This column by Atlanta Constitution editor and WWII combat veteran Eugene Patterson appeared in the combined July 4, 1966 edition of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution.
In a cool auditorium, austere but comfortable with its padded seats and soft colors, 120 young men stood up smartly and looked straight ahead at the American flag one day last week while the Fort Bragg band played The Star Spangled Banner.
A hot North Carolina sun beat down outside on the new, spare buildings and the marching grounds of the U.S. Special Warfare Center. The close quarters in the auditorium added flourish to the trumpets and magnified the tuba’s stirring variations at …”Oh, say does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave …”
Looking at the company of lean, tanned men, one had to be moved.
Tough, upright, clear-eyed and ready, all 120 of those junior and field grade officers are en route now to Viet Nam.
Each will be the lone and self-reliant advisor to some South Vietnamese sector or unit commander in a forgotten place 10,000 miles away, cut off not only from home but from other Americans as he fights with foreigners for their freedom, having already attained his own.
Being asked to address them at their graduation from the jumping-off school at Fort Bragg, one could only tell them to believe in self and country and things like duty.
How could anyone really forewarn them of the stark, immediate difference they faced between this comfortable room in a well-ordered North Carolina base and the electrifying moments when the tracers arc and the white flares burst over a muddy night perimeter?
They marched across the state rapidly, one by one, to take their diplomas in special warfare. Some wore parachute wings, others Purple hearts from Korea. Invariably each looked you in the eye, levelly, coolly; you strongly sensed the individuality as well as the soldierly commitment, and the great strength of this country was in their eyes and bearing. It was brief. A Negro officer won the award as top man in the class. The drums ruffled, the tubas boomed, and they were off to war.
Several were on the airplane to Atlanta, en route to the West Coast, and they seemed far younger and less formidable in informal talk.
But the talk had common threads: Dispassionate critiques of the training they had had, including some critical irony; detached examination of the home front political debate over Viet Nam policy, usually ending in the unshaken judgment that, good or bad, there was duty; realistic but positive appraisals of the difficulties ahead; finally, a mention of wife and children.
An infant, leaning from its mother’s lap, kept a firm grip on the beefy finger of a grinning lieutenant across the airliner aisle.
Wherever that body of bright and sturdy men may be now, it’s the Fourth of July.
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