You know, when I was a kid, my elders used to caution that “the older you get, the faster time travels.”
I thought my dear friends couldn’t possibly be right, that made no sense; I was enjoying the slower pace of life as a youth.
And then as I got older, my monthly calendar was not turned quickly enough before it was gone; them “old friends” were right!
It was true.
And as life passed me by quickly, the only thing I have left now are some old memories.
One of them is the Vietnam War.
President John F. Kennedy had sent some early Green Beret troops to Vietnam in 1961 to fight against “Communist insurgents.” Approximately 2.7 million men and women of our military would follow them until the war’s end on April 30, 1975.
In 1967, I found myself stationed with the First Aviation Brigade at Long Binh, Vietnam. I would sometimes journey to Saigon.
During the last few days of January 1968, during a religious holiday (Tet), the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military attacked Saigon and many other cities in the south.
A looming sign that the war had taken a serious turn.
It was around 1968 too that Secretary of Defense McNamara had concluded the U.S. would not prevail in Vietnam, yet he kept sending troops to that battle zone to be killed. He sadly documented his thoughts in a book (“Retrospect, The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”).
In was a “crazy” time in Southeast Asia as the U.S. military became further entangled in an unpopular war. Protests of opposition began to rage on the streets of America. In May 1970, several Kent University students were killed and others injured by the Ohio National Guard as they protested the war on their campus.
I soon began to ask this question myself, ‘Why Vietnam’? No legitimate answer was forthcoming.
More than 58,000 servicemen and women would lose their lives in that far away land, ‘for what’?…only ‘silence’ is offered as a reply.
Seventeen young soldiers from Washington County would be listed among the dead in Vietnam; they gave their all ‘”or what’“? No good answer exists even today, only sad memories!
The seventeen are still remembered on a memorial at 181 S. Walnut St., Hagerstown, Maryland.
Did you know any of them?
Ed Glenn Jr. (Army); Don Tracy (Marine); Ken Deavers Jr. (Marine); Ralph Flint Jr. (Marine); Ron Adams (Army); Harry Watkins Jr. (Army); Harry Ecton (Army); Jack Beard (Army); John Hutzell, (Marine); George Massie (Marine); Nolan Byrd (Army); Orville Knight (Army); Otto Barnhart (Army); William McGowan (Army); James Dodd (Army); Hugh Ronneberg (Army); and Ron Sanbower (Army).
I personally knew four of them and Orville Lee Knight who stepped on a landmine in Bien Hoa Province on April 8th, 1969, was my “best” friend. His family and friends were never the same. Orville lies today beneath a grassy knoll at the Keedysville cemetery.
It is always a sad day when I think of those fatalities killed during this “wasteful” war. Too many lives ‘“sacrificed’“by “ill advised” political decisions, and too many families left behind with lingering misery.
The fall of Saigon ended on April 30, 1975, as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city. The South Vietnamese government was defeated.
The new city name given to Saigon by the North Vietnamese was “Ho Chi Minh.” The war was over. Americans went home carrying physical and mental scars.
And maybe Forest Gump offered the best quote about the war ~ “Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don’t go home at all. That’s a bad thing. That’s all I have to say about that.”
Forrest Gump was right! Vietnam was a “bad thing!”
That Memorial on S. Walnut Street reminds us so……
