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2001

Letters

A THING IN COMMON

As a longtime member of VVA, I feel compelled to comment on the most recent issue of The Veteran. Two items bothered me. First, a writer in the “Letters” column complained about “four pages” of poetry in a previous issue. He prefers to read about chapter activities.

During my years active in the local chapter, I have learned that Vietnam vets are as diverse a group as the general public. We have only one thing in common, and that is our service to our country in that faraway land. No one speaks for all of us, and no one is the “typical” Vietnam vet. But there is a bond. And that bond should start with respect for each other.

As vets, we have different interests and different ways to express our experiences, and those ways can include the various arts. I want The Veteran to offer me exposure to those vets and what they are doing. Keep up the good work.

Secondly, I want to thank The Veteran for the great pieces on Gold Star Mothers. As did many Vietnam veterans, I experienced cold shoulders and condescending attitudes when I first walked into a traditional veterans establishment. Now I read that Gold Star Mothers of previous wars had the same attitude toward the mothers of my fellow vets.

My younger brother served fourteen months near the DMZ, and shortly after he returned I went over for eighteen months. Today I am a father and grandfather, and I cannot image the stress and anxiety that my brother and I put our parents through for nearly three years. Should something have happened to one of us, it’s unthinkable that anyone who experienced a loss from a previous war would look down on my mother as though her loss were somehow less than theirs. To those Gold Star Mothers from “our” war who persevered and made the organization a better place for future generations, I thank you.

Ted Larson
Minneapolis, Minnesota

NOVEL RECOMMENDATIONS

In the July/August issue I read “The Aftermath” article on Vietnam War poetry. First, thank you, Vietnam veterans, for your service. I am asking for the names of other veteran authors that veterans would recommend. I have become a fan of Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran and excellent writer who is the author of The Things They Carried. I, an Iraq veteran, am glad to see my fellow soldiers sharing their experiences through art and literature. The poems are outstanding, and I enjoyed reading them all.

Allen Utterback
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

David Willson replies:

Thanks for your letter about the poetry article. Thanks also for your service in Iraq. I appreciate your response to the article and your request for the names and works of other worthy authors. I’ve picked just six to start with. More would be daunting for both of us, considering the thousands of possibilities. 

Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers
Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters
John Clark Pratt, The Laotian Fragments
Ward Just, Stringer
Robert Roth, Sand in the Wind
William Turner Huggett, Body Count

The Army, Air Force, and the Marines are represented in these fine novels. There is both action and reflection. I hope you enjoy them.

NOT JUST FOR LIBRARIES

I write in response to Mr. Buzin’s letter in the September/October issue denouncing your publication of poetry.

I was saddened by Buzin’s letter. He wants more reports on chapter activities at the expense of any hint of mind- and memory-provoking poetry. I cannot fathom the notion of providing even more notes of chapter meetings—poking holes in the sky with angry fingers or even the positive side of promoting activities and projects to benefit our fellow vets—and not offering some insight into the creative mind of some of those vets. 

If he wanted to read poetry, Buzin said, he’d check out a library book. That seems on the surface unlikely, either wanting to read or checking a book out. Mr. Buzin may depend entirely on the statistical fulminations of chapter activities in his dealings with the past, but I, for one, appreciated the inclusion of this selection of poetic works. 

I’ve long known of David Willson’s work in that cloistered arena, and I am grateful
for Editor Michael Keating’s consideration and perception in making these works available. Well done.

Robert Flanagan
By Email

HAVING IT ALL

For a couple of the veterans at our local Vet Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas, poetry has been an important way to get in touch with emotions and experiences inside themselves, and to communicate them to others. And it’s important to read the activities of VVA groups and members around the country: This is how we hear about old friends and get ideas how to help vets here at home.   

Let’s have both.

Carl Guhman
Ft. Smith, Arkansas

NO PLACE FOR POWs

On September 25, 2002, Staff Sergeant Ryan Foraker went missing from his assignment at Guantanamo Bay. This soldier had a sterling record. GITMO is not a location that one can easily or even with difficulty go missing from. GITMO also qualifies one for hazardous duty pay. Yet despite my urging, no organization claiming to represent veterans has taken up his cause. Not Vietnam Veterans of America. Not the National League of POW/MIA Families. Repeated emails and letters to VVA’s POW/MIA chair Richard DeLong and the League’s national coordinator Lacy Rourke went unanswered.

Do any of these organizations really care anymore? I do. Staff Sergeant Foraker is an MIA in my book unless the Castro regime somehow has him as a POW, which I doubt. Either way, we owe the Foraker family much more after nearly fourteen years since his unusual disappearance.

The VVA motto, “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another,” sounds great, but we need to put those words into practice. Staff Sergeant Ryan Foraker’s mother Angie said it best: “I have given my country three of my sons—one in the Army, one in the Navy, and one in the Air Force. This is not the way I expected to be treated. I want to know what is going on.”

Bob Faro
Nazareth, Pennsylvania

LITTLE STATEMENTS

John Raiden’s letter in the September/October issue made me think back a couple of years to when my wife and I were dining at a seafood restaurant. We noticed several young men enjoying their meal, but one of them kept looking in our direction. He got up and came over to our table and introduced himself as a Lance Corporal who had just come back from Afghanistan.

He said that he noticed my Vietnam veteran hat. He asked about my tour of duty and told me about his. As he was getting up to return to his friends, he gave me something that has only happened once in the forty-six years since I came home: a very firm handshake and “Welcome Home, Soldier.”

Little statements mean the most.

Ron Drinks
By Email

HUE ’68

The otherwise well-done book review in the September/October issue repeats some common errors about the Hue battle. There is wide agreement that the NLF—not the North Vietnamese Army—executed civilians in Hue. What is in dispute is the number of civilians killed and how they were killed. Douglas Pike, a staunch proponent of the “bloodbath theory” and the author of The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror, gave a number of about three thousand.

Historian Marilyn Young (The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990) cites an estimate of between three hundred and four hundred. Journalist Ngo Vinh Long estimated the number as high as seven hundred dead. The dead were likely killed by what photojournalist Philip Jones Griffith called “the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen.”

Further, some of the dead were from RVN assassination teams that moved through the city during the final days of the battle looking for NLF supporters who had surfaced and cooperated with the revolutionary administration: students, priests, teachers, and others, according to Marilyn Young.

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci claimed eleven hundred people were killed following the U.S. and RVN reoccupation. Stanley Karnow wrote in Vietnam that their bodies “were thrown into common graves with the Viet Cong’s victims.”

The claim of bloodbaths was a cliché for apologists of the war. The NLF were dedicated and ruthless when they thought they needed to be, but the carnage visited on Vietnam was largely from U.S. anonymous firepower, and most of the killing was done with artillery and airstrikes. That is particularly true of the civilian deaths. That is still true today.

Mike Dedrick
By Email