Santa Rosa -- December 9, 2005

Fred Ptucha, a member of Christ Church UM in Santa Rosa since 1978, was on a local radio talk show Nov. 14 with Daniel Ellsberg -- the whistle-blower in 1971 of Pentagon secrets about Vietnam War mishandling. Ptucha told of the guilt he still carries from having had information about some of the cover-up. He was a Navy top-secret control officer when he served in Vietnam, but he kept things to himself.

He now foresees soldiers coming back from the war in Iraq who will experience the same type of guilt for devastating a country for nothing more than what he sees as a U.S. reach for hegemony -- and it will take years for them to divest themselves of it.

Ptucha still isn't over his Vietnam guilt, though he feels he is making progress. In 2002 he and seven comrades in a Veterans Vietnam Restoration Project went back to some of the very areas they had "destroyed to save" -- bringing funds to start 12 new homes, and helping in some of the construction. The homes were for former Viet Cong -- the U.S. enemy in the Vietnam War. "Every one had suffered a major wound, some without arms, yet they were gracious to us," he observed. "I can't help but think that if the reverse were true -- if anyone who had destroyed my country were to come back 30 years later -- I couldn't be as gracious and forgiving."

Ptucha said he volunteered to go to Vietnam in the 1960s, accepting the U.S. government contention that countries in Asia were likely to fall like dominos to communism, and he had to help stop it. "It didn't dawn on me that our government would lie."

In 1965 he was stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. His destroyer, the Joseph Strauss, had replaced the Maddox, the destroyer attacked on August 2, 1964. He proceeded to read secret files about the CIA having planted detonating devices along the coast of North Vietnam prior to that attack. He then immediately knew that President Johnson's claim of the preceding year -- that an attack on the Maddox was unprovoked -- was a lie. Further reading revealed that an alleged second attack on August 4 never occurred, although Johnson insisted it did. The Maddox incident is historically accepted as the reason Congress escalated the Vietnam War, from which the U.S. did not extricate itself until 1975.

Ptucha said he wanted to blow the whistle in 1965, but that he was threatened by superiors with the brig and court martial if he did. That he did not reveal the truth haunts him to this day -- as he contemplates the 58,000 American names on the Wall in Washington DC, and the many thousands more Vietnamese dead.

Being part of Christ Church, where the United Methodist congregation shares its sanctuary with a Reformed Jewish congregation, has been part of his healing, Ptucha affirmed. "I like the diversity message of a cross on one side of a tower and a Star of David on the other."