From war to politics | Tell Your Story – Chico Enterprise-Record

Mulholland, driver

Over the years people have asked me how/why I got involved in politics (Democrat party). One word answer, Vietnam. I was born and grew up in Philadelphia, at the time it had 2 million residents with all the traditional neighborhoods with Irish, Poles, other Whites, Jews, Blacks, Puerto Ricans and many others.

Then one day I got home from my factory job and there it was, a draft notice (not a football scholarship) Ordering me to report in 10 days. Many of my friends were already in the military, either drafted or joined but it never occurred to me that they would be “calling” me. Only one kid from my parish had left for college.

In July 1966, I showed up, got a one minute “physical,” and on a train with over 500 other guys, to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. After eight weeks of boot camp, I got sent over to the stockade to be a guard, a prison with a couple of hundred inmates my age.

Months later I volunteered for the paratroopers and Vietnam, which I got both. My late Dad served in the General Patton Army, Battle of Bulge, etc., so I felt I should do my part. After jump school, I got assigned to the 101st Airborne and in December 1967, in the biggest and longest airlift ever in war, 10,000 of us paratroopers flew to Vietnam in C-141s.

All well, then the Tet Offensive on Jan. 30, 1968 and in February alone over 2,000 Americans were killed and over 8,000 wounded and then in March they got me — mortar shrapnel and if I had not had my flak jacket on, I would not have survived the night and morphine is a wonder drug. I spent almost a month in three different field “hospitals,” (Quonset huts) and read a paperback about the recent history of Vietnam. It devastated my beliefs.

In 1954, the Geneva Accords, agreed to by the West, stated that Vietnam would have a presidential election in two years. Then as Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower was reminded that Ho Chi Minh would win, he canceled a democratic election. Ho Chi Minh was for an independent Vietnam with no foreign troops and yes, a communist. In 1945, Eisenhower as the Supreme Allied Commander was part of the West’s decision to put much of Eastern Europe (millions of people) under the complete control of the Soviet Union communists.

Here I am laying in a bed with several hundred other wounded guys in dozens of Quonset huts and realizing that we were told we were in Vietnam to allow the Vietnamese to hold democratic elections, but Eisenhower had canceled the real one which Ho Chi Minh would have won and no American would have ever heard of Vietnam.

While in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson announced he was not running and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated. I believe Bobby would have been elected president that year and we would have left Southeast Asia in 1969. Incidentally, the demographics of U.S. troops in Vietnam were the same as in the city I grew up in. And 13% of the 58,300-plus Americans killed were Black, thus meeting the “affirmative goals” of America, as 12% in America were Black.

I, like many thousands of Vietnam Veterans, participated in marches when we got out against the war. In cities, construction workers were allowed to leave their building sites and go and beat up marchers and calling even Vietnam veterans, some missing limbs and in wheelchairs, traitors. Really, we were the traitors! Congress never declared war (last time was in WWII) against North Vietnam but Congress and the “Best and Brightest” loved funding the war. The first American killed in Vietnam, post WWII, was in September 1945 and the last two were killed on April 30, 1975.

The Pentagon Papers exposed all the lies, including a memo from Jan. 20, 1966 from a deputy to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, “The present U.S. objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation.” The several hundred thousand of us drafted in 1966 were never told that they needed us to avoid humiliation.

Today America has full diplomatic and trade relations with Communist Vietnam. We could have done that without our war in Vietnam, and I think of that every time I visit our wall in D.C. with over 58,300 names. Of the 2.7 million Americans who served in Southeast Asia, many have had numerous health issues costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

You can email Bob Mulholland at chicobob@msn.com.