by Kate Stewart
The 1971 book catalog includes a lot of American fiction—some nineteenth-century classic novels—and a large amount of midcentury fiction, particularly books by authors that appealed to men: Kingsley Amis, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, John Dos Passos, Ian Fleming, Dashiell Hammett, James Michener, Vladimir Nabokov, John O’Hara, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and Leon Uris. Science fiction, westerns, and mysteries were also offered in large numbers in both the field delivery kits and the field collections. Nonfiction books include helpful basic titles in languages, science, photography, travel, and various self-help topics. Also included in the catalog were comic-strip compilations such as Peanuts and Andy Capp, which would have provided some fun reading for both well-educated men and those who were nearly illiterate.
Impressive for the era was the depth and breadth of the lists’ titles in the areas of African American literature, history, and culture. When the civil rights movement peaked during the Vietnam War, African American troops were eager for news about this topic (many African American magazines were ordered as well). The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Why We Can’t Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were standards in the paperback deliveries and were widely read by both African Americans and whites in the US. Despite the racial tension evident across the military during the war, librarians provided many copies of Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and new books that promoted the ideologies of the Black Power, Black Panther Party, and Black Is Beautiful movements, as well as many other classic titles by African American writers like James Baldwin.
A gaping hole in these lists concerns books related to women’s issues or the feminist movement. By 1971 books such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex were very popular. It seems curious that none of these books appear on the field collections list. Perhaps they were available at the permanent libraries, but it is surprising that Ruth and other librarians who selected books did not include them. Perhaps they thought that men wouldn’t read them or that they would get complaints. Classic novels by women writers such as Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf are also noticeably absent. Even though the libraries were serving a primarily male clientele, women were actively serving in many roles across Vietnam and certainly some of them, and some men as well, would have enjoyed reading such titles.
Veterans who answered my survey listed novels they remembered reading, such as A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. An anonymous veteran wrote that he read only John Steinbeck’s books while in Vietnam and often read them while he was high—in order to get out of his head, as he put it. Playboy became so popular in the field kits in the late 1960s that at one point they were stored in the empty swimming pool behind the Saigon Library when there was no space to store them inside.44 In the end the magazine may have been the most memorable aspect of the library system to the average Vietnam veteran, although most didn’t realize it came from the library at all. Librarian Ann Kelsey, who worked at the library at the Cam Ranh Bay Air Base in 1970, explained, “You hear somebody who says, ‘I never saw a library in Vietnam,’ or, ‘I never saw any books.’ But they’ll usually say, ‘But these Playboy [magazines] kept coming around.’ They remember the Playboys.”45 The troops read the high-quality fiction and essays in Playboy and may have discovered new authors to explore.
Perhaps the most personally important fiction books to these troops were war novels and those that addressed colonialism. Many of these classics, such as The Red Badge of Courage, Heart of Darkness, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Mother Night, appear in the book catalog. An anonymous veteran read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Randy, an army veteran, recalled reading Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle, a paperback he still owns.46 This influential novel about an ambitious army officer during World War II remains one of the most popular books read by members of the military and serves as a warning against the military industrial complex.47 Marc read All Quiet on the Western Front: “I read out of boredom and likely out of fear of the unknown. Reading brought comfort. On the other hand reading Remarque in combat was an odd thing to do.”48
Besides reading about military history in general, troops in Vietnam were also very eager to read about their own war. Stephen Fee, who served in the army from 1968 to 1970, stated in the survey, “I checked out a book titled The Battle of Dau Tiang49 by S. L. A. Marshall while I was there. The book was about the battles that took place in 1966. I knew the places and the units that were described in the book. It was eerie reading about combat while I was in combat in the same places but 3 years later.”
While searching the internet for anything about the libraries in Vietnam, I came across a blog comment on a post about the death of North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. This man wrote:
Oddly enough I developed my admiration for General Giap during my time as a rear area soldier in the Vietnamese War.
The woman who set up the Army libraries in Vietnam agreed to do it on condition that there was no censorship.
I learned more about the Vietnamese leaders and their programs reading in an American Army library in-country than I learned in two years of protesting against the war.
I went to a “liberal” university in a “liberal” city and I had no access to the literature about the Vietnamese efforts and policies.50
I assumed that “the woman who set up the Army libraries” was Ruth, even if he hadn’t met her or didn’t even know her name. After a few attempts, I discovered that this anonymous commenter was a man named Joe Hudson, who finally sent me an email. He had served at Qui Nhon from 1968 to 1969 and went to the library daily to search for books on Vietnam, as did many other men who were stationed there. After I explained my research on Ruth, he wrote to me:
That was without a doubt the absolutely best library that I have ever used . . . If I asked the librarians for a book, I got it. No ifs, ands or buts. I gave the librarians a thorough work out on locating books. I was probably reading two to five books a day. I was able to get translated books about the war from French, German and Soviet Russian authors . . . The general non-fiction books were extremely well balanced . . . I’ve probably dealt with over 40 libraries during my lifetime. That library would be my ideal of a library . . . Ms. Rappaport knew what a library and librarians should be, in an ideal world. She was real, real damn good. That library was the one bright spot in my eleven and a half months in the hell we Americans created in Vietnam.51
As the antiwar protests heated up in the United States, there was a concern that military censorship was blocking both the troops’ and the public’s access to news about what was really happening in Vietnam. But no books or materials were banned in the libraries, despite the efforts of a few library employees who tried to hide magazines with cover stories on the antiwar movement.52 Book lists available from the National Archives, although they were not comprehensive for the whole library system over the full span of the war, prove that troops had ready access—within the limits of what could physically be obtained at the time—to the current literature on the Vietnam War and its background. Some of the nonfiction and fiction titles available in 1971 included the following:
Vietnam: The Roots of Conflict by Chester A. Bain
Vietnam: A Political History by Joseph Buttinger
Southeast Asia Today and Tomorrow by Richard Butwell
Limited War and American Defense Policy by Seymour Deitchman
Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard B. Fall
Southeast Asia in U.S. Policy by Russell Fifield and Paul A. Varg
The Rise of Red China by Robert Goldston
Dimensions of Conflict in Southeast Asia by Bernard K. Gordon
One Very Hot Day by David Halberstam
The Struggle for Indochina by Ellen J. Hammer
Vietnam: Between Two Truces by Jean Lacouture
Dateline: Vietnam by Jim G. Lucas
Background to Vietnam by Bernhard Newman
Vietnam in the Mud by James H. Pickerell
The Vietnam Reader by Marcus Raskin
US House and Senate Vietnam hearing transcripts
Ann Kelsey still has in her possession a bibliography on Vietnam—regularly updated and available at every military library during the war years—that was prepared by librarians.53 Clearly the troops had access to a wide array of opinions and research on the war, including books that exposed the corruption and lies of military leaders and politicians. Despite this, there were a few explicitly antiwar omissions, notably Mark Satin’s Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada—which was so popular in the US it was regularly stolen from libraries but obviously not helpful for troops once they were in Vietnam—and John Kerry’s The New Soldier (it might not have been released yet in 1971 when this list was created by the library system).
Although they had tried to distance themselves from this mass of antiwar media and sentiment, librarians could not ignore the reality of the war once they got there. Ann Kelsey was working at the Cam Ranh Bay library in 1970 when she was ordered to close an engineering library because the unit was headed to Cambodia. She was shocked because she had just heard Nixon on the radio announce that troops were not invading Cambodia. It was a turning point in her life; from then on she could never trust the American government again.54 Other librarians similarly left Vietnam with a very bitter feeling toward the military and their government.
The massive amount of money spent in Vietnam was increasingly embarrassing and difficult to justify. By 1970 the military was trying to end the building of permanent structures and divert resources to mobile trailers.55 Ruth continued to adapt and refine library service by installing trailer libraries at temporary bases and ordering new custom-made bookmobile trucks for the largest bases, in addition to the vans that were already used to move books around to permanent libraries. Some officers were baffled and jealous that the library system got such state-of-the-art trucks. Only two of the bookmobiles were used regularly, at Long Binh and An Khe.56
Floyd Zula, Ruth’s assistant in 1970, was there when she quit. He described his time working for her during her last year there:
In general we operated in crisis management mode. Ruth seemed to procrastinate on a whole array of issues until the seriousness of the matter dictated no more delay . . . My recollection is that Ruth was something of a micro-manager and that may explain why there were piles of paper everywhere. Now I remember that Ruth’s actual work space on her desk was about the size of a piece of typing paper. Around that one empty space there were Alpine heaps of paper, including her in-box. And her horizontal file cabinets were equally stuffed with more paper.
I do recall a party that Ruth threw at her trailer for the troops in the Special Services office. She served a deadly punch that was laced with a variety of liquors and fruit juices which we referred to as “Rappaport Punch.”
Some of the troops went into something like alcoholic bizerkness. One trooper from St. Louis became so belligerent that he intended to slug me through the window of my vehicle as I was ferrying dazed troopers back to the barracks. I quickly rolled up the window and this fellow Bill smacked the glass and broke some knuckles. He wore a cast for a time . . .
After Ruth returned to the USA, Michael Ridgeway was ordered by the then Special Services major to clean out her office. Her files, many of which contained indecipherable scribbles and all kinds of numbers, were dumped on the center of the office floor and we took turns photographing ourselves with our feet on this heap of file folders. The caption for this activity was “Ruthless.”57
By 1970 Ruth was desperate to get out of Vietnam. In the form she had to fill out to officially quit, she had to name a reason. She simply wrote, “After 7 years and 9 months service in Vietnam I desire to return to CONUS [contiguous US].”58 Even though she didn’t have another job lined up, she left in October, finally quitting her mission in Vietnam, perhaps demoralized and defeated after eight years. She was tasked, like A. A. Allison had been with the HSAS, to write a history of the library system in Vietnam. She detailed the growth from just a few shelves into an enormous system, the chaos, and the budgeting and administrative issues. She commended the staff for “their know-how, experience, effort and energy; tirelessly they worked long and arduous hours to try to meet the growing demands.” She concluded:
The motto had to be [to] get the most material to the most men. Emphasis was primarily on quantity and availability, only secondarily on quality and service. After materials en masse, emphasis was placed on facilities, providing at least one place on post where a man could forget the war, if but for a little while, and sit in comfort, peace and quiet. As many a departing GI has said to many a librarian over the years, “our library, well, it was like a little bit of home…” The choice was deliberate and conscious. Under combat conditions with constant threat of destruction, even an enemy rocket in the Saigon Library in commemoration and almost as if to publicize National Library Week, 1970, certain priorities had to be observed. These were materials and more materials for the largest number of personnel.59
After Ruth left, the drawdown accelerated in the early 1970s, and the enormous military infrastructure in Vietnam was dismantled haphazardly. Books were either given to local Vietnamese libraries or shipped off to other base libraries.60
When she applied for her next job, at the Library of Congress, Ruth once again had to fill out a form that ended up in her FBI file. She listed her address from November 1970 to January 1971 while she was unemployed as “QTR 113 B, DCII House, Ford Island, Hawaii,” the naval base at Pearl Harbor. I’m not sure what she did there, but I like to imagine her on the beach with a mai tai, a pack of cigarettes, and a good book.
The military’s library system still continues to this day, although many have closed at bases in urban centers with nearby public libraries. It does not provide actual libraries in war zones anymore, perhaps because most recreational information can be found on the internet and because troops can easily order their own books online through websites such as Amazon. While I researched Ruth’s work in Vietnam, Greg and his four deployments to Afghanistan were in the back of my mind. He regularly perused the books that wound up in the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation rooms (MWR) from various sources—donations from “support the troops” organizations and some left behind by other service members—and was surprised by the gems he found. In 2010 he read Moby Dick over the four months he was at Bagram. Even though he was required to work twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, he still read every night he was there. It was his only escape and the one thing that got him through.
Part VIII:
Some Days I Wonder What Ever Made Me Become a Cataloger
WASHINGTON, DC, 1971–1993
Chapter 30
A week before Obama’s first inauguration, I was laid off from my first full-time job after I graduated from library school. I had been working for only nine months as a corporate archivist in the suburbs of Washington, DC, after moving there from Oregon. Although I had been unhappy in that position and was already looking for a new job, I panicked about being unemployed while living in such an expensive city. But I soon got a call about a reference librarian position in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division in the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress. The job had seemed like a dream to me when I applied; I couldn’t believe then that I had gotten an interview.
I knew I needed to understand beforehand more about the library, so I took the official tour of the Jefferson Building. Walking into the Great Hall for the first time, I was dazzled by the beauty of the building, which looked more like a gilded palace than a library. I realized that whoever designed this building didn’t think of a library as just a warehouse for books; they wanted everyone who walked inside to be awed not just by the architecture but also by this building’s purpose. When the tour guide took
us up to the balcony overlooking the Main Reading Room, she pointed out the statues of some of the secular saints that lined the octagon-shaped room: Michelangelo, Beethoven, Herodotus, James Kent, Edward Gibbon, Plato, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Homer.
Afterward I walked to Eastern Market, a focal point of the Capitol Hill neighborhood that I had heard about. I admired the old row houses on the way and noticed that on this strangely warm Saturday in February, the sidewalks were crowded with joggers and families out doing errands. I knew that if I got this job, I would want to live in this neighborhood. I sat on a bench across from the market for a while, imagining that I worked at the Library of Congress and lived on Capitol Hill. I knew that if I could make it happen somehow, my life would be perfect.
During her last years of working in Vietnam and her months of unemployment, Ruth had her eye on the Library of Congress. Her friends from the air force, Pat Moesker (whom she had roomed with in Okinawa) and Pat’s husband, Bob, had moved to Capitol Hill in 1969 when he accepted a job at the Library of Congress in the Science and Technology Division. Her former army employee Bill Sittig had also started working there after he had come back from Saigon, as had Gabe Horchler, whom Ruth had interviewed but been unable to hire. She probably had at least a few more friends from the military who now lived in DC, and some of her cousins had also moved to the region.