Sergeant Chuck Hagel in Vietnam 45 years ago.
On being a combat grunt:
Well, you know, people who have never been in combat have no way of understanding what it is. They see movies. They see different dynamics. They read. They talk with people who have been through it.
And I think there’s always an exaggerated sense of it to a certain extent that, you know, you’re fighting every day, and there’s this life-and-death situation every day. And it isn’t that way.
Yes, you — I don’t know how many firefights I was in. I don’t know how much combat — I mean, the actual day-to-day people shooting at you and you shoot at them and the problems, I’ve never tried to calculate it. I had my share. And 1968, as you know, was the worst year we ever had over there, but a lot of it is pretty boring, too.
A lot of it is pretty monotonous. A lot of it is going through the same thing day after day. And maybe you go for a week and not have anything. Maybe you go for two weeks and just not have anything.
Of course, that’s dangerous, too, because you get sloppy and you — you don’t pay attention. But that’s the only thing I would add about — you asked the question about the combat experience. There’s a lot of downtime in the sense of a lot of boring time.
Now, we weren’t sitting around, munching pretzels and drinking beer. We were out in the field and sweating and probably wishing sometimes you were in combat and doing the patrol work and the breaking jungle for 16 hours a day with a machete and always thinking that you might be in the gun sights of a sniper up in a tree or always knowing that there was a grenade hanging on that tree or always knowing you could be walking right into an ambush, which we did.
And the mental pressure that is on people who are out in those situations, the intensity of that pressure, does make — does make an individual break. It makes him do funny things. It — and I don’t think people quite understand that. It carries forward, too.
You know, we’ve gone through this 30 years and 20 years and 10 years of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Really is there such a thing?
And do guys wake up in the middle of the night?
I remember my father, when I was young — he was in World War II overseas for almost three years. I remember him waking up in the middle of the night screaming. No. It does happen. And it happens not just because of necessarily the blood and gore that you see in combat. It’s the — it’s the pressure of the mental process that — that makes you that way.
On getting out:
The out-processing was terrible. Now, for me, wanting to just get the hell out, at that moment, for me, it was — it was the greatest thing that could happen because the last thing I wanted was to hear a bunch of majors or sergeant majors tell me about anything.
But — but when you think of — of 72 hours prior to the time you let somebody out on that street in San Francisco or wherever they’re going to go to with a full wallet, new Class As. “Thank you for your service, young man. Now go have a good life.”
Considering what they had just been through, with no transition, no kind of bringing it down a little bit, no adjustment, no — I mean, you had your quick little physical. You had your little — you had the chaplain talk to you. You had a couple of psychiatrists talk to you, and that was all about an hour, the whole thing.
“And now, you be a good boy, and don’t do anything crazy. Don’t get too drunk on the way home. And don’t spend all your money. Your mom’s waiting for you. Or your wife’s waiting for you. Be careful. We appreciate your service.” I mean, that was it…
That just wasn’t a good way to do it because you had — in those days in ’68, you had so many of these draftees in there who many of them weren’t suited to be there for a lot of reasons. And they needed some counseling out of this.
Now, some guys were going to be headed for trouble, no matter what. Some guys went in with trouble and they came out with trouble. And some guys blame it on Vietnam, and maybe Vietnam made it worse for some guys. In some cases, it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d gone to Vietnam or not. These are some pretty troubled guys.
And — but — but to almost just cut them loose with 72 hours notice, say, boom, you’re on your own, and not bringing them down a little bit, just a little at a time, a little at a time, was a — was a — is a bad, bad thing to do.
And I’ve had many veterans — when I was at the Veterans Administration, when I was deputy administrator of the VA in the first Reagan administration, had many of these guys say the same thing to me that I’m saying to you. “If I would have had maybe a week or 10 days just to think through and get myself together a little bit,” but what happened was you go hit a bar or you got that full wallet. You meet some girls. You go do something stupid.
On his leaders:
The company commanders and the platoon leaders, they were the ones obviously on the ground with you. But I was not much impressed with our — our battalion leaders, our XOs.
I don’t — I didn’t ever get a sense that they came down in, enough into the platoon company level to really do what I thought officers should do.
And the lieutenants and the captains carried the bulk, as they do in any war, essentially.
But it was the sergeants. It was the senior enlisted that carried the weight. I mean really carried the weight. And it was obvious to everybody. And they — the senior sergeants were the reassuring, calming guys.
And in many cases, many cases, these were the guys that didn’t fall apart. And some of the officers did. And some of the officers couldn’t read maps very well. And I just — I never had much confidence in — in a lot of the officer corps.
How he has applied what he learned in Vietnam to life since:
There’s not a day goes by that you don’t pull back on at least some little thing — life’s not about big things every day — and you don’t recall in some way an experience you had in the service, in Vietnam, a tolerance, an understanding, reaching beyond, trying to understand more than the obvious underneath.
And probably most fundamental for me as a United States senator, when we talk of going to war again Iraq or against anyone, we need to think it through carefully, not just for the political and the geopolitical and the diplomatic and the economic consequences — and those are important.
But at least for me, this old infantry sergeant thinks about when I was in Vietnam in 1968, United States senators making decisions that affected my life and a lot of people who lost their lives, that they didn’t have — I didn’t have anything to say about.
Someone needs to represent that perspective in our government as well. The people in Washington make the policy, but it’s the little guys who come back in the body bags.
h/t Best Defense