Loon - Jack McLean [91]
But I didn’t.
There was nothing of my year away that would evoke such a deep emotion again for another thirty years.
28
SEVEN YEARS LATER, DA NANG FELL.
On a Tuesday evening in early April, I was driving toward home down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from my job as the assistant ticket manager of the New York Mets at Shea Stadium. I turned on the car radio and heard the news. The enormous American combat base that I’d first seen from the window of a banking Pan Am 707 in October 1967 was quietly taken over by the army of North Vietnam. It had been abandoned by the United States days before. Actually, it had been turned over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) for safekeeping.
Da Nang. Jesus.
I remembered all of the activity: marines, napalm-laden jet fighters taking off every thirty seconds, hundreds of people wandering around the enormous PX as though they were in a Sears store in Grand Rapids, wiry pasty-white boys with bronzed necks and lower arms enjoying a two-day in-country R & R at China Beach, big guns, hundreds of tanks, enormous ammo dumps, huge petroleum tank farms, and the steady daily flow of munitions and material being directed in country from the sprawling United States Marine Corps supply center in Barstow, California.
Da Nang.
For the first time in seven years, I actually thought about Vietnam for more than a few minutes. During my two years in the Marine Corps, I had written home nearly every week. The night that I heard that Da Nang had fallen, I felt a need to write one last letter home.
Brooklyn, New York
April 1975
Dear Home,
Horror, chaos and anarchy—Da Nang, spring 1975. And so it now begins as it ends. The light at the end of the tunnel is a dark one. As the end is certainly inevitable, I am touched for the first time in seven years at seeing it occur.
The C-2 bridge, Gio Linh, indeed Con Thien, and hill whatever are as strategically significant now as Waterloo, Verdun, Gettysburg, Dien Bien Phu, all now dots on a map surrounded by placid countryside inhabited by a generation which appreciates it only as history, spoon fed without the emotional scars of the ravishing reality that is war.
So now may the American era of Vietnam become History.
The mothers alone shall continue to ask “Why?” with a perspective that does not tolerate the antiseptic analyses of historians. The mothers shall continue to chronically grieve for the Sid MacLeods with fervor far beyond their control. Indeed, as arthritis reacts to a rainy day, so shall they be agitated by the sight of refugees fighting for non-existent hope as the noose tightens upon the sacred soil their sons bled upon. The mothers like their sons shall soon die.
I am sad that Vietnam went the way it did, but in a country run by politicians, it fell characteristically, apathetically.
We gave a weak body a false high so many years ago and last week, after the addict had reached a multimillion dollar a day habit, the supply was cut off—no public stances, no firm policy decisions—indeed it occurred through the absence of any decision. As the body began to shake with withdrawal, the pusher was far away enjoying spring recess at home with family and constituency, struggling for his tenuous tenure on national economic issues seemingly so far removed and yet so directly attached to that horror they created long ago.
The question I have rarely, if ever, addressed myself to in these letters is why—again why? It is fortunately a question I was never forced to answer while I was there. I was called in a time of national need. I served my country with immense pride to the best of my ability. I was discharged. The war was wrong, but this is not an issue for the soldier. “I think …” “You are not paid to think.”
Soon after, I knew how wrong it was; perhaps I knew while I was there, but it was my first war and I had nothing to compare the phenomenon with. Every soldier who served in that war should share my pride, for we