Some mornings we walk the mile together from the Metra station to Tribune Tower, though I can barely keep his pace.
He never volunteered he was in the Army. But one time he used a word–some acronym like TEMDU or BOQ–that gave him away. There aren’t a lot of fellow veterans at work (another column for another time) so, as is my habit, I bored in.
He said something about infantry and Vietnam and changed the subject.
Then last month, during the media splash over the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I asked him what he thought of the coverage. “About like you’d expect,” was his wry, journalist answer. But as the conversation drifted, he blew his cover by letting it slip that he sometimes shops at a military PX.
I was on him like a hound: You’re in your early 50s and you’ve been at the Trib for years. Why do you still have PX privileges?
At which point my walk-mate probably figured he could either tell his story or switch to a different train.
Like me, he was at Northwestern University in the ’60s earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism while keeping one eye on the war-that-wouldn’t-go-away. Like me, he signed up for an officer training program, not because he was gung-ho, but to increase his chances of honorably staying alive. Unlike me, his strategy backfired. He ended up a Spec 4 grunt, slinging an M16 for the 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Division. His outfit did helicopter-borne “search-and-destroy” from U.S. fire bases in and around the Iron Triangle. This was the longtime stronghold of both the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, never controlled by the French, just 20 miles northwest of Saigon near the Cambodian border.
He got hit three times.
The first two were flesh wounds: mortar shrapnel above his right elbow; and later, a gash above his right eye from an AK47 rifle. (Not a bullet wound, but a glancing blow during bayonet attack on his camp.)
The third wound sent him home. He and another GI were moving along an irrigation ditch when a rocket-propelled grenade landed a few feet away, fortunately on the far side of a fallen palm tree. The concussion blew them both into the water and shrapnel nearly tore off his left foot.
The gunfire was so intense he had to walk out (he doesn’t remember how far) to a rear area where a Med-evac chopper could land. He does remember biting off the inside of his lower lip before someone stuffed a towel between his teeth to help him cope with the pain.
At the “landing zone” he saw several “guys under ponchos.” No palm tree luck for them. From there it was off to the transit hospital at Cam Ranh Bay, then a bigger one on Okinawa, and finally “back to the world,” or at least the hospital at Ft. Benning, Ga.
There he had the good fortune to draw a young, “Hawkeye Pierce-type” orthopedic surgeon. The doctor chose not to fuse his smashed ankle joint (as was standard procedure) but have it wrapped and, in time, rehabilitated with a long regimen of physical therapy. It worked. Thirty-one years later he can’t play tennis (no lateral stability) and his side-to-side gait is a bit pronounced. But, like I say, I can barely keep up.
He is neither bitter nor judgmental about the war. But he is a journalist. And when pressed, he can’t help but be analytical.
“What I saw was a totally amorphous situation. We hardly ever talked to the people … except for the kids trying to sell us Cokes and cigarettes. It was amazingly insular. Down at our level, we were just trying to do our 12 months. Back in Saigon, they strategized like we were fighting on the plains of Europe. It never made sense. I’m not surprised it turned out the way it did.”
He didn’t march in Chicago’s 1986 parade for Vietnam vets, though he watched from the curb on Michigan Avenue. “That gave closure to a lot of people and I’m glad for them.”
But he was annoyed, and maybe a bit angered, to see Gen. William Westmoreland, the top field commander for much of the war, lead that parade as grand marshal. Many think it was Westmoreland’s overly optimistic dispatches to Washington that led Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to keep pouring it on … until 50,000 Americans were dead.
Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, later had the decency to admit it was all a tragic mistake. Westmoreland never has. Other ex-commanders say our military was “not allowed to win.”
Says my friend, the quiet grunt: “I don’t think so.”
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E-mail: jmccarron@tribune.com
