The pictures were taken at a ceremony in Ho Chi Minh City, once known as Saigon, where the two were part of a delegation that attended the opening of the first American Consulate since the war. During the same trip, Tom and Chuck returned to the war zone, to the riverbank where Tom had saved Chuck. The trip was filmed for a documentary.
In the footage from the trip to the Mekong Delta, you can see in the brothers' faces a startled sense of being transported in time. Their van drives into the familiar green tangle of the humid jungle, and they roll the windows down. Into the vehicle waft the pungent smells of village coal fires and outdoor privies, and the suffocating heat, all unchanged.
Tom is overcome with emotion standing by the river where friends lay dying so many years ago, a river that flowed red with blood -- "like Campbell's tomato soup," he says. In one scene, Tom chokes up and has to walk away from the camera. "It was probably one of the most difficult emotional experiences of my life. Overwhelming. I was consciously, physically trying not to cry much of the time," he says.
Back in the United States, far from the scene, talking about the trip and the making of the documentary, Tom's face went ashen recounting how a friend died. "Someone had pulled him out and he was leaning up against a tree with just ..." He motioned to the knee area where the soldier's legs had been blown off. He choked back tears, and there was a long pause. "Whew," he said, clearing his throat.
The senator, meanwhile, said that the return to the jungle "was much harder than I thought it would be." Yet during the trip, at least on the surface and on camera, he remained characteristically cool. In general, Tom said, even during the period when he and his brother were having fistfights about the politics of the war, Chuck has kept the same equilibrium when he talks about his experiences. "I have never, ever," Tom said, "seen Chuck express himself about Vietnam emotionally at all."
What is different now, Tom said, is his brother's feelings about the meaning of the war: There "has been a sea change for Chuck, and that is about the core of the conflict between us, the Vietnam War, whether it was justified and all of that. He has now come around 180 degrees in his thinking. I never changed my feelings."
Hagel told Tom the same thing he has told others. What finally opened his eyes and turned him around was listening, in recent years, to tapes of Lyndon Johnson and his advisors, tapes that were made two years before the teenage Hagel brothers went to Vietnam. The tapes, Tom said, "acknowledged that they weren't going to win the war but kept dragging it on to get the best deal. They sent people to a slaughter just to wait it out to get the best political deal."
Tom's sense of having been betrayed, like that of many veterans, was so intense and immediate that, he said, "it used to drive me nuts that Chuck couldn't see it. It seemed to me so clear that we were used."
Now, Tom said, without bitterness, "we have just finally laid it to rest."
In 2007, the brothers are again on the same side about a war. Once again, they got there from very different places. Tom opposed the war in Iraq from the start. As he listened to the 2002 congressional debates about granting the president the authority to go to war, he cheered as his brother the senator expressed serious reservations -- "imposing democracy through force is a roll of the dice." Then Chuck voted with the majority. Said Tom, "He just couldn't pull the trigger."
Today, Chuck Hagel, who confirms that he and his brother have "talked about [Iraq] a lot of times," emphasizes that he had "very significant concerns early on." He also takes care to note that Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Joe Biden, like him, voted to authorize the president to go to war. He explains his vote this way: "I believed the president and others who said they would exhaust all diplomatic efforts. Which they did not. They told us they would and they did not."
He turned against the war as it became a morass. He saw the parallels with the earlier war he'd been slow to condemn, and soured on it far more quickly. When President Bush announced plans for the surge, Hagel called it the "most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Then in March, Hagel clinched a win for the Democrats by voting with them for a war-funding bill that mandated withdrawal by 2008. On April 26, when the Senate passed the final version of the bill, Hagel again sided with the victorious Democrats. He was one of two Republicans to cross the aisle in a 51-46 vote.
President Bush has vowed to veto the bill, calling withdrawal the prelude to a bloodbath. Hagel is furious at the president for trying to shift blame to Congress and for equating support for withdrawal with not supporting the troops. "I am solidly behind where we are in the Senate, how I voted," Hagel said. "It is wrong to escalate our military involvement in Iraq. It will end in disaster. You bog down and you bog down and you can't get out."
The day after my most recent of many interviews with him, Hagel left Washington for his fifth visit to Iraq. While in Iraq, he took a swipe at surge supporter John McCain during a press conference. "We didn't go shopping," said Hagel, archly, referring to McCain's infamous stroll through an open-air Baghdad market while protected by massive firepower. On his return from Iraq, Hagel gave his younger brother Mike a grim assessment. "Every time I go over," he said, "it gets worse. It is so bad now it is pathetic."
In his office, prior to the trip, he was more measured. "An additional 50,000 troops is not going to turn that around. We cannot stay as an occupying force, which is essentially what we are. It is a violent sectarian conflict fully complicated by an intrasectarian conflict. That's a civil war. To put American troops in the middle of that is wrong, and to further escalate our military involvement is wrong."
To that, brother Tom would say amen.
About the writer
Myra MacPherson first interviewed the Hagel brothers when they were in their 30s, for her book "Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation." She later interviewed them for a Washington Post feature, for revisions of "Long Time Passing" and again when Hagel was on George W. Bush's shortlist for vice president in 2000. Many of the quotes in this article are from those unpublished interviews from 2000.
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