Those Who Have Borne the Battle (2 page)

This was all part of the culture of the post–World War II years. Ron Kovic wrote that when he met the marine recruiters in their dress-blue uniforms on Long Island, it was “like all the movies and all the books and all the dreams of becoming a hero come true.”
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Philip Caputo grew up in suburban Chicago and recalled that joining the Marine Corps “symbolized an opportunity for personal freedom and independence.”
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In the pre-Vietnam years there was little thought of cost or consequence. Caputo and Kovic would encounter serious levels of each. My generation, just a few years older, did not. No one ever fired a shot at me, and I never had to fire at anyone. Just three years after I joined the marines, my younger brother enlisted in the navy; he was also seventeen years old and just out of high school.

As a marine, I certainly stayed out of trouble and followed the rules, even if I found them often petty and learned that some of the noncommissioned officers (NCOs) I met enjoyed being petty. I resented for years a particularly cruel and stupid drill instructor I had. In time, I achieved the rank of lance corporal, not very rapidly, or with much distinction. A strength of the Marine Corps has been its training and discipline; sharpening these things in peacetime, while an essential activity, was boring at best.

It was only with later reflection that I realized what a critical and empowering interlude this was for me. While at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, I flinched at the embedded racism of Mississippi in the late 1950s. My unit, Marine Air Group-13 of the First Marine Brigade, was stationed at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii; we shipped out on an LST (a US Naval vessel, landing ship, tank), the
Tioga County
, LST 1158, and served on temporary deployment in Atsugi, Japan, during the Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1958.

From Atsugi, I was able to watch occupied Japan begin to step with some assurance into a new world. I saw this from a base that still had underground facilities from its service for Imperial Japan during World War II, including a training base for Kamikazi pilots. I watched U-2 planes take off from the base for “weather reconnaissance,” and I would learn a few years later that the squadron my unit replaced, Marine Air Control Squadron-1 of Marine Air Group-11, was the outfit to which Lee Harvey Oswald was assigned. I was in his barracks while he was down in Taiwan—shortly afterward, he would go home. My unit returned to Hawaii, again via an uncomfortable and crowded LST (the
Tom Green County
, LST 1159) in time for the celebration of Hawaiian statehood on Waikiki Beach.

In my formative late-teen years, I saw much of the world. I encountered racism in a Marine Corps that was still dealing with desegregation. I also met and developed friendships with young marines from all over the country, and I served under some impressive officers and noncommissioned officers who had been in World War II and in Korea. I developed a sense of discipline and self-confidence, the ability to work within and with a group toward common goals—although surely my St. Michael's School nuns had taught me self-discipline as effectively as any marine drill instructor!

 

 

When I joined the marines I had no real life plans. I thought this experience would give me a few years to put off working in the local mines or factories. I never had any expectation of staying in the marines for a career. This reflected the culture of the time: if most of us expected to serve, very few thought of doing so for any more than the minimum time required. One of my high school classmates stayed in the air force for a career. Other than him, I knew very few from Galena who served for more than their original enlistment. The military was part of our life, but only briefly.

When I was discharged after three years, still not twenty-one years of age, I decided I would go to college. I was curious to learn and I was eager to explore. Once I started going to school, I never stopped. I enjoyed history and thought I would like to be a high school history teacher. I
worked hard and turned out to be a good student. Faculty encouraged me to think of a doctorate, and upon graduation I received a Danforth Fellowship. In 1964 I commenced a graduate program in American history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

As it turned out, my decision to go to college had not allowed me a total pass on working in local mines and factories. My family had no money to help me, and as a peacetime veteran I had no government support until there was a program instituted during my last years of graduate school. While an undergraduate, I worked in a local cheese factory, as a janitor at the Galena High School, and as a bartender at a bowling alley as well as a local club that maintained illegal slot machines in the back room. I also worked for the Eagle Picher Mining Company at its zinc mines, the Graham and the Birkett. The mining company provided good employment for me, including weekends, while I was a student at nearby Wisconsin State College, Platteville. I monitored the underground pumps, was on fire watch, and worked as a security guard. I had a lot of time to study during my overnight shifts.

In the summer before I went to Madison for graduate study, I was working in the Birkett mine as a powderman, setting dynamite charges. My ground boss had persuaded me to do this, saying a former marine must surely know how to handle dynamite; I assured him I had never touched it. He said I could learn, and the clincher was when he offered me $0.20 more an hour, $2.35, for the assignment. I left the backer position on the drill machine and picked up a handmade powder knife. We had our lunch breaks underground, and in August of that summer I recall that we talked briefly about the reported attacks on US Naval vessels in the Tonkin Gulf of Vietnam. The other miners expressed general support but not much real interest when the Americans hammered coastal North Vietnam with air attacks. I basically shared these feelings, but not in any reflective way.

During my first year at Madison, the Vietnam War ramped up significantly. I do not recall any strong reactions when President Lyndon Johnson sent some marines ashore at Da Nang in March 1965, the first introduction of American combat troops to Vietnam. Within a short time, however, Madison was roiled by protests against the war. My own
view evolved from apprehension to concern, and then to opposition. I did not actively join in protests; I was older and focused on my program, but I was sympathetic with these activities. David Maraniss in his book
They Marched into Sunlight
captures well the on-campus emotions and views in those years. I knew several of the former students he had interviewed and remember vividly the demonstrations.
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By 1967 I had turned strongly against the war because it seemed so strategically wrong and so horrible in its casualties. I never joined in any criticism of the US forces serving; I was concerned about them and what they were being asked to do. I was worried about the marines encircled at Khe Sanh and in fact wondered if I knew any of them. Later it was easy—I would say essential—to criticize Lieutenant William Calley and his platoon. But I never assumed that they were truly representative.

Even as I was following the Tet Offensive and the battle of Khe Sanh, in the winter of 1968 I supported and rang some doorbells in Madison for Eugene McCarthy in his antiwar campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. I recall the angriest adult exchange I ever had with my father, who was then working as a bartender at the Galena post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. We were watching on television the Democratic convention of that year. I supported the protesters; he applauded the Chicago police.

A year later when a young Galena boy we both knew was killed on “Hamburger Hill” in the A Shau Valley of western Vietnam, my dad agreed that sacrifices over meaningless hills were simply wrong. This soldier had been a student of mine when I student-taught a class at Galena High School. His dad, who had earned a Purple Heart in World War II, was a good, supportive boss at the mines. It was a tragedy, and I had a chance forty years later, when I spoke on Veterans Day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, to remember Mike Lyden, the son of a miner, who died in Operation Apache Snow in May 1969.

Out of a total 1970 population of 3,930, there were 115 Galenians who served in the armed forces during the Vietnam War. In addition to Mike Lyden, another young soldier, Joseph Funston, was killed at Binh Dinh in 1968 just a few weeks after his nineteenth birthday. A classmate recalled him as “the kindest, most considerate boy” at Galena High School.

In the summer of 1969 I came to Dartmouth as an assistant professor of history. The following spring, following the deployment of US forces into Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, our Ivy League campus was rocked by protests. The faculty and the administration suspended spring-term classes, and I joined another faculty member in taking a group of students to Washington. We did not join protesters or pickets, but we did meet with members of Congress and others, such as AFL-CIO representatives, to talk about ending the war. In the summer of 1970, I met Senator George McGovern and signed on to help him in his New Hampshire primary campaign. I was impressed by Senator McGovern as a World War II hero who was opposed to the current war in Vietnam.

By the time I arrived at Dartmouth, the school was well on the way to closing down the college's ROTC and NROTC programs. When the administration brought back ROTC in the 1980s, I spoke out against linking this program with a liberal arts campus. I later redoubled my criticism of the programs because of the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policies. Dartmouth developed a tolerance for the program despite the intolerance of the government. When I became president of Dartmouth in 1998, I can't say it was an issue. The board had reinstated it, and I was responsible for maintaining it.

 

 

When the United States and some allies went into Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks in order to root out the Taliban and to find or kill Osama bin Laden, I thought this was a justifiable action. When we went into Iraq eighteen months later, I was not convinced it was either justifiable or wise.

In the fall of 2004, I was surprised at how engaged emotionally I became with the battle for Fallujah in Iraq. In reading newspaper accounts and watching news programs, I was increasingly impressed by the soldiers and marines who were fighting in the streets there. Maybe I identified with them as someone who had been a young marine forty-five years earlier. More important, they were the age of the students for whom I was responsible at Dartmouth. I had colleagues and associates at Dartmouth
who had known me for years and had not ever known I had been a marine. I had not hidden it, but I didn't talk about it, either. It was part of my history. Now this history reappeared.

I expressed to a friend my interest in helping the wounded in some way. A Dartmouth graduate and former US Marine officer, he suggested I visit the marines who were hospitalized at Bethesda Naval Hospital. With his help, I first went to Bethesda in the summer of 2005. I would return there and also go to Walter Reed Army Hospital and Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, making some two dozen visits over the next six years. My pattern has always been the same: to try to go bed to bed, talking to the young wounded; asking about them, where they are from, and why they had joined the military; inquiring about how they were injured; and encouraging them to think about continuing their education. I told them I had been a lance corporal who had never attended college until I was discharged from the Marine Corps. I never kept tallies or notes or names, respecting the privacy of those whom I met. Over the years I have heard some inspiring and some horrifying stories, told matter-of-factly by young marines and soldiers who were not seeking sympathy.

My hospital visits, which continue, have often been emotional experiences for me. In the first six years of doing this, I talked to probably three hundred young men and a few women in their hospital beds, lounges, and therapy rooms. In the hospitals I visited, these patients were by definition seriously injured. These young veterans were racked with pain and sedated with medication, and I tried hard to talk naturally to those with disfigured faces and freshly scarred bodies, those with tubes running into their veins, often with stumps of limbs still marked by swelling and the seeping of blood and pus, or those with new prostheses, insisting that they will run again and rejoin their units. At first I was surprised at the latter, assuming it was a reflection of their enthusiasm for the mission in Iraq or Afghanistan. I learned that the mission was quite secondary; enthusiasm for it was not even necessarily their motivation, but they did have a tremendous loyalty to those with whom they served. I have never gotten used to seeing these young wracked bodies; I never want to get used to it.

My work with the veterans led me to join with the American Council on Education to establish and raise money for a more formal counseling program at some major military hospitals. There were several news accounts about this and later about my work with senators Jim Webb, Chuck Hagel, and John Warner regarding the GI Bill of 2008 introduced by Senator Webb. These resulted in some recognition—I was considered something of a curiosity as an ex-marine, Ivy League president who was working with military veterans. I worked with some veterans groups and met some generals. I had a few meetings and briefings at the Pentagon.

As I became more involved with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I began sending a package whenever I learned of any Dartmouth graduate who was serving there. These parcels included Dartmouth caps and T-shirts, maple candy, and a book of Robert Frost poetry. I received a note back from a recent ROTC graduate who was a platoon leader in Iraq. He wrote me to say that none of the men in his platoon had a college education and that he had taken to reading them a poem when they returned from patrols through always-hostile places. He reported that they enjoyed Frost's poems and were asking for more. His approach affirmed for me that not only was there a place for ROTC on campuses like mine, but there was also a place for liberal arts graduates in the military ranks.