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There wasn't the political will to win the war: Jerry Beckett
"All my uncles served in World War II, and I could remember as a little boy when they’d write home to my grandmother, because I lived with my grandmother. And the troop trains used to come through town – I was about nine or 10 during the Korean War. The trains would stop, and they (the troops) couldn’t get off, so everyone in town was bringing food to them. I’d run back and forth buying beer for them. When that train pulled out, I’d have all kinds of pocket change.
I made up my mind then at 10, I wanted to be a soldier like my uncles. I knew I wanted to serve my country, whether I was going to make a career or it was something I didn’t know. For my generation, it was almost expected. It wasn’t like a draft. You just went and gave your country three years, then you went and came back home and worked the railroad or the coal mines.
I enlisted at age 17. Later on, I had been in the army about two years and I was in Vietnam. I got a letter that said I’d been drafted. I said to my platoon leader that I had to go home because I’d been drafted. “Shut up, Beckett and get back to work!”
It was in 1961. I couldn’t even spell Vietnam. I didn’t have an inkling. We were still eating K rations from the Second World War – all that stuff has a shelf life of like 100 years, and they didn’t throw away anything.
First time I went to Vietnam, I was scared to death. I remember they opened that door, it was this heat blast, this smell. I’ll never forget that. They had all these beautiful Vietnamese girls lined up, they were giving you leis like they do in Hawaii. I was just amazed. It was just the spices and the aroma – and the heat. I wouldn’t say it stinks, but it was a new smell for me.
You had to sit around for a few days before you got your assignment. They’d put you in these hotels, and there’s lizards crawling around on the walls. Later on, we found that was good because they ate the mosquitoes.
Finally, they gave me my assignment and said I was heading north. And I was all happy because the fighting’s going on in the south, in the delta, so I thought I’d be relatively safe.
I had no doubt about why I was in Vietnam. We bought time for them, and could have done a lot more, but there wasn’t the political will to win the war. Trust me, the American army fought with more honor and more sacrifice than they had in any other war. The second world war didn’t have the same restraints placed on them that they did in Vietnam. Back in those days, if you had the audacity to pick on America, you paid the consequences. There was no collateral damage. It was a totally different outlook.
The solider is not a diplomat or a politician. It’s hard for a solider to understand how an enemy can fire on you and your buddies, then cross this magical line into another country (Cambodia) where you can’t pursue him. Our politicians have to realize that the military is trained for on thing, and that’s search and destroy.
We were advisory teams; we had light weapons advisors, we had heavy weapons advisors. We had an interpreter named Mr. Hahn and I befriended him right away. He taught me Vietnamese, and the meal I was invited to was in his house.
We were tugging at the (the Vietnamese) and the North Vietnamese were tugging at them. We were trying to get them to side with us, they were trying to get them to side with them. Only we had very different views. We were trying to win hearts and minds, they were killing them if they didn’t conform.
When I first got there, there was a lot of coups going on. You could watch the Vietnamese, they’d be siding with whoever they thought was going to win. Also at that time: Yes there was a war going on, but it wasn’t just the north and south. It was the Buddhists and the Catholics. It was always a mixture of a lot of things.
We were an “advisory” team. But I never forget the first time I got shot at. We were approaching a village. And so we jumped out of the jeep and got behind a hill, and he was firing back at whoever it was. He told me to fire, and I was scared to death. That was my baptism of fire (laughing).
You weren’t in combat everyday. You had to go out and look for these people. The lesson they learned was that they couldn’t go head-to-head. So they changed their strategy. They had to outnumber you 5-to-1, they had to have the element of surprise, they’d have to hit you hard, fight desperately and withdraw. They stay long, they knew the air strikes and the artillery were coming.
I learned real quick how mean and how ugly the Viet Cong could be. Some of the villages we’d go into and give the kids shots; later on the Viet Cong would come in and hack off their arms, telling them those shots were going to kill them. With what I witnessed, I had no sympathy for the Viet Cong. It’s one thing for a soldier to fight another solider, but some of the things they were doing – if you wasn’t motivated, it would motivate you.
When I first went there on a Continental jet, they (flight crew) couldn’t do enough for you. As time went on, I could see how things were changing, just because of how the stewardess treated you. You’d be lucky to get something to eat."
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