Word: sloan
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Seeing anti-war demonstrations form Vietnam, Sloan was afraid the Liberals were going to discredit themselves and ruin any chance of progressive domestic legislation. But even more disturbing was the feeling that the people who were protesting the war were "people I admired and respected," he says...
After three more months of Communications and Methods of Instruction at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Sloan volunteered for Vietnam but instead was shipped to Munsan-ni, Korea because he didn't have the rank to get to Vietnam. After nine months in Korea and a promotion to SP4, Sloan again volunteered for Vietnam and finally made it to Can Tho in the Mekong by April...
...time was split between shooting people and making plans of how to shoot more people; everyone around me was sure they were doing the right thing, and they rationalized the bad by saying that it was the price that has to be paid," Sloan said. "The people I was with were not fanatics, they were thoroughly regular people who were isolated form others with a different opinion of the war," he continued...
After seeing one civilian regime after another crumble, Sloan remembers becoming convinced that the only viable government was the South Vietnamese Army. South Vietnamsee soldiers are hard to communicate with, unlike Westerners they never say anything in a straight-forward fashion but instead drop hints about their real feelings. Sloan says that he tried to get through to them, to understand what they really wanted, but that in retrospect they seemed not unlike "the docile Negroes in the South, the Uncle Toms who have been tricked into going along with the system...
...time, outwardly, the South Vietnamese soldiers encouraged the Americans and confirmed for them that what they were doing was right: Sloan received two medals from the South Vietnamese, one of them their highest medal of honor. When he was about to leave he was given a farewell dinner. "Only when I had gotten some distance form the fighting did the justification for the war begin to erode," Sloan said...