Bringing a Voice to the Vietnam War

QDT: Although you served in the military, you've been careful to say that you did not serve in Vietnam. What compelled you to explore Vietnam from a human perspective rather than focusing on things like weaponry and military strategy?

I enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1957, at age 17, and served for three years. I was never in Vietnam until I spent some time there in 2014 researching Enduring Vietnam. But the Vietnam War in the 1960s and after was an important and powerful part of my experience. I came to be critical of the war in the late 60s, but critical of the leaders who sent finally over two and a half million Americans there and not of those who served.

It is a story that needs, that deserves, to be known.

Over the years, I became concerned that we had neglected the story of this generation. In 2009, I spoke on Veterans Day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. I told the gathering that we had an obligation to ensure that those who served and sacrificed in Vietnam would be remembered. 

I said, “Casualties of war cry out to be known—as persons, not as abstractions called casualties nor as numbers entered into the books, and not only as names chiseled into marble or granite ...We need to ensure that here, in this place of memory, lives as well as names are recorded.” 

Reminding people of the human face of war became my focus for the next decade, in two books, a dozen op-eds, and many public presentations. 

When my wife, Susan, and I saw Hamilton on Broadway several years ago, one of Eliza Hamilton's lines stayed with me. She asked, “Who lives, who dies, who tells the story?”

Those who serve in war directly confront the first two of her questions. The third question is about the responsibility that remains after the war. Without the story being told, the personal story, we fail to understand the nature of war. When I wrote Those Who Have Borne the Battle in 2012, I had a chapter on Vietnam. I knew then that I needed to do more to tell the story of the generation who served in Vietnam and came home to an ungrateful nation. This book aims to do that. 

It was hard then, and has been hard since to look at [photos of the dead] without confronting the human face of sacrifice.

I have often turned back to a Life Magazine issue of June 1969 that deeply affected me then—and still does as it sits on a table five feet away. The magazine had 12 pages of...

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