We were ordered to Vietnam; we were never welcomed back

OPINION:

When my plane landed at Norton Air Force Base in January 1972, the captain came on the intercom before anyone stood up and gave us a welcome-home briefing.

“America has changed,” he told us. We were U.S. Marines who left home as teenagers and came back bearing scars, most of them invisible.

He suggested we change out of our uniforms before we reached the terminal and move through the airport quickly. Thousands of men who came back from Vietnam have similar stories: We were drafted as teenagers, served in one of the most brutal theaters of the 20th century and were told, in ways both direct and unmistakable, that the country we had served considered us an embarrassment.

The war was unpopular. We understood that. Yet we had no say in the decisions that sent us there. We were ordered to go. We went. When we came back, the country’s frustration with the war found the nearest available target.

That target was us. This Sunday, National Vietnam War Veterans Day, it’s worth asking whether America ever reckoned with what that meant.

Protesters had every right to oppose the war. The freedom to dissent is, after all, one of the things we were fighting to preserve. Somewhere along the way, opposition to the policy became something uglier. It became contempt for the men ordered to carry it out. In most cases, these men had no more say in Vietnam than the protesters did.

That distinction is the fault line this country has never had the courage to examine.

In the 50 years that have followed, Americans have wrestled with this painful chapter by debating the politicians who escalated the conflict, the strategists who misread the terrain, the journalists who shaped public opinion and the draft that filled the ranks. That is the rightful work of a democracy.

The men who were handed rifles and told to go were not the architects of the war. They were its instruments, not its authors. Yet it was they who absorbed the country’s rage.

Directing anger at them was a failure of moral precision that this country has never honestly acknowledged. That failure had consequences that outlasted the war itself.

The war ended. The division it created didn’t. A country that won’t examine its own fault lines is condemned to keep living along them.

This month, I returned to Vietnam with 10 of my brothers who served. Many haven’t been back since they left 50 years ago. Some have never spoken about what they saw. Others have spent decades carrying images they couldn’t share with anyone who wasn’t there.

Fifty years of silence has a way of breaking open when you finally return to reexamine the place that caused it. One veteran, standing on ground he hadn’t seen in 55 years, said the only word he could find for the experience of being there was healing.

Another, who spent his tour providing security while Vietnamese villagers exhumed mass graves in search of their families, said it was the first time he had ever talked about it.

These men don’t need America to relitigate the war. They need to be seen and heard.

That is what reexamination offers: not absolution, not revision, but the chance to look at what happened with clear eyes and finally set it down.

I learned that on a previous trip back to Vietnam. Flying missions from the carrier, we took fire from Viet Cong hiding in the caves of Marble Mountain. Every pass over that mountain meant potential casualties. Men I served with didn’t always make it back. So when I watched an Air Force F-4 drop a bomb on the mountaintop one afternoon, my crew and I cheered.

Years later, I went inside that mountain. A guide led us through the caves and described the day the bomb fell with a trembling voice. To her, Marble Mountain was simply a Buddhist temple, a sacred place where her people had worshipped for generations. Looking up at the hole in the mountaintop, I see that it was the same hole I had once cheered for when it was made.

The Marble Mountain was both a sacred place and the reason some of my brothers never came home. There was no reconciling those two truths — only the hard, necessary work of holding them both. My wife held my hand as I looked up at that hole. Standing there, I understood for the first time what peace actually costs.

America is still waiting for its own version of that moment — not to rehash the events of the war, not to assign blame, but to look these men in the eye and reckon honestly with what they carried home.

This way, we can hold both truths at the same time: the sacred and the scarred, the protester and the veteran, the war that divided us and the men who had no say in fighting it.

That is what National Vietnam War Veterans Day asks of us. It asks us to do the harder thing, to see these men clearly, to hear what they have carried in silence and to reckon honestly with what this country owes them.

It’s time we said “Welcome home” to the veterans who fought a war that many still argue we should never have entered.

When we landed at Norton Air Force Base, the hippies were spitting and throwing eggs at us in protest of the war, to which the captain had one last thing to say: “Remember, gentlemen. We fought for their freedom to spit on us.”

Most of us left for Vietnam as teenagers. There were only men on that plane.

• Robert Kiyosaki is a Vietnam War veteran, financial educator and author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad.”