That incident pushed me back into political activism with a lot tougher skin this time; I was bloodied and unbowed when Reagan-Buchanan won and learned that the bad guys don’t get their way every time when Clinton and then John F. Kennedy Jr. ran.
Always persevere, stay the course, and never be afraid.
James Rice: In the long run I think everything worked out, I stayed in the Army for a year after the cease fire and then went back to school and eventually got my Masters. Things really got screwed up for some people, one of my father’s partners had a son who claimed to be a “revolutionary” and joined the anti-war movement; his parents helped him go to Canada to avoid the draft and my father was so outraged that he never spoke to the man again. I got more out of my Vietnam experience than I realized at the time; five years later I helped put together a group of investors that built the Indochine Hotel in Saigon, the biggest hotel and casino in the Far East. Because of my service there during the war, I was instrumental in finding the site to build on. It’s all about turning negatives into positives.
That’s what my father did, it seemed Johnson and Nixon were quite intent on keeping on the good side of the people who helped deliver California to them; that’s why a construction company in which he owned a majority interest got a bunch of lucrative government contracts over the next three years to help renovate and expand the Naval base at San Diego and the docks at Long Beach. The statute of limits on any and all laws and regulations has long since expired, so I’m comfortable telling it now. Dad knew where his bread was buttered and remembered who’d scratched his back; I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but on August 9th of 1974, when LBJ finally went to that great White House in the sky, he lowered the flags in front of the big house in Torrance and the second home on Oahu to half mast.
Gen. Earl Halton: I was in Mr. Nixon’s office at the Pentagon that final Thursday in August when he signed his resignation as Defense Secretary; a plane was waiting to fly him to Chicago where he would accept the second spot on President Johnson’s “Unity” ticket. “I’m sacrificing a lifetime of party loyalty here,” I remember him saying, “but I’ll be Goddamned if I’ll let those Kennedy’s piss away all the hard work I’ve accomplished in this place in the last three years. Bobby is just mad because Lyndon and I did in Vietnam what he and Jack could never do in Cuba. It’s nothing more than that.” Then he shook my hand and effusively thanked me for all the help during all those tough days. “You were a rock,” he told me, “a rock.” I took that as high praise.
But as I watched Mr. Nixon walk away, all I could think about was Hubert Humphrey and how he was getting on a plane to fly out of Chicago at that moment, kicked to the curb. He was the loser in a very tough game and I was standing in the wake of the ultimate winner, but at what a price. I’ll say this for Richard Nixon, on the day after he assumed the Presidency, the first call he made was to Mr. Humphrey, asking him to become Vice President again.
I stayed on after Clark Clifford took over at Defense, but moved over to the Chief of Staff of the Army’s office. It was pleasant duty and I had a chance to go over to the White House after President Johnson resigned because of his heart condition in April of 1971, but I turned it down; after so many years, I’d had enough of Washington, not the place, but the mentality.
So in January 1972 I took over command of MAACV in Saigon, but I did not find it a pleasant experience. I consider myself a soldier, not a viceroy, which is what that job had become in my opinion. We had gone to war to achieve a free and independent South Vietnam, not to establish an American satrapy in Southeast Asia. What I found particularly distasteful was dealing with the petty South Vietnamese politicians and Army officers who were constantly currying favor in order to get their hands on the millions of dollars America poured into their country every year. This was a situation that corrupted and degraded both countries and during my tour of duty I made many recommendations to Washington on ways to rectify the problem, including reducing our military commitment there. This did not win me many friends in the “Vietnam Lobby,” but unlike them I didn’t believe I deserved to get rich off my service to my country. These were the same people who opposed my efforts to allow radiation patients from the North come to the United States for medical treatment.
While at MAACV I was able to establish our first contacts with the Chinese military command in the North. This went a long way toward easing remaining tensions leftover from the end of the war. It only made sense, considering the fact that there were over 200,000 Chinese troops just over the DMZ, trying to maintain control over the North. I also had the chance to meet with a number of surviving members of Ho Chi Minh’s government who had escaped from their imprisonment by the Chinese and were now seeking to wage a new guerrilla war against them. I was struck by how little bitterness they held toward America, considering how harshly we had waged war against them. Their wrath was reserved for the Chinese, whom they felt had betrayed them. I tried to arrange a meeting with Gen. Giap, who was reportedly organizing resistance to the Chinese out in the bush, but it didn’t come about. I wanted to ask him if he appreciated the irony of the fact that after all of his and Ho’s struggles and triumphs, Vietnam ended up back under foreign domination.
Travis Smith: I’ve got one question after all this time: If we had the Neutron Bomb from the very beginning, then why did we wait two and a half years to use it on the North Vietnamese? Why couldn’t LBJ and Nixon have used it right in the spring of ‘65 and saved us from having to go through all that shit over there? I’ve read all the books on that war and I don’t care what they claim, it wasn’t the same as when Truman dropped the A-bomb on the Japs. Guys like me had been getting their asses shot off for 24 straight months, but it wasn’t until the politicians and Generals in Washington started feeling the heat that they brought in the big artillery and took care of business. They must have been pissing in their pants at the thought of having all those coffins coming back home in an election year.
Of course I should know better than to get all worked up about it, but it gripes me that so many E-11’s did all the fighting and dying, while somebody else took all the glory. It has been that way in all wars I suppose, but when it’s your war, that little fact of life can be hard to swallow. I still think about all those kids that had to go over there and the men who died in that unnamed valley in Laos. That’s why I didn’t vote for Johnson/Nixon in 1968, my father and brothers could not understand why I wouldn’t support the men who‘d nuked the ‘Cong. I didn’t argue with them, but when I went into the voting booth, I wrote in the names of former Sgt. Hugh Stone for President and former Sgt. Patrick O'Mara for Vice President. Both of them were out of the Army on disability and after all the years they had served their country, it seemed to have no place for them now. If the White House was going to be the ultimate spoils of the Vietnam War then I figured I’d give my vote to somebody who had earned my respect and needed the job.
Looking back on it, I can see now how incredibly lucky my family had been: my Old Man was at Belleau Wood in 1918 and barely got a scratch; my oldest brother, Eddie, landed at Normandy; the next brother, Ennis, was with Patton and neither one of them got anything more than a nick; brother Bob was a Marine on Iwo Jima and the worst that happened was when his helmet got dinged by a nickel sized piece of shrapnel; my closest brother, Lawrence, landed at Inchon, saw the worst of it at Pork Chop Hill and came back with nothing more than frost bite from the damn Korean winter. I came back whole from the Vietnam campaign, same for Eddie‘s son, George.