Download PDF of this full issue: v38n1.pdf (23.7 MB)

Coming Home: A 40-Year Journey that Began in 1968

By Bill Christofferson

My first set of dress blues, issued to me with only six months left on my enlistment, should have been a clue.

The Marine Corps didn't hand them out willy-nilly. Fresh from 17 months in Vietnam, mostly as a combat correspondent, I was going to end my military career behind a desk in Philadelphia, editing a monthly magazine, not to be a recruiter.

The blues were not to wear to the office. They were for funeral duty. I could not have imagined how often I would wear them during February of 1968, when the Tet offensive rocked everything we thought about the status of the war when I had come home a few months earlier.

As someone who was in country fairly early, in 1966-67, I joke now with the later arrivals that we were winning when I left, before they screwed it all up.

But we did think, in those days, that if we weren't winning we were certainly holding our own, and not just in body counts, but other measures like the number of villages listed as "pacified," or the miles of Highway 1 a convoy could travel with relative safety.

Those illusions were all blown sky high by the Tet offensive. As the newspapers reported on major battles in the I Corps, and I read about heavy fighting in some of the "pacified" areas where I had been a few months earlier, it was clear we had been fooling ourselves.

Militarily, the US won the battle of Tet. But that was the beginning of when we lost the war. We clearly were not winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, and we never had been.

The year 1968 opened my eyes, changed my politics and, eventually, my life.

In April, just before my discharge, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin. In June, another outspoken, charismatic opponent of the war, Robert F. Kennedy, was slain. In late August, as the editor of a small daily newspaper, I watched the Democratic Party self-destruct at its chaotic Chicago convention.

And sometime that summer, I got a call from a fellow ex-Marine combat correspondent, Mike McCusker, asking me to lend my name to a newspaper ad for an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I begged off, saying that as a newspaper editor I couldn't take that kind of stand, but had to remain objective.

I wasn't at all objective, of course. The Chicago convention was a time when you had to choose sides, and it was clear to me which side I was on. I wasn't a VVAW member, and wouldn't be for many years. But I was a Vietnam veteran and I was against the war. I began to write about it in my columns, about a boot camp buddy I lost to a booby trap, about the continuing waste of lives, American and Vietnamese, in this lost cause.

I didn't hear again from McCusker, who was a VVAW organizer in the Northwest and testified at Winter Soldier in 1971. And I purposely didn't get in touch with any of the other Marine correspondents I'd served with in Vietnam. I did what I could, personally, for peace, but put Vietnam behind me, in a closed compartment in my cranium.

Twenty-five years after coming back to the States, I reconnected with many of those Marines when one of them tracked me down and invited me to a reunion. I went with more than a little ambivalence, but I went. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I had made in 25 years. The bond, the brotherhood, was still there. A couple of those guys are now the best friends I have.

They're not all anti-war. Whatever tension there is at our biennial get-togethers is usually a hawk-dove conversation that escalates. But the closest bonds these days are with those who share my politics and my revulsion at the current debacle in Iraq.

It is the war in Iraq that finally brought me into the ranks of VVAW, ending the journey that began in 1968.

When I retired in late 2006 I decided to put my energy into a limited number of things that are important to me, and ending the Iraq war and occupation was at the top of the list. That led me to the January 2007 march in Washington against the war, and also led me to joining VVAW and Veterans For Peace. Two of my Vietnam buddies, from Texas and Pennsylvania, met me in DC, and we marched near the head of the column behind the VVAW banner.

"Welcome home" has seemed like a cliché at times when I've been greeted that way by fellow vets. But marching with VVAW last year really did feel like coming home, even if it was almost 40 years late.