A Few Notes About Vietnam (#46)

On the Damned German Language!

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
-Mark Twain, Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878

Vietnam is the war that never ends for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. We lived it; we breathed it. We participated in it and marched against it. We saw it every evening on the news and heard about it on the radio. Some of our friends died there and some burned their draft cards as others went to Canada or Sweden. Michael Herr, in Dispatches, wrote “Vietnam, Vietnam. We’ve all been there.” He was wrong, but I know what he meant. Vietnam colored our lives whether we spent a tour of duty or more there or not.

A large number of us both went to Vietnam as soldiers, Marines, whatever, and came back and protested against the very war we were a part of. Some of us who went feel we betrayed them. I don’t think we did. It is not a betrayal to come to the realization that a thing is wrong, even a thing that we became a part of, and then shout out loud that it was wrong. I think we have a moral responsibility to do so.

At any rate, in the summer of 1973, I enrolled in a quasi-submersion intensive German class. I’ve written about it before in an essay called “The Woman of My German Summer” (published in Eclectica and revised for The Texas Review), an essay probably much more interesting than this blog entry since it was filled with romance and loss, learning the vocabulary of German love while staying up late at night in bed and using the point and touch system. What a fine way to study a foreign language! Neither of us knew German when we started and both of us were pretty good when we finished the course. Fifteen hours of language credit for one summer class and we earned every bit of it. I am no longer very good at what Sam Clemens called the “awful German language,” just as I am no longer a good Vietnamese translator/interpreter.

Vietnamese Years Later

I did, at one time, dream occasionally in Vietnamese but that was decades ago. I dreamed, once, that I was moving from one place to another in Austin and had a U-Haul trailer fastened with bungee cords to the back of my VW convertible. As I drove through the streets of Austin, the trailer kept stretching farther and farther behind me. As if it had a mind of its own, it veered from right to left, lept curbs, over-turned people’s propane barbecue pits, took down mail boxes. And then we, the trailer and I, were driving down Highway 14 in Pleiku and over-turning vats of nuoc mam, chased by hordes of Vietnamese women with betel nut-blackened teeth. And then we, turned west onto Highway 19 and I careered on up the hill, the trailer setting off land mines. You should be aware that not once while I was stationed in that area did I ever even see a mine explode! I pulled into Engineer Hill and woke up.

Another time, in San Antonio, I was able to use what Vietnamese I still retained. I was in a Stop ‘n Go (Shamrock gasoline) when the San Antonio Police brought an old woman into the store. She was lost and they were trying to find out where she lived. Bright guy that I was at the time (I make no such claims now), I realized that she was muttering in Vietnamese. I introduced myself to her with words much like these: “Ten toi la Hoang…toi giup do ba duoc?” Okay, no tones because I don’t know how to make them here. I told her (I think) “My name is Hoang.” (That was my Vietnamese name back in Language school and in 1967-1968 in Viet-Nam.) “Can I help you?” I suspect both the tomes I used and the words were not correct, but she stopped muttering and looked up at me. “Ba song o dau?” I asked. (“Where do you live?”) She told me…and I told the police. They took here there. That is, I think, the last time I ever used Vietnamese seriously though I have said Hello,. how are you? in Vietnamese to a few of our international students from Vietnam.

Back to the Subject

I am very much off the subject of this blog. Back to Germany! Back to language study. One afternoon, the students growing restless, student activists on campus called for another march down Guadalupe street. Our German class was meeting that day and one of the team of TAs teaching the class started mouthing off about the United States. We were going to cancel the afternoon session (class met from 9 – 12 and from 1 -4 every day) so we could all march against the imperialism that was American foreign policy. That was too much for me. A German national lecturing us (five of us were graduate students, two of us Vietnam veterans) about imperialism!!! I made a few mild references to the Franco/Prussian War, to WWI and to WWII, and to the generosity of the Marshall Plan that had helped get his country on its feet and him to the U.S.A. to criticize the U.S.A.

I would not have done that with Frau Hilda Schucking, a fifty-year-old TA who frequently talked to me about the Lost Generation of young German men from WWII and how it had affected young German women like her: lack of young men when she was coming of age. That afternoon, somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to him, I caught up with Gerhardt on the march and shook his hand, said We’ll just have to disagree about some things.

That march was somehow not as memorable for me as the march that ended up as a sleep-over under the UT Tower when a young woman and I zipped out sleeping bags together and lay down under the stars while someone in the Tower played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the carillon.

A Few Notes About Vietnam #44

There's Something Happening Here

On May 4th, 1970, my first semester in the doctoral program at the University of Texas in Austin, I was so out of everything having to do with Vietnam, with the National Security Agency, with the protest movement. I was living in the moment, taking classes, meeting young women, growing my hair long, reading Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and poets like John Berryman, Richard Wilbur and, well, a whole new/old world was opening in front of me. And then on May 4th, the world of the past few years crashed back into me. The news rocketed around the campus…four students killed, nine wounded…Ohio National Guard…the students, some of them at least, protesting the Cambodian incursion. [See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]

I had not joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War though I had actually received a written invitation to become a charter member. All of us who had signed that petition that had appeared in the New York Time the previous semester, damn, I was already thinking in terms of semesters!, had received charter member invitations. I decided not to join. I was proud to have marched with GI’s United Against the War and was now a doctoral student, a path I had started down when I had been drafted four years earlier. I didn’t want to join any veterans groups, not VVA, not VFW, none of them. I was a student and that was enough.

But the day after the Kent State killings, and I do not really care who was at fault, the Guard should not have fired, I joined thousands of other students from the University of Texas and marched in Austin, Texas. We finally squatted on “The Drag,” Guadalupe Street in front of the University of Texas. Austin police had snipers on the tops of the building—it had not been that many months since Charles Whitman has killed people from the UT Tower, which we could see from the street. Now, another sniper was on top of the Tower. That was the only demonstration I ever marched in where I was tear-gassed.

That night, we gathered together again under the Tower for an all night sleep-in. Those of us who taught either canceled our classes the next day or had what we liked to call a “teach-in.” I used my class that day to introduce anti-war poems by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. A few years later, I would have included Seigfried Sassoon, Wildred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg; several years later and I would have added Bruce Weigl, W. D. Ehrhart, and Yusef Komuyakaa. That night was beautiful: crisp, cool. I zipped my sleeping bag together with my then girlfriend’s, and someone in the tower played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the great carillon. Hundreds of us sang the songs. The bell tones drifted out over Austin until someone in authority shut it down.

The next morning, we marched again. And then, things settled down. We went back to our classes, to our studies, to other things we were passionate about. Moments in time, memories. And yet four people even younger than I was then, four undergraduates, cannot look back on those days. And the Guardsmen who fired, I wonder if they can ever forget or even want to do so. Ten days later, two other students were killed, this time by the police, at Jackson State University. When I think of these things, I’m always reminded of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

A Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 42)

Marching with the Moratorium

November 15, 1969. This was it. the big one. On the front page of The Washington Post, Nicholas Von Hoffman (who would later be fired for calling Richard Nixon a "dead mouse on the kitchen floor," published a column advising residents of D.C. that they had nothing to fear from the protesters, that they were peaceful and were coming to the city to assert their legal right to protest openly. This was in the days before the Metro made it possible to get into and out of Washington easily and Linda and I, with the twins, used my deep blue VW to get to the Mall. It was exciting, electric. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people were walking everywhere, looking for the start point for the march.

On November 9th, a week before the Moratorium, The New York Times had published a petition signed by 1,365 active-duty servicemen calling for the end of the war. If you've been reading this blog for a whole, you'll recall that Don and I signed it when we were down in Fayetteville, NC, to participate in a march sponsored by GI's United Against the War. In a small chapbook of my essays published almost 25 years after that advertisement appeared, I wrote that having my name on that list of active-duty servicemen was one of the times my name had been in print that I am most proud of. That remains true.

The march on November 15th was one of the last times I was able to see Linda and the kids (more about that later). We all held hands and marched in the middle of a very peaceful half a million person throng, right down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. When we got to the White House, the people on the stage were relatively irrelevant: big names associating themselves with the march. BFD. Who cares that they were there. They simply were not needed. The 500,000 of us would have been there with or without them. I would have preferred that they simply walk along with us, but some people cannot resist a photo-op.

As we walked past the White House, Linda and I each lifted one of the kids onto our shoulders so they could see. Nixon would say, later that day, something to the effect that it was good to see young Americans exercising their right but that it would not matter in his pursuit of the war.

Damn that was fun! For those of you who think protesting against wars or against injustice should be a deadly serious thing to do, I would ask why they do it in the first place. When you put yourself out there, even in a crowd of half a million, you should really enjoy what you’re doing. I hope all those Egyptians out in Tahrir Square had a hell of a good time as they brought Mubarak down. I saw photos of smiling laughing Czechs during the Velvet Revolution and even during the Prague Spring before it was crushed. I’ll bet the Chinese in Tien An Men Square were mostly happy. That’s just how it ought to be. People sacrificed beach balls and Frisbees, sang and shouted. Acting on your convictions should not cause frowns, only laughs!

Not too long ago, I wrote an appreciation of the work of Elena Poniatowska in writing about the student strikes in Mexico City in 1968. Here’s what she said:

[The novelist] Luis Gonzalez de Alba remembered how the halls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters were crammed full; how buses were used as improvised pulpits; the return of the [student] brigades after the protest marches, when boys and girls would set themselves to folding banners like sheets, storing placards…then climbing aboard their already crowded school buses to return to guard duty on the rooftops; the sandwich at three or four in the morning, the tacos at a taqueria on Insurgentes Avenue, the hot coffee, the laughter, the happiness that brings triumph…

That’s how it is. People who think protesters should be deadly serious, poker-faced, “boring,” don’t bother me. I just think they should re-examine what they are doing and why.

The down side of all that for me was that the National Security Agency finally read the petition in The Times. It was organized to help them locate those of us who signed. Why? To confirm that the signatures were valid. There’s been a petition, fairly recently, apparently signed by active-duty soldiers to oppose the wars in the Middle East, but they are not transparent enough and people don’t really believe active-duty servicemen signed it. Our petition was neatly organized, just to avoid that kind of uncertainty, into the posts and bases where we served. Under "Fort Meade, Maryland," home of NSA: "Henry P. Hall."

What happened as a result of that will wait for the next blog post. But on that day, I was deliriously happy, still in love, surrounded by people who agreed with me. There may have been a VC flag around, but I didn’t see it. There were people with various causes marching, but all of those people were also against the war, and I pretty much supported their causes. It was fun! I was happy! Linda was happy! And we by damn marched against that war.

Whether we accomplished anything or not is irrelevant.

A Few Notes about Vietnam, Part 41

Linda and Washington. Peace marches, protests. Rock concerts and art museums. My VW convertible, my 250CC Suzuki, my MX-5. So much time. A bicycle in South Vietnam. A hitched ride in a deuce and a half. It all becomes mixed up somehow—time out of sequence. There is an old saying that life is motion, that when you stop moving, you finish dying. In my dissertation, written on the Vietnam War novels back in 1984, I wrote, and again this was many years ago, about the helicopters in Vietnam:

Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.

I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.

In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.

I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.

When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.

That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.

At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.

Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.

This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.

As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.

I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.

Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.

I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.

Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.

This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.

The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.

A Few Notes About Vietnam, Part 40

Moratoriums and Mobilizations

So, I drifted. Linda anchored me a bit, Linda and the twins. I suspect this would be a very different blog if she were writing it, but we can only always see things through our own eyes and even if two or more of us look at the same thing, we do not see the same thing. Thus, we get arguments about the massacres at Hue with some people not believing and others taking the killings as an article of faith. And how many different ways is it possible to lose a war and did we lose a war? Some people claim that because we left in 1973, before the war was over, that we did not lose the war, our allies, puppets, whatever…they lost the war. Those same people, at least some of them, claim the South Vietnamese would not have lost the war if we had continued to supply them and to provide at least aerial support.

By 1969, I just wanted the killing to stop. I wanted to pick up The Washington Post and read baseball scores and not body counts. That summer, 1969, I participated in a number of small demonstrations, usually outside the White House and always on weekends. It was illegal for me to wear my uniform while I was protesting against, but it was not illegal for certain officers to wear theirs while they were supporting, the war. Either both or neither should be illegal.

I remember quite clearly Linda and I walking with a few hundred people down Pennsylvania Avenue one Saturday morning. We were all holding hands and singing songs of peace. An older man walked up to me and said something to the effect that before I spoke out against the country’s war in Vietnam, I should go myself and see what was happening. I told him I had been there until a few months earlier, that I spoke Vietnamese, that I knew (with a conviction that comes only when you’re very young) that the war was wrong. He said that since I had been there, I should know better than to march in the streets.

A priori assumptions. We all grew up in some social milieu that shaped us, that, as we say in the Catholic Church, “formed” us and yet, somehow, we can break out of that formation, turn from what we absorbed in our formative years.

That was a very small demonstration and, afterwards, Linda and I went to the Freer Gallery where I liked to rub my hands over the belly of a small Buddha for luck and wander into the Peacock Room and admire Whistler’s art and very strange sense of style. I always preferred the small demonstrations in Washington and, later, in Austin; I have never much cared to be a small part of a huge crowd though huge crowds do get all the news.

And then, on October 15, 1969, Linda and I joined a few hundred thousand people for what was a truly historic peace march. Here’s how I wrote about it several years ago:

I marched in October and in November in Washington, but the October march, though smaller, is the one that has always burned most brightly in my memory. Picture 75,000 people, almost all of us carrying candles, walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, quiet, singing softly, serious, but deep down happy to be where we were. We passed the White House and turned to the Treasury Building. We let the candle wax drip down on the black, wrought-iron fence and left our candles there to burn. The sky around the building, lit up with the flames of thousands of candles, was liked the most magnificent Christmas tree you could ever dream of us and we, some of us, knelt down quietly and prayed for peace. [from From the Periphery: poems and essays]

That night was and remains holy, at least to me, and I suspect to a large number of those 75,000 people who marched. When you do something significant, something that marks what you believe, and do what those of us who were once Baptists call “giving testimony” or “testifying,” you quite simply feel good and feel a great rush of sheer joy. I do not claim that feeling just for the peace movement but for anyone who walks in company with people who believe as he believes and is willing to show that belief.

I would march only once again in Washington, a month later, in a march that was far larger and that would, the very next morning, see me under investigation by the CID and denied entry into the gray walls of the National Security Agency, more than the Army my employer for the past three and a half years.

Just a few notes: RIP Elizabeth Taylor

For Elizabeth Taylor: a memory

New York, 1964. I am working at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and, though I am not terribly fond of the job, I love New York. Slathering mustard and relish on hot dogs, making change, listening to complaints about the expense, hearing hundreds of dialects and languages, I am not impressed with the fair. My feet hurt. My eyes hurt. My sense of smell is incredibly dulled. I go to see Michelangelo’s Pieta: alabaster woman, son lying across her lap-so white, so pale. And yet protected by bulletproof glass, my feet on a moving sidewalk that draws me quickly through the room. Not New York, Disneyland, long before Disney cleaned up Times Square.

I live at the Dixie Hotel, a few blocks off Times Square and I have a girlfriend, Sharon, I met at the Fair. Years later, I wrote a poem for Sharon, an aubade, a morning poem:

There should be flowers, sweet fragrances
the buzzing of bees. When I wake, your bottom
hot against my groin, the sun has got to rise,
golden beautiful in the east, to paint your body.

But we are in the Dixie Hotel, a block or two
off Times Square and the windows are streaked
with grime from back before the war, no,
not that war, I mean the second of the two.

No air conditioning and the ceiling fan doesn’t
work any more if it ever did back when the Dixie
was fairly swank if such times ever were. We’ve
left the window open, can hear the sounds

not of sweet birds and of crickets rubbing their legs
together, but of cabs and buses, the crashing
of garbage trucks. Still, your body touches mine, and even
with this dawn, this heat, the air in the room barely

moving, we can sing the morning in, ignore dark soot,
let our fingers draw lines of damp sweat on naked canvas.
Ah, love, outside noise and hot streets call,
but let’s remain a while, here, in this still morning.

I take long walks any time of the night and day. No one ever mugs me. On the day I arrived, I was insulted, but the old woman was crazy. She heard my voice, assumed I was from Texas, and accused me of killing John F. Kennedy. Crazy, I suppose. But I did kill Kennedy, as much as anyone did, anyone in our society of celebrity. He is avenged a few years later when I am sent to Vietnam.

We are all crazy, beyond the grasp of reality. Have you imagined New York is real? Any more than the London Eliot called “Unreal City?” I find New York as I have so often found New Orleans or Washington, D.C.: a dream world where I can lose myself and become something other.

One day, Sharon and I walk a couple of blocks to the theater district to where Richard Burton is performing Hamlet. The building is, for some reason, unlocked. We walk in and see the dark interior. I flip on a light and climb up on the stage; Sharon sits on the front row. “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, or dissolve itself into a dew,” I whisper to her and to a thousand empty seats. I am young, in love again and enamored of theater, and all the seats are full.

I am Hamlet and am in love with everything, even as Hamlet loved everything. He did, you know, he loved everything and truth most of all. “I have been so great a lover,” Rupert Brooke says to open one of his poems, and so I have. Later, he would write “If I should die, think only this of me / That there is some corner of some foreign land / That is forever England.” I have never been that much of a romantic about war. Perhaps it was just the war that I happened to have. But I have loved the dirty streets of Times Square, a filthy hotel room, the grime of Far Rockaway, a young woman who came onto me one late night in New York and whom I could not afford and would not have afforded could I have.

I see the last acts of a dozen plays. I cannot afford to see the whole play—much too expensive for a young man subsisting in New York on minimum wage. But I find the money to see Burton perform Hamlet a few weeks later and continue, so many years later, to think it was worth it. Late at night, long after I have seen Elizabeth Taylor pick Burton up in a limousine, I open my window in the Dixie Hotel and sit on the fire escape. I whisper the “to be or not to be” speech out across the back alley.

No air conditioning, no rest room (I go to a common bathroom at the end of the corridor when I need to go). The room is a pale green, some of the paint peeling from the walls. It has a burner and a small fridge. Many of the rooms, I am certain, rent by the hour. I rent mine by the week and manage to make ends meet.

One Sunday I go to a matinee of Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri (I do not mean to imply that Mercouri was my date, she was the star) and I fall in love with her. She is much older than me, but I had also fallen in love with Simone Signouret when I saw her in Room at the Top. I am busy falling in love; it is what I do best when I am in my twenties. I fall in love with my cheap hotel room, with small pizza-by-the-slice places, with winos in the crowd, with the pieta (only a passing flirtation), with street musicians, with Central Park, with everything in the city. But Melina Mercouri is both love and lust. I notice nothing around me in the theater except her and then the man in the seat next to mine gropes me and throws his coat over my lap. I push his hand off and throw his coat back on his own lap, turn to him and say, “No, thank you.” He is about sixty-five, I think, and is embarrassed. I am more interested in Melina Mercouri. After her four curtain calls, I leave the theater.

I am not certain I can tell you what my summer in New York meant to me—that summer of the World’s Fair, that last summer before I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. That summer in the city, that summer going to the theater, to a few cattle calls, before going back to the southeast corner of Texas to teach high school and then go off to war, that summer living in what I would call poverty had I taken the days in another way of taking something seriously, that summer that comes back to me when I chart where I have been and how I have gotten where I eventually arrived and where I might have arrived had I remained there as something other than a romantic, romanticizing tourist.

You see, I loved the Manhattan of 1964. It was dirty, profane, not yet cleaned up by Disney and Associates. I loved the idea of me there in those years before I ever thought of writing and when theater and love were everything.

It has been too many years for me to remember precisely what New York meant to me when I was a very young twenty-two years old. That is so long ago that I now remember only bright images. But I can remember that young man who walked out of the Dixie Hotel and wandered over to Radio City where he was offered a job as an NBC Junior Executive (that meant “usher” in those days) and preferred just walking through the streets looking at things, staring up at buildings taller than the pine trees in Southeast Texas, and losing himself in crowded streets and falling soot.

Late that summer, I left New York, hitched a ride to Philadelphia where my uncle had taken up residence with his upper class Philly wife thirty years earlier. Tall at 6’ 4” and a certified WWII hero, Purple Heart awardee and member of the renowned “greatest generation,” he went to the Wharton School at Penn on the GI Bill and, ultimately, became a steadfast Republican and ally of Governor Scranton. I am not sure Scranton knew who my uncle was, but my uncle mentioned him frequently. I am, I am afraid, being uncharitable to my uncle whom I loved and who was always kind to me. I don’t mind, though, and he’s no longer with us. Besides, I drop George McGovern’s name probably as often as he dropped Scranton’s.

He really wanted me to find a job and tempt me to settle down in the Philadelphia area. So, it seemed counter-productive to me for him to keep complaining about how awful Philadelphians were. I mean I could never figure out why he wanted to stay in a place he seemed not to like, much less why he thought what he was saying would influence me to move there. But this isn’t about my uncle or even about Philadelphia. It’s about young lust and, even, towards the end, about young love.

To that end and to entice me to stay, he set me up with a few girls, daughters of his friends for the most part. One, I remember, had been his kids’ baby sitter. All were white, protestant and a year or two younger than me. Each one, except the sitter, had a nice car and belonged to a good club. In that year, 1964, the summer before I would be drafted, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, predating the summer of love by a few years, had already started to emerge. The Beatles had exploded into our consciousness only recently and “All ya need is love” might not have been recorded yet but was an ever-present nagging sound in my mind. And love, love, love was all around.

With my uncle shouting about the undesirables in his neighborhood, I closed my ears and went out with a few young women and groped and snuggled and made love along the river, in their parents’ houses when their parents were out for the evening, and almost, once, while the baby sitter was driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge into New Jersey. I am not, really, ashamed of any of that. It was merely the zeitgeist.

Then, with only a week to go, I went with my uncle and his family for a brief stay at their beach house on the Jersey coast. I loved the house, even got along with my aunt’s mother when we visited and putt-putted around with my cousin in his small boat. And there was another girl and, as always, she was enticing. I walked along the beach with Connie whose last name I cannot remember even though I do remember that the water seemed strangely cold for August and not at all like the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I can remember her touch, the warmth of her skin, even a small dimple, but not her name. Somehow, that seems sad to me now. I suspect she doesn’t remember my name either but does remember some boy from Texas she spent time with one summer in Avalon.

I did not have to hitch a ride back to Texas. My uncle was generous and bought an airline ticket for me, the first time I had ever flown. And I’m pretty sure the plane was a DC-3. In Vietnam a few years later, we would call them C-47s. I suspect my uncle was pleased to get rid of me and had changed his mind about the possibilities of finding me a good job in Philly.

Back in Beaumont, I met Jenny. Jenny was unlike any other woman I had met up until that time. She was ahead of her time and definitely ahead of mine, too. A few decades later, I wrote a poem for her. It’s never been published, probably because it’s pretty bad; so I won’t reproduce it here.

This whole little series of stories is for Elizabeth Taylor. I never met her, but she is, somehow, like the girl in the white convertible in American Graffiti. I turn a corner...and she is there. I see a new production of Hamlet and her limo sweeps into the alley and picks up Richard Burton. Beautiful, beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, violet eyes luminescent in dark alleys, lighting the sky for all of us.

Just a Few Notes About Vietnam #38

Making love and peace and listening to music

Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969. Woodstock happened from August 15 – August 18, 1969. The two events have been linked in my mind for a long time. We knew, at NSA, some weeks prior to the death of the man who presented himself to the world as “Uncle Ho,” that he was dying; we were just waiting for it to happen. I was waiting, as were a number of other people, at the National Security Agency.

By the week prior to Woodstock, we thought the old man could not hang on a minute longer, but his death was somewhat like that of Francisco Franco: he lingered and lingered. I hate to admit to this, but we started making jokes about it and for a month or more afterward kept asking ourselves if Uncle Ho were still alive. Part of that was because North Vietnam did not want the people of the North to hear about it on the days of celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the DRVN. We knew about it at NSA.

Flashback a bit to August 14, 1969. My friend, Allen Hallmark, made one of his trips to Washington and, in his hand, held a cluster of tickets to a music festival being held in Upstate New York. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go!” But I was on the Death Watch. NSA would not give me the time off while we were waiting for Uncle Ho to die. So, I had a ticket to Woodstock, held it in my hand, and then watched a few friends head off to New York while I stayed behind to translate inane messages about the illness of Uncle Ho.

Not too long after that, I could hardly make my way through the streets of D.C. without hearing people shout “WERE YOU THERE???!!!!!!!!!!!” and having to admit that, "No, I was not there." There was some consolation, though:

Linda and I managed to go to the Corcoran Gallery and were out of the car and sitting on the floor, beneath my legs glass brick and green light shining through, and a band at the front, a band that no longer exists, a band called Love Cry Want played sitar music accompanied by a panoply of instruments from Thailand and Burma. A big man in dreadlocks moaned into a microphone as the walls moved in and out and the green light hit my face. The light show was designed by the lights people from Woodstock. Someone passed around a small cup with sugary liquid stuff and I tasted just a little—I never really did that kind of thing, but that time. . .—and passed the cup to a guy sitting to my left. Then I watched the walls come to life, breathing in and out to the rhythm of the music.

So? That was my Woodstock and my life, then, was accompanied by that same band when we drove out to Rock Creek Park to sit among a few thousand other people and listen to Love Cry Want front for a group called The Who and watched and listened to them perform Tommy. Good times, really. I have always had very little patience with people who claimed we had to be serious and solemn when participating in peace demonstrations. To me, those were always joyous events.

I spent the night Ho Chi Minh died in The Building, the large gray edifice that housed the National Security Agency. I translated message after message coming from all over both South and North Vietnam, expressions of loss from various official and non-official groups, the PRG governments in the South, and from the official government in the north. We may have hated Uncle Ho, but he was much revered throughout the North. His loss was felt all over the country. After that, North Vietnam was pretty much governed by the committee that made up the Vietnamese Communist Party. The night of September 2nd. . . no sleep, just endless messages, all saying about the same thing.

The next month, Linda and I would march in the almost silent October march where we deposited candles on the wrought iron fences of the Treasury Building and the next month, the November march that was the largest march in the history of the protest movement. On November 19th, my name appeared in a New York Times petition against the war signed by 1,000+ active duty troops from all over the country. The next morning, I was denied entry to The Building though my security clearance was not pulled.

My time in the Army was drawing to a close anyway. By January, I was headed back to Texas and graduate school and more marching. More about the big peace demonstrations and Austin in a later blog entry.

Washington, D.C.: Unreal City (Vietnam Notes 37)

Washington, D.C.: Unreal City

D.C. D.C. was wonderful…even in those days of assassinations and marches in the streets and people dying in Vietnam and going to jail for what they believed in or going to Canada or Sweden. Other people, most of whom also believed in what they were doing, were on patrol in Vietnam, pursuing elusive enemies, trying to win in a cause I believed was already doomed.

D.C. Washington: a beautiful city with a grimy, dirty underbelly that those of us who did not truly live there, who were involved with love and peace and national and international events, but were not involved with in its day-to-day life, could not or would not see. Janet Cook wrote about it; but she, too, did not take the time to truly discover what she thought she had found. Instead, she developed a composite of all the suffering children of Washington she could think of and, yes, this was some time after I spent my time in D.C., and publish it to the world. What Cook did was write truth while ignoring fact. Facts can sometime get in the way of truth. She’s been a bad example of ethical misbehavior in journalism classes since then, yet still, she wrote a truth bigger than her lies.

I’ve been a member of a Vietnam discussion group on the internet for almost twenty years and from time to time the discussion veers to the problem of spat upon Vietnam vets. You know the story: those hundreds of spitters just waiting for vets to return from Vietnam. There is no evidence that this ever happened though it may have happened, probably did happen, a very few times. But, fact that it happened often? No. Very few if any Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned to the United States from overseas duty. But, truth: for many of them it felt as if people had spat upon them even if they had not done in fact. I have no problem with that: The metaphor is important even if it is based upon something less factual than those vets believe.

Years after the war, many years, back when troops were returning from the first Persian Gulf War, there was some kind of effort made to reverse the lack of respect given to vets of the Vietnam War. We were, in many cases, invited to participate in the parades for the Iraq veterans. I found that extremely patronizing.

Some truths are simply more powerful than facts. Janet Cook had her Pulitzer stripped from her even though her stories in the Washington Post struck at a truth so powerful no one could deny them. The little boy she made up became a powerful metaphor for almost everything that was wrong in that grimy underbelly that was in the substructure of Washington, D.C. And, damn, the writing was good and the writing was true. It just wasn’t factual. That is also true of the stories of returning veterans from our war.

I am wandering here and I have wanted to write about Washington, D.C., as I experienced is in 1968 and 1969. But that Washington, D.C., was an unreal city. Those of us who lived there temporarily were our own city, separate from, co-existing with, something so real that we could not approach it without killing off what we had brought with us: that sense of idealism that managed to survive knowing, however superficially, where we were, the war we had fought in, those assassinations that had rocked the country. That’s why, many years ago, when some of this was starting to sink in, I wrote this:

Our Lady of the Metro
(originally published in Briar Cliff Review)

At the Metro Station in Dupont Circle
I ascend a steep escalator into a too bright
day, see a slender silhouette with hair flung
wild descend. It could, of course, be you, but

I cannot tell, only the form of an image dropping
downward into dark. A moving step ladder
carries me up, you down, until you develop
like those white sheets of paper in a darkroom,

like an x-ray reverting: meat firming,
packing onto bare bone, body budding
under sheer cloth, legs, waist, face, breasts
growing from dark outline to fleshy fullness

until I can know it is not you, not those lips,
long legs, careless hair. But for a moment
in a mandala of light, her body shaped
against the curve of sky, I longed for faith.

You see, for me, Washington was relief from daily work life at NSA where I continued the work I had been doing in Pleiku, Vietnam. The same old stuff kept happening, day after day, month after month, and, seemingly, year after year. But at 5 p.m. each day, I took off the war with my uniform when I went home to Chillum Heights. I would drive over to Linda’s home in my VW convertible and we would simply forget about the war or I would go into College Park and encase myself in Melville or some minor poet of Renaissance England.

But, some days, Linda and I would hold hands and march with tens of thousands of other people or, at night, we would light candles and walk slowly through the streets of that beautifully unreal yet somehow truthful city.

Part 36: Return to Normalcy, sort of

Who Killed Cock Robin?

That period between Vietnam and the peace marches, between Pleiku and D.C. and Austin? Basically, they were fairly ordinary for someone still wearing a uniform, commuting to work each morning, carpooling with my friend Don Mohr in his MGB (or was it an MGA?), top down when the weather permitted and both mags were firing. I eventually bought my own car, a not new, blue and shiny, Volkswagen convertible. I re-entered a world that included Vietnam only from 8 - 5, Monday through Friday.

Among the first things both Don and I did was enroll at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Not only was I planning to do what I had set out to do three years earlier (go to graduate school at UT-Austin) but I wanted to meet young, well-educated women. I know that sounds snotty but I did not want to hear again, not ever, “I love you so much, GI” and I did not want to "date" (quaint word these days) any of the mostly conservative women I met at the National Security Agency. Those were mostly women with a professional mission or clerk/typists with security clearances. I wanted to forget what we always called The Building (upper case letters implicit in the pronunciation) and immerse myself in being a college student again.

I took two classes at the University of Maryland: Renaissance literature and a course in Melville and Hawthorne. Damn that was wonderful. I decompressed, became totally human once again. I can hear combat vets now: “Puh-leeze!!!!!!! You were safe. No one pointed an AK at you. You got to talk with young women.” Yes, that’s all true. And I will repeat something I have said many times before: I mostly enjoyed my tour in Vietnam…from the ship ride over, to internment at Subic Bay with huge quantities of San Miguel beer, to the LSTs rocking down the coast of what was then South Vietnam while we sang Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag,” to my strange last night in Nha Trang and the Pan American “Freedom Bird” home. But I wasn’t happy with myself for having, if not enjoyed it all, been separate from it while being in the middle of it and standing on the periphery while helping locate people who were going to be killed.

My first little book, about the war mostly, was called From the Periphery: poems and essays and that’s mostly how I felt: on the periphery of the war, not truly involved, marking time, doing something I had never questioned but had begun questioning while in the middle of it all. Dak To was a part of that questioning, the young P.O.W., an increasing feeling, after Tet, that the waste of life on both sides was futile. Those who did believe were correct in that we did not fight to win. Those who were opposed to the war were correct in that we should not have been there in the first place. I was, by the time I left, irrevocably on the side of those who felt we should never had been there in the first place.

My first semester at the University of Maryland, I was besotted with being a student, fell in love a few times with young women not much younger than I was, met Linda and fell in love with her. When I got back from Vietnam, I started falling in love with everyone. I met Linda in that Renaissance lit. class that was a reintroduction to college classes. Dr. Spurgeon had assigned a poem by George Gascoigne called, quite ironically, “Lullaby.” Here’s the whole poem and it’s quite long for this medium:

Gascoigne's Lullaby

Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.

First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.

Next, lullaby my gazing eyes
Which wonted were to glance apace.
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile.
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.

And lullaby, my wanton will:
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.

Eke lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest.
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby be thou content,
With lullaby thy lusts relent.
Let others pay which hath mo pence;
Thou art too poor for such expense.

Thus, lullaby my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware and all that was.
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby now take your leave,
With lullaby your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.

That is not a difficult poem but the class was mixed: juniors and seniors mostly, a few older people. Some of them did see that the poem was all about sex; some did not. And, when we got to the “little Robin” stanza, no one was wiling to offer their reading on what Gascoigne was talking about. Spurgeon grew somewhat exercised over this and, finally, I raised my hand. “At last,” he said,” Mr. Hall, will you explain the stanza. I did. The whole poem is rather like Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech, about how raunchy we are when young, how we may sprinkle pollen and babies around the landscape in lust run amok…okay, okay, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but…

The stanza in question has got to remind us of the “Cock Robin” lullaby and that old reprobate and deflowerer of virgins, George Gascoigne, is saying goodbye to an active penis in an age when we had not yet invented Viagra. It was not that I knew more or was smarter than the other students but that they were unwilling to say out loud what needed to be said out loud (and there was no Viagra or Cialis in those days).

So, why am I telling you all this? Well, Spurgeon applauded. I figured I’d still be able to cut it in grad. school, and Linda asked me out for a drink after class. MORAL: When you’re amongst English majors, it always helps to read poetry well: you get the grade, the girl and everything.

Later, she was my constant companion at rock concerts in the parks and at the Corcoran and, more importantly, on peace marches. Her twin children often went with us. The way I left her is among the more shameful things I’ve done, but that’s a few blogs away still.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * *

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.

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.