When I finished the book, a dog-eared copy of Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, I rolled over and placed it on the nightstand and turned off the light. Lying there in the combined afterglow of a good read and the dreamy feeling of the onset of slumber I knew exactly what I was going to do, but I had no idea that I had just made one of those snap decisions that changes your life forever. For those who have never been there, war is so hard to understand. So foreign. Over my years of leading classes on the history of war, I had done what I could to teach students about the realities of violent conflict, ranging from having veterans speak in class to wandering the battlefields of Europe. While standing with 25 students among the nearly endless crosses in the silent cemetery above Omaha Beach was intensely moving, the experience of war still remained elusive, somehow hovering just beyond our collective grasp. Kovic’s eloquent prose, though, had forcefully reminded me that wars don’t end at the cemetery. Veterans were out there, sometimes invisible in the crowd, still struggling with the painful remembrances of bygone days of battle and destruction. Before I drifted off to sleep I made up my mind to contact the local Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care Center to see if any of the veterans who remained under the care of the doctors there would mind sharing their experiences with the students from my class on the Vietnam War.
Once I got to work the next morning I called the main number for the VA and fumblingly tried to get my point across to a bemused operator. “How can I direct your call?” “Well, I’m not quite sure. I think I need to speak with a doctor.” “Oh, are you a veteran with a health problem?” “No ma’am. I’m a history teacher, and I would like to speak with a doctor about having my class come and meet with some of the veterans there.” A short pause followed as the operator tried to process the odd information. She finally responded, “I’ll put you through.” “Wait! Put me through to whom?” But it was too late. The phone was already ringing. The person who answered the phone identified herself as Dr Leslie Root, who was head of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) clinic. Her announcement left me in a bit of a panic. Post-traumatic stress disorder? What was that? Sure I had heard of it. Heck, I’d seen as many movies about Vietnam veterans as the next guy, but what was it really? What was I about to get myself into? At a loss regarding how to proceed, I told Dr Root about my plan. After a few minutes of conversation, during which she began my education into PTSD, Dr Root decided that some of her patients might benefit from, if not enjoy, talking about their experiences with a group of bright and interested college students. She would work to get the veterans ready; all I had to do was bring my class to the VA in two weeks’ time.
Nobody quite knew what to expect that late spring day in 1997. My class and I had no real idea what PTSD was beyond the frightening, bastardized Hollywood depictions of unhinged Vietnam veterans. For the veterans who met with us, though, the situation was infinitely worse. They were about to share their most feared memories, things that had haunted them for decades – things they had not yet been able even to discuss with their closest loved ones. And they were going to share these closely guarded remembrances of horrors endured and friends lost with college students? College students had spat on them and jeered as they got off the freedom bird from Vietnam. Those college students? After everyone took their seats, there were a few tense moments before a shared realization descended upon the room. We began to understand: these guys weren’t crazy. They were just men who had seen things that were so terrible and heart-rending that they had never fully been able to forget. They began to understand: these college students weren’t protestors waiting at the airport in San Francisco. They were young people who wanted to know about what had happened in Vietnam all those years ago – young people who really cared. After all these years, somebody cared about Vietnam.
The minute I walked into the room I noticed him sitting there at the table with three other veterans. He had long, graying hair that fell down beyond his shoulders, a craggy face – the kind that is etched by years of working in the sun – and wore an old military jacket bearing the roundel of the 9th Infantry Division. It was his eyes, though, that caught my attention. Gray, piercing eyes that betrayed his mistrust. The other veterans spoke movingly of their experiences in war, but this veteran held the group spellbound. The meeting was short, and the memories exchanged were by necessity fleeting snapshots of frozen moments from the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. Surges of death and destruction, moments of tenderness, nights of despair. As the river of memories eddied and swirled, something slowly dawned on me. He never spoke about himself, but instead about others, the boys of his unit who were boys no longer. Sometimes the verbal pictures were tragic; sometimes they were heroic – but the pictures were always of others. My notion was still vague and unformed, but I had a feeling that he was the steward of something special. After the meeting, the students and veterans shook hands and we made ready to depart. As I stood in the parking lot, the long-haired veteran walked up, fixed those eyes on me, and said that this was the first that he had ever heard of a class on Vietnam being taught at the college level. Then he asked if he could sit in the next time I taught. To this day I don’t quite know why I said it, but I told him that he couldn’t sit in, but if he wanted he could come and help me teach the class.
I next taught my Vietnam class the following spring semester. To be honest I was reasonably sure that this was going to be one of those nice promises that both sides mutually forget. In the intervening eight months the veteran with the haunting eyes would move on to other things, I would get lost in grading and writing and let his kind offer slip my mind, and the class would proceed as normal. But neither of us forgot, and on a cold January morning in 1998, he made the hour-long drive to meet with a fresh batch of students eager to learn about Vietnam. In those days I began my class with a movie, one made up mainly of action clips and reports from the time. After introducing the veteran to the class, I dimmed the lights and began the film. Settling back I watched as the story progressed from scenes of the Gulf of Tonkin and decision-makers in Washington, D.C. to graphic visions of firefights in the Mekong Delta. As I looked on, I noticed that my veteran visitor was holding on to his desk so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. Before I could even think that I ought to get up and stop the film, he jumped to his feet, violently kicking his desk to the side, and started yelling – screaming at the top of his lungs – and gesticulating wildly. I sat there frozen, thinking that this could not be happening as events crawled forward in slow motion. The students sat transfixed and shocked, with the sounds and flicker of the movie as mere backdrop. The veteran, wild-eyed and lost in his world of memories come to life, continued screaming – animalistic noises, unintelligible sounds. But then one phrase crystal in its clarity and meaning: “Get Down! Get Down!” He dove to the floor, gashing his forehead open on the hard concrete, and began to convulse uncontrollably.
Some students in the class, who were also Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets, seized the moment and rushed to his side, elevating his feet, and making certain that he did not swallow his tongue. In the furor someone, perhaps me, called the ambulance and got in touch with Dr Root from the VA. Before the ambulance arrived, the students departed, each having to walk past the veteran still prone on the floor. His eyes, once so wild, were now still and open. Those eyes looked at each student as they walked past, but our veteran visitor was not there. He was not in those eyes. He was gone, lost in Vietnam. Outside the room, students gathered in their ones and twos, many weeping openly, as the paramedics loaded the veteran onto a gurney and took him away. I rode with him to the hospital – but I was alone. He was alone. I could only wonder at how horribly wrong it had all gone. He just wanted to tell students about his war, about his friends, and now what was going to happen?
The veteran had been “awake” the whole time, but he came back to us in a hospital room a few hours later that day to find a doctor, me, and Dr Leslie Root all hovering nearby. It was Dr Root who told us all what had happened. He had experienced a total flashback to Vietnam, something that had never happened to him before, presumably brought on by a combination of the pressure-packed situation of coming to speak in front of a class for the first time and the battle scenes of the movie. After receiving assurances that I had done nothing wrong and that there was nothing more I could do to help, I went home. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well that night. On one hand, I couldn’t stop thinking of what a horrible thing I had done – I had stepped into the world of PTSD without really even knowing what it was, much less what I was doing. I was certain that I had taken something fragile and crushed it due to my lack of care. On the other hand, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I had heard some of his story, tales of friends and violence, but I couldn’t help wondering at what I had yet to hear. The stories he had yet to share. What could have happened so long ago – what events were so terribly powerful that they could reach across the decades and pull the man with the piercing eyes back into their awful embrace so thoroughly and so quickly? Part of me hoped that the veteran would have the good sense to save himself the heartache and never return to my class, but another part of me wanted nothing more than to see those haunting, haunted eyes again.
The door opened at the beginning of the next class, and there he was – complete with fresh stitches in his forehead – along with Dr Root. It took a lot of guts to walk through that door. He would much rather have faced an enemy machine gunner in Vietnam than to stand in front of a class of college students and have to explain his own human frailty – to explain how he has to live with PTSD. But he did it. He and Dr Root explained what had happened, how war had affected his very soul. The experience was powerful beyond words. From that day on the veteran came to every class, with me prattling on about facts – American troops splashed ashore outside Da Nang, air mobility a key tactic in the war – while he provided a texture and analysis that made the proceedings come alive. He could tell the students what it felt like to see a tripwire tighten around a friend’s leg, how to burn leeches off with a lit cigarette, how it felt to watch someone you love die.
What began to emerge from that very first day was a Vietnam story like none I had ever before heard, a story I had somehow known was there from the very first moment I had met him. Once comfortable in a classroom setting, and sure of the fact that we meant his generation no historical harm, the veteran proved an impassioned educator, an eloquent speaker, and a fierce advocate of the men with whom he had served in Vietnam. Together we taught everywhere we could, to anyone willing to listen – in college classrooms, in church fellowship halls, and with study-abroad students in the steaming rice paddies of Vietnam. Along the way, I learned the extraordinary tale of the boys of Charlie Company, 4th Battalion of the 47th Infantry of the 9th Division in Vietnam during 1967. I heard their stories; I walked their battlefields in Vietnam; I met the boys themselves at their reunions and was welcomed with grace into their unit family. The more I heard, the more I knew that the stories were truly special, that Charlie Company occupied a unique position in the Vietnam War. There was something there that needed to be told.
In researching this project I consulted a wide variety of materials from archival sources that were especially rich given Charlie Company’s place in the Mobile Riverine Force’s joint army/navy command structure. Of special value were the battalion and divisional after action reports and command orders, which contained detailed descriptions of Charlie Company’s every move on a day-to-day basis. The most important source for this work, though, is Charlie Company itself. Over a period of three years I was able to conduct extensive interviews with 71 officers and men who served with Charlie Company, including both of the company’s commanders, one of the battalion chaplains, the company first sergeant, and two of the original four platoon leaders. To gain a fuller understanding of the reality of military life, and to learn the stories of those members of Charlie Company who did not survive Vietnam, I also conducted interviews with 21 family members of Charlie Company veterans, including wives, children, parents, and siblings. Several members of Charlie Company also generously sent me their personal papers, which included collections of letters, a diary, an abundance of newspaper clippings, training notebooks, field manuals, condolence letters, and photographs of every description. What emerged from the collection of sources was a vivid portrait of the life and times of Charlie Company; a portrait unprecedented in its completeness. Given that all of the views and details contained in this book are taken directly from interviews with the veterans and their families, footnotes will be kept to a minimum.
In the spring of 1966, while the war in Vietnam was still popular, the US military decided to reactivate the 9th Infantry Division as part of the military buildup. Across the nation, farm boys from the Midwest, surfers from California, city-slickers from Cleveland, and sharecroppers from the South opened their mail to find greetings from Uncle Sam. The newly shorn men in their ill-fitting uniforms got off the busses together at Fort Riley, Kansas, were hectored by drill instructors together in the time-honored rite of military passage, and trained together under the tutelage of officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who would lead them into battle in Vietnam. Charlie Company was part of the 9th and was representative of the greater whole. Everyone was there in the newly raised company – the joker who roller skated into the company first sergeant’s office wearing a dress, the nerdy guy with two left feet who would rather be off somewhere inventing computers, the gung-ho true believers bent on outshining everyone else, the everyman who just wanted to get through unnoticed, the guys who liked Motown, the guys who liked country music.
Most American soldiers of the Vietnam era trickled into the war zone as individual replacements for men who had become casualties or had rotated home, embarking on a wartime experience unparalleled in its individualism. Charlie Company, though, was different, part of the only division raised, drafted, and trained for service in the Vietnam War. During their training, the men of Charlie Company, a unit almost entirely composed of draftees, became a family without ever really knowing it. Its members entered Vietnam as brothers, sometimes squabbling, sometimes joking, sometimes missing their wives and children, but always brothers. Charlie Company was a throwback, part of an old breed. Charlie Company’s experience of being drafted, thrown together, and trained for war hearkened back to the very heart of the American military tradition, a tradition that came to an end in Vietnam; a tradition that might never return, leaving Charlie Company historically the last of its kind.
The bonds of brotherhood made the Charlie Company that arrived in Vietnam in January 1967 a lethal military machine. Entering the conflict just as General William Westmoreland had finally gathered enough military force to translate his military plans into violent reality, Charlie Company faced a brutal year of relentless combat and constant loss. The 9th Infantry Division, Charlie Company’s parent unit, formed the infantry component, the mailed fist, of the Mobile Riverine Force – a mix of river-borne naval power and infantry muscle designed to contest control of the populous Mekong Delta, the homeland of the Viet Cong (VC) in South Vietnam. Unlike many of their infantry brethren in Vietnam, Charlie Company usually went to work on converted landing craft instead of helicopters. Using the thousands of miles of rivers, canals, and streams that crisscross the delta, Charlie Company, along with the other units that made up the Mobile Riverine Force, searched for and sought to destroy enemy troop concentrations in the delta and wrest control of the population from the communists. The Viet Cong, though, had long dominated the region, had worked hard for years to prepare the battlefield, and were determined first to bloody and then drive off the new wave of invaders. The boys of Charlie Company entered an alien land of murderous heat, sucking mud, and unforgiving jungle. The Viet Cong had festooned the region with deadly mines and booby traps, dug defensive emplacements into thousands of rice paddy dikes – making each field a potential death trap – and hid away in the depths of steaming swamps where they could move like silent ghosts on familiar terrain while the Americans floundered in the chest-deep mud.
For a calendar year, the draftees of Charlie Company followed intelligence leads that usually proved to be stale and chased the VC across the watery landscape. On a few occasions, Charlie Company engaged with the Viet Cong, often at point-blank range, in great surges of battle, filled with death and killing. More often than not, though, Charlie Company’s war took the form of endless marches through the sodden terrain in search of an elusive foe, marches that might seem only like a long walk in the hot sun at one moment but could split open into bloody violence at any turn. A sniper shot blowing open a buddy’s head here, a mine ripping off a friend’s legs there. War in Vietnam for the men in Charlie Company was unlike anything they could have dreamed – a war of stillness interrupted by sudden, terrible violence in which a friend was maimed or killed – an impersonal violence that all too often left the boys of Charlie Company with no targets for their rage. You can’t shoot back at a booby trap.
While the continuing violence honed Charlie Company’s fighting skills, the men dealt with their losses, the fear, and the killing as best they could. During their short spells of downtime, the boys of Charlie Company unburdened themselves in various manners, some of which were as old as war itself: writing letters home to loved ones, drinking, grousing about army life, sneaking out of the base to enjoy the “pleasures” of a local village, and praying. Nothing, though, could mask the truth. The inexorable crush of war, the sudden cataclysms of mass death, the broken bodies and shattered lives of comrades once so dear hardened the boys of Charlie Company. The carefree life of their youth was extinguished in a transition jarring in its suddenness. The draftees had become warriors in all of their time-honored guises – some became killers, others survivors. Some had their young souls stilled, while others turned to God.
The losses and wastage of war that so affected the men also had an indelible impact on Charlie Company itself, transforming the one-time family of brothers into a unit of near strangers that more typifies the dominant public perception of American units in Vietnam. In April 1967, just over two months after Charlie Company’s arrival in Vietnam, one soldier wrote home to his parents that his platoon, which had numbered nearly 50 men when it had arrived in country, was down to only 24 originals. In September, another soldier told his parents that of the soldiers who had left Fort Riley in the entire company, which he estimated at 160 men, only 30 remained. Over time the Charlie Company that had trained together and had become true brothers-in-arms was whittled away, steadily eroded by a combination of death, crippling wounds, and a confusing system of intra-division transfers. To take the place of lost friends, brothers who had gone home in body bags or had been bundled – bleeding and broken – onto medevac choppers, came a flood of replacements. The new guys were good men faced with the unenviable task of trying to find a place in a tightly knit family. The Charlie Company originals worked well with the replacements; after all, their lives depended on it. Many were even lucky enough to find friendship. But it was a different kind of friendship, and Charlie Company was a different kind of unit. The band of brothers was gone. Those with the shared experience of training and war shrank to ever smaller groups at the core of the company. Their melody faded while the war of individual replacements came to be the dominant theme. By the end of its year in combat, Charlie Company, although still a lethal military formation, was no longer a brotherhood of draftees that hearkened back to America’s military past. It had become a unit of replacements, a mixed group of veterans, draftees, new guys, and lifers. Charlie Company had come to typify an American unit in Vietnam.
In January 1968, on the eve of the Tet Offensive, the Charlie Company originals gathered in ones and twos to board the “freedom bird” for their flight back to “the world.” After their unit had suffered 25 killed and 105 wounded during its year in combat, the lucky ones were going home again to reclaim their lives as postal workers, students, mechanics, farmers, husbands, sons, and Americans. But the boys of Charlie Company were returning to a country that many did not recognize. When they had received their draft notices, the nation was at peace, and support for their war was high. In 1968, though, the once nascent anti-war movement was nearing the apex of its tumultuous appeal and had begun to turn against the soldiers themselves. The returning veterans of Charlie Company were among the first to be greeted by crowds of jeering, cursing protesters. While in Vietnam, the boys of Charlie Company had heard of protests and marches, but they had never expected this: screams of “baby killer,” spat curses, people throwing condoms full of urine. The members of Charlie Company, a unit so reminiscent of the American experience in World War II, were denied the victorious welcome home that their fathers and uncles had once enjoyed. There was no grateful nation waiting to absolve the boys of Charlie Company of the sins of war. The World War II experience was over; the Vietnam experience had begun.
After navigating the maze of protestors and saying their all-too-brief goodbyes to the closest friends of their lives, the boys of Charlie Company went home – some to joyous reunions, some to the hugs of children they had never before met, some to agonizing months of rehabilitation, some to prostheses and to the task of learning how to walk again. Some wives, parents, and toddlers never got the joy of a welcome home, only a flag-draped coffin. As Charlie Company shattered into its component pieces, the individual veterans and their families had to try to piece their old lives back together as best they could. For these men who had once held so much in common, reintegration into society was an intensely individual experience. There was no dominant veteran narrative of the war. Some of the members of Charlie Company locked the war away in dusty corners of their attics and got back to the business of living, working, and raising families. The war haunted others for the remainder of their days, dogging their every step with bloody memories and nights of unimaginable terror. Locked in worlds of fear, some lashed out at their loved ones, others tried to drown their feelings with a sea of alcohol, a few became homeless, and others simply went numb. Some never overcame their fear and remain consumed by a long-ago war, while others found solace and redemption in religion. Some members of Charlie Company refused to allow grievous wounds to get the best of them and learned to walk on false legs or to live life undaunted though they would never walk again. Some of the boys of Charlie Company became rich, others worked as artisans, and others were mired in poverty.
The only common thread that ties together the varied postwar experiences of the boys of Charlie Company is Vietnam. Their experience stands as unique in a war littered with military and cultural uniqueness. Plucked from society, trained and transformed into a band of brothers, the boys of Charlie Company were the last of something special in American history – the true citizen soldier at war. But the crucible of battle forged Charlie Company into something new, into a unit of replacements and individuals that came to typify the Vietnam War. That jarring transformation, along with the transformation of the country to which they returned, changed the lives of the boys of Charlie Company forever.