by Jack McLean
It was eight o’clock in the morning.
The early light poured into our house as I dragged my heavy seabag in the back door, completing the final leg of its long journey. Mom made me a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, orange juice, and coffee. The two of us spent the next hour at the dining room table making some small talk but mostly just quietly looking at each other in disbelief.
As my last feeble spasms of energy began to flicker, I pulled my seabag to my side, retrieved several personal items from the top, closed it, and dragged it down the cellar stairs to the far corner of the basement, where it remained untouched for years. I climbed back up to the kitchen, kissed my mother on the cheek, walked up the two flights of stairs to my room, removed my uniform for the last time, and collapsed onto the crisp clean sheets that waited on my gently turned-down bed.
I was asleep before my head hit the downy fluff of the pillows.
The following morning—or perhaps it was later that same day—jet-lagged, culture-shocked, and still exhausted, I took my parents’ big green Plymouth Fury out the gravel driveway and down High Street to navigate the twenty-five miles up Route 93 to Andover. Barby was finishing a six-week course at the Andover summer session. I was going to pick her up.
Every conceivable memory and emotion coursed through my veins during the forty-five-minute drive north. I was disoriented after my sleep but still felt my new life gaining on me with a speed for which I was ill prepared. Memories of other drives up to Andover—the deep depression of a new winter term or the day so long ago when my mother first drove me up from Summit to begin my freshman year—flashed in and out, all overlaid with the unscratchable itch of wondering what Dan Burton was doing at that moment. What hill was Charlie Company on? What time was it on the DMZ?
Had I really actually just been in a war?
A fucking war?
Barby had been the most vulnerable participant in the awful family drama that had unfolded over the past year and was, thereby, the one whose welfare had continually caused me concern. She hid it from me well. Any piece of correspondence from her absolutely made me smile, no matter the heat, the wet, or the horror of the moment.
It had been a long dark year for the three on the home front.
After I returned, I realized that they had all lived under a nine-month cloud at 14 Allerton Street. Each morning, they anxiously checked the New York Times front page for any news of Charlie Company. On June 15, their nerves were jangled when the photograph of our body snatch did in fact make the front page of the Times—above the fold.
Evenings brought the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Vietnam increasingly and predictably became the lead story there as well. Every Thursday, Cronkite would read the weekly body count. Dozens turned to hundreds turned to thousands during 1968. The family’s dinner table talk was always about what they’d heard of the war, reading my old letters aloud, checking the map of Vietnam that was hung in the downstairs bathroom to see exactly where I was. Wondering why I hadn’t written that day.
Barby said later, “It was scary thinking you might be killed, and it put a pall over everything. An unspoken gloom. Sitting in the darkened living room as the projector hummed and we saw slides of you and your buddies and the bunker, et cetera. ‘What do you suppose that is,’ Mom would say to Dad as they tried to decipher the slides without you to give a narrative. It was quite a time.”
And suddenly there I was, turning off Main Street onto Chapel Avenue and the Andover campus. Pulling to a stop, I looked up the familiar path that wound through the tall pines to Henry L. Stimson House. Then I saw Barb walking—and then running—down the path after catching sight of me at the wheel of the family car. It is a sight that will forever remain deeply etched in my mind’s eye. Had I picked a moment to cry, that would have been it.
But I didn’t.
There was nothing of my year away that would evoke such a deep emotion again for another thirty years.
28
SEVEN YEARS LATER, DA NANG FELL.
On a Tuesday evening in early April, I was driving toward home down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from my job as the assistant ticket manager of the New York Mets at Shea Stadium. I turned on the car radio and heard the news. The enormous American combat base that I’d first seen from the window of a banking Pan Am 707 in October 1967 was quietly taken over by the army of North Vietnam. It had been abandoned by the United States days before. Actually, it had been turned over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) for safekeeping.
Da Nang. Jesus.
I remembered all of the activity: marines, napalm-laden jet fighters taking off every thirty seconds, hundreds of people wandering around the enormous PX as though they were in a Sears store in Grand Rapids, wiry pasty-white boys with bronzed necks and lower arms enjoying a two-day in-country R & R at China Beach, big guns, hundreds of tanks, enormous ammo dumps, huge petroleum tank farms, and the steady daily flow of munitions and material being directed in country from the sprawling United States Marine Corps supply center in Barstow, California.
Da Nang.
For the first time in seven years, I actually thought about Vietnam for more than a few minutes. During my two years in the Marine Corps, I had written home nearly every week. The night that I heard that Da Nang had fallen, I felt a need to write one last letter home.
Brooklyn, New York
April 1975
Dear Home,
Horror, chaos and anarchy—Da Nang, spring 1975. And so it now begins as it ends. The light at the end of the tunnel is a dark one. As the end is certainly inevitable, I am touched for the first time in seven years at seeing it occur.
The C-2 bridge, Gio Linh, indeed Con Thien, and hill whatever are as strategically significant now as Waterloo, Verdun, Gettysburg, Dien Bien Phu, all now dots on a map surrounded by placid countryside inhabited by a generation which appreciates it only as history, spoon fed without the emotional scars of the ravishing reality that is war.
So now may the American era of Vietnam become History.
The mothers alone shall continue to ask “Why?” with a perspective that does not tolerate the antiseptic analyses of historians. The mothers shall continue to chronically grieve for the Sid MacLeods with fervor far beyond their control. Indeed, as arthritis reacts to a rainy day, so shall they be agitated by the sight of refugees fighting for non-existent hope as the noose tightens upon the sacred soil their sons bled upon. The mothers like their sons shall soon die.
I am sad that Vietnam went the way it did, but in a country run by politicians, it fell characteristically, apathetically.
We gave a weak body a false high so many years ago and last week, after the addict had reached a multimillion dollar a day habit, the supply was cut off—no public stances, no firm policy decisions—indeed it occurred through the absence of any decision. As the body began to shake with withdrawal, the pusher was far away enjoying spring recess at home with family and constituency, struggling for his tenuous tenure on national economic issues seemingly so far removed and yet so directly attached to that horror they created long ago.
The question I have rarely, if ever, addressed myself to in these letters is why—again why? It is fortunately a question I was never forced to answer while I was there. I was called in a time of national need. I served my country with immense pride to the best of my ability. I was discharged. The war was wrong, but this is not an issue for the soldier. “I think …” “You are not paid to think.”
Soon after, I knew how wrong it was; perhaps I knew while I was there, but it was my first war and I had nothing to compare the phenomenon with. Every soldier who served in that war should share my pride, for we served. Blue Star mothers should not feel bitterness for the loss of their sons, for they served.
We have from this war corporals and captains who may stand on equal elevation with their peers who trod upon the beaches of Normandy—the purpose was to serve. The shame, the bitterness, and the disgust we must feel is for our co
untry which year after year after year ignored its people, betrayed its conscience, and grossly miscalculated its ego by using force, terror, and unprecedented belligerence, while trying to impose a way of life and government that abhors these very same things.
We must publicly proclaim our national guilt. We made a mistake. Is it so shameful to admit that we are human beings?
Rather than sulk in our mire as this nightmare painfully ebbs outward with the tide, we must learn to rule by example. Our books, our minds, our resources are for the world to admire and share if we keep our own house in order and our own sense of rightness and grandeur in perspective.
May we never again forcibly impose with grenades and guns and grand young sons what we tried to impose upon the people of South Vietnam.
Love,
Jack
29
THE THREE WEEKS BEFORE CLASSES BEGAN BECAME infamously marked in American history. On August 8, 1968, Richard M. Nixon successfully overcame challenges from former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and former California governor Ronald Reagan to gain the Republican nomination for president during the party’s quadrennial convention held in Miami Beach. The following evening, Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland accepted the nomination for vice president. Both would eventually resign in disgrace, victims of their own dishonesty and the ongoing war in Vietnam.
On August 20, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia with more than two hundred thousand troops, putting an end to the so-called Prague Spring, and began a period of enforced and oppressive “normalization.”
On August 26, while the Democratic party reluctantly nominated Hubert H. Humphrey for president at its convention in Chicago, thousands of students outside the hall were noisily protesting the war in Vietnam and the inability of the American political process to stop it.
Without provocation, the Chicago police stormed the crowd, injuring more than one hundred people before a live worldwide television audience. The protesters were chanting “The whole world is watching” for the international media that was filming. The following day, while speaking at a news conference, Mayor Richard Daley uttered the malapropism that became a symbol of the times: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Daley was such an unwittingly galvanizing force that the statement perhaps defined the moment when opposition to the war in Vietnam became institutionalized in the United States.
Memorial Hall is one of the older structures on the Harvard University campus. It is a cavernous edifice of dubious architecture that was built in 1878 to commemorate those Harvard alumni who died (for the Union) during the Civil War. It was being used this day as a center for freshman registration.
The entrance hall was huge, drafty, and dimly lit. Upon its dingy old paneled walls were engraved the names of the dead, arranged by order of graduating class. This was the first war memorial that I had seen since returning. I wondered if Sid or Snowball would ever have their names carved on a memorial. I hoped so, but it didn’t seem likely. Those dead inscribed on memorials were older—our parents’ age or older—not kids like us. Besides, our war wasn’t like World War II or the other big ones. There didn’t seem to be any sentiment to remember those who’d died in Vietnam.
It became increasingly obvious during my brief month back that Vietnam was not a war Americans would choose to celebrate in the grand tradition of the great wars. Would Harvard later commission a noted architect to design a monument such as this to the sacrifice of her grand young sons who had served in Vietnam? It seemed unlikely.
Indeed, few sons of Harvard would ever serve, let alone die, in Vietnam. Elite colleges had become a sanctuary from military service because of the draft laws that allowed students to “defer” military service for the term of their attendance. To ensure that status for ensuing generations, Harvard, and many other colleges, eliminated on-campus ROTC the following year to protest America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Thus began an enormous schism between the military and the country’s centers of higher learning. This continues largely unchanged to this day.
Harvard had admitted me, but there was little if anything about the institution that was friendly to veterans of the Vietnam War. I knew that I had earned my place, but I would never feel respected by my class or the institution for my achievement of the previous two years. Those precious few who were curious about my time in the Marine Corps dwelled more on their complete inability to understand why someone like me ever would have enlisted in the first place. Mostly my Vietnam service rarely came up. When it did, I was not the initiator.
The interior of Memorial Hall was more akin to a Gothic cathedral than a university building. High above, great wooden arches dwarfed the interior. Entering exterior light was refracted through dozens of enormous stained-glass windows. Before me was stretched the length of a football field of folding tables manned by a cross section of university life, including athletic teams, academic and social clubs, and volunteer organizations and antiwar groups.
Hundreds of voices echoed off the walls and then echoed again—then again. The discordant cacophony was disorienting and grated on my every nerve. The occasional loud noise still made me flinch and would instantly take me back to Vietnam. It could take minutes for me to recover my composure. Noises really rattled me—to a large degree, they still do. The involuntary responses for my survival that had been so finely honed were not as easily buried as the memories of the experience.
I was approached by all manner of hawkers eager for my participation in their chosen extracurricular area. It had elements of a bazaar. The rowing coach took particular interest, given my height and muscularly lean frame.
The students all looked young. How was I ever going to fit in? Not even ninety days had passed since the horror of LZ Loon—less time than most of these students had just spent on summer vacation.
After a bewildering several minutes of absorbing the frenetic scene, I was directed to a corner table over which was displayed a sign with the letters K-P. I stood briefly in line and then recited my name to the person behind the table and was given a fat manila envelope that contained registration materials.
My name was typed boldly on the outside.
No service number.
No rank of corporal.
Just my name.
Unlike how I felt on my first day at Andover, I now felt that I belonged and had earned my way through the front door as surely as if I had gotten 800s on my College Boards. I had little concern that the academic difficulties I had faced at Andover would follow me. I’m pleased to report that they did not.
I registered for courses in the areas required for freshmen that included the full range of liberal arts disciplines. There would be no Care and Cleaning of the M60 Machine Gun with Sergeant Rodriguez here. The college pep band wandered through the building playing fight songs. One such, “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,” was composed to raise the blood of the faithful on the football field against Yale—not exactly “The Marines’ Hymn,” but then again, Yale wasn’t exactly the North Vietnamese Army either.
It all seemed simply manageable.
Almost quaint.
Later that afternoon I was sitting on the steps of the Fogg Art Museum prior to an orientation session. A lovely girl sat on a step nearby. Nervously, I took a deep breath and opened.
“Hi.”
She turned slowly, as though lost in thought. “Oh, hi,” she responded.
“Are you here for the orientation?” I continued.
“Yes.”
“Where are you from?” I asked. She didn’t appear to be particularly responsive.
“Connecticut. Ethel Walker,” she answered. Ethel Walker was an all-girl prep school outside of Hartford. She did not ask about me, so I stumbled forth anyway.
“I’m from here—well, near here—Brookline. I went to Andover.” This was going nowhere. I felt as though I were in a battle with neither a rifle nor training. I was devoid of all social skills. This was tough.<
br />
“Andover?” She lit up suddenly. “Did you know Freddy Witherspoon? He went to Andover too. I met him last summer on the Cape.”
“Well, no. I mean, well, his name sounds familiar. He would have been a sophomore when I graduated.” Now what? I thought. Might as well come out with it. “I actually graduated from Andover two years ago. I’ve been serving in the United States Marine Corps for the past two years. I just got back from Vietnam.”
“Oh.”
That was it. “Oh.”
No “How great it must be to be home.”
No “Thank you for your service.”
No “You’re a fucking baby killer.”
No “I’ve always wanted to do it with a marine.”
No nothing.
Just “Oh.”
With that, she rose and headed up the steps into the building. The conversation, such as it was, was over. I had learned a valuable lesson. Few, if any, people at Harvard cared about military service—particularly Vietnam service. From that point on, for the next four years, and well beyond, I barely mentioned it.
30
IN NOVEMBER WE RETURNED TO ELIZABETH, NEW Jersey, for the Thanksgiving celebration with Grandma and Grandpa. After Grandpa completed the recitation of his annual poem, he asked the entire family to hold hands and stand in a circle with me in the center. He was proud of what I had accomplished and was relieved that I was home safe. Upon his command, all sang three verses of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” I felt self-conscious at first but drew increasing strength by looking at Grandpa. He openly cried as he sang. I had never seen anyone shed an actual tear over my service.
This was my homecoming parade. It was the only formal recognition I received for my service from any quarter.