From Michigan to Mekong: Letters on Life, Learning, Love and War (1961-68)

By James B Hubbard, Deborah Nylec and John M. Faust

With phone and internet technology, it's easy to look back at the recent years of our lives in great detail. The more distant past is harder. There may be fragments-a photo, a news clipping, a family story-but rarely is there enough to recapture what it really felt like in that other time. 

Unless, like a young Jim Hubbard

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Design Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737302414

James B Hubbard

James B. Hubbard, Jr. (Capt., U.S. Army, Ret.) is a Michigan native who was awarded the Silver Star for his service in Vietnam, where he led a truck platoon and was aide-de-camp to the general who served as Assistant Division Commander of the Army's Ninth Infantry Division. After his Army career, Jim worked for 23 years as a senior director with the American Legion in Washington, DC, advocating for veterans before Congress on a range of issues including the defense budget, transition to civilian life, job training and home ownership, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He and his wife, the former Judy Davis, have two daughters and live in Frederick, Maryland. In retirement, Jim is learning to play bluegrass banjo, volunteers at Monocacy National (Civil War) Battlefield, and tries to inject a bit of humor on social media by posting internet memes and cartoons.

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Praise for From Michigan to Mekong

Not enough Americans today comprehend the sacrifices of those we ask to protect this country. That’s why I so appreciate the ‘you are there’ perspective that Jim Hubbard offers on what it means to serve. Reading Jim’s letters, I feel like I’m looking over his shoulder as he grows up and goes off to war at one of the most turbulent times in American history. And Jim’s wit makes his account as enjoyable as it is informative.

Col. Charles S. Chick Ciccolella (USA, Ret.), former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Veterans’ Employment and Training Service

This excellent book quietly delivers things you didn’t expect. Jim Hubbard’s dispatches give us an interesting look back at the 1960s, but far more important, they teach us to move forward—always forward—and show the simple power of putting thoughts down on paper and sending them to a loved one now and then.

John Hanson, former Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

From Michigan to Mekong

Letters on Life, Learning, Love and War (1961-1968)

James B. Hubbard, Jr.

with

Deborah Nylec And John M. Faust

New Design Press

Copyright © 2021 by James B. Hubbard, Jr., Deborah Nylec and John M. Faust

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Published by New Design Press www.newdesignpress.com

Cover photo: First Lt. James B. Hubbard, Jr., Dong Tam, 1968

Book design by Christy Collins, Constellation Book Services

Credit for photo of the Greyhound bus: MANHATTAN RESEARCH INC from SEATTLE, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons (orig. in color).

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-7373024-0-7

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-7373024-1-4

For all the men and women who served during the Vietnam War, and for those who keep memory alive, especially Mary Carter Hubbard (who saved so many letters over the years, including these).

Contents

Foreword

Home Base

Jim Hubbard’s Michigan Childhood (1943-61)

Off to College

Michigan College of Mining & Technology,

Houghton, Michigan (1961-63)

Regrouping

Ludington, Michigan: Take Two (1963-64)

If at first you don’t succeed. . .

Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michigan

(1964-65)

A Ludington Summer: 1965

This Judy Davis business seems to be getting

a little more serious all the time

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo,

Michigan (1965-66)

Marriage, and Preparing for Vietnam

Fort Riley, Kansas (Summer 1966)

Fort Eustis, Williamsburg, Virginia (December 1966-May 1967)

Fort Knox, Kentucky (May-August, 1967)

Fort Hood, Killeen, Texas (August-November, 1967)

Fort Sherman, Panama (November 1967)

Vietnam

(December 1967-June 1968)

(July - November 1968)

Home: 1968-69

I have more confidence in myself than I ever had before

Epilogue (The Next 50 Years and Counting)

Foreword

Now for the news of the century. I volunteered for a year’s tour in Vietnam.

Imagine. It is the 1960s. You’ve grown up happily on the Eastern shores of Lake Michigan, in the movie-set-perfect small town of Ludington, Michigan, with family and friends all around, and, of course, a nearby ice cream shop. You’re a fun-loving kid, but also careful, serious, respectful. Off to college you go, with all the timeless questions, big and small: What am I good at? No good at? Can I get the grades I need? How will I pay for all this? What if I flunk? How do I step away from my parents to make my own way in the world, when I still depend on them? Who will I date? Who will I marry? What do I do with my life, anyway?

James B. Hubbard, Jr.—Jim—wrestled with all these questions. But unlike most of us these days, he chronicled his progress to full adulthood in dozens of letters home, most of them written by hand and sent by U.S. Mail, with the ones to his parents often signed Your loving son. Jim’s letters are open, thorough, funny, and honest about all his daily successes and failures. Among other things, the letters paint a colorful picture of academic and social life at the three different Michigan colleges he attended in the early and mid-1960s. One of us, Jim’s daughter Deb, found his letters in a bag that her aunt kept when she cleaned out Jim’s parents’ home after they passed away. The letters are all transcribed here, just as Jim wrote them. They would be interesting reading even if all they showed was one young man’s coming-of-age in another place and time, an old-fashioned America that seems simpler than the one we know today.

What makes Jim’s letters even more compelling, though, is that they continue from his itinerant college years right through a truly transformative event, his tour as a newly married Army officer in Vietnam, in 1968. Many now look at that year as the most pivotal of a very troubling conflict, maybe the year that did the most damage to the sense of innocence we associate with so many of the Ludingtons across mid-century America. Jim wasn’t assigned to a direct combat role, so this isn’t another Apocalypse Now or Platoon or The Things They Carried, those epics of heroism and suffering for an uncertain cause that most people call to mind whenever Vietnam comes up. Iconic as those stories are, they only address the experience of a relatively small percentage of the millions of Americans who served in Vietnam.

Jim’s letters fill in some of the rest of the picture. He led a transportation unit that supplied food and ammunition to troops in combat and helped evacuate those who were wounded or killed. He also served as a general’s aide-de-camp at the Dong Tam base near Saigon. It was important work that lives depended on, and it’s plain from the letters that Jim did it with competence and pride. He wasn’t always safe, either. That comes through between the lines in the straightforward accounts he gives of his work and whereabouts and living environment—and the Silver Star he received for his valor—even if Jim spared his family by hardly ever mentioning any of this directly. His letters give a ground-level perspective on life in a faraway war zone over half a century ago, from the tedious to the terrifying. More than that, they give a sense of how playing one’s small part in such a hugely significant event can set the tone and direction for the rest of a long life.

Accompanying some of the many letters that follow are notes and stories to give context to the people, places, and events Jim mentions, as well as some pictures and maps for the same reason. ¹

There are notes, for example, describing the basic causes, major developments, and public perception of the Vietnam War; life on a military base; the 1964 and 1968 presidential elections; cross-country Greyhound bus travel; popular movies and performers of the time; college life in Michigan (including snow sculpture and forestry skills competitions); and something called a smelt dip. But the star of this book remains, of course, a young man and his letters home.

—Deb Nylec and John Faust

Manistee, mid-1940s

Home Base

Jim Hubbard’s Michigan Childhood (1943-61)

Undated 1953

Dear Grandma,

I am going to a party tonight with some other girls and I think I am going to have fun. Mother says I am growing up.

We expect to get a cat this weekend but don’t worry, Sandy [the family dog] is afraid of cats.

I think I am doing okay with my clarinet.

Much love, Jimmy

P.S. I liked your letters. Thank you.

The young author of this early letter, Jim Hubbard, was born in 1943, the oldest child of James Boyden Hubbard, Sr. and Mary Carter (Gould) Hubbard, who went by Con. Jim is three years older than his brother, Dick, and ten years older than his sister, Sally. Jim, Sr. was a civil engineer who served in the Army during World War II in Panama, and afterward as a reservist back in the U.S.

Jim grew up in and around Ludington, Michigan. He was born about 25 miles north of town, in Manistee, and spent his early childhood about 60 miles south of it, in Muskegon, before Jim, Sr. moved the family to Ludington in 1955 to take a job at Dow Chemical Company. The Hubbards’ Ludington was and is a charming slice of life in the American Midwest. The high school is a few blocks from the post office, which is just down the street from the ice cream shop, the Park Dairy, now renamed the House of Flavors and owned by one of Jim’s high school classmates. At the marina, locals and tourists still go out on breezy, cool summer evenings to watch the S.S. Badger, the last coal-fired steamship in the States, as it ferries passengers and their vehicles across Lake Michigan to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, the same journey Jim and his future wife took to see each other when she was teaching in Racine, Wisconsin and he was finishing his college degree in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

* * *

It still seems as if life is simpler in Ludington, especially in the summer. Oppressive heat and humidity never seem to reach the town, thanks to cool breezes off the lake. Families fill the beach every day, some of them brave enough to splash around in the chilly water. Couples stroll down the pier hand-in-hand to the lighthouse as waves crash against its side. Fishermen brag about their catch to the curious children peering into their buckets. At the end of the pier, there is a playground in the sand, loud with happy kids at play. In the evenings, a band plays on one end of the park. Ice cream is highly encouraged, even in the antique store across the street from the Park Dairy. The next day is a repeat of the same.

– Deb Nylec

With parents, Manistee, mid-1940s

With parents, Manistee, mid-1940s

Off to College

Michigan College of Mining & Technology, Houghton, Michigan (1961-63)

Senior Picture, Ludington High School, 1961

In the fall of 1961, 18-year-old Jim left Ludington for his freshman year at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology (Michigan Tech, or just Tech, since renamed Michigan Technological University) in the town of Houghton on the north side of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The college was founded in 1885 to train engineers to operate the local copper mines. Jim planned to major in forestry.

* * *

Houghton averages 202 inches of snow a year due to cold Canadian air moving over the warmer open waters of Lake Superior. Temperatures can remain well below zero for long stretches. The town celebrates winter with a multi-night Winter Carnival, hosted by the University; it began in 1922 as a one-night event, with students dressed as circus animals. Then came other activities, like the Queen Competition (contestants were judged on their ice skating and skiing skills as well as their beauty) and the Beards Competition (in which the queen and her court judged the quality of the contestants’ beards). In 1959, two years before Jim arrived, dozens of girls were bused in for the Carnival’s first Sno-Ball dance (the Tech student population was overwhelmingly male). Other events over the years have included skits, comedy and music acts, hockey, downhill skiing, a torchlight ski parade, human dogsled races, and a tug-of-war on ice.

But the most famous Carnival event is snow-sculpting, added in 1936. Putting Houghton’s vast amounts of snow to good use, various groups on campus compete in one of two contests: The All-Nighter allows for 16 hours overnight to build a snow statue no more than ten feet high; while the Month-Long competition features much larger statues constructed around a given theme. All statues must be pristine white snow and structurally sound as well as self-supporting, with no hidden beams or outside scaffolding remaining once complete.

September 20, 1961

Dear Mom and Dad,

Everything is OK so far. I've met lots of nice kids and haven’t met anyone I really dislike yet. Denny [Jim’s roommate] is not as bad as I expected, except that he gets up at 6:00 in the morning. I get up about 6:30 and eat and clean up my room. That leaves me plenty of time to get to my first class.

On two days I don’t have classes until 9:00 so I can sleep in a couple of days.

If dad wants accounting of my money spent on college fees, I can send it to him. Don’t forget to send me my personalized checks when they come. Boy, the demand for girls certainly exceeds the supply. At meals, all you can see in the cafeteria are boys. When a girl walks by all the heads turn as one. It sure looks funny.

Tell Dad that the Phys. Ed director up here was the director at Lansing Eastern from 1931-1937. His name is Prof. Alan Bovard. You can address my letters to me—228 WEST Wadsworth Hall, Houghton Michigan.

When dad last saw my room, it was a real mess. He’ll be happy to know that we finally got everything put away. Well, I'll write again this weekend. See you at Thanksgiving.

Love, Jimmy

P.S. Tell Dick and Sal I said Hi!

September 22, 1961

Dear Mom and Dad,

Classes started today but I don’t have any homework yet. My first class on Friday is at 8:00 so I have to get out of bed on time. That particular class was Chemistry Recitation and we didn’t do much. I have English at 1:00 this afternoon, and math at 3:00 so I may get some work in those subjects.

I met a lot of nice people at Canterbury House on Thursday nite. There are even a couple of girls in the club. I feel pretty lucky. Father Paige is one of the nicest persons that I have ever met. There are three or four profs in the club also. The man who has the freshman Chemistry lecture is in the club so maybe I'm a little luckier than some of the other students. At least I can get to know him. Before I forget, please send up my work shoes. I can use them for interdorm football. We play a bunch of kids from Douglas Houghton Hall (D.H.H.) on Sunday at 2:00. I think we’ll beat them judging from the size of the boys who came over to challenge us to the game. I was almost injured in a game Thurs. afternoon. I went out for a pass and ran smack dab into another boy who was covering me. It knocked the wind out of me, gave me a terrible headache and gave me a sore knee. I went back to the dorm and slept for a couple of hours and then I felt all right.

I have met lots of nice kids up here. The president of the Canterbury Club is a Senior from New York. He is a real riot. Well, I have a class pretty soon so I must close. Write often, you have no idea how lonely it is up here. Say hi to the rest of the family for me.

Lots of love, Jimmy

P.S. Don’t forget to send my Shoes!

Canterbury Club was an Episcopal campus ministry. There is still a Canterbury House on the Tech campus, but now it hosts an organization that provides English language learning and other support for international students and their spouses.

October 16, 1961

Dear Folks,

I didn’t get a chance to write to you this noon because as you can see from the enclosed schedule, I have nine hours of classes on Monday. Also, we pick up our clean sheets on Monday between 11 A.M. and 3 P.M. I just barely have time to get back from math, eat, pick up my laundry, and get to English.

There is so much to do up here in the way of social activities. I am staying out of most everything though. I am in the Forestry Club, and on the ROTC drill team and that’s about it. When the situation gets to the point where a student becomes a so-called activity major, it’s time to quit. I don’t plan to let it get that far.

I have a place for Lori [Jim’s high school girlfriend] to stay when she comes up at winter carnival time. She can stay at Canterbury House. I checked with Fr. Paige and he said that the one bedroom was up for grabs so I grabbed it. Lori will have to room with one other girl though. The best part about it is that the only charge is a donation to take care of laundering the sheets. It sounds like a real cool deal.

Canterbury Club had an outing last Saturday. We went up the peninsula and went exploring. We stopped at a place called Douglas Houghton Falls. That is a real pretty spot. I'll take you there next time you come up. We also went to two old mine shafts, and explored the rock piles.

Also, next time you come up, I want dad to see the cable drum on the mine on top of the hill. It is one of the largest in the world. Boy what a monster. The mine it is connected with is almost 12,000 ft. deep, the deepest in the world. I took a look at it last Sunday with Denny.

Well, I must go now as I have some studying to do, shoes to polish, brass to clean, and other types of assorted junk to do. We wear our ROTC uniforms tomorrow.

Lots of love, Jimmy

P.S. How about my bank account?

P.S.S. Tell everyone I said hello! Especially Mr. Butler and Father Jack.

"ROTC" stands for Reserve Officer Training Corps, a program offered at colleges and universities across the United States that prepares young adults to become officers in the U.S. Military. In exchange for college expenses, participants—or cadets—commit to serve in the military after graduation. At this time, first and second year cadets were not eligible for ROTC compensation.

At 110 feet, Douglas Houghton Falls is Michigan’s tallest waterfall. It was privately owned until 2018, with access eventually restricted due to accidents, many of them fatal. The State of Michigan now owns the site and reportedly intends to create a Veterans Memorial Park there.

Mr. Butler, or Bill, was a work colleague