When pieces of your life slip into the annals of history

Robert Strange McNamara is dead.

He was the secretary of defense during the massive build up of men and arms in Vietnam. In his autobiography “In Retrospect,” he said he had misgivings about the conduct of the war as early as 1967. For me and thousands of others whose lives were changed, it might have been good for him to express them sooner.

On the other hand, for those of us who survived, we might not be who we are today.

My little piece of McNamara’s war deserved a brief mention on page 246 of his book.

“They concluded the bombing [of the Ho Chi Minh freeway, as we called it] had indeed been ineffective and recommended building a ‘barrier’ as an alternative means of checking infiltration. This concept, which had first come to my attention in the spring of 1966, would involve laying down a complex belt of mines and sensors across the Demilitarized Zone and the Laotian panhandle to the west. (the sensors would guide our attack aircraft to enemy forces on the move.) The barrier would be costly [that was the most secret aspect of the whole thing], but because our bombing was ineffective, I authorized it … Once it was put in place, the barrier was intended to increase infiltration losses. And it did.”

His intelligence from people with brass on their shoulders, and mine from inside a computer-filled, air conditioned tin shed in the jungle eight miles from Nakon Phanom, Thailand, tended to differ.

Each of those sensors was said to cost the same as a Volkswagen beetle, which then was about $2,000. They would drop a series of them from aircraft. Some sensed seismic motion, some sound, some smell. How a jungle dwelling Loatian smelled any different than an infiltrating Viet Cong with his heavily laden bicycle was a mystery to the enlisted men manning the computers.

It was all so antiseptic, so high-tech compared to what was on the ground, beneath the three-tiered canopy of jungle, in the mud and the rain, the insects and the snakes.

After an air strike sent as a result of those sensors, recon would report secondary explosions and secondary fires — yeah right, burning logs we speculated.

When ground intelligence would spot a POW camp that would be duly noted on the maps so they could be avoided. But after five days they were to be removed, because the assumption was that they were would be moved about. Some of us forgot to remove them from the maps.

McNamara said the project came to be known as McNamara Line, without mentioning the derisive allusion to the Maginot Line. We called it McNamara’s Wall.

To this day I wonder if there was not some cosmic joke in the fact that as we walked from our monsoon-soaked hooches to that tin shed the lizards in the trees would make a mocking call that distinctly sounded like: “(Expletive) you.”