CARLISLE, Pa. — On a mud-splattered landing strip near the demilitarized zone, Capt. Bob Scales said a final farewell, through streaming tears, to the men of Battery B.
He had led 55 artillerymen across Vietnam's canopied forests and mountain crags, through midnight firefights and thundering bombardments during the convulsive summer of 1969. And now Vietnam was over for him, he believed. A mission accomplished. A chapter closed.
He was wrong.
The Vietnam War, which ended 25 years ago on April 30, touched Scales again and again as he moved from one command to another during a 34-year military career that has elevated him to the rank of major general.
In the 1970s, as U.S. troops withdrew to a homeland thrown in turmoil by the war, Scales saw his Army nearly destroyed by internal strife and neglect. He felt the scorn of civilians as he pursued graduate studies at a university where decorated veterans like himself knew it was only prudent to trade uniforms for bell-bottom jeans, to keep their warrior pasts a secret.
Scales saw Vietnam sow doubts in some of the Army's best officers, including his own father, and observed how it reshaped the U.S. military's fundamental notions ofwhen and where to fight.
He made sure its lessons were not forgotten as he and other veterans who stayed in the Army rebuilt the shattered force over a period of 15 years. And today, Vietnam's legacy permeates the military worldview that Scales, now 55 and commandant of the Army War College here, imparts to new generations of officers.
For the Army, "Vietnam is, in many ways, an invisible scar," said Scales, a man with piercing blue eyes who is considered one of the service's visionaries. The war so changed the Army and so influences it today, he said, "you can't understand the one without the other."
The fall of Saigon 25 years ago marked the end of a 16-year calamity that shook the nation's ideals and its institutions.
Nowhere were the wounds more grievous than within the U.S. military, once the proud symbol of U.S. dominance but suddenly the humbled loser in an unpopular and ultimately unsustainable war in Indochina.
In the years since, the armed forces have triumphed in a war in the Persian Gulf. They have leaped so far past their peers in prowess that even close allies have become anxious. Yet the painful lessons of Vietnam remain ingrained in veterans like Scales who, though fast dwindling in numbers, still guide the armed forces.
The legacy of Vietnam is visible when the Air Force bombards a creaky Yugoslav army from the safety of 15,000 feet, when the Navy launches unmanned cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away to punish a dictator in Baghdad and when the Army offers arms and trainers--but not combat troops--to help a Colombian regime fight a jungle insurgency.
It is evident today, when Pentagon leaders fret publicly that the peacekeeping deployment in Kosovo is changing, through a phenomenon known as "mission creep," into a dangerous quagmire.
In the generals' secret war councils at the Pentagon, no one mentions Vietnam. No one has to: Its lessons were long ago imprinted on their psyches.
How this lesson was embedded is plain in the stories of soldiers like Scales, who was trained as a military historian and has seen the Army from the perspectives of field commander, administrator and strategist.
Scales' dad, Robert H. Scales Sr., was a career Army officer from the Texas Hill Country who piloted amphibious landing craft in the Pacific campaign of World War II. He took pride and purpose in the way that war had become a unifying national crusade.
The younger Scales wanted to be like his dad and chose his life's work at age 5. He read books on military history "as far back as I can remember" and bored through Douglas Southall Freeman's weighty "Lee's Lieutenants," a book about the Confederate Civil War generals, while in middle school.
He was appointed to West Point, class of 1966, a group that produced dozens of top officers, including Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military chief in the Kosovo war. Scales' class also suffered more casualties--including 38 dead--than any other in the academy's history.
Scales was restless in his college days, ready to start his military career. But when he finished 422nd in a class of 580, he fretted that he would not get a top combat assignment in a war that was swiftly building to peak intensity.
The best students got to choose among assignments in Vietnam; Scales' first posting was to command an artillery unit in Germany. When President Lyndon B. Johnson, facing deepening controversy over the war, announced on March 31, 1968, that he would not seek a second term, Scales panicked.
"I thought, 'Oh, my God, the war's going to end before I get there,' " he said.
