Deros Vietnam

by Doug Bradley

  “Private Bradley!” The young soldier behind the glass was trying to get my attention. “These are your orders and this is the voucher you use for your plane fare.” He handed me a bunch of official-looking papers and, without even looking me in the eye, shouted “Next.”

  My hands were shaking as I glanced down at my orders. I quickly cut through all the military folderol to realize two things: I was going to have a 10-day leave, and I was to report to the Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City on Tuesday, May 12.

  Holy shit! I wasn’t going to Advanced Infantry Training. I wasn’t a grunt, and maybe I wasn’t even going to Vietnam. I almost kissed the guy standing in line behind me. I was overjoyed.

  But my joy was short-lived, because as I headed back to formation, the eyes of every guy in my platoon were on me, wondering What happened? You okay? I nodded, tried not to smile, and stood there with them as they received their orders to Ft. Polk, Ft. Sill, Ft. Benning. They were all boarding trains heading south that night. Most of them would be in Vietnam by the fall.

  I never heard from any of those guys, and while I can still see their faces, especially as they were on that sunny day in May, I don’t remember their names. It’s just as well because I’d be afraid I’d find too many of them etched in black granite on The Wall.

  Kent State erupted the following Monday, May 4. Every time the phone rang or there was a knock on my parents’ apartment door during my leave, I figured it was the Army telling me to grab a gun and go shoot some students. I was convinced that I’d be taking up weapons against my peers before I’d have to shoot a Viet Cong.

  I spent much of that ten days in Buffalo with Christine, trying to decide if the revolution was underway or whether I should go to Canada. We went to the movies instead and sat through “Z” a couple times, our mouths agape. Fiction and reality had become one and the same, and we both felt as if what was happening in a celluloid Greece was happening in Vietnam and Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. I was almost relieved to put on my uniform and get the hell to Kansas City. It somehow seemed safer.

  The Army Hometown News Center was located on Troost Avenue in Kansas City, the same street where Walt Disney had his first studio. The irony was not lost on me as we pretended to share good news with parents and loved ones across the USA about their sons who were far away in Vietnam. We never talked about the deaths, and we never wrote about them either.

  It was a long, hot summer and I allowed myself to join the other lotus-eaters, acting as if the war in Vietnam and the one in America weren’t happening. Christine paid a couple visits, I shared a decent apartment with two GI roommates, and there wasn’t any extra duty to pull since we lived in a city and not on a base. I had to admit that Army life was pretty good.

  The very best thing about Kansas City was meeting George, who became my best friend and lifelong confidant. He struck me as the complete antithesis of a soldier—skinny, brainy, and a daddy. We lived together the first couple weeks before his wife and baby daughter joined him from D. C. I couldn’t understand why the Army would pursue a guy like George, but of course logic and good decision-making had nothing to do with this shit show.

  Everything was going good, too good, until a late July morning when George and I were summoned into the Master Sergeant’s office. He told us that we’d just come down on levy to go to Vietnam. I never understood the levy concept, but it had something to do with big-ass IBM computers at the Pentagon that had punch cards with all our names and MOS and dates, etc., so that when somebody with your MOS left Vietnam, they ran the computer to identify who was out there to replace them. It reeked of Robert McNamara’s—he was both JFK and LBJ’s defense secretary—brand of troop management by machine.

  Unfortunately for me and George, our punch cards were in the database and our numbers came up that day. We were to report to Travis Air Base north of San Francisco on November 4 for our tour of duty in Vietnam.

  I was surprised by how unprepared I was for this terrible news. I spent the first few days on the phone with Chris, who was making contacts with the Underground Railroad types in Canada. “You can’t go to Vietnam.” She sounded pretty adamant. “You can’t.”

  But I did. Sure I agonized and second-guessed and even entertained the Canada scenario briefly, but in the end I upped my intake of booze and dope and partied my way out of Kansas City and back to Philadelphia for a 30-day leave.

  That was the lowest of the lows. I couldn’t look my parents in the eye, especially my mom, who teared up every time we exchanged a glance. My dad was in pain, too, but he didn’t know how to deal with it, so he took me and my brother to watch a prize fight which I guess made him feel better.

  I spent nearly two of the weeks in Buffalo and that was no picnic either. Neither Christine nor I would talk about that sword of Damocles hanging over my head, but we sure as hell were thinking about it. We stayed away from other conversations too, including the obligatory one of who would wait for whom and how true we’d be to one another. We mostly sat around her house listening to Laura Nyro albums.

  I grew enormously sick and tired of all the people who shook my hand or patted me on the back or gave me a hug and wished me well and told me I was a hero and thanked me for what I was about to do. None of them believed how badly I didn’t want to do this. Why weren’t they listening? Why weren’t they helping?

  By day 30, I’d made some peace with myself and my parents. I didn’t marry Chris. And I met George in San Francisco on November 4.

  George and I got split up early on. He was up, up and away to Vietnam while I had to wait several more days for my death warrant. I spent those days donating blood so I’d be relieved of extra duties and reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in the base library. I nearly became invisible.

  The orders came. They always do. I boarded a plane late on November 10, stopped in Alaska and Japan, crossed the International Date Line, and arrived at the 90th Replacement Battalion in Long Binh on November 12. Then another of those fate-timing-luck moments occurred as I ended up being sent just a few clicks from where I was standing, to the Information Office at USARV Headquarters in the same exact office where George was working. I was safe and I was alive.

  And I intended to keep it that way.

  Long Binh was a major supply area and headquarters base. It was bigger than big. And it was a sanctuary for pencil-pushers like me and my officemates, as well as legions of clerks, logistics specialists, attaché aides, and others lucky enough to escape field duty. If it came down to a battle of rulers and pens and compasses, I was certain we’d get the best of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. But that wasn’t the war we were fighting.

  In fact, for most of my time in country, we weren’t fighting at all. With Vietnamization and the expanded air war and the renewed peace talks, there was an atmosphere of I sure as hell ain’t gonna be the last GI killed in Vietnam about everything. Disagreements and defiance were daily occurrences. Hair was long, tempers were short, stimulants were plentiful, and the racial and generational divides were deep and growing. Huge.

  I remember things getting hairy just twice—once during the invasion of Laos in February, 1971 and the other during the South Vietnamese so-called elections for president in August later that year. Both times Long Binh post was on red alert as we office-types stumbled and bumbled our way out to bunker line. I doubt we could have held off anybody, but lucky for us we didn’t have to.

  Such relative tranquility in no way diminished the fighting and dying still occurring almost daily. Thousands of my brothers were killed while I was there. Although I was a correspondent, I reported none of those deaths. The feel, the vibe of Vietnam in 1971 was to keep your head down, look out for one another, find a way to get through the day, fuck the lifers.

  At the USARV Information Office (IO), we worked 11 hour-days, six days a week. Thanks to the high-priced help we worked for, our offices were comfortably airconditioned. And except for the lifers who ordered us around, almost everybody in the IO office wa
s a college grad like George and me. My alma mater, Bethany College, was the least impressive among a pedigree that included Boston College, NYU, Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin. Maybe that’s why we read a lot of books, debated the vagaries of the American popular TV shows they broadcast on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network, or AFVN, and played a highly intellectual game of 20 questions we called Botticelli.

  We lived better than most, spending our down time in hooches, two of us to a tiny cubicle with two bunks, two lockers, electric fans, and Vietnamese mama-san housemaids who cleaned, made our beds, shined our shoes, did our laundry, and every now and then helped us buy contraband on the black market.

  There was a bar in front of our hooch with a big refrigerator and a chalk board that listed the names of those whose job it was to buy the beer for that month at the PX. Hard liquor and cognac—extremely popular on the Vietnamese black market—were also available for PX purchase. Everybody smoked cigarettes, most smoked Mary Jane, and everything was cheap, including lives.

  It obviously could have been a lot worse, and we saw some of that on the days we went back and forth to Saigon to assemble or mail our office newspaper, the Army Reporter, and especially saw it when we were sent to cover a story beyond the Long Binh confines. One of the best reporters in our office, Steve Warner, was killed during the invasion of Laos.

  So, try as we did, we weren’t immune from the war. We just never wrote about it that way. Our way was always how we were winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, or how we were handing the war over to them, even though the real picture was a lot different. That’s not a roll of film we’d ever expose. And we underlings couldn’t risk pissing off Uncle Sam and getting our asses sent to the DMZ.

  There was a lot of country, and a nation full of people, between Long Binh and the DMZ, but we never took the time to get to know that or them either. We never saw the country as a country but solely as a war. We only saw the Vietnamese through that prism, too—the alien enemy, maids, bar girls, pimps, prostitutes, slaves, and servants. No wonder the Vietnamese call this the American War and not the Vietnam War.

  As I look back on it now, I realize that Vietnam was a little like Kansas City in terms of my state of amnesia. I worked, ate, slept, smoked, drank, laughed, read, joked, and pretended that my other, “real” life was still moving along somewhere. The fact that I was in the rear, that I wasn’t in kill-or-be-killed situations, and that this was 1971 and not 1968 helped lull me to sleep. In some ways, it’s taken me this long to wake up, but not soon enough to save a generation from Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Most everything else about that time and those people is in these stories, with the requisite names changed to protect the innocent—and the guilty. Between each of the longer stories I’ve placed an interlinear piece—what Ernest Hemingway referred to as an “interchapter” in his classic World War I work In Our Time. These very short pieces serve as a magnifying glass to focus attention on an aspect from its related, longer story.

  Short or long, writing these pieces has pushed me, after all these years, to complete my own cycle. Some is eerily autobiographical, some fictional, and some a little of both. What it all means and how much it matters is now up to you.

  Dog Tags

  Everybody said the reason Murphy tried to frag Lieutenant Colonel Fraser was because of the chewing out and the court-martial. They talked about how Fraser’s face got right up next to Murphy’s the morning after Steve Ward’s DEROS party and how it changed colors when he let Murphy have it. Everyone agreed: that incident was what damn near did in the old Lt. Col.

  I know different. I know because I dropped by Long Binh Jail during my last day off and got the real low-down straight from the mouth of Private Dwayne Murphy. He didn’t try to off Fraser because of the ass chewing or the extra duty the Lt. Col. gave us for the bathroom graffiti. It wasn’t the curfew restrictions or even how he busted Murphy with a court-martial after Ward’s DEROS party.

  “It was the dogs,” Murphy told me. Everybody forgot about the goddamn dogs.

  “He was fucking crazy,” he explained to me and the darkness. “Out of control.”

  The two of us sat with a large black MP between us in the bowels of LBJ, Long Binh Jail, thousands of miles from our former lives back home.

  “Every fucking thing he did was part of some weird master plan, just like this goddamn war. All Fraser and the rest of the brass understand is winning, getting ahead. They don’t know a goddamn thing about life. Only death.” He paused. “When he told us to kill the goddamn dogs, I knew that was it. He had to be stopped.”

  Things had been strange around our office ever since Colonel Brock left a few months before the shit went down. Back then, our IO unit ran like a well-oiled machine—we ground out the weekly newspaper, press releases, hometown tapes, and public and command information, all without a hitch. Not a week went by without the tiny, bald Brock strutting into our office, smiling around the room and congratulating everyone within earshot: “Damn fine newspaper this week! Damn fine paper!” He made us feel good about the jobs we were doing, even if we were in the Army.

  Then Brock’s tour was up and he headed back to the world. And Lt. Col. Walter Fraser arrived. It was like the air had gone out of our balloon and we’d landed smack dab in Vietnam. Things changed for all of us, but especially Murphy. He and Col. Brock were tight. They’d spent some time together stateside—attended the same university before ‘Nam. Everyone had their own version of the story about the savvy, fatherly colonel and the eccentric freshman from Minneapolis together at the radical hotbed University of Wisconsin.

  I’d never been anywhere near the Midwest, never been to college, but I’d heard about the riots and antiwar activity. And right there in the midst of it all was good old Colonel Brock. A helluva place for an Army lifer, but that was the kind of guy Brock was. Hippies, teargas and all, he had Uncle Sam send him to Wisconsin to study public relations. Damned if he and Murphy didn’t end up taking some of the same classes!

  By the time I’d been in ‘Nam long enough to know my ass from a hole in the ground, the Brock-Murphy bond was common knowledge. Every time we had a DEROS party or holiday bash, somebody would egg them on to talk about their “student radical days” together in Madison.

  There was a lot of good-natured joking and some intense political discussion—Murphy didn’t buy into Brock’s analysis of Ho Chi Minh’s propaganda strategy; Brock thought Murphy’s capitalist theory of Southeast Asian exploitation was naïve—but Murphy and the Colonel shared a real affection. They might have held very different ideas about the Army and the war, but they had a helluva lot of respect for each other. You couldn’t miss it.

  So, when they transferred the old man to the Army War College to teach the art of military propaganda or some shit, Murphy missed him way more than the rest of us. It seemed like part of him left. Maybe if they hadn’t been so close, Murphy might have been better able to deal with Lt. Col. Fraser.

  So much has changed. Since Fraser took over, the paper’s gone to hell, guys have gotten transferred or reassigned, half the old gang’s DEROS-ed, and their replacements don’t know shit. Makes it pretty tough for us short timers.

  We figured we were in for it even before Fraser arrived. Sgt. First Class Kennedy had given us a background briefing, and it wasn’t pretty. Fraser didn’t have any journalism or information training; he’d never been near an IO office during his two decades in the Army. In the last six months he’d jumped from Da Nang to Quang Ngai to Soc Trang. It seems he was obsessed with earning a Legion of Merit citation and his colonel’s silver eagle. Even Kennedy, who prided himself on his commitment to military command and control, was a little apprehensive. Brock’s laid-back policies made his job easier since we all behaved ourselves and he didn’t have to get on our case.

  For the first couple of days, Fraser faked us out. Somebody must have tipped him off because he came on kinda low key and friendly. But it didn’t take long for his true characte
r to assert itself. It all started on a fateful Friday—July 19 to be exact—when Sgt. Kennedy walked across the hall to our office.

  “Men, I’ve got some new directives here from Lt. Col. Fraser. I’ll put them up on the bulletin board where I want you all to familiarize yourself with them. Don’t bother me with any bullshit questions. Just follow the rules and do as you’re told.” He turned on his heels and walked out.

  We sat there, feeling a little woozy from Sgt. Kennedy’s out-of-character curtness. Finally, Conroy walked over to the board.

  “Jesus Christ will you look at this,” Conroy slammed a fist against the wall. “Commencing 1300 hours today, 19 July, all enlisted personnel in Command and Public Information will fully acquaint themselves with the barber shop down the hall.

  “Personnel are to pay particular attention to Army Regulations (AR) 614-30, table 7-2 which pertains to the length of hair and sideburns. All mustaches are to be trimmed and should not exceed the length of the upper lip. Boots are to be well polished and cleaned. Pressed fatigues must be worn at all times.”

  Sitting in the back of the room, Nevin gulped back a nervous laugh. Nobody said a word. Being in Vietnam was shitty enough. Now Fraser was ordering us to act like we were still in the fucking Army.

  That night we sat around our hooch, letting off steam about the memo. Everybody except Murphy. Locked in silence, he took his share of lousy mess hall food, folded it up in his napkin, slipped it into his fatigues’ pocket, and took the grub to feed the dogs.

  To the rest of us, the dogs were a bunch of dumb mutts. With Colonel Brock gone, they were Murphy’s only real source of companionship. There were hundreds, probably thousands, scattered around the base. Growing up in a “civilized society” you forget what it’s like in the jungle where everything runs wild. What with Sir Charles roaming the countryside doing what he fucking pleased, no one had the time, energy, or inclination to keep the dog population down, so there were packs of half-starved mutts all over South Vietnam. We were lucky that only three or four of them had taken up permanent residence in the living area outside our hooch.