In Vietnam Juris had a pet civet called Lovey that climbed like a monkey and traveled on his shoulder. Unfortunately, civets were considered food by the Montagnard guards and one day Lovey disappeared. Juri was philosophical about it: “We had a captain we didn’t like. They ate his parrot too, so I forgave them.”
A poetic moment from Juris’s Viet Nam diary, written at the height of the rainy season in 1967: “A very civilized sound, the rain on the concrete walkways. But out past the buildings, on the other side of the perimeter and wires and snagging barbs, obscured by the thick downpour, the rain touches quietly to earth. Caught by the green flesh of the jungle it slides silently down the trunks and stalks and shoots onto the soft floor below.
“I don’t feel any more. I am cut off even from sensation. I am being absorbed.”
As readers of “Red Flags” know, Juris served on an small, extremely isolated base adjacent to a tiny town. The roads in and out were too dangerous to use for supply runs, so everything arrived — when it arrived at all — by air. This report comes from late September, 1967: “Running out of everything– soap, soda, sleep, but not sun, of course. The end of the month drought. And naturally everyone has been paid — already — and packing all sorts of money with no place to spend it, so it slides back and forth across gaming tables, boxes, bare ground. By tomorrow morning half the compound will have the other half’s money, but of course, with nothing to splurge on, the gods of odds will readjust the imbalance by the next dawn.”
Clear-eyed from the start, only two months into his tour (April, 1967) Juris wrote: “I was just reading about the peace protests in NY and on the coast. Quite a picture, that mob of people at the U.N. I don’t know what they proposed as a solution, but I dare venture to predict something will break before Nov. ’68 and the election. For all of Johnson’s platitudes and pronouncements on the subject, this thing is going nowhere. He’s either going to have to throw in the towel gracefully – step off and make some big concessions and make it look like something other than saving face — or else step aside for the next poor sap to try his hand at this mess over here. Lyndon can announce and denounce all he likes but that jungle doesn’t budge an inch for all the rhetoric, and these people know their terrain. We hold what we sit on and waltz around during the day but come sundown it’s all “his.” Sometimes they even pop up during the day. The locals recently held their umpteenth holiday rally (very pathetic affairs) and the VC joined it with their own banners and people just to let us know who is really running the show and just how close they can get. And about all we could do was to scare them all off with a few rounds through the Red banners. This whole war is one big unfunny joke.”
As a child, Juris loved Westerns. “All movies, truth be told. On Saturdays the local cinema showed three feature films and a continuing serial for the price of one ticket. We came out blind as bats after three feature films and the latest installment of a Flash Gordon serial.” Juris the movie lover was frustrated in Viet Nam, where most of the time movies were “an unsynchronized, stuttering mess. Can’t wait to go watch a flic in its entirety upon my return to the world, one with no breaks and shakes and lizards on the screen.” His movie wish list for his return to ‘the world’ included Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Blow Up,” a second viewing of “The Sleeping Car Murders,” and anything new from Bergman. (He was also looking forward to seeing “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” on stage.) In the meantime, he had to content himself with the odd assortment of films that made its way to his remote province: “They’re showing ‘Madame X’ again – that old Lana Turner tear jerker. It would be a fair bit of acting if only they would dispense with the dialogue. A great silent flic it would make. I caught most of it the other night in typical Phu Bon fashion: the first reel second, the second reel first. Didn’t affect the film in the least.”
Juris on the local fauna in Viet Nam, which he would refer to years later in “Red Flags” as “protein on the hoof”: “It’ll be a cold day in Long Bien before a bug ever scares me again with the specimens they have over here—mosquitoes, beetles, moths, carnivorous flies, bees, wasps, locusts. They’ve got bugs big enough to leash and keep as pets. Today a ‘grasshopper’ big enough to ride practically, at least eight inches long. One of the guys threw a hat on it hoping to trap it for a picture and the thing started walking away with the hat. If someone walked up and told me he had just seen a butterfly with teeth I would believe him. And I thought the beetles here were big. I could just about eat the damn things now, like the Montagnards. Small consolation: at least the VC have to contend with all the lovely monsters too.”
In November, 1967, Juris was reading about the October march on the Pentagon that would become famous in Mailer’s “Armies of the Night.” Among other things, how strange to think that only a few years later he would be crossing paths with Mailer and Ginsberg. “We’re just now getting magazines with accounts of that march on the Pentagon. Pretty impressive really but—hawks, doves—I’m afraid they are all for the birds as far as the kids over here are concerned.
“Good people these youngsters. Corny but true though I’d smash any patriotic stateside soul in the mouth who said it. Haven’t got much use for hawks, doves, or the Army.
“The only thing that really interested everyone was that group that wanted to levitate the Pentagon 300 feet off the ground. Everybody got a kick out of that one, especially the judge permitting them to raise it only ten feet and no more. Beautiful. I hope my boys don’t ever become similarly inclined. They’d do it. Three hundred feet and then some. The best demolition squad in the highlands. They call them the Humpty Dumptys—for obvious reasons.”
Juris was in the Signal Corps, his job to relay information about VC traffic on the part of the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Phu Bon province. By Viet Nam standards, Team 31 was a tiny operation, “but even our little ‘shot’ keeps us busy with regular radio-telephone-teletype communication. One van with the radio hookup and modulating equipment, another full of backup equipment, one secret secret little van shelter for the crypto teletype operation, and a cement floor, wooden “hootch” housing the switchboard, our living room, office, and bar. Small, but open for business round the clock as we are, keeps the seven of us hopping. Hate to think how many nights we’ve spent coddling this red-eyed monster. And if it’s not the radio, it’s the generator, and if … endless tale of woe.”
Managing the equipment, Juris quickly abandoned “by-the-book operation” for “bailing wire, Viet Nam methods”:
“The generators went off so I took a jeep to jump them. Turned out to be the major’s. I’m acquiring the reputation of an easygoing funny joker with a twinge of wild.
“Back to the wires and batteries and beeps. Beep crackle crackle to you too, you electronic slave driver. You have to talk rough to the damn thing or it won’t work right.
“Have enough static stored in my ears to last me a lifetime. I doubt if I’ll be able to tolerate anything more electrical than a light bulb for quite a while. We all started out patient and conscientious but now everybody resorts to the RM at the slightest indication of trouble. (That’s Rubber Mallet.) Very effective I might add. Really amazing what a few well placed whacks will do for this sophisticated half million dollars’ worth of gadgetry.”
Juris was completely devoid of machismo. Here he is at 24, writing about Viet Nam: “Nearly twelve months I’ve been here and the biggest, most protruding, obvious truth I yet discovered is that men are never such little boys as when they are playing war. Incredible all this bravado and banality. And I thought Hollywood war was bad. The worst John Wayne flic is a sober documentary compared to the show these people put on with such embarrassing enthusiasm.”
Corruption in wartime is a theme that runs through both “Red Flags” and “Play the Red Queen.” Juris saw it all around him in Viet Nam, most pointedly in the way aid intended for the indigenous Montagnards was siphoned off along the way. “The Viets really take the poor, exploited Montagnards for everything, not that they have it to be taken. All the carelessly strewn US aid that they should be getting manages to pass no further than the higher up Viets. Much graft. I remember reading ‘Ugly American’ and believing it to be true but a little condensed and overdramatized. It isn’t. If anything it’s understated. The jokers over here literally hold the power of life or death. I think any GI in the backwoods could do a more hair-raising job of writing the ‘Ugly American’ than the touring professionals. Graft, corruption, murder, and pestilence. Elections that elect no one, rice that goes nowhere—what’s the use? And all with the full knowledge of the U.S. authorities. I’m only glad I’ve got my GI greens and my little pistol to keep me warm. And, believe me, we don’t pack weapons because of the VC. That’s the least of our headaches.”
