Monthly Archives: January 2020

Starch and polish

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Toward what he assumed would be the end of his Viet Nam tour, Juris was plagued by the decision of whether or not to extend: stay longer in Viet Nam but serve a shorter total hitch in the army, or return to a stateside post but owe the army more of his life. Ultimately, the decision would be made for him by the Tet Offensive, which extended his tour involuntarily. But in the meantime, he wondered whether he could stand ‘real’ military life back home. As he wrote, “The Army really wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so military and so much like an army.” For the anti-authoritarian Juri, stateside duty sounded like hell.
“Hopped back to Phu Bon and resumed polishing for the general. A cute guy as generals go. Friendly too, even shook hands with me, but then I guess he couldn’t do much else—our salutes are much too embarrassingly unmilitary. Hardly remember how. Thank god I got stuck in the boondocks. Not too much protocol around here. It’d be really rough to take all this junk otherwise. Bad enough being here without having to put up with the finer aspects of military life. I don’t know if I can get used to the States again. Rolling socks and boots and formations and starch and polish. Will not be easy. The big outposts and the Army are getting worse and worse. It’s getting to be like stateside, really. In Pleiku and Da Nang you’d think you were back in a major post in Washington, DC or something. You can hardly tell it’s a war zone: inspections, formal guard mounts. We don’t have any here. People just sling a rifle over their shoulder and walk around with soft caps on, a magazine in their weapon. Oh, the States. How are you going to take this stuff seriously after standing next to some light bird colonel in the morning and watching him shave his feeble face in his drawers?”

Border war

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Because he spent his days (and nights) monitoring radio traffic, Juris was well aware of the illegal war spilling out of Viet Nam into Laos and Cambodia: “The Charlies are going mad lately. Not much rhyme or reason to it. They’ll come off the border and work it like the Rio Grande in the old days: hit, and then run across the river, and we can’t go after them. Not that anyone knows where the border really is. And they do go after them, but very much on the sly. Not for publication: I’ve been on their radio a couple of nights, and you have ‘unidentified aircraft’ crossing the border, maybe eight ships at a time. They pick them up on radar. They’ll challenge them over the radio freqs, and you don’t hear anything coming back. So they’ll put up a FAC or something to intercept them, threaten to fire on them. Then you’ll hear the Americans saying ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’ Oh, crazy war.”

Fair elections?

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“All quiet in the province,” Juris wrote in late summer 1967. “Too quiet.” Viet Nam was tense because of the elections scheduled for the end of August, when VC harassment was expected everywhere. As a warning, the country was covered with “gory posters of all sorts of atrocities.” The runup to the election had been “quite a surprise. No one apparently expected the civilian candidates to advocate peace negotiations as strongly as they have. It looks like Johnson isn’t the only one losing supporters. The hawks seem to be flying the coop all over. Pretty soon the only fowl left on Capitol Hill will be Lady Bird.”
Given our own fears about election tampering, it’s fascinating to read about the way elections ran in Viet Nam that year. “Thieu and Ky took about 48% of the vote, and did as well in the rest of the country too, I imagine. Little wonder—they were the only ones who could mount any sort of campaign, controlling the government agencies and communications as they do. Somewhat lopsided but at least here a ‘fair,’ untampered election. You never know, though. The Army holds the ballots for safekeeping and could have done anything it liked with them before sending them on to be tallied. And of course government representation did the actual counting so you can’t really be too sure. Still a long cry from the days when they would use candidate symbols on a ballot, except for the government’s choice, and then tell the Montagnards and Viets to choose from them. If you were an illiterate, unsuspecting Montagnard, who would you vote for to run the government—a donkey, an elephant, a flower, or some smiling guy in a uniform?”

Slapping themselves silly

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One of the many ways the tiny outpost where Juris served was unlike the rest of Viet Nam was the lack of a certain type of organized commercial venture: “The Vietnamese were just as entrepreneurial as in the big cities, but some of the universal signals were not there. You could go to the perimeter of any major base and slap yourself in the chest with a twig and some vendor would pop up offering you dope of some variety, either bags of marijuana or perfectly rolled marijuana cigarettes, in the carton, perfectly sealed as though it had never been opened. I think they were called Buddhas or some slang reference like that. In Cheo Reo, even that signal wasn’t there. On occasion we were visited by large units of Americans who were slapping themselves silly at the perimeter wondering where the hell were the vendors?”

Our nominal allies

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As is apparent in both “Red Flags” and “Play the Red Queen,” Juris knew from his own experience that the American relationship with our nominal allies was far more complex than our relationship with the enemy: “Ostensibly we were there to advise the South Vietnamese military presence, which was one battalion across the street from us, only four hundred strong, who were not very interested in us and very resentful, which was true throughout the country – there was tremendous resentment between the Vietnamese and the Americans. The Americans were critical of the South Vietnamese for not listening to the advice, for not engaging the enemy, not being bold warriors and not sticking it to the Viet Cong. We were ostensibly advising them but of course they didn’t listen to us at all. We’d say, “The North Vietnamese are over there,” and they’d say “Thank you“ – and go in the other direction. Or if they went – reluctantly—with your suggestion, they were very noisy about it, very slow about it, so by the time they got there, there was nothing. In all fairness, they had orders from their central command to avoid contact, to keep their casualties low.
“I was there in ’67. In ’65, they had gotten really hit and suffered 300 casualties in a single day, and the memory of that kept them close to home, close to their barracks. They did have some artillery pieces they would fire every night, firing H&I: harassment and interdiction. That never seemed to hit anybody. Which was also very odd. But at a hundred bucks a shell, they were laying those out there.”

Just a fish in the net

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Juris on the sickening absurdity of war: “I don’t think wars are ever black and white. Usually it’s dozens of vying parties that clash and sometimes secretly cooperate. And then there is you in the belly of it, unobtrusively occupying a small patch, and along comes a total stranger with no apparent reason to wish you harm attempting to remove you from the planet. It made me feel ill — like a fish someone was pursuing for sport. There’s no discussion, no symposium, no meeting of the minds. Just you, hooked, and the fisherman with the net and club working you toward shore.”

A little red helicopter

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In civilian life, hands down, Juris’s favorite mode of transportation was his bicycle. In the army he had to drive of course (although I’m pretty sure he’d not yet actually gotten his license). “I’m still unenticed by the automobile,” he wrote, “but slowing falling in love with my jeep. Spend a lot of time in that jeep—fixing lines, going down to the river, making the courier run to meet the plane. But I’m going to give up driving after this. Any kind of traffic would petrify me. Not too much opposition on these roads except for an occasional stubborn cow or stray water buffalo. About the only thing you have to worry about is running out of road unexpectedly, especially now with the rains coming on. They tend to disappear overnight. At times during the rain it’s like trying to drive in a river—upstream. Still we get there in our slow but reliable buggy. Not bad for a lousy driver—and shift no less. Nope, driving’s not for me. I’m considering, however, investing in a little red helicopter. It’s not riding and it’s not flying, either – sort of like floating.”

Boredom or madness

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Juris on the reality of war — “boredom, booze, and an occasional boom”: “If there is a banality to evil, there is certainly a banality about war. Contrary to the Dick Lit that passes for war fiction and the furious shoot’ em up films and video games, a lot of the time war is actually boring beyond belief. Drudgery. The sun shines and cooks your brain, it rains, you walk, you look, you do your job and any additional work you’re assigned. You sleep, you make your one independent decision of the day – to eat or not to eat – and then you sleep again, and do it all over the same way the next morning. The film that most honestly depicts what war is like might well be Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Picture him going nuts repeating the same day of his life over and over. And then, imagine when he is the most tired and least alert, something whistles or clacks past his head, something explodes in the barbed wire or falls into the compound and goes crump and all hell breaks loose. The real thing doesn’t come with a soundtrack to give you any warning or a big buildup to a crescendo. Not if they do it right. Then it’s fifteen minutes of utter fear followed by a return to boredom.
“What we didn’t know going there was how long an undeclared war would hold us prisoners. Boredom or madness—take your pick.”

Just reacting

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Juris didn’t have many obvious lingering signs of his Viet Nam experience, but he first got back readjustment to city life was tough: “I had trouble sleeping. I got a walkup apartment on First Avenue and 58th Street – UTB, Under the Bridge. I found it hard to sleep, so I’d have to go to the park overlooking the river. There I could sack out. I had to be outside. All these things you don’t expect. Manhole covers make this clunk-clunk that sounds just like a mortar coming out and you find yourself on your knee suddenly tying your shoe because you want to be in the ground. You’re not even thinking, you’re just reacting. There’s almost no fear with it, just a reaction. It’s that fast. And then, the ridiculousness that on the Upper East Side in Manhattan they still had DC current running through some kind of cables under the ground, which generated a tremendous amount of heat, and in the summer, the manhole covers would go bang straight in the air and then come clanging down. Some of the manhole covers right by my little walkup apartment decided to do this and I found myself halfway into the wall one night. I couldn’t sleep and had to go back to the park where there were no manhole covers.”

An incomparable sense of loss

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The name on the wall below was Juris’s commanding officer, whose unexplained death became the impetus for “Red Flags.” Yet even when speaking to an interviewer from West Point, Juris was able to mourn the American dead without ever losing sight of the toll the war had taken on the North Vietnamese: “Westmoreland had that whole attrition idea: that body count really mattered, that they’d simply run out of bodies if we killed enough of them. So the report card became the bodies. That became its own kind of ridiculousness. If you brought in some guy, even for questioning, and his wife and child, all three of them were Viet Cong on the numbers. The non-coms would twit the intelligence people about the infants being logged as Viet Cong. There was an essential silliness, because as we found out after the fact, they had stopped caring – I don’t mean that the North Vietnamese were lacking in some moral way – but they realized that they’re up against someone with an Air Force that they haven’t got, they’re up against someone with tanks they haven’t got, they’re up against helicopters they don’t have, they don’t even have the boots. They don’t have steel pots on their heads. All they’ve got is themselves, and their bodies. And they would in some way have to compensate for the superiority of their enemy – us – by simply accepting more casualties. They suffered unbelievable casualties. I mean we are, to this day, mourning those 58,000, and some of us will mourn them until we ourselves check out – the 58,000 on our wall – their wall would hold two and a half million. It was just an incomparable sense of loss.”