IN RETROSPECT...
Dear Friends:
Every person, probably twenty or more, to whom I have sent this retrospect either served in Viet Nam or lost a loved one there. You who served were grunts, doctors, nurses, helicopter pilots, hospital administrators, firebase commanders, nuclear sub skipper, and finally, the only non Viet Nam Veteran, the current President of the United States.
Since I am now 72, I am entitled to some wisdom as I have both "been there" and come back. I also can look back without trepidation upon the errors in judgment made over the years, because, as a surgeon, I was trained to recognize mistakes, so that I would not repeat them.
I send this only because yesterday, Nancy Baldwin Wagner, our first born (1961) touched down in Ho Chi Minh City as an executive for her NYSE company, H.B. Fuller, Inc. This landing was without fear or steep dives to avoid local militia rifle fire. There was a McDonald's and a Burger King at the (former Tan Sun Nuit) airport, and she proceeded to her 4-star hotel to prepare for her visit to the Adidas factory to which her company supplies adhesives, paint and other supplies for a couple million pair of sneakers every year. The site of the plant lies on the sprawling industrial complex which was once Long Binh Post.
Who knows, she could be standing on the very spot where the choppers brought the wounded in 1968... 39 years ago, to her dad and some of you at the 24th Evac Hospital.
Does this tell you anything? Does it speak of the waste and the blunder that Viet Nam was and is today? It took me thirty years to figure out we were standing in the way of a united country that only wanted to be free from colonial France... and we picked the wrong guys to back.
History does repeat itself and as I landed in Germany forty years after my dad's cohorts liberated it, so now does our daughter touch down in a nation of really gentle people who fought like hell against the best we had... and for what gain to the USA?
Makes you think.
This is my opinion. I thought I would share it. It takes nothing away from the sacrifices made there by our boys... they were the greatest. They served, they went. But the folks who sent them... that is where the problem lies.
Love,
JB