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.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
I Participate in My First Antiwar March (Part 34)
GIs United Against the War
Sometime during the summer of 1969, back when I was living in Chillum Heights with Don Mohr and Will Chapman, Allen Hallmark called me from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Allen had been separated from the rest of us: he was a certified troublemaker and sent to North Carolina instead of back to Fort Meade. I have no idea of what his official duty was at the home of the Airborne and of Special Forces, but his more interesting job (well, not an official job) was as a writer and one of the editors of Bragg Briefs, an underground newspaper on the post.
Anyway, Allen called me from Fort Bragg. He wanted to know if I would be interested in traveling down to North Carolina to 1) participate in teach-ins at North Carolina colleges and universities and 2) take part in a march against the war that would go through the streets of Fayetteville, NC, and to the gates of Fort Bragg. I was only a little bit hesitant. And then Don said he’d like to go, too. As I recall, we hopped into my little blue VW convertible, top down, and drove down the highway to North Carolina.
North Carolina? Scary place in those days. I was glad I wasn't "driving while black" (a term we didn't have in those days). As we crossed the State line from Virginia, we saw an enormous billboard: Man dresses in white sheets, on a rearing white horse, a burning cross in his hand. “Welcome to North Carolina,” the billboard said, “Home of the Ku Klux Klan.” I resisted turning back. Aside from that, there was nothing terribly intimidating about North Carolina though I suspect Virginians are pleased to have NC south of them: makes them look good.
Fayetteville was a pretty typical Army town, filled with bars, convenience stores selling dirty books, drunken soldiers in the evenings. Pretty normal stuff for “outside the gates” towns.
The group Allen belonged to, GI’s United Against the War, had organized fairly recently and this would be there first march. GIs came from various places to participate in the demonstration, which was, as far as I can tell, the first active-duty soldiers protest against the on-going war in Vietnam.
It was a great march. Not a lot of us, maybe 100 active-duty soldiers, and 200 civilians who joined us. I walked, in civilian clothes (against the law to demonstrate in a uniform unless you were an officer speaking FOR the war), but carrying a sign saying I was active-duty. Walking next to me: a young black woman who carried her baby in her arms. As we marched from the Quaker church down the streets toward Fort Bragg, she held the baby up in the air and said, “Look, honey, this is all for you.” Eventually, those leading the march decided not to approach the gates since the Airborne had threatened a counter-demonstration.
As I said, it was a great march, even greater, though, for personal reasons. It was my first participation in formal anti-war activity since returning from Vietnam. We didn’t get a ton of publicity though we made a few newspapers, but we did get some recognition from other anti-war groups. They were wise enough to see that active-duty service men and women could be a major benefit to convincing the country that those opposed to the war were not simply long-haired, selfish hippies.
At the end of the march, we reassembled. We circulated a petition that all of us who were active duty signed. Leonard Weinglass, who had defended the Chicago 7 and had been a member of the Judge Advocates Court between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, warned us that signing the petition could get us in trouble. We signed it anyway. Altogether something like 1,350 signatures from Airmen, Marines and Soldiers ultimately appeared on the petition that would appear in the New York Times shortly before the November 19th march on Washington, D.C.
More about that later. That day was wonderful, a milestone for me, something I will never forget. Don and I crashed on the floor at someone’s house and headed back to D.C. to work at the National Security Agency the next day.
Sometime during the summer of 1969, back when I was living in Chillum Heights with Don Mohr and Will Chapman, Allen Hallmark called me from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Allen had been separated from the rest of us: he was a certified troublemaker and sent to North Carolina instead of back to Fort Meade. I have no idea of what his official duty was at the home of the Airborne and of Special Forces, but his more interesting job (well, not an official job) was as a writer and one of the editors of Bragg Briefs, an underground newspaper on the post.
Anyway, Allen called me from Fort Bragg. He wanted to know if I would be interested in traveling down to North Carolina to 1) participate in teach-ins at North Carolina colleges and universities and 2) take part in a march against the war that would go through the streets of Fayetteville, NC, and to the gates of Fort Bragg. I was only a little bit hesitant. And then Don said he’d like to go, too. As I recall, we hopped into my little blue VW convertible, top down, and drove down the highway to North Carolina.
North Carolina? Scary place in those days. I was glad I wasn't "driving while black" (a term we didn't have in those days). As we crossed the State line from Virginia, we saw an enormous billboard: Man dresses in white sheets, on a rearing white horse, a burning cross in his hand. “Welcome to North Carolina,” the billboard said, “Home of the Ku Klux Klan.” I resisted turning back. Aside from that, there was nothing terribly intimidating about North Carolina though I suspect Virginians are pleased to have NC south of them: makes them look good.
Fayetteville was a pretty typical Army town, filled with bars, convenience stores selling dirty books, drunken soldiers in the evenings. Pretty normal stuff for “outside the gates” towns.
The group Allen belonged to, GI’s United Against the War, had organized fairly recently and this would be there first march. GIs came from various places to participate in the demonstration, which was, as far as I can tell, the first active-duty soldiers protest against the on-going war in Vietnam.
It was a great march. Not a lot of us, maybe 100 active-duty soldiers, and 200 civilians who joined us. I walked, in civilian clothes (against the law to demonstrate in a uniform unless you were an officer speaking FOR the war), but carrying a sign saying I was active-duty. Walking next to me: a young black woman who carried her baby in her arms. As we marched from the Quaker church down the streets toward Fort Bragg, she held the baby up in the air and said, “Look, honey, this is all for you.” Eventually, those leading the march decided not to approach the gates since the Airborne had threatened a counter-demonstration.
As I said, it was a great march, even greater, though, for personal reasons. It was my first participation in formal anti-war activity since returning from Vietnam. We didn’t get a ton of publicity though we made a few newspapers, but we did get some recognition from other anti-war groups. They were wise enough to see that active-duty service men and women could be a major benefit to convincing the country that those opposed to the war were not simply long-haired, selfish hippies.
At the end of the march, we reassembled. We circulated a petition that all of us who were active duty signed. Leonard Weinglass, who had defended the Chicago 7 and had been a member of the Judge Advocates Court between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, warned us that signing the petition could get us in trouble. We signed it anyway. Altogether something like 1,350 signatures from Airmen, Marines and Soldiers ultimately appeared on the petition that would appear in the New York Times shortly before the November 19th march on Washington, D.C.
More about that later. That day was wonderful, a milestone for me, something I will never forget. Don and I crashed on the floor at someone’s house and headed back to D.C. to work at the National Security Agency the next day.
Monday, February 21, 2011
At Home Though the War Continues (Part 32)
Home Is the Soldier...
After a few weeks off, I drove back to Washington, D.C., and Fort Meade, Maryland, where I would be stationed for the rest of my mercifully brief Army career. But I did not really leave Vietnam and may never fully leave. I continued until November, 1969, to translate documents and messages from that war-ravaged country. Through assassinations that rocked the United States to moon landings and peace marches and the greatest rock concert in the history of the world, I worked at the National Security Agency until, in November, 1969, the Agency denied me access to classified information. That’s a fairly long story and it played out through the remainder of 1968 and almost all of 1969.
Before returning to Fort Meade, though, I had two weeks’ leave in Beaumont, Texas. I took some long hikes in the Big Thicket, visited friends, managed almost to forget the war though the news was full of it, sounds and images. I got drunk much more than I should have. There are some great bars back in the Thicket. While there, I bought a used Volkswagen convertible and took a few days to drive to Fort Meade. I wanted to get out of Beaumont, get out of Texas. I continued to care for my friends there, but nothing seemed quite like it was. Beaumont had not changed, but I had.
When my Pan American flight home from Vietnam ("freedom bird") landed in San Francisco and I walked through the airport, I had half expected to be accosted by hippies who would call me a baby killer or, at least, try to make me feel guilty for my tour in Vietnam. That had not happened. I’ve come, over the years, to think a lot of the stories I’ve heard about Vietnam veterans’ returns to “the World” have been grossly exaggerated. No one said a word to me even though I was in uniform.
It was, I grant you, different, more lonely, than I see in airports today. Believe me, I’m glad to see this, but today, total strangers approach men and women in uniform and thank them for their service. They deserve that gratitude even though their war today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not much more popular than ours was.
Years later, after the first of the Persian Gulf Wars, when some communities started to hold parades for returning GIs and invited Viet Vets to participate I felt vaguely upset by the whole thing. I edited a book instead, A Measured Response, a collection of poems written by poets who were Vietnam vets and dealt with their feelings about Desert Storm. Some good writers participated in that book: Luis Rodriguez, W.D. Ehrhart, Charles Fishman, David Jauss, Renny Christopher, dozens more.
In my introduction to that book, I wrote: A few years ago, as I watched the beginnings of countless parades celebrating the victory of allied forces in the Persian Gulf War, I heard people talking about the Vietnam vets and how they were being welcomed back through the openness and good cheer of the Desert Storm celebrations. Frankly, I didn’t see it….Coming home from a conference in Utah, [I saw] a young (how very young!) Desert Storm vet two seats in front of me. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw his friends and relatives in the airport with signs welcoming him home. I walked out to my car and drove to my own home in San Antonio.
Washington, D.C., in 1968 and 1969 was wonderful. A few friends and I rented an apartment off post in Silver Spring because we were planning to take classes at the University of Maryland in the evenings. We were in what would probably be considered very low-cost housing at a place called Chillum Heights (not the image one normally gets when speaking of Silver Spring, but still). We kept our lockers in the barracks at “C” Company ASA and commuted in each morning to work at the building and managed to make inspections and roll call when necessary.
I suppose the real reason we went to U of Maryland was to have a better opportunity to meet young women. But I did take classes: one on Renaissance literature and one on Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both were excellent classes. And I did meet a wonderful young woman, Linda, in the renaissance lit. class.
Somehow, during that first year back from Vietnam, I managed to stay in good standing with the military. I was assistant section chief for my section at NSA and they courted me to transfer to civilian status when I got out of the Army. They promised me that if I converted, I would have the rank of GS-9 with a promotion a year later. “Converted”? Sounds religious and many of them were very religious about their jobs.
I had a number of military people and civilians under me in the Building: some were NCOs and junior-grade officers, one warrant officer. I was a Spec-5. The Army did not like it when officers and sergeants reported to Spec-5s. They're kind of hung up on the rank thing. NSA didn’t care. My job was to assign translations to other people in my section and assist them when necessary.
As a result of all that, the C.O. of my company called me in one day for a serious discussion about my future. He asked me to apply for a direct commission. I said no. He asked why. I told him I wanted to get out when I was supposed to and taking the commission would extend my stay in the Army and make me eligible to be called back up for years afterwards. He got pissed. I didn’t care.
I had a similar conversation about converting with my section chief at NSA. I told him I wanted to go back to graduate school. He said I could do that at the University of Maryland while working at NSA. He said I was needed. I asked him for how long. He didn’t understand my question. I suggested that maybe we would not be in Vietnam forever (I was almost wrong about that!) and that NSA might not need so many linguists forever. He said they’d teach me another language. I said I wanted to be an English teacher. He said we’d talk again later. We never did.
Meanwhile, I felt very much like a civilian. I went to work in the mornings in civilian clothes and then drove home to Chillum Heights after work. Usually, I would get together with Linda in the evenings, go out with her on the weekends. Some weekends, I did have to participate in parades and inspections, but most of the time, my weekends were my own. I had a great time though the war kept causing problems.
After a few weeks off, I drove back to Washington, D.C., and Fort Meade, Maryland, where I would be stationed for the rest of my mercifully brief Army career. But I did not really leave Vietnam and may never fully leave. I continued until November, 1969, to translate documents and messages from that war-ravaged country. Through assassinations that rocked the United States to moon landings and peace marches and the greatest rock concert in the history of the world, I worked at the National Security Agency until, in November, 1969, the Agency denied me access to classified information. That’s a fairly long story and it played out through the remainder of 1968 and almost all of 1969.
Before returning to Fort Meade, though, I had two weeks’ leave in Beaumont, Texas. I took some long hikes in the Big Thicket, visited friends, managed almost to forget the war though the news was full of it, sounds and images. I got drunk much more than I should have. There are some great bars back in the Thicket. While there, I bought a used Volkswagen convertible and took a few days to drive to Fort Meade. I wanted to get out of Beaumont, get out of Texas. I continued to care for my friends there, but nothing seemed quite like it was. Beaumont had not changed, but I had.
When my Pan American flight home from Vietnam ("freedom bird") landed in San Francisco and I walked through the airport, I had half expected to be accosted by hippies who would call me a baby killer or, at least, try to make me feel guilty for my tour in Vietnam. That had not happened. I’ve come, over the years, to think a lot of the stories I’ve heard about Vietnam veterans’ returns to “the World” have been grossly exaggerated. No one said a word to me even though I was in uniform.
It was, I grant you, different, more lonely, than I see in airports today. Believe me, I’m glad to see this, but today, total strangers approach men and women in uniform and thank them for their service. They deserve that gratitude even though their war today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not much more popular than ours was.
Years later, after the first of the Persian Gulf Wars, when some communities started to hold parades for returning GIs and invited Viet Vets to participate I felt vaguely upset by the whole thing. I edited a book instead, A Measured Response, a collection of poems written by poets who were Vietnam vets and dealt with their feelings about Desert Storm. Some good writers participated in that book: Luis Rodriguez, W.D. Ehrhart, Charles Fishman, David Jauss, Renny Christopher, dozens more.
In my introduction to that book, I wrote: A few years ago, as I watched the beginnings of countless parades celebrating the victory of allied forces in the Persian Gulf War, I heard people talking about the Vietnam vets and how they were being welcomed back through the openness and good cheer of the Desert Storm celebrations. Frankly, I didn’t see it….Coming home from a conference in Utah, [I saw] a young (how very young!) Desert Storm vet two seats in front of me. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw his friends and relatives in the airport with signs welcoming him home. I walked out to my car and drove to my own home in San Antonio.
Washington, D.C., in 1968 and 1969 was wonderful. A few friends and I rented an apartment off post in Silver Spring because we were planning to take classes at the University of Maryland in the evenings. We were in what would probably be considered very low-cost housing at a place called Chillum Heights (not the image one normally gets when speaking of Silver Spring, but still). We kept our lockers in the barracks at “C” Company ASA and commuted in each morning to work at the building and managed to make inspections and roll call when necessary.
I suppose the real reason we went to U of Maryland was to have a better opportunity to meet young women. But I did take classes: one on Renaissance literature and one on Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both were excellent classes. And I did meet a wonderful young woman, Linda, in the renaissance lit. class.
Somehow, during that first year back from Vietnam, I managed to stay in good standing with the military. I was assistant section chief for my section at NSA and they courted me to transfer to civilian status when I got out of the Army. They promised me that if I converted, I would have the rank of GS-9 with a promotion a year later. “Converted”? Sounds religious and many of them were very religious about their jobs.
I had a number of military people and civilians under me in the Building: some were NCOs and junior-grade officers, one warrant officer. I was a Spec-5. The Army did not like it when officers and sergeants reported to Spec-5s. They're kind of hung up on the rank thing. NSA didn’t care. My job was to assign translations to other people in my section and assist them when necessary.
As a result of all that, the C.O. of my company called me in one day for a serious discussion about my future. He asked me to apply for a direct commission. I said no. He asked why. I told him I wanted to get out when I was supposed to and taking the commission would extend my stay in the Army and make me eligible to be called back up for years afterwards. He got pissed. I didn’t care.
I had a similar conversation about converting with my section chief at NSA. I told him I wanted to go back to graduate school. He said I could do that at the University of Maryland while working at NSA. He said I was needed. I asked him for how long. He didn’t understand my question. I suggested that maybe we would not be in Vietnam forever (I was almost wrong about that!) and that NSA might not need so many linguists forever. He said they’d teach me another language. I said I wanted to be an English teacher. He said we’d talk again later. We never did.
Meanwhile, I felt very much like a civilian. I went to work in the mornings in civilian clothes and then drove home to Chillum Heights after work. Usually, I would get together with Linda in the evenings, go out with her on the weekends. Some weekends, I did have to participate in parades and inspections, but most of the time, my weekends were my own. I had a great time though the war kept causing problems.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 32)
Leaving Vietnam (Part 2)
"Hey, GI! You looking for Dang?" A young boy on a bicycle. I squint my eyes and look at him.
"Yeh, we were having a little talk."
"You come with me, GI."
I follow him for 20 or so blocks through the dark, narrow streets of the old city. Nha Trang has been one of my favorite cities since I arrived in Vietnam a year earlier. A coastal resort city during the French colonial period, its French architecture has hardly suffered during the years of war and the beaches along that section of the South China Sea are wonderful. But Nha Trang has changed since the Tet Offensive of 1968. It's a spookier place late at night and the young boy and I seem to be the only two people on the street.
The young boy. He seems about 12 years old and I assume Dang has asked him to show me the way to her home. So, I follow him.
When we get to the house, the boy points to a stairway on the outside leading up to the second floor. "You wait for me," I say.
When I knock on the door, Dang opens it. Wearing flannel PJs and looking as if she has just climbed out of the shower, she is obviously surprised to see me. I laugh and say "Surprise!" Her response puzzles me. I would have expected almost any reaction from mild amusement to frigid hostility, what I see is fear.
She looks down the stairs and sees the boy grinning up at her. Her dark eyes fasten on mine and she whispers, "Xin anh di (please go)." "Tai sao? (Why?)," I ask. And she explains how being seen with an American could hurt her reputation so much that she might have to become a prostitute just to survive.
I leave. As I said, I am not looking for leased sex, but I had enjoyed the conversation at the Doc Lap. I hope she got along okay after I left Nha Trang and Vietnam, but have no way of knowing. She probably did become a prostitute; I hope not.
When I get back down the stairs, I tell the boy to take me to a house where it is safe for Americans to sleep and he leads me another 15 or more blocks through the narrow streets of old Touraine.
I knock on the door of a small house and an older woman answers. "All girls in use," she says.
"I don't need a girl, just a place to sleep," I tell her. She nods and I pay the boy a few dollars for his assistance and go into the house. The woman leads me to a narrow cot in the middle of a small room that has ten narrow beds surrounded by scrim-like material, cloth you can see through. All of the beds are occupied and some of them by Americans who are still getting their money's worth from the women they have paid. Not a pretty sight. And the sounds are worse.
I nod to the woman, give her ten dollars and lie down on the cot. Almost immediately, a girl who can not be more than 12 or 13 climbs into the bed with me. "You fuck me, GI? Only ten dollar."
I get up immediately and pull her out of the bed. I give her ten dollars and tell her to go to sleep somewhere. And then, with the sound of working women and men making the beast with two backs, I cry a little bit, fall asleep.
The next morning, when I get on the plane, I think I am leaving Vietnam forever, but I don't believe anyone who was there ever really leaves, not all the way.
"Hey, GI! You looking for Dang?" A young boy on a bicycle. I squint my eyes and look at him.
"Yeh, we were having a little talk."
"You come with me, GI."
I follow him for 20 or so blocks through the dark, narrow streets of the old city. Nha Trang has been one of my favorite cities since I arrived in Vietnam a year earlier. A coastal resort city during the French colonial period, its French architecture has hardly suffered during the years of war and the beaches along that section of the South China Sea are wonderful. But Nha Trang has changed since the Tet Offensive of 1968. It's a spookier place late at night and the young boy and I seem to be the only two people on the street.
The young boy. He seems about 12 years old and I assume Dang has asked him to show me the way to her home. So, I follow him.
When we get to the house, the boy points to a stairway on the outside leading up to the second floor. "You wait for me," I say.
When I knock on the door, Dang opens it. Wearing flannel PJs and looking as if she has just climbed out of the shower, she is obviously surprised to see me. I laugh and say "Surprise!" Her response puzzles me. I would have expected almost any reaction from mild amusement to frigid hostility, what I see is fear.
She looks down the stairs and sees the boy grinning up at her. Her dark eyes fasten on mine and she whispers, "Xin anh di (please go)." "Tai sao? (Why?)," I ask. And she explains how being seen with an American could hurt her reputation so much that she might have to become a prostitute just to survive.
I leave. As I said, I am not looking for leased sex, but I had enjoyed the conversation at the Doc Lap. I hope she got along okay after I left Nha Trang and Vietnam, but have no way of knowing. She probably did become a prostitute; I hope not.
When I get back down the stairs, I tell the boy to take me to a house where it is safe for Americans to sleep and he leads me another 15 or more blocks through the narrow streets of old Touraine.
I knock on the door of a small house and an older woman answers. "All girls in use," she says.
"I don't need a girl, just a place to sleep," I tell her. She nods and I pay the boy a few dollars for his assistance and go into the house. The woman leads me to a narrow cot in the middle of a small room that has ten narrow beds surrounded by scrim-like material, cloth you can see through. All of the beds are occupied and some of them by Americans who are still getting their money's worth from the women they have paid. Not a pretty sight. And the sounds are worse.
I nod to the woman, give her ten dollars and lie down on the cot. Almost immediately, a girl who can not be more than 12 or 13 climbs into the bed with me. "You fuck me, GI? Only ten dollar."
I get up immediately and pull her out of the bed. I give her ten dollars and tell her to go to sleep somewhere. And then, with the sound of working women and men making the beast with two backs, I cry a little bit, fall asleep.
The next morning, when I get on the plane, I think I am leaving Vietnam forever, but I don't believe anyone who was there ever really leaves, not all the way.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 31)
Leaving Vietnam
(concerning May 17, 1968)
[This is fairly long and has actually been published a few times, but it seems a good way to end my “friends among the indigenous population” parts of the blog. I’m making it two blog entries; please put up with it if you’re reading this.]
A night in a cheap bar. Nha Trang, South Vietnam. If I recall correctly, the French had called it Touraine, one of their beach resort cities when Indochina/Annam was their colony. [Remember Bloody Mary and Leah in South Pacific? They were Annamese/Indochinese/Vietnamese].
I am drinking ba-muoi-ba and talking with a young lady who says her name is Thich Duong Dang. I call her Dang (pronounced Zang in Vietnamese). She wants me to buy her another drink, but I know the drink will be very expensive tea with just enough alcohol in it to make it smell like "a drink." You see, Dang is a bar girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, five years younger than I am. What money she earns she gets from having American GIs buy “alcoholic” beverages for her, hoping she’ll go to bed with them, but she will not and she is paid by the bar management based upon the number of expensive, watered-down drinks she can sell.
I get the impression (possibly mistaken) that she is enjoying herself. Her normal clientele cannot speak Vietnamese and she normally has to talk to them in some kind of pidgin English that resembles baby talk. We, on the other hand, can discuss the war, poetry, art, whatever we like, simply because I can speak in her language. Probably she thinks I am speaking pidgin Vietnamese!
I would like to get something straight immediately: I am not at the Doc Lap Bar for the purpose of leasing female companionship for the evening. Tomorrow, I am leaving Vietnam. I'll take a short flight down to Cam Ranh Bay and board what we have come to call a "Freedom Bird" back to the United States. I am in the Independence Bar ("doc lap" means "independence" in Vietnamese) to have a few beers, my last drops of "33" beer ("ba muoi ba" means "33" in Vietnamese) before leaving country.
Dang rubs the front of my leg with her foot as we talk...about Yeats as I recall. I have just done an execrable, unrhymed translation of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" into Vietnamese for her sake and she does not like all this talk of rising up and going to a wee small island. I know this is hard to believe: quoting Yeats in the kind of military level Vietnamese I have been taught to a young woman who probably doesn’t even like Vietnamese poetry, much less Irish...but there it is.
Dang is, and there is no other word for it, exceptionally beautiful. She wears a deep purple ao dai and white silk pants that fit tight around her bottom and then flows out from her ankles. Her skin is flawless and she has not had that operation some Vietnamese prostitutes get to make their eyes look more western. She is slender, with a small waist and bust that gravity has not yet had time to play with and that, I suspect, nothing else has ever played with. She is not really a prostitute, only a bar girl, and that is, if anything, a less honest profession.
In spite of curfews in Nha Trang, the Doc Lap never really closes; the bartender only turns the light inside down and the lights outside off. The imitation American rock band from Manilla does a heavy, syrupy version of "Satisfaction" and seques into "Feeling Groovy." Dang and I chat quietly. She invites me to her house for the evening.
"Much too dangerous for an American to go back to base so late at night." She kisses me on the cheek, "Plus, I want to talk some more." I give her 10,000 Dong/piasters (a little less than $10) to buy a bottle of Scotch and, at her suggestion, will meet her outside so no one will see her leave with an American. Now, I am not stupid. I know that as soon as she goes through the door she will vanish for the evening. After all, I've already told her I'm leaving Vietnam tomorrow. Actually, this morning, it's already after midnight.
The bartender laughs at me and tells me she is still a virgin and that I have wasted my money on her. But if I want a woman for the night, he has the prettiest in Vietnam, "Ah, choi oi!, dep lam!" I laugh back and tell him I want no other woman than Dang. When I get out into the narrow street in front of the bar, it's so dark I can hardly make out the road. This part of Nha Trang is filled with two-story buildings hanging over narrow streets and it reminds me of nothing more than a poor, older area of San Antonio that has not yet been gentrified.
* * *
(concerning May 17, 1968)
[This is fairly long and has actually been published a few times, but it seems a good way to end my “friends among the indigenous population” parts of the blog. I’m making it two blog entries; please put up with it if you’re reading this.]
A night in a cheap bar. Nha Trang, South Vietnam. If I recall correctly, the French had called it Touraine, one of their beach resort cities when Indochina/Annam was their colony. [Remember Bloody Mary and Leah in South Pacific? They were Annamese/Indochinese/Vietnamese].
I am drinking ba-muoi-ba and talking with a young lady who says her name is Thich Duong Dang. I call her Dang (pronounced Zang in Vietnamese). She wants me to buy her another drink, but I know the drink will be very expensive tea with just enough alcohol in it to make it smell like "a drink." You see, Dang is a bar girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, five years younger than I am. What money she earns she gets from having American GIs buy “alcoholic” beverages for her, hoping she’ll go to bed with them, but she will not and she is paid by the bar management based upon the number of expensive, watered-down drinks she can sell.
I get the impression (possibly mistaken) that she is enjoying herself. Her normal clientele cannot speak Vietnamese and she normally has to talk to them in some kind of pidgin English that resembles baby talk. We, on the other hand, can discuss the war, poetry, art, whatever we like, simply because I can speak in her language. Probably she thinks I am speaking pidgin Vietnamese!
I would like to get something straight immediately: I am not at the Doc Lap Bar for the purpose of leasing female companionship for the evening. Tomorrow, I am leaving Vietnam. I'll take a short flight down to Cam Ranh Bay and board what we have come to call a "Freedom Bird" back to the United States. I am in the Independence Bar ("doc lap" means "independence" in Vietnamese) to have a few beers, my last drops of "33" beer ("ba muoi ba" means "33" in Vietnamese) before leaving country.
Dang rubs the front of my leg with her foot as we talk...about Yeats as I recall. I have just done an execrable, unrhymed translation of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" into Vietnamese for her sake and she does not like all this talk of rising up and going to a wee small island. I know this is hard to believe: quoting Yeats in the kind of military level Vietnamese I have been taught to a young woman who probably doesn’t even like Vietnamese poetry, much less Irish...but there it is.
Dang is, and there is no other word for it, exceptionally beautiful. She wears a deep purple ao dai and white silk pants that fit tight around her bottom and then flows out from her ankles. Her skin is flawless and she has not had that operation some Vietnamese prostitutes get to make their eyes look more western. She is slender, with a small waist and bust that gravity has not yet had time to play with and that, I suspect, nothing else has ever played with. She is not really a prostitute, only a bar girl, and that is, if anything, a less honest profession.
In spite of curfews in Nha Trang, the Doc Lap never really closes; the bartender only turns the light inside down and the lights outside off. The imitation American rock band from Manilla does a heavy, syrupy version of "Satisfaction" and seques into "Feeling Groovy." Dang and I chat quietly. She invites me to her house for the evening.
"Much too dangerous for an American to go back to base so late at night." She kisses me on the cheek, "Plus, I want to talk some more." I give her 10,000 Dong/piasters (a little less than $10) to buy a bottle of Scotch and, at her suggestion, will meet her outside so no one will see her leave with an American. Now, I am not stupid. I know that as soon as she goes through the door she will vanish for the evening. After all, I've already told her I'm leaving Vietnam tomorrow. Actually, this morning, it's already after midnight.
The bartender laughs at me and tells me she is still a virgin and that I have wasted my money on her. But if I want a woman for the night, he has the prettiest in Vietnam, "Ah, choi oi!, dep lam!" I laugh back and tell him I want no other woman than Dang. When I get out into the narrow street in front of the bar, it's so dark I can hardly make out the road. This part of Nha Trang is filled with two-story buildings hanging over narrow streets and it reminds me of nothing more than a poor, older area of San Antonio that has not yet been gentrified.
* * *
Friday, February 18, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 30)
Boredom and Being in the Army
Boredom. Not the easiest thing to write about. Until the Tet Offensive of 1968, I was rarely truly bored after we got to Pleiku. I could always find something to do: ride down to the air force base and go to the library, walk or hitch or take a TriLambretta to the city, hang out on Le Loi Street, read, use the dark room at the 330th, BS with other people, get a drink in one of the outside cafes. One of those cafes, in particular, at the intersection of highways 19 and 14, was fairly special. That’s where I would take the local paper or a paperback book and sit down, drink a Coke, have kids come up to me and ask what I was reading. They were amazed that I could read Vietnamese, not that I could speak a little, but that I could read it.
I took photos of some of the prostitutes, too. They all wanted shots of themselves to give to their “long time” boy friends. Decent shots, not porn stuff, not much skin showing except legs and shoulders and arms. For some reason, they wanted the GIs they rented themselves to to have photos to remember them by. Photos to remember them by? That's kind of sad. I wonder if any of those now old men take one of those photos out and stare at it these days. I never charged them for the photos and never took what they had to offer, not even a short-time. They didn't seem terribly unhappy: they laughed when they talked to me, spoke in a kind of pidgin English or in my not very good Vietnamese. Perhaps it was just that they knew I was not buying what they had to sell.
Flashback: In the months after I got drafted, Anthony Sabatino, a college friend, and I drove to Florida and just about everywhere else in the country. After we left Florida, we drove back west, spending a week in New Orleans, always drinking and driving, sleeping in the car in the Fontainebleau (Font le blue, the natives called it) State Park across the lake from New Orleans and driving back in in the afternoons to drink in the Quarter and watch strip shows. I can still clearly remember a stripper named Linda Brigitte who bought me drinks when she found out I'd been drafted. She was the only stripper I met who seemed to enjoy her work; the rest did their bumps and grinds on the tops of bars, bored, tired, Kerouac would have called them beat, beat down almost all the way. Linda still looked young and, at least, pretended to be enthusiastic about her dancing. The rest of New Orleans remains hazy. The women in Pleiku who sold themselves always made me think of the older strippers on the tops of the bars on the wrong end of Bourbon Street. A very few were like Linda Brigette: young and still thinking there might be a way out…the next soldier, the next long-time GI.
After Tet, boredom set in big time. Eight hours of work, the EM and, after making E5, the NCO club, the PX where I bought electronic gear to ship home, the darkroom. I would occasionally put on my piss-pot, take my M-16, and head down to the AFB for another book. I know, I know. We still had it good compared to the grunts. We didn’t go on patrol. We didn’t stage night ambushes. We didn’t man listening posts. I even considered volunteering for an LP just to relieve the boredom but decided that would just be too GI for me and definitely too dangerous.
Toward the end of our tour, Allen did something, or something he had done earlier, came back to the 330th. The story belongs to Allen and I won’t attempt to tell it. Briefly though, he had written a letter, home I think, and the contents of the letter, suggesting that morale in the 330th was low, made its way high up in certain circles (perhaps because Allen had influential parents), high enough that the IG sent a message to the command structure of the 330th suggesting strongly that they investigate the poor morale of the 330th and that that investigation should probably begin with Specialist Hallmark.
After Allen was called in to be questioned by Captain America (a splendid physical specimen of an officer but dumb as a post, a laughing stock among the EMs), he told us what had happened. We learned enough from him (for example, ‘Captain America suggested that I looked like I wanted to hit him…and I said, No, Sir, I don’t want to hit anybody” and so on) that we got a bit afraid that some kind of accident might happen to him.
I don’t even know if Allen was aware that, until we DEROSed, one of us always kept an eye on him…even while he was filling thousands of useless sandbags. [I’m going to invite Allen to write a few paragraphs for this blog…about his adventures with Captain America and maybe correct anything I've said here that needs correcting. He’s a damned fine writer and was a photojournalist for the Medford, Oregon, newspaper after he finally found a firm sense of what he wanted to do.]
Eventually, all of us who had arrived, way back almost a year earlier with the 601st RR Detachment in Chu Lai, were flown to Nha Trang to be out-processed prior to going to Cam Ranh Bay to fly home.
Everyone except Allen. He wasn’t on our orders.
Boredom. Not the easiest thing to write about. Until the Tet Offensive of 1968, I was rarely truly bored after we got to Pleiku. I could always find something to do: ride down to the air force base and go to the library, walk or hitch or take a TriLambretta to the city, hang out on Le Loi Street, read, use the dark room at the 330th, BS with other people, get a drink in one of the outside cafes. One of those cafes, in particular, at the intersection of highways 19 and 14, was fairly special. That’s where I would take the local paper or a paperback book and sit down, drink a Coke, have kids come up to me and ask what I was reading. They were amazed that I could read Vietnamese, not that I could speak a little, but that I could read it.
I took photos of some of the prostitutes, too. They all wanted shots of themselves to give to their “long time” boy friends. Decent shots, not porn stuff, not much skin showing except legs and shoulders and arms. For some reason, they wanted the GIs they rented themselves to to have photos to remember them by. Photos to remember them by? That's kind of sad. I wonder if any of those now old men take one of those photos out and stare at it these days. I never charged them for the photos and never took what they had to offer, not even a short-time. They didn't seem terribly unhappy: they laughed when they talked to me, spoke in a kind of pidgin English or in my not very good Vietnamese. Perhaps it was just that they knew I was not buying what they had to sell.
Flashback: In the months after I got drafted, Anthony Sabatino, a college friend, and I drove to Florida and just about everywhere else in the country. After we left Florida, we drove back west, spending a week in New Orleans, always drinking and driving, sleeping in the car in the Fontainebleau (Font le blue, the natives called it) State Park across the lake from New Orleans and driving back in in the afternoons to drink in the Quarter and watch strip shows. I can still clearly remember a stripper named Linda Brigitte who bought me drinks when she found out I'd been drafted. She was the only stripper I met who seemed to enjoy her work; the rest did their bumps and grinds on the tops of bars, bored, tired, Kerouac would have called them beat, beat down almost all the way. Linda still looked young and, at least, pretended to be enthusiastic about her dancing. The rest of New Orleans remains hazy. The women in Pleiku who sold themselves always made me think of the older strippers on the tops of the bars on the wrong end of Bourbon Street. A very few were like Linda Brigette: young and still thinking there might be a way out…the next soldier, the next long-time GI.
After Tet, boredom set in big time. Eight hours of work, the EM and, after making E5, the NCO club, the PX where I bought electronic gear to ship home, the darkroom. I would occasionally put on my piss-pot, take my M-16, and head down to the AFB for another book. I know, I know. We still had it good compared to the grunts. We didn’t go on patrol. We didn’t stage night ambushes. We didn’t man listening posts. I even considered volunteering for an LP just to relieve the boredom but decided that would just be too GI for me and definitely too dangerous.
Toward the end of our tour, Allen did something, or something he had done earlier, came back to the 330th. The story belongs to Allen and I won’t attempt to tell it. Briefly though, he had written a letter, home I think, and the contents of the letter, suggesting that morale in the 330th was low, made its way high up in certain circles (perhaps because Allen had influential parents), high enough that the IG sent a message to the command structure of the 330th suggesting strongly that they investigate the poor morale of the 330th and that that investigation should probably begin with Specialist Hallmark.
After Allen was called in to be questioned by Captain America (a splendid physical specimen of an officer but dumb as a post, a laughing stock among the EMs), he told us what had happened. We learned enough from him (for example, ‘Captain America suggested that I looked like I wanted to hit him…and I said, No, Sir, I don’t want to hit anybody” and so on) that we got a bit afraid that some kind of accident might happen to him.
I don’t even know if Allen was aware that, until we DEROSed, one of us always kept an eye on him…even while he was filling thousands of useless sandbags. [I’m going to invite Allen to write a few paragraphs for this blog…about his adventures with Captain America and maybe correct anything I've said here that needs correcting. He’s a damned fine writer and was a photojournalist for the Medford, Oregon, newspaper after he finally found a firm sense of what he wanted to do.]
Eventually, all of us who had arrived, way back almost a year earlier with the 601st RR Detachment in Chu Lai, were flown to Nha Trang to be out-processed prior to going to Cam Ranh Bay to fly home.
Everyone except Allen. He wasn’t on our orders.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 28)
Time for a Reassessment
When I started writing these “notes about Vietnam,” I suggested that changes in my own thoughts about the war sprang from the things I was writing about here. I think, now that I am past mid-year, through the Tet Offensive, having dealt with places I never went and never in my worst nightmares want to go: Hue, Lang Vei and Khe Sanh, that I ought to do some kind of self-assessment, see if I’ve really written about what caused my change.
Change? Where was I mentally and politically when I got my draft notice and decided to join up instead of let myself be dragged into the Army? Where was I a year and a half later when I boarded the USS Gordon and sailed from Oakland Bay to DaNang Harbor and then trans-shipped onto an LST to sail down the coast of what was then South Vietnam to the beaches of Chu Lai?
This I know: I was apolitical. I did not want to go to war, but I was neither for nor against that same war I did not want to participate in. I went because. . . ,well, because I went. I had no moral or political qualms about going; instead, like Dick Cheney, I would have preferred to be doing something else: skiing, fishing, whatever. But I did go.
Have you seen the film Go Tell the Spartans? It’s based upon a novel called Incident at Muc Wa by, if I remember correctly, Daniel Ford, and it was published back in March, 1967 (I looked that up and, yes, the author was Daniel Ford). That’s while I was already in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, preparing to go to Vietnam. The central character in the novel is a lot like I was at that time (though he was, fictively, in Vietnam in 1964, before the big buildup that got me drafted in 1965). A lot like me? He didn’t have political views of the war, went because, well, because, why not? His commander claims he’s a “war tourist”—went to see what it was like.
Let me confess, that, even now, I am not sorry I went. I learned a lot and what I learned has made me a different person than I would have been had I not gone. I can’t help but wonder if I would have been so much opposed to the first of the Persian Gulf Wars had I not been in Vietnam or to the second Iraq War and to the travesty we now have going on in Afghanistan—that whole litany of unnecessary wars and killings we have been engaged in during and after Vietnam.
But why turn against the Vietnam War while I was active in the war itself? All of the earlier blog entries I’ve written (27 already!) speak, indirectly, to that. If some of us participate remotely in a killing machine, even when we do not pull triggers, and if we neither believe in nor fail to believe in what we are doing, we do start asking ourselves why. You witness the destruction, even if you do not see the body, of a young man on a hill over-looking your camp; you meet the “enemy”—a 15 or 16 year old boy with a head injury who you are expected to interrogate—and the face of the “enemy” becomes visible. You see wounded children in the streets, men and women with no legs, with horrible burns…you see legions of women who have become prostitutes to survive and sell themselves to people in your company...you see people you are supposed to be helping not really wanting to, not really, be helped, not caring one way or the other if the current regime controls their lives or another regime, even if it’s communist, people who just want to be left alone.
You start wondering why you and the military you are a part of are there in the first place. Is it to defend what seems to be a fairly corrupt regime? Is it because we really, truly, believe that if we don’t stop them here, they’ll be invading us through California’s beaches just as we rushed down from the LSTs onto their beaches at Chu Lai? Is it because we truly believed that if Vietnam fell, Cambodia and Laos and Thailand would fall, maybe the Philippines? Dominoes keep clicking in my head! People in the military really are not supposed to think for themselves. That’s knocked out of them in basic training. They are supposed to obey orders. . .straight on up the chain of command: the platoon commander, the company commander, the battalion commander, the regimental commander, the division commander, the army commander, the MACV commander, the joint chiefs, the president…. Well, no. You can't do that. That leads to My Lai. That leads to mindless killing. We should always think before we kill. . .given enough time to do so.
Some people did not have that problem, perhaps most people. They believed and still do, absolutely, that we should have been there. They were not troubled by why we went to war, but they might well have been troubled by why we got out of the war when it was still going on. That’s okay. I mean, they start with different assumptions, with different beliefs, and that’s their business. I don’t argue with them, not ever, because when two people start off with different a priori assumptions, there’s no common meeting ground, no room for discussion, only for shouting. In Vietnam, yes, in Vietnam, I started, naively, with no assumptions at all. Oh, I had a vague sense that my country would not send me to a war without having a good reason to do so. I think now and thought before my war year was over that that basic assumption was wrong.
So, why were we there anyway? A game with the Soviets? That seems to be the best guess. We were there because we did not one foot of soil to fall to communism. The soviets had beaten us into space with Sputnik. . .Barack Obama’s Sputnik Moment for the other side, the URsputnik moment. We had lost the Bay of Pigs. They had backed down on the Cuban Missile Crisis. A chess game: and I was one of the pawns. All of us who went, regardless of our assumptions, were caught up in a huge game of global politics, a game that ate us up and spat us out. Things that were, to me at least, ultimately merely games countries play.
What happened that had any relevant affect on the United States when we quit and went home? Nothing I can think of.
But really, I changed because of the people I met there and people I did not meet but saw in the streets of Pleiku. And people I didn’t see in person, but saw on television and read about in the newspaper. Not peace movement people in the United States, but people like Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the war; people like General Loan, who put a pistol to the head of a prisoner and shot him; and so many people in Pleiku who were maimed, prostituted, desolate. It’s all so facile, so easy to say, but you think about things when you’re on guard duty, when you’re off work and town is closed down, when you’re squeezed into the back of a triLambretta with ten Vietnamese who are just people like you, when the Vietnamese woman who cleans your clothes and your hootch, works silently one day and the next and the next for a full year and then cries and, when you ask her why, just looks at you and then leaves.
I am not at all sure I can explain why I turned against a war I had been apathetic about, but when my friend Allen called me from Fort Bragg one day in the summer of 1969 and said “Come down to Fayetteville, we’re going to march against the war,” I packed my VW convertible and Don Mohr, my friend, joined me as we drove down to North Carolina to march with GIs United Against the War.
I’m not yet through with these blog entries, but needed to stop here for a moment, just to clarify some things in my own mind. My change was not Pauline (I did not get struck by a blinding light and hear God calling me out as Paul did); it was more Augustinian: the result of reading books from the small Air Force Library, of reading with open eyes the books I had taken to Vietnam with me, of seeing what we had done to a small country that had once been beautiful, of meeting our English students, of talking with prostitutes and children in the streets of Pleiku, of chatting over hot tea with an old woman who ran a tea shop, of coming to terms slowly and finding out, discovering, what I really believed and, yes, as corny as it sounds, who I really am.
When I started writing these “notes about Vietnam,” I suggested that changes in my own thoughts about the war sprang from the things I was writing about here. I think, now that I am past mid-year, through the Tet Offensive, having dealt with places I never went and never in my worst nightmares want to go: Hue, Lang Vei and Khe Sanh, that I ought to do some kind of self-assessment, see if I’ve really written about what caused my change.
Change? Where was I mentally and politically when I got my draft notice and decided to join up instead of let myself be dragged into the Army? Where was I a year and a half later when I boarded the USS Gordon and sailed from Oakland Bay to DaNang Harbor and then trans-shipped onto an LST to sail down the coast of what was then South Vietnam to the beaches of Chu Lai?
This I know: I was apolitical. I did not want to go to war, but I was neither for nor against that same war I did not want to participate in. I went because. . . ,well, because I went. I had no moral or political qualms about going; instead, like Dick Cheney, I would have preferred to be doing something else: skiing, fishing, whatever. But I did go.
Have you seen the film Go Tell the Spartans? It’s based upon a novel called Incident at Muc Wa by, if I remember correctly, Daniel Ford, and it was published back in March, 1967 (I looked that up and, yes, the author was Daniel Ford). That’s while I was already in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, preparing to go to Vietnam. The central character in the novel is a lot like I was at that time (though he was, fictively, in Vietnam in 1964, before the big buildup that got me drafted in 1965). A lot like me? He didn’t have political views of the war, went because, well, because, why not? His commander claims he’s a “war tourist”—went to see what it was like.
Let me confess, that, even now, I am not sorry I went. I learned a lot and what I learned has made me a different person than I would have been had I not gone. I can’t help but wonder if I would have been so much opposed to the first of the Persian Gulf Wars had I not been in Vietnam or to the second Iraq War and to the travesty we now have going on in Afghanistan—that whole litany of unnecessary wars and killings we have been engaged in during and after Vietnam.
But why turn against the Vietnam War while I was active in the war itself? All of the earlier blog entries I’ve written (27 already!) speak, indirectly, to that. If some of us participate remotely in a killing machine, even when we do not pull triggers, and if we neither believe in nor fail to believe in what we are doing, we do start asking ourselves why. You witness the destruction, even if you do not see the body, of a young man on a hill over-looking your camp; you meet the “enemy”—a 15 or 16 year old boy with a head injury who you are expected to interrogate—and the face of the “enemy” becomes visible. You see wounded children in the streets, men and women with no legs, with horrible burns…you see legions of women who have become prostitutes to survive and sell themselves to people in your company...you see people you are supposed to be helping not really wanting to, not really, be helped, not caring one way or the other if the current regime controls their lives or another regime, even if it’s communist, people who just want to be left alone.
You start wondering why you and the military you are a part of are there in the first place. Is it to defend what seems to be a fairly corrupt regime? Is it because we really, truly, believe that if we don’t stop them here, they’ll be invading us through California’s beaches just as we rushed down from the LSTs onto their beaches at Chu Lai? Is it because we truly believed that if Vietnam fell, Cambodia and Laos and Thailand would fall, maybe the Philippines? Dominoes keep clicking in my head! People in the military really are not supposed to think for themselves. That’s knocked out of them in basic training. They are supposed to obey orders. . .straight on up the chain of command: the platoon commander, the company commander, the battalion commander, the regimental commander, the division commander, the army commander, the MACV commander, the joint chiefs, the president…. Well, no. You can't do that. That leads to My Lai. That leads to mindless killing. We should always think before we kill. . .given enough time to do so.
Some people did not have that problem, perhaps most people. They believed and still do, absolutely, that we should have been there. They were not troubled by why we went to war, but they might well have been troubled by why we got out of the war when it was still going on. That’s okay. I mean, they start with different assumptions, with different beliefs, and that’s their business. I don’t argue with them, not ever, because when two people start off with different a priori assumptions, there’s no common meeting ground, no room for discussion, only for shouting. In Vietnam, yes, in Vietnam, I started, naively, with no assumptions at all. Oh, I had a vague sense that my country would not send me to a war without having a good reason to do so. I think now and thought before my war year was over that that basic assumption was wrong.
So, why were we there anyway? A game with the Soviets? That seems to be the best guess. We were there because we did not one foot of soil to fall to communism. The soviets had beaten us into space with Sputnik. . .Barack Obama’s Sputnik Moment for the other side, the URsputnik moment. We had lost the Bay of Pigs. They had backed down on the Cuban Missile Crisis. A chess game: and I was one of the pawns. All of us who went, regardless of our assumptions, were caught up in a huge game of global politics, a game that ate us up and spat us out. Things that were, to me at least, ultimately merely games countries play.
What happened that had any relevant affect on the United States when we quit and went home? Nothing I can think of.
But really, I changed because of the people I met there and people I did not meet but saw in the streets of Pleiku. And people I didn’t see in person, but saw on television and read about in the newspaper. Not peace movement people in the United States, but people like Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the war; people like General Loan, who put a pistol to the head of a prisoner and shot him; and so many people in Pleiku who were maimed, prostituted, desolate. It’s all so facile, so easy to say, but you think about things when you’re on guard duty, when you’re off work and town is closed down, when you’re squeezed into the back of a triLambretta with ten Vietnamese who are just people like you, when the Vietnamese woman who cleans your clothes and your hootch, works silently one day and the next and the next for a full year and then cries and, when you ask her why, just looks at you and then leaves.
I am not at all sure I can explain why I turned against a war I had been apathetic about, but when my friend Allen called me from Fort Bragg one day in the summer of 1969 and said “Come down to Fayetteville, we’re going to march against the war,” I packed my VW convertible and Don Mohr, my friend, joined me as we drove down to North Carolina to march with GIs United Against the War.
I’m not yet through with these blog entries, but needed to stop here for a moment, just to clarify some things in my own mind. My change was not Pauline (I did not get struck by a blinding light and hear God calling me out as Paul did); it was more Augustinian: the result of reading books from the small Air Force Library, of reading with open eyes the books I had taken to Vietnam with me, of seeing what we had done to a small country that had once been beautiful, of meeting our English students, of talking with prostitutes and children in the streets of Pleiku, of chatting over hot tea with an old woman who ran a tea shop, of coming to terms slowly and finding out, discovering, what I really believed and, yes, as corny as it sounds, who I really am.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 27)
After Tet
After Tet, time passed. It has a habit of doing that. We followed the news of the Marines and ARVN fighting to retake the City of Hue, the loss of life in attacking the Citadel, the discovery of mass graves and possible massacres of civilians by the VC. And we continued to watch the Siege of Khe Sanh on our Day Room television and wonder what the enemy was up to.
Did they really want to turn Khe Sanh into a second Dien Bien Phu? Didn’t they know they could not do that against a super-power like the United States. And yet, they tweaked us, dropped rockets and mortars on the base, defied the power arrayed against them. Starting with the battle at Dak To and moving through the hill fights, the VC, sometimes the PAVN, had been fighting almost constantly. Khe Sanh was the most protracted fight of them all.
It began prior to the Tet Offensive, on January 21, 1968, and lasted far past the offensive, finally, ending on April 8, 1978. That’s 3½ months of rockets and mortars falling on the camp. The Air Force had launched Operation Niagara, which dropped tons and tons of bombs around Khe Sanh, but enemy forces continued to attack. The severity of the American response was unmatched for ferocity.
According to Wikipedia, quoting authoritative sources:
By the end of the battle of Khe Sanh, U.S. Air Force assets had flown 9,691 tactical sorties and dropped 14,223 tons of bombs on targets within the Khe Sanh area. Marine Corps aviators had flown 7,098 missions and released 17,015 tons. Naval aircrews, many of whom were redirected from Operation Rolling Thunder, strikes against North Vietnam, flew 5,337 sorties and dropped 7,941 tons of ordnance in the area.
That’s a total of more than 22,000 tons of bombs, not including artillery fire directed at NVA and VC forces.
Those of us at the 330th? We just watched it on TV (like other Americans back home in the States). We knew that LBJ would not tolerate the enemy over-running the base, that he had ordered the military in Vietnam to ensure that it did not fall into enemy hands. Finally, though, Khe Sanh just ended. Relief columns fought their way into the base and the enemy faded back into the hills and jungles…across the border into Laos, across the DMZ, wherever they faded to.
During the siege, in a lesser known operation, the NVA, using 12 tanks, totally devastated a Green Beret camp near Khe Sanh, the small base (manned by Bru Montagnards, some Civilian Irregular Defense Group folks, and 24 Green Berets)was called Lang Vei. Marine Colonel Loundes and his staff refused to implement their existing plan to relieve Lang Vei because they feared it was a PAVN trap. Loundes was supported in that decision by General Westmoreland and Marine General Cushman.
Lieutenant Colonel Ladd, commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, infuriated that his men were being left to die at Lang Vei, proposed that Green Berets go to Lang Vei in Marine Helicopters to relieve their men. Cushman continued to resist until Westmoreland ordered him to provide the choppers. The relief effort was a success and managed to rescue 11 of the 24 Green Berets. The rest had been killed.
The Marines at Khe Sanh managed to further distinguish themselves by not allowing the Gook “Bru” to enter Khe Sanh. They had to find their own way back to Laos. All of this information is Wikipedia information, but it is all footnoted. I’m sure there are other, more reasonable explanations for the Marine behavior.
Us? We were mostly bored. We had been proved correct in our assessment of what was going to happen at Tet. And our lives changed slightly. A few of us stopped going into town because the regulations changed: Instead of civilian clothes, we had to wear jungle fatigues…and: we had to carry our M-16s with us. In other words, we had to join the Army!!!! Aside from that, our school was dismantled. We had one last meeting with our students and signed documents attesting to their having graduated as “advanced intermediate speakers of English.” We hoped those letters would help them get jobs and keep them out of the ARVN.
We continued to translate documents, did our day-to-day work. Nothing exciting happened for a few months and that was not earth-shattering: well, the commander of the 330th did receive a letter from the Inspector General’s Office stating that reports had reached pretty high levels that there was a morale problem in the company and that he should report back on the situation. Furthermore, the IG suggested that that report should probably start with an interview with Specialist Allen Hallmark. That is really Allen’s story, so I’ll stick to my own take on what followed in a subsequent blog.
After Tet, time passed. It has a habit of doing that. We followed the news of the Marines and ARVN fighting to retake the City of Hue, the loss of life in attacking the Citadel, the discovery of mass graves and possible massacres of civilians by the VC. And we continued to watch the Siege of Khe Sanh on our Day Room television and wonder what the enemy was up to.
Did they really want to turn Khe Sanh into a second Dien Bien Phu? Didn’t they know they could not do that against a super-power like the United States. And yet, they tweaked us, dropped rockets and mortars on the base, defied the power arrayed against them. Starting with the battle at Dak To and moving through the hill fights, the VC, sometimes the PAVN, had been fighting almost constantly. Khe Sanh was the most protracted fight of them all.
It began prior to the Tet Offensive, on January 21, 1968, and lasted far past the offensive, finally, ending on April 8, 1978. That’s 3½ months of rockets and mortars falling on the camp. The Air Force had launched Operation Niagara, which dropped tons and tons of bombs around Khe Sanh, but enemy forces continued to attack. The severity of the American response was unmatched for ferocity.
According to Wikipedia, quoting authoritative sources:
By the end of the battle of Khe Sanh, U.S. Air Force assets had flown 9,691 tactical sorties and dropped 14,223 tons of bombs on targets within the Khe Sanh area. Marine Corps aviators had flown 7,098 missions and released 17,015 tons. Naval aircrews, many of whom were redirected from Operation Rolling Thunder, strikes against North Vietnam, flew 5,337 sorties and dropped 7,941 tons of ordnance in the area.
That’s a total of more than 22,000 tons of bombs, not including artillery fire directed at NVA and VC forces.
Those of us at the 330th? We just watched it on TV (like other Americans back home in the States). We knew that LBJ would not tolerate the enemy over-running the base, that he had ordered the military in Vietnam to ensure that it did not fall into enemy hands. Finally, though, Khe Sanh just ended. Relief columns fought their way into the base and the enemy faded back into the hills and jungles…across the border into Laos, across the DMZ, wherever they faded to.
During the siege, in a lesser known operation, the NVA, using 12 tanks, totally devastated a Green Beret camp near Khe Sanh, the small base (manned by Bru Montagnards, some Civilian Irregular Defense Group folks, and 24 Green Berets)was called Lang Vei. Marine Colonel Loundes and his staff refused to implement their existing plan to relieve Lang Vei because they feared it was a PAVN trap. Loundes was supported in that decision by General Westmoreland and Marine General Cushman.
Lieutenant Colonel Ladd, commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, infuriated that his men were being left to die at Lang Vei, proposed that Green Berets go to Lang Vei in Marine Helicopters to relieve their men. Cushman continued to resist until Westmoreland ordered him to provide the choppers. The relief effort was a success and managed to rescue 11 of the 24 Green Berets. The rest had been killed.
The Marines at Khe Sanh managed to further distinguish themselves by not allowing the Gook “Bru” to enter Khe Sanh. They had to find their own way back to Laos. All of this information is Wikipedia information, but it is all footnoted. I’m sure there are other, more reasonable explanations for the Marine behavior.
Us? We were mostly bored. We had been proved correct in our assessment of what was going to happen at Tet. And our lives changed slightly. A few of us stopped going into town because the regulations changed: Instead of civilian clothes, we had to wear jungle fatigues…and: we had to carry our M-16s with us. In other words, we had to join the Army!!!! Aside from that, our school was dismantled. We had one last meeting with our students and signed documents attesting to their having graduated as “advanced intermediate speakers of English.” We hoped those letters would help them get jobs and keep them out of the ARVN.
We continued to translate documents, did our day-to-day work. Nothing exciting happened for a few months and that was not earth-shattering: well, the commander of the 330th did receive a letter from the Inspector General’s Office stating that reports had reached pretty high levels that there was a morale problem in the company and that he should report back on the situation. Furthermore, the IG suggested that that report should probably start with an interview with Specialist Allen Hallmark. That is really Allen’s story, so I’ll stick to my own take on what followed in a subsequent blog.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 26)
Witness, not a participant, to Tet, 1968
So, a few days before Tet. As I recall, Allen’s parents were vacationing in Thailand and Allen was on a week or two leave to visit them in the Bangkok area. I always thought Ms. Hallmark had intelligence operatives that were somewhat better than the CIA’s and managed to get her oldest son out Vietnam for Tet, but je ne sais quoi! I could, quite easily, be misremembering this whole thing and I’ll rely on Allen to set the record straight.
We did work really hard in those days: translating, putting things together, sending reports out whenever some little VC sitting somewhere in the South sent a message indicating that his unit was ready for the forthcoming great and glorious offensive and general uprising. We heard rumors that the Pleiku Provincial Chief and his family had left for Saigon for classier Tet parties than could be found on a provincial backwater like Pleiku…but those were just rumors. As it was, Pleiku had a rather exciting Tet party of its own…not, however, rivaling that held in either Saigon or the imperial city of Hue.
The night of the Eve of Tet, 1968, the 330th was on alert as everyone in all of South Vietnam really, really, really should have been. I recall starting out in the bunker (might as well be safe) and drinking a few '33' beers before migrating to the berm. A few VC units had jumped the gun, so to speak, and started their offensive a little early, but I suspect that had just caused MACV to think their attack was the whole thing, easily overcome.
I still recall how creepy it all seemed that night. Remember: our company was between the Cambodia border and the town of Pleiku, 4th Division HQ was on the other side of the town. To get to the city, the VC had to march around us. That night I listened carefully, tried to hear any sign of thousands of enemy troops marching past us but could never hear anything. They must have stayed a klick or two north and south of the areas our floodlights highlighted.
Finally, I hear the sounds of a huge firefight, see tracers—green for the bad guys, red for us good guys. I see flashes, hear explosions from down in the city, dark night, flashing lights. Amber flares shoot up in an explosion of artillery and drift down beneath white parachutes. The rest of the 330th races to the berm, poised to return fire that never comes. The Tet Offensive of 1968 is not about American bases; it is, instead, an attempt to take control of all the major town and cities in the South. In direct disobedience to General William C. Westmoreland, the VC demonstrate that they can, indeed, wage war all over the country on the same freaking night!
The VC hold out, stay in Pleiku for two days. They kill a number of people; we kill a number of people. That’s what this war is all about: numbers, not territory taken and held, not old-style war. They keep control of Hue and its Citadel much longer. Marines and ARVN fight street to street in that city before they regain control. The best description I have read of the Hue fighting is in Michael Herr’s Dispatches and in Gustav Hasford's great novel, The Short-Timers (Full Metal Jacket was made from that book).
Our indigenous native personnel? The ones who work for us at the 330th? They had not come in to work the day before. I wonder why? Xuans 1 and 2? Our very own bar girls? MIA for three days. No one reports to work in the Mess Hall. The men who burn our shit? They had some compelling reason not to come to work that day before. Who needed intel? We could tell by the number of Vietnamese locals who showed up for work or who failed to show up.
The big news: Yes, we did win the Tet Offensive. The North and their southern minions failed to achieve any of their stated objectives. There was no general uprising. Well, they did manage to occupy a few towns for a few days. A few things spoiled that major victory for us: 1. the false notion that our embassy had been over-run, 2) television images of the fighting including General Loan’s execution of the VC soldier in civilian clothes, 3) General Westmoreland’s statements about enemy strength in the weeks prior to Tet.
The so-called “fog of war” was at its foggiest in those days during and after Tet, 1968. The VC ,after Tet, were closer to what the General had described before Tet: unable to mount another major battle. As a fighting force, they were wasted, destroyed during Tet. From Tet on, most of the fighting would be done by the North Vietnamese Army. We did win Tet, but we lost the war that week…even though we would continue to fight for five long years afterwards.
So, a few days before Tet. As I recall, Allen’s parents were vacationing in Thailand and Allen was on a week or two leave to visit them in the Bangkok area. I always thought Ms. Hallmark had intelligence operatives that were somewhat better than the CIA’s and managed to get her oldest son out Vietnam for Tet, but je ne sais quoi! I could, quite easily, be misremembering this whole thing and I’ll rely on Allen to set the record straight.
We did work really hard in those days: translating, putting things together, sending reports out whenever some little VC sitting somewhere in the South sent a message indicating that his unit was ready for the forthcoming great and glorious offensive and general uprising. We heard rumors that the Pleiku Provincial Chief and his family had left for Saigon for classier Tet parties than could be found on a provincial backwater like Pleiku…but those were just rumors. As it was, Pleiku had a rather exciting Tet party of its own…not, however, rivaling that held in either Saigon or the imperial city of Hue.
The night of the Eve of Tet, 1968, the 330th was on alert as everyone in all of South Vietnam really, really, really should have been. I recall starting out in the bunker (might as well be safe) and drinking a few '33' beers before migrating to the berm. A few VC units had jumped the gun, so to speak, and started their offensive a little early, but I suspect that had just caused MACV to think their attack was the whole thing, easily overcome.
I still recall how creepy it all seemed that night. Remember: our company was between the Cambodia border and the town of Pleiku, 4th Division HQ was on the other side of the town. To get to the city, the VC had to march around us. That night I listened carefully, tried to hear any sign of thousands of enemy troops marching past us but could never hear anything. They must have stayed a klick or two north and south of the areas our floodlights highlighted.
Finally, I hear the sounds of a huge firefight, see tracers—green for the bad guys, red for us good guys. I see flashes, hear explosions from down in the city, dark night, flashing lights. Amber flares shoot up in an explosion of artillery and drift down beneath white parachutes. The rest of the 330th races to the berm, poised to return fire that never comes. The Tet Offensive of 1968 is not about American bases; it is, instead, an attempt to take control of all the major town and cities in the South. In direct disobedience to General William C. Westmoreland, the VC demonstrate that they can, indeed, wage war all over the country on the same freaking night!
The VC hold out, stay in Pleiku for two days. They kill a number of people; we kill a number of people. That’s what this war is all about: numbers, not territory taken and held, not old-style war. They keep control of Hue and its Citadel much longer. Marines and ARVN fight street to street in that city before they regain control. The best description I have read of the Hue fighting is in Michael Herr’s Dispatches and in Gustav Hasford's great novel, The Short-Timers (Full Metal Jacket was made from that book).
Our indigenous native personnel? The ones who work for us at the 330th? They had not come in to work the day before. I wonder why? Xuans 1 and 2? Our very own bar girls? MIA for three days. No one reports to work in the Mess Hall. The men who burn our shit? They had some compelling reason not to come to work that day before. Who needed intel? We could tell by the number of Vietnamese locals who showed up for work or who failed to show up.
The big news: Yes, we did win the Tet Offensive. The North and their southern minions failed to achieve any of their stated objectives. There was no general uprising. Well, they did manage to occupy a few towns for a few days. A few things spoiled that major victory for us: 1. the false notion that our embassy had been over-run, 2) television images of the fighting including General Loan’s execution of the VC soldier in civilian clothes, 3) General Westmoreland’s statements about enemy strength in the weeks prior to Tet.
The so-called “fog of war” was at its foggiest in those days during and after Tet, 1968. The VC ,after Tet, were closer to what the General had described before Tet: unable to mount another major battle. As a fighting force, they were wasted, destroyed during Tet. From Tet on, most of the fighting would be done by the North Vietnamese Army. We did win Tet, but we lost the war that week…even though we would continue to fight for five long years afterwards.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 25)
Interim: a Visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
I was in Washington last week and, as I usually do when I am in that city, took time to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall. And, as usual, I found myself tearing up. I visit out of respect for all those young men and a few women who gave their lives in our war. It does not really matter whether we approve of the country’s wars or not, the sacrifice deserves respect. Still, though, I had been reviewing Vivian Shipley’s recent collection of poems, All Your Memories Have Been Erased, just before I left for D.C. and could not help remembering her poem for the students killed at Virginia Tech and the haunting line about how they were cut off “mid-song.” The human beings represented by the names carved into that black wall were also only part way through singing their own songs when their voices were lost to us all.
I was rushed on this visit and took a taxi from the conference hotel to the memorial. The cabbie seemed used to Vietnam veterans rushing to the Wall and asked if I had been there, meaning Vietnam. When I said yes, he said he'd wait for me on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial. The area was totally under repair, reflecting pool drained, walkways rerouted, but the Wall...it still called out to people. The last time I was there a few kids were racing around and their parents were shushing them, asking them to behave. I remember telling them that the people represented by the names would not have minded, that that kind of happiness and joy was okay with them. This time, though, only a few of us, no cherry trees in bloom, no laughing children.
The first few times I visited The Wall, I did not feel that sense of healing some veterans have mentioned, instead. . . Well, I’ve written a few poems, none recently, about how the memorial makes me feel. The first was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and was about a trip I took to the memorial with my friend Pat Valdata. Pat’s a glider pilot and writer and she was a good companion on that walk up the reflection pond to the Lincoln Memorial before we turned right to visit Maya Lin’s tribute:
New Names
1
Cherry blossoms blow along the ground
and green buds promise leaves to come,
closed walkways send us west and nothing's
mirrored in the murky pond.
She notes that gulls soar much as she does
when the clouds build just this way.
She paces me, stride for stride, sees
mallards, heads buried in the slime.
She seems entranced with winged things.
2
Here, the cherries blossom still—a little
north and east of where we stand.
The path leads down beside a polished wall
that sprouts the names of one war's dead.
New faces blossom, new letters grow
from black wings struggling to rise, but
anchored in the hill and in our minds.
New names to link old remains—men
and women who will not grow old.
The wings reflect, although the pond does not,
cherry blossoms in the April sun.
I have returned to the place many times in the intervening years and, each time, the memorial affects me in a different way. The image of “wings,” though: that is constant. When I last wrote about the memorial, I was thinking of the young man named Bao who reported on the camp at Dak To and about what was, surely, his own death after we had pinpointed his locations:
Not All the Names Are There
I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I knew not all the names were there, not all.
They said the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mentioned rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.
A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I knew not all the names were there, I could not
see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one wrote his name upon the Wall.
No one ever mentioned tears could fall and rage
could dominate between those wings of black carved names.
I said I would not write about the Wall;
not all the names can fit there, hardly all.
This time, the visit brought regret. I think the truth about the Wall is that it does not simply reflect our faces against the carved names of the dead in the black mirror polish of its exterior, but also reflects the baggage we bring with us. This is Maya Lin’s real achievement: that the memorial is different for each man or woman who sees it, just as our war was different for each person who fought in it. We do not simply see their names, but see our whole lives since theirs were lost.
January 30, 1968, was neither warm nor cold in the area around Pleiku, but it was a day many new names would become eligible for the stone carver’s art. Allen, Jim, Will, all of us who worked in the linguist hootch at the 330th and all the cryppies, reporters, diddy-boppers, mechanics, cooks, all of us, knew the morning would change the course of the war and would, simultaneously, change dramatically, the way we would live out the remainder of our tour in Vietnam.
I was in Washington last week and, as I usually do when I am in that city, took time to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall. And, as usual, I found myself tearing up. I visit out of respect for all those young men and a few women who gave their lives in our war. It does not really matter whether we approve of the country’s wars or not, the sacrifice deserves respect. Still, though, I had been reviewing Vivian Shipley’s recent collection of poems, All Your Memories Have Been Erased, just before I left for D.C. and could not help remembering her poem for the students killed at Virginia Tech and the haunting line about how they were cut off “mid-song.” The human beings represented by the names carved into that black wall were also only part way through singing their own songs when their voices were lost to us all.
I was rushed on this visit and took a taxi from the conference hotel to the memorial. The cabbie seemed used to Vietnam veterans rushing to the Wall and asked if I had been there, meaning Vietnam. When I said yes, he said he'd wait for me on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial. The area was totally under repair, reflecting pool drained, walkways rerouted, but the Wall...it still called out to people. The last time I was there a few kids were racing around and their parents were shushing them, asking them to behave. I remember telling them that the people represented by the names would not have minded, that that kind of happiness and joy was okay with them. This time, though, only a few of us, no cherry trees in bloom, no laughing children.
The first few times I visited The Wall, I did not feel that sense of healing some veterans have mentioned, instead. . . Well, I’ve written a few poems, none recently, about how the memorial makes me feel. The first was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and was about a trip I took to the memorial with my friend Pat Valdata. Pat’s a glider pilot and writer and she was a good companion on that walk up the reflection pond to the Lincoln Memorial before we turned right to visit Maya Lin’s tribute:
New Names
1
Cherry blossoms blow along the ground
and green buds promise leaves to come,
closed walkways send us west and nothing's
mirrored in the murky pond.
She notes that gulls soar much as she does
when the clouds build just this way.
She paces me, stride for stride, sees
mallards, heads buried in the slime.
She seems entranced with winged things.
2
Here, the cherries blossom still—a little
north and east of where we stand.
The path leads down beside a polished wall
that sprouts the names of one war's dead.
New faces blossom, new letters grow
from black wings struggling to rise, but
anchored in the hill and in our minds.
New names to link old remains—men
and women who will not grow old.
The wings reflect, although the pond does not,
cherry blossoms in the April sun.
I have returned to the place many times in the intervening years and, each time, the memorial affects me in a different way. The image of “wings,” though: that is constant. When I last wrote about the memorial, I was thinking of the young man named Bao who reported on the camp at Dak To and about what was, surely, his own death after we had pinpointed his locations:
Not All the Names Are There
I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I knew not all the names were there, not all.
They said the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mentioned rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.
A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I knew not all the names were there, I could not
see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one wrote his name upon the Wall.
No one ever mentioned tears could fall and rage
could dominate between those wings of black carved names.
I said I would not write about the Wall;
not all the names can fit there, hardly all.
This time, the visit brought regret. I think the truth about the Wall is that it does not simply reflect our faces against the carved names of the dead in the black mirror polish of its exterior, but also reflects the baggage we bring with us. This is Maya Lin’s real achievement: that the memorial is different for each man or woman who sees it, just as our war was different for each person who fought in it. We do not simply see their names, but see our whole lives since theirs were lost.
January 30, 1968, was neither warm nor cold in the area around Pleiku, but it was a day many new names would become eligible for the stone carver’s art. Allen, Jim, Will, all of us who worked in the linguist hootch at the 330th and all the cryppies, reporters, diddy-boppers, mechanics, cooks, all of us, knew the morning would change the course of the war and would, simultaneously, change dramatically, the way we would live out the remainder of our tour in Vietnam.
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