Henry Kissinger has a decidedly mixed legacy. From Scott Ritter at scottritterextra.com:
Henry Kissinger, recognized by many as one of the most influential practitioners of American foreign policy ever, has died at the age of 100.
Much will be written about the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State over the next days and weeks, some of it glowing, much of it condemning. I will leave it up to others to decide how they want to characterize the man and his life. As for me, I will focus on the brief moments of intersection I had with Secretary Kissinger, and how those impacted my life and my work.
My first brush with Henry Kissinger was as a child living in Hawaii. My father was a career Air Force officer, and in the early 1970’s he was assigned to the Headquarters, Pacific Air Force, where he was involved with a variety of logistics-related assignments, including helping facilitate the transfer of US military equipment to the Vietnamese Air Force as part of the Nixon administration’s “Vietnamization” program, which sought to transfer responsibility for the defense of South Vietnam from the US military to the Vietnamese armed forces. In this regard, my father made several trips to South Vietnam. Two things stood out from these experiences: one was my father’s disgust at the lies being told by senior US military officers who would issue glowing reports about the progress being made after spending less than 48 hours in South Vietnam, most of that time being spent in bars and nightclubs.
My father had been deployed to Vietnam in 1965-66 as part of the 10th Air Commando Squadron—the “Skoshi Tigers”—responsible for bringing the F-5 fighter to Vietnam, testing it out as a combat platform, and transitioning the F-5 to the South Vietnamese Air Force. He knew more than a little about the realities and of turning over modern weapons systems to a military culture unaccustomed to such complexity. While the US Air Force was able to employ the F-5 in both an air-to-air and air-to-ground role in South Vietnam, the South Vietnamese never really grasped how to properly use the capabilities inherent in the airframe. This was true in 1966, when my father left South Vietnam for the first time, and it remained the case in 1973-74, when he was involved in implementing “Vietnamization.”
