A Viet Vet Comes Home to Harvard

Imagine walking through Harvard with a great big red, white and blue LBJ button; you'd probably survive about as long as Eichmann would have had he been stripped naked, branded, and let loose in the streets of Tel Aviv. Think of suggesting to an SDS meeting that a petition be circulated to award Walt W. Rostow an honorary (not electric) chair from Harvard. Then speculate for a minute, about telling your friends in Adams House what it is like to machinegun Viet Cong from a helicopter over the Mekong.

Inconceivable? Perhaps, but then most of us spend our time convincing each other that the war is wrong. Rarely do we hear anyone who defends U.S. involvement and only a few of us have ever conversed with someone who has actually fought over there. The war has now been going on long enough so that students who dropped out of college in '64 and joined the Army are beginning to filter back to Harvard after their tours of duty in Vietnam.

Jim Sloan, now a senior in Arams House, qualifies as one of Harvard's first "Viet Vets." After spending nine months of last year as a sergeant advisor in the Mekong, Sloan came back to Harvard to face a campus overwhelmingly against everything he had been fighting for. Certainly the American soldier coming back from any one of the wars we have engaged in has had a certain amount of difficulty readjusting to civilian life, but to come back from this particular war to this particular campus makes effective reintegration doubly difficult.

Raised in Clinton, South Carolina, Sloan describes. political upbringing as non-racist, conservative, Southern Repubilcan. Shaking his head in disbelief of his own past political views, he admits that had he been of age he probably would have voted for Nixon in 1960. "But I changed when I came to Harvard," Sloan continues with more than a trace of drawl, "and I realized when I heard that Kennedy had been assassinated that I'd become a somewhat contankerous, old-fashioned liberal.... I liked Kennedy's style, he seemed to stand for a kind of rational liberalism which I felt very comfortable with."

In January of his junior year Sloan enlisted in the Army "for the same reason that people used to go to sea years ago: I was looking for adventure and I felt I couldn't really study until I'd gotten it out of my system." Carolina and eight months of ad-After eight weeks of basic in South vanced infantry training in Louisiana, Sloan volunteered for paratroop training because the pay was good and it was the fastest way to Vietnam. "It was still Kennedy's war then," Sloane reminisces, "and I believed it when they told me that we were fighting to save the parliamentary democracy of the South from the dictatorship of the North."

After three more months of Communications and Methods of Instruction at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Sloan volunteered for Vietnam but instead was shipped to Munsan-ni, Korea because he didn't have the rank to get to Vietnam. After nine months in Korea and a promotion to SP4, Sloan again volunteered for Vietnam and finally made it to Can Tho in the Mekong by April of 1966.

"Our time was split between shooting people and making plans of how to shoot more people; everyone around me was sure they were doing the right thing, and they rationalized the bad by saying that it was the price that has to be paid," Sloan said. "The people I was with were not fanatics, they were thoroughly regular people who were isolated form others with a different opinion of the war," he continued.

After seeing one civilian regime after another crumble, Sloan remembers becoming convinced that the only viable government was the South Vietnamese Army. South Vietnamsee soldiers are hard to communicate with, unlike Westerners they never say anything in a straight-forward fashion but instead drop hints about their real feelings. Sloan says that he tried to get through to them, to understand what they really wanted, but that in retrospect they seemed not unlike "the docile Negroes in the South, the Uncle Toms who have been tricked into going along with the system."

At the time, outwardly, the South Vietnamese soldiers encouraged the Americans and confirmed for them that what they were doing was right: Sloan received two medals from the South Vietnamese, one of them their highest medal of honor. When he was about to leave he was given a farewell dinner. "Only when I had gotten some distance form the fighting did the justification for the war begin to erode," Sloan said.

Seeing anti-war demonstrations form Vietnam, Sloan was afraid the Liberals were going to discredit themselves and ruin any chance of progressive domestic legislation. But even more disturbing was the feeling that the people who were protesting the war were "people I admired and respected," he says.

Upon returning to Harvard at the beginning of the spring term last year, Sloan found that "people were shocked at what I had done and I couldn't understand their being upset." Because he "enjoyed a little cheap celebrity," Sloan amused himself by provoking his anti-war classmates.

"I'm used to being alone, and I don't think I changed my views about the war because they were unpopular." But, Sloan remembers, his friends patiently prodded him into rethinking the issues. "Then I read Mary McCarthy and found that her reporting was accurate and analysis valid. I kept asking myself why I hadn't seen through the situation earlier."

In the beginning he had thought of the war as a necessary evil to protect a parliamentary democracy from the Communists; he had seen American activity in Vietnam as a kind of over-flow of Theodore Roosevelt energy. But then he started asking himself how the Viet Cong managed to survive if they didn't have a popular base in South Vietnam. He questioned the U.S. military assumption that only the South Vietnamese Army was mature enough to govern south Vietnam. "Being a patriotic American I felt that people should have the right to determine their own destiny and that in fact the U.S. was imposing a form of government on South Vietnam."

Sloan now feels that the war is wrong, but that many of the anti-war criticisms about U.S. military methods are misplaced. "It's not that our military tactics are deliberately evil," Sloan says, "in fact the U.S. is bending over backwards to prevent civilian casual- ties. The war is wrong not because of its tactics but because it is being waged against innocent people."

One of the first to return to Harvard from Vietnam, Sloan is still wrestling with his conscience and revising his views. Many more Viet Vets are apt to be returning in the next few years and will have to face the same painful re-entry problems. Each will have a vested interest in reaffirming the rightness of what he has been fighting for. Maybe a few of them, like Sloan, will make their adjustment by re-examining their views and lending their prestige to ending the war