Real names, real places

Robert Hopkins

   A couple of weeks ago I was listening to "Fresh Air" on National Public Radio. Substitute host Dave Davies was interviewing Mark Bowden, the author of "Black Hawk Down," about his new book, "Hue 1968."
   Hue is the city at the center of the action in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." I was going to post a YouTube video of a scene from it, but I can't even watch it without grimacing, so I won't subject my handful of readers to it.
   During the interview, Bowden read a passage. It's a gripping passage describing a scene I've heard variations of in my interviews with World War II veterans.
   It also contains an error, the kind an author with all the resources at his disposal of a Mark Bowden shouldn't make. If I can confirm the error with a few clicks of a mouse, you'd think Bowden would have been able to, especially if it's in a passage he's going to read in interviews and cite as one of the key moments in the book.
   Maybe the error shouldn't bother me -- after all, Steven Ambrose was famous for some of his miscues and Cornelius Ryan gave the world the impression that the D-Day assault on Pointe du Hoc was for naught. The reason this error bothers me is that Bowden is talking about people with real names from real places with real families who may or may not have known how their loved ones died, or what was or wasn't in the casket that came home.
   This is the passage. At first I didn't sense an error. But being a newspaperman at heart, I'm always looking for a story angle, and for a moment I thought I found one.

"

Dave Davies: Well, Mark Bowden, welcome back to FRESH AIR. I want to begin with a reading of your book. This is a moment where we meet an American soldier who is with a unit that is pinned down by North Vietnamese soldiers. He's in a foxhole. Do you want to just set this up and read us this portion?

MARK BOWDEN: Yeah. His name is Carl DiLeo, and he was an infantryman with an Army Cavalry unit that had been sent out to push toward the Citadel from the north. And they got trapped in the middle of a field where they were stuck for a day or two essentially with the North Vietnamese taking target practice at them. And it was a - they lost half of their men. So it was a harrowing and terrifying experience for him and for all of the men who were there.

(Reading) The worst thing was the mortars, which rained straight down on them. They were being launched periodically from only a few hundred yards away. DiLeo could hear the pock and then the whoosh of its climbing. If he looked up, he could actually see the thing as it slowed to its apogee. From that point on, it was perfectly silent. There it would hang, a black spot in the gray sky, for what seemed like a very long beat, the way a punted football was captured in slow motion by NFL Films, before it plummeted straight down at them.

(Reading) The explosion was like a body blow even when it wasn't close. All of these were close. You opened your mouth, and sometimes you screamed out of fear, and it kept your eardrums from bursting. It was hell, a death lottery where all you could do was wait your turn. If you stayed down in the hole, you were OK unless the mortar had your number and landed right on top of you.

(Reading) This is what happened to DiLeo's good friend Walt Loos and the other man in his foxhole, Russell Kephart. They were one hole over. They got plumed. They were erased from the Earth. DiLeo watched the round all the way down, and it exploded right in their hole, vaporizing them. One second, they were there, living and breathing and thinking and maybe swearing or even praying just like him.

(Reading) And in the next second, two hale young men, both of them sergeants in the United States Army, pride of their hometowns - Perryville, Mo., and Willimantic, Conn., respectively - had been turned into a plume of fine pink mist, tiny bits of blood, bone, tissue, flesh and brain that rose and drifted and settled over everyone and everything nearby. It, or they, drifted down on DiLeo, who reached up to wipe the bloody ooze from his eyes and saw that his arms and the rest of him were coated, too. Then there would come another pock and another whoosh.

DAVIES: And that is Mark Bowden reading from his new book about a pivotal battle in the Vietnam War, "Hue 1968." You know, that's such a vivid description of the brutality and terror of war.

    This is where my ears perked up. I work part time for a small newspaper in Connecticut. The newspaper's parent company, Central CT Communications, recently bought the Willimantic Chronicle. I thought hey, Russell Kephart might still have family living in Willimantic and the fact that his death is described so powerfully in a bestseller might make for a good story.
   Thanks to things like the Traveling Wall and various other sites, there is a good deal of information on the Internet about the 58,000 young Americans who died in the Vietnam War.
   According to HonorStates.org, Thomas Walter Loos died "through hostile  action ... small arms fire." So far so good, except for the difference between being killed by small arms fire and taking a direct hit from a mortar in your foxhole. Loos also was awarded the Silver Star.
   Now imagine my shock when I looked up Russell Kephart and found at the Virtual Vietnam Wall (vvmf.org) that his place of birth was not Willimantic, Connecticut, but Lewistown, Pennsylvania.
   There was a third sergeant killed from the same unit that day, Robert E. Hopkins. He was from Willimantic.
   In the fog of war it might be easy for a combat veteran to mix up the hometowns, if that is what happened. But if a researcher or Bowden himself were responsible for the mixup, it would be unconscionable.
   I sent a correction to "Fresh Air," but since it was the author's mistake and not the show's, they apparently didn't see fit to make a correction, although they did point out that they misidentified a war correspondent in a clip they aired at the beginning of the show.
     In the last few days I've heard from the granddaughter of a person I interviewed some 20 years ago and was able to send her some anecdotal material about her grandfather, as well as the audio of the interview with her grandmother. And I heard from a young woman with the same last name as Max Lutcavish who is trying to determine if she was related. I sent her a couple of stories about Max, including one in which he told his buddy Dess Tibbitts he was going to go on a "careful drunk," mixing sterno with grapefruit juice, and a half hour later he couldn't stand up. Also, Lutcavish was responsible for one of the high water marks in the history of the 712th, knocking out a Mark V Panzer with the .37 millimeter gun of his light tank. No wonder his nickname was Lucky.

   I'm not perfect. Years ago I posted on my web site a very convincing interview with a veteran who described in great detail  how he survived a massacre, having his chin shot off when he turned his head as the German shot him in the head. Exhaustive research proved that such a massacre did not take place.  That description got picked up in a book about Normandy, and will probably be rewritten in other books in future years. I believe the veteran had a form of Munchhausen syndrome, and was brilliant at making bizarre scenarios seem plausible. When I interviewed him the medic who treated him was there and I asked what he looked like. The medic said he looked like Chester Gump, a popular cartoon figure who had no chin. The veteran said to the medic, "You know, only a little while after you left the dressing you put on fell off." To which the medic replied, "I didn't charge you much, did I?"  

esident of the United States takes pride in presenting the Silver Star Medal (Posthumously) to Thomas W. Loos, Sergeant, United States Army, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against a hostile force in the Republic of Vietnam. Sergeant Loos distinguished himself by intrepid actions on 4 February 1968 while serving with Company D, 2d Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. His unquestionable valor in close combat is in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflects great credit upon himself, the 1st Cavalry Division, and the United States Army.

The Wall (no, not THAT wall, this post is apolitical)

Doug Coleman (Vietnam) and his father, Cleo Coleman (World War II)

   Just a side note, the title of this post has nothing to do with the presidential race. Rather it is about the wall that sometimes exists between a father and a son, that did exist between my father and me. I learned many years after his death that when I ran away from home at the age of six (I only made it as far as the corner grocery store, where I unraveled my hobo stick and spent my life savings on a Pepsi before my grandmother came looking for me and brought me home), he discussed getting some kind of counseling for me, and even though I never got the counseling, I realized only then that he was more sensitive than I knew him to be growing up.
   When I got my deferment from the Vietnam War, he said he opposed the war on strategic grounds -- that was circa 1970 -- because he didn't think it was winnable, but then he had second thoughts and hinted that he thought the Army might have made more of a man out of me.
   I never knew him very well, and that's something I regret. We never bonded the way fathers and sons often do. His father was an excellent chess player and so was he, but I could never get him to play chess with me and soon lost interest in the game. We never went to a baseball game. In retrospect, I remember him once saying that he wished he could have gone out for a beer with his father-in-law, my maternal grandfather. I never went out for a beer with my father. But before I start crying in my nonexistent beer, I used to say the only thing I inherited from my father was his sense of humor -- he had a great sense of humor and was a wonderful storyteller when I was a child -- and for that I'm eternally grateful.
   Now, getting back to this post before I get any more maudlin, it is about fathers and sons. A few years back I read online that a book was coming out that was an oral history of fathers who served in World War II and their sons who were in Vietnam. I thought damn, that's a good idea, and in fact it's an idea I had at a reunion of my father's 712th Tank Battalion when I learned that Cleo Coleman, a B Company veteran from Phelps, Kentucky, had brought several family members to the reunion including his son Doug, who was a veteran of the Vietnam War. I thought I'll bet they never sat down and compared wars, and it turned out I was right, so I got them to sit down together with the tape recorder running. Dale Albee, another World War II veteran, joined us. Dale was mostly quiet, listening, during the interview, but when the subject of movies came up, Dale, the World War II veteran, remarked that one of the most realistic scenes he ever saw in a movie was in "Platoon," Oliver Stone's movie about Vietnam, when a Vietcong soldier is shot and a puff of dirt comes out of the back of his jacket. Doug said he saw that too, and that's what it was really like.
   I didn't buy the book about fathers and sons, "Brave Men, Gentle Heroes," when it came out. But a couple of months ago I saw a notice that the author, Michael Takiff, was going to speak at the New Britain Museum of American Art. As I work part time in New Britain and occasionally stay there, I thought I'd like to go hear him talk, even if it meant I'd probably have to buy his book.
   Not that I didn't want to buy his book. As an author, I love selling books and collecting the occasional royalty, but as a reader I hate paying full price for a book, especially when I'm not likely to read it and I could buy it used for a few cents plus $3.99 shipping, and in many cases used on amazon means practically new.
   The talk was interesting. Virtually everything he said about the World War II veterans I had heard a dozen times over straight from the source, albeit from different veterans, and the audience was very moved. Afterward I bought his book, paperback, for $15 and he signed it, but I still haven't read it. But I asked him a question at the end of his talk.
   The whole 45 minutes that he spoke, there was no humor. The few Vietnam veterans I've spoken with at length often mentioned humor, and humor was essential to both Vietnam and World War II veterans. Look at all the humorous blogs like "Duffel Blog" from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and all the funny videos of terrorists accidentally blowing themselves up. And the introduction of the talk noted that the author, Takiff, was a comedian early in his career. So I asked him if he had heard any humorous stories from the veterans of either war. He said he couldn't think of any offhand.
   Of the 20 reviews his book got on amazon.com, most are of the five-star variety, but the one two-star review he got pointed out how all the stories in the book are grim. Reading that, I didn't regret not yet having read the book.
   On the other hand, there isn't much, if any, humor in my interview with Cleo and Doug Coleman. The interview is 29 pages single spaced. I just did searches on the words "laugh," "funny" and "humor" and the only thing that came up was a comment in which Doug was talking about his life after the war:

Doug Coleman: I=ll tell you, the life I live right now, believe it or not, and he can tell you that, I mean I laugh and joke about it, and my wife laughs and jokes about it, my kids even laugh and joke about it, and you might think it=s dumb and stupid, and he can tell you, I live that kind of life, I live like Forrest Gump, don=t I? I mow grass for how many hours, I live out in the country, I don=t hardly never see nobody, and that=s the way I live.

Cleo Coleman: Just like me, I want to be by myself a lot of times. I just don=t know, if the war did anything to me or what.

   And here's the part about "Platoon":

Doug Coleman: I seen things in movies that I relate to...

Aaron Elson: Because movies, they go for the grotesque and the really bizarre, do the things that they show in movies about Vietnam, do they approximate what you saw yourself?

Doug Coleman: Yeah, a lot of it is, it=s just like the guy that made Platoon, that=s the way I lived. The guy that made the movie, he was there. He lived that life. Now that=s exactly almost identical to the way, I know this was a movie, but that=s the way I lived. And that=s how it was.

Dale Albee: May I say something? The same thing I was gonna say of APlatoon.@ Do you remember when that Vietnamese ran, and the guy shot him, did you see that puff of dirt come out of his back?

Aaron Elson: I don=t remember, but yes...

Dale Albee: Did you remember that? He shot him, and you saw that puff of dirt.

Doug Coleman: Yeah.

Dale Albee: That=s exactly what you get when you hit a guy. When you see a guy running and you shoot him that=s exactly what you get is that little puff. And that was one of the things that I remember about APlatoon.@ Because that=s actually the way it happened.

The full interview with Cleo and Doug Coleman is at tankbooks.com. It is also included in my collection of a dozen fascinating edited transcripts, "A Mile in Their Shoes: Conversations With Veterans of World War II."

Father Joe's "Most Memorable Christmas"

Cardinal Spellman in Vietnam. Father Joe is on the left.

My Most Memorable Christmas

Excerpted from "Foibles of Father Joe," by the Rev. Connell J. Maguire (1918-2012)

(c) 2012, Chi Chi Press

With the task of choosing my most memorable Christmas came awareness of the strength of memories of Christmases past.  Small wonder of course.  At Halloween we may change our surface appearance, but at Christmas we are transformed in feeling and behavior.  We find ourselves suddenly more loving, more giving and forgiving, kind, warm.  Even hard facts from the business world attest to this transformation.  Stores are jammed with people on a new mission – shopping not for themselves, but for those they love.  The second part of the testimony is even more impressive.  This shopping for others, for love, is far greater than any other shopping spree, for any other motive, year round.

What could cause this outpouring of our best except that deep within our spirits we sense that something of great joy has transpired.  There is a realization that Christmas brings a new relationship with the source of our life.  The Divine has become tangible in the form of a child.  A great outpouring of God’s love occurred which touches and moves us at the core of our being.  “The heart has its reasons the mind knows not of.”  For us at Christmas, heart and mind both embrace a great reality, ever present, everlasting.  And so the noisy, crowded aisles of stores and the quiet, reverent aisles of churches speak in response the same message of overflowing hearts.

That our memories are bright, then, is easy to understand, but choosing one is no less a task.  I remember so vividly a Christmas Midnight Mass on an aircraft carrier at Cannes, France, in 1953.  The decorated hangar deck was jammed with U.S. Navy men singing their hearts out in those first magic moments of Christmas, their voices traveling over the quiet waters of the anchorage to the Riviera hills.  I remember clearly the special quality of Christmas in Japan with all the ships in Sasebo port for the holidays.  We had to use a downtown theater to accommodate the crowd for Midnight Mass.  An all-Japanese choir sang carols in that rarefied, angelic tone of a people who seek their God first in beauty.  But though these are unforgettable, I must choose as the most memorable of all – Christmas 1965, in the land of beauty and terror, Vietnam.

So busy were the news media in reporting the terror that few found space for a description of its scene.  Vietnam is ineffably beautiful.  Mountains of every shade of green rise inland, peeping over each other’s shoulder until lost in a blue haze.  Rivers emerge from the hills, and wind across flat green plains patched with rice paddies.  Daytona-like beaches rim the land.  Our tents were on the instep of a mountain so at night, rather than looking up, you looked directly at the stars.  One Sunday morning as we admired this scenery from our shared jeep, Rabbi Reiner (on the way to his “weekday” service) remarked wistfully, “Everything is order except mankind.”

Christmas had to share in this paradoxical mixture of beauty and terror, joy and sadness, love and hate.  Rifles stuck up from the shoulders of Marines kneeling in prayer or standing to sing “Silent Night.”  This was to be their last Christmas in Vietnam, but Marine infantry casualties were very heavy.  For many a white Christmas was only a dream, never to be.  How would they return to America?  The question was always there.  Would it be on a seat in an airplane or in a box?  The loneliness of perhaps never returning home and the thought of the impact of “the box” on those at home, especially for a father, is a more persistent feeling than fear.

At Christmas 1965, into this scene, came an old man who had traveled the fronts of three wars, Francis Cardinal Spellman.  To some he may be a controversial figure in church history, but no one could deny his great affection for young Americans which motivated him to travel thousands of miles in all kinds of aircraft to assure the troops that they were appreciated and unforgotten.  His heart went out to all those young men, too young to vote on the policies determining their sad fate.  His message assuring them of the dignity of their lives was amplified by his frail condition.  To think he had come so far even though his legs were too weak to climb unaided the platform to the altar.

Father Joe and Cardinal Spellman in Vietnam

 We placed the altar on the same platform Bob Hope would use a few days later.  It could be said we tested it for him.  Early in the Mass, the jerrybuilt sound system went dead.  Chaplain Morton, a Lutheran, and Chaplain Garrett, a Methodist, came to our aid.  They raced to the compound at the end of the mud street of Hua Paat village, known as Dog Patch to the Marines, and came back with a portable lectern and mike in time for the Cardinal’s sermon.  The Cardinal was equal to the task of singing the Mass and in a strong voice expressed his greetings to a grateful assembly.  Shortly after he had given his blessing, one of his last, he was whisked off in a helicopter to Chu Lai Hospital to visit the wounded.

The monsoon rains which had held off during the Mass started again.  Protestant and Catholic chaplains had a cup of coffee together in the shelter of a tent and exchanged our own season’s wishes.  We were all a bit exhausted.  Conducting eve and midnight services and an early morning schedule in isolated areas had used up a lot of energy.  It was afternoon now on that Christmas of intense joy and sadness.  We would all remember that its light had shone brightly against the dark background.

The Vietnam War is far behind us, thank God.  A prayer that our land will lead the way to peace and justice is on our lips with every Christmas.

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