My first memory of anything having to do with Vietnam, then called Indochina, was newsreel footage of C-119s dropping supplies to the French garrison at Dienbienphu. It was 1953, I was eight years old and at my grandparent’s house. Over the next decade, I heard occasional mention of the region and saw articles in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and various magazines. There was a piece in a GI Joe or some other military-related comic book about the “farmers-by-day, soldiers-by-night” guerrillas in that far away land.
After graduating from high school in 1963, I enlisted in the Air Force. I remember seeing an airman in civilian clothes wearing a jacket (in San Antonio in summertime) that said on the back “I’m going to heaven when I die, I’ve served my time in hell – Saigon” with a date, probably 1962-63. The air police technical school was there at Lackland Air Force Base. I remember a rumor going around that an AP graduating class was going to Vietnam. I saw Vietnamese officer candidates around the base. After Lackland I went to Amarillo AFB for jet mechanic training. I don’t recall any talk about Vietnam. I got orders to Pope AFB, NC. I knew that Pope had C-123s and they were involved in South Vietnam. But I had been trained as a jet mechanic and was going to C-130s, not C-123s. When I got to Pope, I learned that the C-123s were leaving the base as brand new C-130Es came in to replace them. As it turned out, Pope was the one Air Force base most involved in Vietnam, or it had been. The wing’s C-123s had mostly gone to Vietnam and the last of them were going to Hurlburt Field, Florida to be used to train crews for duty in South Vietnam. Many men in the wing had spent time in Vietnam already, at a time when most Americans had no idea where the country was. A movie about a Marine helicopter pilot in Vietnam was shown in the base theater. The pilot, played by Marshall Thompson, was shot down. He was rescued by South Vietnamese paratroopers who jumped out of C-123s. A cheer went up in the theater when a V of C-123s appeared on screen.
A few months after I got to Pope, an opportunity came along for me to train into the aircraft loadmaster career field. Loadmasters had recently become part of the C-130 flight crew. I jumped at the chance to go on flying status. A little over a year after I got to Pope, I was qualified as a combat-ready C-130 loadmaster. I was on my way to Vietnam but didn’t know it. The training course I went through at Pope included training on the C-123 “just in case” we might get orders to Vietnam. But we were in C-130s. There were several C-130 squadrons in the Pacific, one in Japan and three on Okinawa, and I knew men who had come back from there. Some Tactical Air Command C-130 wings had squadrons on temporary duty in the Pacific but our TDY squadron was at Evreux, France. I had been at Evreux a few weeks when we got word we were moving to Kadena, Okinawa. President Lyndon Johnson had ordered the “Rolling Thunder” bombing campaign in North Vietnam and the Air Force had ordered several TAC fighter squadrons to the Pacific. We were going to Kadena to support them. As it turned out, we went back to Pope first.
My crew arrived at Kadena in early May – after flying several missions carrying troops from the 82nd Airborne from Pope to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Those missions were combat missions. Soon after we got to Kadena, my crew went on a mission to Saigon. My aircraft commander was a Vietnam veteran. He had spent a year there flying C-123s before going to Pope. We were on a “stage” mission, meaning we surrendered the airplane at Tan Son Nhut to another crew and went downtown to a hotel. We had stopped at Nha Trang on the way in. It felt like I was being slapped in the face with a hot, wet towel when I opened the airplane door. There were no quarters at Tan Son Nhut so we went downtown to a hotel, the Tan Loc. Captain Shoupe, our AC, found the hotel after the people at the control center at Tan Son Nhut give him a list of hotels to call. Another airplane was supposed to come in the next day but it was three days before it got there. We were downtown and got to see a little of the city. It was crowded with refugees from the countryside. They were sleeping in doorways. It was a depressing sight. Our airplane finally came in early one morning. We were scheduled to make a stop at Da Nang to drop off cargo. It was over 100 degrees before daylight. I thought about the poor Marines patrolling outside the base.
As it turned out, that was the only trip we made to South Vietnam during our two months at Kadena. We went home in July. In September, we went to a brand new base in the Philippines on an island called Mactan. We would be there until December. Our missions were mainly in support of the steadily escalating war in Vietnam. Sometimes we flew north to Clark Field on Luzon to pick up a load. We were on one such mission carrying men and equipment from a radar site to a place I’d never heard of called Dong Ha when we took our first hit. We didn’t know it. I found the bullet hole in the left flap when we got back to Mactan later that night. We figured we got it while on approach to the dirt strip. We flew missions carrying Australian troops from Vung Tau where they had just arrived on a ship to Bien Hoa. We went to Kimpo Air Base in Korea and picked up a load of Korean troops and their commander, a brigadier general, and took them to Qui Nhon. We mostly carried cargo but sometimes we carried troops. Some were Vietnamese. Whenever Vietnamese troops traveled, their entire family went with them. Most of the women’s teeth were stained with betel juice. They carried jars of stinky nuoc mam, a sauce made of fish oil. We flew missions into places like Pleiku, where I learned that a big battle was going on not far away – and a lot of Americans were being killed. We hauled KIAs, dead soldiers in rubberized body bags. I don’t remember the first one. I know I dreaded it because I had a fear of dead bodies as a boy. I quickly got used to carrying them, to the point that I once sat beside a KIA in a body bag and a Vietnamese KIA in an aluminum coffin and ate my lunch.
We went back home and I thought my time in the war was finished. The Air Force had sent eight C-130 squadrons to the Pacific, including one from Pope. I wasn’t picked for the move. When I got back after leave over Christmas, I was shocked when the squadron clerk met me in the barracks and told me I had orders. I was going to Naha, Okinawa. I was not excited. I was supposed to be there in two weeks but as it turned out, there were few slots for transportation to the Pacific and I got about a month at home before I finally left Seattle on a civilian flight.
The senior loadmaster in my new squadron briefed me and another newly arrived loadmaster what to expect. I was somewhat shocked to learn that we’d be flying missions other than airlift, and some of them would be over North Vietnam. I was surprised when the orientation briefing for new personnel was classified – my new unit had a number of classified missions – flare missions, leaflet missions, high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) parachute operations and some missions so classified no one seemed to know what they involved. (They were CIA-directed missions.) I got to Naha on a Monday evening. I left the following Sunday for my first mission, a trip to the new airbase at Cam Ranh Bay. When we got there, we learned we’d be shuttling cargo, mostly ammunition, into Ban Me Thout and Tuy Hoa in support of an operation between the two airfields. We carried a few passengers. We flew into Ban Me Thout one morning and dropped off some passengers with our load. One was a Spec Five. We went back in there later in the day and were informed we’d be picking up a KIA. Now, my instructor was a bit of a prevaricator and I didn’t look at the names, but he claimed the body was that of the Spec Five we had carried in earlier in the day.
I had been at Naha three months when I was sent TDY to Ubon, Thailand to BARREL ROLL, the code name for interdiction missions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. The mission had started out at Da Nang more than a year before then moved to Thailand, possibly because two airplanes had been destroyed in a mortar attack, but also because a new C-130 mission was starting at Cam Ranh Bay and funding was transferring to it. The mission operated differently than it had at Da Nang where a single C-130 would go out with two B-57s and a Marine EF-10 electronic countermeasures airplane. After the move, the C-130s operated as single-ship forward air control airplanes to search for trucks on the Trail. Each C-130 carried a cargo compartment full of 24-million candlepower flares to illuminate any targets for fighter attack. It promised to be an exciting mission and it was. A fleet of eight airplanes had been sent to Ubon along with an equal number of crews. Four missions went out each night, two over Laos operating as BLIND BAT and two over southern North Vietnam operating as LAMPLIGHTER. The LAMPLIGHTERs were the most exciting. I’d been told that the mission had once operated as far north as Hanoi but by the spring of 1966, missions were confined to Route Packages One and Two, the southern part of North Vietnam from the coastal city of Vinh south to the demilitarized zone separating the two Vietnams.
My first mission was a LAMPLIGHTER. Our crew was split up to go out with other crews in order to see how everything worked. We started getting fire as soon as we entered North Vietnamese airspace over the Mu Gia Pass on the border between North Vietnam and Laos. “I want my mother!” I thought. I’d been shot at before but it was the first time I’d actually seen the tracers coming up at us. The rest of the night wasn’t as exciting. We flew one night on, one night off. My second mission was with my crew two nights later. There were four loadmasters on each crew, actually one assigned as loadmaster and the other three as flare kickers. I was the crew loadmaster but we rotated duties, with one acting as the loadmaster/safety in front of the load to be ready to jettison everything if we were hit and the other three maintaining positions as flare loaders and kicker. The kicker sat on the cargo door holding the flares in the aluminum flare chute with his feet, hence the name. The other two took the flares out of the bins holding them and loaded them into the chute.
Missions over Laos were highly restricted. The crew was briefed each night on specific targets to attack but we spent much of the time flying around looking for lights on the ground. We’d occasionally drop a string of flares to see what might appear. If we spotted trucks, we had to get permission before we could send fighters in to attack them. The pilots communicated with another C-130 operating as a command and control ship. They in turn communicated with the Laotian embassy and other agencies. The local province chief had to give permission before we could send fighters in to attack trucks. Usually by the time we got permission, the trucks had pulled into “a village” and couldn’t be attacked. Many “villages” were fake and had been constructed by the communists to provide sanctuary for trucks coming down the trail. There were also restrictions in North Vietnam. At the time we were operating under such restrictions, some members of the press were writing that American aircraft were attacking “indiscriminately.”
Although I didn’t know it for more than thirty years, the true highlight of our Ubon tour was the discovery of Dieter Dengler, a Navy pilot who had been shot down on a mission over Laos and held by the Pathet Lao until he managed to escape. There were nights when things got really exciting, such as the night our navigator nodded off and we got too close to a radar-controlled flak trap. I was sitting on the door when the tracers started coming up. The pilot threw the airplane into a Split-S to get away from them. I felt the airplane going over and was expecting to fall off the door but he held positive Gs. Later that night I watched a fighter go in and destroy those guns with cluster bombs. Seeing those red tracers come up at the fighter then seeing all those little winking lights as the CBU went off was one of the thrills of my life. I was elated that the gunners who had tried to kill ME a few hours before were now dead, dying and maimed.
I went back to Naha in July and back to “trash-hauling.” The Naha and Tachi squadrons were now supporting a new mission out of Cam Ranh. We’d go down for sixteen days – a day to fly to Cam Ranh, two weeks flying missions and a day to go back home. Scheduled passenger missions had been set up but most missions hauled cargo, some out of Cam Ranh to places like Qui Nhon, where the Army had a large depot, Saigon and Bien Hoa. Some were tactical, meaning they operated into forward fields in direct support of combat operations. We carried anything and everything but our most frequent cargoes were ammunition and fuel. We had a similar mission operating out of Don Muang Airport at Bangkok. It was set up the same but we weren’t getting shot at. We also lived downtown in a modern hotel while we lived in a Quonset Hut at Cam Ranh. I spent a lot of time at Cam Ranh on duty loadmaster. Duty loadmasters were there to rig and derig seats, load airplanes at the beginning of a crew’s duty day and unload them at the end so the crew loadmaster didn’t have to come out early or stay after the rest of the crew left. A crew’s duty day was based on when the first crewmember arrived at operations and ended when they left. We were also there to fly as second loadmaster on drop missions but drops were few and far between.
We got shot at - a lot. We usually didn’t know it. I was on a night mission and went into Tan Son Nhut. The aerial port crew asked me if we knew we were being shot at as we were on approach. “Them mothers was hosing your ass. There was tracers all over the place.” They saw a stream of tracers coming up at us as we were on approach. They came out of the Cholon District, where there was a VC presence. We hauled KIAs, and sometimes body parts. One night we went into Pleiku. An Army Chinook helicopter had crashed there the day before. We got word we would be picking up the remains. They brought out a single body bag on a stretcher. There was a lump in the middle. That lump was all that was left of five men. It smelled like fresh meat.
Although air evacuation of casualties was part of the troop carrier mission, we hardly ever flew them because the Army and Marines had a large helicopter air evacuation presence. I only flew one and it was a doozy. We were on a night cargo mission and were getting ready to leave Da Nang to return to Cam Ranh when the ramp vehicle driver came out and told me to rig for air evac. We were going to Dong Ha to pick up a Marine with a head wound. An air evac crew consisting of a nurse – male – and two med techs came out. The four of us rigged the airplane while we were taxiing out. The numbers of wounded kept growing while we were in flight. The base was under attack and a fire fight was underway right off the end of the runway. We went in over the flying tracers so we wouldn’t be exposed on the ground. We departed Dong Ha with about twenty litters and an equal number of “walking wounded”. The guy with the head wound died while enroute to Da Nang. After we got the wounded off the airplane, I stood by the body while waiting for graves registration to come out and get it. I looked down at that dead face and wondered about the person it had belonged to. The cargo compartment was a bloody mess. I told the pilot to call for a firetruck to come out and wash it out. They sent a water truck. The crew chief came out to meet his airplane when we landed. He took one look inside then turned around and started puking. The water truck driver handed me the hose and went back outside. I washed American blood and gore onto Vietnamese soil.
My four-year enlistment was up in July. I extended by six months to see what kind of assignment I’d get. My assignment was to my liking – to Robins AFB, Georgia and C-141s. I went ahead and reenlisted. I was at Cam Ranh on duty loadmaster. I had been at Naha for eighteen months. I left thinking I was through with Vietnam. I was wrong.
My new squadron was a special missions squadron, meaning we were tasked with the transport of special weapons – nukes. When we weren’t flying nuke missions, we flew “channel traffic” missions for Military Airlift Command. While some missions went to Europe and the Middle East, most were to Southeast Asia. We “staged” at certain locations, meaning a crew would fly an airplane to a stage base then wait for another airplane to come in. Stage missions for Southeast Asia trips were at Elmendorf, Alaska; Yokota, Japan; Kadena, Okinawa then back through Elmendorf to a MAC base on the East Coast – Charleston, SC; Dover, Delaware and Robins. The MAC wing at McGuire, NJ was getting C-141s but I don’t remember ever staging there. Missions went over fully loaded and usually came back empty. Some came back as air evacs and staged through Yokota since the Army had a large hospital nearby. MAC air evacs were different. The patients had been treated and were dressed in hospital pajamas. Some were in litters and some were ambulatory. There was no blood. The medical crews consisted of two female flight nurses and two male med techs. Some nurses were cute. We also carried bodies, but they were not in body bags. They had been processed at one of the two mortuaries in Vietnam and were in aluminum shipping containers. The shipping containers were identical to those used for other things except they weren’t painted. There were no flags and no fanfare. Human remains, as they were identified, went to Dover, Delaware. (Human remains applied to embalmed remains – men killed in combat and carried in body bags were KIAs.) West Coast remains went to Travis AFB, California. We got the same combat pay and tax exemption as men and women actually based in South Vietnam. All that was required to qualify was to “penetrate the ADIZ,” the air defense intercept zone that identified Vietnamese airspace. We could get the pay for overflying Vietnam on the way to and from Thailand.
I had been at Robins for just over a year when orders came in sending me back to the war. This time I was going to Clark Field, Philippines. I was going back to C-130s but to newer C-130Bs; at Naha I had flown on C-130As. The war had changed during the time I was back in the States, at least I was based in the States although I was out on trips most of the time. The infamous Tet ’68 attacks had brought the war into a new phase. Losses had increased, including airlift airplane losses. Naha hadn’t lost a single airplane while I was there. A number of C-130s had been lost by all the Pacific Air Forces C-130 squadrons in 1968, some on the ground but most in the air. Some were lost to accident. Losses would continue into 1969.
Nothing had really changed except I was on a newer model airplane at a different base. When I first got to Clark, we were rotating to Tan Son Nhut and staying in a hotel in Cholon. I’d only been there a few months when our TDY base changed to Cam Ranh. At least new air-conditioned quarters had been constructed and opened in my absence in a complex north of the airfield called Herky Hill. Herky Hill was a base in itself. We had our own chow hall, our own open-air theater, we even had our own Red Cross rec center with real roundeye girls running it. (Roundeyes were not a novelty for us – there was a WAF squadron at Clark with more than 400 women, and a number of teenage dependent girls on the base.) We also had a new mission – we, some of us, were dropping ten-thousand-pound bombs. The TNT bombs were left over from the B-36 bomber days. The huge bombs were ostensibly being used to clear helicopter landing zones but the targets were often enemy base camps. I got a 100-KIA bomb damage assessment on the first bomb I dropped. Bomb drops were radar-guided by ground radar units used to control B-52 missions.
When we weren’t bombing, we flew trash-hauling missions but things had changed while I was in the States. The war had moved south to the Cambodian Parrot’s Beak area north of Saigon. Several airfields had been constructed right on the Cambodian border and that is where we went. Those airfields were “hot spots.” During my previous tour, the VC had been equipped mostly with mortars with only about a 2-mile range. Now they had Russian 122 millimeter rockets with a 12-mile range. The North Vietnamese had a large presence just inside Cambodia. They’d cross over and attack US and South Vietnamese forces inside South Vietnam, and they had the airfields zeroed for their rockets. C-130s had picked up a new nickname – Mortar Magnet. Whenever a C-130 landed, the base could count on a rocket barrage as soon as the rocket crews could set up. Our pilots had learned to get in and get out quickly. My crew was rarely on the ground more than five minutes. If a crew was on the ground for ten minutes, they could count on being a target. We set up to “combat offload” our cargo, meaning we opened the ramp and door then released the load and taxied forward out from under it. We hardly ever carried anything out of the forward bases – except KIAs in rubber bags and empty pallets.
I was on one sortie into Tonle Cham, one of the Cambodian border airfields, when we suddenly lost an engine while on short final. It just wound down. When we got on the ground back at Tan Son Nhut, maintenance found that the power lever control cable had been hit by a bullet. We were carrying a company of troops when we lost the engine. We’d picked them up at Bien Hoa where they had sit around drinking beer while waiting for us to come in. A thunderstorm was approaching Tonle Cham when we went in to land, and we started hitting turbulence when we were right off the end of the runway. That’s when the engine quit. I didn’t realize it because I was wearing headsets but the pilot had inadvertently left the PA on after briefing the passengers at Bien Hoa. They heard it all. All of a sudden, one puked. There is a rule in flying, when one pukes, they all puke – and they all puked, including the Army captain who was sitting on the bunk in the cockpit. It was one big mess. At least I didn’t have to clean it up. Somebody had decided it was maintenance’s job to clean up after air evacs and sick passengers, not the crew’s.
One of the saddest missions I flew was the one with the body of a young nurse who had been killed the night before in an attack on Army casualty evacuation hospital just north of Herky Hill. The engineer and I were awakened by the sound of explosions. We went out on the balcony and saw that the attack was just north of us. Helicopters were flying over us. We went back to bed. The next morning when I got to C-130 Ops, I learned I would be carrying the body of a nurse who had been killed the night before. Her body was in a refrigerated CONEX container used for perishable cargo. We all stood around and looked at the pitiful sight. The girl’s name was listed in Stars and Stripes a day or so later. But there’s something funny – records don’t show a nurse killed at Cam Ranh! The only nurse listed as killed in action was Sharon Lane, who was killed at Chu Lai. I have been told we must have carried her body. The trouble is that the timing doesn’t coincide with our time in-country that shuttle. My crew arrived in country the day after Lt. Lane was killed and we flew a bomb drop the next day, not a cargo mission to Tan Son Nhut where the mortuary was located. I believe the death was hushed up because Cam Ranh was supposed to be “secure.”
It was at the end of that same shuttle – that’s what we called our sixteen-day tours – that something else happened that I completely blanked out. We were on our last day of flying and had made several trips into Katum, a Cambodian-border hot spot, from Bien Hoa. After we dropped our load and took off, the pilot notified HILDA, the airlift command center in Saigon, that we were going to Cam Ranh. HILDA said, no, we weren’t – our crew day was being extended and we were going back to Bien Hoa for another load for Katum. The pilot said he was refusing the extension; we had been up since early that morning and were tired. Another crew was sent to Bien Hoa for the mission and they were shot down while on approach to Katum and everyone was killed. Although I knew a crew was killed at Katum, I completely blanked out our part in the episode. It wasn’t until close to fifty years later that I learned from my pilot the part we had played. The pilot on the dead crew was a friend of his. Furthermore, because he had just been upgraded to pilot-in-command status and was on his first shuttle as an aircraft commander, he shouldn’t have been sent into Katum. I couldn’t place the loadmaster who died, although my buddies assured me I knew him.
Not only were we often rocketed at forward fields, Cam Ranh was subject to rocket attacks. The attacks were more harassment than anything. They’d fire three rockets at a time usually followed by three more but they rarely hit anything. One hit the chow hall on Herky Hill sometime during the holidays in 1969 but my crew was back at Clark. There were also ground attacks. One night the engineer and I were laying in bed when a flare went off somewhere outside the window and we heard the security policemen in the guard shack at the bottom of the hill open up with his M-60 machinegun. Another guard further down the road also opened up. Then everything quieted down and we went back to bed. We learned the next morning that a communist ground team had swam across the narrow inlet on the other side of the road and were on their way to attack Herky Hill. They tripped a tripwire and set off a flare and were illuminated. The alert security policeman mowed them down. The same thing happened down the road at the West Ramp. (A successful attack occurred at the Navy Ramp on the south end of the field but I don’t think I was in-country at the time.)
There was another incident of a more sinister nature. A flight engineer found a Styrofoam cup with a hand grenade in it while preflighting a C-130. Finding such booby traps sometimes occurred, especially after hauling Vietnamese. Cam Ranh was different from other bases – Vietnamese didn’t have access to the West Ramp. The grenade had to have been placed by an American, probably someone from maintenance. The antiwar movement in the US had grown in intensity and some young military personnel had been affected. Underground newspapers in the States advocated that troops rebel and shoot their commander. Fragging incidents, where troops threw grenades at officers and NCOs or shot them in the back, were not uncommon. Our wing lost a C-130 and crew in October and sabotage was suggested as a possible cause, although it is more likely that they flew into an artillery firing zone.
The Cambodian border was a sore spot among US troops. North Vietnamese troops occupied much of the region along the Cambodia/South Vietnam border. The communists were believed to have a central command center in Cambodia. Peoples Army troops crossed the border at will to attack US and South Vietnamese units then fled back across the border to safety. Airfields and fire bases along the border were under constant rocket attack. Finally, President Nixon had had enough. He authorized US troops to cross the border into Cambodia. The attack was preceded by the detonation of two 15,000-pound bombs. Our wing was the only one dropping the massive bombs, which had replaced the 10,000-pounders. We were not involved. My crew was finishing two weeks on a special mission at Kadena. We were briefed on the Cambodia “incursion” during our daily intelligence briefing.
We went in-country right after we got back to Clark to a changed war. We could land at the airfields along the border, shut down engines and offload our cargo with a forklift without fear of rockets coming in from Cambodia. We all thought the crossing was great, all but one pilot, who decided to hang up his wings. He was not from our wing, but from our sister wing in Taiwan. Those of us in Vietnam applauded the move but the antiwar movement in the States took up arms – literally. Protests were organized on college campuses all over the country. Those of us in Vietnam were pissed off at the students, who were impervious to the war due to their draft deferments. When we learned that the protest at Kent State in Ohio had escalated into gunfire, we were glad. The students and Guard personnel – who were also impervious to the war – were finding out what it was like to be shot at.
After the Cambodia operation, the war settled down to the intensity of the mid-60s. Major combat operations ceased and communist activity became harassment with no military objectives. Harassment consisted of rocket attacks on rear area bases and an occasional sapper attack on a coastal installation where they could come in from the sea. Instead of hauling cargo into forward fields, we were picking up equipment and hauling it to rear areas for shipment to the States. US troop withdrawals intensified as South Vietnamese forces assumed responsibility for the war. US casualties had begun declining in 1969. They continued to decline.
I was scheduled to return to the US in mid-summer. Orders came in sending me to Charleston, SC, my first choice. Charleston was about to receive the first of the new C-5 transports. I was at Cam Ranh when the first one came in with a load of cargo. I would be back on a C-5 myself in November. I continued flying into Cam Ranh on C-5s until the base closed. After that, we flew into Saigon. But my missions were purely logistical and we were only on the ground a few hours. My role in the war was over. The war flared up again in the spring of 1972 when North Vietnam launched an offensive – out of Cambodia – toward Saigon. Although few US ground troops remained in South Vietnam, the South Vietnamese defeated the offensive with the help of US airpower. I went out on a mission to fly vehicles to Guam from Shreveport and ended up flying into Cam Ranh at least twice, first with cargo then with a load of tiny O-2 FAC aircraft we picked up at Hickam in Hawaii. President Nixon sent B-52s against targets around Hanoi that December and North Vietnam agreed to a peace settlement a few weeks later. The last US troops left South Vietnam the following March.
Two years after the US left the war, Hanoi finally was able to mount an offensive that overran the beleaguered country. I was on a trip to Tehran and was grounded at Torrejon outside Madrid while the communists moved rapidly south. I was depressed at the news and the realization that my country had abandoned the South Vietnamese to their fate. Every year at the time I would be depressed, until I finally realized why. The war has been over for almost fifty years – and has been for fifty years for me – but it lives on in my mind.
You didn't even know why you were in a country 10,000 miles away. Vietnam now has a 91% home ownership rate - better than America. That hollow feeling you have is being lied to by a cabal of war hawks who themselves had no idea what they were doing or why. There's no sense to a war like Vietnam.