Eye Corps: Coming of Age at the Dmz

By Jack Walker

This is the story of a young man who was drafted into the army in 1964 and who ended up in Vietnam as a marine recon company commander at the DMZ in 1967. While a war story, it is more importantly about growing up in a combat zone with the help of senior mentors and a bit of luck, while dealing with a tenacious enemy as well as politicians thousands of miles from the battlefield. It is also a portrait of America in the troubled 1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524500351

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© 2016 by Jack Walker.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2016907830

ISBN:            Hardcover               978-1-5245-0037-5

                      Softcover                 978-1-5245-0036-8

                      eBook                      978-1-5245-0035-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 05/25/2016

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Contents

Why This Book?

PART ONE THE GETTING READY

Chapter 1 On the Bottom

Chapter 2 Times Square

Chapter 3 Adieu Virginity I

Chapter 4 Meeting Chesty Puller

Chapter 5 Heading West

Chapter 6 Camp Lejeune

Chapter 7 Camp Pendleton

Chapter 8 Crossing the Pacific

PART TWO INTO DANANG

Chapter 9 Camp Reasoner

Chapter 10 Jed Is Dead?

Chapter 11 Happy Valley

Chapter 12 Louie Ville

Chapter 13 Adieu Virginity II

Chapter 14 Court-Martial

Chapter 15 Dick Done

Chapter 16 The Battleship New Jersey

Chapter 17 Playing Not to Lose

Chapter 18 Dunne’s Funeral Parlor

PART THREE AT THE DMZ

Chapter 19 Why We Here?

Chapter 20 Rock Pile

Chapter 21 Hypnosis

Chapter 22 Leech Country

Chapter 23 Fever of Unknown Origin

Chapter 24 Field Promotion

Chapter 25 Kuala Lumpur

Chapter 26 Cordon and Search

Chapter 27 Grenade!

Chapter 28 Laurel and Hardy

Chapter 29 Incoming!

Chapter 30 General Truong’s Apology

Chapter 31 Helicopter Valley

Chapter 32 Presidential Unit Citation

Chapter 33 Wipeout!

PART FOUR BACK IN THE WORLD

Chapter 34 Mallomars

Chapter 35 Eighth and Eye

Chapter 36 Lynda Bird

Chapter 37 Home Sweet Quantico

Chapter 38 March on the Pentagon

Chapter 39 Stonewall Tour

Chapter 40 Resurrection of the Bodies

Chapter 41 Epilogue: 1968

Coda

Appendix

For my beloved bro, Paul Ronald Walker.

DEDICATION

To the dead, wounded, and psychologically scarred victims of the American War (1955–1975), as the Vietnamese people call it today.

This book focuses on Americans who served in Vietnam and their families and friends back home whose lives were shattered and dreams dashed by the war. But while 58,200 Americans tragically died in Vietnam, 3.5 million Vietnamese also died—sixty times the American deaths in Vietnam.

As a rule, history is written by the winners. The Vietnam War is an exception to that rule.

AUTHOR’S CAUTION AND A PLEDGE

A word about memory, memoirs, and the writing of history. Here’s an apt observation by one of the great historians of the twentieth century, C. V. Wedgwood:

History is, in fact, the fragmentary record of often inexplicable actions of innumerable bewildered human beings, set down and interpreted according to their own limitations by other human beings, equally bewildered.

—C.V. Wedgwood, History and Hope (1987)

This book is a memoir, that poor cousin of history, and so Wedgwood’s points pertain. Here are three corollaries.

First, never trust a vet, or any other person for that matter, describing his or her combat experience. There’s always an inclination to embroider.

Second, memory morphs. As we tell stories over time to different people, the stories, shall I say, evolve. The events described below happened fifty years ago.

Third, a note about my attempt at accuracy. Alas, there are large holes in my recollection, although I’m amazed at how many details bubbled up once I started writing. Several characters and events in this book—and certainly the dialogue—are best-effort reconstructions. I combine some events and characters and can only approximate timing and sequencing. I also change most names, including those few I remember, to protect people (including myself). Still, I believe that most of what follows happened more or less as described, and the rest could have happened.

But it’s all a kind of truth. As Tim O’Brien said in his luminous The Things They Carried, I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Slippery slope though.

My pledge is that I’ll do my best to convey the truth of—and my feeling about—my experience. Otherwise, this won’t work for me.

WHY THIS BOOK?

Then you have done a braver thing

Than all the Worthies did;

And a braver thence will spring,

Which is, to keep that hid.

John Donne, from The Undertaking

T his is an account of my life between November 1964 and April 1968. I spent part of that time in Vietnam as a Marine infantry officer, but this is not so much a war story as a growing-up story.

I started writing this book at age seventy-two, on Veterans Day 2014, fifty years after a very low point in my young life. By late 1964, I had lost my direction and was living at home with my parents in their small Bronx apartment. They couldn’t afford to carry me, so I made a deal: my childhood bedroom for most of my earnings from working odd, pointless jobs, sometimes two at once, plus helping around the house. My younger brother, Paul, was still in college, and my parents were struggling to make ends meet. Two months earlier, I had received a draft notice, which limited my freedom to be indecisive. I thought it was awful news. Greetings . . ., it said. Greetings my ass. But as it turned out . . . well, that’s what this book is about.

***

What took me so long to write this down? For decades, we Vietnam vets were persona non grata, and we kept our heads below the bunker line. Then 9/11/01 came along and transformed America into a war machine and vets into heroes. All vets. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the words Thank you for your service. It was in Mississippi in 2007, forty years after I said tam biêt—good-bye—to Vietnam. My wife and I were on a road trip. We were having breakfast at a B&B in Vicksburg, formerly an antebellum mansion on a high bluff overlooking the mighty Mississippi. I was chatting with a white man with a thin face, bald head, deep drawl, and serious dark eyes. I made out, not without difficulty, that he had been teaching history to poor black high school kids in the Mississippi Delta for thirty years. Suddenly shifting from amiability to solemnity, he asked whether I’d served in the military. I said yes.

Marine Corps?

Yes.

Vietnam?

Yes.

Semper Fi. Pick you out of a crowd, sir. Which surprised me. That wasn’t my self-image, although somehow former Marines are able to recognize one another. Then he thanked me for my service. I was stunned. I felt emotional—all I could do was nod appreciation.

I’d leveraged my vet status just once in my life, when I applied for GI Bill help with law school. It simply wasn’t a flag to fly back in the day, and I’d long since grown used to that. Now, suddenly, I was off America’s shit list because of Osama bin Laden.

It took time to adjust to my newly accepted status. Was I ready to excavate the buried memories of 1964–1968? It was an unsettling prospect. I had no idea what would turn up. There was no lack of dusty artifacts in my closets. I kept a patrol notebook in Vietnam and took many pictures. My thousand-plus slides sat in shoeboxes for decades. Recently, I had them digitized: I’ve patched several dozen photos into this book. I also kept maps, dog tags, a cigarette lighter, a plaque, and even my jungle boots, still dusty with orange VN clay. Years ago, my college roommate returned letters I’d sent him from Vietnam. I read a few and stuck them away. When I digitized the slides, I read those and other Vietnam-era letters. And finally, my cousin Dan Murray was editor of the Notre Dame campus magazine when I was in Vietnam. With my permission, he excerpted and published a number of my letters in a long article. I still have that magazine.

This is a story I’ve not told in full, not even to myself. There’s a risk here—I have a settled view of my experience. Like most combat vets, I don’t easily talk about it because of survivor guilt—what about the guys who didn’t make it, didn’t get to have a family, listen to music, go to ball games? These were my mentors, my buddies, my kids. I had their backs, they mine. When I visit their names on the profoundly affecting Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in DC, I tear up, still. It’s stunningly unfair. The other stopper is that I killed people, directly, indirectly, sometimes thoughtlessly, recklessly. Hard to deal with that, even if it was my sworn duty. And to top it off, we lost the damn war. The whole experience challenges comprehension. Did it really happen?

PART ONE

THE GETTING READY

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

William Butler Yeats, from Oedipus at Colonus

CHAPTER 1

ON THE BOTTOM

A ll my life I’ve claimed that my earliest memory was of V-J Day, or more likely the day after, which was August 15, 1945. I was three years old. The day was bright and sunny. I picture my mother’s brothers, Al in his Army uniform and Richie in his Navy uniform, celebrating the end of World War II by throwing things—confetti?—out the window of our small, rent-controlled (forty dollars a month!), fifth-story apartment in Parkchester in the Bronx. I remember laughter and think I remember singing as well, although my Irish dad was always singing. My baby brother Paul was on my mother’s lap, and I was parading around waving a little American flag. I saw tears on my mother’s cheeks. That may be why I remember the moment. Mom rarely cried. There are no pictures of the event.

I cling to that memory, although I have no basis to believe it really happened, or happened in that way.

Fast-forward nineteen years.

***

Turn around! Move! Okay now, drop your drawers, bend over, grab your cheeks, and smi-ile!

We stood in a jagged lineup with our pants puddled around our ankles, fifteen draftees of varying shapes, colors, attitudes. The gray windowless room was as dull and chill as a morgue. It was a rainy Monday, November 23, 1964, two months after my draft notice arrived portending two years of peeling potatoes. A shooting war was not yet in sight. It was also a year and a day since the senseless murder of my hero, President Jack Kennedy, which had hammered me. I was pretty low and lost.

The ferrety Army doc—I assumed the sadistic jerk in the front of the room was a physician—couldn’t suppress a smirk as he watched us bend over. This was clearly his favorite thing in life, examining the buttholes of scared young men over whom he had absolute, state-sanctioned power. We did what he said because that was what young men did in 1964, except for the skinny redheaded guy next to me—Taylor was his first name—who fainted into a tangled heap. I reached down to help him. The doc barked, Leave him alone, idiot! I bristled; no one had ever spoken to me that way. A barrel-chested black soldier with a shirt full of ribbons strutted over, threatening me with his dark eyes. I glared back, and then I looked away. I realized any other response would not be in my best interest. He lifted Taylor like an empty bathrobe. The doc spoke. Like that other jerk, Sarge. Head down, feet up. Splash cold water on his face and give him a shake. Then get him back in here.

***

Recruits had been poked at and processed at the US Army Building at 39 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan since 1885, according to the plaque in the ground-floor lobby. Later, during the soon-to-be-started Vietnam War (my timing has always been impeccable), the dreary building would be picketed nonstop by Dr. Spock and other antiwar notables, even bombed four times. But that was in the nasty future.

I’d arrived an hour early, by IRT subway from my home in Southeast Bronx. So I had plenty of time to read lobby plaques before my report time. Also early was the skinny redhead who later fainted next to me. As we stood together reading the plaques, he chirpily introduced himself as Taylor something Yankee-sounding and started talking. And talking in spite of a slight stutter. He said he’d gone to St. Paul’s and Harvard C-College, although he was taking a break from college just now and, if classified 1A, would probably apply to be a navy officer, which was what his f-father did in World War II when he was drafted. He suggested we walk up P-Pearl Street together to kill time. That was okay; I’d always been intrigued by the tight gray canyons of Lower Manhattan. The leaden sky threatened rain, but we both had coats and umbrellas.

Taylor chatted and stuttered as we walked, which was fine with me. I didn’t feel very peppy. He offered a cigarette, and I accepted. Earlier that year, the US Surgeon General declared smoking a health hazard, and I’d resolved to quit my lazy practice that did not amount to a habit—two or three a day. Taylor flicked his Zippo, making sure I saw the university legend. He was the first Harvard student I’d met, so I assumed his behavior was par for the Harvard course.

As we walked north, he waved his cigarette toward where he said his investment banker father would come into work later. White Weld. His building’s up there, F-Father’s. He’s a p-partner. Wall Street. He’s Harvard too. They start late.

But I wasn’t listening; I was considering his story about jumping Army-enlisted life by applying to become an officer. Can you just do that? I asked. I really didn’t know about these things. I mean, just skip this whole draft-Army-enlisted business by signing up to be an officer?

Oh sure. Easy. Just go to a recruiting office and tell them you want to be an officer. I assume you have a c-college degree and you’re not a convicted felon. Do it soon, though, like today. It’s three years plus OCS. Army enlisted is two years. So that’s the trade-off. I have three years of c-college, but they make exceptions, and my f-father—

I broke in. I have a college degree. Not a felon. So maybe I’ll do that.

Sure. You really don’t want to be an Army private. Ugh.

We walked and puffed while I considered my expanded options. I tried to anticipate my father’s reaction. Dad told me once he regretted being ineligible for World War II. Maybe he’d be proud of me.

After a long silence, Taylor looked up at me. I was six inches taller. So what c-college? He had finally acknowledged my existence. I suspected he was eager to restate his Ivy League credentials.

Notre Dame, I said, after clearing my throat a couple of times. And a master’s degree from North Carolina.

Oh. The master’s claim seemed to impress.

But I’d overstated my case. I’d done everything toward a master’s degree in comparative literature except submit my final thesis. Just a few weeks earlier, a friend and I had stopped in Philadelphia for the Navy-Notre Dame game, pausing our journey from Chapel Hill to New York. As we were partying in the Ben Franklin Hotel after the pep rally, someone broke into my friend’s VW Bug and stole all our luggage. In the luggage were my handwritten draft, all my files, my three-by-five cards, notes, scraps—everything, gone!

Thinking about my stolen thesis recalled my last conversation with my father. He had big goals for me and was upset about my failure to finish my master’s degree. Another half-done project, Jackie. His eyes were moist. I’m sure my lack of remorse baffled him, but he just shook his head. I’d nixed an academic career long ago and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I knew I wasn’t going to rewrite that dumb thesis.

Dad, a former NYC fire chief, fell into a hole at a fire years earlier and retired on disability. He’d not finished high school, but he drove himself to excel at whatever he did. Or perhaps it was my mother who did the driving; I never could make it out. Their goal in life was to get their two sons through Notre Dame, the Irish Harvard. One down, one to go. Now I, Dad’s namesake, the college grad, was going nowhere, half-assing jobs and projects, questioning everything.

But Dad was a softie when it came to me, never a confronter. Mom was the confronter. Tell me something, Jackie, he said in his warm Bing Crosby baritone. What do you do with comparative literature anyway? In terms of making a living.

I had no answer. Maybe my brother, still in college but more focused and driven, would make him proud someday.

***

What’s your field? Taylor asked, shattering my reverie. Is it Jack? Or Jim. I’m not good with n-names.

It’s Jack. Literature. Mostly German literature.

You speak German? he asked.

Ein Bisschen. I looked at my watch. We should probably start walking back.

You’re right. Wish I could speak German. Or French would be better. His building’s over there, F-Father, on the left. We had reached Wall Street and you could smell the coming rain. I’m not feeling too hot, he said, apropos of nothing.

***

After Taylor recovered from his swoon and had his butt checked, we were able to whisper together. I said I liked his idea and might apply for Marine OCS. I felt a buzz about that.

Marines? Why Marines? Taylor asked, tilting his head. That’s hard.

Dad thought the Marines were special, but I didn’t tell Taylor that. I told him I wanted the physical challenge. Which I did, although I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I also liked the uniforms. At that time, Vietnam was a small hot spot among bigger hot spots, including Berlin, Cuba, Nationalist China (Taiwan), and the Near East, as it was then called. Congress had passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August, giving President Johnson broad power to mess with Vietnam. But I’d never heard of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. I’d barely heard of Vietnam. I didn’t pay attention back then.

Taylor was excited for me. He said I should take the subway up to Times Square immediately and visit the Marine Corps recruiting station there. He said they had the sharpest staff and would take care of my draft notice.

***

We were released from the Army Building at noon into a steady drizzle. I’d been tentatively categorized 1A. Taylor’s status was under review. He’d recovered from his fainting spell and was elated to not yet be 1A. He shook my hand, wished me luck, and set off north for lunch with his father. Never saw him again. He wasn’t that bad of a guy.

I popped Dad’s black umbrella and headed for the Seventh Avenue subway. As I walked, I wondered why the Marine Corps would locate its sharpest recruiting staff in the middle of squalid Times Square. I then thought about my lost thesis and the decision my friend and I made to park on the street in a bad neighborhood in Philly, avoiding the two-buck cost of hotel parking. The insurance adjuster had speculated that the thief thought the boxes and suitcases might contain valuable loot and chided my friend for creating such an attractive nuisance. I smiled, imagining the jacker’s disappointment when he saw the fruits of his labor: dirty laundry plus a paper titled Characterization Techniques in Franz Kafka’s Short Fiction.

CHAPTER 2

TIMES SQUARE

M y visit to the Marine recruiting station in sodden, sketchy Times Square was a success. I spoke with a sergeant and a lieutenant and filled out forms. The sergeant had a massive chest, a shaved head, and a crisp attitude—not to be messed with. The officer—a nice-enough guy, smart, but closer in aspect to Clark Kent than Superman—told me to expect orders to the Marine Corps base in Quantico for Officer Candidate School starting in March. When I asked where Quantico was, he said, Um, Virginia. His cocked eyebrow told me he expected me to ask where Virginia was. After a pause, he said that if I made it through the ten weeks of OCS, I’d get my second lieutenant’s gold bars. If I washed out, I’d go to Parris Island in South Carolina to be trained as a private. Fair enough. He’d take care of the Army-draft thing.

When I walked out of the recruiting station, it was raining hard. A fire truck was parked at the curb, and a red-faced fireman in full rain regalia smiled warmly as I opened Dad’s umbrella. Suddenly, I started crying. When the light turned green, I stepped into the crosswalk, hiding under the umbrella. Tears and rain poured down as I crossed Broadway. My insecurities were eating me alive. I was always the youngest kid in my class and was used to being a half-step behind, except in grades and long-distance running. Which didn’t count for much in the playground. Never part of the cool group. Now the frigging Marines! We’d call it an attack of impostor syndrome today.

When I reached the curb, I closed my umbrella, faced north into the now violent downpour, and started walking, hoping the rain would mask my tears. It did. At least no one seemed to notice me, but this was Broadway, Times Square, where much weirder stuff happens than someone crying. By the time I reached 59th Street and Columbus Circle, I’d cried myself out and the rain had eased. I’d never been more thoroughly drenched. I had cash, so I hailed a taxi to get home quickly and maybe avoid pneumonia. I had to promise the cabbie double fare for a ride up to the South Bronx on a busy rainy day.

As I watched soggy gray Manhattan glide by, I felt strangely content, as if maybe I’d done something right, something Dad would like, maybe even admire. When I arrived home and told Mom, she asked what the hell was I thinking, joining the Marine Corps in this dangerous world.

Dad’ll like it.

She shook her head and squinted at me. Okay. I guess it’s a done thing. At least you’ll be getting a paycheck. She headed for the kitchen to prepare supper.

Dad did like it. When I sat with him and reported what I’d done, his eyes filled with tears. He patted my knee, nodded, and went back behind his beloved Herald Tribune. He was the emotional parent. We used to say he’d cry at a hockey game.

***

I loved those four winter months at home waiting for OCS to start. I especially loved the solitude of it. All my high school friends were gone. In the late morning, I worked as an attendant in a Parkchester playground, shoveling snow and teaching little kids sports skills. In the late afternoon, I took the subway down to the Manhattan offices of the Saturday Evening Post, where I picked up cartoons for transport down to the printing plant in Philly (hard to imagine in this digital age). So every evening, I traveled back and forth between Penn Station and Thirtieth Street Station, devouring novels. Among other things, I read all Henry Miller’s racy novels, an eye-opening experience for this Catholic virgin.

I also worked hard to get into physical shape. In the early morning and on the weekends, I ran all over the Bronx and up into Westchester County. That was fun. I had been a decent cross-country runner in high school. My favorite stop on these sorties was the stadium steps at Pelham Bay Park at the end of the IRT subway line.

What I didn’t do was build up my upper body. So when I arrived at Quantico’s Camp Upshur, the site of OCS, on March 8, 1965, I could run forever but was not good at pull-ups. I was slapped into remedial PT with other deficient officer candidate shitbirds. A further blow to my self-confidence, which had been pounded to dust beginning the minute I arrived.

To wit, the first thing they did when we got off the bus was yell at us about our crappy civilian clothes and long hair and poor posture and not moving quickly enough. Then they shaved our heads in about twenty seconds, yelling all the while about how royally fucked up we were. Then they stripped away all our stuff, including our clothes—they stored it in a locker but didn’t tell us—and made us stand naked with 150 other naked guys getting medically examined and fitted out in grim khaki clothes. Then they ran us through a battery of grueling physical tests, including a run on the infamous Hill Trail. I did fine on the Hill Trail but not so fine at upper-body exercises.

A side point, to illustrate my knack for bad timing: my arrival at OCS coincided to the day with the arrival of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Danang Harbor, which kicked off America’s shooting war in Vietnam. So there was an urgency at Camp Upshur that sharpened the scrutiny of new arrivals.

Those first weeks remain a blur. I was convinced I’d fail. The weather was perfect for what we were doing, a dull gray slate sky day after day. Every day, at 0530, our platoon sergeant