The Big Picture
Robert George, Publisher of The American Experience in Vietnam: Reflections on an Era

 

I arrived in Da Nang, South Vietnam in August 1969 as a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps trained to fly the A-6 Intruder, a state-of-the-art all-weather jet aircraft widely considered to be the most capable combat aircraft the U.S. had deployed to Vietnam. As long as I could remember, I had wanted to fly airplanes, particularly jets. It had taken more than two years of rigorous, competitive training to achieve my goal. Even so, by the time I left Cherry Point, North Carolina for Vietnam, I knew very little about the war I was about to join.

Once in-country, I flew 118 combat missions over the next year. Most of my flights occurred at night providing close air support for U.S. Marine infantry fighting in the heavily vegetated, mountainous regions of I Corps; we also provided air cover for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Close air support is a Marine pilot’s primary mission, but we also flew missions far to the north, more than 1,000 miles round trip, patrolling the borders of China and North Vietnam in search of truck convoys carrying supplies and munitions to the battlefields in South Vietnam. As a Marine pilot I also spent time with the Marine infantry in the bush coordinating air-ground operations, and with the Navy’s Combat Information Center aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ranger stationed just off the coast.

My brother, Ken, also served in Vietnam. He was a Marine infantryman with 3/3/M on the Rockpile, Con Thien, and on Mutter’s Ridge during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Ken endured some very difficult times during the height of Tet in areas that were hotly contested. Ken returned home from Vietnam only to die a young man from the effects of Agent Orange. His son was born with Hydrocephalus, a birth defect likely caused by the chemical. My generation’s Vietnam experience, I learned, would not end with us; it would be passed to future generations as well.

These very different roles and experiences that my brother and I encountered gave me an unusual perspective on the war, along with a mix of very strong emotions, primarily frustration. Whereas most U.S. troops saw only a narrow slice of the fighting in one particular region of the country, I saw the war from the air, the ground, and the sea, in the north as well as the south. Witnessing the war in this way, I soon began to draw my own conclusions—we had been assigned an impossible task. The enemy’s supply lines were too scattered, its ground forces too difficult to find and fix, and its stationary military targets too limited in number to be effectively interdicted from the air. Most of North Vietnam’s supplies came from beyond its borders, mainly the Soviet Union and China. There was a steady source of supplies flowing down a vast network of roads to an enemy that was difficult to distinguish from the local population we were expected to protect.                  

One mission in particular seemed to epitomize the futility of it all. I had flown up to the Chinese border on a Barrel Roll mission in search of truck convoys rolling across China’s border bound for North Vietnam and onto the Laotian branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I managed to hit two trucks. I had flown a multi-million dollar jet—the most technologically advanced aircraft in the American arsenal—on a thousand-mile round-trip bombing run, and all that I accomplished was to destroy two trucks. Meanwhile, hundreds, if not thousands of other trucks rolled across the border driving along impossible to detect dirt roads protected by 6,000-foot karst mountain ranges and large amounts of Soviet antiaircraft artillery. There appeared no way to prevent the southward flow of supplies and munitions—in short, there seemed no way to help our Marines on the ground fighting a well-equipped and determined enemy hidden in the triple-canopy jungles of I Corps. I began to feel that the war was unwinnable.

The mind copes in many ways. I stopped looking at the big picture and the politics of it all. Instead, I looked at the little picture; I focused on helping the “kids” in the jungle, as we often referred to the younger ground troops, by giving them the best air support we could, either as pilots or as Forward Air Controllers. Give them the support they needed, get them home safe, and then get ourselves home safe. That became the mission. And the fact that my brother had been one of those kids, though we were not allowed to serve in-country at the same time, only intensified that feeling.           

But the “big picture” was always there, lurking in the background—especially when we came home. The country was deeply divided over the war, though it wasn’t always easy to know who was on which side, or even what the sides were. I remember one incident that occurred soon after I returned to the U.S. My wife Pam had flown to meet me in Laguna Beach, California, where some of us were housed in a civilian motel because of overcrowding at the El Toro Air Base. We went to a local bar. After a while, I began to feel uncomfortable because I was one of the few short-haired men in the place—a telltale sign I was in the military. So we went back to the motel to look at some slides I had taken in Vietnam (this is the first time I was able to see the undeveloped film I had mailed home). Then there was a knock at the door, and when I opened it, a long-haired hippie was standing in front of me. He had been looking through the gap in the curtains, which we had intentionally closed, and asked if the pictures projected on the wall were of Vietnam. I assumed we were about to have a confrontation. Instead, he asked if he could come in. “I just got back from there myself not too long ago.”

After my tour in Vietnam, which ended on July 15, 1970 when my ear drums were blown flying a close air support mission for the 101st Airborne during Operation Ripcord, I joined the Marine Reserves and gained some experience in public affairs, starting off my career in publishing. I began by publishing periodicals, and then books, and did reasonably well back in those days when book publishing was in its heyday.

In the late 1970s I sold my company to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, where I accepted a position as vice president of marketing. During those years, like many Vietnam veterans, I rarely mentioned my service in the war. But one day while I was meeting with Bill Jovanovich, it slipped out. Before I could explain my involvement—or try to explain it away—Bill interrupted me and said, “You don’t have to apologize for going.” He told me his son had gone, too, and there was nothing to be ashamed of. I never apologized again for my service in Vietnam, though I still wrestled with a lot of suppressed emotions about the war and its aftereffects that had built up over the years. But these feelings would become a driving force for me professionally, and without question, shaped what would become my life’s work. At the time, I didn’t know that I would end up publishing twenty-seven books on Vietnam. I only knew that I was searching for answers. And I learned that thousands of other veterans were too.

In 1979, I left HBJ and resumed my career as an independent publisher. At Harcourt I had worked with the Italian publisher Rizzoli on a couple of continuity book series—books linked by a common theme that could be marketed to a list of subscribers—and I began toying with the idea of publishing a series on the Vietnam War. At that time, only four years after the fall of Saigon, many people I consulted didn’t believe there would be an audience for such a series. In fact, most Americans were so weary of the topic it seemed as if the entire country had entered a period of collective amnesia about the war. I did, however, encounter one person who thought my idea might work—Robert Wolff, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. I also conducted market research that suggested some potential, although some copywriters refused to work on a project about Vietnam.

Following the market tests, I asked Bob Wolff to serve as editor of the new series, he took an early retirement from Harvard, and together we began to move ahead with the series I titled The Vietnam Experience, to be published under the imprint of Boston Publishing Company.

When Bob Wolff died unexpectedly in 1980, before the first volume was in print, I enlisted Robert Manning—former European bureau chief for Time magazine, former assistant secretary of state in the Kennedy administration, and longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly—to edit the series. We hired a team of young writers, most of them academic historians fresh out of grad school, along with photo editors and researchers, and set to work on what we originally envisioned as a 12-book series. It would eventually grow to 25 volumes.

We sent our writers and researchers into government and military archives and presidential libraries to examine documents that in many instances had not been seen, or declassified, since the end of the war. They interviewed government officials and battlefield commanders along with ordinary veterans from every branch of the American military. And they supplemented this primary research by consulting a vast range of published sources, from newspapers and magazines to memoirs and scholarly monographs. The result was one of the earliest comprehensive histories of the war, described by The New York Times as “the definitive work on the Vietnam War.”

The first three volumes of the series, which traced the history of U.S. involvement in the conflict from 1945 through the Kennedy years, sold modestly. But following the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C. in November 1982, interest in the series spiked, and sales quickly followed, particularly after Time-Life Books signed on to market and distribute the series. Many new subscribers were veterans, the majority of whom had served only a year in country (thirteen months if they were Marines) and had little understanding of the history of Vietnam or the war in which they had fought. For them, the series provided a way to contextualize their own “Vietnam experience” within a broader historical framework—to see how the war had escalated and changed over time, how the combat experience of an Army grunt in the Iron Triangle in 1966 differed from that of a paratrooper in the Central Highlands in 1967 or a Marine combat pilot based at Da Nang in 1969. But vets were not the only ones to buy the books. The Vietnam Experience ultimately attracted more than 700,000 subscribers, who collectively purchased more than 11 million books. It was apparent that many people, vet or not, still wanted to know “how?” And “why?”

After the series came to a close, I commissioned two of the writers, Clark Dougan and Stephen Weiss, to write a single-volume history of the Vietnam War that encapsulated the work we had done over the previous eight years. That book, published in 1988 under the title The American Experience in Vietnam, was in many ways the capstone of the series we launched in 1979. The book you are about to enjoy, The American Experience in Vietnam: Reflections on an Era, is based on that edition, revised and expanded by Nick Mills, another writer on the original series and himself a Vietnam veteran and combat photographer.