Deros Vietnam

by Doug Bradley

  DEROS Vietnam:

  Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle

  Doug Bradley

  To all those who served in Vietnam but didn’t live to see their DEROS date.

  Contents

  Dog Tags

  Brass Tact

  Raining Frogs in Kuala Lumpur

  Cannon Fodder

  Battle of the Bulge

  Nightly News

  The Beast in the Jungle

  Fearful Symmetry

  By the Time I get to Phoenix…

  A Lean, Well-Painted Face

  Herded Through the Grapevine

  The Revolution Isn’t Being Televised

  Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

  The Medium is the Message

  The Gospel According to Shortimer Sam

  Delta Lady

  Blue Ribbon

  The Art of War

  DEROS

  Malaria

  Insubordination Nation

  Basic Choices

  Race Against Time

  Ticket to Soulville

  Postcard from Hell

  The Quiet Americans

  Test Drive

  Confessions of a REMF

  Moron Corps

  The Girls They Left Behind

  Every Picture Tells a Story

  You Baby Ruth

  Introduction: The Air-Conditioned War

  I spent 365 days in Vietnam from November of 1970 to November of 1971.I worked in a corporate-esque, shine and polish, public information office in the U.S. Army’s headquarters at Long Binh, a former rubber plantation about 15 miles from Saigon. How in the hell I ended up there after my graduation from college in May 1969 and not at law school at Boston University where I’d been accepted is a question I still ask myself.

  And while I think the answer has something to do with Nixon, the draft, Vietnamization, my birthday, and bad luck, I’ve more or less given up trying to figure it out. The reality is I didn’t go to law school and I did get drafted. Vietnam became my real graduate school—my true education if you will—and it’s something that continues to teach me a lesson every day of my life.

  My Long Binh officemates and I were categorized as REMFs: Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. That was meant, I believe, to distinguish us from the grunts, the guys who were fighting the war, but I also think it was meant to keep us in our place, and to be a slap in the face. As far as I can tell, it worked. We were less than the grunts, and we still feel guilty about having a safer, cushier job than our brothers who did the fighting and dying.

  That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any pain and sacrifice and danger for us REMFs. But it’s muted, much like our collective Vietnam voice, because, well, most of what we did wasn’t glorious or heroic or even very interesting. Trying to unmute that REMF voice is part of the reason why I’ve been writing about Vietnam for more than 40 years. I mean, hell, there were more of us in the rear than there were grunts in the field, and we did have to put up with all the military and political and Vietnam bullshit too, so why doesn’t anybody know about our experiences?

  Truth is, that’s way too noble a motivation for me and this collection of stories. I wrote them mainly for myself because the process of writing has helped me to better understand Vietnam—and to heal myself a little in the process. I need to write, I have to write, to be who I am. There’s as much of the non-Vietnam me in here as there is the Vietnam me.

  But I doubt you’ll be able to tell the difference.

  There is some truth to the Nixon-draft-Vietnamization-birthday-bad-luck mantra I mentioned earlier. For starters, I blame all U.S. presidents from FDR on for getting us into Vietnam. But up until Spring 1968, my junior year in college, I figured if I stayed in school long enough and got my college diploma, the war would be over. I mistakenly believed Lyndon Baines Johnson. I wouldn’t make the same mistake with the next president.

  I sure as hell didn’t buy Tricky Dick’s B.S. about a “secret plan to win the war” and all that. I was so pissed at LBJ that I projected my anger on to his V.P., Hubert H. Humphrey. In the end, I marked my virgin trip to the ballot box on November 5, 1968 by writing in Dick Gregory for president. That’s the only vote I ever cast—and I’ve voted in every election since—that I wish I had back.

  Not long after Nixon ascended to the throne in 1969, I began to pay more attention to what was going on with the war and the draft. LBJ had cancelled graduate school deferments in March 1968, so even with my law school acceptance at B.U. later, military conscription appeared more likely than law school matriculation.

  On a beautiful spring day in 1969, I graduated from tiny Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia. It was May 24 to be exact, and while Led Zeppelin brought down the house that night with “Dazed and Confused” at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago and the Grateful Dead jammed to “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” at Seminole Indian Village in Florida, my parents drove me back to Philadelphia in their tiny red VW.

  Thus began the worst summer of my life.

  I was now classified 1-A (available for unrestricted military service) as opposed to 2-S (deferred because of collegiate study). Every day brought the same throbbing headache, the crippling knot in the stomach, and the perpetual conundrum: What in the hell am I going to do?

  I’ll admit I let the trauma and the anxiety and the fear get the best of me. I ballooned to well over 190 pounds (I’ve weighed around 160 ever since Vietnam), pissed and moaned all summer long, and turned down a couple decent jobs. I ended up working in a tiny factory where they made locks for aircraft carriers. I increased my intake of alcohol and marijuana. I was lonely and miserable.

  I wasn’t eager to give more than two years of my life away to the Army—or the Navy, Marines, or Air Force—and I didn’t have any pull to help me get into the National Guard or Reserves. That seemed like a major copout anyway.

  So, I sat and ate and smoked and cursed and waited.

  September 1969 eventually rolled around. Vietnamization—a term coined by Melvin Laird, a Wisconsinite and Secretary of Defense—was sailing along, but there were still nearly a half million of my peers in Viet-nam. It was just a matter of time until the draft caught up with me, so I dropped out of law school and dropped into my pre-induction physical for the draft. It was like a never-ending episode of “The Twilight Zone,” and I kept hearing Rod Serling’s smoky voice warning me: This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you’re on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable… By the time I came to, I’d passed with flying colors. I was on my way to the land of the different.

  Which is exactly where luck, good and bad, and birthdays intervened. To show the American public that Vietnamization was working, Nixon boldly cancelled November and December draft calls, so guys like me could worry about their uncertain futures a little longer. He then introduced a “more just and equitable means” for conscription—the lottery.

  In this case, having the winning number was not what you wanted. No, you wanted to lose the lottery so you could keep your ass out of Vietnam.

  On December 1, 1969, at Selective Service National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., 366 blue plastic capsules, each containing a day of the year, were placed in a large glass jar and drawn by hand to assign orderof-call numbers to all American males between the ages of 18 and 26. It was just and equitable all right, but for those of us with our lives hanging in the balance, it was the ultimate horror show, a real game of Russian roulette, not the bogus crap Michael Cimino later invented in “The Deer Hunter.” Except this time the lone bullet rotated among 366 chambers.

  It was also one of the bigger media events of the year. All the TV networks were there—we only had four back then—and radio and film, too, as well as newspapers a
nd wire service reporters and Congressional types and on and on. It definitely was a circus, but with the feel of a public hanging lingering in the air.

  I chose to listen to the lottery on the radio in a Philadelphia suburb, playing cards and drinking beer with my brother and sister-in-law, rather than watch with my parents, who were even more uptight about all this than I was. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle their stress as well as mine. So, I more or less listened to the goings-on and got really drunk.

  The first capsule, drawn by a Republican Congressman from New York who served on the House Armed Services Committee, contained the date September 14. The last one drawn was June 8—the day after my June 7 birthday, which came in at 85, eventually landing me in Fort Dix, New Jersey by March and Vietnam that following November.

  Now that my fate was more or less determined, I devoted more time to feeling sorry for myself—and to being pissed at my parents since they were the ones responsible for my June 7 birthday. What if they’d waited to have sex? What if my dad hadn’t arrived back home from the war horny and eager to affirm his survival? What if my mom could have endured a few more hours of labor? What if she didn’t have to have a C-section, which the hospital probably wouldn’t have accommodated the next day, a Sunday? What if …

  That perverse line of inquiry was my only holdover from my flirtation with law school. Now that I was a marked man, I didn’t know how long I had until my blindfold and last cigarette, so I left the country right after New Year’s Day. Not for exile in Canada, where it was cold and protected, but for a respite in a tropical paradise like Nassau in the Bahamas, where the U.S. had jurisdiction. Let them come after me, I muttered to myself, armed every day with a book, some ganja and a gin and tonic.

  They never came.

  It took being away from the USA for me to realize just how much I’d been missing during my period of self-absorption. Two big anti-war moratoria, My Lai, murders and mayhem, the Bahamian locals and travelling beach bums knew about all this and more, and I’d listen to their conversations deep into the night before I’d stumble back to my beach bungalow for another round of self-pity.

  Some time during that trip, I sobered up long enough to fall in love with Christine from Buffalo, a wandering romantic like myself who loved F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rod McKuen and saw the world through rose-colored glasses, literally. I took the fact that Christ was in her name as a sign that I’d be saved.

  It didn’t happen.

  After Christine headed back to college in Buffalo and I ran out of money, I made a decision about my future. Among my three shitty options—jail, Canada or the military—I chose Door Number Three. Where was Monty Hall when I needed him?

  Arriving “back in the USSR” in February 1970, I was welcomed by an inviting letter from Uncle Sam that proclaimed “Greetings!” Four weeks later, on March 2, 1970, I raised my hand and swore an oath to God and country along with a hundred or so like-minded sheep in a U.S. Army induction center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Why Pittsburgh and not Philadelphia where I was currently living? That’s because Pittsburgh is where I registered for the draft and that’s where my Selective Service board was located.

  This is where luck, good and bad, and fate and timing and whatever else you want to call it began to intervene, or at least I began to notice the intervention. Like many baby boomers, I’d figured that what separated us as soldiers—later veterans—from reservists and protestors and MIAs and deserters and POWs and draft avoiders came down to luck, fate and timing—who you knew, where you lived, when you graduated from high school, how you were raised, how many WWII movies you saw, when you turned 18, whether or not you committed a crime, big or small, at 17 or 18, when your number came up, etc. etc.

  Hell, for me, even the fact that I turned 18 in Pittsburgh, thereby registering for selective service in that blue collar city, but was back living in Philadelphia at age 22 when I got drafted—meaning I boarded a bus in Philly in the wee hours of March 2 and headed west to the Steel City to take my vows with Uncle Sam—had everything to do with my eventually being assigned to Fort Dix, New Jersey and not Fort Bragg, North Carolina for basic training. Everything changed with that simple twist of fate.

  Similarly, prior to my rendezvous with Uncle Sam in Pittsburgh, I’d serendipitously sat beside a soldier on a late February flight to Buffalo to visit Christine. Even though I did everything I could to avoid sitting next to this guy (back in those days, folks with student IDs and guys in the military both flew “stand by” on planes so the two of us were called up to the podium just before takeoff and were seated next to each other), we eventually struck up a conversation that would have a direct impact on my Army career.

  “By the end of the first couple days of basic training,” the helpful GI told me, “you’re going to be totally frazzled, and really pissed.” Even though this guy looked younger than I was, there was something in his eyes and in his voice that made him a lot older. “Then they lay on you a battery of aptitude tests and other shit. Don’t blow these off!” he raised his voice and pinned my wrist to the arm rest. I jumped.

  “When you get in there, be awake, be serious. Take the tests seriously because they might help you get a good MOS.”

  I knew this was important, but what the hell was an MOS?

  “MOS is your military job,” he continued, “it stands for Military Occupational Specialty. Mine was 25C40, radio operator. Those tests that you don’t want to take and are pissing you off go a long way to deciding what the Army wants to do with you.” He stared so hard into my eyes that I thought he could see my soul, my fear.

  “Even if you’re drafted?” I asked, barely audible. I figured my ass was grass because of the draft.

  “Yeah, even if you’re drafted,” he said. My spirits lifted. “I was drafted,” he went on, “but they sent me to radio training after basic. Not everybody who gets drafted goes to combat.” He paused. “Of course, there are no guarantees.”

  There was yet another of the Vietnam-era mantras. “No guarantees.” Of safety, of sanity, of being whole, of getting laid. Of coming back. No guarantees.

  No shit.

  The soldier on the plane to Buffalo was right. And I thank him wherever he is because his unsolicited advice helped me nail those basic aptitude tests and be expertly prepared for a follow-up interview so that the Army awarded me an MOS of 71Q20—Information Specialist—at the end of basic training. I was going to be an Army journalist. Or was that an oxymoron?

  Of course that knowledge didn’t come until after eight weeks of worry and fear and harassment. The drill sergeants at Ft. Dix knew I was a college grad, one of only two in my basic training platoon, and they bugged me relentlessly every day about becoming an officer instead of a grunt.

  “Bradley, you’re a smart guy, a college boy,” they’d tease me, “so why don’t you save your sorry ass and sign up for OCS (Officer Candidate School)? Officers give orders and have cushy jobs. You don’t want to be the guy taking the orders, especially if you’re a grunt,” they’d snarl. “And as sure as I’m Ho Chi Minh, the Army will make you a grunt and you’ll be DOA if you don’t sign up for OCS!”

  Sure, I was scared. But not scared enough to become a “shake and bake,” a.k.a. second lieutenant. Even though I was new to the Army, I already understood that being a junior officer in Vietnam might lead to a oneway ticket. So, I kept my head down, kept my mouth shut, and humped my ass through eight weeks of basic training.

  Because my defenses were up and my anxiety high, I didn’t take the time to make deep connections with the other guys in my platoon. Those two months are like an old kinescope of faces, places, and nerves. Of Baby Fat Bob singing “Fire and Rain” every morning before formation, of black Murphy from Brooklyn saying he was going to knife me and white Murphy from New Jersey saying he’d get the other Murphy back, of two trips to the Big Apple with Billy and Doc and Four Eyes and Rufus to see Chris and her crazy, oversexed girlfriends from her all-girls school in Buffalo. Of mud and rain an
d night infiltration and weapons familiarization. And a somber Easter dinner with my parents at the Ft. Dix PX. I was the Pascal lamb, and there wasn’t a resurrection in my horoscope.

  There was also a visit to the base chaplain to inquire about Conscientious Objector status and long talks with my drill sergeant about bravery and cowardice and picking up a gun.

  Right before we completed Basic Training, Nixon announced his decision to launch American forces into Cambodia. I remember a bunch of us standing around one of the sergeant’s rooms watching a black and white TV on April 30 as Nixon pointed at maps and said things like “it is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight” and “the time has come for action.”

  The drill sergeants who’d been over there were shaking their heads and twirling their dog tags. The rest of us were clueless as to what was going on, but that didn’t prevent us from joining in the litany of fuck, fuckin’ A, fucked up, fuckin’, fubar, and other declensions of the GI’s favorite word.

  Later that night it started to sink in. The goddamn war wasn’t cooling down, it was heating up. The odds of us draftees becoming grunts had just gotten a whole lot worse.

  And the next day was May Day. How goddamn appropriate that was, since we’d be getting our MOSs and shipped to our next assignments.

  The tension in the barracks the following morning was off the charts. No one spoke as we showered and dressed and prepared to meet our maker. Ours was one of several companies preparing to graduate from basic training on a perfect spring day. Our drill sergeants approached, accompanied by a handful of guys who looked like junior accountants. I couldn’t hear what they were saying until Flipper (he had big ears) turned to me and hollered: “Brads, they want you.”

  Time stopped. My heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t hear what the Spec. 4 accountant-type was saying. I followed him into a building and stood in a small line, as he directed. By the time I got to the front of the line, I was ready to piss my pants. Had the drill sergeants signed me up for OCS after all? Could they do that? Was I going to have to take basic training over because I’d paid somebody to cover my last KP? Did they know I was smoking marijuana? It hit me at that moment that I had no control whatsoever over what the Army wanted to do with me. Just put me on a plane to Vietnam now. I was fucked.