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Vietnam DiariesTrembling RecollectionsBy Ken Anderberg
Brian Tate's blue-suit-cool cover was blown. His earlier, casual recollections of the Vietnam War now changed to a trembling voice, watery eyes and an uncontrollable twitching of his right leg. "What is your opinion of our involvement in Vietnam?" was the straightforward question of the CEO and president of Digitel Corp.
"Robert McNamara coming out and changing his story is the height of hypocrisy," Tate says emotionally. "Maybe I'm still angry about that whole thing. I lost good people. What I saw with my own eyes over there was people that were being herded around and controlled by an invading force.
"When you look back and say it was all a mistake, a political joke, and we shouldn't have been there, and the fact that some 50,000 U.S. servicemen and women died, I choose to remember the fact that maybe we had an impact on those people. Obviously, I'm pretty disturbed as to how the government chose to finish that war, but what can one voice do."
Apparently, one person can do a lot in the United States as an entrepreneur. Tate started Digitel in 1983, "with no money and no customers," he says. He expects the company to record $22 million in revenues this year from its 13 U.S. offices. Digitel sells, installs and services Nortel and Siemens telephone systems to small and medium-size companies.
Tate moved Digitel into the data transmission side several years ago, accurately gauging his customers' needs. Early this year, the company purchased a Nortel Internet service provider based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., adding an important new service for customers. "There is a tremendous upside to the Internet operation," he says of the division named NeoNova. "The market is real hungry for Internet services."
A native of Dayton, Ohio, Tate cut his teeth at hometown NCR Corp. when he returned from Vietnam in 1970, using the industrial engineering degree he had earned from Ohio University before he was drafted by the Army in 1968. Shortly after marrying his wife Valerie in 1972, he was recruited by mini-conglomerate Questor in Toledo, Ohio, to work in its operational audit staff reviewing divisions such as Evenflo and Spaulding sporting goods.
Ten years of corporate relocations, however, took their toll. Assigned to Atlanta in 1982, the Tates, now with a three-year-old son, had lived in seven houses in that period. When they were asked to move again, Tate decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of starting his own company, admitting now that he really didn't know how to do it. He could see, however, the opportunity about to be created by the divestiture of the phone companies, and Digitel was born.
A former Ft. Benning-trained paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, Tate admits Vietnam is never far from his thoughts. "That year in Vietnam was the most memorable part of my life," he says. "There's hardly a week that goes by without thinking about it.
"It helps to put your life in perspective. When you've lived in a combat zone and watched people get hurt, get killed, it puts day-to-day business problems in perspective. I don't know that I would have been entirely different without that experience, but it's an experience that has made a major impact on me personally."
In Vietnam, Tate first served as a rifle platoon leader (as a sergeant) with the1st Infantry Division, 70 miles northeast of Saigon near the Michelin rubber plantation and Black Virgin Mountain. The mountain, he recalls, was secured all around its base by the 25th Infantry. The Green Berets controlled the summit. "And there were gooks all through the middle of it, with hospitals and bunkers and all kinds of stuff."
Although he says his platoon would usually spend seven days on patrol and one day in the relative safety of a fire base, he sidesteps any discussion about actual combat, except once to mention briefly how his company accidentally walked into a North Vietnamese Army base camp, where he earned one of his two Bronze Stars. "Those guys could hide pretty well," he adds with a smile.
In fact, he says, his four months with the 173rd at the end of his tour were more harrowing, even though he was stationed in a base camp. "In terms of fear, it was worse in the rear than it was out in the jungles. Every single night they would start dropping in those 122mm rockets. They would start at the helicopter pad and walk'em across the compound.
"Society takes war and violence for granted," Tate continues, finally letting his feelings overcome his tacit self-control. "Just to send our troops over some place because it's a macho thing to do is not right. And 30 years later you get a guy like McNamara saying, 'Oh, well I guess we were wrong,' and makes a bunch of money by writing a book about the fact that he sent people overseas to a bad war, a political mistake.
"I think the Kosovo situation was a disaster. What sense does it make to bomb a country into destruction if you're mad at one guy. I don't agree that we should turn a cold face to that kind of tyranny or that kind of brutality but, hell, that's not the right way to do it - destroy a country and then rebuild it when you're done. What's changed? It was a terrible decision.
"I do think about Vietnam a lot,"he continues. "I don't think it will ever be closed (for him). There were a lot of unpleasant things that happened. People got hurt. I had one of my guys die in my arms. I did everything I could. He just died. I don't think I'll ever be able to forget that."
Bryan Tate - Personal File
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