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8 A Media Event When a dusty Buick pulled off the highway and a pudgy and rumpled American in his mid-fifties hoisted himself out, I knew I was looking at another kind of veteran. The gentleman’s clothes looked like they’d been slept in and a battered straw hat was pushed back on his head. Once my visitor got his bearings he strolled over to where I was sitting in my jeep and showed me his press card. It was midday, the sun was bearing down, and I was trying to stay cool without much success. I invited this slightly frowzy representative of the fourth estate to join me. As soon as he got settled in the other front seat of the jeep he produced a hip flask and offered me a pull. I appreciated the thought but it was a bit too early in the day for me to be drinking neat whisky out of a hot flask. Neither the time of day nor the temperature of the beverage seemed to slow him down, and as he drained the flask we discussed the state of the world and the ongoing battles to clear the enemy roadblocks. My new friend from the press told me that his car had been shot at on the drive up from Saigon. Both he and his Vietnamese driver thought they had seen soldiers in khaki uniforms and sun helmets crouching in the brush along the highway south of Chon Thanh, toward Lai Khe. He was sure they were North Vietnamese and he was concerned about getting back to Saigon that afternoon. That was the first I’d heard the enemy might already be farther south on Highway 13 and decided maybe he had a good reason to empty his flask after all. As subsequent events were to demonstrate, he had probably seen a North Vietnamese reconnaissance team well in advance of major enemy units moving in behind us. Once I’d established an encrypted link with advisors at the brigade’s base camp at Lai Khe, I passed on the reporter’s account of the enemy troops he had seen. I also put in an order for water and ammunition the battalion needed. A Media Event 39 Several months later I learned that my press friend’s account of our conversation had been printed as a front-page article in the 16 April 1972 issue of Pacific Stars & Stripes. It had also been picked up by a number of other newspapers in the United States and several friends sent me copies. It was run under Hugh Mulligan’s byline and included the following uplifting, if somewhat creative and wide-ranging, narrative: “What’s wrong with this girl?” asked Captain Mike McDermott, holding up a Pacific Stars & Stripes that showed Raquel Welch in fulsome cleavage at the Academy Awards ceremony. He was hard to hear over the blam-blam of howitzers firing at an enemy machinegun somewhere nearby in the jungle scrubs. McDermott, from Highmore, S.D., squatted at a field telephone in the corrugated sewer pipe serving as his front line command post on Highway 13, Vietnam’s Thunder Road. A four-year man in the Nam, having extended twice on previous tours with the 101st Airborne, the captain took issue with a visitor (in fact Mulligan) who called Highway 13 “interesting.” “That’s rear echelon talk,” he corrected between telephone squawks telling why he couldn’t get more air strikes and what had become of the water he ordered yesterday for his men.“It’s not interesting. It’s dangerous.” Mulligan’s article went on to recount the adventures of his trip up from Saigon. He then reviewed a short history of the major battles previously fought along that stretch of the highway before returning to our discussion. “Now no one knows what will happen along Thunder Road, least of all the men fighting there.‘All I know is what’s happening 100 yards in front of me, and that ain’t good,’” said McDermott. After I eventually got back to the United States my mother, who was the county librarian as well as a retired rural schoolteacher, asked if I really used the bad grammar quoted in the article. I assured her the author probably inserted the questionable verbiage to somehow make our soldierly conversation more authentic. Perhaps he thought it might be a symbol of manly militarymedia bonding. Or maybe that’s what Mulligan actually thought he’d heard...

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