As the U.S. winds down its operations in Afghanistan and is faced with renewed conflict in Iraq involving ISIS, I'm reminded of the contradictions of war. The leaders who wage war are often men middle-aged or older, safely ensconced hundreds or thousands of miles away from the conflict; the combatants are nearly always young mixed forces of men and women. There are no guarantees the combatants will make it out alive. If they do, they may be severely injured or damaged. Many of the combatants are participants either because they have to be for economic or other reasons or because they have not yet found their way in life; and the participants may or may not be supported by their countrymen in their endeavors.
When I was 14, living with my parents and siblings and two-thirds of the way through my freshman year of high school in Missoula, Montana, my older brother Gary was killed "in action" on February 6, 1970, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, 19 days shy of his 21st birthday.
Gary's death made the front page of our hometown newspaper, The Missoulian. A picture of Gary in his dress uniform accompanied the short article. Inside, the paper announced that Missoula's mayor had ordered flags to be flown at half-staff. Another short article said that Gary would be accorded full military honors at his funeral.
Gary's death left me searching for answers. Why him? Why then? What was his role in the war? How did it happen?
Gary was a voracious letter writer throughout his short life. He corresponded with a young woman in a nearby town who dated him briefly and traded letters with him prior to and during his assignment overseas. She later shared her letters from Gary with me, helping me better understand what he was thinking prior to his death.
In a 1967 letter, he expressed conflict about his life and the war: "I just heard on the radio that the Pentagon has issued a draft call of 34,000 men for January. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll make it back to school or not. Concerning school, I'm still not decided about what to major in. I think I would have been better off if I had gone ahead with the idea of enlisting in the Air Force. I'm getting more confused all the time and don't know what I should do."
Unable to find his way in college or make enough money working seasonal jobs for the U.S. Forest Service, Gary made the decision to enlist in the U.S. Army on October 23, 1968. He was later assigned to helicopter training school at Fort Hood near San Antonio, Texas, where he received his commission as a U.S. Army warrant officer and his orders for Vietnam. He landed at Bien Hoa Airbase east of Saigon on December 13, 1969.
After landing, he talked about the flight over and his impressions of the people and the countryside: "Just one evening I'm in San Francisco and the next morning I'm in Nam. Though I've seen almost nothing yet, I'll give you the options I picked up on the seven-mile bus ride from the airbase to Long Binh. The poverty is much more extensive than I had imagined. The younger Vietnamese women are extremely beautiful. The older people seem ancient. No middle age. Just beautiful young people and decrepit old people ... I had been told that the entire country had an offensive odor, but I've not noticed a stink yet."
Twelve days later, on Christmas Day 1969, Gary went to see a show featuring Bob Hope and a slew of celebrities: "The show was nothing tremendous but I liked it. At the very end, Connie Stevens sang 'Silent Night' and the several thousand GIs in the audience joined in, definitely a tears-in-the-eyes, lump-in-the-throat experience. When the song ended with the words 'Sleep in Heavenly Peace,' thousands of tired, dirty and lonely soldiers picked up their M-16s and straggled off to try and locate transportation back to their units. I'll never be able to reconcile certain contradictions in life--like soldiers celebrating religious holidays."
In Vietnam, Gary was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division as a co-pilot of an unarmed Medevac Huey helicopter which picked up patients from the field and transported them to field hospitals or hospital ships: "A couple of days ago we had a mission for a downed aircraft. The pilot had landed on a mountaintop landing strip that the Viet Cong had booby-trapped. The explosion killed both pilot and co-pilot and seriously wounded the eight passengers. After we dropped the wounded off at the evacuation hospital, we went back for the pilots. They loaded the remains of both on one litter, a bouncy pile of individual arms, legs, heads, etc. If the pro-Vietnamese people in the States could see a couple guys with every limb severed from their bodies, perhaps they wouldn't be so reluctant to pull American troops out."
On another mission in early January, Gary's crew picked up victims of a Viet Cong mine along the Song Bo River: "One of the victims was a Vietnamese baby girl who couldn't have been more than a year old. She had metal frag wounds to the head and seemed to be in tremendous pain. For the first time since I've been here, I heard a baby cry. It was touching. When we dropped them off at Hue Citadel Hospital, I felt I'd done something really useful. One quickly becomes accustomed to grotesque and grisly battle wounds, but it's impossible to turn off the emotion when you see a completely innocent child with blood."
While stationed in Vietnam, Gary would put in two or three hours a day flying and spend the rest of the time playing cards, reading and "listening to really heavy sounds on tape": "I finished reading Steinbeck's Once There was a War. Parts of it seemed very close to home, although he was writing of the Second World War. Some aspects of the army are ageless. Have you ever read Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead? If you want to understand the military at its worst, then read it. It's not a happy book."
In one of his final letters, Gary spoke of daydreaming while not flying: "I'm content to think about whatever invades my mind--totally undisciplined contemplation. Maybe it's a necessary defense mechanism in my present situation. But more likely, I'm just making excuses. Sorry I strayed to an intangible tangent. Vietnam may be a slow-motion freakout."
After serving 55 days in Vietnam, Gary and the three other members of his crew were killed in a helicopter crash near a church after receiving a request to evacuate a patient reported to be suffering stomach cramps and regurgitating blood. The cause of the crash was undetermined, and not due to any hostile fire.
Jeff Thatcher is a professional communicator and longtime resident of Little Rock.
Editorial on 01/11/2015