Prelude to Vietnam

On April 29, 1970 American and Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia for the purposes of destroying Viet Cong supply routes. Expanding the war to a second country—third if you count Laos, which already seemed to be on the fringe of the fighting—drew protest from around the world, not to mention the usual gang of suspects, students from American universities.

A little bit after noon, on Monday May 4, 1970 the Ohio National Guard fired on Kent State students who were protesting the invasion. Four students died and the picture of one girl’s feeling of helplessness and anguish as she knelt over a victim spread around the globe.

On May 21, 1970 in the Record Planet’s Recording Studio 3, Neil Young’s “Ohio” was recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and goes on to become an anthem of the protest movement.
 



   Looking back, this isn't much but being editor for a week
looked good on my resume when I arrived in Vietnam.

I had spent most of the eleven weeks of AIT training going out nightly with Charlie, a Marine PFC, as we visited the SNAFU Bar, located 25 feet off base, the Sugar Daddy Lounge, a mile up the road towards Indianapolis, where we'd listen to a local troubadour sing ballads like, "Have some Madeira, my dear."  On weekends we rented cars, thumbed or road busses—most notably Louisville on Derby Day, where Charlie, a native of South Carolina introduced me to Rebel Yell and Cincinnati on the day Hank Aaron got his 3000^th hit.


Despite of all this extramural activity, I somehow   managed, by June 8, to rank in the top three of our class and  awarded one of the three coveted editor positions for the school's final project—a  4-page mock-up newspapers.  Charlie, on the other hand, had parlayed eleven weeks of drinking and traveling into a dead last finish.

It wasn’t a big surprise when I made Charlie my first choice but it was pretty much thought to be the kiss of death. Even I began to have my doubts when the Sports Page—given to Charlie at his request, was nothing but a blank page on the eve of the day we were to submit our copy.

But Charlie had an ace up his sleeve that no one else was aware of, including me. On base, in another unit, was an All-American football player from Georgia. It wasn’t easy but Charlie arranged for what became a half-page interview. While the other two papers were doing stories about base baseball games and volleyball tournaments, Charlie had done an interview that could have been featured in the Indianapolis Star, and would have been if they knew the man was in town.

Wednesday June 17, 1970, Fort Benjamin Harrison saw the current class of the Department of Defense School of Journalism assembled to receive their final evaluation. Our paper, PentaStaff —get it?—was selected the best overall on the basis of best overall design, best news, best editorial and best Sports Page.

 

Best Sports Page was the real shocker as well as the real clincher.     

Due to the events mentioned earlier, the last month had been filled with a lot of anxiety and expectation about what our next assignments would be, especially within the ranks of the soldiers in the class. There were so many more options for the Army guys but always, the elephant in the room was Vietnam.

The previous class—the one I was supposed to be in before my orders got screwed up at boot camp—had sent all it’s Army graduates to Fort Hood, Texas. None of us knew anything about any of the stateside posts, but the general consensus was no one wanted to go there. It wasn’t Vietnam but was Texas.

In the week that the three teams were putting their mimeo-papers together the new assignments were posted and the whole class of Army personnel learned they were being assigned to Vietnam. One paper, The Quill, edited by Irwin Polls even included an article entitled “Nam Ain’t Bad,” which despite its title did everything to argue the case that while it might not be bad it sure as hell wasn’t good.

I took a lot of flack for picking Charlie and had my own serious doubts when the criticism appeared to be warranted but in the end I looked at it philosophically. A college degree didn't keep me out of the military, but that was mostly my fault. Boot camp didn't turn out exactly the way I had expected, but I had been warned it hardly ever did. I missed my intended class at AIT, the one that would have sent me to Texas, and made the next class, the one that sent me to Vietnam. 

 I decided I couldn't ever know for sure how something was going to turn out so I had better just get used to that. I had worked hard at AIT, but also managed to have some fun. Charley was a good friend and sticking by him was the right thing to do. It also turned out to be the smart thing to do. I decided that until something goes wrong, there is no harm in expecting everything to go right. Expecting good things to happen doesn't really hurt or change anything. That's the approach I took to my assignment to Vietnam.

This didn't mean I wouldn't have some explaining to do when I called home with news of my assignment. Just six months earlier my parents had watched me drive to the recruitment center to enlist in the Navy's nuclear submarine program only to learn when I got home that I had enlisted in the Army.

I'd tell them now that going to Vietnam as a journalist was the best of all possible worlds if one was going to that part of the world.

Both of them were well aware that my father had survived the invasion of North Africa only to be captured in his ancestral homeland of Sicily. So we all knew that you can never be too sure. But I was pretty sure everything was going to be okay. Hell, six months ago I didn't have a job. Now I was an information specialist—whatever that was.