1 Jul 2018

Healing Legacy

by Andrew Speno | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

I grew up convinced I would die in the jungles of Vietnam. I needn’t have worried. My birth had come almost a full decade too late.

My worries weren’t constant, in any case. Most of the time I was too busy playing pick-up games in the backyard or schoolyard, and organized games at the local park or ice rink. It was only on Sunday evenings when we went to my grandmother’s house that my anxiety came to the fore. As we sat in the parlor waiting for Nana to serve the pot roast, Walter Cronkite came on the television and with him the images. And with the images, the fear. (Did the adults have any idea how powerful these images were on impressionable minds?)

Then the war went away. I was too busy with sporting activities and being a kid to wonder why.

The cloud of Vietnam never fully lifted from the cultural horizon. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now introduced me to a seamier side of the war that CBS had not. I had been too young for the war and now I was too young for Hollywood’s first cinematic depictions of it. I didn’t get them. The Russian roulette scene (“Mao!” Thwack!), the choppers flying to Wagner’s music (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”) was all my friends and I could talk about, all we cared about.

In high school, the Woodstock movie was more my speed. Country Joe MacDonald sang “And it’s one, two three,/ What are we fighting for?/ Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,/ Next stop is Vietnam;/ And it’s five, six, seven,/ Open up the pearly gates,/ Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why,/ Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.” Arlo Guthrie sang (well, he didn’t actually sing that part) about the “twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles/ And arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one….” These protest songs I could relate to. I knew I would have done anything to avoid the war, myself.

More books and movies followed: A Rumor of War, Platoon, Good Morning, Vietnam!, Forrest Gump, The Things They Carried. All reinforced the idea that this was an especially sinister war, in which American participants, from the president on down, lost their moral compass in the “heart of darkness” of Vietnam.

The war hung unresolved and poorly understood over my head. Then, last summer, I read Marvin and Deborah Kalb’s Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama. The father daughter team chronicled in detail how the shadow of the war has loomed over our politics to the present day. In so doing, they gave context to the many international news events of my adult life.

Now, this summer, I discover Elizabeth Partridge’s Boot’s on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam. It takes its camera closer to the ground to show the lived experience of young Americans who were actualy there. Partridge writes with equal respect for those who served as those who protested. The polarized cultural legacy is as “haunting” as the political/military one in the Kalbs’ account. Partridge gives hope that we might eventually escape its “haunting legacy.”

Partridge interviewed eight different service members: an early military advisor, two infantry soldiers, a machine gunner, a Green Beret, a medic, a nurse, and a Vietnamese refugee (her son’s mother-in-law!). Between these “Vietnam” chapters, Partridge places chapters labeled “America,” which follow the contemporary political developments in the United States. (The camera may rise out of the jungles, but it continues to follow individuals’ stories.) She includes a chapter from President Kennedy’s point of view, two from Lyndon Johnson’s, one from Martin Luther King’s, three from Richard Nixon’s, one from Country Joe McDonald’s, one from Gerald Ford’s, and two from the creators of the Vietnam Memorial.

The “America” chapters are as important and illuminating as the “Vietnam” chapters. The post-war chapters are as important as the war chapters. In fact, I found the Maya Lin chapter to be one of the most powerful in the whole book. Her iconic design might have been stillborn had some vocal dissenters had their way.

Partridge begins her book with a very personal prologue. It is November 1968. The author and her boyfriend (and one other friend) are driving east into the Sierras. These three Berkeley hippies pick up a hitchhiker who, they now notice, has short hair. “Military short.” They learn he has just come back from “Nam.” Partridge recalls her discomfort, making clear what side of the cultural divide she grew up on. She follows her student-eye memories through the 1970s before jumping ahead to the twenty-first century, and her first visit to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Remember that, she is saying. The Wall is crucial to this story.

Though her perspective shifts throughout the book, Partridge’s book is neatly chronological. Often threads from an America chapter find their way into the next Vietnam chapter. We read that President Johnson, in the summer of 1965, reluctantly sent forty-four more combat battalions to Vietnam, bringing the total number of troops to 200,000. In the next chapter, we learn that Gilbert de la O is one of those soldiers whose battalions has been called up. The narrative shows Martin Luther King in 1967, struggling to balance nonviolent principles with the need to stay focused on civil rights. In the next chapter, Henry Allen, a King follower, faces the same quandary, even more intensely, while toting a machine gun in Southeast Asia.

As the narrative approaches the seventies, we read about Country Joe McDonald’s performance at Woodstock and, in the next chapter, how nurse Lily Lee Adams (partial to “love-ins and peaceful protests”) regretted missing the festival at Yasgur’s farm. We read of Gerald Ford’s decision to abandon Saigon in 1975, followed in the next chapter by Hoa Thi Nguyen’s harrowing escape from the fallen capital. These may be small moments, but they show the deft touch of a gifted nonfiction storyteller

Each American serviceman (and one woman) we follow in this book leaves us a little more distressed and ashamed. How could our government, our country, put its citizens in such a no-win situation. Partridge articulates the thoughts of Jan Scruggs as he lies wounded under a tree, early in his tour “in country”: “I’m going to be dead within minutes in this little nothing of a battle in Vietnam that’s not even going to change the course of the war. This is not like Normandy, or Stalingrad. This is just a skirmish.”

The presidents’ stories elicit varying degrees of sympathy, scorn, and incredulity. Partridge’s research lets us listen in on Kennedy’s private thoughts following the November 1963, overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem: “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he records into his Dictaphone. Later in the recording he called the killing “abhorrent.” One feels anguish and the weight of responsibility behind those words.

JFK’s successor, in Partridge’s depiction, is both pitiable and outrageous. He roars in frustration, “This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.” He laments in desperation, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

Nixon brings a Machiavellian crudeness to the Vietnam presidency. Partridge quotes him saying, “If you can’t lie, you’ll never go anywhere,” then documents how he follows through on this promise–repeatedly –in his ordering of bombings in Cambodia. Nixon doesn’t allow us to muster even a whit of sympathy on his behalf. He calls the protesters “bums.” He authorizes an investigative unit, later known simply as “the Plumbers,” to dig up dirt on Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. We know where that line of work will lead. We know how that sordid story ends.

Partridge doesn’t let the story drop with the fall of Saigon. The struggle over the meaning of the war continued, both for the individuals who served and for the country as a whole. In one of her most affecting chapters, Partridge follows the abrupt highs and lows of Jan Scruggs in the decade following his year in Vietnam. Marriage and degrees in psychology were accompanied by heavy drinking and a near-attempted suicide. A viewing of the movie The Deer Hunter sent him into a tailspin that might have ended badly but, instead, gave him the idea for a Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

The last two chapters recount the unlikely selection of Maya Lin’s design, its near-rejection by the community of veterans, and its ultimate vindication at the National Salute to Vietnam Veterans in November 1982.

Boots on the Ground is a book of healing. It gives voice to service members who were “asked to fight for something [they] didn’t believe in, for a country that didn’t believe in [them].” Then they returned from war only to be neglected or, worse, shamed. Partridge’s book shows them honorably trying to execute the mission they were assigned, a mission they tried valiantly to believe in. It shows them having more than a little in common with the protesters who spat on them as they returned home. Even Country Joe’s protest anthem was anti-the-people-who-made-the-war-happen, not anti-soldier.

If you don’t close the book making a pledge to yourself to visit The Wall as soon as possible, it can only be because you have already visited it in the past. In which case, Partridge’s book is equally valuable for revealing its story–along with those of eight others whose names are not etched in its granite.

Source: Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam, Elizabeth Partridge (2018)

12 Jun 2018

Fictional History

by Andrew Speno | posted in: Good Reads: Fiction | 0

Juba! by Walter Dean Myers is historical fiction with a strong emphasis on the history. The title character actually existed. The events in the book are documented. Fourteen archival images grace the pages, including map, photo, and engraving; portraits, posters, and original documents. It’s not so much historical fiction and fictional history.

Documentary evidence of the dancer Juba exists, but large gaps, huge questions, will always exist. To wit: How did a Negro boy from the Five Points district of New York rise rise so high, so quickly? What obstacles did he face as an African American, and how did he overcome them? Who was Sarah, the woman he married? What was his attitude toward his homeland after traveling to the United Kingdom? Walter Dean Myers put his novelist’s imagination to work and gave us a plausible accounting of a life that must otherwise remain opaque.

I was interested in Myers’s account of the prejudice inherent in minstrelsy. I understood that white entertainers “blacked up” to perform Negro music, that they inserted lyrics and actions designed to make fun of blacks and assert their own superiority. But Myers provides a window into the African American point of view. When blacks performed they were expected to “coon it up”: act the buffoon. Myers’s Juba character resents this and refuses to go along.

Here is a scene from the first half of the book:

“’Show your minstrel stuff, Fred. You’re the best!’

“…Fred wasn’t a first rate dancer but better than the fool I saw on the floor. He came out reeling and staggering around like he was drunk. He looked over where Mr. Reeves was sitting and began rolling his eyes. John Diamond started laughing, and so did Mr. Reeves. The more they laughed, the more Fred clowned it up, even falling to his knees and shaking his shoulders as if her were having a fit or something.

“I felt myself getting madder and madder.”

[Then Juba starts his audition.]

“’Coon it up! We want to see some minstrels!’ John Diamond yelled out. I ignored him and kept dancing, but the clapping began to slow down.

“’Coon it up, boy! This is a colored dance!’ John Diamond again.”

The dramatization of Juba’s resistance is satisfying to read.*

Myers does another interesting thing with his narrative. He catches Juba exhibiting some reverse racism of his own. Margaret Moran, a middle-aged Irish American dance instructor, is Juba’s go-to person when he needs help organizing his dance. The two have several colorful interactions (“’Glory, no!’ Margaret looked at me sidewise. ‘You already have a mouthful of sour lemons–how could you fit any more in there?’”) before Juba makes his big pitch. He tells her that the show is going to be “a colored dance performance with some white dancers and singers just around to show it was a mixed group.” Margaret calls him on his superiority. Juba protests. Margaret rebuts: “You were spitting some of the words and swallowing some of them, but you got your teeth together enough to say that [the white dancers] didn’t have to be that good, didn’t you?” Juba concedes her point.

Ultimately, Juba learns to value the contributions of the white dancers–and be less cocksure of himself. Myers leaves open the possibility that the real Juba was influenced by Irish dancing as much as African American dancing in the decades to come. The story’s end catches one by surprise, but, again, Myers just imagines the details in what he knows to have actually happened.

(* I have been watching Will Rogers movies of late. Sadly, this same tendency is evident in the 1930s, eighty years later. Black performers are given roles where they are mostly not to be taken seriously.)

Source: Juba! by Walter Dean Myers (2015)

3 Jun 2018

Art Imitates Life

by Andrew Speno | posted in: Laura and Rose Wilder | 0

If Laura is the author and protagonist of the Little House books, Pa is her muse and the series’ catalyst. His wanderlust drives the Ingalls ever onward (if not precisely westward) in search of unspoiled land. He sets the overarching plot of all the books in motion. Pa had a “wandering foot,” Laura wrote. He bristled when settlers grew “too durned thick.” After just a couple years in De Smet, Charles told Ma, “I would like to go west. A fellow doesn’t have room to breathe here any more [sic].” The Ingallses had barely gotten over the Long Winter. Survival was not a luxury they could afford to scorn. Ma put her foot down, and the Ingallses stayed put. Did Pa think any place he settled would remain wild and still yield a prosperous farm?

Laura inherited her father’s love of wild places. For her, the prairie’s wildness was intricately wound up with her love of family. In 1923 on her homestead in Missouri, she had a realization while picking a sunflower in a meadow: “As I looked into its golden heart such a wave of homesickness came over me that I almost wept. I wanted mother, with her gentle voice and quiet firmness; I longed to hear my father’s jolly songs and to see his twinkling blue eyes; I was lonesome for the sister with whom I used to play in the meadow picking daisies and wild sunflowers.” Years away from the Dakota prairie had made her heart grow fonder. The nostalgia drove her to put pen to paper.

The Wilders, Laura and Manly, had been forced out of the Dakotas thirty years earlier by pure economics. The couple traveled southeast to Mansfield, Missouri–hardly untrammeled wilderness but full of natural beauty, nonetheless. Laura lived the rest of her long life–six more decades–at their Rocky Ridge homestead. Her own child, Rose, inherited Pa’s restlessness, if not so much Laura’s love of wild places. Rose spent a long life searching, like Pa, for she-knew-not-what. Dissatisfaction was her default emotion; anywhere-but-here her fallback position. After traveling for long stretches, she was always drawn back to Rocky Ridge…where she would grow restless and eager to move on within days!

Rose settled on Albania as her favored escapist locale. Tellingly, she was attracted by its pre-modern qualities. Then and in her later life, she looked backward, to the lost world of the past, for the utopia she sought. Once, while traveling the by-roads outside the capital of Tirana, she, her friend and their servant stayed out long enough to catch the sunset. It was

very brief; not an Albanian sunset at all. The mountains were sliced off along their tops, neatly, in a straight line, by a dark blue mist that covered the eastern sky. Beneath this line, between the nearer mountain peaks, the far valleys and farther mountain peaks were revealed in sunshine. They were vaguely beautiful–something as lovely as our waking dreams of lands we shall never see.

The sight prompted her to philosophical musings that stayed with her for years: “We continue to cling to the belief that when we see them [dream lands] they will be beautiful, but an implacable circle of reality moves with us wherever we go.” Rose seemed to acknowledge, wisely, that her constant searching, her constant striving, was largely futile. It didn’t put an end to her quest, though. She kept grasping until she found a cause that could give her life purpose.

Fifteen years later, while helping her mother draft her eighth and final book in the Little House series, Rose perceived an opening in the narrative in which to insert her Albanian insight. The text from pages 152-153 in These Happy Golden Years reads as follows:

Sometimes on Saturday, Laura walked westward across the prairie to Reverend Brown’s house–on his claim. It was a long mile and a half walk, and she and Ida made it longer by going to the highest point of the rise of ground beyond the house. From there they could see the Wessington Hills, sixty miles away, looking like a blue cloud on the horizon.

“They’re so beautiful that the make me want to go to them,” Laura said once.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ida replied. “When you got there they would just be hills, covered with ordinary buffalo grass like this,” and she kicked a tuft of the grass where the green of spring was showing through last year’s dead blades.

In a way, that was true; and in another way, it wasn’t. Laura could not say what she meant, but to her the Wessington Hills were more than grassy hills. Their shadowy outlines drew her with the lure of far places. They were the essence of a dream.

Walking home in the late afternoon, Laura still thought of the Wessington Hills,…. She wanted to travel on and on, over those miles, and see what lay beyond the hills.

Thus the defining wanderlust of father, daughter, and granddaughter came together in a timeless work of literature. Indeed, the passage–and the books in toto–speak to a defining quality of the American spirit: a restlessness and a drive that impels us ever onward–sometimes rashly, sometimes boldly–to seek the necessary, the inspiring, the new.

Thank you, Ingallses and Wilders for that shared experience. Thank you, Rose. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Charles.

Sources:

Fraser, Caroline. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017.
Holtz, William. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. The Happy Golden Years. New York: Harper Collins, 2004 (1943).

31 May 2018

100 Years Ago Today: Etaples Hospital Air Raid

by Andrew Speno | posted in: WWI Nurses | 0

Millions of British troops passed through the French coastal town of Étaples, France, on their way to the Western Front. The training camps housed as many as 100,000 troops at a time. Many thousands of British and Empire wounded returned to Étaples to one of more than a dozen hospitals there. Patient population peaked at about 22,000. Étaples was the largest base camp ever established by the British overseas, before or since.

No wonder the Tommies had a love-hate relationship with the place and rechristened it their own tongue-in-cheek name: “Eat-Apples.”

No wonder, too, that Germans targeted it with air raids in their spring offensive of 1918, Geneva Conventions be damned. The German Luftstreitkräfte were not very scrupulous about avoiding medical buildings when there were so many legitimate targets nearby: munitions depots in addition to training camps.

On the night of May 19, 1918, Étaples was hit hard. Among all hospitals, including both hospital staff and patients (some of whom would likely have been German prisoners) one hundred and sixty-nine were killed. Six hundred and twenty-two were injured. These data, taken from the war diary of the Etaples Base Commandant, appear higher than those found in other sources. The St. John’s Ambulance Brigade, one of at least seven major hospitals, listed a total of only fifteen casualties (of whom five were killed).

More mayhem struck on May 31. Twenty-three patients and personnel were wounded at the SJAB hospital, of whom eleven were killed. Damage to infrastructure was extensive. Four of the major hospitals were closed and their patients sent to England for care.

The Germans had chosen their target wisely–or brazenly. Either way, the battle was engaged in a fight that really would yield a finish. A second War of Movement would progress, following three and a half years of trench-bound stalemate. Casualties would continue heavy for the remaining months of the war, but never again would so many patients and medical personnel come under direct attack as they did at Étaples in May 1918.