A veteran's view:
Chandler, Jerome Greer
A VETERAN'S VIEW JEROME GREER CHANDLER IT'S NOT an easy place to find. In a city of alabaster exclamation points, it hunkers in a cut just beyond the Washington Monument. You can see the famous...
...When they hit us, our artillery spotters at a nearby firebase would know where the buggers were...
...The names of the dead and missing are chronologically arranged...
...He survived...
...and those I didn't, like the former company medic who thought he'd finally been relegated to the "rear area...
...For some vets, the mere word "Vietnam" sparks flashbacks...
...Maybe all that anti-war stuff back home was misguided...
...Wherever that was...
...The NVA popped a rocket-propelled grenade over our position as we crawled out to tend the wounded I was evacuated the next morning by helicopter along with a handful of others, having achieved the ultimate: the John Wayne Wound...
...The people around us just stared as we ran into each other's arms I cried...
...The contrast between the innocence of their youth and the weapons of war underscores the poignancy of their sacrifice...
...Lost 70 percent of their people " Unbelievable...
...Tears were nothing unusual in that somber place...
...Seventy panels compose each wing of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial...
...The Captain would tell you how our presence allowed the peasants to increase rice yields fivefold, and how MEDCAPS into the villages brought health care to people for the first time in their lives...
...Then, one evening I went to a bar in camp reserved for non-commissioned officers...
...This time he looked and sounded like a Mexican-American Staff Sergeant...
...The reflection is broken only by the names: 57,939 of them...
...they are young...
...Barely...
...At that moment, however, I felt personally betrayed...
...And yet they are each alone...
...Nothing else I experienced during the war was as shattering...
...There is about them the physical contact and sense of unity that is the nature of men at war...
...During the fierce climactic fire fight of July 14 our company's scout, a North Vietnamese who had defected South, rolled over on his back, pulled the pin of a fragmentation grenade and held it to his chest...
...The spelling was unmistakable, one of those German names with an umlaut...
...In the corner near a juke box was the "South Vietnamese officer" I'd seen on arrival...
...Not bad enough to really maim, just a confirmed ticket back to "The World...
...For me, it most often prompted a question: "Did Dave make it out...
...He could inspire confidence and performance...
...He was right, In the same vein, he would tell you that D Company's mission that particular period in July was to act as a magnet for the elusive North Vietnamese...
...The litany began on line 18 in sharply chiseled letters 015 of ant inch deep...
...Those who had doubts about why we were there left the session feeling better...
...Beside him were the Captain and the RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) Vietnam was a war in which sincerity and deceit were part of the same verb: to win Part of the indoctrination process on arrival in the country for new members of the 101st Airborne was a talk by a South Vietnamese Lieutenant Colonel who had defected from the Norm...
...When training ended in the fall of 1969 we received orders...
...The man was honest...
...Their strength and their vulnerability are both evident...
...He didn't want to be captured...
...He believed in the war, if not in the mechanics...
...Our company commander was a clear-eyed believer from an Ivy League school...
...But mime were tears of joy me were tears of joy...
...They got their-blown away...
...Until I saw the names in the stone I'd been able to avoid the answer Afraid of doing it myself, I asked a friend to look in the book...
...There were those I expected to find, JEROME GREER chandler has written for the Saturday Evening Post, National Review, and America like the young artillery lieutenant...
...In retrospect, I don't doubt his charade was sincerely motivated...
...I had a general idea where I'd find what I was looking for: the middle of July 1970, panel 8 west I was hit the evening of the 12th at the end of a fire fight...
...A day after I left, my company was decimated, its reputation as the luckiest bunch in the battalion erased...
...Their true heroism lies in the bonds of loyalty in the face of their aloneness and their vulnerability ". The sculpture works, but perhaps a high-tech, 3-D hologram of the ersatz South Vietnamese officer talking to his American alter-ego would help explain the look on their faces...
...If you have any doubts about where to find a particular inscription a guidebook at the nearby information booth provides the answers...
...Before I left the memorial there was one last thing I had to find out Dave and I had both gone through medic training together at San Antonio's Fort Sam Houston, Ours was one of those lightning friendships forged by olive drab pressures and common interests: like bock beer and MGB's...
...While lying in a warm, morphine-fuzzed convalescence in an evac hospital at a place called Phu Bai, the horror stories began to filter in: "Ya hear what happened to Delta Company...
...Hart describes the statues as "consistent with history...
...You can see the famous landmark mirrored in the brilliantly polished black granite...
...They wear the uniform and carry the equipment of war...
...He provided us with a primer on Vietnamese politics...
...Minutes later she had the answer "He's not there...
...His assignment was Vietnam while mine, initially, was Alabama...
...Sculptor Frederick Hart was commissioned to complement architect Maya Ying Lin's compelling $7 million memorial with a life-size bronze of three vets Mr...
Vol. 110 • July 1983 • No. 13
