Lieutenant Dangerous Read online

  “From arguably the best political cartoonist this nation has ever produced…wow: words! And what words. Having spent a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, I can certify: this book applies directly to today’s wars. Only, in the transition to an all-volunteer army, what may have disappeared from the ranks of our officers is this type of brutally honest skepticism.”

  — Sarah Chayes, author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban and On Corruption in America: And What Is At Stake

  “Every West Point cadet should be required to read Lieutenant Dangerous, political cartoonist Jeff Danziger’s powerful memoir about his four years in the army, when honor, integrity, and purpose were as illusory as American victory in Vietnam.”

  — David Cay Johnston, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, an IRE Medal, and the George Polk Award

  “Not since Tobias Wolfs’ In Pharoah’s Army has there been such an honest and self-aware war memoir to come out of the Vietnam conflict. Jeff Danziger’s Lieutenant Dangerous belongs on the shelf next to Wolf, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn.”

  — Tom Bodett, author and radio anomaly

  “ ‘I am not a weeper, but I sat on the bus to Ft. Dix and wept.’ So begins Jeff Danziger’s youthful journey to the center of America’s Vietnam maelstrom. A 24 year-old Vermonter with a pregnant wife at home, Danziger experienced the full-on nightmare of the Army’s Vietnam catastrophe. He saw everything combat – death, hypocrisy, moral degradation, and the fervid futility of the mightiest nation on earth bested on the battlefield by men and women fighting in pajamas and loincloths. He saw everything, that is, except the nominal purpose of the conflict. There is no evidence of a shared cause with our South Vietnamese ‘allies,’ no evidence that American soldiers knew or cared about the Communist Threat, and no evidence of the proverbial quest for glory that theoretically animates military endeavors. War, he writes, is ‘in an awful way, interesting, if you can avoid getting killed and don’t mind loud noises.’ Danziger’s purpose is to inform, but he and we wonder what the story of the 55,000 squandered American lives has taught us. Then the jungle; now the desert. Then B-52s; now Predator drones. The more America’s ill-informed interventions change, the more they stay the same.”

  — Alex Beam, author of Broken Glass and Gracefully Insane

  Copyright © 2021 by Jeff Danziger

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L. L. C., 31 Hanover Street, Suite 1

  Lebanon, New Hampshire 03766

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN 9781586422738

  Ebook ISBN 9781586422745

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  For Jan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  People go to fight wars because they don’t understand the seriousness of what they’re doing.

  — JOSEPH HELLER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Vietnamese are among the bravest and most wonderful people on earth. I hope this writing shows the deepest respect and appreciation for their culture and their history. Despite much study and effort, throughout my war experience, I never gained much mastery of their musical language. And they never could pronounce my last name.

  Dummerston, Vermont

  August 2020

  1

  It has now been more than forty-five years since my tour in Vietnam in the army, a period of time in which I thought I would think about the war less and less. The opposite is true. These days I wonder how such a thing could have happened, not just to me but to the United States as a whole. I am reminded from time to time when I am talking with younger people, and I have to force myself to not talk about the war. I have to make an almost physical effort to mention the war only in passing and go on to other subjects. They, after all, have the present to think about.

  But if they do bring it up first, that’s a different story. And when they do, their interest is often motivated by their own personal security. For instance, if there’s one thing young people interested in my Vietnam War experience want to know about first, it’s the draft. What if the draft were reinstated? How did it work?

  The rules of the draft back then were sneaky and open to local interpretation, not exercised the same or to the same effect everywhere in the country. In these days of gender equality, it seemed strange that only males were required to register at the age of eighteen. Even stranger that they could avoid being called up if they were in college. That immediately struck my listeners as terribly unfair, which it was. Why should young people who were fortunate enough to be in college not have to share the burden of the war? Why should other young people lacking the intellect or the money for college be sent off to risk their lives fighting? Didn’t this hint that the thinking at high government levels was that if a young man were thick enough to get drafted, he deserved less from life? He deserved to be an infantry grunt. If you were dumb and poor you were expendable. Even today, I find that hard to explain.

  There were other unfair exceptions. If a man was married by a certain date, or had a child by a certain date, the draft boards had to excuse that man from service. That was the law. If you were drafted and you didn’t show up, they came and arrested you. You could go to jail, and then be in the army anyway. It was not only unfair, it was weird. And it got weirder.

  For example, there was the somewhat secret stipulation that your draft board could not be changed from the location where you registered at eighteen. The draft boards were made up of local people in local communities. How they were chosen remains a mystery. But they had a normal inclination to protect the young people they knew locally, and choose for service people they didn’t know. They had to supply so many draftees a month from the lists of those who had registered in their communities. A friend in my basic training company, John Stephenson, was from Montana and had attended Dartmouth College. He was in Hanover, New Hampshire, when he turned eighteen. After graduation he moved back home to Montana. The Hanover draft board, probably reflecting the townie sensibility, drafted him, and called him back from Helena. He was angry, unhappy with Hanover and with the beggar-thy-neighbor attitude of the New Hampshire people he had come to dislike anyway. Of course, the draft board in Helena probably did the same thing, drafting men not from local families but from away. To John it seemed to be a perversion of the idea of everyone sharing a national burden equally. And it was.

  What if you really didn’t want to go? I had to think. What if? But no one wanted to go. I found it hard to explain that a huge percentage of American soldiers didn’t want to be American soldiers.

  My draft board was in Peekskill, New York, and they did the same thing to me as they had done to John Stephenson. I had moved to Ve
rmont after college. The Peekskill people were just as eager to protect their local sons, and since I was no longer local, they put my name on the list. For a year I had a job in Vermont at a GE plant that made machine guns for fighter aircraft, and the job had a deferment. My exact job was to produce industrial films to illustrate the destructive power of miniguns. Miniguns were Gatling-style guns used to strafe the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army troops. They were very effective. Fired down from small planes and helicopters, they supposedly protected US Army troops, or so I felt at the time. It did not occur to me that miniguns were very high-technology weaponry used against an enemy who had just rifles and no aircraft. I did not want it to occur to me.

  The deferment ended. The arrival of a draft notice had a strange effect. My father had served in World War II during some hellish island fighting in the South Pacific. He counseled…well…nothing. If I wanted to go to Canada or Sweden, he offered financial help. In the mid-1960s the arguments for and against the war were at best inconclusive and at worst highly suspect. Young people who were against serving may have been legitimately against violence and war and in favor of peace for all humanity. Or they may have been against the idea of them individually and personally leaving their lives of American ease and privilege for hot, dangerous, and demeaning military duty. I could have gone to Canada because I had the family backing, but not everyone could do that.

  I had been raised in middle-class comfort, and the trade-off was obedience. You didn’t necessarily do what you were told, but you did what was expected. The most powerful influence on a young person was the conviction that there were well-thought-out rules and everyone followed them. Wise heads had concluded that America had to fight communism. The only way to stop communism was to fight against it, whereas in fact the cure for communism was plain. The real cure for communism was communism.

  Second after that conviction was the widely accepted idea that the United States was guided to do the right thing given enough time and opportunity. God had something to do with this — we believed in right and wrong. Our version of ourselves was a combination of the World War II victory, the Marshall Plan, and Louis Armstrong.

  I showed up as instructed for induction because, in addition to the foregoing reasons, I had always taken the path of least resistance. I was not a protestor, at least not personally. The easiest thing to do was to let myself be drafted and then look for a way to keep out of the actual fighting. The army was, after all, a very big place. Many drafted people served in Germany, which didn’t sound too bad. Some never left the US. In addition, the war was the subject of fierce national political debate. The war might end. The number of US killed each week was down to about two hundred, depending on whom you believed. The acceptability of this number was explained by the general in charge, William Westmoreland, as being less than the number of Americans killed on the highways each week.

  In retrospect I am amazed that I was so obedient. I knew that I didn’t want to go, although I had no strong objection to other people going. I knew nothing about the army. I knew nothing about the history of Indochina. And I had no idea where or what Vietnam was. A survey of Americans revealed that a scant 6 percent of Americans could find Vietnam on the map, and most of those did so by accident.

  I had to leave my job at General Electric, which paid fairly well, and adjust to ninety-five dollars a month as a private. My wife and I had expenses — mortgage payments, car payments, heat and light bills, and so on. I gave my new truck back to the bank. I did so despite a law left over from a previous war. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act of 1940 said that debts were uncollectable under certain circumstances when a man was drafted. I could have told the bank they would get no further payments until I was discharged. But that meant a depreciating car on which the same debt would be owed. So the bank sent someone, and he drove the truck away. Whatever money I had already paid was forfeited. This gave me a sharper sense of the changes to come.

  The worst part of the entire change was that I had to leave my wife, a gentle and understanding person, alone in our old house, on top of a hill in New England, a lovely place but something of a misery in winter. She worked as a teacher at a salary of less than four thousand a year. She determined that she would keep the job, mostly so we could make the mortgage and not lose the house. It helped me keep my sanity to know that I would be able to go back there and pick up life where it had been.

  2

  I left Vermont for Fort Dix on a wintry evening from the Hotel Barre, a handsome old brick building that had a fireplace we sat in front of until the bus showed up. Then it was time to go. I am not a weeper, but I sat on the bus to Boston and wept. I realized that I was going to a military something little more than a dreaded mystery, to fight in a questionable war in a country that I knew nothing about and cared nothing about, to be trained to shoot and kill people against whom I had absolutely no complaint.

  A major revelation awaited me. More than a revelation — it was a surprise, even a shock. This was in 1968. About halfway through my eight weeks of basic training I realized that the army itself was a mess. The training was phenomenally stupid, left over from World War II and having nothing to do with conditions in Southeast Asia. It was this side of mad. It was in the winter in southern New Jersey. We marched in the snow and did exercises in the blistering wind. At one point we approached a mock Vietnamese village full of snow. We trained with old rifles, M14s, which included taking them apart and putting them back together blindfolded. M14s were not used in Vietnam. The training cadre did their approximation of stentorian drill sergeants they had seen in movies, but no one took them seriously. We ran in boots and wore backpacks and learned close-order drill. None of this had any use in the war. And we did KP, kitchen police.

  I was on KP duty with a friend one day, and at the end of the morning’s work we were sent back to the barracks to rest during the afternoon shift. The Fort Dix barracks were old, frame buildings, poorly insulated and heated by ancient coal furnaces and water boilers. The water heater burned all day heating a large tank of water for evening showers, the only real pleasure of the training day. My friend, whom I will call Demetri, was a large, very muscular African American man who had hurt someone badly in a fight in his hometown and had been given the choice by a judge of jail or the army. He disliked the army as much as I did, but I guess he thought it was better than jail. Or at least he thought so at the time.

  The barracks had separate rooms for cadre, and in our building there lived two cooks, skinny white kids who that day had stolen several boxes of frozen strawberries from the mess hall. When Demetri and I got back to the barracks we found that they were attempting to thaw the strawberries by letting the showers run on them, wasting the precious hot water. Demetri grabbed both of them and hauled them into the showers. He beat them one by one, probably as badly as he had beaten whoever it was back home. Their noses bled profusely. The scene, which I remember clearly, was steam, blood, strawberries, and hot water. Demetri seemed to lack restraint. I had to interfere, which he grandly acknowledged later probably saved their lives.

  Since the end of the Korean War no one had done much in the way of maintenance at Fort Dix. The Vietnam War showed up as a surprise. Some modernization was in progress, but the basic-training facilities were low on the priorities. It didn’t matter very much since our esprit de corps was rock bottom to start. The army may have thought that crummy housing and a generally crappy environment could somehow make us tougher. This was not true. The dumpiness of the barracks and the mess halls and everything else only confirmed the suspicion that the army placed minimal value not only on our comfort but also on the effectiveness of our training. Standards of physical ability had been reduced for wartime, together with levels of marksmanship and first-aid training. The food we were served was poor quality.

  I was dragged into the army with clear assumptions about military orderliness and strict discipline. I had seen movies about Wor
ld War II in which orders were followed. This was most probably the case. But not in the 1968 army. That was the beginning of the problem.

  We marched off in the mornings to the firing ranges with M14s left over from Korea. We blasted away with these cumbersome things, attempting to follow instructions bellowed from a tower. I got the idea that none of us really cared whether we got a high score. We were not, for the most part, killers, and it occurred to many that if we were recorded as lousy shots, we were probably less likely to be candidates for the infantry. Some time later I found out that this was true. Infantry commanders, a strange group within the commands, set high standards for the troops they wanted. Only a fool tried to improve his aim.

  Shortly after Christmas a strain of influenza went through our barracks. At Fort Ord in California an epidemic of spinal meningitis in the training barracks got national attention. Fatalities from meningitis at Fort Ord were numerous and got lots of unwanted press. Fort Dix showed concern that influenza might be a parallel embarrassment. The tactics against influenza had a moronic character such as is only found in the army. To control the spread of sneeze-borne contagion, for instance, we were directed to sleep with canvas tents over ourselves at night. These tents were made with a part of bivouac shelters. We fell asleep to the sound of endless coughing. The medical effect was less than nothing. This silliness was the army’s tendency to do something even if the something was useless and stupid.

  If anyone was actually infected and had the flu they were sent to a special ward of the base hospital. The doctors there fell into two categories — young doctors who’d just graduated and owed the government some years in return for Pentagon financing, or old doctors who had made a career out of the army and were waiting for blessed retirement. The cure, and there was only one cure offered, was extreme hydration, using vast oceans of sugarless Kool-Aid, sweetened with the artificial sweetener sodium cyclamate, which was banned as carcinogenic by the FDA a few years later. We were directed to drink somewhere around two gallons of grape sugarless Kool-Aid a day, and the nurses, who had to wake us up every two hours, kept records. After a few days of this torture we would elect to return to training, half asleep, half drowned, and nauseous.