Correcting the Record on the Vietnam Generation

For those of you with some walkingaround knowledge of what goes into this space each week, you know that I write what I mean and mean what I write. But today, I am going to walk back something I said a few weeks ago because I didn’t say it well.

My column about the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association’s production of a film entitled, “Truths and Myths About the Vietnam War,” a 47-minute documentary produced with Emmy award-winning film producer David Naglieri, introduced by actor Sam Elliott and currently running on the YouTube channel (To view, go to the website AVVBA.org.) brought a lot of reader response from those who served in Vietnam. Like most anything having to do with those tumultuous times, the responses ran the gamut.

One called the film “revisionist history conducted by the right wing.” Another found the film so meaningful, he intended to write a Letter to the Editor. Some veterans told of being vilified for their service. Others had no bad experiences. One reader said Vietnam wasn’t a war, it was a conflict. He was a minority of one. Everybody else called it a war.

So, where did I screw up? In introducing the column, I compared the Greatest Generation of World War II with what I referred to as the “Not So Great Generation” that followed. That was a generalization that was inaccurate and unfair and several readers reminded me of that.

I was referring to the draft dodgers who burned their draft cards and left the country rather than serve it. I was thinking of the headline-grabbing antiwar activists and the counter culturalists, the San Francisco hippie community, protesters like Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Seven, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, the riots (aka, “peaceful demonstrations”) on college campuses, in major cities and at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I realize now they were the minority.

I had that brought home in a response I received from a former colleague in Atlanta, Charles Van Rysselberge, now living in Gainesville. He shared a 16-minute film clip of a presentation by Marine General Anthony C. Zinni in 2012 at a gathering of Marine and U.S. Army veterans in San Francisco. You can find it on www. youtube.com (“2012 Salute to Vietnam Veterans — General Anthony C. Zinni.”) Like the AVVBA film, I highly recommend it to you.

General Zinni is a retired four star U.S. Marine Corps general and former Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command who did two tours in Vietnam. Here is what he told those assembled that evening about what I had referred to flippantly as the “Not So Great Generation.”

“We” — meaning the Vietnam Generation of which he was a part — “don’t have to apologize for anything. We are as much the greatest generation as the one that preceded us. We not only fought this ten-year war with confused political direction, we won every battle we were asked to win.” After Vietnam, he said, “We went on to rebuild our military, won the Cold War, faced down the Soviet Union and created the greatest economy this nation has ever had.”

“Our generation did as much if not more for our nation as any generation. We saw more combat than our fathers did in World War II,” Gen. Zinni told those assembled. “The average ‘grunt’ saw 240 days of combat in a one-year tour. The veterans of World War II saw 40 on average.”

Referring to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, the general noted how young his generation was and “how innocent we were.” Among the 58,000-plus names listed on the Wall is a 15-year-old soldier, five 16-year-old soldiers and a number of 17-year-olds. The average age on the Wall is 23. By contrast, the average age in World War II was 26.

Gen. Zinni concluded that his generation came out of the war (and, yes, he referred to it as a war, not a conflict), “young but wise beyond our years. We never lost our dignity or our honor. We are as much the greatest generation and we are as much the proudest generation as any of those that went before us. No one can take that away from us.”

I thank Mr. Van Rysselberge for sharing Gen. Anthony Zinni’s remarks with me, making an impressive case as to why the Vietnam Generation can refer to themselves as the Greatest Generation, too. Indeed, they can and I stand corrected.

You can reach Dick Yarbrough at dick@dickyarbrough.com or at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.