Larry Gwin

It seems that recently there has been a flood of Vietnam memoir books. Those of you born after 1965 can now turn your interests elsewhere. For a baby boomer, like me, born in 1947, Vietnam was an all-consuming, ever-present, presence. We could not escape it effects. It permeated our lives, dictated careers, education, relationships, everything. We worried about getting drafted, philosophized about religious beliefs not to mention our feelings about imperialism and war and America's role in the world. (Obviously, we learned nothing, and the chickenhawks went onto rule and then make more mistakes than the "best and the brightest."

Anyway, I'm pleased that publishing one's memoirs and recollections has become so much easier. Most are not literature although there are some very good books o come out of all wars, I expect, like Matterhorn, Red Flags,and many others. I've been reading many. Obviously each GI's experience was different so to look for an"average" experience is ridiculous. All of them are fascinating. This one was no exception.

Gwin had joined ROTC at Yale, mostly because all of his predecessors had fought in an American war, even if one had been on the Confederate side. Commissioned after graduation he was sent to Vietnam as part of the advisors (this was in 1965+) before things got totally out-of-hand. I graduated in 1969 when things were definitely murky, but as you'll see the quagmire was already forming in '65. Anti-vaXXers take note, you will not like the military. They give shots for everything. "We got our gamma globulin shots the next day, at the naval hospital across town. Five cc's in each cheek for the big guys like me. I spent the afternoon in bed, on my stomach, waiting for the pain to go away. We'd received by that time the full gamut of immunizations, shots for cholera, typhus, yellow fever, and plague." Unfortunately, no shots for malaria.

After six boring weeks with ARVN (filled with the need for Kaopectate, otherwise known as GI cement, for his dysentery) that conveyed a sense that the Vietnamese army was doing its best to avoid the enemy, Gwin was transferred to the 1st Air Cavalry Division, not a pleasant new job, as he had witnessed how vulnerable helicopters were.

Larry Gwin was not a sniper, not tunnel rat, nor anything unusual. "He was a conventional soldier in a conventional unit doing conventional things. His story will hit home with the vast majority of readers who, like him, are more or less conventional."* But perhaps that makes him, and those like him, extraordinary.

Gwin is unsparing in recounting events you'd never see in a John Wayne book or movie. On one mission the plane ferrying his entire 3rd platoon, some forty plus men, crashed on take-off, everyone was killed, and Gwin was tasked with trying to help identify bodies that had been reconstructed by the unsung heroes of the GRU (Graves Registration Unit). A searing memory.

The strategy was unsustainable. Send patrols out to scour for the enemy, i.e. get used as bait, call in artillery and air support to kill them, and then return to base, leaving the enemy to return to where he was. If you run across a hamlet, destroy it, after sending all those of fighting age back to base. "It made me angry. Who the hell were we to march in and disrupt this hamlet—march in, tear it up looking for weapons, drag everyone out of their homes like Gestapo in the night, and send the men off somewhere to be interrogated? Maybe it was necessary. Maybe not. Who knew? ... After the Hueys flew away, we picked up and continued southward, leaving the village behind us. But the wailing of those poor, terrified women seemed to stay with me all day. ...A young boy, four or five years old, stood motionless near the door of a burning hootch. He stared at me as I walked by. His face expressionless. No tears. Nothing. He just stared. I'll never forget the look on his face." Perhaps not the best way to win the hearts and minds of the locals.

As an appalling aside, this is what President Bone Spurs said about Vietnam. "Trump sometimes bantered about Vietnam with radio host Howard Stern. He referred to trying to avoid sexually transmitted diseases on the dating scene as “my personal Vietnam.” “It’s pretty dangerous out there,” he said in 1993. “It’s like Vietnam.” That is probably the most egregious insult to Vietnam Vets I have ever read.

Note that Gwin makes an appearance in Harold Moore's We were Solders Once and Young and there is a Youtube documentary on LZ X-Ray.

If you are looking for a company level commander memoir, I highly recommend Company Commander by Charles B. MacDonald.

*https://www.historynet.com/book-review-baptism-a-vietnam-memoir-larry-gwin-vn.htm… (más)