My father, Robert McNamara, failed in Vietnam War. It still haunts us all. | Opinion

On April 30, 1975, the most divisive war in American history came to an end. Or so we thought at the time.

The war's painful schisms were personal for me. I am the son of the late Robert S. McNamara, Defense secretary under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Though I loved my father then and for the rest of his life, I was so distraught during the war years that I dropped out of college and fled on my motorcycle ‒ 6,000 miles through Latin America. I exiled myself in Chile and Mexico for more than two years, searching for relief from the anguish of knowing my father’s intense involvement in an unjust war.

I was not dodging the draft, though I hold no contempt for the tens of thousands of draft-age men and soldiers who sought asylum in Canada and Sweden. The severe case of ulcers that afflicted both my mother and me disqualified me from serving in our military.

In recent years I have learned that, for the people of Vietnam, the war has never ended. Millions of the unexploded bombs and land mines we left behind still kill and maim children and farmers throughout the country.

I recently traveled for three weeks in Vietnam, to better understand why the United States entangled itself in this misbegotten war, and why an unsophisticated yet ingenious armed force was able to defeat the most powerful military in the world, led by my father.

'Fog of War' and my father, Robert S. McNamara

I had been invited by a Vietnamese film team to participate in a documentary, based in part on my book, "Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, From Vietnam to Today."

Before I left for Vietnam, the crew filmed me in conversation with four prominent U.S. historians and speaking with several American artists, veterans and poets. I interviewed the eminent filmmaker Errol Morris, who won an Academy Award for his 2003 documentary feature with my father, "The Fog of War." And I spoke with my father's top Pentagon aide and with former New York Times journalist Philip Taubman, co-author of a definitive biography of my dad, to be published later this year.  

The consensus was that, as Frances Fitzgerald wrote in her 1972 history, "Fire in the Lake," our country’s leaders simply didn't make the effort to study the history and culture of the Vietnamese people and their millennium-long struggle for independence against imperial powers, including China, France and Japan.

Once in Vietnam, I met the soldier who first spotted U.S. troops landing on Danang's China Beach in April 1965.

I had lunch with an American government official, whose U.S. Marine officer father was with one of the first landing parties.

I met Vietnamese men and women who, in their teens, served as lookouts in their villages' rice paddies to warn their parents about our troops and bombers.

'McNamara Line' just one of many US failures in Vietnam War

During the last days of my visit, I met with an elderly man and woman who were instrumental in foiling one of my father's most notorious battle strategies.

Known as the “McNamara Line," the strategy involved equipping a broad swath of land running across the middle of Vietnam with electronic sensors to help detect enemy actions, including movement of arms supplies.

My dad was convinced that, if he applied the same kind of strategic analysis to this war that he had used in World War II and as president of Ford Motor Co., the United States would achieve a victory that had eluded the Chinese, the Japanese and the French.

But these two elderly peasant warriors showed me how they had strung aluminum plates, cups and canteens, stuffed with live frogs and mice, to confound our sensing systems. As a result, the bomb squads that were summoned destroyed harmless animals, not weapons from North Vietnam.

It took only two years to begin repairing Europe after the end of World War II. But two postwar decades passed before the United States opened diplomatic relations with Vietnam, and for the Americans and Vietnamese to begin locating missing troops from both sides and addressing the legacies of the Vietnam War.

Sadly, just as these programs have begun bringing relief and promoting reconciliation, they have been abruptly paused, bringing untold hardship to a country that is now a major trading partner and ally. 

During my visit, I pledged to continue supporting efforts to eradicate the legacies that continue to kill and maim children, 50 years after the war ended. In this way, I found my visit and participation in the documentary personally healing.

I wish my father were alive today to read my memoir and travel with me. Like so many of our wartime veterans, he was haunted to the end of his life by the crimes we committed in Vietnam.

Craig McNamara owns and operates Sierra Orchards, an organic farm raising sheep and growing walnuts, olives and almonds in Northern California. He's the author of the memoir "Because Our Fathers Lied."