| The worst moment in my life was a hard landing at Danang, Vietnam in early 1968. On a normal day, the only bad result would have been my obligation to pick up the bar tab at the Tuy Hoa Officers Club that night. But this was a special trip. We were carrying wounded GI’s from Dong Ha to Danang. Dong Ha was a postage stamp strip just 5 miles from the North Vietnamese border. That area of Vietnam is oddly like an English moor, rolling grass plains and few trees. At night, they lit the 2,600 foot strip with those little round kerosene lamps they used around construction sites through the early 50’s. Dong Ha was a place where a wounded soldier, minutes from the field, would be transferred from a helicopter to a C-130 rigged to carry 72 litters, plus medical staff. We could get them to Danang in 30 minutes and the worst cases would be put on another chopper for a three minute trip to the hospital ship in Danang harbor. That afternoon, I was told as they loaded on the litters at Dong Ha, we carried a kid with a sucking chest wound. I normally had no trouble landing the C-130 – John Robb will confirm that it’s a tractable, responsive and forgiving aircraft. But every pilot just gets it wrong once in a while, and we typically made a dozen landings a day, so the law of averages caught up with all of us every month or so. But at Danang? Jeezus, the runway’s 2 miles long and 300 feet wide and it was broad daylight. It was just a bonehead mistake. The landing was really hard. Not a bounce, there was no airspeed left to afford that, just a crunch that would make you wonder if the gear was OK, if you didn’t know how tough these planes are. Normally, the crew would have burst out laughing, having a good-hearted guffaw at my expense – just one more of the many delights of hauling stuff around Vietnam, since most of our cargo was things, not people. But today no one said a word. No doctor running to the flight deck to yell at the miserable clod who just jarred the teeth of all the people in back who still had a face. No conjecture on how was the kid with the sucking chest wound. I’ve done a lot of things to regret, but nothing as irredeemable as that hard landing at the wrong time. The Kids MatterI was reminded of that moment when I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this weekend. Michael Moore’s purpose is to shock us with the images of our guys and their people maimed and killed by the carnage of war. He’s been criticized by those who think he went too far. Those of us who’ve witnessed the combat know that Moore understates its effects. If he aired more extreme footage for three hours, he’d still understate the horror of those scared, confused and suddenly mortal 19-year-olds, whose lives will never be the same.
That is why combat veterans don’t talk much about their experiences. Only distant observers like me, witnessing the action from on high or the results lying in the cargo bay, can even broach the horror. We’re silent not because we’re strong but because we cannot comprehend how stupidly the inexperienced bulk of society speaks of war as a rational option that we’re entitled to use on people the way a company might launch a hostile takeover: Boys with tin soldiers, attempting to seem grown up.
Ah, some say. You’ve been scarred by an unfortunate personal experience that blinds you to the necessity of expressing America’s rights in the global arena. We honor your experience but not your conclusions. Like history’s great leaders, we must wage foreign policy with the objectivity demanded of real adults like us. Why else would we be in power, if we were not a better judge of international realities?
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