My Vietnam

John Mort 2

I’ve written, some time ago, about the Vietnam War,

in two fictional accounts, Tanks and Soldier in Paradise.
But “My Vietnam” is a personal essay, describing, the
best I can remember it, what I actually experienced in my
year with the First Cavalry, C/2/8, from April, 1969 into
March, 1970.
Thanks to fellow grunt Wayne Bartunek for the cover
photo; and to George Hobson, commander of Charley
Company, for permission to use “My Vietnam” in this
space. George is pulling together photographs and
reminiscences for a book about Charley Company.

All rights reserved by John Mort (2010).

My Vietnam
John Mort 3

My Vietnam

In 1965 I began college in North Manchester, Indiana,

at a Church of the Brethren school with a fine reputation. I
was a fake Hoosier, however, having spent most of my
childhood on a little farm in southern Missouri. I had long
hair and rode a motorcycle, and might have seemed a
romantic figure. But I was really just a transplanted
hillbilly, scared of girls, chronically shy, ignorant and
naïve.
Rather like the better-known Quakers, the Brethren
are pacifists. I developed a lot of respect for them. They
operated—still operate--the Brethren Voluntary Service, or
BVS, which did VISTA-like work throughout the country,
and BVS was one way of getting out of the draft. The kids
who joined BVS didn’t believe war was justified, any war,
and they were utterly sincere.
Listening to rants on both sides of the question, it
didn’t seem to me that the Vietnam War made much
sense. A lot of men were dying for what at best seemed
like a chess match between Robert McNamara and General
Giap. The Domino Theory? What the hell was that? Where
were the Huns, or the Nazis, carrying off our fair virgins?
But then there were those idiots, like Jane Fonda,
posing prettily on North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns.
Damn, she was cute, but it was a real betrayal,
particularly for the horny fans of Barbarella—many of
whom were serving in Vietnam.
Fonda’s antics dovetailed with the anti-war rhetoric
characterizing President Johnson as a baby-burner and
war criminal. Johnson was trapped by the policies of
Kennedy and Eisenhower before him. The man was
overbearing, arrogant, crooked, but a war criminal? He got
the Civil Rights bill through. He didn’t start the damn war.
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John Mort 4
He kept upping the ante with troops and bombing because
he wanted out of it.
And he was a hillbilly like me. Witness his holding up
those hound dogs by the ears, and speeding down the
dusty red roads of the Texas hill country in his Lincoln
Continental. This was the man who said, of J. Edgar
Hoover, “It's probably better to have him inside the tent
pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” Immortal
words!
After an agonizing debate with myself, I dropped out
of college, and volunteered for the draft. I didn’t really
belong with those nice kids in the BVS. Already, I knew I
wanted to be a writer. It was a bad war, but it was also
the biggest story of my generation.

Down at Ft. Campbell (for basic training), I drew an

old yahoo drill sergeant who was certainly tough, but he
also was—how do I put it?—full of love.
Toward the end of basic, one morning around four
a.m., the lights came on. They had begun to relax their
manic discipline somewhat, so, as I stared into the glare, I
wondered what we’d done to merit losing sleep. Oh, God, I
thought: another cold run. More screaming at me over
breakfast. More vomiting.
A fierce, toothy head dangled before me, its fur caked
with dried blood.
“Hit’s a bobcat, boys!” our drill sergeant said. “Shot
him right on the fort here!”
He likes us, I suddenly realized. He actually likes us.
The same man—a hillbilly, you understand, like my
secret soul—stood on the PT stand one sunny morning,
put the three platoons at ease, and demonstrated how to
tie a tie, explaining every step in his Tennessee drawl. He
was precise. It was impossible not to learn. I’ve had a
couple of jobs where I wore a tie every day, and always I
thought, “Thanks a lot, Drill Sergeant.”
***
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John Mort 5
Off I went to Ft. Lewis for Advanced Infantry Training
(AIT), along with Tim Hildebrandt, an artist from
Logansport, Indiana. More about Tim later.
The only thing I remember about AIT was the Escape
and Evasion course. The drill instructors didn’t have the
gravitas of that old hillbilly at Ft. Campbell, but they
hyped the thing endlessly. It would go on all night, as you
thrashed through the woods from the point of escape to
Checkpoint Charley, all along being harassed by the
enemy. God help you if you were captured. They’d put you
in a cage and poke sticks at you.
We were all pretty cynical by then. There’s not much
romance in being a conscript for an unpopular war—not
much morale, either.
Somewhere I found a map on which the Escape and
Evasion course was clearly outlined, right up against a
state highway. To the south, almost adjacent to the
course, was a little town called Roy. So on the night of our
trial, when our leaders pointed north toward Checkpoint
Charley and shooed us into the woods, I convinced Tim
and another man to accompany me out of the bounds of
the course, and into Roy.
There was nothing to see there, but a general store
was open, and we bought a six-pack of Olympia. The air
was chilly and none of us really wanted the beer, but it
seemed to enhance our outlaw exploits.
Then we walked up the state highway, parallel to all
the excitement. There was a big moon and plenty of stars,
so we could see blanks going off, explosions, intense
lights, and at last a truck growling through the Douglas
firs, carrying prisoners in a cage.
Kind of like one of those haunted houses cities put up
at Halloween.
We sat drinking across the highway, hardly one
hundred meters from Checkpoint Charley. The escapees
who had evaded the harassment, but who had the
temerity to report in first, got harassed still further, and
were thrown into the cage. Not fair, we thought, but as
more soldiers straggled in, we saw that the harassment
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tapered off. Around four a.m. we crossed the road, slipped
behind another group, and got ourselves cups of coffee.
We were the best escapees and evaders of all, but
couldn’t tell anyone. It was disappointing.

At Bien Hoa, as I awaited assignment, a first sergeant

swept me up with two others, and set us to digging a
ditch. I asked what was it for, and the first sergeant said,
“Drainage.”
Digging the ditch to nowhere, or digging the
meaningless hole, is famous World War II lore, but I
couldn’t believe such silliness still went on. The first
sergeant was pleasant and chatted with us a while, and
we thought the project was real.
I’d worked on a lot of construction jobs, so wielding a
shovel was kind of fun. The first sergeant said he’d never
seen such a fine shoveler, and it’s probably true. It’s not
much to claim, but I’m good with a shovel.
Then the day grew hot, and the first sergeant left—
saying he’d bring us some water. The water didn’t arrive,
and the other men climbed from the ditch. “Enough of this
bullshit,” said one. I shoveled on for a while, but then
crawled out, too, and headed for the PX. I’d been conned.
It truly was a ditch to nowhere.
There I was, as we used to say, the clever escapee
and evader, taken in by the oldest and dumbest ploy the
army had to offer. I’d been conned because I didn’t
believe anybody could be so stupid as to suggest such a
stupid task.
The first sergeant taught me a lesson, though I’m not
quite sure what it was. Maybe it’s, Confronted with
stupidity, don’t outsmart yourself.

Tim Hildebrandt and I were linked again in our first

assignment. I can’t remember where it was—up country
somewhere, in rolling terrain spotted with fields of grass,
shallow lagoons, and scrub timber. Reminded me of
Florida.
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John Mort 7
Guys who had been in-country a while weren’t
especially friendly. It was as though they belonged to a
fraternity, and you’d been pledged, but they wouldn’t
explain the rules for full membership. A no-nonsense
sergeant from Louisiana, a black man who could barely
read, made a project of me, and probably kept me alive. I
wish I could remember his name. He didn’t like the army
much, but he was a fine soldier.
We flew out from the LZ on platoon-sized patrols.
Wearisome stuff, and nothing happened for several
weeks. Then one night just before dawn I woke to the
booms of Claymores going off, and rifle fire. All manner of
twigs and little stones—and dried fish—rained down in the
camp. As daylight came, we counted the North
Vietnamese dead. There might have been three, or six, I
can’t recall.
Our casualty was Tim Hildebrandt. He pranced
around the camp, delighted he was going home, and
talking crazy talk. “I got a million dollar wound,” he said,
pointing to the back of his head. A piece of shrapnel had
pierced his skull.
Sure enough, he went home, and I had several letters
from him. Later, Tim and his brother, Greg, became the
famous Hildebrandt Brothers, a team of fantasy
illustrators who produced, among many other things, the
Lord of the Rings calendars you can still find in
bookstores. Look them up on the web.
But Tim suffered a great deal before that. He spent a
year at Ft. Riley, sweeping up the entire fort to hear him
tell it. Then surgeons put a steel plate in his skull, and the
army released him. But the wound had aggravated his
childhood dyslexia, so that for a long time he couldn’t find
perspective in his painting—and therefore, couldn’t work.

After the skirmish, the old guys accepted me, and

tried me out at point. I was a failure, but not, strictly
speaking, because I was afraid. Some men, such as the
late Gene Dunn, seemed to have an instinct for pointing,
maybe because they’d done a lot of hunting. I stared
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John Mort 8
before me, and was paralyzed. Suddenly, all the world was
my responsibility. If you missed a suspicious arrangement
in the weeds, or a movement or sound, somebody could
get killed. It was all too difficult for me.
They put me to carrying ammo, and then the squad
RTO went home, and I replaced him. I was a fine RTO. I
spoke clearly and didn’t get rattled. I moved up to the
platoon slot, and toward the end of my tour became Jade’s
—Captain Joe Gesker’s—battalion RTO. I’d found
something I could do well, and be proud of.

Norm Gipe tells me we used to sit in foxholes and

write stories on C-ration cardboard—he one sentence, me
the next. I don’t remember this, but I know I was always
scribbling something, and I read constantly, carrying
paperbacks my mom sent that, altogether, must have
weighed ten pounds. I wrapped the one I was currently
reading in plastic inside a LRP (Long Range Patrol)
container, and carried that in a deep side pocket, and read
through the day as we labored along. Even with my
precautions against the monsoon, the books got wet. I’d
peel off pages and leave them for the edification of the
North Vietnamese—Dickens, Tolstoy, Dreiser. I liked the
classics because they went on so long.
Norm and I sang songs as we walked through the
brush, in that high whisper that was sort of allowed. The
songs I remember most are Jackie DeShannon’s “Put a
Little Love in Your Heart,” and the Beatles’ “Baby, You
Can Drive My Car.” Imagine singing such songs when
you’re soaked in sweat, and brush keeps swatting you in
the face, and your legs are shot, and your pack straps
bear down like you’re carrying an anvil. Then all of a
sudden, up the column somewhere, there’s incoming, and
word comes back that someone’s dead.

Speaking of music, one of the few vets I saw after the

war, the late Ralph Bianculli, aka “New York,” had been in
a band called The Good Rats. The army was putting
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John Mort 9
together a band down in Bien Hoa, to entertain on aircraft
carriers—and LZs, too, I guess.
Ralph was a flamboyant guy, and quite the operator.
He kept claiming how he’d applied to play in that band,
and it was only a matter of time before he’d be on easy
street. I said, right, like that’s gonna happen. But it did, to
the amazement—one might say, the awe—of everyone in
the company.
Headed out for R & R, I heard Ralph’s band in Bien
Hoa, practicing in an unused barracks. They played, “Dear
Prudence,” and were damn good. Much later, Ralph joined
Gene Dunn in a West Texas band, and they played small
venues in places like Lubbock, and then over in the gas
country of New Mexico. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear them.

One of my most surreal memories is also one I can

place in time: Christmas Day, 1969.
We humped all morning through some rugged terrain,
finally descending into a wooded valley that in its deepest
portion had been blasted clear from a B-52 strike. We set
up around a crater that had formed a little lake, and had a
flat berm on one side where helicopters could land.
They proceeded to fly in those oval Mermite cans
containing our Christmas dinner, and we lined up for
turkey and barely warm mashed potatoes and so forth,
deep in the jungle. Then another chopper landed, and out
stepped a navy glee club in their immaculate whites, and
gave us a kind of Brothers Four rendition of “God Rest Ye
Merry Gentleman” and “Tannenbaum.”
The navy flew away, and the Mermite cans
disappeared without an opportunity for seconds. Another
bird circled. It was a Chieu Hoi helicopter, which ordinarily
spewed out American propaganda, but they’d rigged it to
play Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”
Let’s say they were 800 meters up. Bing’s voice was
distorted, so that you could only make out the melody,
and a high-powered, scary gargling. Like a tape playing
backward, but loud. Must have frightened a lot of geckos.
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I wasn’t entertained, or disgusted, or amused. I
couldn’t comprehend it.

I have no idea where this was, or when. Some of us

flew out with combat engineers to blow up an LZ that had
been overrun. I don’t know how many men were killed,
and how many extracted.
We threaded up a long field, wary that some of the
enemy might still be lurking in the woods. Here and there
smoke rose, but mostly fires had burned themselves out. I
recall an overturned, burned-out “mule”—those little
flatbed trucks.
Several went ahead to check for booby traps, but
there didn’t appear to be any; and the engineers began
setting charges. We fanned out over the little base,
looking for small, salvageable objects. The place was a
ghost town. Overturned ammo boxes lay scattered with
empty water cans, clothing, and busted chairs. You knew
a terrible struggle had gone on, and if you raised your
eyes toward that ominously near woodline, you got chills.
A ragged tarp fluttered over what must have been the
mess hall, and several of us made our way there, hoping
for food to scrounge. Up on a table, like some kind of
abandoned offering, sat a round, massive block of cheese.
The skin hadn’t been pierced, and it was stamped with
those black, block style army letters, “Wisconsin Cheddar
Cheese.” Or maybe the words read, “Cheese, Cheddar,
Wisconsin.” The cheese was three feet across, and four
feet high.
How did this fine, perishable thing make its way from
Wisconsin to such a godforsaken spot? You’d have
thought it would have been diverted in the rear
somewhere, and fed to generals. It was too good for the
poor grunts who’d bled and died for it. They never even
tasted it.
And what of the North Vietnamese? Didn’t they like
cheese?
“It’s spoiled,” I remember saying.
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John Mort 11
A soldier pulled out his knife and cut a sample. “No,”
he said. “It’s great.”
Word came the engineers had finished their work, and
it was time to pull back. Oh, no, I thought. The cheese!
I sawed off a pound or two, and others rushed in like
rats, and maybe we accounted for a tenth of that big
block. We marched up the field, and the LZ blew up
impressively as we wolfed down cheese. Oh, for some
decent bread, and some wine!

We tried our best to kill them—the ones designated

as our enemies—but grunts hardly knew any Vietnamese.
You spent a year in the country, but learned little about it.
I always wanted to go to Saigon, for instance, and never
could. Soldiers who actually learned something about
Vietnam were probably not in combat.
For a while, we had an ARVN scout assigned to us.
Everyone said he was worthless—everyone said all the
ARVNs were worthless—but I tried to get to know this guy.
His name was something like “Tru Vu.” I’d say hi to him in
the mornings, and he’d say hi back. He was married, I
learned, and wrote poetry in the classic Vietnamese
manner. He was indeed a lousy scout, and, while I don’t
remember the details, know that he, at least indirectly,
led us into an ambush. Not long after that, he fell behind
the column, and when they heard a thrashing, the squad
following last shot him dead. Accidentally? Accidentally,
on purpose? Lots of things happened like the death of Tru
Vu, and you never knew the truth. But no one, including
the captain, seemed to grieve Tru Vu’s passing.
Our more usual contact with the Vietnamese was with
camp followers—a wonderful term historically, and in
politics, but in this case referring to “boom-boom girls”—a
pretty wonderful term, too. Five dollah one time, twenty
dollah all night.
Enough said.

To bring up another embarrassing subject, there was

a lot of drug use among soldiers. A lot of rock music, a lot
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of partying. Our behavior was particularly reckless on an
LZ called Barbara, which supposedly had been built by the
French. It was the Hilton of LZs, with electric lights in the
bunkers, and real bunks. Soldiers sat up top in chaise
longues made of sand bags, and played their guitars, and
studied the night sky. Sometimes, there would be a “mad
minute,” and the sky would light up, and red and green
tracers would crisscross, and maybe a barrel of Fougas
would blow. Wild stuff.
And a lot of marijuana got smoked. I never saw
anyone use it in the field though alcohol was consumed--
after dark, on guard. Wives and sweethearts sent whiskey
—which sometimes made it through the mail room. The
army itself often supplied beer—Pabst, as I recall it, and
Carling Black Label. I could trade beer for my own passion,
C-ration apricots. During my last months in the field, I
pretty much existed on B-2 units (cheese and crackers)
and apricots. Those damn LRPs made me gag.
Some soldiers claimed there was a lot of heroin use in
the rear areas. They said the Thai soldiers brought it in.
They said some of those RATs (Rear Action Trash) kept
extending their tours because they were addicts. These
stories were akin to urban legends, a folklore impossible
to verify, though I was fascinated by it.
The drug use suggested a demoralized army. We
knew the war was shutting down, and that nothing had
been resolved. In the 1970s, a lot of embittered veterans
would say, “We never lost a battle.” Nonetheless, the war
tore the country apart, and the public seemed to hate us.

I was in the bush almost my entire tour, and never

wounded, but I developed a massive, thoroughly
disgusting boil on my neck, and after that, an aggressive
case of jungle rot. The medic—and he was a fine medic—
blamed me for it, which I resented. I changed to dry socks
when I could get them, but you lived in the rain, and your
feet were wet hours on end. I always took his medicine
religiously—the horse pill for malaria, the anti-fungal pills
for jungle rot.
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At first, the pills worked a cure, and the jungle rot
retreated. But since the conditions didn’t change, the
jungle rot returned, and after a while the pills didn’t work
anymore. It got so bad I could hardly walk, no matter how
I padded my feet or how carefully I laced up my boots.
Pissed off, the medic set me up for a profile, and I joined
the troupe of shammers at battalion headquarters, in Tay
Ninh.
If you were wounded and in the hospital, that was an
honorable thing. Blue-eyed blondes would visit you. But if
you joined the twilight world of shammers, you were a
leper. No one believed you were really sick. You were
doing your best to avoid combat, and that was cowardly—
if perhaps sensible.
Jungle rot seemed to be the chief among our
maladies, but others recuperated from broken bones,
minor wounds, malaria, and gonorrhea. We mustered
every morning, five of us or ten, and the first sergeant
would assign details—usually not KP, because Vietnamese
women did that, and most of us couldn’t scamper around
well enough for such work. We pulled night duty on the
greenline—the bunkers around the
LZ--but not frequently. The only regular duty I recall was
burning shit.
There isn’t a euphemism for it: we burned shit. You
dragged out half barrels, half full, from the latrine, mixed
in diesel fuel, and set the mixture on fire with a bit of
toilet paper. You stirred it with a hoe, and maybe added
more fuel, and that’s all there was to it.
Necessary, of course. And I grew almost to like
burning shit, because it took a while to get the job done,
and no one bothered me. I’d sit on the berm, out of the
way of the ghastly smoke, and read Charles Dickens.
After I finished burning shit, I liked to go down to the
Filipino compound, where I’d be hard to find if some other
duty arose. I could buy a cold San Miguel beer there, and
read. Sometimes, I went to the Red Cross Club, where the
pretty Doughnut Dollies led us in their strange games.
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After perhaps three weeks I returned to the field. It
had stopped raining, and I managed to keep the jungle rot
at bay.
Some of those guys, however, would open a wound to
keep from returning. They saw no point whatever in the
war. Morale wasn’t high for any of us, but for the
dedicated shammer, the idea of “morale” wasn’t even on
the planet.

The biggest battle I lived through was on Valentine’s

Day, 1970. Before long, I would go home. I had just moved
to the CP (Command Position), joining Captain Gesker as
his battalion RTO. The platoon I left behind, Log Chain,
would be decimated—essentially, wiped out. For survivors
of that battle, it’s our most difficult memory.
I wrote about this back in the 1980s, in a long story
called “Tanks,” published in a short book of the same
title. And I don’t want to write about it again. It’s still
painful, and my memory isn’t good enough. I thought
instead I’d round out the picture a little, and remind
veterans of what happened about three hours before the
battle.
Charley was attached to an armored unit, which was
hard for us. We had to ride up on top on that steel plate,
and it bruised your bones. The armored soldiers were a
different breed, and partied all night. Loud noises were
their specialty. In my story, the armored commander is a
baldheaded jerk, and I doubt that he was. I don’t
remember him at all. But the command structure was a
little confusing, because there were two commanders.
The armored soldiers lost men, too. The remnants of
that company, wherever they are, also have terrible
memories.
There are several characters named in the following
excerpt, but they aren’t based on anyone. “Porter” is
pretty clearly me.
The story opens at dawn. The tracks have camped out
in the middle of a big field. Here and there, soldiers are
winding in their claymores. Men are waking up, and
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staggering to the mess track for breakfast and coffee. The
following occurs when “Porter” returns to his bedroll:

He saw a crane. It was huge, with a white neck; except for the
black tips of its white wings, it was white. With the early sun, the
damp-looking jungle, it suggested a cool pastoral; its wings
seemed to sweep in time with the rolling grass. It flew low,
ponderously . . . correct. “Caree . . . caree . . . ” it sang.

It crossed the sun, and the sun, too, was correct: wild and orange
and over-sized, holding the crane. There had been such moments
in Missouri, on land so backward Porter thought he was the first to
come calling . . .

“Jesus,” Okie said, softly. The three of them had stood to watch
the crane. Then the dream was over: Billy Boy raised his rifle,
thumbed it to automatic, let fly six rounds.

Porter was amazed. Of course! If you had a gun you could shoot
it. It hadn’t occurred to him. Stunned, he nodded stupidly as
Preacher stepped forward, raised a hand like a prophet, and
shouted, “Don’t shoot that bird!”

But all the perimeter had the idea. Men leaped up on the tanks
and wheeled the .50 Calibers around. The morning roared
alive. The crane flew past the sun, seemed to hang in the air
before a dead tree, the only one on the plain. Then it fell. Officers
ran up, to protest the firing, but it had already ceased.

The crane—perhaps just an egret—did exist, and we

did shoot it down. I don’t believe there was a soldier
called “Preacher,” but a lot of soldiers were devout
Christians, and possibly I based this character on a nice
Mormon kid whose name I can’t remember. (He was later
killed.) Being a literary wonk, I was attempting to evoke
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge’s poem, in
which a sailor kills an albatross representing good luck
and a pure, serene spirit. After the albatross is killed, all
hell breaks loose.
My Vietnam
John Mort 16

I returned from the war to Ft. Carson, where I had a

bit of luck, and became a company clerk. I’d been
promoted to sergeant, and thus didn’t have to pull KP,
and I was excused also from field maneuvers. A lot of the
guys from Charley popped up around the base, and some
would drop by, and tell me how much they hated those
maneuvers. It was impossible to motivate a draftee who’d
already served in Vietnam, and had only a few months of
service remaining. James Patrick Cafferty, aka Irish,
perhaps the fiercest soldier I ever knew, just couldn’t
handle garrison duty.
There was a black soldier, I’ll call him Danny though I
don’t remember his name, who stormed into the CQ one
morning, and scuffled with the XO. Danny was in the
wrong, but believe me, the XO was no prince. Anyhow, I
filled out a report on Danny, not understanding the
implications, and the upshot was that I had to strap on a .
45 and escort him to the stockade. The stockade was
frightening. I was almost in tears. Danny was a nice guy,
and had been through hell in Vietnam. He had a wife and
child to support. His problem was debt, and his creditors
were coming after him through the XO.
Nonetheless, I liked my time in Colorado. A girlfriend
came to see me, and we went up into the mountains. I
almost re-enlisted—I’d go to officer school, or get some
medical training. But the times were wrong for it, and I
couldn’t get past my bitterness quickly enough. It took me
a long time to realize that the war wasn’t the army’s fault.
The army does what it’s ordered to do.
***
Vietnam vets were all but criminalized in the public
imagination, fed by the media. How many episodes of
Hawaii Five-O were there, exactly, featuring a crazed
veteran in a bell tower? Blaming us for the war is akin to
blaming Haitians for their earthquake, but that wasn’t
something you could communicate, at least on a college
campus. I didn’t want to argue, I did want an education,
and I said very little.
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John Mort 17
Most of us went to work, got married, established
careers. Maybe we were troubled by memories of the war,
but we soldiered on.
After a while, the mood changed. Sometimes, we
were victims to be pitied. Then novels and memoirs, and
finally movies, appeared, presenting us in a better light.
We changed from criminals to victims to dark heroes. They
began to romanticize us, as in the Rambo movies.
I met a couple of teachers who told of their exploits in
Vietnam--but they’d never been there. Huh?
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial helped a lot.
And now we’ve replaced the veterans of World War II,
who are mostly gone. Whatever you think of our ongoing
wars, the public has learned not to blame the soldiers.
Even Jane Fonda—who, like all of us, is no longer a cute
young thing--said she was sorry.
I wasn’t wounded, and couldn’t claim to have suffered
from PTSD. I winced when I heard the wings of National
Guard helicopters, beating over the horizon. I’m still
startled by loud noises, or people coming up behind me.
That’s about it.
I joined a tour to Vietnam several years ago, and
finally got to see a bit of Saigon. It’s a bustling place full
of air pollution. The government maintains some war
shrines, and dutifully stocks them with propaganda—and
bored clerks. But the population is young, born long after
the war, and pays no attention. They work in factories
making clothing and cars to export to the West.
I felt no connection to the place. As tourists, we felt
neither hostility nor friendliness. The Vietnamese food is
better in Houston, or Sacramento.
Speaking only for myself, the war turned out to be an
asset. Because of the G.I. Bill, I got a good education. I
wrote two books with a Vietnam War theme—well-
regarded books. In recent years, I’ve reconnected with
men I served with, and that’s a joy. The war profoundly
changed me, matured me, made it clear just how small
and inconsequential I am. It gave me a deep appreciation
My Vietnam
John Mort 18
for simple pleasures. I look back on it with wonder, and
revulsion. And gratitude.