The Secret War in Vietnam

Hi Everyone,

In the last few months I have been reading The Women, a vibrant novel by Kristin Hannah. I admire Kristin’s writing; I find her novels commercial, engaging and sincere, always teasing out a woman’s story that resonates, from whatever tale, whatever decade! I wasn’t sure about The Women to start with, though; not sure I wanted to read about Vietnam, or rather the Vietnam War. I was both attracted and repulsed by the bright red cover featuring the silhouette of the same sort of helicopter my father flew in Vietnam, hovering over a jungle canopy. Yes, Vietnam, surely drama, but at what cost, and to whom?

There is a lot of information about what the US armed services suffered in the Vietnam War, including PTSD. But I’m not sure how much has been written about those who grew up watching the war from afar. As a twelve year old, I used to listen to anchorman Walter Cronkite’s body counts on the CBS evening news, having just worked out that my father’s necklace, his ‘dog tags’, were to identify him if… If what? I can still see those body bags televised in black and white being piled up like sandbags, forming a sort of dike, holding back a flood, and hoping that if one of those ‘sandbags’ did belong to my father, he would still have his ‘dog tags’ on. We would be able to identify him.

Reading Kristin’s Vietnam novel coincided with my son finding mention on the internet of his grandfather leading a mission, with resultant high commendations. ‘Is this Grandad?’ This inspired me to do something that I had been putting off for ages, avoiding, in fact, since my father’s death at the age of eighty-six in November 2014. Before his passing, my father, Lt Col Harry F. Hauser, had been writing a memoir. His draft manuscript entitled The Secret War in Vietnam was ostensibly about his time as Commander of the 21^st Helicopter Special Operations Squadron (‘The Dust Devils’) while stationed at Nakhon Phanom Royal Air Force Base in Thailand. I put off reading the record because I missed my father terribly (I still do), and I didn’t want to read what I imagined would be a disjointed tale that in many ways would herald his (for me) untimely death.

Well, I did open The Secret War in Vietnam, and yes it was fragmented, yet revealing. If someone had asked twelve-year-old me ‘What does your father do?’, I might have said, ‘He flies a helicopter.’ His memoir allowed me in some respects to spend a day at ‘the office’ with him. From night flights in black aircraft with men in black flight suits to near misses (failed rescue hoists) and the repeated mention of ‘those brave men’, I am humbled by the stories he had previously never shared.

In his memoir, I saw and heard the gregarious, powerful leader he proved to be, his sheer joy in any manoeuvre that saved men and foiled the enemy. For example, he described the brilliance of a young soldier’s suggestion that half a chopper blade be painted white so that the hovering camouflaged craft could be sighted by the one hovering above, distinguishing it from the jungle canopy below.