by Miles Harvey
To operate this state-of-the-art system, the Army needed to seek out exceptionally bright soldiers. It found them among incoming troops who were given tests to determine their intelligence and technical aptitude. “It was the equivalent of the college boards for the military. And the higher scores would get into this field,” explained Bergen, who wrote Military Communications: A Test for Technology, a history of the corps in Vietnam.
Gilbert Bland apparently scored well enough on those tests to be offered the option of joining the Signal Corps and receiving advanced instruction after basic training. He accepted—perhaps because the offer was accompanied by an additional enticement. Joseph Zottarelli, Jr., who served in the same company as Bland, remembered getting “a lot of bullshit from the enrollment sergeants. You know, ‘Hey, take these [tests] and you won’t be going to Vietnam. You’ll probably be going to Germany.’ ” But once Zottarelli arrived at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey—the same place Bland received his electronics training—he quickly discovered that “most of all the equipment they were teaching us how to use was in Vietnam…. I think about 90 percent of the guys that graduated from signal school went over there.”
Bland was among them. His military records show that he arrived in Vietnam on May 4, 1969, for a one-year tour. He was a few months shy of his twentieth birthday. “They took guys over in commercial airlines,” remembered Zottarelli, who arrived several months after Bland. “And when you got off the plane, they said, ‘Hurry up and get off because the plane has to get off the ground.’ They didn’t want the plane to stay on the ground too long because it was taking mortar and rocket fire. So you got in country and you wondered, What the hell is going on?”
Bland could not have been happy to be there. But he must have known that most soldiers in Vietnam had far worse jobs. Assigned to the 361st Signal Battalion, he had as his official mailing address Qui Nhon, a once-small fishing town that U.S. forces had transformed into a bustling port city, complete with a naval station and military base—a burg of such wartime decadence that the mayor reportedly turned his official residence into a massage parlor for American soldiers.28 It’s unclear, however, whether Bland actually lived in Qui Nhon, or for how long. His records hint that he may have been reassigned to at least one other locale. This would not have been unusual for members of the 361st, who were spread out in small outposts, which provided communications links around the country. These “fixed station” sites usually consisted of two single-story prefabricated buildings filled with electronics equipment and surrounded by several large billboard or horn-shaped antennas. Some sites were located on the edges of huge military installations, others in more isolated areas. Either way it was not known as a particularly dangerous assignment.
“I really didn’t come under fire that often,” said Frank Dapuzzo, who served in the same company as Bland. “Occasionally, [the enemy] would lob in some rockets and some mortars—but believe me, there were a lot worse conditions than what I had to go through. Some of the people who really had to go through bad times there, they would look at us and say we were on the gravy train.”
Dapuzzo, like several other former members of the company with whom I spoke, has no memory of Bland—which may have less to do with the map thief’s inconspicuousness than with the unit being so spread out. Dapuzzo, for instance, was stationed at a Korean army base in Ninh Hoa and had little face-to-face contact with other members of the 361st. It’s a safe bet, however, that Bland’s day-in, day-out life in Vietnam did not differ much from that of the other members of the company. He worked as a fixed-station controller, a twelve-hour-on, twelve-hour-off assignment spent inside an air-conditioned building, in which the main enemy was likely to be boredom, not the Vietcong or North Vietnamese.
“The environment in the fixed stations in Vietnam by ’68 or ’69 was very civilized, at least on a base,” Bergen told me. “The big fixed stations where these controllers worked were in most cases attached to bases that had sidewalks, PXs, and swimming pools. It would be just like being on a base in the United States. Some of the fixed stations—on places like Monkey Mountain outside of Da Nang—would be more isolated. But even those places, though they wouldn’t have a PX or a swimming pool, would still have an environment with air-conditioned dormitories, safe water, generators, and all that kind of stuff The degree of danger in a job like that compared to an infantryman or a radio-telephone operator with an infantry unit was like night and day.”
Gerald Streett, another former member of Bland’s company, offered a similar perspective. “You got up; you ran your checks on your equipment; you did maintenance, things like cleaning up outside of the van; you did a daily calibration of your monitoring equipment. And that’s about it If you had to go to a combat zone, this was kind of a nice job to have. I can’t say they were fond memories, but there were one hell of a lot of worse places to be.”
In fact, said Streett, the enemy actually went out of its way not to fire on his communications site on the edge of an air base, Nha Trang—and for good reason. “We had these sixty-foot billboard antennas. They had red anticollision lights on them, and [the enemy] used those lights as a reference for firing on anyone else in that geographic area. We were at one end of the airfield—and, of course, Charlie knew enough about that base to say, ‘Okay, those lights are the 361st; if I go a quarter mile to the right I’m going to hit so-and-so; if I go an eighth of a mile to the left, I’m going to hit someone else.’ It wasn’t that they loved us, it was just that they thought, ‘Hey, these antennas are great!’ I mean, they were on twenty-four hours a day. So we were Charlie’s best friend.”
Nothing in Bland’s military record indicates that he saw any direct combat. His medals, for example, were all perfunctory, most of them indicating only that he passed certain skill tests. It seems unlikely that his war experience was the sort that would traumatize a soldier for the rest of his life.
Unlikely, yes, but not impossible, according to Don R. Catherall, a psychologist who serves as executive director of the Phoenix Institute in Chicago, a clinic specializing in treating victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. “There have been cases in which it has been accepted that people in Vietnam suffered traumatic stress even though they were not exposed to a discrete trauma, such as being shot or being shot at, or being in a particular combat action,” explained Catherall, himself a Vietnam vet. “The state of the entire countryside was such that it would be possible for a person to go through a noncombat tour there and still never feel safe. There was a lot of guerrilla activity that couldn’t be predicted, and of course there was terrorism going on. Even in the rear, where people didn’t carry weapons, there was the possibility of rocket attacks. So it is possible that some individuals remained in a state of heightened arousal, similar to what happens when somebody is actually exposed to a trauma, but that their state of arousal was primarily geared toward anticipating a possible trauma happening…. The heart of trauma is often a feeling of helplessness.”
And that feeling was not unfamiliar to other members of Bland’s company. “You’re not actively engaging the enemy, but yet you’re not in any position to run, either,” Gerald Streett said about working at the fixed-station sites.
In his book on the Signal Corps, John D. Bergen noted that life in the sites “held its own dangers and terrors,” many of which stemmed from working day after day “in the window-less confines of a building … and being unaware of what was happening outside.”29 Reading those words, it struck me how deathly claustrophobic it might have been for somebody trapped in one of those trailers, the war waiting somewhere in the unseen distance like a huge crimson-eyed beast. Fear of the unknown—is this not among the most ancient and awful of human horrors? Indeed, the scholar G. Malcolm Lewis has wondered whether it was the very thing that led to the invention of maps.30 For early humans, he wrote, mapping may have “served to achieve what in modern behavioral therapy is known as desensitization: lessening fear by the repeated representation of what is feared. Re
presenting supposedly dangerous terrae incognitae in map form as an extension of familiar territory may well have served to lessen fear of the peripheral world.”
It plagues us still, this dread of the dark beyond. “In some cases, the reaction is not to what’s outside, it’s to what you perceive to be outside,” explained Catherall, author of Back from the Brink: A Family Guide to Overcoming Traumatic Stress. So it’s at least possible that the war had a particularly strong impact on Bland. And, as his fellow soldier Joseph Zottarelli, Jr., observed, returning from Vietnam was tough on everyone, regardless of actual combat experience. “It kind of screws you up when you come back,” he said. “All the time you were over there, you kind of missed out on everything over here. And there were a lot of changes going on in the States. It took a long time to get back into things.”
One thing it did not take Gilbert Bland a long time to get back into, however, was trouble with the law. On October 20, 1970—less than six months after he had returned from Vietnam—he was arrested in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, for desertion from the Army. “We got a call of a suspicious vehicle in the orchards; in that era we had a lot of orchards,” remembered Woodcliff Lake Police Chief Richard Poliey, a patrolman at the time. “I was given that call. I checked it out and observed a white male who was later identified as Gilbert A. Bland.”
Poliey remembered Bland as being “kind of disheveled. He didn’t fit the profile for the area. I thought he was a drunk driver.” Upon discovering that the auto registration the suspect produced did not match his plates, Poliey ran Bland’s name through the National Crime Information Center. “I got a hit that he was a deserter from the military The MPs came and got him, and that was the end of that.”
Then as now, the maximum penalty for desertion was death. Such a punishment would have been extremely unlikely, given Bland’s circumstances and the political realities of the time. Nonetheless, he was, by all indications, in serious trouble. Instead of being sent back to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he had previously been posted, he was assigned to nearby Fort Dix. There, according to military records, he was put in a special detachment that Daniel Zimmerman, curator of the Fort Dix Museum, described as “an organizational unit … where people would have been assigned who were awaiting a court-martial or awaiting discharge or awaiting transfer to some other custody, say the local police. He would not have been confined to prison, but he would have been confined to the barracks.”
But that did not stop him from getting arrested again, on January 21, 1971, this time in his hometown of Ridgefield Park. According to police records, the charges—possession of burglary tools, failure to give good account, and trespassing on private property—stemmed from someone “trying all of the apartment doors” in a local building.31 He was found not guilty on those charges, but police records nonetheless indicate that he was AWOL at the time of his arrest. He was returned to Fort Dix, but some six months later, on July 6, 1971, the FBI arrested him for allegedly being AWOL once again. What happened next is something of a mystery. Bland’s military records show that at least part of his final six months in the military was spent in a “pre-trial confinement facility”—but those same records show that no court-martial trial ever took place. Perhaps it was just too much trouble to court-martial a soldier whose military career was almost over (though privacy laws prevent the military from revealing such information). Whatever the case, Gilbert Bland left the armed services for good on August 31, 1971, at the age of twenty-two, apparently having dodged major legal problems for the second time in his short life.
IN THE PATHFINDER’S DAY, MANY MAPS OF THE AMERICAN West contained something called the Rio Buenaventura, a huge waterway flowing from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. It was the latest incarnation of a centuries-old myth known as the Great River of the West. Like any unexplored territory, the region had been home to many marvelous places never actually seen but nonetheless thought to be real. There was Cíbola, described by one purported visitor as “a land rich in gold, silver, and other wealth,” with seven “great cities” whose residents were so prosperous that the women wore belts made of gold.32 There was Quivira, where, according to legend, common supper plates were made of gold and fish were as big as horses. And there was the land of the Madocians, a fair-skinned race thought to have descended from a Welsh prince whose reputed discovery of America in 1170 gave the British evidence that they had more claim to the continent than the Spanish. Like those places, the Great River of the West was the result more of desire than of reason. Ever since setting foot in North America, Europeans had fantasized about a waterway, or system of waterways, that would lead them neatly, safely, cheaply to the Pacific and the Orient beyond. “It must exist because it had to,” wrote the historian Bernard DeVoto of this Great River.33 “The logic of deduction from known things required it to, and so did the syllogism of dream—both on no grounds whatever. So it did exist in personal narratives and speculative treatises, in treaties and on maps, under various names, flowing in various directions.”
In 1776 a Franciscan friar named Silvestre Vélez de Escalante made a remarkable fifteen-hundred-mile trek through the Southwest, during which he crossed the site of the present-day Dinosaur National Monument between Colorado and Utah. There he came upon what is now known as the Green River. Escalante, however, gave it a different name: San Buenaventura. His cartographer, Bernardo de Miera, later placed this waterway on a map—but instead of making it head south, the direction in which the Green River actually flows, he sent it off southwesterly toward the sea. Miera never connected the Buenaventura to the Pacific, but the mapmakers who followed him were not so cautious. Before long, observed the author Carl I. Wheat, “it had become … a mighty stream, flowing, as befitted logic, into the San Francisco Bay or thereabout, and for many years even the most knowledgeable cartographers made this and other equally apocryphal streams flow westward from the central mountain range and from the Great Salt Lake to the Pacific.”34
By the spring of 1843, when John Charles Frémont launched his second big mapping expedition of the West, serious doubts had begun to emerge about whether there really was a Rio Buenaventura. The explorer Benjamin L. E. de Bonneville, for example, had returned from his extensive travels in the region claiming that no such body of water existed. Bonneville’s map of 1837, as well as those of former Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin in 1836 and Geographer to the House of Representatives David H. Burr in 1839, contained no Buenaventura, but the river remained intact on other popular maps of the period. In November 1843, having gone as far west as Fort Vancouver, near present-day Portland, the Pathfinder decided to put an end to the controversy once and for all. Instead of proceeding directly home along the Oregon Trail, he resolved to reroute his return trip to the south. He did this in large part, as he later explained, to make a final determination about “the existence of a great river flowing from the Rocky Mountains to the Bay of San Francisco.”35 It was a typically rash and dangerous move. On no one’s authority but his own, Frémont was leading his twenty-five men into a largely unknown wilderness just as winter set in. They wandered into the Sierra Nevada, expecting “with every stream … to see the great Buenaventura,” Frémont later wrote.36 The higher they climbed, the more it snowed. As always with the Pathfinder, disaster awaited.
Critics often cite the journey as proof of Frémont’s recklessness. His biographer Allan Nevins, for one, called it “appallingly foolhardy.”37 Yet reading about the episode, I couldn’t help but admire what the Pathfinder was trying to accomplish. At the time I was searching for my own waterway of sorts, a stream of events that coursed through more than twenty-five years of a man’s life. If I were to believe Bland’s lawyers, the Vietnam War had led to his crime spree just as surely as a great river flows to the sea. Bland’s critics, by contrast, argued that his claim of post-traumatic stress disorder was nothing more than a convenient fiction, the courtroom equivalent of the Rio Buenaventura. Neither side, however, offered me much in the way of evidence. And
so it was that I once again found myself following the Pathfinder’s lead, on a mission to separate reality from myth.
I made a lot of discoveries on that journey. In the Bahamas I found a map dealer named Jonathan Ramsay, who had worked closely with Bland and seemed to know him as well as anyone in the industry. “One thing he did talk about was the war in Vietnam,” Ramsay told me. “He had been over there and was quite affected by it. He didn’t really like having been sent over there and he didn’t really approve of the war and the way it was conducted. And he chatted a lot about his feelings about the Vietnam War and the people over there I can’t remember the details exactly, but I thought that he was teaching at one of the local schools. He had the opportunity to teach the Vietnamese kids in this town, wherever it was that he was stationed, and he said that that was one of the most rewarding parts of being in Vietnam. I can’t remember exactly what it was, a Catholic school or a government school for orphans or what. But he was obviously very moved by that. He felt that he was contributing something very positive.”
On the East Coast, I found one of Bland’s daughters by his first wife, Carol Ann Talt Bland, whom he married in 1971 and divorced in 1978. Heather Bland told me she’d never had much contact with her father. Still, she was able to recall an old family tale about his days in Vietnam.
