 Please welcome Dr. William Inboden, Executive Director of the William P. Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Good afternoon. It's my honor to introduce our final panel here of the Vietnam War Symposium. This one is titled Lessons Learned, The War's Effect on America's Foreign and Military Policy and Our Role on the World Stage. Now, the mission of the Clements Center is to apply the insights of history to current national security challenges. And so it's fitting that our final panel of this summit explore how the legacies of Vietnam continue to loom over our nation's foreign and defense policy today. To explore this question, we're going to hear from three leaders who are singularly equipped to address this question. Each of our panelists is a warrior who has experienced the searing intensity of combat. Each is also a statesman who has shaped our nation's national security policy at the highest levels of government. They are Bob Kerry, who served as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam for which he received the Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation's highest military honor for his uncommon valor in combat. He went on to become governor of his home state of Nebraska for one term before serving two terms in the U.S. Senate where he was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was then president of the New School in New York City before becoming managing director of Allen and Company. Bill McRaven is currently our chancellor of the University of Texas system here and a retired Navy four-star admiral. Prior to becoming chancellor, he was the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command where he led a force of 69,000 men and women and was responsible for conducting counterterrorism operations worldwide, including the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. He's advised presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and many other U.S. leaders on defense and foreign policy issues and received many awards for his service. Chuck Robb is a Marine veteran of Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in combat. He later served as Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Governor of Virginia, and a United States Senator where he was the only senator to serve simultaneously on the Senate's three national security committees, armed services, foreign relations, and intelligence. In 2006, he was appointed to serve on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board and he's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And finally, our moderator will be Mark Lawrence. He's an associate professor of history here at UT, a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and the director of graduate studies for the Clement Center. His books include Assuming the Burden, Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, and the Vietnam War, a concise history. And he's really one of our nation's leading scholars in the Vietnam War. So please join me in welcoming our panelists. Well, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for coming to this climactic session of this fascinating three days. Our topic, of course, is lessons learned. A number of panelists so far over the last three days, how could they not have, have, of course, touched on the lessons of the war. So here we have a chance to isolate this issue with three people who are, I think, particularly well qualified to speak about it. I am a historian of the Vietnam War and I've become very interested in recent times in the ways in which Americans have tried to come to terms with the legacies of the war and learn lessons from the war. But when I approach this subject, of course, I use official memos and reports and speeches and the kind of thing, frankly, that one can find on the 10th floor of this wonderful repository. But here we have a chance, really a bonanza for a historian like myself, to sit down with people who have truly lived the American attempt to come to terms with the lessons and legacies of the Vietnam War. So this is personally a very exciting opportunity for me and I think a wonderful opportunity for all of us to bring this event to a conclusion. I thought the place to begin is with our two Vietnam veterans and to pose to them the question of what were your ideas as you set out for Vietnam back during the 1960s about the political and military challenges that U.S. forces face there. And then how did your thinking change by the time you departed Vietnam and came back to the United States? Shall we start with Bob? Well, I apologize on the flight in here because I never know what I'm going to say. I wrote an answer to your question and annoyed my fellow passengers by practicing and I hope I keep it well to the shorts. I'm not certain we learned any lessons from the Vietnam War. And soon, all of the participants, those who advocated for and organized it, those who fought in it and those who protested or resisted participation, will all be dead. This conference, as well as Ken Burns' documentary, will become part of a large and still growing historical record. Very few of our elected leaders today and fewer still going forward will understand that history. And truth be told, American executive or legislative branch officials rarely provide historical context of any kind when answering foreign policy or national security questions. And that's because voters equate weakness with explanations of subtle historical nuance. Voters in particular do not like to be told that their ideological conclusions are built upon the sands of ignorance. So we... Well, thank you for plotting, but I did it myself for 60 years. So we're treated and become addicted to the satisfying pleasure of foreign policy and national security reduced to bumper stickers, applause lines, sound bites, and tweetable answers. Donald Trump gave us plenty of these yesterday in our nation's capital. In my case, I knew nothing about the history, the culture, or the economy of Indochina in 1969 during my brief time in country. And from my own amateur reading of history since and listening particularly to wiser people than me, what I now see is that when I look at the Vietnam War, I do see it as a tragic event that happened at the end of a 500-year-old story. And you can be rest assured I'm not going to tell that 500-year-old story here this afternoon. But it includes the rise of international trade and the growth and the reluctant withdrawal of European empires, the industrial revolution, the conflicts between labor and capital, and the evil corruption by Lenin and Stalin of a bad economic idea in the first place. The first and second world wars, the peace agreements that followed, the 50-year conflict between the Soviet Union and the West, the terrible and too often forgotten proxy wars between the two sides, the betrayal of an ally we promised we would never abandon, the bloody awful tactics chosen by the United States to attempt to defeat North Vietnam and its insurgent force, the National Liberation Front, the arrival of one and a half million Vietnamese boat people who have become American citizens and the rise of an independent Vietnam as an important leader in Southeast Asia. But understanding this history is less important to me than working to try to build peace between the United States and Vietnam, a project that began for me in the early 90s as the Soviet Union was collapsing and the Cold War was ending. My part of this work began actually in 1990 when Secretary of State Jim Baker approved the opening of a prosthetic clinic in Hanoi. And the man behind this idea was Ernie Burgess, a retired Veterans Administration surgeon who wanted to build better limbs for American veteran amputees like myself and wanted to do the same for Vietnamese veterans. And when I visited the clinic, I spoke with a man who had fought with the Vietnamese against the French and another who had fought with the North Vietnamese Army against the United States. And all three of us were walking on limbs made by Ernie Burgess. About the same time, under the leadership of the first President Bush, under Secretary of State Richard Solomon successfully led a very complicated and difficult effort to reach a peace agreement to end the fighting in Cambodia. And equally important was the POW-MIA Commission led by Senators John Kerry and John McCain which concluded that there were no live Americans being held as prisoners by the Vietnamese government at that particular point in time. These two efforts allowed President Bush, the first President Bush, to negotiate with the government of Vietnam to produce a roadmap to normalization of relations between our two countries. And President Clinton completed that part of the project in the summer of 1995 by signing legislation that ended the Trading with the Enemy Act commercial restrictions, authorized the opening of a U.S. Embassy in Vietnam, sent a former POW back to Vietnam as our first ambassador in 20 years and set the stage for a bilateral trade agreement. We went back to Vietnam at the site, in my view, of our worst foreign policy mistake with our heads held high, not with our heads hanging down. All of these things were extremely controversial. The black POW-MIA flag still flies over most state capitals, including here in Austin, as a sign that opponents of these actions, especially many Vietnam veterans, is alive and well in the land. Contained in that legislation was provisioned that established a graduate school of education through the U.S. State Department's Fulbright program. It's located in Ho Chi Minh City. It's enabled more than 1,000 Vietnamese to finish masters and graduate programs. And today, with bipartisan support in the Congress, we're working with the support of President Obama, Secretary Kerry, Senator McCain, and many other people, including the government of Vietnam and the Vietnamese community, we're building an undergraduate school. The university's first president is a woman who grew up in Hanoi. She remembers the war. She remembers the Christmas bombing. She remembers the terrible destruction. And yet, she does not hate us. She sees us as a partner and as friends, and we try our best to continue to deserve these titles. Making peace is hard. In some way, it's harder than making war. In part, this is true because our memories of war tend to harden as we age. For our personal happiness, we should resist this tendency. As important as it is to understand the history of Vietnam War in order to avoid the mistakes that cause so much suffering. We can still make good foreign policy and national security decisions if we are completely ignorant of that history. We only need to follow the hope of the great Irish poet, Seamus Haney, who had plenty of experience of violence and the bitterness that flows from these traumas. Here's part of a very often quoted poem called The Curate Troy. Human beings suffer. They torture one another. They get hurt and they get hard. No poem, play, or song can fully right a wrong inflicted and endured. History says, don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the long, four-title wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme. This is a lot easier said than done. But it is what we are trying to do today in Vietnam. Okay, I'm down. Well, we may still try to get you to talk about your experience. Okay, fine. We'll come back to you. Thank you for that, though. Chuck, would you? First of all, I've known Bob for a long time. We have been co-conspirators on a variety of different projects, including the normalization relations with Vietnam. I came to the service in Vietnam a little differently than many of our fellow veterans. I had wanted, after a very positive experience in Marine officers' basic school at Quantico, had wanted to get into some opportunity to see if I was as good as they thought I was. But they kept giving me better assignments than I could ever ask for. My very first assignment out of basic school was to be the executive officer of the Marine Detachment on the U.S.S. Northampton. Bill may remember where the Northampton was. It was a highly classified National Emergency Command post-a-float. We had President Kennedy at sea with us for two days with all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chairman and ranking members of the relevant committees and what have you. The entire Atlantic fleet passed into review. I think it was 81 men of war starting with the carriers and the cruisers. It had never been done, certainly on that magnitude before, and never had visited. But this is my first assignment. I never asked for anything like that. I go down to Camp Lejeune to report to the Second Marine Division. I end up being the senior aide, the only aide to the commanding general and spent three years traveling the various places where we had responsibilities. And I thought, well, finally I'm going to get, because Vietnam is now starting to come on the radar screen. I'm thinking, well, I know they're going to send me over there now. And they send me up to Marine Barracks, Washington, 8th and 9th under the Marines, which is the utmost in ceremonial posts, the Marine Van, the Ranger Home of Yoga Corps, the Commandant. All of those activities are focused right there. And I had an additional duty as a White House military social aide. I was officer in charge of the White House Color Guard. Everything was going well. And I'd also continued to re-app my request to, at this point, no longer just a West-back duty, but I wanted to go specifically to Vietnam. I knew that, but then I, by chance, ended up marrying the Commander-in-Chief's daughter. The good thing about that particular happening was that I didn't have any more problem with getting to Vietnam. And when I got there, I was fortunate enough to, when I reported in and sent to the First Marine Division to report to the Commanding General, and he was somebody I knew from previous service and had actually played golf with five years before, whatever it had been. So I said, this is a good sign. I'm not going to get stuck in the rear of the gear, whatever the case may be. And then I went down to, I was ordered to report to the 7th Marine Regiment, and who should be there, but the man who'd actually recruited me into the Marine Corps. And I said, you know, things are going really well. I went down to the battalion. I got assigned to be the commanding officer of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, which for infantry officers in the Marine Corps is the ultimate assignment. But it took me, let's see, eight, nine years in the Marine Corps. And a lot of people said, you could have gotten out. You didn't need to go to Vietnam. And even some fairly serious people made that recommendation. I said, you don't understand. I need to go. Too many of my brother service people, Marines, all services have gone over, a number of them haven't come back. And if I were to leave before I had actually tested my medal in that particular circumstance, I could never live with myself. But it's a very different situation if you're drafted or if you're against the policy. And in all truth, I was reasonably comfortable with the general policy at that particular time. And I had read about Dien Bien Phu and some other things, but had no foreshadowing experience. Bottom line is I went as a very aggressive volunteer. I was nominally supportive of the domino theory, if you will. I believed Lee Kuan Yew when he said that, but for that action, the Indo-China, the Ostean nations might be very different today than they were. But in any of that, I understood the circumstances. I'll wait till we get to other questions, but that's how I entered it. So I was happy to be there. Sharp contrast with many of my fellow vets, but I was not dragged there. I got there on my own volition. And did you're thinking about the challenges that the United States faced in Vietnam change dramatically as a result of your period of time? Not as a result of my participation, no. But as a result over a period of time, we were really fighting two wars. The United States was fighting a war against communism and not to exclude any other rationale. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were fighting for a battle of nationalism and to preserve their country. And both General Gap and Ho Chi Minh were quoted as saying they could absorb losses of 10 to 1, and they could keep on doing that forever. And they were never going to change. And so most of the changes that took place back here, and I was there in 1998, 1997, when most of that change was taking place, that had more of an impact on the reversal. And once our fellow citizens turned very much against the war and the media who had been very supportive as had fellow citizens and Congress. And so you've got those three key elements that have to have your back. If your citizens don't have your back, if your Congress doesn't have your back, you just have a very slim chance of succeeding. But if you're actually fighting different wars, it's hard to sort it all out. Bill, your military career began in 1977. Two years after the fall of Saigon, four years after the withdrawal of the final American troops from Vietnam. Can you talk about what the mood was like within the military at that very interesting moment in the history of the U.S. armed forces and how the lessons of Vietnam were being discussed in that period? Yeah, thanks, Mark. First, let me begin by saying what an honor it is for me to be on the stage with these two great warriors and public servants. I have followed both their careers for most of my career and gentlemen, thank you very much for everything you've done for us. As you said, I came in 1977. I graduated from ROTC here at the University of Texas and immediately went into basic SEAL training. And all of my instructors were Vietnam veterans. And really for about the next 10 years or so in the military, the Vietnam generation continued to kind of train and mentor those of us that were new. And I can tell you from kind of a military standpoint, tactically, operationally, and strategically. Everything that kind of shaped the way I grew up for the next, actually probably the next 20 years was a result of Vietnam. I mean, going through basic SEAL training as Senator Kerry well knows, the tactical maneuvers, the shoot, move, and communicate, they were drills we learned from Vietnam, how to patrol, how to ambush, how to get out of an ambush, how to communicate on a PRC 25, how to use the brownwater fleet. I mean, all of these sort of things tactically was what drove us in the 70s and really to the mid-80s. Operationally, it also had a huge impact because again, even as SEALs, the lesson from Vietnam was you have to have artillery support, you have to have air support, you have to have what we refer to as combined arms. And not only my generation, but every successive generation understood the value of combined arms in a way that came out of Vietnam. And really strategically, I do think if you go back and look at that period of time from 75 until 9-11, you will see that the administration, certainly as you look at something like the invasion of Panama, even Grenada, but certainly Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the understanding that if we got in, we had to get out. And we didn't want to be mired down in a fight. I've got to believe that that was a valuable lesson that came out of Vietnam. And even when you look at the Powell Doctrine, I guarantee you the Powell Doctrine came as a result of General Powell's engagement in Vietnam. So while a lot of things may have gone wrong in the war, I think you can almost attribute that time from 75 until 9-11, the really extended period of peace with the exception of Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and some of the smaller conflicts was a result of the lessons that we had learned from Vietnam. Bill, I appreciate your getting us to think about the long flow of time between 1975 and 9-11. I'd like to ask you gentlemen a couple of questions about specific points in that history in the two or three decades after the end of the Vietnam War. It seems to me that the way the story conventionally gets told, at least, in the immediate aftermath of the war, these were the years of the heavy Vietnam syndrome. In other words, Americans were principally learning the lesson that the United States needed to be very careful about using its force overseas or very tight constraints on what could be done politically. And we were getting a hollow army. Yes, and problems as well with the sheer capability to exert power internationally. And then a really interesting moment in this story of American attempts to come to terms with the war comes in August of 1980 with the Ronald Reagan campaign. And if you'll forgive me, I'll just read you these famous lines. And my question to you, of course, is going to be for your thoughts about how you, not necessarily receive these specific lines, but what you felt at the time about the sentiment that stood behind this suddenly resurgent idea that the United States should think differently about its experience in Vietnam and recover its ability to act boldly internationally. So Ronald Reagan famously, candidate Ronald Reagan, famously said in August 1980, it is time that we recognize that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam. If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and the determination to prevail or we will not have what it takes to secure the peace. And while we are at it, let us tell those who fought in the war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win. What was your sense of that sentiment around the time when these words were spoken? I didn't notice it myself. I'm just doing other things. I had been in business and I was dealing with inflation at the time so I wasn't paying much attention to what either Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter were saying in 1980. I don't think it's wrong. Again, I think it's a lot easier to say it than to do it. I think we started this effort with good intent. South Vietnam was a troubled, difficult democracy but it was a democracy and we valued freedom and we took them as an ally. Stalin had died in 1953 but the Soviet Union and the Chinese were continuing to support insurgencies all over the world. And particularly what the communists did in Eastern Europe after World War II, they basically would come in and compromise every liberal thinking social democratic party and they'd crush them and take over the work. So as I said in my statement, it was a terrible economic idea of communism and made into an evil force by the totalitarian nature of what we were experiencing. So it started, I'm very sympathetic with the president but presidential candidate Ronald Reagan said but it's a lot easier to say than it actually is to do. So I'm not of the school that says if we just ramped up our effort in Vietnam we could have won it. I'm just not of that school at all because I think the most important thing that we underestimated was presuming that communism was monolithic and that basically Vietnam was a puppet of the Soviet Union and China and they certainly had a lot of support coming from the Soviet Union and China but they were more independent of the Soviet Union and China than Yugoslavia was. Yugoslavia was a well-known sort of renegade inside of the communist party movement. The suggestion, you might characterize it, is go bigger, stay home. It's a little shorter version of what Ronald Reagan said on that particular occasion and there is a lot of legitimacy, I believe, in that statement but there's lots of qualifiers too which suggest that you don't, if those elements that I mentioned earlier, if they don't have your back and if you don't have a clear understanding of the type of war that you may be contemplating and some idea of what victory success looks like and what kind of circumstances would require you to rethink the whole operation and if you can't answer those and then overlay that with the support of the international community which I think is critical. I'd be happy to talk about Go For One in that regard but if all those pieces are not in place and if you don't have the capability and we've had enormous capability and many, I know there are a fair number of vats today that say if we've just gone all in and they didn't have to be Curtis LeMay and bombs away but we clearly had more capability and we protected the Laotian and Cambodian areas for critical supply and some areas in Vietnam were off limits and you can't really engage successfully against somebody that is prepared to stay there for the rest of their lives or the strategy that is so limited so at some point your luck is going to run out under almost any circumstances. I would just offer from a more practical sense again three years into my time in the Navy in 1980 when candidate Reagan said that we already were on our road to a hollow force and you see this after every major conflict that there's an immediate drawdown so as a Navy Seal even though we were relatively well resourced in terms of ammunition and weapons we didn't have money to travel anywhere so you had all the ammunition to shoot but you didn't have a range to practice on we had to go out to Nile in California it was about the only place we had as Senator Kerry knows and that was it so you weren't able to really refine your skills at all during that period it really wasn't until the Reagan build up when you began to see resources applied towards the military that a number of things changed I think everything from the quality of our capability to the integration to the reduction of racial tensions a lot of things that were I would say in some way were precipitated by the hollow force beginning to be developed after Vietnam and once we began to strengthen our resources and take greater pride in the individual soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines and the mission that we had you began to see that turnaround so I do think you have to certainly credit then President Reagan with that recognition that we had to have a quality military if we were going to be the leaders of the free world let me ask you about the first Gulf War another famous moment in the history of American attempts to come to terms with the legacies of the war George H. W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of that war famously said by God we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all and it seems to me that not really the Vietnam syndrome hung over American decision making with respect to any number of military operations thereafter why wasn't the first Gulf War more of a decisive turning point why doesn't it stand out as that moment when some of the conventional wisdom that seemed to surround the Vietnam War broke apart well it wasn't entirely typical of most of the confrontations we're likely to run into today you had a discrete nation that had been invaded the boundaries were much clearer the aggression on the part of the bad guys if you will was much clearer the international community was behind you just a quick story to illustrate in that particular instance a colleague of Bob's and mine Lauren Rudman and I were fortunate enough to be invited over to the White House by George Herbert Walker Bush to discuss it was about two or three days after the invasion had occurred and one from each party and then Brent Scrowcroft and Bob Strauss Strauss Center is also helping to sponsor this particular group and he was a wise man who was well respected by both sides and would give some very clear advice but we spent I remember we end up missing a Redskins Giants football game that day so it was a major contribution to go over there and spend the day but he was interested in getting some views and really he didn't say we want to talk about the Vietnam syndrome but it was very clear that that was on his mind and we offered a good deal of advice you get what you pay for and then when the second of four came along well first of all let me say I was an advocate early on because I'd been involved in the planning stage I'd gone on a co-del Majority Leader George Mitchell had led to the area with seven or eight other happen to be Democrats I was the only one who was a supporter I came back and remained the only one as a supporter and George said he'll give me a bye because I've been speaking on television whatever in support of the force authorization if the president should ask for it but then when the second Gulf War came around it was a very different situation and most of the people who were at least thinking about running for president had voted quote wrong including my friend Sam Dunn who always re-read his vote against force authorization at that time they weren't against authorization but they were against doing it at that particular moment and it was clearly an up or down situation and they got it wrong when the next vote came along and I was out of the arena altogether but I looked and everybody who had expressed any interest in running for president at that point was in support of that position and they've since pulled back a good deal from some of those positions but you could see how important getting it right and putting the Vietnam syndrome behind was to them and again they're not all still supporting it but it was an interesting phenomenon to watch and I think that that is behind us to that extent but it'll always be in our subconscious Thank you Well let me make one other comment No! Because I had been outspoken and Virginia which is a conservative and very military state and would normally be expected to be very supportive of force authorization calls coming into my office knowing of my position were 9 to 1 against my position from the people in Virginia and I went out several times to relieve some of the interns who were taking the calls because they were getting devastated the kind of marks that people would have it wasn't until day 3 of that particular conflict when it was clear that it was going to come to a successful conclusion and that we were not going to have significant losses and even then it only turned to 50-50 in terms of the relationship so the Vietnam syndrome was still very much at play in the minds of the public but I think in the minds of most policy makers that we've taken the right lessons and moved ahead Thank you Well I think the world of President George Walker Bush I'm not being critical when I say this but Vietnam is not a syndrome it's a fact it happened and it's unpleasant to look at what happened because oftentimes it tends to conflict with the mythology that we've developed on ourselves and I share that mythology it binds us together it's not unimportant but it's a story it's a real story it happened both good, brave, cowardly it's a story that we need to face and I think what General Powell did in the first Gulf War is to say we're going to calculate what we think our force structure is we're going to multiply it by two what happened in the Iraq war I believe I think fairly is that Brunsfeld calculated what was going to be necessary and divided by two in order to be able to demonstrate that it could do it with a small force I also have to put I was a Republican until 1978 so I'm not terribly partisan on these issues but in fairness the ramp up in military effort began in 79 with the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan so Carter really did start it Reagan unquestionably continued it but one of the things that gets missed and trying to understand the story of the Vietnam War either from the perspective of the Vietnamese or the perspective of America and by the way I think you have to do both it's massively self-indulgent to think that the Vietnam War occurred inside but it didn't that's why we call it the Vietnam War we don't call it the Nebraska War so you know it is that it was exceptionally difficult time I mean I watched when President Johnson announced that he wasn't going to run for reelection he was going to try to negotiate an end five days later Martin Luther King was killed and every city in America every large city in America other than Indianapolis erupted in flames the White House I think they could see the fire a couple of blocks away I mean and that's just an indication of what was going on in the country at the time and there's no question I mean I have a memory of what it was like to say I was in the military if you were trying to apply for a job you'd leave it off your resume in the 1970s so it was a there was a whole bunch of things going on at the time and it wasn't just the controversy of the war the counter-cultural revolution, the civil rights movement I mean America was really coming apart at the time I think we've resettled and I think it began in the late 70s and it's continued all the way through the 80s and it's good news but to repeat Vietnam is not a disease it's not a syndrome that we can treat with changing our policy it is a long and painful story in my view of missed opportunities let me offer again from the Desert, again Desert Shield, Desert Storm standpoint because so now 14 years in my career I can tell you we are incredibly well equipped incredibly well qualified as we went forward into the Gulf but I would echo a couple things Senator Rob said which was at least from the military standpoint we felt the nation was behind us we felt we knew what our objectives were the issue is there was a little bit of good versus evil that invaded Kuwait that was wrong so in the military even I mean I was a navy commander at the time but I can tell you even the youngest petty officers and sergeants understood this was now going to be a little bit of the good war we were doing the right thing in the right context and we were well equipped to do so but something did fundamentally change and actually Secretary Kerry mentioned it last night about the fact that there was this we support the troops I don't know where it started I don't know who generated the actual bumper sticker that said we support the troops but what you saw was this was a fundamental change it was no longer about the policy in terms of the recognition of the troops it was about the troops were required to go forward and do what the nation asked them to do and irrespective of whether we support the policy or not we are going to support the troops and I can tell you as a troop we understood that and we appreciated that and again when we came back from Desert Storm there were parades there was a conclusion and the first thing the Desert Storm veterans did was reach out to the Vietnam vets everywhere they could to say join us in these parades be part of this this is your welcome home as well so I do think both from a military standpoint resources capability it was a turning point but I can tell you in the military at the time we viewed it as an opportunity to write wrong or indifferent to write what we felt were the wrongs from Vietnam and again embrace our Vietnam veterans as part of this good news of the success of Desert Storm I think it's right the story you're telling is how the military learned but Bill answer this question and I'm glad that Americans think support the troops I think it's enormously important in part because so few Americans have sons and daughters in the military today the cynical side of me says it's guilt that's causing to do it I mean I talk to people still think we don't have anybody in Afghanistan or Iraq so how much of this comes from the all volunteer force how much did that change things to you it has changed things again the discussion yesterday your job please and I for you know Ken Burns used the term last night I don't remember exactly what it was but it was something about false patriotism and it was to your point about our Americans patriotic because there is this sense of guilt because now we have this warrior class because what has developed from the all volunteer military is you really do have a warrior class we are finding ourselves more and more and therefore the point made last night was then it's easier and easier for the administration to move you forward I will tell you having been part of that warrior class for a long time I was okay with that now that may not be right but I volunteered and said I'm ready to serve the military and I was okay with people continuing to worry about the Super Bowl or worry about you know what was going on I was okay with that I think we can be on a slippery slope here of getting so disconnected that it is easy to send in the marines, send in the seals and not think a lot about it because the lack of connection back with the broader society so I do agree it is something we need to be very very cognizant of I've been very much concerned for the last 30 years or so about the parallel tracks that the country is proceeding on there there is essentially a military family's track and most of the new incoming recruits come from somebody who already has a military background and there is very little understanding that's one of the reasons that I've also been pushing and Sam Nunn and I co-sponsored some legislation very early on to try to provide some sort of compulsory national service for a period and two or three of the speakers have said essentially the same thing here cost alone I think prohibited us from getting as far as we'd like to have on that not requiring 100% of the people being in the military but I mean maybe only 2% actually will choose the military and maybe will give them a little extra incentive for choosing the military but everyone ought to make some contribution to what they've inherited and feel the binding that does take place in the military in a way that it doesn't take place in most other institutions in society. We've already moved in our conversation well into the 21st century but let me focus our attention for just a moment on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars I often say in the spirit of a horrible kind of black humor that these were great events for people like me because suddenly my knowledge of the Vietnam War was relevant again and people were talking about Vietnam all the time it seemed especially after about 2004 talking heads on TV, op-eds, it was all over the place it seems to me and those of us who specialized in the history of the Vietnam War in many cases wrote books on the subject or at least articles was the Vietnam precedent, was the Vietnam analogy useful, was it more useful or more of a detriment to the kind of debate that did and should have perhaps taken place around those two experiences was it useful to talk about Vietnam so much in connection with these new wars Secretary Kerry last night said there's a danger sometimes of being prisoner of the Vietnam analogy did we fall into that in recent times I just offer my experience in Iraq and Afghanistan I think very much mirrored the experience of these two gentlemen in terms of your fighting and insurgency which means that they are living with people in Iraq of course it's a much more modern society but in Afghanistan we went back and of course looked at the counterinsurgency doctrine from Vietnam and the counterinsurgency doctrine as hard as it may have been to actually implement in Vietnam I think was a solid doctrine in terms of you have to gain the respect of the village elders you have to make sure you have security zones you have to link the areas of security one by one it is painful it is hard but I would tell you the other piece of this was and I was talking to a wonderful army nurse here right before walking in and I can tell you what she experiences an army nurse in terms of the blast effects so the kids coming off the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq probably looked very much like the young men and women that were coming off the battlefield in Vietnam in terms of the amputees in terms of how they were engaged improvised explosive devices and bushes RPGs these same sort of problems that beset us in again in Vietnam were there in spades and certainly in Afghanistan and maybe a little bit to a less degree in Iraq but yes it absolutely framed our thinking in terms of how we had to engage with the civilian population and engage the enemy in a constructive way in a very constructive way I think because the most important lesson I got out of Vietnam was nine months spent nine months in a Philadelphia naval hospital and I've continued to work more on a volunteer basis today with veterans who have been injured but Bill Sayne is 100% right he's got these multiple tours we've been at war in Afghanistan for 15 years and as I said you pull 100 Americans at random and you ask them are we in Afghanistan and I don't think so where's that the trauma of those multiple tours it's very very difficult to measure and the other thing I'd say about Afghanistan which is brand new is the outsourcing it was done to private companies my god in Iraq as well I think we lost 6 billion dollars cash that went over there and pallets or something like that the money that's been going out to private sector companies I think it's just morally reprehensible particularly when you put it up against when you put it up against the suffering of these men and women who have done it from the psychological suffering look at the suicide rates even in SEAL team I never thought we'd have suicides in SEAL team and that's born I think of this long standing anxiety and frustration then you come home and you expect everybody else to be changing they're not these transitions back and forth from active duty or civilian time are very very difficult the Afghan and the Iraq war is done there's nothing comparable to Vietnam in my view it's far worse I would agree with that I think that issue we're all in basic agreement sure we're in violent agreement let me shift gears for a moment it seems to me that one of the lessons that the US government took away from Vietnam it has to do with the need to manage information particularly information about military campaigns I was reminded by a session with Dan rather earlier today how much freedom flexibility reporters had on the ground in Vietnam how much free discussion there was of operational tactical issues even and that seems to have changed pretty dramatically following the Vietnam war the consequence of a conscious decision within the defense department or perhaps elsewhere but especially there to manage information about military activities much more carefully and I think one can reasonably argue that this has been a harmful thing to the need to have an educated citizenry with an awareness of what happens in battle zones could you talk about that let me just set the stage perhaps for a discussion because most of us grew up in the period where you'd go to the Saturday matinee and see movie tone news of the Second World War and it was absolutely without any real casualties that were ever shown it was it was propaganda it was good news but it was only good news and even the bad news was described in fairly favorable terms and it seemed to be overtaken but I'll also say that I don't think there's any president, any military commander, anybody else who isn't going to want to have some ability to have control over the message and that's going to be even more difficult is right now with everybody having their own little mobile devices the chances of anyone covering up anything that was terribly significant goes way down in fact reporters probably have a tough time keeping ahead of the tweets or the messages that are sent back home but it's a natural instinct that we have to understand at least that having somebody come into every planning session and then immediately critiquing it as it goes along or what of the case is not what a military commander wants to have and I think we do benefit enormously by virtue of the volunteer service now so that you have more people who want to be there and not people who are there against their will and whatever and I can imagine the kind of messages that we would be going back and forth from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, you name it today if that kind of capability existed back in the Vietnam period what can I say, that was perfect he never used to say that yes I did let me come in with a question that I think is best directed to Bill although I'd certainly welcome others who may wish to comment what is the state of play these days with regard to the place of the Vietnam war in military education to what extent is the Vietnam war being taught to our young military professionals? you still find at all of the basic training areas the war colleges, the Vietnam war is still very important to us again from a military standpoint in terms of both the tactics of it the operational aspect of it and again at the senior level the war colleges the strategic implications of the Vietnam war and we and I think what you'll find is when Ken Burns' documentary comes out it will be kind of required watching for officers going through these courses and autobie absolutely right I think the good thing about the military is we all fancy ourselves as many historians understand what happened in the Civil War and you want to understand what happened in World War II and you want to understand what happened in Vietnam because your life depends on it and you want to make sure that if there is an opportunity to learn something from what occurred before that you take that opportunity and put it into play now again as each war gets further and further away and you have less an opportunity to talk to people that have been there much as Ken Burns said last night it may not resonate quite as much because now you're referring to books or movies but it still resonates very strongly within the US military it's interesting to me that you've just suggested that Vietnam is used to great constructive purpose within military education Bob's first comment I think of the afternoon was that essentially we haven't learned lessons well I'm referring to the civilian population what Bill is talking about is inside the military so it's a it's as he said his life depends on it very important distinction but I can't resist asking given this contrast how well do we do as a society in learning from history I don't think we do very well at all there's two things about history first is it's work I should have read it earlier I mean the memoirs of Sherman's memoirs and I suppose if I was a career Navy Army Marine officer I probably would have read it much earlier because he gives real tactical as well as some interesting political things going on but the hardest thing that I was saying about earlier when I was saying Vietnam's not a syndrome history can cause us to look in the mirror and say God did we do that my own view about war the citizens tend to get all excited at the beginning get all pumped up and then all of a sudden oh my God people are dying and killing each other that's not good and then the support drops off particularly in the all volunteer force where fewer and fewer people are actually having to do the work every time I hear somebody say we ought to go I hear Ted Cruz we ought to bomb them Ted you're not going to bomb them you're not going to do any fighting you're too damn old you might not have been any good when you were young I don't know some of it is a little bit connected what Chuck was saying because we still tend to over dramatize and clean it up it's not all bad to do that but as citizens I think studying history is really hard I think by the way the historians have enabled us to understand lots of things that we didn't know before which can be painful as well but it's the difficulty when you say oh God is that who we were and the hardest thing is to say we're going to go on that's why I emphasize the promise thing that I did in the United States Senate was participating in the peace agreement in Cambodia helping to normalize Chuck that was at least as controversial and it's working we've gone back to Vietnam we're working well together we're making peace I repeat it peace is hard you've got to make decisions in group decisions you never get perfection in those moments and you're always going to find some windbag on the sidelines who can be criticized I think you said that perfectly I can answer it who would dare speak after that listen we are running short on time but let me wrap things up with a very straightforward and quick question is there a lesson of the Vietnam War that we haven't dwelled on here or perhaps other sessions have not hit upon that you would like to put on the table of huge consequence or potentially of minute consequence one very quick one is instead of having individual rotation we have unit rotation and I have long thought that individual rotation was counterproductive and if you can get unit rotations people come in ready to work and carry out their mission together if you have recently got a couple of brand new people that you're trying to familiarize with the whole situation and a couple of people that are short timers that are really counting down the days until they can get their flight home or whatever the case it undermines morale and makes it more difficult for the commander so I'm if there's any big lesson learned between Vietnam and the more recent experience I would say it's not individual rotation which is exactly again to Senator Rao's point we learned that lesson from Vietnam again it's hard to do that but it is a lesson the army did have these issues in Vietnam with individual rotations and I know again when Iraq started that was one of the very first decisions going back to this because of that problem I guess I would offer that something that was raised last night and again both gentlemen here have talked about the complexity of any war and you have to be careful about taking the wrong lessons away from the war and sometimes we allow historians who may or may not have served in that war to interpret what they find in the archives and then draw those lessons and then those lessons become the lessons of our history right wrong or indifferent that's what happens sometimes but I mean you need to have somebody that does that I don't want to dismiss that but these things are very very complex there's nothing easy about them that's why I think something like the Vietnam war summit here is so important to have the opportunity to hear both sides of the story to hear of all the complexities the good and the bad and then kind of we need to collectively or individually make our own judgments about what was right and what was wrong look I think here history is a very good guidance I speak to on behalf of the millions I think of two great examples of neither of them are connected to the Vietnam war the first is Gandhi who insisted we're going to have multi-religious nation we're going to make peace in his case he's into we're going to make peace to the Muslims and he died because of it and the more eloquent one was it's Akrabin who said any fool can make peace to the friend it's making peace to the enemy it's hard he did he was at war with the Oscar air fact and he died because of it making peace is hard because you get criticized people say you're weak in my own view real men do diplomacy as well well I think one thing that has become clear over the last three days is that the Vietnam war entails an infinite number of questions and an infinite unending amount of controversy the best that we can hope for I think at the end of the day is to have the debate at a higher level of sophistication and a higher level of knowledge and I think these three gentlemen have helped us to think about some of these very weighty matters on a higher plane so thank you very much