Why I still Write About the War
--a version of this was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and then in Coming to Terms (Plan View Press, 2008)
I can sometimes move forward without writing about Viet-Nam (the actual spelling minus the diacriticals) in my journal and then something brings it back to me: the way the water looks in the Laguna Madre near Padres Island, a cool breeze on campus, catching the silhouette of a telephone pole above the woods in my backyard late at night and mistaking it for a giant bird with a huge beak, the smell of peanut butter cookies in the oven, almost anything if it hits at just the right moment.
Almost it is as if someone turned a switch to the ON position and words begin to flow. Not always good words, not always the right words, but words tumble out. That happened the other day when a friend asked about Bruce Weigl and thought maybe he should start writing about other things and leave the war behind him, that perhaps focusing so much on Viet-Nam was limiting in some way, and I began to think about a number of writers who have focused closely and not repetitively as I am doing now, but often on that "splendid little war" that so many of us share in some way. I wondered how they could possibly stop writing about it, not why they should continue to do so.
When I walk through the hill country here in Texas, or hike into the Organ Mountains outside of Las Cruces, or stroll down a trail in the Big Thicket, paddle a canoe through the bays of the Texas coast or down the Guadalupe River when there is no drought, or return to my grandmother's home on Wakulla Bay and walk down sand roads, I feel more alive than I do at almost any other time, even when, no, especially when, I am alone.
But when I see these things, find myself away from other people, way out into the still waters of Espiritu Santo Bay or between lines of hills where I cannot hear cars on the highway or on a path hiking up to Dripping Springs outside Las Cruces, I find myself not exactly flashing back, with all the unpleasant connotations that accompany that phrase, but seeing once again the hills and low mountains of the Central Highlands in Viet-Nam, hearing the waters of the South China Sea at Chu Lai, looking again into a schoolyard in Pleiku and seeing a giant Buddha smashed apart.
The other day, I had to replace two tires on my Ranger and went to NTB, a subsidiary of Sears. The salesman's name was Jesse something and, as he looked out at the rains beating down on the parking lot, he said that whenever it rained it reminded him of the monsoons in Viet-Nam. I told him I had been there in 1967-68 and he said, "No shit, man. Me, too. I was with the first of the 46th, Americal Division. I laughed and told him I'd gone over on the USNS Gordon with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, another part of the Americal. He'd been on the same ship. We talked about it for a while, all the time looking out at the rain. He's not a writer and he doesn't suffer from a bad case of PTSD, but his war is always with him, too.
Sidebar: Introducing a speaker
Back in 1984, I was a member of the program committee for the Texas Library Association and had the pleasure of introducing a speaker, a man whose name I have forgotten, a former diplomat. In the introduction, I mentioned that I had read one of his books while i was on the Gordon bound for Viet-Nam. He raced up before I had finished introducing him and grabbed me. "I was on the Gordon!" he said. "When I escaped from the Soviet Union through China, the ship that carried me to the United States...the same ship you were on!" A coincidence, yes, but a startling one. The ship that carried my regiment to South Vietnam was an old transport ship that had once been used during WWII and its aftermath. My story got blended with his and his story was, undoubtedly, a part of hundreds of other stories as is my story after his had ended.
I do not know how anyone who was in Viet-Nam, whether in combat or not, could avoid those moments or why they would ever want to do so. Some Viet-Nam veteran friends of mine and I had dinner just last night at Jim's Restaurant here in San Antonio (we do that sometimes when mutual friends come into town), and we talked just briefly about Christmas in Viet-Nam. That day for me remains hazier than most days. I didn't get drunk very often when I was stationed in Pleiku, but I did on December 25, 1967. Just something about the holidays.
I had poured a fifth of Ruffino's Chianti, the only portable drink other than beer the Club had on that day, into my two canteens and wandered down to the berm. I sat on top of the berm, and sometimes the bunker, and looked down at the lights of the AFB and the comparative darkness of Pleiku. That night, I drank until I drained both canteens. I shouldn't have done that while I was on guard duty, but the VC didn't care and no one else did either. I spent a lot of time that night looking back at people I knew and at important places in my life. I still do that, much too often as I grow older, but I was young then.
Sidebar: looking back
I look back over places that have had some significance in my life: to Beaumont, Texas, when I was in my teens and young twenties and fell in love with everything and everyone; to New York, still in my twenties and working at the World’s Fair when I fell in love with Sharon and the dirt and grime and soot of the area surrounding Times Square before it became a possession of Disney, Inc., which sanitized it; to Pleiku, Vietnam, and Nha Trang and what was then Saigon when I lost myself in language and in people who hungered for something they could not know; to Austin, Texas, and five years living and learning with people who shared my own love for literature but who also made a part of me on journeys into the Hill Country and wild canoe trips shooting the rapids of the Guadalupe River; and, back further, to the years I spent on the edge of the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas. All of these places and so many more shaped me and they never really leave, though for some decades now, they have been colored a bit with the red dust of Pleiku.
Nothing happened that Christmas Eve in 1967...just like most evenings. No one dropped any mortars in the compound. No one that I know of got hurt. When I woke up in the morning, I had a hangover, but no one got angry at my not being where I was supposed to be in "the appropriate uniform at the appropriate time" that morning after Christmas. It's a hell of a moment to have memories about — a drunken night when absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened
But it's part of the reason, not just the anger, not just the violence and death, that I think writers like Bruce Weigl and W.D. Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa and that conscientious objector named John Balaban and so many others can't not write about Viet-Nam or, at least, must come back to it frequently. It's always there, sitting in the landscapes of our minds, even for those of us who didn't wander into danger very often.
Since Christmas is upon us right now, I thought I'd share one of my Viet-Nam Christmas poems:
Christmas, 1967
The sand bags look the same:
a dismal green-grey bag leaks red clay
upon the bags below. Outside the perimeter
children pick though the garbage heaps:
thrown out waste of a thousand men.
Christmas in Pleiku, 1967, war fills
the surrounding hills. Across the valley
we see cloud puffs of artillery and
at night red, green, amber flares dangle,
shining bright beneath white parachutes:
December displays in sound and light
rivaling the staged events of a thousand
towns across the "world" on New Year's Day.
But this is Christmas: a time of truce.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 9)
A Departure: Sometimes, you should not look back
Some years ago I wrote a little poem that has been reproduced several times: a couple of anthologies, one of my own books, and twice in periodicals. That poem was about a chance meeting with a small boy in the yard of a Buddhist school in the heart of downtown Pleiku. The school had been rocketed a day or two earlier and one of the rockets had destroyed a statue of the Buddha that had been in the front playground of the school.
Let me go ahead and reproduce the poem which tells the story of what happened, a poem that gave me incredible problems with the rhyme scheme, before I continue:
Father Buddha
First published in The Practice of Peace (Sherman Asher Publishing)
for the Children of Pleiku
I walked two klicks down Le Loi Street
to a schoolyard, a Buddha broken in the dust
shattered by a rocket meant for us,
and saw you sitting in his hand
tossing carved pieces of the statue’s feet,
not even caring where they’d land.
What mattered was that I did not want to be
where and what I was and saw
that you had also had no choice. Some law,
legal in my case, chance in yours,
with no way out that you or I could see,
gave me a twelve month, you a lifetime, tour.
We shared a cigarette and watched the smoke
rise into the red dust Pleiku air.
You laughed, blew smoke rings with the flair
that comes only when you’re very young.
You told me I was on the Buddha’s throat
and should beware the Buddha’s tongue.
I remember that once, when the war was calm,
we laughed and played with shattered stones,
and know there can be no way to atone
for all the wounds, the pain, the death.
If you still live, rest quietly in father Buddha’s palm;
if not, sleep peacefully in the Buddha's breath.
And so, earlier today (all my papers graded and not quite ready to start another project and in the middle of a new memoir of my Vietnam war year) I was spending some leisure time with Google’s maps and the satellite images. I headed west from San Francisco, on to Korea and south to Vietnam where I pulled up the area of Pleiku Provice (now Gia Lai Province). I traveled east on Highway 664 with the satellite images as close as I could get them to the road and the houses until that road crossed Le Loi Street (also called Highway 14, the road to Kontum and Dak To) in the middle of the town. That’s where the school was but it was no longer there.
Instead, I saw a large building called the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Hotel. Here’s a description of what took the place of that war-devastated little school where I once sat and smoked with a Vietnamese child who would now be in his late 40s:
***
"...You are so beautiful Pleiku
Breaking my heart into pieces... "
The passionate ballad by musician Nguyen Cuong has captured the soul of many tourists who visited the beautiful highland city. Pleiku - with its almost always foggy atmosphere, its wintery evenings, its winding roads encirling the various hills and mounts - emerges like a breathtakingly beautiful painting. Tourist are also lured by the various cultural festivals such as Cong Chieng Festival, Pa Thi Festival, ect... As well as its famous landscapes, among them Bien Ho Lake and Yaly Falls.. With its Grand Opening in December of 2005, Hoang Anh Gia Lai Hotel located downtown has become an indispensable part of this romantic city, adding to it the auras of modern life: it is the fist internation 4 - stars hotel in Pleiku. Welcome to our beloved Gia Lai hometown and especially our Hotel. Whether you're here for a once-in-a-lifetime expedition, for a rejuvenating vacation or simply just for a wonderful time, you will be satisfied with our professional staff and friendly services.
Time passes and what was is no more. Sic transit Gloria and all that.
Still, though, there should be room even for Buddhist schools in a place as repressive as the unified country of Vietnam. Some day, there will be.
Some years ago I wrote a little poem that has been reproduced several times: a couple of anthologies, one of my own books, and twice in periodicals. That poem was about a chance meeting with a small boy in the yard of a Buddhist school in the heart of downtown Pleiku. The school had been rocketed a day or two earlier and one of the rockets had destroyed a statue of the Buddha that had been in the front playground of the school.
Let me go ahead and reproduce the poem which tells the story of what happened, a poem that gave me incredible problems with the rhyme scheme, before I continue:
Father Buddha
First published in The Practice of Peace (Sherman Asher Publishing)
for the Children of Pleiku
I walked two klicks down Le Loi Street
to a schoolyard, a Buddha broken in the dust
shattered by a rocket meant for us,
and saw you sitting in his hand
tossing carved pieces of the statue’s feet,
not even caring where they’d land.
What mattered was that I did not want to be
where and what I was and saw
that you had also had no choice. Some law,
legal in my case, chance in yours,
with no way out that you or I could see,
gave me a twelve month, you a lifetime, tour.
We shared a cigarette and watched the smoke
rise into the red dust Pleiku air.
You laughed, blew smoke rings with the flair
that comes only when you’re very young.
You told me I was on the Buddha’s throat
and should beware the Buddha’s tongue.
I remember that once, when the war was calm,
we laughed and played with shattered stones,
and know there can be no way to atone
for all the wounds, the pain, the death.
If you still live, rest quietly in father Buddha’s palm;
if not, sleep peacefully in the Buddha's breath.
And so, earlier today (all my papers graded and not quite ready to start another project and in the middle of a new memoir of my Vietnam war year) I was spending some leisure time with Google’s maps and the satellite images. I headed west from San Francisco, on to Korea and south to Vietnam where I pulled up the area of Pleiku Provice (now Gia Lai Province). I traveled east on Highway 664 with the satellite images as close as I could get them to the road and the houses until that road crossed Le Loi Street (also called Highway 14, the road to Kontum and Dak To) in the middle of the town. That’s where the school was but it was no longer there.
Instead, I saw a large building called the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Hotel. Here’s a description of what took the place of that war-devastated little school where I once sat and smoked with a Vietnamese child who would now be in his late 40s:
***
"...You are so beautiful Pleiku
Breaking my heart into pieces... "
The passionate ballad by musician Nguyen Cuong has captured the soul of many tourists who visited the beautiful highland city. Pleiku - with its almost always foggy atmosphere, its wintery evenings, its winding roads encirling the various hills and mounts - emerges like a breathtakingly beautiful painting. Tourist are also lured by the various cultural festivals such as Cong Chieng Festival, Pa Thi Festival, ect... As well as its famous landscapes, among them Bien Ho Lake and Yaly Falls.. With its Grand Opening in December of 2005, Hoang Anh Gia Lai Hotel located downtown has become an indispensable part of this romantic city, adding to it the auras of modern life: it is the fist internation 4 - stars hotel in Pleiku. Welcome to our beloved Gia Lai hometown and especially our Hotel. Whether you're here for a once-in-a-lifetime expedition, for a rejuvenating vacation or simply just for a wonderful time, you will be satisfied with our professional staff and friendly services.
Time passes and what was is no more. Sic transit Gloria and all that.
Still, though, there should be room even for Buddhist schools in a place as repressive as the unified country of Vietnam. Some day, there will be.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 8)
They Say the Neon Lights Are Bright
We had three work shifts at the 330th and we rotated those each week: 8 a.m. until 4 p.m.; 4 p.m. until midnight (swing shift); and midnight until 8 a.m. (mid shift). On weeks when I had the swing shift, I would often wander off the hill to Pleiku. That involved walking past the small PX, out the heavily-guarded gates and down the road a bit to Highway 19. When I got down to the road, I had three choices:
1. Keep on walking down into the valley,
2. Stick my thumb out (someone in a jeep, ¾ ton truck or deuce and a half was always willing to give people a ride, or
3. take one of the ubiquitous TriLambretta taxis.
The small, three-wheel taxis were kind of fun and often held up to ten people though they were built for about four plus the driver. They were hot and dusty but everyone on them seemed to enjoy the rides.
I would, not too often, walk the 4 or 5 miles down to the city just for the joy of walking. The problem, though, was that the closer I got to the air force base, the dustier the road got. And, except in the rainy season when I never walked to town, the dust was worse than I used to see in those old cowboy movies about Laredo and Dodge City. I am going to add, very quickly, that there was very little danger in walking those miles because the road was so heavily trafficked. Teams were also sent out each morning to clear the road of possible mines before the first trucks rolled out of their bases to head to other bases. The traffic on Highway 19, mostly military vehicles, could sometimes rival in density the highways through some of our major cities. Most of that traffic went straight through downtown Pleiku and out to 4th Division Headquarters.
When I did walk down to Pleiku, I would often turn off to take the short side trip down to Lake Bien Ho. I rarely saw other Americans there, but always saw Vietnamese families and children. I did not venture much farther than the closest bank of the lake, never tried, as Thoreau did with Walden Pond, to measure the lake’s circumference or depths. And I was often a bit leery of being even that far off the main road. I went to the lake to get away, to pretend for a moment or two that there was no war, to see Vietnamese families doing normal things that had nothing to do with the political and military currents swirling around them. At the same time I was the equivalent, I know, of Shrödinger’s cat: my being there, observing things, brought what they were escaping to them. Einstein wrote to Shrödinger that “Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.” I suspect that the normalization of the lives of the Vietnamese families at the lake was affected by my own “Act of observation.” Still, though, those few moments out by the lake were amazing to me…even if I were unwilling to try to walk all the way around it for fear of what I could not observe not too far away.
The last leg of the walk or ride was the dustiest, filled with vehicles carrying materials from the air force base to the 4th ID HQ. But a sense of town life also began to show up: women hanging laundry out, children playing in bare dirt yards, a few restaurants, and always, always, always, soldiers buying souvenirs and leasing women. Turning right on Le Loi Street past the school yard, I would get, eventually, to the open air market where men and women sold an amazing profusion of vegetables, fish and meat—all swarming with flies. Entrepreneurs also sold marijuana disguised as packs of cigarettes. They would take a pack of, usually, Salems and empty the tobacco from each cigarette. After that, they would push ground up marijuana into the paper tubes and repack the original container. A pack sold for approximately 500 piasters (approximately five dollars): the same price as an hour with one of the prostitutes.
Just past the market was an artist’s studio/gallery. “Song”—Vietnamese for river; Vietnamese for life. The artist, a young man of maybe twenty-five, drafted neither into the ARVN nor, apparently, into the Viet Cong seemed to exist by selling, mostly, velvet paintings of naked women and fully-dressed Elvises to the GIs. Once, in the back of the shop, he showed me his own work: landscapes and cityscapes of the Pleiku area, paintings of the children, of a war-torn area. The artist was an artist and his shop, when you got past the tourist stuff, may well have been what Vietnam should have been: a place where people could create art or, if not art, their own lives free of what happens when politics gives way to war.
One last stop: a small house farther down Le Loi Street, a tea house, where an elderly Vietnamese lady serves tea and small pastries in delicate china. I always enjoyed going there. The tea was a green, very clear tea and at the bottom of each cup were large poppy seeds. She would always drink with her customers. I always considered those tea-sipping (thus the insult) visits as brief moments of what passed for civilization.
Just a brief sidebar here: In Pleiku, back in 1967, the military tried very hard to get montagnard women to wear clothing over their breasts. Until I left in the middle of 1968, they had still been unsuccessful. As with other people in the province of what is now Gia Lai, the montagnards came to market both to buy and to sell. The only people who seemed concerned with their lack of clothing up top were the Americans.
After what always turned out to be a fairly long day, I usually hopped into a TriLambretta and headed back up to the hill. “The Neon lights Are bright?” Well, no. I didn’t go downtown at night and, should I have done so, there would have been no lights at all. Pleiku pretty much shut down altogether after dark. I mean, why present a visible target to whoever happened to be the enemy on any particular night?
One final note: Until Tet, 1968, I made those treks down to the city in civilian clothes and did not carry a weapon. After Tet, that was officially against procedures.
We had three work shifts at the 330th and we rotated those each week: 8 a.m. until 4 p.m.; 4 p.m. until midnight (swing shift); and midnight until 8 a.m. (mid shift). On weeks when I had the swing shift, I would often wander off the hill to Pleiku. That involved walking past the small PX, out the heavily-guarded gates and down the road a bit to Highway 19. When I got down to the road, I had three choices:
1. Keep on walking down into the valley,
2. Stick my thumb out (someone in a jeep, ¾ ton truck or deuce and a half was always willing to give people a ride, or
3. take one of the ubiquitous TriLambretta taxis.
The small, three-wheel taxis were kind of fun and often held up to ten people though they were built for about four plus the driver. They were hot and dusty but everyone on them seemed to enjoy the rides.
I would, not too often, walk the 4 or 5 miles down to the city just for the joy of walking. The problem, though, was that the closer I got to the air force base, the dustier the road got. And, except in the rainy season when I never walked to town, the dust was worse than I used to see in those old cowboy movies about Laredo and Dodge City. I am going to add, very quickly, that there was very little danger in walking those miles because the road was so heavily trafficked. Teams were also sent out each morning to clear the road of possible mines before the first trucks rolled out of their bases to head to other bases. The traffic on Highway 19, mostly military vehicles, could sometimes rival in density the highways through some of our major cities. Most of that traffic went straight through downtown Pleiku and out to 4th Division Headquarters.
When I did walk down to Pleiku, I would often turn off to take the short side trip down to Lake Bien Ho. I rarely saw other Americans there, but always saw Vietnamese families and children. I did not venture much farther than the closest bank of the lake, never tried, as Thoreau did with Walden Pond, to measure the lake’s circumference or depths. And I was often a bit leery of being even that far off the main road. I went to the lake to get away, to pretend for a moment or two that there was no war, to see Vietnamese families doing normal things that had nothing to do with the political and military currents swirling around them. At the same time I was the equivalent, I know, of Shrödinger’s cat: my being there, observing things, brought what they were escaping to them. Einstein wrote to Shrödinger that “Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.” I suspect that the normalization of the lives of the Vietnamese families at the lake was affected by my own “Act of observation.” Still, though, those few moments out by the lake were amazing to me…even if I were unwilling to try to walk all the way around it for fear of what I could not observe not too far away.
The last leg of the walk or ride was the dustiest, filled with vehicles carrying materials from the air force base to the 4th ID HQ. But a sense of town life also began to show up: women hanging laundry out, children playing in bare dirt yards, a few restaurants, and always, always, always, soldiers buying souvenirs and leasing women. Turning right on Le Loi Street past the school yard, I would get, eventually, to the open air market where men and women sold an amazing profusion of vegetables, fish and meat—all swarming with flies. Entrepreneurs also sold marijuana disguised as packs of cigarettes. They would take a pack of, usually, Salems and empty the tobacco from each cigarette. After that, they would push ground up marijuana into the paper tubes and repack the original container. A pack sold for approximately 500 piasters (approximately five dollars): the same price as an hour with one of the prostitutes.
Just past the market was an artist’s studio/gallery. “Song”—Vietnamese for river; Vietnamese for life. The artist, a young man of maybe twenty-five, drafted neither into the ARVN nor, apparently, into the Viet Cong seemed to exist by selling, mostly, velvet paintings of naked women and fully-dressed Elvises to the GIs. Once, in the back of the shop, he showed me his own work: landscapes and cityscapes of the Pleiku area, paintings of the children, of a war-torn area. The artist was an artist and his shop, when you got past the tourist stuff, may well have been what Vietnam should have been: a place where people could create art or, if not art, their own lives free of what happens when politics gives way to war.
One last stop: a small house farther down Le Loi Street, a tea house, where an elderly Vietnamese lady serves tea and small pastries in delicate china. I always enjoyed going there. The tea was a green, very clear tea and at the bottom of each cup were large poppy seeds. She would always drink with her customers. I always considered those tea-sipping (thus the insult) visits as brief moments of what passed for civilization.
Just a brief sidebar here: In Pleiku, back in 1967, the military tried very hard to get montagnard women to wear clothing over their breasts. Until I left in the middle of 1968, they had still been unsuccessful. As with other people in the province of what is now Gia Lai, the montagnards came to market both to buy and to sell. The only people who seemed concerned with their lack of clothing up top were the Americans.
After what always turned out to be a fairly long day, I usually hopped into a TriLambretta and headed back up to the hill. “The Neon lights Are bright?” Well, no. I didn’t go downtown at night and, should I have done so, there would have been no lights at all. Pleiku pretty much shut down altogether after dark. I mean, why present a visible target to whoever happened to be the enemy on any particular night?
One final note: Until Tet, 1968, I made those treks down to the city in civilian clothes and did not carry a weapon. After Tet, that was officially against procedures.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 7)
A Quick Side Trip to New York
What can I say except...this is the way I write about things. Organizational structure implies some kind of fixed route from here to there, some idea that the world is structured in a way that I have come to believe is not really possible. So, this side trip to the theater in New York, to two musicals: one from when I was young and in love with theater; the other from today, when I am growng old and remain in love with the theater:
Do you know what's worth fighting for?
When it's not worth dying for?
Does it take your breath away
And you feel yourself suffocating?
I have often thought about the questions asked in Green Day’s fine song “21 Guns”—both while I was in Vietnam (long before the song was written) and afterwards. But this is not about that. I was listening to American Idiot again today and thinking about the two musicals on Broadway that were pretty much emblematic of my generation and our war: Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar. Broadway musicals have not often reflected the major concerns of the young–people who, almost by definition, cannot afford the ticket prices for the big shows. But some of them do reflect their times and the zeitgeist of the current culture.
West Side Story, and I love the music but consider the whole thing dated, yes, even the version I saw last year with the Puerto Rican songs translated into Spanish, now seems terribly dated. I don't think that's true of a musical like Hair. I saw both musicals in New York last year. And on that trip into musical theater also saw the revival of another musical set during a time of war, South Pacific. I suspect that musical will never be "dated" even though HBO's The Pacific shows us a so much more realistic view of that war.
God knows there have been plenty of patriotic, pro-war musicals in Broadway’s history, usually when the war being fought was popular with the general populace. Think, just for a moment, of George M. Cohan. His songs went to war with the doughboys of the first world war. “Over There” was a classic derisively satirized in the seventies: “And we’ll all be over / when it’s over over there.” But there have not been many antiwar Broadway musicals: Off Broadway, yes, and Off-off Broadway definitely. But on Broadway? No, not really.
It took wars like Vietnam and, now, Iraq/Afghanistan to produce anti-war shows that could make a buck and stand for a whole generation. Songs like “The Age of Aquarius” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” are beautiful ballads that could have existed in any musicals, not just anti-war musicals. But Green Day’s “Jesus of Suburbia,” “21 Guns,” “St. Jimmy” (more about the millennial drug culture than the war) and other songs are not the normal fluff that Broadway gives its public.
Hair shows us how the sheer joy and exuberance of youth can suddenly give way to the deadly serious (if not equally frivolous in nature) concerns of the adult world. Tunny, in American Idiot returns from Iraq, like BD in Doonesbury, as an amputee.
We saw the same thing, I think, in the progression of films about Vietnam: from unabashedly pro-American war films like The Green Berets to an almost immediate response by Burt Lancaster in Go Tell the Spartans to real art in a film like Apocalypse Now. In theater, we went from Barbara Garson’s MacBird to the plays of David Rabe (When PBS showed his play, Sticks and Bones, the local affiliate refused to show it because San Antonio was “military town, USA). Art reflects the current culture. Even musical theater does not always show the culture of the political and power elite but can sometimes make room for the culture of youth.
“Summer has come and past / the innocent can never last” Green Day sings and writes. “Wake me up when September ends….” Youth and its innocence, its fervor is merely a waking dream, a brief moment, and then, after September, an old and lasting metaphor, reality plunges its knife into us. This little overwrought series of vignettes from memory reinforces that for me. I am impressed, though, that Broadway can mount a production like American Idiot and, mostly, that it can succeed, be nominated for a Tony as best musical and win two lesser Tonys.
I just realized I had not yet talked about Jesus Christ, Superstar and wondered why. Perhaps because it’s something of an aberration and does not deal directly with youth culture and the deepening culture of war. I am reminded a bit of that musical by Johnny’s role in American Idiot. Johnny is the “Jesus of Suburbia” who gets addicted to heroin (“St. Jimmy”) and plunges deeply into the heart of darkness as his friends cope with reality: one going to war, one getting his girlfriend pregnant. “I’m the son of raging love! Jesus of suburbia,” he sings. And, for his generation, he quite probably is.
But in Jesus Christ, Superstar, Judas and Mary Magdalene have all the good songs, not Jesus and Peter. I particularly love Judas’s “ Do you believe what they say you are” and the Magdelene’s “I don’t know how to love him,” a song reprised later in the play by Judas. As much as the songs on American Idiot, these songs reflect the zeitgeist for some people.
I'll make more detours from the zig-zaggy narrative of the "memoir" in the future because memory does that, travels back and forth in time, sideways onto different roads. If that's confusing, I apologize. Well, no, not really.
What can I say except...this is the way I write about things. Organizational structure implies some kind of fixed route from here to there, some idea that the world is structured in a way that I have come to believe is not really possible. So, this side trip to the theater in New York, to two musicals: one from when I was young and in love with theater; the other from today, when I am growng old and remain in love with the theater:
Do you know what's worth fighting for?
When it's not worth dying for?
Does it take your breath away
And you feel yourself suffocating?
I have often thought about the questions asked in Green Day’s fine song “21 Guns”—both while I was in Vietnam (long before the song was written) and afterwards. But this is not about that. I was listening to American Idiot again today and thinking about the two musicals on Broadway that were pretty much emblematic of my generation and our war: Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar. Broadway musicals have not often reflected the major concerns of the young–people who, almost by definition, cannot afford the ticket prices for the big shows. But some of them do reflect their times and the zeitgeist of the current culture.
West Side Story, and I love the music but consider the whole thing dated, yes, even the version I saw last year with the Puerto Rican songs translated into Spanish, now seems terribly dated. I don't think that's true of a musical like Hair. I saw both musicals in New York last year. And on that trip into musical theater also saw the revival of another musical set during a time of war, South Pacific. I suspect that musical will never be "dated" even though HBO's The Pacific shows us a so much more realistic view of that war.
God knows there have been plenty of patriotic, pro-war musicals in Broadway’s history, usually when the war being fought was popular with the general populace. Think, just for a moment, of George M. Cohan. His songs went to war with the doughboys of the first world war. “Over There” was a classic derisively satirized in the seventies: “And we’ll all be over / when it’s over over there.” But there have not been many antiwar Broadway musicals: Off Broadway, yes, and Off-off Broadway definitely. But on Broadway? No, not really.
It took wars like Vietnam and, now, Iraq/Afghanistan to produce anti-war shows that could make a buck and stand for a whole generation. Songs like “The Age of Aquarius” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” are beautiful ballads that could have existed in any musicals, not just anti-war musicals. But Green Day’s “Jesus of Suburbia,” “21 Guns,” “St. Jimmy” (more about the millennial drug culture than the war) and other songs are not the normal fluff that Broadway gives its public.
Hair shows us how the sheer joy and exuberance of youth can suddenly give way to the deadly serious (if not equally frivolous in nature) concerns of the adult world. Tunny, in American Idiot returns from Iraq, like BD in Doonesbury, as an amputee.
We saw the same thing, I think, in the progression of films about Vietnam: from unabashedly pro-American war films like The Green Berets to an almost immediate response by Burt Lancaster in Go Tell the Spartans to real art in a film like Apocalypse Now. In theater, we went from Barbara Garson’s MacBird to the plays of David Rabe (When PBS showed his play, Sticks and Bones, the local affiliate refused to show it because San Antonio was “military town, USA). Art reflects the current culture. Even musical theater does not always show the culture of the political and power elite but can sometimes make room for the culture of youth.
“Summer has come and past / the innocent can never last” Green Day sings and writes. “Wake me up when September ends….” Youth and its innocence, its fervor is merely a waking dream, a brief moment, and then, after September, an old and lasting metaphor, reality plunges its knife into us. This little overwrought series of vignettes from memory reinforces that for me. I am impressed, though, that Broadway can mount a production like American Idiot and, mostly, that it can succeed, be nominated for a Tony as best musical and win two lesser Tonys.
I just realized I had not yet talked about Jesus Christ, Superstar and wondered why. Perhaps because it’s something of an aberration and does not deal directly with youth culture and the deepening culture of war. I am reminded a bit of that musical by Johnny’s role in American Idiot. Johnny is the “Jesus of Suburbia” who gets addicted to heroin (“St. Jimmy”) and plunges deeply into the heart of darkness as his friends cope with reality: one going to war, one getting his girlfriend pregnant. “I’m the son of raging love! Jesus of suburbia,” he sings. And, for his generation, he quite probably is.
But in Jesus Christ, Superstar, Judas and Mary Magdalene have all the good songs, not Jesus and Peter. I particularly love Judas’s “ Do you believe what they say you are” and the Magdelene’s “I don’t know how to love him,” a song reprised later in the play by Judas. As much as the songs on American Idiot, these songs reflect the zeitgeist for some people.
I'll make more detours from the zig-zaggy narrative of the "memoir" in the future because memory does that, travels back and forth in time, sideways onto different roads. If that's confusing, I apologize. Well, no, not really.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 6)
William H. Gass in his “In Defense of the Book” (Harper’s Magazine, reprinted in Best American Essays of 2000) quotes from an old book he picked up:
What a deale of cold business doth a man mis-spend the better part of his life in! in scattering complements,tendering visits, gathering and venting newes, following Feasts and Playes, making a little winter-love in dark corners.
Gass recommends more reading, more visits to libraries and bookstores to find books, to promote literature, more acquaintance with Joyce, Hegel and others. All this wealth of reading to replace the past-times listed in the old book. In spite of who I am, a lover of books and words, I am more attracted to the phrase “making a little winter-love in dark corners” than to any of the other phrases in that sentence.
“Making a little winter-love in dark corners!” The exclamation point and italics are mine and the sentence is George Saintsbury’s from A History of English Prose Rhythms. The phrase is wonderful. Books promote civilization, William Gass claims, but what is civilization worth if not for those dark corners where we can shelter from the cold of winter and make a little love. Perhaps even read poetry to each other. Kathleen Ely’s essays, set mostly in the winter months of Montana, often remind me of that passage. And we need more of that huddling, love-making, even if Saintsbury is more concerned about the darkness, about the need to huddle away from uncivilized life. We need places and time to cling to each other, to be warm together, to make love, to protect ourselves from so many of the stark realities that remove pleasure from our lives.
A person who hungers, who hides from invading armies, who shakes from fear of disease, can still find a dark corner, a shelter, if only momentarily, from all that and a little winter-love can help warm and light up those corners. Like Gass, I am for more reading of books but I cannot reject dark corners if they are filled with the making of love.
***
Years ago, in a particularly dark corner in the red dusty city of Pleiku, war bursting out all over, I walked a few klicks each week to the local air force library and checked out book after book by Thomas Hardy. When I had a new book from the library, I would turn off the road and sit for a while near the shores of Lake Bien Ho and read. I must have read all the novels and the poetry and these were a great solace in those times. But I did not have my own dark corner, my own place to make a little love and I did not have a woman I truly loved. I suspect I would have enjoyed Vietnam had I been blessed with that second half of the equation.
I do not mean to suggest I was in great danger or that armed soldiers searched for me as I dreamed of making winter-love in the weeks and months before the Tet Offensive of 1968, only that we were caught in larger movements just as Hardy's characters are. The gods know that my friends and I, at least, were among the safest Americans in the whole country. The books helped. Thoreau helped. Poetry helped. Hell, even dark old Thomas Hardy helped. But what would have made it all worthwhile, except of course none of it was really worthwhile, would have been a little warmth in that dark corner of Pleiku. Cold business? Nonsense! Life-affirming business.
I took books with me to Vietnam. Camus’s L’etranger, Sartre’s Les Mouches, Hemingway, Yeats, Frost, Hopkins and others. And I reread them while I was there. I still have a few of those books in my personal library and the edges remain coated with red dust to this day. I keep them because the redness reminds me of Pleiku each time I pick them up. I read most of the books in that little library that, for some reason, contained the complete works of Thomas Hardy; but those books would have been secondary had there been someone like Frederick Henry’s Catharine Barclay. Still, though,that was in another war and, besides, the wench is dead.
I am reminded, I think, of those novels and poems because the deterministic nature of Hardy's work fits so well into my own view of that war and of my being there. You see, I had been teaching for two years in a small high school back in the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas. I quit that job at the end of the school year in 1965 to go to UT-Austin to work on my Ph.D. in English and between my old teaching deferment and my soon-to-be student deferment, my selective service board sent me a classic letter. I could, I know now and suspected then, have successfully fought my being drafted but the currents swirling around me, my indecisiveness about what I really wanted to do when I grew up caught up with me and I went down to the recruiting station and joined up. Sometimes some of us do not do the things we do for any particular reason, only because, well, what the hell, we don't have anything else we really want to do. We let outside forces make decisions for us. That was 1965. Two years later, the year I actually went to Vietnam, I suspect I would have found, as Dick Cheney did, things I would rather have been doing.
Books. Love. War. What a combination!
What a deale of cold business doth a man mis-spend the better part of his life in! in scattering complements,tendering visits, gathering and venting newes, following Feasts and Playes, making a little winter-love in dark corners.
Gass recommends more reading, more visits to libraries and bookstores to find books, to promote literature, more acquaintance with Joyce, Hegel and others. All this wealth of reading to replace the past-times listed in the old book. In spite of who I am, a lover of books and words, I am more attracted to the phrase “making a little winter-love in dark corners” than to any of the other phrases in that sentence.
“Making a little winter-love in dark corners!” The exclamation point and italics are mine and the sentence is George Saintsbury’s from A History of English Prose Rhythms. The phrase is wonderful. Books promote civilization, William Gass claims, but what is civilization worth if not for those dark corners where we can shelter from the cold of winter and make a little love. Perhaps even read poetry to each other. Kathleen Ely’s essays, set mostly in the winter months of Montana, often remind me of that passage. And we need more of that huddling, love-making, even if Saintsbury is more concerned about the darkness, about the need to huddle away from uncivilized life. We need places and time to cling to each other, to be warm together, to make love, to protect ourselves from so many of the stark realities that remove pleasure from our lives.
A person who hungers, who hides from invading armies, who shakes from fear of disease, can still find a dark corner, a shelter, if only momentarily, from all that and a little winter-love can help warm and light up those corners. Like Gass, I am for more reading of books but I cannot reject dark corners if they are filled with the making of love.
***
Years ago, in a particularly dark corner in the red dusty city of Pleiku, war bursting out all over, I walked a few klicks each week to the local air force library and checked out book after book by Thomas Hardy. When I had a new book from the library, I would turn off the road and sit for a while near the shores of Lake Bien Ho and read. I must have read all the novels and the poetry and these were a great solace in those times. But I did not have my own dark corner, my own place to make a little love and I did not have a woman I truly loved. I suspect I would have enjoyed Vietnam had I been blessed with that second half of the equation.
I do not mean to suggest I was in great danger or that armed soldiers searched for me as I dreamed of making winter-love in the weeks and months before the Tet Offensive of 1968, only that we were caught in larger movements just as Hardy's characters are. The gods know that my friends and I, at least, were among the safest Americans in the whole country. The books helped. Thoreau helped. Poetry helped. Hell, even dark old Thomas Hardy helped. But what would have made it all worthwhile, except of course none of it was really worthwhile, would have been a little warmth in that dark corner of Pleiku. Cold business? Nonsense! Life-affirming business.
I took books with me to Vietnam. Camus’s L’etranger, Sartre’s Les Mouches, Hemingway, Yeats, Frost, Hopkins and others. And I reread them while I was there. I still have a few of those books in my personal library and the edges remain coated with red dust to this day. I keep them because the redness reminds me of Pleiku each time I pick them up. I read most of the books in that little library that, for some reason, contained the complete works of Thomas Hardy; but those books would have been secondary had there been someone like Frederick Henry’s Catharine Barclay. Still, though,that was in another war and, besides, the wench is dead.
I am reminded, I think, of those novels and poems because the deterministic nature of Hardy's work fits so well into my own view of that war and of my being there. You see, I had been teaching for two years in a small high school back in the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas. I quit that job at the end of the school year in 1965 to go to UT-Austin to work on my Ph.D. in English and between my old teaching deferment and my soon-to-be student deferment, my selective service board sent me a classic letter. I could, I know now and suspected then, have successfully fought my being drafted but the currents swirling around me, my indecisiveness about what I really wanted to do when I grew up caught up with me and I went down to the recruiting station and joined up. Sometimes some of us do not do the things we do for any particular reason, only because, well, what the hell, we don't have anything else we really want to do. We let outside forces make decisions for us. That was 1965. Two years later, the year I actually went to Vietnam, I suspect I would have found, as Dick Cheney did, things I would rather have been doing.
Books. Love. War. What a combination!
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 5)
We Are Attacked: I Start Smoking Cigarettes
I have, for years, equated my smoking habit to a particular evening in Vietnam when the Viet Cong dropped a few more than twenty mortars into our camp in the middle of Engineer Hill. The 330th RRCo. was, in non-official Army nomenclature I’ll leave to the imagination, pretending to be part of the world’s most advanced fighting force. Of the linguists and code breakers and radio intercept operators there, I believe more than 50%, like my friend Allen Hallmark and me, had college degrees; while many others, like my friend Don Mohr—who remained at Chu Lai when Allen and I were shipped out as undesirables from the 601st Radio Research Detachment—were on their way to a degree and later became lawyers, college professors and other namby-pamby professionals. We were, basically, not fit—as Arlo Guthrie suggested in “Alice’s Restaurant”—to serve our country in its military wing. We were not, let me hasten to add ever found guilty of littering,
But still and all, on a few nights when we were being entertained by Asian strippers and rock bands (all incredibly fond of singing "We gotta get out of this place / if it's the last thing we ever do..." or watching a movie about the war, or maybe even sleeping,some nights when we least expected it (we never really expected it), the VC had the sheer gall to drop mortars on our hootches. Some of those mortars even sent shrapnel into the linguist’s hootch—some people claim that that “t” in the middle of “hootch” is a French affectation and should be deleted, thereby making the word “hooch,” but that seems barbaric to me, much as “punji” must be the one and only correct way to spell those sharpened sticks the VC had the bad habit of dipping in shit and planting in holes where our grunts in green could step on them and get major infections—, and could have done serious damage to our refrigerators or even punctured our beer cans, but I digress.
The minor cut I received on my right big toe that night could have come from flying shrapnel or from the haste with which I slid under my cot. I should explain that “hiding under your bed” rarely is a good way of avoiding childish monsters, nor is pulling the blankie over your head, but that in this case I did have a sheet of ¾ inch plywood under my mattress. It is quite conceivable that I cut my toe on the metal of the cot. At any rate, I never reported it, just bandaged it—possibly with one of those little Mickey Mouse band aids that were so popular back then.
I’m determined to get back on topic: Smoking. I have often seriously suggested that I started smoking that night when—with my big toe dripping all of six or seven drops of blood and my stoically refusing to put myself in for a Purple Heart, with people yelling and screaming and quoting Yeats and Shakespeare ("Once more onto the breech" and all that), my heart beating rapidly from fear, and my dismay at the misquoting going on all around me—I could borrow but a cigarette (no cigars handy) from a friend standing, or perhaps lying, nearby and suck it down to the very butt. And so I propose a semi-heroic reason—man in extremis, defending his homeland—for taking up the habit. This was the very heart of Marlboro country—a place where rugged men (almost all college graduates, many, like me, English, theatre ["drama majors almost always affect the British 'theatre' instead fo the American 'theater'] or language majors) had to smoke amidst the hellacious fog of his country’s wars. Well, yes, that is all true. But it is merely a shadow of the truth
SIDEBAR: some years earlier, way back before I had graduated from college and had spent two very earnest years teaching English back in the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas to what we then, with no pretense, called remedial students and not developmental students, I had essayed to work on a film with my good friend J. D. Feigleson, now head of Feigleson Productions in Hollywood. Yes, that Hollywood, the one near the City of Angels in California. J.D. and I were both speech and drama majors at Lamar Tech… which has since changed its name quite pretentiously, just as every other college and tech college seems to have done, from Tech to University (Texas Tech has gone all of them one better bny calling itself Texas Tech University). J.D.—who had much more money than I—was making a movie: full color and sound, set in medieval England, about a man who carries a bow and whose son is kidnapped for some reason that is never made quite clear.
That was not unusual among filmic auteurs of the day. And for the purposes of this Facebook note/essay, quite irrelevant. What is relevant is that J.D. was making a film that would serve as a kind of portfolio for his eventual triumphs in Hollywood. And I was his “associate” everything. I worked on the plot with him, took a small part in the film, scouted for sites, did a little bit of everything.
So, together, big-shotting it as if we were really Hollywood producers—a title J.D. would eventually earn for himself legitmately—we smoked cigars. Mostly, in my case, cheap cigars. But we smoked: in his car as he accelerated and smushed me back against the seat of his racing competitive stock Fairlane Ford, in the Thicket as we prepared for the day’s shooting, at J+J’s Steak House as we readied the next day’s shoot over chicken-friend steak. In his makeshift home studio as we edited the film, and finally, in the five different movie houses owned by his uncle that debuted the film to an audience of supportive friends and relatives; and later to Beaumont, Texas, and later still, to Houston strangers. Damn but that was exciting! And the whole trail was accompanied by smoking.
“The Bowman” was about thirty minutes long. It was pointless, and therefore some critics today might say, "brilliant." It had no clear point of view. It followed the bowman on his quest for his son, way out into the boonies, until he killed the pair of heartless thugs who had kidnapped the boy for no apparent reason. And then he and his son continued down the trail to wherever they were going in the first place.
This was all just soooo Vietnam a few years before we had even heard of that small country. It was far enough ahead of its time that it won a ciné gold eagle in the amateur class at Cannes. Or at least, it won a gold eagle from some film festival—the name of which I have conveniently forgotten. And me? I learned to smoke. J.D.? He’s got his own studio now and has produced and directed a few films that have appeared on PBS and in your local theaters. I became a college professor, librarian and poet/essayist and a confirmed smoker.
I did not, though, have my first actual cigarette until that night mortars fell on Engineer Hill and I cut my foot and was totally out of cigars. Sad, sad, sad. Now? I no longer smoke, but it took me decades to finally break the habit. Those of you who used to see me cut out of conferences to take a quick drag will no longer have that pleasure. It has been over now for five years. After way too many years. Fini. Hết rôi. Es todo.
I have, for years, equated my smoking habit to a particular evening in Vietnam when the Viet Cong dropped a few more than twenty mortars into our camp in the middle of Engineer Hill. The 330th RRCo. was, in non-official Army nomenclature I’ll leave to the imagination, pretending to be part of the world’s most advanced fighting force. Of the linguists and code breakers and radio intercept operators there, I believe more than 50%, like my friend Allen Hallmark and me, had college degrees; while many others, like my friend Don Mohr—who remained at Chu Lai when Allen and I were shipped out as undesirables from the 601st Radio Research Detachment—were on their way to a degree and later became lawyers, college professors and other namby-pamby professionals. We were, basically, not fit—as Arlo Guthrie suggested in “Alice’s Restaurant”—to serve our country in its military wing. We were not, let me hasten to add ever found guilty of littering,
But still and all, on a few nights when we were being entertained by Asian strippers and rock bands (all incredibly fond of singing "We gotta get out of this place / if it's the last thing we ever do..." or watching a movie about the war, or maybe even sleeping,some nights when we least expected it (we never really expected it), the VC had the sheer gall to drop mortars on our hootches. Some of those mortars even sent shrapnel into the linguist’s hootch—some people claim that that “t” in the middle of “hootch” is a French affectation and should be deleted, thereby making the word “hooch,” but that seems barbaric to me, much as “punji” must be the one and only correct way to spell those sharpened sticks the VC had the bad habit of dipping in shit and planting in holes where our grunts in green could step on them and get major infections—, and could have done serious damage to our refrigerators or even punctured our beer cans, but I digress.
The minor cut I received on my right big toe that night could have come from flying shrapnel or from the haste with which I slid under my cot. I should explain that “hiding under your bed” rarely is a good way of avoiding childish monsters, nor is pulling the blankie over your head, but that in this case I did have a sheet of ¾ inch plywood under my mattress. It is quite conceivable that I cut my toe on the metal of the cot. At any rate, I never reported it, just bandaged it—possibly with one of those little Mickey Mouse band aids that were so popular back then.
I’m determined to get back on topic: Smoking. I have often seriously suggested that I started smoking that night when—with my big toe dripping all of six or seven drops of blood and my stoically refusing to put myself in for a Purple Heart, with people yelling and screaming and quoting Yeats and Shakespeare ("Once more onto the breech" and all that), my heart beating rapidly from fear, and my dismay at the misquoting going on all around me—I could borrow but a cigarette (no cigars handy) from a friend standing, or perhaps lying, nearby and suck it down to the very butt. And so I propose a semi-heroic reason—man in extremis, defending his homeland—for taking up the habit. This was the very heart of Marlboro country—a place where rugged men (almost all college graduates, many, like me, English, theatre ["drama majors almost always affect the British 'theatre' instead fo the American 'theater'] or language majors) had to smoke amidst the hellacious fog of his country’s wars. Well, yes, that is all true. But it is merely a shadow of the truth
SIDEBAR: some years earlier, way back before I had graduated from college and had spent two very earnest years teaching English back in the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas to what we then, with no pretense, called remedial students and not developmental students, I had essayed to work on a film with my good friend J. D. Feigleson, now head of Feigleson Productions in Hollywood. Yes, that Hollywood, the one near the City of Angels in California. J.D. and I were both speech and drama majors at Lamar Tech… which has since changed its name quite pretentiously, just as every other college and tech college seems to have done, from Tech to University (Texas Tech has gone all of them one better bny calling itself Texas Tech University). J.D.—who had much more money than I—was making a movie: full color and sound, set in medieval England, about a man who carries a bow and whose son is kidnapped for some reason that is never made quite clear.
That was not unusual among filmic auteurs of the day. And for the purposes of this Facebook note/essay, quite irrelevant. What is relevant is that J.D. was making a film that would serve as a kind of portfolio for his eventual triumphs in Hollywood. And I was his “associate” everything. I worked on the plot with him, took a small part in the film, scouted for sites, did a little bit of everything.
So, together, big-shotting it as if we were really Hollywood producers—a title J.D. would eventually earn for himself legitmately—we smoked cigars. Mostly, in my case, cheap cigars. But we smoked: in his car as he accelerated and smushed me back against the seat of his racing competitive stock Fairlane Ford, in the Thicket as we prepared for the day’s shooting, at J+J’s Steak House as we readied the next day’s shoot over chicken-friend steak. In his makeshift home studio as we edited the film, and finally, in the five different movie houses owned by his uncle that debuted the film to an audience of supportive friends and relatives; and later to Beaumont, Texas, and later still, to Houston strangers. Damn but that was exciting! And the whole trail was accompanied by smoking.
“The Bowman” was about thirty minutes long. It was pointless, and therefore some critics today might say, "brilliant." It had no clear point of view. It followed the bowman on his quest for his son, way out into the boonies, until he killed the pair of heartless thugs who had kidnapped the boy for no apparent reason. And then he and his son continued down the trail to wherever they were going in the first place.
This was all just soooo Vietnam a few years before we had even heard of that small country. It was far enough ahead of its time that it won a ciné gold eagle in the amateur class at Cannes. Or at least, it won a gold eagle from some film festival—the name of which I have conveniently forgotten. And me? I learned to smoke. J.D.? He’s got his own studio now and has produced and directed a few films that have appeared on PBS and in your local theaters. I became a college professor, librarian and poet/essayist and a confirmed smoker.
I did not, though, have my first actual cigarette until that night mortars fell on Engineer Hill and I cut my foot and was totally out of cigars. Sad, sad, sad. Now? I no longer smoke, but it took me decades to finally break the habit. Those of you who used to see me cut out of conferences to take a quick drag will no longer have that pleasure. It has been over now for five years. After way too many years. Fini. Hết rôi. Es todo.
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 4)
My Actual job (Sort of)
Sometimes my friends ask what I did in the war. When I tell them, they often say no, no…I mean the fighting. I’m always honest. I tell them I was not what people call a “warrior” but worked In support of the actual fighting people, the “warriors” who waged fierce individual battles against noble enemies. Well, no, they mostly didn’t do that (maybe a few fighter pilots in the North) and I don’t think anyone’s actually done that in centuries. But there is no denying that many people did, in fact, fight, put themselves in danger, against an enemy that tried their very best to kill them. I have a lot of respect for them, the grunts in our war. But I was not one of them. Forty-some years later, I’m still happy I wasn't.
I fought, if you can call it “fighting,” in an office environment. Granted, the office was a huge tent, but the tent did have wooden floors and had canvas walls you could roll up and tie so the breezes could drift in. I fought with typewriters and with language skills the Army had given me over a 52-week period at Fort Meade, Maryland. I fought with yawns and with dictionaries, not with M-16s and bayonets. I confess that it did not feel like fighting. In fact, it felt very academic, not significantly different from what I do now.
Probably the most interesting message we came across, one that never got classified (most of what we translated was fairly useless but we couldn’t know that until we had translated it), fell into the lap of my friend Allen Hallmark. He was puzzled by the message. And while it had little or no tactical or strategic interest, it did fill in some of the blanks on what the local VC had to cope with.
Essentially, the message said: “Comrade Long died last week. He is beginning to stink. Please advise.” Comrade Long and his comrade were evidently a part of some observation post spying on American or ARVN installations or convoys. The VC, hell, let's just say it: the man (we depersonalize our enemies much too much--I was reading Wikileaks after-action Air Force reports the other day and they kept referring to "mandresses"--marginally better than "ragheads," but aimed at ridiculing people who happen to be the current enemy)writing the message apparently did not have the equipment needed to bury Anh Long. More than likely, the two men were on one of the rocky hills in Kon-Tum Province or maybe even somewhere off Highway 19, perhaps near the Mang Yang Pass. The VC did that sort of thing: sent spies out to observe major roads American and ARVN convoys traveled down to signal ahead so other groups could set ambushes. Much like the old cowboy and Indian movies that were so popular in the fifties. They were often in the same place for weeks.
So, somehow, anyway, whatever, one day in the war a VC named Long had died. Perhaps having been killed by free fire artillery, perhaps having stepped on a two-step snake, whatever, for some unknown reason Long had died. He spied, he died. His epitaph. And his colleague in this two-man outpost sent a message back that never arrived. Why not? The message-carrier stumbled into and was killed by some American patrol. That’s how we got the message. We got most of the stuff we translated via radio, but a few things came in on paper, scavenged from dead men’s hands or from their backpacks. You can, by the way, purchase some of those “original VC packs” on e-Bay even today.
Allen translated the message first and didn’t really believe what he was translating. So, we all consulted on it. Richard Miller, “Big Minh,” told us it was what it was. Later in the war, the expression "There it is" would come into play, but it fits here. Long had somehow died, the other member of the two-man outpost couldn’t find a way to bury him, and, after a few days he had begun to smell. Life in the war. The war for life. The message got in our hands because the courier was killed. As far as I know the writer is still out there somewhere waiting for an answer in that string of deaths. Kind of like those Japanese soldiers found on remote islands years after WWII.
We’d go to work in the morning at 8 a.m. or on the swing shift at 4 p.m. or the midnight shift at 12 p.m. Always, there was at least one linguist on duty in case of an emergency that never came. I don’t mean to say that the work was unimportant. It was important. Among other things, we made MAC-V and the White House and the National Security Agency aware that there would be a Tet Offensive on the last evening of January in 1968. The fact that General Westmoreland and LBJ did not believe that is totally irrelevant to the value of the translations we did. Well, maybe not. How valuable is months of work if the work is not paid attention to? We did help prevent one ambush in the Mang Yang by alerting 4th Division HQ. We were, in short, all that we were allowed to be and we were damned good.
That was my day-to-day existence for the last eleven months of my time “in country,” that was how I fought the war. Except for a couple of weeks when Jim and I were sent to Dak To, but that was only for a couple of weeks. More about those weeks later.
Sometimes my friends ask what I did in the war. When I tell them, they often say no, no…I mean the fighting. I’m always honest. I tell them I was not what people call a “warrior” but worked In support of the actual fighting people, the “warriors” who waged fierce individual battles against noble enemies. Well, no, they mostly didn’t do that (maybe a few fighter pilots in the North) and I don’t think anyone’s actually done that in centuries. But there is no denying that many people did, in fact, fight, put themselves in danger, against an enemy that tried their very best to kill them. I have a lot of respect for them, the grunts in our war. But I was not one of them. Forty-some years later, I’m still happy I wasn't.
I fought, if you can call it “fighting,” in an office environment. Granted, the office was a huge tent, but the tent did have wooden floors and had canvas walls you could roll up and tie so the breezes could drift in. I fought with typewriters and with language skills the Army had given me over a 52-week period at Fort Meade, Maryland. I fought with yawns and with dictionaries, not with M-16s and bayonets. I confess that it did not feel like fighting. In fact, it felt very academic, not significantly different from what I do now.
Probably the most interesting message we came across, one that never got classified (most of what we translated was fairly useless but we couldn’t know that until we had translated it), fell into the lap of my friend Allen Hallmark. He was puzzled by the message. And while it had little or no tactical or strategic interest, it did fill in some of the blanks on what the local VC had to cope with.
Essentially, the message said: “Comrade Long died last week. He is beginning to stink. Please advise.” Comrade Long and his comrade were evidently a part of some observation post spying on American or ARVN installations or convoys. The VC, hell, let's just say it: the man (we depersonalize our enemies much too much--I was reading Wikileaks after-action Air Force reports the other day and they kept referring to "mandresses"--marginally better than "ragheads," but aimed at ridiculing people who happen to be the current enemy)writing the message apparently did not have the equipment needed to bury Anh Long. More than likely, the two men were on one of the rocky hills in Kon-Tum Province or maybe even somewhere off Highway 19, perhaps near the Mang Yang Pass. The VC did that sort of thing: sent spies out to observe major roads American and ARVN convoys traveled down to signal ahead so other groups could set ambushes. Much like the old cowboy and Indian movies that were so popular in the fifties. They were often in the same place for weeks.
So, somehow, anyway, whatever, one day in the war a VC named Long had died. Perhaps having been killed by free fire artillery, perhaps having stepped on a two-step snake, whatever, for some unknown reason Long had died. He spied, he died. His epitaph. And his colleague in this two-man outpost sent a message back that never arrived. Why not? The message-carrier stumbled into and was killed by some American patrol. That’s how we got the message. We got most of the stuff we translated via radio, but a few things came in on paper, scavenged from dead men’s hands or from their backpacks. You can, by the way, purchase some of those “original VC packs” on e-Bay even today.
Allen translated the message first and didn’t really believe what he was translating. So, we all consulted on it. Richard Miller, “Big Minh,” told us it was what it was. Later in the war, the expression "There it is" would come into play, but it fits here. Long had somehow died, the other member of the two-man outpost couldn’t find a way to bury him, and, after a few days he had begun to smell. Life in the war. The war for life. The message got in our hands because the courier was killed. As far as I know the writer is still out there somewhere waiting for an answer in that string of deaths. Kind of like those Japanese soldiers found on remote islands years after WWII.
We’d go to work in the morning at 8 a.m. or on the swing shift at 4 p.m. or the midnight shift at 12 p.m. Always, there was at least one linguist on duty in case of an emergency that never came. I don’t mean to say that the work was unimportant. It was important. Among other things, we made MAC-V and the White House and the National Security Agency aware that there would be a Tet Offensive on the last evening of January in 1968. The fact that General Westmoreland and LBJ did not believe that is totally irrelevant to the value of the translations we did. Well, maybe not. How valuable is months of work if the work is not paid attention to? We did help prevent one ambush in the Mang Yang by alerting 4th Division HQ. We were, in short, all that we were allowed to be and we were damned good.
That was my day-to-day existence for the last eleven months of my time “in country,” that was how I fought the war. Except for a couple of weeks when Jim and I were sent to Dak To, but that was only for a couple of weeks. More about those weeks later.
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