VietNam remembrance

 A little something I sent to the newspaper, our AikenStandard.  Published May 10.  Thought I'd like to have it here, too.

Dear AikenStandard: 

 

Thank you for your article on the moving of the Vietnam war memorial that used to be in front of our police department and our main post office.  It was appropriately placed there at the time it was created, and now is, again, in an even more appropriate place for all to see and, for some, to understand.  TET of 1968 (TET being a local important holiday in Vietnam) was a difficult time for troops in Vietnam.  It was a time when North Vietnam’s leader, “Uncle Ho,” really “Ho Chi Minh”, decided to show us he could hit us anytime and anywhere he wished.  He decided to do it, and his troops, mostly part-timers from the civilians in the area who supported his hopes for their country, did it.  Those who were at one of our largest American bases, Tan Son Nhut, a facility collocated with the Saigon airport, along with most, if not all (I just don’t know) bases with American troops, were provided with a sample of what “Uncle Ho” wished us to see.  I was there as was, I believe, Kenny Lail, a friend and Aiken HS Graduate from my class who also was assigned to service in VietNam at the time. 

 

Twenty-six defenders of this base had the opportunity to return home a bit before their year was up.  They returned, as did many others, each in one of those aluminum containers provided for each and every one of those 29,000, +/- Americans who were killed in that war.  Many who were able to see the flatbed trucks taking their loads to the cargo planes designated to return these troops to their homeland gave them their last “in country” salute.  Not something they wanted, for sure, but the only thing “we the living” (thanks, Ayn Rand) were able to do for them at that time.  And, yes, I was able to give my salute to them as I walked to my duty assignment after that incident.  A few months later, I was able to join them with my return home, without that aluminum covering, though.  Glad I was able to return in the preferred manner, as were my parents, relatives, and friends.  This was the end of my full-time military duty.  I mustered out at a facility near, I think, San Francisco, or possibly Los Angeles, where the Tech-Sergeant who completed the necessary paperwork advised me to leave by a back gate, there being a crowd of protesters at the main gate.  I did as he said, and, afterward, wished I hadn’t.  I wish I had passed by those protesters, with or without the spit that was, seemingly, their thing for Americans who had been tasked with the assignment I, an Airman First Class, had been tasked with.  Oh, well, that’s just the way things were in those 1968 days.

 

Glad to be home today.  Thanks, again, for the memories, AikenStandard.  And thanks to all who created and finalized this remembrance to those of our military, some of whom preceded me in my return, one of whom was a personal friend of my daughter.

 

And, I, of course, do appreciate the monument that we have to those we lost in that war.  They were good people, doing a thankless job.  They deserve the monument, even if many of the rest of us do not deserve one single thing for what we did, or were doing, at the time.  And, as for those spitters, I, personally, would be happy to return the favor to one and all of them.  They, not we, our country’s military assignees to the war, they are the ones who should have been spit on, by damn near every other proud American.  We might have been wrong to have supported some of the VietNamese who were running their country at the time, but our military personnel were not to blame for that—not one bit!

 

Stephen Vaughn Geddes

A1C, at the time, SMSGT, Ret’d, SC Air National Guard

Aiken