In Liberating Strife: A Memoir of the Vietnam Years, Volume 2: In Country

By Steve Atkinson

The author begins his tour of duty in Vietnam as his fiancé and family continue their own daily lives in a nation wracked by continuing controversy and crisis. His assignments “behind the lines” in the war zone sometimes seem calm by comparison with the nation’s domestic turbulence as he enjoys friendships with Army budd

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen B. Atkinson
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998797632

Steve Atkinson

Steve Atkinson was born in Minneapolis and has lived there for most of his life. After returning from Vietnam in 1970, he enrolled in the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, earning an MA in English and History, and an MBA in Accounting. He retired in 2009 after a career in financial services, a welcome change that has allowed him to devote more attention to his first loves of reading and writing. He and Bev, his wife of 46 years, also spend time on such favorite activities as traveling and volunteering, but they agree that the best job of all is grandparenting. They live in Minneapolis within a mile of their son and his family.

Book preview

In Liberating Strife

A Memoir of the Vietnam Years

Volume 2

In Country

by

Steve Atkinson

Testimonials

In Atkinson’s personal story of service, families will hear echoes of the stories their veterans will not tell; it is a story that will help historians understand why drafted men fought in a war they thought unconscionable.

—Joseph C. Fitzharris, Professor Emeritus of History, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota

Steve Atkinson has performed a minor miracle with his memoir, In Liberating Strife: A Memoir of the Vietnam Years. He has humped the same path as David Maraniss did in his prize-winning They Walked in Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967. Maraniss, a stellar reporter for the Washington Post, focused on one battle in Vietnam that October and the burgeoning antiwar movement at the University of Wisconsin.

Steve Atkinson shifts the American perspective to Minnesota, where he was a university student. What sets Steve’s book off from Maraniss’s and others is that he was in-country in Vietnam for a year and writes from ground zero. In compelling, colorful detail, Steve lets us into his inmost thoughts and feelings. He does this through remarkable reporting, both by himself and his wife Bev. He saved their letters from their courtship during his two-year absence, half of it in Vietnam. From their literate correspondence, we can learn to be English majors. Steve captures the ordeal Bev and his own family endured back home as he grew into a unique manhood in various danger zones in Vietnam.

This is a book for ordinary people—the kind who forged some connection with the Vietnam War, Americans who have served since and—perhaps most important—reaching out to civilians who must still decide how they feel about boots on the sand in Iraq and Afghanistan.

—Mike Tharp, correspondent and bureau chief with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Far Eastern Economic Review, U.S. News & World Report, People Magazine and as a freelancer for AARP publications. He was a soldier in Vietnam and received an Honorable Discharge and a Bronze Star. As a civilian he has covered six other wars.

© Stephen Barrett Atkinson. 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-0-9987976-2-5 (print)

978-0-9987976-3-2 (ebook)

Book Design: Patti Frazee

Published by

City Limits Press

Minneapolis, MN

To Mom, Dad, Bev, and Robert

I.

The Big Red One

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.

—Rudyard Kipling Mandalay

Chapter 1

Lai Khe

October-November 1969

Iwas already awake in the early morning hours of October 5 when Dad came downstairs to say goodbye. He was leaving that morning for a duck and goose hunting trip up in Canada with his brother Jim and two or three other buddies, an annual fall tradition that they rarely missed. As usual, we had trouble expressing our feelings to each other even though we both knew how strong and genuine they were. We did as well as we could but it was not easy and that was only the second time that I could recall Dad struggling to hold back tears. The first was back in 1964 when his mother passed away. The World War II Navy vet and the young soldier would be strong for each other and our loved ones, and we did not need to verbalize our emotions to know that. After breakfast I said goodbye to Granny and John and I really felt bad about that because I knew the situation was reawakening all of Granny’s old emotions and fears surrounding Uncle Joe’s death in 1942. My gear was already packed so there was nothing left to do and in the late morning Mom, along with Mary and Jane, drove me out to the airport, stopping to pick up Bev along the way.

None of us was in the mood for small talk or pleasantries, and we could not speak about what we were really thinking because we needed to keep our emotions in check, so the drive and wait at the gate were both morose affairs. We said our final goodbyes as well with no one breaking down and finally it was time for me to board my flight to San Francisco. I had a window seat above the wing and I could see them in the terminal. I was too far away to see faces clearly but I saw Bev’s brown dress with the white tie that was one of my favorites. I believe that departure was the most painful thing I had experienced up to that point in my life, but to see women I loved seeing me off like that strengthened my resolve to do everything within my power to come through the year ahead safely. Since I did not believe in the war I was unable to conjure up any thoughts of patriotism or doing my best for my country, the nation that had betrayed my generation. It might have made the situation more tolerable if I had believed my comrades and I were pursuing a just cause, but to hold such a conviction was no longer within the realm of possibility for me and had not been for over three years.

The flight was a pleasant one and, as was fairly common in those days, our pilot made things interesting by telling us what we were seeing. We flew over western Minnesota and then South Dakota, coming near Pierre and Rapid City. This was mostly farmland with the characteristic patchwork quilt pattern of cultivated fields. As we reached the western plains of Wyoming the land became more barren and rough, and then we flew over the Rockies and southeastern Idaho with the winding Snake River. I had never been to Nevada so I was struck by how desolate and largely uninhabited it appeared, as well as how long it took to cross it. The day was clear with a bright sun and the black shadows of the hills and mountains provided a sharp contrast to the brown desert floor. About that time the crew served us a lunch of roast beef with noodles and mixed vegetables. Then the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range began to appear and soon we could see Lake Tahoe glistening in the distance with a beautiful bluish-green hue much like turquoise. Leaving the lake behind, we passed over the crest of the Sierra Nevada and began our descent toward the Pacific coast. As we continued west the slopes of the mountains changed from bare rock with occasional patches of snow to ones dotted with groves of pines. We soon reached the lower slopes that were covered with a lush dark evergreen forest, and then we flew right over the Yosemite Valley. Next we saw the Sacramento area with all the bright green irrigated farmland that is the northern part of the San Joaquin Valley that produces so many of our vegetables. Houses became more numerous as we approached the coast and finally we could see Oakland and the bay, then the hills and towers of San Francisco itself. It was a pleasant sight because I loved the city, even though I knew I would only be seeing glimpses of her on this trip.

We landed at SF International about 5:30 p.m. and I got off, envying the passengers who were going on to Hawaii. I did not see any other GIs so I took a cab by myself and asked the driver to take me to a motel near Oakland Army Base. My orders were to report by Noon the next day, Monday the 6th and I had flown out on Sunday to make sure that nothing would cause me to be absent without leave (AWOL), but I did not want to report a day early. There were some inspiring views of the city along our drive north to the Bay Bridge, and what struck me most were the colorful row houses with the bay windows that are such an iconic feature of the city. From the long bridge after we passed Treasure Island, I could see Berkeley and the campus’ Campanile tower. That brought thoughts to my mind of Bev’s friend Wanda who lived there now, as well as The Graduate and Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. We arrived at my driver’s choice, the Rancho Motel, about 6:45. It was obvious I was in a black neighborhood, so since I had no idea how safe it was, I decided to stick close to home. I went out and bought a six-pack of Budweiser and a bag of Granny Goose Tortilla Chips, then settled in to watch TV and write letters to Bev and my family. Gunsmoke was on so that was a good start. Bev had given me a small reel-to-reel tape recorder to go along with the one her folks had given her so that we could send tapes back and forth to each other. She had recorded a birthday message to get started and I listened to it twice that night. The three kids had sent me off with touching little gifts as well, and even on my first evening away, all these little tokens of affection from home meant a great deal to me.

After a restless night I took a cab over to Oakland Army Base on the morning of the 6th. The base was a drab, depressing compound of industrial buildings on the waterfront just south of the westbound entrance to the Bay Bridge, and many of the structures were huge warehouses. We had been instructed to leave most of the clothing we had been issued during training at home because we were to receive tropical-weight items at Oakland. It was all green, even the underwear and handkerchiefs. The lightweight fatigues were certainly something we could have used during training, especially at Fort Mac, but the jungle boots seemed to attract the most interest among the guys. They were a combination of black leather and heavy olive-drab fabric, and far lighter than the combat boots that we marched and ran in during training. We knew there was a steel plate embedded in the sole for protection against punji sticks. The process of receiving our new clothing was a classic example of hurry up and wait as we inched along in one long interminable line from station to station until we finally had our full issue. The whole situation at Oakland was all too reminiscent of the reception station at Fort Campbell, and it felt almost as though we were being subjected to all the petty indignities of training once again. I think that most of the brusque, impersonal treatment at Oakland was due to the need to move so many troops through the processing steps on a tight schedule rather than deliberate harassment, but it still grated after being away from the Army for three weeks.

After we got all our gear and arrived at the barracks they pulled a bunch of us out for details and I got kitchen patrol (KP). So on Tuesday several of us got up at 2:30 a.m. and reported to the mess hall. The KP duty at Oakland was for only one meal and they had assigned so many men that none of us had to do very much. I mopped the floor and broke eggs for breakfast, and then we got off at 9:00 a.m. After that I called home and told Mom how things were going. I wanted to let the family and Bev know that I got out there all right and was back on duty even though, other than that, I had nothing new to report. I also just wanted to take the opportunity to talk with them for a bit since it was likely that it would be months before we could do that again. Mom said that Bev and Marcia were going downtown but I called the apartment anyway on the chance she might still be there. They had already left. Then I went to the Service Club to write letters and kill time until the next formation. They had given us a fact-sheet on mailing things to APO addresses so I included that in the letter to my family. I also had a sheet of Peanuts stickers for letters, most featuring Bev’s favorite, Snoopy, so I started putting one of those on the backs of my envelopes to add a lighter touch.

There were three formations each day where they picked men for details and announced the names of the ones who would be shipping out. We were told that they had put a hold on the records of nearly all the men with an infantry MOS because there were more of us than they needed for replacements at that time in the Republic of Vietnam. That could have meant that some of us might be sent somewhere else, or we might end up in Vietnam but receive on-the-job training there in another MOS (Military Operations Specialty). I did not tell Mom for fear of arousing false hope but I did write to Bev about it, along with the caveat that it almost certainly would not happen. At the 12:30 p.m. formation I was among those who were told we would be shipping out at 2:00 a.m. the next day. We brought our gear over from the transient company barracks, my home for one very brief night, to one of the big warehouses where we were to stay until it was time to leave. Some of the guys from Fort Mac were there, including the wild man, Ed Russell. There were various bays separated by partitions with bunks for napping and things to pass the time such as a snack bar, games, TV, and war movies. The Army was always big on war movies but it seemed peculiar to be using them as entertainment for men who were on their way to a combat zone. Another oddity was a luggage shakedown to check for weapons: Apparently the Army did not want us to kill any enemies in an unauthorized manner. After seven months in the service though, the weird was our normal and we knew this was only a brief preview of the mad world that awaited us once we got overseas.

As the time drew near to ship out, we were all sitting on our duffel bags in a big open area of the warehouse. There were huge spotlights up near the ceiling that lit things up as brightly as high noon even though it was the middle of the night, as well as loudspeakers blaring out popular songs. The only one I remember is Tracy by the Cuff Links, and the love-happy bubble-gummy ditty seemed like the most inappropriate soundtrack possible for our solemn situation but, then again, I was not expecting the Army to provide something like Dylan’s Masters of War or the Doors’ The Unknown Soldier. They finally began calling out our names for boarding the buses and when we had stowed our gear and boarded the drivers took us about forty-seven miles northeast to Travis Air Force Base. As we passed Berkeley I could see San Francisco all lit up across the bay, a beautiful sight and one we all hoped to see once again in a year.

At Travis we boarded our Overseas National Airlines plane, a large commercial jetliner with a civilian crew. We took off about 3:30 a.m. and landed three hours later at Elmendorf Air Force Base (AFB) in Anchorage, Alaska. I had slept for most of the flight, except when they served us breakfast. We had a one-hour break there but it was still dark and everything in the terminal was closed. When we stepped outside the weather was cold with light rain. We continued along the Great Circle Route to Japan crossing the International Date Line, and this leg took about eight hours. We were all tired and spent most of the time sleeping, but I also wrote letters and read a few poems by Wallace Stevens. Russell often took an interest in what I was up to because he recognized a fellow malcontent when he saw one, and he was predictably disgusted when he looked over my shoulder and saw that one of the poems was The Death of a Soldier. The sun was up for the last two hours of the flight but all we could see was clouds. As we finally descended below the cloud cover we could see some of the outlying areas of Tokyo. It looked much like an American suburb from our lofty perspective, although you could tell that the houses were much smaller than their typical American counterparts. We landed at Yokota AFB in Fussa, a city in the western part of metropolitan Tokyo. We spent about two hours there and I took the first pictures with my new Kodak Instamatic 414 camera, a faithful companion until I was able to purchase a Pentax Spotmatic the following July when I returned to Japan on R&R. There were some standard oriental items offered for sale in the terminal, such as kimonos, smoking jackets, fans, and pillow covers imprinted with souvenir of Japan.

After takeoff, we flew over some hilly rural country. Everything was green, from the dark tones of the wooded slopes to the lighter shades of the cultivated level areas on the floors of the valleys. Mount Fuji was enshrouded in clouds and we never had a glimpse of her. Soon we were flying south above the cloud cover again. When there were breaks in the cover we could see that we were back over the ocean, with a few small islands visible along with some with coral reefs. Taiwan passed below us on the right and then we were over the South China Sea, which brought the haunting tales of Joseph Conrad to mind. It was clear from the clouds that we had arrived in an unfamiliar part of the world because they were the big dramatic cottony kind that I soon came to associate with the tropics. When the surface of the ocean was visible it was dark and tranquil. It struck me as memorable that I had been to latitudes both as for north and as far south as I had ever been within the same twenty-hour period. The mood of most of my comrades was not particularly dark, which helped to bolster my spirits as well. We had accepted the fact of going into combat months ago and now there was a certain element of relief in knowing that all the speculation and anticipation had come to an end and that we would soon be face-to-face with the thing itself. We were also well aware that our year in-country began when we left Travis and so we were already into our second day. I wrote to Bev and my family about this because I wanted to share anything remotely positive with them. I also told them yet again that I knew the situation was even more difficult in many ways for them because they had no way of knowing what was going on until they received my letters after a delay of about a week.

This final leg of our long journey lasted about five hours, and after four we were passing over the coast of Vietnam. We must have been over the Central Highlands because the topography was hilly, and such a verdant green that from our height it seemed almost black. As we proceeded south and further inland the land became flatter but still heavily covered with vegetation, and soon we were low enough to see roads and small villages. Before long some fire support bases and bomb craters became visible as well. One of the stewardesses announced that we were approaching beautiful downtown Vietnam, which resulted in a brief chorus of humorless chuckles. The crew did a pretty decent job of keeping our spirits as high as could be expected. Soon some large military installations came into view, which was the complex of Bien Hoa Air Base and Long Binh Post. We also passed over the adjoining large Vietnamese town of Bien Hoa with its metal roofs, dirt roads, and occasional large churches, which were either Buddhist temples or Catholic churches from the French colonial era. Even though I had not yet set foot on the ground, I also noticed the ubiquitous grayish-white columns of smoke rising into the air that were so characteristic a sight around US bases. They were from burning garbage, and the most pungent was the waste from latrines. The receptacles under the toilets were fifty-five-gallon drums that had been cut in two and, of course, disposing of this noxious residue in a hot and humid land without a sanitary sewer system was a never-ending chore right near the bottom of a long list of undesirable tasks. Such duties were often referred to as shit details but in the case of burning the latrine waste that term was literal. The task of hauling the containers to a burn site, pouring in diesel fuel, and then getting upwind before lighting the mess was often assigned to the male Vietnamese employees, or papa-sans, but many GIs also found themselves stuck with the obnoxious chore. I was to learn all this as time went by, but I could not help but notice the smoke plumes before we even touched down because my first thought was that they might be from fire fights.

We landed at Bien Hoa Air Base about 1:30 p.m., or 1330 military time, on Thursday, October 9. Welcome to paradise. As we walked down the stairs from the plane onto the tarmac it was hot and humid, but not really much worse than Alabama in August. Some men speak of the smell, so different from anything they ever experienced before, as one of their lasting first impressions of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), but since I have such a poor sense of smell I did not share in that memorable sensation as powerfully as most. Our plane was the freedom bird for the troops who were leaving and they gave us a big cheer as we walked across the runway over to the terminal. The thought ran through my mind that for the first time in my life I was in a situation where people were looking for a chance to kill me but I almost instinctively fell into the all-important behavior for FNGs (fuckin’ new guys) of observing the experienced troops for cues on how to behave and what was happening, and since they were clearly unconcerned about any present danger I took that to mean there was little or none.

We waited for a bus that was to take us about five miles southeast over to the 90th Replacement Battalion in the northern area of Long Binh Post. The 90th was one of the two main Army replacement facilities in the RVN, along with the 22nd up on the coast at Cam Ranh Bay, a base that included the famous China Beach. The 90th was usually the better of the two for entering the war zone because that meant you were to be assigned to a unit in the southern half of South Vietnam, which comprised III and IV Corps Tactical Zones. The fighting in the north, the I and II Corp Zones, was almost always worse because of the presence of many North Vietnam Army (NVA) regulars and the proximity of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that provided the enemy with more heavy weaponry such as armor and artillery. The Army endured its share of large-scale battles in the northern part of the RVN, especially up near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the 17th Parallel, but the worst of that was usually handled by the Marines.

Once we all got on the bus along with our duffel bags, the driver started to lurch like mad over toward Long Binh. The first thing many of us noticed was that the windows were covered with metal grating, which we guessed was to provide at least some protection from projectiles and grenades. Part of the five-mile trip was through the village of Bien Hoa and we would soon learn to refer to these Vietnamese towns as villes. Our driver was reluctantly forced to slow down going through the town because of the gaggle of pedestrians and vehicles including US Army trucks and jeeps, carts drawn by water buffalo, three-wheeled Lambrettas, motorcycles, bikes, and a few old French and American cars. That gave us more of a chance to observe our surroundings and most of us had never seen such obvious abject poverty. It made the rural southern US look good by comparison. The guy next to me said it was a nightmare. There were ramshackle huts of plywood, corrugated sheet metal, cardboard, and anything else that could provide a bit of protection from the elements. There was junk and trash lying around all over the place, children playing in the dirt, and some makeshift stands offering various small items for sale. This was how the Vietnamese lived who had been displaced from their agricultural roots and I suspected that the war was frequently the cause of their plight.

We soon arrived at the 90th which, like Oakland, was to be my home for one night. The buildings were not as substantial as those on stateside bases but this was still clearly not a temporary facility. They were constructed of wood, steel, concrete block, and often a combination of these materials. One difference from their US counterparts that we noticed immediately was tiers of sandbags along the exterior walls. These protective barriers varied in height but were always at least tall enough to provide protection from shrapnel from exploding exterior ordnance for men lying on the floor. There were also many reflections of the usual efforts to present an appearance of good military order such as named streets (after US states at the 90th), concrete sidewalks, short fences around some of the facilities, and gravel beds or even attempts at lawns covering many of the unused small areas of land between buildings. We had a short orientation session and were then assigned to transient barracks without electricity or bedding on the bunks for Thursday night. During a restless night in my bunk I could hear the intermittent sounds of distance explosions, which I would soon learn to dismiss as yet another fact of life in the war zone.

***

Back in Minneapolis, Bev was also enduring the dull ache of our sudden separation after three weeks together. She wrote on Monday the 6th about managing to plow through sixty pages of Yeats’ autobiography, which had been no easy task with her mind wandering to questions of what I was doing while Joyce C and Jennifer chatted in the same room. She was grateful to have others nearby, though, because it helped keep her mind occupied at a time when everything seemed to be bothering her. She also found solace in taking some quiet times most evenings to talk with me in letters, and that feeling was certainly mutual. Mail from home meant everything to the troops on the other side of the world, and I tried to send nearly as many letters back as well.

Her M-W-F class schedule for the quarter allowed more flexibility in her nonacademic activities. She was going shopping downtown with her mother on Tuesday, then grocery shopping in the afternoon, and then to see the movie Funny Girl that night. She hoped to go shopping with my mom up at Apache Plaza later in the week. My mom had called and said that Dad and his hunting buddies had a lot of rain, but they always rented a cabin or rooms at a hunting lodge and the shared friendship was really the main reason for the trip anyway. Bev was enjoying Ted Wright’s Yeats class a great deal and already had plans for writing her paper on several of his poems. Jennifer was student teaching at Field School in South Minneapolis, and a recent highlight was the hatching of a monarch butterfly, Mony. The children were delighted, except for one boy who had wanted to smash Mony’s wings. Jennifer brought him home on Monday afternoon and let him go.

The activities for Tuesday went off as planned, although it seemed like a strange sort of mechanical day to Bev because of her down mood. She and her mom went downtown and shopped at Dayton’s, with Bev buying two ties for her dad’s upcoming birthday, an umbrella for her mom’s birthday, and hose for herself. That night the two of them, along with Jennifer and her mom, saw Funny Girl. I had given her a round button that read When You’re Happy, I’m Happy that she wore for many months and she said that the usher at the theater read it aloud. I had picked it up at the TWA counter at the Atlanta airport and it most likely referred to the company’s desire to foster good customer relations, but through serendipity it also turned out to be the perfect talisman to remind her of our love and hopes for the future. Her mother had asked Bev what she would like for Christmas and she replied Steve, Steve home, Steve happy. I was grateful that Marcia was there to help her daughter through those first few days of my deployment.

Wednesday the 8th was a class day, and that night my folks took Bev and her mother to supper at the Wig & Bottle, a fine dining restaurant on the corner of Lowry and Marshall. My mom had scallops, Marcia had chicken, and Bev and Dad had steaks. They had passed around popovers during the meal and Marcia could not recall ever having them before. Bev said they talked for quite some time after eating, and it was good to hear that her mom and my folks were getting to know each other better.

They stayed home in the apartment all day on Thursday and the third time Bev went down to check for the mail my first two letters to her were there, bringing her up to date on my flight to California and activities in Oakland. She and JC were both studying for the English Master of Arts (MA) exam and that day her goal had been to read all the sonnets and songs of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, one of the twenty-five works on the reading list. She made it through ninety of the 108 sonnets, which I thought was impressive since reading that many sonnets at once seemed rather like eating a whole box of candy—way too much of a good thing. The Yeats class would be a big help for the exam since The Tower was on the list as well. She closed by writing out two poems: Tosadnessday by Mason Williams, suggested by Jennifer, and The Fiddler of Dooney by Yeats.

Bev and her mom played the old favorite Yahtzee on Friday night, and then on Saturday she and my mom and Mary took Marcia out to the airport. Bev’s mom said she had loved the visit to Minneapolis but would still be glad to get back home to work on her PEO report because she needed to be alone in order to concentrate on it. On the way back they stopped at Sears and the grocery store where her Happy button attracted more attention. A worker there said I can tell you’re a college student because that’s the kind of button they wear. Younger kids wear stuff like ‘ban the bomb.’ Then that afternoon in Musicland in Apache Bev and Mary practically ran into someone who was staring at the button. She said it was the kind of day when she just took things as they came, and I knew that with my sisters around there would be no shortage of suggestions for things to do. She had tried to read some Yeats, without much success, and then Mary talked her into going up to the Hilltop Drive-In to see Gone with the Wind, so she went up there with Mary and Jane. As magnificent a film as it is, it was not a good one for her to see in her current state of mind, and the vivid depiction of the pain of separation and then the death and destruction wrought by a terrible war was a bit too much for her. They got home late so she spent the night at the house and when she was finally alone in the guest bedroom she broke down.

On Sunday the 12th she spent the day at the house reading and just bumming around feeling sort of lost. That evening back at the apartment she read some Aristotle and then began Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, another work on the MA exam list. She was looking forward to having the exam behind her, for better or for worse, in five weeks and she and JC were planning to celebrate in some way but there are few breaks in the hectic life of a grad student. They were both teaching assistants (TA) for Sandy MacLeish and just about the time the exam was over there would be mid-quarters to grade, but she wrote that all the work helped comfort her by keeping her busy. She included a few sports highlights in her Sunday letter, but the big news was that it was snowing. Two inches were expected by Monday morning, so her first experience of walking the half-mile trek to campus in winter weather was coming right up.

***

At the 90th I was still with Ed Russell and six other fellow platoon members from Charlie Company at Fort Mac, and on the morning of Friday the 10th we went through the process of being assigned to units. We knew this was a crucial time in our lives because the random decision of some clerk could determine our fate for the next year, perhaps even whether we would live or die, and yet there did not seem to be any initiative we could take to help increase the odds of a favorable outcome. We were assigned to the First Air Cavalry Division, which at that time was operating in III Corps in the area of the RVN adjoining the portion of Cambodia known as The Parrot’s Beak. That was not particularly good news because the unit was known to be gung ho, although a good part of that reputation had been earned during the hard fighting in the northern part of the country during the earlier days of the war, often against NVA regulars. Just when we thought we knew where we were going, we were told that would not be our assignment after all. Someone had noticed we had taken the new intensive infantry Advanced Individual Training (AIT) and decided that meant we should be assigned to a ground unit rather than one that was air mobile. Soon the eight of us were assigned to the First Infantry Division, The Big Red One.

Before the morning was over we had collected our gear and were taken by truck about five miles west over to Di An, the location of the rear area of the division’s headquarters. We had our first brief view of rural Vietnam on the way and it was far more pleasant than the filthy and chaotic ville. There was an array of farm animals such as cows, ducks, chickens, and the ubiquitous water buffalo. I also noticed a number of dogs with erect pointed ears and tails curving upwards that reminded me pictures I had seen of Australian dingo dogs. There were occasional small box-like structures up on stilts that I took to be shrines and many well-tended graves. I recalled that somewhere along the line during training we had been told that the Vietnamese held their ancestors in very high regard. But what I remember most of all is my first view of rice paddies. The color of these water-covered fields varied by the type of light and the maturity of the crop, but there were times when they were such a verdant green that they seemed to radiate with an aura of shimmering iridescence, a sensation that was enhanced even further when the wind gave them the appearance of an enchanted green sea by creating undulating waves across the surface of the paddies. We passed a school and the kids out for recess were all so cute. At the time we were preoccupied with what lay ahead of us and I had little time to reflect on what we were passing but these were my first hints of the beauty of this little corner of the world, and what a cruel fate it was for these diminutive people that they had been pawns for so long in the clash of empires.

We were given an orientation session at Di An and what I liked best about that was the fact that the BRO was probably seeing less action at that time than any other combat unit in-country. They said that Di An had not been hit for over a year, but there were still plenty of the famous heavily fortified 1st Division bunkers around. There were other items of business as well, such as the strict requirement that we turn in all US currency to avoid the possibility of undermining the Vietnamese economy through hyperinflation. In fact, it was a court-martial offense to be caught with any US money. We were to exchange it for military payment certificates (MPC) that served as cash on US bases, and these little pieces of scrip always reminded me of Monopoly money. There were no MPC coins and so the denominations went all the way down to five cents. MPC were also readily accepted off-base, or we could exchange them for piasters, the Vietnamese currency, for dealings in Saigon or the villes. We were now nearing the end of the rainy, or monsoon, season, which lasted from May through late November, and one guy said it had rained every day since April. The rest of the year was the dry season. February through June was the warmest time, but it was hot and humid pretty much year round. The time difference between the RVN and The World was often a source of confusion and disagreement, but eventually I was able to verify that we were twelve hours ahead when Minneapolis was on Daylight Saving Time and thirteen hours ahead for the rest of the year.

We spent that night in yet another transient barracks and then on Saturday the 11th came the process of being assigned to field units. They pulled a few of us out of formation and asked if we could type. We knew they had chosen the ones who had college degrees, but that meant nothing unless we could also pass an Army typing test. They say that mother knows best, and mine had insisted that I take a typing class over at my parents’ alma mater, the old North High, during the summer of 1960. The instructor, resembling nothing so much as an old-time schoolmarm who had remained from the days my parents attended in the 1930s, had insisted that we learn to type with all ten fingers and I had kept it up in high school and especially college so I really was a pretty decent typist, which was all that the Army required. They told us to take our time on the test, meaning accuracy was probably more important than speed, and I had no trouble passing. Four of the seven of us who took the test passed, and I felt sorry for the ones who did not. They told the four of us that we would be interviewing for clerk-typist positions. That seemed like such a fantastic break that I told myself not to believe it until I actually had a position, but my hopes were high.

Then three of us were told that we were going up to division HQ for a job interview at a place about forty clicks to the northwest called Lai Khe. Click, also spelled klick, was the military term for a kilometer. I thought we were at HQ in Di An but it turned out that the commanding general and most of his immediate support staff were up at Lai Khe, so that was the official HQ. The idea was that the officers at or near the top should be close to the action and one man working at Di An told me that Lai Khe was in an area known to be hot and was nicknamed Rocket City because of all the incoming rockets and mortar rounds, especially at night. I knew that it would still be infinitely better than fighting out in the boonies if I was only lucky enough to get the job. On the ride up Highway 13, Thunder Road, I was able to see more of the countryside, along with a few small villages. Much of the agricultural land was attractive, although everyone seemed to be living in poverty. There were stretches where things looked much like the southern US, but soon there would be something like a palm tree, banana grove, water buffalo, or Buddhist cemetery to remind a soldier that he was in a strange alien place. It was also one of the most dangerous places in the world at the time and there were frequent reminders of the ravages of war such as bomb and shell craters. One ville immediately south of Lai Khe, Ben Cat, had so many blasted-out and pock-marked buildings that it reminded me of photos of Germany after World War II.

As the headquarters of both the entire division and the 3rd Brigade, Lai Khe, or Danger Forward, was an important military base, and it was located on one of the old Michelin rubber plantations. Many of the French buildings were still there serving as offices for some of the units that make up the extensive administrative command structure for a unit of approximately 20,000 soldiers. The large groves of rubber trees planted in neat rows along with the colonial buildings with their whitewashed walls and red tile roofs lent an exotic air to the place, and I had not expected to see such a sight in a country that the American media usually portrayed as nothing more than a war-torn hellhole. The main reason this base was so verdant and bosky compared to the other three I had already seen was that it had not been sprayed with defoliants such as Agent Orange because our forces had been ordered not to harm the rubber trees. In other words, it still had the normal landscape for a setting in the tropics of Southeast Asia. I had no time to marvel at the relative beauty of Lai Khe, however, because my only priority was to do whatever was necessary to land the job behind the lines.

My interview was with a major in the office of the division adjutant general, one of the head administrative officers for the unit. There were some brief introductions to men I hoped would soon be my co-workers and then I went in to meet Major Painter. He proved to be the most amiable officer I had yet encountered, reminding me of a fatherly high school teacher, and I appreciated the way he put me at ease rather than trying to intimidate me with his rank. We talked about our college experiences and it turned out that he had completed a doctorate a couple of years before. He especially liked my English degree because the job would involve a good deal of writing and proof-reading. He soon said that he would like to have me in the office, but he also noted that I was trained as a Charlie and the division was short on such soldiers. So he asked me if I would mind not serving in that capacity. I think he felt that he needed to say that but, of course, my reply was that I would be more than happy to work for him. I felt like I was walking on air when I left his office and spent a bit more time talking with the other men in the office, and then it was time to catch my ride back to Di An. All three of us got the jobs we were hoping for so we were a pretty high-spirited bunch of soldiers on our return trip as we shared details about our new assignments. I felt that mine sounded like the best one but, for men who thought they were soon going to be in combat just two days before, any position behind the lines was just perfect, or Number One in the parlance of the slang commonly heard around the bases and villes. When I got back my first priority was to write to Bev and my family with the wonderful news. I knew my letters would not reach them for about a week but I enjoyed imagining their reactions when they read them.

The Big Red One, known as BRO, was a combat unit and it was expected that every soldier in the war zone would be able to fight if the situation required that, so before moving on to our units we had to go through a four-day review of our infantry training at the division training command, also at Di An. The official name was Danger University, but most of the troops called it Snake School. This moniker referred to the primary obsession of every soldier in-country, which was how much time he had left to serve in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). New men like us were long and hence snakes. As the weeks and months passed a man became shorter until he finally attained the coveted status of being short. Most of us began claiming this title when our days until DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas Service) dropped to less than one hundred, at which point we were also known as two-digit midgets.

I ended up spending five days at the HQ company area and sleeping in the transient barracks at Di An because of the need to change my orders, and even though I was eager to get settled in up at Lai Khe, I had no problem with doing little or nothing for a few days either. After a half-year in the military I had mastered the essential skill of assessing what was permissible and then taking full advantage of whatever leeway the men in charged allowed. I met a guy named John Henkel from Whittier, California, and we goofed off together. One of the first things we learned was that there seemed to be no penalty for missing formations, even though such an infraction had been a cardinal sin during our training days, and since that was where they assigned work details we skipped most of them. We showed up for enough formations so that we would be there when the administrative personnel had finished processing our paperwork and cut the orders assigning us to our units. It was clear that the discipline was far more lax than at stateside posts and one of the clerks told me that a position well behind the lines on a big base in the RVN was better than an assignment in the US. Almost everything you needed was free, there were hardly any inspections, cold beer and pop were readily available and cheap, and there were Vietnamese civilian employees to do the KP and many of the other shit details. Promotions, and hence pay increases, came faster and there was also the extra money for serving in a combat zone. I knew that when I got up to the AG’s office the men there would fill me in on the culture of that particular unit, but I certainly liked what I was hearing so far. Yet another bonus of not having a combat assignment was that you could feel reasonably safe about extending your time in-country so that you had less than five months to serve when you returned to the US. Under the Army’s early-out policy such troops were discharged upon their return, and because of the delays caused by my mono, I would only have to extend for about two weeks to reduce my active duty time from twenty-four to nineteen months.

Off-duty diversions at Di An included movies at the service club but I only saw half of the first one I went to, a western, because the projector broke. On the night of Monday the 13th we were treated to a showing of The Angry Breed, a justifiably forgotten stinker most likely made for the drive-in theater circuit. It actually had a Vietnam connection because the protagonist is rewarded for saving the life of a screenwriter in the RVN by being given a movie script. After he returns to the US his efforts to have the film produced lead him through a series of bizarre adventures involving a motorcycle gang, hallucinogenic drugs, and a romantic escapade with the delectable Melody Patterson. The NCO-EM (Non-commissioned Officer Enlisted Men’s) club offered more enjoyable entertainment, along with the usual booze, in the form of singers and bands that offered their own renditions of popular American songs. I think the entertainers were usually from the Philippines and their music bore an uncanny similarity to the original recordings that they had listened to when learning them. Of course, these ensembles always included scantily clad young ladies demonstrating their singing and dancing skills. Another feature of the service clubs in the RVN that was new to me was the banks of slot machines. I never played them but they were all over the place in every club I frequented. I had a few beers at the club on the night of the 12th with Ed Russell and some other buddies from Fort Mac and they left for Snake School the next day.

I finally left for my own training review on Wednesday the 15th. The cadre there tried to make the atmosphere something like Basic Combat Training (BCT) and AIT by throwing in some yelling and minor harassment but we all knew we were there for less than a week so it was not hard to take. In fact, for the men going to field units it was a welcome delay since it represented four days in their tours of duty without any fighting. We fired all the weapons once again but most of us had infantry AIT so it really was just a review rather than anything new. I was pleased with how well I remembered my skills, even though I hoped I would never need to use them, and one instructor was especially impressed with our accuracy with the M79 grenade launcher. The weather was hot and humid but that resulted in a minimum of discomfort since we were not exerting ourselves much. There was a hard rain every day between 1700 and 1800 hours that began and ended suddenly. This daily pattern was interrupted on the 17th, a hint that the end of the rainy season was approaching. One night I had guard duty and was assigned to patrol a well-lit area near the motor pool. It was somewhat strange to be out there on my own in the middle of the night but any anxiety was minimized by the knowledge that we were far from any of the base’s perimeters.

The final exercise on the 18th was an ambush and walking to the site with full field gear in the tropical heat gave us our first real taste of just how miserable life in the field could be even without anyone shooting at you. It was far worse than anything I had experienced in Alabama and the tepid water in our canteens provided scant relief. We had to cross a rice paddy with water about waist-high, but fortunately we were allowed to walk on the dikes to avoid crushing the plants during the harvest season. The ambush exercise was after dark and things seemed to go off as planned. We fired just about all the small arms, as well as Claymores and flares. Our enemies were paper targets, however, and when the instructors looked them over there were few holes to be seen. In the panic and confusion of a real combat situation there probably would have been even fewer. I did not have to fire my weapon since I was pulling security on one of the flanks which meant that after we returned to the base I did not have to clean it before retiring to my bunk. I left the Division Training Command on Sunday the 19th and returned to Lai Khe.

***

Back in Minneapolis, Bev was still feeling isolated and detached as she tried to adjust to the recent changes in her life. She wrote on the 14th about how all the reading she had been doing for her courses and the upcoming exam may have contributed to her mood, but she also knew full well that the main reason was our separation compounded by the fact that I was in harm’s way. Even her roommates seemed to be on a different wavelength and she felt that she was missing out on most of their inside jokes. They had been unable to contact JR and were still uncertain whether she would be joining them in the apartment. Jennifer’s friend Matthew was over that evening, but Bev and JC were well practiced at tuning out distractions in order to stick to their studying. JC had an extra advantage there because all she needed to do was turn off her hearing aids.

I was always intrigued by how Bev liked background music when she studied because I would never have been able to concentrate in such an environment but that skill might have been honed through five years of living in dorms. The music was not doing much to raise her spirits, however, because the melancholy songs reinforced her moodiness and the upbeat ones made her wish we were enjoying them together. She mentioned Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin’ from Midnight Cowboy, which could be the anthem for folks who are feeling down and misunderstood. She had Glen Campbell’s album Galveston and mentioned that Time made her quite pensive and melancholy. And of course the poignant title track by Jimmy Webb describing the thoughts of a soldier in a war zone who dreaded the prospect of dying and never again seeing his beloved could do nothing to brighten the mood of a woman in her situation. Sugar, Sugar by the Archies came on and her only comment on that ditty was they must play it one hundred times every day. She also mentioned The Beatles’ Hey, Jude and Bobby Sherman’s Little Woman.

I was always impressed by her scholarship but she was taking on an unusually high volume of reading that fall because of preparing for the MA exam on top of her normal course load. She had finished Culture and Anarchy and found Arnold’s thought relevant to contemporary times. She was nearing the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and found the medieval romance adventurous, enticing, and just plain fun. She was only going to review Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde because she had read the entire work two years before. JC was studying just as diligently and seemed to be spending nearly all of her time away from campus reading in the apartment.

She wrote on Wednesday the 15th in a state of excitement and joy because she had just received my letter describing my new assignment as a clerk. I was pleased that it had reached her in four days because that bode well for the speed of our communications over the next year. She asked me to thank Major Painter personally for her. Bev and my family received their letters on the same day so she and Mom had been sharing their gratitude and relief over the phone. Mom said that she felt ten years younger and as though her prayers were being answered. Bev had just gotten home from the Moratorium march, which she described as a peaceful and meaningful demonstration, and after that she had eaten lunch with a girl she met during the event.

The document calling for the Moratorium had been signed by 500 student body presidents and college editors at over 200 institutions. It was a short and plainly worded piece beginning with the straightforward declaration that ending the war in Vietnam is the most important task facing the American nation, and then continuing with a call for the suspension of business as usual so that those wishing to take some sort of action could further their cause by carrying the message to the larger communities adjoining their campuses. In Minneapolis Mayor Charles Stenvig announced that, while he did not support the cause, he would cooperate with the planned march downtown from campus by issuing a parade permit. Governor Harold LeVander voiced his opposition to the event, while Gene McCarthy, Fritz Mondale, and Don Fraser all planned to demonstrate their support by participating and speaking. On Monday the 13th the Twin Cities Campus Assembly voted to support the Moratorium, although the passage of the resolution required the overwhelming support of the student members since a majority of the faculty representatives had voted against it.

The events in Minneapolis began at 9:00 a.m. on the 15th with the rally in front of Coffman featuring speakers such as Mulford Sibley and Sandy Wilkinson, followed by the march downtown to the Old Federal Building. The events downtown featured a requiem ceremony conducted by four Twin Cities clergy, including Harry Bury of the Newman Center, for the dead in Vietnam. Other activities included the distribution of leaflets throughout the city, a silent vigil in front of the Armory on campus, panels conducting a teach-in all afternoon at Coffman Union that was also broadcast live on the student radio station, and a closing rally over at Macalester College. A group of Vietnam veterans carried a wooden coffin on the march downtown symbolizing the 825 men from Minnesota who had already died in the war. The day was planned as a sober expression of concern and determination to effect change rather than yet another wild exhibition of rabble rousing, and the solemn purpose was respected by the staff at the Federal Building as they lowered the flag there to half-staff as their own way of showing respect for the war dead. The entire day resulted in only five arrests and the police department estimated the crowd at the downtown rally as 10,000. The turnouts elsewhere were also massive, reaching a total in the millions when all the worldwide events were tallied. The National Mall hosted an immense crowd that was clearly audible at the White House, and the event on Boston Commons, the largest, attracted 100,000.

Moratorium Day is considered yet another milestone in the glacial but inexorable progress of a shift in attitude to one against the