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In World War II the military mission was clear. In Korea it was less obvious but discernible to most of those who fought there and to the nation that supported them. The men who fought in Viet Nam rarely knew why they were fighting; the mission degenerated to individual survival for one year—the soldier's obligation pared down to an irreducible cynicism. The ally did not help: the South Vietnamese military and government looked spectacularly corrupt. Tactics collapsed into an exhaustingly futile sequence: take it by day, lose it by night, fight to the death for a patch of incomprehensible land, then call in the choppers to pull everyone out. There was no standard of victory, of progress, except the slippery figure in the black bag: the body count. In-country, when no one was looking, some played games from Heart of Darkness, calculating the toll with ears around their neck. If a gook was dead, he was V.C.
War seldom makes sense. Viet Nam, from the viewpoint of those who fought there, made no sense at all, on any level. The typical Viet Nam firefight was intense, murderous, brief and utterly pointless—like a summer storm. What killed was almost always invisible, beyond the tree line or hidden in booby traps, trip wires, pungi sticks. Viet Nam was a land of unlikable surprise. The boys tamped down their antipathy to the place by taking drugs: grass, heroin, opium, speed. They had their talismans, their superstitions. They gave themselves nicknames: Delta Death Dealers, Ground Pounders, Jungle Eaters. HIGH ON WAR read the legend on the helmet, the brag of the oafish, ostentatious grunt who, having survived three months, concluded he was immortal. Of course, it is part of the lingering turmoil of Viet Nam that a lot of men who fought there did love the action: they had never felt so wildly alive as they did under fire. They took a sneaking pleasure in the power and shellfire and even the killing. The world since has seemed anticlimactic.
Richard Fulton, 37, of Los Angeles spent 28 months in Viet Nam as a Marine. "I died in Viet Nam," he says. "I had a lot of allegiance to the Marine Corps. I had no more allegiance to America." In Viet Nam, Fulton was sent into the bush to kill payroll masters and other important V.C.—a way of sabotaging enemy business. He saw combat. He stepped on a mine and spent time in the hospital.
He lost friends. More than that: he lost two brothers. All four Fulton boys joined the Marines. Two died in Viet Nam. The third came home with a heroin habit; one day he stepped into the street, shot a stranger, and was sent to Washington State Penitentiary. "We thought we were going to be like the Sullivans," says Fulton, referring to the five Navy brothers who died in the sinking of the U.S.S. Juneau in 1942. He wound up eating out of garbage cans on Los Angeles' Skid Row, but he eventually recovered.
When Fulton thinks of Vietvets, he thinks of blacks. Defense Secretary Robert