September 2010 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

My Vietnam War

It’s my destiny to have been part of a war everyone in the world would have been better off without.

Beyond the war movies and books, my involvement with war began when I was 11-years-old and was told by my father the US had wars every 20 years or so and I should get ready for mine. He taught Physiology at the University of Miami Medical School and, during WWII, had been a PT boat captain in the South Pacific.

His war – “the great war” as he liked to call it – was symbolized by a Japanese leg bone he had in his desk drawer. I have it now in my bookcase. It’s 14-inches long, a fibula, the small bone in the lower leg. He cut it off a rotting Japanese corpse on Peleliu, a small island south of Okinawa famous for a horrific and unnecessary battle in the closing months of the war.

My father tied the bone to a rope and dragged it behind his PT boat for a couple weeks, then soaked it in kerosene. He packaged it up and, always the wit, sent it home to his mom, addressed to Ink, her cocker spaniel.

He also told me about US Marines on Peleliu celebrating Christmas with a string of Japanese scrotums decorating their quarters. I think my father wanted to toughen his sons up. What he did with me was instill early a realization of the true horror and absurdity of war.

By high school, I was reading adult novels on my own. I read The Centurions by Jean Larteguy and The Quiet American by Graham Greene. The former is a sympathetic portrait of the French military in Vietnam and Algeria, while the latter is a critique of Americans intervening in the period between the French and the US wars.

Greene’s political critique went over this 17-year-old’s head and all I understood was the exoticism and mystery of the colonial world of Vietnam.

I was a pretty open-minded kid, and by this point my father and I were at each other’s throats. So in June 1965, seven days after my high school graduation, I joined the Army to get out of the house and see the world.

The recruiter saw me coming. There was a push on then to get kids into the Army Security Agency, the Army’s newly formed branch of the National Security Agency. I passed the right tests and was told the ASA was an elite assignment. Since I was focused on a Graham Greene world of exotic intrigue and had no John Wayne fantasies, this sounded perfect.

(I must interject, here, had Graham Greene, who was alive then, known that his fictional critique of the evil of American “innocence” actually had something to do with an American kid joining the occupation army in Vietnam, he probably would have said: “I rest my case; they are indeed insidious idiots.” So, allow me, now, to extend to that great Catholic writer an apology for misusing such a magnificent little book. It planted a seed that took years to grow to maturity.)

At Fort Devons, Massachusetts, I learned Morse code and was trained in direction-finding on a DF radio called a PRD-1 that we were told was an obsolete piece of WWII equipment. Next, I was assigned to a company shipping off to Vietnam.

This was Lyndon Johnson’s great 1966 rush of troops into Vietnam. Our entire company was loaded onto the USS Hugh J. Gaffney, an aging naval “bucket” with thousands of stacked canvas bunks in its bowels.

We steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge and headed out toward a very noticeable line of turbulence beyond which was the vast Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, the rails of the ship were lined with vomiting soldiers, either from the increased rocking or just the realization there was no turning back.

We made Vietnam in 17 days, record time we were told. Off the coast of Qui Nhon, the company was loaded onto a large LCU, which hit the beach like a John Wayne movie. When the bow section was lowered we saw air conditioned buses that took us to an Air Force base for the next leg to Pleiku in the Central Highlands.

Riding through Qui Nhon I’ll never forget witnessing real poverty for the first time and looking down and seeing a 12-year-old kid next to the bus, big as day, extending his middle finger.

My job in the ASA was to locate enemy radio operators with – you guessed it – that obsolete WWII era box and antenna, the PRD-1. We were assigned to the Fourth Infantry Division and worked in three teams of two-men each.

We mounted the PRD-1 on a jeep and set up off the road or next to villages. Sometimes, we put it on top of an armored personnel carrier and crashed through the woods until we found high ground. A few times we were dropped on mountaintops with a squad of grunts to protect our rear-echelon butts. Back at base camp, they triangulated on a map the three single bearings we sent in and reported the location to intelligence.

Often our bearings were faulty. First off, the large mountains played havoc with radio signals, and, second, there was always operator error. If the Air Force, the artillery or infantry units acted on our locations, it was always possible we were leading them to an innocent village. The fact is, we were kids and we really didn’t know what we were doing. We did the best we could. But that’s how war works on all levels. The minor screw-ups are forgotten and the serious mistakes that involve lives are classified.

We were like the worst kind of American tourists, with guns instead of cameras. We had money to burn in a country of dire poverty. Everybody had something to sell, including young girls. And there I was, a kid just out of high school, being flown around on choppers over amazing expanses of incredible jungle. I’ll never forget looking out the open door of a Huey and the beauty of the winding Se San River and the dawn light that made it look magically like a shimmering golden snake.

I was a kid in awe. But, the truth be known, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing there or why Vietnamese kids just like me were trying to kill me, and me them. The real tragedy was history shows that our leaders didn’t have much of a clue either.

Beyond a few mortar attacks, I was fortunate to avoid any kind of wound or trauma. In a way, I feel I was charmed. This is the basis for what I do carry, a whopping case of survivors guilt.

I have many vet friends who were in combat, some who were grievously wounded and did things they regret. One friend earned a silver star for saving men in a burning chopper under fire. Another, who was and is gay, was a Navy corpsman who didn’t carry a weapon and patched up wounded and dying Marines.

My brother was an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam, and he saw terrible things. We were in Vietnam at the same time, and I actually ran into him one day at a remote firebase west of Pleiku that amounted to a cigar-burn in a green shag carpet. I’d been there for two days when I happened to see him across the landing zone. The coincidence still strikes me as amazing. The day after I moved on from that firebase, it was attacked and there was a battle.

As I look back, I think of the Vietnamese men and boys I hunted with my DF radio. They were generally communicating with their leadership, in many cases over the border in Cambodia. The operator would send a series of five-letter coded groupings in Morse code using a leg key, while his assistant worked a bicycle generator to power the radio.

Knowing we were looking for them, they would go to a different, remote location each day. Our job was, over time, to come up with a pattern that revealed where the operator’s unit was dug in, possibly totally underground in tunnels. One time we hit the jackpot and located a major brigade headquarters that was bombed and assaulted without mercy.

I’ve been back to Vietnam twice, and both times I was very warmly received. As I think of the men, and women, who died or were maimed because of my work I become that much more dedicated to preventing and stopping wars.

The Vietnamese only wanted to be left alone. They wanted what we in the United States want, liberty and independence. President Truman and others decided they had no right to that because they were deemed “communists.” The fact Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh guerrillas had been our WWII allies against the Japanese and that Vietnam had a long history of hostility with China went right over their arrogant and delusional Cold War heads.

The war I was part of was a disaster for the Vietnamese first and foremost, but it was also a disaster for the United States, and it still divides the nation from itself. All this did not preclude individual acts of bravery by US soldiers. Honor was possible, even though the war was wrong. But there was no glory – only shame.

I have no classic “war story” to tell. But there is a memory I vividly recall. With a partner, I was working the PRD-1 on the back of a jeep in a field next to a village 15 miles west of Pleiku on Route 19. From the west, came a “deuce and a half” truck with hollering men in the back. They were shooting at a little village dog running and barking at the truck.

Since we were unseen and in their field of fire, we ducked behind the jeep and watched as they eventually hit the poor little dog and he rolled over squealing. I walked over to the dog and could see he was hurt badly but still alive and moaning. Thinking it was the humane thing to do, I shot him and put him out of his misery.

I had not noticed a young Vietnamese woman walking up to the spot. I’ll never forget her looking at me standing there with my rifle. She did not seem frightened; she was more amazed. The look in her eyes said: “Why!? Who are you people!?”

With hand signals, I tried to explain about the truck and the shooting. But there was no hope. I was just as guilty as the yahoos in the truck.

John Grant

John Grant is a member of Veterans For Peace and is a writer and photographer. He writes a weekly essay for the four-writer blog This

Can’t Be Happening at www.thiscantbehappening.net .