The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (American Century Series) by David Farber

Author:David Farber [Farber, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1994-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

The soldiers on the field did not have a general understanding of exactly what the purpose of the war was. We did not therefore deal with those questions. We really dealt with how to help each other in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Also, because the U.S. troops did not have a Hitler to hate, there was an attitude among the troops that they just wanted to get through the year alive and get out of there.

Almost all the men in Vietnam served a one-year tour of duty. Many soldiers worked in the rear areas handling endless paperwork, moving supplies, repairing and preparing war machinery, helping the wounded, packing up the dead. At one end of the spectrum, service in Vietnam, thanks to American affluence (in stark contrast to Vietnamese poverty), could be relatively easy duty. One rear-duty serviceman recalls: “We rode to work in air-conditioned buses, we worked in air-conditioned offices. Our barracks had hot and cold running showers and flush toilets … . There was a movie every night. We drank beer. You could eat all you wanted.”

But on the other end of the spectrum, Vietnam could be hell.

For almost all the men, arrival in Vietnam was a shocking experience. Most men deplaned not to the sights and smells of war but to a seemingly chaotic, hustling world of poor Asian people—the men called them “gooks”—few of whom seemed to regard them as a liberating force. The men rode off to get their field assignments in buses with windows protected by wire mesh. One soldier wrote:

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