THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504300053
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Ask him what he thinks of Robert McNamara's mea culpa for the Vietnam War, and Joe Leszczynski doesn't mince words:
``McNamara should be arrested for killing 58,000 people.''
The blunt-spoken Navy retiree faults the former defense secretary for pursuing a spineless, no-win policy. It may seem a harsh judgment, but Leszczynski has rendered harsh judgments before. One of them brought the second of his two tours of duty in Vietnam to an abrupt halt 24 years ago.
This is how it happened:
Leszczynski, 53, who left his native Detroit for the Navy at 17, went to Vietnam in 1968 as a repairman for Navy PCFs (fast patrol craft) - known in sailors' parlance as ``swift boats'' - used for coastal interdiction in Cam Ranh Bay.
The Navy soon put out a call for more crewmen for the boats, and Leszczynski stepped forward.
``I was 25, and I wanted to go shoot somebody,'' Leszczynski said last week. ``I said, `My government needs commie-killers, I'm a commie-killer.' That's the way I thought.''
By his reckoning, he killed at least 18 enemy troops.
On his second Vietnam tour in 1971, Leszczynski was assigned to Da Nang as an adviser to the South Vietnamese navy, which was being groomed to take over more of the war effort. On a mission to salvage a boat that had run over a mine, the Vietnamese sailors he was accompanying got off the boat and didn't come back.
That night, the unit came under North Vietnamese mortar fire.
``They beat feet back to Da Nang,'' Leszczynski said of his South Vietnamese charges. ``They knew that attack was coming.''
He and his fellow U.S. advisers survived the attack unscathed, salvaged the boat and returned to Da Nang. There, Leszczynski shouldered his M-16 and confronted about 15 of the absentee Vietnamese.
``I was gonna blow 'em away,'' Leszczynski said. ``Then a warrant officer stepped in front of me and said, `Don't do it.' I said, `Step away. They need to be killed, because they ran.'
``The next day, I was on a plane headed back to the states.''
Leszczynski retired last year as a master chief petty officer after 35 years in the Navy. He and his fourth wife, Carolyn, live in a modest one-story white house on a big lot in Lakeview Park off Northampton Boulevard.
Taking a break from a painting job last week, he paced across the back yard from his workshop, trying to put words to his rage over McNamara's book. A burly man with graying hair and a mustache, Leszczynski was dressed in a T-shirt, fatigues and a baseball cap.
``We thought it was a just cause. And now McNamara says, `We were wrong. We were wrong!' '' he said, raising his voice and thrusting his tattooed arms skyward. ``We paid for that war in lives and dollars!
``He's telling me I'm a murderer.''
``It took me 10 years to go down there and touch that wall,'' Leszczynski said, referring to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, where the names of the 58,000 U.S. dead are carved in granite. ``I went there and cried like a baby.''
Leszczynski believes, contrary to McNamara's assertions, that the war was winnable but was not pursued vigorously enough. As an example, he points to a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam called by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
``We had it won in 1968,'' he said, ``and then Johnson stopped the bombing. From '68 on, it was a grist mill, because we couldn't bomb them, we couldn't cross into North Vietnam. You can't believe how our hands were tied.'' There were times, he said, when U.S. troops had to call for permission before they could return hostile fire.
By 1971, he said, ``we knew that it was useless.''
By then, it was plain that the North Vietnamese had the stronger will to win, Leszczynski said. To illustrate, he recalled a prisoner exchange he once observed. ``One of these North Vietnamese guys, who was missing an arm, looked at me and said, `I'll be back.' That's how much they believed in what they were doing.''
Leszczynski's ideal of what a military leader should be is Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf War, because ``they went in there and kicked ass and took names.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
KEYWORDS: VIETNAM WAR by CNB