Looking back at Vietnam War experiences
PBS recently took two retro looks at the Vietnam War. One was the highly acclaimed Ken Burns’ documentary on the full spectrum of Vietnam, going back to the fall of the Nguyen dynasty during World War II, continuing through the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and finally covering the American combat in Vietnam.
The other program was “American Medevac” which focused on a 1971 rescue mission at Hawk Hill, an emergency aid station at an army fire base in central Vietnam. I was particularly interested in these programs because I was drafted and served four years in the Army during the war, including prosecuting many courts-martial appeals that had been tried in Vietnam.
Burns’ series provides a panoramic view, providing a dramatic parallel timeline of events in Southeast Asia and Washington, so that each vignette was a tiny building block of history. We could watch President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara have a discussion that, at least in hindsight, sounded like a concession that the war was unwinnable. Yet they seemed stymied as to how to withdraw. While these talks were going on in Washington, our country’s best and brightest were dying in Vietnam — 58,000 young men and women.
“American Medevac” was produced by Morton Dean, a longtime CBS News reporter and, later, a news anchor on ABC’s Good Morning America. During Dean’s assignment in Vietnam, he hitched a ride on a Huey helicopter as its crew rescued soldiers who had been badly wounded by a booby trap. Forty years later, Dean sought out the medevac crew and identified three soldiers who had been airlifted to Hawk Hill that fateful day.
Dean sought to reconnect those people to provide some closure to their time in Vietnam and explore how their experiences had affected the rest of their lives. Casualties like this happened virtually every day. Typically the medevac crews would not even know the names of the wounded soldiers. When Dean connected the crew to the wounded men, it was the first time they had met. These meetings reflected the anguish of the incident and the gratitude each had for the other. What was so clear and so numbing was to see the psychological effects on them as they worked their way through survivors’ guilt and their flashbacks to combat.
Several years ago I met Morton Dean. Over a long dinner we discussed Vietnam generally and this incident specifically. As he continued to work on these materials he posted them online and asked me to review them. As Dean scoured the country to reunite these men, I was taken by his passion for the vets and their stories. His interviews opened the scars of the war for anyone who had family or friends die in Vietnam or suffer mental or physical injuries from their service.
The Ken Burns series provided me with helpful perspective, but I know some veterans who served proudly in Vietnam who thought the program had cast a negative light on their service. From a personal standpoint, I concluded that the lives and views of the Hawk Hill survivors (then and now) gave me a better insight to the experiences of our Vietnam veterans. I will be forever grateful. Dayton attorney Merle Wilberding is one of our regular community contributors.