Lt. Les Payne accepts "Best Battery" honors from Ft. Bliss Commanding General, on post parade field. U.S. Army Photograph 6 Oct. 1965

Les Payne

May 29, 2010

Vietnam has been dragged back into the news this Memorial Day weekend not as foreign policy but as a bragging point for a politician on the make who back when it was time to put up—he shut up.

As a Vietnam veteran, I find Richard Blumenthal amusing.

Running for a senate seat in Connecticut, he has been exposed as claiming falsely that he served in Vietnam. Instead, as the New York Times revealed, young Richard hid out in the National Guard after exhausting all non-uniform means to duck the military call up of able-bodied men.

Draft avoidance was common, back then, among patriots immune to shame and irony. These middle-class heroes got the jobs and a career leg up on their brethren who leaped to the cannon roar. Two such opportunists became two-term, U.S. Presidents, one selecting as his number-two, one Cheney, a "hero" who avoided the military draft five times.

Blumenthal’s public boast about Vietnam should have been a tip-off; most veterans hold their tongue about involvement in this particular war.

Thus, I was caught off guard, when at the recent funeral of Lena Horne; a fellow Vietnam veteran asked me if I had been embittered about my battlefield experience. Neither of us had talked much about it over the years.

Perhaps, it was the moving tribute paid to Lena by the octogenarian members of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen that brought it all back. Ms. Horne had sung for the airmen during WWII and became their sepia pin-up girl.

I told my fellow veteran on the steps of St. Ignatius Cathedral that I house no bitter feelings about the war or, for that matter, much feeling about my service at all. Back then, the thought of avoiding the military obligation of citizenship no more crossed my mind than the thought of accepting less than my fair share of the civilian benefits.

It is over this citizenship equation that I part company with the likes of Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney and Richard Blumenthal, running for Sen. Christopher Dodd’s seat.

These narcissistic gluttons—as with the chicken-hawks—consistently place narrow group interests above country and themselves above all else. Yet, this Memorial weekend, each of them—along with the Tea Baggers and the whole of the Republican Party-- will station himself, flag pin in place, hand over heart, yakking some boilerplate about love of country.

As with all males of my family, I was determined to make my parents  proud, and to shatter the Army stereotype about black leadership.   

“Leadership is not imbedded in the negro (sic) race yet and to try to make commissioned officers to lead men into battle—colored men—is only to work disaster to both,” wrote U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in his diary on Oct. 25, 1940. “Colored troops do very well under white officers.” (Substitute “coach” for “officer” and, with rare exception, you have the thinking of most team owners in professional sports in America today.)

As a 24-year old, 1st Lieutenant commanding a 138-man, multi-million dollar Nike Hercules missile unit, I repeatedly won quarterly honors as the “best battery” commander at Ft. Bliss, Texas. Up against seasoned captains, many of them West Pointers, my unit out-performed all others on technical inspections, administration, barracks upkeep, as well as accuracy in tracking and shooting down drones with anti-aircraft Ajax missiles.

White army officers, and more than a few Negroes, who somehow felt—as did Secretary Stimson—that “leadership is not imbedded in (African-Americans),” were irrevocably dumbfounded by my “best battery” commander citations.

Conversely, I was astounded at every turn by the level of white, male mediocrity, which by 2001 would make its way into the White House. Meanwhile, I had to make do with General William C. Westmoreland as my boss during the year I served in Saigon as the army’s version of a journalist.

This son of a South Carolina textile worker, who commanded the 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, had harassed the only black cadet in his ’36 West Point class by giving him the “silent treatment.” Westmoreland and other white classmates didn’t speak to Benjamin O. Davis outside of duty because he was black and they hoped to drive him out.

Avoided like the Ebola plague, Davis never had a roommate, ate alone in the mess hall, and he rode to football games on crowded West Point busses—sitting alone on his bench seat. Despite four years of alienation, the man who became the first African-American general in the Air Force, finished 35th in a class of 278; Westmoreland finished 112th.

North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap had fun chasing this racist piece of mediocrity from delta to highlands and back again.

As for me, I arrived in Saigon as an Army Ranger Captain at the start of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Fireworks, 24-7, were not good for the nerves, however, fear has a short shelf life and we soon became numb even to the sounds of B-52 carpet-bombing.

From that first day to the last, it was clear that U.S. forces did not belong in Vietnam—and I said as much and often. By the hundreds of thousands the GIs arrived with the simple ambition to stay alive and get back to "the world.” LBJ and Westmoreland had ordered them to bend the Vietnamese to the will of Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics. No one told them the Vietnamese were unconquerable.

In its naïveté, America loosed its technology against a people about whom it knew zilch. And it trusted execution of that policy to mediocre generals out of West Point. Their nasty campaign against Vietnam ran counter to history and, as with all wars, its inhumanity was waged against what is right.

Conducting war against both history and right at the same time, as John Foster Dulles once counseled, will not achieve victory ever.

The question this Memorial Day weekend is: has America learned this lesson about what’s right--and about history--in Iraq and in Afghanistan?

It does not seem so.