27 Nov 2023
I tip my hat to those in the combat arms who endured the most severe dangers and miseries of the war. My own experience in Vietnam was less hazardous. During the last year of the U.S. involvement in the war (April 1972 to March 1973) I was one of the Army officers running a replacement operation on a compound within Tan Son Nhut airbase outside Saigon. We were the processing point for almost all U.S. military personnel who were coming into or out of Vietnam during that period. Many GIs whose tours in Vietnam were cut short by the continuing withdrawal of U.S. units saw me both when they arrived and again when they left.
The airbase received just a couple of enemy rocket barrages when I was there, the last one being in the final 90 minutes before the cease-fire went into effect. What I observed directly was not combat but rather the effects on a residual U.S. military force of an eight-year war in which most Americans had long ago lost faith, and in which individual objectives were mostly limited to staying alive and going home. One of the principal parts of the processing of personnel coming through our compound on their way back to the U.S. was drug testing to separate out the disturbingly large number of heroin users.
Given the nature of my unit’s mission, we had to process everyone else on that journey home before we could pack our own bags and leave Vietnam. I came back on the last plane of the U.S. withdrawal, at the end of the 60-day withdrawal period provided for in the cease-fire agreement. I was glad that the conclusion of the U.S. war in Vietnam coincided with the end of my tour of duty there. Besides being a significant point in U.S. history, this coincidence helped to provide a sense of closure that so many who served before me were not fortunate enough to get.
Even with the service commitment that came from going through Army ROTC at Dartmouth, the Army had given me the choice—after a delay, for graduate study, of what I expected would be two years of active duty—to do an abbreviated duty tour that, among other things, would surely have meant not going to Vietnam. I chose otherwise, believing that two years of doing something that had leadership responsibilities and was totally different from being a student and a scholar would be good for personal development. Knowing everything that I know now, I probably would have made the same choice.
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Paul R. Pillar Nonresident Senior FellowCenter for Security Studies Georgetown University