In the spring of 1968, when I was a first year graduate student at the University of Minnesota majoring in English, President Johnson ended graduate student deferments. Shortly thereafter I received a notice from my draft board in Manchester, NH, my home town, changing my classification to 1A, and requiring me to report for a physical examination.
The change in draft status began a period of my life that required me to make choices and decisions which, if not determinative of final outcomes, at least showed me who I was and what was important to me. The first of those decisions had to do with how I responded to the draft notice itself. The Viet Nam war was very unpopular at the time, especially on university campuses. Many questioned its morality and even the morality of war itself. They advocated a range of options, from fleeing to Canada to doing things intentionally to fail the induction physical. I did not give serious attention to these options. Despite my moral inhibitions about war in general and this war in particular, I had an emotional connection to the experience of war and to the heroic possibilities of war.
I was a child who grew up in the wake of World War II. My dad served in both World War II and the Korean War. I played war games as a boy. My brothers and I dressed up in my father’s old uniforms, and I was always enamored of war movies. I calculated that there was a generation between WW I and WW II, and now there was a generation until the Viet Nam War. This was our war. It troubled me that our war was not as righteous as either of my father’s wars. I was angry with my country on that score. Nevertheless, I did not feel right turning my back on my country’s call to duty. It was a question of pride and honor. Hence, I settled on a compromise position in response to the draft. I would submit to the will of my country, and do what I was required to do. I would not however support the war by becoming an officer. I would remain a private soldier. This was my moral high ground.
I soon discovered that my compromise position was more difficult to maintain than I had imagined. I found it impossible to be passive or a dud in the army. Call it an ego thing. In basic training at Fort Dix, NJ, I could not resist throwing grenades accurately through plywood framed window openings. I could not resist hitting human cutout targets at 200 meters with my M-14. Both feats earned me little garlanded medals, expert badges, which I wore on my dress greens. And both feats also made it likelier that I would be selected for the infantry and likelier to be sent to Viet Nam.
After advanced infantry training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, I was given the opportunity of attending the non-commissioned officer school in Fort Benning, Georgia. This was a result of scoring well on aptitude tests, which also I couldn’t resist doing. Everything in the military turns on rank, and in part I was prey to my own vanity and the seductive power of a little higher status. Several months later I emerged from the school with expertise in infantry operations and intelligence and the three chevrons of a buck sergeant on my sleeve. In a short amount of time, I had taken several significant steps up the ladder. But success in becoming an infantry NCO also made it likelier that I would be sent to Viet Nam.
In early September 1969, I arrived at Bien Hoa airport in South Viet Nam and then flew up the coast to Chu Lai where I received my assignment to a unit in the Americal Division. From Chu Lai, which is on the South China Sea, I flew by Chinook helicopter across the flat coastal lands of Viet Nam about 20 miles inland to an area of hill ranges and valleys. I landed on a hilltop called LZ (Landing Zone) Center. The hilltop had a large helicopter landing zone and a resupply area where water and fuel arrived in huge rubber wheels called blivets. There were battalion headquarters command buildings, an artillery battery, an aid station, mess halls, heavy mortar units, as well as all of the other small, auxiliary buildings needed to provide life’s essentials, such as latrines and shower stalls. The battalion had four rifle companies, a support company, and a recon platoon. Three of the rifle companies were constantly in the field on rotation with one rifle company, which occupied defensive bunkers all around the hill top. Beyond the defensive bunkers the hill top was ringed with trenches, mine fields, and concertina wire.
LZ Center, accessible only by helicopter and on foot, would be the focal point of my whole tour of duty in Viet Nam. My company commander looked at my personnel folder and said, "I’ve got just the job for you." He put me in charge of a small squad of men who provided round the clock coverage for the Gimlet Observation Point. The observation point was at the highest point on the hill, near the command center, the officers’ mess hall, and the senior officer bunkers. The observation point faced west out over a broad flat green valley to a range of other Appalachian sized hills. Beyond that were the mountains in Laos. In the following months, I would become totally familiar with the landscape surrounding LZ Center for miles around by peering through binoculars and telescopes, starlight scopes at night, and occasional forays by Huey helicopters over the area. Our mission, my squad and I, was to be perpetually vigilant for enemy approaches up the hill and also to spot the enemy further off in the field and call in the appropriate fire missions. The good news was that I would not be out humping in the field with rifle companies or the recon platoon. I would stay in the relatively secure environs of the hilltop for six months and then later I would take a position as field liaison to two South Vietnamese provincial and regional force units, where I held the same kind of job. I would occupy those relatively safe positions for another six months until the end of my tour of duty in Viet Nam and also the end of my military service.
In many respects I lucked out in the army. My actions and decisions leading up to deployment in Viet Nam might have been reckless, making a tour as an infantryman in Viet Nam more probable, as it eventually did. But I escaped unscathed and I acquired a good sense of what the major defining event of my generation was all about. I only have to reread one of my journal entries from early in my tour in Viet Nam to bring back the feeling of that time.
September 23, 1969 - "Yesterday morning at 7:30 AM part of Bravo Company was CA’d (chopper assault) onto one of the hilltops, Phu Vinh Dong, clearly visible from my OP (observation post). Though their landing zone had been primed beforehand with air strikes and artillery fire they nevertheless encountered heavy machine gun and small arms fire when they landed. Gooks popped out of the ground as close as ten feet from where the choppers landed. Immediately we began to take casualties. One chopper was shot down. The pilot and machine gunner were killed. Another chopper made it to a rice paddy on this side of the hill while on its way back to LZ Center. It received 30 caliber machine gun fire from its left flank and finally landed in the paddy. It is still there today. We were going to blow it up last night, but gunships were constantly in the air firing and dropping flares. A company is on the way to the chopper today. Another chopper was downed on a different LZ (landing zone) N.W. of the rice paddy. Altogether in operations during the day we lost eight helicopters.
"But the really tragic thing was the loss of men in the field. I could not actually see men dying in the field. At around six in the evening however a chopper arrived from the valley below. On it were four body bags. I watched them lug these body bags to another chopper. I have scarcely ever been as much stricken and pained as I was at that moment.
"Altogether we lost 11 men during the day and many more wounded. My heart is sore."
One major impression from that time is that war makes men do unspeakably cruel things. I served in the same division as Lt. Calley, the officer primarily responsible for the infamous My Lai massacre. The scale of the massacre at My Lai (500 civilians slaughtered) was truly horrific, but I suspect there were numerous instances of brutality on the part of our soldiers at least once in a while in Viet Nam. The brutality tended to spike after we had suffered losses ourselves in a major engagement such as the occasion above. Fortunately, these were not daily or even weekly occurrences. Most of the time our soldiers fought the heat, bugs, jungle, and rain, as well as the occasional sniper and booby trap. This is an entry from my journal of September 27, 1969, several days after the journal entry above:
"One of the hardest things - hard for the heart - to comprehend about the war - the battle around me - as I hear it from the mouths of my fellow soldiers is the brutality indulged in while the soldiers are in the field. Seldom do they actually see any NVA or Viet Cong. Their contacts with males, especially armed males, are rare. When it occurs there are casualties on both sides.
"Much more common in the field is the killing of women and children. This is neither done reluctantly nor non-involvedly. Wednesday I talked with a soldier from Alpha Company, who had just helicoptered in with his unit from the field in the late afternoon. He said that that morning his unit had come across several hootches which sheltered three mama-sahns and five children. After questioning them, the soldiers killed them. They shot the women in the face and in the crotch. If the opportunity arises they rape the women before killing them. As they were leaving the hootch compound they noticed one of the children’s bloodied heads nodding grotesquely back and forth. One of the GIs simply approached the child and gave it a violent kick in the head.
"A soldier I knew was out on a patrol which happened to come across a lone woman in a hootch. His method of execution was to tie a block of C-4 to her thighs.
"Another soldier laughingly explains how his element came across a pregnant mama-sahn. They drilled her with bullets and then reported a confirmed body count of two."
One of the most common sayings that I heard over and over again in Viet Nam was, "It don’t mean nuttin’." That phrase summarized the meaninglessness and fatalism that you could see in the faces of the GIs. Things just happened. Nobody was in control. For example, I was awarded the bronze star and combat infantry badge in Viet Nam all because one evening LZ Center came under attack. It wasn’t a serious or sustained attack. A number of mortar rounds fell within our perimeter. I fired my M-16 into the perimeter. As it happened, one of the enemy mortar rounds landed on my bunker and destroyed the bed I slept on. But I wasn’t in it at the time. So "it don’t mean nuttin’."
So there is the story of the soldier who had spent eleven months in the field, and then as a kind of reprieve from danger he was made a barber on LZ Center for his last month in country. It doesn’t take much training as a barber to give people buzz cuts. The trouble is that this fellow kept getting so stoned that he couldn’t find his way to the barber shop in the morning. So he was sent back to the field with his unit for his last few weeks in-country. Three days later, he pulled on a stick at a night encampment position. The stick was booby-trapped. He was blown up.
But the story that means the most to me and that I keep looking back on after all these years is the one about my friend, Jim, who worked for battalion headquarters as a writer doing various things including writing the battalion news, which was all propaganda and puff pieces. He was drafted as a graduate student in English as I was, but he got so bored and disgusted with his assignment that he asked to be sent out to the field with one of the rifle companies. He had a slight build, and he didn’t look like the kind of guy who would thrive in the jungle carrying a heavy rucksack, ammo, and weapons. I talked to him. "Every single soldier out in the field wants to get out of there," I told him. "It’s just wrong to want to go there - for the experience. You shouldn’t do it." But he went anyway. I left Viet Nam a short time later so I never learned what happened to him.
The encounter with Jim disturbed me and made me angry at the time, and reflection on this incident disturbed me and made me angry for a long time afterwards. I knew that I allowed myself to be corralled into Viet Nam. If truth be told, there was a part of me that wanted a war experience as much as Jim did. I did things all along the way that likely led to that outcome, and I got really close to it, very close, just a hillside away, but I didn’t take that final step. I never really admitted that "yes, the war experience is what I want." I insisted on being passive about it, thinking thereby among other things that I would stay on the moral high ground and not be responsible for any harm that came to me or to others.
In a different vein, isn’t it an irony that my company commander, who didn’t know me from Adam, assigned me to head up a squad for an "Observation Post?" How did he know I was a natural born watcher, more than a doer? And I didn’t catch on at the time that Jim was a doer, regardless how I saw him, and that it wasn’t enough for him to merely watch. And so, yes, it turns out that I have been more of a watcher than a doer all of my life.
What made me angry as a result of the Jim experience was something else. I was and have been angry at those who made it so that in regard to my country - the United States of America - shirking, screwing up, running away, or avoiding service was possibly the right and moral thing to do. That’s one tragic legacy of Viet Nam - the loss for so many of the innocent, benign perspective about country. People can say what they want about the "greatest generation", the generation that went through the depression and fought World War II, but it’s the hubris of that generation that led to all the senseless cruelty and death of Viet Nam. Who wouldn’t be angry or sad, even if just a little bit after all these years, when all of the sacrifices - suffering and injury and death - have proved to be so inconsequential and have all but faded away.
Bern Duval