Deros Vietnam (5 page)

Next to his textbook was Brock's midterm assignment, a document he was calling “Master of the Strategic Art.” Rubbing his shaved head, Brock reassessed his introduction:

U.S. Army Officers are expected to engage in lifelong learning and professional development relying on a blend of institutional training and education, operational assignments, and self-development.

“Amen to that,” Brock muttered to himself. That's why he was here at the University of Wisconsin in the first place. Culver had convinced him to come to Madison, to take this class, to earn his master's degree, to learn how to influence public opinion. The good professor had even gone out on a limb for Brock, a fellow World War II vet, persuading the UW and the Army War College to add him to the list of more than 100 Army officers Culver would direct in their master's theses.

But Culver hadn't warned him about the UW's daily protests and anti-military fervor. Even out of his uniform, the students in Culver's class knew who Brock was and what he stood for.

In broad terms,
Brock's paper went on,
programs and curricula of the War College should be built around the concept of mastering the strategic art, which this paper defines as ‘the skillful formulation, coordination, and application of ends (objectives), ways (courses of action), and means (supporting resources) to promote and defend the national interests.'

Brock wasn't aware he was reading aloud, emphasizing terms like
strategic leader, strategic theorist, and strategic practitioner …
Then he uttered aloud his favorite line:
The intent is to focus on how and why one thinks, rather than on what to think.

“Hey, Pop—can you keep it down over there?” snarled one of the class's more vocal students. Brock didn't know his name but the kid usually dispensed a dirty look in his direction. “Some of us are trying to sleep,” he said to supporting laughter.

Brock didn't flinch.
That was it,
he thought to himself,
that's how he would train future leaders, prepare officers, convince the public, and win the war.
Focus on the how and why, not the what. Forget about the kid's comment but instead understand why that's what he's thinking, how these students are caught up in challenging authority, in rebelling.

As a group of TAs fanned out diagonally throughout the large lecture hall, distributing handouts, one of them stopped next to Brock. The hair on his arms stood up. Was the guy targeting him, ID-ing him for the rest of the class?

The TA moved on as the nearby students smirked. The one who called him Pop had thick brown hair that cascaded across his face. The boy's muttonchops reminded Brock of the pet furballs his kids used to put on the doorknobs at home.

Being here was a strategic advantage, Brock realized. Brock would mine that like a mother lode.
…institutional training and education, operational assignments, and self-development.

Taking in the classroom overflowing with adolescent energy, Brock smiled, knowing that he would become a full-bird colonel, that he would one day teach military strategy at the Army War College, that he'd indulge his grandchildren. He'd write his memoirs.

“All right, let's get down to brass tacks,” Culver shouted from the podium, smiling, Brock thought, in his direction. “Please turn to Chapter Seven, ‘Defining Public Relations Problems.'”

Raining Frogs in Kuala Lumpur

It was February 2, 1970. I remember the exact day because I was standing in the USARV Information Office's teletype room, arguing with Conroy about which prognosticating groundhog the news services would be covering that day. Being a son of the Midwest, Conroy was making his case for Sun Prairie Jimmy, from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, “the world headquarters of the groundhog,” as Conroy proudly proclaimed.

But as a Pennsylvania native, I held my ground for Punxsutawney Phil.

“Everybody knows who Punxsutawney Phil is,” I countered. “He's the reason we even celebrate Groundhog Day. Hell, they even drive him around in a limo after he makes his prediction.”

We kept going back and forth like this, two noncombatants without a clue about what in the hell was really going on with the war and our country. While the three large teletype machines kept banging away at top volume, the war and danger and the Viet Cong lurked somewhere outside, hiding in the bush, waiting for us to get complacent.

I won a case of beer from Conroy that day. He didn't seem to mind. In fact, for grins he placed the story with the dateline “Punxsutawney, PA” at the bottom of that day's
Morning News Roundup.
I can still see him waving a copy of the “rip and read” teletype copy as he roused us from our hard-earned sleep. Raising a carton of milk, Conroy proposed a toast: “Lads,” as a huge Beatles and Shakespeare fan, Conroy always called us
lads,
“if rodents can predict the weather in the good ole USA, then laughter can rain down in Vietnam. Or my name isn't Punxsutawney Phil.”

“Rip and read” was indeed the term the old-timers used and that pretty well sums it up. In Vietnam, we updated the old reporter mantra to “rip and release.” In both cases journalists relied on the same source, namely teleprinters connected to telephone lines fed by newsgathering companies like United Press International, Reuters, and the Associated Press. We called those revered news sources the Holy Trinity. The three of them were the founts of our Army reporter religion in Vietnam.

The first time I ever set foot, or ear, in the Teletype room at Army Headquarters in Long Binh, I was swallowed up by the endless reams of paper the three machines spewed and submerged in the deafening noise. For a brief moment I was back in college, attending a lecture on the “Model 15 teletype printer.” Delivered by a pompous gasbag, the lecture referred to these workhorse printers as “clackers,” and now that I'd encountered them, well, I had to admit he was right. The damn things actually did clack, and I mean clack. Standing in the vicinity of three of them—we nicknamed ours Moe, Larry and Curly—you couldn't hear yourself think.

The irony of all this news spewing out into the teletype room in Long Binh, South Vietnam was that it had nothing to do with our jobs as military journalists. We didn't “write the news today, oh boy,” or report on what was happening in our midst. Rather, we churned out recurring quantities of puff and propaganda for dissemination through weekly newspapers, quarterly magazines, and scores of homespun news releases about hometown heroes.

So why were the teletypes there in Vietnam in the first place? Good question. At first, we figured the Army brass wanted us to stay up-to-speed on what the traditional media was reporting on Vietnam. Pretty soon, we realized that Moe, Larry and Curley's main job was providing material for one of the Army's more interesting innovations, the
Morning News Roundup.

The concept was simple. One of us over-educated information types would spend his night at the IO office, babysitting the Three Stooges, finding eight or ten of the more interesting news stories of the day, cutting and pasting them to an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper and running them over in two separate batches (one page with 4-5 stories at a time) to the Headquarters' print shop. Lo and behold, by 0600 hours, hundreds of copies of the
Morning News Roundup
appeared at the scores of mess halls scattered across Long Binh post.

The end result was that the homesick troops could have their morning paper with breakfast, just like they were back home in the good old USA.

Some of us were better suited to the
Morning News Roundup
than others. We all had to execute it at some point, but if someone volunteered to make it their regular job, well, that made life easier for guys like me who preferred company and camaraderie. Conroy didn't seem like an obvious candidate. He wasn't your typical Army loner. He just liked doing the
Roundup.

“I enjoy the quiet, the isolation,” Conroy confided to me one night on guard duty. “It's cool being in control.” He smiled so broadly that I could see his teeth shine in the deep dark of the bunker. “Especially when you find the one piece that will tickle someone enough to get them to laugh.”

After the Groundhog Day story, Conroy decided to always end his two-page (front and back)
Morning News Roundup
with one of these “kickers” as he called them—the quirky, oddball stuff that happens every day in the world and that you could find on the teletypes if you had Conroy's sense of irony. The stuff he found and reprinted in the
Roundup
—like the Vatican's issuing a Ten Commandment-like “Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road” document or a British hotel chain reporting that 95% of the somnambulists in their establishments had been naked men—was so good and so unusual and so funny that mess hall GIs started reading the kicker first so they could at least have smiles on their faces as they were greeted by another fucking day in Vietnam.

That argument on behalf of humor was the one Conroy delivered to the brass when they were threatening to bust him: “Let's be honest,” he smiled at his antagonists, “it's not as if there isn't enough doom and gloom in Vietnam, not to mention back home. If one of our primary jobs is to lift the morale of the troops, then that's just what I'm doing.”

Whenever Conroy pulled guard duty or was on R&R, one of us had to fill in for him and take a shot at doing the
Roundup.
We didn't even try to compete with him. But Conroy competed with Conroy. The committed communicator had set the
Morning News Roundup
bar so damn high that he couldn't maintain his own standards.

Which was probably how the ersatz Punxsutawney Phil pieces got started.

As Murphy's Law would have it, there came a time when Conroy couldn't find anything that remotely resembled an acceptable—by his standards—kicker. As
Morning News Roundup
press time approached—not wanting to disappoint his faithful readers—Conroy decided to go fictional with the saga of the world's most famous prognosticating rodent.

As offered in evidence by his adversaries, here's how this “rip and release” copy read:

Punxatawney, PA (UPI) – Police were dispatched to Gobbler's Knob today, home of the world-famous Punxatawney Phil, to break up a raucous demonstration. A small but vocal group of out-of-town agitators were protesting Phil's recent prediction of an early spring. Brandishing copies of the Farmers Almanac and waving signs that read “Shadow This” and “Put this where the spring sun shines,” the protestors vowed to return. “We will not have our prognostication rights trampled on by an erroneous rodent,” said Dick Hertz, the group's leader.

Conroy's second venture into the universe of stories that never made the teletype featured a platoon of counter-demonstrators flocking to Punxatawney and ended with the assembled multitudes chanting, “Phil, our nation turns its frozen eyes to you, boo hoo hoo!”

We all knew what Conroy was doing and that he was bound to take it too far. But what the hell could “too far” mean in Vietnam anyway? Was it Conroy's fault that he wanted to keep guys smiling in a world which didn't offer much in the way of comic relief? It wasn't like he was making up bogus casualty numbers or inflating body counts.

About a week or so after the second fictional Phil piece, Conroy plopped an article about raining frogs in Kuala Lumpur at the bottom of the
Roundup.
Problem was he did this on one of those days in Vietnam when we didn't kill many and lost hardly any, leaving the brass with time on its hands.

“Find the clown who's writing this shit and bring him to my office,” commanded Brigadier General Sullivan.

Before you could say Malaysia, Conroy was in Sullivan's office getting royally chewed out. Best we could figure, the Army's beef with him was that he violated official guidelines for how to keep GIs happy. “Humor unbecoming a military journalist” was probably how they'd put it. Conroy simply cared too much about doing a good job.

When you fucked up at a prime location like Long Binh, you might not get busted, but you'd likely get assigned to the 108th Artillery Group which was the closest Army outpost to the DMZ. They got mortared constantly.

Without Conroy at the helm, the
Morning News Roundup
became just another empty-headed Army assignment. Our hearts weren't in it and we all hated doing it, the quasi-solitary confinement of being alone in the IO office reminding us of the “Twilight Zone” episode starring Earl Holliman when he's walking up and down the streets of a city and can't find a single person to talk to and it starts to drive him crazy. It turns out he's in a space capsule, being tested by NASA to see if he can survive on his own as an astronaut.

That was Vietnam all right. A test without answers. Being stuck in the Twilight Zone.

Eventually, we got word from Conroy at the 108th.
Deeds, not words
was the artillery group's motto, so we suspected he was doing more soldiering than writing. Turned out the Army didn't bust him for the Punxsutawney Phil pieces. Instead they came down on the story about raining frogs. The irony? That one was true. Conroy had the teletype copy in his possession. He shared it with us in his letter:

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Reuters) -- Local citizens were surprised this morning when they awoke to find small green frogs falling from the sky. Weighing just a few ounces each, the frogs landed in trees and plopped into the streets. The Malaysian Meteorological Institute surmised the frogs, native to North Africa, must have been picked up by a strong wind.

Cannon Fodder

While there was an obvious irony in being a soldier named Cannon, the decorated master sergeant would never describe it that way, would never use a term like that. But whatever you called it, the name thing didn't elude his fellow GIs who used it as an excuse to hurl jokes and one-liners in Cannon's direction.