9 Things the Army Promised Grunts in Vietnam and Never Delivered HH

12 months, son, and you’re home.  And the army takes care of its own. Many young men heard something similar in 1965 and 1966 at the draft board or the distribution center, and most of them believed it.  Now imagine one of them a few months from now. Monsoon rain, soaked through field uniforms, leather boots falling apart at the seams, a can of ham and beans eaten cold.

He is still waiting for the rest of that promise. The army provided 12 months for most men.  This file is about the rest of the list. Nine things the Army promised the Marines in Vietnam and never delivered, or delivered late, or delivered to some and not to others. Jungle gear, a rifle, a vacation, a hot meal , bug spray, a visible end to war, veterans’ benefits, care at home, and a grateful country—these are not complaints, they are facts.

  If these topics are important to you, like , subscribe, and write in the comments where you’re watching us from.  And if you served, when? Before we begin, the infantrymen in this file, their equipment, and the rules they lived by are described in our book “No Man Will Ever Cover This.”  Search for this title on Amazon or point your phone’s camera at the code on the screen.

  Number nine is jungle gear.  Here’s the part that hurts the most.  The army was small.  By the time the massive buildup began in 1965, the army already had a tropical combat uniform: lightweight , quick- drying cotton, with slanted chest pockets and large cargo pockets on the pants.  There were also jungle boots: with a leather sole and a canvas upper, with small mesh holes in the instep to let water out.

  On paper, a soldier going to Vietnam was dressed for Vietnamese conditions.  But the number of troops grew faster than the ships arrived.  At the beginning of 1965, there were fewer than 25,000 Americans in the country.  By the end of that year, there were almost 200,000 of them, and new ones were arriving every week.

  The supply system couldn’t keep up with them. Many of the men who arrived in 1965 and 1966 went into the field in what they had been trained in at home.  Heavy American uniforms and black leather boots, made for Georgia and Kentucky, not rice fields during the monsoon.  The mold absorbed the water and held it. The shoes never dried out.

  The seams were rotting, the skin was cracking, and in some units, soldiers walked with soles held together with tape and wire. Feet would remain wet for days, begin to peel and crack, and in a bad week a medic could lose more men to the condition of their feet than to the enemy.  The people who had the new equipment were often from units that had priority, or had a good supply sergeant or were able to trade him.

    To be fair , the army did what it promised.  By 1967, most fighters in the field wore jungle uniforms and boots, and boots were improved over time: a mud-shedding sole and a plate at the bottom to protect against sharp spikes appeared.  Jungle boots became one of the best things the army gave the infantryman in that war .

  But for many soldiers in the first year and a half, they showed up too late to save their legs.  The jungle gear was authentic.  For many in 1965 and 1966, it was on a ship somewhere far behind.  Number eight— rifle. There is a separate article on this channel about the entire history of the early M-16, so here is just a brief summary.

  When the new rifle entered service with many units in 1966 and 1967, it had a reputation for being a weapon that required almost no cleaning.  And in some units, cleaning kits were in short supply or completely absent.  Then the rifles jammed during the gunfights. The soldiers wrote home about it .  Some of these letters reached Congress, and in 1967 a House subcommittee headed by Richard Aikord investigated the rifle program and issued a scathing report.

  The kits arrived, the rifle was changed, and the M-16 that most carried later was a different weapon compared to the one the first fighters received. The correction was real.  It came after the soldiers needed it.  They were given a rifle that was supposed to service itself.  In fact, it was the soldiers who ultimately took care of her.

  Number seven.  Vacation (R&R).  This was mostly done by the army , and it is worth saying this directly.    A soldier on annual service was entitled to one leave for rest and recuperation outside the country.  Five days for most destinations.  This list was like a wet night’s dream.  Hawaii, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Sydney, Singapore, Manila.

Many married couples chose Hawaii because their wives could fly there to meet them. Most did get their vacation, and many still remember it as the best 5 days of the entire year.  But the places were distributed according to quotas for each unit, several per month, so the soldier chose a destination and waited. In the firing company, the wait could be long.

The operation was beginning, and vacations were being canceled.  The place was vacated and given to the person who was on the list earlier. Some got their rest in the last month, so close to returning home that it felt like a rehearsal.  Some say they didn’t wait at all , and some of those who waited didn’t live to see this moment.

  So, the vacation was not a broken promise. For most men, it was a promise kept. It was simply carried out in the order that the war allowed, and the war was never rushed for the sake of those at the end of the list.  For most men, these 5 days came.  For those still waiting, 5 days was the longest promise in the army. Number six, hot food.

  Somewhere during training, many people learned the idea that in this war the army would deliver hot lunches directly to the positions.  And in many units, that was the goal.  When fighting permitted, cooks at the base loaded food into thermoses and a helicopter delivered it to the troops in the jungle.  Hot eggs , hot coffee, sometimes even steak.

  No army had ever attempted to do this on such a scale before. But the goal and the result are different things.  In some units and at certain times of the year, soldiers sat for weeks on dry rations and nothing else.    The ham and beans that no one wanted.  The cupcake and peaches that everyone wanted.  A pinch of C4 explosives under a can to heat up food, if you managed to hide it.

  And when the thermoses did arrive, they weren’t always hot. The helicopter should have waited for the weather or transported ammunition and wounded first, which was the right priority.  And by the time the food arrived, the eggs were getting cold and the gravy was covered in cling film.  The men still ate it while standing in the rain.

  And some of them will tell you it was the best lunch they had in a month.  That’s the honest truth about it.  In many units, the army provided soldiers with hot meals more often than anyone expected.  And the chefs who did it deserve words of gratitude.  But a promise made with the note “if possible” is a promise that war can always break.

And in places where the fighting was fiercest, she usually did just that.  The Marmite tin was real.  Like the look on the man’s face when he opened the lid and the eggs were cold. Number five, spray.  You were standing in a meadow that had been green a month ago.  Now every leaf is brown and drooping, the trees are bare as in winter, and you can see far into what used to be a solid wall of jungle.

There is a faint chemical smell in the air, and there is a coating on the leaves you pass. Someone in the squad says it’s just herbicide .  The same as what farmers use at home, only stronger.  You believe him.  And why not? This is from my own people.  You wipe your face with your sleeve, fill your flask in the stream, and move on.

  From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, American planes, helicopters, trucks, and people with backpack sprayers sprayed herbicides on the jungles, riverbanks, and the outskirts of bases in South Vietnam. The most famous was Agent Orange, named after the orange stripe on the barrels.  The idea was simple.  Destroy the cover, and the enemy will have nowhere to hide.

Many say they were told that the spray was harmless to people, and many simply understood it that way because no one said otherwise.  Some of them sawed it off themselves.  Some used empty barrels in the camp.  Then they returned home, and years later some of them became ill.  For a long time, when a veteran came to power and said that the spray had something to do with it, the response was that no one could prove it.

  People fought this fight for years, and some of them died fighting.    It was only after the passage of the Agent Orange Act of 1991 that the law began to assume that certain illnesses in veterans who served in Vietnam were related to that service, instead of requiring each person to prove it on their own.  The list of these diseases has grown since then, and there is a separate file about this list on this channel.

  So, the country finally gave something.  She granted it late, in pieces, after a long struggle, and a great many men did not live to see that moment.  They were told it was just herbicide.  It took the law over 20 years to recognize that it was something more. Number four, the end is in sight.  In November 1967, General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam , returned to Washington.

  He addressed the National Press Club with the message that the war had reached a critical point, the end was in sight, and that within a few years, American units would be able to begin handing over more combat missions to the South Vietnamese. It was reported everywhere, and many soldiers on the front lines read about it in the Stars and Stripes or heard it on the radio.

  For the young rifleman, who was counting the days until demobilization, this was not politics.  It was hope.  Perhaps his service was one of the last. Maybe his younger brother won’t have to go there.  Two months later, on the night of January 30-31, 1968, during the Tet holiday, attacks on cities, towns, and bases erupted across South Vietnam—from the far north to the Mekong Delta.

  In Saigon, fighting reached the territory of the American embassy.  In the old city of Hue, fighting continued for weeks.  Militarily, the attackers paid a terrible price, and historians still debate the significance of the Tet Offensive. But for the people who experienced it, one thing was clear.  There was no end in sight.

  1968 was the deadliest year of the war for Americans. American ground troops remained in Vietnam for another 5 years after that speech.  And that young man who read the good news in November 1967 was very often the same one who spent February 1968 in a battle that no one warned him about.  In November, the end was on the horizon.

  And in February, the fighters could only see a line of trees ahead.  Third, the same GI Bill as their parents.  Many men in Vietnam grew up in homes built thanks to the GI Bill.  Their parents returned home from World War II to a law that directly paid for college tuition within a generous annual limit, as well as sending the veteran a monthly living check.

  Millions of men have taken advantage of this.  This allowed an entire generation to get a college or professional education, and many of those fathers told their sons, “You will serve your time, and the country will thank you as much as it did me.”  The sons returned home to the Veterans Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966.

  It was real help and a real law, and many of them graduated thanks to it.  But he worked differently. Instead of paying the school, he sent the veteran a monthly check, which at first was usually about a hundred dollars a month for a single, full-time student.  And from that check, he had to pay for tuition, textbooks, rent, and groceries.

  At a public school in an inexpensive city, a man could somehow make ends meet.  In many colleges, tuition alone took up most of the funds, and some men, seeing these numbers, never enrolled.  To be fair, it’s worth adding that Congress increased payments several times, and by the mid-1970s the check was significantly better.

    A large number of Vietnam veterans took advantage of this, went to school and built a good life on it.  But someone who was demobilized in 1967 or 1968 received an early version and knew exactly how it correlated with what his father had.  Their parents paid for their college education.  The sons received a check and an invoice for the remaining amount .

  Point two: care after returning home.    The Army did in Vietnam what no army had done before.  Thanks to helicopters and field hospitals, the wounded were often on the operating table in less than an hour, and people survived injuries that would have killed their parents’ generation.  It was a promise kept, and thousands of men owe their lives to it.

  But everyone the Army rescued returned home to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which was not prepared for so many rescues.  In the early 1970s, many VA hospitals were overcrowded, understaffed, and operating in old buildings.  In 1970, a national magazine published a photo report from the VA hospital in the Bronx .

  Photos of wounded young men in crowded wards , waiting for help that came too slowly.  People who saw these pictures were shocked. Congress held hearings.  Things were slowly starting to move forward, but there was another kind of wound, one that no one could photograph. The men returned home terrified, shuddering at every loud sound, with anger they didn’t recognize, and abusing alcohol more and more every year.

  Some doctors in the 1970s called it ” post-Vietnam syndrome,” but it wasn’t recognized as a diagnosis until 1980, when post-traumatic stress disorder entered psychiatric manuals.  In 1979, Congress opened special veterans assistance centers where a person could come and talk to someone who understood.  For many men, this was already 10 years after returning home.

  And now, honestly. Today’s VA is a very different place: larger, better equipped, and much more experienced in working with veterans of that war, and many are receiving quality care there now.  If you served and never applied there, or were rejected many years ago, it’s worth trying again. The army rescued more wounded than any army before it.

Then she sent them home to a system that wasn’t ready for it. First, a grateful country. This is a promise that no one had to write down.  Every generation of American soldiers before them was welcomed home as heroes.  After World War I, parades were held. After the Second World War, there were parades, and a man in uniform could barely buy himself a drink.

  The men who went to Vietnam grew up on these stories.  They weren’t waiting for the parade.  They were waiting for at least a ” thank you.”  Many of them got to the airport in the middle of the night.  They were returning home alone, on their own time, and this channel told the story of that flight. Many say they were advised to change into uniforms before leaving the terminal.

  Some were met by protesters.  And many were never met by anyone at all .  Some would come to the local veterans center and see the older men treating them coldly, as if their war wasn’t real.  Many hid their uniforms in the closet and didn’t talk about Vietnam for twenty years.  The greeting arrived, but with a great delay.

In November 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington.    A black wall with names , and men who had n’t spoken about the war for decades stood before it and cried.  In 1985, New York City held a parade for its Vietnam veterans.  In 1986, Chicago held its own, and the men who returned to empty airports marched past cheering crowds.

Much later, the country introduced a national Vietnam Veterans Day. All of this was real.  All of this happened 10, 15, 40 years after it was supposed to, but something different happened in those years .  Something that the country did not organize. The men began to say this to each other.  At a meeting, at the counter in a hardware store, when one of them noticed the cap: ” Welcome home.”  Two words.

Words the country never said to them at the airport.  Said by the only people who knew what they were worth.  The country is late.  But not them.  They welcomed each other home.  Back in 1965, the young man heard this at the military registration and enlistment office.  “12 months, son, and the army will take care of its own.

”  He served his 12 months.  He got his jungle boots a year later.  He got a rifle that was fixed after it failed him, an occasional hot meal, a check that wasn’t enough for his education, and a welcome home that was 15 years or more late. The army failed to keep every promise it made to him.  And he kept every promise he gave to the Army.

  Now it’s your turn.  What promise have you waited the longest for and did you get it at all?  Tell us in the comments. The best story will become a future archive on this channel.  If this video was worth your time, please give it a like, as it will help other people who have also been waiting for one of these nine promises to see it.

Share it with your son or daughter, because some of this they may never have heard from you .  And sign if you are one of those who fulfilled their part of the deal.  If you want these archives on your shelf, the book “No Manual Ever Covered This” is for you. Find it on Amazon or point your phone camera at the code on the screen.

  Those who fulfilled their part of the deal, and those who waited for the rest, but never got it. Welcome home. This was for you.