Life and Death in the Central Highlands: An American Sergeant in the Vietnam War, 1968-1970

Chapter 3. Joining the Vietnam Class of 1969-70

38 Joining the Vietnam Class of 1969–70 3. ARRIVING IN VIETNAM AND FIRST EXPERIENCES: GOING TO VIETNAM I started the process of joining theVietnam Class of 1969–70 in the middle of August 1969, when I finished my assignment at Fort McClellan, Alabama, as an infantry instructor.There was a formal graduation ceremony immediately followed by a sortingout process. The lucky, well-connected, wealthy, White men in my platoon went home and resumed their civilian lives except for one weekend a month when they showed up for duty with the National Guard.We called that weekend warrior work.The rest of us got a two-week leave.Then we boarded airplanes that transported us from membership in the Draft Class of 1968 to theVietnam Class of 1969. CRITICAL NEWS ISSUES—VIETNAMIZATION AND HO CHI MINH’S DEATH The orders to go toVietnam had hovered over my shoulder like a ghost for a year. I often thought about them in the same childish way I had thought about facing my father when I got into Joining the Vietnam Class of 1969–70 39 trouble at school or broke a window playing baseball. I would just keep telling myself,“Maybe something good will happen and I won’t have to deal with it.” In fact, during the midsummer and early fall of 1969, there were two critical news items that actually encouraged my naiveté about a last-minute reprieve.Then, at other times, I thought I would go to Vietnam but that I would not be there for very long.The sources for these flights from reality were the press coverage of the policy of Vietnamization and the announcement of Ho Chi Minh’s death. Vietnamization was the centerpiece of Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policy.The central idea was to transfer as much of the responsibility for combat from American forces to the ARVN as quickly as possible.1 Presidents Nixon and NguyenVanThieu met on the island of Midway in late May 1969 to discuss implementation of the policy.It was an important meeting because it signaled the departure from President Johnson’s policies of escalation and attrition. After their Midway meeting, President Nixon held a press conference to announce that the first stage of Vietnamization would involve the “redeployment” of 25,000 Americans. Of course,I read the word“redeployment”as“withdrawal,”and I also speculated on the possibility of those 25,000 becoming the first of a flood of troops coming home.That naïve hope was bolstered by a press conference on July 21 when President Nixon, with the new MACV commander Gen. Creighton Abrams in attendance, told the world that the troops in question would be home by the end of August 1969.The fact that Abrams specifically named an infantry unit (the 3rd Battalion, 66th Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division) as part of the redeployment process raised my hopes of avoidingVietnam even higher.2 That degree of specificity and the fact that he mentioned infantry troops made me feel this was something more than empty propaganda to assuage the anti-war sentiment in the nation. Major J. F. Harris, the assistant judge advocate general at the Army War College, wrote a report on the mechanics of 40 Life and Death in the Central Highlands Vietnamization called, “Lessons Learned, Bulletin Number 76, Vietnamization, 1969.” Major Harris’s work explained how the process worked for the 9th Infantry Division in the upper Mekong Delta, and how it was applied to the 9th Regimental Landing Team of the 3rd Marine Division in I Corps, the northern part of South Vietnam. The redeployment plan was called Operation Keystone Eagle. According to Harris, “Each [of those units] contained all categories of redeploying personnel, some of whom had to be released before their unit’s redeployment.”3 The key word in this segment of the report was “released.” It referred to all the men who were released from the 9th Infantry Division or the 3rd Marine Division, and reassigned to other units inVietnam because they had not served a minimum ten-month tour of duty.Those men who had served less than ten months were transferred to other units and men in those other units who had served ten months were released from their units and reassigned to the 9th Infantry Division or the Marine Regimental LandingTeam.4 In effect, the 9th Infantry Division and the 3rd Marine Division...