The Saigon Guns shares facts about the final year of US combat operations in South Vietnam from the perspective of someone who was actually there. Why was this an important book for you to write?

This is a history that has not been told. Most people think the US Army involvement in South Vietnam ended in mid-June of 1972. Actually, some of the most intense combat that year for the US Army forces was after June. The US Army Greenbook, which is the official history of the US Army even perpetuates this myth today. A consequence of the lies about 1972 US Army operations was that the military records for those of us there at that time went missing. This plagued me for the rest of my career, as it did for many others, and almost denied me VA benefits. Only recently has the National Archives allowed access to some of these records.

When I attended the US Army War College in 1994, I heard seminar instructors explain that no US Army forces conducted combat operations, only local unit defense, after June of 1972. I pointed out that this was not true. I was asked on what basis I could say that. I explained I was there and that the US Army units still in-country were seriously taking the fight to the North Vietnamese and the Soviets well into December of 1972. The seminar leader was incredulous. He suggested I write a paper, which I did. Never saw that paper again, and it was not to be published.

President Nixon stated that he had pulled out all combat troops of Vietnam in June of 1972 as a re-election ploy, despite the fact that he did not. But no one wanted to confront the truth. After we were actually out of Vietnam as the result of the peace treaty, President Nixon and Congress had no appetite to re-engage even in the face of the massive North Vietnamese violation of that very treaty in 1975.

The Vietnam War is one of those moments in history that is glossed over in textbooks or outright ignored. Your book sheds light on the facts and uncovers the uncomfortable truth of the situation. I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story and those who were stationed in Vietnam. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

I suspect that most combat veterans have the hardest time dealing with “survivor guilt.” As a consequence, it was most difficult for me to write about the loss of friends in combat. For the rest of your life, you wonder, “Why them and not me?” But I also found that writing about specific combat actions or engagements sometimes became a bit too intense for me, and I would simply stop and take a break. Then I found that on many occasions it was hard to pick the narrative back up and continue. It might take hours, a week, or even a month to do that sometimes. Of course, then there was research I needed to try and make the narrative as accurate as I could. This took time. My wife and I even traveled to the National Archives in Maryland to research records. Though what we found was scant few records of use for this period of the war. I also reached out to fellow unit members that I served with in Vietnam to pick at their memories and personnel records to fill out details. That is why it took me several years to write this book.

What is a common misconception you feel people have about the Vietnam War and the military forces that were sent there?

The main misconception, now fostered in many high-school textbooks, is that the Vietnam War was an illegal war. This is, of course, the same line that anti-war groups, often assisted by the Soviet-operated World Peace Counsel, publicized to support their anti-war efforts. The truth is that the war was started by the North Vietnamese for two purposes. One was certainly to unify the country under Communist control. The other, less clear reason, was that the Soviets wanted a “warm water’ port on the South China Sea. The Soviets wanted this port because it provided them an all-weather power projection base against the American Pacific Fleet and against the Chinese, with whom they were in direct conflict in the 1960s and 1970s. The US turned down a request by Ho Chi Minh to assist them in unifying the country by force in the early 1960’s. The US refused to assist him with a takeover by force of arms. Additionally, the US had an air base in South Vietnam in Da Hang that was strategic to our defenses against the rising power of the Soviets. So, when the effort to overthrow the government in South Vietnam was begun by the North Vietnamese, supported by the Russians, we sided with the South Vietnamese on the basis that it was illegal for one country to take over another peaceful country by force of arms. It is also interesting to note that most Americans, again as the result of Soviet propaganda and, to a certain degree, the interests of opposing political parties in the United States, were told that we were only fighting poor Vietnamese peasants and the North Vietnamese were simply assisting them. The truth was that the North Vietnamese were who we were primarily fighting and who made up the bulk of what we refer to as the VC or Viet Cong irregular forces. By 1972, with the major North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam with conventional armored forces, entire Soviet military units were committed to the way and were engaged against US forces. Today there is a Russian Vietnam Veterans organization!

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your story?

The truth about the war and what those of us who served there tried to do for America and for the poor South Vietnamese is what I hope readers take away from my book. Remember that millions of people died in Southeast Asia upon our pullout of forces and our refusal, after the Spring of 1973, to provide support to the South Vietnamese.

There is an old joke among my contemporaries about that war. We were winning when we left. This was quite true. In the space of 8 months in 1972, four US Army Cavalry troops, the US Air Force, and the US Navy, with an assortment of American military advisors with various South Vietnamese Army and Marine units, wiped out five divisions of North Vietnamese and Soviet armor. This was not old, obsolete Russian Armor from World War II but then state-of-the-art Soviet military hardware. Yet the North Vietnamese offensive combat power was destroyed to the point that the North lacked the capability to continue the war when the Peace Treaty in Paris was signed.

It took the North Vietnamese, and their Soviet supporters two and a half years to rebuild the North Vietnamese offensive combat power and then conquer South Vietnam. With our complete pullout and refusal to provide help to the region, panic set in across all the nearby countries, and dictators and thugs, backed by the Soviets and the North Vietnamese, seized power in Cambodia and Laos. Estimates for the loss of life over the four years following our complete withdrawal and the fall of South Vietnam in these three countries alone run as high as 10 million people! And, to this day, the propaganda of the Soviets and of the anti-war movement here still denies these facts and the reality of that war. We see the same approach to war in Ukraine today, along with the same use of propaganda and ruthless war on a civilian population. The “just war” concept has no place in the Russian way of war. It was so in Vietnam, and it is so in Ukraine. So yes, there are lessons, and they start with recognizing and accepting the truth of what is actually happening.

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