Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  It began only a week or so after our arrival, on the evening of Valentine's Day, when shortly before nine o'clock an explosion rocked the nearby Fort Dix Coffee House. A small brick building located not far from the camp, the coffeehouse was one of many organized near military installations around the country by antiwar activists. Its purpose was to provide not only a place for soldiers and their friends to congregate, but an opportunity to spread the truth about what was happening in Vietnam. Many of the coffeehouses were staffed by former military men, who were anxious to share their stories. The Fort Dix Coffee House had been the target of violence for some time. Its large glass windows had been smashed only a few weeks before, and soldiers were unofficially discouraged by base command from frequenting it. Being in the early stages of our training, we were ineligible for off-base activity anyway, so for myself, Andy, and the others, staying away from the establishment was not an issue, regardless of our opinions of its mission, which were varied and largely undiscussed. On the night of the explosion, we were recovering from a long day of training. Sleep, not Valentine's Day or the Fort Dix Coffee House, was foremost on our minds.

  We did, however, hear the explosion, which blew out the plywood that covered the coffeehouse's shattered windows. We heard, too, the sirens of the fire trucks that arrived minutes later. But it wasn't until the next day that we learned what had happened, that someone had tossed what appeared to be a

  "power bomb"—an army-issue training grenade—through the door of the coffee house. Packed as the place was with GIs and their dates, it was only sheer luck that no one was killed and only a few wounded.

  New as we were to the army, many of us were still in the throes of first love. Andy, in particular, denounced the organizers of the coffeehouse as cowards and traitors. "I hope those fucking Commies learned a lesson," he said that night at mess, earning nods of agreement from many in both our and surrounding squads.

  I feel the need to point out that we were not stupid. Yes, many of the draftees were there because they had been unable to attend college, either for financial or academic reasons. And we were young. But many of us—I would argue most—were capable of independent and at least somewhat nuanced thought, and for us the bombing raised questions, some of which we'd already considered and some which were new. This questioning was intensified a few weeks later, in early March, when there appeared around Fort Dix copies of Shakedown , an underground antiwar newspaper allegedly written and produced by soldiers from the base and nearby McGuire Air Force Base with the help of civilian sympathizers. The cover of the March 6 issue, a typed-up and mimeographed affair, featured a photograph of the bombed-out coffeehouse with the headline FT .DIX COFFEE -HOUSE BOMBED…CLOSED BUT

  THE MOVEMENT GOES ON. The accompanying article decried the attack and provided additional details, including the charge that two men had been seen running from the scene and that rifle shots had been fired at patrons fleeing the explosion. Additional articles criticized the war in general, urging those of us still in training to recognize the barbarousness of what was happening in Vietnam and to protest our own treatment at the hands of the military establishment. Afraid to be seen reading the paper, I took a copy and hid it beneath my shirt. I read it later in the latrine, the only place I could get even a few minutes alone, then flushed it, page by page, down the toilet, lest I be discovered and accused of insubordination. Years later, I came across that issue of Shakedown at a flea market in San Francisco, for sale by an old hippie who had collected all kinds of antiwar propaganda and now was making a living selling it off piece by piece. Today it hangs over the desk in my office at the college, where I frequently look at it and remember what it was like to sit in that freezing cold bathroom, wrestling with the philosophy of war while outside the stall door my platoon mates celebrated a successful run through the camp's obstacle course. If you had asked me then if I was prowar, I would have answered yes. Now, having had a few years during which to think about it, I might clarify and say that I was antiwar but pro-Vietnam, by which I mean that although I found the idea of warfare itself distasteful and inherently repellent, I believed that what we were doing in Vietnam was right inasmuch as we were trying to keep a hostile force from overcoming our allies. In addition to seeing my involvement in the war as an adventure and a quest, I quickly came to see it also as a mission of honor. Perhaps instinctively I needed to do so in order to spare myself some of the mental anguish I suspected was due to befall me. Or perhaps I was merely impressionable.

  In any case, there was little time for doubting my purpose or anything else. I did what I was told, and by the middle of April and the end of BCT, I was ready to move forward. Having survived basic training, we were now ready for what the army refers to as "Advanced Individual Training." AIT is where soldiers learn the specialized skills needed for whatever job they or, more likely, their superiors think best suits them.

  There was more than a little nervousness the day we learned what our AIT destinations were. For the unlucky, or those who for their own reasons volunteered, it meant more time at Fort Dix learning advanced infantry tactics. This was an almost guaranteed ticket straight to the battle zone, where a soldier's chances of coming home dead or damaged rose considerably. For the rest of us, our futures were less certain but probably safer. Many of us would eventually end up in Southeast Asia, but most likely in less hazardous positions than the infantrymen, who had earned their designation as cannon fodder by amassing more casualties than all other military units combined. When I emerged from my company commander's office following my meeting, I found Andy waiting for me. "What'd you get?" he asked.

  "Quartermaster training," I told him. "Fort Lee. How about you?"

  "Helo mechanic," he told me. "I guess knowing how to fix all that farm machinery finally paid off." "Congratulations," I said, knowing he'd been hoping for helicopter training all along. "Where?" "Fort Eustis," he said.

  "Right down the road from me," I said. "Maybe we'll see each other."

  He nodded, clearly more interested in his AIT assignment than in our proximity to one another. I had mixed feelings about it myself. I was still undeniably attracted to Andy, although more and more I'd come to see him as someone who needed looking after. I'd had my fill of that with Jack. Plus, given Andy's apparent disinterest in continuing our sexual encounters (he hadn't approached me once in our ten weeks at Fort Dix, although admittedly this may have had more to do with the lack of both time and privacy than an abatement of desire), I saw no reason to encourage him. It was, I thought, a good time to make a clean break.

  Graduation was attended by my parents. My mother looked drawn and tired, but she hugged me enthusiastically, and when she said she was proud of me, I believed her. My father actually saluted me, a gesture I returned before joking, "I expect you to call me ‘sir' from now on."

  As they were leaving, I broke a promise to myself and asked about Jack. My mother struck her forehead with her fingertips. "I almost forgot," she said, opening her purse. "He sent a letter for you."

  I read it later, sitting alone on one of the massive log hurdles in the middle of the now-empty obstacle course. It was written in Jack's familiar, slanted scrawl on a single piece of lined paper, the edges ragged where he'd torn it from a notebook, as if he'd been in a hurry to send it and hadn't had time to find either a typewriter or stationery. I smoothed it out and read it as the spring sun was setting. Dear Ned:

  Congratulations on finishing basic training. I bet it was pretty tough. I still can't believe you're a soldier. Things are good here. Believe it or not, I like my classes, and the other guys are great. I don't really know why you joined the Army. I hope it wasn't because you thought you had to take my place. I just couldn't go. I hope you understand that. I know you will, because you know me better than anyone else.

  Take care of yourself, and don't get hurt or anything. I wouldn't be able to handle it if you did. Jack I folded the letter and stuck it in my jacket pocket. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to feel, or
what Jack wanted me to feel. His letter seemed more like an excuse a child would bring to his teacher to explain a missed day of school than it did an apology or a simple good-luck wish. It was as if he wanted me to forgive him for a trespass he couldn't even name. His remark about not being able to go irked me. No, I didn't understand it. Being afraid, I could understand. Not facing that fear, I couldn't. Especially not from Jack. Our whole lives, he'd been the one to jump first, accept the dare, risk injury and embarrassment without hesitation. But now I was the one wearing a uniform and facing an uncertain future, while he remained safe behind the seminary walls. I was angry at him, too, for thinking that I might have done what I'd done to make up for his actions. Did he really, I wondered, think we were seven years old and I was still covering his mistakes? Was it truly impossible for him to imagine that I might have made my choice based on my need to do something for myself? Despite his feeble attempt at expressing concern for my well-being, he had succeeded only in revealing further his own guilty conscience and his continuing belief that everything in the world was somehow concerned with him. He was the same old Jack.

  I, however, had changed. During those ten weeks of training I had, bit by bit, discarded many of my old perceptions, allowing them to fall away as I marched doggedly through snow and rain and leaving them to be trampled into the mud by the boots of the men behind me. I still wasn't sure who I was, but I had started to know who I wasn't. I was no longer the boy who trailed along in Jack's shadow. I did not see him as a hero to be admired and defended. Even my physical desire for him had died, replaced by something more like pity, or perhaps disdain. His letter only served to prove to me that I was right in seeing him this way.

  As I watched the sun go down, turning the muddy field a dirty orange, I said good-bye not only to Fort Dix, but also to Jack. In the morning I would board a bus for Virginia and Fort Lee. After that, I didn't know. What I did know was that I had bested Jack in the ultimate competition. I was, I told myself, a better man than he was, and that thought made me very happy.

  CHAPTER 24

  "Welcome to the Republic of South Vietnam, gentlemen." The voice that came through the Pan Am 707's speakers woke me from a restless sleep. Except for refueling stops in Anchorage and Tokyo, we'd been on the plane for almost twenty-two hours since taking off from Travis Air Force Base in California. Most of that time I'd been awake, my mind racing from one thought to another as I tried to prepare myself for actually being in-country. I'd spent the winter and spring getting ready, but the minute I'd received my orders to report to Vietnam, I'd felt as if I was back at my first day in basic.

  After seven uneventful weeks of AIT at Fort Lee's Quartermaster school, I was now Private First Class Brummel, Military Occupation Specialty (MOS) 76Y, Unit Supply Specialist. All of that is a fancy way of saying that I was trained in the receipt, inspection, organization, and issue of supplies and equipment. But nothing is simple in the army, and so, like every other soldier, I'd been assigned a lengthy designation to explain the fairly straightforward work I was trained for. "What's your MOS?" was a frequently-asked first question when meeting another grunt, much like "What's your sign?" in a pickup bar. It's how we identified one another. Your MOS was a clue not only to your skills, but to your suitability for friendship and even your likelihood of survival. Finding out a man was 11B, for instance, the army's code for a generic rifle-toting infantryman, let you know not to get too close, as chances were high that he wouldn't see the end of the war.

  There was nothing glamorous about being a 76Y, but we were an integral part of army life. Part of the Quartermaster Corps, we were the guys everyone came to when they wanted anything, from toilet paper to small arms and ammunition, blankets for their beds to dog food for the canine patrols. I'd been steered toward quartermaster training based on my above-average performance on memorization tests and demonstrations of organizational ability during BCT, and also, I suspected, because I'd scored near the bottom of my unit in marksmanship. As one drill instructor said after watching me barely pass my required shooting test, "Don't worry, Brummel. If you can't hit the enemy, at least you'll knock the leaves off the tree he's hiding behind."

  As the plane descended, I looked out the window and tried to get a glimpse of Vietnam. It was early morning, dawn a blush of orange and pink, and the glare off the wing blinded me. Then we fell through a bank of clouds and I was looking at what seemed like a checkerboard of green, the ubiquitous rice paddies I'd seen in numerous photos. They stretched for miles on either side of a dirty-brown river winding lazily through the verdant squares like a snake moving through the grass. There was movement within them, tiny dots like pinpricks.

  "Doesn't look like a country where a war is going on, does it?" said the man beside me. His name, I remember, was Camper. He was a 51E, a camouflage specialist. In civilian life he'd been an artist, a painter. Now he made things disappear against the backdrop of the jungle. It was, he'd told me earlier, his second tour of duty.

  "It's beautiful," I answered. "I was expecting, well, I don't know what. Not this." "Everybody says that on their first landing," Camper said. "It's surprising what you can cover up, isn't it?" As the plane's wheels touched the runway at Bien Hoa Air Force Base, a cheer went up from the passengers. After months of waiting, we were finally in Nam, weary from traveling and anxious to be off the plane and moving.

  When I stepped out the 707's door, my first inclination was to duck. I half expected to be the target of sniper fire. Instead, what I saw was a sea of military men standing on the tarmac around the base of the metal stairs that had been pushed up to the plane, all of them grinning ear to ear. For a moment I thought they were there to welcome us. Then I realized that they were simply waiting for us to get off so that they could get on. The plane bringing us in was soon to turn around and take them out. It was their Freedom Bird, and they looked at it as if it were taking them straight to paradise. Many of them called out words of encouragement as we walked to the main terminal, but some stared with haunted eyes, saying nothing. Their faces frightened me, and I looked away, concentrating on the back of the man in front of me. I realized that although it was morning, I was already sweating. The air was hot and moist, and it smelled like a combination of growing things, piss, and diesel fuel. We'd been told to expect rain and heat, but still I wasn't ready for the overwhelming reality of being in a foreign land. There was something in its scent that brought to mind tangles of vines and the breath of wild animals. (Years later, while visiting the National Zoo in Washington with friends, I would open the door to the primate house and be hit with a blast of air from its central enclosure, and for a brief moment think that I had once again stepped off a plane in Bien Hoa.)

  Once inside, we were directed to waiting buses, which carried us down Highway 1 to the 90th Replacement Battalion. Again I was surprised at the modernity of Vietnam. The highway had four lanes and traffic lights, a far cry from the narrow dirt roads I'd expected to find. Through the metal grates welded over the windows to prevent anyone from tossing a grenade into the bus (a popular VC pastime), I did see bicycle rickshaws and people wearing no'n baì thos andao dais , the traditional conical hats and tunics of Vietnam, but there were also newer model cars and advertisements for "33" beer and Ruby Queen cigarettes. My notion of Vietnam as a land solely of barefoot farmers leading water buffalo and old women selling chickens on the streets was quickly disappearing. A thirty-minute ride brought us to the 90th Replacement. Just about every serviceman coming in or out of South Vietnam passed through the 90th, usually spending a few days in each direction. Because it was the processing center for GIs both entering and leaving, it was a place with a strange, almost schizophrenic, atmosphere, simultaneously joyous and subdued. Those of us coming in for the first time eyed the veterans with curiosity, from their mud-caked and cracked boots to the assortment of patches and pins on their fatigues and the scars on their bodies. They, in turn, tried to see reflected in us any traces of the boys they'd arrived as months before and h
oped perhaps to be once again. With only a few days before they got to go home, many of them moved about the camp warily, as if trying to avoid any injury that might jeopardize their impending departure.

  I used to think it peculiar that the army would allow us to meet those outgoing soldiers, on the chance that we would listen to their stories and be made afraid of what was to happen to us. I understand now that they wanted us to see them, if only so we would believe that survival was possible. In those later years of the war, incoming soldiers had read and heard much about the mounting casualties and lack of success in pushing back the North Vietnamese Army, and morale was decidedly down from the time when it appeared that victory was imminent. Whereas the men leaving Nam were sometimes disillusioned by what they'd seen and experienced during their tours of duty, those of us just arriving were often already doubtful before even spending one day in the bush. This was especially true of the reluctant draftees among us, who were some of the first men called up following the December draft. The army could do little about what exiting soldiers thought, but I think they believed that by showing us men who had survived, they could send us into battle with at least some sense that what we were doing was worthwhile, or at least bearable.

  The next few days were a classic army drill of hurry up and wait. After receiving my billeting assignment and dropping my gear off in the makeshift bunkhouse (really an open-sided canvas tent filled with rows of cots), I stood in a series of lines, each of which had a specific purpose, yet were indistinguishable from one another. One line allowed me to change some of my American dollars for Vietnamese piasters, which according to the handbook I'd been given I would use to pay for services, like laundry and haircuts, rendered by locals. My remaining currency I exchanged, after a wait in a second line, for MPCs, Military Payment Certificates we were supposed to use for all other purchases, the possession of greenbacks being against military code. Another line took me to an in-country briefing, where among other things I learned how to check myself for parasites and foot rot, was warned against frequenting prostitutes, and reminded that I was in Vietnam as a guest of the government, who had requested my assistance in freeing them from the threat of Communism. More welcome was the line for the showers, which I badly needed, and the mess hall, which satisfied the ache in my belly. In between standing in lines, I filled out more forms, performed a few shifts of KP and guard duty, and tried to sleep. At this I was mostly unsuccessful, the sounds of mortar fire in the distance keeping me from ever fully shutting down. As a result, by my third day at the 90th, I was exhausted and more than ready for a change of scenery. To my relief, that afternoon my orders came down—I was being sent to join the 81st Quartermaster Platoon at Quan Loi. I had no idea where it was, but I was glad to be going somewhere else.