A Veterans Day reflection: That’s me up there. It’s 1967 and Lance Corporal John Tsitrian is in Dong Ha, Vietnam.
It’s Veterans Day and I’m revisiting the Nam.
In the above pic, I had just come back to the relatively secure airstrip at Dong Ha, slightly south of the Demilitarized Zone, after spending a few weeks at some — pick an adjective, they all fit — desolate, remote, bleak, lonely, dark, depressing, forlorn, gloomy, wretched and neglected outpost along the nearby Cua Viet river, where rocket and artillery attacks were part of the daily routine and potshots into our perimeter were an occasional part of the nightly routine.
It sucked, and it wasn’t just about me. Describing life for the Marines along the DMZ, Dispatches author Michael Herr titled his piece about us “Hell Sucks.”
That pretty well summed it up.
It was at the DMZ that I had my first encounter with incomprehensibility and surrealism, where waste of materials and humans was supposed to be an acceptable consequence of an American crusade to fight off, in then President Lyndon Johnson’s words, “the deepening shadow of Communist China,” which was a principal source of supplies and weapons to our enemy, North Vietnam. Together, the Chinese and the North Vietnamese were characterized by American cold warriors as “the yellow peril.”
Johnson sold the war to the American public with that kind of rhetoric, but it turned out to be baloney.
How’s that? Well, in 1972 with the war still raging, LBJ’s successor Richard Nixon set out to make friends with China, even though Chinese weaponry was still targeting and killing American troops. Despite that, Nixon was proudly and optimistically visiting Beijing. He was busy opening up trade and diplomatic channels with the country that LBJ just a few years earlier described as a fearsome spectre and “deepening shadow.”
Confused? I was.
Was China LBJ’s threat to the free world, or was it Nixon’s friend and potential diplomatic and trading partner? The war was so messed up that the two presidents of the era couldn’t get their stories straight.
To me, it’s little wonder that so many Vietnam vets have had post-war mental health issues. The confused situation of our war was indeed surreal, if not altogether schizophrenic. A 2022 Veterans Administration study on the subject concluded that “veterans who served in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos during the Vietnam War have a higher prevalence of mental health issues, particularly PTSD, compared with both other Vietnam-era Veterans and non-Veterans.”
The whole mangled mess of it was an exercise in muddled objectives and wasted resources, so much so that when people died we didn’t say that they were killed. We said that they “got wasted.”
Now, nearly sixty years later, I’m a generally appreciated veteran. I couldn’t be more pleased. I like my status, but must note that thanks to that war, I also couldn’t be more skeptical about the utterances of our political leadership. That coarsened attitude has pushed me to speak out via my earlier stints as a feature writer and newspaper columnist and now as the co-publisher and -editor of this blog.
With my fellow vets, I thank you for your attention and appreciation – as well as your support and patience when it comes to encountering veterans who were permanently scarred by experiences like mine.
I also hope that as you acknowledge and honor our veterans, you do so with a commitment to exercise some critical thought when listening to the rhetoric of our political class. That would be a nice outcome when you think of what veterans sacrificed in pursuit of their service to our country.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
