THE DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT

By Jimmie vonTungeln

 Dedicated to an old friend and to our wives with the assurance that this is all absolutely, one hundred percent fictional except for the parts that really happened.

Part One 

            Having been encouraged by the canonization of the World War Two servicemen, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” I take this opportunity to place in print a few reminisces of my own experiences of a later date and time. I refer, of course, to the Vietnam era.

It doesn’t seem that it would be helpful to make comparisons. That’s best left for future generations. I might point out that it doesn’t much of a hero to be drafted into a popular war. To go voluntarily, on the other hand, into a dirty, embarrassing, sniveling, despised, and much regretted little mud-fight of a freedom mission, when even your old high school English teacher tells you that you are a chump to do so, takes a real man in my book.

            Of course at the time I wouldn’t have called it completely voluntary. Later listeners would invariably say, when I related how I wound up, in the middle of the night, cradling an M-16 rifle and sitting on top of a bunker a hundred yards out in the jungle south of DaNang, Republic of South Viet Nam: “Well after all, you enlisted willingly, didn’t you?”

            Not really. I only call myself a volunteer in these later times when it suits some purpose or other. I simply couldn’t think of any way out at the time that wouldn’t have embarrassed Mother. And a southern boy’s fear of his mother’s disdain is stronger than the fear of any mortal enemy.

            So, in what passed for “analytical-mode” in those days, I reasoned that the two physical places, in a military sense, most remote from either a rice paddy or a jungle were in an airplane or on a ship. They always say that ships are more forgiving of human error than planes, so I opted for the United States Navy. Besides, they offered the sexier uniforms. My main concern was that I would not have to offer the military any benefits from either my education or talents. I was real smart, even in those days.

            They, the Navy, were happy to see me, or at least they said so. It was somewhere around the first of June 1966 when the Draft Board tracked me down in San Francisco, California. I was living on Masonic, between Haight Street and the panhandle of Golden Gate Park a block over from Ashbury and having a hell of a good time. When they, the Navy, offered to sign me up and postpone my actual entry for six months, I jumped at the chance to get the Army off my back and trust that the war might end by the time I had to go. I have always placed a lot of faith in the healing nature of time. Time … anything that can cure a hangover should be embraced and not feared, or so it seems to me.

            No such luck. Six months eased by, like gray horses passing in a morning mist, and I was due. I was living in the company at the time of a young girl of few convictions and even fewer misgivings who had gone along on more than one free ride in her life. For the price of a car title, she agreed to accompany me to Arkansas posing as my wife, and they, the Navy, agreed to let me enter the adventure of my life from my home state.

            Tina was a rather tall person, somewhat flat-chested and big-hipped but oozing a full-lipped sensuality that would make a stranger stop her on Haight Street and ask if they didn’t belong to the same Existentialism Club. She wore her dark hair short because she loved to put on men’s clothes and hit the bars on Saturday night pretending to be gay. I didn’t know at the time if she was or not. Those distinctions were somewhat blurred in those days and in that place. Subsequent events suggested she was simply enjoying one of her many larks. But hell, who knows?

            “Takin’ any dope?” she asked, a few days before our scheduled departure. She tended to plan ahead when it came to recreation, a trait that I’m sure came in handy more than once. I studied on it for a moment and remembered that I had saved up a couple hundred dollars to buy a television set. Reasoning, correctly as I later found out, that they, the Navy, wouldn’t allow it in Boot Camp, I gave her the money and said to see what it would buy.

            It bought a lot, as it turned out, about four shoe boxes full if I remember correctly. We wrapped most of it as Christmas gifts and she hid the rest in a Kotex box and we took off for Arkansas in an old Rambler automobile that now belonged to her. It was years later I learned that those presents would have been first items searched had the car been search. Luckily, it wasn’t. We pressed on.  I was due to report in ten days and we had a couple of stops to make.

            I won’t bore the reader with a detailed account of the circuitous voyage to Arkansas. Well, actually I couldn’t if I wanted to for I simply don’t remember too much of it. I think we arrived in my hometown with two of the shoeboxes still intact. How we escaped prison I will never know except that Tina, that was her name, was the most accomplished and believable liar of the last century. She could have gotten caught in bed with the Police Chief’s son and convinced the world that she was simply a religious missionary going out of her way to give testimony. She was that good. I kid you not.

            To the contrary, I was awful at it, lying that is. I don’t think Mother ever really believed we were married, so naturally she wouldn’t have believed the story I made up later, a good one but amateurish by Tina’s standards, describing the “Dear John” letter and subsequent divorce. When Mothers are simply suspicious, they ask for some proof. When they know you are bullshitting them, they pretend to go along, making you feel even more crappy about it.

            My Dad didn’t talk about it much at all. He was from an old German family, aristocracy back in the old country we are told. After coming to America the family had pretty much minded its own business and had assumed that the federal government would have the common decency to do the same. This extended to the draft board.

            “It ain’t none of our concern,” was all he said. “Why are you going in when it ain’t none of our concern?” He was, of course, referring to the Vietnam War.

He didn’t exactly encourage active avoidance. He simply felt that if you communicated effectively enough, the government would sense your lack of interest and leave you alone. Only one member of the family had ever failed in this approach, an older uncle who, finding no other way out, waited until he got in the Army and then wet the bed every night until the finally gave him a medical discharge. That seemed to me a little drastic.

            Anyway, we hung around the old home for a few days and Tina got ready to take me to the Induction Center. That’s when I heard the news that Michael D, an old friend from college was in town.

            Now Michael D was a man who proved the old adage that everyone is famous for something. In his case, it was a, mythical some say, sexual technique quite infamous in our hometown. Simply called “A Turtle,” it was more whispered about than openly practiced. I only know of it by general description and through the claims of its sexual enslavement of females. I would have doubted Michael D’s reported mastery of it had I not been a first-hand witness, not to the act itself but to its aftereffects, on a girl who, at the time was engaged and hopelessly in love with a good friend of ours, a true madman. I offer no further details except that it caused an almost irreparable rift in the engagement and nearly cost Michael D. his life.

            That was during our earlier days. Now he was a soldier. As he later explained, his first attempt at higher education ended when, “Inertia overtook me.” Thereafter Michael D had taken a mutually agreeable break from our state university. While cruising the college town bars, perhaps looking for potential Turtle victims, he met an army recruiter named Sergeant Goforth. I am not making this part up. With a name like that, it only took a few cold beers to convince Michael D. that he had a new home waiting in the Green Berets. He was a little impulsive like that.

            So he had enlisted and completed Officer’s Training School by the time I was being hauled into the United States Navy. They, the Army, had given him a few days leave prior to his next duty assignment. The convergence of forces that placed us in our hometown on that same night still seems scary. But it happened just that way.

            Tina got excited. At the time I had no idea why. So instead of spending a horrible evening at my parents’ house wilting under their accusing stares, we decided to make a night of it.

            Michael D. was typically eloquent when he heard my voice on the phone and I knew the Army hadn’t changed him. “You gotta be shittin’ me!” This had been his response to most revelations for as long as I had known him. He was, I guess one could say, an ebullient cynic. A brief explanation and he was ready for whatever. As I mentioned, he was a little impulsive.

            I packed the few things they, the Navy, had said to bring to Boot Camp and said goodbye to my family. They were sulking so it wasn’t particularly emotional. They were used to my going away on adventures by now and, besides, had two more children who had never shown the least inclination to leave town. A year later, I would have the real farewell, with Mother standing at the back door, hand to her mouth in a Dorothea Lange pose and I in my sailor suit by then and headed for six weeks weapons training for Naval Security Forces, a real man headed for a real man’s war with a real Mother fighting back tears at the farmhouse door. It was a real suckass moment but months in the future. We still had tonight to go.

Next: The Night Begins