Judge Widder & Army Intelligence

Judge Champ Widder has spent a lot of time recently thinking about the future. He could retire, but he's not sure he wants to. What would he do with that blank future?

Today, though, he is thinking about the past, as he always does on Memorial Day.

Judge Widder is a Vietnam vet. He was drafted after his sophomore year at Cratchit State U. He spent 2 years in Vietnam as a lieutenant. When his two years were up, he returned to college. He was a local boy, having grown up in the small city of Hope's Promise, where CSU is located. His father owned the local Buick dealership. He was a business major. He was a basketball star. He was elected student body president the first month he was back. He was also the chief speaker at protests against the war.

"I was in army intelligence," he recounted. "My job was to crawl out into the brush by myself and locate the enemy. Then I called down air strikes on my own map coordinates. That's army, but it's not intelligence."

That always got a good laugh.

"But I got close enough before I called for the air strikes really to see those people called enemy. They were just kids, younger than I was, chatting with each other, fixing a little meal, playing games. I knew there was something wrong with that picture, the big guy from thousands of miles away, lurking in the bushes, getting ready to destroy these kids in their own land..."

He was a hero to some and a traitor to others.

It was only later that it was revealed most American casualties and "enemy" casualties both occurred after American generals and politicians had decided the war was unnecessary and unwinnable but kept it going just because they didn't know how to stop.

"That's the true oxymoron of army intelligence," he thought this morning, as he looked at the deer slipping in and out of the woods on the back of his place east of town, "wasting young lives because you don't know how to stop it. That's army, but it's not intelligece."

So he thinks this morning of Milt Olive, and Randy Thompson, and Justin Daye, and all the Vitenamese boys whose names he never knew but whose lives he took, and he shakes his head and says, "What a waste..."