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2001

John Burnam’s Quest To Honor A Vital Component Of The War

BY REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON & DAVID WILLSON

John Burnam joined the Army at age eighteen in 1965, soon after graduating from high school. “I wasn’t ready for college, even though I had a potential wrestling scholarship to attend Trinidad Junior College in Colorado,” Burnam writes in Canine Warrior: How a Vietnam Scout Dog Inspired a National Monument (Lost Coast, 400 pp., $28.95). “I was more interested in leaving home and being on my own than in pursuing a college education.”

Burnam arrived in Vietnam in March of 1966. He served with Company B in the First Cavalry Division’s 1st/7th not long after that unit had been involved in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Burnam was seriously wounded during that first tour of duty. He volunteered for a second, serving from 1967-68 with the 3rd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division.

He found his calling after joining the 44th Scout Dog Platoon, teaming with two remarkable German Shepherds, Clipper and Timber. Burnam’s account of his combat-heavy second tour as a scout dog handler makes up the bulk of his memoir. The last third or so is a recounting of his successful quest beginning in the early 1990s to erect a national monument to honor his fellow dog handlers and their dogs.

Burnam’s descriptions of Vietnam War combat are well drawn and evocative. That includes his detailed renderings of what it was like to work with scout dogs in the midst of Vietnam War combat at its most deadly.

The heavily illustrated section describes Burnam’s work to build a monument to the life-saving work done by untold numbers of military dogs and their handlers in every American conflict since World War II. When the U.S. Military Working Dog Teams National Monument was dedicated in 2013 at Lackland Air Force Base, the author writes, he had “accomplished my mission by building a national monument to honor them all forever!”

AO HISTORY 101

Peter Sills, an attorney who specializes in environmental causes, was one of the lawyers who helped represent Vietnam Veterans of America in our 1979 class action lawsuit against the big chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange, the extremely toxic herbicide the U.S. military sprayed in Vietnam from 1962-71. In his well-written, well-researched Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange (Vanderbilt University, 288 pp., $39.95), Sills presents a thorough overview of the subject that has been one of VVA’s highest priorities since the organization formed in 1978.

Sills offers a concise history of the herbicide beginning in the 1950s, concentrating on the chemical industry’s development of AO and the U.S. military’s decision-making about putting it to use in Vietnam as a defoliant to deny the enemy cover. Ultimately, even in the face of evidence that the herbicide had the potential to cause serious health problems among those exposed to it, the military sprayed more than nineteen million gallons of AO and other herbicides over inland forests and maritime mangrove forests in South Vietnam.

Sills agrees with virtually everyone else who has studied the history and use of Agent Orange when he writes that the manufacturers were well aware of the health effects caused by exposure to AO, but they never adequately warned the military of the dangers. 

“We kept spraying more and more of these chemicals, even though we didn’t really know whether they were doing an adequate job or, sometimes, even what that job was supposed to be,” he writes. “Denial reigned supreme. Any evidence (and there was plenty) showing that herbicides were counterproductive and causing enormous, unanticipated harm was simply brushed aside. Even worse, the chemical industry and at least a few government scientists knew that these compounds contained a hidden, extraordinarily toxic contaminant [dioxin], and they kept the information secret.”

Sills also covers the years of litigation that led to Congress passing the Agent Orange Act of 1991. That legislation, which VVA strongly lobbied for, gives the VA the power to declare certain maladies “presumptive” to exposure to Agent Orange and dioxin and enables Vietnam veterans to receive treatment and compensation from the VA for these health conditions.

There’s one minor but important misstatement about VVA in the book. Sills describes VVA as an “offshoot” of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. That is not true. Although many of VVA’s founding members had been in VVAW, Vietnam Veterans of America is an independent veterans service organization and never has been affiliated with VVAW. —M.L.

SEABEE STORIES

The stories in Jim Zitzelsberger’s Loose Ends: Stories Started During the Vietnam War (Moki Lane, 210 pp., $19.95, paper: $9.99, Kindle)  are mostly lighthearted, semi-autobiographical tales of Seabees in the Vietnam War. Death, however, often intrudes. The hero, Henry James Barthochowski, nicknamed “Cow,” is a sort of stand-in for the author.

Reading this book was an eye-opener. Until I read it, I knew little or nothing about the role of the Seabees in the Vietnam War. Now I know.

Cow is stationed in Quang Tri. Like the author, the book’s hero did two tours in Vietnam before turning twenty-one. In fiction is where the truth resides. And all of these short stories ring with truth.

Cow is one of my favorite figures in the literature of the Vietnam War. He is mild, eternal, and as memorable as Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s  darkly comic World War II novel, Catch-22. The stories in Loose Ends, in fact, teach us many of the same lessons about war that Catch-22 tried to teach us. Americans seem to need these lessons taught over and over.

This is that rare Vietnam War book of fiction that not only mentions General Westmoreland, but contains an entire story with the general as the main character—a story in which Westmoreland is making his exit from Vietnam after guiding the war since 1964.

Every story brings home the daily life of a lowly enlisted Seabee in Quang Tri and Da Nang, whether he is driving a truck, standing guard, welding a water tank, or doing any of the myriad crappy duties that the low-level Navy man must do. Many of

them, of course, are chickenshit duties that put him in constant threat of conflict with lifers who are more an adversary than the VC or the NVA.

Much of the book involves “monkey business as only young men can make it.” Said monkey business is always fun to read about.

Henry James Barthochowski will always live in my memory because the author brings him alive on every page. This Wisconsin farm boy in the Navy in Vietnam is “a listener, observer, and anything but a cheerleader for military decorum.”  His observations lead him to conclude that “the theater of war is more the theater of the absurd.”

The story that makes this point best is the one in which Cow is showering and three pretty Vietnamese girls come in to clean the shower room. They giggle and pretend they don’t see him.  Funny stuff. The same thing happened to me in Vietnam at Tan Son Nhut more than once.

Cow’s homecoming is also familiar. He comes back to his small town in Wisconsin and is castigated for his long hair, quickly grown when he returns to college. The local American Legion lets him know that they do not want him as a member as he had not been to a “real war.”

This is a fine and funny book. Read it, and you will learn plenty, too, and have more than few laughs. —D.W.

Off the Shelf, May/June 2014 Heeding The Call REVIEW BY JOHN MORT As he recounts in his memoir, I Heard My Country Calling (Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $27), James Webb has been a U.S. Senator, Secretary of the Navy, a correspondent, an author, and—the distinction, combined with his fierce intellect, that set up everything else—a fighting Marine. He’s a decorated Vietnam veteran, wounded twice. The second time, grenade fragments lodged in one kidney and near a knee, leading to a lifelong disability. Webb’s reflections on the Vietnam War don’t appear until the last quarter of his book. He writes first of his heritage, which is Southern and Midwestern. His ancestors were Scotch-Irish, some of them tenant farmers who moved from Appalachia into the drab, mosquito-infested lowlands of eastern Arkansas. Webb reflects on the South’s colonial heritage, where a privileged white elite oppressed white and black alike—trumping up phony issues to keep one race resentful of the other. Webb’s understanding of poverty perhaps explains why, in late middle age, he ran for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, when otherwise his profile would suggest that he is a moderate Republican. He has argued passionately for such issues as taxing capital gains at the same rate as income, on the grounds that the present rate is a boon to those who are already rich. Webb didn’t grow up poor, though. He and his three siblings were military brats, moving again and again as their father, James Webb, Sr., distinguished himself as an Air Force pilot, flying cargo during the Berlin Airlift, among other missions. The Webb family lived in motels, farmhouses, apartments, and even a sort of manor house in their brief deployment to England. Webb learned to hunt and fish, and became a kid entrepreneur with a unique scheme for delivering newspapers. He was an inconsistent student, but a voracious, eclectic reader. He became a talented boxer. The main thing, through these formative years, was that he knew that he “was born to be a soldier . . . bred to it, like a bird dog.” At Annapolis he elected to become a Marine. Soon enough he found himself a platoon leader, then a company commander, in AOs north of Da Nang. He has written about the Vietnam War elsewhere, and what’s most impressive here is his three-point analysis of the war: 1) American troops came out on top on the battlefield; 2) we held our own fighting the enemy, even as opinion at home soured and morale among conscripts fell; 3) but we could not counter the terrorist campaigns of the enemy, who assassinated village chiefs and sometimes even killed their own loyalists to assert control in the countryside. Webb argues that these factors caused us to lose the war. While in law school Webb wrote his great combat novel, Fields of Fire. It falls in the tradition of patriotic, World War II novels such as those by Herman Wouk, rather than those by left-leaning writers. Critics rank it highly, but the literary establishment has preferred Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Both writers were conscripted, enlisted men who perhaps found the Marine notion of “Death Before Dishonor” somewhat quaint. But that sentiment, reflected also in his title, describes Webb. He is a loyal Marine forever, and a keenly intelligent one who has often been at odds with naval doctrine and with his Senate colleagues. His country called, and Jim Webb served it imaginatively and faithfully. Would that there were more like him.