In 1968, I was a navigator in C-141s flying out of McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash.
I was in the 4th Military Airlift Squadron. My job was to fly from Tacoma to Southeast Asia, carrying men or equipment to support the war — one undeclared by Congress, but a war nevertheless — and to bring back the maimed, the dying, the dead.
I made more than 100 such trips. The things we carried to Vietnam on our four-engine jets were labeled “hi-valu.” Some were airplane parts. Some were technologically advanced weapons.
Our cargo on the return to the United States, through Japan and Alaska, was dead or wounded American boys and men, such as those who could not be properly cared for on hospital ships and needed more intensive care at the burn center in Texas. They weren’t marked “hi-valu,” but it was work I took seriously, searching the skies for the tail winds that would give us the fastest, smoothest ride.
When we hit turbulence in the jet stream over Japan, I could hear the men in the back of the plane crying out. I can still hear those cries.
I did my best, but sometimes it wasn’t enough.
The bodies we carried were in olive-drab caskets. There were no flags on them but, unlike our other cargo, we didn’t stack them. They were carried in a single layer on the floor of the C-141, which was a very big aircraft. We could get 35 or 40 caskets on one trip. And we did so, quite often.
It was the bodies of those young men and women, eventually numbering more than 58,000, and the photographs of them that had a profound effect on the American people. The pictures of the caskets being off-loaded from the C-141s changed things. It was no longer a war halfway around the world, but a war that killed young men and women for no apparent reason other than to satisfy what Gen. Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” and that resulted in their bodies being brought back to be buried.
These days, the military covers each shiny aluminum casket with a flag. In Vietnam, we had no flags to cover the caskets. A picture of our cargo bay would have been unimpressive. But most of those bodies were of young men who had been drafted, and that makes all the difference. Today, each dead American is regarded as a hero, but in Vietnam a dead draftee was just someone without a deferment or a job in the National Guard.
Flying those long hours over the Pacific, bringing the shattered or burned bodies of soldiers home, I had plenty of time to consider what I was a part of. I was a volunteer. I had signed on because I was reservist and my country had said it needed me. I knew about Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, who grabbed their rifles from over the mantle to serve the country when they were needed. I was on a Wolf Hunt, but now I wasn’t sure who was the hunter and who was the wolf.
In the Bush administration, our government was draping every casket with an American flag for the families and then preventing the publication of photographs. But some pictures leaked.
People who have never seen war or have never seen their buddies die have no idea what it’s really like. The politicians now waging these wars have never seen what war really means. They visit men in hospitals, they pin medals on the wounded, and they talk, but they haven’t watched their friends die. They don’t attend the funerals, they don’t look at the mangled bodies. They didn’t even want pictures of the caskets published. They didn’t learn enough.
It will be interesting to see the result of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ decision to allow families to decide whether to allow photos of their loves ones’ caskets to be published. Will anything really change?
David Steiner (davidesteiner@gmail.com) is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, a retired professor of theater and public speaking and a columnist for the Allenspark WIND.
