Robert D. Kaplan: Why vets and soldiers see things differently than civilians
... The relative obscurity of [Bud] Day's autobiography [Duty Honor Country, published in 1989 by American Hero Press, Fort Walton Beach, Florida] and other books like it about Vietnam constitutes a lesser-known aspect of our civilian-military divide. The books to which I refer should be part of our recollection of Vietnam, but they generally aren't. They aren't so much stories that soldiers tell civilians as those that soldiers tell each other. Of course, there are exceptions: most famously James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978), a book that overlaps with this category and which, in fact, did become a bestseller. But there is a range of books of lesser literary merit, yet of equal historical worth, that either have small readerships or readerships consisting overwhelmingly of military personnel, active duty and retired. The authors of these lesser-known books include marines and Green Berets (Army Special Forces) who were involved in counterinsurgency operations. Their writing reveals a second divide—that between professional warriors and conventional, citizen soldiers—which is but another facet of the warrior's alienation from the civilian world. To explore this second divide, I must also bring into the discussion a French writer and a British soldier, whose legacies include not only Indochina, but Algeria and pre-World War II Palestine—scenes, too, of messy, irregular warfare. Thus, my notion of another Vietnam library goes beyond the subject at hand.
Reading habits are influenced by the people you meet. If I hadn't had the opportunity to embed with professional warriors, I would never have heard of some of these books. For example, I learned a great deal about Bud Day and Duty Honor Country from Air Force Captain Jeremiah Parvin of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a young A-10 Warthog pilot with a "Misty" patch on his arm. The A-10 is essentially a flying Gatling gun. Its pilots hover low to the ground and loiter over the battlefield at great risk. Even as they disdain the rest of the Air Force, marines and Green Berets consider A-10 pilots true warriors. A-10 pilots feel the same bond toward combat infantry. It is a trait of professional warriors that they feel closer to those in other armed services who take similar risks than toward men and women in their own service who don't. Being in the military is not enough for these men: To earn their respect, you had to have joined in order to fight—not to better your career, or your station in life.
Capt. Parvin was serving in South Korea when I met him. He hoped soon to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. He told me all about the Misty FACs in Vietnam. He showed me a coin that he always carried in his pocket, commemorating the Mistys, with Bud Day's name inscribed on it. It was a tradition in his squadron that the youngest and oldest members always carried the coin on their person. Whenever there is a reunion of Misty warriors from Vietnam, held usually in the Florida Panhandle—where Day now lives—the pilots of Parvin's A-10 squadron, two generations removed, send a representative.
Bud Day's memoir is riveting. But it is also a raw manuscript in need of an editor. His tirades against the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the "ding-bat traitor" Jane Fonda get tiresome. To be sure, Day's address to the Navy flyers the morning I met him was laced with colorful profanities. But it was his very rage and aggression against communism, against the Democratic Party of the era, against those whom he considered weak soldiers in America's own ranks, against many things, that allowed him to survive more than half a decade of sustained torture.
Among the persons he dedicates his book to is "President Richard M. Nixon," for ordering "Linebacker I and Linebacker II," the 1972 bombings of North Vietnam (the latter known as the Christmas Bombings), and for giving the go-ahead to the Son Tay Raiders: Green Berets out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who in November 1970 stormed the Son Tay prison west of Hanoi, where POWs were believed to have been held.
Because the prisoners had been moved from Son Tay nearly four months earlier, the raid was harshly criticized by major newspapers and some Democratic senators, notably William Fulbright, who questioned the "real purpose" of the mission, beyond freeing the prisoners. A New York Times editorial said the raid was "likely to widen the home-front credibility gap." Yet as Day recounts, the raid—along with the bombing campaigns that followed—constituted enormous morale boosts for the prisoners and led to improved treatment for them. Today among Green Berets, the Son Tay Raiders are looked upon as though mythical heroes from a bygone age.
What Bud Day and other POWs specifically admired about Nixon was his willingness to strike back in a way that Johnson hadn't. Johnson's bombing halt in 1968 was seen as a betrayal by POWs, and caused disappointment and anger even throughout the U.S. military. Remember that these POWs were often combat pilots—professional warriors and volunteers that is, not citizen soldiers who were drafted. Professional warriors are not fatalists. In their minds, there is no such thing as defeat so long as they are still fighting, even from prison. That belief is why true soldiers have an affinity for seemingly lost causes....
Read entire article at Atlantic Monthly
Reading habits are influenced by the people you meet. If I hadn't had the opportunity to embed with professional warriors, I would never have heard of some of these books. For example, I learned a great deal about Bud Day and Duty Honor Country from Air Force Captain Jeremiah Parvin of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a young A-10 Warthog pilot with a "Misty" patch on his arm. The A-10 is essentially a flying Gatling gun. Its pilots hover low to the ground and loiter over the battlefield at great risk. Even as they disdain the rest of the Air Force, marines and Green Berets consider A-10 pilots true warriors. A-10 pilots feel the same bond toward combat infantry. It is a trait of professional warriors that they feel closer to those in other armed services who take similar risks than toward men and women in their own service who don't. Being in the military is not enough for these men: To earn their respect, you had to have joined in order to fight—not to better your career, or your station in life.
Capt. Parvin was serving in South Korea when I met him. He hoped soon to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. He told me all about the Misty FACs in Vietnam. He showed me a coin that he always carried in his pocket, commemorating the Mistys, with Bud Day's name inscribed on it. It was a tradition in his squadron that the youngest and oldest members always carried the coin on their person. Whenever there is a reunion of Misty warriors from Vietnam, held usually in the Florida Panhandle—where Day now lives—the pilots of Parvin's A-10 squadron, two generations removed, send a representative.
Bud Day's memoir is riveting. But it is also a raw manuscript in need of an editor. His tirades against the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the "ding-bat traitor" Jane Fonda get tiresome. To be sure, Day's address to the Navy flyers the morning I met him was laced with colorful profanities. But it was his very rage and aggression against communism, against the Democratic Party of the era, against those whom he considered weak soldiers in America's own ranks, against many things, that allowed him to survive more than half a decade of sustained torture.
Among the persons he dedicates his book to is "President Richard M. Nixon," for ordering "Linebacker I and Linebacker II," the 1972 bombings of North Vietnam (the latter known as the Christmas Bombings), and for giving the go-ahead to the Son Tay Raiders: Green Berets out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who in November 1970 stormed the Son Tay prison west of Hanoi, where POWs were believed to have been held.
Because the prisoners had been moved from Son Tay nearly four months earlier, the raid was harshly criticized by major newspapers and some Democratic senators, notably William Fulbright, who questioned the "real purpose" of the mission, beyond freeing the prisoners. A New York Times editorial said the raid was "likely to widen the home-front credibility gap." Yet as Day recounts, the raid—along with the bombing campaigns that followed—constituted enormous morale boosts for the prisoners and led to improved treatment for them. Today among Green Berets, the Son Tay Raiders are looked upon as though mythical heroes from a bygone age.
What Bud Day and other POWs specifically admired about Nixon was his willingness to strike back in a way that Johnson hadn't. Johnson's bombing halt in 1968 was seen as a betrayal by POWs, and caused disappointment and anger even throughout the U.S. military. Remember that these POWs were often combat pilots—professional warriors and volunteers that is, not citizen soldiers who were drafted. Professional warriors are not fatalists. In their minds, there is no such thing as defeat so long as they are still fighting, even from prison. That belief is why true soldiers have an affinity for seemingly lost causes....