Interview: Lt. Col. John K. Swensson, Ret.

Subject: Interview with TEACHER

Re VN. This is not well edited, nor is it Gospel. It is just my opinions on the war
in response to a student who asked good questions for his research paper.
"..we ended up taking second place."

A talk with John Swensson, Lt. Col. U.S. Army, (Ret.)
by Paul Cwick, EWRT 1A (circa 1992)

The Vietnam War. Even now, after all these years, the mere mention it provokes
the deepest emotional reactions in those who remember it. Perhaps no other
conflict in the twentieth century has so sharply divided a nation or has created
lasting sentiments of such profound bitterness. Not since the Civil War has
America found itself so violently torn asunder by a conflict. Even now, people are
still trying to assess the full impact of the war and its aftereffects, and to put it
into an historical perspective. If we were to look at it from a purely objective
viewpoint, such an assessment would be easy; we know when this happened or
where that happened, and this took place because of that condition and so forth.
But to more fully understand what the war really meant to the people involved,
we must take into account the thoughts and feelings of those who experienced it
first-hand: the men who were sent overseas to a distant country to fight an
unpopular war, the men who had to do the actual dirty work that so many others
opposed. For too long, these men have had to keep silent, as they felt compelled
to keep their involvement In Vietnam a secret from their countrymen. Only
recently have they begun to speak openly about it. The thoughts, feelings and
recollections of these men hold file key to a better understanding of the impact
that the war had on the individual human being.

John Swensson is a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Army, in
which he served from the age of seventeen. He is a graduate of West Point
Military Academy. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam: in January, 1966, he
went over with the 25th division and returned in May of 1968. He has worked for
General Westmoreland and General Abrams, among others. He is currently an
instructor of English writing and military history at De Anza College.

Q: Were you the only member of your family in the service, or did you have
brothers or sisters in the service?

A: No, my father was in the service, and I grew up in the Army. And I never had
any question but that I wanted to go to West Point. So, that was how I ended up
in Vietnam. When I was a sophomore, my father was an advisor in Vietnam, a
headquarters logistics advisor, in '62 or '63. We really didn't know much about
Vietnam. When I was a senior, in about February of 1965, I had lunch with
General Nguyen Khanh, the deposed premier of South Vietnam. We were sitting
up in the poop deck, up over the Corps of Cadets. He looked out and he said to
me, "All of the members of your class, all those cadets will serve in Vietnam.'
And I thought he was nuts. But he was right.

Q: Were your friends and family supportive when you went overseas?

A:  Early in '66, early in the war, when I first went over, we were making the
"Camelot" contribution. John F. Kennedy. I was a Private in 1961, standing there,
freezing, at the inaugural ceremony of John F. Kennedy, when he said, "Ask not
what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." So, we
were well-motivated. We were over for God, Mom, apple pie,
kill-the-communists-for-Christ. I mean, it was a crusade. There were a lot of
idealistic reasons. We were stopping Communism, we believed in the "Domino
Theory"-that if we didn't stop the Communists there, Southeast Asia would fall.
So, early in the war, people went for idealistic reasons. And we were sure that
our cause was right, and we were sure, based on our mythology, that we would
prevail. And we ended up taking second place. Although there is some argument
that there were some positive things that came out of it... I think I accept that
we..took second place.

Q: When you went overseas for the first time, what were your thoughts?

  A: Well, it was real simple. We were on the boat from Hawaii to Vietnam,
and I had forty-two, forty-three soldiers, and I wondered, as Henry Fleming does in THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE how I would do under fire. But I was not so
  concerned for myself, I was fairly confident about that. Oh, there were questions.
I mean, I had a sergeant who'd been in Korea, and we'd ask him, "What's
combat like?" because he was the only guy who'd been there. But my concern
was to keep my troops alive. So, I remember going over in the boat. That was a
major concern. We were doing training. And I had been to ranger school, which
was a nine-week Army school, in which I'd been leading patrols. And that
leadership experience of being out, leading patrols really was that stood me in
good stead. But I won't tell you I was very confident going over. I mean. there's
this big question; "How am I going to do?" Not as an individual soldier under fire,
but "How am I going to do as a platoon leader? Am I going to be able to lead my
troops? And keep them safe?'

Q: Were you in combat?

  A: Oh, yeah. The first six months of my tour in 1966, 1 was an infantry platoon
leader, engaged in close combat. We were living over the Cu Chi tunnel complex,
although we didn't know it. Even when we left (and I would guess the 25th
division pulled out in '72 or '73), we didn't understand the full extent of that
tunnel complex. So. we moved in on top or it, and we going primarily against the
local-force VC (Viet Cong). But they'd been around for quite a while and you
didn't see them very often. You got sniped at a lot. You had a lot of booby-traps.
We had some fire-fights, we had some contact.

Q: How long were you over there, altogether?

  A:  A year, the first time. Because halfway through my tour, I moved up to
  division civil affairs officer. and worked for General Fred Weyand, who later on
got four stars and became chief-of-staff of the Army. Fred Weyand was one of
two senior generals. along with Lew Walt of the Marine Corps who in my opinion
were the smartest two guys there were in terms or understanding what was
going on the ground. But they were not successful in bringing General
Westmoreland over to their point of view: that we should take the American
troops and put them in the populated areas. rather than running around the
woods, getting our butt blown off every day. So ...we lost in Vietnam because of
major errors that the military made. Yes. our hands were tied: yes, there were
proscriptions (prohibitions, things we couldn't do). We couldn't invade North
Vietnam. We had a certain troop ceiling that we could never go over. But do I
believe the military got beat by the press and the politicians? No, I think General
Westmoreland's big war theory of taking our U.S. forces and setting them out in
the jungles and the woods and attempting to attract the VC main force and the
NVA (North Vietnamese Army) into set-piece battles was a great waste of assets.
That the war really was for the peoples' hearts and minds. so that's where the
troops should have been. And Fred Weyand understood that. Lew Walt
understood that. But General Westmoreland didn't understand that. I could not
tell you. with such great prescience, when I was a young officer, the mistakes we
were making. I do remember, though. as a second lieutenant...having a
one-on-one with General Weyand and saying you know, 'In my mind, we're doing
this wrong; we've got to put more effort with the people'. Because I took my
platoon, and we'd go through the woods, and we'd get blown up, and then we'd
go back next week, go through the same woods and get blown up again. And I
didn't see that we were making any progress. And who the Hell cared about the
woods, anyhow? Those were just trees. And Fred Weyand understood that, and
Fred took and put nine maneuver battalions out in populated areas for about a
six-month period, and Jesus, it opened up all the roads, the rice farmers could go
out and harvest the rice, the VC couldn't come into the villages at night.
Unfortunately, William C. Westmoreland...was not brought up to understand
counter-insurgencies...sadly, he was very much a big politician, he wanted good
press, but there, was no substance there.

Q: How do you feel the media covered the war? Do you feel they presented an
accurate picture of it?

  A: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No question about that. It starts back with these great
heroes, David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, in the early '60's, when they were
reporting, based on what they were hearing from John Paul Vann, among
others. They were reporting the problems accurately. And that was going
  against the line that the ambassador and General Harkins were feeding back to
the Pentagon and back to the White House. It got so bad that John F. Kennedy
(who was really an enlightened leader, if you look at his prosecution or the war)
asked the editor of The New York Times to kick Halberstam out of the country.
But Halberstam was telling it just like it was. And the great book that Sheehan
wrote, A BRIGHT SHINING LIE was based on the story of John Paul Vann. They
just weren't saying what Washington wanted them to say. And those guys were
terribly courageous. I've never had a problem with the press. And I worked with
the press. in one job. As civil-affairs officer, I took a lot of newspaper reporters
and photographers around. Yeah, the press was fine.

Q: How do you feel the current motion pictures about Vietnam compare with
the reality?

  A: Well, "Platoon" is the most real, although it is allegory. You didn't have all
that good and all that evil all in one place, all in such a short period of time. So,
in fact, it was allegory: it is the meta-story. It is the young Charlie Sheen or the
young Henry Fleming from RED BADGE OF COURAGE...it is the young man who
wants to go over and, in Sheen's case, he confronts the forces of good and evil.
in (the character Elias, who's a Christ-figure..and the character Sgt.Barnes who's
the personification of evil. So. it's an allegorical story, but the texture, the ants,
the heat, the waiting, the terror. The texture of Platoon--that's how infantry
combat is. And I worked with Dale Dye, who was the technical advisor on that.
That's about the most realistic Vietnam movie that's been made. Movies like
"Apocalypse Now" that's surrealistic, that's taking [the] reality in Vietnam and
making it surreal, and then intermixing it with Joseph Conrad's HEART OF
  DARKNESS. The greatest movie, in my mind, about the Vietnam experience...is
"The Deer Hunter". The Deer Hunter is about America. We have, again as
metaphor, Russian roulette. I might compare that to masturbation: it's an activity
that, according to the Bible, does nothing but waste, and is the taking or human
life. Nobody played Russian roulette in Vietnam. When I saw that movie in '79
when it came out I was a captain. I had already taught in the English department
at West Point and I thought I was a liberal. I was horrified, I mean I had a
terrible gut reaction to that movie. I said I'd never see the piece of trash again.
And in the early 80's the first time I taught my Vietnam class, I said, "Well, I'd
better look at that piece or garbage:' And I said, "My God, what beauty!" Now
that movie never changed, but I did. So, that's the great movie about America.
And that is a great picture.

The best documentary about the war is "The Anderson Platoon" by Pierre
Schoendorfer, who is a Frenchman. And it almost took a Frenchman to look at
the war. He said he discovered America. I'm not sure an American could've done
that documentary so well. And it won an Emmy and an Oscar in '68. It's about my
dear friend and classmate, Joe Anderson's platoon. And they just went around
and filmed; dry-filmed for a week or so to get them used to the cameras.

Q: How do you feel about the Vietnam veterans finally getting some
recognition, such as the memorial in Washington D.C.?

  A: Nobody wanted to hear about Vietnam, nobody wanted to read about it.
We went through a long period from '75 until the day Ronald Reagan was
inaugurated, and that, only because that was the day the hostages from Iran
were released. That's when the Vietnam vets saw the adulation that the Iranian
hostages were getting. they said, "Wait a minute, we haven't gotten ours," and
so they began to come out of the closet, and began to get organized. And they
  built this great Vietnam veteran's memorial, which a plebe in my squad, Jack
Wheeler, was one of the main organizers. That process of building the
monument. raising the money, advertising it. and then finally commissioning it.
and having a parade. That was the start of the healing process, and the point at
which Vietnam Veterans began to come out of the closet.

You didn't list Vietnam on your resume if you were looking for a job before 1980.
And, you know, there was that thing that Carter had given amnesty to all the
draft-dodgers. Vietnam split this country like nothing had ever done before,
except the Civil War. So, that healing process continues. And there's still a lot of
people, three million people, who served in Vietnam. There's still an awful lot of
people with an awful lot of problems, who won't go to these movies...because
they can't handle it; they can't deal with it. And that's the sad condemnation.
So, one of the reasons I teach my Vietnam class, and bring in a variety of people
from both ends of the political spectrum, plus Vietnamese guest speakers, is so
we can deal with some of that.

I thought I had that pretty well worked out, and I thought everything was cool,
until last May or June, (when) I went to New Orleans between quarters, and I
happened to be there accidentally for the "Welcome Home Desert Storm" parade.
And when I saw what New Orleans, Louisiana did for that parade. I really...I'd
been to the dedication for the Sacramento Vietnam veterans' memorial. I'd
watched all those things on television, I had taught Vietnam. But it was really
awesome to me to see what this country could do for its soldiers. Which we did
after World War II, and we've all seen the documentaries of the Desert Storm
which just reminded me that, yeah, we really never got that closure-that closure
sailor kissing the girl in Times Square. But to see that then happen for Desert
Storm was kind of unreal.

Q: What sort of treatment did you receive when you came back home?

  A: Well, mine was fine. Personally. I didn't have a big problem when I got back
from Vietnam, even the second time. There's a book written last year...that
  centers only on spitting incidents. There were people who reported...being spit
on, while they were hitch-hiking, or outside the gate of Travis, or in San
Francisco airport. And so, somebody wrote a book, and he said, "If you've ever
been spit on, I want to know how you were treated when you got home." And it
turns out there was a lot of spitting, and them was a lot of rejection of Vietnam
veterans by the American public. I personally didn't see that; I was at West
Point. We had, I remember, some women from Vassar who came up and gave
the cadets flowers, as a kind of peace gesture. But we were isolated from that.
You really have to talk to some Vietnam veterans who went from American
society to Vietnam and back to American society. The book does establish that
the spitting did occur, and it occurred very frequently, and it's not just a bunch of
wild and crazy vets who made that stuff up.

Now, I personally went into graduate school for a couple of years. I sat there and
watched students with their Viet Cong flags, I watched them burn the R.O.T.C.
building down; yeah, that hurt. But at the same time in that graduate school
experience, I saw the right wing, the Virginia state police close down the
University of Virginia. The left-wing anti-war protestors couldn't close it down,
but I saw the police bring their dogs up, and saw the moderates' reaction to these
dogs. It was a lot worse than the moderates' reaction to the protestors. So I saw
the right wing in this country shut down a university through their own ineptness.
and through their militarism. But then I went to West Point to teach, and at West
Point. you're kind of hermetically sealed from life. But for most of my
counterparts, my peers, my comrades who came back to the active army, they
were supportive. The war was our profession; the war was our business, and we
sustained one another. It wasn't like the draftees, who came back from the war
and had to go back into society. and felt the rejection. felt the turn-off. So, we
didn't really have that experience of being integrated into civilian life into America.
We were still living in our own military corner. and it was different, particularly at
West Point. It was just like a monastery. Jim Ford, my dear friend, who's Chaplain
of the House of Representatives, said (in those days. there was a "God is dead"
movement going on) "The Church and the military are two sinking ships in our
society, and I have a foot in each." [laughs]

Q: While overseas, did you have any close friends or bitter enemies?

  A: You may go over for God, Mom and apple pie, but the thing that sustains a
  combat unit is people looking out for each other. I remember...the day that Sgt.
Binion was killed. I was pinned down by a sniper, and he was killed trying to get
me out of (them); he was trying to get the sniper, and the sniper killed Binion.
And Rick Clark, my fellow platoon leader in first platoon, was Binion's platoon
leader. [He] told me that he would never be able to continue if I were killed or
Binion were killed, and I said, "Rick, that's crazy." And the next day, Binion was
killed trying to save me. I couldn't deal with the Binion incident...the working out of
the death of Binion hurt me for a long, long time. I couldn't sit there and talk about
it for ten years. Now, I go to the memorial, I look up Binion's name. I've been
trying to find his family. But do you take care of one another? Listen, B.T. Collins
...says it right: it is the only profession where you're willing to sacrifice your life
for your friends; and your friends are willing to sacrifice their lives for you". So,
there's a terrible amount of taking care of one another. And again, "Platoon"
shows that very well.

Q: How would you relate your own experiences with an historical perspective of
the war? And what have we learned from Vietnam?

  A: I believe that the military screwed it up. And I was a part of that process.
I believe that William Westmoreland's big war theory was wrong-headed. I think
that's the central lesson of the war. It's not the press and the politicians. Although
I gotta say the political (forget the press-- they weren't important) strictures, and
this thing of Lyndon Johnson's selecting the targets in the White House-that's
crazy. I was convinced about that when I got back that second year. I knew we
were in trouble, that it was over: I mean, the game was over, the war was lost,
probably in '66, '67; certainly by '67. And it was lost politically. You know, recently,
if you follow this stuff, this "L.B.J." series on PBS. Wow. You want to understand
where we screwed up in Vietnam...I think that's a thesis-ridden document - but I
think L.B.J.'s pride [was the problem]. The thing I got out of that [piece] was that
the conversion of Robert Strange McNamara really occurred earlier, and that
McNamara knew, and a lot of people knew-that George Ball may not have been
the only dove in the pile. But Lyndon Johnson wasn't going to change his mind.
So I knew, when I got back in '69, the war was over and that we had lost.
I suspected that very strongly.

It would appear, based on Desert Storm. that we learned our lessons. As an
example, I would go to Panama, and I know a great deal about Panama. And
General Thurman is my dear friend. We used massive force: 27,000 troops went
to Panama to take out the top tier of the PDF [Panamanian Defense Forces]. The
senior officers, because they were all corrupt. That system had gotten terribly out
of kilter. So, we didn't want to kill the PDF soldiers, but we wanted to take out the
leadership of the PDF. In order to do that, we used stealth fighters: we used
27,000 troops. That's the massive application or combat power to get in, get the
job done quickly, and get it over with, which we did. I think that was a good
operation. So there's where we learned a lesson from Vietnam. That's just one
example. Letting Norman Schwarzkopf have his head. Thank God it was Norman
Schwarzkopf. I don't know any four-star general who had the patience of Stormin'
Norman. And you can read C.D. Bryant's book FRIENDLY FIRE and you can listen to
Norman Schwarzkopf and see why he had the patience, why he was willing to let
those air guys keep going. But the final history lesson about Desert Storm, the
thing that scares me is this: To the American public, Desert Storm appears easy.
It appears like a cakewalk. In fact, it was the technology. It was preparation, it
was learning from Vietnam that allowed us to be successful in Desert Storm.
And my concern is that the American public then thinks that war is cheap, that it's
easy. And I don't think it is. You're always going to have some adversaries: you've
got to be prepared. And we've cut the Army back from 18 to 12 divisions, so
we've lost a third. Well, there's members of Congress who say "Well, we need
to cut more than that" I think we're going about as low as we can go. And I think
that the price of not being prepared is young American soldiers, both men and
women, their lives.

(unedited-not for publication--JKS)