Vietnam: 30 years on

Mike Sulsona, a former Marine, called the other day, just back from Vietnam for the first time since the war. He was excited because he surprised himself by liking it there this time and because he was pleased with the research he did for a play he wants to write about an Army tank driver. The tank driver, whom Mike Sulsona did not know, was caught in an ambush between Kontum and Dak To just before the Tet offensive of 1968.

Mike himself was in a Tet battle three years later, but whether it is viewed as a country, an era, or a war, Vietnam does not engage Mike Sulsona politically, only personally. For Sulsona, originally a boy from Brooklyn and now a burly family man living on Staten Island, it is enough that, as the 30th anniversary of the war’s end is marked – celebrated in Vietnam, briefly noted here in the losing country – the Vietnamese people embraced him.

Thirty years after the end of World War I in 1918 was already three years past the end of World War II. Thirty years after the end of World War II in 1945 was the end of the war in Vietnam when, on April 30, 1975, the last helicopter pushed off from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon. Thirty years later, in another war against both real insurgents and terror’s phantoms, we can find some comfort in our increasing closeness, even friendship, with our former enemies. Mike Sulsona’s return journey was a revelation in terms of his personal acceptance. “I could hardly believe it,” he said, “but they not only treated me as a friend, they actually honored me as a former warrior.”

The first time Mike was in Vietnam, as a Marine in Quang Nam province south of Danang 34 years ago, he left his legs there. When I met him not long after that, he was modestly dismissive of his loss as he practiced walking with his two new prosthetic legs. “There’s really not that much to talk about,” he had said then, smiling shyly. “We were walking on a patrol, and we ran into an ambush – about six, seven guys really got hurt. It was a battalion ambush.” Mike stopped talking and looked down where his real legs used to be, and then he looked back up, still smiling. “We called in two or three medevacs, and they got hit, so finally the last one came in and got us out.” Characteristically, Mike did not mention the obvious, that he himself had been hit. He considers he was caught in a trap between history and ideology. “The Vietnamese I knew then and the ones I met now,” he said, “were good people. As for what happened, that was my job, that was the country, that was the time.”

What Mike was searching for in Vietnam this time were details to fill out the story of Dwight Johnson, the Army tank driver who had been ambushed along Highway 14 midway between Kontum and Dak To in the Central Highlands. Johnson and the rest of his convoy were attacked at a point on Highway 14 where three hills overlook the road, providing perfect perches for the attackers. “With his tank immobilized,” Mike Sulsona told me, “Dwight Johnson climbed out and fought like hell.” Armed with only a .45 pistol, Johnson killed several of the enemy. Returning to his tank, he found a submachine gun, came back outside and shot more Vietnamese. When he ran out of ammunition he killed a Vietnamese with the stock of the gun. He carried a wounded soldier to safety and then rushed to his platoon sergeant’s tank from which he fired the main gun until it jammed. Again armed with only a .45 pistol, Johnson fought his way back to his own tank, which he climbed aboard. On top of the tank, he was fully exposed as he manned his tank’s externally mounted .50 caliber machine gun, where he remained firing until, as the Army records later put it, “the situation was brought under control.”

For his almost unbelievable valor and patriotic violence, Dwight Johnson won the Medal of Honor and lost, essentially, his mind. Out of the Army, Johnson couldn’t find a job. Back in the Army as a recruiter – a living recruiting poster, actually, as an African American Medal of Honor winner in Detroit – he went AWOL. In 1971, three years after his combat heroism, Johnson tried to hold up a liquor store and was shot dead by the owner.

When Mike Sulsona arrived at the site where Johnson’s unit was ambushed, he found a war memorial the Vietnamese have erected at the crest of a hill, reached only by climbing 100 steps, to honor their own soldiers who fought a number of brutal battles in Kontum province. These days Mike doesn’t use his artificial legs anymore because he finds they actually impede his movement, which is much more fluid with his wheelchair. A friend carried his chair up the steps while Mike, using his powerful arms as levers, pulled his 53- year-old torso upward. With the patience and persistence of a pilgrim, Mike repeated his hopping-hoisting motion 100 times until he reached the shrine his former enemies had constructed to their own bravery and patriotic violence.

Next to a huge urn at the center of the memorial, Mike placed a picture of Dwight Johnson and an American flag. Reclaiming his chair, he roamed around the summit for an hour, enjoying the peaceful vistas across the Central Highlands. The photograph and flag were undisturbed when Mike and his friend left.

Back in Ho Chi Minh City, the old Saigon, Mike was rolling his chair down a crowded sidewalk when he almost collided with a middle-aged Vietnamese man, also in a wheelchair and wearing a combat decoration. He was trying to sell lottery tickets. The two paraplegics stopped their chairs. Then the Vietnam veteran and the Vietnamese veteran wheeled to face one another as they might once have done with weapons.

“Suddenly, we began laughing,” Mike said. “Heavy belly laughs. I have no idea what side he was on. Does it make a difference? We were laughing and laughing and couldn’t stop, couldn’t help ourselves, just a couple of guys who got messed up in the war. Now he’s selling lottery tickets and I’m trying to make a buck writing about a guy who got killed at home after he fought in the war. Neither of us could stop laughing. I mean, what was all that about anyway?”

Peter Davis, who lives in Castine, made a documentary about the Vietnam War, “Hearts and Minds,” for which he received an Academy Award in 1975. Michael Sulsona appeared in the film.