Vietnam’s dark legacy, as faced on the West Germany border
With the torment of Vietnam finally ended, the U.S. Army is eager to move on, where moving on implies forgetting. Protecting Europe from the threat of Soviet invasion has once more claimed centerstage. Among the units standing guard alongside the “Iron Curtain” is the storied 16th Armored Cavalry Regiment — known since the Civil War as the Ravens.
Major Tobias “Tubby” Hicks serves as the 16th ACR’s regimental adjutant. Himself a veteran of the Vietnam War, Hicks does not share this inclination to forget. Moreover, as a Black officer in an Army only just committing itself to racial equality, he is wary of belated enlightenment becoming an excuse to avoid reckoning with the immensity of the Vietnam disaster.
Now, a deadly border incident that Hicks is tasked to investigate — followed by the suicide of the 16th ACR’s lone Black unit commander — brings Tubby face-to-face with Vietnam’s dark legacy and tests his commitment to the Ravens’ regimental motto — “Duty, With Honor.”
Excerpts
Albert Speer had done the Ravens no favors. In the 1930s, Hitler’s favorite architect had laid out the grounds for the Nazi Party’s gaudy annual rally in Nurnberg. Included in the complex was a sprawling barracks meant to house a ceremonial SS detachment.
With the coming of war in 1939, large-scale celebrations ceased. By mid-1945, the Party itself no longer existed. Soon thereafter, the SS barracks, its exterior scarred by shellfire, the huge swastika-bearing eagle ripped from its façade, became the headquarters of the 16th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Here, the regiment was to remain for decades, fixed in place by the exigencies of the Cold War.
Renamed by the U.S. Army in memory of PFC Joseph F. Merrell, an eighteen-year-old G.I. killed during the liberation of Nurnberg, Speer’s formidable but graceless building had not aged well. By the 1970s, the roof leaked, and windows needed replacing. Worse, an odor that some visitors compared to a plugged-up toilet pervaded the place. Speer’s genius did not include an aptitude for plumbing.
The main entrance to Merrell Barracks, an oversized archway, opened onto a long corridor. Apart from glass cases displaying trophies won in long-forgotten sports competitions and vending machines dispensing soft drinks and candy bars, the corridor itself was almost entirely empty. A mural on the wall opposite the trophy cases retraced the regiment’s heroic journey from Normandy, in late July 1944, to its arrival at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, just prior to VE-Day. The G.I. artist, his name lost to history, had a particular affinity for burning German tanks, demolished bridges, and Old Glory waving in the breeze.
At the far end of the corridor, heavy double doors marked the entrance to the RCO’s sanctum sanctorum. With its tall windows, twenty-foot ceilings, and parquet floor, the office itself exuded an aura suitable for the senior SS officer for whom it had been intended. To sit behind a desk that had once belonged to some Nazi Standartenführer had imparted to several of Bart Caldwell’s predecessors a heady sense of playing a part in some vast historical drama. Direct exposure to hubris bred hubris in turn.
Leading down the hallway to the RCO’s office were lesser spaces inhabited by members of the regimental staff. Lining the walls in each were plaques, certificates, and photographs testifying to past assignments at various outposts of the American imperium and to hopes—some barely flickering—for further advancement. Among officers assigned to the 16th ACR, ambition burned like a hard flame.
-opening to Chapter One
After considerable reflection, Caldwell had concluded that this U.S. presence in Europe had almost nothing to do with preventing World War III. After all, if the Soviets had any interest in overrunning Europe, wouldn’t they have taken the opportunity to do so when a half-million U.S. troops were bogged down in Southeast Asia? What better moment to make their move?
Far from plotting to expand their empire, the Soviets already had their hands full just hanging on to the empire they had. If ordered by the Kremlin to do so, Russian conscripts would no doubt attack into the heart of NATO. But would conscripts from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and other satellites willingly join in? Given the uprisings that had roiled the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s and 1960s, that seemed unlikely, at best. Indeed, under such duress, the Warsaw Pact might simply unravel, with incalculable risks to the Soviet Union itself.
In other words, the canonical Cold War scenario—a massive Communist assault out of the East—did not stand up to close scrutiny. This did not, however, rob that scenario of utility. Caldwell had come to appreciate the way that expectations of a Warsaw Pact attack—however fanciful—sustained a vast network of power and privilege that, among myriad other things, found him being driven to dinner at government expense in a large Mercedes Benz with glove-soft leather interior.
-from Chapter Three
The event that followed was strikingly devoid of feeling. Lieutenant Thurlow, the acting troop commander, called the formation to attention. A recording of The Star-Spangled Banner played over loudspeakers. As squadron commander, Massey approached the podium and dutifully expressed regret about the tragic events of the prior week. Chaplain Scanlan came next. He recited a nondenominational, army-approved prayer that asked the Almighty to look favorably upon the souls of the departed.
Then, Caldwell stepped forward, removed a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his field jacket, and baffled those in attendance by launching into a poetic recitation:
Chant this chant of my silent soul, in the name of all dead soldiers. Faces so pale, with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet; Phantoms, welcome, divine and tender! But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead, with their silent eyes. Dearest comrades! all now is over; But love is not over — and what love, O comrades!
This was not language to which the typical American soldier was accustomed. Even so, as the Lord of the Ravens stepped back from the podium, he looked rather pleased with himself.
“Walt Whitman,” Tubby whispered to F.X.
A recording of “Taps” followed. Then, within twenty minutes, it was over. Of the speakers, only F.X. had mentioned the deceased by name. None had described the circumstances of their passing. When Thurlow dismissed the formation, the assembled soldiers, relieved to be done, shouted “Duty, with Honor, Sir!” and scattered.
