By the end of my first Vietnam tour of duty, I made sure there would not be a second tour. The Marine Corps had a policy guaranteeing Marines returning from overseas one year back in the States before being redeployed for another 13-month tour of duty. So I voluntarily extended my overseas duty, serving six months in Japan. When I returned home in May of ’67 I wouldn’t be eligible for redeployment until May of ’68. That only left four months before my discharge, making it highly unlikely they would send me back to Vietnam.
In January 1968, I was at Camp Pendleton serving with India Company, Third Battalion, 27th Marines. I was a sergeant, leading a squad in the third platoon. At the end of that month, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam which became known as the Tet Offensive of 1968. Army General William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam, asked President Johnson to send another 200,000 troops. Johnson called up two units for deployment: the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne and my unit, the 3rd Battalion 27th Marines. I was listed as non-deployable. All things being equal, I would not return to that country. But all things were not equal.
I had become close friends with my 29-year-old platoon sergeant, Nate Lee. Having been back home for more than a year since his first combat tour, Nate was deployable. He was like the older brother I never had, and I could not see him going back to that hellhole without me. Instead of signing a waiver, waiving my right to a full year Stateside, I persuaded the company clerk to secretly switch my status to deployable.
We received a new platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Marcus Fiebelkorn, who met with the platoon, informing us that we would be departing from the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. He also told us that we’d be getting a send-off from President Johnson himself. I immediately responded, “If that son-of-a-bitch tries to shake my hands, I’ll refuse.”
“Now, Sergeant Harlan, don’t make a scene,” replied the lieutenant, to which I replied, “What are they going to do, sir? Send me to Vietnam?”
As luck would have it, Johnson stopped in front of me in the formation.
“Good to see you. God bless you and keep you,” he said.
A few years ago, a buddy of mine in California emailed me a brief scene from a Vietnam documentary that showed that encounter. I took a screenshot that didn’t turn out well, but it was me, wearing my wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses.
As you can see, I shook his hand. What else could I do? He was accompanied by General Lew Walt. I wasn’t about to embarrass Lew Walt, a man who was devoted to us, and we to him.
We were sent to the same nasty place I had left 15 months earlier, the Quang Nam Province. It had become worse than ever. After three months, the fifteen-man squad I led when we arrived had dwindled to eight men.
One morning, as we were preparing to embark on a new operation, the company clerk said, “Sergeant Harlan, grab your gear. You’ve got orders for Stateside.”
Unbeknownst to me, my dad had written to Missouri Senator Stuart Symington demanding to know why his son was sent back to Vietnam nine months after his return from overseas. The senator contacted Headquarters Marine Corps and they agreed that I shouldn’t have been.
Two weeks later, I was back at Camp Pendleton when I received a letter from one of my buddies with tragic news about the operation I barely missed. They were caught in a company-sized ambush at a place called Go Noi Island resulting in many KIAs (killed in action) and WIAs (wounded in action). One of the KIAs was a man from my squad, Richard Turner, a black Marine from Washington, D.C. (pictured above). So was Captain Thomas Ralph, our company commander; and our platoon commander, Marcus Fiebelkorn.
Nate Lee was one of the Marines killed that day. It was his mother’s birthday.
When 1968 rolled around, I was happy and optimistic about my future. Thanks in large part to my friendship with Nate, I had quit the heavy drinking and had become readjusted. All that progress was wiped out and replaced by survivor’s guilt and a deep-seated rage toward the government that sent us over there.
With the letter of introduction that I received in Hanoi from Colonel Thiet, I met with General Tran Van Tra in Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City, though the city is still commonly referred to as Saigon by the people who live there) and his interpreter, Colonel Tran Doan Toi. I learned that General Tra was born in Quang Ngai Province where Operation Utah, which I described in part one, took place. He and Colonel Toi fought together against the French.
It wasn’t until I did some research after the trip that I learned what an amazing man Tra was. He commanded the attack against Saigon in the Tet Offensive and was the strategist of the opening attacks in the Final Offensive that brought an end to the war in 1975. Thinking about it later, I found it odd that Colonel Thiet, a man who followed the party line to the letter, would introduce me to a man with a history of standing up to the Politburo. General Tra published a book in 1982 in which he placed the blame for the disastrous Tet Offensive of 1968 solely on the leaders in the North:
“The Tet objectives were beyond our strength. They were based on the subjective desires of the people who made the plan. Hence our losses were large, in materiel and manpower, and we were not able to retain the gains we had already made.”
General Tra’s stance toward national reconciliation revealed someone more inclined toward nationalism than Communism. On 7 May 1975, exactly one week after the Saigon government’s surrender, General Tra gave his first speech as chairman of the Military Management Committee, assuring the South Vietnamese people that “Only the US imperialists have been defeated…All Vietnamese are victors. The grandchildren and children of all strata of the new society will from now on be able to grow up with a spirit of national pride, hold their heads high, be happy, be provided for, and be able to work in the most brilliant period of development of this country.”
Sadly, it did not work out that way. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners were sent to long-term “reeducation camps”—a euphemism for forced labor camps. Both they and their families were denied basic rights as citizens including employment, education, or any hope for advancement.
In 1986, The Club of Former Resistance Fighters (CFRF) was formed in which General Tra served as a senior advisor. The CFRF accused the party of imposing a reign of terror on the whole population including those who fought with the Viet Cong against the Americans. “The whole population lives in terror of the party, exactly as they lived in terror of the emperors and feudal rulers of yore,” wrote the general. I had no idea that day we met in Saigon that this was a man after my own heart.
When I mentioned to General Tra that my next stop was Da Nang, where I hoped to meet some of the men who were once my enemy, he wrote a letter of introduction for me. The man who led all Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam during the war handed me the letter, and with a smile said, “Here is your passport.”
When I presented the letter to the director of a Da Nang travel service in Da Nang, a man who had served as a liaison officer between the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, I was provided with an interpreter and a driver and arranged a half-dozen meetings with Vietnamese veterans from all over the province. One of the veterans was Le Minh Trung a lieutenant who participated in the ambush on my company at Go Noi Island. At a Marine reunion several months later, when I told the guys about meeting Trung, someone asked, “Did you kill him?.” I replied, “No, and as you can see, he didn’t kill me.”
Another veteran I met was Tran Canh Phoung, who was a company commander leading his troops against us in Operation Utah. He was one of the first three veterans I met. We were sitting at a table drinking tea. It was a peaceful, friendly atmosphere, oddly similar to being at a Marine reunion. Who, after all, could appreciate the fact of our mutual survival more than each other, the men who had once spent their days trying to kill the other? Who but the other understood the sacrifices that made our mutual survival possible? As vicious and formidable a place as it had been, I detected no animosity from them nor anyone in Quang Nam Province.
It's difficult to describe the profound effect that just being there had on me. One morning I walked several miles along a trail we took hundreds of times back in the day. An old lady working a couple of hundred yards away in a rice paddy spotted me, stared a bit, and waved. She had doubtless seen hundreds of tall Americans like me walking on that trail. I was probably the first one who was alone and unarmed. I waved back, grateful for her warm reception.
Today there are beachfront hotels in Da Nang. I’m thankful to have returned early enough to see images like this one:
For years I had recurring nightmares of either pursuing or being pursued by shadowy figures—some dressed in black, others in green—all of them armed and dangerous and all of them faceless. I never had those nightmares again. I met the enemy and having seen his face, I could see that he was no longer my enemy.
It was a healing experience, one that I arranged for six of my comrades twenty-five years later. I will describe that experience in the final installment of this story.