Special Point of Interest:

The deadline for submitting articles to be published in the May newsletter is April 24th.

Farmington HS JROTC Report - By David Stock

In Jan we hosted our own 2nd annual Scorpion Drill Meet. 11 schools from Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico competed. We are proud of this event. All of the schools praised it as an outstanding meet and promised to return next year.

February found us in El Paso, Texas, competing in the Yseleta Invitational drill meet. We came home with 2nd Place Male Physical Fitness, 3rd Place in Female Physical Fitness and Air Rifle. This was out of 52 teams competing. One week later we took our scout teams to Los Lunas for an orienteering/rifle meet. Out of 9 schools entered we dominated the event winning; 1st Place Sweepstakes along with 1st Place in both male and female team categories.

In March we attended the Cibola High School Physical Fitness competition. We placed 2nd overall and took 2nd in the male category and 3rd in the female category. Additionally we had 1st place individual winners in pull-ups, 1/2 mile run and female set-ups.

Since January we have entered our rifle teams in nation wide postal matches. Often there are over 100 teams competing in these matches. to date we have received trophies for; 2nd Place in Gainesville, FL and El Dorado, ARK along with 3rd Place in Jesuit High School match in New Orleans, LA.

As you can see, the winter season has been busy for us. Our cadets are doing very well. We are proud of them.

We are getting ready to go to Amarillo, TX drill meet on the 15th of April. We then turn our efforts toward end of school activities. Selecting a new cadet staff for next school year. Holding award and promotion boards. Culminating with our awards banquet on the 20^th of May. While it is a busy time it is also one of the most rewarding as we see the product of our hard work bringing out the very best in our cadets.

Thanks for your support!

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Veterans to Speak at San Juan College

April 17, 2000—Mr. Samuel Tso, a Navajo Code Talker from Lukachukai, Arizona, will be speaking at the San Juan College’s Henderson Fine Arts Building, Room 1010. Mr. Tso served with the Marines in the South Pacific during World War II.

Mr. Mike Hoskin ‘s presentation will follow. He served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War and later in diplomatic serve in Thailand.

May 1, 2000—Our own Charles R. Keller will be speaking about the US Army’s Air Corp during World War II. Topics include anti-submarine patrols off the United States’ west coast and the 557th Bombardment Squadron missions in Europe.

Fern Duckworth has reported that she and George gave presentations to a large crowd on April 3rd. They were pleased by the quiet attentiveness of the many young students in the standing room only theater. The student were very interested in the picture displays and the handouts.

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April Calendar

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The Rift Between WWII and Vietnam Era Veterans

What follows is the text from a 1999 Veterans Day speech presented by Mr. Phil Gioia at Veterans Auditorium, Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California. Mr. Gioia graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967, and served two combat tours in Vietnam in airborne infantry, air cavalry, and special operations units. He received two awards of the Silver Star and two awards of the Purple Heart.

Due to the length of this speech, the article will be presented in parts over the course the next few months.

November 11, 1999—Good morning to you all. When Colonel Jack Potter invited me to give the remarks at today's ceremonies, I was intrigued. When he told me the general topic that I was to address, I was concerned. There appeared, said Jack, to be a widening gulf between those who served in Word War II, and those who served during our involvement in the Vietnam War.

As we stand on the verge of a new century, and the torch passes from one generation who served to another, would I speak to this problem, Jack asked, with a view toward setting the stage for a "New Beginning" between these two groups? I gave it some thought, and believe the best way to address this issue, which is a real one, may be to make some comparisons between the two generations, then attempt to debunk some of the popular "mythology" that's been applied to those of us who fought the war in Vietnam.

Part of what I'm about to say I will give to you as though I were lecturing to a section of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where I delivered a series of talks in "Art" in the 1970s. The rest is going to be "one man's opinion".

It is noteworthy here to say that your appreciation when hearing the term "Art" will probably not square with that of the Academy's, where my lectures were delivered as part of the curriculum known as "History of the Military Art". And I think the Academy's title is right: history and the military are inextricably intertwined, and the skilled use and deployment of men, will, and resources in war is, in fact, a form of "art".

Most of what follows are my own observations and opinions. Some of it is extracted from a couple of recently-published books that go much further than the usual in taking the covers off a lot of the misinformation and disinformation that's floating around about the Vietnam war. I highly recommend them to you. They are "Stolen Valor", by Burkett, and "Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War", by Dunnigan and Nofi. Regardless of their titles, both are very much worth reading. And no, I do not own stock in Amazon.com! Let's begin by looking at a "snapshot" of World War II, and a contrasting snapshot of the Vietnam War.

During World War II, fascism was a major and direct threat to U.S. security. The war was truly global, with operations in every theater, and on all continents. Pursuit of the enemy's forces and units, anywhere and everywhere, was the word of the day, with very little restriction. The war was a full national effort, with the full mobilization of the U.S. economy, and the full support of the American people. The U.S. fought on the side of its "United Nations" Allies: Britain, France, Russia, and others.

There was universal military conscription, with very few deferments granted, except for medical problems and war-essential work. All of the Reserve and National Guard units were called to active duty. In fact, the unit which actually landed at the "Dog Green" sector of Omaha Beach in the first assault wave on D-Day was not the 2nd Ranger Battalion, as portrayed in the recent hit film "Saving Private Ryan", but Company "A" of the 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, a Virginia National Guard unit, and the direct lineal descendant, recruited from Bedford, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, of Stonewall Jackson's Valley Brigade of 1862. That real "A" Company from the Virginia National Guard was totally destroyed. It never made it off that beach. That is the reality of war.

Any man serving in the armed forces in World War II was in "for the duration". That meant that no one expected to be released from active service until the war was ended.

The war had the full support of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Many stars went into the service. Some examples: Clark Gable became a B-17 air gunner, Jimmy Stewart led B-24 bombing raids over Germany, Robert Taylor became an Air Corps instructor pilot, Sterling Hayden joined the Marines and became an OSS operative in Yugoslavia and Greece, and so on.

Even the music of World War II was inspirational, with songs like "Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer", "Remember Pearl Harbor", "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy", "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree", "I'll be Seeing You", "My Buddy", and others. Great bands, like Glenn Miller's, and singing groups like the Andrews Sisters, provided the music of that era. Some of those tunes are still popular today.

The stipulated Allied policy in World War II was total and unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. The war lasted just under four years, from December '41 to August '45, and the result was total victory in both global theaters: Europe and the Pacific.

Service men and women returning from World War II were welcomed home with unbridled enthusiasm, and the VFW and American Legion became popular and politically powerful post-war organizations.

Now let's look at Vietnam. Like fascism, communism was also perceived as a major threat to U.S. security, although (and this is a big distinction), the communist threat in Vietnam was definitely not perceived as a direct threat to American security. Our involvement in Vietnam should also be viewed in the context of America's general experience in confronting communist expansion in the post-World War II environment.

By the late 1950's, the U.S. had participated, with varying degrees of success, in various efforts against communist insurrections, invasions, or guerrilla operations. To name a few: support of the Greek government (successful) against their communist revolution in the late 1940's, support of the Philippine government (successful) against the Huk-Balahap guerrilla movement in the early 1950's, support of the South Koreans (as a UN effort, and ending in a draw) against the North Koreans and Chinese in the early 1950's, and support of the French (unsuccessful) during the French Indochina war.

U.S. foreign policy in the 1950's can be best described as one of "containment of communist expansion", and a willingness to engage in what were then beginning to be called "brushfire" wars: dirty little guerrilla wars around the world. That policy was made and carried out by men who had fought in World War II, were in many cases veterans of O.S.S., and had migrated to its successor agency, the CIA Examples: Allen Dulles, Bill Colby, Cord Meyer, Ed Lansdale, and many others. Seen in the context of the above, then, support of the South Vietnamese government against the communist Vietcong was a logical commitment for the U.S. to make.

Now for a few key differences between Vietnam and World War II. Unlike World War II, Vietnam was a limited war, largely fought in a single theater of operations: South Vietnam. Though extensive air bombing of North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was conducted, no major protracted or sustained ground campaigns were conducted anywhere but in Vietnam. Even the "invasion" of Cambodia in 1970 was a relatively limited assault, and U.S. forces were withdrawn into South Vietnam fairly quickly. No major ground assault or other operation by U.S. forces was ever launched into North Vietnam or Laos. Until the Cambodian invasion of 1970, the North Vietnamese Army (N.V.A.) enjoyed "safe-harbor" base areas in Cambodia and Laos. Division and regimental sized base areas were constantly used for replacement, rest, and re-fitting of N.V.A. units who would fight along the border in South Vietnam, then slip back into Cambodia or Laos at will. American forces were forbidden from pursuing them across a line on a map.

And the United Nations stayed out of the war in Vietnam. The U.S had to recruit its "allied" commitments locally, and even that took serious arm-twisting of foreign leaders by Lyndon Johnson. Korea sent a division of Marines, the Philippines sent a military engineering group, and New Zealand and Australia sent an excellent infantry regiment, aviation units, and their own superb SAS, counterparts of U.S. Special Forces. There was no UK presence in Vietnam, and there was definitely no French assistance. Any major allied assistance in Vietnam from the UK or other European nations would very likely have come with the prerequisite that the US fight the war to win it.

President Johnson also made a key decision early in the war that enabled the U.S. to go on thereafter, year after year, fighting a war without a strategy to win it. The war, he and his advisors determined, would be fought using active-duty, Regular forces, with a very limited call-up of Reserve or National Guard units. The manpower to fuel the war would thereby come from the draft, pulling individual young men out of their otherwise normal lives, training them, sending masses of them as replacements to Vietnam for a one-year tour, and processing virtually all of them out of the service almost immediately, or at most within a few months, of their return from the war zone.

That was a very clever decision, because the officer and senior NCO strength of Reserve and Guard units was (and still is) made up of men and women who represent key civilian personnel occupations: business executives, doctors, teachers, politicians (very important), mechanics, technicians, consultants and others, whose absence from their jobs and the economy for a protracted period of time could only be justified if there was a cohesive and direct plan to win the war in Vietnam relatively quickly, and return these key people to their civilian occupations.

While there definitely was a draft during Vietnam, it was a limited draft. There was no universal military conscription. Many deferments were issued, and deferments were easy to obtain, given enough influence or guile. Many men evaded the draft by going to Sweden, or to Canada.

While there was general support for our involvement in Vietnam at the outset, that support transitioned over time to apathy, then to general opposition to the war. On American college campuses, opposition was both active and virulent, with the establishment of Students for a Democratic Society, protests, shut-downs, and other forms of overt activity.

President Johnson and his advisors decided that the U.S. economy during our involvement in Vietnam could support the war effort, the needs of an active consumer economy, and his "Great Society" social programs, all at the same time. The deficit spending that funded all of that simultaneously gave an enormous boost to our national debt, and to the general inflationary spiral which lasted on into the 1990s.

Hollywood was generally opposed to Vietnam War. No stars went into the armed forces. Jane Fonda, however, starred in an infamous role supporting the North Vietnamese, in which she visited Hanoi, and browbeat American POWs at the "Hanoi Hilton" prison, all filmed for propaganda purposes by the communists. In a famous photo from that trip, Fonda is seated at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, a helmet adorned with a big red star on her head, and an enraptured look on her face as she gazes into the sky through the gun's sights, while beaming North Vietnamese gaze upon her with awe. That episode earned Fonda the undying enmity and disgust of almost every man who wore our uniform during the Vietnam War.

Many stars, however, visited U.S. units in Vietnam, among them Bob Hope, Joey Heatherton, Joey Bishop, Martha Raye, Charlton Heston, William Holden, and John Wayne. Martha ("Maggie") Raye was even made an honorary lifetime member of the U.S. Special Forces. Bill Holden, in an episode that became legend, once stayed up all night playing poker with the commander and XO of a Special Forces "A" Team, in a fighting camp on the Cambodian border, and drank his hosts under the table, while cleaning them out in the card game.

The music of the time was apocryphal, rather than inspirational, from groups like the Doors and the Rolling Stones, and with songs like "So Long Mom, I'm Off to Drop the Bomb", "Draft Dodger Rag", and "The Eve of Destruction".

Oddly, there were no films made about the war, during the war in Vietnam. And the ones made afterward are as dark as the music of the time: "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now", "Platoon", "Jacob's Ladder", and "Taxi Driver", all portrayed Vietnam as some sort of psychotic experience, and the men who fought there as on the hair-trigger verge of insanity or violence. There was no clear, stipulated American policy in Vietnam

American involvement began in the early 1960s as an "advisory" role to the South Vietnamese government forces, evolved in the mid-60s to direct combat, with the commitment of half a million men and some of the most famous units in the U.S. military, then in 1970 to something called "Vietnamization", during which we tried to get the South Vietnamese to pick up their share of the war (...wasn't that where we began with the "advisory" role?), and finally to withdrawal of all U.S. forces in 1973. America's involvement in Vietnam lasted for thirteen years: from 1960 to 1973. Our own Revolutionary War was shorter.

The result was no victory at all. Not even a cease-fire and demilitarization of a strip of land between the two separate nations of North and South, as had happened in Korea. Just negotiated terms, under which the United States could execute a "withdrawal with honor". Whatever that meant.

So, instead of coming home victorious with his unit, to parades, acclimation, and the support of his fellow citizens, as did most of the returning soldiers, sailors, airman or marines of World War II, the average American returning from Vietnam came home alone, in most cases as just another passenger on a chartered civilian airliner or an Air Force cargo plane, and wound up dumped onto a windy ramp at some military airbase, usually in the middle of the night, to indifference, antipathy, and in some cases antagonism.

No wonder many veterans of Vietnam prefer not to talk about their experiences. If you were yanked out of your normal life at home, trained for and shoved into a war with no end, served your own year and returned alive, often wounded, and had then been treated by your country (and especially the media) like a piece of used Kleenex, or as something the dog dragged across the doorstep, you wouldn't be quick to talk about it either.

So we see the general differences in the context between our two wars.

[Stay tuned for Part 2, The Perceptions and Myths, to be published next month.]

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President's Page

I recently received a letter from Lieutenant General Michael A. Nelson, USAF (Ret), President of TROA. He is concerned that there has been "considerable disinformation on the internet about TROA's position on health care." He enclosed a long update prepared by the Chairman of TROA's Board of Directors, Adm. Leon Edney, USN (Ret) addressing TROA's Health Care Strategy. The following is quoted from Adm. Edney’s document:

TROA is actively engaged in these and may other legislative matter on behalf of all retirees and active duty military. According to Adm. Nelson's letter, "Council and Chapters are the bedrock of TROA's legislative agenda" and if you like, you can use TROA's WEB site to urge your legislators' support. In the left margin of TROA's home page (http://www.TROA.org), click on "Lobbying Congress-Bills of Interest." Then select the bills you support and use the buttons at the top to identify the cosponsors and non-sponsors from your state. Click on the blue envelope to the right of your legislator's name to send him or her and electronic message. Or, you can use TROA's toll free Capitol Hill hot line to contact your legislators by dialing 1-877-762-8762 and asking the switchboard operator to connect you with your representatives or senators.

I encourage all of you to become active in the legislative effort. Jack Lee and John Romaine are our Legislative Committee fellows. We need to ask them how we can help.

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