This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Memories can last a lifetime. 

That is true for me with respect to the major word in the headline – Vietnam.

Not because I went to Vietnam in that war, which reached a crescendo just as I was graduating from college in 1970.

But because I lived through that terrible war and saw, sometimes almost firsthand, the damage it did to others who served.  Not to mention the plight for our nation as opposition to a pointless escapade – perhaps even an illegal one — overseas grew into demonstrations and violence at home.

So it was other day that I was surprised to learn one of my brothers and his wife were heading off to Vietnam on vacation.  They were scheduled to head first to Ho Chi Minh City where they would meet up with friends for a walking and biking tour of the countryside.

I don’t oppose this trip for them, for I have heard from others that the vacation experience there has been worthwhile despite the region’s history for persons of my age.

Further, I cannot stomach heading to that far off land, which took the lives of many friends and left the U.S. far worse off than before the war.

Vietnam lives on in various films depicting the war such as Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, The Green Berets, and Apocalypse Now.  I know about them, but I never watched them through to the end.  Too graphic.

The statistics are mind-boggling for the U.S. which started a troop build-up in 1964 that mostly ended with the Fall of Saigon:

• More than 185,000 U.S. troops were sent off to war.

• More than 58,000 did not return; they were killed in action.

• Many more were maimed.

• Most who returned were treated as villains for participating in what was viewed by many as an unjust war, though the fact that some young men soldiered on stood for me as an example of sacrifice and honor.

• Plus, thousands of South and North Vietnamese died in the conflict.

On-line, war analysts put it this way:

“The Vietnam War was a disaster from its bad beginning until its tragic end.  It killed four million Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans. Millions more Vietnamese and Americans were wounded by shell or shock and the war came close to ripping the U.S. asunder.”

The worst of Vietnam happened while I was in college from 1966-70.  In that last year, I was subject to the draft, which, for the first time, was conducted by a lottery.

I remember sitting in my apartment listening to the radio intently as birth dates were drawn and announced.

At the time, the prediction was that men with birthdays in the first 150 days of the year would be subject to being called up.  Those beyond that date might be lucky enough to avoid being drafted.

For me?  My birthday was called as number 32, so I knew immediately that I was subject to being drafted.

So, the next day, I went down to the U.S. Army Recruiting Office in Seattle, Washington (that’s where I attended college) and signed up for a six-year hitch in the Reserves, which, back in those days, operated much like the National Guard. 

I thought I would be a long line of guys around the block waiting to do the same. 

But no.  I was the only one there.

As for my motivation, it was not a high-calling.  It was to avoid having to go to war in Vietnam.

Therefore, my perceptions about Vietnam are colored greatly by this experience, now so many years ago.

They also are colored, frankly, by the cases of my friends who died in the war, one of whom came home from service as a medic, only to come down with cancer from Agent Orange and succumb later to that dread disease.

So I cannot imagine touring places where so many persons – both Americans and Vietnamese – died such horrible deaths without knowing why.

Glad it’s my brother and wife making this trek, not me. 

But I do wish them well, even as my intent is to leave Vietnam behind – never going there and trying to forget its tragedy.