by Doug Bradley
Jackson would just show up at our office out of nowhere. He’d hang out and work on his company’s newsletter. What he was really good at was getting us high on the kick-ass dope he smoked. Most days we were fucked up on the job, it was Jackson’s doing.
He was also our main source for what was happening stateside. Reading Stars and Stripes and the sanitized versions of Time and Newsweek left us clueless about what was really going on, so we depended on Jackson’s insights.
The night before the shit went down, he’d told us how happy he was with the way things were going back home. America was owning up to its responsibilities. Before ‘Nam he’d been everywhere from San Francisco to the Big Apple, he’d hitchhiked from upper Michigan to Key West, Florida. Everywhere he was struck by the same good vibes—people were getting high and flashing the peace sign.
He’d talked a couple of us into going with him to check out Woodstock at the Bien Hoa base theater. Before the movie, we went out to the bunker line with some other REMFs and got wasted.
“Brothers, was Woodstock the greatest thing that ever happened to America or what?” Jackson asked rhetorically. “How’s the movement going here?”
“Shitty,” someone volunteered.
“It’ll get better,” he smiled. “You’ve got everything here at Long Binh—discontent, quadraphonic sound systems, lots of soul brothers, and great dope. Things will go well here.”
None of us said anything.
Jackson pretended to be our drill sergeant and marched us to the theater. We sang cadence about Jody and our girlfriends, adding a couple choruses from “Coming into Los Angeles.”
Later at the theater, they stopped the film just as Sly and the Family Stone were cranking up the volume on “Higher.” The lights came on, and a voice told us that the VC were nearing the perimeter and we had to get to a bunker. With the movie’s sound track off, we could hear mortars exploding and sirens sounding. Most of us started moving dutifully toward the exits.
Jackson refused to leave. He was standing on his seat, arms raised, singing at the top of his lungs.
“Feelin’s gettin’ stronger…” he yelled at the screen. Sly shouted back, telling Jackson he was going to take him higher and higher. The rest of us had already left the theater.
The last we saw of Jackson he was wearing his shades and giving the peace sign as the MPs led him away. None of us did anything to help him.
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
We all had rituals in Vietnam. The brothers had their dap, the grunts had their boonie hats and bracelets, the zoomies had their high-class clubs, the lifers had their Vietnamese lovers.
What we had late in the war, way back in the rear, was TV. Not the TV that brought the turmoil of the world into your living room on the six o’clock news. No, for us it was the kind of TV that reminded us of growing up, of sharing rites of passage with families like the ones on Ozzie and Harriet, My Three Sons, and Leave it to Beaver. Bummer about the Beaver, buying his lunch in Vietnam. Kinda made sense though, when you think about it.
For the hard-charging, hard-working, gung-ho REMFs in the USARV Headquarters’ Information Office, the TV ritual was watching Room 222 which had premiered on ABC around the time most of us were initiating our acquaintance with the Army and Vietnam. It reminded me of the 1967 movie “To Sir, With Love” with Sidney Poitier playing an idealistic teacher dealing with rambunctious white high school students from the London slums. The TV version was based in L.A., but the lead character, Pete Dixon, was black and cool, just like Sidney Poitier.
Watching Room 222 every week was the one thing that brought everybody in the hooch together. Juicers liked it, dopers liked it, loners liked it, our resident lifers liked it—hell, even our one and only soul brother liked it.
We did more than just watch Room 222. We would live it, or at least pretended to be living it for the 30 minutes it was on. Nevin or Conroy would warm things up by making a bold prediction about who would be the focus of that episode’s story line. Then they’d make things more interesting by establishing odds and laying bets.
It was the night after Kenny Martin’s visit. I can still see Nevin walking up and down the hooch with a clipboard and a sheet of paper, puffing on a Lucky Strike and wearing a green visor on his head like Uncle Billy, the bank teller in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“Fifteen minutes, boys and girls,” he shouted through puffs of smoke. “Just fifteen more minutes to place your bets.”
“Who will it be?” he continued in his carnival barking manner. “Our favorite history teacher Pete Dixon? Walt Whitman High School’s long suffering principal Seymour Kaufman? Liz McIntrye? Or how about everybody’s wet dream, Alice Johnson?”
Shouts of “Alice, dear sweet Alice, I love you Alice, I want to screw your brains out Alice” rained down on Nevin, a shared vision of Karen Valentine, the cute young actress who played student teacher Alice Johnson on the show. Something about her perky smile, her luscious lips, her mini skirt and high socks. Hell, everything about Alice Johnson had the entire hooch moaning with pleasure.
“Or will there be a dark horse tonight?” Nevin continued. “Helen Loomis? Wild-hair Bernie? Or how about our favorite militant Jason Allen? Or resident genius Richie Lane?”
By the time the show started, Nevin had collected an assortment of cigarettes, ration cards, Military Payment Certificates, and joints, all of it, in theory anyway, to be paid out to the winners. He posted tonight’s odds on the blackboard that hung next to the refrigerator: 2-1 in favor of Alice with Principal Kaufman second at 5-1. A surprising Richie Lane held third place at 10-1 while regulars Pete and Liz were out of the running.
Alice always got the most votes because, well, we all desperately wanted every show to be about her. However, the rhythm of the series that we’d been able to detect pointed to the brooding principal as tonight’s likely focus. That usually translated into something heavy or meaningful like race or pregnancy or bigotry which meant less of Alice. Damn!
Before we got completely settled in, Conroy warned everybody about making too much noise. “It’s okay to shout when Alice appears, or when Pete comes on,” he intoned, waving his can of PBR to the multitudes. “But keep it down during the show so we all can follow what the hell’s happening. We’ll have the usual post-game discussion immediately after the broadcast.”
Sometimes the best part of watching Room 222, besides the camaraderie, was talking about it afterwards. Like the night we dissected how and why Principal Kaufman burned out and quit, arguing for hours why he should or shouldn’t go back to work. Or the episode about the freshman girl with a crush on Pete who tagged along on his dates with his girlfriend Liz.
And, of course, any show about Alice.
So far the episode that had provoked the most intense all-night debate (fueled by beaucoup beer and reefer) was the one where Walt Whitman High started its own radio station—call letters KWWH of course—compliments of an egotistical city councilman who arranged to have the station built at the school. Eventually, the pompous ass went ballistic because the Walt Whitman students start to broadcast programs criticizing school board policies. Might have seen that one coming.
That episode hit home for us because it seemed so much like the Vietnam we knew and the AFVN radio we listened to morning, noon, and night. By the end of our back-and-forth, we had arrived at a consensus that the Walt Whitman kids had more balls than we did. At least they’d gone after the guys in charge. Mostly we rolled over and played dead.
Tonight, Conroy sat down to cheers as the show’s inane theme song filled the Vietnam night air. Full of anticipation, we glued our eyes to the TV. An unlikely bunch of 20-somethings, thousands of miles from home in the middle of a jungle and a fucked-up war, we sat watching a TV show more or less about ourselves. The fictitious Walt Whitman High School in Room 222 is our high school, the place we want to be tonight, every Wednesday night. Now light years away.
That night’s episode was entitled “If It�
�s Not Here Where Is It?” and you could tell within the first few minutes it wasn’t up to Room 222 standards. Not even Alice could save the situation. That night our favorite show was a little too topical, a little too close to home.
The subject was Vietnam.
Guys started to hoot and howl at the entrance of the alleged 19-year-old “Vietnam veteran” returning to Walt Whitman to resume his education. The guy was a gold-plated cliché. He didn’t fit in with the other students, couldn’t handle authority. The whole fuckin’ nine yards. Even stalwarts like Pete Dixon and Seymour Kaufman spouted sanctimonious bullshit. And Alice, sweet Alice, never showed.
Eventually, Ward walked over to the TV and turned it off. Nobody said a word.
“Now hear this,” Nevin jumped up and contorted his face like James Cagney in the movie “Mr. Roberts.” “Now hear this. All contributions to tonight’s war widows and pensioners retirement fund will be immediately returned to their rightful owners.”
He was trying hard to lift our spirits. A few of the guys started to smile. “It has come to our attention that the commanding officers of Room 222 have gone AWOL and been replaced by hard-charging lifers in need of a promotion,” Nevin pointed his finger in the direction of USARV headquarters. “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused. I repeat, all contributions will be returned.”
Nevin handed back the wagering materials as most of the guys cleared out. A few of us lingered, feeling let down, deceived.
“They didn’t have to remind us we were in Vietnam,” Ward was pointing at the TV. “That’s just not fucking fair.”
The Medium is the Message
“Who the fuck watches TV in Vietnam?” Kenny Martin asked me that question the one night he spent in our hooch. He was on his way back up north after some in-country R&R. He’d just come off several rough weeks in the field, and he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t even want to get high.
So we drank a few beers and reminisced about college, about coeds, and mostly about the days we’d spent together washing dishes in the women’s dining hall. Even though Kenny and I later became fraternity brothers, it was those first few weeks together as freshmen, shaking our heads at the mountains of discarded food and trying like hell to differentiate Dawn Smith from Jackie Mills, seeing their midriffs as they came through the line that had forged a bond between us.
Now here we were, doing our post-graduate work in Vietnam. One a grunt and the other a REMF. Still struggling to figure out who was who.
There was so much that separated Kenny and me and our Vietnam experiences that we couldn’t even begin to talk about it, which is probably why we focused on the past. But reminiscing couldn’t make us forget where we were. Or where we were going. I was headed back to my job in the air-conditioned jungle in the morning while Kenny had to return to the real jungle. He wrote me later to say he’d asked for reassignment when he got back to his unit but was turned down. He wanted to be a REMF, he admitted, and it was all on account of the night we were together. It wasn’t on account of anything I said. It was what Kenny heard.
As I blathered on about our college days, Kenny’s grunt ears perked up at the sound of something unusual. It was the din of our hooch TV blaring in the background. That now became our topic of conversation.
“You guys really have a TV?” he asked as if he’d just discovered gold. “And it works?” I nodded affirmatively and Kenny shook his head as if stunned to discover electricity in Vietnam.
“What do you watch?” he asked almost in a whisper.
I didn’t want Kenny thinking we had all the comforts of home, so I tried downplaying the TV.
“We only see what the military brass wants us to see,” I lied. “None of it is any good.”
Kenny wasn’t buying it.
“So you get news and sports and, like, real shows?” Kenny’s eyes were big as saucers.
“The news is censored, the games ended a week ago and the shows, well, it’s mostly old crap like Bonanza and Combat.”
At the mention of Bonanza, the face of the young Kenny from college reemerged. He was somewhere else, with the galloping horses of the show’s theme song, watching the flames burn the map of the Cartwright spread.
“Wow,” his whole body spoke. “What I wouldn’t give to see an episode of Bonanza.”
But Bonanza wasn’t on the AFVN schedule in Saigon that night, so Kenny missed getting reacquainted with Hoss and Little Joe. A week later when Kenny rejoined his unit in the bush, he got to see a terrific program called NVA Night Attack. I missed that one.
The Gospel According to Shortimer Sam
Shortimer Sam was so damn short he needed help just getting his socks off the bottom shelf. He’d DEROS in 11 days which meant he’d been in this hellhole for 354!
The place just won’t be the same without him. That’s because Sam was the U. S. Army’s ambassador of astute advice. He was our Ann Landers, Dear Abby, and Billy Graham rolled into one.
I had my own selfish reason for not wanting Sam to return to the World, mostly on account of the brass wanting me to take over his column. No way I could be Sam. The guy flat out knew how to give advice, knew when to be tough and when to be kind. Not to mention he could cite every stinking Army rule and regulation verbatim.
Like the letter last week from some PFC in the 229th Aviation Battalion.
Dear Sam:
Can you tell me if the 229th Avn Bn has been awarded the MUC? If they have, am I eligible to wear it even if I wasn’t here when they got it?
- PFC ALG, 229th
To which Sam replied:
Dear PFC:
The 11th Avn Grp received the Meritorious Unit Citation in GO 3006, dated 20 June 67. It was for action Sep 65 to Nov 66. The 229th Avn Bn was added on the first order, in GO 787, dated 21 Feb 68. If you served for 30 days in the unit during the cited period, you wear the MUC as a permanent decoration. If not, you go bare.
- Sam
Fucking A, only Sam could know that.
He could be funny, too. Like the question he got a couple weeks ago from a GI named “River Rat.”
Dear Sam:
Me and some of the other guys think we saw a submarine on the Vam Co Dong River on patrol the other day. We hadn’t been in the sun that long so it couldn’t be heatstroke. It didn’t look very big but it operated under the water and came up every once in a while.
What’s up? Or should I say, down?
- River Rat
Dear Rat:
I did a little reconnaissance myself and here’s
“What’s up, Doc.”
There is indeed a thing that operates in the Vam Co Dong. In fact, what you saw was a 50-gallon water drum operated by an ex-VC Navy Captain who thinks he’s Burt Lancaster. He has a crew of three on board with him and they float around looking for Clark Gable.
Run Silent, Run Deep, GI.
- Sam
I’d proved my point. Life in Vietnam would be a lot worse if it weren’t for Sam’s weekly comments and insights. I just wished he’d have taken me under his wing and let me watch him work because he’ll be gone soon and I’ll be shit out of luck. He may have written a lot, but he sure didn’t talk much.
When Sam was preparing his last column, he stopped by my hooch and asked me to meet him out on the bunker. For some reason, when Sam had something on his mind and felt like communicating, that’s where he liked to talk.
It was late. I was sitting around in my skivvies and sure as hell didn’t feel like doing anything. But, it’s Shortimer Sam, so I grabbed my official green Army t-shirt, put on a pair of cutoff fatigues, strapped on my Ho Chi Minh sandals, and headed outside. It was hot as hell.
I found him sitting on top of the green nylon sandbags that covered our bunker.
“Read this.” Sam shoved several sheets of paper in my face and handed me his Government Issue flashlight with MX-99I/U marked in big letters on the side.
“What the fuck, Sam,” I sputtered, trying to hold the flashlight and
the pages in my hands.
“Please don’t swear,” Sam requested.
“Okay, but what do you want me to do with this?”
“Read it over a couple times and give me your reactions.” Sam talked like his columns read. “I value your opinion.”
“Read it? I can hardly see it.”
“Here, I’ll hold the flashlight.”
I could see Sam staring at me in the humid darkness. His most distinguishing feature, his unibrow, looked like the ribbon on a typewriter.
“Sam, if you really value my opinion, then you’ll let me take this back to the hooch and read it there.”
“I can’t let you do that,” he shot back.
“What’re you talking about?”
“Someone will see it, and if they know you’ve read the rules, then Shortimer Sam won’t be meaningful.”
“Come again?” I wasn’t accustomed to someone referring to himself in the third person, as if he were some kind of objective observer. And give me a fucking break on what was, and wasn’t, meaningful in Vietnam anyway.
I decided to tell Sam just how fucking ridiculous he was acting when he yanked the flashlight away. It flickered under his chin, throwing a ghostly light on the rest of his face. That look reminded me of Bogey’s face in the scene from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” when he started going crazy.
All of a sudden, I was spooked.
Frightened or not, I made up my mind to get the hell out of there. But when I tried to stand, my cutoffs stuck to the sandbag and my shorts rode up my crack. Sam wasn’t speaking, but I detected a faint sound in the jungle night, one that came from the direction of the Officer’s Club. The tune seemed familiar enough but the singer’s voice was a mix of Don Ho, Eric Burden and Charlie Chan.
“Jesus, those Filipino bands sure can ruin any song,” I laughed. “Who knows? Maybe they’re playing that Animals’ song for shortimers like you.” I turned back toward Sam.