Viet Nam

 I got a flattering note from a man named Heinz the other day and then shortly after received a notice that someone named Heinz had liked my old review of  Into Cambodia, Spring Campaign, Summer Offensive, 1970 by Keith Nolan, the first and only like it has ever received.  I thought, oh, the same guy, how about that, but it turned out they were two different persons.

Anyway, I'd forgotten I'd reviewed that book, let alone read it, but I took a look at my review and immediately recalled the book.  I'd read it as part of my effort to understand my mother's life.  As I've mentioned, she was an Army nurse in Viet Nam, so I went through a period of trying to read books about that war, but the subject was too grim and depressing so I gave up, but I did get through this one.  Below are quotes from the book I thought were interesting.  You can see one reason why I became depressed reading about that war.

  "Troops can't afford a commander who feels sorry for them."
"An enemy left to slip away would be there the next day to blow you away."
"Without hesitation, we would spend a million dollars in artillery shells rather than risk one GI's life."
"What the U.S. Army now had in the jungle were 21-year-old lieutenants and 20-year-old sergeants running rifle platoons of 19-year-old kids."
"After the 1968 Tet Offensive, Washington, faced with an enemy that had finally stood up to their firepower and been decimated, negated their advantage by stopping the bombing and placing their faith instead with negotiations. Likewise, after the 1970 Cambodian incursion, Washington used the breathing space afforded them not to press on--not to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, to cross the DMZ, to shut down Haiphong and Hanoi--but to accelerate the withdrawals. There were many who could commiserate with the bitter comments of one infantry battalion operations officer: 'After Cambodia, you couldn't pick a fight. If only we had persisted we would have won the war.'"
And the conclusion of Joseph B. Andersen, Jr., the CO of B/2-5 Cavalry after losing three men in a fight to seize an enemy cache:
"From that time in June until I gave up the company in November, we didn't receive another single shot. We'd wiped out all their supplies and demoralized them so greatly that they were not ready to fight. As we ran our patrols, we would find they were trailing us so they could eat our garbage, the stuff we'd thrown away. As a company commander, I did not have any feel for the political and international ramifications of going into Cambodia. But as a guy who had to live or die by how well the enemy was equipped or fought, there was no doubt in my mind that the correlation was very great between us going into Cambodia and then not taking any more heat from the enemy."

Once again the USA seized defeat from the jaws of victory.
We're good at that.
Practice makes perfect.

One time back when I was dumb enough to post comments to on-line articles I mentioned that I had flown in a C-141 from Yokota to Andrews.  I was told it was the last flying C-141 in the Air Force inventory and would soon go to the boneyard. I wrote a few lines about the experience and my reaction to being on the plane. One of the regular commenters at that site chimed in to tell about the time he flew back from Europe in a rattle-trap of an airliner that he was afraid would fall apart at any moment.  He clearly didn't understand my comment, thinking my mention of it being the last C-141 flying was meant as some sort of comment on how terrible my flight was and he was going to top that with his story. 
But that wasn't what I was saying.  My reaction to being aboard a C-141, the legendary Sky Lizard, was because of my mother being an Army nurse during Viet Nam when the C-141 was used to fly the most critically wounded soldiers, those with head and spinal injuries, back to the States for treatment.  I'd heard stories about the difficulties the flight nurses encountered.  And now I was aboard one of those planes.

Flight nurse Deanna Cox with wounded Marine aboard a C-141

The cargo bay had only metal deck plates, no insulation or sound-proofing and limited lighting, so it made for a noisy, dimly lit, cold and uncomfortable environment to work in during the long flight across 10 time zones.
Each plane carried 44 litter and 48 ambulatory patients, most in their late teens or early 20s, all with terrible injuries. Usually they had been in combat less than 24 hours earlier. The flight nurses wore earplugs throughout the flights, which impeded their ability to communicate with each other and with their patients. Because they often could not hear a respirator cycling or suction machine operating, the nurses had to closely observe patients to determine their status and the equipment's effectiveness.  Sometimes they ran out of medical supplies during the flight. Often a patient would have a crisis beyond any help the nurses could give.  Sometimes they died. Whatever happened, the planes did not divert. They flew on, hour after hour across time zone after time zone. The dead lay among the living, or was it the living lying among the dead? 

As the C-141 I was flying in rumbled across the Pacific at 430 knots, I thought about those days, imagined my mother receiving the freshly wounded coming in on helos, rushing them for treatment, cleaning the maggots out of their wounds, preparing them for emergency surgery, assisting in the surgery, then selecting the worst cases for evacuation to the States, seeing them back aboard a helo, kneeling over them, saying reassuring words if they were conscious, a prayer if they were not, a final touch of her hand to their cheek and they were gone.  And she stood there watching the helo depart.  Then another helo would come whomp-whomping in with more wounded and she would sigh, look down at the ground, gathering her strength for the next bout of horror, then dash in under the spinning blades to begin the cycle all over again.