He's Just Happy to be Here. In the End, So Was I.

One of the first things Gary said to me when I dropped into his pub in what constitutes downtown Grafton, NE, was: "I'm just happy to be here."

Ostensibly, the topic of the interview was supposed to be focused on the development and later demise of Grafton, population 126 as of 2010 (no larger now) for a book I'm doing on all the Graftons I can find. My stay to that point had been challenging to dredge up meaningful stories of what appeared to be a small, sad place, like so many other rural towns gradually fading away. There were quirky accounts of things like three drunken guys stealing a railroad depot and removing an entire town's significance at the behest of another's.

I didn't know what I was going to get from Gary, a long-time veteran of Grafton. I chuckled when he told me that his bar was the first place along U.S. Highway 6 between Lincoln and Denver where liquor was sold by the individual drink, not just the whole bottle--and that didn't happen until well after World War II.

At times, though, interviews can drift. Sometimes it's better that way.

When I entered, the St. Louis Cardinals were in the first inning with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the fifth and deciding game of the National League Division Series. It was on screens within easy eyesight of either of us. An amazing first inning it was, too, as the Cards got ten runs.

I'm a baseball guy from age seven, so such a game would be of interest. I missed the whole inning, though, because Gary, the Grafton veteran, began talking about his other time as a veteran, in Vietnam. He was involved in a battle which he nearly did not survive. It was a harbinger, too, of worse battles to come. I didn't arrive expecting such a story. But he just kept providing details.

It was January 5, 1968. The war was accelerating to a point beyond which no one could have predicted in 1965, when the U.S. began sending combat troops to South Vietnam to help that government rid itself of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army regulars. But as we know, it became a quagmire of diminishing expectations. Thousands of our soldiers had died by the time Gary got there in October, 1967. He was a draftee out of the University of Nebraska, a business major. The draft lottery had not yet been devised. I came along later, a 1969 graduate of Grafton (WI) High. My draft number, to which I had been assigned in the summer of 1970, was 310. The lower the number, the more likely you'd be drafted. By that time, though, the withdrawal had begun. Being called to fight a dubious war that far down the list was quite impossible.

Gary's unit was "in country", as the Americans called it, looking for the North Vietnamese on that January 1968 afternoon. He was part of a fairly large unit operating in what was then the prescribed way: getting dropped off by helicopters, patrolling a certain defined area in which the NVA had been reported or were suspected, and then engaging the enemy, if it was still there, and attempting to clear it out of the area. Either way, they would be picked up again by helicopter at the end of the operation, successful or not. If they were victorious, they would never stay, and the enemy would gradually seize the area again.

Body counts were the point: the U.S. Army could usually report more killed in action than we had, by far, thus reinforcing the concept that the war was going well. It became an endless, nearly pointless meat grinder of death designed to support a government that was endlessly dependent and increasingly corrupt, attempting to rule a people who appeared to be lukewarm, at best, about maintaining their sovereignty within a divided nation.

The press knew the strategy had been yielding diminishing results; it named the Pentagon's daily briefing "The Five O'Clock Follies" for its obvious efforts to hide the increasing futility of emptying a glass that would nearly automatically refill itself. As opposed to World War II and subsequent wars after Vietnam, reporters were allowed to go with outfits "into the bush", giving very dangerous but very accurate accounts of the daily fighting, including the maddening efforts to tell friend from enemy Vietcong. Dedicated to unbiased journalism, not allowed to interject the actual truth of the matter, reporters were unable to communicate exactly how precarious the situation was. In the meantime, much like 45 and his sycophants do so blatantly, the government was happy to utilize a free resource to spread its propaganda.

Gary was a Specialist 4th Grade, a "spec-4" in the terminology, the rough equivalent of a corporal. This particular operation was close to the Cambodian border. The Americans had received information which indicated that there was a significant build-up of NVA there. It drove our guys crazy: The enemy could strike and run back across the border, and not only would Americans have to wait to be fired on before shooting back, but they couldn't engage in hot pursuit for fear of unintentionally involving a supposedly "neutral" government, even though it was providing safe havens for ambushes, knowingly or not.

Back home, the protests against the war were accelerating, too. As President Lyndon Johnson would put it, he found himself caught in the way it could get in a Texas thunderstorm, walking along a lonesome highway: "I can't run, I can't hide, and I can't make it stop."

Thirty Americans, "grunts" as they called themselves, were about to find themselves in exactly that situation. The operation ended about three in the afternoon of the 5th, but all the soldiers could not be picked up on the first sweep, or the second, or the third; the helicopters assigned to do so had all been shot down. Those left behind, including Gary, were about to enter hell in a very small place. It would be called The Hourglass. I had taught the subject of the Vietnam War for about a quarter-century and thought I had read up on the topic pretty well. But I had never heard of this battle.

As often happened, there were far more North Vietnamese regulars in the area than the Americans could dredge up. About 250 of them descended upon the 30 Americans for a firefight. We sat in Gary's bar that afternoon as he recalled it, chicken wings cooking away to be soon sold and eaten as they were on most Wednesday nights to mostly younger adults from the surrounding area of this now shell of a town. A post-season baseball game became quite irrelevant.

Among the first Americans to die, Gary said, was the company medic while working on one of the wounded. That left the others to tend with basic first aid techniques, giving them morphine to ease pain and resist death by shock. The rest formed a perimeter and fought for their lives. It would be four hours before another helicopter managed to make it to the ground intact.

Nearly a third of the Americans would not make it back alive that afternoon. Every single soldier there received at least the Bronze Star for what the army calls "heroic or meritorious achievement or service while engaged in military operations." You might want to file this under "meritorious." Few who have been in battle buy into heroics. It's left to people like us, the secondary storytellers, to add words like "gallantry" or "fortitude" to a bunch of grunts down on their luck. But meritorious? You bet. After all, they weren't overrun by a force completely surrounding them, eight times their size after engaging them for four hours.

Lt. Hector Colon, the commanding officer of Company B, 4th Battalion of the 9th Infantry, 25th Division U.S. Army , moved swiftly from soldier to soldier, providing ammunition, inspiration and hope. "He was standing up, too," said Gary, marveling at the moment, amazed that he wasn't shot even once, adding "but that's war." I thought about George Washington in his first battle with the French and Indians in western Virginia colony in 1754. Upon meeting them in dense woods, he had four bullets rip through his clothing, but none actually touched his skin. The father of our country benefited from war's often complete randomness. So did we.

Gary, too, found the CO's good fortune remarkable, but did not back away from its significance or genuine heroism. He could have put his head down and crawled around like everybody else, but he didn't. "I have no idea," Gary said, "why he didn't win the Medal of Honor." He did win the Distinguished Service Medal, one step from a soldier's highest honor. I suggested that, with more research, sometimes greater honors are justified and awarded.

But it is also war when someone isn't quite as lucky but survives half a century later. Gary was wounded three times, including once in the back and once when a rocket whizzed between his arm and his side. When I mentioned that he must have lost a lot of blood, he said, "You're operating on pure adrenalin there." When a chopper finally managed to land to get the beleaguered thirty, he ran the length of a city block under fire to get to the door with a round in his back. "I laid down on the floor and said to myself, 'Please, please, let's take off,'" he said. But he had to wait, because Americans never leave their dead on the battlefield.

The toll was devastating: nine dead, twelve wounded, seventy percent casualties. But all managed to get aboard. "The chopper was so overloaded that we barely got up above the treetops," Gary said.

I listened as ravenously as I consumed half a dozen wings with great sauce and threw down a couple of beers. He treated, but I didn't feel bought off to report something in an exaggerated or excessively positive way. That isn't how true soldiers talk, anyhow, and it certainly wasn't the way in which he discussed it. "I won't talk about it [on my own]," he said, "But I'll answer questions." And there he was, answering questions from a history teacher-now-journalist who had taught the subject as best he could but at a level nowhere near the real people doing the real thing. They've seen buddies die in front of them. They've suffered during and after battles from wounds, some of which are visible. They are later introduced to the more opaque but very real hell of post-traumatic stress. Someone takes them away from sudden death in the field, but the brain doesn't withdraw quite as decisively. Above all, they don't brag like politicians and other apologists love to do. They just tell their stories if they are capable.

My late uncle Jim fought hand-to-hand with a German in another war far more glorified and victorious but no less horrifying. He didn't discuss the event for 33 years, and then all he said in explanation was, "I'm here, aren't I?" I didn't ask Gary about it, but he had to have taken lives to preserve his. As always in war, it's one or the other. Perhaps he had had that moment of truth as in All Quiet on the Western Front, when Paul the storyteller realizes that the Frenchman he had just stabbed and was slowly dying had a real family and a real home, and he had just arranged it so he would never see them again. Perhaps it had hit Gary in a way not quite so dramatically, but with just as much devastation. It would take me another visit, I figured, to bring that up. To approach on that level would take more trust.

I wanted to know more in detail about the particulars of the battle. Were they fired upon as they loaded the chopper? Were any other grunts hit at that last moment? Was there any other air support called in? But we headed toward six p.m. with the expected wave of younger adults about to arrive. We had been talking for about 90 minutes. I decided to stop.

At first, when returning home to a country that not only didn't appreciate the grunts but sometimes mocked and discredited them in an odd and horrible attitude of immaturity connected to its politics and just as disappointing in its hypocrisy, Gary didn't care to discuss the battle for years. He did some internet research, though, and found not only reference to it, but a reunion that he had been missing. He re-bonded with his buddies, and connected with the CO one last time. Colon died of Alzheimer's disease in 2017.

Those reunions helped Gary cope with the effects of that battle and others. As he recovered from his wounds, he was shipped to Japan where he served out the rest of his two-year hitch. He returned to Grafton, NE, where he first worked at what was then known as the Grafton State Bank, right next door to the pub that would eventually bear his name.

I gave him my card, took a picture of him, and left. It had to be a long journey from the deadly jungles of Vietnam to home, where if five cars passed in an hour, it would make big news. The battle in which he nearly lost his life might have been an important one, making bigger news, if the Defense Department and the commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, had considered that it might be a forerunner to a more sweeping and devastating invasion that would follow in just another three and a half weeks. Westmoreland had information to that effect, but he had sat on it to keep satisfying, it would seem, Johnson's need for news that the war was going well, and maybe to secure his own position.

The Tet Offensive would change the political calculus in the U.S. forever, including the withdrawal of Johnson from the 1968 presidential race, the start of negotiations to withdraw from Vietnam, and the surreptitious undermining of those negotiations by Richard Nixon, whose subversion of the process to gain credit for himself as the one who ended the war would keep the U.S. there for another five years and cost more than twenty thousand additional American dead. CBS had learned about Westmoreland's coverup in the early 80s, made a broadcast called A Vietnam Deception, and stood off Westmoreland's lawsuit against it.

All of which made the tragedy of this battle even greater. Had Westmoreland made a successful adjustment to the indication that the North Vietnamese were preparing a strike against the major South Vietnam cities, it could have been defended far better at the outset, instead of waiting weeks for a counterattack. As it was, Hue, a provincial capital which had major psychological significance to the South Vietnamese, "had to be destroyed in order to save it," as an officer later remarked; and the American embassy in Saigon, the capital, had been pockmarked with shells and bullet holes.

The irony is that The Hourglass, fought less than a month beforehand, might have shown the futility of the intention of good appearances, instead of maintaining them long enough to invite a major ambush which at the outstart appeared to make the U.S. effort in Vietnam look weaker and more futile than it actually had been. After the initial NVA thrust, Allied counterattacks killed a thousand NVA per week, but the initial image of our powerful forces being overrun, seen on the evening news, could not be shaken. On Jan. 5, 1968, the U.S. strategy in the Vietnam War looked great but was at the edge of its greatest challenge; after Jan. 31, the start of the Tet Offensive, it looked ineffectual but it actually proved that Americans could fight back very successfully. Either way, it denied the fighting's results.

After things had calmed down a little, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, one of the most trusted people in the press, decided to take a look on his own. He came back with a report featuring, for then, an unusual personal commentary: The war couldn't be won. It was an endless stalemate. Shaken, Lyndon Johnson began peace talks and withdrew from the 1968 presidential race.

With perspective, Gary's view of the war has changed. I mentioned that I was a war protester and that our efforts were meant to help them. "Well, I didn't agree with it at the time," he said, echoing many grunts who felt they had been betrayed back home. (I've just recently seen, for the first time, "The War at Home," the documentary made mostly about the protests at the University of Wisconsin, shown in Madison where it debuted in 1979. It's easy to forget, too, the violence with which some protestors were treated.)

Now, though, he sees things differently. Vietnam was "the worst idea we ever had," he said. We came at it from two entirely different directions, but we could at least agree on that. Left perhaps for eternity was a consideration of the value of The Hourglass and those it had sent to eternity as well. That someone had not only survived the onslaught but could still speak of it might be of its own value. Even someone running a pub in an eyeblink of a Nebraska town was still bearing witness to a war's madness, regardless of result or any lessons learned from it at all, half a century later.

He was just happy to be there on a quiet night, telling the story to an amazed journalist who'd come for an entirely different kind of conversation. In the end, so was I.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark