Son of John and Miriam Lademan, born and died prematurely

Cousins Anthony Andrews and Lawrence Andrews are buried at the Andrews-Liggett Cemetery.

THE ARROWHEAD FIELD BY UNCLE BILL ANDREWS [CONTINUED FROM UNCLE JOEL ANDREWS]:

With three of these wire mesh openings, a soldier on guard duty could have a 180-degree field of view and fire.

There were three soldiers assigned to each bunker with usually only one person from the 165th at any one time. A single bunk with an old mattress was built into the back wall on the opposite side of the M-60 machine gun. We could sleep in shifts so long as two people were awake at all times. We made use of what we called a starlight scope, which registered body heat. During my first stint on perimeter guard, I strained to see the jungle edge for signs of life. Bulldozers had pushed back the foliage two or three hundred yards from the concertina wire and this gave us a respectable amount of time to mount a defense in the event of trouble. Looking through the starlight scope I picked up some oscilloscopic green moving in the distance. By wind-up telephone, I called the command tower down the line and explained what I saw. We were told to hold our fire until confirmation could be made of a hostile force. The problem was that several other bunkers were likewise noticing movement and some must have been as green as I. Along the line we suddenly heard M-60's and M-16's opening up. Soon all were firing without permission. I ran to the back of the bunker to grab a handful of parachute flares which looked like oversized Roman candles. Pulling off the top and placing it on the bottom of the cylinder, I hit the bottom with the palm of my hand. This action fired the flair into the night sky with the luminescence of burning white phosphorus, which lit up the distant tree line and cast rolling shadows across the open ground. When the flare burned out I fired another and then another. We saw not a soul in the open terrain. One of my companions whose hand was on the trigger of a claymore yelled for me to pick up the phone which must have been ringing for some time through the din of shouting and shooting. A very agitated voice at the other end ordered us to stop firing. All along the line we could hear that the shooting was beginning to subside. When daylight arrived a few hours later we were told that a large colony of spider monkeys had been moving through the trees and that their collective presence had registered on our starlight scopes. If we were not a little embarrassed by our behavior, those of us who were "green" at least had the consolation of knowing that most of the bunkers doing the shooting were occupied by seasoned warriors as well. The danger in such unauthorized shooting was that sometimes friendly ARVN forces deployed on the outside of our perimeter.

My first encounter with real combat occurred several weeks later during the unheralded Tet Offensive of 1969. It was the night of 22-23 February. Not nearly as devastating as the Viet Cong offensive of the previous year in which five or six enemy battalions attacked Long Binh and, in some places, breached the perimeter, this action was nonetheless memorable for those of us who had never before been exposed to hostile fire.

Apparently early in the evening an American Recon unit along the Dong Nai River saw what looked like VC guerrillas carrying Soviet-made 120mm BM-21 rockets and sappers carrying Bangalore torpedoes to blast holes through the concertina wire along the perimeter of Long Binh's Tanker Valley. We were told by the brass to expect some enemy demonstrations that evening and we were all issued extra ammo clips for our M-16's. Weighed down by flack jacket and helmet, I was thankful not to be on perimeter guard that night. Those guys were our first line of defense. If sappers broke through the perimeter, it would bode badly for our comrades in the bunkers and it would be our job, as a second line of defense, to push the enemy back.

If my memory serves me, the attack began a little before midnight on the 22nd. From the sandbagged bunkers and protective parapets in front of the hooches of the 165th CAG we could see a spectacular display of ordnance expended. The enemy attack seemed to be well coordinated and dispersed for we could see tracer rounds smashing into the jungle canopy not only in our front but also along the entire perimeter which was exposed to our view. We were on high ground, near North Hill where the commanding heights were occupied by USARV and MACV headquarters. Soon we could hear 105mm artillery rounds from Bear Cat Firebase exploding several hundred yards in our front. Like the ability of a symphony aficionado to pick out the distinct sounds of the various instruments, we could distinguish the characteristic resonance of exploding claymores, M-16's, grenades, incoming rockets and outgoing artillery, mortars, incoming AK-47's, and the unique roar of Gatlin-guns mounted on the attack helicopters. As I peered out of my sandbag with M-16 in hand, I was mesmerized by the spectacular assault on the senses – the smell of cordite, the convulsive vibrations of the earth in tumult, the sight of a night sky crisscrossed by tracers, and the cacophony of ear-shattering explosions. All I could think of was being thankful that I was not on the receiving end of the massive outpouring of American firepower.

The most visually enthralling spectacle was the appearance of the helicopter gunship or "Jolly Green Giants." If it was difficult to hear them in the din and impossible to see them in the night sky, their signature presence was unmistakable. Every fifth round from the gunships was a red tracer and as their mounted mini-guns fired thousands of rounds a minute, the effect was that of watching dozens of illuminated red ribbons hanging from the heavens and descending to earth below. There were red ribbons everywhere and we watched them in a transfixed awe as if they were hypnotizing us. I noticed that the ones descending from the higher elevations began to wave and wobble slightly as if being coaxed by the wind. However, because there was only the slightest of breezes, perhaps the waving motions were an optical illusion. Then suddenly these bright red vertical lines began to form the shape of a V as the gunships fired down on the hard-topped Highway 1 to Saigon, the tracers ricocheting back into the night sky.

The fireworks persisted for the remainder of the night and subsided for the most part with the coming of daylight. About a half hour before light I was ordered to report to our bunker on the perimeter to relieve our man who had been under attack all night. I grabbed my gear, pilfered additional magazine clips, jumped into the passenger seat of a jeep and took off. Because our perimeter bunker was situated not far from the main airfield where helicopters abounded and because we were near the main ammo dump, this sector was hit hard during the night. As our jeep passed slowly by each bunker, I could tell the fighting had been ferocious. A number of Americans had been killed and I could see the trucks removing their bodies for the trip to Graves Registration. It was a depressing scene. One bunker we passed had been hit particularly hard when VC sappers in the initial wave had cut through the wire and turned the claymore mines around to face the GI who triggered the devices.

Just before arriving at my bunker, my eyes caught sight of several dozen Viet Cong bodies laid out in a row with their faces looking up. Their bodies were in a terrible state of mutilation from American firepower and I thought that M-16's could not do this kind of damage to flesh, bone and sinew. My driver stopped momentarily to get out and survey the carnage. I tried to avert my eyes but they were drawn to the faces of the dead, ashen gray or slightly bluish. Most of the faces looked young, too young to shave, too youthful, it seemed, to know war on this kind of level. I began to feel quizzy and got out of the vehicle to walk to the nearest bunker. I squatted in the dirt, holding my rifle in both hands with the butt plate to the ground for balance. I bowed my head hoping to regain some composure. About this time an officer called over to me and asked that I take his picture with an associate on the dirt road by the bodies. He was about thirty yards away and I couldn't tell if he had the insignia of a colonel or a general. His uniform was pressed and boots polished, probably a staff officer from MACV. He held out his camera for me and all I could do was shake my head in the negative. The officer began to yell at me when his companion said something about us being fatigued from fighting all night. Apparently they didn't realize that I had just arrived. The officer turned away and found a willing photographer among the many onlookers. The entourage reminded me of tourists gawking at the sight of a particularly gruesome traffic accident. It was a great relief when my driver signaled me to resume our trip down the dusty perimeter road.

I kept thinking of those young faces as we drove away and the image has never left me. A year later, when I was back in the Arrowhead Field sauntering to my own thoughts, I recalled those faces. They were the faces of young boys – not long into puberty – looking up at me. I once had a conversation with John while we looked for arrowheads and I told him that the rank and file Viet Cong were not fighting for communism. Those youths laying face up on the perimeter had not been fighting for communism. Hell, by then I had two college degrees and had read the Communist Manifesto in its narcoleptic entirety and I couldn't make any sense of the ideology. How could fifteen-year-old illiterate peasants comprehend its dry tedium? No, they were fighting for something else.

The following summer while in the Arrowhead Field, in the pristine and innocent clarity of its dusty furrows and dry clods, it came to me. The dead VC youth had been the impressionable sponges of propaganda articulated in far off places like Moscow, Beijing or Hanoi where a kind of party-endorsed jihad was announced against foreign interlopers. They had fought big white men with blue eyes and light hair who liked strange music and pin-up pictures of strange-looking women with enormous breasts, and loud chatter which was unintelligible to ears accustomed to short, choppy, monosyllabic sounds in speech. They had fought the French and now the Americans. Impressionable, naïve and innocent, they reminded me of the young boys in basic training who applauded the sergeant who trivialized American battle deaths in Vietnam with the dismissive air of a statistician. Now we were killing these youths because of their inability to accept us as liberators or their inability to recognize our noble intensions. The image of those faces attached to bodies, which were horribly torn by the technology of gunship ordnance, resurrected another idea, which I had as a youth in the Arrowhead Field. God created the mysterious machinery of evolution and we were but a mere million years or so into our course of self-improvement. We would have a long way to go yet, perhaps millions of years more, before we would be anywhere near the image and likeness of the Creator.

When I arrived at our perimeter bunker, the soldier of the 165th I was sent to replace greeted me. He was a short redhead whose shirtless body was blackened by an amalgam of sweat, dust, nitrate powder, and oil. I could tell this youth was ready to leave. He looked much older than his years, bone tired and emotionally spent. As he climbed into the jeep, he warned me that there was likely to be a follow-up assault when darkness came. I was consoled by the fact that my shift was only during the day and that my replacement was to arrive just before dark. It was to be a twelve-hour shift. When I entered the sandbagged structure, it was obvious that the firing had been intense in this sector. The redoubt was filled ankle deep with spent M-60 and M-16shells, grenade canisters, and expended flare tubes. It was apparent the defenders had spared no ordnance.

While I awaited new ammo supplies, I tended to stay outside, cognoscente of what happened to a bunker down the line that was damaged when sappers turned its claymores around to fire back at its occupants. Although we in the 165th CAG referred to the structure as "our bunker," there was never more than one of us from our unit assigned at any one time. I suppose the rationale for this was to prevent the distractions that might arise when three friends were all together. The bunker protocol required two men to be awake at all times while the third man slept. We would rotate every three hours. Of the two men on guard, one was on the M-60 machine gun while the other operated the starlight scope, the telephone and his M-16. If things got hot, then the third man could rotate from triggering the claymores (if sappers were within range) to firing the grenade launcher, the parachute flares and his M-16. The starlight scope was highly regarded because it could detect sappers cutting the wires and slipping between and behind the bunkers where they could do the most damage. Our greatest fear was a sapper slipping behind us unnoticed and tossing a grenade into our little fortress. To prevent this, we tied empty c-ration cans to the concertina wires, hoping that even the most surreptitious sapper would alert us by rattling the cans. We heard stories of fanatical VC sappers doping themselves up with sufficient drugs to be impervious to the pain of our M-16 rounds as they sprinted forward with satchel charges and bamboo bangalors torpedoes capable of blowing holes in the wire defenses.

Not long after I arrived, two more men came to relieve the last of the previous night's occupants. One of the replacements brought a watermelon and, as enemy activity was minimal during the day, we sat outside and feasted on the treat. We could hear the sporadic cracks of rifle fire but it all appeared to be outgoing and remote. Truth be told, we were getting so accustomed to the distant reports that we paid little heed. Besides this, when a round comes anywhere near you, you hear the whiz overhead or the sound of earth kicking up. We heard none of this. Suddenly a young officer drove up to us at a high rate of speed and, slowing his jeep just long enough to deliver his message, told us to take cover because a lone sapper was firing at us. We dived for cover as the officer drove off in a cloud of dust. A lone VC guerilla had managed during the night to slip through our perimeter, cross the dirt road running behind our bunker, and hide in a large grassy field between us and the base ammo dump. We peered up to see in the distance a figure so obscure that his torso, exposed slightly above the waist-high vegetation, was but a speck. He was either, we surmised, the worst possible marksman or he was firing at some other bunker down the line. We figured it took some brass balls to fire at our positions in broad daylight with no avenue of escape. He was calling conspicuous and suicidal attention to himself. If he could have kept a low profile until nightfall, he at least would have had some opportunity to slither back across the perimeter from whence he came originally. In any case, we didn't take our eyes off the man. Finally a M-551 Sheridan tank made its appearance, slowly and methodically moving in the direction of the lone sapper who was now firing his AK-47 at the monster machine. When the tank was within flamethrower range, its crew unloosed its incendiary salvos. We watched as the Vietnamese was burned to death.

As darkness approached, the three of us moved back into the bunker and checked out our replenished supply of ammunition. We took turns squinting into the starlight scope as another nighttime assault was expected. I kept looking at my watch, wondering why my replacement had not yet arrived. Could our duty officer at 165th Headquarters have forgotten about me? I felt like making a phone call but thought otherwise for fear of inviting ridicule. Without taking our eyes off the perimeter, we engaged in some hushed small talk. Then, one of my bunk mates who was from a nearby combat engineering unit let it be known that he was hoping to see some action.

"Haven't you seen enough already?" I asked in a startled and uncomprehending voice. My other bunker companion declared that he had seen enough to last a lifetime. The gung ho Rambo type seemed to enjoy the rise he got out of the two of us. A few minutes later he confided that his American father had married a German war bride while stationed in Europe during the postwar occupation and that his mother had been in the Hitler Youth before the war. When I asked him if he were a Nazi, he responded by telling us that Hitler had gotten a bad rap, that the holocaust was the invention of anti-German propagandists, and that he was bored with no gooks to shoot at. Suddenly I wanted to be relieved more than ever and, despite the risk of revealing my cowardess, I phoned the duty officer to see when my replacement would arrive. I was relieved to learn that he was already on his way.

This Tet Offensive of 1969 was miniscule in scope and consequence when measured by the impact of the offensive of the previous year. Despite that, we learned later that, by confirmed body count, over a hundred guerillas of the Viet Cong 175th and 174th Regiments had been killed in the attack on Long Binh. It was surmised that many more were killed when infantrymen found the blood trails at distances sufficient from the perimeter to permit the bodies to be evacuated and hurriedly buried. …….

In the weeks after the Tet Offensive life appeared to return to a kind of routine characterized by work, card games, volleyball and an occasional outdoor movie. We worked six days a week and nine hours each day. Sunday was downtime. In the mornings after perimeter guard, we were given time to catch up on sleep but we rarely slept. Daytime heat was excessive and, about halfway through my tour, in anticipation of the monsoon season, we replaced the canvas tent coverings of our hooches with tin roofs. The tin only increased the heat in the poorly ventilated, plywood walled and sandbagged edifices. We were also during the day visited by Vietnamese hoochmaids who, for a nominal sum, washed our clothes and cleaned our "home." They were so noisy in their manic chatter and they played native music so loud on our radios that, for the trooper trying to sleep during the day after perimeter guard, the effort to rest was always a frustration. Late in the afternoon, about the time we returned to our hooches after work, the women were trucked off base for security concerns. After the Tet Offensive of the previous year, there was the lingering fear of fifth columnists in our midst.

The most anticipated moment of the day was mail call and I was fortunate to have many letters from home. My letters, written on -----, were subject to censure so I was more inclined to use my battery charged tape recorder for most correspondence. In one of my letters from Joan, I learned that she was taking a political science course from one of my old professors. She was now a sophomore at St. Louis University and she had Dr. Leguey Fillier. She described a conversation she had with him after class in which he tried to justify our role in the Vietnam War in terms of the lesser of two evils. He had catalogued all the evils of Ho Chi Minh's regime in the North and this included religious persecution of Vietnamese Catholics and mass execution of dissenters. Joan's tone, if such could be expressed in a two-dimensional letter, appeared to be one of approval. At first I was surprised by my sister's apparent 180-degree turnabout on the war issue. After all, it was Joan who first demonstrated against the war before I ever began to entertain doubts. In retrospect, the softening of her earlier position seemed in keeping with her views on the Hitler opposition during World War II. Back in high school, she had read my William Shirer book on "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and had become fascinated with the anti-Nazi student opposition group known as the White Rose. An admirer of the early Christian martyrs, Joan realized that these saints and the White Rose students had much in common, particularly their pacifism. However, as she read more on the subject, she came to an almost passionate respect for Count Claus von Stauffenburg, the heavily decorated and much wounded German army colonel who, because of religious scruples, had carried the satchel bomb into Hitler's bunker in the July 20th Plot of 1944. Hitler narrowly escaped and Stauffenburg was executed once it was apparent that the plot had failed. Although I may have been wrong, my impression was that Joan felt that, despite the Biblical injunction against taking life, to assassinate a Hitler to save millions of Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables was morally justified. From her letter, it seemed that the SLU professor was appealing to a similar rationale in Vietnam.

If I found it difficult to accept Dr. Leguey Felliur's analogy, it was easier to attack the war effort in Vietnam on more practical grounds. I told her that our tactics were as inefficient as those of the French before us, that our strategic hamlet plan to forcibly relocate unwilling civilians was alienating the population, that sweeping search-and-destroy missions, free-fire zones, and carpet-bombing were taking the lives of too many civilians, and that, ultimately, as foreign interlopers we could not win the hearts and minds of a people whose culture and history were so different from our own. In a follow-up letter, Joan admitted that some of my arguments made sense. I could sense, however, that my little sister was becoming in almost imperceptible increments more conservative. The evolution in her thinking, I was soon to discover, was prompted by more than the Vietnam War. Joan was soon to devote herself heart and soul to the Right to Life movement in the aftermath of the Roe v. Wade decision. Her new calling would trump all of her previous crusades.

Although Saigon was officially off limits to us, I managed to make a couple of quick trips to the South Vietnamese capital. On one of these excursions, we filled a Deuce-and-a-half with food, medical supplies and some toys and drove to an orphanage, which we had adopted. The facility was run by Catholic nuns who were Vietnamese and who spoke to us in French. There were children everywhere and they were of all ages. The unusually clean and spacious nursery was impressive. There were classrooms whose framed religious iconography and dark wooden desks with ink-well holes reminded me of my elementary school in Columbia. I thought it odd that a picture of Pope Pius XII hung from the wall over the chalkboard and concluded that the chaos of war had prevented a replacement with the likeness of subsequent prelates.

Most of the older orphans were Vietnamese while overwhelmingly the infants in the nursery and the toddlers were Amerasian. Young Vietnamese women were increasingly getting pregnant from the American liaisons and, for the sake of their family honor and to avoid the stigma which could torpedo chances of a future marriage, the orphanage was an obvious solution. Marriage to American soldiers was vigorously discouraged by the military, the State Department, and the INS. We were here to help the Vietnamese in every possible way other than marriage. Sex could not be prevented and this orphanage was here to deal with the consequences.

When I arrived in Nam in January, because my ETS date was 21 September, I figured I'd be there for only nine months. However, in a scenario with which I was growing familiar, fortune struck again. I learned that if one were accepted to a college and the paperwork supported the request, a GI in Vietnam could apply for an early out for school for as much as three months. I learned about this very important policy only after being in-country for several months. I immediately wrote to Father Barry McGannon, Dean of Students at St. Louis University, and asked for a summer class schedule and a reapplication form. With the course work I had at Georgetown University the previous year, all I needed to graduate from SLU were two classes. Father McGannon took a personal interest in my case, expediting all the paperwork and waiving the deadline that had already passed. Because summer school classes began a week before I could be discharged from the army, Father McGannon suggested that Susan, already a student at SLU, take notes for me during that first week. By the third week in May, the army approved my request. My new ETS date was 21 June 1969, exactly one year and nine months after my induction date. I was ecstatic. In one more month I would be free. Never before had I thirsted so much for freedom. I would never again take it for granted.

The euphoria was temporarily shattered by the death of a comrade. It was a late Sunday afternoon, a day of leisure and I was on my bunk recording a taped message home to Mom wishing her a happy Mother's Day. I was communicating the good news of my impending early out and also the fact that I was to receive the Army Commendation Medal, an award which for many American soldiers in Vietnam was a perfunctory recognition that the recipient simply did his job without rancor or an Article Four conviction. For me, the medal was tantamount to collegiate grade inflation, an inexpensive way for the brass to build some sense of morale in a war that was increasingly looking like a military cul de sac. As I was doing my recording, I could hear the 105mm batteries at Bear Cat opening up. I was sure that Mom would hear the noise in the background and reassured her that it was merely a salvo of outgoing ordnance. When I finished the taping, I walked over to headquarters and asked the orderly what all the commotion was. He divulged from his information conduit – really a mix of gossip, speculation, and shreds of actual intelligence from the bamboo pipeline – that the area Viet Cong were mobilizing for some kind of a demonstration to celebrate the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese president who four months hence would die of natural causes. I shrugged wistfully and returned to my bunk to read the final chapter of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," a gift from our lone hippie when he left the 165th for a reassignment to I Corps near the DMZ. "Olie" Olson had left about two months earlier and I had suspected that it was because he incurred the ire of the brass for his rather conspicuous display of peace signs, beads and long hair. There wasn't much marijuana use among the men of my hooch but, for those who were tookers, I suspected that this soldier was their supplier. I finished the book that night and, after eating in the mess and playing a game of poker, turned in. I fell into a deep sleep.

I awoke suddenly to a thunderous roar and with a blast which catapulted me out of my bunk. My first thought was that I had been hit by lightning. However, with flying sparks of shrapnel smashing through the plywood walls and ricocheting about, I knew instantly we were under attack. In the darkness everyone instinctively ran to the hooch door facing the wooden walkway closest to the large corrugated steel cylindrical bunker encased in sandbags. We wore nothing but our olive green boxer shorts and we all hit the door at the same time. The impact of nearly twenty GI's was sufficient to knock the door off its hinges and the entire façade seemed to give way, ripping nails and screws from their moorings. Those of us in the back had to retreat momentarily to permit an efficient exit. I was actually laughing and I could hear others uttering a similar response. Granted it was nervous laughter. Pounding hearts and surging adrenaline levels more accurately represented our endorphin states – but still there was laughter. I cannot speak for the rest but, for me, it was the recognition that we had all been suddenly transformed into herd animals with none of the macho bullshit which passes for courage. Rather it was collective terror. Our guard was down and we were all behaving like frightened beasts and this is what seemed humorous at the time. Looking back on the event, some thirty-four years later, the scene appears surrealistic.

We sprinted to the reinforced bunker while incoming rockets intermittently exploded. Because my bunk was at the opposite end of the hooch exit, I was the last from our hooch to enter the bunker. It was already filled to capacity with the boys from the entire company. All were sitting nervously on two parallel benches facing each other in the dark, all barefoot and in shorts. The atmosphere was heavy, hot, and stuffy with the strong sense of sweat and body odor. In only the second time since a child, I was suddenly overtaken by a sense of claustrophobic nausea and I worked my way out into the fresh air as comrades from more remote hooches tried to pile in. I knelt at the entrance, somewhat protected by the sandbagged parapet abutting the edifice. I breathed in the fresh air and regained my composure. As men were continuing to squeeze in, I saw in the partially illuminated night a fully uniformed sergeant rushing the opposite direction, yelling out for help. He yelled that there were some casualties. I arose and ran after him, thinking of giving a hand. We entered the hooch next to the outdoor theatre and water tank. In the erratic motion of flashlight illumination, I could see several injured men being helped out the opposite door where the ambulance driver, a Mormon friend from Utah, was at the wheel. Then I approached a bed at the far left. The top bunk was empty, its mattress and sheets ripped into shreds. On the bottom bunk was the contorted form of John Love, our occasional poker companion with the Scottish brogue and the eye for the photographs on my wall. A desperate effort was being made by a corpsman to stabilize him for the ambulance ride to the --- Medivac Hospital. Blood seemed to be pouring out of his body faster than the beer was running out of the midget refrigerator by his bed. Overhead was a poster of the Sacred Heart of Jesus – the face perforated and the heart pierced yet again. On the floor, blood and beer ran in rivulets about our bare feet. He was promptly evacuated with the other wounded and the rest of us returned to the bunker. I can't recall how long it was but, after an interval when the rocket attack seemed to have subsided, the Mormon ambulance driver approached us and told us that John Love had died before he ever reached the hospital. A Chinese-made 140mm rocket had scored a direct hit, smashing through the metal roof of John's hooch. Fortunately for John's bunkmate, he was at that very moment returning from R&R and, had the attack had occurred a day later, would likely have shared John's fate.

Heavy monsoon rains suddenly began to fall and the rocket attack ended as abruptly as it had begun. Except for a small group considering the possibility of a renewed attack, most of us returned to our hooches. As we slowly reentered the building, we kept the lights off to make it more difficult for VC on the perimeter to sight and align their rocket launchers to us. The din from the rains pounding against our metallic roof nearly drowned out the voice of one of our number. It sounded like Bob Lacosta but it was too dark to know for certain. The speaker reminded us that torrential rains fell immediately after the death of Christ. We were all stunned and eager for analogy, so this comment met with our approval. In the flicker of a cigarette lighter I could see some of us nodding.

No one was in the mood for bed. No one wanted to die alone in a bed like John. We began to sit on the plywood floor in the middle of the hooch or on the sides of nearby bunks. A rough circle began to form. In the light of a candle that we were careful to hold to the floor, we began a discussion which I will never forget. The conversation began with our poker group and it began quietly. Soon everyone in the hooch left their beds to join the conversation, a few talking and most listening. It was not long before the talk grew to such intensity that even the thunder outside, indistinguishable from the occasional artillery salvos from Bear Cat, did not interrupt us. We spoke of wives and lovers, of parents and hometown haunts. I had heard many of the stories before but now the telling possessed more urgency and depth. It was as if we wanted our stories told so they could outlive us. We had to speak loudly to be heard over the downpour.

We reminisced about John and tried to understand the meaning of his leaving us. We tried to imagine what an afterlife would be like. We spoke of free will and bad luck. We explored the purpose of pain and evil in the world and we acknowledged the injustice of death. This was a pretty sophisticated group in my midst. I never imaged that these carefree and reckless souls could ever be so serious. While sitting there discussing John Love's life, I could not help remembering the bullsession that I had in our Walsh Hall dorm room when we heard of Ben Guthrie's highway death in late 1965. Because Ben had been killed with his girlfriend after a weekend together in the Ozarks, one of our number had questioned whether God would punish him in the afterlife. I must have grown because the question seemed to deserve an answer four years earlier. Not now. It was as if God were required to offer some explanation for all death.

Now in our Long Binh hooch, there was no agenda, thoughts and feelings haphazardly intermeshing, sometimes in randomly flowing verbage and sometimes in profoundly moving testimonials. I remember someone spoke of his sister's out-of-body experience while on the operating table and another told the story of an aunt who late one night saw her husband standing in the doorway at the moment his ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo. Then someone told a joke about a naked cheerleader standing in the doorway and the resulting laughter was louder than the story deserved. We were clinging to levity no matter how banal. Some, I could fathom from the intonations, seemed to be laughing and weeping at the same time.

Soon Roland Renee and Glen Poppinga left their hooch nextdoor to join us. As the bull session grew in emotional intensity, other GI's whose voices were not familiar to us joined in. The candlelight was now augmented by popping cigarette lighters and the occasional luminescence of parachute flares descending in the distance around the perimeter. The frankness with which we admitted our fears and the candor with which we spoke of disappointments in life and love's dramas had a leveling effect, sealing us even more compactly into a band of brothers. The experience, I concluded, helped us to better understand the psychological components of the conflict and John's death deepened that awareness. We could with greater insight, I thought, appreciate the value of camradship, group loyalty and personal responsibility.

I told the group that our assembly reminded me of a late medieval book I had once read, a book by Giovanni Boccacio called "The Decameron." It concerned a group of young men and women who had left the city of Florence for a hideout in the countryside to escape the ravages of the Black Death. Like Chaucer's "Canterbery Tales, each of the men and women told a story to while away the time. I told everyone present that none of us would probably ever forget this night. I told them that we could refer to it as our Vietnam Decameron.

I'll never forget the dimly lit faces around the candle that night. My great regret is that I never kept a journal during these years. Already the ravages of time are assaulting my memory. The names are beginning to fade but not the faces. Many years later, after reading a book by Czech writer Milan Kundara, I made a trip to Washington DC with my wife and our three young sons. We were going to visit the Vietnam Wall. Kundara claimed in his novella that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness. As we walked toward the wall from the Lincoln Memorial, I could not help but think that I had already forgotten too much. When it comes to war, I believe we are all anesthetized to its reality by the stupor of romantic myth and the imperfect programming of our genetic codes. We become lethargic and forgetful.

At the wall I discovered to my dismay that John Love's name appeared twice – two men by the same name killed in the same month. Because I could not remember his middle name or his exact date of death, I felt that something important was lost to me when I touched the two names on the polished black basalt. My wife, who had participated in several antiwar demonstrations at her medical school while I was in Nam, wept when she thought of the boys in her high school whose names were on the wall. Our three boys, observing the emotion overtaking both parents, remained silent.

CHAPTER SIX: A NEW BREATH OF FREEDOM
June 1969 – June 1971

The day I left Vietnam was, until then, the happiest of my life. I was taken by my Mormon friend to the Bien Hoa processing station for the flight back to the "world" where I would immediately ETS out of the army. At the processing station I was forced to surrender all my fatigues, which, I was told, would be burned. The only thing I truly hated to leave behind was my canvass camouflaged helmet cover which had inscribed on it, among other things, a peace sign, Georgetown, short, and Jane – the girl from Marymount who sent me the St. Christopher medal which was attached to this same cover.

At one point I was asked by an army physician if I had any medical ailment or injury incurred during my tour of duty. I told him of a loud and deafening ringing in my left ear, a problem that began with the rocket explosion that killed John Love. The doctor asked me if I had sought treatment when it began and I told him that, a week after the rocket incident, I walked to the nearest Medivac hospital. I explained to him that as I was waiting to be seen, a helicopter landed and disgorged a half dozen very wounded and bloodied grunts who were carried in by stretchers. Suddenly my ear problem seemed so trivial by comparison that embarrassment forced me to leave and return to work. However, now on my last day in Nam, this very solicitous doctor informed me that if I were to make a claim, I would have to get into another line and my processing would be extended for a couple of extra days to satisfy the requirements for a more thorough ear exam. This was shocking news because my summer classes at St. Louis U had begun several days before and it was only through the good graces of Father McGannon and the note-taking of Susan that I was able to orchestrate this very important "early out" for school. I told the doctor that I did not wish to make a claim against the government for this ear injury and that I wished to avoid the more thorough physical.

The plane for home was a commercial TWA and, as I boarded, my mouth fell open in a kind of trance-like veneration when I observed the young and exquisitely attractive American stewardess at the door welcoming us aboard. She possessed long blond hair with large rimmed sunglasses pulled back over her head and she wore a brightly colored mini-dress. Even though I made a conscious effort not to stare, I could not take my eyes off her. I thought her the most beautiful creature God had placed on this earth. She seemed like the gatekeeper to a wonderful new world of beauty, possibility, hope and safety. I felt somewhat silly in my excitement, like a child about to enter the big top tent for his first visit to the circus.

Our plane took us to Guam and Hawaii where we refueled and then to Travis Air Force Base in California. We had heard through media stories where returning soldiers were threatened, verbally abused or attacked with eggs but we didn't see any of this. I ETS'd out of active military service in record time on 21 June 1969 and caught a commercial flight directly to St. Louis. Over Kansas City we hit a turbulent thunderstorm and I was forced to consider the possibility of crashing. What irony, I thought, if after six months in Nam my end came as a result of a plane crash less than an hour by air from my destination.

Dad and Mom had already found a place for me at Grand Towers Apartments, an upscale two-bedroom residence with good security, its own convenience store, and a great balcony view of the university's student center across the street. Arriving by airport limousine at the corner of Lindell and Grande where the college church, St. Francis Xavier stood, I walked a block south to the apartment building. The storm, which I experienced over Kansas City, was now thrashing St. Louis. I saw a note on the door telling me that the family was at 7:00 pm mass at the college church. I left my duffle bag with a security guard and walked back to the church. The building was totally dark except for the votive lights that cast a faint glow at the apse. With the help of the candle lights and the flashes of lightning through stained glass windows, I could see my family sitting in the front pew on the right side. I walked up the side isle, genuflected and took a seat. It was a strange reunion because at the moment when I made my appearance and the awkward hugging began along our pew, the choir sang Alleluia and the church lights turned on.

The two-bedroom apartment at Grand Towers was spacious and brand spanking new, a real contrast to the cramped quarters at Griesdick and Walsh Halls. The family had a small homecoming party for me that first night and the mood was festive and celebratory. Everyone was there but John. The date was 21 June 1969. Walking through the sliding glass door to the balcony, I could see old Griesdick Hall at 10:00 o'clock, the student center at noon, and, leaning over the balcony railing, I could see a portion of the St. Louis Arch at 3:00 o'clock. The night air was warm and humid from the recent downpour and from the proximity to the confluence of Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. It dawned on me that I was truly free, that I was at last master of my own body and soul, and that Uncle Sam could no longer set my agenda or presume to dictate my life's priorities. I was in a state of elation and euphoria.

I immediately applied for the G.I. Bill – about $150 a month, an amount that paid for most of the apartment cost and only a fraction of tuition. Savings from army pay and a subsidy from parents covered the rest. John was scheduled to ETS in September and he would move in with me and help with expenses when he resumed his studies at St. Louis University. I purchased my first car, a second-hand Volkswagen bug, which put me in the mood to rock and roll.

It was celestial to be back at school again. I loved the classroom atmosphere and the instructors so much that I began seriously to consider a career in academia. Unlike the anonymity I felt at Georgetown, these professors knew me and embraced me with open arms. It was with high spirits that I visited again with Father Bannon, Dr. Jose Sanchez and Dr. Miller in the History Department and Dr. Daugherty in the Political Science Department. All were supportive when informed that I planned to pursue a master's degree in history. With all the credits transferring from Georgetown, I would get my baccalaureate after summer school and begin graduate studies in September. This would allow me two weeks in August to see the family in Tennessee and perhaps even look for arrowheads.

John called me from Fort Riley and told me that he had a good buddy, Jim Grady, whose sister was studying nursing at St. Louis University. John and Jim had suggested that I introduce myself to her and perhaps take her out to dinner. Two weeks after discarding my "cammies" for "civvies," I phoned Ann Grady and suggested a meeting. From her rather enthusiastic tone I presumed that her brother might have told her to expect such a call. This was my third blind date ever (the other two were from my Fort Belvoir days). She was the prettiest of them all. When she came to the door, I was dazzled by her looks. When she introduced me to her nursing school apartment mates, I had some difficulty resurrecting the appropriate words. It was patently obvious to me that I had been too long without the company of women.

Ann was a slim blue-eyed blond in her third year of an intense four-year BS and RN degree program. We had dinner at Banderas Italian Restaurant on West Pine and then walked to the SLU Quadrangle where we spent quite a bit of time on a bench talking. We were facing Griesdick Hall and I pointed out to her where I had dormed during my first two years at the institution. I noticed that she was not as much the conversationalist as I would have preferred and it seemed like I was doing most of the talking. Frankly I didn't care. It was just a wonderful feeling speaking again to an attractive young woman. I told her I was happy to be alive, to be free, to be in a big city and to be sitting next to her. I remember also telling her that after Vietnam, nothing much would ever go badly in my life. There were too many opportunities for joy and adventure.

When I kissed her goodnight at her apartment, I suggested that we might take in a movie the following weekend. She told me she loved movies and she suggested the following Friday evening. She was so cute that I assumed her weekends were taken up with a crowded herd of admiring males and that I would have to take a ticket and stand in line. She told me to pick the movie.

I'm embarrassed to say that the movie I selected was the twelve hour Russian epic War and Peace, all subtitled in English and playing in four weekly installments at the Brentwood Theatre, a cinema catering to the quirky foreign film crowd. The routine was to have dinner early, watch the film, and then have cherries jubilee at Cyranno's or to have a drink or two at the Fox and Hounds bar at the Cheshire Inn. We followed this routine for four consecutive weekends and I was absolutely astounded by her stamina. Even I was getting burned out. Each week I'd suggest another movie that might better appeal to her tastes and each week she said her preference was the Russian epic. I was frankly beginning to suspect her of not being completely forthright. By the end of the second installment, I was ready for some levity. A comedy with poor reviews would have sufficed. Could Ann be trying to learn Russian? Her class schedule was much more rigorous than mine but her weekends always seemed free. On at least one occasion I tried to teach her to play tennis on the courts at Forest Park but her shots were so wild that I began to lose patience.

Ann Grady was a puzzle to me. If she seemed more serious and mature than other women her age, there was little jollity or flamboyance in her manner. She didn't seem possessed of a single flirtatious gene. It came as a surprise to me that at restaurants and pubs when men would stare admiringly at her, she seemed unaware of their glances. I sensed a sadness in her eyes and suspected that she must still be in the throws of some catastrophic romantic decompression, perhaps on the rebound and secretly lamenting the dissolution of some singularly passionate and glorious relationship. I sensed this most when we sat in my spatially compressed bug and kissed. There didn't seem to be much passion in her. She was probably saving it for the right guy. When I felt the time was right to talk about it, she changed the subject or dismissed the inquiry as irrelevant. I grew accustomed to silence and not a little obfuscation. By the time John arrived in September, I was no longer seeing Ann.

After a manifestly lifeless course at Spring Hill College nearly five years earlier, a theology class was not now one of my priorities. I had postponed my second required class until the very end. By virtue of my military service, the physical education requirement for the BA degree was waived. I didn't have such luck with theology. That said, during the summer school session I was surprised to discover a young and energetic instructor who permitted considerable latitude in our research topics. My theology research paper was more in line with a philosophy paper.

Perhaps more than I was willing to admit at the time, Vietnam had profoundly influenced my evolving worldview. I was reading some of the short stories of Jean Paul Sartre and carrying on a rather serious flirtation with existentialism. Much of the philosophy appealed to me but I still found its pessimism cold and obtuse. For someone with a strong Jesuit education that emphasized the compatibility of faith and reason, I was not quite ready to jettison all my baggage to an ideologue's strident belief in the absurdity of life and the compassionless aloofness of the universe. I was pleased to discover that not all existentialists were atheists and I was reassured by the thoughts of Christians like Gabriel Marcel and Jewish writers like Martin Buber. However, the philosopher who most appealed to me emotionally and who first came to my attention during my research for Mr. _____'s theology class was the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, a Christian existentialist from Spain.

That summer of 1969 I read everything I could find in English by him or about him. What most caught my fancy was his intellectual honesty and humility, his recognition that his boyhood faith no longer buttressed him completely. He was a committed rationalist who could not ignore scientific empiricism. Despite this, he retained an emotional thirst for faith in a personal God and immortality. I could detect in his writings a great pathos, a consuming ambivalence.

When I visited my parents at the end of the summer, I returned to the arrowhead field for the first time in more than two years. I had already submitted my research paper on Unamuno and the instructor had written next to the grade of A a note declaring the paper superb. In the cool recesses of a massive limestone boulder abutted by giant cedars and with the sound of water in a summer trickle at the spring, I read San Manuel Bueno, Martin. It was Unamuno's novella of a parish priest in a small, poverty-stricken village in Spain. The congregation was made up of hard-working, honest and decent people, all salt of the earth, peasants who shouldered considerable burdens and personal tragedies. One day, as the story went, during the consecration of the host, the priest suddenly had a demoralizing epiphany. He had lost his faith. The priest immediately went to work on a sermon for the following Sunday, a homily in which he would tell the people of his sudden apostasy and ask them to look for another cleric. Sunday came and entering the pack church, he went straight to the pulpit to make his announcement. As he peered down into the faces of the people, he could remember the countless baptisms, weddings and funerals he had conducted. They were his friends and he cared for them. Looking down, it occurred to him that, without faith in a benevolent God and an afterlife void of suffering, these poor people would have nothing. They would have no hope and the universe would appear to them indifferent to their dreams and expectations. In other words, the priest reluctantly had to admit that by revealing his lost faith, he would in fact be cruel and selfish. He stepped down from the pulpit and, though now a hypocrite, he continued to minister to his congregation by strengthening their faith.

I thought it was a great story and it seemed to reflect Unamuno's final reconciliation with the innocent and simple faith of his childhood. He would in his heart will to believe that which his mind told him was ludicrous. He would declare his faith in Christ and in an afterlife. "Let us live," Unamuno once wrote, "in such a way that if there be nothing beyond death, then our death will have been a gross injustice." When I read that line at the spring in the late summer of 1969, it reminded me of something Dad said to me years before while we were loading square bales in the Arrowhead Field. "Don't you think it would be more admirable for a person who lacked faith to live a good and decent life of Christian charity out of love than for a believer to lead a good and devout life for fear of hell?" he once asked. Many of the points Unamuno made reminded me of conversations I had with my Dad in the Arrowhead Field. It is my great fortune that, as of this writing, I have both of my parents and that I still have these and similar conversations with a father who stridently insists that one cannot truly control what one believes. He doesn't put much stock in free will. I suppose one of the reasons why I found Unamuno so compelling is that he reminds me of Dad. My father cannot accept the divinity of Christ or the use of miracles. And yet, because he loves my mother and indulges her whims, he attends Mass with her each Sunday and even, until recently, played the organ at church services. I'd call that Christian love and I think it is the animus that compelled the village priest to remain a ministering clergyman. In his poem El Cristo de Valazguez, Unamuno was said to have written perhaps one of the most sublime and moving expressions of faith in the Spanish language. "Thou who art silent, oh Christ, to hear us… grant me, Lord, that when at last I go hence, lost, to leave this tearful nighttime where dreaming shrivels the heart, I may emerge into the clean, endless day, mine eyes fixed on thy body, Son of Man, Humanity complete, to the increate light that never dies; mine eyes fixed upon thine eyes, Christ, my vision lost in thee, oh Lord." This from a man of science and reason, a man who loved his wife and a life of intellectual honesty.

I finished all my coursework for a BA degree in political science at the end of the summer, two months after leaving the army. Dr. Daugherty, head of the department, invited me over to his house in University City for my final oral exam. It was a treat. Before taking the exam, the professor's wife served tea and cookies in an effort, it was my guess, to put me at ease for what ended up being a relatively easy exam. I wouldn't receive the sheepskin until the formal graduation ceremony slated for December at Kiel Auditorium. As I was not interested in pomp and circumstance, I missed the commencement event for my bachelor's degree as I would miss the ceremony for the master's degree a year later.

When the 1969-1970 academic year began at SLU, John had just been discharged from the army and had begun his junior year with a business major at the university. Like me, he had taken enough college courses at institutions near his bases that he made up for a year of course work. We were rooming together and having a fine time in our very clean and spacious apartment. The army had instilled in us enough self-discipline that good grades were easy to maintain.

With our Volkswagen bug for transportation, we had considerably more freedom of movement than we enjoyed during our 1965-66 year together. We often double-dated and took weekend excursions canoeing on the rivers in the Ozarks or visiting nearby historic sites. Neither one of us got too serious during this year's dating. I remember a few double dates when John went out with Barbara Tlapec, the cousin of a girl I knew at Spring Hill College, and also Marianne Braun, a friend of Ann Wynn. During the academic year 1969-70 I dated Gay Layle, an SLU nursing student from Kansas City, Michelle Trafton, a speech therapist major at nearby Fontbonne College, and finally Marilyn (Mame) O'Brien, a sociology major at SLU who was a student in one of John's classes. He introduced us when we encountered her at Pius X Library.

What first attracted me to Mame was her interest in tennis. The family belonged to Old Warson Country Club in the Clayton area of St. Louis and the two of us would play nearly every weekend from the spring to the fall of 1970. We refined our game to such an extent that we knew exactly where each of us would be at any moment under any contingency. In fact, we got so good working together that we won an Old Warson mixed doubles tournament and picked up an impressive little trophy. A footnote to this event occurred when I was showing off my athletic prowess before a crowd of spectators at the moment of victory. I hugged Mame and jumped the net to receive the perfunctory handshake from our opponents. As I was going over the net, one of my shoes caught the top of the tape and I came crashing down with my racket handle slamming into my nose. I was in considerable pain with a conspicuously bleeding nose while the crowd was laughing wildly. My effort to remain cool and nonchalant in the midst of the blood flow succeeded only in increasing the volume of laughter. It was a terrible humiliation.

If I was always somewhat intimidated by the fathers of the girls I dated, I discovered that Dr. O'Brien was an exception. He was an orthopedic surgeon who looked like a carbon copy of Michael Renny, the star of the 195- science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Inviting me over to his home in Clayton for dinners and cookouts, he was always solicitous and, if my perceptions were accurate, seemed to be pleased with me as Mame's significant other. Dr. O'Brien was something of a Renaissance man who was well read and who took an active interest in gardening, tennis, photography, classical music and his Weimariners. Because Mame told him I liked the compositions of Rimsky Korsakov, without fail he would play Shaherizade whenever I dined with the family. He had his own darkroom and seemed to exude pride when he showed me the formal studio slide photographs he had taken of Mame and her younger sister Carol and her older brother Mike. When I showed him my slides of Vietnam and Tennessee, he was as complementary as he could be without betraying objectivity.

As John and I were both interested in pushing ourselves academically to get our degrees as soon as possible, we took heavy loads and went to summer school. In the summer of 1970 we moved into Lewis Memorial Hall, the dorm for graduate students, married couples, and seminarians. There we became part of a large circle of friends in a variety of graduate fields.

One of John's good fiends was Warren Vadrine from Louisiana, a graduate student in chemistry and an adventurer who during the summers often backpacked to exotic archaeological sites around the world. It was from him that I acquired an abiding interest in Maya studies. He told us of a recent trip where he flew into the Petain Rainforest of Guatemala in a rickety World War II vintage aircraft which experienced engine trouble on landing. When Warren returned to the small jungle airfield after a half day exploring the ruins, he discovered that the plane engine was scattered about on the tarmac and the native pilot was trying to read the English-language repair instruction manual. Warren did his best to translate, the engine was reassembled, and the group flew back to Guatemala City. John and I were impressed by Warren's courage. On occasion, John and Warren went rock climbing on the bluffs near Alton, Illinois.

Another good friend was John Allen, a seminarian of the Claretian Order who was getting his PhD in psychology. What I liked about this friend was his penchant for debate and argument. We would often bullshit into the early hours of the morning on any number of subjects. From the bull sessions I learned that John had begun to seriously reconsider his plans for the priesthood. As the year progressed and as I saw him often in the company of attractive women, I realized that he was not long for the seminary. A couple of years later, I went to his wedding in the Old St. Louis Cathedral by the Arch. John Allen was proof positive that political differences can often be ignored between friends. I was a political liberal and it seemed almost incongruous to have a friend so young who studied stock-market quotations and who praised the statesmanship of Richard Nixon. As Goldie Hawn once observed in the movie Butterflies are Free, I didn't think there was such a thing as a "Young Republican."

If John Allen's friendship transcended politics, this was not the case with all my former compatriots at the university. When I began graduate studies in the fall of 1969, I ran into one of my old friends from pre-army days, Jack Peronsky. It was Jack's parents who owned the cottage on Lake Bullah where Butch O'Blennis, Carmen Navarra, Cheryl Melof and I spend that adventurous weekend in the spring of 1967. Jack and I also had a common interest in guns where three years earlier we would while away the hours on weekends plinking at paper-plate targets in the rural environs of the county. He had been in the Air Force ROTC program and, he confided to me when we met again in the fall of 1969, that he hoped to get his fighter status in time to see action in Vietnam. His fear was that the war might end before he had a chance to prove himself. We had been the best of friends just a few years earlier but I was a different person now and his sentiments and concerns seemed alien to me now.

Several months later my old political science professor, Dr. Daugherty, asked me to be one of three guest speakers at a student coffee hour at Choteau House, a current events forum on campus. The speakers were all Vietnam vets. Dr. Daugherty knew my views on the war and was himself relatively strident in his opposition to the conflict. I was the only vet there to articulate an anti-war position. The university had changed much in two and a half years. The students in the assembly overwhelmingly agreed with my position. Jack Peronsky was sitting in the back row of the room and his expression reflected a state of puzzlement and disillusionment with me. As I spoke, I saw him bow his head, rise slowly and walk out of the coffee house. It was the last time I ever saw him. To this day I regret that we could not have maintained our friendship and overlooked our political differences as I have been able to do with most of my conservative friends and family members.

Another old friend I bumped into that year was Rich Brutine, my roommate at Walsh Hall after John was inducted into the army in the fall of 1966. From Rich I learned that Butch O'Blennis was now in law school at the University of Missouri and that Cheryl Melof had become a hippy after I left school for the army. Although a bedrock conservative Protestant from Arkansas who dreamed of wealth building through entrepreneurial investment, Rick was teaching at a Catholic elementary school for very little pay. By now I would have expected him to have made his first million. He had a scheme for an investment and wanted me to join him in a venture that I either could not understand or which appeared very risky. I explained to Rick that I was living on my GI bill, savings from the army, and my parents' largesse. I had no discretionary funds for anything but the basics.

One of my new friends was Ralph Kister, a law student at SLU whose parents owned the Wine Gardens Restaurant in nearby St. Charles, an upscale eatery with a beautifully manicured lawn that overlooked the Missouri River. It was one of my favorite haunts.

[Cont'd to Anthony Lademan]