by Doug Bradley
“Hey, Pop—can you keep it down over there?” snarled one of the class’s more vocal students. Brock didn’t know his name but the kid usually dispensed a dirty look in his direction. “Some of us are trying to sleep,” he said to supporting laughter.
Brock didn’t flinch. That was it, he thought to himself, that’s how he would train future leaders, prepare officers, convince the public, and win the war. Focus on the how and why, not the what. Forget about the kid’s comment but instead understand why that’s what he’s thinking, how these students are caught up in challenging authority, in rebelling.
As a group of TAs fanned out diagonally throughout the large lecture hall, distributing handouts, one of them stopped next to Brock. The hair on his arms stood up. Was the guy targeting him, ID-ing him for the rest of the class?
The TA moved on as the nearby students smirked. The one who called him Pop had thick brown hair that cascaded across his face. The boy’s muttonchops reminded Brock of the pet furballs his kids used to put on the doorknobs at home.
Being here was a strategic advantage, Brock realized. Brock would mine that like a mother lode. …institutional training and education, operational assignments, and self-development.
Taking in the classroom overflowing with adolescent energy, Brock smiled, knowing that he would become a full-bird colonel, that he would one day teach military strategy at the Army War College, that he’d indulge his grandchildren. He’d write his memoirs.
“All right, let’s get down to brass tacks,” Culver shouted from the podium, smiling, Brock thought, in his direction. “Please turn to Chapter Seven, ‘Defining Public Relations Problems.’”
Raining Frogs in Kuala Lumpur
It was February 2, 1970. I remember the exact day because I was standing in the USARV Information Office’s teletype room, arguing with Conroy about which prognosticating groundhog the news services would be covering that day. Being a son of the Midwest, Conroy was making his case for Sun Prairie Jimmy, from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, “the world headquarters of the groundhog,” as Conroy proudly proclaimed.
But as a Pennsylvania native, I held my ground for Punxsutawney Phil.
“Everybody knows who Punxsutawney Phil is,” I countered. “He’s the reason we even celebrate Groundhog Day. Hell, they even drive him around in a limo after he makes his prediction.”
We kept going back and forth like this, two noncombatants without a clue about what in the hell was really going on with the war and our country. While the three large teletype machines kept banging away at top volume, the war and danger and the Viet Cong lurked somewhere outside, hiding in the bush, waiting for us to get complacent.
I won a case of beer from Conroy that day. He didn’t seem to mind. In fact, for grins he placed the story with the dateline “Punxsutawney, PA” at the bottom of that day’s Morning News Roundup. I can still see him waving a copy of the “rip and read” teletype copy as he roused us from our hard-earned sleep. Raising a carton of milk, Conroy proposed a toast: “Lads,” as a huge Beatles and Shakespeare fan, Conroy always called us lads, “if rodents can predict the weather in the good ole USA, then laughter can rain down in Vietnam. Or my name isn’t Punxsutawney Phil.”
“Rip and read” was indeed the term the old-timers used and that pretty well sums it up. In Vietnam, we updated the old reporter mantra to “rip and release.” In both cases journalists relied on the same source, namely teleprinters connected to telephone lines fed by newsgathering companies like United Press International, Reuters, and the Associated Press. We called those revered news sources the Holy Trinity. The three of them were the founts of our Army reporter religion in Vietnam.
The first time I ever set foot, or ear, in the Teletype room at Army Headquarters in Long Binh, I was swallowed up by the endless reams of paper the three machines spewed and submerged in the deafening noise. For a brief moment I was back in college, attending a lecture on the “Model 15 teletype printer.” Delivered by a pompous gasbag, the lecture referred to these workhorse printers as “clackers,” and now that I’d encountered them, well, I had to admit he was right. The damn things actually did clack, and I mean clack. Standing in the vicinity of three of them—we nicknamed ours Moe, Larry and Curly—you couldn’t hear yourself think.
The irony of all this news spewing out into the teletype room in Long Binh, South Vietnam was that it had nothing to do with our jobs as military journalists. We didn’t “write the news today, oh boy,” or report on what was happening in our midst. Rather, we churned out recurring quantities of puff and propaganda for dissemination through weekly newspapers, quarterly magazines, and scores of homespun news releases about hometown heroes.
So why were the teletypes there in Vietnam in the first place? Good question. At first, we figured the Army brass wanted us to stay up-to-speed on what the traditional media was reporting on Vietnam. Pretty soon, we realized that Moe, Larry and Curley’s main job was providing material for one of the Army’s more interesting innovations, the Morning News Roundup.
The concept was simple. One of us over-educated information types would spend his night at the IO office, babysitting the Three Stooges, finding eight or ten of the more interesting news stories of the day, cutting and pasting them to an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper and running them over in two separate batches (one page with 4-5 stories at a time) to the Headquarters’ print shop. Lo and behold, by 0600 hours, hundreds of copies of the Morning News Roundup appeared at the scores of mess halls scattered across Long Binh post.
The end result was that the homesick troops could have their morning paper with breakfast, just like they were back home in the good old USA.
Some of us were better suited to the Morning News Roundup than others. We all had to execute it at some point, but if someone volunteered to make it their regular job, well, that made life easier for guys like me who preferred company and camaraderie. Conroy didn’t seem like an obvious candidate. He wasn’t your typical Army loner. He just liked doing the Roundup.
“I enjoy the quiet, the isolation,” Conroy confided to me one night on guard duty. “It’s cool being in control.” He smiled so broadly that I could see his teeth shine in the deep dark of the bunker. “Especially when you find the one piece that will tickle someone enough to get them to laugh.”
After the Groundhog Day story, Conroy decided to always end his two-page (front and back) Morning News Roundup with one of these “kickers” as he called them—the quirky, oddball stuff that happens every day in the world and that you could find on the teletypes if you had Conroy’s sense of irony. The stuff he found and reprinted in the Roundup—like the Vatican’s issuing a Ten Commandment-like “Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road” document or a British hotel chain reporting that 95% of the somnambulists in their establishments had been naked men—was so good and so unusual and so funny that mess hall GIs started reading the kicker first so they could at least have smiles on their faces as they were greeted by another fucking day in Vietnam.
That argument on behalf of humor was the one Conroy delivered to the brass when they were threatening to bust him: “Let’s be honest,” he smiled at his antagonists, “it’s not as if there isn’t enough doom and gloom in Vietnam, not to mention back home. If one of our primary jobs is to lift the morale of the troops, then that’s just what I’m doing.”
Whenever Conroy pulled guard duty or was on R&R, one of us had to fill in for him and take a shot at doing the Roundup. We didn’t even try to compete with him. But Conroy competed with Conroy. The committed communicator had set the Morning News Roundup bar so damn high that he couldn’t maintain his own standards.
Which was probably how the ersatz Punxsutawney Phil pieces got started.
As Murphy’s Law would have it, there came a time when Conroy couldn’t find anything that remotely resembled an acceptable—by his standards—kicker. As Morning News Roundup press time approached—not wanting to disappoint his faithful readers—Conroy decided to go fictional wit
h the saga of the world’s most famous prognosticating rodent.
As offered in evidence by his adversaries, here’s how this “rip and release” copy read:
Punxatawney, PA (UPI) – Police were dispatched to Gobbler’s Knob today, home of the world-famous Punxatawney Phil, to break up a raucous demonstration. A small but vocal group of out-of-town agitators were protesting Phil’s recent prediction of an early spring. Brandishing copies of the Farmers Almanac and waving signs that read “Shadow This” and “Put this where the spring sun shines,” the protestors vowed to return. “We will not have our prognostication rights trampled on by an erroneous rodent,” said Dick Hertz, the group’s leader.
Conroy’s second venture into the universe of stories that never made the teletype featured a platoon of counter-demonstrators flocking to Punxatawney and ended with the assembled multitudes chanting, “Phil, our nation turns its frozen eyes to you, boo hoo hoo!”
We all knew what Conroy was doing and that he was bound to take it too far. But what the hell could “too far” mean in Vietnam anyway? Was it Conroy’s fault that he wanted to keep guys smiling in a world which didn’t offer much in the way of comic relief? It wasn’t like he was making up bogus casualty numbers or inflating body counts.
About a week or so after the second fictional Phil piece, Conroy plopped an article about raining frogs in Kuala Lumpur at the bottom of the Roundup. Problem was he did this on one of those days in Vietnam when we didn’t kill many and lost hardly any, leaving the brass with time on its hands.
“Find the clown who’s writing this shit and bring him to my office,” commanded Brigadier General Sullivan.
Before you could say Malaysia, Conroy was in Sullivan’s office getting royally chewed out. Best we could figure, the Army’s beef with him was that he violated official guidelines for how to keep GIs happy. “Humor unbecoming a military journalist” was probably how they’d put it. Conroy simply cared too much about doing a good job.
When you fucked up at a prime location like Long Binh, you might not get busted, but you’d likely get assigned to the 108th Artillery Group which was the closest Army outpost to the DMZ. They got mortared constantly.
Without Conroy at the helm, the Morning News Roundup became just another empty-headed Army assignment. Our hearts weren’t in it and we all hated doing it, the quasi-solitary confinement of being alone in the IO office reminding us of the “Twilight Zone” episode starring Earl Holliman when he’s walking up and down the streets of a city and can’t find a single person to talk to and it starts to drive him crazy. It turns out he’s in a space capsule, being tested by NASA to see if he can survive on his own as an astronaut.
That was Vietnam all right. A test without answers. Being stuck in the Twilight Zone.
Eventually, we got word from Conroy at the 108th. Deeds, not words was the artillery group’s motto, so we suspected he was doing more soldiering than writing. Turned out the Army didn’t bust him for the Punxsutawney Phil pieces. Instead they came down on the story about raining frogs. The irony? That one was true. Conroy had the teletype copy in his possession. He shared it with us in his letter:
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Reuters) -- Local citizens were surprised this morning when they awoke to find small green frogs falling from the sky. Weighing just a few ounces each, the frogs landed in trees and plopped into the streets. The Malaysian Meteorological Institute surmised the frogs, native to North Africa, must have been picked up by a strong wind.
Cannon Fodder
While there was an obvious irony in being a soldier named Cannon, the decorated master sergeant would never describe it that way, would never use a term like that. But whatever you called it, the name thing didn’t elude his fellow GIs who used it as an excuse to hurl jokes and one-liners in Cannon’s direction.
“Sergeant, you are a soldier of very high caliber.”
“Knock, knock?”
“Who’s there?
“Art?
“Art who?”
“Art Tillery.”
Good for them, thought Cannon, going on as they did morning, noon, and night. He laughed along with the guys, because he’d been through two wars and two tours and knew that laughter relieved stress and that soldiers in Vietnam needed all the relief they could get.
Truth was, Cannon needed the release too. The war wasn’t going well, and every fresh face that arrived from the States for a 365-day tour was more hostile and less friendly and patriotic.
“No way am I gonna be the last fucking GI killed in Vietnam” was their slogan, and they went about their business as if it was business, and not a cause or a mission. Maybe that’s why they were assigned to the Comptroller office at USARV headquarters in the first place. That’s where all the business of the war was being waged.
Cannon couldn’t relate to this new crop of GIs, which is why the joking around helped. It was like the chaplain said during his sermon last Sunday, “As long as we have laughter, we have hope.”
So everyday Cannon played the game, chuckling, pretending to be amused. He wished like hell some of his old Army buddies were there with him, guys like Wilson and Swoboda and Mellen, who understood their role and their responsibility. They’d all gone home and he was on his own, babysitting three dozen goldbricking pencil pushers.
Whatever happened to that war, to those days? There was a lot of laughter then, too, because platoon sergeants with cannon artillery units were usually nicknamed “Smoke.” Add that to Cannon’s name and it made for an explosive combination. The laughs and the constant wisecracking back then were less personal, more communal.
The chanting of a familiar slogan brought Cannon back to reality. It was a declaration he heard every night, fueled by sarcasm and marijuana.
We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.
Nothing funny about that, mused Cannon. Not a damn thing. He knew now that he was done with this war, this Army, and these pacifist pussies. He’d file his paperwork tomorrow and be gone before you could say Ho Chi fucking Minh.
But on his way out, Cannon would have the last laugh. He’d be sure to have the XO pay a house call some night to the IO/Comptroller hooch—the information guys were downstairs but were just as bad as these deadbeats—and get them busted for drug possession.
Some Army, Cannon mused, when you have to turn in your own guys.
“Knock Knock …”
Battle of the Bulge
The shipments sat inside the rear door of the giant Army Post Office, obscured by mountains of delicately wrapped care packages sent by nervous stateside mothers. Given the popularity of those homemade goodies among the GIs on Long Binh Post, the boxes marked “Cortez” and “Clamato” didn’t attract too much attention, which is just the way Myron Swoboda wanted it. The last thing he needed was more grief from his hoochmates about his weight and his love life.
Reason being that the former was out of control and latter was non-existent. The running shoes in the box marked Cortez and the diet beverages, marked Clamato, were designed to help Sergeant First Class Myron Swoboda on both fronts, even in the middle of a war in a far-off land.
His girth notwithstanding, Myron prided himself on being a model soldier. His salute was crisp and tight, his fatigues perfectly starched, and the tips of his jungle boots gleamed in the Southeast Asian sun. Plus, Myron’s management of several of Long Binh’s larger mess halls, where he oversaw food orders, dining logistics, and dozens of Army and Vietnamese kitchen workers, earned him glowing reviews. Even the mess hall food he served up wasn’t bad by Army standards.
“Yo Bodey,” some satiated GI would usually yell across a mess. “This shit’s almost edible.”
Myron tried to play it cool when he heard comments like that, but he lived for those “attaboys,” words of encouragement which helped him cope with his daily doses of heartache and heartburn.
SFC Myron Swoboda’s heart ached, more than burned, and it ached for Song Le Mai, one of the Vi
etnamese kitchen helpers at the nearby NCO Club. He loved Mai’s smile, her long, jet-black hair, her deep green eyes, and the way she giggled like a high-school girl whenever he spoke to her during a shift at the club.
“Sar-jen Mai Run ver lee fun nee,” Mai would laugh when Myron teasingly asked a question. He’d stand there, trying to think of something else to say to her in English, or pidgin Vietnamese, but he’d always get tongue-tied and slink away.
Myron hated that about himself. He knew he needed to stay put, to hold his ground, and open his heart to Mai. Instead he’d open a can of pork and beans or Spam and slurp a couple of Cokes, drowning his sorrows and swallowing his pride.
All that procrastination was going to cease. Signs pointed that way, and Myron was a strong believer in signs, especially when they came in threes. First, there was the note from his old pal Cannon who was working for the Duffy-Mott company in Hamlin, New York, about some new drink called “Clamato” which could lessen your appetite.
Then there was the shipment of running shoes from Bob Bowman, a recent Army retiree from Eugene, Oregon—a fitness nut who’d just joined a jogging program where they wore the special Cortez shoes.
And just the other day, his mother had mailed him three copies of The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet. The book jacket described it as “a high protein, low carb, and low fat diet.” Myron’s mother Millie scribbled a note which said: Sweetie: Try this on (smile). You should eat six small meals a day instead of three large ones. I lost nearly fifteen pounds the first few weeks and am back to a size seven. Here’s to seeing less of you! Love, Mom.
Myron’s course was now fixed, his assignment understood. He would lose weight, he would be fit, and then he would retire from Uncle Sam’s Army, return home and begin a new life, with his new Vietnamese bride, Sang Le Mai.
But first things first. He, she, and the rest of Myron’s rotund recruits were about to embark on a special mission, something never attempted in the Republic of Vietnam. Under his leadership, Myron and his chunky comrades were going to become the “Camp Clamato Weight Loss and Exercise Club.”