McNamara’s <i> Mea Culpa </i> Angers, Saddens Vietnam Veterans : War: Some say his comments insult those who lost their lives. One man bitterly questions why he didn’t speak up sooner.

By the time his tour of duty as an Army medic in Vietnam ended in 1966, Earl Clarkson says, he was “a dead zombie with a smile on.”

Coming home, he struggled with frequent bouts of depression. He tried to kill himself twice. He broke his wife’s nose in a spasm of uncontrollable rage. He had nightmares and flashbacks of Vietnam so vivid, he says, that he could “smell the monsoon rains.”

So when he read news accounts about how former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara had said the massive American military effort he orchestrated in Vietnam was a mistake, Clarkson’s reaction was swift and bitter.

“I just said to myself: ‘jerk.’ Tell McNamara to go before the wall and tell the wall that,” he said, referring to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where the names of more than 58,000 U.S. service members killed in Vietnam are inscribed. “Let the souls of American veterans hear him say, ‘You died for nothing.’ ”

Southern California veterans of the war--both American and Vietnamese--expressed anger, sadness and dismay last week at the nationally publicized mea culpa of McNamara, who pushed so hard for deeper U.S. involvement in the conflict in 1964 and 1965 that it was dubbed “McNamara’s war.”

McNamara’s comments--his first substantive remarks on the war in nearly 30 years--came in newspaper and TV interviews and in a memoir published last week. He brutally criticized himself and other top officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations--a dazzling circle whose members were once called “the best and the brightest”--for a series of blunders that led to a dramatic escalation of the war in the mid-1960s.

“We were wrong, terribly wrong,” said McNamara, who served as defense secretary from 1961 to 1968. “We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

Known in the public mind as an aloof prophet of efficiency who believed any problem was solvable, McNamara cited “11 major causes for our disaster in Vietnam,” including misjudging North Vietnam’s military capacity, underestimating the enemy’s nationalistic resolve to fight, relying too heavily on high-tech equipment and failing to tell the American public the truth about the war effort.

He also said that heavy American bombing never seriously impeded Hanoi’s ability to carry out the war and that he and other high-level officials never seriously debated whether U.S. military force could prop up the politically unstable South Vietnamese government.

In interviews last week, some veterans angrily said McNamara’s statements insult America’s war dead. Others strongly disagreed with him that the war was unwinnable. Still others wearily pointed out that he is now saying much the same thing as many historians, anti-war protesters and even veterans have said for years.

“The guys who were hip in the military knew we were being conned,” said Bob Alford, a former Army Ranger in Vietnam who lives in Tujunga. “He’s not saying anything the vet doesn’t understand.”

Dr. Co D.L. Pham, a former South Vietnamese army physician who fled his country after the Communist takeover in 1975 and lives in Westminster, said McNamara’s comments confirmed his belief that his own government could never defeat the north.

“We were so corrupt. We didn’t think we could win the war anyway,” Pham said. “We didn’t have a good cause.”

Ronald C. Lawrence Jr., a former machine-gunner in Vietnam, strongly disagreed with McNamara’s assertion that victory in the war was unattainable. American troops could have won if Washington hadn’t tied their hands, he insisted.

The North Vietnamese “had a lot of willpower to win, but I think we had a better fighting force,” said Lawrence, 51, of Lancaster, who must use a wheelchair and crutches most of the time because of a severe back injury he suffered falling out of a hovering helicopter.

“We never lost a battle,” he said. “There were times we got overrun, but we never lost a battle.”

But other veterans concurred with McNamara that the United States should have pulled out of Vietnam as early as 1963 rather than escalate the war year after year with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. Some veterans also agreed with his assertion that no crucial American interests were at stake and that the “domino theory”--which held that all of Southeast Asia would fall to Communist forces without U.S. intervention--was an exaggeration.

“I think they should have tried to achieve a diplomatic treaty rather than . . . fight,” said Bill Relph of Encino, a former Marine rifleman who now works as an electronics production supervisor.

Another ex-Marine, Jon Carnes of Tujunga, compared American intervention in Vietnam to a burglar breaking into a home, saying the invasion provoked even stronger resistance by the North Vietnamese.

Tony Lam, a Vietnam native who once helped U.S. forces interrogate Viet Cong prisoners, expressed disgust with McNamara for not voicing his opposition to the war earlier and more forcefully. McNamara left the Pentagon in 1968 after breaking with President Lyndon B. Johnson over the war and urging Johnson to seek a diplomatic solution.

“He should be held accountable for what happened,” said Lam, now a restaurant owner and Westminster city councilman. “If he thought they were making a mistake, he should have resigned (at) the very beginning of the war.”

Clarkson, the ex-medic, said he had no sympathy for the 78-year-old McNamara, who wept during a television interview while discussing his belated public turnaround on the war.

“To me, this makes him seem more cold and inhumane,” said Clarkson, who added that he was diagnosed in January with post-traumatic stress disorder, a set of psychological problems often associated with combat.

“He’s an old man getting ready to die, and he’s ready to make amends. Well . . . go to the home of a mother who lost a son in the war and make amends. How can he make amends? It’s like he pulled the trigger.”