When Betty Andrews was three months pregnant, she miscarried, and baptized him as soon as he was born, before the doctor arrived. The baby was born alive, perfectly shaped, in the family kitchen, and 12-year-old Joan and 11 year old Susan saw the baby and held him. He was named Joel, and at the funeral, each family member put a lock of hair in the coffin.

Joel's father screeched out of Belfast school upon receiving his wife's phone call while his children watched from their classrooms wondering what had happened.(They took a school bus to Lewisburg that evening and walked the two-miles home to find their mother lying on a mattress on the kitchen floor with Joel above the kitchen counter.) As soon as his father arrived Joel's mother asked him to baptize the baby so that he would feel a part. That day, Joel's mother had been building bookcases into the walls of the bedrooms of the farm house exerting a good deal of energy. The family buried Joel in a coco-can a few days later at a rock outcropping between the pond and the front road where other premature babies of the Andrews siblings would subsequently be buried. Every night for a year Joel's mother had a vision of him. (She says that it wasn't a dream, but something real.) He grew and grew each time he appeared. Then after a year, she never saw him again.

Sister Joan:

It was in 1960, on December 1, that we lost Joel. He was my youngest brother, two years younger than Miriam. We named him John Mary Joel, but we called him Joel. When we had learned my mother was pregnant, we had picked the name Joel for a boy. When he died, Mom wanted the names John and Mary also, for Saint John and the Blessed Mother. We know he was a boy. He was perfectly formed and alive when he was born, although he was premature. We were all in school-including Daddy, who was the principal at Belfast Elementary School-when Mama realized she was losing the baby. She called my dad and told him. He told us, and then he left immediately. John, Bill, Susan and I took the school bus home that afternoon. I remember it so clearly. It was awful. We walked home from where the bus dropped us in town, about four miles away. When we got home, Mamma was in the kitchen and the priest had already come out. Joel had already been born and died. Even though we did not see him alive, we were able to hold him.

The next day we buried Joel in a little cocoa can. (That may sound rather disrespectful since these days cocoa comes in cardboard boxes. Back then, however, cocoa came in beautiful silver boxes-probably aluminum, but it looked like silver-with little tops that you could pull open.) We pasted a cross on the can, a beautiful cross my grandfather (Edward J. Early) had gotten in Europe. Then we each put in a lock of our hair, and then finally we put the little body in. We buried him on the farm. The priest had blessed a plot of land, and we had a regular funeral. We dug up two little cedar trees and planted one on each side of the grave, although they died right away because we planted them in frozen ground.

I remember walking around after that and thinking, "I'll never be happy again." I had never known a death in the family other than those of my grandfather and my Uncle Ted. But they were older, and although it was sad, it seemed all right.

We buried Joel next to a natural stone formation jutting up out of nowhere, near the pond. It is a pretty pond, with lots of trees. We would have preferred to bury him at the spring, which was the most beautiful part of the farm, but it floods there. We made a cement marker with a cross for him.

..Still, I was very awed when I saw how perfectly formed Joel was. He was just beautiful. He was so little, and every little finger, every little toe, was so perfect. He had a perfect little face. But we thought it was funny: he did not have any hair.

Since then, all the babies in the family who died before birth have been buried there. Susan's baby Christopher is buried there, and Miriam's two babies are there.

SISTER JOAN'S MEMORIES:
I remember Daddy walking with us a lot in the woods and telling us stories. Daddy was sweet and quiet. He spanked me twice, once after we took corncobs out of John Ezel's old house in woods. I remember John getting in trouble with Daddy a lot, because he got the tractor stuck in the mud or because of electronics. I remember once John getting spanked and running into woods. I remember when Joel died. John and I planted cedar trees on either side of tomb near the clay pond. I remember Mama always singing to us, saying rosary with us and Mama saying that John was the only one who stayed awake for the entire rosary each night. I remember times when Mama would cry. I recall staying at Grandmother's and Aunt Sara's for two weeks while Mama was in Europe with Ganger and Aunt Sara holding up a newspaper article showing an oceanliner sinking while at sea saying that your mother was on that ship and she's dead. I remember trying to convince Susan that Aunt Sara was lying and running away with Susan that night.

"THE ARROWHEAD FIELD" by brother Bill (continued from father):

Our first workday was spent with our entire platoon on the barracks floor. All of us were in our olive drab boxer shorts and all of us were issued putty knives. We were ordered to scrape all the wax off a well-polished floor. The next day we waxed and buffed. The reason, I gathered, was to strip away our dignity in layers as we were stripping away the wax.

It was to instill in us a sense that we were an organic unit all working together for a common objective, building us up to be reflexively obedient, unquestioning instruments of war. And woe to the individual who asked for an explanation or who complained openly. It was a psychology that worked.

I got the impression that my drill sergeant knew I didn't buy it. Most of the boys in my unit were two to three years younger than I and few had anything more than a high school education. I suspected that some didn't even have that. The reason why the military preferred young and impressionable youths was made abundantly clear to me when we had a company assembly in an indoor arena during our third or fourth week of Basic.

Our platoon leader was a tall, skinny redheaded second lieutenant who seldom said anything to us and who just walked around returning salutes. He was probably fresh out of ROTC but he looked like he was eighteen and so bewildered by his new responsibilities (returning salutes) that our foul-mouthed, chiseled-faced, battle-hardened DI's could have waffled him down for breakfast.

In any case, at the assembly we heard the lieutenant speak publicly for the first time. It was a short address, probably meant to be motivational, but it faltered somewhat. He seemed somewhat diminished in the presence of all those beefy, leather-faced DI's. He was followed by one of the DI's who walked on the stage and began to cuss all the hippies and radicals who were badmouthing the war. Everyone was listening intently and I was trying to figure out where he was going. Then he said that during the previous year more than thirty thousand Americans had been killed in car accidents on our highways. He paused. Then he bellowed out "so what the hell are all those s___-faced pacifists complaining about when only ten-thousand American soldiers got killed in Vietnam last year? Why don't they complain about them what was killed on the highways?" With this the crowd of soldiers, almost to a man, yelled out their enthusiastic accord. "Yeah!!!" Looking around, I could not help the forlorn thought that it would be a long two years.

I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut about my antiwar sentiments in front of the DI's but in bull sessions in the field or at night in the barracks, the guys in my platoon began to talk to me about their anxieties. My nickname became "professor." My only serious confrontation with my drill sergeant occurred the day when we were fighting each other with pugil sticks and football helmets. I had befriended a couple of Puerto Rican recruits who were in our company but whose platoon was assigned to an adjacent barracks. After the fourth week, the discipline was relaxed enough where, after mess, we could fraternize with men of our company in other barracks. These Puerto Riquenos were teaching me some of their songs on the guitar and I was trying to improve my language skills after two semesters of Spanish in college. On the pugil course, our DI was unusually insulting to the Hispanics, calling them Spics, ____ and "__ for brains." What occasioned some of this animosity, beyond simple prejudice, was the fact that the Puerto Ricans were part of a reserve unit activated only for our eight-week basic training course after which time they would return to their civilian jobs back on their island paradise. At any rate, I got tired of the sergeant's tirade and called out to him "why don't you leave them alone." There was a dead silence. The DI turned and walked up to me and smiled. "Andrews," he said with an even voice, "I want you to be the first to demonstrate the pugil stick." He handed me a stick and ordered me to the center of the group. He handed the other stick to the biggest draftee in our unit, a giant of a man who had the physique of a serious bodybuilder. The sergeant handed him a football helmet and told him to beat the __ out of me. When I reached over for a helmet, he told me that my head was too big to fit any of those on the ground.

My opponent, whose name I can not remember, went on to become a friend and, when we graduated, told me he was assigned an MOS as a military policeman. As per instruction, he didn't hold back and I was on my back after just a couple well-laid-on blows. If I had some bruises and a headache that lasted several days, I also had a lot more friends among the Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans in my company. And the biggest surprise was that the sergeant seemed to ease up a bit more after the incident.

We went back to the rifle range several times and I always did well. In fact, after knocking down my human cut-out targets, I sometimes turned my M-14 to fire on the targets in the adjacent lanes. Most of the DI's from the other platoons saw some humor in this. They got together and suggested that I compete with the best shot in another company of two-hundred men. The next morning after our 5:00 am breakfast mess, the company marched out to the rifle range. When we arrived, we noticed that another company was on site milling around and waiting for us. My recollection is that many of them were on some bleachers. There was a steady drizzle this morning and, as we were now in early November, the light was low. The DI's ordered me and the other company's sharpshooter to take our positions and prepare to fire on our respective pop-up targets. I was ordered to fire first. We were the only two on the line to fire.

I had a pair of glasses issued me during the first week and I only used them when on the rifle range. The cold rain increased and my glasses began to fog up as soon as I put them on. After adjusting my rifle's rear sight for elevation, the targets popped up. The cold air and my expirations fogged up the glasses even more as I fired away. I missed many of the targets, particularly in the prone position which was usually my best position for firing. The sharpshooter from the other company bested me. Through the grapevine I learned that my DI had bet a bunch of money on me and had lost. Remembering how he had me disciplined in the pugil beating, I considered his lost money poetic justice.

In the last weeks of Basic we were given a few more privileges, the most prized of which were the visits from loved ones. On several occasions Dad and Joan drove up from Nashville to visit on Sunday afternoons when we were free from work or drilling (so long as we confined ourselves to the base). I considered myself particularly lucky with family so close. Few of my comrades enjoyed Sunday visitations. On the second trip they brought my youngest siblings, David and Miriam who had recently turned ten and eight respedctively. They would always bring my favorite treat, a carton of milk and a box of Keebler coconut chocolate chip cookies. I devoured them in ecstasy as Dad and Joan brought me up to date on family news. Although these visits were the only gifts I cherished during basic, they probably left me afterwards in an even greater state of demoralization. More than anything else I gained from my two years of military service, it was an appreciation for personal freedom.

My most anticipated visit came from John as my eight weeks of training were drawing to a close. He was a PFC stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, and he told me about his adventures and adversities. He was taking classes part-time at the university there and he told me about how he ran into Olympic skater Peggy Flemming at the school library. In retrospect, I believe that John suffered much more than I did from the harassments and humiliations from the army's pecking order, and the arbitrary edicts of petty, small-minded men with a power they could never expect to exert in the fluid and freewheeling civilian world. When John and I shook hands as he was about to leave, I could not control it, hard as I tried, but my eyes watered up and I had to turn quickly away before I embarrassed myself more. I remember thinking what a good brother John was. He was the most sensitive of my siblings, the one who broke down and cried when Milton Evans, our black sharecropper, died. Years later when Ganger died, it was John who broke down and sobbed. The irony was that Ganger always showed more favoritism toward me, showered me with more gifts, and requested that I be the one to stay with her in Mobile. Of all my siblings, it seemed at the time that John had the greatest capacity for sentiment and yet, like Mom and my sisters, was also somewhat disinclined to compromise. These traits would make the regimentation of military life very difficult for him. He was eventually made a Chaplain's assistant.

On graduation day I learned that I had been assigned to Fort Polk, Louisiana for AIT (advanced infantry training). My assigned MOS (military occupational specialty) was 11 Bravo, the designation for an infantry rifleman. I began to think that my pride on the rifle range had trumped my common sense. On the other hand, in true paranoid fashion, I thought that perhaps my DI had gotten the final revenge. Once more familiar with the process of cutting orders, I later realized that a DI likely had little input in the decision.

In stark contrast to my graduation from Father Ryan High, my family was not present for the ceremony at Fort Campbell. In truth, I did not wish them to be present. As I walked back to my barracks for the final time with Fort Polk orders in hand, I noticed a new batch of recruits, all on the floor stripped to their shorts, with putty knives in hand, all quaking under the thunder of our ex-drill sergeant's demonic-sounding tirades.

In one of many fortuitous incidences in my life, I had a piece of good luck when I arrived at Fort Polk. Few recruits in an infantry MOS had any illusions about their future duty location after Louisiana. Nearly all would be shipped out to Vietnam at the end of their eight-week AIT session. One is not trained at Fort Polk's Jungle Warfare Training Center to be sent to Germany or Korea.

Our bus arrived at the sprawling infantry-training center about 10:00 in the evening and as we stepped from our vehicle I noticed a dramatic difference in the climate. It was late November. Just a week before during bivouac at Fort Campbell, we experience some very cold weather. The temperature in Louisiana was by contrast warm and humid despite the late hour of our arrival. After gathering our gear from the belly of the bus, we queued up for registration and assignment to our infantry training units and barracks. My line moved closer to the registration table and there was only one soldier in front of me when a staff sergeant stepped up to us and asked if anyone in our line could type. Several of us raised our hands. We were taken out of the original line and ordered to queue up in another line. We had our MOS's changed and, instead of the infantry, we were reassigned to an administrative training school at the same base. Although I didn't know it at the time, an incident had occurred to alter Uncle Sam's plans for me. The infantry barracks were filled to capacity and arrangements had to be found for additional quarters. Exacerbating the housing shortage was a recent outbreak of meningitis in which some young recruits in the infantry barracks had died and a quarantine temporarily closed down their buildings.

For the next two months I was trained in administration to be an army clerk and my MOS was changed to 70 Bravo. Mom had taught me to type on Dad's old portable Royal typewriter and more recently I had been typing term papers for myself and other students at SLU. I had also typed up reports and papers for other students. Even before the army's clerical school I was typing sixty words a minute.

Fort Polk was one of the bleakest military outposts imaginable north of Antarctica. The nearest town was Leesville and its only excitement was at the Greyhound Bus Station and a drab USO club. The fact that the surrounding counties were dry certainly added to the sense of desolation. The base was known for its jungle survival school and its training in counter-insurgency warfare. On marches into the swamps and bayous, soldiers made it a point to take the snakes they killed and hang them over fences on the side of the roads. Even though I was now in administration, some of our training overlapped with that of the infantry and we would sometimes go out on joint maneuvers. I will never forget the smell of decomposing reptiles, pungent swamp waters, and decaying vegetation that permeated the atmosphere. The only source of entertainment open to me, it seemed, was checking out books from the base library and meandering through the PX looking for creature comforts to buy. It was truly a dead base adjacent to a dead town. Lewisburg appeared like Greenwich Village by comparison.

In another fortuitous twist, my orders came down in early January 1968 for my first post-training duty assignment. It was not Vietnam as I had feared but rather the United States Military Academy Prep School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just to the south of Alexandria and Washington, DC. To say that I was elated would be understatement. With only a stopover for a couple of days in Nashville to see the family, I flew to Washington and took military transport to Fort Belvoir, a major Corps of Engineers base on the Potomac.

The prep school functioned as a feeder institution for West Point where men already in the army with promising IQ's and high ACT or SAT scores could take military and academic courses which would get them up to speed for entry a year later to the Academy. My work was as an administrative clerk for Major Chandler, the vice commander of the school. It was a plush assignment by any army standard. When I arrived I was given a room much like what I had as a student in Clement Hall dormitory at SLU. My roommate was Frank Anselmo, another clerk from Spokane and a college graduate. I remember that he was a trekkie who could recount in detail every episode of the science fiction TV series. It came as no surprise that he loved Italian cuisine and music. On various weekend trips with him to Washington, we canvassed the city for restaurants and record shops that catered to his tastes. With a room to ourselves and with Washington just a half hour away, the Prep School with its Federal brick architecture exuded the atmosphere of a sleepy Ivy League college.

Almost as soon as I got to Fort Belvoir, I made a quick trip to Georgetown University where I spoke to the undergraduate dean about taking some classes after work. The only problem was that, since I had already finished my junior year, the only evening courses available to me in my political science major or my history minor were graduate level classes. After processing my application and granting me admission, I had the challenge of getting Major Chandler's approval. He flatly denied my request because, to take the two evening classes, I would have to miss two hours of work each week. In frustration, I overlooked the chain of command and went over his head. The commandant, a Colonel Sterling, had been friendly from the outset and had complemented me on my writing style in the memos I authored. He was also an avid tennis player and liked to bullshit with me about the fortunes of the game and its current stars. Of course, to play with him would have been no insignificant breach in military etiquette. Apparently he had seen me play on the base courts a couple of times and told me I had an impressive baseline game. When he approved my request, I knew there would be hell to pay with Chandler. There was.I took a graduate level class on the history of China and a political science graduate class on the League of Nations in International Law. I often did not have the time to change out of uniform and came to school dressed as I worked. I was the youngest student in these seminar-style classes and was probably the only one not working on my masters or doctorate. Many of my fellow students were Federal employees working in the State Department, the Pentagon or other agencies and several of the full-time students were in Georgetown's well respected foreign policy school. I loved being back in the classroom again and each of these three-hour sessions made me think I was back at SLU. Both were Jesuit universities and both emphasized the Socratic or dialectic approach to learning. I was not as outspoken in class discussion here, however, in part because these people were older and not the undergraduate bullshiters I was accustomed to debating in St. Louis. I noticed that the students were much more competitive in trying to win points by verbally grubbing their colleagues. A somewhat pompous lay professor in Chinese history periodically humiliated his students by answering their queries in a Latin soliloquy while assuming an expression of exasperation as if dismissing his students as idiots when they couldn't understand the dead language.

One afternoon in late spring, I had just gotten off a bus, which carried me from Belvoir to downtown Washington, and I was waiting for a connecting bus to Georgetown. As I was waiting, a middle-aged gentleman wearing a trimmed goatee and sporting a tweed jacket approached me and stared into my face as he walked. He stopped immediately in front of me and shook his head. Then, after a short pause he said in a serious and somewhat guttural tone "you son of a bitch." He turned and walked away. I turned around to see if he were addressing someone else. There was no one behind me. I was utterly perplexed until I looked down and realized that I was in uniform. Obviously he sported strong anti-war sentiments and regarded me as a deserved object of odium. It was ironic, I thought on reflection, that I was one of the few anti-war soldiers in Washington and it was I who had to be in his path. The encounter was upsetting to me and I found it more difficult than usual to take notes in class that evening.

During the spring of that year I made a quick trip home after I cut my own orders. On the flight back to Washington, we were informed of the assassination of Martin Luther King and told to expect delays and perhaps disturbances in Washington. As our plane approached National Airport (now Reagan International), in the darkness below we could see fires throughout the capital, particularly the area immediately behind the Library of Congress. At the airport, those of us in uniform were asked to take special buses with wire mesh windows to our bases. It was only later that night that I heard of Bobby Kennedy's efforts to quell the potential violence erupting in the wake of the assassination. What he said impressed me much.

My problem with Kennedy was his delay in announcing his candidacy for the democratic presidential nomination. I had decided to work for the most conspicuously anti-war candidate among the democrats and this was Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. I volunteered on weekends to work in McCarthy's Washington campaign headquarters and the bulk of this work consisted of mailing out donation requests and licking envelopes. I never wore my uniform to work in the campaign, as this would have been unlawful. After McCarthy's success in the New Hampshire primary race, Johnson's campaign abdication announcement, and Kennedy's tardy entry into the primary race, I was ambivalent about how to proceed. I knew that Kennedy had the best chance to win in November against the Republicans but I was still upset by his delay. It seemed opportunistic. Perception was a factor and I feared that Kennedy's decision to run, so soon after McCarthy's victory, might appear manipulative and self-serving. Nevertheless, I planned to leave McCarthy and begin volunteer work for Kennedy as soon as my end of semester class work at Georgetown was behind me. Then in June, after his impressive California primary victory, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I was demoralized and heart-broken. All I could think of was the incredible violence of this year – the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and two assassinations - and the year was not even half over. The evening after Kennedy's funeral mass in New York was a graveyard service in Arlington and I made it a point to be there. In the distance with what appeared to be camera lights, I watched the Kennedy family as prayers were said and condolences conveyed. Even at a considerable distance, I could observe on the expressions of the mourners grief, shock, pain and despair.

On many spring and summer weekends in Washington I walked through the museums of the Smithsonian or read in the Library of Congress. Because Mount Vernon was just a few miles away, it was one of my first excursions off base. Monticello followed shortly afterward. Sometimes I'd ride my ten-speed bicycle into the capital until I got permission to leave it at one of the men's dormitories at Georgetown University. I would take the bus into the capital, transfer out to Georgetown, pick up my bike and then ride all over the city. I particularly liked to bike over to the Jefferson and Lincoln monuments, find a shady spot under a tree, and read. I also went on occasion with army companions to discos in the Georgetown area. The location I liked most was a disco converted from an old jail near the intersection of Wisconsin and K Streets. During fall semester orientation week at Georgetown U, I went to some mixers where I met a couple of girls from nearby Marymount College. One, whose first name was Jane, I took barhopping the following weekend and I introduced her to the old jailhouse disco. When I received orders for Vietnam a couple of months later, Jane gave me a St. Christopher medal, which I sewed into the canvas camouflage helmet cover.

Another girl at that mixer, whose name I cannot remember, said her favorite pastime was horseback riding. I rented a car and took her to a riding stable in the northern Virginia countryside. I can't remember much about her except that she was attractive, her father was a mortician, her conversational skills were pretty much limited to horse talk, and, at our equestrian outing, she only wished to post around a small track. I got bored with this and, without informing the owner, took my rented thoroughbred for a canter in the adjacent open field. When I nudged the mount in the ribs to move from a walk to a trot, she took off as if from a starting gate. We were at a full gallop and I discovered too late that, unlike all of the horses on our Lewisburg farm, this animal did not neck-rein. I pulled back as hard as I could and she did not slow down. By the time I tried to turn her with just the right rein to get her into a slowing circle, it was too late. She galloped at full throttle into a wooded trail and I had to ease up on the reins to keep from getting beheaded by overhanging branches. The trail opened into another field with a telephone pole in the center. Again I tried to pull on the right reign to get her into a circle to slow her down. I pulled so hard that her head was turned to our rear and she was still at a full gallop. Realizing that we were heading directly for the pole, I let go of the reins and slid off. Because she was a tall horse of over sixteen hands, it was a painful fall. I jumped about thirty years from the pole but the horses momentum was so great that she did not have time to veer out of the way. I could hear the impact like a slap to the face. The thoroughbred slammed into the pole and her body provided enough cushion to absorb my impact a second later. My helmet was knocked off, my nose was bleeding, and I was dizzily sitting next to the prostrate and bloodied beast. The owner came running down to the crash site screaming that the horse was not trained for riding except on the track. As soon as we got the animal on its feet again, the young woman asked me if I had signed my legal release form at the barn. Although she was initially castigating me for possibly breaking a few of the horses ribs, her demeanor suddenly became conspicuously solicitous. She was obviously very contented once I signed that paper.

One of the things I liked best about my duty assignment at Fort Belvoir was the variety of work I did. One of my assignments was to assist a reporter for Stars and Stripes by doing some research for him in the military archives of the Pentagon. I loved working at this library because its holdings were extensive. Additionally I could do research for papers I was writing for my classes at Georgetown. Sometimes, when I heard that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was meeting, I'd get to the Pentagon early and work later in order to take a two-hour lunch break to attend the sessions. Because of the crowds, when I arrived late I often had to stand in the back of the committee chamber. Often, as when a celebrity like Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford testified before the committee, it was difficult to see much because of photographers, television crews and lighting technicians.

Three senators on the committee were of special interest to me because I admired their skeptical appraisal of war conduct. One was Clairborne Pell of Rhode Island, another was Al Gore, Sr. from my state of Tennessee, and finally there was J. William Fullbright of Arkansas. In particular I thought Gore and Fullbright exhibited courage because of their rather conservative and pro-war constituencies back home. After all, Tennessee is known as the volunteer state, a dubious distinction when I think of its contribution to the Mexican War with all its moral ambiguities. At one of the smaller and more hum drum sessions, I went up to Gore and Fullbright to introduce myself and to encourage them to continue to ask the tough questions in their gadfly manner. I informed Gore that he and I met once before in 1963 at the Tennessean Three Star banquet when I was in high school and I told Fullbright that I had enjoyed reading his book The Arrogance of Power. I can't explain it but my sense was that they took more than a perfunctory interest in me because I was a sympathetic supporter in uniform at a time when they were under fire from the military brass and from hawks in the general population. In my last face-to-face conversation with Gore, I told him that I thought his stand on Vietnam was no less heroic than his refusal in 1955 to sign the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, a southern manifesto condemning the Brown desegregation decision. Fullbright's record on the race issue was not so impressive and I never asked him why he could be so enlightened and farsighted on Vietnam while so uninspiring on race. I think I know what he would have said if I had asked. I think he would have told me that, to do good in government service, one must first get elected and, in Arkansas of that era, to support civil rights openly would be political suicide. What I admired about Gore was, despite all his refined political instincts that would have cautioned otherwise, he followed his conscience in 1968 as he had in 1955.

My time in the military was, I can say without reservation, the loneliest in my life. My roommate at the prep school, Frank Anselmo, was as convivial and accommodating as any trekkie could be but I missed my family and the people I had grown to care about at St. Louis University. I didn't much like the singles bar scene in Washington. It seemed that when on occasion I went with a group of fellow soldiers to the bars and discos, there was this competition to impress each other with one's ability to pick up any female regardless of appearance, IQ, and ability to converse. With some of the lamest lines imaginable, it almost seemed that the guys were trying to impress each other more than the women they'd greet. At times like this, I'd think of Patty Daugherty, Anne Wynn, or Cheryl Meloff and wonder what they were doing at the precise time. I missed them. I particularly wondered why I had not heard from Cheryl. Unknown to me, she had sent several letters in the summer before my induction. In one of these communiqués, she included a photograph of herself sitting on my lap with her lips pressed to mine and with a bottle of beer in her hand. The picture was taken at Jack Peronski's cabin in Wisconsin. Mom had opened the letters and, not fond of what she read and no doubt trying to protect me from myself, failed to forward them. Two years later when I had returned to St. Louis U, Jack Peronski and Rick Brutine informed me that Cheryl had written often during my first year in the army and, not hearing from me, assumed I wanted to end the relationship. They told me Cheryl dropped out of Webster College to become a hippie.

Yes, my love life was about as moribund as a desiccated tumbleweed in the Arizona desert. A middle aged civilian secretary working for Major Chandler asked me so many times to take her daughter out that I eventually complied. Despite my apprehension about blind dates, I enjoyed the young woman's company and we went to a Washington restaurant for a nice dinner. Her father was a reporter for the Washington Post and she had some interesting stories to tell about his take on the fourth estate's inability to breach the wall of secrecy around the White House during this year of high political drama. I should have asked her out again but there was little chemistry and, probably subconsciously, I couldn't help but compare any date with the girls I knew in St. Louis.

About a block from my office at the prep school was a cleaners where I took my uniforms for pressing. Two girls working there took an interest in me and one, a pretty nineteen-year-old redhead by the name of Jessie, asked me to take her to a malt shop nearby. She was an army brat, the daughter of an NCO. She let me understand in no uncertain terms that she hated her job and she hated living on an army base. I suggested that she consider college as a door to a wider world. As an enticement I told her I would give her a tour of Georgetown University the following Saturday afternoon. I had to drop off a term paper, I told her, and had to make the trip anyway. She agreed. On the bus to GU, she read some of my paper on the 1921 Washington Naval Disarmament Conference. I couldn't help but notice how good looking she was. She was wearing a halter top and shorts, which revealed a slim, athletic and very feminine figure.

After depositing the paper in my professor's office mailbox, I gave Jessie a tour of the student center, the university observatory, and the library. On the lawn fronting the main administrative building, we talked until well after dark. On the return trip she asked me to accompany her to the home of her uncle and aunt where she planned to spend the night. It was only when we arrived that she informed me that the couple was out of town and that "we had the house to ourselves." She invited me in for a late night snack. I never got to eat. She handed me a coke and left for what I thought was the bathroom. When she returned, she stood before me, completely nude.

This was full frontal nudity, the face of a Botticelli beauty and the body of a Victoria Secret swimsuit model. This was pounding heart and involuntary body behavior. I was mesmerized by her figure and at the same time embarrassed by my suddenly conspicuous arousal. I was a twenty-two-year-old virgin who was stunned by the girl's modus operandi that seemed at such odds with the shy and reserved Catholic coeds of college days.

I told her that I didn't want to complicate our lives when the future was so uncertain, and that I had a girl back home to whom I wished to remain faithful. It was bullshit and I am sure she must have known it. She looked as confused as I looked embarrassed. I was still a romantic at heart, the product of too much Sir Walter Scott and Fedor Dostoyesvski. I told her I had to leave and it ended there. It was a display of restraint which today, with a more cynical and jaded perspective, intrigues me.

In retrospect I sometimes think that perhaps my postponement of an active sexual life may have inadvertently been an advantage. I look at many of my friends now who had sex as teenagers and hear them confide problems, unfulfilled relationships, physical dysfunctions or lack of interest. This probably reveals a woeful lack of psychological or medical insight on my part but my instincts tell me that the postponement of sexual gratification by a couple of years only enhanced the anticipation as well as the experience itself. My fear now is that I will be a dirty old man well into my nineties, a satyr-like fossil who makes a fool of himself flirting with the same abandon as an elderly Winston Churchill, Lord Palmerston, or Strom Thurmond.

During the summer of 1968 I particularly enjoyed riding my bicycle through the capital. On one occasion I was biking by the grassy area to the north of the reflecting pond between the Washington and Lincoln memorials when I noticed a huge throng of African-Americans putting up tents and other shelters. Out of curiosity I biked over for a closer look and discovered placards and banners proclaiming the Poor Peoples March. The sprawl of tents was referred to as Resurrection City. At one point a black minister sweating in his three-piece suit came up to me and began talking about his crusade. I asked him if he thought the civil rights movement might grow disillusioned with peaceful protest as a result of the King assassination. His response was to acknowledge the loss while affirming that he was in Washington doing exactly what the martyred civil rights leader himself had planned for this summer. He and the others assembled claimed to be working to realize the dream about which King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial five years earlier. He looked over his should and nodded at the monument as he spoke these words.

John was at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the fall of 1968 when he came down with orders for Vietnam. This event brought on something of a family crisis. I cut my own orders and flew home for an emergency weekend family conference. Something Joan once told me was worrisome. While a freshman at St. Louis University where she was active in the antiwar movement, Joan knocked on my dorm room door one night and in a very anxious state told me of a dream she had had the night before. John had just been drafted and in her dream she came to meet him at a train station somewhere. She came up to him and started to hug him when she saw that his face was ashen gray with a sad and forlorn expression. She told me that he appeared dead.

I never assigned much weight to her dream and dismissed it as just one more of the superstitions coalescing around the women in my family. I knew they were devoutly religious and believed much more in the miraculous than experience, reason and science should permit. That said, with Joan's dream now on my mind and my sudden recollection of Mom's premonition of Gampa's death and of my car accident with Pete Cacciopo, I tried on the flight home to think of a way to get John off the Vietnam levy.

In the family dining room at the Tyne residence, I told Mom and Dad that, while John's was combat related, my MOS was non-combat and that I should request service in Vietnam myself to preempt John's orders. We were all aware of the Defense Department's policy precluding more than one brother at any one time in a combat zone. Everyone agreed with me. Furthermore, as I explained to them, John would be in Vietnam for an entire year while my ETS or separation date meant that I would be in Nam for nine months at the most. The only SNAFU was that John already had his orders and that I would have to get some help if I were to preempt him. I told Dad and Mom of my contact with Senators Gore, Fulbright and Pell and surmised that they might be able to expedite my orders.

As soon as I returned to Fort Belvoir, I submitted to Major Chandler the request for reassignment to Vietnam. He was probably none too fond of me after I went over his head to take classes at Georgetown U but he told me he would grant the request. He also told me that he could not reassign me to any special unit in Vietnam. This was done, he confided, by a replacement battalion once I was "in country." The very day that I contacted Major Chandler about Vietnam, I also horridly drafted letters to the three senators. The word spread like wildfire through the prep school and most of my colleagues, including Frank Anselmo, told me in no minced words that I was crazy to leave this cushioned duty station for the hazards of Vietnam.

Despite the proverbial inefficiency of Washington bureaucracy, I was amazed to discover that within weeks I had my orders for Vietnam and that John's orders had been flagged with a new reassignment to Fort Riley, Kansas. I wrote thank-you notes to Gore, Fulbright and Pell. Unfortunately for Gore, his reputation as a war critic was viewed by many Tennesseans as unpatriotic. After thirty-two years of service in Congress, he was defeated in his bid for re-election in 1970. Fulbright was also singed by the Vietnam afterburner. He left the Senate in 1974 after chairing the Foreign Relations Committee longer than anyone in history. Claiborne Pell, the only member of the triumvirate whose constituents kept him in office, served in the Senate until 1996 and is renown for the Pell Grant program which today benefits college students of modest means.

It was now late November 1968. It had been a wild year with the Tet Offensive, classes at Georgetown U, campaign work for Eugene McCarthy, the assassinations of King and Kennedy, peace demonstrations in Washington, a police riot at the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago, an encounter with a beautiful nude, and now orders for Vietnam.

A couple days after Christmas 1968, I reported to Fort Dix, New Jersey. The weather was bleak with overcast skies, a bitterly cold wind, and the residue of a recent blanketing of snow. Fort Dix was one of the processing centers for troops near the East Coast going to Nam. I had another battery of painful prophylactics delivered by the pressure gun method and my papers were scrutinized by orders clerks doing the same job I had done during my year-long stay at Fort Belvoir. I remember looking into the faces of fellow GI's and seeing subdued expressions of anxiety in their eyes. Most like me had no idea where they would be assigned in Vietnam. Most were infantrymen and they knew their prospects of avoiding combat were not good. Because of flying west across many different time zones, I would leave Fort Dix on New Years Day and arrive in Vietnam the same day. I was ready to bid adieu to 1968.

It had been a divisive year with assassinations, war, and campus demonstrations. From the perspective of many, the social fabric of the country was frayed with a vociferous counter culture whose youth questioned parental values and national priorities. On a positive note, the intensity of battle had subsided somewhat after Tet when Viet Cong and NVA forces had been thinned out by American and South Vietnamese counter-offensives. On the negative side, many of us began to sense that the war was being lost and that the overly optimistic prognostications of the Pentagon brass and top field commanders in Nam had been little more than obfuscation and subterfuge. No one at the Pentagon wanted to tell the president bad news because he might blame the messengers. Americans in Vietnam did not want to become casualty statistics in a war that might ultimately be lost. There was an increasing cynicism about.

For me, the presidential election of 1968 didn't bode well for our fortunes. I voted for Humphrey despite his formal endorsement of Johnson's war measures. He could do little else if he wanted the nomination and the support of executive incumbency. But I knew that in his heart he was much like Kennedy. After all, he had been one of the progressive democratic kingpins in the Civil Rights movement since the late 1940's and he had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Great Society's legislative agenda regarding education, jobs and medical insurance for the poor and elderly. Surely he knew the war threatened this domestic progress. Richard Nixon took office twenty days after I arrived in Vietnam and announced the policy of Vietnamization, a phased diminution of the American role in the war and an increased South Vietnamese role in combat. Although this sounded good on paper for those Americans who had tired of the violence and its costs, the real implication for those of us in Vietnam and for those familiar with the war's origins was that the war was lost. The reason was apparent. In 1964 the South Vietnamese were losing the war to a small but well-trained network of South Vietnamese guerrilla bands and smaller numbers of North Vietnamese regulars operating south of the 17th parallel. President Johnson used the Tonkin Gulf Incident to enlarge the war and in 1965 began the deployment of regular American combat troops. By the time of Tet in early 1968, more than half a million American soldiers were in South Vietnam and we were still losing ground to the Viet Cong and NVA. Yes, we were winning the battles but losing hearts and minds. Now in early 1969 President Nixon promised to reduce the number of American troops while turning greater responsibility for the war's conduct to the South Vietnamese Government which was losing the war five years earlier while fighting a much smaller and less organized guerilla force. To both American soldiers in the field and our South Vietnamese compatriots, this meant that the US wanted out with what Nixon called an "honorable end." The fact that he began the secret bombing of Cambodia while I was there and the next year sent US troops into that country seemed contrary to this goal of ending the war on favorable terms.

I flew on a commercial jet from Ft. Dix to a brief refueling stop in Anchorage. Walking on the tarmac with snow all enveloping in the distance, I was surprised to discover that the temperature in Alaska was actually slightly warmer than in New Jersey, despite a difference of --- degrees latitude. From Alaska we flew to Tokyo where again we deplaned briefly to the chill of a blistery Japanese winter. That night we arrived at Bien Hoa military airfield in the Republic of Vietnam. I'll never forget my first impression of the country when I stepped up to the plane's open door and looked out. The first thing that hit me was a blast of warm and humid tropical air. In the distance, under the lights of the terminal, I saw the burning carcass of a plane. I could feel my pulse quicken. The date was 1 January 1969. No one was in the mood for celebration. We were all going to be processed at the 90th Replacement Battalion where within a day or two we would be assigned to specific units in country.

From the plane we were marched to a large, corrugated metal processing building where, at attention rest, we were told a little about the country and how the war was progressing. A first sergeant told us about what happens to GI's who have sex with the local women. We were informed of a dreaded and incurable venereal disease. Soldiers who contracted the pathogen were sent to an isolated island for the remainder of their days. Their families were informed, according to this NCO, that the GI's in question were MIA's or presumed dead. He also related how Vietnamese women, with a sharp razor blade inserted strategically in their vaginas, tried to lure American boys to a brief sexual encounter which would deprive them of their manhood. If I was somewhat worried about the so-called "Black Island," when I heard the razor blade reference I smiled and said quietly to the young man next to me "bullshit." However, turning to see the reaction of my follow troopers in formation, I could see that they all looked frightened. It was a memorable introduction to my new country of residence.

In another one of those strange twists of fate to which I had grown accustomed, I received from the 90th Replacement Detachment my "in country" orders. Instead of some remote artillery firebase or some insecure infantry redoubt in I Corps, I was assigned to the 165th Combat Aviation Group of the First Aviation Brigade at Long Binh, a sprawling and relatively secure installation twenty-seven miles northeast of Saigon. If guardian angels labor on our behalf, mine was working overtime.

At the 165th, I was among men whom I respected and whose company I very much enjoyed. Unlike other duty stations where we would all go our separate directions as soon as our eight-hour work day was at an end, the men in the 165th were truly a family. Not only was it prohibited to leave the base, it was down-right dangerous to do so. Viet Cong operatives were constantly at work building tunnels, collecting intelligence, or constructing rocket launching pads around the nearby hamlets. As such, we worked together and, after work, we gathered in our hooches to play cards, bullshit, listen to music, eat in the canvas-roofed mess, or play volleyball on a makeshift court we built adjacent to the sandbagged bunkers. Many of the men were college graduates who were drafted as soon as their deferments expired. Among these, Roland Renee was a tall, gregarious and self-effacing friend who had a wife and child back in the states. Unlike my comrades at Belvoir, there was no small number of married men in the 165th. Duty so far from home was particularly grueling for these people. Glenn Poppinga was a mild-mannered farmer's son from South Dakota who was a star basketball player at his college and John Marino was a University of Tennessee graduate who enjoyed spiking the volleyball even though he was no taller than I. Two other friends, Bob Lacosta and Dale Hendrickson, were always up for a game of hearts or spades. We were close enough where we knew the names of wives, girlfriends and family members back home. We sometimes read their letters to each other and expected comment and analysis.

All around our hooch was a four-foot-high sandbagged parapet wall that, in the event of hostile rockets exploding on the ground nearby, would protect soldiers sleeping on the bottom bunks. I was on a bottom bunk. Within a hundred feet was a corrugated metal tunnel covered with sandbags in the event of an emergency. Up the road about a mile away were the headquarters for the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) and the United States Army Vietnam (USARV). Although the base was situated in the midst of a topical jungle area, Long Binh looked something akin to a desiccated desert due to the massive defoliation efforts of Agent Orange and the work of great numbers of earthmovers and bulldozers. The entire perimeter contained bunker complexes, concertina wire, pressure mines, remote controlled claymores, and M-60 machine gun emplacements. For added protection we had an artillery firebase at nearby Bear Cat, which could direct its 105mm howitzers to our defense. After the Tet Offensive of the previous year, such precautions seemed justified. Over nine hundred guerrillas and sappers of the 274th and 275th regiments of the Viet Cong Fifth Division were killed in their attack on Long Binh. We were still measuring success by the body count.

Our unit was the administrative and support unit of the First Aviation Brigade's fleet of assault and transport helicopters along with the personnel to fly, service and control their traffic. Our workstation was a Quonset hut located adjacent to the large Sanford Army Airfield and hanger complex at the base. Outside of our hut was a wooden sign which displayed our unit designation and a professional-looking painting of Snoopy in World War I aviation goggles straddling his doghouse roof with paws on the controls, scarf blowing in the wind. We would travel to and from work in deuce and a half trucks.

Behind our complex of canvass-roofed hooches was a small motor pool at one end and, at the opposite, an outdoor movie screen built of white-painted plywood. Adjacent to the movie screen was a small water tower, the latrines, and primitive multi-stalled showers. Behind a row of hooches was the silver, air-conditioned house trailer that functioned as the company captain's personal residence. He was a Tennessean whose preferred side arm was not the standard issue 1911 Colt 45 but a Peacemaker six-shoot .45 revolver of the kind all my cowboy heroes of the 1950's sported.

For morale purposes the brass down at USARV would occasionally send us a recently released Hollywood movie like "The Green Berets" or "Bye Bye Braverman" which we enjoyed as a way to break the monotony. Periodically we would take turns operating a small concession stand in which popcorn and beer was liberally distributed. Often we would invite grunts fresh from the bush, men who sat mesmerized watching the flickering screen while chugging gargantuan quantities of cold beer. One was an Australian in bush hat who chugged his beer with a spider monkey perched and chattering on his shoulder. And occasionally the brass would acquire for our entertainment delight cheap porno flicks which were produced in Saigon and which featured Vietnamese men and women copulating to the accompaniment of bizarre music which didn't appear native or American. After these blue movies were shown, many of the viewers would go AWOL to sample the innumerable whorehouses in Saigon where probably the original films were shot. For those unwilling to go AWOL, there was Dragon Lady's "Steam and Cream" Massage Parlor located on the base. The brass turned a blind eye to this entrepreneurial prostitution because they themselves were doubtless frequent flier patrons.

During my first week with the 165th I was sent out to the bush to be trained on the weapons of choice. Because of the Tet Offensive of the year before, nearly everyone of every MOS was engaged in combat. This was the rationale for my training in the bush. Back at Fort Belvoir, I had qualified as an expert with the standard infantry weapon, the M-16 rifle and I had no difficulty mastering its operation and maintenance in Nam. We were told to fire the M-79 grenade launcher at a dilapidated armored personnel carrier about 150 meters distant and I consistently hit it. While out on the range our company commander pulled from his hip holster his six-shot Colt Peacemaker and fired into a target. When he challenged anyone to do better, several of us volunteered. I was the only one who could consistently hit the target. We did it again with the standard 1911 Colt semi-automatic pistol and, though I bested our company commander, I did better with his Peacemaker because it was easier to sight with the longer barrel.

As I said, while in Vietnam I was part of a new family, the twenty or so people who lived in my hooch. Ours was first line of dwellings fronting the main road and immediately behind the volleyball court. My hooch was the third one from the motor pool and assembly area where we would form up each morning after reveille. In this hooch my closest friends were Dale Hendrickson from Minnesota and Bob Lacasta from New Jersey. The extended family included Glenn Poppinga, Roland Renee and John Moreno whose hooch abutted ours on the motor pool side. As there was little to do and few places to go, we would wile away the after-work hours playing games of chess, hearts, spades, poker, and volleyball. Reading was a pastime for most of us and when we received books or magazines from family back home, they were passed around until all were consumed. We enjoyed the bull sessions, we laughed at an almost limitless reservoir of jokes, we endured each other's eccentricities, and we tolerated the vices. The bull sessions were every bit as enlivening and informative as anything that passed for bull in my college dormitory. As a group we had a high level of education and collective experience. Compared to the innocent and protected youth of college life, these people had seen the world and many could speak with authority on the triumphs and travails of married life. When one of my hooch mates received a letter from his wife asking for a divorce, we comforted him when he broke down. Roland spoke of his wife in words that were romantic and moving. If there was much bravado at first, pretenses were abandoned as we got to know each other. Although I have many friends today as I write this, I can say that I was never closer to any group of men than my associates in Nam. I can close my eyes today and, even if I can no longer recall all the names, I can see them looking up from a game of hearts, lying in their bunks in the quiet of night singly softly in unison to a Rolling Stones tune, or roaring in convulsive and collective laughter to a particularly raunchy joke.

Dale Hendrickson told us of his first experience using the latrine during his first day in our unit. He was sitting on one of the toilet seats on a long row of such seats at a time when he was alone. Suddenly he felt the edifice shake and then he heard a loud grinding sound below him. His first thought was that some gargantuan rat was rummaging around down there, trying to find the perfect springboard of shit on which to catapult up and take a bite from his buttocks. So he jumped off the seat, turned around and peered down into the massive shit-hole that ran the entire length of the rectangular plywood building. There was an elderly Vietnamese woman, a Mamason, looking up at him with a toothless smile. He jumped back in horror. We all laughed at Dale's story because we each had had similar experiences during our first weeks in-country.

We had to explain to him that these women were part of a vast army of native employees who were, like the hooch-maids, paid to do our dirty work. This group of women, lowest on the social ladder of toil, would travel from unit to unit cleaning out the latrines. They would shovel the shit into 50 gallon oil drums, and leave the barrels for the unlucky men in the detail to burn the shit. We explained to him how we would have to haul the drums by inserting a metal pole through two holes in the lip of the drum and then, with each man on an end of the pole, carry the foul smelling mess to a remote site downwind from the hooches for burning. We would pour gasoline into the contents and light the mess. When the fire would burn out, we would have to relight, and relight. It was the most disgusting detail to be had and everyone would eventually have the experience. Looking back on my Vietnam experience, one of the things that stands out in my memory is the smell of shit burning. Because the olfactory sense is so tied to memory I can rarely think back on my Southeast Asian experience without thinking of this staple of life there. Just about every Vietnam vet I talk to can recall his first time taking out the oil drums of human excrement for burning. As much as I wish to, I'm resigned to the fact that I will never forget that foul smell. To me, burning shit was emblematic of that forlorn, abysmal crusade. We were literally burning refuse to improve the appearance of our backyard. Vietnam was a backyard quite distant from our home.

There were the constant card games but occasionally our poker games would attract the more adventurous and the more experienced. One of the best of these was John Love, a supply sergeant whose hooch was two doors down and across the wooden plank walkway which would be our only footpath when the monsoon rains came. John was one of the most entertaining men in the company, a standup comedian who could have outdone Jay Leno or David Letterman any day. He always addressed us in the deep brogue of a Hibernian highlander and for a time he was so convincing that I considered him a volunteer to Vietnam so he could exchange his Scottish citizenship for American. If I am not mistaken, I believe he was from Los Angeles. On occasion he came up to my bunk and surveyed the photographic montage of family and friends on the wall above my footlocker. He was particularly drawn to the photos of Patty Daugherty and Anne Wynn. He confided that I had good taste in women, that they were both beautiful. I confessed that they were merely old friends from school days. He nodded and said "Bet it seems likes decades ago, huh?" Then, as an upbeat afterthought, he informed me that time passed quickly in Nam because of the routine. For John Love, his time in-country would be dramatically cut short in May by a Chinese-made 140mm rocket.

What I remember most about the guys who worked and lived with me in our hooch were the bull sessions. We were a band of brothers speaking incessantly of family and loved ones back home. When one of my hooch mates went on R&R to Japan, he returned with a very nice TKE stereo system. One night late while playing cards, I remember him playing "Hey, Jude." First we all began crooning to the Beetles and then we got up and began to dance the train, moving in tempo up and down the hooch between the two lines of bunk beds. We got louder and louder. Some of the guys who were reading in the bunks climbed down to join the card players and then we were joined by our hooch pup, a stray dog which one of the men adopted and made our hooch mascot.

Although we felt relatively safe in our facilities, the war was never very far away. One evening after work I was sitting on a sandbag parapet near the hooch and I noticed some motion in the distance. I took my binoculars and, to my surprise, in the ebbing light I saw two Viet Cong sappers moving about one of our trash dumps about two hundred meters outside the perimeter. Someone else must have also spotted them because some 105's howitzer shells from Bear Cat whizzed in and I could see the figures scrambling for cover. Sometimes from our hooch we could see low flying jets from Ton Son Nuc dropping napalm canisters and phosphorous bombs on distant VCong squads trying to set up launching pads for their rockets.

Despite our regular administrative work, all of us were expected at night to take turns pulling guard duty on the perimeter. The entire perimeter was lined with sandbag-reinforced bunkers situated about every hundred yards apart. Each bunker had an M-60 machine gun, a supply of parachute flares, two to three claymore mines, and an m-79 grenade launcher with a good stockpile of ammo. A large chain-link screen was placed directly in front of the main forward rectangular port opening in the hope that the fence would detonate an incoming rocket or RPG missile before it hit the shelter. With three of these wire mesh openings, a soldier on guard duty could have a 180-degree field of view and fire. [CONTINUED TO NEPHEW DOMINIC LADEMAN]