For Utahn Craig Simper, only the particulars were different.
As a young enlisted airman in Vietnam, he was assigned to teach South Vietnamese soldiers the basics of military weather operations - a key factor pertaining to air power and artillery as that army prepared to take on its northern rival in the years after a planned American withdrawal.
Nearly 40 years later, as a 59-year-old Judge Advocate General Corps officer, Simper was sent to help Iraq's fledgling government secure its judicial footing - a paramount necessity if American forces are ever to leave that nation with any hope of long-term stability.
America's Vietnamization experience ended as Saigon fell to the northern communist army in 1975. Iraq's future remains undecided, though Simper describes a government with much to resolve if it is to avoid a similar fate.
The Brigham City resident's investigations into Iraq's juvenile and adult prisons left him sickened and saddened by what he found - deplorable conditions, rampant abuse, torture and, he says, murder. His work helping Iraqis secure legitimate warrants for key leaders in the Mahdi Army, a militia led by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, was mostly "symbolic" he said.
"Now when they go in and kill these guys, they can lay a warrant on their dead bodies and say, 'this was a police action,' " said Simper, a member of Hill Air Force Base's 419th Fighter Wing. "For the most part, it's still too dangerous to go in and try to arrest them."
But he has hopes. His tour of duty in Iraq, which ended in May, coincided with a dramatic drop in violence in many parts of that country.
"I really did see it in a very microcosmic sense," Simper said, though he acknowledged the dangers "still seemed significant" to those who travel outside the brooding concrete blast walls that protect American troops at forward operating bases in most parts of Iraq.
Reports he helped write on abuses in Iraq's prisons have been forwarded on to senior government officials there, though Simper said he doesn't know what actions will be taken.
Now back to work as general counsel for Utah State University in Logan, Simper said he's still trying to readjust to the serious - albeit less perilous - demands of his civilian job.
He will retire in September as a member of a select group of Air Force airmen who went to war in both Vietnam and Iraq.
Air Force personnel officials say only a few hundred members of their 327,000-strong service branch served during both periods of war, and fewer of those actually saw duty in both conflicts.
The distinction is uncommon in the other service branches as well, though the Air Force and other service branches say it is a bit more common among reservists.
But a spokesman for the largest reserve force in the state, the Utah National Guard, said it's still a very uncommon distinction.
"Now that it has been more than 40 years since Vietnam, current Guard members who have served combat tours in both Southeast Asia and Iraq are quite rare," said Maj. Hank McIntire.
McIntire said he was aware of only two service members in the Utah guard who had earned deployment ribbons in Vietnam and either of the two current conflicts.
mlaplante@sltrib.com
