As the United States is again involved in another futile war abroad, this time in Iran, it was a good time to read the Education of Corporal John Musgrave about his experiences in the Vietnam War and afterwards.
What an excellent book this is and such an easy read. Sadly, Vietnam veteran John Musgrave died in May this year, but he has left behind a valuable legacy, both in the work he has done helping traumatised servicemen in the United States and also in this book.
Kennedy’s challenge
Perhaps the best way of putting the book into context is to go back to President Kennedy’s inauguration speech on 20 January 1961. Among the memorable phrases Kennedy uttered that day what’s this: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Many boys growing up in the USA at the time took this as a call to arms. Musgrave doesn’t mention the speech in his memoirs, but he clearly believed in the spirit of the challenge set down by Kennedy. Indeed, Musgrave wanted to serve his country from an early age.
Growing up
This spirit was compounded by Musgrave’s upbringing in a small town in Missouri. His father had fought in the Second World War and Musgrave himself remembered that “I don’t recall a friend whose father wasn’t a veteran of World War II or Korea”. Consequently,
Musgrave accepted it as inevitable that he would eventually join the armed forces and it was becoming a marine that he’d set his heart on,
Becoming a marine
Having gained his parents’ permission to join up at the age of 17, John Musgrave went off to train to become a marine. This included a lot of physical hard work and from his memoir it would appear also a lot of bullying from superiors which Musgrave had to learn to accept. If he was going to be a marine, he would have to learn to do exactly as he was told and not question what he was being told to do. Over time, Musgrave would learn to question things…
First contact
Musgrave then tells us about his first contact with the North Vietnamese army, the enemy. It was clearly something that stayed with him all his life as he killed a young Vietnamese soldier about his own age. As he said in the Vietnam War series, that was when he made his deal with the devil, that he wouldn’t kill another big human being while in Vietnam. However, using dehumanised names for the Vietnamese Musgrave would continue to kill. As Musgrave himself said in the Vietnam War series, to become an effective soldier in that war, you had to learn to be a racist.
Con Thieu
Then Musgrave was posted to Con Thieu, an American base on three hilltops just to the south of the Demilitarised Zone with North Vietnam or DMZ as it was known. To the marines it was also known as the dead marines’ zone.
Here Musgrave received an education in the sheer misery of being an infantry man in the Vietnam War. He and his comrades were always hungry while in the wet season, they suffered from Immersion foot, “a condition that develops when feet are kept wet and soggy or muddy boots for days when the outer layer of the skin absorbs enough water it begins to rot off which made it almost impossible to keep flesh on our feet”.
“I know I’m dying”
Under constant bombardment from the North Vietnamese, Musgrave made a significant decision. Using a calendar he had received from his father he marked up every day he was there with a cross every day marking how he was getting nearer to some sort of safety. However, one day he just gave up, believing that it was a waste of time as he was never going to get out of there alive.
So it was that he ended up in a close combat firefight which saw a huge hole blasted in his chest big enough for a fist to be put through it. Having been taken to a makeshift hospital the first doctor who saw him said that there was nothing that could be done for him and asked him what his religion was.
Then as Musgrave lay there seemingly mortally wounded another doctor walked past and Musgrave smiled at him as he had been brought up to do. This may well have saved his life this doctor demanded that something be done to help him and after emergency surgery to try and just fill up the hole in his chest, Musgrave woke up to find that he would soon be on his way back to the States. He was given the military decoration of the Purple Heart.
Back in the USA
Back in the USA, Musgrave struggled for a long time to show that he was fit enough to go back to Vietnam when this was clearly a forlorn effort. In the end he took what seemed to be the most sensible route and took up the offer of becoming a Vietnam veteran at college
A Vietnam Vet at college
By the time that Musgrave entered college the war had become very unpopular and as a Vietnam vet Musgrave found himself similarly disliked by many of the students. That didn’t stop him during a debate from speaking out on behalf of the soldiers in Vietnam and saying that it wasn’t their fault they’d been sent there and now they should be supported, He spoke so effectively that he was given a standing ovation.
With the VVAW
Meanwhile the war was dragging on and newly elected president Nixon put into place the policy of Vietnamisation, which meant handing the war back over to the South Vietnamese and pulling American troops out. At the same time however, he was also expanding the war into Laos and Cambodia and continuing to send young American boys over to Southeast Asia.
This angered John Musgrave as he felt that if the war wasn’t worth staying in for, it wasn’t worth any Americans fighting and dying for. The killing of four unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970 and two more students at Jackson State University in Mississippi, eleven days later, further alienated Musgrave.
Eventually he ended up joining the Vietnam Veterans against the War and even threw his medals back along with many other veterans outside the Capitol in Washington. He also found that he had a voice and became an important and effective public speaker against the war.
Finding others
Following that it was time for Musgrave to look for other veterans who were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder while other veterans’ organisations including the American Legion basically disowned them. Musgrave was able to put together a network of self-help for veterans, and he continued with this kind of work for many years.
He also became a poet finding that writing down about his experiences at Vietnam was a cathartic experience and helped him to overcome it much of the trauma that he himself had experienced
Looking back
Musgrave was an excellent writer and so, and as he looked back to the Vietnam War many years later, these are from the last paragraph in the book which sum up how he viewed the war over 40 years after it had ended:
“It wasn’t until I watched the Vietnam War and saw those North Vietnamese veterans who had once fought against me, and listened to their stories, that I realised they were old men like me, and l could relate to them in a new way. The nineteen year old boys who haunted my dreams were my age now. l wanted to sit down with them and look them in the eyes. l wanted to embrace them and to tell them l was glad they were alive. I wanted to declare peace, for them and me., and to know in my heart that l no longer had to carry the weight l had been carrying for more than fifty years.”
A necessary book
This is a book that we need today, as world leaders such as Putin and Trump continue to embark on foreign misadventures and young servicemen and innocent civilians continue to die in futile wars. The book exposes the hypocrisy and vanity in such leaders’ decisions and how the poor and the marginalised in both a given society and the world in general are those who suffer.
It is a book very much from the American point of view, naturally as Musgrave was indeed an American, but his honesty shines through and his gradual awakening to the plight of the Vietnamese civilians as well as himself and his brothers in arms is one of the most moving aspects of the book.
It is a book that perhaps all powerful leaders should read before embarking on foreign wars that ultimately bring only misery and death in their wake.
You can find the book here.
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