Deros Vietnam
DEROS Vietnam:
Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle
Doug Bradley
To all those who served in Vietnam but didn't live to see their DEROS date.
Contents
By the Time I get to Phoenixâ¦
The Revolution Isn't Being Televised
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
The Gospel According to Shortimer Sam
Introduction: The Air-Conditioned War
I spent 365 days in Vietnam from November of 1970 to November of 1971.I worked in a corporate-esque, shine and polish, public information office in the U.S. Army's headquarters at Long Binh, a former rubber plantation about 15 miles from Saigon. How in the hell I ended up there after my graduation from college in May 1969 and not at law school at Boston University where I'd been accepted is a question I still ask myself.
And while I think the answer has something to do with Nixon, the draft, Vietnamization, my birthday, and bad luck, I've more or less given up trying to figure it out. The reality is I didn't go to law school and I did get drafted. Vietnam became my real graduate schoolâmy true education if you willâand it's something that continues to teach me a lesson every day of my life.
My Long Binh officemates and I were categorized as REMFs: Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. That was meant, I believe, to distinguish us from the grunts, the guys who were fighting the war, but I also think it was meant to keep us in our place, and to be a slap in the face. As far as I can tell, it worked. We were less than the grunts, and we still feel guilty about having a safer, cushier job than our brothers who did the fighting and dying.
That doesn't mean there wasn't any pain and sacrifice and danger for us REMFs. But it's muted, much like our collective Vietnam voice, because, well, most of what we did wasn't glorious or heroic or even very interesting. Trying to unmute that REMF voice is part of the reason why I've been writing about Vietnam for more than 40 years. I mean, hell, there were more of us in the rear than there were grunts in the field, and we did have to put up with all the military and political and Vietnam bullshit too, so why doesn't anybody know about our experiences?
Truth is, that's way too noble a motivation for me and this collection of stories. I wrote them mainly for myself because the process of writing has helped me to better understand Vietnamâand to heal myself a little in the process. I need to write, I have to write, to be who I am. There's as much of the non-Vietnam me in here as there is the Vietnam me.
But I doubt you'll be able to tell the difference.
There is some truth to the Nixon-draft-Vietnamization-birthday-bad-luck mantra I mentioned earlier. For starters, I blame all U.S. presidents from FDR on for getting us into Vietnam. But up until Spring 1968, my junior year in college, I figured if I stayed in school long enough and got my college diploma, the war would be over. I mistakenly believed Lyndon Baines Johnson. I wouldn't make the same mistake with the next president.
I sure as hell didn't buy Tricky Dick's B.S. about a “secret plan to win the war” and all that. I was so pissed at LBJ that I projected my anger on to his V.P., Hubert H. Humphrey. In the end, I marked my virgin trip to the ballot box on November 5, 1968 by writing in Dick Gregory for president. That's the only vote I ever castâand I've voted in every election sinceâthat I wish I had back.
Not long after Nixon ascended to the throne in 1969, I began to pay more attention to what was going on with the war and the draft. LBJ had cancelled graduate school deferments in March 1968, so even with my law school acceptance at B.U. later, military conscription appeared more likely than law school matriculation.
On a beautiful spring day in 1969, I graduated from tiny Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia. It was May 24 to be exact, and while Led Zeppelin brought down the house that night with “Dazed and Confused” at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago and the Grateful Dead jammed to “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” at Seminole Indian Village in Florida, my parents drove me back to Philadelphia in their tiny red VW.
Thus began the worst summer of my life.
I was now classified 1-A (available for unrestricted military service) as opposed to 2-S (deferred because of collegiate study). Every day brought the same throbbing headache, the crippling knot in the stomach, and the perpetual conundrum:
What in the hell am I going to do?
I'll admit I let the trauma and the anxiety and the fear get the best of me. I ballooned to well over 190 pounds (I've weighed around 160 ever since Vietnam), pissed and moaned all summer long, and turned down a couple decent jobs. I ended up working in a tiny factory where they made locks for aircraft carriers. I increased my intake of alcohol and marijuana. I was lonely and miserable.
I wasn't eager to give more than two years of my life away to the Armyâor the Navy, Marines, or Air Forceâand I didn't have any pull to help me get into the National Guard or Reserves. That seemed like a major copout anyway.
So, I sat and ate and smoked and cursed and waited.
September 1969 eventually rolled around.
Vietnamization
âa term coined by Melvin Laird, a Wisconsinite and Secretary of Defenseâwas sailing along, but there were still nearly a half million of my peers in Viet-nam. It was just a matter of time until the draft caught up with me, so I dropped out of law school and dropped into my pre-induction physical for the draft. It was like a never-ending episode of “The Twilight Zone,” and I kept hearing Rod Serling's smoky voice warning me:
This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you're on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable
⦠By the time I came to, I'd passed with flying colors. I was on my way to the land of the different.
Which is exactly where luck, good and bad, and birthdays intervened. To show the American public that Vietnamization was working, Nixon boldly cancelled November and December draft calls, so guys like me could worry about their uncertain futures a little longer. He then introduced a “more just and equitable means” for conscriptionâthe lottery.
In this case, having the winning number was not what you wanted. No, you wanted to lose the lottery so you could keep your ass out of Vietnam.
On December 1, 1969, at Selective Service National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., 366 blue plastic capsules, each containing a day of the year, were placed in a large glass jar and drawn by hand to assign orderof-call numbers to all American males between the ages of 18 and 26. It was just and equitable all right, but for those of us with our lives hanging in the balance, it was the ultimate horror show, a real game of Russian roulette, not the bogus crap Michael Cimino later invented in “The Deer Hunter.” Except this time the lone bullet rotated among 366 chambers.
It was also one of the bigger media events of the year. All the TV networks were thereâwe only had four back thenâand radio and film, too, as well as newspapers and wire service reporters and Congressional types and on and on. It definitely was a circus, but with the feel of a public hanging lingering in the air.
I chose to listen to the lottery on the radio in a Philadelphia suburb, playing cards and drinking beer with my brother and sister-in-law, rather than watch with my parents, who were even more uptight about all this than I was. I knew I wouldn't be able to handle their stress as well as mine. So, I more or less listened to the goings-on and got really drunk.
The first capsule, drawn by a Republican Congressman from New York who served on the House Armed Services Committee, contained the date September 14. The last one drawn was June 8âthe day after my June 7 birthday, which came in at 85, eventually landing me in Fort Dix, New Jersey by March and Vietnam that following November.
Now that my fate was more or less determined, I devoted more time to feeling sorry for myselfâand to being pissed at my parents since they were the ones responsible for my June 7 birthday. What if they'd waited to have sex? What if my dad hadn't arrived back home from the war horny and eager to affirm his survival? What if my mom could have endured a few more hours of labor? What if she didn't have to have a C-section, which the hospital probably wouldn't have accommodated the next day, a Sunday? What if â¦
That perverse line of inquiry was my only holdover from my flirtation with law school. Now that I was a marked man, I didn't know how long I had until my blindfold and last cigarette, so I left the country right after New Year's Day. Not for exile in Canada, where it was cold and protected, but for a respite in a tropical paradise like Nassau in the Bahamas, where the U.S. had jurisdiction. Let them come after me, I muttered to myself, armed every day with a book, some ganja and a gin and tonic.
They never came.
It took being away from the USA for me to realize just how much I'd been missing during my period of self-absorption. Two big anti-war moratoria, My Lai, murders and mayhem, the Bahamian locals and travelling beach bums knew about all this and more, and I'd listen to their conversations deep into the night before I'd stumble back to my beach bungalow for another round of self-pity.
Some time during that trip, I sobered up long enough to fall in love with Christine from Buffalo, a wandering romantic like myself who loved F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rod McKuen and saw the world through rose-colored glasses, literally. I took the fact that Christ was in her name as a sign that I'd be saved.
It didn't happen.
After Christine headed back to college in Buffalo and I ran out of money, I made a decision about my future. Among my three shitty optionsâjail, Canada or the militaryâI chose Door Number Three. Where was Monty Hall when I needed him?
Arriving “back in the USSR” in February 1970, I was welcomed by an inviting letter from Uncle Sam that proclaimed “Greetings!” Four weeks later, on March 2, 1970, I raised my hand and swore an oath to God and country along with a hundred or so like-minded sheep in a U.S. Army induction center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Why Pittsburgh and not Philadelphia where I was currently living? That's because Pittsburgh is where I registered for the draft and that's where my Selective Service board was located.