III
Robert Alan Christoffersen
On June 16, 1953, Sara gave birth to her first and only child, Robert Alan Christoffersen. A week after my birth, my father lost his job after a scuffle involving the store owner’s son. He took a brief stint as a bouncer at a bar, then found more steady work as a truck driver for the Vail Truck Line. His new profession provided a steady income, though it took him all across the country. He was home only three weekends a month.
I remember my mother as a lonely but dutiful wife and mother who devoted most of her time to raising me. On the weekends that Peter was home he drank heavily, and Mom waited on him hand and foot, eager to please him.
I never really knew my father. It seemed he had little interest in me. I learned, at a young age, that if I asked him about the war, he was eager to talk, so I would think up questions to ask him.
Though my father was often harsh and aloof, he was not abusive. The only time he ever struck me I likely deserved it, as I was a teenager and I had taken some money from his wallet without asking.
The money he made driving was sufficient for our needs, and I never felt deprived like some of the other children in our neighborhood did. During the summer of my fourteenth birthday, we moved to a better neighborhood in the suburban area of Lakewood. I attended Lakewood High School, where I played forward on the school’s varsity basketball team. My senior year I played on the team that placed third in state, the farthest our school had ever progressed in the tournament.
I had always been a little shy around the opposite sex, but, beginning in my sophomore year of high school, I dated several girls. My first real girlfriend was Jodi Reynolds. She was a pretty blond girl and was the first attendant at the sophomore “sock hop” prom. Then, halfway through my junior year, I fell in love with a girl named Kate Mitchell, a beautiful brunette who looked a little like a combination of a young Audrey Hepburn and Annette Funicello. We got along well, and my heart was broken that summer when her father took a job in Phoenix and she moved out of state with her family. We wrote for a few months, but once September came we both found ourselves swept into life at school and eventually met others.
During these years, it was important to my father that I work. I had a job at a hot dog stand called Der Wienerschnitzel, and then at Peck & Shaw, a used car dealership where I detailed cars before they went on the lot to be sold. It was a volatile time in the world, a time of social unrest and protests, much of it over the war in Vietnam. In 1969, during my junior year, the first draft lottery since World War II was initiated. A year later, four students were killed in a protest at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. My father was a vocal critic of “the hippies,” and the back window of our station wagon bore a decal that read:
AMERICA.
* * *
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.
I suppose that was why I offered no resistance when my draft notice arrived a week after my high school graduation in June 1971. While some of my high school friends were burning their draft cards or relocating to Canada, I reported to basic training in Fort Lewis, just south of the Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington, not far from where my grandfather had lived during the Depression.
The transformation from civilian to soldier is a fascinating, if not painful process. On the first day everyone arrives with the accoutrements of their own class and social caste. The military is the great equalizer. At the end of the day, we all had the same haircut, our clothing was the same, and our status was equally lowly. Our pay matched our status: we were paid seventy-five dollars a month to risk our lives. For some it was the most money they had ever seen.
During my sixth week in basic training I was called in by my sergeant and told that my father had died. I was in shock. I was told that I could take a hardship leave, but it would have meant starting all over again with a different group. At that moment I realized that I had, in part, gone into the war to win my father’s approval. Now he was gone. I called my mother, and she agreed I should stay.
After eight weeks we were given our MOS—military occupational specialty. This is when each of us should have received an assignment that matched our individual skill set, but at that point in the war they were sending everyone they could to infantry. One member of our group raised his hand and said he spoke Chinese. The captain said, “We don’t care, soldier. We need bodies.”
They needed soldiers in the jungle. I was classified 11B. The B stands for “Bravo,” but the veterans just say it stands for “bush.” There was no way around it: we were all going to see combat, up close and personal.
From basic training we were sent to AIT—advanced infantry training. Jungle training. Same discipline and drilling as basic training, but more classes. We had to take apart our rifles and put them back together in sixty seconds—blindfolded. We learned how to throw grenades, dig foxholes, fire and service a .50-caliber machine gun, and set up ambushes or establish a perimeter with M18 Claymore mines. Most of all, we learned how to move as a platoon.
After we completed AIT we were given another test. I must have scored high, because that afternoon a colonel called me in and told me he thought I was NCO (noncommissioned officer) material. He told me I’d make more money and get to lead some people. I said it sounded good to me. He wanted to send me to Fort Benning in Georgia for NCO school but first wanted me to extend my service a year.
I had no desire to make the military my life, so I said no to the extension. They sent me to NCO school anyway. I guess they were short on leaders. NCO school lasted a couple of months, and although I’d only been in the military for a total of five months, I came out the same rank as my drill sergeant, who had served for six years.
During our second week in NCO our orders came to report to Fort Carson in preparation for being sent to Vietnam. Fort Carson is located near Colorado Springs, just a couple of hours from my home in Denver.
As I prepared to go, I was presented with another opportunity. I was called in and asked to go to OCS (officer candidate school) at Fort Benning. Again I was asked to extend my time in the army, and again I turned them down. Again, they sent me anyway.
In OCS I was trained to lead. I learned how to read maps and was taught communication and leadership skills. I would graduate as a second lieutenant—the rank of a platoon leader—and I would be calling the shots in the bush. I was in OCS for fourteen weeks, and at the end of the training I was sent back to Colorado to await my combat orders.
While I was there I saw my mother twice. She was handling the death of my father better than I had expected. She told me that my father had been gone so much that a part of her just felt he was still out on the road.
The second time I went to see her was two days before I was to fly to Vietnam. The reality that it might be the last time she saw her son was difficult for her to bear. She broke down as I started to go and she told me to “be careful,” which was like telling a surfer not to get wet. I told her that I would do my best.
On February 7, 1972, about two hundred of us were sent by military transport from Denver to San Diego, where we boarded a TWA airliner to fly to Vietnam. We were flown into the base at Long Binh, about thirty-three kilometers from Saigon. Long Binh was the largest US Army base in Vietnam, with more than fifty thousand men and women.
We arrived at night, and after we landed the lights in the airport and on the plane were all turned off, keeping us from being an easy target for mortars and rockets.
I’ll never forget stepping from the plane. Even at night the hot, wet air hit me like a blast furnace. I had never before experienced such humidity. Or such uncertainty. I briefly wondered what my father would think of where I was, or if I felt the same emotions he had on D-Day, but I quickly dismissed the thoughts. My father’s opinions had become irrelevant—not just because of his death, but because my new circumstances demanded it.
Just as oppressive as the humidity was the country’s smell. The jungle is thick and wet, a massive, living compost that fills the air with
heat and the stench of decay.
We were immediately taken to bunkers to sleep. That night we came under mortar and rocket fire, and most of us newbies stayed up expecting an attack until one of the MPs asked us why we weren’t sleeping. When we told him he laughed. He said this was just the Vietcong welcoming us to Nam.
Early the next morning we were rushed out onto a large, fenced-in field to be given our assignments. An officer with a bullhorn addressed us with a greeting I’ll never forget.
He said, “Welcome to Vietnam. This will likely be the most interesting year of your life. Some of you will go home. Some of you won’t. Try to be one of those who goes home.”
Then he walked around shouting out our assignments. The parceling took about an hour. I didn’t have to wait long before he shouted, “Christoffersen, First Cavalry.”
The 1st Cavalry was an air-mobile unit, meaning we were flown into combat by helicopters. As we walked to our assignments, we passed soldiers going home. They were on the other side of a chain-link fence, and most of them were pretty ragged looking. One of the soldiers came up next to the fence and waved us over. “Hey, newbies.”
Me and two others walked up to him.
“If I were you,” he said, “I’d kill myself right now.”
The first month in the jungle is the most critical for survival, because you don’t know what you don’t know. I was there to take over for a platoon leader who had just three weeks left. I had to learn fast. I was fortunate to have a new best friend, a Chinese-Cambodian man named Tac Fuhn. He was what the army called a Kit Carson Scout, but he was really just a mercenary and was paid for every VC we killed. I asked him why he worked for us instead of the North Vietnamese. He replied, “The Americans pay more.” Every day I was glad he was on our side.
My first firefight came after two weeks in the bush. We walked into a clearing and saw four VC in their black pajama-like uniforms. Both sides were equally surprised, and we both fired. I shot off about thirty rounds. I told Fuhn that I thought I got one of them. He laughed and said, “Only if he was hanging from the top of the tree.”
I had wondered if, when the time came, I would be able to shoot another man. I discovered that, when someone’s shooting at you, it’s pretty easy to shoot back. I was fortunate that my first encounter with the enemy was just a few VC and not an ambush with a dug-in army.
Pasted in the book was a picture of my father I had never seen before. He was fifteen years younger in the picture than I was now. This was not an image of the staid accountant I knew. My father was an action figure.
I spent the next ten months in the bush. We became soldiers. Tough. Confident. Skilled. We learned to remain calm under fire. My biggest fear wasn’t death, it was being captured or, worse, losing one of my men. I have heard that new mothers have dreams about losing their babies. Sometimes I had dreams about losing one of my men. There’s a bonding that takes place that only someone under such duress can understand.
Everyone had a nickname: Val, Slim, Abe, Sparky, Willy-boy, Wailin’ Wagers, Forkey, and Flash. My men just called me L.T. or Lieutenant, though after a few months some took to calling me Lucky, since I never got hit in battle.
In some ways, I knew my men better than their own mothers knew them; when a man faces mortality, you see who he really is. I learned that, in the face of death, these men I commanded would come through for me. I loved them, and I discovered that I worried about them more than I worried about myself. I’m proud to say that I only lost one of them, though by the end of my deployment, most of them had been wounded.
The Vietnamese were deadly opponents, and every firefight reminded us of that. The VC created remarkable underground bunker complexes. I remember Tac Fuhn saying to me, “We are close to a bunker.” I said, “Where?” He pointed to the ground and said, “We are standing on it. See the airhole?”
There is one firefight that stands out to me more than the others. We had stumbled upon a huge VC complex. We were extremely outnumbered and taking a lot of fire. I called in a B-52 strike. By the time the planes arrived, most of the enemy had scattered into the jungle, disappearing like sand through our fingers.
Following a major firefight we were required to report a body count, so after the ground was secure and our wounded cared for, we patrolled the compound for dead VC. There was one casualty I’ll never forget. As I approached the still body of a dead soldier I found that she was a woman and pregnant. Her eyes were wide open, and her hand was on her stomach. There were two bullets through her throat, one through her forehead, and one through her abdomen. I don’t know what she was doing in combat, but she had been carrying a gun, which made her a justifiable target.
Justifiable or not, I dreamed about the woman many times. Her wide, lifeless eyes would suddenly blink and she would stare at me, her face distorted with fear and hatred. Then she would ask, “Why?”
The environment itself seemed to be our enemy. I arrived in Nam during the monsoon season, and coming from Colorado I had never seen anything like it. Rain would fall, uninterrupted, for weeks on end. We were always wet. We didn’t wear socks, as they would only cause fungus to grow. There were times we went more than a week without being dry.
There were also snakes. There was a particularly nasty little green pit viper, with bright red eyes, that hung from trees. They were hard to see and I had a few snap at me as I brushed by. They posed enough of a danger that our medics carried antivenom for them. One of our guys was bit, and even with the antivenom it was several days before he was himself again.
Maybe the most annoying of Nam’s creatures were the leeches. One morning one of my men woke with a leech on his eyelid. By the time we got it off, his eye was pretty messed up. We wore leech garters to keep them from climbing up to the soft tissue of our crotches.
IV
Coming Home
I had been in the jungle for nearly ten months when our platoon was engaged in our largest firefight. Twenty-two of my thirty men were injured and had to be medevaced out. With most of my men out of commission, I was brought back with them to Long Binh. I assumed I would be given a new platoon, something I wasn’t happy about.
While waiting for my orders in Long Binh, I was informed by my commander that my request for an early release to attend college had been granted. I was done. The war was over for me. Two days later it was me walking on the other side of the fence watching as frightened newbies lined up to take their assignments. As the plane lifted, everyone on board spontaneously broke into applause.
We flew into the Oakland airport, and I kissed the tarmac as I got off. We were taken to a big hangar to be processed out. It took three days for me to be released.
I was still in my uniform as I flew from Oakland to Denver. I didn’t see what some returning Vietnam veterans reported—angry, jeering crowds calling us “baby killers” or spitting on us. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, it just didn’t happen to me. My mother met me at the airport. It had been only eleven months since she’d sent me off from Fort Carson, but it felt like a lifetime. She had changed a lot since I’d seen her last. She had aged. Her hair was completely gray, and she seemed weary.
Just two weeks later I was a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, wearing bell-bottom jeans and a polyester disco shirt. Reentry into civilian life had its challenges, but having been in Vietnam gave my life context. I remember talking to a fellow student who was upset about our upcoming final. He said to me, “Why are you so calm? It’s half our grade!” I replied, “Because even if we fail, we’ll still be alive in the morning.”
Vietnam was the most controversial of conflicts, and even with my rank and decorations, I wondered if my father would have been proud of me. I discovered that there was a smugness to many of the older vets. Some of them seemed to believe that what they had done mattered and what we had done didn’t. No matter the rightness of the cause, we, like them, answered the call of our country. We felt the same fear, the same pain, and faced the same risks. But, unl
ike them, we came back not to ticker tape parades and celebrations but to a largely indifferent and ungrateful nation.
We had put our lives on the line for a war that had initially been popularly ratified by both the politicians and the people. We had risked our lives for their decisions, not ours, yet they hated us for it. But no matter the country’s schizophrenia, to me the war was more than a news story. It was a part of my life. And though it all seemed to have passed by like a dream, sometimes, in those dreams, I would still see the pregnant Vietnamese woman, her neck and forehead pierced, her dark eyes open, staring at me. And each time she would ask, “Why?”
CHAPTER
Thirteen
Wandering through just one paragraph of my father’s history has changed Key West for me more than walking a few thousand miles.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
Why didn’t I know any of this about my father?
It was past midnight when I set down the book. I suppose we as children are selfish by nature, judging our parents in the context not of their worlds and challenges but of our worlds and how they meet our needs. Even as we mature we rarely think of them as having been young like us.
Reading about my father, more than a decade younger than I was right now, leading a group of men through a murderous jungle, cast him in a different light. He was stronger and more courageous than I had ever given him credit for. He was better than me.
Of course I knew that my father had served in the war, but I’d never given it much thought. I certainly had never understood it from his perspective. The only time we had spoken about Vietnam was when my eighth-grade history class was studying the war and I asked my father if he knew anything about it—which was like asking the pope if he knew anything about Catholicism. Outside of that discussion, he never spoke of it. I didn’t think he was traumatized by the experience, but rather that he had moved past it, and chose not to be defined by it any more than any other experience in his life. Perhaps it had made him more serious, but, considering his father, I think he would have been a serious person whether he served in the war or not.
Walking on Water: A Novel Page 6
