My Father’s War, and Mine

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Theodore M. Hammett

The author shaking hands with Gen. Leonard F. Chapman, Jr. the 24th Commandant of the Marine Corps in Quang Tri Vietnam in 1968. Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

My father enlisted in the Marine Corps as soon as he graduated from Harvard in 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor. He led a platoon in the first assault wave on the South Pacific island of Bougainville in 1943.

He must have seen horrible things in the war, but he rarely spoke about it. His books about the exploits of the Third Marine Division showed dead and disfigured Marines and Japanese soldiers; jungles torn to shreds by gunfire; Marines using flamethrowers to incinerate or flush out Japanese troops in caves. Despite my father’s reluctance to talk about the war, it seems to have been his peak experience; it appeared to me that he found the rest of his life, as a successful lawyer, anti-climactic and vaguely disappointing.

During parties at our house when I was a young boy, my father, after a few drinks, “drilled the troops” with the guests using broomsticks for rifles and marching to his commands through the house and out into the yard. He also used his best drill instructor’s voice to call my Cub Scout troop to attention for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Philip M. Hammett, the author’s father, as a new Marine lieutenant in 1942.

He remained in the Marine Corps Reserve after World War II and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1960. His ashes were later inurned at Arlington National Cemetery with full honors.

My generation’s more complicated war lay beyond the horizon when I joined the Harvard Class of 1967. American “advisers” were trying to help the Army of the Republic of Vietnam ward off the Vietcong guerrillas. It wasn’t going very well, but few people seemed to notice.

My father felt military service was a duty that all young men should carry out and, at his suggestion, I joined the Marine Corps’ Platoon Leaders Class during my freshman year. I finished my first Marine summer camp in 1964 just before the Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” which became the pretext for President Lyndon Johnson to send combat units to Vietnam the following March — a move that, at first, I agreed with. We had to stop the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia, I felt.

Lt. Philip M. Hammett, left, taken in a picture from the South Pacific in 1942. Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

I can’t pinpoint what changed my mind. Probably, it was the relentless escalation, the rising death toll and all the destruction with no clear objective. It was increasingly hard for me to envision being a Marine in Vietnam; instead, I could see myself in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” covered by the Byrds on their first album, in the summer of 1965: “Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight.” It began to dawn on me that if the songs I was listening to were right, then the war must be wrong.

In the class of 1967, we all had to make choices about Vietnam. The privilege of attending Harvard brought many opportunities to avoid the war, including exempt occupations, doctors’ letters (often phony), influence on draft boards and six-month reserve enlistments. These, together with acts of opposition — registering as a conscientious objector, going to jail, fleeing to Canada — meant that only about 40 of my classmates — out of about 1,200 in our freshman class — served in Vietnam, and only two were killed. A total of 22 Harvard men died in the Vietnam War compared with almost 700 in World War II, including two of my father’s roommates.

During a long argument on the telephone in the spring of 1966, I told my father that I was against the Vietnam War and was going to withdraw from the Marine Corps. “You’re spitting on everything I believe in,” he replied angrily. The next morning he summoned me home to explain why he shouldn’t take me out of school. My history tutor told me that I might be able to get a scholarship if I lost my family’s support.

I was troubled by doubt. If I was really against the war, I should bear the consequences. But maybe I was just a coward using opposition to the war as an excuse. In the end, I was unable to stand up to my father and endure the break with him that would have resulted. With neither the pride of my father’s “Greatest Generation” nor the commitment of the Vietnam War’s bravest opponents, I agreed to stay in the Marine Corps despite my feelings about the war.

The author in Quang Tri, Vietnam, in 1968.

I received my commission as a second lieutenant in June 1967 and soon after reported to Basic School, the four-month training for new lieutenants. Clearly, I would not be a model Marine officer. I lip-synced the growls we were supposed to let out when we stabbed the dummies during bayonet drill. One friend labeled me the “Harvard Hindu.” I became hopelessly lost during a war exercise. I essentially faked my way through the program.

At Basic School, we could list three preferred military occupational specialties. I selected supply, motor transport and communications. My suspicion lingered that these choices reflected more cowardice (“why die, go supply”) than a principled wish to avoid combat in a war I opposed. In any case, I would have been a terrible platoon commander.

In its wisdom, the Marine Corps recognized this and assigned me to supply. When I informed my father, his disapproval was palpable. Nevertheless, the night before my departure for Vietnam in March 1968, he told me morosely how hard it was to send a son off to war.

The author at his home in Watertown, Mass.Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

I was assigned to the Third Marine Division, the same as my father, which operated in northernmost South Vietnam and participated in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. I spent my entire tour, however, as supply officer for the division’s field hospital, first near Hue and later in Quang Tri, 10 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone dividing South from North Vietnam.

I saw no combat and was in no real danger. But because my father would expect it, I sought a few experiences of being shot at. I accompanied a friend who was paymaster for his artillery unit to Fire Support Base Russell, which had been nearly overrun by the North Vietnamese Army the night before. I spent a sleepless night in a bunker where several Marines had died, listening to outgoing artillery and small-arms fire on the perimeter. A month later, during a visit to my stepbrother who was a helicopter pilot in the Mekong Delta, I rode along on a night mission during which a converted C-47 transport plane rained thousands of 7.62 millimeter rounds on a village and the Vietcong sent tracers back up toward my helicopter.

War corroded my principles. In helicopters, we strafed, without shooting, Vietnamese working in rice fields and laughed to see the terrified faces below. We deliberately splattered Vietnamese people with mud as we drove by in our trucks and jeeps. Although I hated the war, I began to hate the Vietnamese as well.

My guilt about what my country had done to Vietnam and what I had done to mistreat the Vietnamese led me, like many veterans, to try to do something positive there. I have worked on H.I.V.-AIDS prevention and treatment in Vietnam for more than 15 years and lived in Hanoi for three and a half years. I have come to love the country and its people and to feel at home there.

In September 2016 I joined nine other Marine veterans to tour scenes of our Vietnam War experiences. One of our group, almost half of whose platoon was killed or wounded in a mortar attack just north of Con Thien, described his feelings as we visited the site of that base: “A little pride, but mostly sadness … Not much good happened to Marines here.” Indeed, not much good happened to anyone there.

The author’s United States Marine Corps lapel pin. Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

My father went to war with pride and returned to a hero’s welcome. He and his generation helped to save the world. Since I returned from Vietnam for the first time in 1969, I have become even more convinced that our war there was terribly wrong. Still, I accepted and actually wear the Marine Corps lapel pin given me by my former platoon commander at a Basic School reunion in 2015. I have grown able to appreciate both those who bravely served in Vietnam and those whose actions against the war helped end it sooner than it might have otherwise.

I do not claim to have made the most honorable choices about Vietnam. In 1966 and 1967, I was young and confused and gave in to doubt and fear. If I had it to do over again, I hope I would have been truer to my principles and refused to serve in Vietnam. Over the ensuing years, I argued heatedly with my father about the war, and we never agreed. At the end of one argument, he said that “we’ve come to a parting of the ways.” This was not literally true. I continued a somewhat troubled relationship with him until his death.

In remarks at my father’s memorial service in 1998, I quoted Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem about a soldier killed as he slept in his trench: “He sleeps. He sleeps less tremulous, less cold/Than we who must awake, and waking, say Alas.”

Many in my post-World War II generation made choices about Vietnam that fractured or strained families and have haunted us, in dreams and awake, for the rest of our lives.