Drafted
Page 1
DRAFTED
The Mostly True Tales of a
Rear Echelon Mother Fu**er
Andrew Atherton
Published by Treehouse Publishing Group, an imprint of Blank Slate Press
Copyright © 2013 by Andrew Atherton
All rights reserved.
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Published in the United States by Treehouse Publishing Group, an imprint of Blank Slate Press. Visit www.blankslatepress.com to learn more.
Cover by Kristina Blank Makansi
ISBN: 978-0-9892079-2-8
For my wife
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The greatest sacrifice a soldier can make is not his arm or leg, or even his life. It’s his soul. His spirit. His hope and belief in himself and humanity, and the possibility of justice. Damage to the spirit occurs at its worst among combat troops. But it’s not limited to them. It can happen to rear echelon troops, too.
The vast majority of U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War—four fifths or more—served in support capacities in the rear echelon. Their stories, many of them fascinating, are seldom told. Perhaps this collection will help correct that oversight.
I wrote these stories many years ago under a pseydonym and fictionalized my experiences. I changed names and details of certain events, used composite characters in some instances, and invented dialogue where my memory, or conversations reported to me, were not word-for-word accurate. The letters to my wife are lightly edited from those she saved “in case you were killed.” But while protecting the anonymity of myself and the soldiers with whom I served, my intent was to leave the reader with as accurate an account as possible of the nature of my Vietnam experiences and how they affected me.
Over the years I've rewritten and polished most of these stories, but their content and plot lines remain basically the same as they were back in 1969 and 1970.
If you wish to write to me, my email address is:
andrewatherton1969@gmail.com.
For definitions of military terms and abbreviations, see the glossary. You will also find discussion questions at the end of the book.
Table of Contents
DRAFTED AUTHOR'S NOTE
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: BECOMING A SOLDIER
BASIC TRAINING
THE DRAFT NOTICE
PRIVATE DUCHEK
I AM A MAN
KENTUCKY DIRT
LOST IN THE WOODS
ADVANCED INDIVIDUAL TRAINING
I AIN'T COMIN' BACK LIKE THAT
LAND MINE COURSE
THE FLIGHT TO WAR
PART TWO: VIETNAM
INCOUNTRY
UGLY TRUTH, UGLY JUSTICE
BRONZE STARS & PURPLE HEARTS
DE-DRUMMING
R & R
PERILOUS FOUNDATIONS
INTERVENTION
KP WITH BRUNO, TWEEZE, & BERRY
RIDING HIGH WITH MANGUS
GOING OUT IN TRUCKS
PURE DUMB LUCK
RALPH MANTIS
ROVING GUARD
JIMMY BEAMIS
SNAPSHOT
GETTING OUT AND GOING HOME
GLOSSARY
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
Turns out I’m not humping in the boonies. I’m not using my infantry training, or guarding truck drivers, or scrambling down tunnels looking for VC or even digging ditches. Instead, I’m pushing paper as a clerk in the headquarters office of the 182nd Engineer Battalion at Cu Chi.
If I’d known five months ago I’d end up wielding white-out behind a desk instead of my M16 behind enemy lines, I would have danced in circles, waved my hands in the air, and lit burnt offerings to every deity I could name. Especially Major Roberts.
When I arrived incountry my MOS was Eleven Bravo, meaning I was trained as an infantryman. What a damned farce that was. I wasn’t even good at pretending to be a grunt in Basic and AIT. I’m not joking. I was fully persuaded I wouldn’t return to the States in one piece, if at all. In fact, before I left, I almost told my wife to find another guy, because if I wasn’t killed in Nam and I woke up in a hospital without an arm or a leg, I’d blow my brains out. I saw half-bodied men in Madigan Army Medical Center when I got pneumonia in AIT, and I swore I’d never come back like that. So stop loving me, I almost told her, and shack up with somebody who’ll stay around for the long haul.
Now I’m glad I didn’t tell her that. Of course I could still get my nuts blown off from a mortar round in Base Camp or a land mine on the road when I’m covering a story, but the percentages are a lot better than humping in the boonies.
For the first couple of weeks, I was assigned to perimeter guard duty on Long Binh Base Camp. That was a holding pattern for me and a bunch of other Eleven Bravos. Then thirty of us got reassigned to the 182nd Engineer Battalion here at Cu Chi. Why? Nobody knows. But not knowing in the Army isn’t unique. Nobody in the Army knows squat about shit. But in this case you can do a little figuring once you know a little more about the way the Army works.
We newbie grunts were parked for seven weeks in the 182nd because some brass-assed tidy-butt wanted to wait until enough men were killed and injured in the 101st Airborne Division so he could assign thirty hunks of fresh meat, clean and neat, without overloading the 101st Airborne Division’s reserves. We were the fresh meat he didn’t want clogging up the books.
Anyway, during our processing into the battalion, a personnel clerk was looking through my records and saw I had a college education. He walked into the processing room where I was sitting with the other don’t-wanna-be grunts.
Now this is how it was. We were scared shitless. We didn’t know what to expect. We were praying to be guards for truck drivers and asphalt pavers. We’d have been happy digging ditches. Anything’s better than humping the boonies.
So this clerk walks up to me all crisp and clean and smelling of Old Spice. “You wanna work in battalion headquarters? You got a college education according to this.” He waved my personnel file in my face.
I looked around at the other Eleven Bravos sitting at the tables where we’d filled out all those forms. They looked at me like I was a can of piss they had to drink.
Their reaction was to hearing I had a college education, not to the question of whether I wanted to be a clerk. Nobody took that question seriously. It was a joke played on naïve cocksuckers who think their fancy degrees entitle them to safe clerical jobs.
The ones lucky enough to get those safe jobs are called Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers by the grunts. REMFs for short. They’re held in high contempt even by the men on road paving crews who are constantly exposed to potential danger. In return, a lot of clerks get mean and cocky with the grunts and paving crew members and any other kind of “field worker.”
So, anyway, the other newbie grunts sat there, disgusted by the clerk’s privileged smell, and waited for me to lunge for the bait to be just like him—but surprise, surprise—I’d be assigned by this mean-assed cocky clerk to clean shit cans every day, even Sundays, and the grunts would laugh themselves silly. So there was only one answer I could give this loud-talking, sweet-smelling jerk that might save me a place at the table.
“Fuck you, asshole. I’m not grabbing no shit end of a stick.”
“No, no, man, this isn’t a joke.”
The clerk edged me over and sat down beside me, his voice low and confidential. “Our battalion awards clerk in S-1 DEROSED last week, and the colonel says we gotta fill this position ASAP. So if you can read and type and maybe write a little, you’ve got the job. You want it or not?”
I didn’t know what an awards clerk did or what “DEROSED” meant or where S-1 was, but I took a chance and whispered, “Yeah, I want it.”
The clerk confirmed his offer by whisking me out of the room and taking me down the hall to S-1, the battalion headquarters office. He introduced me to the other S-1 clerks, as well as to Adjutant Harris and the XO, Major Roberts, who happened to be in the clerical office at the time.
Since that day I’ve made myself invaluable to the adjutant, the major, and the colonel by editing and typing award citations, letters, memos, or anything else they give me. At first I typed word-for-word what they wrote in longhand and then I typed an edited version of my own. I submitted both, but it was my edited version they always selected. Now I just submit the edited version.
Understand, I’m not the only clerk in S-1 who does this for the top brass. The legal clerk is a dickhead, but he’s real brainy and a fast typist, and he edits everything he types, too. Apparently there aren’t many of us around here who can read, write, type, and even think at the same time. So when the brass find guys like us, they send the other men out to be killed and save us so they don’t have to write and type their own letters, legal briefs, and newspapers.
Mind you, I’m not just a run of the mill clerk. I’m also the editor of the battalion newspaper—The Road Paver—except I don’t know shit about paving roads.
That’s why Colonel Hackett likes my articles so much. I’m so ignorant I write only the basics they spoon-feed me, which is what the folks back home like to read when they get their monthly twelve pages of mimeographed propaganda our men—their sons and husbands—mail to them.
Hackett’s no dummy. Once he realized I was doing good work as the new awards clerk, and I asked reasonable questions and could write up the answers, he assigned me as editor of The Road Paver, which hadn’t been published in eight months.
That plum came with another cut to my integrity, what little I had left. Hackett had me standing at his desk in his air-conditioned office when he laid out my options.
“Specialist Atherton, in addition to being awards clerk, you are now the editor and sole reporter of The Road Paver, our battalion newspaper. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Sir, and I consider it a—”
“But if you’d rather do your shitting over a cat hole you’ve dug in the boonies, then publish anything that says one goddamned negative thing about this battalion or any man in this battalion and you’ll be out in the razor grass with the bloodsuckers faster than you can whistle Dixie while wiping your ass in one of our six-hole shitters.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Good. We understand each other. You’re dismissed.”
He must have scared the shit out of Major Roberts, too. Roberts previews every article I write. I’m always editing something he thinks might be negatively interpreted. We don’t “repair” anything, for example. We “improve” stuff with innovative designs, unless the repairs are needed because of damage caused by the VC. Then I lock and load my adjectives on the VC.
I want to be clear about one thing, though. I’m proud of what the men in my battalion are doing. These guys are working their asses off.
The 182nd paved the Cu Chi airfield and the roads to Trang Bang and Tay Ninh, and now we’re paving fifty klicks from Lai Khe to An Loc in the midst of sniper fire and land mines and ambushes here and there along that goddamned road all day long. We’re talking quality work these men are doing, most times twelve and sometimes sixteen hours a day, and it’s dangerous as all hell. Maybe not as dangerous as being a grunt in the boonies, but it’s a helluva lot more dangerous than what I do, which is sitting on my ass in the battalion headquarters office typing memos, articles, and letters.
Four weeks after I started working in S-1, Jerry Maener, my new buddy in Personnel, strolled over to the office and told me my records no longer stated I was trained as an infantryman. I’m now trained, according to my 201 personnel file, as a clerk/typist.
“You’re shittin’ me! No, wait a minute. Don’t kid me like that. That’s not—”
“Go look for yourself.”
I jogged over to personnel. I asked for my file. All the clerks were grinning but no one said a word. And there it was. “MOS: CLK 71B30.”
Jerry said that “correction”—literally a white-out over-type—took place by unofficial directive from Major Roberts.
Three weeks later an order came down from higher headquarters assigning all Eleven Bravos in our battalion to the 101st Airborne Division, an outfit that’s famous for combat operations. Within two days, the other twenty-nine guys I’d left behind in the processing room that day were humping in the boonies, and I was still here, safe and sound. I even come back in the office late at night and write letters home—typed ones—and write stories for myself like this one. Or polish articles for The Road Paver.
I’m very, very fortunate.
So far.
I say so far just in case my luck turns sour and I’m blown away before I leave this friggin’ country. I’m writing this smack-dab in the middle of 1969. Why is that important? Because we’re still in the jungle and ain’t nobody knows how we’re gettin' out unless we’re talking about each man’s tour when he shouts out the door of the Silver Bird of Paradise, “I’ll write you sorry bastards as soon as I get home!”
What I’m saying is this: things aren’t going well over here. Don’t make no never mind what the big brass tell the press back home, because we flat out don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.
Nobody has a clue.
Sometimes it’s even hard to remember how I got here.
PART ONE: BECOMING A SOLDIER
BASIC TRAINING
Fort Campell, Kentucky
Tuesday, Aug. 27, 1968
Dear Janice:
I miss you. I’m lonely.
I’m doing okay with the physical training. I’m having a tough time with the push-ups and pull-ups, but I’m not dropping out of our morning and afternoon runs as I feared I might.
So far I’ve met nobody with a college education or anything close to it, nobody with whom I can talk and share my misgivings. In fact, many of the men here don’t have high school diplomas. Some were forced into the Army by court judges as an alternative to trial and jail because they were accused of vandalism, rape or some other crime. I feel like I’m over my head in polluted water and wonder how long I can hold my breath.
I love you and think about you constantly….
Love, Andrew
Thursday, Aug. 29, 1968
Dear Janice:
I am sick and tired of hearing people talk about killing and how tough everybody is. Selfishness and hatefulness are expressed in everything everyone does around here.
I have never been with so many ignorant people in my life. Sex and sports. That’s the range of topics we discuss while we clean the latrine. Oh, and two other topics: the weather and our training.
Every meal I’ve eaten I’ve downed in less than five minutes. More like two. While we’re eating the drill sergeants (DIs) walk around yelling at us.
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Get that food in your fucking mouth and get your fat asses outside.”
I’m thoroughly disgusted by it all. It’s a nightmare.
I think of you every spare moment they give us, and that’s not many. Trainees—all of us—are scared, exhausted, and mentally off balance from the time we get up at 4:00 am in the morning until lights out at 9:00 pm. Drill sergeants are yelling at us and intimidating us all the time.
But I can tell you I miss your touch. I miss your kindness. Your thoughtfulness.
They just turned the lights out in the barracks. The drill sergeant will be furious with me in the morning. I spent time writing this letter and didn’t have enough time to finish polishing my boots.
Love, Andrew
THE DRAFT NOTICE
On the morning of August 19, I got up early and shaved off my beard. Janice drove me to the outer gates of the Detroit Induction Center with my paper bag of toiletries, two changes of underwear, two pairs of socks, two pipes and a pouch of tobacco, a copy of my birth certificate, and my draft notice. We kissed. I told her I loved her and kissed her again.
My draft notice had arrived in the mail shortly after the Tet Offensive and right before I graduated from college. It was 1968 and I was six months shy of turning twenty-six, the cutoff for the draft. When I reported to Basic Training, I was seven years older than most of the other draftees, a college graduate with a degree in philosophy and a minor in English and American literature, and I had been married for two years.
I was so much older than the other men in my unit because I’d had three bouts of rheumatic fever when I was a kid and ended up missing so much school I didn’t graduate high school until I was twenty. The fever caused no detectable heart damage and the doctor didn’t save my medical records, so I couldn’t even try to use my medical records as an out. I was older than most draftees, but I was medically fit for combat.
I’d also used my college deferment to stay in school until I was twenty-six. I wasn’t trying to evade the draft. I was trying to decide what career I wanted and what education I needed. The long and short of it was that I was the last guy Uncle Sam should have wanted on the front lines of any war. But the draft board wasn’t interested in what I thought.