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.
Showing posts with label REMF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label REMF. Show all posts
Friday, July 15, 2011
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.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 31)
Leaving Vietnam
(concerning May 17, 1968)
[This is fairly long and has actually been published a few times, but it seems a good way to end my “friends among the indigenous population” parts of the blog. I’m making it two blog entries; please put up with it if you’re reading this.]
A night in a cheap bar. Nha Trang, South Vietnam. If I recall correctly, the French had called it Touraine, one of their beach resort cities when Indochina/Annam was their colony. [Remember Bloody Mary and Leah in South Pacific? They were Annamese/Indochinese/Vietnamese].
I am drinking ba-muoi-ba and talking with a young lady who says her name is Thich Duong Dang. I call her Dang (pronounced Zang in Vietnamese). She wants me to buy her another drink, but I know the drink will be very expensive tea with just enough alcohol in it to make it smell like "a drink." You see, Dang is a bar girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, five years younger than I am. What money she earns she gets from having American GIs buy “alcoholic” beverages for her, hoping she’ll go to bed with them, but she will not and she is paid by the bar management based upon the number of expensive, watered-down drinks she can sell.
I get the impression (possibly mistaken) that she is enjoying herself. Her normal clientele cannot speak Vietnamese and she normally has to talk to them in some kind of pidgin English that resembles baby talk. We, on the other hand, can discuss the war, poetry, art, whatever we like, simply because I can speak in her language. Probably she thinks I am speaking pidgin Vietnamese!
I would like to get something straight immediately: I am not at the Doc Lap Bar for the purpose of leasing female companionship for the evening. Tomorrow, I am leaving Vietnam. I'll take a short flight down to Cam Ranh Bay and board what we have come to call a "Freedom Bird" back to the United States. I am in the Independence Bar ("doc lap" means "independence" in Vietnamese) to have a few beers, my last drops of "33" beer ("ba muoi ba" means "33" in Vietnamese) before leaving country.
Dang rubs the front of my leg with her foot as we talk...about Yeats as I recall. I have just done an execrable, unrhymed translation of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" into Vietnamese for her sake and she does not like all this talk of rising up and going to a wee small island. I know this is hard to believe: quoting Yeats in the kind of military level Vietnamese I have been taught to a young woman who probably doesn’t even like Vietnamese poetry, much less Irish...but there it is.
Dang is, and there is no other word for it, exceptionally beautiful. She wears a deep purple ao dai and white silk pants that fit tight around her bottom and then flows out from her ankles. Her skin is flawless and she has not had that operation some Vietnamese prostitutes get to make their eyes look more western. She is slender, with a small waist and bust that gravity has not yet had time to play with and that, I suspect, nothing else has ever played with. She is not really a prostitute, only a bar girl, and that is, if anything, a less honest profession.
In spite of curfews in Nha Trang, the Doc Lap never really closes; the bartender only turns the light inside down and the lights outside off. The imitation American rock band from Manilla does a heavy, syrupy version of "Satisfaction" and seques into "Feeling Groovy." Dang and I chat quietly. She invites me to her house for the evening.
"Much too dangerous for an American to go back to base so late at night." She kisses me on the cheek, "Plus, I want to talk some more." I give her 10,000 Dong/piasters (a little less than $10) to buy a bottle of Scotch and, at her suggestion, will meet her outside so no one will see her leave with an American. Now, I am not stupid. I know that as soon as she goes through the door she will vanish for the evening. After all, I've already told her I'm leaving Vietnam tomorrow. Actually, this morning, it's already after midnight.
The bartender laughs at me and tells me she is still a virgin and that I have wasted my money on her. But if I want a woman for the night, he has the prettiest in Vietnam, "Ah, choi oi!, dep lam!" I laugh back and tell him I want no other woman than Dang. When I get out into the narrow street in front of the bar, it's so dark I can hardly make out the road. This part of Nha Trang is filled with two-story buildings hanging over narrow streets and it reminds me of nothing more than a poor, older area of San Antonio that has not yet been gentrified.
* * *
(concerning May 17, 1968)
[This is fairly long and has actually been published a few times, but it seems a good way to end my “friends among the indigenous population” parts of the blog. I’m making it two blog entries; please put up with it if you’re reading this.]
A night in a cheap bar. Nha Trang, South Vietnam. If I recall correctly, the French had called it Touraine, one of their beach resort cities when Indochina/Annam was their colony. [Remember Bloody Mary and Leah in South Pacific? They were Annamese/Indochinese/Vietnamese].
I am drinking ba-muoi-ba and talking with a young lady who says her name is Thich Duong Dang. I call her Dang (pronounced Zang in Vietnamese). She wants me to buy her another drink, but I know the drink will be very expensive tea with just enough alcohol in it to make it smell like "a drink." You see, Dang is a bar girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, five years younger than I am. What money she earns she gets from having American GIs buy “alcoholic” beverages for her, hoping she’ll go to bed with them, but she will not and she is paid by the bar management based upon the number of expensive, watered-down drinks she can sell.
I get the impression (possibly mistaken) that she is enjoying herself. Her normal clientele cannot speak Vietnamese and she normally has to talk to them in some kind of pidgin English that resembles baby talk. We, on the other hand, can discuss the war, poetry, art, whatever we like, simply because I can speak in her language. Probably she thinks I am speaking pidgin Vietnamese!
I would like to get something straight immediately: I am not at the Doc Lap Bar for the purpose of leasing female companionship for the evening. Tomorrow, I am leaving Vietnam. I'll take a short flight down to Cam Ranh Bay and board what we have come to call a "Freedom Bird" back to the United States. I am in the Independence Bar ("doc lap" means "independence" in Vietnamese) to have a few beers, my last drops of "33" beer ("ba muoi ba" means "33" in Vietnamese) before leaving country.
Dang rubs the front of my leg with her foot as we talk...about Yeats as I recall. I have just done an execrable, unrhymed translation of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" into Vietnamese for her sake and she does not like all this talk of rising up and going to a wee small island. I know this is hard to believe: quoting Yeats in the kind of military level Vietnamese I have been taught to a young woman who probably doesn’t even like Vietnamese poetry, much less Irish...but there it is.
Dang is, and there is no other word for it, exceptionally beautiful. She wears a deep purple ao dai and white silk pants that fit tight around her bottom and then flows out from her ankles. Her skin is flawless and she has not had that operation some Vietnamese prostitutes get to make their eyes look more western. She is slender, with a small waist and bust that gravity has not yet had time to play with and that, I suspect, nothing else has ever played with. She is not really a prostitute, only a bar girl, and that is, if anything, a less honest profession.
In spite of curfews in Nha Trang, the Doc Lap never really closes; the bartender only turns the light inside down and the lights outside off. The imitation American rock band from Manilla does a heavy, syrupy version of "Satisfaction" and seques into "Feeling Groovy." Dang and I chat quietly. She invites me to her house for the evening.
"Much too dangerous for an American to go back to base so late at night." She kisses me on the cheek, "Plus, I want to talk some more." I give her 10,000 Dong/piasters (a little less than $10) to buy a bottle of Scotch and, at her suggestion, will meet her outside so no one will see her leave with an American. Now, I am not stupid. I know that as soon as she goes through the door she will vanish for the evening. After all, I've already told her I'm leaving Vietnam tomorrow. Actually, this morning, it's already after midnight.
The bartender laughs at me and tells me she is still a virgin and that I have wasted my money on her. But if I want a woman for the night, he has the prettiest in Vietnam, "Ah, choi oi!, dep lam!" I laugh back and tell him I want no other woman than Dang. When I get out into the narrow street in front of the bar, it's so dark I can hardly make out the road. This part of Nha Trang is filled with two-story buildings hanging over narrow streets and it reminds me of nothing more than a poor, older area of San Antonio that has not yet been gentrified.
* * *
Friday, February 11, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 28)
Time for a Reassessment
When I started writing these “notes about Vietnam,” I suggested that changes in my own thoughts about the war sprang from the things I was writing about here. I think, now that I am past mid-year, through the Tet Offensive, having dealt with places I never went and never in my worst nightmares want to go: Hue, Lang Vei and Khe Sanh, that I ought to do some kind of self-assessment, see if I’ve really written about what caused my change.
Change? Where was I mentally and politically when I got my draft notice and decided to join up instead of let myself be dragged into the Army? Where was I a year and a half later when I boarded the USS Gordon and sailed from Oakland Bay to DaNang Harbor and then trans-shipped onto an LST to sail down the coast of what was then South Vietnam to the beaches of Chu Lai?
This I know: I was apolitical. I did not want to go to war, but I was neither for nor against that same war I did not want to participate in. I went because. . . ,well, because I went. I had no moral or political qualms about going; instead, like Dick Cheney, I would have preferred to be doing something else: skiing, fishing, whatever. But I did go.
Have you seen the film Go Tell the Spartans? It’s based upon a novel called Incident at Muc Wa by, if I remember correctly, Daniel Ford, and it was published back in March, 1967 (I looked that up and, yes, the author was Daniel Ford). That’s while I was already in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, preparing to go to Vietnam. The central character in the novel is a lot like I was at that time (though he was, fictively, in Vietnam in 1964, before the big buildup that got me drafted in 1965). A lot like me? He didn’t have political views of the war, went because, well, because, why not? His commander claims he’s a “war tourist”—went to see what it was like.
Let me confess, that, even now, I am not sorry I went. I learned a lot and what I learned has made me a different person than I would have been had I not gone. I can’t help but wonder if I would have been so much opposed to the first of the Persian Gulf Wars had I not been in Vietnam or to the second Iraq War and to the travesty we now have going on in Afghanistan—that whole litany of unnecessary wars and killings we have been engaged in during and after Vietnam.
But why turn against the Vietnam War while I was active in the war itself? All of the earlier blog entries I’ve written (27 already!) speak, indirectly, to that. If some of us participate remotely in a killing machine, even when we do not pull triggers, and if we neither believe in nor fail to believe in what we are doing, we do start asking ourselves why. You witness the destruction, even if you do not see the body, of a young man on a hill over-looking your camp; you meet the “enemy”—a 15 or 16 year old boy with a head injury who you are expected to interrogate—and the face of the “enemy” becomes visible. You see wounded children in the streets, men and women with no legs, with horrible burns…you see legions of women who have become prostitutes to survive and sell themselves to people in your company...you see people you are supposed to be helping not really wanting to, not really, be helped, not caring one way or the other if the current regime controls their lives or another regime, even if it’s communist, people who just want to be left alone.
You start wondering why you and the military you are a part of are there in the first place. Is it to defend what seems to be a fairly corrupt regime? Is it because we really, truly, believe that if we don’t stop them here, they’ll be invading us through California’s beaches just as we rushed down from the LSTs onto their beaches at Chu Lai? Is it because we truly believed that if Vietnam fell, Cambodia and Laos and Thailand would fall, maybe the Philippines? Dominoes keep clicking in my head! People in the military really are not supposed to think for themselves. That’s knocked out of them in basic training. They are supposed to obey orders. . .straight on up the chain of command: the platoon commander, the company commander, the battalion commander, the regimental commander, the division commander, the army commander, the MACV commander, the joint chiefs, the president…. Well, no. You can't do that. That leads to My Lai. That leads to mindless killing. We should always think before we kill. . .given enough time to do so.
Some people did not have that problem, perhaps most people. They believed and still do, absolutely, that we should have been there. They were not troubled by why we went to war, but they might well have been troubled by why we got out of the war when it was still going on. That’s okay. I mean, they start with different assumptions, with different beliefs, and that’s their business. I don’t argue with them, not ever, because when two people start off with different a priori assumptions, there’s no common meeting ground, no room for discussion, only for shouting. In Vietnam, yes, in Vietnam, I started, naively, with no assumptions at all. Oh, I had a vague sense that my country would not send me to a war without having a good reason to do so. I think now and thought before my war year was over that that basic assumption was wrong.
So, why were we there anyway? A game with the Soviets? That seems to be the best guess. We were there because we did not one foot of soil to fall to communism. The soviets had beaten us into space with Sputnik. . .Barack Obama’s Sputnik Moment for the other side, the URsputnik moment. We had lost the Bay of Pigs. They had backed down on the Cuban Missile Crisis. A chess game: and I was one of the pawns. All of us who went, regardless of our assumptions, were caught up in a huge game of global politics, a game that ate us up and spat us out. Things that were, to me at least, ultimately merely games countries play.
What happened that had any relevant affect on the United States when we quit and went home? Nothing I can think of.
But really, I changed because of the people I met there and people I did not meet but saw in the streets of Pleiku. And people I didn’t see in person, but saw on television and read about in the newspaper. Not peace movement people in the United States, but people like Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the war; people like General Loan, who put a pistol to the head of a prisoner and shot him; and so many people in Pleiku who were maimed, prostituted, desolate. It’s all so facile, so easy to say, but you think about things when you’re on guard duty, when you’re off work and town is closed down, when you’re squeezed into the back of a triLambretta with ten Vietnamese who are just people like you, when the Vietnamese woman who cleans your clothes and your hootch, works silently one day and the next and the next for a full year and then cries and, when you ask her why, just looks at you and then leaves.
I am not at all sure I can explain why I turned against a war I had been apathetic about, but when my friend Allen called me from Fort Bragg one day in the summer of 1969 and said “Come down to Fayetteville, we’re going to march against the war,” I packed my VW convertible and Don Mohr, my friend, joined me as we drove down to North Carolina to march with GIs United Against the War.
I’m not yet through with these blog entries, but needed to stop here for a moment, just to clarify some things in my own mind. My change was not Pauline (I did not get struck by a blinding light and hear God calling me out as Paul did); it was more Augustinian: the result of reading books from the small Air Force Library, of reading with open eyes the books I had taken to Vietnam with me, of seeing what we had done to a small country that had once been beautiful, of meeting our English students, of talking with prostitutes and children in the streets of Pleiku, of chatting over hot tea with an old woman who ran a tea shop, of coming to terms slowly and finding out, discovering, what I really believed and, yes, as corny as it sounds, who I really am.
When I started writing these “notes about Vietnam,” I suggested that changes in my own thoughts about the war sprang from the things I was writing about here. I think, now that I am past mid-year, through the Tet Offensive, having dealt with places I never went and never in my worst nightmares want to go: Hue, Lang Vei and Khe Sanh, that I ought to do some kind of self-assessment, see if I’ve really written about what caused my change.
Change? Where was I mentally and politically when I got my draft notice and decided to join up instead of let myself be dragged into the Army? Where was I a year and a half later when I boarded the USS Gordon and sailed from Oakland Bay to DaNang Harbor and then trans-shipped onto an LST to sail down the coast of what was then South Vietnam to the beaches of Chu Lai?
This I know: I was apolitical. I did not want to go to war, but I was neither for nor against that same war I did not want to participate in. I went because. . . ,well, because I went. I had no moral or political qualms about going; instead, like Dick Cheney, I would have preferred to be doing something else: skiing, fishing, whatever. But I did go.
Have you seen the film Go Tell the Spartans? It’s based upon a novel called Incident at Muc Wa by, if I remember correctly, Daniel Ford, and it was published back in March, 1967 (I looked that up and, yes, the author was Daniel Ford). That’s while I was already in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, preparing to go to Vietnam. The central character in the novel is a lot like I was at that time (though he was, fictively, in Vietnam in 1964, before the big buildup that got me drafted in 1965). A lot like me? He didn’t have political views of the war, went because, well, because, why not? His commander claims he’s a “war tourist”—went to see what it was like.
Let me confess, that, even now, I am not sorry I went. I learned a lot and what I learned has made me a different person than I would have been had I not gone. I can’t help but wonder if I would have been so much opposed to the first of the Persian Gulf Wars had I not been in Vietnam or to the second Iraq War and to the travesty we now have going on in Afghanistan—that whole litany of unnecessary wars and killings we have been engaged in during and after Vietnam.
But why turn against the Vietnam War while I was active in the war itself? All of the earlier blog entries I’ve written (27 already!) speak, indirectly, to that. If some of us participate remotely in a killing machine, even when we do not pull triggers, and if we neither believe in nor fail to believe in what we are doing, we do start asking ourselves why. You witness the destruction, even if you do not see the body, of a young man on a hill over-looking your camp; you meet the “enemy”—a 15 or 16 year old boy with a head injury who you are expected to interrogate—and the face of the “enemy” becomes visible. You see wounded children in the streets, men and women with no legs, with horrible burns…you see legions of women who have become prostitutes to survive and sell themselves to people in your company...you see people you are supposed to be helping not really wanting to, not really, be helped, not caring one way or the other if the current regime controls their lives or another regime, even if it’s communist, people who just want to be left alone.
You start wondering why you and the military you are a part of are there in the first place. Is it to defend what seems to be a fairly corrupt regime? Is it because we really, truly, believe that if we don’t stop them here, they’ll be invading us through California’s beaches just as we rushed down from the LSTs onto their beaches at Chu Lai? Is it because we truly believed that if Vietnam fell, Cambodia and Laos and Thailand would fall, maybe the Philippines? Dominoes keep clicking in my head! People in the military really are not supposed to think for themselves. That’s knocked out of them in basic training. They are supposed to obey orders. . .straight on up the chain of command: the platoon commander, the company commander, the battalion commander, the regimental commander, the division commander, the army commander, the MACV commander, the joint chiefs, the president…. Well, no. You can't do that. That leads to My Lai. That leads to mindless killing. We should always think before we kill. . .given enough time to do so.
Some people did not have that problem, perhaps most people. They believed and still do, absolutely, that we should have been there. They were not troubled by why we went to war, but they might well have been troubled by why we got out of the war when it was still going on. That’s okay. I mean, they start with different assumptions, with different beliefs, and that’s their business. I don’t argue with them, not ever, because when two people start off with different a priori assumptions, there’s no common meeting ground, no room for discussion, only for shouting. In Vietnam, yes, in Vietnam, I started, naively, with no assumptions at all. Oh, I had a vague sense that my country would not send me to a war without having a good reason to do so. I think now and thought before my war year was over that that basic assumption was wrong.
So, why were we there anyway? A game with the Soviets? That seems to be the best guess. We were there because we did not one foot of soil to fall to communism. The soviets had beaten us into space with Sputnik. . .Barack Obama’s Sputnik Moment for the other side, the URsputnik moment. We had lost the Bay of Pigs. They had backed down on the Cuban Missile Crisis. A chess game: and I was one of the pawns. All of us who went, regardless of our assumptions, were caught up in a huge game of global politics, a game that ate us up and spat us out. Things that were, to me at least, ultimately merely games countries play.
What happened that had any relevant affect on the United States when we quit and went home? Nothing I can think of.
But really, I changed because of the people I met there and people I did not meet but saw in the streets of Pleiku. And people I didn’t see in person, but saw on television and read about in the newspaper. Not peace movement people in the United States, but people like Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the war; people like General Loan, who put a pistol to the head of a prisoner and shot him; and so many people in Pleiku who were maimed, prostituted, desolate. It’s all so facile, so easy to say, but you think about things when you’re on guard duty, when you’re off work and town is closed down, when you’re squeezed into the back of a triLambretta with ten Vietnamese who are just people like you, when the Vietnamese woman who cleans your clothes and your hootch, works silently one day and the next and the next for a full year and then cries and, when you ask her why, just looks at you and then leaves.
I am not at all sure I can explain why I turned against a war I had been apathetic about, but when my friend Allen called me from Fort Bragg one day in the summer of 1969 and said “Come down to Fayetteville, we’re going to march against the war,” I packed my VW convertible and Don Mohr, my friend, joined me as we drove down to North Carolina to march with GIs United Against the War.
I’m not yet through with these blog entries, but needed to stop here for a moment, just to clarify some things in my own mind. My change was not Pauline (I did not get struck by a blinding light and hear God calling me out as Paul did); it was more Augustinian: the result of reading books from the small Air Force Library, of reading with open eyes the books I had taken to Vietnam with me, of seeing what we had done to a small country that had once been beautiful, of meeting our English students, of talking with prostitutes and children in the streets of Pleiku, of chatting over hot tea with an old woman who ran a tea shop, of coming to terms slowly and finding out, discovering, what I really believed and, yes, as corny as it sounds, who I really am.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 26)
Witness, not a participant, to Tet, 1968
So, a few days before Tet. As I recall, Allen’s parents were vacationing in Thailand and Allen was on a week or two leave to visit them in the Bangkok area. I always thought Ms. Hallmark had intelligence operatives that were somewhat better than the CIA’s and managed to get her oldest son out Vietnam for Tet, but je ne sais quoi! I could, quite easily, be misremembering this whole thing and I’ll rely on Allen to set the record straight.
We did work really hard in those days: translating, putting things together, sending reports out whenever some little VC sitting somewhere in the South sent a message indicating that his unit was ready for the forthcoming great and glorious offensive and general uprising. We heard rumors that the Pleiku Provincial Chief and his family had left for Saigon for classier Tet parties than could be found on a provincial backwater like Pleiku…but those were just rumors. As it was, Pleiku had a rather exciting Tet party of its own…not, however, rivaling that held in either Saigon or the imperial city of Hue.
The night of the Eve of Tet, 1968, the 330th was on alert as everyone in all of South Vietnam really, really, really should have been. I recall starting out in the bunker (might as well be safe) and drinking a few '33' beers before migrating to the berm. A few VC units had jumped the gun, so to speak, and started their offensive a little early, but I suspect that had just caused MACV to think their attack was the whole thing, easily overcome.
I still recall how creepy it all seemed that night. Remember: our company was between the Cambodia border and the town of Pleiku, 4th Division HQ was on the other side of the town. To get to the city, the VC had to march around us. That night I listened carefully, tried to hear any sign of thousands of enemy troops marching past us but could never hear anything. They must have stayed a klick or two north and south of the areas our floodlights highlighted.
Finally, I hear the sounds of a huge firefight, see tracers—green for the bad guys, red for us good guys. I see flashes, hear explosions from down in the city, dark night, flashing lights. Amber flares shoot up in an explosion of artillery and drift down beneath white parachutes. The rest of the 330th races to the berm, poised to return fire that never comes. The Tet Offensive of 1968 is not about American bases; it is, instead, an attempt to take control of all the major town and cities in the South. In direct disobedience to General William C. Westmoreland, the VC demonstrate that they can, indeed, wage war all over the country on the same freaking night!
The VC hold out, stay in Pleiku for two days. They kill a number of people; we kill a number of people. That’s what this war is all about: numbers, not territory taken and held, not old-style war. They keep control of Hue and its Citadel much longer. Marines and ARVN fight street to street in that city before they regain control. The best description I have read of the Hue fighting is in Michael Herr’s Dispatches and in Gustav Hasford's great novel, The Short-Timers (Full Metal Jacket was made from that book).
Our indigenous native personnel? The ones who work for us at the 330th? They had not come in to work the day before. I wonder why? Xuans 1 and 2? Our very own bar girls? MIA for three days. No one reports to work in the Mess Hall. The men who burn our shit? They had some compelling reason not to come to work that day before. Who needed intel? We could tell by the number of Vietnamese locals who showed up for work or who failed to show up.
The big news: Yes, we did win the Tet Offensive. The North and their southern minions failed to achieve any of their stated objectives. There was no general uprising. Well, they did manage to occupy a few towns for a few days. A few things spoiled that major victory for us: 1. the false notion that our embassy had been over-run, 2) television images of the fighting including General Loan’s execution of the VC soldier in civilian clothes, 3) General Westmoreland’s statements about enemy strength in the weeks prior to Tet.
The so-called “fog of war” was at its foggiest in those days during and after Tet, 1968. The VC ,after Tet, were closer to what the General had described before Tet: unable to mount another major battle. As a fighting force, they were wasted, destroyed during Tet. From Tet on, most of the fighting would be done by the North Vietnamese Army. We did win Tet, but we lost the war that week…even though we would continue to fight for five long years afterwards.
So, a few days before Tet. As I recall, Allen’s parents were vacationing in Thailand and Allen was on a week or two leave to visit them in the Bangkok area. I always thought Ms. Hallmark had intelligence operatives that were somewhat better than the CIA’s and managed to get her oldest son out Vietnam for Tet, but je ne sais quoi! I could, quite easily, be misremembering this whole thing and I’ll rely on Allen to set the record straight.
We did work really hard in those days: translating, putting things together, sending reports out whenever some little VC sitting somewhere in the South sent a message indicating that his unit was ready for the forthcoming great and glorious offensive and general uprising. We heard rumors that the Pleiku Provincial Chief and his family had left for Saigon for classier Tet parties than could be found on a provincial backwater like Pleiku…but those were just rumors. As it was, Pleiku had a rather exciting Tet party of its own…not, however, rivaling that held in either Saigon or the imperial city of Hue.
The night of the Eve of Tet, 1968, the 330th was on alert as everyone in all of South Vietnam really, really, really should have been. I recall starting out in the bunker (might as well be safe) and drinking a few '33' beers before migrating to the berm. A few VC units had jumped the gun, so to speak, and started their offensive a little early, but I suspect that had just caused MACV to think their attack was the whole thing, easily overcome.
I still recall how creepy it all seemed that night. Remember: our company was between the Cambodia border and the town of Pleiku, 4th Division HQ was on the other side of the town. To get to the city, the VC had to march around us. That night I listened carefully, tried to hear any sign of thousands of enemy troops marching past us but could never hear anything. They must have stayed a klick or two north and south of the areas our floodlights highlighted.
Finally, I hear the sounds of a huge firefight, see tracers—green for the bad guys, red for us good guys. I see flashes, hear explosions from down in the city, dark night, flashing lights. Amber flares shoot up in an explosion of artillery and drift down beneath white parachutes. The rest of the 330th races to the berm, poised to return fire that never comes. The Tet Offensive of 1968 is not about American bases; it is, instead, an attempt to take control of all the major town and cities in the South. In direct disobedience to General William C. Westmoreland, the VC demonstrate that they can, indeed, wage war all over the country on the same freaking night!
The VC hold out, stay in Pleiku for two days. They kill a number of people; we kill a number of people. That’s what this war is all about: numbers, not territory taken and held, not old-style war. They keep control of Hue and its Citadel much longer. Marines and ARVN fight street to street in that city before they regain control. The best description I have read of the Hue fighting is in Michael Herr’s Dispatches and in Gustav Hasford's great novel, The Short-Timers (Full Metal Jacket was made from that book).
Our indigenous native personnel? The ones who work for us at the 330th? They had not come in to work the day before. I wonder why? Xuans 1 and 2? Our very own bar girls? MIA for three days. No one reports to work in the Mess Hall. The men who burn our shit? They had some compelling reason not to come to work that day before. Who needed intel? We could tell by the number of Vietnamese locals who showed up for work or who failed to show up.
The big news: Yes, we did win the Tet Offensive. The North and their southern minions failed to achieve any of their stated objectives. There was no general uprising. Well, they did manage to occupy a few towns for a few days. A few things spoiled that major victory for us: 1. the false notion that our embassy had been over-run, 2) television images of the fighting including General Loan’s execution of the VC soldier in civilian clothes, 3) General Westmoreland’s statements about enemy strength in the weeks prior to Tet.
The so-called “fog of war” was at its foggiest in those days during and after Tet, 1968. The VC ,after Tet, were closer to what the General had described before Tet: unable to mount another major battle. As a fighting force, they were wasted, destroyed during Tet. From Tet on, most of the fighting would be done by the North Vietnamese Army. We did win Tet, but we lost the war that week…even though we would continue to fight for five long years afterwards.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 25)
Interim: a Visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
I was in Washington last week and, as I usually do when I am in that city, took time to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall. And, as usual, I found myself tearing up. I visit out of respect for all those young men and a few women who gave their lives in our war. It does not really matter whether we approve of the country’s wars or not, the sacrifice deserves respect. Still, though, I had been reviewing Vivian Shipley’s recent collection of poems, All Your Memories Have Been Erased, just before I left for D.C. and could not help remembering her poem for the students killed at Virginia Tech and the haunting line about how they were cut off “mid-song.” The human beings represented by the names carved into that black wall were also only part way through singing their own songs when their voices were lost to us all.
I was rushed on this visit and took a taxi from the conference hotel to the memorial. The cabbie seemed used to Vietnam veterans rushing to the Wall and asked if I had been there, meaning Vietnam. When I said yes, he said he'd wait for me on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial. The area was totally under repair, reflecting pool drained, walkways rerouted, but the Wall...it still called out to people. The last time I was there a few kids were racing around and their parents were shushing them, asking them to behave. I remember telling them that the people represented by the names would not have minded, that that kind of happiness and joy was okay with them. This time, though, only a few of us, no cherry trees in bloom, no laughing children.
The first few times I visited The Wall, I did not feel that sense of healing some veterans have mentioned, instead. . . Well, I’ve written a few poems, none recently, about how the memorial makes me feel. The first was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and was about a trip I took to the memorial with my friend Pat Valdata. Pat’s a glider pilot and writer and she was a good companion on that walk up the reflection pond to the Lincoln Memorial before we turned right to visit Maya Lin’s tribute:
New Names
1
Cherry blossoms blow along the ground
and green buds promise leaves to come,
closed walkways send us west and nothing's
mirrored in the murky pond.
She notes that gulls soar much as she does
when the clouds build just this way.
She paces me, stride for stride, sees
mallards, heads buried in the slime.
She seems entranced with winged things.
2
Here, the cherries blossom still—a little
north and east of where we stand.
The path leads down beside a polished wall
that sprouts the names of one war's dead.
New faces blossom, new letters grow
from black wings struggling to rise, but
anchored in the hill and in our minds.
New names to link old remains—men
and women who will not grow old.
The wings reflect, although the pond does not,
cherry blossoms in the April sun.
I have returned to the place many times in the intervening years and, each time, the memorial affects me in a different way. The image of “wings,” though: that is constant. When I last wrote about the memorial, I was thinking of the young man named Bao who reported on the camp at Dak To and about what was, surely, his own death after we had pinpointed his locations:
Not All the Names Are There
I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I knew not all the names were there, not all.
They said the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mentioned rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.
A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I knew not all the names were there, I could not
see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one wrote his name upon the Wall.
No one ever mentioned tears could fall and rage
could dominate between those wings of black carved names.
I said I would not write about the Wall;
not all the names can fit there, hardly all.
This time, the visit brought regret. I think the truth about the Wall is that it does not simply reflect our faces against the carved names of the dead in the black mirror polish of its exterior, but also reflects the baggage we bring with us. This is Maya Lin’s real achievement: that the memorial is different for each man or woman who sees it, just as our war was different for each person who fought in it. We do not simply see their names, but see our whole lives since theirs were lost.
January 30, 1968, was neither warm nor cold in the area around Pleiku, but it was a day many new names would become eligible for the stone carver’s art. Allen, Jim, Will, all of us who worked in the linguist hootch at the 330th and all the cryppies, reporters, diddy-boppers, mechanics, cooks, all of us, knew the morning would change the course of the war and would, simultaneously, change dramatically, the way we would live out the remainder of our tour in Vietnam.
I was in Washington last week and, as I usually do when I am in that city, took time to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall. And, as usual, I found myself tearing up. I visit out of respect for all those young men and a few women who gave their lives in our war. It does not really matter whether we approve of the country’s wars or not, the sacrifice deserves respect. Still, though, I had been reviewing Vivian Shipley’s recent collection of poems, All Your Memories Have Been Erased, just before I left for D.C. and could not help remembering her poem for the students killed at Virginia Tech and the haunting line about how they were cut off “mid-song.” The human beings represented by the names carved into that black wall were also only part way through singing their own songs when their voices were lost to us all.
I was rushed on this visit and took a taxi from the conference hotel to the memorial. The cabbie seemed used to Vietnam veterans rushing to the Wall and asked if I had been there, meaning Vietnam. When I said yes, he said he'd wait for me on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial. The area was totally under repair, reflecting pool drained, walkways rerouted, but the Wall...it still called out to people. The last time I was there a few kids were racing around and their parents were shushing them, asking them to behave. I remember telling them that the people represented by the names would not have minded, that that kind of happiness and joy was okay with them. This time, though, only a few of us, no cherry trees in bloom, no laughing children.
The first few times I visited The Wall, I did not feel that sense of healing some veterans have mentioned, instead. . . Well, I’ve written a few poems, none recently, about how the memorial makes me feel. The first was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and was about a trip I took to the memorial with my friend Pat Valdata. Pat’s a glider pilot and writer and she was a good companion on that walk up the reflection pond to the Lincoln Memorial before we turned right to visit Maya Lin’s tribute:
New Names
1
Cherry blossoms blow along the ground
and green buds promise leaves to come,
closed walkways send us west and nothing's
mirrored in the murky pond.
She notes that gulls soar much as she does
when the clouds build just this way.
She paces me, stride for stride, sees
mallards, heads buried in the slime.
She seems entranced with winged things.
2
Here, the cherries blossom still—a little
north and east of where we stand.
The path leads down beside a polished wall
that sprouts the names of one war's dead.
New faces blossom, new letters grow
from black wings struggling to rise, but
anchored in the hill and in our minds.
New names to link old remains—men
and women who will not grow old.
The wings reflect, although the pond does not,
cherry blossoms in the April sun.
I have returned to the place many times in the intervening years and, each time, the memorial affects me in a different way. The image of “wings,” though: that is constant. When I last wrote about the memorial, I was thinking of the young man named Bao who reported on the camp at Dak To and about what was, surely, his own death after we had pinpointed his locations:
Not All the Names Are There
I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I knew not all the names were there, not all.
They said the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mentioned rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.
A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I knew not all the names were there, I could not
see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one wrote his name upon the Wall.
No one ever mentioned tears could fall and rage
could dominate between those wings of black carved names.
I said I would not write about the Wall;
not all the names can fit there, hardly all.
This time, the visit brought regret. I think the truth about the Wall is that it does not simply reflect our faces against the carved names of the dead in the black mirror polish of its exterior, but also reflects the baggage we bring with us. This is Maya Lin’s real achievement: that the memorial is different for each man or woman who sees it, just as our war was different for each person who fought in it. We do not simply see their names, but see our whole lives since theirs were lost.
January 30, 1968, was neither warm nor cold in the area around Pleiku, but it was a day many new names would become eligible for the stone carver’s art. Allen, Jim, Will, all of us who worked in the linguist hootch at the 330th and all the cryppies, reporters, diddy-boppers, mechanics, cooks, all of us, knew the morning would change the course of the war and would, simultaneously, change dramatically, the way we would live out the remainder of our tour in Vietnam.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Just a Few Notes about Vietnam (Part 23)
Between New Year's Day and Tết Nguyên Đán
I have been thinking about poetry while thinking about the time between the western New Year and Tết Nguyên Đán, Between January 1, 1968, and Tet, 1968. And, as with most of us, I have been thinking, always, at least a little, this week, about the economy, which I won’t talk about anymore. Unlike most of us, I have also been re-reading Bruce Weigl’s Song of Napalm this afternoon and I thought, well, yes, there it is. I, also, thought about what’s happening today and how I might have to put off retirement for five additional years (okay, I did talk about it again)...but poetry, poetry is about deeper concerns than this year’s economy or at least it is for me.
"Put off retirement." The phrase reminds me of the way we used to refer, and I regret this, pejoratively, to NCOs who were career men back in Vietnam: “Lifers” and “Beggars.” That was unkind of those of us who were tourists and draftees in the Army then and now seems even worse than unkind. Language, word choice, what we call a man or a thing, is always important. Poetry helps us think of words and word choice in new ways. I have been told (and were I a true scholar would look for the evidence) that the racist term “Gook”—much used on both the VC and our allies, the ARVN in Vietnam—actually comes from Korea.
There’s a story, of sorts, behind that: When the first ship bearing American soldiers landed in Korea, the Korean people on the docks shouted a phrase that sounded like “me Gook.” The Americans purportedly thought they were shouting “me Gook,” “I am a Gook,” and started calling them that. This is an absurd example of the reflexive and a bilingual joke since the Korean word for “American” sounds like “me Gook” and is similar to the Vietnamese word for the United States: “My Quoc.” Probably all of that is absurd and there is an even better reason.
Why absurd? Mostly because the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word back to 1935 in the Philippines:
“1935 Amer. Speech 10 79/1 Gook, anyone who speaks Spanish, particularly a Filipino.
“1947 N.Y. Herald Tribune 2 Apr. 28/6 The American troops‥don't like the Koreans—whom they prefer to call ‘Gooks’—and, in the main, they don't like Korea.”
Poetry. Poetry is essential stuff. Poetry makes us, takes us, helps us consider new places, new concepts, encourages us to revisit the condition of being human. Oh, it may make us laugh, may turn us from gloomy thoughts, but somehow, poetry takes us deep down into places we have never been have and perhaps never wanted to go, fills us with almost inexpressible joy or exposes us to a reality we might have preferred to avoid.
It is not always EASY because life is not always easy, and for the same reasons, it is not always pleasant; it does not fit on a Hallmark card. Weigl reminds me, whenever I read his poems, that sometimes the thickets of our lives are deep, dark and gloomy. Frost is right: “The woods ARE lovely / Dark and Deep” and, yes, “[we do] have promises to keep,” but Weigl forces us to realize that we should not ignore the Dark and Deep part of that beautiful poem, and that, yes, “The lie [hidden behind the beauty of the words] works only as long as it takes to speak / and the girl runs / only as far as the napalm allows.” I will not share more of Weigl’s poem except that “…Nothing / can change that, she is burned behind my eyes / and not your good love and not the rain-swept air / and not the jungle-green / pasture unfolding before us can deny it.”
I am, I suppose, avoiding writing about what happened between the two New Year’s days: ours and theirs. Nothing of what most people would consider “poetic” happened in those days. We worked, we slept, we taught at our little school, we hitched rides downtown or not. We were bored a whole lot. We kept up with the news. We read in the newspapers, saw on television, that General William C. Westmoreland thought the VC were in retreat, that they would be unable to mount any kind of sustained attack again. And we began to translate some odd messages.
I have been thinking about poetry while thinking about the time between the western New Year and Tết Nguyên Đán, Between January 1, 1968, and Tet, 1968. And, as with most of us, I have been thinking, always, at least a little, this week, about the economy, which I won’t talk about anymore. Unlike most of us, I have also been re-reading Bruce Weigl’s Song of Napalm this afternoon and I thought, well, yes, there it is. I, also, thought about what’s happening today and how I might have to put off retirement for five additional years (okay, I did talk about it again)...but poetry, poetry is about deeper concerns than this year’s economy or at least it is for me.
"Put off retirement." The phrase reminds me of the way we used to refer, and I regret this, pejoratively, to NCOs who were career men back in Vietnam: “Lifers” and “Beggars.” That was unkind of those of us who were tourists and draftees in the Army then and now seems even worse than unkind. Language, word choice, what we call a man or a thing, is always important. Poetry helps us think of words and word choice in new ways. I have been told (and were I a true scholar would look for the evidence) that the racist term “Gook”—much used on both the VC and our allies, the ARVN in Vietnam—actually comes from Korea.
There’s a story, of sorts, behind that: When the first ship bearing American soldiers landed in Korea, the Korean people on the docks shouted a phrase that sounded like “me Gook.” The Americans purportedly thought they were shouting “me Gook,” “I am a Gook,” and started calling them that. This is an absurd example of the reflexive and a bilingual joke since the Korean word for “American” sounds like “me Gook” and is similar to the Vietnamese word for the United States: “My Quoc.” Probably all of that is absurd and there is an even better reason.
Why absurd? Mostly because the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word back to 1935 in the Philippines:
“1935 Amer. Speech 10 79/1 Gook, anyone who speaks Spanish, particularly a Filipino.
“1947 N.Y. Herald Tribune 2 Apr. 28/6 The American troops‥don't like the Koreans—whom they prefer to call ‘Gooks’—and, in the main, they don't like Korea.”
Poetry. Poetry is essential stuff. Poetry makes us, takes us, helps us consider new places, new concepts, encourages us to revisit the condition of being human. Oh, it may make us laugh, may turn us from gloomy thoughts, but somehow, poetry takes us deep down into places we have never been have and perhaps never wanted to go, fills us with almost inexpressible joy or exposes us to a reality we might have preferred to avoid.
It is not always EASY because life is not always easy, and for the same reasons, it is not always pleasant; it does not fit on a Hallmark card. Weigl reminds me, whenever I read his poems, that sometimes the thickets of our lives are deep, dark and gloomy. Frost is right: “The woods ARE lovely / Dark and Deep” and, yes, “[we do] have promises to keep,” but Weigl forces us to realize that we should not ignore the Dark and Deep part of that beautiful poem, and that, yes, “The lie [hidden behind the beauty of the words] works only as long as it takes to speak / and the girl runs / only as far as the napalm allows.” I will not share more of Weigl’s poem except that “…Nothing / can change that, she is burned behind my eyes / and not your good love and not the rain-swept air / and not the jungle-green / pasture unfolding before us can deny it.”
I am, I suppose, avoiding writing about what happened between the two New Year’s days: ours and theirs. Nothing of what most people would consider “poetic” happened in those days. We worked, we slept, we taught at our little school, we hitched rides downtown or not. We were bored a whole lot. We kept up with the news. We read in the newspapers, saw on television, that General William C. Westmoreland thought the VC were in retreat, that they would be unable to mount any kind of sustained attack again. And we began to translate some odd messages.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 21)
The Interrogation: No Water-Boarding Here
(to “honor” the publication of George Bush’s memoir, a tissue of lies: a moment of truth)
One of those large eight-man tents, not far from the smaller tent where I was staying for a few weeks. Beautiful Dak To: high hills ringing the small base camp—Some of the hills with names: Ngok Ring Rua, Ngok Rao. I didn’t know what the names meant. They were in the local montagnard dialect and I didn’t speak the language. No one could tell me what the words meant except for the one word “ngok”—mountain. But the landscape as landscape was beautiful—thick triple canopied jungle covered the highest of the hills though sometimes there was a bald spot at the very top. And there were clear spaces, places where our bombs had fallen, places where napalm had cleared the underbrush, places that looked as pock-marked as an adolescent’s face. Other than that, the whole area was lovely.
This isn’t about the Battle of Dak To, nor is it about the death of a scout/spy named Bao: enough has been written about the battle and I've written more than enough about Bao. Army historians wrote a detailed account of everything that happened at Dak To and published it in a full-length, book-sized government document. The Battle of Dak To was the first of the three major battles that divide the whole 1967-1968 war year, like Gaul, into three major parts: Dak To, the Tet Offensive and Khe Sanh. Those names are now, for better or worse, a part of our cultural memory though it is doubtful that, a hundred years from now, anyone will remember what happened near the small town of Dak To.
But I believe that was the crucial year on the war, the year that marked a turning point in the history of the war, the climax of the war. The rest, from after Tet 1968 to the Fall of Saigon, those long eight years, were merely denoument.
What I want to talk about today, though, is what happened in that tent I mentioned back in the first sentence. When I read about the extreme interrogation techniques we used in the Bush era of the Iraq/Afghanistan War, I am always, aways thrust back to Dak To in November of 1967: the only time I participated, if only for one day, in an interrogation. Some MI guys from the 4th Infantry Division had a prisoner: a Viet Cong, not a North Vietnamese Army soldier, Jim and I got a chance to meet with the prisoner the day before we were scheduled to leave Dak To.
It was always hard for me to determine the age of some youngish Vietnamese men. This particular prisoner looked no more than fifteen, but could easily have been in his young twenties. He had a bandage on his head, some blood showing through. When I first saw him I got flashes of Henry Fleming from Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: the bloody bandage, the false bravado, but all bravado is, by definition, false in some way.
I confess that I felt some sympathy for the man/boy. He was on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by men who were much larger than he was, unable to speak their language even when they shouted at him in slower and slower English or tried rudimentary Vietnamese…so rudimentary and wrong that he could not understand a word of it. All of the tones were wrong and if you don’t get the tones right in Vietnamese you aren’t using the right words.
I will say this up front: no one was mistreating him. There was no torture. No one was hitting him. No one used extreme interrogation techniques. But just being there in the tent, lying on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by big men who did not speak his language and who must have wanted some kind of vengeance, must have felt to him like some light form of torture. I suspect the sense of certainty that some form of torture is going to happen is a kind of self-inflicted torture in and of itself.
The prisoner was asking for water, but none of the men around him could understand what he wanted. I told them he was thirsty and one of them brought a canteen. No torture, just a failure to communicate. I handed him the canteen and he drank thirstily. If this were fiction, the canteen with its water might seem like some symbol of communion: take, drink…this is my blood. But this is not fiction and the water was simply…water. No conversion, no spontaneous belief in all things red, white and blue. Merely thirst quenched. He looked better after drinking.
Jim and I were there because we had some use of the language after more than a year of language school: like being able to tell the VC was thirsty, for example. The 4th Infantry Division guys wanted the prisoner to answer questions and they did not know how to ask the questions or comprehend the answers. They had had twelve weeks of Vietnamese language familiarization. That obviously had accomplished nothing.
The boy, because he was not old enough to be called a man, though his wounds might have made up for his age, was perfectly willing to talk, seemed almost eager to do so. I do not remember all the questions, all the answers, but he did tell us which unit he was with and confessed that he did not know much about the area. He was not an officer, not in on any plans that might help the 4th ID succeed in its mission. So, he spilled everything he knew but knew nothing. I remember one of the questions. I was told to ask him if his unit had helmets. I shrugged and asked. His answer: “If we had helmets, I would not be here.”
So, that’s it. I suppose if they had had helmets we would have lost the war even sooner. Or, maybe if we had taken a colonel or general prisoner, we would have gotten more important information from him. You know, plans, major intelligence, but we were stuck with the equivalent of a buck private and like E-1s everywhere, he didn’t really know anything of value. I mean he knew that he was hungry and thirsty and that he was in a shit load of trouble. But that’s about it. And we already knew that. We would have known that without asking him anything. He also told us his unit numbers and designations, but we already knew that unit was in the area. We had known it for some time.
That all happened a long time ago, back in 1967, but I still remember it well: remember the sight of the high hills around the base camp, remember the smell of the camp, the filth, the dead-tired grunts who had recently been fighting for their lives, and, yes, one small prisoner huddled on a blanket on the dirt floor of an eight-man tent surrounded by large men who must have terrified him though they did no physical harm to him.
I don’t know what happened to him after I left the camp and, really, I would prefer not to know. That’s the only prisoner interrogation I was ever a part of and it was fairly mild. I have no doubt that most such interrogations were less friendly than this one, though I'm also fairly certain American soldiers did not torture captured enemy soldiers during the Vietnam War. Whether the ARVN did or not might make us somehow complicit, but I don't know what happened after he was turned over to them. What I do know is that we had a prisoner who obviously could give us very little information. And I also know that we were not unkind though he could not have sensed much kindness from any of us.
I suspect that, right now, he is an aging farmer somewhere in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and sometimes tells a story about the time he was held prisoner in a little out of the way American camp in Kontum Province. He might even mention the American soldier who spoke enough of his language that that soldier was able to know to give him a canteen of water.
Sometimes, that's enough.
(to “honor” the publication of George Bush’s memoir, a tissue of lies: a moment of truth)
One of those large eight-man tents, not far from the smaller tent where I was staying for a few weeks. Beautiful Dak To: high hills ringing the small base camp—Some of the hills with names: Ngok Ring Rua, Ngok Rao. I didn’t know what the names meant. They were in the local montagnard dialect and I didn’t speak the language. No one could tell me what the words meant except for the one word “ngok”—mountain. But the landscape as landscape was beautiful—thick triple canopied jungle covered the highest of the hills though sometimes there was a bald spot at the very top. And there were clear spaces, places where our bombs had fallen, places where napalm had cleared the underbrush, places that looked as pock-marked as an adolescent’s face. Other than that, the whole area was lovely.
This isn’t about the Battle of Dak To, nor is it about the death of a scout/spy named Bao: enough has been written about the battle and I've written more than enough about Bao. Army historians wrote a detailed account of everything that happened at Dak To and published it in a full-length, book-sized government document. The Battle of Dak To was the first of the three major battles that divide the whole 1967-1968 war year, like Gaul, into three major parts: Dak To, the Tet Offensive and Khe Sanh. Those names are now, for better or worse, a part of our cultural memory though it is doubtful that, a hundred years from now, anyone will remember what happened near the small town of Dak To.
But I believe that was the crucial year on the war, the year that marked a turning point in the history of the war, the climax of the war. The rest, from after Tet 1968 to the Fall of Saigon, those long eight years, were merely denoument.
What I want to talk about today, though, is what happened in that tent I mentioned back in the first sentence. When I read about the extreme interrogation techniques we used in the Bush era of the Iraq/Afghanistan War, I am always, aways thrust back to Dak To in November of 1967: the only time I participated, if only for one day, in an interrogation. Some MI guys from the 4th Infantry Division had a prisoner: a Viet Cong, not a North Vietnamese Army soldier, Jim and I got a chance to meet with the prisoner the day before we were scheduled to leave Dak To.
It was always hard for me to determine the age of some youngish Vietnamese men. This particular prisoner looked no more than fifteen, but could easily have been in his young twenties. He had a bandage on his head, some blood showing through. When I first saw him I got flashes of Henry Fleming from Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: the bloody bandage, the false bravado, but all bravado is, by definition, false in some way.
I confess that I felt some sympathy for the man/boy. He was on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by men who were much larger than he was, unable to speak their language even when they shouted at him in slower and slower English or tried rudimentary Vietnamese…so rudimentary and wrong that he could not understand a word of it. All of the tones were wrong and if you don’t get the tones right in Vietnamese you aren’t using the right words.
I will say this up front: no one was mistreating him. There was no torture. No one was hitting him. No one used extreme interrogation techniques. But just being there in the tent, lying on a small blanket on a dirt floor, surrounded by big men who did not speak his language and who must have wanted some kind of vengeance, must have felt to him like some light form of torture. I suspect the sense of certainty that some form of torture is going to happen is a kind of self-inflicted torture in and of itself.
The prisoner was asking for water, but none of the men around him could understand what he wanted. I told them he was thirsty and one of them brought a canteen. No torture, just a failure to communicate. I handed him the canteen and he drank thirstily. If this were fiction, the canteen with its water might seem like some symbol of communion: take, drink…this is my blood. But this is not fiction and the water was simply…water. No conversion, no spontaneous belief in all things red, white and blue. Merely thirst quenched. He looked better after drinking.
Jim and I were there because we had some use of the language after more than a year of language school: like being able to tell the VC was thirsty, for example. The 4th Infantry Division guys wanted the prisoner to answer questions and they did not know how to ask the questions or comprehend the answers. They had had twelve weeks of Vietnamese language familiarization. That obviously had accomplished nothing.
The boy, because he was not old enough to be called a man, though his wounds might have made up for his age, was perfectly willing to talk, seemed almost eager to do so. I do not remember all the questions, all the answers, but he did tell us which unit he was with and confessed that he did not know much about the area. He was not an officer, not in on any plans that might help the 4th ID succeed in its mission. So, he spilled everything he knew but knew nothing. I remember one of the questions. I was told to ask him if his unit had helmets. I shrugged and asked. His answer: “If we had helmets, I would not be here.”
So, that’s it. I suppose if they had had helmets we would have lost the war even sooner. Or, maybe if we had taken a colonel or general prisoner, we would have gotten more important information from him. You know, plans, major intelligence, but we were stuck with the equivalent of a buck private and like E-1s everywhere, he didn’t really know anything of value. I mean he knew that he was hungry and thirsty and that he was in a shit load of trouble. But that’s about it. And we already knew that. We would have known that without asking him anything. He also told us his unit numbers and designations, but we already knew that unit was in the area. We had known it for some time.
That all happened a long time ago, back in 1967, but I still remember it well: remember the sight of the high hills around the base camp, remember the smell of the camp, the filth, the dead-tired grunts who had recently been fighting for their lives, and, yes, one small prisoner huddled on a blanket on the dirt floor of an eight-man tent surrounded by large men who must have terrified him though they did no physical harm to him.
I don’t know what happened to him after I left the camp and, really, I would prefer not to know. That’s the only prisoner interrogation I was ever a part of and it was fairly mild. I have no doubt that most such interrogations were less friendly than this one, though I'm also fairly certain American soldiers did not torture captured enemy soldiers during the Vietnam War. Whether the ARVN did or not might make us somehow complicit, but I don't know what happened after he was turned over to them. What I do know is that we had a prisoner who obviously could give us very little information. And I also know that we were not unkind though he could not have sensed much kindness from any of us.
I suspect that, right now, he is an aging farmer somewhere in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and sometimes tells a story about the time he was held prisoner in a little out of the way American camp in Kontum Province. He might even mention the American soldier who spoke enough of his language that that soldier was able to know to give him a canteen of water.
Sometimes, that's enough.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 20.5)
Thanksgiving, 1967
I am grateful that at this stage in the Vietnam War I remain fairly apolitical. This is the day of Thanksgiving dinner and the Army has good-sized portions of turkey with all the trimmings. The mess hall smells….great! A few of my more politically sensitive brethren boycott the meal. I am perplexed. I fail to see how not eating good food will bring the war to an end more quickly than devouring turkey will. I am either a rationalist or a hypocrite or...maybe, I'm just hungry.
Most of the truces in the war revolved around Christmas and Tet, but there was also a Thanksgiving Truce in the iconic war year of 1967-1968. The odd thing was that the dirty, godless commies pretty much stuck to that 1967 Thanksgiving Truce. Oh, there were a few shots here and there (possibly because the Viet Cong communications net didn’t quite reach everyone out in the boonies), but, generally, the truce held. That was also true the next month for the Christmas Truce. I assume the VC were trying to lull us into a sense of complacency: two truces, no major violations. Surely the upcoming Tet Truce would be similar, no? Well, no, Tet Truce, 1968, was violated everywhere.
But that Thanksgiving in 1967 was, yes, sweet. In the Central Highlands, up in the more civilized area of Engineer Hill (home of the 555th Combat Engineers), we kicked back and enjoyed a quiet evening. Well, relatively quiet, a few jokers fired the fifty calibers and even set off a Claymore, and the combat engineers shot a few rockets into the sky that night. Even the radio traffic was fairly quiet (both theirs and ours). Some of us sat on the VC side of our berm and drank wine and beer, smoked legal and illegal substances, and stared out into the dark, cool night that, to me, most represents the high hills of the province of Pleiku, Vietnam, now called (I think) Gia Dinh or Gia Lai Province.
Sometimes, evenings in the highlands of Vietnam were like that. You could lie down on the berm that surrounded the camp, 3 or 4 clicks from the giant air force base down in the valley, and see the same stars that lit up the sky over southeast Texas, and think of home. Some evenings, Orion, so clear and crisp as it rose above the guard posts, almost brought tears to my eyes. It was all just so damned peaceful! At other times, you could hear fighting off in another section of the valley and see rivers of red tracers piss down on the VC from our guys in what we called Puff the Magic Dragon (after the Peter, Paul and Mary song--we were not divorced from popular culture back home) and a few green tracers flying back up at them. On those nights, the sky was sometimes lit by bright, amber flares floating beneath small parachutes as we looked out into the same valley we enjoyed on this Thanksgiving evening.
Nothing worth reporting happened that day or night: the normal rounds of laughing and bitching, cool breezes, a crisp moonlit sky. Not really worth writing about: a day of relative peace in the middle of ten years of warfare. Hardly worth noting. Not at all.
I am grateful that at this stage in the Vietnam War I remain fairly apolitical. This is the day of Thanksgiving dinner and the Army has good-sized portions of turkey with all the trimmings. The mess hall smells….great! A few of my more politically sensitive brethren boycott the meal. I am perplexed. I fail to see how not eating good food will bring the war to an end more quickly than devouring turkey will. I am either a rationalist or a hypocrite or...maybe, I'm just hungry.
Most of the truces in the war revolved around Christmas and Tet, but there was also a Thanksgiving Truce in the iconic war year of 1967-1968. The odd thing was that the dirty, godless commies pretty much stuck to that 1967 Thanksgiving Truce. Oh, there were a few shots here and there (possibly because the Viet Cong communications net didn’t quite reach everyone out in the boonies), but, generally, the truce held. That was also true the next month for the Christmas Truce. I assume the VC were trying to lull us into a sense of complacency: two truces, no major violations. Surely the upcoming Tet Truce would be similar, no? Well, no, Tet Truce, 1968, was violated everywhere.
But that Thanksgiving in 1967 was, yes, sweet. In the Central Highlands, up in the more civilized area of Engineer Hill (home of the 555th Combat Engineers), we kicked back and enjoyed a quiet evening. Well, relatively quiet, a few jokers fired the fifty calibers and even set off a Claymore, and the combat engineers shot a few rockets into the sky that night. Even the radio traffic was fairly quiet (both theirs and ours). Some of us sat on the VC side of our berm and drank wine and beer, smoked legal and illegal substances, and stared out into the dark, cool night that, to me, most represents the high hills of the province of Pleiku, Vietnam, now called (I think) Gia Dinh or Gia Lai Province.
Sometimes, evenings in the highlands of Vietnam were like that. You could lie down on the berm that surrounded the camp, 3 or 4 clicks from the giant air force base down in the valley, and see the same stars that lit up the sky over southeast Texas, and think of home. Some evenings, Orion, so clear and crisp as it rose above the guard posts, almost brought tears to my eyes. It was all just so damned peaceful! At other times, you could hear fighting off in another section of the valley and see rivers of red tracers piss down on the VC from our guys in what we called Puff the Magic Dragon (after the Peter, Paul and Mary song--we were not divorced from popular culture back home) and a few green tracers flying back up at them. On those nights, the sky was sometimes lit by bright, amber flares floating beneath small parachutes as we looked out into the same valley we enjoyed on this Thanksgiving evening.
Nothing worth reporting happened that day or night: the normal rounds of laughing and bitching, cool breezes, a crisp moonlit sky. Not really worth writing about: a day of relative peace in the middle of ten years of warfare. Hardly worth noting. Not at all.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 16)
What We Did for Kicks at Pleiku Work, teaching at the English school, dodging small dust devils (red because they were commie dust devils), walking or hitching down to the small city that was the provincial capital of Pleiku Province, all that sounds like a lot, but mostly we were bored, bored to tears if not to distraction, especially on those days and sometimes weeks when we were not allowed off the Hill. So, we devised distractions.
Getting drunk or high by some other means was always good. As with many units, we had two major groups of people: those who drank to distract themselves and those who smoked grass. A small group of folks did neither. As far as I can recall, back in 1967 and the first half of 1968, hard drugs were not a part of military life in Vietnam. Nor was overt racism or the kind of militant white/black confrontations we see in many of the later novels and movies of the war. Perhaps that was just a peculiarity of the 330th but the only real “anti” feelings we seemed to have were directed at the officers and NCOs by the enlisted personnel. I mean you have to have someone to be against, haven’t you? We had a few gay men in the company but no one cared. They did their jobs, laughed and joked just like everyone else. I suspect the 330th was more likely than the combat engineers of the 555th to have gays and potheads and not to have any repercussions from that, but I don’t know that to be a fact.
The heads had a bunker of their own, right outside the linguists' barracks. It had all the requisite paraphernalia of the sixties: wine bottles with coats of dripped multicolored wax from the candles, beadwork here and there, posters, and the ever-present reek of both tobacco and grass smoke. The music there was much better than the music in the club where the drinkers hung out. The bunker had Joplin and Hendrix and the Stones and the Beatles and Grace Slick and more. The club had country western music. I suppose whether the music was better there or not was a matter of taste.
We had visiting musical groups, mostly from the Philippines, mostly rock bands with strippers. I don’t think we ever had a USO troupe visit the Hill, but we might have. I do recall that when Bob Hope and his merry band of entertainers visited Pleiku and we were allowed to go, no one from the 330th chose to do so. Not exactly a boycott. I can’t recall ever having seen a Donut Dolly on the Hill either. We did have two Vietnamese women working at the EM Club and both were named Xuan. One of the Xuans had long hair and was beautiful. The other Xuan was kind of short and chubby and was rumored to put out for a few hundred piasters. I never found out.By the way, the Vietnamese called their money “dong”: 500 dong could buy a lot: a fake onyx chess set that would bleed dye onto your fingers, a china vase to send home to mom, a jacket claiming that “Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will fear no evil, because I’m the meanest MFer in the valley," or maybe a short time with one of the local whores. For some reason we translated “dong” into “piaster.” Maybe because that’s what the French called the local currency back when they wee the colonial power in charge.
We were not, however, paid in dongs/piasters but in Military Payment Certificates (MPCs). The local indigenous personnel downtown would take MPCs and give change in dongs: a form of speculation in the U.S. currency. Vietnamese working for us were paid in dongs.piasters, not in MPCs. Periodically, the US. military would change the currency and the MPCs held by the locals would become worthless. We had to turn ours in for new forms of MPC so, in the weeks before the change, those in the know would frequently go into town, let the natives know about the coming currency change and purchase MPCs from them for about a nickel or quarter on the dollar and then turn the old MPCs in on change-over day. I called it "Screw the Vietnamese/Get Rich Day."
On the Hill, poker was always a good way to earn or lose money and to pass the time. “Pass the time!” Wonderful little sentence, no? Pass the time until you go home, until you die, until someone wastes you, until you buy the farm. “Hot damn, we’re all gonna die!” A character in Catch-22 spends much of his time trying to be bored. Why? Because time passes more slowly, in a relative kind of way, when you’re bored; ergo, bored people live longer. Most of us lived a few years for our one year in Vietnam.
We bet on almost everything. We had gross-out contests and, as Allen Hallmark suggested, the grossest thing anyone in camp could do, aside from doing the short, chunky Xuan (rumored to be a guaranteed quick trip to the mythical island where the military kept those with the black syphilis), was to lick the piss tubes. Let me explain: piss tubes were 6” tubes stuck in the ground, the open, above-ground end covered with a wire mesh, into which the men of the company would urinate. Over time, the wire mesh would grow slimy with bacteria and whatever. The drinkers and the heads would dare each other to lick the wire mesh. Some really drunken GI would always take the challenge. The things men do for fun! In trouble once for some reason, I was put on a detail to remove the old piss tubes and sink new ones into a different piece of ground. Wearing heavy gloves, those of us on the detail managed to wrench the old tubes from the ground and the red dirt of Pleiku bubbled and foamed for some minutes afterwards. We covered the bubbling earth with more red dirt and it finally subsided. It could not have been much worse than trying to bury nuclear waste materials. I assume that those who licked the tube are now all dead, but perhaps not. Have I mentioned that we were the most highly educated group of enlisted men in the Army yet? The brightest, by military IQ testing? That does not mean the highest level of common sense.
One evening, one of the analysts (I’ve forgotten his name) stayed off base late. No one was alarmed. And then he was spotted the next morning outside the fence facing our area of the perimeter: naked and with his M-16 pointed in at us. I wish I had a photograph! One of the sergeants drove out and around the perimeter and talked him out of the rifle and into the jeep. I heard later that the analyst was discharged with a Section 8. Rumors! Whatever, he left the Hill that week. Fun! Entertaining!
What I did, mostly, was read: those Thomas Hardy novels and poems, the books I took with me, local newspapers, magazines shipped over from home. I played some chess, some poker, gin rummy. listened to music, learned to use the darkroom, watched TV…and drank. I hardly ever have even a beer anymore. I came much too close to becoming an alcoholic when I got back from Vietnam.
And that is, for the most part, what I did in the war and what we, as a group, did in the war when we were not on duty.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 14)
I Come Under Attack by the VC Air Force
The School was good and very much worthwhile, but the war did continue and we had our normal activities. I’d like, just for a moment to revisit guard duty—mostly because guard duty for us was not very much like the guard duty I have read about in hundreds of Vietnam memoirs and novels. Guard duty in a grunt unit was something very serious. Now, on the matter of Grunt guard duty, I cannot speak from experience and I suspect much of what I have read is exaggerated. Is it possible that our boys in camouflaged green clothing did not have flood lights pointed out from their camps so they could easily spot the guys in black PJs? Didn’t they all have colleagues viciously killed by sneaky VC because they nodded off a bit? That certainly was not how it was for me when I stood perimeter guard on Engineer Hill, but that's what I've read, so it must (in reverse Panglossian logic) be true.
Sidebar: What is a grunt?
Believe me, the only thing I know about this is from my reading and from the this is no shit war stories I have heard and read. And,m of course, there is the "MILTERMS" dictionary on the Internet: A US Army soldier - sometimes, but not always, specifically refers to an infantryman. Folklore has it that GRUNT was originally an acronym of Government Reject - Unfit for Normal Training.
I wrote a poem once about the East St. Louis guy I've spoken about before. To illustrate my own ill-conceived notions about the etymology of the word "grunts," I'll repeat it here:
Push-Ups
(Sgt. Smith, as the grunt's push up count went past 200: "He's gonna set the fuckin' batallion record")
That night, down on the floor
while we counted, your arms,
so fluid, pumped, stretched...
dropped your body an inch above
the tile, then lifted you so high
that something had to give--
the floor, the tiles, the sky--something
had to break. No sweat, just
repetitions, "100," "200," "299!"
and the you stopped.
I knew
why once: the time, the atmosphere,
the need to articulate something
that could not be grunted out
to prove something to yourself
and all of us. Goddamn but you
were cool when you held yourself so still,
looked up at all of us and laughed.
You lifted one hand from the floor, brushed
a drop of sweat from your lip, stood up
and walked away.
Perhaps other definitions: "the noise made by the RTO as he carried everything most people carried, plus a heavy radio, into the boonies. Or the sound the guy carrying the M-60 machine gun carried." Or the inability to express oneself in anything other than grunts. Kind of an insulting way to refer to the people who actually did the fighting and most of the dying, but there it is.
When I went on guard duty, I put on an old pair of fatigues, found my helmet and its liner, checked out my M-16 and filled my OD plastic canteen with wine, then strolled out to my assigned bunker. It was on the other side of the berm the engineers had thoughtfully circled the hill with and so was a bit more dangerous than being behind the berm. First thing we did on guard duty was climb to the top of the bunker (sandbagged metal container box that had been lifted from a ship— about the size of a small office cubicle with a smaller area on top that had a steel roof) and check the fifty caliber and the M-60 machine guns by firing short bursts. Then back down to make sure the Claymores were pointed the right way and armed. We did not test Claymores by firing them though that might have been fun to do.
After that, it was time to be bored, sip wine from the canteen, and stare out across three rows of concertina wire into the darkening night. Sometimes (well most times), if I had two canteens and enough wine, I would recite poetry into the dark after the other two guys at my bunker had fallen asleep. Usually, it was poems like Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Inisfree.” It begins, “I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree…” Or, maybe, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which begins, “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table…” Or maybe Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and wonder what lies I might tell my grandchildren in some as yet unimagined future. If I had enough of a buzz on, I would lift my canteen to the sky and salute, as old Eben Flood did in the Robinson poem, the two moons I could make out quite clearly in the near drunken night. Most of the poems were about getting up and going somewhere else. In the same way, the most popular songs sung by the Filipina strippers who sometimes visited us were about leaving: “Ho-o-meward bou-ound…I-I wish I wa-as….” I would shudder at the failure to use the subjunctive but did join in on the refrain.
I didn’t always wake up the other guys if I got a bit too maudlin or was too happy in my own solitude. You didn’t get too many chances to be alone and think in Vietnam. Oh, we all did think, but usually, in the company of other people. Usually, I would watch the stars shining brilliantly above me in an area that had very little ambient light not made by the floodlights in front of me, and think about girls I knew back in Beaumont, Texas, and in Austin. Those were, I confess, sometimes erotic thoughts if not downright pornographic. Or about my high school students in Silsbee, Texas, many of whom were probably training to come to Vietnam as I stood out there on top of a bunker. In fact, some of my seniors from Silsbee, Texas, might well have already been in Vietnam. I had a full year and a half of training before being shipped over and that would have given them time to go through Basic Training and AIT. A few might have flown over me as the troop ship I was on waddled through the Pacific Ocean. I hope that somewhere at least one of them is reading this.
If, as happened on some nights, the VC fired rockets, the other two men standing (or sleeping) guard would wake up and climb up on top of the bunker. We rarely hunkered down behind the sandbags because they normally fired the rockets well over our heads and into the Air Force Base…we were much too small a target for anything except the occasional mortar attack. It was an interesting show, though, those nights when the VC came out to play.
At any rate, the sun would rise--it has a habit of doing so--and I would go back to my hootch and go to sleep for a few hours before walking over to the Ops Tent to get back to work.
One night, though, things were a bit different. My bunker came under attack.
Here’s what happened and to capture all the gory excitement, I'm shifting to present tense:
My normal state of boredom and mild wine-drinking is broken, but not by anything I can fire a weapon at. A horde of wasps has attacked. Back in the States, I know, wasps do not swarm like bees and certainly not at night. But these are VC wasps or may be some other flying critters that only look like wasps, and feel the night belongs to them. Ugly things. Within a few seconds, they have taken over the whole top of the bunker. Why? Because I desert my post. I jump off the side of the bunker at the first sting. I know damned well I can guard the perimeter just as well from the bottom of the thing. Besides, no one except these wasps has ever attacked us.
I go inside and call the OD (Officer of the Day? Why does he work at night?) to report enemy aerial infiltration and he refuses to believe me. I invite him to come down and take a look. He orders me back up to the top of the bunker and I tell him I will be happy to follow him. He drives his jeep down to the bunker and, while he does not exactly say, “Follow me!” does climb halfway up the ladder before being stung. “As you were,” he says and leaves.
So, that’s the story. One night in the war, my bunker was overrun by the VC Air Force and I shamelessly surrendered to superior forces.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 13)
Our School Outside Pleiku
One of the more delightful things that happened during my tour of the beautiful southern part of Vietnam is that the commander of the Air Force base down in the valley heard that the 330th had linguists. Well, his hearing that was not delightful but what he did because of it was. You see, most of the Air Force linguists were not stationed in Vietnam. A number of them were friends of mine, had been to language school with us at Fort Meade: Larry Ferguson, Joe Newbold, Skip Keating and others. Instead of sending them to Vietnam, the air force sent them to Thailand and bases like U Dorn [SIC?]. So, the commanding general of the Air Force base didn’t have any linguists.
Nor, as it turned out, did he have enough “indigenous native personnel” who spoke English to fill certain jobs on the base. So, he called our commander and suggested that he might want to do the air force a favor and lend him enough linguists to train Pleiku folks who wanted to work at the air force base but whose English skills were not quite good enough. Our C.O. ordered us to volunteer to do so when we weren’t on one of our normal shifts. We were more than happy to do so.
What we thought was going to be our first crop of students for six full months was a hand-picked group of eight students, young men and women who were probably among the elite of Pleiku. They were, for the most part, well-dressed when they came to class and most of the young men had their own bicycles. They were quite eager to learn to speak and write the English language. I was curious about this and asked one of the students. For the young men, he said, working for the air force of the USA was a deferment from getting drafted into the ARVN. It paid better and they didn’t get shot at. That was probably true right up to the day when forces of North Vietnam marched into Pleiku and onto the air force base.
We taught five days each week but only if we were on the swing or midnight shift at the 330th. The Army, of course, came first.
It just occurred to me that I have not yet said that the work we were doing was, officially, in support of the 4th Infantry Division. We were not, I hasten to add, a part of the 4th, but were detached from the 3rd RR to support that division. When we were with the 601st RR Company, we were detached in support of the Americal Division but were not a part of that newly reformed division. That meant that our command structure was not through the commanding generals of those divisions but was through the 3rd and back up through the ASA chain of command to the civilian-controlled National Security Agency.
Nonetheless, the best part of my job in Vietnam was teaching English as a second language to young Vietnamese adults. Some years later, I wrote a Christmas poem, something much like an unrhymed sonnet, for those students:
The English class at Lake Bien Ho
laughs, shouts, sings Christmas carols
in broken English, sing-songy, tonal
inflections that do not somehow fit
in this warm, green land. A small boy
talks about the Buddha. Not long ago
a bonze kindled himself in Saigon, burned
with intensity, no screams, a desperate
song, silence fell on a noisy city.
At Lake Bien Ho the teachers
have brought a Christmas tree, presents
for their students: books, candles,
cakes and candy. They sit on the bank
and sing of shepherds and their flocks.
An old man on a water buffalo watches.
All good things do come to an end and our little school ended on January 29, 1968. We had already sent a message to MACV that the Tet Offensive was going to happen and our students already seemed to know about it. They were getting out of Dodge City as quickly as possible. We had a quick ceremony on the 29th and gave each student a certificate of completion. I can’t recall seeing them again after that day. I hope most of them got out of the country in 1975 when they would have been in their late twenties, but some probably got re-educated. That happened to a lot of former South Vietnamese citizens who worked for us.
The loss of the South and the reunification of the two parts of Vietnam is, I think, probably a good thing in the long run though I would have preferred that the southern region had won and established a true democracy in the country. A good thing? Mostly because the actual fighting, the killing and maiming, ended. In the long run that is a good thing. People will disagree with me and I simply don’t care one way or the other.
I do care, though, about the people I met there and the people I did not meet. We lost more than 50,000 American soldiers in that little country. The Vietnamese must have easily lost ten times that many. And that doesn’t really include everyone who died. Some died years later through suicide or illness caused by Agent Orange or some other reason related to our lost war. We lament our soldiers exposed to a chemical defoliant like Agent Orange but how much worse it must be for those who live there.
So, while I would have preferred a different outcome; I am pleased that there was an end…regardless of the outcome.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 12)
REMFs at War, #2
Most days in Vietnam were dull and uneventful. The VC mortared our compound a few times but no one else was ever injured and none seriously. We had none of the racial incidents that seemed to mark later years in the war. Drug use was mostly grass in 1967 and 1968. You could buy it in the market. Boredom was the major enemy along with news from back in “the World.”
Many of us in the 330th kept abreast of the latest news of unrest on the campuses where we had gone to college. We read newspapers from home or managed to watch the news on the Armed Forces Television Network (Yes, we had television on the Hill. The television show “Combat”--which we saw as a comedy--was a great favorite.) or received letters from home. Most of us realized that the protesters were not protesting against us but against government policy. I do wish people could get that straight in the current wars.
I was becoming a bit more politically aware than I had been when I had pretty much drifted into the Army back in December, 1965. I don’t mean that I would have gone to Canada or even to Sweden (both places are much too cold and actually have white stuff that falls from the sky), but I would probably have visited my Selective Service Board and argued that my student deferment was waiting for me. Seven years later, I would have completed the PhD and the war would have been over for all practical purposes.
In October, though, I was busy with the other linguists working on a whole series of messages heralding the formation of the “Provisional Revolutionary Government.” And I was very busy with Allen, Jim, and others in fighting what I have always called the “Refrigerator War.
And this, too, is no shit:
Not too long after we arrived on Engineer Hill, we finished building our new barracks. It was, truly, much too big and pre-fabricated, all lumber with concrete floors, to be called a “hootch.” We helped put the things together with ladders, hammers and nails (very Thoreauvian that, building our own houses). Inside were partitions that divided the place into two-man sleeping arrangements: cots, footlockers, tin wardrobe-type cabinets where we could hang clothes. Each of the partitions had electric outlets.
And, REMF that I am and have always been, what can I say? The PX sold mini-fridges like the ones most dorm residents have in their dorms now. The only people they could sell them to were soldiers on the Hill. Ipso Facto: they were meant for us. So, two by two, the linguies and others in the 330th bought fridges. Mostly, we stored beer and soft drinks in them, the occasional bottle of white wine. The reds were kept in racks above the fridge. Shameless, no? But we, sans dout, were the intellectual elite of the enlisted ranks. I say that, shamelessly, even though we had been dumb enough to go in the Army and, even dumber, to sign up for four years into of three. Why would we do that? Stupid of us, but we believed the recruiters who said we would not have to go to Vietnam.
In all of that frenzy of refrigerator buying, we had not counted on our company commander. “Shaky,” having received a medal for leading us into battle, mostly against each other,decided that since those of you Vietnam veterans out there who might be reading this and who were grunts could not have cold beer out in wherever in the boonies your battles happened to be, we should, in some kind of weird empathy with you guys, not be able to have cold beer in what passed for our hootches either.
We had not, then, heard of “fragging” and were non-violent enough that we would not have fragged him, but we had heard of peaceful and/or passive resistance. We read the order that was posted on our bulletin board and disregarded it.
A few weeks later, our fearless commander, winner of a non-valorous Bronze Star, shaky to the end of his tour, announced an inspection. On the day of the coming inspection, we took all of the beer out of the refrigerators and lined them up under our cots. When the C.O. came through, I (the ranking Spec-4 in our digs) shouted “Ten-Hut!” and we all snapped to.
SIDEBAR: Why I was the ranking Spec 4
Basically, what happened was that I didn’t have a car. You may well ask yourself what not having a car to do with getting a promotion and, had I not been there, I would be asking the same question. You see, I had had a car, a shiny 1965, pale yellow, Pontiac GTO (my first ever new car) before I got drafted and then enlisted. But that car was only five months old and I had to pay $87.95/month for it. I could afford that, barely, while I was teaching at Silsbee High School but E-1 pay was less than the total monthly car payment. I gave the car back to the bank and wound up doing monthly installments to pay the bank the difference between what I still owed on the car and what they were able to sell the “used, current-year car with 33,000 miles on the odometer” for and what I still owed. I paid them $10/month for the first two years of my Army life. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than 10% of my monthly salary as an E-1 and E-2.
Since I did not have a car, Allen Hallmark gave me a ride (I was the--*wink*--chaperon on the trip from Texas to Fort Meade because Allen was taking his then girl-friend, soon-to-be-wife, Molly, to Maryland with him). They dropped me off at Student Company, ASA, and then went house-hunting.
Okay and en fin, here’s what happened. I reported in on a Friday afternoon and Allen, Don, and everyone else reported in on the following Monday. The captain who was C.O. of student company had never come into contact with an E-2 enlisted man before (or at least had never had one in his company, until us. Most of student company was made up of sergeants and a few officers being re-trained as linguists. We were among the first folks in the call-up of 1965 when U.S. involvement in Vietnam began its rapid expansion with deployment of Marines to DaNang.). The Captain, a really good guy whose name I have forgotten, put through the paperwork immediately to have me promoted to PFC. The other students did not have their paperwork processed until the next week. As a result, like clockwork, I was always promoted a few days before all the rest of my cohort: to PFC, to Spec-4, to Spec-5).
So, there it is. On that day, because I had not had a car when I got to Fort Meade (I would have found something to do until the next Monday when we were supposed to report in if I had had one), I was the ranking enlisted man in our barracks and had to call everyone to attention out of what passed for respect for our C.O.
Back to the REMF War and I do hope Allen remembers this, if he’s reading it—he’s the only corroborating witness I have. When the C.O. got to our partitioned-off cubical and saw the fridge, he ordered us to open it. We did. There was no beer in it. Ever vigilant as our C.O. was, he did spot the cans of beer standing in perfect ranks under the cots. When he had the temerity to ask what those things were under our cots, either Allen or I said, “They’re cans of beer, sir!”
When he demanded to know why we had not gotten rid of the cans of beer as he had ordered us, one of us (I forget which one) said, “You ordered that we not have beer in our refrigerators, sir. These cans are not in our refrigerator, sir!” Shaky shook a little and, as I recall it, we filled sandbags for a while. But thanks to our skills interpreting poetry and other difficult missives, we could not be found guilty of anything. Allen would fill more sandbags before we left Pleiku, but those were my last bags.
For a few weeks, we had our beer in the EM Club and were able to view the occasional rock band/strip show, but then after a minor work slow down had our privileges reinstated. You see, some of us kept getting sick and were somehow unable to read Vietnamese message (unless they were really important). Shortly after that, Shaky decided we had learned our lessons and we were able to restock the refrigerators.
Most days in Vietnam were dull and uneventful. The VC mortared our compound a few times but no one else was ever injured and none seriously. We had none of the racial incidents that seemed to mark later years in the war. Drug use was mostly grass in 1967 and 1968. You could buy it in the market. Boredom was the major enemy along with news from back in “the World.”
Many of us in the 330th kept abreast of the latest news of unrest on the campuses where we had gone to college. We read newspapers from home or managed to watch the news on the Armed Forces Television Network (Yes, we had television on the Hill. The television show “Combat”--which we saw as a comedy--was a great favorite.) or received letters from home. Most of us realized that the protesters were not protesting against us but against government policy. I do wish people could get that straight in the current wars.
I was becoming a bit more politically aware than I had been when I had pretty much drifted into the Army back in December, 1965. I don’t mean that I would have gone to Canada or even to Sweden (both places are much too cold and actually have white stuff that falls from the sky), but I would probably have visited my Selective Service Board and argued that my student deferment was waiting for me. Seven years later, I would have completed the PhD and the war would have been over for all practical purposes.
In October, though, I was busy with the other linguists working on a whole series of messages heralding the formation of the “Provisional Revolutionary Government.” And I was very busy with Allen, Jim, and others in fighting what I have always called the “Refrigerator War.
And this, too, is no shit:
Not too long after we arrived on Engineer Hill, we finished building our new barracks. It was, truly, much too big and pre-fabricated, all lumber with concrete floors, to be called a “hootch.” We helped put the things together with ladders, hammers and nails (very Thoreauvian that, building our own houses). Inside were partitions that divided the place into two-man sleeping arrangements: cots, footlockers, tin wardrobe-type cabinets where we could hang clothes. Each of the partitions had electric outlets.
And, REMF that I am and have always been, what can I say? The PX sold mini-fridges like the ones most dorm residents have in their dorms now. The only people they could sell them to were soldiers on the Hill. Ipso Facto: they were meant for us. So, two by two, the linguies and others in the 330th bought fridges. Mostly, we stored beer and soft drinks in them, the occasional bottle of white wine. The reds were kept in racks above the fridge. Shameless, no? But we, sans dout, were the intellectual elite of the enlisted ranks. I say that, shamelessly, even though we had been dumb enough to go in the Army and, even dumber, to sign up for four years into of three. Why would we do that? Stupid of us, but we believed the recruiters who said we would not have to go to Vietnam.
In all of that frenzy of refrigerator buying, we had not counted on our company commander. “Shaky,” having received a medal for leading us into battle, mostly against each other,decided that since those of you Vietnam veterans out there who might be reading this and who were grunts could not have cold beer out in wherever in the boonies your battles happened to be, we should, in some kind of weird empathy with you guys, not be able to have cold beer in what passed for our hootches either.
We had not, then, heard of “fragging” and were non-violent enough that we would not have fragged him, but we had heard of peaceful and/or passive resistance. We read the order that was posted on our bulletin board and disregarded it.
A few weeks later, our fearless commander, winner of a non-valorous Bronze Star, shaky to the end of his tour, announced an inspection. On the day of the coming inspection, we took all of the beer out of the refrigerators and lined them up under our cots. When the C.O. came through, I (the ranking Spec-4 in our digs) shouted “Ten-Hut!” and we all snapped to.
SIDEBAR: Why I was the ranking Spec 4
Basically, what happened was that I didn’t have a car. You may well ask yourself what not having a car to do with getting a promotion and, had I not been there, I would be asking the same question. You see, I had had a car, a shiny 1965, pale yellow, Pontiac GTO (my first ever new car) before I got drafted and then enlisted. But that car was only five months old and I had to pay $87.95/month for it. I could afford that, barely, while I was teaching at Silsbee High School but E-1 pay was less than the total monthly car payment. I gave the car back to the bank and wound up doing monthly installments to pay the bank the difference between what I still owed on the car and what they were able to sell the “used, current-year car with 33,000 miles on the odometer” for and what I still owed. I paid them $10/month for the first two years of my Army life. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than 10% of my monthly salary as an E-1 and E-2.
Since I did not have a car, Allen Hallmark gave me a ride (I was the--*wink*--chaperon on the trip from Texas to Fort Meade because Allen was taking his then girl-friend, soon-to-be-wife, Molly, to Maryland with him). They dropped me off at Student Company, ASA, and then went house-hunting.
Okay and en fin, here’s what happened. I reported in on a Friday afternoon and Allen, Don, and everyone else reported in on the following Monday. The captain who was C.O. of student company had never come into contact with an E-2 enlisted man before (or at least had never had one in his company, until us. Most of student company was made up of sergeants and a few officers being re-trained as linguists. We were among the first folks in the call-up of 1965 when U.S. involvement in Vietnam began its rapid expansion with deployment of Marines to DaNang.). The Captain, a really good guy whose name I have forgotten, put through the paperwork immediately to have me promoted to PFC. The other students did not have their paperwork processed until the next week. As a result, like clockwork, I was always promoted a few days before all the rest of my cohort: to PFC, to Spec-4, to Spec-5).
So, there it is. On that day, because I had not had a car when I got to Fort Meade (I would have found something to do until the next Monday when we were supposed to report in if I had had one), I was the ranking enlisted man in our barracks and had to call everyone to attention out of what passed for respect for our C.O.
Back to the REMF War and I do hope Allen remembers this, if he’s reading it—he’s the only corroborating witness I have. When the C.O. got to our partitioned-off cubical and saw the fridge, he ordered us to open it. We did. There was no beer in it. Ever vigilant as our C.O. was, he did spot the cans of beer standing in perfect ranks under the cots. When he had the temerity to ask what those things were under our cots, either Allen or I said, “They’re cans of beer, sir!”
When he demanded to know why we had not gotten rid of the cans of beer as he had ordered us, one of us (I forget which one) said, “You ordered that we not have beer in our refrigerators, sir. These cans are not in our refrigerator, sir!” Shaky shook a little and, as I recall it, we filled sandbags for a while. But thanks to our skills interpreting poetry and other difficult missives, we could not be found guilty of anything. Allen would fill more sandbags before we left Pleiku, but those were my last bags.
For a few weeks, we had our beer in the EM Club and were able to view the occasional rock band/strip show, but then after a minor work slow down had our privileges reinstated. You see, some of us kept getting sick and were somehow unable to read Vietnamese message (unless they were really important). Shortly after that, Shaky decided we had learned our lessons and we were able to restock the refrigerators.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)