Vietnam Narrative, 1968-1969

INTRODUCTORY NOTE:  In 2025, I donated a set of materials to the Quaker Archive at Earlham College.  The materials included letters I had written home from Vietnam, photos I had taken, a small diary, and an underground newspaper and other materials I had produced during that period. The following narrative was written as a guide to better understand the donated materials, but this narrative can also be read as a free-standing memoir of my experiences in the Army and, more specifically, as a support person in the 191^st Assault Helicopter Company in Vietnam from May, 1968 through April, 1969. 

Regarding the historical accuracy of this narrative, I have tried to be as accurate as possible in my descriptions of all details.  However, since these events occurred more than 50 years ago, there will necessarily be some inaccuracies.  For example, in some cases I have had to make my best guesses as to when an event occurred.  When I had an exact date (e.g. from my diary or my letters) I specified it. 

Some things I describe are based on accounts of others rather than my own direct observations.  I have tried to make it clear when this is the case—e.g., by indicating that I had heard or was told something. 

Many other things I discuss were general knowledge (e.g. that the classes ahead of us in radio school all went to Vietnam).  I have tried to include enough context to make this clear. 

Still other things were general knowledge but are also confirmed by official Army records—for example the deaths and injuries from the mortar attack on Mar. 2, 1969.  Regarding that mortar attack, I discovered 3 or 4 official accounts online that differed from each other in some important details.  One detail about which I believe I have more accurate information than the official accounts is the timing of the three volleys of mortars (at 1:00 AM, 1:50 AM, and 3:30 AM, with the 1:50 AM volley being the one that caused all six deaths).  The reason I believe my account is correct is that I noted the times and included them in my article describing the attack a few days later. 

I have included the real names of several individuals.  In some cases, when it seemed appropriate, I withheld a name and used a general description instead.

Michael R. Jackson

Vietnam Narrative

I was born in 1946, one of the first of the baby boom generation that followed World War II.  My mother, a naïve socialist, and my father, a labor organizer, had met in Indiana, married, and moved to Southern California.  They had eventually become New Deal Democrats and intellectuals who imparted to their children—my older brother, my older sister, and myself—a skepticism toward authority and toward common cultural wisdom.  We kids incorporated these values, and when I grew older and attended college at UCLA, it seemed natural for me to develop an interest in current issues, to major in political science, and to consider a career in journalism.  I was also attracted to the 1960s counterculture and the protests against the Vietnam War.  Both of these dissident movements were becoming increasingly salient in Southern California during my college years.  Some critics of the war, in particular, impressed me.  I admired their breadth of knowledge and their willingness to talk in depth about the history of the war, the policy blunders that had shaped it, and the disingenuousness of the claims made to support it, including claims that Vietnam was fundamentally two countries, that most people in South Vietnam wanted independence from the North, and that the U.S. was fighting for the interests of the Vietnamese people rather than pursuing its own agenda. 

          At UCLA I enjoyed my academic studies and was inspired by the protests that were growing more intense as the war expanded.  At one point I wrote an op-ed for the college newspaper, the Daily Bruin, criticizing the political science department for its failure to undertake a more aggressive critique of the U.S. war in Vietnam.  But my college years were also accompanied by a great deal of misery.  I was socially awkward, sexually immature, frequently isolated, and, above all, as my graduation approached, I was confronted by the ever-greater likelihood that I would be conscripted into the very war I was protesting.  My parents knew something was wrong, and, at my request, paid for psychotherapy to help me figure out who I was and what I was going to do.  Therapy began to open up some new perspectives for me—but by the spring of 1967, as my third year of college came to a close, it was becoming clear that nothing in my life could truly be resolved as long as conscription into the Vietnam War hung over me. 

          Conscription was no longer a likelihood; it was now inevitable.  This was the peak of the Vietnam War, and of the draft prior to the lottery system, and every young man in my age range was being compelled to serve, unless he had some kind of deferment.  I looked into possible alternatives with increasing desperation.  My parents wanted me to claim conscientious objector status—but I quickly determined that this would most likely be denied.  I would not meet the religious criteria, particularly since I was not opposed to all war—just Vietnam.  So not only would conscientious objection be likely to be rejected, it would also be a transparent and dishonorable falsification.  I considered applying to graduate school; I had the grades but I did not want to pursue a career in an unwanted but deferment-eligible profession like medicine, which would lead only to more years of misery and, most likely, conscription anyway at the end of my training for that profession.  I thought about fleeing to Canada, along with many other draft-age men of that era, but that would mean exile from my home, my country, and everyone I knew.  And, finally, I considered refusal and jail—ironically, the most honorable of the alternatives—but I could not face a choice that I thought would mean not only incarceration but also subsequent internal exile as an unemployable and reviled outcast with a criminal record (much later I came to see this differently, as I will eventually explain). 

          Thus, I came to the conclusion that military induction was inevitable; and I saw nothing to be gained by waiting through another year of anxiety and paralysis.  So in June 1967, I stunned my parents, my friends, my therapist, and everyone who knew me by announcing that I had visited the local draft board and requested that they place my name on the next list of men to be inducted into the U.S. Army.  There was an advantage to volunteering to be drafted rather than formally joining the Army.  Coming into the military as a draftee meant submitting to a two-year period of conscription, as opposed to contracting for the three-year term of a regular Army enlistment.  There would have been some advantages to the latter, such as choosing a particular type of training that might avoid the worst aspects of war.  But choosing the shorter period of service was, for me (and many others), an overriding consideration. 

          I should add at this point that there were other less direct ways of avoiding military service at that time, and many of them became widely known decades later when politicians faced public scrutiny of their war records.  Many prominent politicians, including all three U.S. Presidents who shared my birth year of 1946, had managed to avoid service in Vietnam through alternative military programs, educational deferments, medical deferments, strategic delays, and, particularly, influential family connections.  Some of my own friends had searched out and discovered medical conditions that exempted them from service.  And I myself, when I was in Basic Training, made a half-hearted attempt to convince an Army doctor that my flat feet were causing me serious problems.  I say “half-hearted” because I was ultimately unable to commit to this claim.  Something within me was repelled by lying to avoid what most young men of my generation were facing with courage.  In fact, for all my moral scruples about service in Vietnam, that thing in me that did not want to lie betrayed an ambivalence about the whole idea of avoiding military service.  Primarily, I was appalled by the Vietnam War and wanted nothing to do with it, but in some half-conscious way there was an undeniable appeal in the possibility of being tested by the worst kind of adversity that most men ever face. 

          I was officially inducted into the army on September 18, 1967, and I was bused up to Ft. Ord, California, along with hundreds of other inductees.  For the next two or three days we were subjected to all kinds of processing, such as filling out paperwork and taking aptitude tests of various kinds.  One such test consisted of learning three different Morse code letters and writing them down as they were played randomly, faster and faster.  It turned out that I was good at this, and later on I would be informed that I was being recommended for radio school after I finished Basic Training.  Another examination seemed to be a test of general cognitive abilities.  We took this test in a large room and waited while the results were scored.  An officer then came in and called out the names of a small number of us, including me.  After the others left, the officer told the ones who remained that we had scored high enough to qualify for training to be officers, and he proceeded to encourage us to apply for Officer Candidate School (OCS).  He emphasized that it would allow us to choose our own training, learn leadership skills, and enjoy a number of privileges.  The one catch, however, was that we would have to change our enlistment status from US (draftee) to RA (regular army), which would mean spending an extra year in the army.  When he finished his pitch and asked for volunteers, the dozens of draftees in the room sat in dead silence.  Eventually, one or two got up and went with him, while the rest of us, the overwhelming majority, remained seated. 

A day or two later, I started Basic Training. While Basic was grueling and stressful, there were some things about it that weren’t so bad.  I appreciated the Army getting me into good shape physically.  I learned that cadence calls actually made marching easier, and even somewhat energizing.  In fact, after the Army, power walking became my most consistent and enjoyable form of exercise, and one that kept me in good health as I aged.  Psychologically, too, I felt tremendous relief.  I no longer had to worry about the draft—or any of the other pressures and stresses I had been experiencing in college.  This sense of relief lasted throughout my entire military service, even during the difficult situations I later experienced in Vietnam.  Years later I surprised some people when I confided that I had been much happier in Vietnam than I was at UCLA.

          The 250 guys in my company were all from California, and all draftees.  I wasn’t the only one who had volunteered for the draft, and most of us shared a common disdain for our daily doses of harassment, petty injustices, and army screwups.  I made some close friends, including some who continued to be friends after Basic Training.  At the same time, I differed from many of my fellow draftees in my educational background and interests.  This could be alienating at times, but for the most part the camaraderie we shared far outweighed our differences.  For example, one day I was approached by a friend of mine named Ramirez, an amiable guy who had grown up in a very different economic and cultural context from my own.  He said “You look deep in thought—what’s on your mind?”  I debated about whether or not to tell him the truth.  I finally decided to trust him with the real answer and said, “Well, I’ve been studying the theory of relativity lately and I’m trying to figure out whether the equation E=mc² can be derived from algebra without using calculus if you use the binomial expansion theorem.”  I waited for his reaction.  He stared at me for a long time, and then he said, in a very slow and very thoughtful manner. “You know . . . you’re not as dumb as you look.” 

          Ramirez was a very funny guy.

          As I mentioned above, I learned early on that I would be trained as a radio operator, and at first this was appealing.  It sounded like an interesting job, and one that would probably afford some insulation from the worst aspects of the war.  Soon, though, I began to hear the opposite—not only from my fellow draftees but also from our instructors and drill sergeants, all of whom had been to Vietnam.  The job of radio operator, they said, was, in fact, one of the most dangerous.  Every infantry unit had a man who carried a radio on his back and who had to stay close to the officers in the field.  In an ambush, the radio operator would be the first one shot to prevent any calls for help.  So, upon hearing that my MOS (military occupational specialty) was radio operator, one of my drill sergeants said “Sorry to hear that.”  And later on, another instructor, upon learning my MOS, put his finger on my forehead, painted an imaginary X, and said “You might as well put a bulls-eye right there.”    

          When I moved on to radio school, this was—as one might expect—a topic of some discussion.  Our instructors assured us that the army was not going to spend a lot of time and money giving us specialized training in radio operation just so we could carry the simplest kind of radio in an infantry unit, a job any regular soldier could learn to do.  By this time, however, I had learned enough about the army to be skeptical.  I had seen that decisions were often made on the fly, in a haphazard manner by unqualified people amidst confusion between different units and different levels of command.  There were many cases where someone trained in one MOS ended up working in another MOS (and this did, in fact, happen to me in Vietnam), and I deemed it entirely possible that an infantry unit that was short of men could grab some soldiers who were available for one reason or another, and use them for whatever they might seem qualified to do. 

          At about this same time, we learned that some of us radio school trainees might be selected to go to an advanced school for radio-teletype operators.  I was determined to be one of those trainees.  At that time, our training focused on developing proficiency at Morse code, so I put all my energy into increasing my speed and accuracy.  When we went home on Christmas leave, I bought some materials for learning Morse code and practiced every day.  By the time I returned to the base in January, I had rocketed to the head of the class.  As it turned out, I needn’t have worked so hard; the entire class was sent on to radio-teletype school at the Signal Corps training center in Ft. Gordon, Georgia. 

          At the time I did not think much—or possibly at all—about the fact that by avoiding the frightening prospect of being the prime target for ambushes in Vietnam, I was inevitably relegating someone else to that fate.  That was the inescapable logic of an unnecessary war waged by an affluent superpower using an unjust system like the military draft.  Just as I had to take the place of someone with the privilege, resources, and family connections to evade the draft, so, too, a less fortunate and less educated young man, somewhere in some infantry unit, would be taking my place in a situation far more hellish than anything I later had to endure in Vietnam.

          I arrived at Ft. Godon and was surprised to learn that even though Georgia was Southern state it was cold and snowy in January.  Our barracks were old wooden buildings with primitive coal burning furnaces that did little to heat them up.  To make matters worse, the windows were nailed open as a deliberate measure to keep the buildings cold in order to prevent the spread of meningitis, which was affecting some military bases at the time. But the training was interesting.  We learned about different kinds of radio teletypes and a number of ways in which radio signals could be sent and jammed.  Near the end of the course, our training included some specifics on military security, coding, and code-breaking, which I found fascinating.  In order to complete this training, each of us had to receive a security clearance.  This had initially worried me, as I had participated in anti-war protests and criticism of the war prior to being drafted.  However, I received my clearance along with everyone else. 

          As the weeks went by, it became clear that most people with our training were being sent to Vietnam.  Every week one of the classes ahead of us graduated, and each time, everyone in that class received orders for Vietnam.  The term of service in Vietnam was standard—exactly one year.  When our turn came, we were ready for the inevitable, but, to our astonishment, everyone in our class received orders for Germany or Italy—everyone, that is, except me and one other guy, a friend of mine named Dave Martin.  Why we were the exceptions, we never learned.  Years later, it occurred to me to wonder whether someone in the chain of command had seen my security clearance report and decided to pick me, a troublesome anti-war hippie, to be one of the guys to go to Vietnam. 

          Meanwhile, events of national importance were rapidly unfolding.  At the end of January, the United States experienced a disastrous setback when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, penetrating cities and installations all over Vietnam and making a mockery of U.S. claims of great progress in winning the war.  Near the end of March, President Lyndon Johnson concluded a speech by announcing that he would not run for another term, shocking everyone who was watching the speech, including my fellow trainees and me.  The Civil Rights movement was now joining forces with the anti-war movement.  And on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.  As fate would have it, on that day I had just finished my training at Ft. Gordon and was preparing to go home on a 30-day leave prior to being transferred to Vietnam.  The next day, April 5, at our morning formation, our sergeant, a middle-aged black man, spoke briefly and eloquently about the loss of Martin Luther King and led us in prayer.  During his prayer, I heard one of my fellow trainees mutter under his breath “Thank God he’s dead!”  Attitudes like this were not uncommon in the Army, but they were by no means universal.  Many, if not most, of our instructors in Basic Training were black, and while a few white trainees complained quietly about “being yelled at by niggers,” they accepted the military culture, which was by then deeply integrated.  After Basic, I saw little overt anti-black bias, but my background and education were channeling me into strata of the Army that were primarily white, so my perspective may not have been representative.

          On this same day, I left Ft. Gordon and boarded a flight to California to begin my 30-day leave before going to Vietnam.  The flight made one stop in Chicago, and as we flew into that city I saw columns of smoke rising from the downtown area, apparently from the riots that had broken out there, as in many other cities across the U.S., in reaction to King’s assassination.  The rest of my leave was also affected by these nationwide political upheavals.  The two main topics of conversation with my parents during my leave were (1) my reassurances to them that my job as a radio teletype operator would be one of the safest in Vietnam, and (2) our discussions about what would happen in the 1968 election and how would that affect the war.  My parents opposed the war but weren’t sure whether to support Eugene McCarthy, who had challenged Johnson on an anti-war platform, or Robert F. Kennedy, who had just entered the race and was regarded by some as an opportunist.  I, myself, was excited by Robert F. Kennedy, and, when he came, during my leave, to Santa Barbara where my parents now lived, I had a chance to see him and even to shake hands with him. 

When I went places in public during my leave I did not wear my uniform, nor did I mention that I was a GI with orders for Vietnam.  I did not want to address the contradiction between my anti-war sentiments and my military status.  At that time, it was inconceivable to most people in the U.S. that these two identities—protester and soldier—could co-exist in one and the same young man.  (By the time I returned to the U.S., that would be changing dramatically.)  The single time I did wear my uniform in public was on the last day of my leave when I was getting into my parents’ car to be driven up to the Oakland Overseas Terminal, where I would depart for Vietnam.  As I was about to get into the car, a man I had never seen before came up, shook my hand, and thanked me for my service.  I was irritated, embarrassed, and touched by this gesture, and didn’t know how to respond.  This kind of perplexity dogged me many times, and in many different ways, both before and after Vietnam.  In Oakland, I said my good-byes to my parents in the least emotional way possible; and my mother later wrote me about her distress at how matter-of-fact I had been. 

           The plane ride to Vietnam was an otherworldly experience.  We traveled west, in the shadow of the Earth, and most of the trip, therefore, extended through what seemed to be an endless night over the endless vastness of the Pacific Ocean.  We stopped in Hawaii only long enough to refuel, and did not land again until we reached the Philippines’ where the sun was just starting to rise. When we stepped off the plane, I was surprised not only by warmth and humidity but also the perfume-like fragrance that filled the air, my first encounter with a tropical environment.  We were directed to a bus that took us to Clark Air Force Base, to board another plane to take us on the last leg to Vietnam.

          Our final flight to Vietnam was not a long one, only an hour or so.  Our first view of the country was the coastline, followed by farms and rice paddies, and, after that, many miles of mountains covered by thick jungle.  Then, in what seemed like a precipitous descent, the plane circled downward, rapidly landed on a runway, and decelerated to an immediate halt—the quickest landing I’ve ever experienced—apparently in order to avoid being a target any longer than necessary.  The soldiers on the plane, who had been tense and quiet throughout most of the journey, now greeted their arrival with a spontaneous vocal outburst, mixing excitement, anxiety and war-whoop. 

          The plane had landed so suddenly that I couldn’t quite absorb the fact that we were now actually in Vietnam.  Before I had time to do so, we were given forms to fill out and loaded onto a bus to our next destination.  The bus left the airport and drove through the city of Bien Hoa, where I had my first look at ordinary life in Vietnam.  On the plane I had begun a small diary, and I later wrote this description of the bus ride through Bien Hoa:

“There were rows of shops with Vietnamese everywhere, wearing their traditional costumes—colorful clothing and pointed straw hats. The girls were beautiful and the old women (who didn’t look that old) were cute. I thought that these people must be the most beautiful in the world. And I felt very sorry for them. Many of the buildings were rubble heaps [from the Tet Offensive three months earlier]. Others were poor and very run down. All along the way there were soldiers everywhere and military vehicles. . . Some of the fragrance we had smelled in the Philippines was here too. Many of the people smiled at us and waved. Some painted women in front of a house of prostitution beckoned. There was life everywhere.”

The bus took us a few miles to Long Binh, the largest cluster of U.S. Army facilities in Vietnam, and we were temporarily put into a replacement company, where we would await our permanent assignments.  My diary continues:

“All of this seemed unreal. I could hardly believe I was actually in Vietnam after hearing about it so much . . . I strangely felt that somehow this was a [movie] set and that the “real” Vietnam was somewhere else. . . The air was crowded with planes and helicopters. Once or twice a minute a helicopter would fly over, and frequently jets would go by. There were even a few prop planes. . . The next day I was transferred to the 12^th Aviation Group. I rode on a truck packed with soldiers on the highway that goes out from Saigon. There were hundreds of military vehicles on the road—trucks, jeeps, government cars, even soldiers on motorcycles. There were American army trucks loaded with Vietnamese for work projects. There were a few other Vietnamese on the highway. I began to comprehend the enormity of our military commitment in South Vietnam. The American Army was everywhere. 

“We arrived at the 12^th aviation group headquarters and we were reassigned to a smaller unit, the 214^th aviation battalion [at Camp Bearcat]. Once again we boarded a truck. This time we were accompanied by a soldier with a rifle and a grenade launcher, which made me feel a wee bit uncomfortable. We rumbled off down the highway in the direction from which we had come. Soon we were off the main highway and on a smaller road. We moved on and found ourselves out in open country. I remembered stories I had heard about American vehicles being ambushed outside of large towns. We rode on and the growth around the highway turned into thick brush and then jungle. The plants and trees were deciduous and bright green, and very, very tropical looking. We passed through a Vietnamese village. There were people walking along the road and riding bicycles. Carts drawn by water buffalo and followed by old farmers. More water Buffalo, brown and white, were walking loose by the road.”

Soon after this, the jungle gave way and we reached Camp Bearcat, where I would spend my next six months in Vietnam.  Located about 25 miles east of Saigon and surrounded by jungle, Bearcat was the base of operations for the 9^th Infantry Division.  It was quite large, containing several helicopter fields, endless buildings, bunkers, and supply yards, hundreds of vehicles, and thousands of soldiers.  Dave Martin from radio teletype school had been in the group I was with, and when we reached the 214^th Battalion Headquarters, he and I were told that there was currently no need for radio operators.  Instead, we would be assigned to the security platoon where we would help to guard the Bearcat perimeter at night, an assignment that did not inspire much enthusiasm in us.  We didn’t actually begin guard duty for another two days because of confusion and delays regarding paperwork, procedures, and the locations of offices—a frustrating phenomenon that always seemed to accompany Army life. 

The weather seemed strange.  The air was hot and muggy, and sweat poured off our bodies.  Huge puffy clouds hung in the air and, although we didn’t know it then, we had arrived at the beginning of the monsoon season.  Heavy rain would beat down on us once, or more often, on most days, followed by periods of clearing and intense sun.  The storms, while intense, usually only lasted a short time, sometimes just a few minutes.  There were large puddles of rainwater and patches of mud everywhere.  At night it was still hot, and it might rain, or be clear—in which case the stars would be visible in startlingly bright and unfamiliar constellations.  Another thing that was very common at night were flashes of lightning, usually on the horizon, with no accompanying thunder.  At first, I thought these might be signs of distant battle, but I eventually learned that they were “heat lightning,” distant flickers of distant thunderstorms.  In November, the rains would cease and the ground would become dry and cracked for the next six months. 

Across the road from our battalion, there was an artillery unit, with several 150mm howitzers that fired from time to time, especially during the night.  Their fire was directed by infantry units several miles outside the camp—so far out that we could not hear the shells when they landed.  We could, however, hear the ear-splitting boom from these guns when they fired.  The first time I heard one, I dove for the floor, thinking we were under attack, and then was embarrassed to see that everyone else was ignoring it.  Unfortunately, most of the time these guns fired at night—but, amazingly, within a couple of days I was ignoring them like everyone else, and even able to sleep right through them.  Later, after I left the Army, I gradually realized that I was hearing a ringing in my ears, commonly known as tinnitus.  While I had had tinnitus at times prior to the Army, it was now constant, and has remained so, unbroken, ever since.  For decades, this condition mystified me, but a few years ago I did an intensive internet search into its etiology.  I learned that the causes of tinnitus were unknown, and that many studies had failed to give a consistent explanation.  However, I learned that the one reliable finding was a correlation between tinnitus and military service.  Around this same time, I learned that my barber, who was deaf, had served in an artillery unit.  I asked him if he had been given ear plugs, and he explained that his unit had been issued earplugs, but that nobody had worn them. 

Dave and I served on guard duty for about two weeks.  Our job consisted of sitting in a bunker, looking across a cleared area toward the jungle, and hoping, as I said in one of my letters, that nothing was looking back at us.  Mostly, the job was tedious and deadening.  We were supposed to sleep for three hours, then stand watch for three hours, but the latter was a constant battle to keep from falling asleep.  However, it could also be creepy at times.  We shared the bunkers with rats and at least one tarantula.  Also, at night the jungle was alive with the sounds of birds and insects, and I wrote in my diary, “I swear to God, some of them sound like a human voice.”  We were supposed to report anything that moved, but nothing ever did, except an occasional stray dog or small animal. 

One night it occurred to me that in the global Cold War between the communist world and the Western democracies, this very spot where I was sitting guard was one of the fronts.  Most of the time there was no obvious evidence of war, but there were moments when real war broke through, mostly at night.  Berms guards like us were occasionally shot at, though this never happened to our platoon.  However, the Tet Offensive had occurred about three months earlier, and there were still smaller battles breaking out around Saigon.  At night, we could occasionally hear machine gun fire, and sometimes there would be streams of red tracer bullets visible beyond the camp, usually shot by helicopters into the jungle but sometimes returned at them from the ground.  It was common to hear distant or not-so-distant explosions.  The most ominous of these were the B-52 strikes, which unleashed such destructive force on their targets that they shook the ground and rattled windows for many miles.  We experienced these rumbles from time to time throughout the entire year I was in Vietnam.  Of greater concern to us, though, were the occasional rocket and mortar attacks aimed directly at us from outside the camp.  The very first night I was in Vietnam, I was confused when people started yelling “red alert” and turning out lights.  This turned out to be a false alarm.  But over the next few months, other red alerts occurred repeatedly, sometimes accompanied by actual rocket and mortar attacks. 

          I almost never mentioned these attacks in my letters to my family.  Instead, I tried to reassure my parents by omitting any mention of danger and/or constantly emphasizing how safe the base was.  When I read my letters now, the shakiness of those reassurances seems quite obvious, and I suspect it was obvious to my parents as well.  In the letters, I frequently responded to suspicions that my mother repeatedly voiced that I was not telling the entire truth—which, in fact, I wasn’t—and I occasionally scolded her for worrying too much.  This became especially awkward on a couple of occasions when the news media reported something about the war that was undeniably tied to my unit or location. 

          I should add that the lies I told my parents about safety were facilitated, I now believe, by a certain degree of lying to myself.  While I was in Vietnam, and for years after I returned, I tended to minimize some of the actual danger I lived through during that time.  This is partly because I was acutely aware of the much greater danger that the helicopter gunners and pilots faced every day—not to mention the unbelievable stress, and frequent terror, that infantry troops experienced on an ongoing basis.  But for us on the base, rocket and mortar attacks always carried a possibility of injury or death.  It was easier for me to scold my mother for her worry than to seriously assess that possibility myself.  My reassurances may also have stemmed from feelings of guilt about what I had put them through by volunteering to be drafted.  My father lived with as much worry as my mother, but he rarely said anything about it in the letters they sent to me, which were written mostly by my mother. He had taken it hard when I informed him of my decision to volunteer for the draft.  Looking back on it now, I wonder how much his worry added to his illness and the stroke he suffered while I was in Vietnam.  He never indicated any such connection, but it’s hard for me to believe now that my being in Vietnam was not a factor. 

In reading over my letters, I also find it painful to see how harsh I was toward my mother, at times, about other things.  It’s obvious now that I was still fighting an adolescent rebellion in some respects, and it must have been difficult for her to process her worries about my safety while I continued to snipe at her over petty things.  One of these petty things was my incessant praise for Ayn Rand, the utopian libertarian who idolized laissez faire capitalism and irritated political liberals like my mother by portraying them in scurrilous and outrageous stereotypes.  Today, I would characterize Rand as a writer who appeals primarily to adolescents and naïve adults of a certain political bent, but my attraction to her ideas at that time was genuine and based on something serious.  Years of torment by the threat, and then the actuality, of conscription into a murderous war based on preposterous lies had led me to an obsession with libertarian ideology.  Rand’s writings, while often flagrantly overdone, nevertheless offered flashes of surprising insight woven into irresistible tales of heroic integrity in the face of senseless and arrogant power.

Also, they pissed off my mother. 

          On May 17^th, Dave and I were transferred out of the security platoon and given our assignments for the rest of the year, both of us as clerk typists.  So much for 17 weeks of intensive radio and teletype training!  Dave was placed in the 240^th Assault Helicopter Company, and I was placed in the 191^st Assault Helicopter Company, right next door.  My position was in the Operations building of the 191^st AHC, the nerve center of all its helicopter activity.  The position was a good one, with interesting duties and reasonable hours, though sometimes during the middle of the night.  During the day, I could hear the pilots communicating with each other on the radio.  Usually, not much was said.  However, on the first day of my duty there, the pilots reported that one of the gunners was killed.  I later heard an account of his death, which was both poignant and chilling.  He had been working on the ground and had served almost his entire year in Vietnam, but like many young men he had ambivalently wanted to take a more active role in the war.  On the last day of his one-year tour in Vietnam he had volunteered to fly as a gunner, and on that day he was shot in the head.  Several months later, I was assigned to a detail, along with some other guys, to clean out some conexes, and I unexpectedly came across a flight helmet with this soldier’s name written on it.  It had a single bullet hole in it, and when I turned it over, the entire inside was stained with dried blood.  Evidently, no one had had the heart to throw the helmet away at the time, so it fell to us to do so. 

          The helicopters of the 191^st flew missions daily.  They usually worked with the 9^th Infantry Division, and they would start the day by picking up soldiers and taking them to an assigned area somewhere outside the base.  The helicopters were protected by a gunner on each side of the ship (called “door gunners”).  Often, the insertion of troops would go uneventfully, but if the landing zone was a “hot” one they might receive gunfire from the enemy—North Vietnamese soldiers or local Viet Cong fighters.  On some occasions this could be disastrous if one or more of the “slicks” (helicopters that carried troops) was shot down.  There was also a danger of mid-air collisions.  On one occasion, three helicopters from the 240^th AHC collided with each other, killing all 12 crew members—an event that made the national news in the U.S. and freaked out my parents.  The slicks were accompanied by helicopter “gunships” heavily armed with rockets and other weaponry.  The gunships, especially, could be frightening to the enemy.  These were the ships we saw firing into the jungle, especially after red alerts and rocket or mortar attacks. 

          There were other dangers associated with flying.  One evening in Operations, we received a phone call from a high-level command unit asking us if any of our helicopters had been flying over Saigon that day and might have fired at someone.  We replied that some of our ships had passed near Saigon, but no one had fired.  The next day, an order went out from MACV (the highest command level) that no helicopter was to fly over Saigon except by personal order of General Abrams, who was in the process of assuming command of all Vietnam forces.  We never did find out exactly what had happened, and the order was later rescinded. 

          On another occasion, I inadvertently came across an account of another unexplained event.  I was looking through some old papers in one of the files and I unexpectedly came across a brief report that had been written by a helicopter pilot long before I—and possibly anyone currently in the company—had arrived.  This officer described how he had been piloting one of two helicopters on a mission (I forget exactly what the mission was).  The two ships had flown into a cloud.  When this officer’s helicopter had emerged, the other helicopter was nowhere to be seen.  The report concluded by stating that the area had been thoroughly searched, and no trace of the missing helicopter was ever found.  It was uncanny to come across a report like this, inconspicuously tucked away into a forgotten file in an old cabinet, with no additional information or explanation, and apparently not remembered, or even known about, by anyone currently in the company.  I still wonder who was in that other helicopter and whether anyone ever found out what happened to them. 

          On June 5^th, we learned that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot, and on June 6^th, that he had died.  That day I wrote a bitter letter to my parents, stating that I was so disgusted with the United States that I did not want to return.  I added that if I had not been in the Army, I probably would have been at his campaign headquarters in Los Angeles, possibly standing close to where he had been shot, and I noted the irony that I may well have been safer in Vietnam than I would have been in the U.S.  For once, I was not exaggerating about my relative safety. 

          During my weeks in Operations there had been some changes in personnel, and they had occurred with the usual unpredictability and confusion that I had come to expect in the Army.  I had been moved to the Operations office from the security platoon when that office was short of personnel, but soon after that another member of the security platoon was also assigned there, making one too many of us.  At the same time, the flight platoons had lost a gunner, and there was talk about transferring one of the new clerks to the gunner position.  As I mentioned above, many young soldiers were attracted, sometimes eagerly and sometimes ambivalently, to direct combatant roles, but I was not one of them.  Not only did I have no attraction to the considerable danger of a gunner position, but I was already entangled in the odious war I had previously been protesting, and I had no wish to become even more deeply entangled into a kill-or-be-killed situation.  In the midst of this uncertainty, a position suddenly opened up in the company’s Maintenance office when the clerk there volunteered for the gunner position, and at the end of June I was unexpectedly transferred to take his place in Maintenance.  A few weeks later, the new Operations clerk, who had now taken over my old position there, also volunteered for another gunner position.  As a result, a still newer arrival took my original position in Operations.  As I will explain below, I later learned that this series of events had had life-or-death significance for me, though in a completely different way than I had imagined at the time. 

          I continued to work in the Maintenance office for the rest of my time in Vietnam.  My job consisted mainly of keeping track of equipment and filling out forms.  This job was less enjoyable than the one in Operations had been.  The hours were much longer now, and I worked 7 days a week, so I had only limited opportunities to see anything beyond the company.  We did, though, see a lot of the Vietnamese (mostly girls) who worked on the base.  In my diary, I described them:

“We have some Vietnamese girls who hang around in the afternoon here. They shine shoes for all the guys around here. One is named Cong [Kan]. (We kid her and call her a Viet Cong.) She says she’s 18 but she looks younger (all these Orientals look younger than they are.) She is cute and has her hair in a bun. When she takes it out it goes almost down to her knees. Her sister, Lan, is older and we see her the most. She’s not as cute as the others though.

“There are some others who are here now and then. Some of them are little knockouts, and it’s nice to have them around. They are all very friendly and talk and joke with the soldiers a lot. Some of them speak English pretty well, and we usually don’t have much trouble communicating. . .”

          A few weeks later, I added some additional thoughts as I started to reflect more on some of the cultural differences that I might be seeing. 

“The Vietnamese, at least around here, have come to impress me as being very childlike. They love to laugh and play jokes on each other (and us) and in many ways act like children. The soldiers kid the girls and flirt with them and the girls laugh and always play along. They love chewing gum (which they called “goom”). They are cheerful about everything they never show any unhappiness. A while ago [Kan] showed up one day wearing all black. She acted as carefree as ever. When Tumbri asked her why she was wearing black she casually remarked ‘Papa-San died.’

“One of them, Rosie, is perhaps the sexiest one of the bunch. She wears western style dresses instead of the Asian costumes the others wear. She talks and jokes with soldiers more than the others and is popular with them. Right now she is working in the mess hall as a KP. The other day I saw her there and smiled at her. In answer, she half-closed her eyes and gave me this superlatively sexy look as if to say “Come on, Soldier Boy!” I laughed and laughed. She was the perfect image of a little girl trying to be a ravishing woman.

“All this is kind of cute, but I am beginning to get a little tired of it now. I wish they would act more like real grown-up people. The Vietnamese have always been dominated by foreigners, and I suppose this is part of the reason [they act this way].”

As I read this now, I am struck by how much I still didn’t understand.  Like all the Vietnamese, these girls were adapting to their situation as best they could.  Moreover, some of them must have been sympathetic to, and/or actively aiding, the local Viet Cong.  During my time in Vietnam, I repeatedly found things missing, especially boots.  They may have ended up on the black market, but it’s, perhaps, more likely that those boots ended up on the feet of some of the same Viet Cong who were shooting at our helicopters and launching attacks on us. 

          The attitudes of the American soldiers toward the Vietnamese varied a great deal.  Most of the men I knew were friendly toward them, and reasonably accepting, yet we all called them “gooks.”  That racist epithet was used so universally by Americans in Vietnam that it seemed, even to those of us who opposed the war, to be stripped of any derogatory connotations.  Unlike my friends, though, some of the men in the flight platoons were openly scornful, and in a few cases blatantly hateful toward the Vietnamese.  On one occasion, one of these men, whom I did not know, started throwing rocks in an extremely threatening and dangerous way toward the older Vietnamese woman we called “Mama-San” who cleaned our office.  I came out and yelled at him to stop, and over the next week or so he then turned his anger onto me.  I thought I had made an enemy, but weeks later, out of the blue, he approached me in a conciliatory way and talked poignantly about how dangerous and terrifying his missions as a door gunner were.  Still later, just before I parted Vietnam, I was surprised when my friends told me that Mama-San had burst into tears when she heard I was going home. 

          Attitudes about killing also varied.  Many of the gunners and pilots had killed Vietnamese during combat operations, and it was a badge of pride to have a lot of kills; however, these men generally remained silent about that outside of their own group.  On the other hand, a friend of mine—the operations clerk who had volunteered for the gunner position—subsequently told me one day that he had just killed someone for the first time.  He had seen a muzzle flash from the door of a hootch and had responded by pouring machine gun fire, endlessly, into that hootch.  He knew that it must have killed the shooter, but he also described his surprise that he had had no feelings about it whatsoever.  On another occasion, I overheard one of the gunners saying to another gunner that he didn’t want to stop doing this job because he had discovered that he “just loved killing” too much.  On yet another occasion, I heard that a friend of mine who was a gunner had gone berserk and started shooting wildly and randomly during a firefight.  His peers in the flight platoon were spooked by his behavior—and now wanted nothing more to do with him.  As far as I know, he remained a gunner until the end of his tour.

          The missions of the flight platoons seemed to get worse as time went on, and the experiences of the men who flew these missions were far worse than anything the rest of us had to endure.  However, shortly after I started working in the Maintenance office, things seemed to be getting hotter at the base too.  Looking back on it, I suppose that the enemy was starting to recover from the very substantial losses suffered during the Tet Offensive, and we began to experience direct mortar and rocket attacks from time to time.  The first of these occurred on July 5^th, and I later wrote in my diary:

“We had our first mortar attack last night. I was over at the 240^th AHC barracks shooting the bull with Dave Meeks and Dave Martin, and at about 10:00 o’clock we heard a series of explosions somewhere off outside. This wouldn’t have been any big thing because there are always explosions of 150s firing and distant bombs and other things, but these were peculiar sounding. They made a “whomp!” sound. They reminded me of the sound I had heard one day when some of our gunships were test firing rockets near Bearcat. We heard about 4 or 5 go off and looked at each other. ‘Those don’t sound like our regular artillery,’ said Meeks. ‘No,’ I said, ‘they don’t, do they?’

“We realized they were incoming rounds and made a quick exit outside to the bunker, still hearing them hitting. Inside the bunker there were a few people—one a major. The major seemed rather excited and was yelling orders. Telling people to get into bunkers, et cetera. He struck me as feeling a bit guilty because I heard him remark ‘Well, I should get down to Operations, but I don’t think I should go out there with mortars coming in.’

“Inside the bunker it was pitch black and all that could be seen were the glow of cigarettes, from time to time. I was expecting something to happen but not much really did. Almost as soon as we got into the bunker the shells stopped landing outside. We sat around and talked for a while. Someone had some Corn Puffs and passed them around. We waited for 5 or 10 minutes and it appeared the attack was over. We came out and I said to Meeks I was going back to my company. I walked back toward the barracks. The camp was blacked out and I couldn’t see anyone anywhere. There were sounds of radios in the distance.

“Suddenly two more rounds came in. The second one sounded pretty loud and it sounded very near “WHOMP!!” With that I laid down between a building and some metal barracks, which probably wouldn’t have been much protection from a shellburst, and waited. Nothing happened, so I made a dash for a nearby bunker and almost ran headlong into a guy sitting in the doorway.

“’Com’on in,’ he said. We sat there and talked for a while. We were the only ones there. I still hadn’t seen any other people. There were no more shells. After a few minutes we got out of the bunker, but I wasn’t in any hurry to leave the area after what had happened the last time I had left a bunker.

“By now our helicopters were in the air and we could see by their flashing red lights that they were on the southwest side of the camp. There were booms from explosions coming from that direction. They must have been big because the sound was very low pitched and the rumbling shook things where we were. The booming went on for several minutes. After that the helicopters fired machine gun bursts down into the jungle. It was an eerie sight. With every burst there was a long snake of glowing tracers going from the gunships to the ground. After a while the firing let up. It was interesting that the mortar attack came from the Southwest. The jungle on that side of the camp is incredibly thick. The growth is not very tall but the vegetation is so thick that it looks like a solid wall. It would be an ideal place to fire off a few mortars and then make a quick getaway with perfect cover.”

          Three days later, I added:

“This area is starting to get hot. Right after that last mortar attack (which I found out later was actually a rocket attack) there was a vicious little battle just south of camp. Several helicopter gunships were fighting some kind of ground enemy force. The choppers fired many rockets and continually used their machine guns. We could see streams of tracers again and again. This went on for about 30 or 40 minutes and finally cooled off. Everyone was standing outside watching and making comments and jokes. The Vietnamese KP girls were there, playing and giggling as usual. Every time one of those ships fired a machine gun burst and a red stream of tracers was visible, the people cheered and yelled things like “Give ‘em hell, baby!” It was like a football game.

“The night after, I had berm guard and nothing much happened. There was the usual distant booms and flares and at one time I heard machine gun fire. But that was all.

“Then last night we had another red alert and another rocket attack. The rockets hit further away than last time, in the southwest part of the camp. (Everything seems to happen over on that side where the thick jungle is. Fortunately, we are in the north part of the camp.)”

          Shortly after this, my diary comes to an abrupt end.  Some later pages were torn out, and it is difficult for me to remember now exactly why I did so.  But my vague recollection is that I had started to write about alcohol and drug use.  The final entry describes, humorously, how my friends and I had been drinking during the above rocket attack.  And I think I went on in later entries to describe drug use, especially rampant marijuana smoking.  Some time after that, there were rumors that the Army was going to send investigators around to prosecute drug use as criminal behavior.  I knew that any investigation would include searches for contraband, and I therefore ripped out the pages of the diary that might have incriminated me or my friends.  It was also around this time that I started thinking about putting out an underground newspaper, and I may have said something about that in the diary.  No criminal investigation ever actually occurred—it was all just a rumor.  But I seem to have decided not to resume the diary as a precaution. 

          My own drug use was limited to marijuana and was minimal.  I had smoked it prior to entering the Army and initially experienced it as truly mind-expanding (“psychedelic”).  But as my general anxiety in college had escalated, I started having more and more “bum trips.”  I never enjoyed marijuana much after that, even in the Army where my anxiety was generally minimal.  Also, the marijuana I smoked in Vietnam, which was said to be “Thai grass,” was incredibly strong, disorienting, and, for me, unpleasant.  But the 1960s counterculture was always in the background for anyone who looked for it.  Prior to the Army, I had gone not only to teach-ins and peace demonstrations but also hippie parties and “love-ins.”  And when I was at Ft. Ord I had made a weekend trip to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, to catch the last vibes of the famous “Summer of Love.”  When I arrived at Bearcat and started berm guard duty, I was amused to find that one of the bunkers had been decorated with “hippie” symbols—a colorful bead curtain in the entrance, and a huge sign above it that said “PSYCHEDELIC”—and one of the watchtowers on the berm had the words “HIPPIE LAND” painted on the side.  Peace symbols were prominent in graffiti and on personal belongings, and GIs played popular music sent from home that featured drug and anti-war content.  Some of the officers and NCOs were irritated by these symbols of resistance, but no one did much about them.  This is one of the problems with having an Army full of conscriptees.  In fact, it is my sense that the Army knew it was in a delicate position as dissatisfaction with the war grew, both in the U.S. and among the troops.  And it has often been observed that the months after the Tet Offensive—that is, exactly when I was in Vietnam—witnessed a decisive acceleration of skepticism about the war and increasingly overt resistance to it.

          Some time in mid-July, I had guard duty and shared a bunker with a fellow soldier named Mike Morrison.  We hit it off when we discovered we had similar interests and political leanings, and I told him about my idea of putting out an anonymous underground anti-war newspaper for the 191^st AHC.  He was immediately taken by the idea, and we began planning for it.  On July 21^st I described this in a letter to my parents, and in another letter on August 1^st I added “Boy, are we gonna rock the boat!”  My parents were horrified, even my father, who rarely voiced any of his worries, and they rushed a letter to me the next day (a speed almost unheard of in the Army APO mail system!) begging me not to put out the newspaper, or at least to wait until I was out of the Army.  I responded on August 3^rd with a letter scolding them for their timidity and pointing out that the whole idea of an underground newspaper was to produce it from underground while we were in the Army.  I then attempted to reassure them by describing just how far the countercultural resistance among the troops had already gone: 

“Would you believe that one of the guys has a huge poster of Ho Chi Minh hanging on the wall?  It has been there for quite some time and no one even notices it anymore. . . It is common to see peace symbols (☮) written on walls, as well as obscenities about LBJ (There is also a poster of LBJ rolling a marijuana cigarette hanging in the barracks).  When you think of the Army, you think of a Shakespearean tragedy.  Actually, it is much closer to a Sergeant Bilko comedy.”

In early August, we finished our 4-page mimeographed underground newspaper and distributed it around the company late at night, now with the help of our friend Richard Schutt.  The paper was a mix of company gossip, libertarian ideology, marijuana advocacy, criticism of the war, and humorous accounts of minor screwups and misbehaviors, especially by people in authority.  For example, the lead story was about berm guards smoking pot on duty, and the next story described a rocket attack and a botched attempt to hand out weapons in response.  We included a lengthy quote by Sen. William Proxmire criticizing the war and an anonymous poem about the moral depravity of sending young men to kill women and children.   We named our paper The Boomerang Barb—a reference to the nickname of the 191^st AHC, the Boomerangs (because “Boomerangs Always Come Back”), and a takeoff on the name of a prominent U.S. underground paper, The Berkeley Barb.  Someone (I think it was me) sent a copy of our paper to the real Berkeley Barb, which—I learned only recently—then published an article about it.  I also discovered that our paper was described in Wikipedia as one of only two GI underground newspapers published in a combat zone in Vietnam during the war—the other one being a paper called GI Says, published in the DMZ in 1969. 

The response to the Boomerang Barb was generally favorable.  Most of the guys in the company liked it, although I did hear of a couple of complaints. And there were also some predictable negative reactions.  We heard that the Colonel commanding the Battalion had threatened to court martial whomever had published the paper, but nothing came of it, and that may just have been a rumor.  I don’t remember how we reacted to that rumor, but apparently we were not deterred because about two months later we put out a second issue which included a satirical version of the official Battalion newsletter, with parodies of articles by and about Battalion personnel.  This second issue was more provocative in other ways, too, including a cartoon of a line of dogs sniffing each other’s butts with the caption “Chain of Command” and some particularly impassioned condemnations of the war, the draft, and the suppression of anti-war protesters in the U.S. 

Despite the bravado I had expressed in my letters to my parents, I was getting worried, at this time, about possible repercussions from our paper.  At the beginning of our venture, the three of us had sworn to each other that we would tell absolutely no one else that we were the ones who had put out the paper.  But gradually people began to find out, and by the time of the second issue virtually everyone in the company knew that we were the ones.  While we hadn’t sought it, this gave us a degree of status among some of the guys; and some of the reactions were surprising.  I learned that many of the officers had initially been incredulous that the Boomerang Barb could have been produced by enlisted men, and when it became clear that it had, some officers showed us a new respect.  One lieutenant asked me if I would be willing to write for a local Army publication, which I politely declined.  And another warrant officer, a helicopter pilot, approached us to express his admiration for our work.  He then shared some things that had been troubling him during the combat missions—particularly his awareness of greatly exaggerated body counts of the enemy due to multiple different military units claiming “credit” for the same bodies. 

But our new notoriety also presented a problem: we were no longer anonymous.  I think all of us recognized that we could not continue to put out the kind of provocative material we wanted to publish, and had been publishing, if everyone knew who we were.  As I had said to my parents, you can’t put out an underground newspaper—a real one in a real war—without being truly underground.  So rather than toning down our material we stopped publishing, and the Boomerang Barb never had more than those two issues.  As I will explain later, I eventually turned to producing some written articles that I hoped I could publish in the legitimate press in the U.S., perhaps as a free-lance journalist when I returned.    

At around this time, I had my first opportunity to ride in a helicopter, going to Saigon and back to drop somebody off.  This gave me the chance to sit in the door gunner position with an open and unimpeded view of Vietnam from above, but at a lower altitude than I had seen it from in the plane coming into the country.  It was fascinating to see the city of Saigon from above—and to experience, once again, in the open air of the helicopter, the same fragrance I had experienced in the Philippines and in Bien Hoa.  The center of the city had several large buildings, but the outskirts were filled with tiny hootches crowded together; and the Saigon River flowed in big lazy loops across the whole panorama.  The countryside was, again, filled with farm plots, rice paddies, and patches of jungle.  But this time I saw something I had not seen before: countless bomb craters scattered in different places across the landscape—sometimes in the jungle, sometimes in the farms, and sometimes in little villages along rivers.  

What, in God’s name, I wonder now, prompted us to such madness?  

          Throughout this entire period, we kept hearing that most of the units at Bearcat were going to be moved down to Dong Tam, on the Mekong River, where the bulk of the 9^th Division had now been stationed.  In two letters to my family on July 9^th, I had indicated that Dong Tam would be safe, but earlier, on June 3^rd, before I knew about the move, I had written in a letter to my brother that the Mekong Delta was a bad place to be.  I see now that, unbeknownst to me, my brother had passed that letter on to my father, who was saving my correspondence—so my reassurances must have seemed transparently hollow.  In any case, the Dong Tam move seemed more and more imminent, and in mid-October it finally became a definite plan.  It also may have been the case that the war was escalating in the whole southern region of South Vietnam at that time.  A bit earlier, there had been talk of relocating someone to a small outpost in Tay Ninh.  In this case that “someone” was rumored to be me, which was worrisome because Tay Ninh was near the Cambodian border in a very “hot” area.  I was relieved when that plan was dropped.  But there continued to be red alerts and occasional rocket or mortar attacks.  I remember a particularly scary attack one morning while it was still dark.  The explosions from the incoming rockets were quite loud and got progressively louder with each successive hit—and the Vietnamese KP girls were screaming with fright, which made the whole scene starker and more surreal.  Most often, though, when there was an attack, the VC would just lob one or two mortars somewhere into the base, and not especially close to us. 

          In late October, we began the long-awaited move to Dong Tam.  We tore down every structure, packed everything into conexes, and loaded the conexes onto a convoy of trucks.  The move itself occurred on one day, probably Oct. 31^st or Nov. 1^st, as the convoy proceeded west to Saigon, through that city, and then south to the base at Dong Tam, located about 4 miles west of the city of My Tho on the Mekong River.  I enjoyed the move, riding in the back of a truck, where I could observe and photograph the landscape, small villages, American camps, Vietnamese working or fishing, and, as we passed through it, the city of Saigon.  In a letter home a few days later, I described a brief stop in Saigon:

“. . . a bunch of little kids crowded around us and begged us for money and food and gum and cigarettes, and some of them tried to sell us things.  They discovered that we had a box of C-rations in the truck (all Vietnamese know what C-rations are), and soon there was a big mob of kids all trying to get our C-rations.  We fought them off as well as we could, but by hook or by crook (or by trading) they managed to deplete our entire supply.  Finally, we started throwing ice water on them to make them go away, and that held them off better.  I took a picture of some of the kids with my Swinger (10 sec. polaroid) and gave it to one of the little kids, but they all started fighting over it, and one particularly nasty little brat wouldn’t give up, and finally the picture got torn up.  I also bought a watch from a girl for $10.  Another guy got one exactly like it and it stopped running the next day, but mine still works.”

After Saigon, the land got more rural and less safe, and one of our helicopter gunships escorted us, circling above the convey the rest of the way. 

Like Bearcat, the Dong Tam base was a large one, surrounded by a cleared area and then a wall of jungle.  I continued to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week in the Maintenance office, and my letters home are full of complaints about how boring it was, which may have been partly intended to reassure my parents.  One interesting thing did happen, though.  One day in November, a new arrival came up to me and said “Did you go to Hoover High School?”  I looked up, and there was a guy I had gone to school with, named Doug Crawford.  Not only had he been assigned to the same unit and the same office I worked in, he was also given the bunk right over mine!  Furthermore, we were both good friends with another guy at home, Russell Anderson.  Russell had avoided the draft by joining the National Guard, and had given us lots of advice about the military.  Now we had fun writing him together to say hi from Vietnam.  Doug joined my circle of friends, especially Schutt and Morrison. 

I was able to help Doug out in a peculiar situation that developed shortly after he arrived.  Another new arrival claimed that Doug was actually an Army C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Division) agent sent to expose drug use in our company.  Supposedly this other new arrival had seen Doug in his previous unit.  This was a ridiculous claim, but it immediately evoked paranoia among some of the pot smokers in the company—a perfect example of the kind of rumor that could spread like wildfire in the Army, especially where drugs were concerned.  I was able to quell the rumor, not only because I knew Doug from home but also because I had “street cred” from my role in publishing the Boomerang Barb. 

When the holidays came, I complained in letters home about having worked for 6 straight months without a day off, including both Christmas and New Year’s.  I do remember one bright spot, though:  At midnight on New Years Eve, thousands of GIs all over Vietnam, including all across our base, fired off guns, flares, and any other miscellaneous explosives they had managed to get their hands on—and it was quite a spectacular show.  During this week, Bob Hope came to Dong Tam and we did actually get a day off to see his show.  I complained about it in my letters, but as I recall it was kind of fun, and—irrational as it was—I subsequently had a lifelong irrepressible affection for Ann Margaret for coming to visit us at Christmas.  One other odd thing I remember is that throughout the performance, two helicopters were flying outside the perimeter, shooting rockets into the jungle.  I later heard that they were from our company, and that the pilots had been ordered to go out and shoot the rockets randomly, apparently just to show off. 

          We were allowed one R&R (Rest and Recreation) during the year.  A couple of months earlier, I had requested to go on R&R in January, and the timing proved to be good because by January I was feeling seriously burned out.  While most of the guys I knew put in for places like Hawaii or Japan or Sydney, Australia, I had put in for the island of Penang, in Malaysia, because I wanted to go to the least Westernized place I could find.  On the way to the airport in Bien Hoa, I stopped in Saigon to visit my friend and neighbor from home, Dalton Siirila.  Dalt had a great situation, staying at a hotel in Saigon and working for MACV—but he had an awful job:  sending letters of condolence to the families of soldiers who died in Vietnam.  Dalt and I took a walking tour of Saigon.  The only thing that I now remember about that day is seeing the American embassy, which still had bullet holes in the wall from the Tet Offensive.  I arrived in Penang on Jan 12^th with a handful of other GIs from Vietnam for a 5-day stay. 

Penang is an island with a complex history involving Chinese, Indian, and British  influences, and with much for any visitor to experience.  But I have to confess that the first thing my fellow GIs and I did when we left our hotel in Georgetown was to head for a bar where we could find prostitutes.  If this seems out of character, I can only say that among GIs in Vietnam this practice was so ordinary, at least with unmarried men, that doing anything else would have seemed downright peculiar.  (Married GIs, on the other hand, often arranged to meet their wives in Hawaii, or perhaps Hong Kong or Japan.)  At the time, I was naïve about the dehumanizing forces of poverty and colonialism that forced so many young women into prostitution, and the exploitation and brutality that many of them experienced.  Instead, I fantasized a nice relationship, for a few days, with a sweet girl who would be a willing partner in affirming my masculinity and giving me welcome relief from a horrible war.  Amazingly, and against all odds, that is exactly what I did get.  She was a Chinese girl who took the first name of Sally (a professional alias) with a light-hearted and easy-going character, and who, I soon came to realize, genuinely liked me, as I quickly and genuinely came to like her.  At one point she briefly told me about some of her experiences with other soldiers, and I learned that she had special feelings for a young lieutenant.  I envied him a bit but felt no jealousy.  I was glad that she had someone special. 

I should add that I took one day alone, to walk around Georgetown in an attempt to see what the “real” city was like.  I had to duck out the back of the hotel to avoid the trishaw drivers who always hung around in front, insisting on managing any exploration I might want to do.  Even had I rebuffed them face to face, I anticipated that they might follow me around making suggestions about what to see.  Exploring Georgetown on my own, however, was an odd experience.  I walked through some of the poorer areas of the town and quickly realized that there was no way for an American GI, even without uniform or trishaw, to be inconspicuous or incognito.  People glanced at me strangely.  At one point, I entered a small shop to see what it was like, or for that matter what was being sold there (there was no sign in front, nor any goods).  The man and woman who owned the shop were surprised to see someone like me walking in, but they smiled and greeted me with friendly bows.  I looked around at the merchandise and saw that it consisted of various foods I did not recognize, sold in bulk without signs or anything else to identify them.  At that point I realized how inappropriate my presence there was, and I bowed my thanks to the owners and quickly left, feeling awkward and embarrassed.  I remember nothing else from that day. 

On the other days, Sally showed me around the island and introduced me to some tourist spots like the Monkey Gardens, the Snake Temple, the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, and the Eden Café, which had the best food I ever had tasted.  We also went to a movie theater showing a silly Chinese comedy with two sets of subtitles, one in English and the other in an inscrutable other language—presumably Malay.  We took a cab around the island, stopped at beaches, and spent time in the hotel room.  After our time together, I left Penang and never saw Sally again, although I have often wondered what ever happened to her and what kind of life she eventually lived.  Later in my Vietnam tour, I had a shorter leave to go to an in-country resort town called Vung Tau.  I went with a friend, and, as with R&R, we quickly found prostitutes.  This experience was completely different.  “My” girl was strikingly beautiful, but her demeanor was quiet, passive, compliant, and—I now realize—very depressed.  I later came to understand that this one-night encounter revealed a completely different side of prostitution than the one I had seen in Penang—especially, prostitution in a Third World country occupied by the military forces of a distant world power. 

When I returned from R&R, the Army, with its mud, its dirt, its barbed wire and its drab bases, seemed especially ugly and desolate.  I immersed myself in any books I could find and began to think about my return home.  My letters at this time focus more and more on the money I was saving up and things I could buy while I still had access to discounts in Vietnam.  This was not just pragmatic and transactional.  It was also a way of keeping on superficial topics and avoiding writing about the war, which was definitely getting worse in Dong Tam.  I have already mentioned the gunner who had thrown rocks at our maid but later had confessed to me the fear he was living under.  Similarly, my friend who had left the Operations office to become a gunner told me at around this time that things had changed—that the flights were now going into the same dangerous area with the same brutal fire directed at them day after day, and he told me that the stress was becoming almost unbearable. 

At the base, too, things were getting worse.  By late February, rockets or mortars were landing on the base regularly.  I later learned that this was part of a second Tet offensive, initiated thirteen lunar months after the first one.  Often, these attacks were isolated hit-and-run incidents, with shells landing nowhere near our company.  But each one had the effect of bringing the whole base to a stop for at least a short time.  One day there were eight such attacks in 24 hours.  This was part of a larger enemy push in the area, and it was receiving increasing attention in the press at home, and from my parents.  Thus, my letters alternated between superficial talk about buying a car and determined reassurances to my parents.  Regarding the latter, my letter of Feb. 25^th started with this:

“No doubt you’ve heard about the new offensive here, but nothing very drastic happened at Dong Tam as usual; altho we could hear lots of distant explosions 2 nights ago.  Then later that night some shells hit a fueling area on the other side of camp about 2-3 miles from here.  I don’t think they did much damage but they started a fire that burned for hours and hours before it finally went out or was put out.  (Don’t worry, there’s no fuel around here.)  Nothing else happened.” 

And my March 23^rd letter responds to worried comments from my parents:

“Don’t worry so much when you hear about offensives around Saigon.  “Around Saigon” usually means 40 or 50 miles northwest or west which means 90-100 miles from here.  Even our furthest-flung helicopters don’t go over there.”

But it then goes on to acknowledge:

“They made some air strikes not far from here last night.  Every time they dropped a bomb it shook the ground (about like a big sonic boom).  They do that sort of thing every now and then.” 

          On March 26^th the Viet Cong mortared Dong Tam and started a fire that blew up the base’s ammunition dump, an action was reported throughout the U.S.  I had just gone to sleep and awoke briefly to the loudest explosion I’d ever heard.  There were two more explosions, but I slept through them, as I had, by then, developed the ability to sleep through almost any explosion that didn’t sound like an incoming shell (the faintest sound of an incoming shell, however, would instantly wake me up).  The ammo dump was a couple of miles away, but I was told that the force of the explosion had knocked people in our company off their feet and torn a door off its hinges.  The next day, I went with some friends to look at the site and later wrote a description of it (now added to the Earlham collection).  My parents had heard about the explosion, so my next letter, on March 30^th, begins:

“Sorry you got scared about that ammunition dump getting blown up.  Don’t worry about me, I’m alive and kicking.  The ammunition dump is on the other side of the base (which is very big), so no one around here got hurt.  It really wasn’t’ as bad as they probably made it sound.  Ammo dumps are always in the middle of large clear areas for just that reason.  I went over that day and talked to some guys that were right across the street from it when it blew up & they were OK.”

This was true, but the explosion had also killed 3 people and wounded 69 others, a fact which my parents must have known.  Furthermore, my parents continued to see things in the news that frightened them, a situation that was not helped by occasional lurid and exaggerated accounts in the media, or by the Army’s corresponding penchant for minimizing bad news while simultaneously imposing secrecy.  My letter of April 9^th was, in part, an attempt to help my parents cope with these conflicting messages:

“I’m beginning to gather from your letters that you must think that this place got attacked bad.  Especially that part in Time Magazine about getting “so torn up by hostile fire” etc., etc.  We all had a good laugh about that.  Really, it wasn’t very bad.  The ammunition dump blew up in 3 separate explosions, and I slept thru the last 2, so you know it couldn’t have been that bad!  Nothing has happened since then.” 

But if my letters attempted to present a balance between truth and reassurances with regard to these media-reported events, they remained completely silent about how bad some other things had become.  By the end of February, shells were falling on the base nearly every night.  On the night of March 1^st-– March 2^nd, a particularly heavy mortar attack occurred.  At 1:00 AM, the first volley slammed down on the flight area of our company, damaging at least ten helicopters and wounding a flight line guard.  The rest of us made for the bunkers, waited for the rockets to stop, and eventually returned to the barracks or to our duty stations.  Later, two more volleys of mortars came down on the company.  The first and worst of these occurred at 1:50 AM, when one of the mortars exploded in the company’s Operations office, killing everyone there, except one person who was seriously wounded and lost an eye.  In total, six men were killed, including the company commander, Major Petric, two lieutenants, and three enlisted men.  I was not well acquainted with most of them, but I did know the Operations clerk, Carl Douglas, a very sweet African American young man who had been killed instantly.  Several months earlier, he had been the latest new arrival who had taken my original position in the Operations office.  As time went on, it gradually dawned on me that had it not been for the multiple personnel switches that moved me from the Operations office into the Maintenance office, I, and not Carl, would have been the one killed that night.  Over the years this has troubled me considerably, especially at times like Memorial Day when I think about the deaths in our company, and Carl’s in particular.  I have ruminated about the reasons for the personnel switches and replayed in my mind the different ways they might have occurred, but never with complete resolution. 

The day after the attack, I went to the Operations building and observed the results of the attack.  The furniture had been removed from the building, including a metal desk which was now riddled with shrapnel holes the size of golf balls. The remains of the dead had been removed, but there was dried blood everywhere, and bits of flesh remained on the walls.  The air was permeated with the smell of blood and flesh.  I left, and I attempted to turn my mind to other things, but the scene kept replaying in my mind.

As time went on, I focused on the future.  I had already decided to become a journalist, and I began putting energy into getting equipment to do some interviews with GIs before I left Vietnam.  On March 4^th, two days after the attack, I wrote a letter to my parents.  It was short and focused almost entirely on the car and tape recorders I was considering buying.  I made no mention of the Mar. 2^nd attack, the deaths, or my view of the aftermath.  The immediate response of the company to the attack was to begin construction of a new bunker, much larger and more secure than the one that we had been using.  I had never seen the men work so hard and so fast on anything as on that new bunker.  My personal response was aimed more at reengaging my usual coping device of irreverent and sometimes dark humor.  I composed a cheery but morbid little song to the tune of “Sugartime” about mortar attacks (“Mortars in the morning, mortars in the evening, mortars at suppertime…”), which got a couple of laughs from a couple of people.  And I thought it would be amusing to name the new bunker “Ellsworth,” after Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam.  A friend and I went out one night and painted the name ELLSWORTH in large, capital letters on the bunker.  The company leadership did not appreciate the humor, and I was ordered to scrub the name off the bunker. 

By mid-March, my tour in Vietnam was nearing the end, and I undertook more journalistic projects.  By now I had bought a small reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I proceeded to interview two of my friends who were gunners, one on a slick, and the other on a gunship.  The interviews covered a number of aspects of their experiences in combat, including the kinds of missions they flew, the problems of distinguishing combatants from civilians, the rules of engagement and their violations, the use of drugs, and their feelings about the war and about killing.  Of some significance, one of the interviewees also described what he had heard about secret missions flown by our neighboring company, the 240^th AHC, into Cambodia long before any public acknowledgement of U.S. involvement in that country.  (I also mentioned this in one of my early letters, on May 22^nd, 1968).  Transcripts of these two interviews are included in the Earlham collection.  In addition to the interviews, I wrote three short articles that I thought newspapers might have an interest in publishing, two about mortar attacks and the one previously mentioned about the Dong Tam ammunition dump explosion.    

I don’t remember much about my last weeks in Vietnam.  I had previously learned that draftees like me, who had served in Vietnam and who returned from Vietnam prior to the end of their required two years of service, would be discharged early—immediately upon reaching the U.S.  Of course, I was delighted to learn this, but I began to sense that it would present me with a jarring transformation from war zone to ordinary life, with nothing intermediate.  I focused my energy on preliminary job searches and readmission to UCLA. My recollection is that the mortar attacks were diminishing at this time, but I could not forget the soldier who had been shot in the head on the last day of his tour, so I felt that nothing could be taken for granted.  At last, at the end of April, it was time for my departure.  I said good-bye to my friends, caught a transport to the airport at Bien Hoa, and boarded the plane for home, which was packed with other GIs returning to America.  When the wheels of the plane left the ground, all of us erupted into cheers and applause.  A year or two later, I met a stewardess who told me that the GIs on every plane leaving Vietnam did the same thing. 

In some ways, the flight back to the U.S. was as strange as the flight to Vietnam had been—only now, instead of a long night, we had day and night alternating at an accelerated pace, as though time were trying to make up for the year we had lost.  When we arrived at Oakland, and I subsequently arranged for a bus ride for Santa Barbara, my first impression of the United States was how neat, clean and orderly everything seemed, and how grubby, dirty, out of place, and even contaminated, I felt.  When the bus entered onto the freeway I was disconcerted by how fast 70 mph seemed.  I had planned my arrival home as a surprise, since the return and discharge process had gone more quickly than my parents or I had expected, and of course, when I arrived everyone was overjoyed.  But I was also experiencing a sense of awkwardness with my return from war, a sense that was to grow and permeate many aspects of my life over the next few years.  Early on, I told my parents that things had not been as safe and uneventful as I had portrayed them, and I told them a little about the mortar attacks.  However, I refrained from too many details, and as time went on I sensed that those kinds of things were not really appropriate to talk about in any kind of company.  There was simply no shared basis to do so.  Years later my sister said to me “Do you realize that after you came back from Vietnam, you never said anything for an entire year?” 

People who knew I’d been to Vietnam picked up on my silence about the war and, not knowing how to respond, mirrored it.  When I mentioned my Vietnam tour to those who had not known about it, they would invariably ask “How long were you there?” which repeatedly irritated me because it betrayed a failure to have learned the simplest facts about the war:  the typical tour of duty in Vietnam was always one year, and I resented that they hadn’t absorbed even that much.  Still worse was the very common response I received: “You don’t seem like the kind of person who would have gone there.” Just who, I wondered, was the “kind of person” who would have gone there?  I would often respond by snapping back something like “Oh, they took all kinds of people!”  But I would also feel bad because I knew that whatever stereotypes of Vietnam veterans those people held, they were also trying to give me a “pass” in some way.  I should add that I never experienced, not even once, any ill-treatment from anyone, despite repeated accusations by supporters of the war that Vietnam veterans were spat upon and called “baby killers.”  While I can’t rule out that this happened to some veterans, all I ever experienced was well-meaning sympathy, or, more commonly, awkward silence. 

My efforts to break into journalism were disappointing.  During the summer of 1969, I did get a weekend job working for a citywide news service in Los Angeles, but the stories I was given to cover were sparse and trivial, and I was finally laid off because there was not enough news on the weekends.  I made some attempts to publish my Vietnam stories and interviews, but I was perplexed to discover how little interest anyone showed in them.  In fact, during the year I was gone, there had been a subtle but palpable shift in public attitudes toward the war.  Opposition to it had now become notably widespread, but I sensed an even wider-spread fatigue and—paradoxically—a disinterest in hearing anything more about the war.  I talked with people at the Los Angeles Free Press, a nationally recognized anti-war newspaper, about my interviews with the gunners.  At this point, I had combined both interviews into a long piece in formal journalistic style.  But the Free Press editors were interested only in whether I knew of any new atrocities in Vietnam like the Mi Lai massacre.  Eventually, I offered my interview piece to the UCLA Daily Bruin, where I had published my op ed before the war, and had continued publishing articles after I returned to college.  The Bruin editors had some interest in the piece and offered to hold onto it and to consider publishing it at a later time.  Months went by and nothing happened.  I finally asked them to return the piece to me.  They looked at me blankly, searched around, and then confessed that they had lost it—my one and only copy.  I searched locally for jobs in journalism, which proved to be few to nonexistent.  But my final disillusionment came when I contacted the Los Angeles Times to inquire about a possible job.  By this time I had a portfolio that included the articles I had written in Vietnam, my door-gunner interview transcripts, and many other stories I had covered for the Bruin, including some in-depth investigative pieces, which I thought might hold some interest for them.  They told me not to bother, that they only hired journalists who had at least ten years of experience on a daily metropolitan newspaper.  A couple of weeks later I learned that they hired one of the Daily Bruin editors, who had no such experience but had gotten to know someone at the Times personally. 

My disillusionment with journalism was matched by my disillusionment with political science, which had demonstrated an utter failure to confront the disastrous policies that had led to and perpetuated the war in Vietnam.  At the same time, my interest in the field of psychology was now growing, and I changed my major accordingly.  I had experienced some real benefits from my own psychotherapy, both before and after my time in Vietnam.  Moreover, I had had a lifelong interest in psychodynamic theory and dreams, which had led me to record my dreams ever since adolescence.  And it was in attending to my dreams that I first realized how much trouble I was having letting go of my experiences in Vietnam.  At that time in history, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had not yet been introduced into the lexicon of psychology, but the phenomenon was well-known.  Throughout the time I was actually in Vietnam, even during the worst times, I had rarely dreamed about the war.  I did have one recurring dream in Vietnam, however, and that was that I had returned home and nobody was there.  Several months after I actually returned home, I began having dreams where that theme was reversed:  In these dreams, I found myself back in Vietnam, for reasons that were not entirely clear.  In some dreams, it seemed that I had been recalled to duty, or had been drafted again, or that I had never left Vietnam—and in other dreams, the reason for my return was confusing, or obscure, or it was important but I couldn’t remember what it was.  In most of these dreams, the friends I had had in Vietnam were no longer there, and I felt alone, but in some dreams, even a year or more later, they were still there, and had been there all along, and I was glad to see them again.  In most of the dreams I was overtly afraid of the danger I was in, yet in some of them I had mixed feelings, and was, at least partly, glad to be back.  Mostly, though, I wanted to go home.  When I awoke from these dreams I often had a strong conviction, lasting several seconds, that I was still in Vietnam.  I had these dreams numerous times for the first couple of years I was back, sometimes as much as 4-5 times a week.  Later, a few of the dreams became very frightening, like the following one I recorded in July, 1971:

“In VN—time had passed and I was coming home soon.  I was with other people. . . We were going to be shelled, I was pretty sure.  We were in a building that looked like we were under a house. . . It was the beginning of Jan.—maybe Feb.—1969.  There were a few shells falling outside. . . I began to worry about getting maimed or killed, worrying more and more, though there were just a few distant shells. . . I was digging myself in a kind of a little hole.  The others were laughing and joking, which I found hard to comprehend & faintly embarrassing.  The shelling was getting worse—much worse.  I was digging as deep as I could with my hands (without much success), trying to protect every part of me from flying shrapnel . . . I was more scared now, frantically trying to cover all of my body.  Outside, the day was dark and damp, and there was the old familiar . . . creepy, scary Vietnam atmosphere. . . The fear was thick in my stomach, like a palpable thing. . . I kept thinking about how easily I could be ripped to pieces by one of those explosions out there. . . The shells were falling thick and fast now, almost like rain. . . Someone had a radio on, it was playing cheery music and, absurdly, the downpouring shells were falling in time to the music.”  

I woke up in a fright and recorded the dream, and I also included a comment noting that I had had Vietnam dreams several times during the past week.  They had started just after I had told someone about the strange abruptness of my trip to Vietnam and my trip back home.  In my comment I elaborated the feeling:

“One day you’re leading your normal life, and the next day—wham!—you’re in the middle of Nam.  Once they’ve done that to you, you never feel completely secure again, because you know how close it really is.” 

I had other reactions too.  One of them occurred perhaps a year after I had returned from Vietnam.  I walked into a butcher’s shop and suddenly recognized the smell in that shop as the same one I had experienced in the Operations building after the mortar attack.  I became instantly nauseated.  Another year or so after this, I was talking to some friends late one night about coming back from Vietnam.  I started to tell them about the butcher shop experience, and I was astonished to find that I suddenly couldn’t speak.  I became overwhelmed, hyperventilating, and finally managed to croak out that I couldn’t talk about it.  Still later I tried, again, to talk about this to a therapist, and this time was I seized by weird, compulsive laughter.  I knew enough psychology to recognize these as posttraumatic intrusive symptoms, something I had never experienced before—a long delayed reaction to chronic stress and the horror of the mortar attack and its aftermath.  Eventually, I could talk about it, but I continued to find it difficult. 

Trauma is a puzzling thing.  Throughout my whole time in the Army and in Vietnam, I rarely felt much fear consciously.  The only times I felt truly afraid had nothing to do with rocket or mortar attacks.  They were the periods when I thought I might be assigned to carry a radio in an infantry unit, or to man an outpost in Tay Ninh, or be transferred to the gun platoon.  Otherwise, I felt reasonably normal.  Someone once said “War is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror,” and that’s a pretty good description of getting shelled in Vietnam—but with one significant qualification.  The fear of incoming rockets or mortars for a few seconds is drastically reduced if there is something you can do during those few seconds.  And for us, what we could do was to run like hell for a bunker, where we would be relatively safe.  So I succeeded, for a long time, in banishing from my mind the moments of terror at being shelled, as well as the horror of the aftermath of the deaths of my fellow soldiers.  Those emotions returned only months or years later in recurring dreams and confounding symptoms.  But for the gunners and the pilots, and for the infantry, and for the others, both American and Vietnamese, who often had to live for hours, days or weeks with the very real possibility of imminent death, the terror must have been incomparably worse.  How much worse, too, must have been the posttraumatic reactions for some of those people. 

Before leaving this topic, I will mention one final reaction to my Vietnam experience:  anger.  Earlier, I had been angry, of course, about the war, about the draft, and about the government’s lies.  I had sometimes expressed this anger in controlled or indirect ways, like my op ed in the Daily Bruin, my participation in protests, and my irreverent humor.  But after Vietnam, something had changed in me.  That anger was now building into a seething rage.  Furthermore, it was receiving affirmation, every day, in the now overt and ubiquitous public criticisms of the war, including by GIs like myself.  The anger of my fellow Vietnam veterans felt especially good and provided a kind of camaraderie.  I became acutely aware of this one day shortly after I returned from Vietnam.  I was staying in a large house with several other college age men.  One of them was a guy I barely knew from a few years ago—but he was now a newly returned Vietnam veteran like me.  We had said no more than a few words to each other, but one day we were sitting silently in the living room watching a news story on TV about “fragging,” the shocking practice, now being reported in U.S. media, in which some particularly aggrieved soldiers in Vietnam were murdering highly resented superiors during battle—especially superiors who were seen as foolishly gung-ho and endangering their troops.  The news story featured an interview with a sergeant who complained with bitter outrage and apparent self-pity about being threatened by his own men and coming to fear them.  My fellow veteran and I shared exactly the same reaction.  We both spontaneously burst into laughter. 

I became outspoken and looked for opportunities to vent my rage in public discussions or arguments.  I began writing searing letters to politicians or journalists who supported the war and signing the letters with my name and Army serial number.  I now regretted that I had not refused the draft and gone to prison.  At about this time, some “trial balloons” were floated by pro-war politicians about recalling men in my position to serve additional time in Vietnam, since we were technically still in the inactive reserves.  After my initial outrage, I actually began to hope that the government would do exactly this, because by this time I would absolutely have refused.   I no longer had the slightest fear of public opprobrium, or arrest, or imprisonment, and, in fact, I longed for the opportunity to give the whole corrupt, warmongering establishment the finger.

          But I never got that opportunity.  The years passed by.  The war wound down—for America, that is, but not for the Vietnamese, especially the ones we had supported and then deserted—until the whole misguided venture finally collapsed.  Then the Vietnamese began rebuilding and Americans began forgetting.  My Vietnam dreams mostly disappeared, although some of them still occurred more than 20 years later.  My attitudes mellowed.  When I married, I became a step-father, and I made a conscious decision not to talk much about the war around my son because I did not want to say anything that might glorify it.  I never realized how futile this strategy was until he announced one day that he was joining the Marines, leaving my wife and I just as stunned as my parents had been when I had made my own announcement.  I tried to talk him out of it, and, when that failed, to persuade him, at least, to join a more technically-oriented branch of the service, but that, too, was no use.  Would it have done any good if I had shared more of my own experiences?  I doubt it. 

          Despite my opposition to the war, I never felt anything negative toward my fellow soldiers who supported it.  On the contrary, I respected them for putting their lives on the line for what they believed, and my other anti-war friends in the Army felt the same way.  The only people I truly despised were the politicians and other prominent people who actively promoted the war while making sure that they and their children evaded service, especially service under enemy fire—the so-called “chicken hawks.”  That name says it all, and requires nothing more from me.  For the rest of us I feel sad.  As I age, I see the national memory of Vietnam disappearing.  Public discussions of war and peace rarely mention Vietnam anymore, and it won’t be long until no one who lived that war will be left.  It will become nothing more than an ancient curiosity, barely noticed by succeeding generations who will have their own wars to fight and their own honesty and dishonesty to navigate.