Life and Death in the Central Highlands: An American Sergeant in the Vietnam War, 1968-1970

Foreword

ix When Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon sent us scurrying for a foxhole in our local theaters, I invited a faculty friend, Professor Robert Driscoll,to walk point with me on this cinematic stroll into Stone’s VietnamWar.Bob had served in theTwenty-fifth Infantry Division at roughly the same time (1969–1970) and place (War Zones C and D in the III Corps area) as Stone. Both had been infantrymen. Jim Gillam’s battalion (First of the 22d Infantry in Army-speak) belonged to the Fourth Infantry Division, which campaigned north of the Twenty-fifth’s area of operations. Jim’s tour, however, roughly matched Bob’s in time, place, tactical environment, and “grunt” perspective. Bob and Jim had (and, I suspect, have) much in common,race excepted.They came from that part of our society, the demographic frontier between working and middle class, that furnishes the U.S. Army’s best enlisted soldiers. They came from two-parent homes with siblings in northern Ohio where the work ethic and family security have been eroded by Rust Belt economic distress, but where attending college is still an ambivalent alternative to joining a union.College also remains a great family expense, which makes the Army college program very attractive. Bob and Jim both abandoned their indifferent early academic careers and their 2-S draft deferments to join the Army and become MOS 11B, basic infantryman, in an army fighting a war drifting toward disengagement. Unlike Jim, Bob did not complete a full tour since he was so severely wounded (twice) that our basketball-playing students thought he’d been in a bad motorcycle accident. Foreword x Life and Death in the Central Highlands Bob liked Platoon despite some of its poetic license and the improbable death struggle of two veteran sergeants over the soul of one over-introspective PFC. It was too much Billy Budd meets Heart of Darkness with live ordnance. Bob’s only mild complaint was to observe that all the nasty things that Stone portrayed probably happened to some unit in Vietnam while he was there, but not to one platoon in one company. My own objection, artistically speaking, was that Platoon was totally humorless. Many years ago the veteran Army tactical analyst and author S. L. A. Marshall made this point in his review of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.Although Mailer had been in combat in the Philippines, Marshall wondered if he had not been a pariah in his company for reasons cultural and behavioral because he never remembered the funny things— however macabre—that help soldiers cope with the insanity that lurks behind fear, pain, and exhaustion. Adolf Hitler had the same problem remembering anything funny in recalling his frontsoldaten services in World War I in Mein Kampf. Jim Gillam experienced real combat in hisVietnam tour. His stunning accounts of killing and avoiding being killed ring true, in no small part because he still found some of his experiences humorous, then and now. Like Paul Fussell, Jim Gillam found irony in the infantry. He also served with more honor and skill than the literary lion of the ETO. Jim’s memoir also adds further weight to some observations about the effect of ground combat in theVietnam War upon the men who fought: • They will always be self-conscious about their status as victims of a war that did not turn out well, but like the GIs of World War II, they know that winning alone does not relieve one of the guilt of killing and surviving.They know that surviving is seldom a matter of great fieldcraft and combat marksmanship and certainly not a moral judgment on one’s future value to himself and society. Foreword xi • For some human experiences there is no such thing as “closure .”This mantra soothes only talk show hosts and passive non-participants. • A wartime army creates its own absurdities that reflect the tension between those that fight and those that don’t, complicated by issues of rank, job assignments, and access to privileged goods and facilities like clean uniforms and hot showers.As the social science pollsters that created the classic Samuel Stouffer, et al. The American Soldier learned, even World War II GIs, the “greatest generation,” believed that the Army was often their greatest enemy. Bill Mauldin’s “Willy” and “Joe” dissected that army of unequal danger and discomfort in the...