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With the Armored Cav in Vietnam

By Joel Greenberg (Reviewer)

A Hundred Miles of Bad Road: An Armored Cavalryman In Vietnam 1967-1968, by Dwight Birdwell & Keith Nolan. (Presidio Press, 1997)

A Hundred Miles Of Bad Road is one of the most well-written and interesting personal accounts of the Vietnam experience that I have come across.

The book brackets the period of Tet 1968. In it we get a feel for the change in the role and activities of Troop C, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 25th Infantry Division, the attitudes of personnel who were there earlier in the period as contrasted with those who came later, and the changes the men in this unit went through during this span of time.

This is one of the few books written about an armored unit in Vietnam, so we get a rare insight into the experience of this facet of the war.

A unique aspect of this book is that one of its authors, Dwight Birdwell, is of Cherokee heritage. He gives us a glimpse into the prejudices and discrimination Native Americans had to face. During his time spent in Korea and Vietnam, Birdwell describes incidents he experienced because of his heritage.

One conflict Birdwell confronts is being in the rear versus being in the field. Several times he is faced with the decision of working with the Troops radio repair section in their base camp of Cu Chi.; each time he elects the field. On one occasion, after a period of heavy combat during which time he was wounded, he asks his friends what he should do. He takes their advice and transfers to the radio repair section. Soon feeling out of place in the rear, he is back on the tanks in the field.

Part of his reasoning is his belief that the US was in Vietnam to kill the enemy and that he could not do this if he was in the rear. At one point in the book, Birdwell discounts his time spent in the rear from what he considers his time in-country. The guilt feeling of not being in the field with one's friends (of letting them down and not participating in the 'real' tasks of war) is clearly described within the context of the hardships of combat and the authors' changing attitudes toward the war.

Birdwell started from an unquestioning acceptance of the war and came to the realization that people were wounded and killed because of unnecessarily risky tactics in the pursuit of nothing more then body counts and medals.

While this book is a positive contribution to the collection of literature on Vietnam, the authors stop short in their conclusions about the nature of the war. Despite the bravery, dedication and heroic acts by Birdwell, members of his unit and others who served in Vietnam, we have to realize that the war was wrong and the US had no business being involved in the first place. Coming to the conclusion that over 60,000 GIs and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died for nothing is not easy. Anything short of this however, leaves the door open for future Vietnams.

Joel Greenberg, 501SigBn 101Abn November '67 - June '69, is a member of the Chicago chapter of VVAW.