By Duty Bound Survival and Redemption in a Time of War

PREFACE Since 1975, it has become an article of faith'conventional wisdom'that the Vietnam War was the wrong war at the wrong time in this country's history. I disagreed then, and I disagree now. Communism throughout the twentieth century was philosophically expansionist, which was why the domino theory won over so many believers and why there was, in fact, a cold war. ?Who lost China? was a topic debated everywhere, from kitchens to classrooms to water coolers to the White House, after Mao rose to power. Remember, America's entry into South Vietnam was only twenty years after the end of World War II, and it was clear by then that fifty million lives would've been saved if only Hitler had been stopped at the Rhineland'which wouldn't even have required a great military victory.I don't consider it debatable that if Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had allowed another communist domino to fall in South Vietnam through inaction, the dominoes would have kept falling, because there would have been no reason for the imperial communist powers to stop knocking them over; they would've continued to grab countries, and millions more people would have been subjected to the kinds of unspeakable atrocities that the citizens of South Vietnam and Cambodia endured after United States soldiers withdrew from Vietnam. At some point, the West was going to have to stop the monster from eating'and in the early 1960s it looked like Vietnam was the right place to confront him. Now, you'll get no argument from me that the prosecution of the war was flawed and even bungled; that's what happens when politicians and bureaucrats, not field generals make decisions. But to believe that the world would have turned out as it did? with democracy on the rise and communism on the descent'whether or not we spilled the blood of tens of thousands is a violation of logic; believing that requires believing that the outcome would've been the same even if everything else had been different. You can't extrapolate that way in science'pretend that the test group and control group are identical'and you certainly can't do that in history. It seems highly unlikely to me that the Soviet Union would have crumbled when it did or that China would have opened its doors to, first, President Nixon, and then to the West if not for our fight in Vietnam. Which is why I will go to my grave believing that every man and woman who served in our war there served for a good and noble cause, one that future historians will someday recognize and applaud. 1 There are wars and then there are wars, and within every war there are wars within wars.In Vietnam, it's sometimes hard to tell which war I'm fighting. I know who the enemy is down there, in the jungle, and I know I'm supposed to be on the same side as Burdett, the man just behind me in the cockpit, but I also know he hates me as much as Charlie does. Probably more. Charlie doesn't really hate me; he just wants me dead so I can't kill him. But if he does hate me, it's because I'm an American, and Charlie hates all Americans the same'white, black, yellow, and brown. That's a rational hatred'a hatred for your wartime enemy, and it's nothing personal. Burdett's hatred is personal. Burdett here, he doesn't think of me as American. He thinks of me as a Negro'something less than he is'and he tolerates me because those are his orders. He's stuck flying missions with me, the two of us sent way out in the jungle for hours, but he still can't figure out how the Army let a black man into the cockpit of a helicopter gunship and taught him to fly it into battle. Every time we get back to camp in Thailand, he runs out of there like a guy who's been holding his nose around a stink. That's all right; I'm in no hurry to share a laugh and a smoke with him, either. I'm here for me, and for those guys down there, not for him. I don't like flying with him any better than he likes being paiWare, Ezell, Jr. is the author of 'By Duty Bound Survival and Redemption in a Time of War', published 2005 under ISBN 9780525948612 and ISBN 0525948619.