Dartmouth Veterans: Vietnam Perspectives

Father and Son

Father and Son ---------------------------------------------------------george j. fesus : u.s. army I was in Army ROTC at Dartmouth and was commissioned a second lieutenant, armor, at graduation in 1964. I deferred my entry into the Army to attend business school, so I didn’t enter active service until the fall of 1966. I had signed up for armor because I thought I would prefer riding to walking, because I had seen the movie The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, and because I spoke German and figured I would end up with a duty assignment somewhere near the Alps and skiing. However, by 1967, when my first assignment as a training officer at Fort Knox ended, the Vietnam War had really heated up, and new assignments were thrown into disarray. Consequently, I volunteered for Vietnam and was sent to Civil Affairs School and to Vietnamese Language School. To do this, I had to extend my duty commitment by three months, but that all worked out for the good in the long run. I arrived in country in December 1967, assigned to an advisory team of about fifteen working with the provincial government and army in Go Cong Province, a rich, arable province about thirty-­ five miles south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. I spent a year working with the local officials, supporting them in the construction and improvement of medical facilities, primary schools, and local marketplaces. I spoke as much in French as Vietnamese because many of the educated Vietnamese had learned fluent French during the French colonial era. In addition to my regular jobs, I was also able to meet with my father, an eye surgeon, sixty-­ seven years old at the time. He had given up his practice in Baltimore for three months and served in the regional Vietnamese hospital in Can Tho, the largest city in the Mekong Delta. At the time he was the oldest doctor to volunteer to go to Vietnam, and won 180 : dartmouth veterans outstanding recognition for his service and his treatment of Vietnamese civilians with eye problems. Things got a little tense for our team during the Tet attacks in 1968, but we did not experience the same major onslaughts as other areas saw. The province survived quite successfully, and I was convinced that the people there wanted nothing to do with North Vietnamese invasion or with Viet Cong sympathizers. I was quite sorry to leave after the year. I was also aware of the fact that, unlike my predecessors in World War II, I had the privilege of being rotated out of an unfinished war, which, when all was said and done, was not vital to the survival of the United States, as victory in World War II had been. I was also eager to get on with the rest of my life. The fact that I had extended my duty period by three months meant that I got out of the Army in December 1968. That gave me time to go to Austria to ski for three months before the start of corporate recruiting at business schools. It was during those three months that I met my wife, Susan, who was from San Francisco and also happened to be skiing in St. Anton, Austria. I found my tour in Go Cong significant and satisfying. I confess to being a lifelong, resolute anticommunist. My parents escaped Hungary just as communism was taking hold in the late 1940s, so I have always known communism to be the most repressive and suffocating form of government ever forced on people. Every form of government is imperfect . Churchill is reputed to have said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Communism is surely the vilest. Even dictatorships have had benevolent dictators. And, in my view, there was no doubt that, at least in Go Cong, the population did not want this North Vietnamese invasion and did not support the Viet Cong cadres. The 1.5 million South Vietnamese refugees who got into boats and tried to flee Vietnam after the fall of Saigon seem to have borne that out. I believe that all Americans and I were sent to Vietnam to help the people of South Vietnam improve their lot, withstand the false promises of a Communist dictatorship, and keep their individual freedom. Vietnam was a very different war from Afghanistan and Iraq. We went into Afghanistan and Iraq to protect and further direct U.S. interests. We went into Afghanistan...