Tour of Duty or Deplorable Deployment?

In 1969, it took between 10 and 18 hours to get to Vietnam on the Flying Tiger contract planes. A long, numbing flight to a war with no liquor, not even a beer. The stewardesses, who were the last American women we thought we would see, served low-bidder airline meals, a little sorrowfully I thought, treating us like doomed children. Stops were made in Hawaii, where a special lounge separated us from the tourists and honeymoon couples.

At Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon, the main entry point for American troops, the first whack of reality was the heat. We walked down the stairs from the plane into the boil of the Saigon humidity, weighted by duffle bags and weapons, swaddled in fatigues and canvas boots.

This was going to be awful.

But the one thing that kept us mildly sane was the knowledge that it would last only a year. That was guaranteed. You could, you told yourself, put up with anything for a year. Three months later, especially in combat units, you weren't so sure. Even so, it was the knowledge that every day brought you closer to deliverance from the heat and the noise and the violence and the death that kept most of us from losing it.

This week, the Pentagon informed the 3rd Infantry Division troops in Iraq that they would not be going home on the dates previously promised. In fact they will be extended in their duty "indefinitely."

Errors of judgment and planning have been made in the Iraq operation, but I can think of no other error so grave. What this means to the average soldier, being cooked by the Iraqi summer sun under his flak jacket and helmet, is that there's no longer any schedule against which they can hope for escape.

This Baghdad hideousness, this confusion and the damned heat will go on and on. It means, further, that the U.S. government, which acclaimed them heroes a few months back, has failed in its predictions about the war and is solving the problem by leaving them there to pay for the failure.

In Vietnam, every soldier had his short-timer calendar, carried in his plastic wallet. These curious documents, which counted 365 days like weird little advent calendars, were often humorous and sometimes ribald, drawn up by local wags with artistic talent. Every morning meant crossing off another day. And the calendars held the promise that if you could just get through however many days were left, then regular life -- with families and cars and air-conditioning and cold beer -- would start again. If you got down to less than three months you were termed "short," the cartoon for which was a helmet sitting on two boots.