell trying to run after stabbing the Marine.
>
>                   The suspect, whose name was not released, was held until police arrived. The Richmond County Sheriff's office said it is investigating.
>
>
>
>                   Rick Smythe
>                   Chaplain
                  Marine Corps League
                   St Charles County Detachment 725

Comment by Rex on December 14, 2010 at 9:38am

Paul thanks for posting the video i got tied up with other things and forgot to post it.

Comment by NavyDads Admin (Paul) on December 13, 2010 at 9:40pm

Rex pointed me to this great video. If you are an American, you must watch this:

Comment by Rex on November 16, 2010 at 4:43pm

Here is a great story about a one of a kind American hero ! I know he is not a Navy guy but his story is about courage and fighting for each other.
We are all brothers fighting for each other !
I just ask that no one post any thing political, What the president done today was FIRST CLASS !
HOOAH !
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/16/obama-army-staff-sergean...

Comment by NavyDads Admin (Paul) on October 13, 2010 at 10:16pm

Not that many NavyDads members know the story of one of our members: John Quinn. John served 20 years in the Navy....all the while hiding the fact that he had cerebral palsy. John has written a book about his life...it is an inspirational read! Check out John's profile at: http://www.navydads.com/profile/JohnWQuinn

My daugther Kat posted the following on John's FB page after reading his book:

"Senior, thank you for sending me a copy of your book and for the inspiring message you wrote for me. Reading your book was so surreal, especially your recounts of life on board a carrier. It definitely brought back tons of memories. I think my old first class was on the Stennis with you. I'll have to email him and ask. Again, thank you so much and you really are an inspiration. Standing in port watch with you would have been an honor."

Comment by Rex on October 5, 2010 at 7:42pm

Here is another great story of one of our true warriors, may GOD BLESS of of our military members and there family.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/05/green-beret-receive-meda...

Comment by NavyDads Admin (Paul) on August 19, 2010 at 2:38pm

When the Music Stopped...


(For those who are unaware: At all military base theaters,

the National Anthem is played before the movie begins.)

This is written from a Chaplain in Iraq :

I recently attended a showing of 'Superman 3' here at
LSA Anaconda. We have a large auditorium we use for movies,
as well as memorial services and other large gatherings. As
is the custom at all military bases, we stood to attention
when the National Anthem began before the main feature. All
was going well until three-quarters of the way through The
National Anthem, the music stopped.

Now, what would happen if this occurred with 1,000 18-22
year-olds back in the States? I imagine there would be
hoots, catcalls, laughter, a few rude comments, and everyone
would sit down and yell for the movie to begin. Of course,
that is, if they had stood for the National Anthem in the
first place.

Here in Iraq, 1,000 Soldiers continued to stand at attention,
eyes fixed forward. The music started again and the Soldiers
continued to quietly stand at attention. But again, at the
same point, the music stopped. What would you expect 1000
Soldiers standing at attention to do?? Frankly, I expected
some laughter, and everyone would eventually sit down and
wait for the movie to start.

But No!!... You could have heard a pin drop, while every

Soldier continued to stand at attention.

Suddenly,there was a lone voice from the front of the auditorium,
then a dozen voices, and soon the room was filled with the
voices of a thousand soldiers, finishing where the recording
left off: "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs
bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag
was still there. Oh, say does that Star Spangled Banner yet
wave, o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave."

It was the most inspiring moment I have had in Iraq and I
wanted you to know what kind of Soldiers are serving you.
Remember them as they fight for us!

Be ever in prayer

for all our soldiers serving us here at home and abroad.

Many have already paid the ultimate price.

Written by Chaplain Jim Higgins LSA Anaconda is at the

Ballad Airport in Iraq , north of Baghdad .



God Bless America and all of our troops serving through out

the world.

Comment by Brad on July 27, 2010 at 10:22am

Another great story Rex. Thanks for posting. God bless those Marines!

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