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Change and Assault
As someone who lived through the ’60s—a time I count as beginning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and ending with Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in 1974—I have many personal memories of that turbulent, exhilarating, moving, maddening time that don’t come together in a tidy package of conclusions.One minute it was Ike and the man in the gray flannel suit and the lonely crowd. The next minute it was “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and “Burn, baby, burn.” Americans were walking on the moon and dying in Vietnam. There were assassinations and riots. Jackie Kennedy became Jackie O. There were tie-dyed shirts and hard hats, Black Power and law and order, Martin Luther King, Jr., and George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Tom Hayden, and Mick Jagger and Wayne Newton.
Boom! You get the idea. Few institutions escaped some change or assault. The pillars of the Greatest Generation—family, community, university, corporation, church, law—were challenged to one degree or another. And while the parents of the baby boom generation experienced World War II as a unifying experience, Vietnam deeply divided a new generation. Today it still occupies a central role in our collective memory.
I continue to encounter Vietnam vets in two vastly different spheres: the public arena, where their service is now a badge of distinction, and the working-class arena, where Vietnam is a common bond that is only occasionally mentioned and remains all but invisible to those who do not share it.
Here are two members of the ’60s crowd who did share it. Their stories may surprise you—as they did me.
I knew David Cadwell, a teddy bear of a man, as owner of a small café alongside a covered bridge on the Housatonic River, in northwest Connecticut. I had no idea he was a medic in the Vietnam War until he spoke at the local Memorial Day services the year after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. His Memorial Day remarks were called “The Worst Day of My Life,” and they recounted when his company in the First Cavalry Division spotted what they thought were some North Vietnamese.
He elaborated for me later. “Captain Johnny Ward grabs his rifle and runs,” Cadwell says. “I’m trying to catch up and everyone’s on the move—rat-tat-tat, not a lot of fire, but some back-and-forth. Meanwhile, our artillery officer is doing his job. We’re gonna put artillery on the other side of them. Then somebody goofed. The rounds hit us.
“The only other medic was killed,” Cadwell continues. “Captain Ward—and this drove me crazy—never wore a helmet. He’d always wear a little boonie cap, and literally, the top of his head was taken off by our rounds. But he was alive. Our lieutenant was badly hurt. I was scared to death. I cannot tell you how inadequate I feel that I could not save these guys. And oh, God, the blood—the worst part was the blood. You can’t say, ‘I’m gonna grab a shower now.’”
David Cadwell’s journey to that gruesome scene in a Vietnam jungle began in Southern California, where he grew up the son of an insurance executive and a stay-at-home mom. He graduated from high school in 1968 with no thoughts about Vietnam or much else. He attended a community college and says he was “floundering” when his draft notice arrived.
“It was like, Okay, buddy, it’s your time. I got sucked up into the system. I was 19. What did I know? I didn’t have anything physical to get me out of it. I’m not politically put together, and there’s no way I was off to Canada.
“I knew I couldn’t be counted on to shoot anyone, so I entered as a conscientious objector who was willing to serve. They made me a medic, which was fine. You basically have two sorts of personalities when someone gets hurt. One goes, ‘Ew, I don’t want to do that.’ The other goes, ‘What can I do?’ I’m a ‘What can I do?’ kinda guy.
“Frankly, I thought they’d put me in a hospital. Surprise: I’m with the First Cav, the infantry, and off you go. I never took any heat from the guys for being a CO. I’d say, ‘Since I don’t carry a rifle or ammo, I can carry more stuff to look after you guys.’”
Cadwell was troubled by what he saw. “It was ’70 or ’71, so Vietnamization was under way; we were turning it over to South Vietnam. We didn’t go on search-and-destroy missions. We went on search-and-avoid missions.
“There were exceptions. We would put unearthly firepower on a target and—it just broke my heart—you’d go up and discover a couple of bodies, with no weapons or anything. You’d realize these guys were probably kidnapped from the village to carry rice, while the guys with the guns were gone.”
Eventually Cadwell was assigned to a field hospital away from the combat zones. “We had our own PX, a swimming pool, the Bob Hope show coming through. It was terrific, a very M*A*S*H-like experience.” He was aware that he’d inhabited two different worlds in Vietnam. “They served four hot meals a day at the hospital. One day I’m standing in line, and the guy in front is hollering, ‘What? No Jell-O today?’ That was Vietnam to him. I’m thinking, A few weeks ago, I was carrying all my food and water on patrol.”
As a medic, Cadwell says, he saw death so routinely that he became oblivious to it. But years later, while volunteering as an emergency medical tech for a local fire department, he was called to a ski hill where a young girl had died in a freak accident. “What really affected me,” he says, “was that a dear friend went to pieces over it. Loudly weeping, broke down. It struck me: Why wasn’t I weeping? I’d gotten desensitized by Vietnam, numbed by it. It wasn’t until they brought in a grief expert that I actually broke down.”
Finally, Cadwell was able to grieve. Vietnam had drained that from him—but 33 years later, the death of a child rekindled this man’s heart.
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