Al in Vietnam

 To find out more about Al, a most interesting character, indeed, I Googled him last week. The following story by Peter Arnett came up. After the battle, Al - Lt. Col. Alton Park - was flown to Saigon. "When I got there, I looked down from the stretcher and saw a shiny, black pair of shoes and a pair of white shoes. Westmoreland was in the black shoes, and I asked him about the white shoes. It was a priest who wanted to know if I wanted my last rites."

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 8, 1975

  Phuoc Binh Battle 10 Years Ago Recalled by Yanks as Bloody

 

   By Peter Arnett, Associated Press Special Correspondent

   A gray dawn 10 years ago.

   A dead American sergeant, Horace E. Young of Fayetteville, N.C., lays spread-eagled against a bloodied pantry door, a knife still clutched in his upraised hand.

   Inside the mess hall were four other dead Americans, among them Sgt. William Benning of Pittsburgh area’s Churchill Borough, who was treating wounded in the makeshift hospital when a Viet Cong suicide squad burst in throwing grenades.

   A dozen wounded lay near the bodies, including the commander of the 37-man US advisory group, Lt. Col. Alton Park, of Columbus, Ga., who had been shot in the back after his pockets were picked, but who survived.

   This was the American camp in the South Vietnamese provincial capital of Phuoc Binh in May 1965. It was the first Viet Cong attack against the town, then known as Song Be.

   The battle was fought at a time when many Americans thought such remote settlements as Phuoc Binh were worth fighting and dying for.

   Ten years later, with Americans gone from Viet Nam, North Vietnamese forces finally captured the provincial capital yesterday.

   That first battle in 1965, and others like it, helped convince the US government that American soldiers should be committed to the Vietnam war.

   Eventually, thousands of American troops roamed the scrubby jungle of the region. The shots fired there now must echo in many American homes, because US troops spilled their blood the length and breadth of the region.

   Those who survived that first battle did so with the help of the US Air Force.

   “It’s not often that you get the chance to pull in an air strike on both the church and hospital in the same morning,” said Capt. John Lynch, of Norfolk, Va., the Air Force ground observer at Phuoc Binh.

   He told this reporter, who walked into the capital late in the morning of the battle, Viet Cong troops had occupied both the church and hospital, and he had no choice but to direct the US Air Force B 57s to drop their bombs there.

   By that time it was too late to help Sgts. Young and Benning and the others who had died earlier.

   The Viet Cong midnight attackers had penetrated the barbed-wire barricaded American compound of modern bungalows after the South Vietnamese militia force on the left flank fled.

   “That left the VC through,” said Maj. Michell Sakey, of Boston, Mass., who said the initial attack was beaten off, but only after a large number of Americans were wounded. They were taken to the mess hall for treatment.

   When Sgt. Johnnie K. Gulbreath, of Callison, SC., later heard grenades exploding in the mess hall, he shouted to other Americans manning guns on the camp perimeter, “They’re going for the wounded.” Gulbreath rushed into the mess hall only to be shot and killed.

   Heavy bombing through the day helped drive Viet Cong units from the center of town.

   In the evening, this reporter noticed a US Army doctor with a rifle helping to man the defense perimeter and asked “what about the Geneva convention?”

   “This is preventive medicine,” the doctor answered. “I shoot them before they shoot me.”

   The Viet Cong did not resume their attack. Next day, the survivors hung a large painting of the Purple Heart Medal, awarded to wounded soldiers, over the shrapnel-scarred refrigerator.

   It remained there for several years as successive teams of Americans occupied the advisory headquarters and helped fight off annual enemy attacks.

   No reporters were present at the last days of the most recent battle for Phuoc Binh.

   More important, no Americans were at Phuoc Binh this time. And there were not American planes to blast the jungles.

To view this story as it appeared in the newspaper, go to http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&dat=19750108&id=UMdaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fW0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7192,910482

Notes from the Home - December 13, 2012

  Russ and Karen were over Sunday for the Covenant Woods’ Christmas party. It was a nice affair, with lots of food and drink, carolers, Santa and even a horse-drawn carriage. The carolers looked as if they’d just wondered in from 19th Century London. And for a while, they labored under the misdirection of maestro William.

   I was out front waiting for Russ and Karen when the carolers gathered across the drive from the main door and began singing the music of the season. The area was crowed with people wanting to listen and others waiting for a ride in the carriage. And in front of them all was the somewhat more than slightly inebriated William, gleefully singing and waving his hands as though conducting. He looked like a kid at a parade.

   A few minutes later, Russ and Karen walked up the driveway. We went inside, spotted a table in a corner of the crowded dining room and settled ourselves. We were joined by Margaret, Grey, their son, Craig, and nephew, Bill. Grey has Alzheimer’s and sat quietly. The others were jovial and bantered good naturedly all evening.

   “Did I ever tell you about Matilda?” Bill asked his aunt. “I really, really don’t like the name Matilda. I was dating this girl. Her name was Sue, and we were getting along pretty good. But one day, she complained about her driver’s license picture. ‘Let me see it,’ I said. She did. It turned out Sue was her middle name. Her first name was Matilda. I couldn’t date a woman named Matilda. I never saw her again.”

   I’m not sure Bill was being completely honest. He didn’t seem the type to unceremoniously dump someone. But his tale wasn’t the only one of sniper warfare between the sexes. Joe, who is a retired New York City transit dispatcher, dropped by to say “hello” and tell a story of his own. It seems there was a bus driver who, as he was navigating the mean streets, spotted an attractive young lady in a car. They kept passing each other in traffic, and the bus driver was determined to meet the woman. But how? When she stopped for a traffic light, he saw his chance. He pulled up behind her and nudged her car with his bus.

   He did it gently enough that there was no damage, but the two got out of their vehicles and took a look. Although there was no police report, the bus driver did make a report to the transit authority. And the story of the driver using his bus to meet a woman quickly spread to all corners of the New York transit system.

   A few months passed, and the driver was assigned to work out of the garage where Joe did the dispatching. When the guy’s records arrived at the garage, Joe’s curiosity got the best of him, and he took a look to see how the driver had handled the incident with the woman.

   “According to the report, the bus was stopped, and woman ran into him,” Joe said. “I told him, that wasn’t the way I heard the story. He said, ‘She wouldn’t go out with me. If things had worked out, I’d have taken the rap.’”

  

   Tuesday morning, Annie called and asked if I had a few minutes. I did. She wanted some help with Table Talk, the twice weekly sheet with the schedule of activities and newsy tidbits. I went to the office and was told the problem was a bit of unsightly white space. Could I fill it with a short poem?

   “Sure,” I said, and sat there with a now-what-the-heck-do-I-do look on my face for ten minutes.

   “Come on, Tom,” Annie said. “Look at all the decorations around here. You can write something Christmassy. Look at all the lights.”

   Voila! It isn’t memorable, and it’s devoid of literary merit. But –

   Christmas lights everywhere you look,

   On every tree and in every nook,

   Brightening spirits day and night.

   Isn’t it a delightful sight.

  

filled the space. My task completed, I went back to the apartment. That afternoon, the phone rang again. Table Talk needed to be delivered door-to-door, and Elaine, the resident who normally delivers it, was under the weather. Would I? Sure.

   I was just a Table-Talk-delivering machine, going up and down the hallways. Then, while I was on the third floor of the B Building, the fire alarm went off. My first thought: how fortunate I am to have a first-floor apartment. I can’t do steps, and the elevator kicks out the second the fire alarm comes on. So I waited. A woman came out of her apartment.

   “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong,” she said. “lf there were a problem, someone would be up here telling us what to do. And if my daughter heard me say that, she’d say, ‘That’s just like you, Mom, always telling us to look on the bright side.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, goddammit, why don’t you?’”

   After a while, Katherine came along. The fire alarm didn’t bother her. She was still too angry about the restaurant we went to on Friday. So, it was a relief when William emerged from the stairway.

   “Nobody’s come for us,” Katherine told William.

   “Don’t worry,” he said, “if there’s an emergency, I’ll make sure you get out.”

   I didn’t find that particularly reassuring. Katherine, however, said that when she fell in her apartment a few weeks ago, it was William who came by and heard her calling for help. It was a needed reminder that William’s heart is in the right place, even if his brain is often where his liver and onions ought to be.

   Then Johnny came up the stairs to tell us the problem – smoke caused by leaking Freon – had been corrected and the guy was in the process of resetting the elevators. Right on cue, the elevator dinged, and I was headed for the ground floor. The challenge now was to deliver Table Talk to the apartments in C Building quickly enough to get to dinner on time. But Annie and Irene met me en route, and we divvied up the copies. Annie delivered to the first floor, Irene to the second and I did the third. As I was getting on the elevator again, the guy from Convalesent Care, the company through which many of the residents here have gotten their power chairs, came along. He watched me as I expertly positioned my wheelchair in the car.

   “Good job,” he said.

   “This elevator isn’t as deep as the one on the B side,” I said, fishing for an enhanced compliment.

   “You’re right,” he said. “This is the one we use when we want to test people.”

   My performance had been less than stellar when I was in the C Building elevator Saturday, but he didn’t need to know that.

  

   Beth called yesterday. She has been having a lot of pregnancy related discomfort – some major headaches – but they seem to be abating.

   “Ken has helped me so much,” she said. “He’s always there when I need him. He’s not like the other guys I dated. I dated a bunch of guys that thought they were so tough. Most of them were assholes. Ken’s not like that at all.”

   She made her father proud. And she made him hope she sees a little of her dad in Hayden’s dad.

  

   Judy, the cleaning lady, brought back memories of Ash/Craft this morning.

   “Good thing you’ve got your window open,” she said. “I spilled a little Clorox in the bathroom. Can you smell it?”

   “Yep.”

   “Anybody going by in the hall will know your room got cleaned today.”

   Years ago, in the Ash/Craft employee lounge – also known as The Dark Room with the Loud People – a colleague frequently bragged about putting a little bit of Clorox, or Pine-Sol or other strong-smelling cleaner in the sink and allowing the odor to waft through the house. And when her husband came home, he was sure she’d been cleaning house all day long.

   It can’t be age; it must be the Clorox clouding my memory, but I can’t remember who that sly trickster was.

  

Notes from the Home - December 8, 2012

   Crap chats with Randy, a Covenant Woods maintenance man, are nothing unusual. When I make my morning rounds, he’s usually tossing bags of garbage into the dumpster. The bags he tosses often contain soiled Depends. Some mornings the odor is more pungent than others.

   “Come take a whiff. It’s particularly aromatic today,” Randy said.

   I politely declined. Randy kept on talking crap.

   “Wednesday, we got a call,” he said. “Somebody shit in the elevator. He not only shit in the elevator, he left a trail all the way down the hall to his room. I can’t tell you who it was, but the trail stopped at his door. He says it was probably a dog. That wasn’t no dog crap. James and me are going to have to become shitologists.”

   When a man does a crap job, cooler weather is a blessing. And Randy was duly grateful for the morning chill that kept the bugs torpid.

   “I ever tell you about dog dick gnats? They’re terrible down here in the summer. They get in your mouth and fly up your nose. We went to a picnic in south Georgia a few years ago; they get worse the farther south you go. This guy, he was a Yankee, couldn’t hardly eat, the gnats were so bad. ‘What the hell are these damn things?’ I told him. ‘Why do they call them that?’ ‘See that dog over there? See what he’s licking? That’s where they come from.’ The guy didn’t eat any more.”

   I was enjoying Randy’s jovial crudity, but he ran out of garbage and went off to engage in sweeter smelling tasks. My day went downhill from there. A couple of squandered hours later, I got on the Covenant Woods bus to go out to lunch. The topics of conversation on the bus were more proper. The tone, more mean-spirited.

   “Yesterday, a woman I know wished me ‘happy holidays,’” Violet said. “I told her to wish me a ‘merry Christmas.’ ‘Happy holidays’ is not acceptable.”

   “That’s right,” another woman said. “It might be OK before Thanksgiving, when they want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving and a merry Christmas.”

   “No,” Violet insisted, “not even then. Before Thanksgiving you should wish people ‘happy Thanksgiving;’ that’s all.”

   And so, in the spirit of Christian narrow mindedness, we headed to lunch at The Rose Bakery in Pine Mountain. It was a pleasant place, more of a quaint store than a restaurant.  Everyone agreed the food was good, the service was good and the price was reasonable. Later, Katherine changed her vote. At dinner, she went from table to table in the dining room, telling anyone who would listen – and badgering everyone who wouldn’t – that the food was barely edible, the service deplorable and the cost exorbitant.  Stimulating dinner conversation, indeed.

   A half hour later, in the friendly confines of my apartment, I was backing the buggy out of the bathroom. Wham! The front door slammed against the back of the wheelchair.

   “Hey!” William shouted from the hallway.

   “What?”

   “What are you doing?”

   “Trying to get out of the bathroom.”

   “Let me in.”

   Then Richie joined the conversation from down the hall: “What are you doing, dumbass?”

   “Looking for you,” William said.

   “That ain’t my room.”

   “Oh,” William said. “Hey, Tom, I’m sorry,” and he staggered on.

   My mama said there’d be days like this.

   Thankfully, there haven’t been many.

Notes from the Home - December 4, 2012

   Like ol’ man river, life at Covenant Woods just keeps rolling along. Mark Twain made the river endlessly intriguing. The days here, however, are often just endlessly endless. But not every day.

   Thursday had its moments. It started when I went up front to ask Shirley if December’s rent invoices were ready. She picked up a stack of envelopes, shuffled them and handed one to me. On the way to my room, I glanced at the envelope. It was addressed to Joe. Back at the desk, I waited while Shirley apologized, reshuffled the envelopes and found the one addressed to me.

   In my apartment, I put the envelope on the table and then spent several minutes looking for my checkbook. There was a time when I had hoped scientists would discover a way to give telepathic powers and the ability to move to inanimate objects. That way, my checkbook and pen would sense when I was about to use them and go to the spot where I was most likely to look for them. That never happened. The checkbook, pen and all the other doodads I needed from time to time did nothing more than stay where I’d put them.

   The path to the suddenly necessary item was always long and winding, giving me time to loosen up my tongue and hurl imprecations. In days past, this seemed like a waste of time. Life would be better, I was sure, if the thing I needed got to where I was going to look for it before I got there. These days, a little imprecation hurling helps pass the time. Then I pass more time by reorganizing things so I won’t have the same problem next time. Fat chance.

   But I digress. After spouting a mere two or three imprecations, I found the checkbook. “Right where you left it,” I could hear Mom say. I unfolded the statement and found a strange figure in the “Pay this amount” box. I had been charged for one guest meal. I didn’t remember treating a guest to a meal.

   “Aha,” I thought, “another excuse to get out of the room.” On my way back to see Shirley, Johnny, one of the maintenance men, came up behind me.

   “Hey, Tom, what were you cooking yesterday?”

   “A can of chili.”

   “Cooked it too long, didn’t you,” he said.

   “I don’t think so.”

   “A couple people called,” Johnny said. “They thought something might be on fire. The smell was coming from your apartment.”

   Then I remembered the grilled cheese sandwich, the one I cooked well beyond well done. I ate it quickly and went out for a ride around the parking lot. But the aroma lingered, and a concerned neighbor or two alerted Johnny, who determined that the odor was coming from my apartment. He took a look inside and decided the stink was merely an expression of my culinary incompetence.

   “You ate it?” he asked.

   “Yeah.”

   “Yummy,” he said, smiling doubtfully.

   Then I asked Shirley about my bill. She said she’d look into it. Friday morning, as a group of us waited for the bus that would take us to the National Infantry Museum, Shirley told me to ignore the charge for the guest meal.

  

   Eleanor, Catherine, Richard and I had lunch together in the Fife and Drum, the Museum’s restaurant. We had a lively conversation about this and that. And along the way, Eleanor said something that included a sentence containing the words “men” and “balls.” I did my best to stifle a laugh. My best wasn’t good enough.

   “If you’re laughing,” Eleanor said, “that means you have a dirty mind.”

   “If you know why I’m laughing you must have a dirty mind.”

   “You’re right,” she said, laughing out loud. “I do.”

   After lunch, I watched a movie in the Museum’s IMAX theater about the Canadian Pacific’s struggle to find a route through the mountains. The film sparked another interesting conversation. This one with Richie, a few hours later during the Friday happy hour at Covenant Woods. Richie is easily confused sometimes. I don’t think the problem is dementia; he’s a year or two younger than I am. But he does like to give the impression that he knows more than he knows.

   “What was the movie about?” Richie asked.

   “The building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.”

   “Oh, Cornelius Vanderbilt. He’s the one who built all the railroads.”

   “Vanderbilt was the man behind the New York Central. This was about the Canadian Pacific.”

   “Oh, that must be out in California somewhere,” Richie said.

  

   One day years ago, I was in the car with Uncle Jim meandering through the streets of Pittsburgh. The radio was tuned to WQED, a classical music station, and the conversation turned to tastes in music. Jim was all for the old masters. “A lot of the modern stuff is crap.” That was a mighty strong statement coming from Jim. When it came to expletives, Jim seldom ventured beyond “crap.”

   Last week, a group of us went to a concert given jointly by the Columbus State University Contemporary Ensemble and the CSU Jazz Combos. The first work on the program was the world premiere of Among Distant Fields by Bruce Reiprich, who was on hand to direct the performance. Mr. Reiprich asked the audience to have an open mind: his composition was not built around melody, harmonies and rhythm. He said the inspirations for the work were his dog and Chiyo’s haiku:

      I wonder in what fields today

      She chases dragonflies in play.

      My little girl –

      Who ran away.

  

   Four lines and twenty-four syllables don’t make a haiku. But what do I know? My fear of having to sit through something weird was eased by the image of a dog frolicking in a field. But that dog didn’t frolic, and Uncle Jim’s words came back to me.

   Eventually, the Contemporary Ensemble gave way to the Jazz Combos, and it turned out to be an evening well spent.

  

   Al stopped by the other night. He talked about growing up here in Columbus, his experiences in the Army, his experiences at Covenant Woods and whatever else popped into his mind.

   “We’ve got to get together sometime,” he said. “I’ve got so many stories. And you can write them up.”

   I would love to do that. But Al’s stories always end up being an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic tour of his eighty-eight years and journeys the world over. His niece wants to give Al a tape recorder, but he says he won’t use it. That’s too bad. I don’t think my note-taking skills are up to the task. Of course, as soon as I open up a notebook and get poised to capture some of Al’s ramblings, he says “Why are you doing that? Nobody’s interested in this shit. And nobody would believe it.” Then he goes on to tell another story.

   “I’ll sit out on the porch and feed the birds,” Al told me the other night. “Nobody believes it, but some of the birds come and eat out of my hand.

   “You think I’m crazy as hell, don’t you, Tom. Did I ever tell you about the skink? Do you know what a skink is? It’s a lizard. Years ago there was a skink that let me feed him. And one day he brought his wife with him. And once they ate, he grabbed her and twisted her around, and they fornicated right there in front of me.”