While I studied the French war, support for the American one evaporated. Growing up near Washington, D.C., my friends and I went to peace demonstrations in the capital, curious to see the events. I remained supportive of the war but was skeptical of the American war strategy. The echoes of the French defeat, culminating in the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, stuck with me. The war the United States fought in Vietnam was different from that waged by the French paratroopers, for better and worse. As much as the French tried to dress it differently, theirs was a war of empire, and their counterinsurgency was built on untenable colonial foundations. I didn’t think America’s was.
When I was in junior high school in 1968, my father deployed for a second tour, involving bitter fighting in the central highlands alongside our Montagnard allies. Beginning with the Tet Offensive, the upheaval of 1968—explosive civil rights and antiwar protests, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, Nixon’s election, My Lai—was seared into my young mind. At home I watched my mother endure another separation for a war I strongly suspected she opposed. Mary Gardner Bright was a beautiful southern girl with no connection to the military who had met and fallen in love with a young lieutenant. It wasn’t an easy life, but she navigated six children through two wars with what, even as a fourteen-year-old boy, I recognized was stoic courage.
From the first day of Beast, it was unlikely that Vietnam would be “our war.” In the years before we arrived at the academy, the Nixon administration had steadily drawn down troops, a policy widely supported by the American public. By the time I reported to the Man in the Red Sash, there were fewer than seventy thousand American troops in Vietnam, down from more than half a million only three years earlier. Nixon, like the rest of America, wanted out.
Throughout 1972, the combatants waged bloody campaigns on the peninsula to shore up their negotiating positions that fall in Paris. In October of our plebe year, we watched National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger return from Paris to announce, “Peace is at hand.” But negotiations stalled later that autumn and broke apart in mid-December. That winter, Nixon ordered an intense bombing campaign.
On Saturday, January 27, 1973, North Vietnam signed peace accords with South Vietnam and the United States in Paris, formally ending what at the time was our nation’s longest war. In April 1975, the corps watched intently from within the walls of West Point as Saigon fell. We followed world events to the degree we had time, but we were first and foremost college students. I never knew who among the cadets were conservatives or liberals; we did not walk down the halls deep in heated discussions about Vietnam or anything else. We were at the academy during the doldrums of the early 1970s, too late to have been ignited by President Kennedy’s idealism and too soon to be bolstered by Reagan’s confidence. Our president was Nixon, and he resigned in shame over Watergate in August 1974.
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Shortly after Nixon resigned, I returned to West Point from summer training and leave. I’d had a good summer experience at Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia (where I became qualified as a paratrooper after making five jumps), and then Fort Hood, Texas, with a Ranger unit, and I felt a bit closer to being a real soldier, but at the time I did not know how central being a paratrooper and Ranger would be to my life. I returned to West Point more focused.
But I was carrying baggage. After four slugs and still on the hook to serve the punishment for the last (the Grant Hall raid). With a weak academic record, my future was anything but secure. The implications of my performance in my first two years had been made clear the previous spring when I had tried to take the first step toward what I considered serious soldiering and volunteered to be one of the few cadets allowed to attend Ranger School during the summer break. I was disappointed when I was turned down because of my low academic, disciplinary, and physical training scores. It was a wake-up call.
Soon after returning for the start of cow year, I met my new tactical officer. Then–Major David J. Baratto had graduated from West Point in 1964 and completed two tours in Vietnam, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and serving with the Army Special Forces. He was aware, competent, and tough—but never petty.