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I Didn't Know We Won: Notes From The Boonies

By Paul Wisovaty

Like most guys who weren't smart enough to avoid the draft, I've always found history to be pretty confusing. I could never get all those French Louies straight, and I don't have the foggiest notion how long the Hundred Years War lasted. Like I said, all that historical mumbo-jumbo confuses me.

So, as you might guess, I was really enlightened by reading Barry, Peter and Joe's "History of the US War in Vietnam." (see website url on page 19) Predictably (given the authorship), it was written at a reading level even I could understand, and for the first time I was able to put those decades of French-American-Vietnamese relations into an understandable historical context. As our authors so subtly put it: "We got exactly what we paid for: pimps, prostitutes, cowards and gangsters, masquerading as a government and a military."

Well, just when you think you've got it all figured out, somebody comes along to complicate things.

One day earlier this year, I was looking through some stuff in the basement, and I came across this 1985 issue of the Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine. (I know what you're thinking, but somebody must have put my name on their mailing list, OK? Don't change the subject.) Anyway, this issue was supposed to be all about the Vietnam War, and I have to admit it had some pretty neat pictures in it. Every time I turned the page, there was Bob Hope or Raquel Welch or Zsa Zsa Gabor, dancing and hugging each other and telling these great hippie/war protester jokes that really got the troops rolling in the aisles. I don't know how you can get any closer to the heart and soul of our Vietnam experience than that.

Anyway, I wasn't even going to bother to read the article itself, because I figured it wouldn't be much different from the VVAW account I'd already read. I mean, after all, history is history, right?

Well, not necessarily. I should like to share with you the very last sentence of this article, which purports to detail our involvement in Vietnam since 1954. (We didn't have anything to do with Vietnam before Dien Bien Phu, you understand.)

"In March, 1973, the last US combat troops departed South Vietnam, leaving behind a more stable, democratic Vietnamese government and a much strengthened armed forces."

That's it; that's the end. That is the last line on the last page in the whole damned article. And what's it mean? Well, I think it's pretty obvious what it means.

We won.

We accomplished everything we set out to accomplish. We turned South Vietnam into the most democratic republic since ancient Athens, and we fine-tuned those much-maligned ARVNs into something like the Minutemen at Lexington Green. We left the Saigon government everything they could possibly have needed to drop-kick Ho Chi Minh onto some historical rock pile usually reserved for the likes of George McGovern and David Dellinger.

Like I said, we won.

If you don't mind, I'll get a little more serious, and I'll even drop the weak sarcasm.

I don't care how much these guys lie to themselves, and I don't even care how much they lie to each other or to some other old farts sitting around the bar at the Legion Hall. But I do mind - a whole lot - when they lie to my kid.

So I'm going to try to do a little more about it than just sit around on my front porch with a cold Busch listening to Phil Ochs (although I'm pretty good at that). Starting this fall, I'm going to approach every high school in my little county and tell them I'd like to talk to their history classes about our Vietnam experience. If nothing else, I'd like to let them know that not all the pimps, prostitutes, cowards and gangsters were on the same side of the Pacific. From what I can tell, the politically correct textbooks don't go out of their way to say those things, and God knows the VFW and the Republican Women don't either.

And you know why else I'm going to do it? Because, at the 30 year VVAW reunion in Chicago, I promised Steve Hassna that I would.

It's not like Steve ever danced with Raquel on stage at Cam Ranh or anything, but he is a fellow vet, so I sort of feel like I should keep my promise to him.

Call it a Nam thing.

Paul Wisovaty is a member of VVAW. He lives in Tuscola, IL, where he works for the probation department. He was in Vietnam with the US Army 9th Division in 1968.