Bringing It All Back Home by Philip F. Napoli Read Free Book Online Page A

after, men from his unit began to contact him.
    Today, he says that he is proud to have participated in the Vietnam War and that he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. At the same time, he doesn’t seek out veterans’ reunions or other veterans’ events. He doesn’t want his veteran’s status to define him, instead choosing to be oriented toward his family and his church. He is the father of five and has been married for more than forty-five years.
    I don’t want it to consume me. Some of these guys are consumed.
    Looking back, Eggers associates military service with the virtues of leadership he believes he’s displayed as an owner or manager of small businesses. He recalls being under fire and the instinctive effort to do his job without panic, knowing that mistakes could be costly. He and Semler were the only casualties during the time he led the platoon. And while the majority of the men in his unit were African American, he also had whites and Latinos and remembers that everyone got along. There was never a need to take disciplinary action.
    At the end of our discussion, Eggers came to a realization:
    I never thought about that, but here we are in the middle of a rice paddy, and I had a choice to go forward or back, and I went forward literally into a hail of machine gun bullets rather than go back. That was a conscious choice because I saw this dry spot and I figured I could get up onto it and be able to direct fire.
    Leadership always presents difficult choices. And although Eggers’s decision would lead to an injury and the death of PFC Semler, he felt it was the best decision to make for the platoon. His decision to be in the military was the right way to serve his country. For Eggers, every choice has its cost, but if it’s the right one, the cost is well worth it.
    Eggers argues that we never understood the enemy in Vietnam.
    I think our presidents were in some way responding to generals who wanted notches on their rifle butts for further promotions. We were responding to the defense industry; they had to try new things like the concept of helicopter warfare.
    Nevertheless, he asserts that politics aside, I trained more young men to go over there, and I trained them the very best I could.
    Knowing what he does now, Eggers says he respects people who made the decision to resist service and flee to places like Canada, but that was not his nature. He couldn’t have done it in 1965, and he would not do it today. For him, war is obedience to orders; war is accomplishing your mission. The old phrase goes, “Ours is not to reason why. Ours is to do or die.” And that’s what we did. All of us did.

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    FUTILITY: SUE O’NEILL
    Soldiers—men and women alike—tell their Vietnam stories through the lens of their political and social viewpoints. Some came to see the American odyssey in Vietnam in terms that Richard Eggers might reject—as an effort that was pointless at best, barbaric at worst. While morale remained high throughout the armed forces during the first half of the war, after 1968, writes the historian James Westheider, “morale, cohesion, and discipline throughout the U.S. military establishment began to deteriorate.” 1 Susan O’Neill’s recollection of her time in Vietnam would bear out this assertion. What she remembers best is the futility of the war. But like Eggers, she found that the experience of serving a larger cause, in her case as a combat nurse working to save lives, shaped the remainder of her life profoundly.
    For women as for African Americans, the 1960s was a time of widespread cultural change. Efforts were made to integrate women in the workplace more readily, to pay them more fairly, and to reform policies regarding sexual harassment and domestic violence. The decade also saw the development of the first reliable oral method of birth control, giving women command of their reproductive systems and