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| Book Excerpts |
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The Vietnam War touched everyone’s life in the 60s and 70s, and below are just a few of the compelling and poignant stories told to Chris Appy. |
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"Memorial Day 1968" Clark Dougan "That sand was probably the only thing that saved me" George Watkins "They carried me the whole way back to the North" Ta Quang Thinh "Memorial Day 1968" Clark Dougan I went to Valley Forge High School in Parma Heights, Ohio--a big, working-class, white, ethnic neighborhood just outside Cleveland. We were the Valley Forge "Patriots." Something like thirty-five kids from Parma died in the war. The principal would come on the intercom periodically and say, "We've just received the very sad news that Terry Kilbane, a marine lance corporal, has been killed in Vietnam. Let's please observe a moment of silence." I think we sensed that we were all pawns of forces much larger than we were, and over which we had no control. It all seemed somehow like a roll of the dice. Some would go, some wouldn't, and it depended on accident, on how well we did in school, on what our parents' expectations were for us, lots of factors--but none of us were really that different from one another. There was this one guy who sat next to me in homeroom named Greg Fischer. I played basketball, he played hockey. We didn't know each other very well, but because my last name began with D and his with F, we were in the same homeroom for three years. Toward the end of our senior year I remember talking with him about our plans for the future. I said, "Well, actually I'm going to college next year. I just went down to visit this place called Kenyon and it seemed kind of cool. What are you going to do?" He said, "Ah, I don't think I'm going to go to college. I'm thinking about going into the marines." "The marines? Really?" "Yeah, I mean, I'm going to get drafted anyhow, so if I'm going to get drafted, why not the best, you know?" When we heard those obituaries over the school intercom it was a reminder that the war was there, and it was real. But one of the ways we coped with it was through a sort of black humor. It was almost as if the humor was an effort to make it go away, to make it unreal. For example, a few months after my talk with Greg Fischer, all eight hundred and thirty-five of us marched into Cleveland Public Auditorium for commencement--the Class of 1967. Suddenly some kid starts whistling the theme song to The Bridge On the River Kwai--the movie about British prisoners of war. And we all joined in! Believe me, it's not easy to whistle when you're laughing. This was followed by a very low, teenage, guttural version of "The Caissons Go Rolling Along." I'm not kidding. Meanwhile, in the background, the high school band is wailing away on "Pomp and Circumstance." You can just imagine all these guys in bright blue caps and gowns with the gold tassels, laughing away. It was fantastic. So I go off to my first year in college and I'm really kind of oblivious of the war. The Tet Offensive is raging across South Vietnam and I'm trying to figure out what the hell Paradise Lost is all about. But I came home from college in late May. On Memorial Day 1968, I opened up the Cleveland Press and there was this really angry editorial on the front page with the title "He Was Only 19--Did You Know Him?" It turns out to be about Greg Fischer and how he died at Dong Ha up near the DMZ. It just hit me like a hammer. I remembered that conversation in homeroom and it suddenly had this profound significance. I had gone off to this cloistered college while he was going off to die in Vietnam. Unlike some, I've never had any guilt for not going to Vietnam. But I understand how easily it could have been me. Like any kid who had grown up in the fifties there was a certain allure to the military. And especially the marines. But my parents hadn't been able to go to college and they were determined that I would. The Cleveland Press article concluded by quoting a letter Greg had left in the drawer of his desk. On the envelope he had written, "Open this if I don't come back from Vietnam." The letter was about what to do with the ten thousand bucks his family would get from his military life insurance--the standard death benefit for an American KIA. Primarily he wanted the money to go to his sister so she could go to college. The letter ended with a P.S., "Don't forget to give Joey my hockey skates." The editorial was really asking, how many more people like Greg are we willing to waste? This is just an ordinary kid we're talking about. He wasn't an Eagle Scout, or a class president, or an all-American athlete. He was a kid who had worked in the local pharmacy. We all know the high school kid who works in the pharmacy, even if we don't know his name. I think that was the moment when "Middle America" really turned against the war. The Cleveland Press was part of the Scripps-Howard chain, a conservative syndicate that had strongly supported the war. So it was remarkable that this newspaper would run such an angry editorial about an American casualty. It reflected a feeling that was spreading all over working-class communities like Parma. I think a lot of World War II vets who had been sitting around their kitchen tables saying, "You've got to fight for your country," were starting to say, "Fuck this. It's not worth Greg Fischer's life or his buddy's life." Or maybe they weren't saying it, but they were starting to feel it. In 1982, I went to Greg Fischer's grave. What struck me more than anything else was the simplicity of Greg's marker. There's just one small plaque on the ground surrounded by hundreds of marble headstones. It has his name, the dates of his life, and one word: "Vietnam." That's the only epitaph. I felt good about having gone. And stood there. And remembered. The only tribute you could really pay, and I can still pay, is to remember. What else is there? Back to Top "That sand was probably the only thing that saved me" George Watkins My daddy built this house. He built it from the ground up, a piece at a time. We moved down here when I was three-years-old. He wanted to get all us kids out of the coal camps. He was a coal miner for thirty-six years and he did not want us in the mines, period. That's one thing Daddy would not let. He told the man who run his division of Westmoreland Coal that if he hired any one of his sons, that'd be the day he'd walk out of the mines. I have a brother in the railroad, and one that makes mining equipment, and one that just retired from the highway department. So we all stayed out of the mines. I was drafted on June 19, 1967. I knowed it was coming. Just a matter of time. Come close to not getting drafted. Had high blood--borderline. They kept me three days at Roanoke to watch my blood pressure. I think the three days just laying around doing nothing brought it down. I knowed very little about Vietnam. I mean what I know now about it and what I knowed then is just from scary. I didn't really pay a whole lot of mind to it. I just knowed that we was fighting over there against Communism, so-called. I started doing more thinking about it after I got drafted, in basic training, trying to find out more, but in there it was hard to find out anything. I went to Fort Bragg and then to Fort Leonard Wood. Spent two months training as a combat engineer. That's what my MOS [military occupational specialty] was. I was told when I left I would be with an Engineer Battalion at Pleiku--that's where I thought I was going. But when I got to Vietnam, I reckon they needed infantry and I reckon they just drawed the line somewhere on the list and I went to infantry and the rest of them went over to what they's supposed to. In Cam Ranh Bay they said I was going to Chu Lai to the 196th and I hadn't had one bit of infantry training. The first night I was out there, they put me behind an M-60 machine gun and I had about a two minute lesson. "Here's the safety, here's the trigger, and here's the bolt." Our worse time was about the entire month of December, 1967. We stayed in the field. Everything we had, we had on our back. Where we stopped, that's where we slept. It was just a continuous patrol and ambush at night. Search-and-destroy in the day, and every third night you was on an ambush. You was lucky to get four hours sleep. It was nothing to go thirty to forty hours with no sleep. As a matter of fact, the longest we ever went was seventy-one hours. We lost quite a few people that time. Seemed like everywhere we moved, they was right behind us. Seemed like we couldn't get away from them. We went from ninety-three men down to forty. They brought one Chinook in and took us all out. One Chinook. As they say in the army, we was no longer an effective fighting force. Then we was in one valley, called the Que Son Valley, two miles wide and ten, twelve miles long. We cleaned out every living thing in that valley--people and animals--and destroyed everything else. We just rounded them all up--four to five hundred people--and started moving them eleven klicks to some type of a camp. All their animals was killed. Then we made the valley a free-fire zone. After we cleaned it out, anything you saw was a legitimate target. Two days later, half the people were right back in it. They went back to nothing because we burned and destroyed everything. They had to be some good people to withstand all that. They come right back to nothing and start over. Go out and get some thatch or find some that wasn't burnt, tie it together with a couple branches over some poles and sit up under it with their little beat up aluminum pots. They's some of the most determined people I've ever run into. I don't hate them. They did what they had to do. It's the politicians that put everybody in that place. Although I would like to get ahold of that one that set the booby trap. [Laughs.] They moved us up to Camp Evans right after the big push into Hue during the Tet Offensive. That's where I got hit. We was doing a road sweep. We had about a five mile stretch of road and we had to sweep it every day for mines. All that area is flat and sandy--real sandy country. There just about wasn't any cover. Just dirty white sand. Over the years it had blackened like soot. I've still got some of it in me. The doctors say that sand was probably the only thing that saved me. Instead of coming straight up, it spread the explosion out real big. It was real early, just after day break on a Sunday morning. We moved out in two platoons to that road we were supposed to sweep. My platoon was last and I was second or third from the very last man. We had just moved about a hundred feet when I hit it. Seems like I remember looking at my watch and seeing seven-thirty. Sometimes I think that's why I was looking down--why it got in my eyes. I was unconscious for just a couple minutes. I come around and I was laying in a hot hole with my arms up on the side. There was absolutely no pain, just numbness--total numbness. It was hot from the blast. That's the only thing I remember. I told them to get me out of that hole because it was hot. I got some burns on my back from that. They tell me I hit a pressure-detonated mine--one of our duds, a 105-millimeter round that had been booby-trapped. Its about twenty inches long and 105 millimeters in diameter. Roughly forty people walked by it before I hit it. It also hit a boy in front of me and one to my immediate right. That boy lost a left eye, his left ear, and I think some movement. And I had just mentioned to him to move because he was way too close, just about shoulder to shoulder. I met him later at the hospital in San Antonio and he thanked me. He thinks it would have got him worse if he hadn't moved. And the boy in front, the radio saved his life. He was carrying the radio on his back. Our platoon leader wrote me a letter while I was in the hospital saying they found a piece of shrapnel the size of your hand embedded in the radio. Doc patched me up and the helicopter sent me to an aid station at Camp Evans. A doctor did something and I was right back on the helicopter and they took me out to the S.S. Sanctuary hospital ship. That's when the pain really started hitting me and then it was just unbearable. They pushed me over to the side and was taking people over me. I think it was a triage decision, probably taking the ones that was worse. I can remember laying on that stretcher and it seemed like a long time, but they say in circumstances like that sometimes you don't lose a lot of blood. A lot of times the force of the explosion will seal the ends of the arteries and veins. I knowed something was wrong with my eyes, but I was telling myself that my sight wasn't gone, that it was just sand or powder burn. When I come to after surgery my whole head and face was wrapped in bandages and I just kept telling myself I could still see. Nobody did tell me, but the more the days went, I finally began to tell myself, "No, you're going to be blind." A few days later a doctor says my eyes were just like you took and scrambled an egg. Like you took an egg and you just scrambled it. He said that was the shape my eyes was in. I'll tell you what's surprising. I didn't think about my legs. Legs was a second thought. For some reason my sight meant a lot more than my legs. That's all I can say. All my thoughts and worry was on my eyes. I still had my right leg for seven days. The doctors told me there's four inches of bone missing, but there was a little bit of tissue still holding it together. They tried to save it, but after seven days gangrene set in and my temperature got up to a hundred and six. I was plum out of it. The next thing I remember is running my hand down to my leg and feeling with my fingers. I just said, "It's gone." I don't have much bitterness. Well, I don't think I do. I just wish that none of it ever happened--for everybody's sake. It was a bad political mistake. Have you been to the Wall? I was there in '85. I guess that made me feel the worst that I had felt since I'd been home. I sat right in the middle of it, right at the "V" of it, and run my hands up a ways on it. All those names. And then we went from end to end and picked out some that got killed in our outfit. I felt them. Spelled them out even. Each letter. I sat right there and just tried to think, 'Why did all these people die?' The majority were my age. Their lives and their families all messed up. What was gained from it? At the end of the interview, he worries about how the published version will turn out. "I say things that don't look good in print." He cannot be convinced otherwise. On my way out, he makes a request I do not know how to honor: "Fancy it up," he says. Back to Top "They carried me the whole way back to the North" Ta Quang Thinh I was asleep in the jungle hospital when a male nurse woke me to tell me that Hue's blood pressure had gone down. Hue was one of our patients recovering from serious wounds in a post-operative care unit, a makeshift underground room with an A-frame roof made of logs and covered with a tarpaulin. So I got out of my hammock to go see him. I remember putting the stethoscope in my ears to listen to his pulse. I glanced at my watch and it was almost eleven o'clock. That's all I can remember. Back to Top |
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