For this interview I had the unique and special opportunity to have a discussion with my first cousin once removed Nick Raymond. Why I was so glad to have the opportunity to speak with Nick is because he was a Green Beret in Vietnam, which means he experienced the Vietnam war in a way that not many people who served did. Nick emphasized that he was not a regular grunt in the rice patties, but rather doing more specialized work. Nick was not only a Green Beret in Vietnam but also in Cambodia and later in Bosnia, Afghanistan and the drug war in South America. For this project I will also be pulling from two sources “America, the Vietnam War and the World” (Daum) and “The Vietnam War and Postmodernity” (Bibby) which will provide insight to the true American mission as well as how U.S. involvement was perceived because of misconstrued media. I would also like to note that I’ll be sticking closely to the wording Nick used in my interview, due to his parlance being nothing short of mesmerizing.
Nick was born in 1950 in Fairfax, Virginia, and began his military career at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington City, VA. According to Nick he was “not a particularly good student at VMI, it was very clear that I was not going to make general officer.” But Nick has always had a knack for “the outdoor military experience” which is why he “sought out the more elite units.” While he did say that VMI gave him a leg up in the military he made it apparent that back in the 1960’s and 1970’s the specialized units of the military had to be “mentally and physically tough.” To Nick he saw it as a bit of a personal challenge, he wanted “to see if I could make it,” and of course he did which is when they “Sent my ass to the Vietnam war.” I wanted to know what Nickwas doing there specifically but of course I had to ask about day one, and it’s nothing short of what the media presents, brutality being one not misrepresented. Nick said when he flew into Vietnam the “airfield was taking rounds, that's a welcome to Vietnam. Hadn’t even landed and shit was blowing up.” Nick had entered the war late some time in late 1971 through 1973, Nick landed so late in fact that “the Fifth Special Forces had already gone home and the remaining Green Berets were dealt out to a bunch of different programs across the country.” Nicks late arrival was key to an American show of power “an early withdraw from the war, so the argument went, would cause allies elsewhere in Asia and around the world to lose faith in the reliability of Americas commitments and would embolden adversaries in Moscow and Beijing to pursue aggressive designs all over the globe” (Daum 175). The American mission in Vietnam was not to take power in the country but rather to repel enemy communist forces. When Nick arrived at his debrief he was put in a room and he “would’ve gone to the 101st Airborne or the First Air Cav, which were the last two combat units actually fighting there. Some guy in the back raised his hand and asked what was the Individual Training Group? The sergeant said, ``That's the old Special Forces you don’t wanna go there, they're crazy``.” To Nick he had hit the jackpot in terms of what he wanted to do, signaled by the cash register sound he made, Nick also enforced the fact that he was “no ordinary grunt in the rice paddies,” and that his experience in the war was quite unique.
He entered the Green Beret’s as a “ brand new lieutenant, pretty well trained, physically tough.” This time frame was in the downswing of the war, and Nick was working with a native group named the Cham, a tribe indigenous to Cambodia. Working with indigenous people was a part of the U.S. plan, and a large part of what the Green Beret’s do to this day. The U.S. had “fought for its independence against the nation and government which had created loose associations of colonies in the first place” (Daum 65). Nick was a part of this U.S. mission which was to unify and support groups of indigenous people, “Vietnam did not rebel against Americancontrol; rather, the United States tried to interpose itself in the course of a determined Vietnamese independence movement” (Daum 66). How Nick experienced this was with the Cham, out on the border of Cambodia “indicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail.” The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran from South to North Vietnam and was used by communist led North Vietnamese parties to send supplies to people who supported communism in the South. The reason for working with the Cham was that their land stood right across the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but what's interesting is that the Cham were technically Cambodian so “they couldn't have cared less they didn’t know communist from confederate and all they wanted to do was tend to their land.” This speaks to the Vietnam War and the struggles colonist Vietnam had faced for centuries before, at its core Vietnam was a civil war. Two sides sponsored by different foreign powers pushing their own agenda, and the U.S. goal was to support groups resisting foreign communist power. The Green Beret’s were there to do specifically that, they would “train the tribesmen, equip and lead them on combat patrols and reconnaissance patrols along the border.” Nick was also able to provide insight on the way the Vietnamese were able to continue using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that it wasn’t “one trail it was a network and they'd switch on and off.”
While the U.S. had its main goal of repulsing Communist led forces in Vietnam and Nick had his mission of intersecting the trail. For the most part the Special Forces “were very independent, besides the general assignment of intercepting the trail was left up to us.” Now as I said before Nick’s experience was quite different from most, the experience of a Green Beret was unique in the way that they didn't have someone telling them to do. They had a general mission but because the task at hand was so difficult it required the specialization of the Green Berets - they had to decide where was the most effective place to patrol, gain reconnaissance on enemy positions and movements, trying to figure out when supply convoys would be moving through and things of that nature that a normal soldier wouldn’t be able to do. For the Green Berets assimilation in to the tribe was the largest part oftheir mission and having that resource in Vietnam was important because it was the Chams “jungle, nobody came into their jungle without them knowing it. They were just phenomenal.” Having people who knew the Jungle was important for the Green Berets because while they were specialized they were still in unknown enemy territory. “We didn't teach them anything about being in the jungle, we had the radios and the Arc Lights but they would go out and find the enemy and report back to us.” This is part of the reasoning for the Special Forces relations with native tribes, they offered information which was not previously had and would work to the benefit of the U.S. warfighters. While Nick and the Beret’s were the ones training and supplying, it was the Cham who were giving the Beret’s information which led to the decisions of what to do next. For the Cham “they lived on and in the Jungle a great deal of their livelihood depended on the jungle,” which is why they were so open to help from U.S. forces as they were the ones trying to help protect that land.
One of the main issues that the U.S. faced during the war was gaining support from other Western countries such as France to support the war in Vietnam. This resulted in the More Flags campaign which saw the U.S. claiming commitment to the war in hopes of getting other countries who were weary of the war to do the same. “Boosting the morale of the South Vietnamese had from the start been a key rationale behind the effort to get allies to commit manpower to the conflict.” (Daum 191) But the U.S. also had to worry about the willingness of the South Vietnamese to fight with them, “War-weariness and apathy among the South Vietnamese were a constant source of concern to U.S. officials” (Daum 191). This is why the Green Beret’s involvement was so critical in the U.S. mission, being able to build a tight bond with the many small groups that made up Vietnam would pose as a strong foothold for the American agenda. What the Beret’s were doing was essentially a war fueled grass roots campaign. While the U.S. was trying to fight communism they also understood that the most effective way to do so was by implementing the people who had a large stake in the war. Theway Nick and the Beret’s embodied this part of the mission was one through their leadership of the people but what was also pivotal was supplying the Cham. They would supply the Cham through “helicopter resupply into the base camp. Because they were physically very small people, in the beginning we gave them the thirty caliber version of the M1 Garande and after a while we gave them the M16s which were light enough to carry with the ammo. In addition they used crossbows, which at close range in the jungle can be devastating and can be very demoralizing for the enemy, to come across Nguyen with a crossbow bolt through his forehead.” At this point it should be clear that the Cham were not some uncivilized group of people but rather very capable and very good at what they did, it was the U.S. support that was given to them which allowed them to be more proficient in the mission. It was the localized support of people like the Cham that counteracted weariness of the South Vietnamese among other factors, as the U.S. was showing their commitment. The relationship with the Cham and other tribes was very important but it is clear they welcomed the help as the Green Beret’s were “treated as honored guests. You know how you come to a new corporation and they give you a coffee cup or a baseball hat, well these guys gave me a wife.” Nick was married at the time and was a bit put off by the situation but was told they’d chop his head off if he didn’t accept as it would be a deadly insult to decline. But this again reinforces the point that the experience and mission of the Green Beret’s was to fully assimilate, and that South Vietnamese forces were welcoming of U.S. involvement. Although he came to have an interesting relationship with this woman as her husband had died in the war, which meant she had become an active contributing member of the tribe contrary to the traditional role that women played in the Cham society, Nick was relieved to find out she served as what we’ll call an assistant. The physical presence of the U.S. was very important in their mission as “most friendly governments would continue to offer tepid rhetorical support for America’s mission in Vietnam but rule out meaningful assistance to the cause.” (Daum 192) Nick also never met any resistance to the American influence, as he puts it “They realized that only because of American power wouldthey survive.” Nick was kind enough to offer me an anecdote on what the Beret’s were really getting into as boots on the ground who were assimilating with native people. He said he was once at a banquet where the main course was a monkey in the middle of the table with its brain exposed, from which people were eating the brain of the monkey, and he said “that's the kind of thing Green Beret’s find themselves doing that the First Infantry division does not. You have to live and blend in the way they do.” But what did the Cham think about the war? Well “they couldn't have cared less, they were surrounded by enemies with Cambodia on one side and Communist Vietnamese on the other, they couldn't tell a communist from a confederate.”
“The overwhelming proportion of what has been written and recorded about the Vietnam War has been about America’s war in Vietnam. Given the size, the significance, and the cost of America's commitment this is understandable” (Daum 221). Nick had some interesting perspectives on the size and scale of War that the United States decided to take on and he didn't agree with it. “I objected to going in, in the first place with large American troops, I think that was the mistake. When the Marines and First Infantry landed on the ground from then it was going to be a morass.” Although he also stated that he “had no objection to Special Unit Forces or backing them up with massive air power, I thought the deployment of heavy American ground combat troops was a mistake.” This is to say that Nick believes we could have gotten the job done in Vietnam solely through specialized forces and I'm inclined to agree. The size of which the war was waged was simply too large, and unless you invade from North Vietnam, which the U.S. did not, there's no way out and you are landlocked.
I also wanted to get Nick's perspective on the Anti War movement, as he had given me perspective on all other facets of the war. He said that he “freely believes in people's right to object, and I think people were right to object to a war because it was bad. I only objected to people who left for Canada, and the amnesty they were given.” Nick also wanted to make itclear that he is far from a right wing nutcase and that the people should have the right to use their voice. But as someone who was so deeply involved in the military “it was difficult to watch things that were going on back home even though it didn't affect us and what we were doing.” Nick is a very aware person and he recognized that most of America’s attacks that were waged on a large scale were ineffective, but he knew the work he was doing was proficient in making a difference. This is why it was discouraging to him to see the pushback from Americans as they did not have the full story. The general population had no knowledge of what the Green Beret’s were doing as it was classified at the time, and much of the media following the war created a false narrative of what it was all about. “The idealizing tendency of modernist aestheticism is echoed more frequently in Vietnam literature, however, by comments scattered through oral histories that suggest a casual, if sometimes calculated, awareness on the speaker's part that authenticity depends on narrative persona and point of view as much as on lived experience” (Bibby 19). We often see portrayal of Vietnam in the media as overly romanticized and unrealistic but “The aesthetic traditions of high culture were largely inaccessible and irrelevant to the lower classes from which most Vietnam combat units were composed - and to the mass culture from which imagery about the Vietnam war has come” (Bibby 19). This is to say that the image that has been created by the media doesn’t matter to Vietnam veterans as they already had the lived experience of fighting in the war, but what did matter is the inaccurate way Vietnam was depicted as it created a disconnect from the reality of the situation. “Traditional symbols and themes have been replaced by less complex motifs borrowed from… simplistic stereotypes, that populate the media” (Bibby 19). This means in the eyes of an average citizen the Vietnam war was fought “instead of a holy war or a defense of the free world, the Vietnam war was fought according to a script from the Saturday matinees” (Bibby 19). Take Born on the Fourth of July for example a movie about two Vietnam War veterans in a movie where the “baby killer identity was entrenched in U.S. popular culture” (Bibby 53). But as we have learned from Nicks interview, the U.S. was indeed not there to kill babies but rather to oppose the threatof The Soviet Union and The People's Republic of China which would have grown in Vietnam if it had gone unchecked. “The film in general… [is] rife with such abuse of memory, incoherent bodies, horror movie flashbacks” (Bibby 53). Nick of course had an interesting perspective on life after the war as well and his return from the war, “it was very quick you were out of Vietnam and then you went through, out processing then you're standing in San Francisco surrounded by nut jobs less than 48 hours within pulling the trigger, it was a very abrupt return.” But he also made it clear that it wasn’t like how the media presented it, and that he “didn’t have night terrors or anything of the sort.” Nick reflected on what he did when he got home from Vietnam “besides the obvious with my wife I took a few weeks off, I didn't have a head trip or nightmares,” he went to work for a bank and his transition back into society was smooth.
While Nick is by no means the ordinary soldier from Vietnam his perspective on the war is very important and very unique. Nick was able to provide a perspective which is contrary to that of what is believed and seen in modern media, Nick and his work in Vietnam were the true embodiment of the American mission in Vietnam. It is important we understand our history correctly as it is our history on which American policies are built on. If we perceive our history as something it is not, we will be perpetuating policies and values which we don’t truly support.
Citations
Daum, Andreas. Gardner, Lloyd. Mausbach Wilfred. America, The Vietnam War and the World; Comparative and International perspectives. Publications of the German Historical Institute, 2003.
Bibby, Mchael. The Vietnam War and Postmodernity. University of Massachusetts Press.
All quotes provided without citation are from the interview with Nick Raymond and me.