My Father's Vietnam

[helicopters whirring]

My name is Soren

Peter Sorensen ll,

and this is my namesake

Soren Peter Sorensen I.

He was born over a century

before me in Denmark in 1871,

and he's pictured here at 17

in his Danish military uniform.

Here's his son, my great

grandfather Ralph Sorensen,

holding me at two months old as my

father and grandfather look on.

When I look at this photograph

I wonder if any of these men

ever thought my life would

even remotely resemble theirs.

There's a stranger

lying in my bed

A slate-eyed asleep

assassin in my head

I keep on dying until

I finally fall dead

Every day has a way through

There's an ether hanging

at my door

A cross-eyed crucifier

keeping score

I keep on smiling until

I can't smile no more

Every day fades to blue

We go Waltzing past

the grave

We go Waltzing

past the grave

And we go Waltzing

past the grave

For one more day

[Soren] The first time my father took me to

Washington DC, I was around 1 O years old,

too young to really get it.

DC was one of a number of uniquely

American destinations we used to visit,

places like Annapolis

and Gettysburg,

where all I ever really learned from the monu-

ments, memorials, re-enactments and powwows

was that I loved the junk food that always

seemed to accompanied each day's outing.

When we visited

the Vietnam memorial,

I was hardly old enough to comprehend the

Smithsonian or the air and space museum,

let alone Maya Lin's

granite masterpiece

honoring the more than 58,000 Americans

who were killed during the Vietnam War.

The experience always stayed with me

because my dad made pencil rubbings

of two of the names that day: Loring M.

Bailey Jr. and Glenn D. Rickert.

I remember standing as far away as

I could from my teary-eyed father

as he made the rubbings and took

pictures of each of the names.

Who were these people, I wondered

to myself, these dead soldiers?

He had never

mentioned them before.

I can probably count on one

hand the number of times

I've seen my father's eyes well up with

tears, and I'm not sure he's ever cried.

But it wasn't a good

feeling as a child

seeing that vulnerable, human side

of a guy I imagined was invincible.

This little effort to distance myself

physically from my father in DC

continued emotionally

throughout my adolescence,

manifesting itself as a fear of

upsetting or disappointing him,

as I intentionally grew

into what I considered to be

a much different person

than he once was.

This distance between us,

real or imagined on my part,

caused me to wait until I was over 30

to ask him how he ended up in Vietnam.

[Peter]

"Not by choice, by chance."

Or is it "By chance, by choice"?

There was a recruiting

slogan that had to do with...

Yeah, "By choice, but not by

chance," or something like that.

You pick your branch and all that

good stuff and you get a career path,

go to college and become

a PhD machine gunner.

I backed into it. I knew that this was

probably the biggest news story of my life.

I knew that I wanted to be a journalist,

or thought I wanted to be a journalist.

I was a political science major.

There have been family males

involved in the Civil War,

the Spanish American War, World War I

and II, Korea, and this was just my war.

There's a tradition of, if you're a male

and there's a war on, that's your job.

That's what you do.

It's just bad luck, or good luck

if you're into that sort of thing.

So I was balancing not wanting

to miss this news story,

a dyed-in-the-wool

Ernest Hemingway fan.

On the other side of the coin, I knew that

this was a bogus war, it was a civil war,

the politicians were steering us astray, and I

sure as hell didn't want to die over there.

But you balance one against the other, and

then depending upon where you want to go

with the discussions, you can play this

out right until the day I got over there.

It's avoidance tempered with,

this is something I should

be doing, or want to be doing.

[Soren] In 1968 a lot of

high school and college seniors

were in the same

situation as my father.

And the perception of Vietnam as a working

class war fought only by America's poorest

and least-educated

citizens was changing.

In March, President Lyndon Johnson announced

that he would not seek reelection.

In April, Martin Luther King

was assassinated.

In June,

it was Robert F. Kennedy.

In November, Richard Nixon

was elected president.

[Peter] Nixon had a plan.

I remember distinctly sitting in Fort Dix

cleaning an M14 and listening to speeches,

and Nixon had a plan

to get us out of Vietnam.

I was thinking to myself, if he can do that

in two months, I'm going to vote for him.

[Soren] Another Connecticut resident

who probably voted for Nixon in '68

is Loring Bailey, then an employee

of Groton-based Electric Boat,

the largest manufacturer of submarines

for the United States Navy.

Bailey's only son Loring Jr., or "Ring"

to his close friends and family,

enlisted in the United States Army

around the same time as my father,

and for similar reasons.

When the kids came out of, or

graduated from school, from college,

when they ended home

here in Connecticut...

Well, all over the country,

there lying in the pile of mail

was the card for

registration for the draft.

Every senior faced that.

A lot of people said, "My God, if I'm

going to be drafted I'll enlist."

"I'll go before they call me."

[Soren] It surprised me to hear that

so many young people in the late '60s,

including my father and Ring

Bailey, were still enlisting.

Members of my generation, the sons

and daughters of these baby boomers,

seemed to treat the topic of Vietnam

either with overt criticism,

including comparisons to Iraq and

Afghanistan, or eye rolls and apathy.

I've honestly never spoken to very many people

my age or any other come to think of it,

willing to defend the American

government's motivations

for expanding our military's

involvement in Vietnam.

But the reasons people enlisted were

not as simple as I once imagined.

Because the United States

military is now all-volunteer,

I always figured anyone who made

a conscious decision to enlist,

rather than waiting for the draft

or avoiding the war altogether,

must have been enthusiastically anti-communist,

that or too willing to please their fathers,

members of Tom Brokaw's

"greatest generation."

I think it's partly doing

what is expected.

So I think he was reared in the

tradition of being responsible,

"doing the right thing,"

however you define that,

and not disappointing

your family.

And he had not just a father, but a

grandfather whom he loved, and aunts,

and a family tradition that would

be a big deal to just walk out on.

The National Guard wasn't available unless

you knew somebody, or your name was Bush

or you had some way of getting

in to the National Guard.

The National Guard was closed out,

the reserves were closed out,

'cause they were

really popular, obviously.

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