by Jack McLean
The evidence of our year was now on our chests—rows of battle ribbons indicating wounds, heroism, and, above all, dedicated service. It seemed so pure at that moment. So simple. We had served. We had defended liberty on freedom’s frontier. We would now receive the kudos of a grateful nation and purposefully get on with our lives.
But there were no crowds.
There were no parades.
Perhaps, we thought, all of that would come later.
So all waited.
Several million of us.
It never came.
Our group quickly scattered. Some stayed to make connecting flights to new duty stations or home. Others boarded troop buses for the Oakland or San Francisco airports. There were hasty good-byes among new friends from the flight, along with promises to stay in touch, but the real parting had occurred days before, in the field, when the extraordinary Charlie Company bonds that had been forged over the past year had been broken—most forever.
I was to be processed for discharge over the next several days at the Treasure Island naval base in San Francisco Bay. I called and woke my sister Ruthie who was living in San Francisco with her husband and newborn daughter, Gretchen. My brother, Don, was there as well, having come out to greet me and, no doubt, send reports back to Brookline on the state of my mental and physical health. Ruthie said they would come pick me up, but it would take several hours to get there.
Now what?
Alone, weighted down by my seabag, I slowly walked outside of the now-deserted terminal building and found the section of curb that was closest to San Francisco.
I sat.
The sun grew warmer on my back as the first hour elapsed in silence. There was not a soul in sight. My senses were overcome, working in an overloaded state to reprogram my brain to its new reality. Most apparent at first was the silence—the deafening silence. For nearly a year, there existed an explosive norm of noise coming from twenty-four-hour-a-day bombing, outgoing and incoming artillery, choppers—constant choppers—and the everyday sounds made by two hundred fifty boys living in very close quarters.
Now there was silence.
I tried to return my mind to the present, but the past became more awful with each fleeting recollection—images of the hundreds of grotesque enemy bodies still splayed across LZ Loon the day we returned, their bodies fragmented from the bombs and charred by the napalm; the long patrols through fetid rice paddies and suffocating air that offered no relief. I remembered drinking canteens full of swamp water flavored with halazone purification tablets and Kool-Aid, and the smoky stench of burning human waste.
The future seemed inconsequential by comparison.
Now I was alone.
Completely alone.
There was a moment on LZ Loon, during a brief lull on the third day when we all knew the end was before us, that I felt fear for the first time—raw fear for my life. I remember wishing desperately at the time that I could disappear—evaporate. Who would know the difference? I was one marine in a country of hundreds of thousands. My presence was inconsequential to the overall fight against encroaching Communism.
Real abject fear.
Now alone on the curb, I began to shake and cried for the first time.
And cried.
Another hour passed while I waited for Ruthie to make the drive out from San Francisco. I stood occasionally to stretch my legs while gazing down the long base approach road for the sight of a car—any car. The road was empty. The sun grew hotter, but the generated heat was unusually dry and felt most comforting. Ever so slowly the memories again began to dull. Increasingly there was little room for them within the sensual assault I was experiencing.
Would I remember?
I took solace in the fact that I had written so many letters home. They would be my record. My memory.
I would not read them again for more than thirty years.
Neither would I cry again, for thirty years.
An oddity of the Vietnam War was that most combat participants did not go over or return as a unit. That had been the case with Charlie Company and me. I showed up on a Tuesday, one of three to report that day, and left on a Friday, the only one to leave. I flew over with a planeload of boys from all branches of the service who were assigned to dozens of different units upon arrival. Months later, I returned home with another group with whom I had no common bond, other than the war from whence we came. Few, if any, marines arrived and departed together.
Although there was only one way for a United States Marine to enter Vietnam, there were three ways to leave. He could come home safely by plane, as I had just done. He could come home in a body bag as so many of my Charlie Company comrades had already done and would continue to do long after I arrived home. The third way home was a medical evacuation after a stay in Delta Med in Dong Ha, one of two hospital ships off the coast of Da Nang, or after a stay in the United States Naval Hospital in Japan. Wayne Wood, Doc Mac Mecham, and dozens of the LZ Loon wounded returned in this manner. We rarely ever saw a seriously medevaced marine again. We’d hear rumors about their location or the extent of their wounds, but most never returned to the field.
While waiting in front of the Travis terminal, I remembered Mike Kilderry. We had affectionately dubbed him Snowball because of his white-blond hair and bright-eyed demeanor. When the first rocket hit LZ Loon, Snowball and I were sitting on the side of our fighting hole smoking a cigarette. We ducked when the round hit, but a tiny piece of shrapnel caught the lower right part of his back, just below his flak jacket. He had a corpsman look at it, and then returned to grab his gear. He was being medevaced for what appeared to be a nothing injury. Minutes later when he arrived at Delta Med in Dong Ha, he was unconscious. He was immediately transferred to another helicopter and flown to the hospital ship Repose off Da Nang.
On July 6, 1968, Mike Kilderry, one of the sweetest souls to ever walk the earth, died.
Those of us who returned standing up came home one by one and evaporated into the country. Each was left alone to fight his own private war, and face a country that was tired of the war and openly antagonistic to those veterans who’d fought in it. I did not have to be called a baby killer more than once to know that to openly discuss my military service in civilian circles in 1968 was a terrible idea.
At long last, a lone dark blue Chevrolet Malibu sedan made the approach to the terminal. Donny was driving with Ruthie also in the front and Gretchen sleeping in her car bed in the back. Ruthie later remembered me as “standing there tall, handsome, and healthy, and looking a bit tentative.”
There we were—loading my seabag into the car—gazing at one another from head to toe, wondering what to say, trying to find the words and emotions to fit a moment that had no precedent in our young lives—an epic family event being shared for the first time by three siblings with no parents in sight.
All that was Marine Corps or Vietnam flew from me like water off a shaking dog.
I climbed into a car for the first time in a year.
I rolled the window down and turned the radio up. As we headed for the freeway, I stuck my head out and let the sweet cool air fill my lungs over and over again. The regular morning commuters looked at me with curiosity. They had no idea.
Their daily routine was just beginning.
My new life was just beginning.
In San Francisco the climate was very antiwar. I was coming from nine months fighting in it, while most people there had spent the nine months fighting against it.
After calling my parents, I immediately called the Oakland naval hospital in hopes of locating Doc Mac Mecham. Oakland was the amputee center for boys who hailed from west of the Mississippi. The Philadelphia naval hospital covered the East.
Doc was there and thrilled to hear my voice. He was largely recovered from the physical wounds from the LZ Loon blast that had cost his right thumb, and, since he was a navy corpsman, he had been put on a regular shift at the hospital while awaiting his eventual discharge from the navy
. I could have no understanding of his fermenting mental wounds, to say nothing of my own.
Later that day, he drove over to San Francisco in his red Austin Healey and picked me up at Ruthie’s house in the Sunset District. We then shot back across the Bay Bridge to Oakland and the hospital, with the top down and the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today” playing at full volume on the little car radio. Dustin Hoffman re-created the scene in The Graduate—top down across the Bay Bridge to the music of Simon and Garfunkel.
I could not imagine there ever being a more wonderful moment in my life.
Minutes later, we pulled up to the cavernous old facility and parked.
As with so many other events over the past two years, there was nothing in my experience that could possibly have prepared me for what I was about to face on that gorgeous late July afternoon.
I had bought a box of fresh doughnuts. I hadn’t known what else to do.
Our footsteps echoed as we walked down the long whitewashed hallways past a seemingly endless number of partially open doors that revealed the human remnants of other eras—navy and Marine Corps veterans from distant wars, either dying from injuries sustained long ago or just dying.
We turned the final corner and pushed open the frosted double doors that contained the amputee ward. All of the boys in the room had recently sustained their injuries in Vietnam. After being medevaced from combat, most had spent days or weeks being stabilized on a hospital ship offshore before being moved back to the States. Once in Oakland, they remained a month or two to be fit with prostheses, undergo physical therapy, and just lie there contemplating their new lot in life. As we were a mere seven weeks removed from the horror of LZ Loon, there was an inordinate number of marines from Charlie and Delta companies lying prone between the crisp white sheets of the beds in the amputee ward of the Oakland naval hospital.
There was nothing in my life’s experience that could have provided balance or perspective to that which flooded my eyes as I gazed down the dimly lit ward. The human detritus of our three days on LZ Loon was spread before me. How could I possibly connect what my eyes observed with what my brain could rationally process?
It was horrifying.
The first person I came to was Wayne Wood. We had joined Charlie Company during the same week the previous November. He had been a machine gun squad leader. He wasn’t supposed to have been, but his predecessor had been killed shortly before we’d arrived and a replacement had been needed. Woody had gotten the job. If I’d been first into the command bunker that day, I would have gotten the job.
After that first week, the next time I saw Woody, he had an M60 machine gun carefully balanced on his right shoulder with seven bandoliers of NATO 7.62 ammo hanging around his shoulders. Put a knife in his mouth and he could have passed for Pancho Villa. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday and had a sixteen-year-old girlfriend named Jan back home in Iowa. At every opportunity over the seven months, he’d pull out Jan’s dog-eared picture and speak incessantly about their love and impending marriage. Occasionally we’d avoid him because of it. We could all recite the story almost verbatim.
Shortly after the first rockets hit on the fifth of June, the Skipper called for volunteers to bring the wounded up to the LZ to be medevaced. Woody jumped from his hole and ordered his squad to action. The next round killed them all.
Except Woody.
The rocket from Co Roc, Laos, exploded and sent a sickening monsoon of metal through the leaves and elephant grass. The larger pieces screamed by unaerodynamically until cracking into a tree trunk, thudding into a mound of red clay, or ever so quietly slicing off the skinny pink leg of a seventeen-year-old boy. The smaller pieces sounded like a downpour of rain, with every drop being lethal cargo.
Wayne Wood was thrown fifty feet by the explosion and became filled to overflowing with the full complement of large and small shrapnel. It is difficult to imagine a person alive with more metal in his body than Wayne Wood. His screams haunted me for years. Here he was now in the amputee ward of the Oakland naval hospital without a leg and filled with enough shrapnel to make his every breath a miracle.
I had been blown over by the concussion from the same round that June 5 and had been completely covered with dirt. The larger pieces had either missed me or stuck in my flak jacket. Hundreds of the microscopic ones had filled the unprotected area of my upper arms and neck. For nearly fifteen years afterward, tiny shards from that one round eventually rose to the surface of my skin. One by sickening one, I’d pull them out with tweezers.
That same round had also wounded Doc Mac Mecham, who had been providing field triage to the wounded that Woody and his squad had been ferrying to the LZ.
Incredibly, Woody spent the twenty-minute flight to Delta Med in Dong Ha fully conscious with more pain in more places than could ever be inventoried. He was immediately transferred to the hospital ship Repose off Da Nang.
Doc Patterson was there in the amputee ward as well.
Patterson had been hit by rifle fire on the morning of June sixth, with me close by. He’d been crouched over a wounded marine. I watched in horror as a bullet entered his knee, traveled up his thigh, and exited through his pelvis. His face was frozen in shocked disbelief. The expression haunted me for years. Doc Patterson had been in country for less than one week.
Here they all were, filling bed after bed of this ward and most of a neighboring ward.
This did not include boys who were sent to Philadelphia.
Doc Mac and I stayed for an hour and then headed back across the bay.
As he dropped me off, we vowed to get together again before I left.
We didn’t.
It would be thirty-seven years before we met again.
27
DAYS LATER I WAS DISCHARGED FROM ACTIVE DUTY. It was a beautifully bright early afternoon when I emerged from the out-processing center, clutching my DD-214 and drinking in the breathless view across the bay.
Freedom!
All seemed right with my world.
Hours away would be the homecoming in Boston of which I had dreamt for months.
I was wearing the summer khaki uniform that had been issued almost two years before, during my final days at Parris Island. Although I had gained several pounds over the previous week, the uniform still hung loosely from my shoulders and hips. The weight of the ribbons and metals on my chest made the left side of my shirt hang noticeably lower than the right. The diet of C rations and swamp water had taken its toll.
Ruthie came to pick me up for the last time and drove me to the San Francisco airport for the flight home.
Later that night, after boarding the half-loaded plane, I noticed that I was the only one in uniform. Most of the other passengers looked through me as though I weren’t there. They didn’t know that I was going home and had no way of knowing what the medals on my chest represented. To them I wasn’t even a curiosity.
Stewardesses were different—always friendly, solicitous, and eager to give a first-class upgrade when available. Many could spot a homecoming veteran across the tarmac. Most troop flights in and out of Vietnam were on commercial air carriers—complete with airline food and movies. The stewardesses would drop off a planeload of nervous eighteen-year-old boys in Da Nang at two o’clock and leave with a load of exhausted battle-weary veterans an hour later. Incredible in retrospect. On the next day they would do it again. The following week, they might be back on domestic routes dealing with business travelers.
In several weeks, I was to become the first Vietnam veteran to enter Harvard University. I would then become unique in a not very good way. Student dissent against the Vietnam War was rising to a crescendo on college campuses around the country in the fall of 1968. It was not a good time for a returning marine to publicly express pride in having served his country in harm’s way. It was, in fact, a bad time.
Throughout the night of the six-hour flight, thoughts of Dan Burton and the boys of Charlie Company slowly and inextricably
faded as I began to contemplate the reality of my life ahead. By the time the plane landed, I had pushed much of the experience out of my consciousness into a deep bottomless well, from whence it would not begin to bubble up for another twenty-five years. My brother-in-law Jim Lizotte later described my Vietnam experience as an impenetrably dense little pellet deep within me to which no one, including myself, was permitted access.
Early the next morning the plane lowered through the clouds and began its final approach across Boston Harbor. Gazing with wonder at the changing skyline, I noticed the singular clock tower of the old Custom House and shook my head. My memory took me back to the clutch of five boys huddled around Sergeant Miller’s desk in the first-floor recruiting office nearly two and a half years before, with our right hands held high and our hearts filled with pride as we enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.
I wondered at that moment where the other four were—indeed, where Sergeant Miller was. One or two of them were certainly dead. I remembered the hundreds of boys in their underpants wandering from station to station around the cavernous Boston army base, while being subjected to their pre-induction physicals. Where were they? Across the nation, throughout the years of Vietnam buildup, that scene was repeated thousands of times as millions of boys were processed. In the end, nearly sixty thousand would not come home alive.
We landed and slowly taxied to the gate. As the door opened, I could feel the heavy humid New England summer air ooze into the cabin. We filed down the steps, onto the tarmac, and across to the gate area, where my parents were craning to see my head among our group. I was very happy to see them. The greeting included a quick kiss from my mother and a handshake from my father. They were all smiles, as were several neighboring people who added handshakes and back pats when they realized the nature of this homecoming.
I was home.
Alone.
My mind was on the future. I couldn’t wait to get out of my uniform and on with my life. Minutes later, the seabag in my hand, we headed for the car and made the short drive through the tunnel, down Storrow Drive, and home to Brookline. We dropped Dad off at his office in Kenmore Square on the way. When Mom and I arrived at our house, I was tired and relieved.