Sailing To Oblivium: August 10, 2017

Delicacy forbids details, but I just spent a day and a half in prepping for, and undergoing, a medical procedure. Mostly I read, … mostly.

I spent a good deal of time with Huế 1968: A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam” by Mark Bowden. While it may be disturbing, the book is certainly timely, as we increasingly place our country’s future in the hands of its generals, in increasingly dangerous conditions. We can only hope they, the generals, are good ones like my friend, Brig. Gen. Troy Galloway. He is one of the best that America can produce and American needs more like him.

They weren’t so good in 1968. I’m talking about my war. During the fall and early winter, North Vietnam had positioned some 10,000 troops, along with ample arms, for an assault on Huế. Made an imperial city in the early 1800s, it lay equidistant between the Northern and Southern borders of what was Vietnam at the time. With a population in 1968 of 140,000 or so, all of Vietnam knew the city and viewed it with reverence.

The city was lightly defended for what would become known as “The Tet Offensive.” An ARVN group held a position in the Northern part of the city and a small American force occupied a MACV compound to the South.

I was only 70 miles away, at Da Nang, when 10 battalions of NVA and VC attacked Huế, immediately occupying the city and surrounding the small groups of allied forces.

Away in Phu Bai and Saigon, generals Foster LaHue and William Westmoreland refused to believe that the North could bring that many troops to the city undetected. They believed strongly that  General Võ Nguyên Giáp was using Huế as a diversion for a major attack on an American emplacement at Khe Sahn, farther North.

Giáp fooled them so completely that, after his troops had occupied the city with a force of perhaps 10,000 men and women, our generals refused to recognize or admit the truth. Their report to the public was that a few bands of Viet Cong had entered the city and were being rounded up as they spoke. Privately, they accused the ARVN troops of incompetence and the Americans of a lack of battle experience and the "jitters" for any delay.

Then they began ordering company-level groups of Marines, less than 100-strong, to cross the Perfume River and retake Huế. The disastrous and inhumane results should have triggered a formal review and appropriate punishment. That, of course, never happened.

Meanwhile, there are reports that the Northern troops were massacring up to 3,000 civilians in the city, including some Americans.

Oh well, enough is enough. Here is a film of how the Marines began re-taking the city, building by building, with a level of heroism worthy of their ancestral comrades at Iwo Jima and Tarawa. Oh, and those were the same Marines of whom General Westmoreland once commented: “the military professionalism of the Marines falls far short of the standards that should be demanded by our armed forces.”

I laid the book aside for a while yesterday, and began thinking about generals who give suicidal commands to troops from safe positions faraway. Then I thought of how General Grant spent the night, after the first day’s battle at Shiloh, leaning against a tree less than a mile from the Confederate front lines. We need to know about our generals ere we trust our youth to them.

As I say, I hope we have good ones in place during these fearful times.

Highly recommended.

Sailing to Oblivium: June 12, 2017

They say it never thunders in San Francisco. It did that morning. It rumbled from the west past an old Chinese man and me. It moved on as if carried by the fog, and the man yawned. I leaned against a building, lit a cigarette, and thought about the unfairness of life.

We were standing on the Southeast corner of Haight and Masonic streets just before daylight. I don’t know where the other fellow was headed, but I was headed to the Contra-County bus terminal on Mission Street to catch a bus to the Bay Area Induction Center in Oakland. That’s where they determined if you were fit enough for the military draft. It wasn’t the happiest day of my life.

It was in the late summer of 1966. Anyone who has visited the City by the Bay understands Mark Twain’s saying that “The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” I pulled a sheepskin lined jacket tighter and waited. On a normal day, I would be at this spot two hours later, waiting for the bus to take me to work at a Babcock and Wilcox office in the mission district just across, incidentally, from the terminal where I was now headed. I wasn’t going to work today, though.

These were interesting times in “The City.” In a few hours, hippies would fill the streets, centering on a now-famous intersection a block from where we waited. Later, in the afternoon, Ken Kessey and his band of “Merry Pranksters” would join the crowd around his bus, still parked in the Panhandle Park, across the street from my apartment.

By that afternoon I would know my fate. I had no doubts. Despite suffering from a terminal case of underachievement, I was healthy enough to be sent to die in the jungles of Vietnam. The underachievement part didn’t bother General Westmorland, Lyndon Johnson, or Robert McNamara. My body was warm and I could breathe on my own. That’s all that mattered.

Despite my laconic nature, I had worked my way through a college degree. The last semester I had worked two part-time jobs and carried 18 hours with grades high enough to have me re-classified as fit for cannon fodder. With my degree in hand, and my life ahead of me, I could look forward to a variety of choices: Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, or Coast Guard.

I passed, of course, but I managed to stay in the city a couple of months longer. Then I was off for the seminal adventure of my life, one I wouldn’t do again for a million dollars, nor would I take a million dollars to have not done it. I’m sure there are other old farts around who feel the same way.

One who didn’t enjoy the adventure now serves as our president. To paraphrase the late Hunter S. Thompson, the 45th President of the United States never bought the ticket and he never took the ride. You didn’t have to if you had the right connections, and he had connections that have taken him all the way to the White House. I now read where he says he will make the country “great again” but he doesn’t elaborate, except to assure us that it will be … well … great.

As for me, I’m still looking for the time period that this greatness will replicate. I mean, I’d like the exact year and all that.  As of June 12, 2017, all the news has done the last week is remind me of that foggy morning on Haight Street, so many years ago. Nobody has suggested an exact date for this glorious time—this year of living greatly. I do know one thing, though.

It sure as hell wasn’t 1966.

At the beach in San Francisco. Just waiting.