The newest names are going up now on the war monuments in the South. In a small place called Fulton, Mississippi, between Tupaloosa and Birmingham, there stands off Route 78 a newly erected monument made of old uneven bricks of a burned, darker red. On top, the flame rises from a curved and split iron cup; it was this light that made me stop. The men of the county who went to the last four wars, and are pinned to them forever, are listed on granite slabs: nineteen for World War I, ninety-two for World War II, two for Korea, sixteen for Vietnam: Boozer, Clark, Coats, Davidson, Hall, Hodges, Humphries, Izard, Jones, Palmer, Sanderson, Waddle, West, Willis, Worthey and Yielding. Aron Yielding died in World War II; twenty-odd years later Vietnam had Larry T. Yielding.
DURING THE WAR, somewhere in the middle of it, there were men in Washington, D.C., who were bothered by the rising American casualties—not by the wounds they did not see, but by the concern that perhaps the small towns might not keep taking such losses stoically. It was in these places that people knew the boy who had been killed in Chu Lai, could remember how well he played high school football, knew what his father did, the name of his mother’s family and if they were churchgoers. It wasn’t the same in the cities, where if a soldier from Detroit or Los Angeles or St. Louis got killed, people in the neighborhood would be startled or made uneasy. In Washington the worry was that the small towns would start questioning the war, that the prominent citizens—the banker, the biggest farmer, a principal—would begin to speak against it.
Once, in Missouri, a university student driving me to the airport remembered what had happened in his tiny hometown in that state when there was someone killed in Vietnam. The neighbors took food to the house. It was always done at such times. The neighbors went to the house carrying soup pots, covered dishes and pies to leave on the kitchen table so the woman would not have to cook for her family during the first days, those first white nights of grieving.
The boy, who was gentle and plump, remembered it all. “I bet they had enough food there to last three days,” he said.
People used to say that it was in the small places where Vietnam had cut the deepest, that it was in the small places where the war had taken away so much. So this is where I went: small places of all kinds, everywhere.
One of them was Bardstown, in a smooth and fat part of Kentucky. Driving there, you can see the low white fences of some fine stables. I liked the cold and the grass that promised to be greener when it was warm again, a child’s idea of green, clear and shiny, not the greens of Vietnam, not the green of the Army.
Few of us would find it an alien or puzzling place; the white curtains in so many windows look as if women washed, ironed and fluffed them up every week. The porches are still there, but people sit inside at night to watch television. The architecture of the oldest houses is neo-Greek, New England Colonial, Cape Cod or Georgian. Families still live in some of them, taking care of the blue or yellow poplar flooring, the hand-carved mantels, the brass doorknobs and the curving staircases. On Tuesday it is ladies night—drinks half price for them—at the Holiday Inn near Blue Grass Parkway, and its Oak Dining Room, with the harsh air conditioning and all the salad you want to eat, is considered by many a fancy and special place to go for steaks. In the summer a sweet and yeasty smell from the eleven bourbon distilleries in the county speaks of money, melted, soaking the bright air. There are three factories, nine churches, an art gallery, a Catholic bookstore, a swap shop, good bowling alleys and a diner still named for a dead owner, Tom Pig, because there is no reason to change it. An award is given to the Outstanding Citizen of the Year from Nelson County at the annual ladies-night meeting of the Chamber of Commerce in mid-January. The local newspaper, the Kentucky Standard, runs a picture and announcement if a young man joins the service. It has been like this for a long time. Louisville is thirty-nine miles away; the population here is 5,800; it is the second oldest city in Kentucky.
The town gives its assets, briskly, on a green sign on US 31E: Bardstown, Nelson County, Bourbon Center of the World, Old Kentucky Home, St. Joseph Cathedral.
Just before North Third, a soft and wide street of old trees and white-frame or red-brick houses, there is the building of the Kentucky National Guard Unit based in Bardstown. The war is here, in a small low-lying house with two crossed cannon barrels in front, looking precise and proper. In red and yellow a sign tells you here is Battery C, 2d Howitzer Battalion, 138th Artillery. The entire battery, part of a five-hundred-man battalion, was called to active duty May 13, 1968, by an executive order that summoned 24,000 men to bolster U.S. forces in Vietnam.
Even during that terrible week in June years ago when four men from Battery C were killed on one day in Vietnam—and a fifth did not live another week—no one ever defaced the 138th Artillery sign or said they could not stand the sight of it any more. In Bardstown they are very nice people, not given to messing up property or doing wild things. Nor could it be said that the reporters, with their notebooks and questions, their cameras and television crews, were made to feel ill-at-ease, even as they asked, so many times, how people felt. For a little while the Vietnam war made Bardstown famous for a new, unpleasant reason. The older people, in positions of prominence, were cordial and kept to their cheerful ways, perhaps trying to make the point that good Christians do not collapse in crises. Millie Sutherland makes marvelous chocolate sheet cake and wrote out the recipe for me. Her husband, Judge Sutherland, gave me two boxes of Kentucky Kernel Seasoned Flour, Ideal for Chicken, Chops, Steak, Fish, Oysters and Shrimp, which is made by his family’s firm, with very precise instructions on how to make the best batter and gravy with it. It was the judge who called Bardstown “a place of wholesomeness, goodness.”
The town has always been used to outsiders; it calls out to tourists—who are usually southern—and does not make fun of them when they come. What draws many people is My Old Kentucky Home State Park, one mile from downtown Bardstown, where each summer a cast of forty-six performs in an outdoor musical drama called The Stephen Foster Story. One small Kentucky newspaper called the performance “as merry as a mint julep.” The performers sing “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home,” “De Camptown Races,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Oh, Susanna.” Some are not so sure that the composer wrote his most famous, very sentimental song in Bardstown in 1852 while visiting his father’s cousin, Judge John Rowan, in his mansion inspired by Independence Hall in Philadelphia. But it sells more bourbon and country hams, more souvenirs and more meals, and fills the motels where the room clerks referred to the mayor as Gus and know if the corn is doing well. It is typical of Bardstown that there are taxis bearing signs that say “Heaven Hill creates a better atmosphere.” It was quite some time before I realized that Heaven Hill is only a bourbon sold in Kentucky, but the point is that Bardstown wants things to be calm and pleasant, and believes its own atmosphere to be very nice.
The past is persistent here, claiming attention even under the plates and coffee cups at the Old Talbott Tavern, which calls itself the Oldest Western Stagecoach in America. For there are paper place mats in the restaurant to remind you that the tavern and inn was opened in 1779 during the Revolutionary War when it was used by General George Rogers Clark as his base. Provisions and munitions were brought overland from Virginia and stored in the cellars. In 1797 the exiled Duke of Orleans, Louis Phillippe, stayed here, feeling rather ill, with a large entourage. Later, when he was King of the French, he sent paintings and church furniture to the Catholic Bishop of Bardstown. The gifts included two paintings by Van Eyck, two by Van Dyck, one Murillo and one Rubens, which were hung in St. Joseph’s, the first Catholic cathedral west of the Alleghenies upon its completion in 1819.
Not far from the packages of Old Kentucky Bourbon Candy, $2.95 a pound, on sale in the Old Talbott Tavern, is an eight-inch steel saw which was one of four instruments used by Dr. Walter Brashear in 1806 in the first successful amputation of a leg at the hip joint. The patient was a seventeen-year-old boy whose leg was mangled. Nowhere is his name to be found.
In the Old Court House Square there is the plaque to the surgeon who amputated “without any precedent to guide him,” and another to John Fitch, who died penniless in Bardstown, giving him credit for demonstrating a working steam-powered boat more than twenty years before Robert Fulton.
There is the slave block with the notice that upon this stone slaves were sold before emancipation in 1863, and a tribute to Thomas Nelson, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses and, later, the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Commander of the Virginia Militia, who in 1781 was “commended for selfless patriotism in ordering guns to fire on his own home, the British headquarters at Yorktown, 1781.” Here, too, is a cool bronze reminder that Braxton Bragg’s Army of twenty-eight thousand men camped here from September 20 to October 3, 1862, moved to Harrodsburg, then met Buell’s Union Army in the Battle of Perryville, October 8. The language on the plaques is dry, sparse, correct. It is not intended to move the imagination, to depress people or make them proud.
The newest bronze plaque, put in the Court House Square in May 1970, says this: IN MEMORY Dedicated to those men who gave their lives in Vietnam 1969 for the preservation of freedom.
There are seven names on it. Five were National Guardsmen from Battery C whose deaths came from an enemy attack before dawn at Fire Support Base Tomahawk, near Phu Bai, in South Vietnam. Four died there, in a place women could never imagine, but one burned man lived for another five days. In the long war, twelve men from the Bardstown area were killed. The first died in February 1966 and another later that year. Three died in 1968. The last two died on June 24 and 25, 1969. But there was never such a day as June 19, 1969. Some of the dead were from villages close to Bardstown: Cox’s Creek, Willisburg, Carrolltown and New Haven. In Bardstown, when you ask about the dead, people nod and speak of the Simpson boy, the McIlvoy boy, the Collins boy; even if they cannot clearly see their faces now, there is a father or a cousin whom they know.
There was only one widow left. The four others remarried. It made her feel more alone. Her name was Deanna Durbin before she married Ronald Earl Simpson, who was killed at Fire Support Base Tomahawk. Other reporters had been to see her. She wanted no more of it; she did not want to see me. A child, whom she named Cheryl Lynn, was born five days before her husband’s body was flown home and buried at Bardstown Cemetery on July Fourth in a military service. There were soldiers from Fort Knox, who fired their rifles, and Masons in their white aprons. At the cemetery she sat under the funeral tent, clutching a yellow handkerchief, and afterward she was led away to a car, unsteady, holding the folded American flag.
The young husband is remembered as an easygoing, pleasant man, tall and dark-haired, who did not complain or ask questions when he was in Vietnam. However, Specialist 4 Simpson had been one of the one hundred and five plaintiffs in a lawsuit argued by Nathan R. Zahm, a lawyer from California, that it was unconstitutional to send National Guardsmen overseas. The case was moving slowly to the Supreme Court, but the unit was shipped overseas one day before the court met on October 26, 1968.
Mrs. Simpson did not know what had happened to the case. Nothing about the war, its purpose or its weaponry, or the arguments over it, seemed clear, only that she could not forgive the death of her husband, and the words used to justify it did not calm her at all.
Sometimes Deanna Simpson thought of leaving Bardstown, but it was always the house on West Forrest Street that held her there. Ronald Earl Simpson had built it for them, close to the home of his parents, and they had lived there during that brief marriage, until at the age of twenty-two he was killed. She did not know right away that it happened on a Thursday in a place near Phu Bai. She was not sure what a fire base was. She knew nothing until the following Monday that he was missing in action. The notification of his death came two days later.
The government said it was shrapnel, Mrs. Simpson said. “They bombed the place where he stayed and threw grenades into it,” she said.
Two British reporters from BBC had come to Bardstown, where they were looked on kindly as somewhat exotic but affable fellows. To this day Deanna Simpson remembers how Peter Taylor, one of the BBC men, told her of one man in Bardstown who had shocked the British visitors by his reaction to the casualties. It was First Sergeant Pat Sympson of the National Guard in Bardstown, the man who knew the Bardstown boys in Battery C and first trained them, who had even spent ten months on active duty in Vietnam, although he was not at Fire Support Base Tomahawk when the North Vietnamese sappers came through the wire and, at 2 A.M., half asleep, the young men of Bardstown learned, at last, the real purpose of being in Battery C.
“That man, that sergeant, he said ‘Well, somebody’s got to get killed in a war,’” Mrs. Simpson said on the telephone.
First Sergeant Sympson was sitting behind his desk in an office at the National Guard building. He had his souvenirs arranged around the rim of the desk. There was a grenade and a defused shell casing, which the sergeant said was from a “pineapple.” This is a nickname for an antipersonnel weapon. The pineapple was a very small bomb compared to others. It looked like a perforated Sterno can with six steel spring-locked fins on the top and two hundred and fifty pellets in the casing. An American plane could drop a thousand pineapples over an area the size of four football fields. In a single air strike two hundred and fifty thousand pellets were spewed in a horizontal pattern over the land below, hitting everything on the ground. A long time ago I learned about the pineapple, looking at a Vietnamese, lying on a straw mat, whose body seemed to have a thousand cuts.
The sergeant did not want me there. He did not pretend otherwise. There was only one peculiar thing about him: not the face that made me think of rope, not the hair cut so close to the scalp, not the boots shined to a ferocious glare. It was a pair of pinkish earplugs inside a tiny plastic vial that hung from a breast pocket of his fatigues. They are issued to artillery crews, but in Vietnam I did not see anyone who used them; the men simply covered their ears with their hands, except if they had to handle the warm canisters. The earplugs made it seem as if Sergeant Sympson was not sitting in an office in a quiet town pushing papers, but in the field, standing by the heavy 155s as they turned down to fire point-blank at attacking enemy positions.
Do you think that too much attention has been paid to the deaths in Bardstown? It was the only question I needed to ask him.
Sergeant Sympson did not speak; perhaps he had been told to shut up. He only nodded his head, not once, but twice, the big head dipping up and down very slowly, making sure I would have nothing to write down or quote. Then the sergeant, with the tiny pink earplugs hanging in the little vial on his chest, rose from his desk and made it clear my time was up, that I was not to loiter. He escorted me to the door, and stood there until I went away.
THE ARMY WAS wise about death: it understood that the dying soldier, the dead man, could not give them as much trouble, present as many delicate problems, pose such embarrassment as the people who loved or were bound to him. In the Vietnam war they worked a procedure that was quite perfect for their purposes, a better system than the sending of a telegram, although much more troublesome for the military, more dreadful for the men who had to inform the families.
When a man died in Vietnam, his next of kin were notified in person. The notification teams of two men each were from the nearest Army base. An officer informed the family of a dead, or missing, officer, and noncommissioned officers told the families of men whose rank was below first lieutenant. The rules and guidelines were strict: be sure to identify the next of kin correctly, the wife or parents; always ask a woman to sit down in case she faints; if there are children around, take the mother to another room, so they will not learn the death of their father from a stranger; do not touch the woman even if she cries out or trembles terribly. Never touch her. Neighbors can be called in to assist in cases of collapse or hysteria. The fathers of the dead are not expected to go beserk, or weep uncontrollably, so they were not automatically asked to sit down. There were no prescribed formal expressions of sympathy aside from the opening sentence: “The Secretary of Army has requested me to inform you . . .” The idea was to convey regret—deep, official, masculine regret—but not a regret that sounded too regretful, too mushy, as if the death had been a waste.
It was nearly always expected that a woman would weep. The very calm ones, who stayed composed and polite, usually had a hard time after the notification team had driven off and they began to understand. Notification teams only visited survivors between 6 A.M. and 10 P.M. if a death had taken place in Vietnam. The idea was not to wake them up in the middle of the night when there was no reason to do so. I have heard of women who saw the Army sedans outside their door and at first would not let the notification teams inside. But sooner or later they always had to open the door because the notification team just waited there, knocking politely a second time, a third, refusing to go away. There have been cases of women turning on the man who told her she was a widow, times when women got nasty, blaming the Army, shrieking at the uniform, pleading for proof that the dead man was not someone else. Nothing of the kind happened in Bardstown in June 1969, or in any of the little towns nearby, when it became known that within a week, Staff Sergeant Harold Milton Brown, Specialist 4 Ronald Earl Simpson, Specialist 4 David Burr Collins, Specialist 4 Ronald McIlvoy, First Sergeant Luther Malcolm Chappel, Staff Sergeant James Thomas Moore and Specialist 4 Barry Neal Thompson had ceased to exist.
There were four days of mourning, when flags flew at half mast. It ended on the Fourth of July, a day when men usually go fishing, when there are picnics, a day of pleasant slumping. There was a memorial service, sometimes called “the ceremony” by townspeople, in the auditorium of Bardstown High at 9 A.M. There were Bible readings and prayers given by an Army chaplain from Fort Knox, the Reverend Linus Geisler Joseph Cathedral and the Reverend George Lollis of First Christian Church. Several Bardstown choirs together sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “America the Beautiful.” Two hymns were sung. Mayor Guthrie Wilson read the names, ages, dates of death of the slain men—the honor roll, he called it—and James A. Sutherland, Judge of Nelson County, borrowing from the Gettysburg Address, said: “None of us, yes, none shall ever forget what they did there.” It was these words, perhaps, which the judge said slowly in his old, clear and important voice, that made many people break down, so that the auditorium was filled with the soft, gulping noises of grief that people could not hold back, could not muffle with their handkerchiefs.
Later it was thought that perhaps more than eight hundred people had filled the auditorium. There were not enough seats; dozens had to stand in back.
Judge Sutherland recalled, in his speech, how a party had been held for the Bardstown National Guard Unit before it had departed on active duty, then praised them: “Our men were met on the battlefield, none faltered, so we now come to dedicate a portion of what we have to them. Our men, our husbands, our fathers, our sons have fallen, and in doing so, did consecrate far above our power to add or detract. Those yet to fall must struggle in the storms of fate. Brave men and worthy patriots are dear to God and famous to all ages. Men do not live by bread alone, but by faith, by admiration and by sympathy. So I strain to convey to you, who have had the supreme loss, our pledge of complete admiration and sympathy. None of us, yes, none of us . . .”
MANY OTHER AMERICANS saw the memorial service on CBS national television, or read about it. Beamis Samuels, of the Bardstown City Hall office staff, was surprised that some letters came from as far away as Wakonda, South Dakota, or Westfield, New York. Mrs. Lillian Thompson of Dayton, Ohio, for example, wrote: “This is just to thank you and the people of Bardstown for the most sincere and beautiful service you held on July 4, 1969 in memory of those DEAR PEOPLE who sacrificed their lives for the U.S. I was very fortunate to have seen this service on the television screen.” Mrs. Annie L. Ruckers sent a message on Card-A-Prayer In Sympathy, which said: “To the Grieved Family. Just a word to let you know we are sad in Heart with you all. We are Negroes but we are white with God because we are Christians and the color don’t make a person, we have been sad since we heard the news of the loss May God take care of you.”
All the letters were answered as soon as possible. Mr. Samuels was helpful, and as detached as if I had come to find out about the qualities of limestone water or farm subsidies. It seemed to worry him just for a second that only Deanna Durbin Simpson wished to be left alone. He thought that even at the end of 1973, she had not yet gotten over it.
“She hasn’t made the effort,” Mr. Samuels said, but quite gently.
THERE HAS NEVER been a war, except for Vietnam, in which the men of his family did not volunteer, Mayor Guthrie Wilson will tell you. He was born in Bardstown in February 1923, the only son of Frank Wilson, a farmer who was also in the show-horse and cattle business until he went into automobiles in 1918. During World War II Guthrie Wilson spent fifty-three months in the Army, mostly as an infantry instructor of weaponry and later of company tactics, attaining the rank of major. He did not see combat. He was happy in the Army and might have stayed if his father had not summoned him home to join the business, called Wilson Brothers. The generations catch up with you, Mayor Wilson likes to say, every generation. His father was eighty-one years old, he said. Their ancestors were Scotch and English—Archibalds and Camerons—which leads him to a little joke.
“Of course, you don’t want to get into your family tree too hard,” the mayor said. “Because you don’t know how they got here. They may have come out of debtors’ prisons or anywhere, you know. That’s how we all got here.” His wife, Kitty, and their daughter traveled to England twice and to Scotland, too. The mayor was too busy to go.
It seems only fitting that Guthrie Wilson should live in a red-brick house with a green shingled roof and fat white pillars, not surprising that the parlor, a dim and waxed room, is full of very nice antiques, that the couple sleep in a huge, high and very old four-poster bed. They receive guests in a cheerful small room facing the front, a room many Americans call a den. The mayor has been in office since 1965, running as a Democrat because he was born one, because, by his own admission, he would be licked if he ran as a Republican. But his duties are not full time, the salary is quite small, so he is mainly concerned with being a Chevrolet and Buick dealer. He does not look like a farmer, with his unweathered, handsome face and pale, neat hands, but occasionally he speaks for generations of Wilson men who, even before Kentucky was a state, owned land here, raised crops and had cattle, knew how the weather could ruin you.
“When you’re raised next to the ground, like we are, you’re more conservative-thinking,” the mayor said. “People here just don’t like big government, they don’t like too much liberalism in ideas. As new things come along, good things, they’re a little slower to take hold to them. I’d say people in this area probably thought when Social Security started, it was socialism.”
But the suspicion does not extend to wars, and Mayor Wilson works hard to make you see that in Bardstown people live by putting fears and doubts to one side when the country calls them. He is an honest man, a relaxed one sitting in that sunny little room with its plants and bright colors, telling you that Vietnam was a complicated thing and not all the town’s memories of it were bad. In June 1966, for example, there had been a Vietnam Day party in Bardstown High in honor of Colonel Hal Moore, a local boy who had gone to West Point, a decorated hero of Vietnam, who was home on a visit. The reception, which also paid tribute to other soldiers in Vietnam and local veterans, was from one to three in the afternoon. More than a thousand people came, but Colonel Moore did not talk about the war, and no one pressed him to do so, or asked questions. There had been a sweet and stirring shimmer to that day.
“There was a happy occasion then because in 1966 there was a kind of feeling we were winning, you know,” the mayor said. “Gosh, what an ironic thing. I made a short speech, recognizing boys that were in Vietnam, or some that were back. Life magazine had two big spreads on Colonel Moore. A very low-keyed fellow. He wouldn’t permit us to have any ceremonies. He said no, which I don’t blame him.”
If people grew questioning about the war, or doubting, it was not their way to speak out against it, or to pay too much attention to the demonstrators they saw on television, who were regarded, for the most part, as lunatics or weak-minded.
“Even though people became very disenchanted, it is still a pretty patriotic town, a very great majority of people still thought ‘Well, okay we’ve got to put up with it even though we’ve lost our belief in it,’” the mayor said. “And even over those eleven young men being killed, there wasn’t any bitterness here. I am sure there were isolated cases, I don’t mean to say there weren’t, I can’t speak for Jane Doe or Joe Blow, but generally there was no feeling of bitterness or anything.”
His father, Frank Wilson, who had fought with the Wildcat Division in France in World War I, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, was not pleased that his grandson, known as Guffy, was avoiding the war. The young man finished college in the summer of 1969 and joined the National Guard on a six-year basis.
“His grandfather said ‘Why don’t you go in the Army instead of going in the National Guard?’” the mayor told me. “We never had a war in which a member of my family didn’t volunteer. But Guffy said ‘I don’t want to go in the Army, and the purpose of going into the Guard is so that I won’t have to go to Vietnam unless they call this company back.’”
Mayor Wilson thought that was fine. Battery C was not called up again. But the country stayed hitched to the plow, as he puts it, stuck in Vietnam. “You know, like plowing along, and you hit a rock or something and you can’t move it, so you have to back the mule up and pull the plow back and start over.”
John Laurence, a twenty-nine-year-old correspondent for CBS News, who was well known for his Vietnam coverage, came to Bardstown to cover the memorial service in July. Mayor Wilson had no idea that this slight young man, who looked like a schoolboy until he spoke, was one of the best television correspondents in Vietnam, not only brave (not all were brave), but a fine reporter. The mayor and his wife invited Laurence to have dinner with them.
“We talked till about one-thirty in the morning. He told us ‘We can’t win this thing. It’s useless. There is no way to win it.’ He said ‘You people are being bamboozled. You’re being fooled and you don’t know it.’ I remember those were just about his exact words.”
Mayor Wilson had never heard it put that way before. It had never been clear to him that anyone was lying about the war until that long dinner with Jack Laurence. On the day of the cease-fire, in January 1973, a different CBS crew flew into the local airport from Chicago to see what Bardstown was doing and thinking. They were in a dreadful rush. They only had time to find the mayor and film him in the street. Their speed amazed him. “They just flew in one morning and landed right here. They went back, had that thing edited and on the six-thirty news,” the mayor said. “I nearly fell over. I said surely they can’t make it, but they did. They asked me what effect the war had on the community.”
Not until he saw himself speaking on television did the mayor really know what he had said. But he would not wish to alter it. “I said . . . well, really, I don’t think they felt anything,” he told me. “Except for a little relief. But I heard no conversation about it.”
It was an ordinary day, January 27, 1973.
“It was just this: you got up and went to work the next morning. I guess we felt, well, we’re out of it. But there was never any real resentment. Not that.”
He did not think the people of Bardstown, the people of Nelson County, brooded much about the war, thought of it as futile or unjust. There was nothing like that.
“I mean, it was over after the ceremony, wasn’t it?” the mayor said.
FROM THE AIR, coming down in the UH-1 helicopters that were so open and seemed so frail, the fire bases looked like outdoor prison camps, dried and greyish places where no one could run away, big circles of punishing dullness and undreamed-of noise. When the choppers came down, or rose up, a vortex of dust, twigs, earth, pebbles and bits of nothing whipped the face, coated the teeth, shut the eyes and made you double over. There was so little on a fire base and nothing around it: only the fat black guns, the eighty-pound shells and casings, the miles of barbed wire thickly circling the perimeter, the bunkers and tents. And always there was the promise of a boredom so immense it seemed to flatten or deflate many men, making them dim and dull things, like eardrums that had been punched too often by the ancient noise of cannons. The men were always naked to the waist except when it rained or was cold in the northern provinces. Their faces and chests were startlingly brown; only below their waists did their skin have the paleness of milk. Some fire bases were put up fast, shut down fast; others lasted a very long time. The purpose was to provide support for troops in the area; the self-propelled 155-howitzers could hurl high explosive charges twenty miles away. Sometimes artillery was called in by a platoon that had been fired on by no more than four, perhaps six, of the enemy. The Army did not find that peculiar. All the fire bases had names. There were lots of Bs at one time: Bastogne, Beverly, Birmingham, Buckshot, Brown, Bruiser, Buttons. Others had names that told you a little more: Siberia, Love, Lonely. At night the shells sounded like rushing trains overhead.
There is no reason to suppose that Fire Support Base Tomahawk, twenty miles south of Phu Bai, in Quang Tri province—within the military region called I Corps—was any different from the rest of them. Bulldozers made it, and nothing remained when the men at last left it but a faint raw circle in a place without a name. It was often cold in I Corps during certain months, there was the rain, and a sucking thick mud that made men slide or tilt when they walked in it. There seemed to be no bottom below such mud.
Don Parrish did not mind any of this. None of the Bardstown men in Battery C found Vietnam unbearable; it did not rub them each day like a giant slab of sandpaper going deeper all the time. Artillery was better than the infantry, for they had dry beds and hot food, a sense of power and order and purpose that foot soldiers did not know. The danger was much less. Even Ronnie Simpson, who had wanted the courts to keep the National Guard from sending them to Vietnam, was the same affable and hardworking fellow. He never sulked or pulled back in Vietnam. After all, he had not originated the lawsuit or helped organize such a solemn rebellion. The idea had begun in Louisville, among some of the local Guard units there who wanted support from soldiers who came from the small towns like Bardstown. Don Parrish said the plaintiffs had been organized at Fort Hood, where Battery C was sent in May to train with more modern equipment and to learn urban riot-control tactics. Some of the men had thought they might be sent to Cincinnati, where racial tensions were rising, but Parrish felt it would be Vietnam. He did not think the lawsuit could ever succeed. In Bardstown, many people were distressed by the lawsuit and considered it unpatriotic, but no one mentions it any more now that Ronnie Simpson is dead. No one says he was right or wrong—it was all so long ago.
“I’m really glad now that I’m home that I did get the opportunity to go,” Mr. Parrish said. “I do feel like I did my part and I feel like I learned a great deal from such a service. But I’m very sorry that anyone had to die as a result of it.”
This is how he spoke on that cold December morning in the offices of his father’s firm, Ray Parrish & Sons, which sells concrete products and professional tools. He spoke like a man reading from a piece of paper no one else could see. If you ask him why he feels he benefited from the war, Don Parrish can take you upstairs to a long new office that he designed himself in Vietnam, in his spare time, a tangible gain from the war.
The workday often begins at seven-thirty. Don Parrish is a precise, practical man whose passionate hobby is history. He does not read books about it but rather collects documents, newspapers, and bits of it that come his way. There is an old-fashioned case in his office that has glass windows which pull out and turn like the pages of a huge book. For a little while I stopped asking him to lead me back to the day in June when Battery C was ruined, to look at a list of the valuation of the slaves of Samuel Bealmar from Nelson County. It lists Polly thirty-four years old and child Ellen eight months at five hundred dollars; Old Polly sixty-two years old, sick and diseased and considered of no value at all; Hanora Sunny’s child ten years three hundred dollars. Of the thirty-two slaves that Mr. Bealmar owned, the most valuable were a twenty-year-old male Ben, six hundred and fifty dollars, and Isaac, age thirty-three, six hundred dollars.
Able-bodied men have always been of great value, although there must be other people like me who all their lives never thought much about this. Once I asked a black soldier how much his pack weighed—it was seventy pounds—and although I am not a small woman, I could not stand up straight or walk when he laughed and put it on me. Before Vietnam, I never paid attention to the words “able-bodied.” Don Parrish, of course, was much older than most of the soldiers then in Vietnam: he was twenty-seven then. But none of the bunch from the Bardstown area were fragile men; they knew how to use their bodies and they could push them a long way. They had a simplicity that might have saved them.
“I learned that no matter how bad things get with me here, there’s always someone worse off,” Mr. Parrish said. “I observed life in Vietnam. You don’t see much of it but you don’t have to, just a little, to know you don’t want any part of it.”
He had heard something, of course, of American troops using drugs, trafficking with pimps and whores, making money on the black market, killing their officers with fragmentation grenades, and in the last years, causing more trouble to the U.S. command than the enemy did, but Don Parrish cannot imagine it. Strangers did such things. Strangers wanted marijuana or heroin, put peace signs on their helmet liners, wrote Fuck the Army on walls everywhere, had clap, refused orders and made money.
“The National Guard managed to attract—well, I hate to classify people, but it seems like they managed to draw people who were not so inclined to do this sort of thing,” Mr. Parrish said proudly. “I don’t know that there was a single person from Bardstown who made any attempt at all to make any contact with anyone male or female who was Vietnamese.”
Battery C had been a good unit in Vietnam, an exceptional one, he said. They had arrived there in October 1968. He and Jimmy Moore, who were schoolboys together at St. Joseph’s for twelve years, had sat together on the long, mindless flight from Texas to Travis Air Force Base in California, from Wake Island to Guam to Danang. The unit had been moved around a lot. Ninety-five percent of the battery were from Nelson County, and even now he likes to remember their excellence, how very good they were.
“We fired rounds faster than any 155-howitzer battalion in I Corps,” Mr. Parrish said. “We worked together better than any unit I saw in Vietnam. I don’t know that there was anyone in the unit who really let a whole lot of things bother him, and that’s the reason we worked together so well.”
It saddened him when the Army began breaking the unit up, as if no one realized or cared that they were at their best together, the big country boys understanding how it was done, not whimpering or slowing down. He knew why the Army did it, of course, everyone knew. He still regrets it.
“My thinking was that they tried to break up the small hometown units so if one of them was overrun so many people from one town wouldn’t be wiped out,” he said. “My thinking was that this was, maybe, a good move, but at the same time they were destroying something that we had that no one else had.”
The attack, the first and the last he ever knew, began at 1:45 A.M. on Thursday, at Fire Support Base Tomahawk, which sat in a saddle between two small hills. An infantry platoon was on one of the hills; not more than one hundred men were on the fire base. He was chief of the Fire Direction Center and used to sleeping in a bunker with 155-howitzers going off thirty feet from him. What woke him up that Thursday was the sharp, whiny noise of the rocket-propelled grenades coming in. When the attack began the Americans were changing shifts, and the generator, which provided lights in the bunkers where the troops lived, had been shut off for the night. There were eight howitzers on the fire base. The North Vietnamese sappers had silently slipped through the wire, as they always did. Only one bunker was not destroyed by them. It was the one where Don Parrish slept, connected to the Fire Direction Center where his job was to call in air support and medical evacuation helicopters during fighting. They brought the wounded there, to the Fire Direction Center. It was dark. You could see almost nothing. When Jimmy Moore, who was chief of a howitzer section, came in, it was too dark to see him. He was a tall, bulky man whom Mr. Parrish describes “as a real friendly person, he’d do anything in the world for you . . .
“He walked in saying nothing, really. I recognized him because of his shape. I said ‘Jim, what’s your problem, what’s happened to you?’ I put my hand on his back and I said ‘Jim, what’s the trouble?’” But touching the man, standing so close to him, he knew what the trouble was. He could touch it and he could smell it. “He said ‘Donald, I’m burned up’—he couldn’t sit or lie down, so he just stood there,” Mr. Parrish said.
Forty-four Americans were wounded. The primary attack was over by 4 A.M., although thirty minutes later a few mortars came in, landing outside the fire base. One howitzer had been destroyed. The Americans laid out the enemy corpses: there were eighty-five. It was almost 5:30 A.M. when the helicopters came in from Phu Bai for their own wounded and the dead.
Specialist 4 Ronald Earl Simpson had been shot leaving his bunker, Don Parrish said. Specialist 4 Joseph McIlvoy had fallen on a sapper charge. Part of the skull of Specialist 4 David Burr Collins was gone when he was found inside his bunker, and Sergeant Luther Chappel had been shot through the head, he thought.
They carried Jimmy Moore to a helicopter on a screen door taken down from the little mess hall, for there were not enough litters. Five days later the burned man died. The day after, Specialist 4 Thompson, a draftee who was an infantryman in the Big Red One sweeping near the Cambodian border, died. The first man to be wasted that June was Sergeant Brown, but Mr. Parrish did not know how or where in Vietnam.
Battery C abandoned Fire Support Base Tomahawk shortly afterward, although the Army did not choose to put it that way. The fire base was moved to a site which was more defensible, they said. Nothing happened to Don Parrish afterward that he considers important. He had gone to war to stop the spread of communism—he is not certain whether this was done but he wishes now that the war had been fought a different way.
“The biggest gripe I ever had as an artillery man was that I was not allowed to fire into certain areas, knowing the enemy was there,” Mr. Parrish said. He said that he knew why he couldn’t, there were civilians in those villages, but you could tell that such arguments bored or puzzled him, and had nothing to do with getting the job done.
The survivors of Battery C raised the money for the memorial plaque that stands in the Old Court House Square. They did not need contributions from outsiders.
“It comes back to me every year on June 19 . . . well, no, I think of it—fleetingly—almost every day,” he said.
Then there were his last words on the war in Vietnam. He did not really know how startling they were. “A higher percentage of its population died as a result of Vietnam, more than most small towns, and this was unfortunate,” Mr. Parrish said. “But then, Bardstown had a bigger piece of the action, so to speak.”
FOR A LONG time afterward it was hard to hear those words “a piece of the action” without thinking of a big man charred and dying, standing in a dark bunker, waiting to be asked what was wrong.
IT WORRIED THE wife of Jimmy Guthrie when their oldest son Michael was sent to Vietnam in 1970, but it wasn’t the sort of worry that stabbed her, kept her awake, brought on headaches or dreams. Michael had told her he would not be near the fighting, that he was in communications and the equipment was so expensive, the Army put it way back in the rear. This made her feel calmer. She was never sure exactly what he did there. Michael was a teletype operator, a Specialist 4 stationed near Danang, who did, as he calls it, “secret cryptography.”
Mr. Guthrie watched the news from Vietnam on television and hoped it would mention Danang. For years it had been hard to connect all the names of places over there with anything at all, but Danang changed that. At the lumber mill in Bardstown the Louisville Courier-Journal has always been delivered each morning and Mr. Guthrie took it home at night.
“I feel Michael was safer there than he would have been at home,” he said. “They talk about those fifty thousand boys that were killed there, but I bet half that number would have been killed if they’d been at home, killed in automobiles, cars, that sort of thing.” He meant those killed in Vietnam would have died anyway, just differently.
Jimmy Guthrie had enlisted in the Navy at the age of seventeen and served on a transport ship. In September 1948, when he married Shirley Buznick, they were a startlingly handsome couple: it had something to do with his height and his smile, her eyes, her skin. In December 1973 their nine children ranged in ages from twenty-six to five. Mr. Guthrie is a partner with his wife’s father and brother. Michael is their oldest son; he is small, like his mother, not a mixer and a joker like Jimmy Guthrie, who belonged at one time to the Knights of Columbus, the Optimists Club, the Poker Club and the Quarterback Club.
It may be that Michael is the child that puzzles him most. Mrs. Guthrie is always quick to defend Michael in her soft, insistent way, and in front of company, he does not go too far in making his points. Some of Michael’s remarks do not sit well with his father, who looks bored or irritated when he hears them. He could not know that Michael, for all his mockery and contempt of the Army and the war, the work ethic and materialism, seemed to me a pale and placid creature, quite an ordinary one for his age, compared to others I have known. Michael, with his long hair and sketch pad, was not dancing to a fierce new music.
His mother thought he had changed after thirteen months in Vietnam. “I hate to see him so quiet. He’s so much different. But he still is friendly,” Mrs. Guthrie said.
It did not please her husband to hear us wonder out loud if Vietnam made Michael different, although he saw no combat, only messages giving the end results of it. “But that’s been two or three years ago,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Is he going to keep dwelling on that for the rest of his life? Not too long ago he was raving about something up in Washington, why they weren’t doing it right. And I said ‘Well, how would you go about getting it done?’ He didn’t know.”
“He’s twenty-one years old, he’s not supposed to know,” Mrs. Guthrie said. “I would say the same thing. And I’m forty-five years old.”
She made homemade chili, which we ate on top of spaghetti, and a big salad for dinner. Three married daughters live nearby and they come over often for dinner, pretty, quiet girls with husbands and babies; the circle closes when they are there. The men drink and talk to each other. Mr. Guthrie, who towers over all of them, has funny stories to tell and his language is his own. An old car is a junker; right smart of hay means a lot of hay; a group of times means often. “Them Kennedys, they tough,” Mr. Guthrie will say, meaning it as the highest, if begrudging, praise. No one, of course, would say that Michael was tough. His mother thinks even at the age of eight he was different from the other children.
“I don’t think we were trying to win that war,” Mr. Guthrie said. “We didn’t send enough. They could have sent two million troops if they had to, if they’d wanted to win it. They could have done it. They could have sent five million. We didn’t have the will, I don’t guess, to fight like we should have. We could have wiped out fifteen thousand or twenty thousand at one lick. What they were getting was peanuts.”
He had read that for each man doing the fighting, there were ten in the rear, Mr. Guthrie said. That was no way to do it. Win it or get out, he said.
He did not know about the machines that were waging the war, doing what troops could never do, making it impossible for the Vietnamese to flee or hide or plead innocence. He had never seen the gunships—AC-47, called Puff the Magic Dragon, the AH-1G known as Cobra, the AC-54, AC-119, AC-130—whose primary weapons were the 7.62-mm Gatling gun and the 20-mm Vulcan cannon, capable of firing 6,000 rounds of ammunition per minute from a single gun. He did not know about the fighter bombers, the F-4s, or the B-52s that operated at 30,000 feet. The sky was crowded: FACs and observation aircraft at 2,000 feet; attack and gunships at 5,000 feet; fighter bombers at 7,000 feet; reconnaissance and electronic warfare aircraft at 10,000 feet, and above them, the others. “When they fire their guns, it looks as if a stream of brilliant candy apples is streaking from the aircraft to the ground,” an Air Force sergeant said of the gunships. There were electronic sensors designed to monitor ground movement; ANPQ radar meant to see through trees; infrared cameras intended to register heat emissions at night; giant computers intended to record enemy movement; flares and napalm, Guavas and radar-guided Bullpup missiles.
It was unimaginably expensive; it did not work as well as the Americans had hoped. Some Vietnamese knew why; some Americans gave their opinions. General Julian J. Ewell, often called “Bloody” Ewell by some reporters, who commanded the 9th Infantry Division and then II Field Force, the largest combat command in the Army, was not so sure technology had helped the combat situation. The general, who was famous in 1968 for telling his troops to “get a hundred a day, every day” gave an interview to an Army publication, The Hurricane, before leaving Vietnam, in April 1970, for his next assignment as senior military advisor to the Paris peace talks.
“I think some of these technical devices have been very useful, although it is odd that when they’re first introduced they’re very useful for a period of three to four months and then they begin to tail off. I think the middle-range radar is a good example. When we first introduced them and got them working well, we just shot the brains out of the Communists,” General Ewell said. “And then, after two or three months of that, they’d catch on and begin to get lost, and although the radars now are quite useful, they aren’t as decisive as they were during their early months.
I think this is true in practically any new technological device. The enemy is quite clever and observant, and as he catches on, he devises some way to guard against it, even if it’s just to get lost,” he added.
The Vietnamese put it quite another way. In March 1973 Lieutenant General Tran Van Tra, who was then the chief delegate of the Provisional Revolutionary Government to the truce commission, said at a reception in Saigon that “Americans were good soldiers but they fought the wrong war. They did not have the ideals our soldiers have.” Asked how the Communists always seemed to know how and when the B-52s would strike, the general—who wore a plain, baggy green uniform—said: “It is our country, the trees and the leaves are ours, we know everything.”
THE BOMBING OF Hanoi at Christmas had not upset anyone they knew in town, nor did it bother Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie.
“I think most people thought it was just justified if it got the war done with,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Anyone who grew up during the Second World War would have felt that way. Do you remember during the Second World War anybody complaining about bombing Berlin? I don’t think anybody thought that the Germans were committing atrocities by bombing.”
For them only a very dim and tiny memory exists of Americans who protested the bombing, as if Massachusetts was no closer than Danang, as if the marches in Washington were no more comprehensible than the Buddhist monks who burned themselves in Saigon. Mrs. Guthrie, who gives the impression that her husband is too strict with the children without ever saying so, does not think much of people who marched against the war, those demonstrators. We were sitting in the little dining room when she said it in her halting, pretty way; I was eating the chili and spaghetti and looking at a framed illustrated copy of the Ten Commandments on the wall. It is easy to imagine Mrs. Guthrie praying in St. Joseph’s Cathedral, her head covered with a scarf, wanting God to consider the children.
“It’s because of prosperity,” she said. “The younger generation’s been spoiled, we’ve sheltered them, and they are used to having their own way. It was all students, or ex-students, disgruntled students. The demonstrations were a lark for ninety percent of them. I think it was just like the panty raids of ten years before that. Well, maybe a little different, but I don’t think there were many sincere ones in the bunch.”
Michael might have been one of them if he had gone to college, I said.
“Not if I was paying his way,” Mr. Guthrie said.
Mr. Guthrie seemed perturbed, not about the war but about Michael and his attitude toward money. It seemed as if his son had broken a rule, or worse, ignored it. All of us know the rule: money is the measure of our worth, profit is the proof of virtue; people who do not understand this, who do not choose to make money and then make more of it, are flawed. In men it is a disability.
So it did not impress Mr. Guthrie that Michael had once sold his motorcycle and given the money to his married sister, Scarlett, who wanted to buy a sofa. It did not touch him when Michael turned over a calf he owned to his brother-in-law, Bobby Ballard, so Bobby could sell it and buy an air conditioner. None of this cut the mustard with Mr. Guthrie.
“Yes, yes, he doesn’t want or need too much. He might seem real selfless because he gives somebody the shirt off his back, but you’d bet it would be warm weather if he did. He gives the other kids all his money. I’m not mocking him because of it, but it isn’t near as selfless as you might think because he didn’t actually have anything to spend the money on anyhow. He didn’t care about it, the money didn’t mean anything to him. It wouldn’t be like me giving it away, ’cause I want that money.”
“PEOPLE THINK I come out here to die, to starve myself,” Michael said. His cabin, five miles outside of Bardstown, is in the woods. It is a small thing, a child’s dream, with pine walls, unpainted shelves and seats. There is an army blanket on the bed. Michael’s decision to “retire” so startled older people in Bardstown they could only think of it as a self-punishing act. They could not imagine what he meant when he said he wanted to “sit out here and get things straight.”
At the lumber mill Mr. Guthrie, who took care of customers, saw lot of the men who lived in and around Bardstown; he liked chatting with them. Marchel Simpson, the father of Ronald Earl who married Deanna Durbin, told Mr. Guthrie that his son’s death in Vietnam was a complete waste.
“He said if they have another war to stop wars, he said they ought to start with the oldest and come down to the youngest, start with the seventy-years-olds and then work down,” Mr. Guthrie said. “He said it like I would have said it hearing some Saturday or Sunday morning that some kid was killed in an accident out here, running into the bridge at eighty miles an hour or something.”
He did not think Mr. Simpson was bitter, just sad. “If I had a son killed in Vietnam, I’d be sorrowful but not bitter,” Mr. Guthrie said.
Michael was not upset to hear his father’s comment. He smiled a little. “I understand him. The only reason he would be bitter is because of a feeling my life was wasted, right? But he wouldn’t feel like it was wasted if I was killed there, he’d feel it would be worth it. People weren’t affected by the war here. You’ve got American Graffiti in Bardstown. Somebody goes away to war. They come back two years later, and they pat him on the back and say ‘What the hell’s going on, man, it’s good to have you back.’ Happy times again. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know what it is, but I guess people are content here. In a weird way I think there is contentment. I don’t know why they would be.”
He had been stationed at Hawk Hill and then at Freedom Hill, names that mean nothing to us now, and three times he had been able to go to Danang before the city was declared off-limits to U.S. military.
He had come back from Vietnam with $3,500 in stereo equipment, which had been stolen while he was living in the cabin. The insurance money made it possible for him to pay his father for the land, the six acres on which the cabin stood. It had made it possible for him to be quiet and to think and read. He had worked at the family lumber mill in the summers after coming home.
“I tried to fit in, I thought I was going to fit in. You know, come home a different person, fit back into the world a different person but more content. That’s the way I thought it was going to work. I got up there and they were crazy. Crazy. Now, my father, he made more sense to me. He tried to teach me the business, he had mellowed. He just more or less told me ‘There’s a living up here to be made, son.’ That’s what the told me. ‘I’ve made a good living up here. I’ve got a lot of things. I’ve made a good living up here. Stay here if you want.’ That’s what he told me. And my uncle started driving me crazy, my mother’s brother. I mean, he’s just got a split personality. As a man I like him, he’s a wild dude, likes to go hunting and such things as that. You know, just a man of the world. Yes, he is. But at work he’s a penny-pinching dude. He gets out there and wants to load the truck, wants to shove things and just go real fast, and stuff like that. And they wanted me to go up there and be a boss, see? They wanted me to work in an office and not go out and work on the trucks, like I’d been doing.”
He did not want to give orders or hassle anybody. He preferred to do things himself, which was inefficient and drove his uncle crazy. “I was out of place out there,” Michael said. “After three months I was going nuts. After six months I just couldn’t take it no more.
“If I hadn’t gone to Vietnam I’d have stayed into the swilling,” he said, “I’d be at the lumberyard. I learned a lot; I made a constructive thing out of it. There is no doubt in my mind that the Vietnamese didn’t like Americans. They made it clear that Americans were assholes, a lot of them. But they did tell me they weren’t prejudiced, they didn’t hate Americans like somebody might hate a nigger, be down on a Negro, see. I like the Asian people. I’d go back to South Vietnam, but I doubt I would be able. I’d probably be shot there.”
AN ENDING, A consoling one, which made people of Bardstown proud, came at last when its prisoners of war came home after five years in North Vietnam. Once more people came together as they had in 1966 to see their decorated hometown boy, Colonel Moore, as they had in 1969 to praise and pray for the dead. This time it was to rejoice. On Friday night, April 13, 1973, nearly nine hundred people squeezed into the auditorium of Nelson County High School to pay tribute to a survivor. It was, as the Kentucky Standard described it in a happy manner, an hour’s program that very much resembled This Is Your Life. The guest of honor was Colonel James E. Bean, age fifty, of the United States Air Force, a Cox’s Creek boy who was the son of a farmer. He had spent nine hundred and fifty-seven days in solitary confinement in an eight-foot-square cell in Hanoi.
They had not given him enough water, that was the most unforgivable thing, Colonel Bean said later in an interview with the Kentucky Standard. The food was wretched. He had been given a decent meal on the Fourth of July and again on Christmas, good enough so that at least you could chew and swallow. He said he was not tortured. He never did say much more than that.
He did not speak of the cell that night to the people who came to laugh, to clap hard and to see the giving of gifts. The master of ceremonies, a man known for his plunges into wit, Jack Arnold, had been the colonel’s close friend in the class of ’42, Bardstown High. Mr. Arnold spoke at length, adding bits of humor, about the colonel’s triumphs in football and basketball in those early days. Jimmy Bean had lived with Jack Arnold’s parents in town, Monday through Friday, so he could practice these sports in the afternoons instead of taking the afternoon bus back to Cox’s Creek. The colonel had always been a boy with a sharp, steady glow to him: he was captain of the Bardstown High football team, which ended its second season undefeated in 1941; he was president of the 1941 basketball team; selected as All-Conference fullback in 1941; chosen state president of the Future Farmers of America; and elected president of the senior class. His grades were very good. He began taking flying lessons while in high school and won an athletic scholarship to the University of Kentucky. You might say that his life was a very pretty story, the kind of story they like to tell in small towns. In 1943 he joined the Air Force, was a pilot in World War II; in the Korean War and until he was shot down on January 3, 1968, he had more flying hours as a pilot of an F-105 fighter than any other pilot in the Air Force.
“President Nixon had to make many unpopular decisions, and I suspect he was a lonely man in December last when the bombing was commenced again in North Vietnam,” Colonel Bean said, in a short speech. “But to us in jail in the center of Hanoi, it was the greatest display of mass precision bombing the world has ever seen. It was the most heartwarming sight I have ever witnessed firsthand. At that time I and my captors realized that the U.S. had accomplished its national objective of a free Indochina.”
No one was made uneasy in the audience that night, wondering how a man in prison, who saw nothing, could be so certain the bombing had been precise. But perhaps no one cared if the bombing was precise or messy, it was none of their concern, nothing they chose to worry about. They could not question a man who had always made them so proud, whose life had been more stirring than any Western on television, whose family were such churchgoers, and who that night told them all they were loved.
After Colonel Bean thanked them for keeping faith in him, after he promised to again defend American freedoms if he was needed, the tall, pale man stretched his arms open very wide and called out: “I love you this much. God bless you.”
Mayor Guthrie Wilson presented the gifts: an engraved silver tray and six engraved silver julep cups, one for each year in prison; fishing equipment, including a tackle box full of lures; an album of early class pictures collected and presented by Mrs. B. L. Beeler, a classmate from Bardstown High; an engraved gold charm bracelet for the colonel’s wife, Jeanette; silver cuff links for his two sons; a gold locket for his mother, Mrs. Mary Bean; a picture of the Old Kentucky Home from the Girl Scouts; a lifetime pass to all athletic events in Nelson County High and Bardstown High; life membership in the American Legion Post 121; a season pass to and stereo tape of The Stephen Foster Story.
Once again it was Judge Sutherland who spoke, who told people what they felt. Colonel Bean had “deepened our love and belief in God and in country,” he said in his speech. He referred to the statements of the returned prisoners of war, who one by one by one, over and over, praised the President and the American people, as having “hushed the critics that were so vocal previous to your release and return,” as if the judge himself had never much cared for those troublesome types. He spoke slowly, letting the words wash row after row of people like warm and healing water. Their faces showed they were grateful for it.
He had never known a critic of the war, only the name of Jane Fonda, some Catholics named Berrigan, perhaps a few others, all held in the lowest esteem in Bardstown. Yet at one time even Judge Sutherland seemed puzzled and saddened by Vietnam. After the deaths in July 1969, he said to reporters that ninety percent of the people in Bardstown would vote against going to the war, that the President and Congress wanted to bring about an ending to it. “It brings the question why?” the judge said, meaning the purpose of the war. He was quite good at talking to the press, it did not ruffle him, he spoke in wide, soft strokes, neither condemning the war nor urging men to go off to fight in it. Michael Guthrie used to say that the prisoners of war could not have suffered half as much as the Vietnamese did, but that kind of comment did not reach the judge’s ear.
Once he had stepped slightly out of line as a young man and the memory of it is still with him, nearly thirty years later. “After I got back from overseas in World War II, I lived with my first cousin, now a retired admiral. At breakfast one morning I said ‘Allen, you people in high military positions are prolonging World War II because you want to remain in the spotlight,’” the judge said. “That was such a ridiculous statement. I regretted it after I said it. But it seems like maybe this is the way things have turned out to be. Big business—if they’ve got something going for them that’s making them money, they’ll go to any means to maintain their position, keep it growing.”
Yes, yes, there were people making money from the war; perhaps now China would be our only friend “down the road”; if the United States had not gone into Vietnam, he was sure it would have sent troops to Israel: his opinions are affable, vague, softly pitched. Asking questions is like throwing darts in a bucket of clay. Perhaps the war annoyed and puzzled him more than anything else, for quite a few people had told him firsthand that we could have easily won it.
“If we had just turned our forces loose to go really fight to win a battle,” the judge said. “We were always fighting a suppressed-holding area sort of thing. The multitudes around here would probably say ‘Use the atomic bomb or the hydrogen, use whatever you’ve got.’ I would not have gone that far. But if I’m going to play mumblypeg with you, I’m going to try and beat you. If we’re in any serious body-to-body conflict, I think I ought to try to whip you. I don’t think we did in Vietnam.”
MRS. MARY POWERS BEAN lived in the same white frame house in Cox’s Creek since her marriage in June 1920. In the winter she shut off some of the rooms to save heat. She was eighty-two years old, and that very morning, had baked a jam cake to send to her daughter-in-law, Jeanette Bean, who works in the Pentagon. The four Bean children grew up here, the children of a farmer who did chores, who could not, did not want to goof off. Their father said he always knew Jimmy would be released but that he would not live to see it. This happened.
“Jimmy was very forward as a child, he wanted to go places,” Mrs. Bean said. “He always wanted to be a pilot. I don’t know why, but he did.”
She had believed that her son would not be freed. When he came back she asked him when he knew that he would get out of the Hanoi Hilton.
“That was a common question, everyone asked him that. He said ‘When the first bomb fell.’ That’s when he knew. He said those people don’t understand anything except explosives and power. They don’t understand nice talk. Just power and bombs.”
She is a tiny woman who uses a walker, which makes her grumble because it gets in the way; her memory and energy are alarming. The New Salem Baptist Church takes up much of her time. Elmer and Jimmy were both in World War II; she remembers that Elmer, who was a draftee, didn’t sleep well when he first came home. He lives up the road, an inspector for Rural Electrification.
“He rides over four counties, so he’s busy. Then he has a big hog setup too. He has hogs that are never on the ground, they’re in this electric thing,” Mrs. Bean said. “Air conditioning in the summer, electric heat in the winter.” She and the other twin, Charles, have the three hundred and thirty acres of land, good land for tobacco, cattle, corn, alfalfa, soybeans.
Neighbors thought of her as a stoical woman who remained calm and busy during the five years of her son’s imprisonment. Colonel Bean spent five weeks at home, that summer of 1973, farming. His mother said he worked hard, very hard. It was splendid for him.
“He didn’t look too good when he first came. He had no coordination, he couldn’t play golf. It was humiliating to him not to be able to accomplish what he always accomplished. A neighbor told me that when she first saw him he held on to the steering wheel viciously with both hands. But then she said it wasn’t but a little while before he got so he could drive with one hand and wave with the other.”
In the prison camps he had farmed every day in his mind, carefully, wasting nothing.
“That’s what kept his mind going. He said the boys who didn’t, or couldn’t, well . . . I think that’s a lesson to older people. Train ourselves. We’re such poor trainers, aren’t we? Our ancestors weren’t. My old grandfather was a Baptist preacher and he never forgot anything. You could send him places with a list in his mind.”
No one in the Bean family had wanted the celebration for the colonel’s homecoming to leave out a reference to the casualties in Vietnam, a homage to be paid to the dead. “We had a little neighbor boy who was one of them. Barry Neal Thompson.” She had known his mother since she was a girl. “I helped rear her, I know his whole family. It was hard on that family, and they’ve never gotten over it. They still go to the cemetery and they still grieve for him. But you know, I think you can do that if you don’t get hold of yourself,” she said. “A lot of people have troubles, we’re not the only ones, don’t you know? You have to overcome them. If you don’t have faith . . .”
The coffee was ready. She uses instant coffee now only because of her infirmity. She went on to say how she had always had faith, the children had faith. It was what counted, what got you through all of it. There are 2,505 Americans still unaccounted for; of these, 795 are listed as missing in action and the others killed in action.
IN EARLY MAY 1975, when Vietnam was no longer a country at war, CBS went back once more to Bardstown to find out what people thought. Mayor Guthrie Wilson appeared on my television screen—poised, white-haired, well-groomed, solemn. He said the war had not been worth it. Then the camera showed a middle-aged couple. They were Mr. and Mrs. Marchel Simpson, the parents of Ronald Earl Simpson who had died at Fire Support Base Tomahawk.
“If we had done it, if we had won, what would we have?” Mr. Simpson said.
THE ENLISTED MEN did not like the bagginess of their fatigues, so they often had the pants made narrower so they would fit more tightly over the calves, making their legs seem strangely thin. From a distance, with their helmets and packs off, the men with thin legs looked like soldiers from World War I in puttees. There were no trenches, yet sometimes the deep, long bunkers and their ancient, hateful smells, the rats and the different ways the soldiers liked to kill them, the sandbags and the mud spoke of that early war. All I remembered of it was a photograph of gassed men, sightless, standing in single file, holding on to the shoulder in front of them. It was that I thought of when the wounded in Vietnam had thick white bandages across their eyes. You did not understand how filthy the soldiers were until you saw such whiteness wrapped around them. Once, in the field, I saw a boy on a stretcher, his left arm made bigger by those thick white soft bandages, its hand looking huge and very dirty. He was touching his eyes with that hand, although the eyes were sealed with more bandages. He lies on the stretcher forever in a photograph that I used to show to people during the war. The ex-medic David had told me that the English poet and officer in World War I, Wilfred Owen, had more than fifty years ago shown pictures of the wounded to civilians in England to make them understand. But my own photograph had little effect: a lot of people said they had seen it all on M*A*S*H and they were reminded of how much they liked Hawkeye, how cute Radar is, what a really marvelous television program it is.
Americans had only one happy war. It was World War I, the late Governor Roger Branigin of Indiana said, in April 1968. It was a short involvement, the governor pointed out, but the aura of “Gay Paree” and such songs as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” sung by servicemen created “a nostalgia of spirit.” It was a happy war, perhaps the last happy one, Governor Branigin said. A Democrat and one of Indiana’s most popular governors, he totally supported President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policy in Vietnam. He thought Americans disliked World War II, hated Korea and despised the Vietnam conflict.
The Hines Veterans Administration Hospital, twelve miles west of downtown Chicago, started as a memorial to a young officer in the war that the governor called the happy one. On a bronze dedicatory plaque in Building 2 of the Hines Hospital, the little story is told. The hospital was named in honor of Lieutenant Edward Hines, Jr., the first graduate of the officers’ training camp at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, to die in France. He was a resident of Evanston, Illinois, in the class of 1918 at Yale, commissioned a second lieutenant, assigned to 61st Infantry, volunteered in response to a call for officers for immediate foreign service with machine-gun companies, sailed for France, was sent to the Toulon-Troyon Sectors, Verdun, “in the severe winter and spring of 1918.”
“On April 4, 1919, while on reconnaissance at Graffier Woods in front of these sectors, Lieutenant Hines succumbed to the effects of the rigors of trench life and to extreme exhaustion and from their effects died in base hospital 15, A.E.F. at Chaumont, France, June 4, 1918 . . .” the plaque reads. President Warren G. Harding designated the hospital be called after Edward G. Hines, Jr. His parents provided over a million dollars.
It is an enormous hospital now—fifteen stories tall, fourteen hundred beds—where nearly three-quarters of a million veterans have been treated. But for those in them, hospitals tend to shrink; beds, rooms, halls become quite small. Building 13 at Hines is the Blind Rehabilitation Center for visually impaired and blinded veterans, the largest of three such Veterans Administration centers in the United States. There are one hundred and twenty beds for them at Hines.
He was having a typing lesson with an elderly woman instructor and not doing very well at it. I was on a tour. Right away the blind boy said he was called Jerry and that he had a good job in an office waiting for him. The instructor looked worried, for he had no such thing and the keyboard was giving him trouble. And right away I said his shirt was a very nice one. It was blue and white.
“I like to dress up,” Jerry said. The instructor let it be known in her face that chatting was disruptive. John Malamazian, chief of the Rehabilitation Section, a polite and anxious man, told me what was taught during the eighteen-week course to the blind veterans. They learn how to use a handwriting guide, how to write out checks, home mechanics—how to repair a broken window, fix a bicycle, patch holes in walls, change fuses—how to cook for themselves, how to determine different types of materials so they can buy their own clothes. Mr. Malamazian might be displeased that I have first noted these details. The main purpose, according to all the booklets he gave me, is: orientation and mobility, manual skills, Braille skills, personal and vocational counseling, physical conditioning, recreational activities and self-care. Each man has his own room and radio; he must make his bed, sweep the floor and dress himself.
There was talk of “mobility” techniques, development of tactile perceptions, and the benefit of association with others who were also sightless. I asked Mr. Malamazian if I could spend time with Jerry, who came from a tiny town in the South. Mr. Malamazian looked unhappy. “But he’s emotionally disturbed,” he said. I should have said so was I.
It seemed that Jerry had been in the Rehabilitation Center before, there had been an untoward incident and he had bolted. Now he was back. Mr. Malamazian, a nice man, overcame his hesitancy and we went to Jerry’s room. He was dressed, lying face down on his bed, his arms around his head. When we were alone, Jerry sat in the armchair by the window and was very nervous until he found his lighter, which he had left on top of the dresser. He thought someone had moved it, which was not the case.
“I was wounded in November,” he said. “But I can’t remember, it was 1968 or 1969.” He said he had left Hines the last time, maybe after hitting someone with his stick, or saying he was going to do it. He could not gather together the details. For some reason I laughed, which rather pleased him. He said he liked to laugh. And despite everything, there kept rising in him, above the madness and despair, a spirited boy and a defiant one whose gaiety was of no good to him now.
He did not always finish his sentences; he went in and out of words like a man running in the woods, bobbing and ducking around the trees and then hiding behind them. His father was a policeman, his mother worked in a restaurant, he had three sisters. There were photographs on the dresser: a pretty baby-faced girl, his wife, with children, two chunky sons. One was three years and one was five months old. His wife was in Chicago, staying with a couple they had known in Mississippi, she was able to visit him often, he was allowed to go out. The booklet at the Center said: “Although a member of the veteran’s family may make the journey to Hines with him, he is expected to undergo the program, complete it, and return to his home alone.”
I do not remember if he wore his Braille wristwatch and knew where he was scheduled to be (“Each man engages in all the activities, five days a week, from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. There is little free time except for weekends and evenings,” the booklet said). But we went off to the cafeteria, neither of us knowing where it was. I asked directions, but it was he who led the way, using the long, light metal cane in a frivolous fashion, like a man whacking at daisies in a field of flowers. He hit a standing ashtray and then a lady on the ankle, but neither of us felt sorry about it. In the cafeteria it went well until we reached the cashier. I carried the tray. But he wanted to pay and he was slow with the money in his wallet. There were two bills and he did not know which was the five and which was the one. The cashier became a little cross, as the line was growing long. She did not know he was blind. There was nothing about his face to make you turn away; he was not like the others I know, with their ruined noses, the mashed bones in their faces, the strange hollows, the paths of scars.
Jerry did not want to eat at all; he only wanted to manage the whole thing, make the voyage. Some of the sandwich went on his blue-and-white shirt and there was trouble with sugar in his coffee. I wrote down nothing. I remember how fiercely he spoke of his own father, and the father he was himself, how his own three-year-old had better behave.
There was trouble when we got back to his floor: he was late for an instruction period in mobility technique with his cane. A small dark-haired woman, Miss Saber, spoke to him quite sharply, and my own attempts to take the blame seemed to make her crosser. Jerry stood still and said a lot of yes, ma’ams as the voice of Miss Saber went at him. Miss Saber wanted Jerry to walk different places, correctly using his cane, remembering to keep the cane opposite the side of his step. “I’d like you to trail the north wall heading west,” she said.
Sometimes he forgot to keep the cane out in front of him as he was supposed to do, or he didn’t keep the back of his fingertips waist-high or the crook of the cane over his knuckles. Perhaps his trouble was that being a tall and jaunty man, he had always taken long, loose steps. It was still pretty to see him walk. He did not really want to have to keep close to the walls, walking slower, being careful.
At the end of the instruction period, Miss Saber said to him: “Your directions are good.” Perhaps the best teachers must be harsh. But I thought then that what all of them wanted was for him to move like a timid and old person, a more humble one, who had given up those long, careless strides.
The next class was to develop tactile perceptions. “It’s irrelevant what they make,” Mr. Malamazian said. That day it was wallet stitching. Jerry did not want to go to stitch wallets with old men who gave no trouble, who had already begun their work when we walked in. The instructor looked up, and Jerry, who had not yet learned to be passive or to placate, spoke loudly. “This is my girl friend,” he said. “You had better watch out for her. She’s a shady lady.”
I kissed him goodbye. There had been talk of dinner with his wife, but when I called the hospital only a few weeks later, he had bolted again, unable to finish the eighteen weeks.
That day Mr. Malamazian went on being polite and worried. He showed me the room where blind men learn to operate machinery, to take apart and put together things. I was taken to the library, where there are recorded books: The Godfather was the most popular one that year. The younger men balked at learning Braille. Mr. Malamazian was not certain that I should talk to the psychologist, the idea seemed almost dangerous to him, but she was a handsome young Brazilian who thought it was a most reasonable request. Her name was Beatriz Klich. Hers was the only voice on the staff that did not sound as if it came out of an old, dented can. She told me nothing I did not know, but it was a comfort to have her voice in that place. Jerry had said he liked it, too, that she was nice.
“Vietnam veterans are prone to be schizoid or angry,” she said. “They feel they have been emasculated, that blindness is equivalent to a loss of manhood. It helps them to talk, sitting here; they come in feeling furious. It’s very important for them to speak out. They’re young, impatient. It makes them bitter that so much was done for the POWs.”
Going back to the typing room, an instructor—a different elderly lady—said the new veterans could be very difficult. What she meant was some of them were hateful. Her eyelashes seemed almost wet when she told me of one former helicopter pilot who said, during his third or fourth typing lesson, how many people he had killed in Vietnam and how much he liked it and wasn’t sorry at all.
“Can you imagine, can you imagine,” the typing lady said. Yes, ma’am, I said, yes, ma’am, the way Jerry does it. A little revenge is better than none.
There were other men I knew who were blinded in Vietnam, who made it through Hines, who could move in and out of airports, who managed the perilous line the fork must make from the plate to the mouth, who could cross streets, write checks, type, heat soup, buy clothes. The war words “win” and “lose” still had meaning for them.
This was the case with John Robert Todd, who wanted to talk about the war and did nearly all the time in discussions and debates. He did not tell stories about what he had done or seen, he argued and wrote about the issues. He did not think that most people were even interested. In February 1973, when he had been blind for nearly four years, referring to this always as his “injuries,” Mr. Todd lived in a ground-floor furnished apartment in an East 64th Street brownstone. He had been in New York for nearly two years to consult surgeons privately about restoring some sight in his left eye. “The primary mission of my life is to put myself together again,” Mr. Todd said. His manner of speaking was often military.
Most of the time he was busy as the national leader and chief policy-maker for a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, whose purpose was to support U.S. policy in Vietnam, to explain the mission of the Americans there and how well it had been achieved. His little group was pitted against a larger, older, more publicized one—Vietnam Veterans Against the War. People often called up Mr. Todd thinking they were talking to VVAW.
His voice is the voice of a pilot. It is calm, clear, low, with a pleasing pitch, a rather lovely voice for a man. He was often in demand for radio and television shows; it was easier to find a veteran to denounce the war than to find one who would support it. The newspapers and his mail were read to him by a pleasant middle-aged woman named Janet Martin. They met in the residential hotel where he lived during his first days in New York. He was also taking French lessons at the Alliance Française, four blocks from his apartment. There were mostly women in his class. He thought they came from nice houses in Long Island and wore fur coats: this is how he imagined them. Once the teacher asked the students to say something of their lives in French, expecting shy, soft little sentences to come forth. When it came his turn, Mr. Todd, making a few mistakes in grammar, blurted out: “J’étais aviateur en Indochine et un jour j’ai reçu un mission de combat, et j’ai engagé l’enemi et j’étais fusillé.”
It must have gone around the room like a whip, touching all of them, making the women suddenly stare at the tall young man who wore such dark glasses and moved a long white cane in little arcs when he walked. It was not a typical thing for him to do, he did not often mean to startle people.
But he always calls himself an aviator, not a pilot, even in English. “I could fly very well, I thought,” Mr. Todd told me. “I made life and death decisions and I thrived on it. I was never more proud to be an American man that I was in Vietnam. I’m very grateful for the role I was able to play.”
All of their lives were little before the war; you can sum up the histories of veterans very fast. He was the first of five sons born to a construction contractor in Michigan; he was drafted and volunteered to fly; after six months in Vietnam, where he flew a Charlie-type gunship, his aircraft was hit by a .51-caliber antiaircraft gun northwest of Phan Thiet. He was shot through the nose. The co-pilot was uninjured and got them back.
“I’d like you to underline, to place asterisks by, to put in capital letters, that my views on the war are not new to me, that they are not a result of my injuries, that I have felt a consistency about the war all my adult life,” Mr. Todd said. He knew that people of his own generation who opposed him said he was trying to rationalize his condition. It bothered him a lot.
In Vietnam, he flew support for the 101st Airborne and the 23d ARVN, a South Vietnamese division. Helicopter gunships were used to give close support to troops in battle by hovering above them or to stalk mobile targets. Their rockets, which were delivered singly or in bursts, came from tubes mounted under the aircraft. They could also dispense small bombs that on bursting sent out barbed nails which ricocheted through a human body, destroying tissue and organs; the nails could even penetrate trees. Incendiaries fired by the gunships included white phosphorus that burned on contact with oxygen and could not be extinguished until it had burned slowly to the bone. The pilots called white phosphorus Willie Peter and also used it for target designation for further strikes.
“Twenty-eight days out of the month I flew in support of U.S. infantry; one day out of the month I was flying in support of the Vietnamese. I found this wrong for both countries—wrong for them, wrong for us. Vietnamization was good for both countries—you had to give the South Vietnamese that bullet-type choice: if you want to support your type government, take this M-16 and fight.”
He thought that many people on the fringes of the antiwar movement did not realize that the hard core of the movement wanted a Hanoi victory and that many of them had been deceived. “What they wanted was, let’s just say, a plain end of the war, an end to the killing on both sides,” Mr. Todd said. “I don’t think they espoused victory for Hanoi.”
He flew more than four hundred and fifty hours of combat missions in Vietnam before the last one of them all. For some time he did not know how hurt he was. The damaged eyes and nose did not give him pain: he recalls how the nurses and doctors at Long Binh and then at the 249th Hospital in Osaka, Japan, had to convince him that he had taken a “pretty bad hit.” He was thankful to be alive, deeply, deeply thankful to have had no brain injury. For a year and a day he was in Ward 2, the officers’ neurological ward, at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. Across the hall was Ward 1, where there were other aviators, he said, and infantry, the lieutenants who had been platoon leaders. Nine out of ten men had agreed with his views on the war, Mr. Todd said. Then he had gone to Hines, which was so different, not like Walter Reed, where the men had bought champagne and given parties, invited the nurses and had “great, great times.” He had done the eighteen-week course at Hines in twelve weeks, skipping the cooking course, wanting to be out as fast as possible.
There were people his own age who opposed the war, who voted for George McGovern, who wanted an end to support of the Thieu government, and he did not despise them or think of them as fools. One of his friends had gone to Canada to avoid the draft; they were still friends. He was not combative. “I don’t see any reason to cut off a friendship if the other person is sincere,” Mr. Todd said. “But those people nineteen years old who start discussing the high morality of it all, coming on as though they were the monopolists of conscience, really perturb me.”
There was a framed letter from the White House, dated June 21, 1974, in the apartment, signed by Richard M. Nixon, praising him for forming Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, urging him to speak out on “every forum and every occasion.”
He was hopeful then that an operation scheduled for the following month would let him see. A corneal transplant had already been done on that left eye and it gave him some vision. “It really zooed me out,” Mr. Todd said. “I could see.” But the vision could not be sustained. It lasted for three weeks and then he lost it.
“I wish I could show you a picture of myself before the injuries; people said I looked like Robert Wagner,” Mr. Todd said. He asked me what his face looked like. He took off his dark glasses and I said it was okay, there was a big scar, the nose was a little crooked, but nothing alarming. We talked again about the operation.
“It would help my social life a lot,” he said. “People are afraid of a blind man.”
Almost four years later much had changed for him, but the operations had failed, the sight in his left eye could not be restored. He is still legally blind, although he can make out the shape of some things. He still uses the cane for walking. He married a woman named Joyce, they have a daughter named Lacey.
“She was a blind date,” Mr. Todd said. “We went to a dinner together in Washington, D.C., given by the late Mr. Agnew for the late Mr. Ky.” He had never much liked Nguyen Cao Ky, who had been premier of South Vietnam when he was flying the gunship out of Phan Thiet. The couple live in Ypsilanti, outside of Detroit. He said he was building a patio deck out of wood; Joyce cut the pieces and he did all the work. But there was no way he could fix the lawn mower, which was not working. He is at the University of Michigan getting his undergraduate degree in political science. Joyce has long been a member of the Church of Christ; now he has also joined. They both plan to go to law school together and then work as attorneys, in public service, being useful. It was a word he had used before: useful. The disability payments he receives would make it possible for them to do public service, Mr. Todd said.
The ending of the war upset him a lot. “The attitude of so many Democrats, the men who put us there, led to the retreat and collapse of the South Vietnamese, a Democratic Congress led to their downfall by the decision to not send them more bullets,” Mr. Todd said. “All this occurred because of Watergate—if Nixon had still been in office, he wouldn’t have let that Congress do it.”
Most people had forgotten about the war, he said. “The apathy has continued, furiously, but it’s a landmark as far as foreign policy goes. The politicians misread what the people would tolerate; it was a limited war and the people still wouldn’t tolerate it. There’ll never be another one like it, never another Vietnam.”
He had stopped speaking about Vietnam when he went to Columbia University in New York in the fall of 1973. There was no point to it. “I didn’t talk about the war because I thought I might be ostracized. I wasn’t ashamed, I was just very quiet. But the students couldn’t have cared less. They wouldn’t even have been mad at me.”
IN A TOWN in Oklahoma named Cheyenne, where 892 people were counted in the last census, club women made ditty bags for soldiers during the Vietnam war. I never heard the expression or saw a ditty bag in Vietnam; the soldiers had deep pockets on their jackets and low on the legs of their fatigues, which, when filled, gave them strange lumpy lines. Nonetheless a sustained effort was made by these women, including one with the pleasing name of Laurabel Lemon, who helped head the ditty-bag drive. By 1968 ninety-two ditty bags had been dispatched. This was noted briefly in the Cheyenne Star, which runs county news. Back issues of the newspaper are bound in huge books, the war threading lightly through its pages among other announcements of weddings, illnesses, meetings, auctions, sales and gatherings. There were lists of local servicemen in Vietnam and their APO addresses so people would know where to write Pfc. Tommy O’Hara or Pfc. Roy L. McDaniel. There were bits of news that revealed Sgt. Donnie Walker had a Purple Heart and an occasional snapshot of a grinning GI, like Kenneth Kirk, sitting on his heels somewhere in Qui Nhon.
The Redden brothers publish the Cheyenne paper. W. J. Redden, who is known as Joe, served on the local draft board. The war disgusted him. “We could have walked through them real easy,” Mr. Redden said. His face has the contours of a clean, dependable engine: parts of it move only if necessary. It is a peculiarly dead and correct American face, the kind that men are supposed to need when they play five-card stud, a handsome face for some women.
“Fathers who served in World War II expect their sons to serve,” Mr. Redden said. His son had. Mr. Redden did not disclose his son’s unit, where he had been in Vietnam, how long, or very much about what he had done or seen. Perhaps he did not really know, perhaps he thought it was none of anyone’s business. “He was in rockets,” he said, the way people might say a man was in textiles, in construction, in advertising.
Cheyenne has a deserter: his name is William L. Males. His father is a banker, L. L. Males, whose nickname is “Red.” No one held it against his parents, Mr. Redden said; you could not blame it on his father, it was nothing against a man like Red Males.
People held the banker in the highest esteem. He was one of the men who had turned that part of the dust bowl into a dairy center, and in Cheyenne he is often called the “father of upstream flood control.”
“If everybody is left to decide when to fight for their country, we won’t have a country,” Mr. Redden said. It is a sentence that has come at me so many times, I need now only write down the first words “if everybody” and the rest I know by heart. It was all right with Joe Redden if that Males boy wanted to come back; nobody would try to keep him from coming home. “Of course, there are not too many who would socialize with him, he wouldn’t be welcome in our homes,” Mr. Redden said.
He did not ask me how I knew about William L. Males in Sweden. The subject is a touchy one in Cheyenne, not something to be discussed with outsiders. I knew about the deserter from an article, a long interview in which the writer asked William L. Males in Stockholm why he had left the Army. “Because I knew too much. All of us here knew too much,” Mr. Males said. There were five hundred deserters at that time in Sweden.
He called himself Willi. He spoke Swedish well. He was a student and worked in a hospital, even doing chores like emptying bedpans, which he liked very much because it gave him a chance to touch people. He wanted to touch people. He did not want to hurt or abuse or frighten anyone, the deserter said.
From Cheyenne he went to Yale, where he was fearful that he could not fit in. But then the university made him as uncomfortable as did his hometown. He tried to run away, to go home, but then he bolted from Oklahoma too.
“Cheyenne made things worse because it just reeked of dreams that failed me,” he said. Ashamed of trying to escape from the Army, he joined it to become a medic. After a year he deserted.
“You can’t guess the evil of the Army unless you see it,” Willi Males said. “The thing that bothered me most about the Army is that it’s based on hate . . .”
IN THE CHEYENNE lunchroom a waitress named Tennie Dale Campbell introduced me to her father, an eighty-one-year-old farmer, who had a lot to say about the Great Depression but nothing about the war. I always wanted to talk to farmers. In Texas, in Iowa, in New Jersey and in New Mexico I went to them, pushed on by the sentimental persuasion that these men, above all others, would see the cruelty of driving the Vietnamese from their land and water and rice into the towns and cities where they were degraded and lost. I was quite persuaded that American farmers would not approve of the forests and farms and rice fields of Vietnam being put to death. But the men I met had their own worries; some had doubts but turned from them.
Early in 1967 Senator Richard Russell, born 1897 in Winder, Georgia, spoke his mind to a young member of the White House staff, a speechwriter for LBJ who often wrote on the war and was leaving for a two-week trip to at last see it for himself. “Look into that free-fire zone business. I don’t like the sound of it,” the senator said. “The Vietnamese people are animists. They feel very deeply about the land where their ancestors are buried. I suspect we’re alienating them by moving them away from their homes, even if it’s for their safety. I know how Georgia people feel about that. When a big dam is dedicated down there and a lot of farmers have been moved out to make way for the reservoir, I don’t go to the dedication. I don’t want them to see me up there on a platform built over their land.”
It was good advice, surprising advice from a man of such power who headed the Senate Armed Services Committee, who always voted to keep the war going.
IN THE CHEYENNE lunchroom, of all places, over pie and coffee, I remembered for no reason a man who had lost his garden. It was the garden of a Vietnamese named Le Van Phuoc; Luong and I saw him on the afternoon of a Christmas Eve, a year in Vietnam where that month meant the Bob Hope Show more than Bethlehem. This man, Phuoc, called himself a farmer, for he had been one nearly all his life, but he was then surviving as a carpenter in the city of Can Tho. For five years there had not been a single day or a single night when he had not thought of a village called Long Tri. His family owned a little land there; their house had been built by his father. It was a simple story, many Vietnamese had told it before; one out of every three Vietnamese in the south felt themselves to be refugees, even if they were moved less than thirty miles from their homes. There was nothing unusual about this man and what he told us.
It had always been a deep pleasure for Mr. Phuoc to go out to his garden every morning, even before it was very light, to stand there for a minute, in the lifting darkness, before he left the house and joined the other men in the walk to their rice fields. He could still remember each shape in that garden, even when he was nothing but a refugee in a houseboat that smelled of the brown water of a canal.
Americans had destroyed the village of Long Tri from the air with rockets and napalm. Some Viet Cong—our word, not his—had, perhaps, fired on something to provoke this punishment. He was not clear about this, not wishing to be clear. All Vietnamese knew it was safer to say very little. Speaking of his village, he sounded like a man who had found himself pushed across a fearful frontier, no longer living or sleeping under the same sky. We sat cross-legged on mats in the only room of his houseboat, a low and dark place where I was too tall to stand up, a houseboat that rested on stilts in a canal.
“The wood columns of the house burned for seven days,” Le Van Phuoc said. “And, after, all we had was a basket of nails.”
All of us pretended not to see that his wife was weeping. She kept lifting a checked cloth towel to wipe her eyes and sometimes press against her mouth, although she made no noise.
It was always this way when she thought of their son, Mr. Phuoc said to Luong. He had been killed as a soldier in the Saigon army, in Cambodia, a place his parents knew nothing about. Every sentence seemed to jab the woman into remembering the boy although his name was not mentioned, for we spoke only of the lost village. I knew better than to reach over and touch her hand; they never could bear it.
“Sometimes I cannot sleep at night,” Le Van Phuoc said. “I think of the hamlet, and where I made grow a certain plant, how such a tree grew in the garden, and how we set off early in the morning for the rice fields.” Even if they had to get up so early, and even if there was never enough rest in those days, Mr. Phuoc said, it was a good life. “Everyone felt fine,” he said. “We were very strong.”
His village was only twenty-five miles away, a tiny distance for an American, but there was no way for him to return. He heard the war was always there. There were mines; the land was hurt. Nothing was as it had been. Official permission would be needed to go back, and it was impossible to get—the area was not safe. He did not say that without a son he could not manage to farm again. Instead he showed us a photograph of the dead boy, with his small face and huge smile, which was framed and hung on the wall of the houseboat.
LOVE YOUR COUNTRY, the Vietnamese in Paris said. In Tennessee there were the trees and their names to learn: beech, maple, elm, ash, hickory, buckeye, tulip poplar, redbud. In Smith County, cattle and tobacco country, there are villages called Carthage, Defeated and Pleasant Shade, Horseshoe Bend, Brush Creek and Difficult. On Main Street in Carthage, a woman on her front lawn said these are the boxwood bushes, this is lily of the valley, there is dogwood and mimosa. Old men sit on the benches in the courthouse square of Carthage, with their suspenders and shapeless hats that shade their faces, chatting with each other. In the library, which was opened in 1941 for the county and has fifteen thousand books in all, there were a few books on Vietnam, less than eight: Hell Is a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall was borrowed by five people from April 1967 to 1973; fourteen people read No Place to Die by Hugh Mulligan, an Associated Press reporter from 1968 to 1973. Behind the Lines by Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times, the report of the first American journalist allowed to visit North Vietnam, where he saw that U.S. bombing targets were civilian as well as military, had not been touched.
The younger librarian, a bulky woman in a flowered dress of thin, light material, seemed to find it odd that I would even ask about the library books on Vietnam. She said she had a brother who had been in Pleiku. “Most people like me don’t want to read about it,” Claudia Dillehay said. “I have no desire to read about it. I don’t want to read a whole book on it.”
One of the leading citizens in Carthage was Judge Clint Beardsley, who was born in 1898, was appointed judge and took office in 1930, then stood for election and went on for more than forty years handling juvenile and nonsupport cases as well as being county fiscal agent. In his law office, in Court House Square, Judge Beardsley, a small white-haired man whose favorite poem is “Annabel Lee” and who wore a diamond and gold ring of the Blue Lodge, a chapter of the Shriners, seemed fit except for a slight sinus condition. He called me “honey” or “my friend,” or “my little queen” when he thought I was being slightly sassy.
The judge said: “I know that from the beginning I thought we would have no earthly business in this war, if that’s what you want to know. I would say the vast majority of our people just had no interest, no concern for the war excepting they didn’t think we should be in it.
“Going to Canada—well, I don’t think that was the right route to take. No, I didn’t approve of it, no. Just to be frank with you, there again I would say that by a vast majority our people object to all types of demonstration, especially if there’s any violence attached. The mob has never been right. Mobs just don’t do the right thing. They’re not at heart bad, vicious people by any means, I don’t say that. They’re opposed to violence, I’d say, they’d tell you they were opposed to violence but they become excited.”
Napalm, white phosphorus, cluster-bomb units: that was the violence that I knew, not the inaugural weekend in Washington in 1973 when I kicked a policeman hard and he returned the kick hard. I asked the judge in that small, orderly room, with its leather law volumes behind glass and its venerable clock, that if he thought the war was ill-advised and if the antiwar demonstrators thought the war was wrong, then they had something very much in common.
The judge said: “Now wait a minute, my little queen! I’m a strong believer in constitutional society. Even though I don’t like certain things, if I don’t like certain laws, I think I’m duty-bound as a good citizen to have due respect for the law. I believe one of the worst problems we have today in this country is not teaching young people to have proper respect for constitutional authority.”
Vietnam was a bad experience, it divided the country, but the judge was not worried. “People forget—fortunately they forget the bad things. Back when I was a child the Civil War was still being talked about. In some cases people were bitter towards the North. And if they were not bitter, they certainly were strong for the South. So people forget. Now, back when I was a child I didn’t think they’d ever forget. My own grandfather fought for the Confederacy.”
The judge, who is married but has no children, said he thought of himself as “typical pacifist, if you like. In other words, I’m against wars and I’m against fighting and I’m against feuding, and I believe in people living together in love and peace and harmony.”
I said: “That’s lovely.”
The interview made the judge twenty minutes late for lunch. He was very nice about such a delay. He always went home and ate a chopped egg salad sandwich with olives, coffee and canned pears. Then he took a nap, and went back to the office.
“As a matter of fact, it’s hard to describe, but people here have not discussed this war much—that is, on the street corners. Or, if they do, they must make a few ‘cracks,’ as I’d call them. Make some cracks, wisecracks, and that’s about it.”
Six miles from Carthage, in Gordonsville, Mrs. Orion Key had been the secretary of the local draft board, which is now closed. The board had met once a month in the Federal Building, in a room over the Post Office.
“The Korean war was a nightmare, I was much busier,” Betty Key said. “The Vietnam war, well, this is a patriotic country and few cases caused me any heartache. Five died, but they were all volunteers, none of them draftees. Isn’t that marvelous?”
Men who thought they would get drafted volunteered because they hoped it would give them more of a choice about what might happen to them. Sometimes it did.
“Everybody knew my home, I had calls on Saturday,” she said. “The worse thing about the war is that we’ve seen it in the living room. We see murder on TV.”
Her usual day went from 6 A.M. to 11 P.M. Mrs. Key was secretary of the First Baptist Church, cleaned a six-room house, and was secretary for Mixon & Key, which she calls a motor company but looks like a garage, next to her house on Main Street. Mrs. Key is a dark-haired woman—the mother of a thirty-four-year-old son—who does nothing slowly or sloppily, although she made fun of her “in-and-out method of bookkeeping” for her husband’s company. There was something cooking in the kitchen for supper, which she raced in to stir.
The draft boards did not have to see each man who received notice from his Selective Service Board to appear; they saw only those who wanted deferments for one reason or another. One of the three men on Local Board 87 was Lewis Parker, assistant mortician of the Bass Funeral Home in Carthage, and a coroner. He was a large, calm man who did not want to be interviewed and had his own almost admirable methods of protecting his privacy. He would say “I guess it was” or “I reckon that’s the way you could put it” or “I just don’t hardly know how to answer that question” or “Well, now you know, that’s the sixty-four-dollar question.” Yet he did not tell me to go away and stop bothering him. For an hour we faced each other, like two foreigners, in the Bass Funeral Home on a quiet day when there was no business at hand.
“Nobody don’t want to go,” he said of the draft. “You bring your child up, you want your child deferred. But we didn’t have too many who was nervous up here. But the majority of them was leaving home when they ought to be at home. It was a hardship on the family.”
He was on the draft board for four, maybe five, years. There was no reimbursement. It was clear that Mr. Parker was a man with a regret.
“I got on it when I should have stayed off it,” he said, and would explain nothing more. It made him glum. “It was hard. The biggest thing is your friends. There you are, lots of times your friends, you see, some of them you was raised up with, you know, and then their children come in.”
Those who asked for deferments were mainly college students or hardship cases where a son was needed to help his family. Mr. Parker knew the draft was harder on the children of poor families than on those who could get deferments as students. “Yes, that’s true, but there’s a lot of things you wouldn’t think was fair in the deal but we just had to go by that law they had on the books,” he said. “I don’t remember if there was anyone that wanted to be let off because of what they felt about the war, see, I’ve been out of that thing now and it’s slipped my mind what all did go on.”
During World War II he had been exempt from military service because of a job with the railroads. Both of his two sons, aged thirty-seven and thirty-five, served four years in the Air Force after high school. There were moments when, if Mr. Parker’s large seamed face had changed slightly, become more intent, he might have looked like Lyndon Johnson. But he did not joke or look menacing.
He had never settled the reason for the war in his own mind. “Well, I still don’t know what it was all about, the way I look at it,” he said. “I done my duty without having it settled, I guess that’s it. I don’t feel nothing in favor of it.”
He thought that the men who volunteered had wanted to get it over with. “But just like Betty told you, we lost some, but they volunteered. That wasn’t on your shoulders, don’t you see? If one of them had got killed that I had sent, that would bring more on your shoulders than if he’s volunteered. See what I’m talking about?”
I did not see.
Then Mr. Parker suddenly relented and shared a memory. “I just had one lady and she worried me to death, she’d call me at home in the evening, she’d be cryin’, carryin’ on, all this stuff, this, that and the other. The boy was already drafted, he went off, did his two years, got out. No, no, he’s not dead. If he was dead, I’d know it. He’s here. There’s not many that dies that I don’t know or hear about.”
He knew what I meant when I asked if the country had been deformed by the war, but he had not heard the fury and the shame firsthand, only knew the worries that being on the draft board could lead to hard feelings among old friends.
“I think we’ll get back on the right track,” Mr. Parker said. “I do believe we’ll all get back to pulling together.”
People did not try to save their sons from the war because “they just want to keep out of trouble,” he said. People went along with what they had been told: the fighting in Vietnam was to save a country from the Communists. “But I don’t know whether I do believe that or not now.” Mr. Parker spoke as if it did not make such a difference; a judgment was not required.
We drove through Gordonsville again; I said goodbye and thank you to Mrs. Key. She asked me if Mr. Parker had told me why he quit the draft board, why he had been so upset and felt he had to resign. “Well, I suppose it’s all history now,” Mrs. Key said. Mr. Parker had been shocked by how Lieutenant Calley was treated, how they were blaming him for all those killings. Mr. Parker could not take it. That is how I found out the sad, small secret he wanted so much to keep from me.
Of them all, only Mildred Davis had some questions to ask me. Harrison, her husband, a fifty-four-year-old sharecropper and farmer who takes care of the one hundred and eighty cattle and the thirteen thousand chickens, and grows an acre and a half of tobacco, on Gore Farms, was the one I approached, but he was watching Maude on television and had to get up at five-thirty.
“Well, why not me, I’m the one with book learning,” Mrs. Davis said.
The Davises were married in 1939, had five children, all of whom were born at home, wherever home was. One of them, a plump girl named Brenda Kaye, a pillowy girl with skin as white as eggshells, is still at home. The house has four rooms; a giant color television set goes on during the day and at night. Mrs. Davis said her brother, Virgil Hobbs, was a retired staff sergeant who had been in two wars and said that people who went through wars did not like to talk about it.
“Do you like to talk about what you went through while you were in Vietnam, do you like to?” Mrs. Davis said. Even Virgil could not explain why the Americans went to Vietnam or stayed there.
“I read any paper I can get. I don’t know about the Christmas bombings—a good idea or a bad idea. I just don’t really know, ‘cause you read things like that going on and you don’t know whether to really believe it or not, so you just go on to things you like to read better.”
She thought if George Wallace had not been wounded, he would be a good President, but she didn’t know any women who voted. “I never voted for nobody. Don’t reckon I’ve got a cousin or an aunt or anybody like that who did, I never knew none of them voting.”
Mildred Davis went through the seventh grade; her husband has lead schooling. She remembered when he had made only seventy-five cents a day, now he was on salary, perhaps making as much as a dollar fifty an hour, and they had a decent place to live.
“Back then when you had big farms to look after, well, the older generation felt you didn’t need much schoolin’, you needed to be home working,” she said. “Once when the five children were at home a lady came to the house, for the Red Cross, mebbe, asking some questions. I said ‘I’ve got the best occupation in the world, I just don’t make no money at it.’ She quit writing, she looked up at me and said ‘Well, you got the best job in the world, keeping these children in school.’ And I thought ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t make a thing. Everybody wants to make a little money.’”
She did not know about the Vietnamese, allies or enemies. “Let them fight their own war, it’s the north and the south, just like the other war, our war. But I think the United States won most of it over there because they had the most equipment and the know-how and more troops than the other country does.”
Brenda Kaye, whose silence was quite stunning, spoke at last to say yes, the United States won, but the war did not interest her very much. Her mother thought maybe the antiwar people wanted to be on television.
If there were people in Tennessee against the war, Mrs. Davis thought they probably kept themselves quiet. “They didn’t want to get involved, most of them don’t want to get involved in nothing. ‘Fraid to speak out,” she said. “But me, I never did meet a stranger. I can always talk—I may not talk plain every time, but I never did meet a stranger. I can always get up a conversation with somebody. Can’t you?”
She was sorry people didn’t have time to visit each other as they had once done; she did not deny her loneliness.
“Are you married? Well, you have been married, then. You know how men are whenever the football season is on and the basketball season. Why, you know they’re glued to that on Sundays, so you don’t have much conversation with a man on Sundays. I rattle off all the time, and Harrison, he listens if he wants to, if he don’t, well, he gets up and leaves. He says I talk too much.”
She seemed pleased that I had been told the very same thing, and many times.
It was not until the end of our talk that she said her son-in-law, Rufus Melvin, who married Helen, had been in Vietnam. Mrs. Davis brought out the box that held a card for Tet which said “Cung Chuc Tam Huan” and letters. She had never thrown away the card. Brenda Kaye, who had been deeply bored but could not summon the energy to leave the room, said Rufus couldn’t get used to the weather. “It was so hot over there,” she said.
“He used to wake up hollering and hollering when he came home,” Mrs. Davis said.
A few miles away from Carthage, in a small place called Donelson, Rufus Melvin said he had never been taught anything about the war, he knew nothing about it, perhaps because he didn’t care for book reading.
“I thought it’d be ended before my time, but it wasn’t,” Mr. Melvin said. We sat at the table near the kitchen in his little ranch house. Helen, the daughter of Mrs. Davis, sat with us, but like Brenda Kaye, she did not speak or hear or even squirm. Mr. Melvin was a construction worker. He had been married before and had two children, which gave him a draft deferment. When he divorced and married Helen, he lost it. “They went ahead and got me,” Mr. Melvin said.
He spoke sorrowfully, in a low voice, a shy man with tight curly brown hair married to a woman with ice-blond hair that was so neat, so landscaped, it might have been a wig. Helen looked at her fingernails a lot.
“I was wounded in Mo Duc,” Mr. Melvin said. “We took a little red hill.” The Americans had made a combat assault into a hot landing zone. His platoon was walking a ditchline; there was an ambush. The South Vietnamese troops made the men in the platoon nervous, made Mr. Melvin nervous. “I felt right fearsome. One day it seemed to me we’d fight with them and the next day we’d fight against them because they all looked the same to me. They couldn’t control their weapons. They’d start running out in front of you, them ARVN, you’d better step aside because they just liable to shoot you in the back. Because it would just get away from them on automatic.”
Helen did not move. Perhaps she remembered her father telling her mother not to talk so much, perhaps she knew what the words LZ and on automatic meant.
Mr. Melvin remembered basic training at Fort Campbell when he was scared of shooting so many guns. It made him jump every time he pulled a trigger, but then after a while in Vietnam such things did not bother him any more. Taking the little red hill in the ambush gave him some shrapnel and later he hurt his ankle. In between he had been sent to Mount Baldy to be an aide for a brigade commander. He spoke in knots. I did not try to get the dates straight. Mr. Melvin said he never really knew who he was fighting.
“To me Charlie was North Vietnam and VC. I thought they was the same thing but I didn’t learn the difference until the other night on TV, when they signed the peace treaty, that they was two different things.”
When he came home, there were a few who asked him if he had killed anybody. It brought back to him the man he had once been; it made him take account of himself.
“I always said that I would never be able to kill a man, I never thought I could kill anybody,” Mr. Melvin said, looking at the table.
I looked at the table. Helen kept looking at her long frosted nails, fussing a little with the tips.
“When I was over there I couldn’t understand why them people here was protesting. To me they were showing their hind end. If they cared anything about their country, then why ain’t they trying to straighten it out? When I was over there, well, now, I never thought about nothing that happened back in the States except for the war protesters. Because you can’t have too much on your mind and stay alive over there,” he said.
If the police had been rougher with the war protesters, who he thought were trying to take over the government, then America would be in better shape. “That’s what I think. I have been taught right from wrong. Mom had always, Daddy had always, taught me that if I wanted anything to ask for it. Why, I was eighteen years old before I even had my first date,” Mr. Melvin said.
On his second night in Vietnam in the field, only the second night, in the dark at a listening post in Pleiku, six years ago, he and two other soldiers were sitting out in front of some huts. He remembered hearing the crying of babies when shooting broke behind them, in the place where the huts were and where the people lived. When the attack came, it came from Vietnamese in the hamlet they were guarding.
“One of them went right on top of me. We shot him through the back of his head, all three of us. We put sixty rounds in that man before he fell. We called for those lights, those flares. And so the way he died, you know, he died with one leg up in front of him like he was trying to crawl. And every time one of them flares went off, it looked like that man was moving and we just kept pumping them out. The next morning we went out there. He had an M-1 carbine and we shot it all to pieces and everything. We shot it through the clips and everything. I took it out of his hand. We shot him through the back of his head. It all come through his nose and took all his head out right here. Then the captain come out there and said ‘Good work, good work.’”
He didn’t think the South Vietnamese were grateful. “I would feel the same way if this country got into a fight and another country come in,” Mr. Melvin said.
Then it seemed as if he could not stop talking, not yet, because he was listening to himself for the first time, hurrying as he heard. “I done try to forget most of it, everything I done seen or heard and everything,” he said.
But that was not the end of it.
“I think the war took a lot of morale out of the American people,” Mr. Melvin said. “For me it was mostly the killing. My worstest mistake one day was when we was near a bunker, we had gas grenades and frag grenades. Them Charlie, the VC, were in the bunker and I threw in a grenade. It weren’t gas, the mistake was it was a frag, and there were people in there, and out comes a grandfather holding a baby in its arms, near dead.”
Mr. Melvin looked at my face, but there was nothing for him to see.
The Americans used different gases. If they used too much CS at close range, it gave the Vietnamese burns. CS was wretched for the Vietnamese with lung diseases: it made them choke and squirm and throw up. Luong was persuaded that any American gas had lasting effects and would rot something inside the chest. He had very fixed ideas. There were different gases to induce nausea, irritate the mucus, tighten breathing and sting the eyes. If the gases were combined, or fired in canisters from an M-79 or from the rocket pods of gunships, the Vietnamese were sure the gases were meant to disable or kill them.
“There was lots of mistakes, see,” Mr. Melvin was saying.
There was a noise then, something no louder than a sigh, but much harsher. Perhaps it came from him, perhaps it came from me.
Mr. and Mrs. Melvin stood outside their little house when I left them. She moved her hand in a single wave, but he stood still, an ordinary man with big shoulders and quiet ways, whose name was written in a family Bible when he was born, who trembled in basic training, who used to yell and shout in his sleep and warn his wife never to come up behind him too quietly. But standing there in the sun, he looked like everyone else, a man with nothing special to say, no more dangerous than the rest of us.
HE REMINDED ME of a woodcarving, nice in its way, for Kenneth Morris was a slight, steady, neat man of tidy ways. He teaches what he calls a survey course of the whole spectrum of American history in the high school in Carthage to juniors who are usually sixteen years old. He has five classes a day, no more than twenty in a class. There were five girls in his first class of the morning who were already married. By 1973 there had not been a day in the eight years he taught there when boys, like the ones he faced, were not in Vietnam. Yet the war had not been of that much interest to his pupils, Mr. Morris, a forty-three-year-old Tennessean said. Oh yes, there were boys, mostly boys, who got riled up, not because of the war but because of acts of Americans who opposed it.
Mr. Morris said: “If they were talking about those people lying down in front of troop trains, you know, they said they ought to execute them, shoot them, that’s right, shoot them. I said ‘Well, we’re not at war, if it was a declared war, then they could.’ Then the students said Well, we should declare a war. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t feel hardly that strong about it, because of the nature of the war. In World War II certainly they should have. They were also strongly against people dodging the draft, they thought that if a person’s time comes to go to war, then they shouldn’t run off.”
It was an act people associated with “sorry-ness,” he said. “That’s not a word you use up North. Sorry-ness: somebody’s no good. And people here have a very low opinion of people who disputed the President and the leadership about the war. I’d say that the position here were ninety-eight percent in favor of Calley, that they shouldn’t do anything to him. And I said to the students Well, he lined up all these little children and tied their hands behind their back and killed them—women and everything. They said they were the enemy, that they’d read about these children tying bombs to themselves, that the children were the enemy too, in an enemy area, everybody was the enemy, Calley should have killed them all.
“That kind of struck me because I’m a Goldwater man myself, but I’m not that much. I think Calley is a criminal. No, I didn’t put it that strongly to them. I really didn’t take a strong position with the students, I just gave them the facts on both sides, you know, that perhaps Calley was wrong, then I took the other position a little bit. That Calley thing, that really got them.”
Each year that he taught, the war came closer, but few heard it. Mr. Morris said that he gave some history of Vietnam, but in less than twenty minutes; there wasn’t time to do more.
“We took over the vacuum where the French left. They were colonialists and that’s the reason why, of course, when they asked for our help at Dien Bien Phu, we couldn’t afford to help them because if we took a position favoring colonialism, then it would hurt us in our relations with Africa.
“I started back and told them about Vietnam to start with, before the war, about the struggle with the Vietnamese nationalists and the French. And then we’d take it up to the time when the Japanese occupied Indochina. I’d tell them how Ho Chi Minh was against the Japanese at the time and was aided by Americans. We don’t make a hero out of him, we say he fought the Japanese and after the war they were trying to get independence. Then in ’56 we sent in advisors under Eisenhower. The Vietnamese defeated the French and drove them out, and then it was a struggle between the north wanting to take over the south and make it all Communist. I don’t get into that Geneva Convention too much, about the elections they were supposed to have. Oh sure, Ho Chi Minh would have won. Not that the people believed like he believed but because he was a kind of George Washington. I think it would have been a vote for an individual instead of them wanting communism.”
He said yes, yes, he knew Ho Chi Minh was loved, still loved. Some of us could have told him that no living Vietnamese had the power of this dead man.
“I don’t go into that very deeply because, you know, you teach what you want to teach. You can leave the impression that you want to leave, I guess.”
He thought of himself as a conservative man. He had watched the war on television, he had seen the troops, the prisoners, the helicopters, the rifles, the paddies, the jungles, the litters, the wounded.
“Nothing romantic, like you would have had in World War II, putting the flag up at Iwo Jima. It was just a war going on; of course I wanted to know all I could. But I never believed that we should just pull up stakes and just cut. Dealing with Asians is always a matter of losing face.
“I think actually this war caused a lot of people here like everywhere else to lose the romance of war. It’s no good any more, there’s no romance. The war wasn’t fought for any purpose except to more or less prevent somebody else from doing something. America’s gain in it was nil. This war it’s probably done more to prevent wars than anything that’s ever happened in this country.”
A brother was the postmaster in Carthage and owned interest in a store on Highway 25, which sold $126,000 worth of beer in 1972. The shop was near the Green Hills Golf and Country Club. It was a nice place, Mr. Morris said, there were dances. It cost three hundred dollars to join, fifteen dollars a month for members. There was a bar that didn’t serve drinks: you had to bring them and mix them yourself. He was one of nine children born in Monterrey, Tennessee, he was a member of the Baptist faith but leaned a little toward the Methodists, whom he considered a bit more liberal about their views of Christian behavior.
“I think no one actually won the war, but certainly the Communists came out on top because of their superior dedication,” he said. “I think we met our commitments and got out.”
He knew of no boy killed or badly hurt in Vietnam; there was one who drove for a general, but he did not always know what happened to any of them after they left school.
“I’d tell the students that the Vietnamese are a very warlike people and have been all back during the history. They’ve always picked on their neighbors—the poor Cambodians and the other tribes in that area. They’ve always been that way. While the Chinese haven’t.”
The students did not much read newspapers, but he remembered a girl who once in the sixth grade read both The Banner and The Nashville Tennessean, who once read 112 history books in one year. He thought that boys on the whole were more disinterested than girls in schooling.
“You’ll always have that,” Mr. Morris said. “They’re interested in other things. A lot of them work after school, work at nights. The factories are working a lot of the boys.”
THE VIETNAMESE PEOPLE were many things, but I did not think of them as warlike, the word used by Mr. Morris. What runs through their history, like a coarse, brilliant thread of crimson, is opposition to foreign rule. After a thousand years as a Chinese colony, they were independent—except for a brief period of Chinese rule in the fifteenth century—under their own sovereigns until the mid-nineteenth century. As of 1887 Vietnam had ceased to exist for all practical purposes, as one historian wrote, “except as a memory and a rallying cry to revolt.” In its place a French decree established the Indochinese Union. Three parts of it were Vietnam split horizontally from north to south into the protectorates of Tonkin and Annam and the colony of Cochin China. Japanese intervention, after France was defeated in Europe in 1940, broke the continuity of French rule, but Japanese domination of Vietnam did not survive after the August 1945 surrender which ended World War II. On September 2, 1945, in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the war with France began. In December 1946 the Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or League for the Independence of Vietnam, was supported by the majority of the nation because, when it went to war with France, it carried on a nationalist tradition that stretched back to Emperor Ham Nghi. He was the very young Emperor in 1884 when the French tried to establish a protectorate over Vietnam, and he called on the people to revolt against the French in Hue.
Early in the fifteenth century the national hero Le Loi, who liberated Vietnam from Chinese rule, issued a proclamation in which it is written: “Our people long ago established Vietnam as an independent nation with its own civilization. We have our own mountains and our own rivers, our own customs and traditions, and those are different from the foreign country to the north [China]. We have been weak and we have been strong, but at no time have we lacked heroes.”
When the war with France was over—with General Giap’s military victory early in May at Dien Bien Phu in 1954—the French military effort in Indochina was ended. In a final declaration the Geneva Conference of 1954 noted that the line of demarcation at the 17th parallel was a provisional one and should in no way be constituted as a political or territorial boundary divorcing the north from the south. Article 7 guaranteed the right of the Vietnamese people to enjoy the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by democratic institutions, which were to be established as a result of free general elections by secret ballot in July 1956 under the supervision of the International Commission. The United States government announced that it would refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb the Geneva agreements, but the 1956 elections, giving the Vietnamese the right to choose between the governments of the north or the south, were never held, for the Americans would not permit them, nor would the Saigon government of Ngo Dinh Diem, which we had installed and nourished. President Eisenhower, in his memoirs, said that if the elections had been held, eighty percent of the Vietnamese might have voted for Ho Chi Minh.
In the province of Phu Yen in southern Vietnam, famous for its guerrilla fighters in the nine-year war against the French, I met men who did not dare speak to their children of what they had helped win. They were Viet Minh soldiers in the movement to liberate their country from foreigners; if the movement was Communist-led, it meant nothing for many Vietnamese because it drew the proudest and most hopeful men to its side, the patriots who did not wish to be ruled by whites. After the partition in 1954—when each Vietnamese was to decide whether he wished to live north or south of the 17th parallel—those who stayed in Phu Yen were denounced by the Saigon government and viewed with deep suspicion by local officials during the American presence, when there were monthly quotas and constant pressures to round up any Vietnamese who could be accused of sympathizing with the Communists.
This is why, in the little town of Tuy Hoa, Luong and I waited for hours to arrange to meet the chien si, the Vietnamese word for fighter, men of the Viet Minh. There were handwritten messages to be sent through an intermediary, messages to come back. Luong went out for hours, and only when it was dark did a student arrive to lead us, as silently, as gravely as if we were departing on a night ambush. It was a great risk for the veterans of the Viet Minh to meet with us, when anyone could be arrested under the Phoenix program—arrested, held, abused, bribed, jailed—whose purpose was to round up the Viet Cong and its sympathizers. All were suspect.
The first man was known to us only as Tai. We went down little alleys to find his house—a frail thing, as they all were—and then sat close together by a kerosene lamp. Tai spoke in whispers. It was always the lowest, softest voices in Vietnam that seemed most drilling. Once he moved in that blurred light and I saw that he was not a strong man, that his thinness was not just a matter of small bones and hard work.
“I will never regret it,” Tai said. “I will never be ashamed of it. What we did in those long nine years led to the independence of half of our country.” The half was the north. His own family in Tuy Hoa were not peasants: his father taught school and owned two buses. In the early meetings of the people, Tai told us, all swore to rid themselves forever of the French. No one held back or could not make up his mind, so they were moving times, not like the meetings held now for the people by the Saigon government officials, which made them all sleepy and dull, Tai told us.
On that October night in 1972 he remembered how thirty years ago he and nineteen other youths from the area fought near a bridge nine miles south of Tuy Hoa. The bridge had recently been blown up by Viet Cong guerrillas. Luong and I had seen it. No one spoke of repairing it and no travelers loitered by it.
The day that Tai left Tuy Hoa he told his parents to think of him as their dead son. Twenty of them made the march from Phu Yen province to the U Minh forest at the southern tip of their country, where their mission was a French naval installation. The men crossed through the area of Nha Trang, the coastal city, down to the Saigon-Cholon area, through the Plain of Reeds, crossing the Mekong River to Tra Vinh province, the old name for Vinh Binh, and then on to Tan Bang, Thoi Binh, in the U Minh forest which was never a forest despite its name. There were ambushes by the French, there was malaria, there was a tiredness he had never dreamed of, different dreams and fears.
“The most terrible was moving through the jungles in central Vietnam and those swampy areas in the south. The hardships only sharpened my hatreds, especially when movement exhausted me and I saw airplanes in the sky, automobiles on the road and even trains moving in a distance.”
They walked two thousand miles. It took six months.
The French seemed to have everything: weapons, artillery, planes. Tai remembered the foreign names of the planes: the Morane, an observation plane; the Spitfire, a fighter bomber; the Dakota, a transport and supply plane.
“But anywhere I went the local people considered me as their son and there was no moment in those years when I had the slightest fear of death,” he said. Indeed, he expected it.
During the six-month march his unit never attacked the French, for that was not their mission, he said. His greatest longing was for sugar. Before the march and after the march sugar was never so important to him again, but the memory of it made him ache.
After the Geneva Accords, Tai went back to Tuy Hoa, not to North Vietnam. He said it was his liver which had made him so ill: yellow skin, yellow eyes, a headache that seemed fixed to his skull.
“I was stopped outside Tuy Hoa by police. I resisted arrest by telling them that article 14D of the Geneva Accords allowed me to choose to stay in the south or to go north,” Tai said. “I told them if I had turned up twelve hours earlier they might have arrested me, but now you can’t do it, I said.”
And he was right, for the Geneva Accords protected him. Tai said he knew nothing of the men now fighting a guerrilla war in the south, the men of the National Liberation Front. He did not call them Viet Cong, which to many was considered a bad name. Cong is an abbreviation for Communist, and the designation Viet Cong—or Vietnamese Communist—was used by the Saigon government to avoid the patriotic connotation which the older term Viet Minh had for the people.
“It is much harder for the Front to fight against the Americans. If I were with the Front now, I don’t think I could stand it. The B-52 bombings, the M-16 and so many other weapons. It makes it ten times harder, ten times,” he said.
The second man, known as Huan, was even bolder; he did not want to be humble about what the men in the Viet Minh had done.
“Former resistance fighters like me were looked upon as criminals under Ngo Dinh Diem,” Huan said. “It was an outrage. There is one thing I have—my love of country—and all those government officials can never be as proud of this as I am.”
Huan was a tailor and raised pigs in Tuy Hoa; his wife had a stall in the market. They had seven children. He knew all about the Phoenix program. He had been picked up by the police twice and kept in detention for one month in May 1971, then again in September of 1972. He had been freed only for ten days when we met.
“People like me have had no peace in our own life. I built this house in 1969, the police thought, hah, he is rich and tried to get money by disturbing me. Those Phoenix people spent more time extorting money from innocent people! The south can never find its feet if such a wicked practice is permitted to go on and on. During my last arrest, when I was brought before the Province Security Committee, I told the province chief, in front of all members of that committee: ‘Do you intend to let innocent people earn their living peacefully? May I advise you never to corner innocent people?’ Some men of the committee told me later that they had never heard anyone speak like that.”
He was forty-five, not an age to be feared in Vietnam, as Americans fear it. Something of the young man who had led an assault group rose up again that October night in Tuy Hoa. In his army there were boys and older men; each wore his own clothes and only a few had French guns, the mousqueton indochinois, which were carbines. Huan explained—knowing we knew nothing—that there were three elements in any attack: the assault group, the unit assigned to stop the enemy’s reinforcements and the unit assigned to harass the enemy. He began as an assistant platoon leader of an assault group in what the Viet Minh called the Sixth Military Region. Its five provinces included his own, Phu Yen.
Inside the perimeter of a French outpost, his men always made noises, the same high, piercing sounds that came from the throats of the Vietnamese from the north fighting in Laos during Lam Son 719.
“Yelling was the most important thing. We were at such a disadvantage, for the French had so many more weapons and we had only our conviction. During the assault we would yell, and then, suddenly, the yelling would make us feel very brave.” It did not matter what they yelled, but usually the men screamed “Xung phong”—Assault, Assault—and Huan thought the French felt weaker just hearing that.
“In the first six months my company fought in sixteen battles. We always tried to carry out the wounded around our shoulders and there were times when the man you were carrying was shot as you ran away with him. In the hospital where I was treated, there was only chloroform for the dying or those who had amputations. The nurses gave us more consolation than the medicines.”
His left hand was always still and twisted. It was ruined by shrapnel. It was a useless hand, good only for guiding the cloth when he worked the sewing machine.
“It was a surprise for us that people living near the French outposts had sympathy for us and in many cases helped us a great deal, for we thought they had followed the French. They had not.”
His unit made their first attack against the French on a mountain by the bridge Luong and I had seen.
“We were almost naked except for our underpants,” Huan said. “We smeared mud on our faces and chests. Each chien si carried four grenades and a long knife. But the first attack failed because a deputy platoon leader lost his courage. He was tried on the spot by a military field court and shot. The whole company almost wept with shame, but later we attacked and overran the outpost and withdrew. It was never our policy to seize and to hold.”
He was what the Americans called a sapper. A new generation of Vietnamese smeared themselves with charcoal, wore only underpants, and attacked in the darkest dark with satchel charges and grenades. But they did not yell as they came closer. They came ghostlike through the minefields to the barbed wire, sliding and cutting through it, small men who scarcely seemed to make a noise until they lifted their arms and began to throw.
The Viet Minh only intentionally killed those French or Vietnamese in the colonial army who were officers or noncommissioned officers, Huan said. After each attack villagers would praise and cheer the survivors of his assault group.
The new generation in the National Liberation Front had a worse war, a more dreadful one, he said, dreadful.
Huan said: “Our chien si could mingle with the people even in areas controlled by the French, but now the Front has to operate underground and it is more difficult. In our time there were French-controlled areas and the rest were vung tu do, free places. And the new chien si faces American firepower, tremendous firepower—such as we never dreamed of in those days—so the endurance of the chien si now is much better than ours was.”
Later, when we were alone, Luong told me that Huan had only been freed the last time because he paid a bribe; this one was so large that his wife could not sleep, but somehow she had raised the amount. There was no choice, after all, only the money could have saved him. It was a stunning sum for them, but only forty dollars to an American.