Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Many myths surround the Vietnam War.
All the men who served became drug addicts or alcoholics, were maimed or had breakdowns. Most of the men were drafted to serve.
But those are myths Indiana National Guard Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Jon Torzewski tries to correct when he speaks to middle schools, high schools or colleges.
Tuesday, he was at Warsaw Community High School to speak to students about those myths and what the war was really like. He also spoke at Wawasee High School Sept. 18 and will be at the Vietnam memorial service in Syracuse Oct. 5. The Vietnam Memorial Traveling Wall will be in Syracuse Oct. 2-5.
Torzewski served one year - 1968 - in Vietnam. On Aug. 2, 1967, he went to the post office at 4 a.m., got on a Greyhound bus to Chicago and didn't return for two years. In 1973, he joined the National Guard. In 1977, he was accepted to the Officer Candidate School, where he got his commission. For the past 19 years, he's been training officers with the National Guard.
"I wasn't in combat 365 days. I lived in fear" of traps and not knowing who the enemy was, he said in an interview about his Vietnam experience. He was in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive and was there during the My Lai massacre.
In 1984, a teacher friend asked Torzewski to speak to his eighth-grade class about the war because there was only a page in the history books about it. Since then, his speaking engagements have grown while he remains a full-time commander. But for today's students, he said, the Vietnam War is to them what the Civil War is to him - history they know nothing about.
In his presentations, Torzewski said he just tells students about the war from his perspective. He doesn't try to debate the morality of war and whether the Vietnam War was right or wrong.
The image of the Vietnam soldier didn't get a fair shake from the media, he said. "It's no secret the media and the Army never got along." He often contrasts the Vietnam War as portrayed in films and the media versus what he said actually happened.
His presentations also include a large collection of Vietnam artifacts, which students can view after the presentation.
As for the Vietnam draft, Torzewski said, only about 33 percent of the soldiers who served in World War II volunteered and the rest were drafted, while, of the men and women who served in Vietnam, 33 percent were drafted and the rest volunteered. "That's not the way it's portrayed in the media."
Whatever image the media portrayed about Vietnam, he said, the war had an influence on today's military strategy.
"To me, it's shaped our foreign policy and the way we go to war today," he said. The United States spent years in a war that was politically driven where the military wasn't allowed to win. However, the U.S. did learn a lot of lessons from the war, he said.
As for the image of the Vietnam soldier, Torzewski said, "We only have one image and it's a two-parter." In one part, the Vietnam veteran is imagined as a high-speed killer on the side of the law. The second is as a deranged killer against the government. "The media is interested in victims and violence," he said in his presentation.
Vietnam veterans also are stereotyped as being drug addicts, alcoholics, maimed and not able to handle the pressures of war. "There's nothing further from the truth," he said. Because of that image, in the 1960s and 1970s, if a veteran put on his job application that he served in Vietnam, he wouldn't have been hired, Torzewski said.
Vietnam veterans are the "mainstream of society," he said, including politicians, Fortune 500 company executives, athletes, entertainers, teachers and "just everyday grandfathers." Their divorce, prison and unemployment rates aren't any higher than anyone else's, he said.
He said war movies like "Bloodsport," "U571," "Saving Private Ryan" and "Platoon" have at most seven minutes of reality in them. Movies also tend to make soldiers look like supermen. But Torzewski said in reality, they were all scared.
"Only 1 percent of the world's population has the ability to kill without remorse. The rest of us, it affects."
He also described a typical day in Vietnam for a soldier, violence in war and the aim of the war versus what the U.S. learned from it.
The strategic aims of the war included, according to Torzewski: preserve the noncommunist regime in Saigon, stabilize the regime threatened by communism, preserve the state of mutual nuclear deterrence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, make clear that the cost extracted by violent communist revolution is high.
What the U.S. learned from the war, he said, was: a war needs the support of the people, war needs to be fought by generals and not politicians, use the media to the military's advantage, have a clear understanding of the goals and objectives and support local governments, don't create them.
