Ripped to Shreds: A War Lieutenant's Tale

By David Nardi

"...I like the way you circle back again and again to several events to re-dig them up, new embellishments and revelations each time. This also made the book seem rather dream-like (a fevered dream, to be sure). Overall it left me wanting to hear and know more. Sometimes it read like a philosophical treatise,  sometimes like an alternate socio-political history, and sometimes like a war/ human drama. The "hows" and whys" you presented are definitely not ideas I've ever heard, and I think are probably not at all mainstream, yet startingly plausible! That's what makes the book so eerily present..the actual possibility, through your experience..that this could have been the way things happened.
Which send some shockwaves through everything American if we even consider the possibilities you reveal! Certainly the unique angles (The Sister's point of view and story, Nhu's presence, etc.) show the whole "war novel" experience from uniquely different angles. One thing the book left me wanting to know more about was about your Bronze Star. That's an almost hidden mystery and teaser, that you "didn't" say a whole lot about that..."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479743155

David Nardi

David Nardi was born, raised and educated in the public school systems of Virginia, including the University of Virginia. He was compelled, as were most young men of his age and time, to enter into the fray called the Vietnam War. He most definitely "came of age" at this time. This memoir chronicles his most critical experiences. It was a world which changed the world, one person at a time.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by David Nardi.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2012920641

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4797-4314-8

             Softcover    978-1-4797-4313-1

             Ebook         978-1-4797-4315-5

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.

Rev. date: 06/29/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

120480

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter I:   Historical Account

Chapter II:   Don’t Murder Me

Chapter III:   My First Night in Country

Chapter IV:   Indulgences

Chapter V:   Cajun Capers

Chapter VI:   Clap Your Hands

Chapter VII:   Pictures

Chapter VIII:   To My Best Friend In the 459th Engineer Battalion

Chapter IX:   Tan Son Nhut R & R Massacre

Chapter X:   Captain Dan

Chapter XI:   Brand Nhu

Chapter XII:   A Narrative History of the Roman Catholic Church in Vietnam

Chapter XIII:   Horace, My Friend

Chapter XIV:   Onward Christian Soldier

Chapter XV:   From the Inside Out

Chapter XVI:   Musings

Hi David,

I just finished reading your book. It took me a while with a kerjillion unexpected summer activities, but I finally got down to a nice read. David, I think you have something. It is not the usual Nam reportage that I’ve read (Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Philip Caputo’s Rumors of Wars, or Jim Webb’s Fields of Fire). It read to me more like an almost stream-of-consciousness revelry which is not something that I think has been attempted about that war. I like the way you circle back again and again to several events to re-dig them up, new embellishments and revelations each time. This also made the book seem rather dream-like (a fevered dream, to be sure). Overall it left me wanting to hear and know more. Sometimes it read like a philosophical treatise, sometimes like an alternate socio-political history, and sometimes like a war/human drama. The hows and whys you presented are definitely not ideas I’ve ever heard, and I think are probably not at all mainstream, yet startlingly plausible! That’s what makes the book so eerily present … the actual possibility, through your experience … that this could have been the way things happened. Which sends some shockwaves through everything American if we even consider the possibilities you reveal! Certainly the unique angles (The Sister’s point of view and story, Nhu’s presence, etc.) show the whole war novel experience from uniquely different angles. One thing the book left me wanting to know more about was about your Bronze Star. That’s an almost hidden mystery and teaser, that you didn’t say a whole lot about that.

Though I know a good editor would chop some bits out, I felt the book could have been much longer. I like the near Kerouac-ian, neo-surrealist style, but by halfway, I really was hungry to hear the whole story in your style. It would be a classic in tone, manner and insight, all new from Nam-era war writing I think.

Oh well, keep going and good luck with it. I’m dropping it in the mail to you today along with two articles; on PTSD new treatments, and a recovering warrior project, that sound sensible and innovative.

John Hunter

4 August 2008

Bronze Star Medal Certificates

PROLOGUE

I gave my dad a lyric sheet from an early song by Bob Dylan concerning the nature of the destruction occurring inside Vietnam and where it was coming from. He vehemently reacted in the opposite direction. From that point forward, I was expressly forbidden to possess or bring into the house any antiwar material. Although he has steadfastly denied the penalty for violations was expulsion from the home or starvation or both, this was the regimen in place. Immediately I understood the import of his actions. Not only was my God-given intellectual freedom now rendered moot but also I was raw meat to be thrown to the dogs of war. This was a heavy realization so young and early in my life. Basketball and my other achievements (president of the student government, for instance) doubled as résumé-packers to insure and elongate into college the prospect of avoiding the draft. I was merely going through the motions, saving and conserving my energy and strength. Every instinct inside of me, including premonition, whispered to me the inevitability of what later did occur. Though hope did spring eternal in me, this war was man-made!

Like a plant or a flower, my mind could not and would not grow without water and sunlight. I had to search elsewhere for my intellectual food and sustenance. Obviously, to keep food in my belly and to secure a bed on which to sleep, I wanted, needed, and had to have books and reading material in the house that pleased him and at the same time provided me with intellectual food equivalent to the intellectual antiwar material that he now denied me. I went rapidly 180 degrees in the opposite direction to William F. Buckley’s conservatism and God and Man at Yale. In an odd and more ominous twist, I went farther to the right, not being one to settle for cursory intellectualism about anything. I went headlong and feet first into the Catholic right. Not content to stop there, I journeyed deeper into the jungle of the South Vietnamese Nationalist Catholic right authors. I must have read ten books by Vietnamese authors pleading the case for us Americans to intervene on their behalf in their country. If I was not fortified with sufficiently pro-Southern Vietnamese Catholic Nationalist thought to counteract my suppressed leftist thought to please my father and get free of him by going to Vietnam, then there was nothing more I could humanly do to extricate myself from the untenable ideological tiger cage of my home.

Because me father early on would not allow me to have in his home any antiwar material, I had no choice to seek intellectual sustenance from the Catholic right, though doubtless I harbored an intense and abiding interest in all views of the Vietnam War spectrum. I calculated that if I could reside in my mind inside the Catholic home (of Cardinal Spellman) in Vietnam, which was the counter home to my father’s, I could ultimately survive. This now became my totally focused modus operandi and governed the paths, roads, detours, roadblocks, and pass-throughs which ensued.

It is within these parameters that I arrived at the gates of the Ave Maria Orphanage in downtown Nha Trang, South Vietnam in late September 1969. It is here, alongside Sister L (she wishes to remain anonymous), the mother superior, and her orphans that my true redemption took place—a redemption that both validated and negated me simultaneously. It explained why I carried Thomas á Kempis’s book The Imitation of Christ in one back pocket and Playboy magazine in the other. It explained sufficiently to me the mystery of biblical fundamentalism and Christ’s walking the walk and feeding bread and fish to keep physically alive those who came to hear him. It deconstructed Catholicism for me as it implanted, validated, and connected bread from our army mess hall to the bread that Christ fed to those hungry for literal food, that being part of the modus operandi of his mission. It verified my ability to exercise my free will in the most compromising and direst of situations, doing so as an officer in an army, for the good and sustenance of victimized children. I became a stakeholder in the survival of child war victims. I slowed in being a stakeholder in the military victory of either the United States or the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese. Now I had suffered the little children or had come unto these little children on behalf of Christ through two primary vehicles: Sister L in Nha Trang and my father at home. No schizophrenia, only classical asylum from the worldly, material persons in America. At this flashpoint, the orphans provided me a lifelong and life-sustaining gift—the gift of surviving and behaving morally in the midst of the insane immorality of this war.

I was born a fighter. Completely shutting down my mind like an ostrich was not an option. Because I witnessed killing and knew and understood that the only thing my masturbation injured was my father’s misguided Onan of Judah’s religious sensibilities, Playboy magazine under my teenage mattress was a moral plus for me. Pleasure, that is, masturbation, provided the only antidote to the early untenable and unbearable suppression of my intellect and played a critical factor in my survival of the mortar barrage that night in Camp McDermott. I went under my bunk when the rounds came in. Two weeks earlier, my best friend was hauled away on a stretcher after he came down the steps and was ten feet from the bunker when peppered by an exploding mortar round.

All this was heaped and dumped upon me on top of my father’s forced religious inculcation. He poked and poked his middle finger into my chest repeatedly with extreme anger, and as with one having me in a chokehold and with his terse, angry voice completely intimidating me, saying over and over, You will believe as I tell you to believe, that the Roman Catholic Church is the only one true church, and under the penalty of your loss of salvation and starvation by my hands, you will do, say, and believe as I tell you to do. I was two years old when this happened. Of course when confronted much later in life with what he had said and done to me, he denied it all. This was his pattern. He would do something awful and regrettable such as this to me in a fit of extreme anger and then deny it much later. It wasn’t until much too late that I even understood the dire portend of each of his misappropriations.

With these foundations as childhood precursors and backdrops for all future decisions I would make under the auspices of my nuclear family, it is no leap at all to understand how the prospect of death in the war zone of Vietnam would come to be an acceptable risk for me. I accepted just that risk. All or nothing, red or dead, and nothing in between became my Baba Ram Dass mantra. If you can’t join them, fight them. Jesus will sort them out later.

I discovered a book by a gentleman by the name of Avro Manhattan, Vietnam. Why Did We Go?, which provided context for me. For two weeks over tea in the backyard of Ave Maria Orphanage in downtown Nha Trang, Sister L told me almost the same account that Manhattan wrote. Finding Manhattan’s book on the beginnings of the unholy war in Vietnam was like personally receiving the same manna the Hebrews received to sustain them in their Exodus from Egypt. To whet your appetite for an eventual reading of my manuscript, Sister L’s proscriptions fill in the following problematic yet unanswered numeric differentials. (Neither Oliver Stone nor any other writer I have read who addresses this issue has solved it, one of the most critical issues of the war’s beginning.) It goes to the heart of the who, what, where, when, why, and how the first violent outbreaks of the war occurred in the south of South Vietnam, far from the northern border of the South where Stone and Prouty thought by all accounts should have broken out, as it was just across the border of North and South Vietnam into the south. There was the seemingly natural location for hostilities to have begun. It is real and true indeed, according to Sister L’s and Manhattan’s accounts, that the initial outbreaks in southern South Vietnam did indeed lead to the duping of President Diem, resulting in the eventual entrance of US grounds in force into South Vietnam. To wit, reputable writers such as Prouty and Oliver Stone place 1,100,000 (rounded off) as the number of Catholics frightened, then induced, to move to South Vietnam from North Vietnam after the Geneva Convention (1955) as a last resort. Refer to the addendum article I have included, The Catholic Church in Vietnam by Stephen Denney. In response to the three-hundred-day window for emigration provided by the Geneva Convention of 1955 (this emigration operated in both directions simultaneously), Diem, the Vatican, Cardinal Spellman, and the CIA, with help from the navy and air