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Special Point of Interest:
Chapter Receives Newsletter AwardTROA recognizes its chapters annually through awards and certificates for different projects and programs. For example, recruitment efforts is one, another is community service, and still another is Chapter Newsletter competition. This year we submitted copies of our three 1999 newsletters. There were only three because that was all we had published. The application was provided on time as requested by the rules.
This year's award, Category H, (chapters with under 40 members) TROA Newsletters was won by Steve White, publisher and editor of The Totah News newsletter. It is a well deserved honor and we congratulate Steve for his efforts and continued dedication to this project. All who have contributed stories and information deserve a word of praise and we encourage all of the members to help make it a better and better document. The Chapter has grown some this year, in fact, we’re now a Category G chapter (chapters with between 40 and 69). If we all work together, perhaps we’ll garner the Newsletter award again this year in our new chapter category. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! Joe Zeims Celebrates 80th Birthday
Calendar
Legislative UpdateThe two important bills for retirees in this session of Congress are HR3573 the “Keep Our Promises Act” by Congressmen Shows and Norwood in the House and S2003 a similar bill in the Senate. Congressmen Udall and Wilson have joined in signing the House bill, Sen. Bingaman has signed S2003, but so far Sen. Domenici has not signed on to that one. Both bills are in various stages at the present time. The main thrust of both bills is to start a process where retirees will have the same medical benefits that the Members of the Active Forces have. Recently the House passed the FY2001 Defense Spending Bill without the provisions of HR3573 which Congressmen Shows and Norwood tried to attach to the spending measure. Should you have an opportunity to speak or write to any of the Legislators let them know of your concerns on these matters. The phone number for the House is 202-225-3121, for the Senate it is 202-224-3121. They will connect you to any office. To contact a Member:
The Rift Between WWII and Vietnam Era Veterans (Part 3)The first myth is that somehow, we suffered a major military defeat in Vietnam. Our Americans forces were never defeated in combat in Vietnam, but the American people were unwilling to pay the price of victory. That is an important distinction. Sure, there were temporary, small-unit defeats, as in the Ia Drang Valley battles in 1965, at Hamburger Hill, at Dak To, and many other places, where units the size of companies were savagely mauled. But as we have seen from World War II, that's the price of war. Overwhelmingly in Vietnam, where the enemy could be found, he was defeated. The maxim was "find him, fix him, and finish him". And we had the firepower, the technology, and the logistics to do so. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces operating in South Vietnam were so badly hurt that they were unable to rebuild and launch another major offensive until 1972. But that didn't matter to the enemy. The North Vietnamese leadership could afford to lose the war on the battlefield. They knew they would eventually win it in the minds of the American people, as they eventually tired of the war, and were no longer able to accept continued American casualties. This phenomenon is not historical precedent. In every one of our wars, it has taken a lot to get Americans to commit big time. As casualties build up, especially if there is no dramatic progress in the war, public support wanes. Even in World War II, seen as the "Good War", the isolationist movement was very strong before our entry into the war, and the American people were unwilling to become involved, until Pearl Harbor. By 1945, though on the verge of victory, the American people were terribly weary of the war, and President Truman knew that a weary public would never accept the casualties predicted if American forces were to invade the Japanese home islands. Hence, his decision to use nuclear weapons to bring an end to the war in the Pacific, a decision which was overwhelmingly supported by the American people at the time. Could we have "won" in Vietnam? Probably. But always in the back of the minds of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, there lurked the example of Korea, as a lesson to them both not to allow American forces to get bottled up in a no-way-out fight against the Chinese. And victory in Vietnam would have taken a lot more military power than the half-million men we had in Vietnam at the height of the war. Here's a paradox: in 1964, America wanted to keep Communists out of South Vietnam, and U.S. public opinion overwhelmingly supported that goal. By 1968-69, we were well on the road to accomplishing this, but by then, most Americans wanted to keep Americans out of South Vietnam. That's how it works in a democracy, and the American people got what they wanted. The second myth is that the Vietnam soldier was "very different" from his World War II counterpart. The Vietnam soldier, so we have been told, was much younger (usually about nineteen), poorly educated, forced to go to war against his will, and disproportionately came from minority groups, while his better-off social superiors sat it out at home. The truth is very different. The average age of soldiers in Vietnam was just under 23. Still younger than the average 25 to 26 of those who fought in World War II, but that was a total war, with mass conscription, which picked up a lot of older men, raising the average age. And the enlisted-grade Vietnam soldier was actually the best-educated soldier in the U.S. Army up to that time. 79% of them had completed high school, as opposed to the 24% of enlisted-grade World War II soldiers who had completed high school. In the Vietnam army, 20% of the enlisted men had completed university as well. Proportionately, three times as many college graduates served in the Vietnam Army as in World War II. And that's what happens in a democracy with a draft: your Jeep driver may be better educated than you are. As far as social misrepresentation, post-war studies have proven that if anything, the numbers of blacks and Hispanics who served slightly under-represented the relative percentages of their groups in the U.S. population base. A 1992 study showed that of the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, 30 per cent came from families in the lowest third of the income range, while 26 per cent came from families earning in the highest third of the income range. Hardly a great disparity there. The third myth is that during Vietnam, draft evasion was at record levels, far higher than experienced during World War II. Wrong again. During the Vietnam War, while about half a million men (including Bill Clinton) were draft dodgers, only about 9,000 cases were prosecuted. Relatively few actually served any prison time. Contrast that with World War II. There were more than 350,000 prosecuted cases of draft evasion, and thousands were convicted and sent to Federal prisons. And while about 10,000 Americans went to Canada during Vietnam to avoid the draft, up to 30,000 Canadians entered the U.S. military, and about 10,000 Canadians actually served in Vietnam. Another major difference between Vietnam and World War II was the way draft dodgers were perceived. During World War II, draft avoidance was considered to be reprehensible; the act of a shirker, even of a coward. By the time of the Vietnam war, draft dodging had become the ethical, moral thing to do - somehow to be considered as a badge of courage - while those who had enlisted were somehow considered morally inferior, stupid, or luckless. Tom Wolfe wrote that the antiwar movement had performed a real feat of magic: "They had not only been smart enough to duck the threat of death in combat," he said, "they also managed to shift the onus onto those who fought. Never mind Ho Chi Min and socialism and war atrocities and the rest of it... the unspeakable and unconfessible goal of the New Left on the campuses had been to transform the shame of the fearful into the guilt of the courageous". The sad paradox is that draft dodgers during the Vietnam war weren't morally opposed to all wars. In April of 1975, when North Vietnam invaded and overran South Vietnam, thereby violating the agreement under which the U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam, the American antiwar movement didn't say a word. They were only worried about wars which might effect them. William Smith, dean of the anti-draft lawyers during the Vietnam era, helped about three thousand men avoid the draft. He later wrote, "Most of them - regardless of what they said - were primarily motivated by not having their lives interrupted. It became very obvious to me that it was mostly a personal, selfish thing. We could just about guarantee we could anybody out - and we did - but somebody else always went in their place." There's the real badge of shame for the draft shirkers of Vietnam: somebody else always went in their place. The fourth myth is that casualties were much higher among enlisted men than among officers in Vietnam. Enlisted men make up the majority of combat casualties in every war, because there are more of them, and the infantry (which typically carries the brunt of the fighting) is mostly made up of enlisted men. However, officers killed in action accounted for 13.5 per cent of those who died in Vietnam, although they represented only 12 per cent of the troop strength. Proportionally, the Army lost more of its officer corps in Vietnam than it did in World War II. Twice as many company commanders (captains) died in combat as did platoon leaders (lieutenants), a function of the fact that, in a jungle war, company commanders lead best from the very front, where the action is most intense. In the units I served in, there was a tongue-in-cheek saying that "if you don't get hit, you're not trying hard enough". And twelve generals were killed in action in Vietnam. So much for the myth that senior rank equals safety. Here's an intriguing fact: volunteers accounted for 77 per cent of combat deaths in Vietnam. That's right. 7 out of every 10 men killed in action (and we're not talking about deaths by accident or disease, but deaths as a result of enemy action)... had voluntarily enlisted in the armed forces. Hardly the myth that those doing the fighting were somehow "shanghaied" to the war. When people think of the number of eighteen year-old draftees who died in Vietnam, they believe the number must be in the thousands... after all, the hapless 18-year-old is the quintessential victim of the Vietnam War. The real number? 101, or less than one tenth of one per cent of all those who were killed. The fifth myth is that most Vietnam veterans are suffering from some sort of psychological disorder as a result of their "horrible" experiences. This one is perhaps the most insidious of all the mythologies about Vietnam. Most Vietnam veterans, this one goes, are traumatized by their combat experiences, and are suffering from "post traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD). They are schizoid personalities, needing only some spark to set them off. They make up most of our homeless population, are failures in real life, and are usually drug users. Let's look at PTSD. The "tooth-to-tail" ratio in Vietnam was about 1 to 9. That meant that for every one man in the jungle, there were nine others driving trucks, manning radios in the rear areas, flying support missions, cooking food, and pounding typewriters. For the ninety per cent that weren't in the jungle, Vietnam was as different an experience from that endured by their infantry counterparts as night is from day. Sure, there were attacks on rear area bases, but they were relatively rare. Most times, the biggest threat to the men in the rear areas was boredom. So, with about 1/10th of the men actually doing the fighting, with combat occurring intermittently (not to detract for a moment the horror of combat), in a climate where it was warm, and never freezing, against an enemy who had no heavy artillery, no aircraft, no tanks, and usually only light infantry weapons to use against us, how do we justify the more than half a million Vietnam Veterans who are reported by various sources to suffer from some form of PTSD? There is no doubt that men legitimately suffer from combat-related stress, and my heart goes out to those who really do. But men have suffered this sort of result from combat in all of our wars. Steven Crane wrote about it in "The Red Badge of Courage"; the story of one man grappling with his fears in the Civil War. An interesting tale, too, since Crane himself had never seen any combat before he wrote the book, but he got it dead right. In World War I, it was called "shell shock". In World War II; "combat fatigue". An Army Medical Corps study published in the 1980's indicates that the percentage of combat-related psychological disorders has historically been about 4 to 6 per cent of the men committed to combat. If that were applied to Vietnam, the number would be grossly lower than the half million men who are supposedly wandering around out there with PTSD. So where do these huge estimates come from? Programs for treatment of PTSD are now government-funded, and the agencies that handle veterans reporting these disorders wouldn't be able to justify their current budgets if they didn't have active constituencies. Again, I don't not detract from men who truly suffer from these disorders, but there is an excellent economic maxim that says: to diminish an activity, tax it; to encourage an activity, subsidize it. Unlike any other combat-related disorder in our history, we've created an open-ended subsidy program for this one. And, more recent surveys of Vietnam veterans actually give some surprisingly different numbers than those contained in the popular "myths" about Vietnam veterans. These studies show that 91 percent of Vietnam veterans are proud to have served during that war, and 74 percent believe their service was necessary. The overwhelming majority of those who served in Vietnam (about 92 per cent) received honorable discharges. About 88 percent have transitioned to civilian life without difficulty, and the income of the average Vietnam veteran is 18 to 20 percent higher, with a lower unemployment rate, than his non-veteran contemporaries. Fewer than 0.5 percent of them have been in jail, contrasted to the national lock-up rate of 1.5 percent. Men who served in Vietnam are also less likely to be homeless than those who did not serve. Finally, we come to the saddest Vietnam myth of all: the bogus Vietnam Veteran. At a dinner in the 1980's given by a local chapter of the Decade Association, the alumni group of ex-Special Forces soldiers, one of the members said, "Is it my imagination, or is everybody I meet these days claiming to have been a Green Beret in Vietnam? The truth is that there are men out there claiming to have been war heroes, or to have served on secret missions in Vietnam, whose service records, if given close scrutiny, will show they never served in Vietnam, or if they did, did not participate in combat, and certainly never earned the awards and decorations they so blithely wear on their well-weathered camouflage-patterned fatigues. Which brings me to another point. Camouflage-patterned fatigues were seldom issued during the Vietnam War, except to certain types of special operations units. Unless a man served in Special Forces, Rangers, Marine Force Recon, or SOG, for example, he wore a rather drab-looking, jungle-green fatigue uniform, which faded to a light green with weathering and/or launderings. Even the airborne units like the 101st, the 82d and the 173d Brigade wore plain jungle green. And the camouflage pattern that was worn was a very distinctive tiger-stripe, that you don't see on the current crop of Stateside "commandos". In the 1980's, when I worked in downtown San Francisco, I used to see a lot of guys standing on street corners with signs saying "Homeless Vietnam Vet", or "Help a Veteran". I used to stop and ask them where they served. I don't do that anymore. Most of them, I found, had never served in the military, or if they had, had never got closer to Vietnam than San Diego. It is a sad thing when one man robs another of his honor, his glory, and his reputation, but that's been happening for some time now. And, I don't think it's unique to Vietnam; it probably happened to the World War II generation, too. Well, it was an interesting time, as the Chinese say. The war in Vietnam brought out the best and the worst of the American people. The real story of how that war fits in our national and psychological histories probably won't be written dispassionately until the generation that fought it, protested it, and then argued over it interminably are dead and gone. I leave that to future historians, but I hope what I've offered you has cleared the air a little bit about the disparity between the generation that fought World War II and the one that went off to Vietnam. In closing, let me say that if you older guys look in the mirror and squint a little bit, you'll find the face under the helmet looking back at you from Hue and Khe Sanh and Bu Dop and Tay Ninh isn't so different from the one you wore in North Africa, or Normandy, or at Guadalcanal, or on Tarawa. Thank you very much, and may God always watch over our nation. Phil Gioia is ex-Mayor of the Town of Corte Madera, and CEO of a local high-technology firm. He 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 was awarded two awards of the Silver Star and two awards of the Purple Heart. Phil and his wife and daughter live in Corte Madera. 1999 Veterans Day Address Note from the editor: I hope you have enjoyed the reprint of Mr. Gioia’s Veterans Day address. I have not included any pictures in Part Three so I could fit the remainder of the address in this issue. Have a great summer!! President's PageFellow Totah Chapter TROANS: First of all congratulations to LTC. Steve White, USA (Ret.) editor of our Newsletter. We are all aware of the honor bestowed upon the Newsletter by TROA, declaring it winner of the 1999 Category H (chapters with less than 40 members) contest. The award is an indication of the caliber of document Steve puts out.
Again, let me encourage those of you that have access to the Internet to log in to the Web Page (www.totah-TROA.org). This is another of Steve's contribution to the Chapter and it is being used as a model by other units in the New Mexico Council of Chapters. Make yourself familiar with this media. Secondly, I encourage all of you to attend the Chapter’s annual picnic. It will be held at Admiral Black’s guest house (called Kokopelli’s cave) on July 15, 2000. Have a GREAT summer. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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We
were officially notified through the New Mexico Council of Chapters and received
the award on May 6, 2000. This award is for excellence in appearance, content,
interest stories, and timely information for the membership. The award is given
to the editor of the Newsletter to recognize his/her professionalism and
dedication to the good of the chapter.
The
membership helped LtCol. Joseph Zeims celebrate his 80th birthday during the
last membership meeting before the summer break. CONGRATULATIONS Joe, we wish
you many more healthy and happy birthday’s in the future!
The
cake was provided by San Juan Country Club. Sorry about the picture not being
tall enough to take in Joe’s full stature.
As
we all know, he is the editor, publisher, often writer, printer, mailer, etc.
The Newsletter is really a one man and one woman (Eileen) operation. She will
tell you she does not do anything, but she does and keeps Steve enthused about
it. Thank you Steve and Eileen for bringing such honor to the Chapter after the
first three months of our charter.
