Well, when I got to Vietnam I literally expected to be welcomed with open arms
by the people of Vietnam. I had in my head the black and night
white newsreels I had seen on the Walter
Cronkite twentieth century show of the American troops rolling
through villages in France and being showered with wine
and flowers and kisses. And as we were driving down a guy from the battalion I was
assigned to, picked me up in a jeep at Danang and we had to drive the 20
miles to where my battalion was located. And I, I really was disappointed that there weren't people
standing along the road waving to me and you know, offering
me flowers and things. I really expected to be greeted as with
open arms as a liberator and it was as, as though I was invisible,
as though I didn't exist. And that was a
little perplexing. Moreover it was, it was they looked funny and they acted funny. I mean
just riding along in this jeep the first day I got there. They lived in little
straw huts, and they had animals in their, in
their backyards and they weren't like us. They smelled bad, the whole
country smelled bad. You could smell it, it
would, it hurt the nose and that was disturbing. And then I was
there for about... On the third day I was there, this guy who had picked
me up in the jeep a corporal who I was
ultimately going to replace he and I were in the battalion
intelligence section. We were sent down to the tractor park the, in
fibbies tractor park to meet a bunch of detainees. It was our responsibility
to take care of prisoners and detainees were a
classification of civilians. They were not
combatants they were, they could be detained
for questioning. That's how they were, why
they were called detainees. And Jimmy and I went down there to
track park and two tractors came in they had a whole bunch of Vietnamese up on top. High flat-topped vehicles
about eight or nine feet tall and as the tracks
wheeled into the park, the marines up on top
immediately began hurling these people off. They were bound hand and foot so that they had no way
of breaking their falls and they were old
men, women, children. No young men and I, I couldn't believe these guys
were treating these people this way and I turned to Jimmy and said, I grabbed
him by the arm and said what are, what
are these guys doing? These aren't, these are, we're supposed to be
helping these people. And Jimmy turned to
me and he looked at my hands on his arm, I
sort of took them off and he said Erhard you
better keep your mouth shut until you know what's
going on around here. And I think it was at that point
that I realized things were not quite what I was expecting. It went downhill from there and again I can't even begin to explain in the
space of time that you have all of the things
that went into it, but I began to understand it became obvious that the enemy was the very people in
these villages around us. We were in a very heavily
populated area at that time. They were the enemy or at least the
enemy was out there somewhere and we couldn't tell one from another and day after day our
patrols went out and we ran into snipers and
mines and snipers and mines and snipers and mines. I saw four armed enemy soldiers the first eight months
I was in Vietnam and yet our battalion during that
same period of time sustained 75 mining and sniping
incidents per month over half of them
resulting in casualties. This is for a unit of
about a thousand men, but there was no one
to fight back at and you begin to think these
people are the enemy. They're all the enemy and then you go through villages and you know, you get sniped at and so, you call an air
strike in on the village and the whole village goes up or you go through a
place and you search it and you burn houses
and blow them up. You know the common perception, the notion I heard when I was in high school was it was
the Viet Cong terrorized the Vietnamese population forced them to fight against the
Americans on the pain of death. What I began to understand
in Vietnam was that they didn't need to
do things like that. All they had to do was let a
marine patrol go through a village and whatever was left
at that village, they had all the recruits
that they needed. I began to understand
why the Vietnamese didn't greet me with open arms. Why they in fact hated me, but of course that didn't
change the fact that, that my friends were getting
killed and injured every day and the only place that you could
focus your own anger and fear was on those civilians
who were there. And so, it was a
self-perpetuating mechanism The longer that we
stayed in Vietnam the more Viet Cong there were because we created
them we produce them. None of that distilled
itself into the, the clear kind of expression
that I'm presenting now. What I began to understand
within days and which became patently clear within months
was that, what was going on here was not was
I had been told. What was going on here was nuts and I wanted to get out. I knew if I were still alive
on March the 5th 1968, they'd stick me on an airplane in Danang
we used to call it the freedom bird and I could fly away and
forget the whole thing. Turned out not to be quite
so easy to forget it, but that was the notion and, and certainly for my last eight nine months in Vietnam I ceased to think, I quite
literally ceased to think about why I was there or
what I was doing. The sole purpose for
my being in Vietnam at that point was to stay alive until I could get out. Then the reason
for that is that, you know, the kinds of questions that began to present themselves were just, the questions
themselves were ugly and I didn't want to know the answers.
It's, it's like it's like banging on a
door, you knock on a door and the door opens slightly
and behind that door it's dark and there's loud
noises coming like there's like there's wild animals
in there or something and you peer into the darkness
and you can't see what's there but you can hear all
these ugly stuff. You want to step into that room? No way, you just sort
of back out quietly pull the door shut behind
you and walk away from it and that's what was going on. The questions themselves
were too ugly to even ask, let alone if I had to
deal with the answers. Now part of what was
going on as said I could not have made sense of what I was seeing and
doing in Vietnam because I did not have
a full deck of cards. I needed to have an understanding of the
political historical realities that brought us to
Vietnam before I could make sense of what I was seeing. I began to acquire the
other cards in the deck during the three years or so after I
got back from Vietnam, but while I was there
nothing made sense. Because I kept trying to you
know, play this game with 27 cards instead of 52 cards and
it kept not coming out right and I didn't know why all I
knew was that it was nuts and it became, it became clear
within three or four months. That my reasons for being
in Vietnam were not clear. I mean this notion of
defending the people against these invaders
from North Vietnam the people hated me. The
Vietnamese people hated me. and it was perfectly,
that was perfectly clear. I mean the people didn't say good
morning to you, people didn't, I mean people hated me. I know that other
people's experience some other people's
experience was different, but in my own experience the Vietnamese people hated me and I
gave them every reason to hate me. I beat them, I sometimes kill
them, I destroy their houses, I destroy their crops, I destroy their
fields, I destroy their culture. Why in the hell should
those people like me? And I could see that
I was doing that, and I could see that nothing we
were doing was having any impact on the war itself. Now the funny thing about
Vietnam is that I, I was getting Time
magazine every week. It came in the mail I
could read about my war even as I sat in
the middle of it. And I would read about what
Lyndon Johnson would say and what McNamara would say
and what Russ would say and I could look around and see that aha, I don't know what war
they're talking about, but that's not what's
going on here. We actually had an incident happen
where one of our line companies stumbled upon a
fairly large cache of Viet Cong weapons and ammunition and I read in the
stars and stripes, the daily newspaper
that we received. This little action actually
made it into the papers and we read that we had
set the Viet Cong effort back by at least four
months in our area. Within a week of that article appearing
in the paper, within 10 days of the incident itself, the bridge a hundred
and fifty meters in front of our battalion
compound was dropped by Viet Cong sappers. An Amtrak coming in from the Horseshoe area from
one of the line companies hit a 50-pound box mine several men were killed a
bunch more were wounded. A patrol out of fook
track grid was ambushed, several people were killed, several
people were wounded. I mean nobody told the Viet Cong that
they'd been set back for four months and yet this is what you're reading in
the newspapers. This is what you're being told
back in the United States. I could see that the war went
on day after day after day interminably at the same
pace no matter what we did. I'm wasting your film. When I left Vietnam I was at the time, I was in the
midst of the battle for Hue city during 10th 1968 February 68 and I had been up in the city for
two and a half, three weeks. And I knew that my
day was coming, but I wasn't sure when
and at that point we weren't thinking
about things like that. And we are in the middle
of a low key fire fight we were exchanging fire with
some guys across the street from us along the Eastern, the North East
section of Hue city what was left of my
unit, the scouts about six of us. And a jeep comes
hauling up the street along the river and
whips into this little compound where we were and
says Erhard the orders are in let's go. It's a
lieutenant my boss and I stood, I didn't
exactly stand up but I immediately began
to strip off my gear and distributed to the
other guys who were there and said so long see
you back in the world, got on the jeep. The last thing I
saw of those guys they were laying down
covering fire for us we burned our way
back down the street there was a chopper
sitting on the LZ. I got on the bird, I was up
3,000 feet above Hue city. 10 minutes after, I knew
I was on my way out and went through
some processing. I ended up... They yanked me out early
because one of my older brothers by this time had
arrived in Vietnam and they arranged for me to spend
a couple of days with him. And I got back when I got back in early March was... came in at night went through more processing place called Treasure
Island in San Francisco Bay and then I was free to go and I had, I was still
had time at the marines. I had a month's leave basically before I had to
report to another duty station in North Carolina. And I got a taxi and there I was, my first view of
the United States and I was really, I could hardly wait and it was absolute impenetrable fog. We came across the
Oakland Bay Bridge, couldn't see 10 feet,
couldn't see anything, got to the airport there was... Part of what affected
my coming back, I was happy to be alive, I was excited, but at the
same time I was very ambivalent. I was
afraid partly because I had a girlfriend
when I went over there and in September eight
months after I was there I got a dear John letter
from her and I kept hoping that I'd be able to fix
this up once I got back and I did not know what kind...
and that, that woman, that girl had become the focus of
my life while I was in Vietnam. She had, she had ceased to be a real
person, she'd become this icon and then of course she had sort
of you know, she'd take a hike. And but you can't just let go
off of a vision like that, of the thing that
has kept you going. So, I was scared about all that. I didn't know what I was going
to find when I got back. Finally got back
to the East coast
Welcome to /r/History!
This post is getting rather popular, so here is a friendly reminder for people who may not know about our rules.
We ask that your comments contribute and be on topic. One of the most heard complaints about default subreddits is the fact that the comment section has a considerable amount of jokes, puns and other off topic comments, which drown out meaningful discussion. Which is why we ask this, because /r/History is dedicated to knowledge about a certain subject with an emphasis on discussion.
We have a few more rules, which you can see in the sidebar.
Thank you!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators if you have any questions or concerns. Replies to this comment will be removed automatically.
Bill Ehrhart came to speak at my university last year as part of a traveling exhibit on veterans who opposed the war. His frankness about his own mental state after his tour in Vietnam really struck me, and he must’ve stayed for about thirty minutes after the program ended to answer questions from students.
I asked him if there were any movies that adequately captured the experience of a soldier there. He told me no, that war is hell, and that real combat doesn’t have a soundtrack.
Bill Erhart is in Ken Burns: Vietnam on Netflix. Probably not as detailed as he would be in this interview but still a good watch for his point of view and what his duties were.
[removed]
"She had ceased to become a person, she had become an icon". This man does have an excellent way with words.
What he's saying about the self-perpetuating nature of counter insurgency wars has been known for years, yet NATO still cheerfully rolled into Afghanistan, and the US and UK into Iraq. There has to be a rethink about how wars are fought, and more importantly why and to what goal, because history is full of examples of how simply doing the same thing as the time before over and over, each time with better and more expensive weaponry, is slow death.
As a follow up to this, I recommend reading 'Dispatches' by Michael Herr.
Bill Ehrhart discusses his time in the Vietnam War and how his thoughts about the war changed over time. I find it interesting hearing about historic events from the people that experienced them since they often tell it in a way that differ from what we have been told. Ehrhart tells his story in a moving way that portraits the war how it was for a common solider and it gives me new insight in how it was for the men that was deployd and what kind om mental gymnastic they went through in order to survive.
(Since english isnt my first language I'm sorry if there is grammatic errors.)
I was in Viet Nam at some of the same time. My experience was so different. I was in the air force, worked on the flight line (crew chief) and had one of the best times of my life. I was in Cam Ranh Bay. I worked the midnight shift and spent every day either water skiing or snorkeling on beautiful coral reefs. I spent ten days in the Philippines for school, a week in Thailand for r and r, a week in Tokyo for...r and r. I traveled around the country, Saigon 3 times. Ben Hoa twice, Da Nang during Tet. Later I came home and learned what I had been part of. I worked on F-4's. They left with bombs or missiles or those mini bomblets in tubes or with big tanks of NAPALM, and they came back empty. They mostly came back since flying over South Viet Nam they were unchallenged. The United States would declare a temporary truce and just before it would start the planes would drop bombs with timers so during the truce they would just blow up. I went to college, marched in protest, became a thinking citizen but I cannot make amends. Afghanistan is much the same story.