The blast, and the gunfire that followed, flattened the column of soldiers. Twenty-one-year-old Chuck Hagel was on his back, blood bubbling out of his chest with every breath. His 19-year-old brother, Tom, stuffed bandages into the holes to stem the bleeding before noticing that his own arm was a bloody pulp.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about this March day in 1968 in Vietnam, where over 20,000 US soldiers had already lost their lives. Meanwhile, back home, the country was in tumult: The killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, rioting in cities (even in the Hagels’ home state of Nebraska) and the presidential candidacy of George Wallace, the avowed racist governor from Alabama, had sent the nation reeling.
The story of that terrible year for the Hagels and for America is told in Daniel P. Bolger’s engrossing new account, “Our Year of War: Two Brothers, Vietnam, And a Nation Divided” (Da Capo), out now. Bolger, himself a retired Army lieutenant general, interviewed Chuck and Tom Hagel extensively for the project, and the brothers shared their photos, papers and other materials to help tell their tale.
“Chuck and Tom are us,” Bolger tells The Post. “You have seen Americans like this in any war or period of stress in our country’s history, where people figure out, hey, we’ve got to pull through this together.”
Remarkably, both siblings voluntarily enlisted in the late 1960s. Chuck and Tom were the first and second of Charles and Betty Hagel’s four children, all boys. From the late ’40s through the 1950s, the Hagel family bounced around Nebraska. Charles, who had been a tail gunner on the World War II bombers that rained destruction on Japanese cities, had trouble holding down a job. By the early 1960s, he had become an alcoholic and on Christmas Eve 1962, after one of their frequent family quarrels, he died in his sleep.
Their father’s earthly departure gave the Hagel sons a fast lesson in bootstrapping. All four boys took on jobs to help pay for the family’s basic needs.
Firstborn Chuck graduated from high school in 1964, a football star and student-council president. He got an athletic scholarship to Wayne State, but an injury ended his hopes there. When an acquaintance at the local draft board warned Chuck that he might soon be drafted, he decided to enlist instead.
If Chuck was a straight-shooter, Tom was the opposite: a wiseacre and a smart aleck who didn’t overexert himself in class. But he, too, was in need of direction, and when Chuck signed up for the Army in 1967, Tom joined him right after he graduated from high school.
The military has a policy that prohibits family members from being forced to serve in the same unit. But nothing prevented family members from petitioning to serve together, and “the Fighting Hagel Brothers,” as they sometimes called themselves, did just that. Tom put through papers to join Chuck in the 2-47th Infantry, and soon the two were leading their rifle company into the thick and perilous jungles of South Vietnam. They traded off in point and slack positions; the point man being the forward-most member of the company with the slack man tailing a few yards behind with a compass, serving as a navigator.
They spent nine months together fighting side by side, causing their mother no small amount of anxiety. But she also took comfort in the thought of her boys taking care of each other.
It’s probably for the best that Betty Hagel didn’t know too much about what her two oldest sons were up to. Bolger writes that “they lived in a degree of danger unimaginable to those back home.”
One day in July, Tom Hagel saw a Viet Cong marksman put several well-placed rounds from his AK into the guts of an American chopper, causing it to plummet to the swamp below. The crash killed Lt. Col. Frederick Van Deusen, a high-ranking officer who also happened to be the brother-in-law of Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of the US forces in Vietnam. Tom immediately lit out towards where the shots came from. He nearly collided with the Viet Cong sharpshooter and managed to put a fatal bullet in the man’s forehead before the VC returned the favor.
That same day, Tom also witnessed an American officer kill a young, pregnant Vietnamese woman he’d mistaken for Viet Cong. These scenes would linger in Tom’s mind for years.
“Tom thought policy-wise the war was just all wrong,” says Bolger, “but he was an extremely effective sergeant despite that. He felt like, hey, I owe it to my brother and the other guys I’m serving with. They’re counting on me to do a job here and keep people alive . . . so I’m going to do my job. He had what I would say is a real duty ethic, at the most human level, of looking out for the person next to him.”
After their year of war, in which they earned five Purple Hearts between them, the Hagels were discharged. Chuck was first, Tom followed several weeks later — and they returned to Nebraska. They were never quite the same.
Bolger observes that “something jagged and hurtful was keeping Tom Hagel up at night.”
We would now call it post-traumatic stress disorder, but the idea of PTSD didn’t have much currency in the late 1960s. Instead, former soldiers often struggled in isolation to reenter civilian life, while not speaking of their time at war.
For two years the brothers lived together in Omaha, while they attended the University of Nebraska on the GI Bill. The Hagels had left the war, but the war would not leave them so easily. Their individual feelings about Vietnam had hardened. Tom “considered the Vietnam War an abomination, an awful deviant strain far removed from America’s best instincts, a pointless bloody scrum on behalf of an utterly corrupt local ally.” Chuck felt differently: that the war’s aims, if imperfectly administered, were just. They argued all the time.
It all came to a head one evening early in 1969. The Hagels had been home drinking. Talk drifted to the war, starting yet another argument.
But this time, the two 6-footers got in a fistfight, “smashing beds, knocking doors off,” like something out of WWE professional wrestling. They brawled so brutally, their neighbors called the police. When the authorities arrived, their military instinct for respecting authority kicked in, and the fighting Hagel brothers cooled it. It was their relationship’s lowest point; they went from keeping each other alive in Vietnam to nearly trying to kill each other in the States. Afterwards, Betty Hagel banned all discussion of the war in her house when her sons came to visit.
It was a wise policy, but a family tragedy is probably what did the most to help Chuck and Tom mend their rift. In November 1969, the youngest Hagel brother, Jimmy, was killed in a car accident.
Bolger tells The Post that Jimmy’s death “was a reminder of the fragility of life and importance of family. I think it started both Chuck and Tom on the road to reconciliation.”
That road had the brothers taking separate paths. Chuck went into radio broadcasting and then entered politics. In 1997, he became Nebraska’s independent-minded Republican senator, serving for over a decade. From 2013 to 2015, he was secretary of defense under President Barack Obama. Tom worked as an advocate for veterans, helping them secure benefits. He went on to law school and served as a law professor at the University of Dayton for over 30 years, before retiring in 2015.
Tom and Chuck remained at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they continued to find ways to engage over the war. When Chuck had a leadership position at the VA in the early 1980s, he asked Tom to be part of a committee to study the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam-era veterans. In 1999, the Hagels were invited to visit their original battleground as guests of the Vietnamese government. It was a quiet and emotional return. One wonders if it didn’t move Chuck politically, as well. Bolger tells The Post that around that time, the senator “reviewed some of the Vietnam-era tape recordings from President Lyndon Johnson and realized that there had been a lot of falsehoods peddled. He and Tom discussed that disturbing information and found common ground.”
Going against the mainstream of his party, the Republican senator did not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bolger tells The Post, “He saw too much Vietnam in the Iraq conflict. That reflected what he and Tom had long discussed, going all the way back to 1968.”
Bolger notes that despite their stark disagreement about the war, “as each year went by, the wounds did heal. They realized, hey, we’re brothers, we’re Americans, we were raised together, we’ve got a lot more in common than we’ve got different.” Bolger continues, “These guys figured out how to not only get along but respect each other’s positions. That’s the thing that I think we need more of today. You can disagree with people without demonizing each other.”