Twenty-four
Michael Peterson was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but his family moved to Virginia when he was young, where he graduated high school, moving on to earn a B.A. in Political Science from Duke University in 1965. When the intrigue of war drew the Duke graduate to Vietnam, Peterson felt it would be the perfect experience and setting for him. He expected to write “the great American war novel.”
When Peterson arrived in Vietnam, he was quite anxious and considered to be gung ho. Commissioned as a lieutenant, he was assigned to a small outpost, called Oceanview, located in the northernmost region of South Vietnam. His battalion was small, comprised of no more than thirty men. And by the time he arrived there, in the middle of 1968, Lieutenant Peterson found himself and his men in a tough position.
The platoon he was with had the job of defending a region that the North Vietnamese Army wanted control over; the Oceanview outpost was just at the edge of the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam. According to marines in his battalion, by early 1969, Peterson and his men were having a growing problem with North Vietnamese soldiers who would sneak inside American bases with explosives.
Just months after Michael Peterson’s arrival, the official log of the unit’s activities recorded that on the night of February 22, 1969, numerous positions across South Vietnam were being attacked by the North Vietnamese Army. At Oceanview, the fighting would continue for six hours. As Michael Peterson, the highest ranking officer at Oceanview, recalled the events of that night, he said his outpost spotted enemy troops through night-vision telescopes. Peterson himself, from his command bunker, saw twenty-five enemy soldiers descending near Oceanview. It was a life-and-death situation and his outpost was in jeopardy.
In recalling the incident, Peterson would confide that he demanded his patrol not shoot at enemy troops until he gave the command. Even though Peterson would later claim that instead of listening to his order, his patrol panicked and opened fire, in an interview that was taped right after the battle in 1969, Peterson had said something different: he had admitted that his crew opened fire on his order.
Whatever the case, when the crew from Oceanview had opened fire that night, killing two and wounding others, it was Michael Peterson who was finally able to stop the firing, long enough, at least, to pull his marines back to the command post. In a dramatic moment following the return of his men, Peterson’s nineteen-year-old radio operator, Corporal Jack Alfred Peterson, died in Michael’s arms, saying, “I hurt, Lieutenant, I hurt.”
Michael Peterson would later incorporate part of the Oceanview battle into his novel A Time of War. It was a novel that was so epic, Peterson’s editors would liken it to the James Jones masterpiece From Here to Eternity. Calling Peterson’s account a “classic story of Vietnam,” the book jacket described A Time of War as “a richly textured novel” that captures “the essence of a time and place.” Indeed. Peterson did recount the 1969 battle in one scene in particular, which detailed a lieutenant who sent two men to their death. In that same scene, Peterson described a marine who had to be restrained for being angry at the lieutenant for deliberately getting their men killed by sending them out on patrol.
Perhaps it was based on true life, certainly much of it was fictionalized, but in any case, A Time of War was Peterson’s way of chronicling the brutal action he’d witnessed in the fields of his remote outpost. True to his own account of what happened that night, one of the marine warriors, who dies in the lieutenant’s arms, repeated the same real-life line, “I hurt, Lieutenant, I hurt.”
But the recollections of Michael Peterson, while dramatically fictionalized in his war novel, were never entirely confirmed by all of his former battalion marines. Apparently, Peterson’s memory of the Oceanview battle, was not quite the same version that everyone else had recorded. One of the members of Peterson’s company, Corporal Leo Hazelton, would later tell reporters that Michael Peterson panicked. Hazelton would confide that as the North Vietnamese soldiers began to descend on Oceanview that night, Michael Peterson had to be restrained because the lieutenant was “running around in circles.”
In Hazelton’s reported account of the 1969 battle, when Michael Peterson learned that no reinforcements were being sent to his outpost, Peterson acted as if “the world was coming to an end.” Another marine who was at Oceanview that night, Dennis Coney, recollected that when things got really heated at the outpost, “somebody had to grab Michael Peterson and slap him,” forcing the young lieutenant to face reality.
At the end of the battle, the North Vietnamese withdrew before dawn, never having injured any member of the Oceanview outpost. The men who died, it turned out, were killed by members of their own battalion. Of course Lieutenant Peterson would continue to claim that it was his troop who panicked and opened fire, unknowingly killing members of their own patrol. But Leo Hazelton and others would assert that the Oceanview troop lost American soldiers because they acted on Michael Peterson’s panicked command. “Peterson didn’t know it was our own people,” Hazelton later told the News & Observer.
Michael Peterson would deny being the cause of any battle fire; he would maintain that his troop panicked because the enemy was chasing them. Of course one could never know the actual truth about the 1969 battle. Some of the enlisted men blamed Peterson for the “friendly fire” deaths of their fellow soldiers. Others in the Oceanview troop would praise Lieutenant Peterson for his valiant efforts, claiming Peterson behaved like a leader, that Peterson was able to get them through the night.
After the battle was over, for his successful defense of the Oceanview outpost, Michael Peterson received the Silver Star of Valor. At the end of his tour of duty, Peterson also received the Bronze Star for leadership in combat. For many years following that 1969 battle, Peterson would tell the story of how he was injured that night in Vietnam, the night his radio operator was killed. According to stories told by Michael Peterson, his radio operator had stepped on a land mine when he was killed, a land mine that sent shrapnel into Peterson’s leg, earning him a Purple Heart.
But there was never any documentation of a Purple Heart in Michael Peterson’s military record, nor was there any record of a land mine exploding. When Peterson ran for mayor of Durham in 1999, when he was forced to admit that in actuality he was injured in a traffic accident in Japan, Peterson would explain that the accident happened just after he left Vietnam, and would claim that he spent months in a hospital with dying and wounded soldiers.
To members of his shocked family, who didn’t understand why Michael would misrepresent something as significant as a Purple Heart, Peterson would claim that his memory of that time period was too painful for him to discuss in further detail.
Years later, when local reporters later speculated that Michael Peterson’s Vietnam combat might have shaped Peterson’s character, that the 1969 battle might have had some bearing on the man standing trial for murder, it would be Peterson’s attorney David Rudolf, who would rush to Peterson’s defense.
Disappointed over the News & Observer article that detailed the differing stories of the “Battle at Oceanview,” Rudolf felt it was unfair for local reporters to bring up old stories about Vietnam. Rudolf would assert that, even if it were true that Michael Peterson panicked in the first few minutes of battle, all that mattered was that his client “pulled it back together and won a Silver Star.”