Jack Smith, RIP

[exlrrp]

I'm not posting this for any political reason, it was just in my Sunday Paper and I thought it was wotrth reading


JACK SMITH : 1945-2004
Coming to a final peace with the Vietnam War
The journey of a good soldier and journalist
Jack Smith
Sunday, April 18, 2004
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URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/18/INGO3657291.DTL



I served in Vietnam. What follows is the story of my personal journey home from that war, a journey that has taken most of the past 37 years.

If Vietnam had been a nuclear bomb, it could scarcely have had more impact on America. The war tore our country in two and left deep wounds that still have not entirely healed. For those who fought it, as I did, and for those who demonstrated against it, as many of my friends did, Vietnam remains the formative experience of a generation.

For right or wrong, nearly 3 million Americans went off to serve in Vietnam. Some 58,000 were killed; 153,000 more were injured or crippled by bullets, shrapnel or disease. But there were no parades for those who came home. Instead, we were pushed under the rug along with the unpopular and divisive war we served in. Vietnam veterans became bitter, angry, truly the lost Americans.

I was wounded. But I was lucky. I was not crippled. I am well-employed. I have adjusted. However, for many years I shared the same bitterness as those veterans who were less fortunate than I toward the country we all served so well, but which afterward served us so poorly.

It may sound silly, but war veterans need a parade ... some sort of public acceptance so they can put the war behind them and get on with life. Vietnam veterans never got that, and that's why so many of them for so long walked around carrying the war on their shoulders. A lot of Vietnam veterans never really left Vietnam; they never really came home.

I fought in the bloodiest part of the bloodiest battle of the whole war, the battle of the Ia Drang Valley. It was also the first encounter between North Vietnamese Regular Army troops and U.S. soldiers, and it fixed the war- fighting tactics used by both sides for the remainder of the war.

On the 17th of November, 1965, a day that is burned into my memory, my battalion (about 500 men) was walking away from a place called Landing Zone X- Ray in South Vietnam's Central Highlands, a few miles from the Cambodian border. Along with other units of the 1st Air Cav Division, we had just fought in a major three-day battle there and had decisively defeated two regiments of the North Vietnamese army.

It's the battle that was depicted in the recent Mel Gibson Hollywood movie, "We Were Soldiers." Don't look for me. I ended up on the cutting-room floor. Anyway, the movie only depicts what happened in the first part of the fight. What happened afterward was much worse. More men died in one more day of fighting than had in the previous three.

As we slipped through the jungle into another clearing called L-Z Albany, we were jumped by a North Vietnamese formation. Like us, about 500 strong, and like us, made up mostly of boys 18 or 19 years old. But they had been in- country for a year, and so they were greatly more skilled at fighting and killing. Hearing us coming, they quietly tied themselves up into the trees, uncoiled bandoliers of ammunition and snuck close in the chest-high razor grass.

Minutes after the guns opened up, we 500 were overwhelmed and fighting for our lives. Men rolled in the grass and stabbed at each other, gouged and punched, or blazed away at enemy soldiers just a few feet from them. I was lying so close to a North Vietnamese machine-gunner that I simply reached out and stuck my rifle into his face, pulled the trigger and blew his head off.

At one point in that awful afternoon as my battalion was being cut to pieces, a small group of enemy came upon me, and thinking I had been killed (I was covered in other people's blood), proceeded to use me as a sandbag for their machine gun. I closed my eyes and pretended to be dead.

I remember the gunner had bony knees that pressed against my sides. He didn't discover I was alive because he was trembling more than I was. He was, like me, just a teenager. The gunner began firing into the remnants of my company. My buddies began firing back with rifle grenades -- M-79s, to those of you who know about them.

I remember thinking, oh, my God, if I stand up, the North Vietnamese will kill me, and if I stay lying down my buddies will get me. ... Before I went completely mad, a volley of grenades exploded all around and on top of me, killing the enemy boy and injuring me.

It went on like this all day and much of the night. I was wounded twice and thought myself dead. My company suffered 93 percent casualties.

I watched all the friends I had in the world die. It is not the sort of thing you forget. The battlefield was covered with blood and littered with body parts, and it reeked of gunpowder and vomit. I discovered with a shock, as other soldiers have, that the only thing separating me from meat hanging in a butcher's shop was a thin piece of skin.

This sort of experience leaves scars. I had nightmares, and for years afterward I was sour on life, by turns angry, cynical and alienated.

Then one day I woke up and saw the world as I believe it really is, a bright and warm place. I looked afresh at my scars and marveled, not at the frailty of human flesh, my flesh, but at the indomitable strength of the human spirit. In spite of bullets, in spite of hot metal fragments, the spirit lives on. This is the miracle of life. Like other Vietnam veterans, I began to put my personal hurt behind me and started to examine the war itself.

A footnote on the battle: As I mentioned when I began, it was a seminal event. The first encounter between the regular troops of both sides. It was how we developed the technique of search-and-destroy -- essentially the same technique that George Custer used in the Great Plains: Have U.S. forces troll for the bad guys, and when they attack, kill them 10-to-1 with our superior firepower.

And the North Vietnamese went along. Basically, both sides in the Vietnam War drew the identical conclusion from this first and terrible battle: that they could win by using attrition. What we didn't understand then was that they were willing to pay a far higher price in lives than we were.

When I went back to Vietnam a few years ago, I met General Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who engineered the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu and then commanded North Vietnamese forces in the war with South Vietnam -- and us. He conceded that because of the Ia Drang, his plans to cut Vietnam in half and take the capital had been delayed 10 years. But then, he chuckled, it didn't make a difference, did it?

We won every battle, but in the end the North Vietnamese took Saigon. What on Earth had we been doing there? Was all that pain and suffering worth it, or was it just a terrible waste? This is why Vietnam veterans don't really let go, why many can't get on with their lives. It is what sets them apart from veterans of other wars.

Nothing is so precious to a nation as its youth. And so, to squander the lives of the young in a war that -- depending on one's point of view -- either should never have been fought, or we were never prepared to win, seems crazy. Yet, that's exactly what happened in Vietnam. However justified the war seemed in 1964 and 1965 -- and, remember, almost all Americans then thought it was -- it no longer seemed that way after 1968. And no matter what you may remember of the war, we never really fought it to win.

When I was wounded, it caused a minor sensation at home. My father is Howard K. Smith, the former anchorman and TV news commentator, who was then at the peak of his career. That the son of a famous person should get shot in Vietnam was, in 1965, news.

When I returned to the United States after my tour in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson, who was a friend of my father's, invited me to a dinner party at the White House. I remember a tall, smiling man who thanked me for my service and sacrifice. I liked him then -- I still do today. Yet, no one bears as much responsibility for the conduct of the war as he.

In the first Gulf War, we took six months to put half a million troops into the war zone. In Vietnam, more than six years. We were too timid to carry the fight to the enemy until the end, and we tried to keep the war contained to South Vietnam.

The result was that our enemy, a small country waging total war -- that is, using all its resources -- saw a superpower fighting a limited war, and concluded that if it could just sustain the 10-to-1 casualties we were inflicting for a while, then we would tire and leave, and it would win. After all, North Vietnam produced babies faster than we could kill its soldiers.

Ho Chi Minh was right. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, we quit and began the longest and bloodiest retreat in U.S. history. Dean Rusk, the then- secretary of State, many years later ruefully told me, "They outlasted us."

Johnson harnessed his generals to a basically civilian policy -- fighting the war piecemeal in the vain hope that no one in the United States would notice. As for the enemy, he treated Ho Chi Minh like a member of the congressional opposition: Show him the United States was tougher, and he'd give up. But Ho saw U.S. incrementalism as a sign of weakness and hung on. Tens of thousands of young Americans died needlessly.

Whether the war was right or wrong, it was fought in such a way it could never have been brought to a conclusion. With time, that now seems clear. What a waste. It's why so many veterans of Vietnam feel bitter.

We finally did get our parades, and we finally did build our memorial on the mall in Washington. These helped. But so many veterans were still haunted by the war, and I was, too.

Thirteen years ago, I watched the Berlin Wall come down and, as an ABC News correspondent, I witnessed firsthand on a number of trips the collapse of communism. The policy of containment worked. We won the Cold War. And however meaningless Vietnam seemed at the time, it contributed to the fall of communism.

That was something to hold onto. Pretty thin and not wholly satisfying as a justification for what I and many of my friends went through in Vietnam. But at least it was something.

Then nine years ago came an event that changed me. An opportunity to go back to Vietnam for ABC. With 10 other Ia Drang veterans, I traveled back to the jungle in the Central Highlands and walked the Ia Drang battlefield for several days in the company of some of the same North Vietnamese we had fought against nearly 30 years earlier.

Did I find the answer to my question about the futility of the war? No, I don't know if what I and the rest of us did in the war ultimately was worth it, but what I did find surprised me.

North Vietnam may have conquered the South, but it is losing the peace. A country that two decades ago had the fourth strongest army in the world has squandered its wealth on quarreling with and fighting wars against most of its neighbors, and is poor and bankrupt as a result.

In Vietnam today, communism is dying. Unfortunately very slowly. But it is dying. You look at Vietnam with its eager entrepreneurs and its frightened party bosses, and you wonder why they fought the war. Many North Vietnamese wonder the same thing.

More importantly, Vietnam is a country profoundly at peace. Because the North Vietnamese feel they won, they are not haunted by the same ghosts as we. The memorials and cemeteries that dot the Vietnamese countryside, to most people we met, were just artifacts from another time. And people could not understand what our little group of gray-haired, middle-aged Americans was doing there, what demons we were trying to exorcise, because they did not have those demons.

What struck me was the overwhelming peacefulness of the place, even in the clearing where I had fought. I broke down several times. I wanted to bring back some shrapnel, or shell casings, some physical manifestation of the battle to lay at the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington ... under the black granite of panel No. 3, where all my army buddies' names are carved, more than 200 of them.

But, do you know, search as I did, I could not find any battle debris. The forces of nature had simply erased it. And where once the grass had been slippery with blood, there were flowers blooming in that place of death. It was beautiful and still, and so I pressed some flowers and brought them back to lay at the foot of panel No. 3. That is all that I could find in that jungle clearing that once held terror, and now held beauty.

What I discovered with time may seem obvious, but it had really escaped me all those years on my journey home from Vietnam: The war is over. It certainly is for Vietnam and the Vietnamese. As I said on a Nightline broadcast when I came back, "This land is at peace, and so should we be, so should we." For me, Vietnam has become a place again, not a war, and I have begun letting go.

I have discovered that wounds heal. That the friendship of old comrades breathes meaning into life. We meet every year in Washington to read the names of the dead at the Vietnam Memorial.

Even the most disjointed events can begin to make sense with the passage of time. This has allowed me, on days like this, to step forward and take pride in the service I gave my country. But never to forget what was, and will always be, the worst day of my life. The day I escaped death in the tall grass of the Ia Drang Valley.

Jack Smith, 58, died on April 7 of pancreatic cancer. He was a correspondent and writer for ABC News from 1976 to 2001. This article, which appeared on military.com, was adapted from a speech he gave in October 2002 at the Marin Breakfast Club.

?2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ

[sn-e3]

Rest in Peace Jack

[MontanaKid]

What a good article. It made the memories flow for me, too.

[1CAVCCO15MED]

See ya later buddy.

[b3196]

So Sad.....So True
God bless you, Jack
Bob K

Great article,thanks much for taking the time to post it.
Glad he found peace before it was time to rest.
Later Jack

[DMZ-LT]

Thank you for posting this James. Glad Jack found peace and meaning in his life. Salute

[exlrrp]

I loved this when I read it, I'm still trying to write my own storyand it defintely did not end in Vietnam-- it just keeps going on and on. I think every one of us should write something like this--not only what happened to us but how we tried to find the meaning of it. We'll all die sometime--what exactly do we want to tell eternity about what we did?
One of the things that touched me the most was his description of going back to the NAm. Thats what I found when I went back there, actually walked some of the places that had the most dark hidden meanings for me. So many things had such HUGE meanings for me that the Vietnamese had moved way beyond. The war is indeed over, except the one we're still carrying around in our hearts.
May you be free from the things that hold you down

James

[Gimpy]

Thanks so much for posting this.

He WAS our brother................and one hell of a reporter and writer.

May God bless him and hold him in his arms forever!

[usmcsgt65]

This is the Jack Smith, who's father was Howard K. Smith. He was an excellent reporter. I saw his report on the Ia Drang Valley that he did for ABC - excellent. Truely, one of our band of brothers. Semper Fi, Jack.