They call it the Breakfast Club, and they meet each morning at 9:30.
That’s a half-hour before Concord American Legion Post 21 opens for real. They drink coffee, soft drinks and apricot brandy, sometimes at one of the circular tables, but mostly at the bar. They eat donuts and they discuss the stock market, their love lives and the Red Sox.
And war, of course. As Vietnam veterans – the foundation for this club – they share a bond most of us can’t appreciate. And these days, they see the visions coming from Afghanistan. They see our Afghan allies chasing military planes at the airport in Kabul, desperate to elude the charging Taliban, which has taken over the country in recent days in a blitzkrieg attack, a blur, a fighting machine regaining its power against a demoralized opponent.
Recently, a palpable sense of loss has returned. Thousands of Americans killed, billions of dollars spent, for a goal that never came. Then, just like now.
As Carl Nolin, adjunct leader of Post 21, told me, “It’s deja vu. It’s similar, no doubt about it.”
Similar enough to blanket a place like Post 21 with uneasy feelings and conflicting thoughts. The vets recall that the Vietnam war ended because the United States went home after nearly a decade of fighting, leaving a city vulnerable.
They recall that nearly 60,000 Americans died, and they forever ask themselves, for what? Yet this doesn’t mean these veterans said we should have stayed in Afghanistan to complete our nation-building. No more than we should have stayed in Vietnam, fighting an endless war with no hope for peace in sight.
“Now we go through this again, but it’s worse,” Nolin said. “The Taliban seemed to have more knowledge about what we were doing than we did. It needed to be planned better.”
Nolin enlisted and went to Vietnam in 1969 with the 52nd Aviation Battalion. He said attacks at Pleiku, once an American airbase, were common. Friends died.
He came home, taught middle school science in Berlin, stuck with the National Guard. He called Vietnam a “give-away,” because after eight years of fighting and dying, the North emerged victoriously.
“What did we do other than lose soldiers and have others come home injured?” Nolin asked.
We sat around a large circular table at Post 21 and faced these hard truths, that American history now includes another huge loss of resources with no gain at the end.
It’s been a dominant topic lately. Five to 10 veterans come to Post 21 each morning. Before it opens. Someone brought muffins. Sometimes, it’s donuts. Nolin makes the coffee.
The TV gives updates on the crisis in Afghanistan. For these veterans, it has become impossible not to think back.
“If you lived the first month, you had a good chance of making it out,” said 73-year-old Concord resident Bob Richard, referring to Vietnam. “But this is deja vu 46 years later. I’m watching thousands of Afghanistan people trying to get on one plane. I never thought in my lifetime we’d do that twice.”
The first time was in 1975, two years after the United States had pulled out. Minus the Americans, North Vietnamese troops and the Vietcong overwhelmed Saigon, the southern capital.
An iconic photo showing a trail of evacuating American citizens and South Vietnamese allies – some already on a ladder, nearly inside a waiting helicopter, others on the roof of the CIA station below – showed the urgency and danger of a campaign that would save a total of 7,000 people from different areas of the city.
Recently, a scene from the Kabul airport showed Afghan citizens, many of whom helped the United States fight the Taliban, clinging to military planes leaving the runway. Some fell from the sky and died, an awful imprint in our collective memory. Just like that roof-top photo from Vietnam, representing retreat, chaos, waste.
“I think our government twice tried to do the right thing,” said Frank Ahern, a 73-year-old retired salesman and Vietnam vet. “We went into train another country’s army to defend their own country. For whatever reason, that army chose not to participate to learn how to fight the way they should have. But I think in both cases it was smart to leave.”
Conversations blended into other topics. Nolin said the heart of Afghanistan’s Army, its will to fight, needed some context. “They couldn’t even get rations and a lot of them weren’t getting paid,” he noted.
Ahern lamented about the harsh treatment he and others suffered after returning from Vietnam, saying he changed into civilian clothes before moving through the airport to hide his military identity.
“They are coming back from Afghanistan as heroes,” Ahern said. “When we came back, we were not treated very well.”
Soon, the toll Vietnam took on Ahern became clear. He grew weary of remembering, telling me, “It’s 50 years ago, it’s in my past. And after 20 years in Afghanistan, you have to learn. You have to move on.”
That’s not always easy. Richard has been attending a reunion with his war buddies every other year since about 2010. Last year’s was canceled due to Covid. Next year’s will be held in Florida in May.
The wives go every time. They gather and trade stories, about how their husbands are feeling since the war. They mention mood swings. Richard still suffers from post-traumatic stress.
“A great many of the guys at the reunion have it,” Richard said.
Fighting men and women back from Afghanistan are now waging this other type of war. As are those who’ve returned from Iraq. The war in which Richard remains engaged. The one inside his head.
It’s an enemy that won’t easily surrender. An enemy whose influence grows stronger as war drags on.
A gentleman at the bar, a Vietnam vet who declined to give his name, suggested that George Patton – the general who fought Nazis during World War II and helped secure their surrender – could have reached the goal, whatever that was, in a more timely fashion.
But warfare, we know, was different in Vietnam and Afghanistan, as compared to the fighting around the world during the 1940s. Tanks facing off against one another. Combatants clearly identified through their uniforms. Nations clearly identified on maps. A declared war in which failure was not considered an option. A justified war, many felt at the time. Good vs. evil.
Vietnam and Afghanistan were blurry. Maybe we should have left Vietnam alone. Maybe we should have left Afghanistan 10 years ago, once Osama Bin Laden had been shot dead.
These were undeclared wars with unclear goals, shadowy foes blending in with civilians, an end nowhere in sight, civil war raging in a society of people trying to figure out whom to support, what’s best for them.
It happened, and then it happened again. The Breakfast Club at Post 21 – and gatherings at VFWs and Legion Halls across the country – sips coffee and apricot brandy before a buzzer opens the door for the day. They have more to talk about beyond their love lives and the Red Sox.
Nolin looked ahead, and his forecast wasn’t sunny. He fears lessons learned from the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan will not r esonate.
“We’re going to do this again,” he predicted. “Of course, this is going to happen again.”