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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The scars of Vietnam


Before performing a cleansing ceremony, Glen Douglas leaves tobacco as he asks for permission from the war dead to enter the sacred ground of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.
 (Colin Mulvany / The Spokesman-Review)

There is not a great deal Glen Douglas can say about his three tours of duty in Vietnam. It’s not that he can’t remember. In fact, there is much he would like to forget.

He cannot talk about what has had such a profound impact on his life because he signed three documents pledging not to – one in the field, one in Saigon and one at Fort Lewis, Wash., upon his discharge in 1966. After having fought three wars and receiving eight Purple Heart citations for injuries in battle, it is his Vietnam experience that has left the deepest scars.

Today, the Spokane combat veteran of three wars, one of the most decorated in Washington state, will attend the dedication of the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. The 77-year-old Lakes-Okanagan Indian, who also is visiting the Korean and Vietnam memorials, has survived some of the most intense fighting of the 20th century, but it has taken a warrior’s courage to confront his past this Memorial Day weekend.

“I am now willing to face my trauma of war,” Douglas said. “Instead of going back to each country and picking up the pieces of myself that I left behind, I will go to Washington to find the boy I left behind.”

In the hills

His first tour of duty in Vietnam was from June 1959 to the end of May 1960 as an intelligence analyst with a Special Forces A team, Douglas said. He was a unit replacement. His mission was to train indigenous forces and gather information in the highlands northwest of Pleiku.

By 1961, such missions, which became known as the Civilian Irregular Defense Group programs, were commanded and controlled directly by soldiers of the U.S. Special Forces, according to a U.S. Army history of the era. Though the Vietnamese were officially in command of the guerrilla forces, “this arrangement was not firmly and universally adhered to from the start,” according to that history. The development of paramilitary forces among minority groups in areas then largely out of South Vietnamese government control became the primary focus of Special Forces in Vietnam, according to U.S. Army documents.

“We would recruit from village to village, just as the Viet Cong did,” Douglas said. “Only our recruits were voluntary. Our mission was counterinsurgency.”

The 12-man Special Forces teams would include an officer and medical personnel. Improving quality of life for the tribes was a big part of winning the hearts and minds of the indigenous peoples, traditionally looked down upon by Vietnamese as savages. This was something Douglas, a North American native who had been abused in the residential school system in Canada, could relate to.

Montagnards and other minority ethnic groups in the highlands resented the South Vietnamese government, and Viet Cong saw them as ripe for recruitment. The U.S. Special Forces were trying to turn that around.

“At one village it was too quiet,” Douglas recalled, “so we sent in a scout who determined that Viet Cong were lying in ambush. We hit them from behind and drove them off.”

Later, as Viet Cong tried to infiltrate the U.S.-backed indigenous forces, rules were adopted to ensure loyalty among its recruits, Douglas said. New members had to have recommendations from two others who were already in the force of between 300 and 400 tribesmen.

“If that recruit turned out to be a spy, the two who recommended him would be executed,” Douglas said. “It was their rule, not ours.”

Douglas said he returned to Vietnam for two back-to-back tours of duty from January 1964 to 1966. During this time, he said, he would parachute into North Vietnam as part of a Special Forces Studies and Operations Group. These would be high-altitude, low open, or HALO, parachute drops to ensure secrecy.

The missions included blowing up pipelines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, creating diversionary firefights so downed U.S. pilots could be extracted, marking bridges for demolition and kidnapping or assassinating high-ranking enemy officers.

His team would operate in North Vietnam for up to 30 days at a time. It was involved in numerous firefights and could ask for neither extraction nor medical assistance.

Inner conflict

Douglas believes that much of his post-traumatic stress disorder stems from this two-year period. In World War II, he froze the first time he was fired on, but was given a second chance to kill or be killed. In Korea, he fought and killed out of anger over seeing his own men become the victims of atrocity.

“In Vietnam, it was fighting to kill,” he said. “In my second tour, it was kill, kill, kill. I was one of the most powerful men in the world as long as I had a radio in my hand.”

But when he returned to the United States, this man who had fought so bravely for his adopted country felt “shame and guilt.” Though he had only an eighth-grade formal education, he was capable of reading “The Principles of Nuremburg,” which told him obeying orders is no excuse for inhumanity. Yet he also was capable of starting a bar fight against insurmountable odds in a struggle against his own anger. He hated himself for becoming a killer and hated his government for making him that way.

“When I was fired on in Vietnam, I was able to do something about it,” Douglas said. “When I got back home, I was spit on and could do nothing about it. I felt rejected by the people and abandoned by the politicians all the way up to the commander-in-chief.”

Tomorrow: A warrior faces his past.