Safe Return by Michael Uhl

Michael Uhl’s Safe Return: Inside the Amnesty Movement for Vietnam War Deserters (McFarland, 271 pp. $29.95, paper; $17.99, Kindle), a literate part memoir, part history, part polemic, is the no-holds-barred story of a dynamic two-person organization that advocated universal unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft dodgers, draft resisters, deserters, and those with bad paper discharges. 

Uhl served as a U.S. Army Lieutenant in Vietnam in 1968-69, where he led a combat intelligence team with the 11^th Infantry Brigade. He wrote about his war experiences and political radicalization in the 2007 book, Vietnam Awakening: My Journey from Combat to Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam. 

The new book covers Uhl and Tod Ensign’s efforts from 1971-75 to create the Safe Return Amnesty Committee and its offshoot, Families of Deserters for Amnesty. Uhl chronicles and analyzes the groups’ tactics, strategies, successes, and failures. The failures include an inability to work with some individuals and other organizations with analogous goals but different agendas.

In pre-social media times, Safe Return generated an enormous amount of paper – newsletters, correspondence, flyers, advertisements, and staged public surrenders of several deserters (“semi-retired veterans”) and draft evaders, to publicize its message. This led in part to books, newspaper and magazine articles, congressional hearings, support by politicians and celebrities, and even two movies.

Uhl had hoped to translate the antiwar sentiment into universal amnesty for all and was always consistent in that uncompromising position. However, the elimination of the draft, he posits, extricated “the principal stone from the heels of draft-age youth, no longer requiring their service in the armed forces…, [such that] the grit of popular resistance was removed from the machinery of war.” 

In 1974, President Ford created the Clemency Board. In January 1977, President Carter issued pardons for men who evaded the draft Vietnam War draft by leaving the country and those who did not register their local draft boards, but not for deserters. Carter later created a Special Discharge Upgrade Program, which could affect about half of all bad paper discharges. Who is to say that Uhl’s “cigar-box enterprise” did not have an immeasurable effect on all these events?

Michael Uhl

Marc Leepson, The VVA Veteran’s Arts Editor, asked me if I would be willing to review this book.  I had no problem agreeing to do so. All books should be reviewed, particularly by those who might disagree with some of the book’s major premises.

A further question is whether my fellow Vietnam War veterans should read the book because they showed up then and did their duty. Of course, they should.

This well-written book is worth a read because you will learn about a particular part of the antiwar movement. However, it has been more than 60 years since politicians committed America to this unnecessary war, and then different politicians abandoned our South Vietnamese allies to their dismal fate. 

These politicians are the ones against whom you may continue to hold a grudge, so that such horrendous mistakes might not happen again. On the other hand, after all this time, it may be healthier for you to be at peace with antiwar activists, draft dodgers (a couple of whom have been elected president), draft resisters, and “semi-retired veterans.”

–Harvey Weiner

My Country is the World edited by Luke Stewart

My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements Against the Vietnam War (Haymarket Books, 400 pp. $65, hardcover; $29.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle), edited by the historian Luke Stewart, is an extensive look at the antiwar movement of the late 1960s, concentrating on the leadership of one man, Staughton Lynd.

Lynd (1929-2022) actively opposed America’s involvement in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1970, especially in New York and Washington. His efforts peaked in the months after a December 1965 trip he made to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, founding member of Students for a Democratic Society, and Albert Aptheker, a historian and member of the Communist Party of the United States.

A professor at Yale University, Lynd believed that the U.S. went to war in Vietnam because of a foreign policy established by a group of privileged people who felt their manhood threatened by any challenge to American power.

Lynd’s wife Alice, who often worked beside him, seemed most comfortable being involved in draft counseling. Those who took part in that work were well aware of the painful irony that for every young man they helped avoid conscription, another one would be drafted and likely be sent to Vietnam.

Lynd started working for Civil Rights in the South before moving to opposing the war in Vietnam. From 1965-67, many considered him to be the leading American voice against the war. This volume collects his major writings, speeches, and interviews during this time.

In February 1965 the Lynds wrote to the IRS stating they would stop paying the percentage of their income taxes that went to the Defense Department. Lynd said he instead favored the U.S. paying massive reparations to the Vietnamese people.

Lynd considered the fighting in Vietnam to be the result of a civil war, and not a question of foreign aggression that should be stopped by military intervention. He moved from opposing the war to trying to end it and called for the creation of a War Crimes Tribunal.  

“This country is presently waging an undeclared war so evil and so dangerous that the imagination can hardly comprehend it,” Lynd declared at a protest meeting in Carnegie Hall. He went to Hanoi in an effort to encourage peace talks. While in Vietnam he said the war was “immoral, illegal, and antidemocratic.” The trip resulted in having his passport revoked, losing his job at Yale, being marked by the CIA as “the notorious national peace leader.”

Lynd later became a critic of the antiwar movement’s tactics and strategies. That resulted in a permanent split with his good friend and another leader in the movement, David Dellinger. Lynd then began to move away from national antiwar activity, becoming more involved in the labor movement.

The records gathered here are an important accounting of the early years of the American antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. Just as important to me is editor Luke Stewart’s lengthy, informative essays that make up the book’s chapter introductions.

This book will help to balance out many a Vietnam War library.

–Bill McCloud

Conscientious Objector by Wayne R. Ferren, Jr.

The words “conscientious objector” are at once are a label, a category, a frame of mind, a belief—and a designation that can well cause a wounded war veteran to stiffen his spine. Conscientious objector status, classified 1-O by the Selective Service System during the Vietnam War, was granted to tens of thousands of  American men during the war. Nearly 55 percent of them completed alternative civilian service.

Wayne R. Ferren, Jr., the author of the memoir, Conscientious Objector: A Journey of Peace, Justice, Culture, and Environment (Archway, 538 pp. $44.95, hardcover; $33.99, paper; $8.99, Kindle), is a self-described hippie. Ferren writes that he has “a firmly professed primal faith, neo-pagan, and new-age bases for my beliefs, as well leanings toward Buddhism and Transcendentalism,” although he was raised as a Methodist.

His book contains more than 425 pages of text, along with 60 pages of endnotes. It follows Ferren from his 1948 birth to the present, and seems at times to be a peripatetic ramble through his life. An early interest in geology propelled him to study the interconnectedness of the earth and its systems. He takes us through his school years, where he began to form his anti-conflict beliefs, and his future involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 60s and early 70s.

Throughout the book Ferren regales the reader with his thought processes and how he went about securing his much-sought-after CO designation from the Selective Service. He even includes copies of copy of the paperwork involved, intertwining those passages with the story of his life and times as a “hippie activist.” There are a few factual errors, but the writing and editing of this book are well done.

As a Vietnam War veteran, I found myself reacting to Ferren’s story with a much kinder eye than would have been possible for me to do 50 or so years ago as the ensuing years have both blunted and sharpened my perceptions of the antiwar movement and those who took part in it.

Which is why I recommend this book as maybe it’s time to see the other side of the coin.

–Tom Werzyn

Battle Green Vietnam by Elise Lemire

Elise Lemire’s Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press, 248 pp. $45, hardcover; $35.99, Kindle) is a detailed look at a relatively little-known antiwar protest held over Memorial Day weekend in 1971 by members of the New England Chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Lemire, a Literature Professor at Purchase College at the State University of New York, conducted more than a hundred interviews with veterans and civilians who took part in the event or were opposed to it, and did a vast amount of research into archival materials. She has done a great job pulling all of that material together and tells a very interesting, readable story.

The protesting veterans considered the importance of place and performance for this demonstration to both focus, and magnify, what they were trying to say. They carried out their peaceful protest on Revolutionary War battlefields in Massachusetts enacting guerilla-theater war atrocities with toy rifles terrorizing innocent “civilians.”

The antiwar veterans believed that traditional ways of affecting change would not bring about the end of the war fast enough and so they needed to make a bold statement to try to make that happen. They walked almost a hundred miles to make the public more aware of their reasons for calling for an immediate end to the war.

Elise Lemire

The marchers wore jungle fatigues and carried toy M-16 rifles. They used battlefields where the Revolutionary War began: Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. They chose to do Paul Revere’s famous ride, as mythologized by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in reverse, marching from Concord to Boston.

The idea was to suggest that the U.S. needed to reverse its course in the Vietnam War. They saw this as a patriotic act to warn the American people about what their government was up to in Southeast Asia. Along the way the veterans drew crowds, made speeches, engaged in acts of civil disobedience—and were charged with trespassing,

Lemire also provided a good, concise history of VVAW, and also explains how the U.S. became involved in the Vietnam War, the role the New England colonies played in the Revolutionary War, and the meaning of using obelisks to represent war dead.

Lemire brings the story of this three-day-long demonstration to brilliant Technicolor life. It’s a story that well deserves that treatment.

The book’s website is battlegreenvietnam.com

–Bill McCloud

Cambodia and Kent State by James A. Tyner and Mindy Farmer

“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant,” President Richard Nixon famously said in an April 30, 1970, address to the nation, “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

During that speech Nixon announced plans for a joint South Vietnamese-American operation into Cambodia to confront the North Vietnamese Army, which had long used the territory as a sanctuary to launch missions into South Vietnam. The address spurred an immediate reaction from antiwar activists across college campuses, culminating in confrontations that led to Ohio National Guard troops shooting to death four students at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, and Mississippi state police officers killing two students at Jackson State College on May 15.

In their book, Cambodia and Kent State: In the Aftermath of Nixon’s Expansion of the Vietnam War (Kent State University Press, 88 pp. $12.95, paper) Kent State professors James A. Tyner and Mindy Farmer provide a concise introduction to the domestic and international context of the shootings, as well as an overview of the historical memory in Kent and Cambodia. The book relies on secondary sources and the authors’ knowledge of the university where Farmer serves as the director of the May 4 Visitors Center.

The book’s thesis—connecting the incursion into Cambodia and the ensuing domestic protests to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, while also examining the collective memory in both countries—is laudatory. It is a helpful primer on both topics, and its strength is the closing chapter on the commemorations of the four victims in Kent and the millions in Cambodia.

But the book’s brevity does not account for curious unforced errors or reductive analysis. The world’s previous conflict was not World War II, as the author say, but the Korean War. What’s more, Kissinger and Nixon did not create realpolitik; it was a 100-year old political philosophy. And the South Vietnamese Army was a full participant in the operation, committing more than 60,000 troops and suffering some 600 killed in action.

“Nixon’s Expansion of the Vietnam War,” as the subtitle puts it, is important to the authors’ conception of the incident, but the context of the decision is more nuanced than the familiar Nixonian caricature. As the authors document, the North Vietnamese had long violated Cambodia’s neutrality, and when Prince Sihanouk was deposed in mid-March 1970 and replaced by the pro-Western Lon Nol, who welcomed the incursion, it provided the opportunity for something that the American military had long yearned.

Though Nixon’s Secretaries of Defense and State opposed the plan, there were no “fierce objections,” and the incursion had the support of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, the South Vietnamese Embassy, and the National Security Adviser. The pacing of the book can be frenetic, jumping between the administrations of Nixon, Ford, and Carter with alacrity.

The Nixon Administration anticipated domestic fallout from the Cambodian action, but they underestimated how severe that reaction would be. In Kent, the protests were marked by an escalating level of violence, including burning the campus ROTC building. A Gallup poll showed that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for the killings.

Not explored in this book, but important to the historical context, is the infamous New York City “Hard Hat Riot” that occurred four days after the shootings, and the subsequent May 20 rally that drew some 100,000 Nixon supporters. In 1972, Nixon won reelection by more than 18 million votes.

Four Dead in Ohio

The coda of the book is an appropriate elegy to the senseless deaths of four students on a beautiful Monday afternoon in Ohio, and to the millions who perished at the hands of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

In the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, this succinct treatment is a welcome addition to the historiography of the “end of the Sixties.”

–Daniel R. Hart

Waging Peace in Vietnam edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty

Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War (New Village Press, 256 pp., $35, paper) is a-large format, heavily illustrated book that looks at the role played by active-duty troops and Vietnam War veterans in the antiwar movement. The book—edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty—is based on a multimedia exhibit that has been shown in this country and in Vietnam.

The editors begin with a 1964-73 timeline of the Vietnam War antiwar movement.  Then comes an essay, “Dissent and Resistance Within the Military During the Vietnam War,” by Cortright, a former Army draftee who was active in the GI peace movement who today is professor of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. In the essay Cortright writes that by 1970 U. S. ground troops had ceased fighting as an effective fighting force. The reason, he says, was opposition to the war from within fomented by underground GI newspapers and other antiwar activity.

Other essays, oral histories, and reprinted newspapers, posters, flyers and photographs deal with Jane Fonda, John Kerry, and nearly all the usual suspects who played important roles opposing the Vietnam War. There also are brief sections on important places and people in Vietnam, such as Long Binh Jail, aka LBJ.  There is a good photo of LBJ, which communicates what the place must have been like for those locked behind its bars.

The biographical section at the end contains good information on the voices heard in the book and the men pictured on the front cover. I enjoyed reading those bios and learned a few things I had not previously known.

This is a valuable reference book and should be a part of every Vietnam War section in college and public libraries.

The book’s website is wagingpeaceinvietnam.com/book

–David Willson

The War I Survived Was Vietnam by Michael Uhl

Michael Uhl’s The War I Survived Was Vietnam: Collected Writings of a Veteran and Antiwar Activist (McFarland, 300 pp., $29.95, paper) is a wide-ranging compilation of Uhl’s reviews and opinion pieces that will certainly generate responses. True to its subtitle, this collection has an antiwar agenda. It also covers issues other than the Vietnam War, including the plight of veterans exposed to atomic weapons and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As David Cline, the national president of Veterans For Peace says in the book: “There have always been veterans for peace. War makes veterans warriors for peace.”

A Vietnam Veterans of America member I served with once told me that his feelings about the Vietnam War took several drastic shifts as his circumstances changed. He focused on survival while in country. When he came home, he examined how the war ended, as well as the nation’s treatment of veterans, along with the controversy over the design of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the POW/MIA issue. Uhl, who served as an intelligence officer in Vietnam in 1968-69, includes reviews and essays on these subjects and more.

They are sure to evoke strong reactions. As Uhl puts it: “If they provoke thought in whoever reads them, I will be profoundly satisfied.”

Uhl writes about many players involved in the Vietnam War, including some unheralded heroes, some famous and infamous people, and some who helped orchestrate the war’s strategy and tactics. Gen. Julian Ewell, the Ninth Infantry Division Commander in February 1968, is one of the key players Uhl credits with implementing the “body count culture,” which he says enabled American troops to hand out “candy to small children” one moment, then later to torch “a hootch or abuse a cringing papa-san.”

Uhl’s essays cover many topics, but I believe his essay on the Heinemann brothers succinctly represents the personal impact the Vietnam War has had on many people. “Three Heinemann brothers would eventually go into the military, two to Vietnam,” Uhl wrote in 2005. “Among them only Larry [the author of Paco’s Story] remains. One brother was a post-war suicide; the other left his family never to be heard from again.”

Michael Uhl

Mentioning Robert Strange McNamara will liven up any discussion of the war. In 1995 in The Nation Uhl and co-author Carol Brightman wrote: “McNamara’s critics span the ideological spectrum, though the burden of their indignation differs according to whether they believe his moral failure lies in the past for not having spoken out sooner, or in the present for having spoken at all.”

This anthology is a valuable reference tool for anyone looking for scholarly and incisive writing on America’s most divisive overseas war. The fervor of those opposed to the war may have never been matched. Uhl includes essays by some of those who were dedicated to bringing the war to an end, such as David Harris, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and environmentalist and one-time presidential candidate Barry Commoner.

This anonymous excerpt written by a veteran quoted by Uhl may be the best summation of the Vietnam War legacy:

I carried the war in my blood

In or out of service

I was at war

Even today

Every day war explodes in my brain

—Curt Nelson

Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham

Clara Bingham’s Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul (Random House, 656 pp., $30, hardcover; $14.99, Kindle) is neither a polemic nor an unquestioning ode. Bingham uses oral histories of people who served in the Vietnam War, along with those who were involved in the political and cultural movements of the era, concentrating on the year of 1968. The individual testimonies are not long discussions or recollections; they are shorter sections interwoven into the narrative to make a complex tapestry.

The book is divided into sections such as the draft, Woodstock, My Lai, and Kent State. The chapters contain histories and the words of many of the movers and shakers of the day, including Mark Rudd and Bernadette Dohrn of the Weather Underground, Daniel Ellsberg, Timothy Leary, the journalist Seymour Hersh (who broke the My Lai story), and Oliver Stone. Bingham also makes good use of the voices of Vietnam veterans.

The Vietnam War was the cyclone around which most division centered during the 1960s and 70s. Questioning the most divisive overseas war in U.S. history made people question almost everything else, from feminism to government programs and policies to music.

The book contains two of the most famous and galvanizing photos of the Vietnam War: South Vietnamese Gen, Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a VC prisoner in Saigon during Tet, and the naked Vietnamese girl running and screaming after being hit with napalm. Bingham also recounts the often-told tale of the My Lai massacre.

Bingham also deals with Vietnam War veterans’ post-war emotional adjustments, including these words from Vietnam Veterans of America’s founder Bobby Muller: “You come back, you’re in a normal place, you’re not in a war zone, you think about the shit you did, and you don’t believe that you fucking did this. And then you live with the memory.” He later says: “These are the good guys. We look at what goes on in the world and we think it’s a subspecies of human beings. It’s not. It’s us.”

Clara Bingham

Nineteen-sixty-eight was the height of the war and the height of the protests at home, along with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Many folks at home who had comfortable lives could not cope with the turmoil and our country suffered a huge divide. All these events are included in the book and all are told by the people involved at the time.

To read what those involved had to say—and still have to say—is to be transported back to that time. To those who lived through it, details return with clarity. For those who were not around in those days, their ideas and actions will arrive with clarity.

—Loana Hoylman

 

The American South and the Vietnam War by Joseph A. Fry

 

I graduated from a Pittsburgh high school in 1951 and from Penn State in 1955. While talking about the American Civil War, my teachers inculcated me with the belief that the eleven states of the Confederacy were still a world apart from the rest of the nation. As northern liberals, my teachers had looked down on Southerners, disparaging their pride and dedication to the Confederacy and its lost cause.

Since 1956, except for overseas military assignments and extended vacations, I have lived in the South. I have encountered situations that confirmed or denied my teachers’ lessons. But long ago, I learned to accept each event according to its own merits.

Historian Joseph A. Fry resuscitated a few prejudices for me in The American South and the Vietnam War: Belligerence, Protest, and Agony in Dixie (University Press of Kentucky, 467 pp., $35.57, hardcover; $33.79, Kindle). The book describes the struggle between pro- and antiwar individuals and organizations, emphasizing the influence that like-thinking people from the eleven former-Confederate states (plus Kentucky) exerted on the Vietnam War and America at large.

Fry approaches this with a brief history lesson about Southerners and United States foreign relations from 1789-1973. Fry’s twelve southern states share a distinct regional perspective, viewing needs of the world as contrary to their domestic desires and favoring “unrestrained military intervention aimed at decisive victories rather than diplomatic negotiations.”

He next addresses Southerners’ opposition to the Vietnam War. As they do throughout the book, racism and other sensitive issues play a large part in the discussion. Ill will, anger, threats, violence, shootings, and killings frequently accelerated the dissension between opposing sides. Fry withholds judgment and allows facts to tell the story.

He astutely shows how powerful conservative Democratic Sens. Richard Russell of Georgia, John Stennis of Mississippi, and Harry Byrd of Virginia influenced the nation to minimize overseas military assistance from 1953-64. They contended then that intervention in South Vietnam would be too costly and its people were an inferior race unwilling to protect themselves.

Meanwhile, obsessed with a need to contain communist expansion, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson gave aid to South Vietnam. A strong sense of honor and manhood made maintaining international credibility a necessity for Johnson. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident provided the impetus for him to gain a congressional resolution to prosecute war in Vietnam, Fry says.

Unfortunately, the resolution, which Congress overwhelmingly supported, did not solve the problem of how to run the war. Fry clearly shows that debates over the scale, pace, duration, and cost of the war never ended.

The book’s second half covers Southerners’ views on the war’s conduct, their contribution to the decision to withdraw from Vietnam (1968-70), and their views on ending the war (1971-73). Southern thinking seldom matched national attitudes about domestic policies, racial problems, military appropriations, foreign aid, and other contentious issues. Often, southern regionalism promoted self-serving behavior, which compounded disagreements. At times, racial assumptions and the quest to procure government military spending trumped party politics, Fry says.

LBJ and Sen. John Stennis

Two sections—”Southern Soldiers” and “Southern College Students”—interrupt the book’s chronology. These chapters might hold the greatest interest for Vietnam veterans. “Soldiers” exemplifies southern manliness by describing horrific combat scenes in which Southerners engaged. But Fry’s argument here is weak because men from all sections of the country experienced similar horrors in Vietnam.

Much of Fry’s support material comes from books written by Southerners. Nevertheless, this chapter might educate readers unfamiliar with the war about death and destruction, leadership, religion, race relations, and post-war attitudes among fighting men.

The chapter focuses on the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, including the fighting at Landing Zone Albany, all but glorifying them as engagements led by southern officers in which Southerners suffered the highest number of casualties. In fairness, Fry then cites the My Lai massacre, which was led by Southerners, as a failure in ethics. Later in the book, Fry reviews the political fallout from My Lai. He points out that it required “moral courage” by another Southerner to reveal the breadth of the massacre.

I disliked Fry’s long and emphatic references to characters from novels to “celebrate the South’s warrior tradition,”  even though one character reflects the thinking of former Marine and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, according to Fry. I believe Fry should have quoted Webb directly or quoted other courageous infantrymen—there are plenty of them—to make his point. As I see it, fiction is fiction and does not adequately serve a history book’s purpose.

“Students” does an excellent job reporting on the diverse antiwar activities by organized groups. Until the end of the war, University of Texas students, for example, led protests that unbalanced the South’s pro-war stance but never toppled it. Within Dixie, “antiwar students lost all the battles and the war for majority southern opinion regarding Vietnam,” Fry says.  He quotes fellow historian George C. Herring on the student issue: “The antiwar movement lost every battle but eventually won the war—the war for America’s mind and especially for its soul.”

Fifty-seven pages of endnotes support Fry’s study. Rather than listing sources alphabetically, he includes a bibliographic essay that relates sources to each other. Fry’s research included delving into oral histories, transcripts, interviews, memoirs, and letters by leaders, along with those from ordinary citizens, students, and military personnel.

Andy Fry taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for nearly forty years. His courses included U.S. foreign relations, the history of the American South after 1850, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

At times I feel that Americans have overburdened themselves with their arguments about the Vietnam War. After fifty years of arguing, we should accept that we learned nothing from the war. Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, tricked us into fighting in Southeast Asia, which we failed to recall when another Southerner, George W. Bush (aided by Dick Cheney’s misdirection), misled us into Southwest Asia.

In this election year, Fry’s book might best serve as a voters’ guide: Do not cast your ballot for anyone who professes a correlation between manhood and war.

—Henry Zeybel

 

Last Train Runnin by Ronnie D. Foster

Ronnie Foster sums up his opinion of the Vietnam War with words he attributes to his protagonist in his novel, Last Train Runnin (R.D. Foster, 415 pp.; $21.25, paper):

Oh the rich kids went to college

And the poor boys went to war.

They were soaking up the knowledge

Of beer and sex and cars.

We were shootin’ folks and dying,

Didn’t even know what for.

The rich kids went to college,

And the poor boys went to war.

Foster experienced his share of combat in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. In this novel of the 1960s, Foster tells his war story through the eyes of Everett Blalock, a Navy Corpsman with a serious case of fear. The young man was a renowned folk singer in Austin, Texas. After the wealthy parents of his sweetheart arranged for his induction into the Army through the draft, he enlisted in the Navy to avoid becoming an infantryman. That plan did not exactly work.

The story begins with Everett in bloody combat southwest of Da Nang. The sole survivor from an ambushed eight-man squad, he receives a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

Thereafter, he watches many men die while he survives helicopter assaults, search and destroy missions, costly firefights, and rocket and mortar attacks. Homesick over his shattered relationship with his girlfriend, he writes songs—which are in the novel—about the good parts of life that he and the men around him are missing. Between battles, he teams up with a harmonica-playing sergeant and they create and perform music.

Alternating chapters present the life of David Duncan, an antiwar University of Texas rich kid in his sixth year of a college deferment. As a newspapers trainee, he receives an assignment to learn what became of Everett Blalock, who dropped out of sight after rock and roll took center stage from folk music. An out-of-control boozer and druggie, David staggers through a self-defeating series of life-changing events regarding protest, love, wealth, and war.

Ronnie Foster in 1987

His assignment takes him to Vietnam. The results of his quest and meeting with Everett have repercussions that extend decades beyond the end of the Vietnam War.

Along with writing books, Ronnie Foster has been a singer, songwriter, and musician since leaving the Corps. Foster’s One Day as a Lion is a tribute to twenty-one men from rural Collin County, Texas, who died in the Vietnam War.

Foster offers hundreds of pictures from Vietnam and a highly specialized brand of music and humor on his web at ronniefoster.com

—Henry Zeybel