Scenes from a Short but Interesting Life

The formative years …

The Albany Academy, Albany NY

My younger brother, Jeff Sharlet, spent his formative years well up the Hudson River at a venerable old school in New York’s capital. The campus of the Albany Academy with its extensive grounds and playing fields could be found just off Academy Road. Established in the early 1800s, the school boasted a number of graduates later distinguished in American life of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

After the Civil War, the Academy adopted a quasi-military structure, and students, now called cadets, wore uniforms. Classes were small; the faculty, products of elite colleges, were dedicated; and the facilities excellent.

Private school also came with a lively and upscale social life. The Academy boys mixed with girls from the several country day schools of the Capital region. There were proms, balls, and dinner dances as well as gala house parties at the grand homes of the wealthier families.

In a word, the Albany Academy was not a bad place to get one’s education in a pleasant setting while enjoying schoolboy life in the process.

Jeff spent his middle and high school years at the school, flourishing there nearly up to the end. He excelled academically, played two sports creditably well, and performed as an effective member of the Academy’s battalion. By senior year he was appointed an officer in one of the line companies.

Then things began to go awry. Our father, who had provided Jeff a comfortable existence, lived beyond his means and ran his business into the ground. Jeff had his eye set on Dartmouth College, and through junior year his grades and activities strongly indicated he would get in.

However, at the end of football season that fall our father sat him down and broke the news that they’d be unable to afford Dartmouth or, for that matter, the tuition at any private college. Because our parents always made a point of never discussing business in our presence, Jeff was caught completely by surprise.

As a young man with a sports car who wanted for little, Jeff’s bright near-future suddenly darkened. He plunged into an academic tailspin. From Cum Laude  among the top ten of a class of 50, by spring term Jeff had spiraled down to 36^th in class rank, hardly competitive for selective Dartmouth or for any comparable college, even if the funds had been available.

Discouraged by the changed family circumstances, Jeff took no steps to apply to college. He seemed not to care, but the parents prevailed upon him to follow me to grad school. I was headed to a Big Ten research university, and Jeff was coming along as a freshman.

A friend, remembering Jeff from their last days together before the Academy’s commencement ceremony, recalled the two of them sitting in a convertible on a warm June evening ‘under a Rembrandt blue sky’ happy to be putting their formative years behind them.

For me graduate school was a heady experience, but Jeff was lost at that large university of some 30,000 students. Far from home and his friends, all of whom had gone on to the Ivy League back East, Jeff knew no one. He was not a happy trooper.

Jeff dropped out at the end of fall semester, drifting for several months through part-time jobs in the small university town. However, no longer covered by a college deferment, the draft and two years of Army life beckoned. Facing the inevitable, Jeff enlisted for three years with the promise of a year of language study.

Thus began a journey which set him on a trajectory quite different from his peers. The experience and reverberations would shape the rest of Jeff’s short but interesting life. Though serious things lay ahead and Jeff’s personal story would end sadly, there’d also be good times and lighter moments along the way.

                                        

                                           Out to the coast …

Nepenthe’s at Big Sur, California coast

Jeff got through Basic Training at Fort Dix uneventfully. All the marching, drilling, and manual of arms of the Albany Academy years gave him an edge – top sergeant made him a squad leader. That meant a more comfortable billet in the barracks and a few privileges.

He had joined an autonomous intelligence outfit within the Army, and as promised, they sent him to language school for a year of study.  The school was perched on a hill along a particularly beautiful stretch of California coast. Though uniforms were the order of the day during classes, academic life took priority over military life on the base high above Monterey Bay.

There was a lot of free time and just a minimum of duties typically expected of GIs in garrison. After classes and on weekends, the military ‘students’ were off duty and could don their civvies and go where they pleased.

Jeff had a gung ho roommate and got stuck with a starchy Marine NCO as barracks chief. Still, it was great duty only slightly removed from the collegiate ambiance from which Jeff and his classmates had arrived at the school.

There was much to do after hours. Jeff had an old motorcycle, and he and a buddy would ride across the peninsula to the charming village of Carmel-by-the-Sea or roar up the coast highway to San Francisco. Sometimes they’d head off to a race track for a day with the ponies.

By far though, Jeff’s favorite weekend hangout was Nepenthe, a dazzling restaurant built from redwood harvested from the surrounding forest. It was located on a breathtaking strip of coast called Big Sur south of the language school. There Nepenthe extended over a cliff high above the Pacific.

The patios, candle-lit as dusk fell, afforded magnificent views up and down the wild and rocky coast. Food was delicious, but above all Nepenthe was a marvelous place to drink, linger, and talk into the night. It was an easy place to forget one was serving in the armed forces.

Late ’62 Jeff graduated as a Vietnamese linguist, or lingy in the outfit's slang. Originally he’d hoped to go to Europe on the Army’s nickel, but on arrival at the school he’d had been bumped from a Slavic language program, so it was westward ho to Southeast Asia. 

Life in the tropics …

Enjoying good times in the Philippines

Flying with stops in Honolulu and on Guam, Jeff found himself at a vast military airfield in the Philippine Islands (PI), a major US base in the global Cold War. In a far flung corner of the base – far from flight lines where fighters and bombers constantly took off and landed – Jeff worked the graveyard shift in a flood-lit, windowless, heavily guarded building. In effect, he was in the rear area of the low key war underway across the South China Sea in Vietnam.

Again, military life in Jeff’s outfit was at a minimum, and when he wasn’t at his classified tasks, life was very good in the PI. The billets were as comfortable as good college dorms. There was an enlisted men’s club where drinks were beyond cheap, and for the endless sunny days of the subtropics, a large outdoor swimming pool.

Evenings Jeff and buddies would often gather in the pubs and cafes of Angeles City, a honky tonk GI town not far from the gates of Clark Airbase. Jeff joined the glee club, which meant invitations to sing at other American bases in the islands, usually followed by excellent dinners. At one point he considered going out for the Clark football team, which would have meant away games all over the US network of bases in Asia.

There were also trains to Manila, the capital, and bus trips up into the cool mountains as well as excursions to white sand and palm-fringed beaches of the South China Sea.

Travel to other cities of Asia was available. On one occasion when Jeff had leave, he flew military transport gratis to exotic Tokyo, while another time he caught the 4x-a year leave-ship to British Hong Kong. Judging by his letters home, he found those two great cities fascinating.

As the saying goes, all good things come to an end, and Jeff was ordered one evening, late summer ’63 to pack his gear and report to the flight line in the morning. He was shipping out to Vietnam.

To the Paris of the Orient …

A Saigon street scene, 1963

It was a deadly serious matter that rushed Jeff and fellow lingys to Tan Son Nhut, the capital’s airport. A coup was in the air. South Vietnam’s president was mismanaging the country and botching the war against the Communist insurgency. The general staff was thoroughly fed up, and President Kennedy (JFK) had lost patience with America’s Southeast Asian client.

With JFK’s secret blessings, behind the scenes the generals had begun plotting a coup. The US ambassador had a liaison with the plotters, but Washington wanted to be sure what it was getting involved in and dispatched Jeff and his team to clandestinely monitor the electronic communications among the conspirators.

The mission was Top Secret lest the South Vietnamese government find out what we were up to. The lingys were billeted in the capital and transported to their operational site in a remote corner of a US base outside Saigon. They worked around the clock. Each day’s ‘product’ – the intercepts – was sent down to their parent outfit in the capital to be closely analyzed.

So sensitive was the operation that the daily product was packed with incendiary explosives to be detonated should there occur any chance of interception by troops loyal to the South Vietnamese president.

Despite this grim routine, Jeff and buddies had unforgettable times in Saigon, then still regarded as the ‘Paris of the Orient’. The American presence was not yet overwhelming, and it was still a lovely city with broad avenues and a French flavor.

The young Vietnamese women wearing the white silk ao dai – long tunics slit down both sides and worn over long pants – seemed universally attractive. Fine European-style hotels served indigenous dishes and continental cuisine. A popular dining place was a floating restaurant moored to a bank of the Saigon River.

Off-duty, Jeff and his pals were fond of pub crawling through the town’s many attractive bars and outdoor cafes. But – as depicted in the film Good Morning, Vietnam – all was not quiet. An insurgency had been underway in the mountains and jungles for several years, and its impact was beginning to be felt in the country’s capital where the American military advisors were concentrated.

The insurgents – called the Viet Cong (VC) – not only conducted hit and run attacks on the South Vietnamese Army in rural areas, but carried out terrorist activities against places where Americans gathered in Saigon.

A VC attack hit a movie theater frequented by US advisers and their dependents, but more often a VC action was no more than two young men on a motor scooter racing down a busy street and rolling a live grenade into an open air bistro.

That happened one evening as Jeff and friends were walking along a major avenue toward one of their favorite Vietnamese-French places. Maybe a hundred feet ahead of them, a couple of VC cowboys sped by and the café exploded. The place was wrecked, but miraculously no one was killed in that incident.

VC terror was such a part of the urban scene in a city at war that GIs had grown accustomed to it. Jeff and the guys glanced at the damage to the cafe, stepped around it, and continued the night’s outing.

A few days later when the café had been repaired, Jeff and the GIs went back to enjoy the good food and pleasant ambiance. Their favorite waiters were decked out in red sneakers instead of the customary sandals. When Jeff asked why, they replied, “To run faster next time.”

After nearly seven weeks on the secret op, Jeff and the initial team were pulled out and flown back to the Philippines. Replacements continued the operation up to the eve of the successful coup on November 1^st..

High above the heat and dust of the plains

The road to the hill station at Baguio

Returning to his duties at the 9^th ASA Field Station in the PI, Jeff resumed the languorous life of the islands. Nearby Angeles City, however, was a come-down after Saigon with its lovely girls in the flowing ao dai, flower vendors along the sidewalks, and, despite VC interruptions – the night life of a romantic Oriental city edged with a frisson of danger.

But the Philippines still had its charms for a young college boy GI with money in his pocket and plenty of downtime. It was back to the sunny beaches, catching the train again to the bright lights of Manila, as well as occasional free-swinging dinner parties with fellow lingys and crypts, or cryptographers. It felt once again like extended spring break.

As relief from the tropical heat of the lowlands, Jeff and friends would make the harrowing bus trip up to the refreshing air of Baguio along narrow, tortuous mountain roads with sheer drops of 1000s of feet. In British India Baguio was the kind of place they called a hill station, high above the dust and heat of the plains far below.

The only break in the daily routine from the night shift in the windowless building and days of beer and bar girls was a tragic one, the assassination of JFK in Dallas. Profound shock was felt by Jeff and his buddies so far from home at a terrible moment in the life of the nation.

By early ’64, Jeff had had it with military life. He’d been in the forces for two and a half years with just six months to go, and was thinking ‘short’ – shorthand for combat GIs counting the days until they were out of harm’s way.

Jeff’s most urgent concerns became getting his driver’s license renewed back in the States, arranging to return to college, and generally transitioning back to civilian ways.

But then political conditions in Saigon became unstable, the post-coup junta proved inept, and rumors of another upheaval were rife. Once more on short notice, Jeff found himself transferred to Vietnam, but this time in different circumstances, absent the creature comforts and good times of his first tour.

As we shall see in the next posting, he was about to come face to face with the realities of the smoldering, low intensity war in the bush.

Sojourn on the South China Sea

Jeff Sharlet hoped to be shipped to Europe, but landed on the shores of the South China Sea. He had enlisted in the Army Security Agency (ASA), a semi-secret communications intelligence outfit, the military arm of the National Security Agency in Washington. ASA sent Jeff to the Army Language School (ALS) in sunny California.

By late ’62 he’d completed the 47-week Vietnamese course, received Top Secret and Cryptographic clearances, and was soon dispatched to the 9^th ASA Field Station at Clark Air Force Base (AFB) in the Philippine Islands (PI).

Life in the islands – a quiet backwater of the global Cold War – was relatively pleasant for ASA personnel. Across the South China Sea a low intensity civil conflict was underway in Vietnam, and the Pentagon was gradually stockpiling Vietnamese linguists (lingys for short). ASA was temporarily parking most of them in the Philippines out of harm’s way.

With so many interpreter/translators on hand, the workload at the 9^th ASA was not heavy, and the troops enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. But for the war looming in Vietnam, one might call it an extended spring break in the South Pacific.

For the young college-boy lingys, it was something of an adventure. While they bided their time waiting for the call to war, daily life in the tropics resembled scenes from From Here to Eternity without the romance – a sprawling military base, a nearby GI town, palm trees swaying in the breeze. 

Excerpts from Jeff’s letters home trace his carefree time as a GI in the PI during the early months of ’63.

13 Jan 63 – from Honolulu enroute to the Far East

Hawaii is beautiful and warm. I’m on a Super-Constellation. It will take 30 hours to get to the Philippines. The South Pacific looks enchanting.

29 Jan 63 – at 9^th ASA Field Station, Clark AFB, PI

This base is like a little piece of America. It has everything. We live in a fairly new billet in three-man rooms. Outside walls, and inside walls as well, are louvered for ventilation. We have houseboys at $2.50 a month to make beds and shine shoes as well as clean rooms, the billet, and its grounds.

Jeff (r) & Fred Baumann outside barracks, Clark AFB, 1963

The pool is across the street, tennis courts are nearby, and the enlisted men’s open mess, called the Coconut Grove, is next door.

The pool across the street

You hear music everywhere on base. It’s from Armed Forces Radio (AFR), which we get on our transistors, and you can also hear it through speakers in the clubs and the rec areas.

It’s a strange combination of Country Western and Rock ‘n Roll, everything from ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and ‘Oklahoma Hills’ to Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ and lots of Ray Charles.

♫ I’m an old road-hog/I drove a big truck

Shot the pinball machine, but it brought me bad luck†

The work is interesting, informative, and not too hard. I work the mid-shift from Midnight to 7:00 AM. The place where we work, called Operations (Ops for short), is a windowless, concrete building in a heavily-guarded, barbed wire enclosure in the middle of an enormous field.

When I wake up in the afternoon, I do errands, read in bed, or go to the pool. I generally go to Happy Hour at the Airmen’s Club from 4:30 to 5:30  afternoons. All drinks are only 10 cents, normally 20 cents, while weeds run 95 cents a carton. I either stay there for a while or go into town with a buddy.

The town called Angeles City is right outside the base. It’s like something out of Susie Wong’s world, just like those Far Eastern army towns you read about in war novels. All the joints have American names.

A GI joint, Angeles City, PI, 1963

It’s one huge collection of bars, whores, beds, Jeepney taxi drivers, horse and buggy conveyances, and the most poverty stricken people I’ve ever seen. The girls are mostly young.

Thus far when I think of this country, the R&R song ‘Babycakes’ (Ooooh, baby, oooh), the dance ‘Mashed Potatoes’, strong San Miguel beer, as well as comments in the bars like ‘Hey Joe, you buy me a ladies beer’ – come to mind as representative of the PI.

♫ Hey Mama, don’t you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy all night long††

15 Feb 63

The Filipinos and the bar girls don’t need any information. The first night I went to town, all the girls asked me if I was ‘9^th ASA’. I’m trying to organize the girls into an entertainment union so they can get a guaranteed wage for hustling drinks.

Jeff (2d on l) & buddies, Angeles City, 1963

         

Manila, the capital, is 65 miles away. I just got back from there. It’s just like any large city in the States, a total imitation of the US with gangs, the PTA, an American Legion, and a Chamber of Commerce. English is the common language, and just about everyone speaks it. The University of the Philippines even has sororities.

I like it here, but I don’t know why.

24 Mar 63

I have a chance to get a hop to New Delhi next month, but I’m going to pass it up for a while. They have space available on planes to India once a week and to Saigon, Bangkok, Taiwan, and Japan every day. They also have a ship, which goes to Hong Kong 4 times a year, expressly for guys going on leave.

I might go out for football because they go on game trips to Japan, Korea, and Okinawa. This station has a good team. They almost beat the Far Eastern champions last year.

11 Apr 63

Some friends and I took a train to a place called Dagupan, a few hours from here. Just beyond the city is a beautiful white sandy beach on the South China Sea where we rented a hut for a couple of days, took in some sun and surf, and drank a lot of beer.

♫ Where the deep blue pearly waters

Wash upon white silver sands

We watched the sun set in the evening

In a far and distant land†††

I cut it too close getting back from town last night and almost missed the shuttle to Ops for mid-shift. If a guy’s had one too many in Angeles, the flood lighting around the Ops building for night security definitely has a sobering effect.

28 Apr 63

The PI is quite different from any other environment I have ever seen. This country is a cross between the 20^th and 19^th century. Even in Manila, a large (pop. 2 million), Westernized, and extremely dirty city, one will see horse-drawn carts on the streets with old WWII jeeps used as taxis and private vehicles.

Manila Bay

About 85% if the people are extremely poor, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and unhealthy. Begging for money or cigarettes is very common here.

A strong national police force secures the peace. In the expensive commercial sections of Manila, there’s a cop on duty every hundred yards. There are guards on all the trains. Most cops carry submachine guns or shotguns.

It’s starting to get very hot now with the rainy season approaching soon.

17 May 63

Some of us took a bus to Baguio, a mountain resort about 120 miles north of Clark AFB. It’s about 5000 feet up in the clouds and nice relief from the heat of the plains.

♫  I’m gonna climb that mountain

Walk up there among the clouds††††

         

On the way up – before the steep ascents – we passed many poor farmers and their water buffalo. The trip was one of the most beautiful as well as the most dangerous bus rides I’ll probably ever take.

Perilous Baguio road, 1963

         

In the Philippines, Jeff availed himself of the Army’s recruiting slogan ‘Fun, Travel, and Adventure’ or FTA,* but the bloom was beginning to fade. The weather in the South Pacific – rising temps and drenching monsoons – was a damper, but he was also finding the repetitive classified work less challenging, while the allure of an endless party life had begun to pall.

As will be apparent in the next post, it was war just over the horizon that would dramatically change Jeff’s experience in the military.

____________________________________________________________ 

*With the later rise of GI anti-Vietnam War protest in which Jeff was a principal player, the Army’s slogan FTA became ‘Fuck the Army’.

Links to music videos:

†       

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIbK9LWKO5g

††      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjSaHcBcI4I&index=3&list=RDfgfYSLNddGo

†††     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrErJRCovSw&list=RDGrErJRCovSw&index=1

††††

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0JsYKHTJlg

Under an Azure Sky, Death Awaited

Peering over the side of a landing craft, young Marines about to go into battle in the South Pacific must have experienced a momentary disconnect. There ahead lay a beautiful tropical beach fringed with palm trees swaying gently in the breeze, all framed under a bright, cloudless sky. Yet all their training had taught them that in minutes when the front hatch went down, they’d be hitting that beach, and just beyond, hidden in the dense jungle, Japanese defenders awaited.

Two decades later in the ‘60s many American troops arriving in South Vietnam experienced the same initial sensation. My brother Jeff Sharlet, who was in-country 1963-64, extolled the natural beauty of the country in letters home – the white sand beaches sparkling on the South China Sea and the dense green jungle undulating across the Central Highlands were especially stunning from the air.

Along the South China Sea

America’s Vietnam War was then still young and casualties light, but subsequent waves of troops would soon learn there was a price to be paid for the eye’s pleasure in such a striking landscape. Beneath the azure sky under the jungle canopy death awaited tens of thousands of Americans as well as countless Vietnamese on both sides.

Hollywood set out to capture the perverse dichotomy of stark beauty and hidden terror in a second wave of Vietnam War films. Having successfully tested the public’s tolerance for revisiting the war with three releases during 1978†, the film industry was ready for more ambitious projects, none more so than Apocalypse Now (1979).

With Francis Ford Coppola of Godfather fame directing; Brando, Duvall, and Martin Sheen co-starring; and Michael Herr of Dispatches as voice-over, Apocalypse garnered numerous nominations and awards from Cannes to tinseltown. The story line is simple – Kurtz, a maverick Special Forces colonel (Brando) goes rogue and out of control.  Captain Willard (Sheen), a special ops assassin, is dispatched upriver to “terminate with extreme prejudice.”

Before the two men come face to face in the wilderness, Willard travels by Navy gunboat up the fictional Nung River deep into Cambodia, a picaresque journey in the company of a bizarre crew. The setting is one of great heat and humidity, tropical jungle to water’s edge, and exotic birdsong – all creating an atmosphere of anticipatory anxiety for the well-armed and trigger-happy young boat crew. Occasionally fired upon from the riverbank by the enemy or natives with spears and arrows, the gunners respond with fusillades of heavy machine gun fire, but never see their adversaries.

The riparian vistas are scenic enough for a tourist excursion, but death lurks along those riverbanks. Still, during quiet passage the journey resembles a lark – one crew member sports a peace symbol, another gets high on drugs. At those moments the war appears as just another ‘trip’ with surreal sights of a GI surfboarding as enemy mortar rounds fall around him and even a light show as the gunboat glides beneath a bridge brightly lit up like a Christmas tree in the dark night.

When the real war does interrupt the crew’s reveries, the action sometimes anticipates a contemporary video game – an enemy soldier pops up, gets off a few rounds, and the high strung bow gunner answers with a curtain of fire temporarily silencing the cries and calls of jungle creatures.

Adventures occur en route, most memorably when Willard’s crew encounters a swashbuckling air cavalry commander, Lt Colonel Kilgore (Duvall). 

The colonel takes a sailor along on a helicopter assault on a Viet Cong village – complete with the whoosh of outgoing rockets accompanied by psyops loudspeakers on the command chopper blasting Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries'. Then, on the ground and while watching a bombing run along the tree line, Kilgore utters the movie’s signature line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

 

Kilgore and ‘napalm in the morning’

Overshadowing Willard’s mission and adding measurably to the tension is the sense of the crew having left civilization behind as they close on Kurtz’s camp, heading into a Conradian ‘heart of darkness’. And the great Brando does not disappoint in his essentially cameo role, stealing the show as he did in Godfather. The viewer comes away from seeing Apocalypse as if, in GI argot, returning from Southeast Asia’s cauldron of death and destruction back to ‘the world’.

Fast forwarding a decade past some better known Vietnam War flicks, we come to 84 Charlie MoPic, a small gem of a film which couldn’t have depicted the war more differently than Apocalypse Now. It is a relatively short (95 mins), low-budget film shot by a director better known for television work compared to the very long (2.5+ hrs in the original version), big budget film directed by a seasoned Academy Award winner.

While Coppola assembled a large distinguished cast of stars as well as upcoming lesser knowns, 84 Charlie was made with just seven actors, of whom a prominent reviewer wrote. “commanding performances by cast of unknowns.”* Predictably, while Apocalypse made tens of millions at the box office and has become a classic on the war, 84 Charlie, despite winning the coveted Sundance Festival Grand Prize, earned just over $150,000 and regrettably has slipped into filmic oblivion.

I say ‘regrettably’ because what the director may have lacked at that point in big screen experience, he more than made up for as an ex-Vietnam GI who knew the war from the inside. The structure of the film is highly unusual – a two-man 82^nd Airborne film crew making a training film on a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, known by its acronym LRRP, while accompanying an actual patrol.

♫Six klicks is a mighty short walk

When you march behind the band

But six klicks can seem like a hundred miles

When you’re walking in Charlie’s land†† 

The enforced silences of patrol in hostile terrain as well as the sharp disjunctions between boredom and terror in the combat zone are masterfully handled. The overall effect is of a documentary film, one that could be used in an Advanced Infantry Training course. The result is probably one of the most ‘realistic’ films made about the Vietnam War.

In effect, it takes one down trail in the Central Highlands on a familiar wartime tactical maneuver – to search out and gather intelligence on enemy positions without engaging unless necessary, the idea being to get back with the information. With little or no music compared to the soaring soundtrack of Apocalypse Now, the viewer accompanies the patrol and its embedded film crew step by cautious step, the point man several well out front looking to his left, looking to his right.

♫Every step you take

Death is holding your hand

     Walking in Charlie’s land†† 

As OD, Cracker, Pretty Boy, Hammer, and Pvt Easy penetrate deeper and deeper into what they dub ‘Indian country’, what began as a routine patrol goes awry. For the most part, their elusive adversary is unseen – mostly a potential threat, rarely a presence – until the patrol spots a large enemy encampment and beats a hasty retreat in the face of a superior pursuing force. Men are hit, people die. In general, although 84 Charlie is also a ‘journey’ film, it takes place within a small cinematic universe, a slice of jungle and underbrush that the GIs traverse at greater and greater risk. 

♫ Some of our boys learned too late 

Just who owns this real estate  

This is Charlie's land†† 

84 Charlie represents the war as an unglamorous affair – methodical, wearying, and largely bereft of the vivid scenes of Apocalypse Now. Instead, the film has a plausible experiential dimension with which an average person could empathize, if not identify. Like Go Tell the Spartans (1978) starring Burt Lancaster, which came out in the same year with two other major Vietnam War films, 84 Charlie MoPic never found a significant audience.

America is a long, long way from closure on its catastrophic involvement in Vietnam, but one film offered a view of the finality of the war for at least a select group of those who fell: Gardens of Stone, Coppola’s elegy to Arlington National Cemetery, the nation’s most hallowed burial ground, where the precisely choreographed ceremony of death was performed with ever greater frequency during the Vietnam War.

Coppola's film goes neither upriver nor down trail, but is largely confined to the sacred acreage on a hillside across the river from Washington; it takes place in the thick of the Vietnam War. Many Americans probably know the ceremony, having seen either film or photos of the funeral of JFK in ’63 with the President’s body borne on a horse-drawn caisson followed by a riderless horse.

Not quite a decade earlier on a hot summer day, a writer, as he stood at the Arlington burial of his grandfather, who had served with the cavalry on the Montana and Wyoming frontier in the 1880s, looked out across the rows of markers and described the view from Arlington, “heat currents rise from the Potomac River to distort the classic lines of the Lincoln Memorial. The geometric panorama of Washington wavers like a quilt on a laundry line.”**

In Gardens, the non-coms, senior sergeants who’ve served and survived Vietnam (James Earl Jones, James Caan), are in a safe billet. A young private is assigned to the ceremonial platoon. In the Korean War, his father had been the non-coms’ comrade in arms. They take his son under their wing. The boy proves to be a model soldier in a unit distinguished by high standards. The war rages on as the Arlington Honor Guard performs the daily ritual of interring the dead from the battlefields of Ia Drang, Dak To, Khe Sanh, and other less well-known combat sites hallowed in Vietnam War memory. 

However, the young man is not satisfied to sit the war out in his spotless dress uniform. The legacy of a soldier-father, admiration for his Arlington mentors, and youth’s eternal attraction to adventure, to challenge, draws him to Officer Candidate School and then to volunteer for combat.††† The older men, knowing the war as a killing field, try to dissuade him, but to no avail.

The age-old quest to prove manhood proves too strong; the new lieutenant is determined to serve in battle. The young officer inevitably returns to Arlington for his final journey on a horse-drawn caisson and is laid to rest to the mournful sounds of Taps under an azure sky.

 

Burial procession, Arlington National Cemetery©

What have we learned from these three fine films – that misbegotten war becomes madness, that the deadly trail must be traversed to the end, and that the only certitude about war is the finality of death.

*L Maltin, Movie and Video Guide: 2000 Edition (1999), 399.

**H Masters, Last Stands: Notes from Memory (2004), 3.

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-year-of-vietnam-war-movie.html

†† http://www.ipernity.com/doc/rasch2000/10348021

†††  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/12/taps-for-north-country-dead.html.

©Leo Touchet, 1999. Photo is of the 1998 funeral procession for Lucien Conein, WWII hero and the legendary ‘Lawrence of Vietnam’. See http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/conein-lawrence-of-vietnam.html