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WEEK of MAY 31, 2004
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Famous Vietnam Vet Visits Upper School

by Jeffrey Stanley

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Robert Hemphill, commanding officer of Vietnam’s famed “bravo company,” the unit immortalized in the movie Platoon (directed by one of Hemphill’s men, Oliver Stone), visited the Upper School recently as a guest speaker in Vlad Malukoff’s Upper School history classes. Hemphill, whose memoir, Platoon: Bravo Company, was published in 2001 by St. Martin’s Press, was accompanied by his wife Carol, a retired U.S. Army colonel and current elementary school teacher. The Hemphills live in Pennsylvania and run a horseback riding camp, where Upper School student Max Nager is a regular attendee.

Hemphill, standing in Malukoff’s classroom before a map of Vietnam, began his talk with his overview of the conflict: “how we got there, what went on, how we got out.” Hemphill’s commanding presence was tempered by his informality, his short sleeves, and his bluejeans. He went into just enough detail to make the talk specific and informative while remaining unceremonious and approachable to the students. “At the end of World War II this country became very concerned with the spread of Communism,” he told them. As examples of this concern, he mentioned the United States’ formation of NATO and similar “mutual defense organizations” around the world, in which an attack on one is an attack on all. One of these organizations was SETO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. “That’s how we got into Vietnam.”

He explained that the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong, a militant communist group in South Vietnam bent on overthrowing the government, began receiving supplies and troops from the North Vietnamese army along the notorious Ho Chi Minh trail, a network of supply lines leading from North to South Vietnam. Because South Vietnam was a member of SETO, the United States was obligated to act to protect it from the spread of communism. At first, that action was in an advisory capacity. By 1964, after a U.S. Navy boat was attacked by the North Vietnamese, the United States had begun sending troops. Some say the attack was staged to get us involved. “Maybe so, maybe no,” said Hemphill. “The point is, that’s how we got there.”

Hemphill went on to summarize the next four years of the conflict, up through the bloody 1968 Tet offensive. The operation was, he insisted, a military success, despite the fact that half of the roughly 160 men in his own command were wounded or killed in action. “The Viet Cong was no more. It was annihilated. The Viet Cong was still on the books, but it was peopled by North Vietnamese troops. The VC as an indigenous, revolutionary force no longer existed.”

However, he explained, prior to the Tet offensive the public in the United States had been told that the war was winding down, that the troops would be coming home soon. People did not respond well to news of the large numbers killed in the offensive, and the tide began to turn irrevocably against our government keeping troops in Vietnam. “Tet, which was one of the biggest victories, paradoxically became the spark that ignited the anti-war movement.” It wasn’t the result of the offensive which fed the movement, he explained. “It was the fact that it had occurred at all.” Despite the growing anti-war movement, the complete pullout of U.S. troops took six more years.

Not until 1974 did the United States cut off all military aid to South Vietnam. “So what happened in 1975 [when South Vietnam fell to communism]?” Hemphill asked. “They weren’t defeated by North Vietnam, they deteriorated from within.”

Hemphill and his wife Carol, who is not a Vietnam veteran, have visited Vietnam on a few occasions as tourists in recent years. One student asked Hemphill if he had any regrets. “No. We have a saying in the Army: ‘We were winning when we left.’ From a military standpoint, we did a good job.” However, he did indicate his frustration that the conflict lasted as long as it did. Hemphill blames General Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, for prolonging the war by insisting that the conflict be a U.S. victory and a U.S. war, rather than a South Vietnamese-led fight supported by the United States. “If not for Westmoreland,” he said, “we’d have been out sooner, maybe by ’68.”

Another student sheepishly brought up the stories prevalent in our culture about innocent civilians killed, tortured, and displaced by U.S. troops as a matter of policy during the conflict. Hemphill insisted that it “never happened.” He was resolute: “In populated areas we were careful. Things like My Lai [a 1968 incident in which hundreds of unarmed civilians were massacred by U.S. troops], were aberrations.” He said there were “a few” cases like that, but that as a matter of policy, “we instructed our people all the time to avoid atrocities.” He gave a stark illustration of what he and his men faced on a day to day basis, and said that in most cases civilians knew to stay out of the way. “Generally, when we got to a village and we saw citizens running away down the road, we knew we were going to have to fight, because the villagers knew the enemy was lying in wait for us.” He was adamant that most atrocities against South Vietnamese civilians were committed by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers, not U.S. troops.

Hemphill concluded by pointing out that today in Vietnam’s cities, one will see Citibank, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Prudential, and a host of other powerful U.S. corporations in operation, and that in urban supermarkets products can be purchased in either Vietnamese Dong or U.S. dollars. “We won the war,” he said with a satisfied smile, “but it took 20 years after the fighting.”

“Clearly there are different interpretations of what really went on in Vietnam,” says history teacher Malukoff. “My goal is to bring in different voices and give students a broad sampling of people and opinions from that time in our recent history.”

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