When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
--John Keats
I was just going to give you the first two lines of that fine sonnet by John Keats and then felt that would be unfair...to Keats and to you.
At some point, at some time in my life, for some reason, my existence stopped revolving around Vietnam. I don’t know exactly when and, quite certainly, Vietnam has not receded into some quiet place, some framed photo to place on the corner of a table and watch while people pick it up and nod. Vietnam remains a visceral part of me and, I suspect, everyone who went there.
But it is no longer the central part of who I am. I keep thinking that some day in what I hope is some remote future, the headline of my obituary will read: VIETNAM VETERAN AND POET DIES. That’s okay if that’s how I defined my life, but it really isn’t. Somewhere in that brief notice, I would hope some acknowledgment might be made of my service and even of my later opposition to the war; I just don’t think it’s central to my life. This is more than a little morbid and I do apologize for that.
It’s just that I don’t believe I fit the image that headline would foist upon me. You see, we all do have a stereotypical image floating back in the back of our minds that the words Vietnam veteran conjure up. Right now: grab a pencil (or use your computer) and write ten words or phrases that come to mind when you hear those two words! Well, “old” might be one of them. "Bitter" could well be another. Perhaps, "mercurial and violent."
I’ve been back from Vietnam, and I do mean all the way back, since 1968, a little more than 44 years ago. Vietnam was one year in my life, marching against the war was another six years. So, seven whole years thinking about the war in some way or another. And a few more, cumulatively, writing about it.
Part of this is my own damned fault. I have written about the war since I started writing poems, essays and short stories. I don't regret that. I once wrote a really, really bad novel about it, A Position at the Rear. Okay, I’ve read worse, but it was still pretty bad. Next month even, I have an essay coming out in Voices de la Luna about the death penalty in Texas and how we in Texas are all responsible for the close to 250 killings perpetrated by Rick Perry and his cronies and the other killings by his predecessors. You know what I’m talking about: the killings applauded by the Tea Party crowd. In the essay I link those killings and the sense of group responsibility to the death of a young man I located in the hills surrounding Dak To, Kon-Tum Province, Viet-Nam, Republic of. So, yes, I am somewhat responsible.
But I have written almost as much about the brutal killing of James Byrd, Jr., and last week’s execution of one of his killers, Lawrence Russell Brewer. And I have written about a pond in Africa and nature essays and poems about the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas and the area around Wakulla Beach, Florida. Lately, I have been focusing a lot of attention on completing a book about the Old Spanish Trail Highway. It became US Highways 90 and 80—way back in 1927. So, why focus on one part of a person’s life? Aside from all that, I have had a long (and continuing) career as a librarian and English teacher, and as publisher of more than 125 books from Pecan Grove Press. I have recently celebrated the 38th anniversary of my marriage with Susan and have a son, 31-years old, who is a successful computer programmer/developer.
Uh, believe me, I am okay. Just thinking, reflecting. I've been writing this kind of stuff for forty years!
I was profiled in the San Antonio Express-News a few years ago. The writer was supposed to write about the 25th anniversary of Pecan Grove Press but focused pretty much on me instead. The phrase I kind of objected to was “crusty veteran.” Well, yes, I might be a little crusty and I am a veteran, but I preferred the rest of the article. Marian Haddad wrote a really nice profile of me for The Texas Observer a few years ago and did mention my Viet-Nam year but focused on other things I consider more important. She started with Reflections from Pete’s Pond (in Botswana, Africa) instead of with the Viet-Nam material. Marian referred to me as a “literary icon” of San Antonio and I had a plaque made for my office door: “H. Palmer Hall: Unknown Icon.” It's still mounted there.
Well, I really don’t care all that much. And I am, in fact, fairly proud of what I've written about that tragic little country and our part in its tragedy though I haven't made any of the anthologies of contemporary war poetry or, even, Viet-Nam War poetry. I won’t be around to read whatever is written anyway.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam (#47, the last at last)
Afterwards
Eventually, the war ended. For most Americans, that end came in 1973 when almost all of the American military packed up and went home. For others, it ended in 1975. If you are old enough, you’ll remember those striking pictures of South Vietnamese citizens trying to get into the American Embassy to make their escape before northern tanks rolled into the city or of South Vietnamese helicopters being pushed off the decks of American ships. However you look at it, whether you were for the war or opposed to it, the damned thing ended badly.
As I watched the end of this very televised war, I was more sad than happy. The students my friends and I had taught at that little language school sponsored by the Air Force were still in Pleiku seven years after the classes ended with the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I have often wondered what happened to them. I suspect most did get jobs with the U.S. Air Force Base in Pleiku. And I suspect most were sent to re-education camps after the South fell. Son, Le-Linh, Xuan…all should have been offered relocation in the United States. We left much too quickly, without an exit strategy for our friends: not that we should have left later, but that we should have prepared sooner. The Green Berets have long felt that we deserted our Montagnard helpers though many of the Hmong have come to the United States. Many of the Vietnamese also found their way here, to our country, the Land of the Big PX, boat people and others. But too many were left behind and the victors did not treat them well.
Time passes and, off and on, I read about the Vietnamese immigrants to our country. Sometimes, because I live not far from the Gulf Coast, I read about Vietnamese shrimpers and the problems they have had with Texas- and Louisiana-bred shrimpers. Sometimes those problems have involved gunshots and shrimp boat burnings. I read about California’s attempts to cut back on the number of Asiatic students admitted to the University system because they out-perform “American” students though they are themselves “Americans.”
Our war keeps on getting fought.
And I still recall, quite clearly, the Vietnamese hooch maids we had, squatting in front of large metal pans to wash our clothes and shine our boots. They are speaking in Vietnamese, high, lilting, musical sentences. They do not seem unhappy for the most part, but how can we tell. I remember the two bar girls named Xuan in our EM/NCO Club, serving drinks, wiping the bar, men playing grab-ass with them.
I remember the whores of Pleiku, out in the streets, chatting with big men who carried M-16s. They’re like Maggie in the Stephen Crane story, only, unlike her, they spent their time going along to get along, to survive. They, too, seemed happy enough. But I also remember the children, so resolute, laughing for the most part as older men with stumps instead of legs wheeled by, palms open, begging, children who sometimes forgot to be happy.
War. Our war. We have to wonder why. And there is no real answer; instead, we get a multiplicity of attempted answers: standing up to the Commies, protecting American interests, domino theories, SEATO treaties, invitations, whatever. There is no answer, no good reason.
We don’t even know when it really started though everyone has an opinion. Americans were there in the 1950s, spooks mostly—read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955). Read The LBJ Brigade by William Wilson (1967). Watch almost any of the films from Go Tell the Spartans to whatever Vietnam War film is most recent. No answers, only questions. Take a trip up the MeKong River with Apocalypse Now and get into that Heart of Darkness at the end.
Questions. Nothing else. Hemingway's great NADA.
We had a little war and hundreds of thousands of people died. It would be pretty, as Hem might say, to think there was some good reason.
That’s it. Het roi! Hoa Binh.
Eventually, the war ended. For most Americans, that end came in 1973 when almost all of the American military packed up and went home. For others, it ended in 1975. If you are old enough, you’ll remember those striking pictures of South Vietnamese citizens trying to get into the American Embassy to make their escape before northern tanks rolled into the city or of South Vietnamese helicopters being pushed off the decks of American ships. However you look at it, whether you were for the war or opposed to it, the damned thing ended badly.
As I watched the end of this very televised war, I was more sad than happy. The students my friends and I had taught at that little language school sponsored by the Air Force were still in Pleiku seven years after the classes ended with the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I have often wondered what happened to them. I suspect most did get jobs with the U.S. Air Force Base in Pleiku. And I suspect most were sent to re-education camps after the South fell. Son, Le-Linh, Xuan…all should have been offered relocation in the United States. We left much too quickly, without an exit strategy for our friends: not that we should have left later, but that we should have prepared sooner. The Green Berets have long felt that we deserted our Montagnard helpers though many of the Hmong have come to the United States. Many of the Vietnamese also found their way here, to our country, the Land of the Big PX, boat people and others. But too many were left behind and the victors did not treat them well.
Time passes and, off and on, I read about the Vietnamese immigrants to our country. Sometimes, because I live not far from the Gulf Coast, I read about Vietnamese shrimpers and the problems they have had with Texas- and Louisiana-bred shrimpers. Sometimes those problems have involved gunshots and shrimp boat burnings. I read about California’s attempts to cut back on the number of Asiatic students admitted to the University system because they out-perform “American” students though they are themselves “Americans.”
Our war keeps on getting fought.
And I still recall, quite clearly, the Vietnamese hooch maids we had, squatting in front of large metal pans to wash our clothes and shine our boots. They are speaking in Vietnamese, high, lilting, musical sentences. They do not seem unhappy for the most part, but how can we tell. I remember the two bar girls named Xuan in our EM/NCO Club, serving drinks, wiping the bar, men playing grab-ass with them.
I remember the whores of Pleiku, out in the streets, chatting with big men who carried M-16s. They’re like Maggie in the Stephen Crane story, only, unlike her, they spent their time going along to get along, to survive. They, too, seemed happy enough. But I also remember the children, so resolute, laughing for the most part as older men with stumps instead of legs wheeled by, palms open, begging, children who sometimes forgot to be happy.
War. Our war. We have to wonder why. And there is no real answer; instead, we get a multiplicity of attempted answers: standing up to the Commies, protecting American interests, domino theories, SEATO treaties, invitations, whatever. There is no answer, no good reason.
We don’t even know when it really started though everyone has an opinion. Americans were there in the 1950s, spooks mostly—read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955). Read The LBJ Brigade by William Wilson (1967). Watch almost any of the films from Go Tell the Spartans to whatever Vietnam War film is most recent. No answers, only questions. Take a trip up the MeKong River with Apocalypse Now and get into that Heart of Darkness at the end.
Questions. Nothing else. Hemingway's great NADA.
We had a little war and hundreds of thousands of people died. It would be pretty, as Hem might say, to think there was some good reason.
That’s it. Het roi! Hoa Binh.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam (#46)
On the Damned German Language!
In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
-Mark Twain, Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878
Vietnam is the war that never ends for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. We lived it; we breathed it. We participated in it and marched against it. We saw it every evening on the news and heard about it on the radio. Some of our friends died there and some burned their draft cards as others went to Canada or Sweden. Michael Herr, in Dispatches, wrote “Vietnam, Vietnam. We’ve all been there.” He was wrong, but I know what he meant. Vietnam colored our lives whether we spent a tour of duty or more there or not.
A large number of us both went to Vietnam as soldiers, Marines, whatever, and came back and protested against the very war we were a part of. Some of us who went feel we betrayed them. I don’t think we did. It is not a betrayal to come to the realization that a thing is wrong, even a thing that we became a part of, and then shout out loud that it was wrong. I think we have a moral responsibility to do so.
At any rate, in the summer of 1973, I enrolled in a quasi-submersion intensive German class. I’ve written about it before in an essay called “The Woman of My German Summer” (published in Eclectica and revised for The Texas Review), an essay probably much more interesting than this blog entry since it was filled with romance and loss, learning the vocabulary of German love while staying up late at night in bed and using the point and touch system. What a fine way to study a foreign language! Neither of us knew German when we started and both of us were pretty good when we finished the course. Fifteen hours of language credit for one summer class and we earned every bit of it. I am no longer very good at what Sam Clemens called the “awful German language,” just as I am no longer a good Vietnamese translator/interpreter.
Vietnamese Years Later
I did, at one time, dream occasionally in Vietnamese but that was decades ago. I dreamed, once, that I was moving from one place to another in Austin and had a U-Haul trailer fastened with bungee cords to the back of my VW convertible. As I drove through the streets of Austin, the trailer kept stretching farther and farther behind me. As if it had a mind of its own, it veered from right to left, lept curbs, over-turned people’s propane barbecue pits, took down mail boxes. And then we, the trailer and I, were driving down Highway 14 in Pleiku and over-turning vats of nuoc mam, chased by hordes of Vietnamese women with betel nut-blackened teeth. And then we, turned west onto Highway 19 and I careered on up the hill, the trailer setting off land mines. You should be aware that not once while I was stationed in that area did I ever even see a mine explode! I pulled into Engineer Hill and woke up.
Another time, in San Antonio, I was able to use what Vietnamese I still retained. I was in a Stop ‘n Go (Shamrock gasoline) when the San Antonio Police brought an old woman into the store. She was lost and they were trying to find out where she lived. Bright guy that I was at the time (I make no such claims now), I realized that she was muttering in Vietnamese. I introduced myself to her with words much like these: “Ten toi la Hoang…toi giup do ba duoc?” Okay, no tones because I don’t know how to make them here. I told her (I think) “My name is Hoang.” (That was my Vietnamese name back in Language school and in 1967-1968 in Viet-Nam.) “Can I help you?” I suspect both the tomes I used and the words were not correct, but she stopped muttering and looked up at me. “Ba song o dau?” I asked. (“Where do you live?”) She told me…and I told the police. They took here there. That is, I think, the last time I ever used Vietnamese seriously though I have said Hello,. how are you? in Vietnamese to a few of our international students from Vietnam.
Back to the Subject
I am very much off the subject of this blog. Back to Germany! Back to language study. One afternoon, the students growing restless, student activists on campus called for another march down Guadalupe street. Our German class was meeting that day and one of the team of TAs teaching the class started mouthing off about the United States. We were going to cancel the afternoon session (class met from 9 – 12 and from 1 -4 every day) so we could all march against the imperialism that was American foreign policy. That was too much for me. A German national lecturing us (five of us were graduate students, two of us Vietnam veterans) about imperialism!!! I made a few mild references to the Franco/Prussian War, to WWI and to WWII, and to the generosity of the Marshall Plan that had helped get his country on its feet and him to the U.S.A. to criticize the U.S.A.
I would not have done that with Frau Hilda Schucking, a fifty-year-old TA who frequently talked to me about the Lost Generation of young German men from WWII and how it had affected young German women like her: lack of young men when she was coming of age. That afternoon, somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to him, I caught up with Gerhardt on the march and shook his hand, said We’ll just have to disagree about some things.
That march was somehow not as memorable for me as the march that ended up as a sleep-over under the UT Tower when a young woman and I zipped out sleeping bags together and lay down under the stars while someone in the Tower played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the carillon.
In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
-Mark Twain, Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878
Vietnam is the war that never ends for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. We lived it; we breathed it. We participated in it and marched against it. We saw it every evening on the news and heard about it on the radio. Some of our friends died there and some burned their draft cards as others went to Canada or Sweden. Michael Herr, in Dispatches, wrote “Vietnam, Vietnam. We’ve all been there.” He was wrong, but I know what he meant. Vietnam colored our lives whether we spent a tour of duty or more there or not.
A large number of us both went to Vietnam as soldiers, Marines, whatever, and came back and protested against the very war we were a part of. Some of us who went feel we betrayed them. I don’t think we did. It is not a betrayal to come to the realization that a thing is wrong, even a thing that we became a part of, and then shout out loud that it was wrong. I think we have a moral responsibility to do so.
At any rate, in the summer of 1973, I enrolled in a quasi-submersion intensive German class. I’ve written about it before in an essay called “The Woman of My German Summer” (published in Eclectica and revised for The Texas Review), an essay probably much more interesting than this blog entry since it was filled with romance and loss, learning the vocabulary of German love while staying up late at night in bed and using the point and touch system. What a fine way to study a foreign language! Neither of us knew German when we started and both of us were pretty good when we finished the course. Fifteen hours of language credit for one summer class and we earned every bit of it. I am no longer very good at what Sam Clemens called the “awful German language,” just as I am no longer a good Vietnamese translator/interpreter.
Vietnamese Years Later
I did, at one time, dream occasionally in Vietnamese but that was decades ago. I dreamed, once, that I was moving from one place to another in Austin and had a U-Haul trailer fastened with bungee cords to the back of my VW convertible. As I drove through the streets of Austin, the trailer kept stretching farther and farther behind me. As if it had a mind of its own, it veered from right to left, lept curbs, over-turned people’s propane barbecue pits, took down mail boxes. And then we, the trailer and I, were driving down Highway 14 in Pleiku and over-turning vats of nuoc mam, chased by hordes of Vietnamese women with betel nut-blackened teeth. And then we, turned west onto Highway 19 and I careered on up the hill, the trailer setting off land mines. You should be aware that not once while I was stationed in that area did I ever even see a mine explode! I pulled into Engineer Hill and woke up.
Another time, in San Antonio, I was able to use what Vietnamese I still retained. I was in a Stop ‘n Go (Shamrock gasoline) when the San Antonio Police brought an old woman into the store. She was lost and they were trying to find out where she lived. Bright guy that I was at the time (I make no such claims now), I realized that she was muttering in Vietnamese. I introduced myself to her with words much like these: “Ten toi la Hoang…toi giup do ba duoc?” Okay, no tones because I don’t know how to make them here. I told her (I think) “My name is Hoang.” (That was my Vietnamese name back in Language school and in 1967-1968 in Viet-Nam.) “Can I help you?” I suspect both the tomes I used and the words were not correct, but she stopped muttering and looked up at me. “Ba song o dau?” I asked. (“Where do you live?”) She told me…and I told the police. They took here there. That is, I think, the last time I ever used Vietnamese seriously though I have said Hello,. how are you? in Vietnamese to a few of our international students from Vietnam.
Back to the Subject
I am very much off the subject of this blog. Back to Germany! Back to language study. One afternoon, the students growing restless, student activists on campus called for another march down Guadalupe street. Our German class was meeting that day and one of the team of TAs teaching the class started mouthing off about the United States. We were going to cancel the afternoon session (class met from 9 – 12 and from 1 -4 every day) so we could all march against the imperialism that was American foreign policy. That was too much for me. A German national lecturing us (five of us were graduate students, two of us Vietnam veterans) about imperialism!!! I made a few mild references to the Franco/Prussian War, to WWI and to WWII, and to the generosity of the Marshall Plan that had helped get his country on its feet and him to the U.S.A. to criticize the U.S.A.
I would not have done that with Frau Hilda Schucking, a fifty-year-old TA who frequently talked to me about the Lost Generation of young German men from WWII and how it had affected young German women like her: lack of young men when she was coming of age. That afternoon, somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to him, I caught up with Gerhardt on the march and shook his hand, said We’ll just have to disagree about some things.
That march was somehow not as memorable for me as the march that ended up as a sleep-over under the UT Tower when a young woman and I zipped out sleeping bags together and lay down under the stars while someone in the Tower played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the carillon.
Friday, July 15, 2011
A Few Notes about Vietnam #45
The Case of the Missing Gas Mask
Right off the bat, you need to realize that there was a principle involved. I would not have threatened my getting out of the Army on time for anything less than taking a principled (if somewhat trivial) stand about something. It all started on about December 12, 1969:
I was out-processing (wonderfully awful hyphenated word) and the supply sergeant (an overweight lifer who had, for some reason I cannot fully understand, never really liked me, grinned and said, “Your gas mask is missing.” Now, the sergeant did not say “gas mask,” but used military nomenclature that I cannot recall, something like “protective face gear, AR-M-40pcuwhatever.” I said I had not seen it, that we didn’t keep the gas masks but that they were stored in his supply room at all times.
While these were not his exact words (they would have been much more colorful and I wish I could recall them), he said something like, “Specialist Shit-for-Brains, you owe your fucking Uncle Sam $27.95 for losing your protective face gear.” I informed the sergeant that I had no intention of paying for a piece of equipment that had never been in my possession. He glared at me and I left.
That same afternoon, I got permission from the boy captain to visit the Judge Advocates Court and consult with a military attorney. One of the truly great things about military attorneys at the lower ranks is that most of them dislike the military viscerally. They shouldn’t since most of them had their law school expenses paid for by the military but they still resent having to put in some years of service to repay their tuition and expenses. Some are there because they couldn’t pass state bar exams and the Army is the only place they can practice law, but that’s another story and is not mine to tell.
I lucked into finding an Army attorney who wanted to use me to get back at the Army. Mind you, now, I had nothing against the Army (he said with a straight face), just did not want to pay for something I had never seen. My attorney advised me to ask for a “report of survey” of the company. A “report of survey” [RoS] is a process that requires the company to search diligently to try to find missing equipment. That took two days and my ETS of December 19th was getting closer. The RoS did not turn up the missing gas mask. The supply sergeant said, Pay, asshole.” I said no.
I went back to my attorney. He laughed and said, ”Now request a RoS for the battalion.” I did. Nothing. The whole regiment! Nothing. My attorney told me that, eventually, we would have the entire 1st Army, headquartered at Fort Meade, searching for one $27.95 gas mask. A day before my ETS, the boy captain, evidently pressured by superior offices (and who was not?) informed me that an anonymous person had paid for the missing mask and that I was free to leave the Army the next day. I almost regretted having to tell my attorney that that had happened. He had calculated the man hours we had cost the Army and they were enormous. Much more than $27.95.
The next morning, I packed up my VW convertible and drove home to Texas.
Het roi! No more about the army. One more post about peace marches.
Right off the bat, you need to realize that there was a principle involved. I would not have threatened my getting out of the Army on time for anything less than taking a principled (if somewhat trivial) stand about something. It all started on about December 12, 1969:
I was out-processing (wonderfully awful hyphenated word) and the supply sergeant (an overweight lifer who had, for some reason I cannot fully understand, never really liked me, grinned and said, “Your gas mask is missing.” Now, the sergeant did not say “gas mask,” but used military nomenclature that I cannot recall, something like “protective face gear, AR-M-40pcuwhatever.” I said I had not seen it, that we didn’t keep the gas masks but that they were stored in his supply room at all times.
While these were not his exact words (they would have been much more colorful and I wish I could recall them), he said something like, “Specialist Shit-for-Brains, you owe your fucking Uncle Sam $27.95 for losing your protective face gear.” I informed the sergeant that I had no intention of paying for a piece of equipment that had never been in my possession. He glared at me and I left.
That same afternoon, I got permission from the boy captain to visit the Judge Advocates Court and consult with a military attorney. One of the truly great things about military attorneys at the lower ranks is that most of them dislike the military viscerally. They shouldn’t since most of them had their law school expenses paid for by the military but they still resent having to put in some years of service to repay their tuition and expenses. Some are there because they couldn’t pass state bar exams and the Army is the only place they can practice law, but that’s another story and is not mine to tell.
I lucked into finding an Army attorney who wanted to use me to get back at the Army. Mind you, now, I had nothing against the Army (he said with a straight face), just did not want to pay for something I had never seen. My attorney advised me to ask for a “report of survey” of the company. A “report of survey” [RoS] is a process that requires the company to search diligently to try to find missing equipment. That took two days and my ETS of December 19th was getting closer. The RoS did not turn up the missing gas mask. The supply sergeant said, Pay, asshole.” I said no.
I went back to my attorney. He laughed and said, ”Now request a RoS for the battalion.” I did. Nothing. The whole regiment! Nothing. My attorney told me that, eventually, we would have the entire 1st Army, headquartered at Fort Meade, searching for one $27.95 gas mask. A day before my ETS, the boy captain, evidently pressured by superior offices (and who was not?) informed me that an anonymous person had paid for the missing mask and that I was free to leave the Army the next day. I almost regretted having to tell my attorney that that had happened. He had calculated the man hours we had cost the Army and they were enormous. Much more than $27.95.
The next morning, I packed up my VW convertible and drove home to Texas.
Het roi! No more about the army. One more post about peace marches.
Friday, June 24, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam #44
There's Something Happening Here
On May 4th, 1970, my first semester in the doctoral program at the University of Texas in Austin, I was so out of everything having to do with Vietnam, with the National Security Agency, with the protest movement. I was living in the moment, taking classes, meeting young women, growing my hair long, reading Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and poets like John Berryman, Richard Wilbur and, well, a whole new/old world was opening in front of me. And then on May 4th, the world of the past few years crashed back into me. The news rocketed around the campus…four students killed, nine wounded…Ohio National Guard…the students, some of them at least, protesting the Cambodian incursion. [See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]
I had not joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War though I had actually received a written invitation to become a charter member. All of us who had signed that petition that had appeared in the New York Time the previous semester, damn, I was already thinking in terms of semesters!, had received charter member invitations. I decided not to join. I was proud to have marched with GI’s United Against the War and was now a doctoral student, a path I had started down when I had been drafted four years earlier. I didn’t want to join any veterans groups, not VVA, not VFW, none of them. I was a student and that was enough.
But the day after the Kent State killings, and I do not really care who was at fault, the Guard should not have fired, I joined thousands of other students from the University of Texas and marched in Austin, Texas. We finally squatted on “The Drag,” Guadalupe Street in front of the University of Texas. Austin police had snipers on the tops of the building—it had not been that many months since Charles Whitman has killed people from the UT Tower, which we could see from the street. Now, another sniper was on top of the Tower. That was the only demonstration I ever marched in where I was tear-gassed.
That night, we gathered together again under the Tower for an all night sleep-in. Those of us who taught either canceled our classes the next day or had what we liked to call a “teach-in.” I used my class that day to introduce anti-war poems by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. A few years later, I would have included Seigfried Sassoon, Wildred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg; several years later and I would have added Bruce Weigl, W. D. Ehrhart, and Yusef Komuyakaa. That night was beautiful: crisp, cool. I zipped my sleeping bag together with my then girlfriend’s, and someone in the tower played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the great carillon. Hundreds of us sang the songs. The bell tones drifted out over Austin until someone in authority shut it down.
The next morning, we marched again. And then, things settled down. We went back to our classes, to our studies, to other things we were passionate about. Moments in time, memories. And yet four people even younger than I was then, four undergraduates, cannot look back on those days. And the Guardsmen who fired, I wonder if they can ever forget or even want to do so. Ten days later, two other students were killed, this time by the police, at Jackson State University. When I think of these things, I’m always reminded of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:
There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
On May 4th, 1970, my first semester in the doctoral program at the University of Texas in Austin, I was so out of everything having to do with Vietnam, with the National Security Agency, with the protest movement. I was living in the moment, taking classes, meeting young women, growing my hair long, reading Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and poets like John Berryman, Richard Wilbur and, well, a whole new/old world was opening in front of me. And then on May 4th, the world of the past few years crashed back into me. The news rocketed around the campus…four students killed, nine wounded…Ohio National Guard…the students, some of them at least, protesting the Cambodian incursion. [See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]
I had not joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War though I had actually received a written invitation to become a charter member. All of us who had signed that petition that had appeared in the New York Time the previous semester, damn, I was already thinking in terms of semesters!, had received charter member invitations. I decided not to join. I was proud to have marched with GI’s United Against the War and was now a doctoral student, a path I had started down when I had been drafted four years earlier. I didn’t want to join any veterans groups, not VVA, not VFW, none of them. I was a student and that was enough.
But the day after the Kent State killings, and I do not really care who was at fault, the Guard should not have fired, I joined thousands of other students from the University of Texas and marched in Austin, Texas. We finally squatted on “The Drag,” Guadalupe Street in front of the University of Texas. Austin police had snipers on the tops of the building—it had not been that many months since Charles Whitman has killed people from the UT Tower, which we could see from the street. Now, another sniper was on top of the Tower. That was the only demonstration I ever marched in where I was tear-gassed.
That night, we gathered together again under the Tower for an all night sleep-in. Those of us who taught either canceled our classes the next day or had what we liked to call a “teach-in.” I used my class that day to introduce anti-war poems by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. A few years later, I would have included Seigfried Sassoon, Wildred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg; several years later and I would have added Bruce Weigl, W. D. Ehrhart, and Yusef Komuyakaa. That night was beautiful: crisp, cool. I zipped my sleeping bag together with my then girlfriend’s, and someone in the tower played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the great carillon. Hundreds of us sang the songs. The bell tones drifted out over Austin until someone in authority shut it down.
The next morning, we marched again. And then, things settled down. We went back to our classes, to our studies, to other things we were passionate about. Moments in time, memories. And yet four people even younger than I was then, four undergraduates, cannot look back on those days. And the Guardsmen who fired, I wonder if they can ever forget or even want to do so. Ten days later, two other students were killed, this time by the police, at Jackson State University. When I think of these things, I’m always reminded of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:
There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam #43
I Get Kicked out of the National Security Agency (Gently)
I should, I suppose, mention the huge march again. . .the one on November 15, 1969.
More than 500,000 of us marched through the streets of D.C. and gathered on the national mall to protest the war. As I have said, I found the October march more significant, almost spiritual in its quiet solemnity, but the November march was impressive for sheer numbers.
Finally, people seemed to get it. Please, don’t get me wrong. among the more arrogant things I always disliked about the “Peace Movement” was all the verbiage by 18- to 20-year-olds about the necessity to “educate the people.” The people were really no less educated than you or I; they merely disagreed with us. Well, that’s what I thought in the late 60s and early 70s, but the rise of the so-called “Tea Party” movement and the far right wing-nuts, of the "birthers" and "Fourteenthers" might mean that I should reassess my thoughts about that. In spite of that, I will always look back on both of those marches as important and memorable moments in my life.
Part of the sheer joy of those marches for me might have been that I knew I was getting out of the Army before Christmas and had been readmitted to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin for the spring semester. Part of it was having all of that to share with Linda Casson, being young and in love, marching against the war and making love: the sixties! Judy Collins was wrong: I was in the sixties and remember it all. I was living in D.C., commuting to work like a regular working stiff, enjoying life, living in my twenties. Nothing could be better! Elena Poniatowska, the great Mexican journalist and writer was absolutely correct: Doing what you believe in, especially if it is tinged with some modicum of danger (and love), makes you become more alive, more aware of everything around you, casts some small amount of light in dark corners.
And then: Monday morning after the march, I returned to work at the National Security Agency, the quintessential alphabet agency, the NSA, The Building, and Don and I were stopped from entering by the Marine guards. Why? I had not read The New York Times on the morning of November 19, 1969, but I was in the newspaper.
If you’ve read earlier entries in this blog, you may remember that the previous summer my friend Don Mohr and I had driven in my little VW convertible down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to participate in a march against the war sponsored by GIs United Against the War. My friend Allen Hallmark was one of the organizers and had invited us down. While there, we had both signed a petition of active duty soldiers opposed to the war and demanding that it stop NOW!
The actual petition was divided into military posts by alphabet and then by names of active duty troops, alphabetically. Even NSA was sharp enough to go down the list to Fort Meade and pick out the two names there. Let me say right now what I said in my first chapbook of prose and poems, From the Periphery, that my name on that petition remains one of the publications I am most proud of.
We were taken from The Building to a small cubicle (I forget where on post) and interviewed (no enhanced interrogation measures were used) by an officer from CID. It was actually fairly pleasant; perhaps because the ACLU had made it public that they would defend any of the petitioners against anything that might affect our futures (e.g., withdrawal of our security clearances, felony charges, etc.). So, we were asked if we could give the names of other employees of NSA who had participated in the anti-war movement. We both, in different rooms, said "no" but that we would ask them if it was okay. A bunch of people who had participated wanted to be named; some who had never participated wanted to be named. I decided not to name anyone.
What happened as a result of all this was that I was denied access to cryptographic information and access to The Building, but I did (thanks to the ACLU) retain my security clearance. For the remainder of my stay in the U.S. Army, I defended our rights to freedom of speech and petition by painting rocks blue and white around the company area and filling in for the clerk/typist when he was on leave.
I was at the time of all this, 27 years old. The captain commanding “C” Company, ASA, Ft. Meade, was 24. I have forgotten his name. But the First Sergeant was a very nice guy named Zeigler. Sergeant Zeigler was approaching his twentieth year in the Army and retirement and asked me all the time if I thought he could find a job in the private sector. I remembered my days working at Sear and told him they hired a lot of retired Army sergeants but recommended that he use the GI Bill and go to college. he was a bright guy (unlike some of my drill instructor sergeants at Ft. Leonard Wood). Odd, I thought, to be giving advice to a man in his forties.
I found the captain somewhat disturbing as he frequently asked me what these kids were so upset about these days and why we were marching and demonstrating. I mean, he was younger than me!!!
My next blog entry is going to be about what everyone except the Army called “gas masks.” They called them something like “protective masks, OD” or some other nomenclature.
I should, I suppose, mention the huge march again. . .the one on November 15, 1969.
More than 500,000 of us marched through the streets of D.C. and gathered on the national mall to protest the war. As I have said, I found the October march more significant, almost spiritual in its quiet solemnity, but the November march was impressive for sheer numbers.
Finally, people seemed to get it. Please, don’t get me wrong. among the more arrogant things I always disliked about the “Peace Movement” was all the verbiage by 18- to 20-year-olds about the necessity to “educate the people.” The people were really no less educated than you or I; they merely disagreed with us. Well, that’s what I thought in the late 60s and early 70s, but the rise of the so-called “Tea Party” movement and the far right wing-nuts, of the "birthers" and "Fourteenthers" might mean that I should reassess my thoughts about that. In spite of that, I will always look back on both of those marches as important and memorable moments in my life.
Part of the sheer joy of those marches for me might have been that I knew I was getting out of the Army before Christmas and had been readmitted to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin for the spring semester. Part of it was having all of that to share with Linda Casson, being young and in love, marching against the war and making love: the sixties! Judy Collins was wrong: I was in the sixties and remember it all. I was living in D.C., commuting to work like a regular working stiff, enjoying life, living in my twenties. Nothing could be better! Elena Poniatowska, the great Mexican journalist and writer was absolutely correct: Doing what you believe in, especially if it is tinged with some modicum of danger (and love), makes you become more alive, more aware of everything around you, casts some small amount of light in dark corners.
And then: Monday morning after the march, I returned to work at the National Security Agency, the quintessential alphabet agency, the NSA, The Building, and Don and I were stopped from entering by the Marine guards. Why? I had not read The New York Times on the morning of November 19, 1969, but I was in the newspaper.
If you’ve read earlier entries in this blog, you may remember that the previous summer my friend Don Mohr and I had driven in my little VW convertible down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to participate in a march against the war sponsored by GIs United Against the War. My friend Allen Hallmark was one of the organizers and had invited us down. While there, we had both signed a petition of active duty soldiers opposed to the war and demanding that it stop NOW!
The actual petition was divided into military posts by alphabet and then by names of active duty troops, alphabetically. Even NSA was sharp enough to go down the list to Fort Meade and pick out the two names there. Let me say right now what I said in my first chapbook of prose and poems, From the Periphery, that my name on that petition remains one of the publications I am most proud of.
We were taken from The Building to a small cubicle (I forget where on post) and interviewed (no enhanced interrogation measures were used) by an officer from CID. It was actually fairly pleasant; perhaps because the ACLU had made it public that they would defend any of the petitioners against anything that might affect our futures (e.g., withdrawal of our security clearances, felony charges, etc.). So, we were asked if we could give the names of other employees of NSA who had participated in the anti-war movement. We both, in different rooms, said "no" but that we would ask them if it was okay. A bunch of people who had participated wanted to be named; some who had never participated wanted to be named. I decided not to name anyone.
What happened as a result of all this was that I was denied access to cryptographic information and access to The Building, but I did (thanks to the ACLU) retain my security clearance. For the remainder of my stay in the U.S. Army, I defended our rights to freedom of speech and petition by painting rocks blue and white around the company area and filling in for the clerk/typist when he was on leave.
I was at the time of all this, 27 years old. The captain commanding “C” Company, ASA, Ft. Meade, was 24. I have forgotten his name. But the First Sergeant was a very nice guy named Zeigler. Sergeant Zeigler was approaching his twentieth year in the Army and retirement and asked me all the time if I thought he could find a job in the private sector. I remembered my days working at Sear and told him they hired a lot of retired Army sergeants but recommended that he use the GI Bill and go to college. he was a bright guy (unlike some of my drill instructor sergeants at Ft. Leonard Wood). Odd, I thought, to be giving advice to a man in his forties.
I found the captain somewhat disturbing as he frequently asked me what these kids were so upset about these days and why we were marching and demonstrating. I mean, he was younger than me!!!
My next blog entry is going to be about what everyone except the Army called “gas masks.” They called them something like “protective masks, OD” or some other nomenclature.
Friday, April 15, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 42)
Marching with the Moratorium
November 15, 1969. This was it. the big one. On the front page of The Washington Post, Nicholas Von Hoffman (who would later be fired for calling Richard Nixon a "dead mouse on the kitchen floor," published a column advising residents of D.C. that they had nothing to fear from the protesters, that they were peaceful and were coming to the city to assert their legal right to protest openly. This was in the days before the Metro made it possible to get into and out of Washington easily and Linda and I, with the twins, used my deep blue VW to get to the Mall. It was exciting, electric. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people were walking everywhere, looking for the start point for the march.
On November 9th, a week before the Moratorium, The New York Times had published a petition signed by 1,365 active-duty servicemen calling for the end of the war. If you've been reading this blog for a whole, you'll recall that Don and I signed it when we were down in Fayetteville, NC, to participate in a march sponsored by GI's United Against the War. In a small chapbook of my essays published almost 25 years after that advertisement appeared, I wrote that having my name on that list of active-duty servicemen was one of the times my name had been in print that I am most proud of. That remains true.
The march on November 15th was one of the last times I was able to see Linda and the kids (more about that later). We all held hands and marched in the middle of a very peaceful half a million person throng, right down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. When we got to the White House, the people on the stage were relatively irrelevant: big names associating themselves with the march. BFD. Who cares that they were there. They simply were not needed. The 500,000 of us would have been there with or without them. I would have preferred that they simply walk along with us, but some people cannot resist a photo-op.
As we walked past the White House, Linda and I each lifted one of the kids onto our shoulders so they could see. Nixon would say, later that day, something to the effect that it was good to see young Americans exercising their right but that it would not matter in his pursuit of the war.
Damn that was fun! For those of you who think protesting against wars or against injustice should be a deadly serious thing to do, I would ask why they do it in the first place. When you put yourself out there, even in a crowd of half a million, you should really enjoy what you’re doing. I hope all those Egyptians out in Tahrir Square had a hell of a good time as they brought Mubarak down. I saw photos of smiling laughing Czechs during the Velvet Revolution and even during the Prague Spring before it was crushed. I’ll bet the Chinese in Tien An Men Square were mostly happy. That’s just how it ought to be. People sacrificed beach balls and Frisbees, sang and shouted. Acting on your convictions should not cause frowns, only laughs!
Not too long ago, I wrote an appreciation of the work of Elena Poniatowska in writing about the student strikes in Mexico City in 1968. Here’s what she said:
[The novelist] Luis Gonzalez de Alba remembered how the halls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters were crammed full; how buses were used as improvised pulpits; the return of the [student] brigades after the protest marches, when boys and girls would set themselves to folding banners like sheets, storing placards…then climbing aboard their already crowded school buses to return to guard duty on the rooftops; the sandwich at three or four in the morning, the tacos at a taqueria on Insurgentes Avenue, the hot coffee, the laughter, the happiness that brings triumph…
That’s how it is. People who think protesters should be deadly serious, poker-faced, “boring,” don’t bother me. I just think they should re-examine what they are doing and why.
The down side of all that for me was that the National Security Agency finally read the petition in The Times. It was organized to help them locate those of us who signed. Why? To confirm that the signatures were valid. There’s been a petition, fairly recently, apparently signed by active-duty soldiers to oppose the wars in the Middle East, but they are not transparent enough and people don’t really believe active-duty servicemen signed it. Our petition was neatly organized, just to avoid that kind of uncertainty, into the posts and bases where we served. Under "Fort Meade, Maryland," home of NSA: "Henry P. Hall."
What happened as a result of that will wait for the next blog post. But on that day, I was deliriously happy, still in love, surrounded by people who agreed with me. There may have been a VC flag around, but I didn’t see it. There were people with various causes marching, but all of those people were also against the war, and I pretty much supported their causes. It was fun! I was happy! Linda was happy! And we by damn marched against that war.
Whether we accomplished anything or not is irrelevant.
November 15, 1969. This was it. the big one. On the front page of The Washington Post, Nicholas Von Hoffman (who would later be fired for calling Richard Nixon a "dead mouse on the kitchen floor," published a column advising residents of D.C. that they had nothing to fear from the protesters, that they were peaceful and were coming to the city to assert their legal right to protest openly. This was in the days before the Metro made it possible to get into and out of Washington easily and Linda and I, with the twins, used my deep blue VW to get to the Mall. It was exciting, electric. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people were walking everywhere, looking for the start point for the march.
On November 9th, a week before the Moratorium, The New York Times had published a petition signed by 1,365 active-duty servicemen calling for the end of the war. If you've been reading this blog for a whole, you'll recall that Don and I signed it when we were down in Fayetteville, NC, to participate in a march sponsored by GI's United Against the War. In a small chapbook of my essays published almost 25 years after that advertisement appeared, I wrote that having my name on that list of active-duty servicemen was one of the times my name had been in print that I am most proud of. That remains true.
The march on November 15th was one of the last times I was able to see Linda and the kids (more about that later). We all held hands and marched in the middle of a very peaceful half a million person throng, right down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. When we got to the White House, the people on the stage were relatively irrelevant: big names associating themselves with the march. BFD. Who cares that they were there. They simply were not needed. The 500,000 of us would have been there with or without them. I would have preferred that they simply walk along with us, but some people cannot resist a photo-op.
As we walked past the White House, Linda and I each lifted one of the kids onto our shoulders so they could see. Nixon would say, later that day, something to the effect that it was good to see young Americans exercising their right but that it would not matter in his pursuit of the war.
Damn that was fun! For those of you who think protesting against wars or against injustice should be a deadly serious thing to do, I would ask why they do it in the first place. When you put yourself out there, even in a crowd of half a million, you should really enjoy what you’re doing. I hope all those Egyptians out in Tahrir Square had a hell of a good time as they brought Mubarak down. I saw photos of smiling laughing Czechs during the Velvet Revolution and even during the Prague Spring before it was crushed. I’ll bet the Chinese in Tien An Men Square were mostly happy. That’s just how it ought to be. People sacrificed beach balls and Frisbees, sang and shouted. Acting on your convictions should not cause frowns, only laughs!
Not too long ago, I wrote an appreciation of the work of Elena Poniatowska in writing about the student strikes in Mexico City in 1968. Here’s what she said:
[The novelist] Luis Gonzalez de Alba remembered how the halls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters were crammed full; how buses were used as improvised pulpits; the return of the [student] brigades after the protest marches, when boys and girls would set themselves to folding banners like sheets, storing placards…then climbing aboard their already crowded school buses to return to guard duty on the rooftops; the sandwich at three or four in the morning, the tacos at a taqueria on Insurgentes Avenue, the hot coffee, the laughter, the happiness that brings triumph…
That’s how it is. People who think protesters should be deadly serious, poker-faced, “boring,” don’t bother me. I just think they should re-examine what they are doing and why.
The down side of all that for me was that the National Security Agency finally read the petition in The Times. It was organized to help them locate those of us who signed. Why? To confirm that the signatures were valid. There’s been a petition, fairly recently, apparently signed by active-duty soldiers to oppose the wars in the Middle East, but they are not transparent enough and people don’t really believe active-duty servicemen signed it. Our petition was neatly organized, just to avoid that kind of uncertainty, into the posts and bases where we served. Under "Fort Meade, Maryland," home of NSA: "Henry P. Hall."
What happened as a result of that will wait for the next blog post. But on that day, I was deliriously happy, still in love, surrounded by people who agreed with me. There may have been a VC flag around, but I didn’t see it. There were people with various causes marching, but all of those people were also against the war, and I pretty much supported their causes. It was fun! I was happy! Linda was happy! And we by damn marched against that war.
Whether we accomplished anything or not is irrelevant.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
A Few Notes about Vietnam, Part 41
Linda and Washington. Peace marches, protests. Rock concerts and art museums. My VW convertible, my 250CC Suzuki, my MX-5. So much time. A bicycle in South Vietnam. A hitched ride in a deuce and a half. It all becomes mixed up somehow—time out of sequence. There is an old saying that life is motion, that when you stop moving, you finish dying. In my dissertation, written on the Vietnam War novels back in 1984, I wrote, and again this was many years ago, about the helicopters in Vietnam:
Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.
I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.
In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.
I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.
When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.
This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.
This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.
The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.
Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.
I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.
In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.
I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.
When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.
This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.
This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.
The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam, Part 40
Moratoriums and Mobilizations
So, I drifted. Linda anchored me a bit, Linda and the twins. I suspect this would be a very different blog if she were writing it, but we can only always see things through our own eyes and even if two or more of us look at the same thing, we do not see the same thing. Thus, we get arguments about the massacres at Hue with some people not believing and others taking the killings as an article of faith. And how many different ways is it possible to lose a war and did we lose a war? Some people claim that because we left in 1973, before the war was over, that we did not lose the war, our allies, puppets, whatever…they lost the war. Those same people, at least some of them, claim the South Vietnamese would not have lost the war if we had continued to supply them and to provide at least aerial support.
By 1969, I just wanted the killing to stop. I wanted to pick up The Washington Post and read baseball scores and not body counts. That summer, 1969, I participated in a number of small demonstrations, usually outside the White House and always on weekends. It was illegal for me to wear my uniform while I was protesting against, but it was not illegal for certain officers to wear theirs while they were supporting, the war. Either both or neither should be illegal.
I remember quite clearly Linda and I walking with a few hundred people down Pennsylvania Avenue one Saturday morning. We were all holding hands and singing songs of peace. An older man walked up to me and said something to the effect that before I spoke out against the country’s war in Vietnam, I should go myself and see what was happening. I told him I had been there until a few months earlier, that I spoke Vietnamese, that I knew (with a conviction that comes only when you’re very young) that the war was wrong. He said that since I had been there, I should know better than to march in the streets.
A priori assumptions. We all grew up in some social milieu that shaped us, that, as we say in the Catholic Church, “formed” us and yet, somehow, we can break out of that formation, turn from what we absorbed in our formative years.
That was a very small demonstration and, afterwards, Linda and I went to the Freer Gallery where I liked to rub my hands over the belly of a small Buddha for luck and wander into the Peacock Room and admire Whistler’s art and very strange sense of style. I always preferred the small demonstrations in Washington and, later, in Austin; I have never much cared to be a small part of a huge crowd though huge crowds do get all the news.
And then, on October 15, 1969, Linda and I joined a few hundred thousand people for what was a truly historic peace march. Here’s how I wrote about it several years ago:
I marched in October and in November in Washington, but the October march, though smaller, is the one that has always burned most brightly in my memory. Picture 75,000 people, almost all of us carrying candles, walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, quiet, singing softly, serious, but deep down happy to be where we were. We passed the White House and turned to the Treasury Building. We let the candle wax drip down on the black, wrought-iron fence and left our candles there to burn. The sky around the building, lit up with the flames of thousands of candles, was liked the most magnificent Christmas tree you could ever dream of us and we, some of us, knelt down quietly and prayed for peace. [from From the Periphery: poems and essays]
That night was and remains holy, at least to me, and I suspect to a large number of those 75,000 people who marched. When you do something significant, something that marks what you believe, and do what those of us who were once Baptists call “giving testimony” or “testifying,” you quite simply feel good and feel a great rush of sheer joy. I do not claim that feeling just for the peace movement but for anyone who walks in company with people who believe as he believes and is willing to show that belief.
I would march only once again in Washington, a month later, in a march that was far larger and that would, the very next morning, see me under investigation by the CID and denied entry into the gray walls of the National Security Agency, more than the Army my employer for the past three and a half years.
So, I drifted. Linda anchored me a bit, Linda and the twins. I suspect this would be a very different blog if she were writing it, but we can only always see things through our own eyes and even if two or more of us look at the same thing, we do not see the same thing. Thus, we get arguments about the massacres at Hue with some people not believing and others taking the killings as an article of faith. And how many different ways is it possible to lose a war and did we lose a war? Some people claim that because we left in 1973, before the war was over, that we did not lose the war, our allies, puppets, whatever…they lost the war. Those same people, at least some of them, claim the South Vietnamese would not have lost the war if we had continued to supply them and to provide at least aerial support.
By 1969, I just wanted the killing to stop. I wanted to pick up The Washington Post and read baseball scores and not body counts. That summer, 1969, I participated in a number of small demonstrations, usually outside the White House and always on weekends. It was illegal for me to wear my uniform while I was protesting against, but it was not illegal for certain officers to wear theirs while they were supporting, the war. Either both or neither should be illegal.
I remember quite clearly Linda and I walking with a few hundred people down Pennsylvania Avenue one Saturday morning. We were all holding hands and singing songs of peace. An older man walked up to me and said something to the effect that before I spoke out against the country’s war in Vietnam, I should go myself and see what was happening. I told him I had been there until a few months earlier, that I spoke Vietnamese, that I knew (with a conviction that comes only when you’re very young) that the war was wrong. He said that since I had been there, I should know better than to march in the streets.
A priori assumptions. We all grew up in some social milieu that shaped us, that, as we say in the Catholic Church, “formed” us and yet, somehow, we can break out of that formation, turn from what we absorbed in our formative years.
That was a very small demonstration and, afterwards, Linda and I went to the Freer Gallery where I liked to rub my hands over the belly of a small Buddha for luck and wander into the Peacock Room and admire Whistler’s art and very strange sense of style. I always preferred the small demonstrations in Washington and, later, in Austin; I have never much cared to be a small part of a huge crowd though huge crowds do get all the news.
And then, on October 15, 1969, Linda and I joined a few hundred thousand people for what was a truly historic peace march. Here’s how I wrote about it several years ago:
I marched in October and in November in Washington, but the October march, though smaller, is the one that has always burned most brightly in my memory. Picture 75,000 people, almost all of us carrying candles, walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, quiet, singing softly, serious, but deep down happy to be where we were. We passed the White House and turned to the Treasury Building. We let the candle wax drip down on the black, wrought-iron fence and left our candles there to burn. The sky around the building, lit up with the flames of thousands of candles, was liked the most magnificent Christmas tree you could ever dream of us and we, some of us, knelt down quietly and prayed for peace. [from From the Periphery: poems and essays]
That night was and remains holy, at least to me, and I suspect to a large number of those 75,000 people who marched. When you do something significant, something that marks what you believe, and do what those of us who were once Baptists call “giving testimony” or “testifying,” you quite simply feel good and feel a great rush of sheer joy. I do not claim that feeling just for the peace movement but for anyone who walks in company with people who believe as he believes and is willing to show that belief.
I would march only once again in Washington, a month later, in a march that was far larger and that would, the very next morning, see me under investigation by the CID and denied entry into the gray walls of the National Security Agency, more than the Army my employer for the past three and a half years.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Just a few notes: RIP Elizabeth Taylor
For Elizabeth Taylor: a memory
New York, 1964. I am working at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and, though I am not terribly fond of the job, I love New York. Slathering mustard and relish on hot dogs, making change, listening to complaints about the expense, hearing hundreds of dialects and languages, I am not impressed with the fair. My feet hurt. My eyes hurt. My sense of smell is incredibly dulled. I go to see Michelangelo’s Pieta: alabaster woman, son lying across her lap-so white, so pale. And yet protected by bulletproof glass, my feet on a moving sidewalk that draws me quickly through the room. Not New York, Disneyland, long before Disney cleaned up Times Square.
I live at the Dixie Hotel, a few blocks off Times Square and I have a girlfriend, Sharon, I met at the Fair. Years later, I wrote a poem for Sharon, an aubade, a morning poem:
There should be flowers, sweet fragrances
the buzzing of bees. When I wake, your bottom
hot against my groin, the sun has got to rise,
golden beautiful in the east, to paint your body.
But we are in the Dixie Hotel, a block or two
off Times Square and the windows are streaked
with grime from back before the war, no,
not that war, I mean the second of the two.
No air conditioning and the ceiling fan doesn’t
work any more if it ever did back when the Dixie
was fairly swank if such times ever were. We’ve
left the window open, can hear the sounds
not of sweet birds and of crickets rubbing their legs
together, but of cabs and buses, the crashing
of garbage trucks. Still, your body touches mine, and even
with this dawn, this heat, the air in the room barely
moving, we can sing the morning in, ignore dark soot,
let our fingers draw lines of damp sweat on naked canvas.
Ah, love, outside noise and hot streets call,
but let’s remain a while, here, in this still morning.
I take long walks any time of the night and day. No one ever mugs me. On the day I arrived, I was insulted, but the old woman was crazy. She heard my voice, assumed I was from Texas, and accused me of killing John F. Kennedy. Crazy, I suppose. But I did kill Kennedy, as much as anyone did, anyone in our society of celebrity. He is avenged a few years later when I am sent to Vietnam.
We are all crazy, beyond the grasp of reality. Have you imagined New York is real? Any more than the London Eliot called “Unreal City?” I find New York as I have so often found New Orleans or Washington, D.C.: a dream world where I can lose myself and become something other.
One day, Sharon and I walk a couple of blocks to the theater district to where Richard Burton is performing Hamlet. The building is, for some reason, unlocked. We walk in and see the dark interior. I flip on a light and climb up on the stage; Sharon sits on the front row. “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, or dissolve itself into a dew,” I whisper to her and to a thousand empty seats. I am young, in love again and enamored of theater, and all the seats are full.
I am Hamlet and am in love with everything, even as Hamlet loved everything. He did, you know, he loved everything and truth most of all. “I have been so great a lover,” Rupert Brooke says to open one of his poems, and so I have. Later, he would write “If I should die, think only this of me / That there is some corner of some foreign land / That is forever England.” I have never been that much of a romantic about war. Perhaps it was just the war that I happened to have. But I have loved the dirty streets of Times Square, a filthy hotel room, the grime of Far Rockaway, a young woman who came onto me one late night in New York and whom I could not afford and would not have afforded could I have.
I see the last acts of a dozen plays. I cannot afford to see the whole play—much too expensive for a young man subsisting in New York on minimum wage. But I find the money to see Burton perform Hamlet a few weeks later and continue, so many years later, to think it was worth it. Late at night, long after I have seen Elizabeth Taylor pick Burton up in a limousine, I open my window in the Dixie Hotel and sit on the fire escape. I whisper the “to be or not to be” speech out across the back alley.
No air conditioning, no rest room (I go to a common bathroom at the end of the corridor when I need to go). The room is a pale green, some of the paint peeling from the walls. It has a burner and a small fridge. Many of the rooms, I am certain, rent by the hour. I rent mine by the week and manage to make ends meet.
One Sunday I go to a matinee of Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri (I do not mean to imply that Mercouri was my date, she was the star) and I fall in love with her. She is much older than me, but I had also fallen in love with Simone Signouret when I saw her in Room at the Top. I am busy falling in love; it is what I do best when I am in my twenties. I fall in love with my cheap hotel room, with small pizza-by-the-slice places, with winos in the crowd, with the pieta (only a passing flirtation), with street musicians, with Central Park, with everything in the city. But Melina Mercouri is both love and lust. I notice nothing around me in the theater except her and then the man in the seat next to mine gropes me and throws his coat over my lap. I push his hand off and throw his coat back on his own lap, turn to him and say, “No, thank you.” He is about sixty-five, I think, and is embarrassed. I am more interested in Melina Mercouri. After her four curtain calls, I leave the theater.
I am not certain I can tell you what my summer in New York meant to me—that summer of the World’s Fair, that last summer before I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. That summer in the city, that summer going to the theater, to a few cattle calls, before going back to the southeast corner of Texas to teach high school and then go off to war, that summer living in what I would call poverty had I taken the days in another way of taking something seriously, that summer that comes back to me when I chart where I have been and how I have gotten where I eventually arrived and where I might have arrived had I remained there as something other than a romantic, romanticizing tourist.
You see, I loved the Manhattan of 1964. It was dirty, profane, not yet cleaned up by Disney and Associates. I loved the idea of me there in those years before I ever thought of writing and when theater and love were everything.
It has been too many years for me to remember precisely what New York meant to me when I was a very young twenty-two years old. That is so long ago that I now remember only bright images. But I can remember that young man who walked out of the Dixie Hotel and wandered over to Radio City where he was offered a job as an NBC Junior Executive (that meant “usher” in those days) and preferred just walking through the streets looking at things, staring up at buildings taller than the pine trees in Southeast Texas, and losing himself in crowded streets and falling soot.
Late that summer, I left New York, hitched a ride to Philadelphia where my uncle had taken up residence with his upper class Philly wife thirty years earlier. Tall at 6’ 4” and a certified WWII hero, Purple Heart awardee and member of the renowned “greatest generation,” he went to the Wharton School at Penn on the GI Bill and, ultimately, became a steadfast Republican and ally of Governor Scranton. I am not sure Scranton knew who my uncle was, but my uncle mentioned him frequently. I am, I am afraid, being uncharitable to my uncle whom I loved and who was always kind to me. I don’t mind, though, and he’s no longer with us. Besides, I drop George McGovern’s name probably as often as he dropped Scranton’s.
He really wanted me to find a job and tempt me to settle down in the Philadelphia area. So, it seemed counter-productive to me for him to keep complaining about how awful Philadelphians were. I mean I could never figure out why he wanted to stay in a place he seemed not to like, much less why he thought what he was saying would influence me to move there. But this isn’t about my uncle or even about Philadelphia. It’s about young lust and, even, towards the end, about young love.
To that end and to entice me to stay, he set me up with a few girls, daughters of his friends for the most part. One, I remember, had been his kids’ baby sitter. All were white, protestant and a year or two younger than me. Each one, except the sitter, had a nice car and belonged to a good club. In that year, 1964, the summer before I would be drafted, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, predating the summer of love by a few years, had already started to emerge. The Beatles had exploded into our consciousness only recently and “All ya need is love” might not have been recorded yet but was an ever-present nagging sound in my mind. And love, love, love was all around.
With my uncle shouting about the undesirables in his neighborhood, I closed my ears and went out with a few young women and groped and snuggled and made love along the river, in their parents’ houses when their parents were out for the evening, and almost, once, while the baby sitter was driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge into New Jersey. I am not, really, ashamed of any of that. It was merely the zeitgeist.
Then, with only a week to go, I went with my uncle and his family for a brief stay at their beach house on the Jersey coast. I loved the house, even got along with my aunt’s mother when we visited and putt-putted around with my cousin in his small boat. And there was another girl and, as always, she was enticing. I walked along the beach with Connie whose last name I cannot remember even though I do remember that the water seemed strangely cold for August and not at all like the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I can remember her touch, the warmth of her skin, even a small dimple, but not her name. Somehow, that seems sad to me now. I suspect she doesn’t remember my name either but does remember some boy from Texas she spent time with one summer in Avalon.
I did not have to hitch a ride back to Texas. My uncle was generous and bought an airline ticket for me, the first time I had ever flown. And I’m pretty sure the plane was a DC-3. In Vietnam a few years later, we would call them C-47s. I suspect my uncle was pleased to get rid of me and had changed his mind about the possibilities of finding me a good job in Philly.
Back in Beaumont, I met Jenny. Jenny was unlike any other woman I had met up until that time. She was ahead of her time and definitely ahead of mine, too. A few decades later, I wrote a poem for her. It’s never been published, probably because it’s pretty bad; so I won’t reproduce it here.
This whole little series of stories is for Elizabeth Taylor. I never met her, but she is, somehow, like the girl in the white convertible in American Graffiti. I turn a corner...and she is there. I see a new production of Hamlet and her limo sweeps into the alley and picks up Richard Burton. Beautiful, beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, violet eyes luminescent in dark alleys, lighting the sky for all of us.
New York, 1964. I am working at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and, though I am not terribly fond of the job, I love New York. Slathering mustard and relish on hot dogs, making change, listening to complaints about the expense, hearing hundreds of dialects and languages, I am not impressed with the fair. My feet hurt. My eyes hurt. My sense of smell is incredibly dulled. I go to see Michelangelo’s Pieta: alabaster woman, son lying across her lap-so white, so pale. And yet protected by bulletproof glass, my feet on a moving sidewalk that draws me quickly through the room. Not New York, Disneyland, long before Disney cleaned up Times Square.
I live at the Dixie Hotel, a few blocks off Times Square and I have a girlfriend, Sharon, I met at the Fair. Years later, I wrote a poem for Sharon, an aubade, a morning poem:
There should be flowers, sweet fragrances
the buzzing of bees. When I wake, your bottom
hot against my groin, the sun has got to rise,
golden beautiful in the east, to paint your body.
But we are in the Dixie Hotel, a block or two
off Times Square and the windows are streaked
with grime from back before the war, no,
not that war, I mean the second of the two.
No air conditioning and the ceiling fan doesn’t
work any more if it ever did back when the Dixie
was fairly swank if such times ever were. We’ve
left the window open, can hear the sounds
not of sweet birds and of crickets rubbing their legs
together, but of cabs and buses, the crashing
of garbage trucks. Still, your body touches mine, and even
with this dawn, this heat, the air in the room barely
moving, we can sing the morning in, ignore dark soot,
let our fingers draw lines of damp sweat on naked canvas.
Ah, love, outside noise and hot streets call,
but let’s remain a while, here, in this still morning.
I take long walks any time of the night and day. No one ever mugs me. On the day I arrived, I was insulted, but the old woman was crazy. She heard my voice, assumed I was from Texas, and accused me of killing John F. Kennedy. Crazy, I suppose. But I did kill Kennedy, as much as anyone did, anyone in our society of celebrity. He is avenged a few years later when I am sent to Vietnam.
We are all crazy, beyond the grasp of reality. Have you imagined New York is real? Any more than the London Eliot called “Unreal City?” I find New York as I have so often found New Orleans or Washington, D.C.: a dream world where I can lose myself and become something other.
One day, Sharon and I walk a couple of blocks to the theater district to where Richard Burton is performing Hamlet. The building is, for some reason, unlocked. We walk in and see the dark interior. I flip on a light and climb up on the stage; Sharon sits on the front row. “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, or dissolve itself into a dew,” I whisper to her and to a thousand empty seats. I am young, in love again and enamored of theater, and all the seats are full.
I am Hamlet and am in love with everything, even as Hamlet loved everything. He did, you know, he loved everything and truth most of all. “I have been so great a lover,” Rupert Brooke says to open one of his poems, and so I have. Later, he would write “If I should die, think only this of me / That there is some corner of some foreign land / That is forever England.” I have never been that much of a romantic about war. Perhaps it was just the war that I happened to have. But I have loved the dirty streets of Times Square, a filthy hotel room, the grime of Far Rockaway, a young woman who came onto me one late night in New York and whom I could not afford and would not have afforded could I have.
I see the last acts of a dozen plays. I cannot afford to see the whole play—much too expensive for a young man subsisting in New York on minimum wage. But I find the money to see Burton perform Hamlet a few weeks later and continue, so many years later, to think it was worth it. Late at night, long after I have seen Elizabeth Taylor pick Burton up in a limousine, I open my window in the Dixie Hotel and sit on the fire escape. I whisper the “to be or not to be” speech out across the back alley.
No air conditioning, no rest room (I go to a common bathroom at the end of the corridor when I need to go). The room is a pale green, some of the paint peeling from the walls. It has a burner and a small fridge. Many of the rooms, I am certain, rent by the hour. I rent mine by the week and manage to make ends meet.
One Sunday I go to a matinee of Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri (I do not mean to imply that Mercouri was my date, she was the star) and I fall in love with her. She is much older than me, but I had also fallen in love with Simone Signouret when I saw her in Room at the Top. I am busy falling in love; it is what I do best when I am in my twenties. I fall in love with my cheap hotel room, with small pizza-by-the-slice places, with winos in the crowd, with the pieta (only a passing flirtation), with street musicians, with Central Park, with everything in the city. But Melina Mercouri is both love and lust. I notice nothing around me in the theater except her and then the man in the seat next to mine gropes me and throws his coat over my lap. I push his hand off and throw his coat back on his own lap, turn to him and say, “No, thank you.” He is about sixty-five, I think, and is embarrassed. I am more interested in Melina Mercouri. After her four curtain calls, I leave the theater.
I am not certain I can tell you what my summer in New York meant to me—that summer of the World’s Fair, that last summer before I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. That summer in the city, that summer going to the theater, to a few cattle calls, before going back to the southeast corner of Texas to teach high school and then go off to war, that summer living in what I would call poverty had I taken the days in another way of taking something seriously, that summer that comes back to me when I chart where I have been and how I have gotten where I eventually arrived and where I might have arrived had I remained there as something other than a romantic, romanticizing tourist.
You see, I loved the Manhattan of 1964. It was dirty, profane, not yet cleaned up by Disney and Associates. I loved the idea of me there in those years before I ever thought of writing and when theater and love were everything.
It has been too many years for me to remember precisely what New York meant to me when I was a very young twenty-two years old. That is so long ago that I now remember only bright images. But I can remember that young man who walked out of the Dixie Hotel and wandered over to Radio City where he was offered a job as an NBC Junior Executive (that meant “usher” in those days) and preferred just walking through the streets looking at things, staring up at buildings taller than the pine trees in Southeast Texas, and losing himself in crowded streets and falling soot.
Late that summer, I left New York, hitched a ride to Philadelphia where my uncle had taken up residence with his upper class Philly wife thirty years earlier. Tall at 6’ 4” and a certified WWII hero, Purple Heart awardee and member of the renowned “greatest generation,” he went to the Wharton School at Penn on the GI Bill and, ultimately, became a steadfast Republican and ally of Governor Scranton. I am not sure Scranton knew who my uncle was, but my uncle mentioned him frequently. I am, I am afraid, being uncharitable to my uncle whom I loved and who was always kind to me. I don’t mind, though, and he’s no longer with us. Besides, I drop George McGovern’s name probably as often as he dropped Scranton’s.
He really wanted me to find a job and tempt me to settle down in the Philadelphia area. So, it seemed counter-productive to me for him to keep complaining about how awful Philadelphians were. I mean I could never figure out why he wanted to stay in a place he seemed not to like, much less why he thought what he was saying would influence me to move there. But this isn’t about my uncle or even about Philadelphia. It’s about young lust and, even, towards the end, about young love.
To that end and to entice me to stay, he set me up with a few girls, daughters of his friends for the most part. One, I remember, had been his kids’ baby sitter. All were white, protestant and a year or two younger than me. Each one, except the sitter, had a nice car and belonged to a good club. In that year, 1964, the summer before I would be drafted, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, predating the summer of love by a few years, had already started to emerge. The Beatles had exploded into our consciousness only recently and “All ya need is love” might not have been recorded yet but was an ever-present nagging sound in my mind. And love, love, love was all around.
With my uncle shouting about the undesirables in his neighborhood, I closed my ears and went out with a few young women and groped and snuggled and made love along the river, in their parents’ houses when their parents were out for the evening, and almost, once, while the baby sitter was driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge into New Jersey. I am not, really, ashamed of any of that. It was merely the zeitgeist.
Then, with only a week to go, I went with my uncle and his family for a brief stay at their beach house on the Jersey coast. I loved the house, even got along with my aunt’s mother when we visited and putt-putted around with my cousin in his small boat. And there was another girl and, as always, she was enticing. I walked along the beach with Connie whose last name I cannot remember even though I do remember that the water seemed strangely cold for August and not at all like the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I can remember her touch, the warmth of her skin, even a small dimple, but not her name. Somehow, that seems sad to me now. I suspect she doesn’t remember my name either but does remember some boy from Texas she spent time with one summer in Avalon.
I did not have to hitch a ride back to Texas. My uncle was generous and bought an airline ticket for me, the first time I had ever flown. And I’m pretty sure the plane was a DC-3. In Vietnam a few years later, we would call them C-47s. I suspect my uncle was pleased to get rid of me and had changed his mind about the possibilities of finding me a good job in Philly.
Back in Beaumont, I met Jenny. Jenny was unlike any other woman I had met up until that time. She was ahead of her time and definitely ahead of mine, too. A few decades later, I wrote a poem for her. It’s never been published, probably because it’s pretty bad; so I won’t reproduce it here.
This whole little series of stories is for Elizabeth Taylor. I never met her, but she is, somehow, like the girl in the white convertible in American Graffiti. I turn a corner...and she is there. I see a new production of Hamlet and her limo sweeps into the alley and picks up Richard Burton. Beautiful, beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, violet eyes luminescent in dark alleys, lighting the sky for all of us.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam #38
Making love and peace and listening to music
Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969. Woodstock happened from August 15 – August 18, 1969. The two events have been linked in my mind for a long time. We knew, at NSA, some weeks prior to the death of the man who presented himself to the world as “Uncle Ho,” that he was dying; we were just waiting for it to happen. I was waiting, as were a number of other people, at the National Security Agency.
By the week prior to Woodstock, we thought the old man could not hang on a minute longer, but his death was somewhat like that of Francisco Franco: he lingered and lingered. I hate to admit to this, but we started making jokes about it and for a month or more afterward kept asking ourselves if Uncle Ho were still alive. Part of that was because North Vietnam did not want the people of the North to hear about it on the days of celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the DRVN. We knew about it at NSA.
Flashback a bit to August 14, 1969. My friend, Allen Hallmark, made one of his trips to Washington and, in his hand, held a cluster of tickets to a music festival being held in Upstate New York. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go!” But I was on the Death Watch. NSA would not give me the time off while we were waiting for Uncle Ho to die. So, I had a ticket to Woodstock, held it in my hand, and then watched a few friends head off to New York while I stayed behind to translate inane messages about the illness of Uncle Ho.
Not too long after that, I could hardly make my way through the streets of D.C. without hearing people shout “WERE YOU THERE???!!!!!!!!!!!” and having to admit that, "No, I was not there." There was some consolation, though:
Linda and I managed to go to the Corcoran Gallery and were out of the car and sitting on the floor, beneath my legs glass brick and green light shining through, and a band at the front, a band that no longer exists, a band called Love Cry Want played sitar music accompanied by a panoply of instruments from Thailand and Burma. A big man in dreadlocks moaned into a microphone as the walls moved in and out and the green light hit my face. The light show was designed by the lights people from Woodstock. Someone passed around a small cup with sugary liquid stuff and I tasted just a little—I never really did that kind of thing, but that time. . .—and passed the cup to a guy sitting to my left. Then I watched the walls come to life, breathing in and out to the rhythm of the music.
So? That was my Woodstock and my life, then, was accompanied by that same band when we drove out to Rock Creek Park to sit among a few thousand other people and listen to Love Cry Want front for a group called The Who and watched and listened to them perform Tommy. Good times, really. I have always had very little patience with people who claimed we had to be serious and solemn when participating in peace demonstrations. To me, those were always joyous events.
I spent the night Ho Chi Minh died in The Building, the large gray edifice that housed the National Security Agency. I translated message after message coming from all over both South and North Vietnam, expressions of loss from various official and non-official groups, the PRG governments in the South, and from the official government in the north. We may have hated Uncle Ho, but he was much revered throughout the North. His loss was felt all over the country. After that, North Vietnam was pretty much governed by the committee that made up the Vietnamese Communist Party. The night of September 2nd. . . no sleep, just endless messages, all saying about the same thing.
The next month, Linda and I would march in the almost silent October march where we deposited candles on the wrought iron fences of the Treasury Building and the next month, the November march that was the largest march in the history of the protest movement. On November 19th, my name appeared in a New York Times petition against the war signed by 1,000+ active duty troops from all over the country. The next morning, I was denied entry to The Building though my security clearance was not pulled.
My time in the Army was drawing to a close anyway. By January, I was headed back to Texas and graduate school and more marching. More about the big peace demonstrations and Austin in a later blog entry.
Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969. Woodstock happened from August 15 – August 18, 1969. The two events have been linked in my mind for a long time. We knew, at NSA, some weeks prior to the death of the man who presented himself to the world as “Uncle Ho,” that he was dying; we were just waiting for it to happen. I was waiting, as were a number of other people, at the National Security Agency.
By the week prior to Woodstock, we thought the old man could not hang on a minute longer, but his death was somewhat like that of Francisco Franco: he lingered and lingered. I hate to admit to this, but we started making jokes about it and for a month or more afterward kept asking ourselves if Uncle Ho were still alive. Part of that was because North Vietnam did not want the people of the North to hear about it on the days of celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the DRVN. We knew about it at NSA.
Flashback a bit to August 14, 1969. My friend, Allen Hallmark, made one of his trips to Washington and, in his hand, held a cluster of tickets to a music festival being held in Upstate New York. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go!” But I was on the Death Watch. NSA would not give me the time off while we were waiting for Uncle Ho to die. So, I had a ticket to Woodstock, held it in my hand, and then watched a few friends head off to New York while I stayed behind to translate inane messages about the illness of Uncle Ho.
Not too long after that, I could hardly make my way through the streets of D.C. without hearing people shout “WERE YOU THERE???!!!!!!!!!!!” and having to admit that, "No, I was not there." There was some consolation, though:
Linda and I managed to go to the Corcoran Gallery and were out of the car and sitting on the floor, beneath my legs glass brick and green light shining through, and a band at the front, a band that no longer exists, a band called Love Cry Want played sitar music accompanied by a panoply of instruments from Thailand and Burma. A big man in dreadlocks moaned into a microphone as the walls moved in and out and the green light hit my face. The light show was designed by the lights people from Woodstock. Someone passed around a small cup with sugary liquid stuff and I tasted just a little—I never really did that kind of thing, but that time. . .—and passed the cup to a guy sitting to my left. Then I watched the walls come to life, breathing in and out to the rhythm of the music.
So? That was my Woodstock and my life, then, was accompanied by that same band when we drove out to Rock Creek Park to sit among a few thousand other people and listen to Love Cry Want front for a group called The Who and watched and listened to them perform Tommy. Good times, really. I have always had very little patience with people who claimed we had to be serious and solemn when participating in peace demonstrations. To me, those were always joyous events.
I spent the night Ho Chi Minh died in The Building, the large gray edifice that housed the National Security Agency. I translated message after message coming from all over both South and North Vietnam, expressions of loss from various official and non-official groups, the PRG governments in the South, and from the official government in the north. We may have hated Uncle Ho, but he was much revered throughout the North. His loss was felt all over the country. After that, North Vietnam was pretty much governed by the committee that made up the Vietnamese Communist Party. The night of September 2nd. . . no sleep, just endless messages, all saying about the same thing.
The next month, Linda and I would march in the almost silent October march where we deposited candles on the wrought iron fences of the Treasury Building and the next month, the November march that was the largest march in the history of the protest movement. On November 19th, my name appeared in a New York Times petition against the war signed by 1,000+ active duty troops from all over the country. The next morning, I was denied entry to The Building though my security clearance was not pulled.
My time in the Army was drawing to a close anyway. By January, I was headed back to Texas and graduate school and more marching. More about the big peace demonstrations and Austin in a later blog entry.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Washington, D.C.: Unreal City (Vietnam Notes 37)
Washington, D.C.: Unreal City
D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.
D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.
I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.
Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.
Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.
I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:
Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)
At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but
I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,
like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness
until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.
You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.
But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.
D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.
D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.
I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.
Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.
Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.
I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:
Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)
At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but
I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,
like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness
until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.
You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.
But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Part 36: Return to Normalcy, sort of
Who Killed Cock Robin?
That period between Vietnam and the peace marches, between Pleiku and D.C. and Austin? Basically, they were fairly ordinary for someone still wearing a uniform, commuting to work each morning, carpooling with my friend Don Mohr in his MGB (or was it an MGA?), top down when the weather permitted and both mags were firing. I eventually bought my own car, a not new, blue and shiny, Volkswagen convertible. I re-entered a world that included Vietnam only from 8 - 5, Monday through Friday.
Among the first things both Don and I did was enroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Not only was I planning to do what I had set out to do three years earlier (go to graduate school at UT-Austin) but I wanted to meet young, well-educated women. I know that sounds snotty but I did not want to hear again, not ever, “I love you so much, GI” and I did not want to "date" (quaint word these days) any of the mostly conservative women I met at the National Security Agency. Those were mostly women with a professional mission or clerk/typists with security clearances. I wanted to forget what we always called The Building (upper case letters implicit in the pronunciation) and immerse myself in being a college student again.
I took two classes at the University of Maryland: Renaissance literature and a course in Melville and Hawthorne. Damn that was wonderful. I decompressed, became totally human once again. I can hear combat vets now: “Puh-leeze!!!!!!! You were safe. No one pointed an AK at you. You got to talk with young women.” Yes, that’s all true. And I will repeat something I have said many times before: I mostly enjoyed my tour in Vietnam…from the ship ride over, to internment at Subic Bay with huge quantities of San Miguel beer, to the LSTs rocking down the coast of what was then South Vietnam while we sang Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag,” to my strange last night in Nha Trang and the Pan American “Freedom Bird” home. But I wasn’t happy with myself for having, if not enjoyed it all, been separate from it while being in the middle of it and standing on the periphery while helping locate people who were going to be killed.
My first little book, about the war mostly, was called From the Periphery: poems and essays and that’s mostly how I felt: on the periphery of the war, not truly involved, marking time, doing something I had never questioned but had begun questioning while in the middle of it all. Dak To was a part of that questioning, the young P.O.W., an increasing feeling, after Tet, that the waste of life on both sides was futile. Those who did believe were correct in that we did not fight to win. Those who were opposed to the war were correct in that we should not have been there in the first place. I was, by the time I left, irrevocably on the side of those who felt we should never had been there in the first place.
My first semester at the University of Maryland, I was besotted with being a student, fell in love a few times with young women not much younger than I was, met Linda and fell in love with her. When I got back from Vietnam, I started falling in love with everyone. I met Linda in that Renaissance lit. class that was a reintroduction to college classes. Dr. Spurgeon had assigned a poem by George Gascoigne called, quite ironically, “Lullaby.” Here’s the whole poem and it’s quite long for this medium:
Gascoigne's Lullaby
Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
Next, lullaby my gazing eyes
Which wonted were to glance apace.
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile.
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.
And lullaby, my wanton will:
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.
Eke lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest.
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby be thou content,
With lullaby thy lusts relent.
Let others pay which hath mo pence;
Thou art too poor for such expense.
Thus, lullaby my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware and all that was.
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby now take your leave,
With lullaby your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.
That is not a difficult poem but the class was mixed: juniors and seniors mostly, a few older people. Some of them did see that the poem was all about sex; some did not. And, when we got to the “little Robin” stanza, no one was wiling to offer their reading on what Gascoigne was talking about. Spurgeon grew somewhat exercised over this and, finally, I raised my hand. “At last,” he said,” Mr. Hall, will you explain the stanza. I did. The whole poem is rather like Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, about how raunchy we are when young, how we may sprinkle pollen and babies around the landscape in lust run amok…okay, okay, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but…
The stanza in question has got to remind us of the “Cock Robin” lullaby and that old reprobate and deflowerer of virgins, George Gascoigne, is saying goodbye to an active penis in an age when we had not yet invented Viagra. It was not that I knew more or was smarter than the other students but that they were unwilling to say out loud what needed to be said out loud (and there was no Viagra or Cialis in those days).
So, why am I telling you all this? Well, Spurgeon applauded. I figured I’d still be able to cut it in grad. school, and Linda asked me out for a drink after class. MORAL: When you’re amongst English majors, it always helps to read poetry well: you get the grade, the girl and everything.
Later, she was my constant companion at rock concerts in the parks and at the Corcoran and, more importantly, on peace marches. Her twin children often went with us. The way I left her is among the more shameful things I’ve done, but that’s a few blogs away still.
That period between Vietnam and the peace marches, between Pleiku and D.C. and Austin? Basically, they were fairly ordinary for someone still wearing a uniform, commuting to work each morning, carpooling with my friend Don Mohr in his MGB (or was it an MGA?), top down when the weather permitted and both mags were firing. I eventually bought my own car, a not new, blue and shiny, Volkswagen convertible. I re-entered a world that included Vietnam only from 8 - 5, Monday through Friday.
Among the first things both Don and I did was enroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Not only was I planning to do what I had set out to do three years earlier (go to graduate school at UT-Austin) but I wanted to meet young, well-educated women. I know that sounds snotty but I did not want to hear again, not ever, “I love you so much, GI” and I did not want to "date" (quaint word these days) any of the mostly conservative women I met at the National Security Agency. Those were mostly women with a professional mission or clerk/typists with security clearances. I wanted to forget what we always called The Building (upper case letters implicit in the pronunciation) and immerse myself in being a college student again.
I took two classes at the University of Maryland: Renaissance literature and a course in Melville and Hawthorne. Damn that was wonderful. I decompressed, became totally human once again. I can hear combat vets now: “Puh-leeze!!!!!!! You were safe. No one pointed an AK at you. You got to talk with young women.” Yes, that’s all true. And I will repeat something I have said many times before: I mostly enjoyed my tour in Vietnam…from the ship ride over, to internment at Subic Bay with huge quantities of San Miguel beer, to the LSTs rocking down the coast of what was then South Vietnam while we sang Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag,” to my strange last night in Nha Trang and the Pan American “Freedom Bird” home. But I wasn’t happy with myself for having, if not enjoyed it all, been separate from it while being in the middle of it and standing on the periphery while helping locate people who were going to be killed.
My first little book, about the war mostly, was called From the Periphery: poems and essays and that’s mostly how I felt: on the periphery of the war, not truly involved, marking time, doing something I had never questioned but had begun questioning while in the middle of it all. Dak To was a part of that questioning, the young P.O.W., an increasing feeling, after Tet, that the waste of life on both sides was futile. Those who did believe were correct in that we did not fight to win. Those who were opposed to the war were correct in that we should not have been there in the first place. I was, by the time I left, irrevocably on the side of those who felt we should never had been there in the first place.
My first semester at the University of Maryland, I was besotted with being a student, fell in love a few times with young women not much younger than I was, met Linda and fell in love with her. When I got back from Vietnam, I started falling in love with everyone. I met Linda in that Renaissance lit. class that was a reintroduction to college classes. Dr. Spurgeon had assigned a poem by George Gascoigne called, quite ironically, “Lullaby.” Here’s the whole poem and it’s quite long for this medium:
Gascoigne's Lullaby
Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
Next, lullaby my gazing eyes
Which wonted were to glance apace.
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile.
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.
And lullaby, my wanton will:
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.
Eke lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest.
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby be thou content,
With lullaby thy lusts relent.
Let others pay which hath mo pence;
Thou art too poor for such expense.
Thus, lullaby my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware and all that was.
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby now take your leave,
With lullaby your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.
That is not a difficult poem but the class was mixed: juniors and seniors mostly, a few older people. Some of them did see that the poem was all about sex; some did not. And, when we got to the “little Robin” stanza, no one was wiling to offer their reading on what Gascoigne was talking about. Spurgeon grew somewhat exercised over this and, finally, I raised my hand. “At last,” he said,” Mr. Hall, will you explain the stanza. I did. The whole poem is rather like Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, about how raunchy we are when young, how we may sprinkle pollen and babies around the landscape in lust run amok…okay, okay, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but…
The stanza in question has got to remind us of the “Cock Robin” lullaby and that old reprobate and deflowerer of virgins, George Gascoigne, is saying goodbye to an active penis in an age when we had not yet invented Viagra. It was not that I knew more or was smarter than the other students but that they were unwilling to say out loud what needed to be said out loud (and there was no Viagra or Cialis in those days).
So, why am I telling you all this? Well, Spurgeon applauded. I figured I’d still be able to cut it in grad. school, and Linda asked me out for a drink after class. MORAL: When you’re amongst English majors, it always helps to read poetry well: you get the grade, the girl and everything.
Later, she was my constant companion at rock concerts in the parks and at the Corcoran and, more importantly, on peace marches. Her twin children often went with us. The way I left her is among the more shameful things I’ve done, but that’s a few blogs away still.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Allen Hallmark's fine Facebook Note on What Happened with Captain America
Trouble with Capt. America or how I almost didn't make it out of Vietnam in October 1968
by Allen Hallmark on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 1:43pm
[Note: Allen and I served at the 330th RRC together and have been friends for many years. He's a fine writer and photographer and I'm delighted that he's writing this blog entry. My hope is that Allen will some day write a formal memoir covering Vietnam and his life as an activist afterward.]
The end of my mandatory 365 days of service in Vietnam was fast approaching, the clock having started when we disembarked from Oakland on that troop ship in October 1967. It was now only about two weeks before Palmer Hall, Don Mohr and I were due to be flown back to the U.S.
As far as Vietnam assignments go, we were lucky to have spent most of our tour with the 330th Radio Research Company (Army Security Agency outfits weren’t supposed to be in Vietnam according to some Geneva convention, so the Army changed the name from ASA to RRC, but the mission was the same.)
With less than a month remaining before we were due to ship out, our company commander made a decision that riled up many of us, especially me. He decided to take away half of the big metal lockers from those of us who lived in “hooches” and give them to the new guys, who were living in tents.
Our company was one of the largest in the Army and beginning about six weeks before I left for home, it began growing at a fast rate. Those of us who were growing “short” lived in more or less permanent barracks called “hooches” built on concrete pads with solid walls topped by wire screen covered by tin roofs. The hooches were divided into rooms by plywood walls about six feet tall and each soldier had his own metal two-door locker in which to keep his uniforms, other clothing and personal belongings.
The company commander’s order to take out one of every two of the lockers from each room might have made sense had there been room in the tents occupied by the newly arrived soldiers. But there wasn’t any room in the tents. So, dozens of these nice, expensive metal lockers, purchased with tax money, were placed out in the weather where they proceeded to rust and were of no use to anyone and would soon become rubble.
Several of us stoners got to talking about how stupid this was. We decided we should do something about it and got together with others and urged everyone to write their congressman and complain about this stupid waste of the taxpayers’ money.
But as I was preparing to write my letter, I got the brilliant idea to write to the President of the United States rather than my congressman. I figured that since I was going to be flown home soon, I may as well send my complaint to the guy who could do some good. However, I failed to reckon with how the Army works.
A few days after I mailed my letter to the president, with a little over a week left before I was due to fly home, I got word that the company commander, an Army major wanted to see me ASAP. I also got word that it had something to do with a message about me that the major had received from the Army Inspector General’s office.
The enlisted man who told me this was all excited and indicated that I was likely in “a world of hurt.” So, I knew some kind of shit was about to hit the fan. I went back to my hooch and found the list of grievances that we had drawn up about how our company was being mismanaged by the company commander and his staff. I wish I had the list now, but I don’t, but there were a bunch of bullets on that list.
Then, with some trepidation I walked over to the Company Headquarters and went in. The company clerk had me wait for a while and then ushered me into the commander’s office, where I’d never been invited before.
I stood at attention or “parade rest” for the whole time I was in there. I was facing the major, who was seated behind his desk. Behind me, sometimes seated and sometimes standing right behind me was the deputy company commander, whose name I’ve forgotten, but who was known to us enlisted guys as “Captain America.” He was about 6’ 3” tall and 225 lbs of muscle and like the vice principal of my junior high school, Captain America was the disciplinarian for the company. He had a testosterone-driven temper that made him infamous among the troops.
After some preliminary questions from the major, who had a copy of my letter in his hand as well as a letter from the Inspector General’s office, to confirm what he already knew, Captain America took over the questioning from behind me. Protocol and fear forbid that I turn around and face him. He screamed at me for what seemed like an hour, but I’m sure was probably five or ten minutes.
Captain America screamed his accusing questions at me: “Just who do you think you are, Specialist Hallmark? The company lawyer?” and “Were you trying to bring disgrace on the major and this company?” and “I guess you think you could do a better job of running this outfit.”
From his ranting, I soon discerned that I’d made a big mistake in writing the president instead of my congressman because the president is in the “chain of command” and one of the basic rules of the military bureaucracy is that you go through the chain of command, step-by-step, going only as far as necessary without jumping ahead to a link in the chain higher than necessary. If a soldier has a grievance, he’s supposed to talk it over with his platoon leader and, if he can’t get satisfaction, then with his company commander, and so on up through the ranks. Instead, I had jumped straight to the top of the chain, the President of the United States. Big faux pas.
Still, I’d really like to know what the letter from the IG’s office had to say.
At some point Captain America ran out of venom for a few moments and the more reasonable major asked me a few more questions. He wanted to know what specific changes I would make if I were in charge.
I don’t know where I got the chutzpah, but I asked permission to refer to my list and he let me fish the piece of paper out of my pocket and start reading it. As I recall, Captain America grabbed the list before I finished and started making sarcastic remarks.
A few minutes later I was dismissed by the major, but as I was leaving the office, Captain America approached me and ordered me to go into the TOC bunker with him. This was the tactical operations command bunker that was surrounded by layers of sand bags where the commanders would go when our company was under attack. Once inside with the door closed, no one could see or hear what went on in there. It was an above-ground bunker but with a very low ceiling, so that both of us had to duck to get inside and sat down on a bench.
Capt. America eyed me in the dim, dank interior of the bunker, and I could see his jaw tensing up and twitching and his eyes were fierce and piercing.
He said, “Hallmark, you look like you want to hit me!” I could see his hand had balled up in a fist and it was trembling too in time with his square jaw. I was very close to peeing in my pants, if not worse.
I said, “No, sir, I do not want to hit you, Captain.” I can’t recall exactly what I said. I tried to speak respectfully and calmly while my heart was pounding and part of my brain was telling me to get up and run for your life. Somehow, I stayed put and for some reason, Capt. America calmed down.
After a while he got to talking about points on my list where I suggested that sandbag walls should be built around the tents that housed the new guys to protect them from the occasional mortar attacks from the Viet Cong sapper units that hit our area. And I suggested that the indigenous tribal people, then called Montagnards (French for “mountain people”, really the Degar people of the Central Highlands of Vietnam) should be hired to work in our compound because from my contact with them I knew they needed the money and that they were hard workers while many of the Vietnamese we hired were lazy and might even have been spies for the Viet Cong.
Capt. America mulled this over. Then, he ordered me to go get a haircut from the Vietnamese barber who worked in our company and to return to him when I was done. I was ever so happy to get out of that TOC bunker with my jaws and other bodily parts in tact and uninjured.
I went and got a haircut, which I really didn’t want to do. I wanted my hair to be as long as possible when I got back to the states and would be on leave on the West Coast for a couple of weeks before heading to my next duty assignment at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas.
I came back to the Company Office and reported to Capt. America. He took one look at my hair and ordered me to go back and get another haircut. I stopped in my room in my hooch on the way to the barber and looking for something in my pockets, I discovered that I had nearly an ounce of marijuana in one pocket of my jungle fatigues that I’d forgotten about. If Capt. America had thought to search me, he could have court-martialed me and sent me to Long Binh Jail for who knows how long. I was trembling, but so relieved that I didn’t mind the second hair cut at all and told him to cut it close.
When I went back to see Capt. America, he had devised a punishment for me. He said he wanted me to build revetments around the tents where the new guys lived. I had a week left before I was supposed to go home. Now, it looked like Capt. America was going to keep me there working on this project indefinitely. I saluted and returned to my hooch almost in tears. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. For a whole year I had yearned for the day when I could leave the Vietnam War behind me forever and fly home to the loving arms of my beautiful wife Molly (that’s another story).
Anyway, I talked the situation over with my buddies and soon I formed a plan. I figured that Capt. America wanted me to fail, so he could heap more punishment on me and maybe even have me court-martialed for insubordination. I decided that I just had to build those revetments.
When I got some time off from work, I talked to my buddy who had a Montagnard girlfriend and who had taken me to their village nearby on several occasions. I told him that I wanted to hire some of the men to help me build the revetments and fill sandbags to fill the revetments. I can’t remember if I got to go to the Montagnard village myself or if he got them to come to me.
The next day a bunch of Montagnards showed up and my buddy served as my interpreter. I told them that I didn’t have much money but I could pay them with cartons of cigarettes, boxes of candy and other goodies from the Post Exchange. Despite the meager pay, they were more than eager to go to work, probably figuring that once they got a foot on post, they could get real jobs there.
I drew up a plan for the revetments and went to Capt. America and told him what materials I needed. He was amazed that I was actually trying to build the revetments, and I was amazed that he soon supplied me with the lumber and sand bags that I needed. Over the next few days, my Montagnard crew built a couple of nice revetments. There were lots more tents that needed them, but by then Capt. America was quite happy with me and my work and we were on pretty good terms. He finally let me join my buddies and fly off to Nha Trang and then to Saigon for our flight home.
I wish I knew what happened to my tribal friends who worked so hard for so little pay and made it possible for me to leave Vietnam on time.
by Allen Hallmark on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 1:43pm
[Note: Allen and I served at the 330th RRC together and have been friends for many years. He's a fine writer and photographer and I'm delighted that he's writing this blog entry. My hope is that Allen will some day write a formal memoir covering Vietnam and his life as an activist afterward.]
The end of my mandatory 365 days of service in Vietnam was fast approaching, the clock having started when we disembarked from Oakland on that troop ship in October 1967. It was now only about two weeks before Palmer Hall, Don Mohr and I were due to be flown back to the U.S.
As far as Vietnam assignments go, we were lucky to have spent most of our tour with the 330th Radio Research Company (Army Security Agency outfits weren’t supposed to be in Vietnam according to some Geneva convention, so the Army changed the name from ASA to RRC, but the mission was the same.)
With less than a month remaining before we were due to ship out, our company commander made a decision that riled up many of us, especially me. He decided to take away half of the big metal lockers from those of us who lived in “hooches” and give them to the new guys, who were living in tents.
Our company was one of the largest in the Army and beginning about six weeks before I left for home, it began growing at a fast rate. Those of us who were growing “short” lived in more or less permanent barracks called “hooches” built on concrete pads with solid walls topped by wire screen covered by tin roofs. The hooches were divided into rooms by plywood walls about six feet tall and each soldier had his own metal two-door locker in which to keep his uniforms, other clothing and personal belongings.
The company commander’s order to take out one of every two of the lockers from each room might have made sense had there been room in the tents occupied by the newly arrived soldiers. But there wasn’t any room in the tents. So, dozens of these nice, expensive metal lockers, purchased with tax money, were placed out in the weather where they proceeded to rust and were of no use to anyone and would soon become rubble.
Several of us stoners got to talking about how stupid this was. We decided we should do something about it and got together with others and urged everyone to write their congressman and complain about this stupid waste of the taxpayers’ money.
But as I was preparing to write my letter, I got the brilliant idea to write to the President of the United States rather than my congressman. I figured that since I was going to be flown home soon, I may as well send my complaint to the guy who could do some good. However, I failed to reckon with how the Army works.
A few days after I mailed my letter to the president, with a little over a week left before I was due to fly home, I got word that the company commander, an Army major wanted to see me ASAP. I also got word that it had something to do with a message about me that the major had received from the Army Inspector General’s office.
The enlisted man who told me this was all excited and indicated that I was likely in “a world of hurt.” So, I knew some kind of shit was about to hit the fan. I went back to my hooch and found the list of grievances that we had drawn up about how our company was being mismanaged by the company commander and his staff. I wish I had the list now, but I don’t, but there were a bunch of bullets on that list.
Then, with some trepidation I walked over to the Company Headquarters and went in. The company clerk had me wait for a while and then ushered me into the commander’s office, where I’d never been invited before.
I stood at attention or “parade rest” for the whole time I was in there. I was facing the major, who was seated behind his desk. Behind me, sometimes seated and sometimes standing right behind me was the deputy company commander, whose name I’ve forgotten, but who was known to us enlisted guys as “Captain America.” He was about 6’ 3” tall and 225 lbs of muscle and like the vice principal of my junior high school, Captain America was the disciplinarian for the company. He had a testosterone-driven temper that made him infamous among the troops.
After some preliminary questions from the major, who had a copy of my letter in his hand as well as a letter from the Inspector General’s office, to confirm what he already knew, Captain America took over the questioning from behind me. Protocol and fear forbid that I turn around and face him. He screamed at me for what seemed like an hour, but I’m sure was probably five or ten minutes.
Captain America screamed his accusing questions at me: “Just who do you think you are, Specialist Hallmark? The company lawyer?” and “Were you trying to bring disgrace on the major and this company?” and “I guess you think you could do a better job of running this outfit.”
From his ranting, I soon discerned that I’d made a big mistake in writing the president instead of my congressman because the president is in the “chain of command” and one of the basic rules of the military bureaucracy is that you go through the chain of command, step-by-step, going only as far as necessary without jumping ahead to a link in the chain higher than necessary. If a soldier has a grievance, he’s supposed to talk it over with his platoon leader and, if he can’t get satisfaction, then with his company commander, and so on up through the ranks. Instead, I had jumped straight to the top of the chain, the President of the United States. Big faux pas.
Still, I’d really like to know what the letter from the IG’s office had to say.
At some point Captain America ran out of venom for a few moments and the more reasonable major asked me a few more questions. He wanted to know what specific changes I would make if I were in charge.
I don’t know where I got the chutzpah, but I asked permission to refer to my list and he let me fish the piece of paper out of my pocket and start reading it. As I recall, Captain America grabbed the list before I finished and started making sarcastic remarks.
A few minutes later I was dismissed by the major, but as I was leaving the office, Captain America approached me and ordered me to go into the TOC bunker with him. This was the tactical operations command bunker that was surrounded by layers of sand bags where the commanders would go when our company was under attack. Once inside with the door closed, no one could see or hear what went on in there. It was an above-ground bunker but with a very low ceiling, so that both of us had to duck to get inside and sat down on a bench.
Capt. America eyed me in the dim, dank interior of the bunker, and I could see his jaw tensing up and twitching and his eyes were fierce and piercing.
He said, “Hallmark, you look like you want to hit me!” I could see his hand had balled up in a fist and it was trembling too in time with his square jaw. I was very close to peeing in my pants, if not worse.
I said, “No, sir, I do not want to hit you, Captain.” I can’t recall exactly what I said. I tried to speak respectfully and calmly while my heart was pounding and part of my brain was telling me to get up and run for your life. Somehow, I stayed put and for some reason, Capt. America calmed down.
After a while he got to talking about points on my list where I suggested that sandbag walls should be built around the tents that housed the new guys to protect them from the occasional mortar attacks from the Viet Cong sapper units that hit our area. And I suggested that the indigenous tribal people, then called Montagnards (French for “mountain people”, really the Degar people of the Central Highlands of Vietnam) should be hired to work in our compound because from my contact with them I knew they needed the money and that they were hard workers while many of the Vietnamese we hired were lazy and might even have been spies for the Viet Cong.
Capt. America mulled this over. Then, he ordered me to go get a haircut from the Vietnamese barber who worked in our company and to return to him when I was done. I was ever so happy to get out of that TOC bunker with my jaws and other bodily parts in tact and uninjured.
I went and got a haircut, which I really didn’t want to do. I wanted my hair to be as long as possible when I got back to the states and would be on leave on the West Coast for a couple of weeks before heading to my next duty assignment at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas.
I came back to the Company Office and reported to Capt. America. He took one look at my hair and ordered me to go back and get another haircut. I stopped in my room in my hooch on the way to the barber and looking for something in my pockets, I discovered that I had nearly an ounce of marijuana in one pocket of my jungle fatigues that I’d forgotten about. If Capt. America had thought to search me, he could have court-martialed me and sent me to Long Binh Jail for who knows how long. I was trembling, but so relieved that I didn’t mind the second hair cut at all and told him to cut it close.
When I went back to see Capt. America, he had devised a punishment for me. He said he wanted me to build revetments around the tents where the new guys lived. I had a week left before I was supposed to go home. Now, it looked like Capt. America was going to keep me there working on this project indefinitely. I saluted and returned to my hooch almost in tears. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. For a whole year I had yearned for the day when I could leave the Vietnam War behind me forever and fly home to the loving arms of my beautiful wife Molly (that’s another story).
Anyway, I talked the situation over with my buddies and soon I formed a plan. I figured that Capt. America wanted me to fail, so he could heap more punishment on me and maybe even have me court-martialed for insubordination. I decided that I just had to build those revetments.
When I got some time off from work, I talked to my buddy who had a Montagnard girlfriend and who had taken me to their village nearby on several occasions. I told him that I wanted to hire some of the men to help me build the revetments and fill sandbags to fill the revetments. I can’t remember if I got to go to the Montagnard village myself or if he got them to come to me.
The next day a bunch of Montagnards showed up and my buddy served as my interpreter. I told them that I didn’t have much money but I could pay them with cartons of cigarettes, boxes of candy and other goodies from the Post Exchange. Despite the meager pay, they were more than eager to go to work, probably figuring that once they got a foot on post, they could get real jobs there.
I drew up a plan for the revetments and went to Capt. America and told him what materials I needed. He was amazed that I was actually trying to build the revetments, and I was amazed that he soon supplied me with the lumber and sand bags that I needed. Over the next few days, my Montagnard crew built a couple of nice revetments. There were lots more tents that needed them, but by then Capt. America was quite happy with me and my work and we were on pretty good terms. He finally let me join my buddies and fly off to Nha Trang and then to Saigon for our flight home.
I wish I knew what happened to my tribal friends who worked so hard for so little pay and made it possible for me to leave Vietnam on time.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
I Participate in My First Antiwar March (Part 34)
GIs United Against the War
Sometime during the summer of 1969, back when I was living in Chillum Heights with Don Mohr and Will Chapman, Allen Hallmark called me from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Allen had been separated from the rest of us: he was a certified troublemaker and sent to North Carolina instead of back to Fort Meade. I have no idea of what his official duty was at the home of the Airborne and of Special Forces, but his more interesting job (well, not an official job) was as a writer and one of the editors of Bragg Briefs, an underground newspaper on the post.
Anyway, Allen called me from Fort Bragg. He wanted to know if I would be interested in traveling down to North Carolina to 1) participate in teach-ins at North Carolina colleges and universities and 2) take part in a march against the war that would go through the streets of Fayetteville, NC, and to the gates of Fort Bragg. I was only a little bit hesitant. And then Don said he’d like to go, too. As I recall, we hopped into my little blue VW convertible, top down, and drove down the highway to North Carolina.
North Carolina? Scary place in those days. I was glad I wasn't "driving while black" (a term we didn't have in those days). As we crossed the State line from Virginia, we saw an enormous billboard: Man dresses in white sheets, on a rearing white horse, a burning cross in his hand. “Welcome to North Carolina,” the billboard said, “Home of the Ku Klux Klan.” I resisted turning back. Aside from that, there was nothing terribly intimidating about North Carolina though I suspect Virginians are pleased to have NC south of them: makes them look good.
Fayetteville was a pretty typical Army town, filled with bars, convenience stores selling dirty books, drunken soldiers in the evenings. Pretty normal stuff for “outside the gates” towns.
The group Allen belonged to, GI’s United Against the War, had organized fairly recently and this would be there first march. GIs came from various places to participate in the demonstration, which was, as far as I can tell, the first active-duty soldiers protest against the on-going war in Vietnam.
It was a great march. Not a lot of us, maybe 100 active-duty soldiers, and 200 civilians who joined us. I walked, in civilian clothes (against the law to demonstrate in a uniform unless you were an officer speaking FOR the war), but carrying a sign saying I was active-duty. Walking next to me: a young black woman who carried her baby in her arms. As we marched from the Quaker church down the streets toward Fort Bragg, she held the baby up in the air and said, “Look, honey, this is all for you.” Eventually, those leading the march decided not to approach the gates since the Airborne had threatened a counter-demonstration.
As I said, it was a great march, even greater, though, for personal reasons. It was my first participation in formal anti-war activity since returning from Vietnam. We didn’t get a ton of publicity though we made a few newspapers, but we did get some recognition from other anti-war groups. They were wise enough to see that active-duty service men and women could be a major benefit to convincing the country that those opposed to the war were not simply long-haired, selfish hippies.
At the end of the march, we reassembled. We circulated a petition that all of us who were active duty signed. Leonard Weinglass, who had defended the Chicago 7 and had been a member of the Judge Advocates Court between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, warned us that signing the petition could get us in trouble. We signed it anyway. Altogether something like 1,350 signatures from Airmen, Marines and Soldiers ultimately appeared on the petition that would appear in the New York Times shortly before the November 19th march on Washington, D.C.
More about that later. That day was wonderful, a milestone for me, something I will never forget. Don and I crashed on the floor at someone’s house and headed back to D.C. to work at the National Security Agency the next day.
Sometime during the summer of 1969, back when I was living in Chillum Heights with Don Mohr and Will Chapman, Allen Hallmark called me from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Allen had been separated from the rest of us: he was a certified troublemaker and sent to North Carolina instead of back to Fort Meade. I have no idea of what his official duty was at the home of the Airborne and of Special Forces, but his more interesting job (well, not an official job) was as a writer and one of the editors of Bragg Briefs, an underground newspaper on the post.
Anyway, Allen called me from Fort Bragg. He wanted to know if I would be interested in traveling down to North Carolina to 1) participate in teach-ins at North Carolina colleges and universities and 2) take part in a march against the war that would go through the streets of Fayetteville, NC, and to the gates of Fort Bragg. I was only a little bit hesitant. And then Don said he’d like to go, too. As I recall, we hopped into my little blue VW convertible, top down, and drove down the highway to North Carolina.
North Carolina? Scary place in those days. I was glad I wasn't "driving while black" (a term we didn't have in those days). As we crossed the State line from Virginia, we saw an enormous billboard: Man dresses in white sheets, on a rearing white horse, a burning cross in his hand. “Welcome to North Carolina,” the billboard said, “Home of the Ku Klux Klan.” I resisted turning back. Aside from that, there was nothing terribly intimidating about North Carolina though I suspect Virginians are pleased to have NC south of them: makes them look good.
Fayetteville was a pretty typical Army town, filled with bars, convenience stores selling dirty books, drunken soldiers in the evenings. Pretty normal stuff for “outside the gates” towns.
The group Allen belonged to, GI’s United Against the War, had organized fairly recently and this would be there first march. GIs came from various places to participate in the demonstration, which was, as far as I can tell, the first active-duty soldiers protest against the on-going war in Vietnam.
It was a great march. Not a lot of us, maybe 100 active-duty soldiers, and 200 civilians who joined us. I walked, in civilian clothes (against the law to demonstrate in a uniform unless you were an officer speaking FOR the war), but carrying a sign saying I was active-duty. Walking next to me: a young black woman who carried her baby in her arms. As we marched from the Quaker church down the streets toward Fort Bragg, she held the baby up in the air and said, “Look, honey, this is all for you.” Eventually, those leading the march decided not to approach the gates since the Airborne had threatened a counter-demonstration.
As I said, it was a great march, even greater, though, for personal reasons. It was my first participation in formal anti-war activity since returning from Vietnam. We didn’t get a ton of publicity though we made a few newspapers, but we did get some recognition from other anti-war groups. They were wise enough to see that active-duty service men and women could be a major benefit to convincing the country that those opposed to the war were not simply long-haired, selfish hippies.
At the end of the march, we reassembled. We circulated a petition that all of us who were active duty signed. Leonard Weinglass, who had defended the Chicago 7 and had been a member of the Judge Advocates Court between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, warned us that signing the petition could get us in trouble. We signed it anyway. Altogether something like 1,350 signatures from Airmen, Marines and Soldiers ultimately appeared on the petition that would appear in the New York Times shortly before the November 19th march on Washington, D.C.
More about that later. That day was wonderful, a milestone for me, something I will never forget. Don and I crashed on the floor at someone’s house and headed back to D.C. to work at the National Security Agency the next day.
Monday, February 21, 2011
At Home Though the War Continues (Part 32)
Home Is the Soldier...
After a few weeks off, I drove back to Washington, D.C., and Fort Meade, Maryland, where I would be stationed for the rest of my mercifully brief Army career. But I did not really leave Vietnam and may never fully leave. I continued until November, 1969, to translate documents and messages from that war-ravaged country. Through assassinations that rocked the United States to moon landings and peace marches and the greatest rock concert in the history of the world, I worked at the National Security Agency until, in November, 1969, the Agency denied me access to classified information. That’s a fairly long story and it played out through the remainder of 1968 and almost all of 1969.
Before returning to Fort Meade, though, I had two weeks’ leave in Beaumont, Texas. I took some long hikes in the Big Thicket, visited friends, managed almost to forget the war though the news was full of it, sounds and images. I got drunk much more than I should have. There are some great bars back in the Thicket. While there, I bought a used Volkswagen convertible and took a few days to drive to Fort Meade. I wanted to get out of Beaumont, get out of Texas. I continued to care for my friends there, but nothing seemed quite like it was. Beaumont had not changed, but I had.
When my Pan American flight home from Vietnam ("freedom bird") landed in San Francisco and I walked through the airport, I had half expected to be accosted by hippies who would call me a baby killer or, at least, try to make me feel guilty for my tour in Vietnam. That had not happened. I’ve come, over the years, to think a lot of the stories I’ve heard about Vietnam veterans’ returns to “the World” have been grossly exaggerated. No one said a word to me even though I was in uniform.
It was, I grant you, different, more lonely, than I see in airports today. Believe me, I’m glad to see this, but today, total strangers approach men and women in uniform and thank them for their service. They deserve that gratitude even though their war today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not much more popular than ours was.
Years later, after the first of the Persian Gulf Wars, when some communities started to hold parades for returning GIs and invited Viet Vets to participate I felt vaguely upset by the whole thing. I edited a book instead, A Measured Response, a collection of poems written by poets who were Vietnam vets and dealt with their feelings about Desert Storm. Some good writers participated in that book: Luis Rodriguez, W.D. Ehrhart, Charles Fishman, David Jauss, Renny Christopher, dozens more.
In my introduction to that book, I wrote: A few years ago, as I watched the beginnings of countless parades celebrating the victory of allied forces in the Persian Gulf War, I heard people talking about the Vietnam vets and how they were being welcomed back through the openness and good cheer of the Desert Storm celebrations. Frankly, I didn’t see it….Coming home from a conference in Utah, [I saw] a young (how very young!) Desert Storm vet two seats in front of me. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw his friends and relatives in the airport with signs welcoming him home. I walked out to my car and drove to my own home in San Antonio.
Washington, D.C., in 1968 and 1969 was wonderful. A few friends and I rented an apartment off post in Silver Spring because we were planning to take classes at the University of Maryland in the evenings. We were in what would probably be considered very low-cost housing at a place called Chillum Heights (not the image one normally gets when speaking of Silver Spring, but still). We kept our lockers in the barracks at “C” Company ASA and commuted in each morning to work at the building and managed to make inspections and roll call when necessary.
I suppose the real reason we went to U of Maryland was to have a better opportunity to meet young women. But I did take classes: one on Renaissance literature and one on Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both were excellent classes. And I did meet a wonderful young woman, Linda, in the renaissance lit. class.
Somehow, during that first year back from Vietnam, I managed to stay in good standing with the military. I was assistant section chief for my section at NSA and they courted me to transfer to civilian status when I got out of the Army. They promised me that if I converted, I would have the rank of GS-9 with a promotion a year later. “Converted”? Sounds religious and many of them were very religious about their jobs.
I had a number of military people and civilians under me in the Building: some were NCOs and junior-grade officers, one warrant officer. I was a Spec-5. The Army did not like it when officers and sergeants reported to Spec-5s. They're kind of hung up on the rank thing. NSA didn’t care. My job was to assign translations to other people in my section and assist them when necessary.
As a result of all that, the C.O. of my company called me in one day for a serious discussion about my future. He asked me to apply for a direct commission. I said no. He asked why. I told him I wanted to get out when I was supposed to and taking the commission would extend my stay in the Army and make me eligible to be called back up for years afterwards. He got pissed. I didn’t care.
I had a similar conversation about converting with my section chief at NSA. I told him I wanted to go back to graduate school. He said I could do that at the University of Maryland while working at NSA. He said I was needed. I asked him for how long. He didn’t understand my question. I suggested that maybe we would not be in Vietnam forever (I was almost wrong about that!) and that NSA might not need so many linguists forever. He said they’d teach me another language. I said I wanted to be an English teacher. He said we’d talk again later. We never did.
Meanwhile, I felt very much like a civilian. I went to work in the mornings in civilian clothes and then drove home to Chillum Heights after work. Usually, I would get together with Linda in the evenings, go out with her on the weekends. Some weekends, I did have to participate in parades and inspections, but most of the time, my weekends were my own. I had a great time though the war kept causing problems.
After a few weeks off, I drove back to Washington, D.C., and Fort Meade, Maryland, where I would be stationed for the rest of my mercifully brief Army career. But I did not really leave Vietnam and may never fully leave. I continued until November, 1969, to translate documents and messages from that war-ravaged country. Through assassinations that rocked the United States to moon landings and peace marches and the greatest rock concert in the history of the world, I worked at the National Security Agency until, in November, 1969, the Agency denied me access to classified information. That’s a fairly long story and it played out through the remainder of 1968 and almost all of 1969.
Before returning to Fort Meade, though, I had two weeks’ leave in Beaumont, Texas. I took some long hikes in the Big Thicket, visited friends, managed almost to forget the war though the news was full of it, sounds and images. I got drunk much more than I should have. There are some great bars back in the Thicket. While there, I bought a used Volkswagen convertible and took a few days to drive to Fort Meade. I wanted to get out of Beaumont, get out of Texas. I continued to care for my friends there, but nothing seemed quite like it was. Beaumont had not changed, but I had.
When my Pan American flight home from Vietnam ("freedom bird") landed in San Francisco and I walked through the airport, I had half expected to be accosted by hippies who would call me a baby killer or, at least, try to make me feel guilty for my tour in Vietnam. That had not happened. I’ve come, over the years, to think a lot of the stories I’ve heard about Vietnam veterans’ returns to “the World” have been grossly exaggerated. No one said a word to me even though I was in uniform.
It was, I grant you, different, more lonely, than I see in airports today. Believe me, I’m glad to see this, but today, total strangers approach men and women in uniform and thank them for their service. They deserve that gratitude even though their war today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not much more popular than ours was.
Years later, after the first of the Persian Gulf Wars, when some communities started to hold parades for returning GIs and invited Viet Vets to participate I felt vaguely upset by the whole thing. I edited a book instead, A Measured Response, a collection of poems written by poets who were Vietnam vets and dealt with their feelings about Desert Storm. Some good writers participated in that book: Luis Rodriguez, W.D. Ehrhart, Charles Fishman, David Jauss, Renny Christopher, dozens more.
In my introduction to that book, I wrote: A few years ago, as I watched the beginnings of countless parades celebrating the victory of allied forces in the Persian Gulf War, I heard people talking about the Vietnam vets and how they were being welcomed back through the openness and good cheer of the Desert Storm celebrations. Frankly, I didn’t see it….Coming home from a conference in Utah, [I saw] a young (how very young!) Desert Storm vet two seats in front of me. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw his friends and relatives in the airport with signs welcoming him home. I walked out to my car and drove to my own home in San Antonio.
Washington, D.C., in 1968 and 1969 was wonderful. A few friends and I rented an apartment off post in Silver Spring because we were planning to take classes at the University of Maryland in the evenings. We were in what would probably be considered very low-cost housing at a place called Chillum Heights (not the image one normally gets when speaking of Silver Spring, but still). We kept our lockers in the barracks at “C” Company ASA and commuted in each morning to work at the building and managed to make inspections and roll call when necessary.
I suppose the real reason we went to U of Maryland was to have a better opportunity to meet young women. But I did take classes: one on Renaissance literature and one on Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both were excellent classes. And I did meet a wonderful young woman, Linda, in the renaissance lit. class.
Somehow, during that first year back from Vietnam, I managed to stay in good standing with the military. I was assistant section chief for my section at NSA and they courted me to transfer to civilian status when I got out of the Army. They promised me that if I converted, I would have the rank of GS-9 with a promotion a year later. “Converted”? Sounds religious and many of them were very religious about their jobs.
I had a number of military people and civilians under me in the Building: some were NCOs and junior-grade officers, one warrant officer. I was a Spec-5. The Army did not like it when officers and sergeants reported to Spec-5s. They're kind of hung up on the rank thing. NSA didn’t care. My job was to assign translations to other people in my section and assist them when necessary.
As a result of all that, the C.O. of my company called me in one day for a serious discussion about my future. He asked me to apply for a direct commission. I said no. He asked why. I told him I wanted to get out when I was supposed to and taking the commission would extend my stay in the Army and make me eligible to be called back up for years afterwards. He got pissed. I didn’t care.
I had a similar conversation about converting with my section chief at NSA. I told him I wanted to go back to graduate school. He said I could do that at the University of Maryland while working at NSA. He said I was needed. I asked him for how long. He didn’t understand my question. I suggested that maybe we would not be in Vietnam forever (I was almost wrong about that!) and that NSA might not need so many linguists forever. He said they’d teach me another language. I said I wanted to be an English teacher. He said we’d talk again later. We never did.
Meanwhile, I felt very much like a civilian. I went to work in the mornings in civilian clothes and then drove home to Chillum Heights after work. Usually, I would get together with Linda in the evenings, go out with her on the weekends. Some weekends, I did have to participate in parades and inspections, but most of the time, my weekends were my own. I had a great time though the war kept causing problems.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 32)
Leaving Vietnam (Part 2)
"Hey, GI! You looking for Dang?" A young boy on a bicycle. I squint my eyes and look at him.
"Yeh, we were having a little talk."
"You come with me, GI."
I follow him for 20 or so blocks through the dark, narrow streets of the old city. Nha Trang has been one of my favorite cities since I arrived in Vietnam a year earlier. A coastal resort city during the French colonial period, its French architecture has hardly suffered during the years of war and the beaches along that section of the South China Sea are wonderful. But Nha Trang has changed since the Tet Offensive of 1968. It's a spookier place late at night and the young boy and I seem to be the only two people on the street.
The young boy. He seems about 12 years old and I assume Dang has asked him to show me the way to her home. So, I follow him.
When we get to the house, the boy points to a stairway on the outside leading up to the second floor. "You wait for me," I say.
When I knock on the door, Dang opens it. Wearing flannel PJs and looking as if she has just climbed out of the shower, she is obviously surprised to see me. I laugh and say "Surprise!" Her response puzzles me. I would have expected almost any reaction from mild amusement to frigid hostility, what I see is fear.
She looks down the stairs and sees the boy grinning up at her. Her dark eyes fasten on mine and she whispers, "Xin anh di (please go)." "Tai sao? (Why?)," I ask. And she explains how being seen with an American could hurt her reputation so much that she might have to become a prostitute just to survive.
I leave. As I said, I am not looking for leased sex, but I had enjoyed the conversation at the Doc Lap. I hope she got along okay after I left Nha Trang and Vietnam, but have no way of knowing. She probably did become a prostitute; I hope not.
When I get back down the stairs, I tell the boy to take me to a house where it is safe for Americans to sleep and he leads me another 15 or more blocks through the narrow streets of old Touraine.
I knock on the door of a small house and an older woman answers. "All girls in use," she says.
"I don't need a girl, just a place to sleep," I tell her. She nods and I pay the boy a few dollars for his assistance and go into the house. The woman leads me to a narrow cot in the middle of a small room that has ten narrow beds surrounded by scrim-like material, cloth you can see through. All of the beds are occupied and some of them by Americans who are still getting their money's worth from the women they have paid. Not a pretty sight. And the sounds are worse.
I nod to the woman, give her ten dollars and lie down on the cot. Almost immediately, a girl who can not be more than 12 or 13 climbs into the bed with me. "You fuck me, GI? Only ten dollar."
I get up immediately and pull her out of the bed. I give her ten dollars and tell her to go to sleep somewhere. And then, with the sound of working women and men making the beast with two backs, I cry a little bit, fall asleep.
The next morning, when I get on the plane, I think I am leaving Vietnam forever, but I don't believe anyone who was there ever really leaves, not all the way.
"Hey, GI! You looking for Dang?" A young boy on a bicycle. I squint my eyes and look at him.
"Yeh, we were having a little talk."
"You come with me, GI."
I follow him for 20 or so blocks through the dark, narrow streets of the old city. Nha Trang has been one of my favorite cities since I arrived in Vietnam a year earlier. A coastal resort city during the French colonial period, its French architecture has hardly suffered during the years of war and the beaches along that section of the South China Sea are wonderful. But Nha Trang has changed since the Tet Offensive of 1968. It's a spookier place late at night and the young boy and I seem to be the only two people on the street.
The young boy. He seems about 12 years old and I assume Dang has asked him to show me the way to her home. So, I follow him.
When we get to the house, the boy points to a stairway on the outside leading up to the second floor. "You wait for me," I say.
When I knock on the door, Dang opens it. Wearing flannel PJs and looking as if she has just climbed out of the shower, she is obviously surprised to see me. I laugh and say "Surprise!" Her response puzzles me. I would have expected almost any reaction from mild amusement to frigid hostility, what I see is fear.
She looks down the stairs and sees the boy grinning up at her. Her dark eyes fasten on mine and she whispers, "Xin anh di (please go)." "Tai sao? (Why?)," I ask. And she explains how being seen with an American could hurt her reputation so much that she might have to become a prostitute just to survive.
I leave. As I said, I am not looking for leased sex, but I had enjoyed the conversation at the Doc Lap. I hope she got along okay after I left Nha Trang and Vietnam, but have no way of knowing. She probably did become a prostitute; I hope not.
When I get back down the stairs, I tell the boy to take me to a house where it is safe for Americans to sleep and he leads me another 15 or more blocks through the narrow streets of old Touraine.
I knock on the door of a small house and an older woman answers. "All girls in use," she says.
"I don't need a girl, just a place to sleep," I tell her. She nods and I pay the boy a few dollars for his assistance and go into the house. The woman leads me to a narrow cot in the middle of a small room that has ten narrow beds surrounded by scrim-like material, cloth you can see through. All of the beds are occupied and some of them by Americans who are still getting their money's worth from the women they have paid. Not a pretty sight. And the sounds are worse.
I nod to the woman, give her ten dollars and lie down on the cot. Almost immediately, a girl who can not be more than 12 or 13 climbs into the bed with me. "You fuck me, GI? Only ten dollar."
I get up immediately and pull her out of the bed. I give her ten dollars and tell her to go to sleep somewhere. And then, with the sound of working women and men making the beast with two backs, I cry a little bit, fall asleep.
The next morning, when I get on the plane, I think I am leaving Vietnam forever, but I don't believe anyone who was there ever really leaves, not all the way.
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