Spring 2003 Charles River Review: Articles of War

I keep a lot of stuff, some of it junk. I keep old receipts and bank statements, Christmas cards and letters, matchboxes from places that probably don't exist anymore, even shoes that have unfortunate flaws but which may still someday serve an odd purpose. I tell myself that's why I keep things. Because they'll serve a purpose. And there's always that chance I'll learn something.

Among my stuff, I have a cache of old clippings and sports memorabilia of my favorite teams, the Boston Bruins and Boston Red Sox. These things seem to be particularly frivolous, but they bring me back to my boyhood. Sifting through some boxes of old stuff the other day, I came across a bunch of newspaper clippings about the Boston Bruins from the late '60s and early '70s.

I'd kept a half-page ad from The Boston Globe congratulating the Bruins on their 1972 championship. I remembered carefully cutting it out, maneuvering the scissors around the letters of the headline and the odd-shaped illustrations within. I was 11 years old and the Bruins were Stanley Cup Champions. Things could not be much better. The day of the final victory, our family living room erupted at the end of the game. The late afternoon sunshine glared through the windows, a dramatic backdrop for our glee. "Glee" is an odd, old-fashioned word, but one I think applies well to the innocent, detached elation that was ours that day. Mine is a sports-crazed family and we chose to enjoy the ride with this great team right through the dark days of the Vietnam War.

* * *

Turning the yellowed newsprint ad over, I saw the inadvertent result of my fastidious scissoring. I had been concerned only with preserving the Bruins ad, and the articles on the other side, randomly truncated, were all about the war.

The date had been cut off the articles, but the paper must be circa mid-May 1972. The Stanley Cup finals would have ended around May 10 or 12. There is an article about the North Vietnamese offensive that had started on March 30, 1972 across the demilitarized zone at a South Vietnamese city called An Loc. The headline reads, "An Loc defenders fight to keep toehold." Another headline reads, "78 US planes lost in offensive." Other headlines read, "Ships avoid Haiphong Harbor" and "Foe insists on political settlement." In the last article, both sides at the Paris peace talks fail to agree on the details of a proposed ceasefire.

Sitting among the memorabilia and old newspaper clips strewn about the floor, it struck me that these articles probably had a greater impact on me now, even though the war was long over, than they might have during the heat of their time, when terrible news appeared every day. They were part of a story that would grow. I knew from the hindsight of history that dozens of peace-plan details, and thousands of soldiers' deaths, would fill correspondents' articles before the end in Vietnam.

* * *

All the wrangling at the peace talks went on while the war escalated--and potential draftees waited. At the height of the troop buildup there were 540,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. More than half a million men stationed in Vietnam had to come from somewhere, and the Selective Service provided a large number of them. Every 18-year-old American male had to register for the draft. About 10,000 had chosen to leave the country and avoid the draft by the end of the war. Others claimed exemptions. But the majority chose to register and received a two-inch by three-inch card with a number on it. It was a lottery. To hit it in the years between 1965 and 1973 was to win a trip to a war zone. Both of my older brothers would receive their cards, but I never saw them or even asked to see them. Their draft cards were tucked in their wallets, I'm sure. But their assigned numbers floated somewhere in the atmosphere, where chance and lightning are made.

United States Selective Service

Armed Service Draft Registration No.

965

Lightning did strike a lot of young men during the years of the draft. Exemptions only helped a small number avoid service in Vietnam. What started in 1963 as a 700-man military advisor corps grew to 15,000 advisors under President Kennedy and escalated drastically through the Johnson and Nixon administrations. At the end of 1965, the official beginning of American involvement in Vietnam, there were 200,000 combat troops there, twice that at the end of 1966, a half million at the end of 1967, and a high of 540,000 at the end of 1968. With large-scale domestic protests, disclosure of the massacre at My Lai, and the political weight of years of war, troop reductions began to occur in 1969, with the total down to 280,000 at the end of 1970, and to 140,000 at the end of 1971. After further gradual reductions in 1972, the last American combat troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973. I remember somber church bells ringing on that afternoon.

* * *

Indeed, so much of what I recall about the Vietnam war seems to be set in the waning afternoons of my boyhood. Summer afternoons drenched in heavy-lidded heat and the patina of sunset. Evenings when nobody wanted to play catch or pickle. The war itself was put aside during the fresh part of the day. There were games and long bike rides. But in those late afternoons, when the day's activities abated, I came home to news footage of soldiers who were also hungry and tired. And I knew not all of those soldiers, living and breathing on television, would be coming home.

More than 57,000 American soldiers did not make it home alive. One who did was my friend's oldest brother from a few houses up the street. My friend quietly showed me his brother's room once and a framed picture of the Army helicopter that his brother worked on. He had been snatched away by the draft because his number was up, and perhaps because he was a mechanic, not a senator's son. He served his one-year tour of duty, as endlessly long to him as our summer vacations seemed to us: hot months slogging through frog ponds, pestilent woods, and shimmering fields abuzz with cicadas.

In the summer months of his return he dedicated himself to reviving an American icon. The hulk of a 1957 Ford Thunderbird, which had sat rusting on cinder blocks in his family's side yard while he was in Vietnam, roared to life in the summer of 1968. I remember hearing the backfires and seeing the oil-smoke billow as the car, brown with primer paint, rode down the street one bright morning. Not long after, the Thunderbird was in mint condition, painted canary yellow with a detachable roof complete with side portholes. He didn't stay around town long after that. My friend and I still played street hockey in his driveway, though never speaking of his brother, as the cinder blocks sat empty in the side yard.

I should have been afraid that my own older brothers might be drafted; they would be eligible for the draft as the war went on. But I knew nothing of chance really, except that it was a fat chance any team would beat the Boston Bruins in those days. And I don't remember much talk in our family about the draft, so I didn't look at my brothers as potential soldiers. In my mind, my brothers were really not linked to the war in any significant way. On the surface, they adopted the trappings of the hippie times--long hair, fringed jackets, faded jeans, and peace signs. We listened to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" but I didn't laugh at it nervously, as perhaps they did, when the main character tried to feign insanity to avoid the draft. They were not particularly antiwar. I suspect they were not for war but were not against the American soldier either. In fact, an earlier addition to their record album collection included "The Ballad of the Green Berets," a paean to the American soldier in Vietnam sung by US Army Sergeant Barry Sadler.

They were certainly interested in the war, and my brothers' interest probably helped pique mine. My brother Jack had done a school report on the war, complete with a hand-drawn map of Vietnam. The map showed Vietcong and US positions during the 1968 Tet Offensive, blue for the US and red, of course, for the Vietcong. I always associated the sweep of the red arrow, thick and seemingly as wide as the country itself, with the "red hordes" from the battle of the Yalu River in the Korean War. My nightmares had the endless red hordes swarming over the little hump often used as a pitcher's mound in our backyard.

And I was not the only one in our house to have nightmares in that time. Famous family lore recalls that my brother Jack once walked in his sleep, delirious with a fever in the middle of the night, while screaming over and over, "They bombed it! They bombed it!" It could be that his nightmare was fueled by the war "comic" books that my brothers bought at the corner store along with gum and Matchbox Cars. These were dark, violence-filled cartoons that chronicled the exploits of American GIs and the Vietcong "gooks," as they were called in the books. In these comics, the heads of the VC soldiers were covered in mushroom-cap hats, and the encroaching jungle vegetation that hid the insidious booby traps made of bamboo spikes gave the impression that everything in Vietnam was organic, fashioned from the fruits of the earth. And somehow, there in that cursed cartoon place, the earth was itself evil and deadly. This was as close to Vietnam as my brothers were to come. Their numbers didn't come up, they weren't in college or connected or conscientious objectors, and they didn't volunteer.

* * *

Now, even as I recall that I was not at the time in fear of it, the danger I sense about that war is colored by the possibility that my own brothers could have been sent there. Tracing their names on a memorial or seeing their young faces frozen in time in revered portraits might have been part of how I thought of them and the war, had they gone. My collection of stuff might include things they had kept for their own purposes.

Today, March 29, 2003, is the 30th anniversary of the withdrawal of the last American combat soldiers from Vietnam. America is again at war. This time in the Middle East. And I'm still keeping a lot of stuff these days, including newspaper articles. Much from my youth and the time of the Vietnam war has gone away. Gone are the glory days of the Bruins, the '57 Thunderbird and the Vietnam vet who restored it, my nightmare of the red hordes, and even the pitcher's mound in my parents' backyard--razed to make room for a picnic table. But much has reappeared: bell-bottom hip-hugger jeans, peace signs, war protests, and the timeless youthfulness of a Marine's formal military photo in the newspaper. And it would still make me happy to cut out an ad congratulating the Bruins on a championship this year, happier still if the flip side does not contain articles of war.