Sunday, March 29, is National Vietnam Veterans Day. I’m a ‘Nam vet’. I have the colored ribbons to show for it. I never set foot in Vietnam!
I was part of the ‘Secret War’ in Southeast Asia. Walter Cronkite didn’t talk about it on the six-o’clock news, because according to the government it never happened. There are thousands like me. We served at bases in Thailand, and Laos, where some of us died. They weren’t even American bases because, officially, we weren’t there and everything we did was classified.
I spent a year at Nakon Phanom (NKP) Royal Thai Air Force Base, fourteen miles west of the town of Nakon Phanom which is located on the Mekong River in northeast Thailand, directly west of the DMZ in Vietnam. We could sit on the river bank and hear F4 (Phantom) fighters in the distance over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.
The history of how we got in Vietnam, what went wrong, and the consequences to the nation and our society have been analyzed to exhaustion, and is not what this column is about. It’s about those of us sent to that war — but who weren’t officially there.
To the vast majority of Americans who served in Vietnam, Thailand was where they went on “R&R” to party. The Patpong district in Bangkok was legendary. When they hear I was based in Thailand, they assume it was one long party, and don’t even consider us “real Nam vets”.
They don’t know, for instance, about Air Force CMSgt Richard Etchberger who died at a secret radar station on a mountain top in Laos in 1968. He received the Medal of Honor for helping to save the lives of others when they were attacked by North Vietnamese soldiers who, according to a 1962 treaty, weren’t in Laos either. His family weren’t told what really happened to him — because ‘it never happened’ — for over a decade. He didn’t receive his (posthumous) MOH until 2010.
Nor do they know about the pilots who flew out of Thai bases to interdict supplies coming down ‘the Trail’ in Laos, intended for North Vietnamese troops who were killing Americans in South Vietnam. Many of those pilots never returned, and their bodies still haven’t been found. Their families were originally told they died in “training accidents”.
Our mission at NKP was air, and covert, operations in and over Laos, some of which were so classified those of us there didn’t know about them. I worked as a medic in ops without knowing what I was a part of – because I didn’t “need to know” to perform my duties. It’s only been through my membership in an organization of Thailand,, and Laos veterans that I’ve learned, after 40 years, some of what I was involved in.
Like most veterans we went where we were told, and did the jobs we were trained to do. Some of us died. Many of us suffer from PTSD. Some have health problems related to Agent Orange (AO) exposure. But because we were never officially there, and the US government still denies AO was used in Thailand or Laos, the VA won’t recognize AO claims for those who never had “boots on the ground” in Vietnam.
To be sent by your country to war that wasn’t officially a “war”, to a place we weren’t officially at, is surreal. Then to not even be considered “real” veterans of that war by other veterans is disheartening.
It’s because of that shared experience that the Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) was founded in 1998, by Vietnam veterans who didn’t serve in Vietnam but were very much a part of that war. In 2014, the Secretary of Defense recognized the TLCB as an official partner in the Department of Defense 50-year commemoration of the Vietnam war.
We’ve always been entitled to wear the yellow-green-red Vietnam Service Ribbon, as most of us proudly do, though we couldn’t always explain how we earned it. The government that sent us to war has finally, officially and publicly, acknowledged us as veterans of that war.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.