My VietNam Experience

The War That Ended Dreams

ken taylor

Jul 19, 2023

So there I was on April 29th and 30th in Saigon, unsure how I arrived and untrained in what operations I was about to perform, but I followed along and there was little need for any medical expertise anyway, my task was basically escorting people onto helicopters who were attempting to flee the city. At some time in the early morning hours I was told no more Vietnamese could be accommodated onto the helicopters. In the predawn morning of the 30th I was myself told to evacuate and helivaced to a ship waiting to transport us back to safety. A few days later I was back in Indiana.

Well that is the sum of my experience in VietNam. I had married my first wife four months prior to this experience, but we had separated (she returned in mid-May when she discovered she was pregnant) but I never mentioned what had happened while we had been apart. I never mentioned it to anyone. Somehow I delivered a probably unreasonable fear that I might become prosecuted for impersonating a military personnel if I told anyway and I somehow, probably unreasonably again, thought if no one ever knew I would never be “found out”. But I imagine 48 years later it is all moot.

The War At Home-from the perspective of the Laborer

When I returned to the States after failing to graduate high school and began to work in the foundry, the war was at its zenith, in the sense that military draftees were at the peak of their demand, I was only seventeen, so not yet eligible to be drafted. But all of my male cousins in Indiana (barring one who was much younger than I) did get drafted. And barring none they all died, no survivors on that side. One cousin did survive his first tour, but died during his first. And over the next few years I saw all of my co-workers sent to VietNam.

They didn’t go because they wanted to. That’s a misnomer, that only the youth on the campuses were against the war. We saw no more reason to go and die in VietNam’s meaningless war than they did. Indiana, at that time, was a closed shop state, and if you worked where there was a union, you were in the union just by virtue of working there. Union workers were heavily democratic voters and Humphrey (in ‘68) dominated the labor vote who had not gone to college or who, like me, had failed to get a high school by nearly nineteen percentage points, with Nixon not even achieving a third of the working class. Of course Wallace got some of this vote in the south, but the south was never heavily unionized, but Wallace took the white labor vote there that normally would have almost all have voted democratic, and if that had happened, Humphrey would have beaten Nixon by the labor vote alone by over thirty percentage points. There is some kind of mistaken revisionism that the working class turned against Humphrey and voted for Nixon because they were pro-war and disliked the disruptions of the college campuses and the civil rights movement. Actually it was many of those who were protesting that didn’t get their way at the democratic convention that turncoated and voted for Nixon. The recently graduated white-collar voted for Nixon by an advantage of six points and 22% percent advantage of those who had become professionals. Humphrey did win the overall vote of those under 40. But considering that nearly 70% of eligible voters had no college diploma and that most currently enrolled in college could not vote because they were not 21 (in fact I was still three months away from being eligible and so was 24 before I could cast my first ballot in a presidential election. Well a lot of those professionals, even among the younger voters, do not make up for the assumed disparity that laborers' despair against the VietNam war agitators caused Nixon to win. Just not true.

But what is true is that a divide began to develop between the college educated and the working class during these years. During the 50’s and the 60’s as the economy stabilized and many families could assist their children to go to college they were very proud that one of their own could become educated. That began to change with VietNam.

We thought the deferment for college students was a new thing, that it hadn’t happened previously in the second world war or Korea. We were wrong, but of course not a hell of a lot of working class kids attended college during those bygone eras. But even during those prior days it was a bone of contention. An even greater bone though was that during world war II the army was segregated and there were insufficient training facilities devoted to blacks training facilities so the amount that could be drafted was limited. One of the reasons so many black citizens were able to move north or into larger industrialized areas in the south, like St. Louis was because jobs became available to them due to so many white workers being drafted. Southern states became very vocal in opposition to the limited percentages of blacks eligible to the draft, complaining that all their white boys were gone and that their women would become vulnerable. I don’t need to say what they thought their women would be vulnerable to, do I?

My grandfather, though white, was ineligible, because he had spent two years in a federal prison. Prisoners could choose to serve in the military to be released, or trial judges could offer military service in lieu of prison, but ex-felons were not permitted to serve. World War II however did allow my grandfather to move from his dollar a week farm laboring position to a better paying factory position. And he was really proud of my father (for a while) that he was able to attend college.

But by Viet Nam the military was desegregated and black laborers seemed to becoming a majority of the draftees–college campuses were filled with white students, there was not yet “affirmative” action programs too much extent, although they began to be instituted by some college admission programs in the mid-60’s, that developed out of Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 even though the affirmative action of the order was initially only directed at employment practices of private businesses desiring government contracts. A need began to be seen that in order to get these contracts they needed the universities to begin churning out qualified black citizens and actually private business began encouraging more affirmative admissions to educational programs.

But for those of us left working in the factories, what we observed was a bunch of youth who were not eligible to be drafted marching against a war we–and most of my co-workers in the foundry were black we’s—thought they would not have to fight. (We didn’t quite realize they could be drafted after they graduated and some did get drafted and some enrolled in ROTC and of course they might be sent to the war). Our experience however was that they were not helping us and in fact if we went out and protested we could increase our chances to be drafted, we could be arrested for protesting,and ordered to “join” as an alternative to going to jail. Or we could be marked as participants and advanced up the list to be drafted. It came to the point by ‘69 where I was the only one under 25 who had been working longer than 2 years that had not been drafted. So we did resent the college protesters and we really really resented their deferments. We thought fewer of us would have to die if they were subject to the draft. And we felt we died so they could march. Since so many blacks were disproportionately being drafted, it became an issue in the civil rights movement itself.

To seemingly make the draft less arbitrary the government initiated a lottery where everyone would be drafted by the day of birth drawn randomly. I got day no. 365 for my birth year and now had no fears of being drafted. So after receiving my lottery no. I began researching how I could go to VietNam and not need to ever fire a gun. I had no desire to go in the army except to appease my guilt over so many I knew who had died. If that seems absurd to anyone who might have exempted and didn’t get drafted because they were in college at the time, then let me pose a question to you—how many people in your family, how many co-workers (co-students) did you know who died in VietNam? Any? Ten? A hundred? How about over 600 like me?

I didn’t want to be a field medic. My knowledge, at first, was an impression that medics wore white hats, didn’t carry guns, and were never shot at. Then I discovered that was a false impression. That medics in Nam were armed and needed too often shoot back just to be able to do their job. And knowing my personal inclinations towards always attempting to place myself between someone who was being attacked and the attacker, not something I have a”philosophical” stance upon, just an insane (I’m told) reactive response that I don’t contemplate, just reactively do. And knowing I have a philosophical stance against self-defense that I try very hard to adhere to-don’t hit back, I grapple and try to encircle someone who is attacking and to prevent them from placing blows upon others, but to use force or to ever strike another, I did not see that as a viable option. Not that I am afraid of death if I am overwhelmed or unable to prevent someone from attacking another—of course I fear death as much as anyone, but my personal self-respect depends on having the willingness to sacrifice myself in defense of another. In defense of myself I try to follow the teachings of the sages, in defense of others I think to hell with the sages.

So I learned about the 57th Medical Detachment and it seemed to me that there was little likelihood that in that position there was much less of a chance, not of harm coming to me, but of being put in a position where I might harm another. And carrying stretchers seemed to me to be a prohibitive opportunity to also have to be carrying an offensive weapon simultaneously.

I had not enlisted, and probably never would have, had the lottery not come about and I had not gotten eliminated from the chance of ever being drafted. I had always expected my time would come. But I bore too much responsibility to those I knew who had died or been mutilated or lost a great deal of their sanity, from their participation in that war. I could not consciously accept shirking my responsibility when the chance of being drafted was removed. After going through the enlistment procedure and qualifying for the 57th, I signed the contract to serve four years in the military with my first duty assignment post-training being VietNam. The scheduling of the next training class delayed my entry into basic for roughly two months. But when it was time, I cut my hair, bought some “conservative clothing” , and duly reported. Where I was told my school had been canceled and I would go to VietNam after AIT at Fort Sam as a regular medic. Of course I said No, I did not contract to that. They told me they couldn’t delay my basic any longer and if I didn’t agree to their new terms. I was told I would remain subject to the draft and would have no choice of unit or duty station. Well the threat was meaningless as I already knew that wasn’t going to happen.

So I never served and I never went to VietNam until 1975. I don’t know if it was a mistake and they thought I had been in the 57th or they knew I hadn’t and it was “my draft call.” But after the few hours in Saigon I felt I had in some way alleviated my responsibility to all those whom I knew who had served and died. At least I shared some service with my class-the working class. But I have to admit that I have never been able to forgive the college protesters who lived while those around me died.

And much of my “radicalization” occurred from my working class experience during the war—and while I would go in a different direction in the post war years, I know full well where the beginnings of the resentments of the working class begin. I still have the biases they developed, albeit that mine would depart ways from many of my old co-workers.

The UnUtopian Optimist

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