Born on the 4th of July
The true story of a man born on July 4th who went to Vietnam
This evening I had the privilege of sitting across from a man who served in Vietnam. Today is his 70th birthday. My in-laws kindly invited him and my family to dinner. They invited us because it’s Independence Day. They invited him because it’s his birthday and it’s Independence Day. I’ve been with him once before on his birthday, but today he really opened up about his life, especially his time in Vietnam. I’ll call him Brennan.
Brennan was part of the Army Special Forces: he was a Ranger. I asked him if he was drafted, and he responded that he was part of the voluntary draft: When he was about 16 and a half, he got in trouble and was in jail. They told him he could spend three years in jail, or he could go be with the military for three years. He decided on the military, knowing that he’d probably go to Vietnam. He said some people went to Germany, but those people probably had connections.
Brennan went to training, but before he shipped out he had to figure out what to do with his girlfriend. He gave her a ring, but Brennan talked to her dad and told him he thought it would be best not to marry her because it wouldn’t be fair for her since he’d be going off to war for so long just after getting married. The dad agreed. So she had the ring, and he went off to war.
He was at Okinawa, Japan, first. He stayed there for a few days until his 18th birthday 52 years ago today. They wouldn’t send him to Vietnam until he turned 18, and then he was there.
He said he must have met John Kerry while there, but Kerry wasn’t famous yet so he thought nothing of it. Kerry was on a swift boat, and Brennan came in by air through parachute, or perhaps dropped straight into water. That was to get them in fast.
All orders were by radio. There were 144 people in his unit at the beginning, and they would be ordered to take a village. They would do their job to take the village, but there was very little context about what they were doing. Right as they came in, they got a map of the area or village, and the orders to take it, all by radio, and there were no commanders with his unit. He never knew where he was. He knew he was in Cambodia or Laos for part of the time when he was over there (I forget which), but when he came home, people told him he wasn’t in Cambodia or Laos, but he swore he was, and they told him again: he wasn’t there. Then, about twenty years later, someone called him and told him, “You were there.”
Brennan and his unit would take villages. He said the villagers would lie a lot. He said they’d find a bunch of guns and then they’d torch the village. Brennan said there were probably some innocent people that died, but that’s war. He also said that they would give them warning, but then he said, “No,” we didn’t warn them.
Brennan went into the Army with three other guys from his hometown. They were fortunate to get to stay together during their time in Vietnam. When one of them died, he went along with his two living buddies to be pallbearers for their dead friend’s funeral. He said it wasn’t good. Brennan was attacked by the deceased sister around the time of the funeral because she said it was his fault. Then the three went back and another one of his hometown friends died.
Brennan and his unit were in the thick of it. Of the 144 people in his unit, only 13 came home. He said 8 to 10 of his unit were awarded the Medal of Honor. That’s of 174 Medals of Honor awarded to people in the Army for service in the Vietnam War (that’s according to Wikipedia). I don’t know if another unit saw more action than his. He went home with the one guy left from his hometown. The thirteen survivors used to have reunions, but he said those people have slowly died off so he doesn’t go to the reunions anymore, if they even exist. By my estimation, he could be the last survivor.
Brennan said about three years ago his hometown Vietnam friend died: it was suicide. Brennan said his friend called him up saying he would commit suicide for a year and never did, so when he called him after a year Brennan told him to just quit talking about it and just do it. He said to us that he figured his friend wouldn’t do it if he’d been talking about it for over a year and hadn’t done it yet. His friend did.
When Brennan found out that his friend died, he cried. He said it was the first time in his life he ever cried. He explained to us that during his training they broke them down until there was nothing left, and then they built them up into exactly what they wanted them to be. He was trained to follow commands and feel nothing.
He described the time he almost died from a motorcycle accident, I think this was more recent: he said the nurse told him he was dead but they shocked him and he came back to life. Brennan told us that nothing and no one phases him or scares him. The only thing that could affect him would be his own death: nothing else affects him.
While in Vietnam, his unit was all over the place. They would clean up one village and then be ordered on to the next. Because they were all over, there was a sixth month lag between when mail was sent from the United States and when he received it. Brennan heard from his girlfriend that she was pregnant, but he wondered why she would tell him that since it couldn’t be his baby since he was over in Vietnam. He told his friend back home to take care of his girlfriend.
Brennan came home with the one hometown friend that he had left, only to find out that his buddy that he had asked to take care of his girlfriend had married her. Brennan’s girlfriend asked him if he wanted the ring back, but he wasn’t sure if that made sense if his buddy used it to marry her. A lot of sarcasm, but I sensed a depth of pain through his experience here that’s hard to put into words.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Vietnam took a heavy toll on Brennan, and I never once got the vibe that he’s lived an easy life since. He has one daughter, he lives alone, and I don’t think he has many visitors.
It’s hard for me not to wonder if Brennan’s life would look different had he not gone to Vietnam.
Brennan’s story makes me think of the dire consequences of war, both for our men (and women), and the people on the other side. Brennan kept reiterating that the other side was losing twenty of their men for every one of ours that was lost.
War hurts those who return home from the war and have seen action. It also hurts those they are close to. Probably even more profoundly, there’s also the huge toll on the lives of those who die, and their friends and family. And there’s another type of toll for those who come back wounded, both physically and mentally, and the toll on their friends and family.
When the United States goes to war, the severe toll tells me a few things: 1) we shouldn’t get into a war that we can’t win, 2) we shouldn’t get into an unjust war, 3) we shouldn’t go to war unconstitutionally, 4) and that previous one means that we should only get into war when Congress declares war. A Congressional declaration of war forces a few things: it forces our legislators to be held accountable for the war, it forces the legislators to vote on the war, meaning they will be hard-pressed to vote yes to a war when their constituents are telling them no, and it forces them to either step down or come up for reelection based on the outcome of the war, whether the war is ongoing or over.
I believe war should absolutely be a last resort, only ever be in response to aggression, and never as an act of aggression. But, as the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 3, there is “a time for war.”
When I think about the people who have served in the military, I am very thankful for those who have served defending our freedoms. It’s hard to know who has done what, but sometimes when I think about a war like Vietnam it’s harder for me to be thankful for the people who served in that war because it doesn’t feel like they were directly defending our freedom. At the time many if not most in the United States felt it was necessary for our military to fight to defend our freedom, but as the war dragged on less supported it, and in hindsight I think almost everyone would call the war a mistake. But I need to be thankful for them because they were serving our country, but more importantly, virtually all of them were serving each other while over there, and for that we must be thankful. I am also thankful to those who clearly defended our freedom and to those who perhaps did not because of the toll that their service placed on their own lives and the lives of those they knew. The toll often seemed worse in what I would call an unjust war such as Vietnam. And I’m thankful for those serving us and each other right now in war.
According to Wikipedia, the United States is presently at war in Yemen, Uganda, Iraq, Syria, and Cameroon. These wars are unjust and unconstitutional because they have not formally been declared by the Congress of the United States. Any troops in those countries need to immediately be ordered home, and all drone strikes need to cease, until and unless Congress legally passes a declaration of war.
We need to get out of our current wars, and we need to stay out of war unless Congress declares war. Only when Congress is willing to declare war, and the President goes along with it or Congress is able to override the President, do I believe that our wars over the past 100+ years have a chance of being a war worth fighting. And it’s not even the fighting that matters as much as the human toll. The loss of life, limb, sanity, and well-being that comes with someone who has been in war, and the effect of that on their family and friends. War is, perhaps, the gravest of things that anyone could go through, and we must never send people to war without asking ourselves: would I like to go into this war? and would I want to send my children into it?
