We all come to our interest in history (and we all have it, or we wouldn't be collecting this stuff) by various routes. My own route involved 16 years as an Army brat, 6 of them overseas in Japan, Taiwan and what used to the the Republic of Viet Nam. That, plus the fact that "there's nothing like the smell of blood and gunpowder to make postal history interesting" (to quote David Beals, a long-gone philatelic acquaintance) accounts for my interest in military postal history.
I wish that I could claim authorship of the essay below. It was written by my youngest brother, Paul (born in 1954 in Japan on one of those overseas assignments), and I found it a couple of years ago while going through his effects. I think that he got most of the historical details right (the evacuation was in February of 65 as I recall -- Marines in, dependents out; heady stuff to be a part of history; and while I recall water buffalo in the field outside our bedroom windows of our first house in Saigon, I remember the Continental Hotel as having been a considerably more up-scale neighborhood), but even if he blew the odd small detail, the flavor is certainly very, very true by my recollections of that place and time.
I Was an Outsider
Paul Mayo
ENGL 3003
Assgn. # 9
At our plane’s last refueling stop, in Tokyo, there’d been snow on the ground. At the one before that, in Alaska, it’d been easy to fancy that there was no such thing as ground -- just snow; now, as the plane’s door opened onto Ton Su—Nhut airport in South Vietnam, the ground veritably rose up to meet us on shimmering waves of heat that made the ramp of stairs pulled up to the aircraft seem unnecessary: "We could float down in this stuff," I thought, and it seemed almost true.
We’d moved again. It was 1964. I was eight and an Army brat and already used to moving, but this was going to take a little getting used to. I couldn’t believe the heat. I couldn’t believe that at the Continental Hotel, ooh-la-la, we had to boil the water. I couldn’t believe that our hotel window overlooked a field containing a water buffalo. And I couldn’t believe there was a war going on, a fact I do not recall anyone’s mentioning to me until, shortly after our arrival, my older brother delighted in breaking away from the family group as we shuffled along Saigon to ask of passersby, "Are you a V.C.? Are you a V.C.?"
"Uh.. .what’s a V.C.?" I asked my parents (as they swatted my older brother and told him to shut up). And I found out.
So, you’re in a war zone. Nothing to it: You share your school bus with two armed guards and learn your multiplication tables while soldiers carrying M-16’s crunch along the gravel on the roof overhead; you forego P.E. (and most other outdoor activities) for a while, and instead of fire drills, you have sniper drills, and practice diving under your desk; you play tag with your friends and wind up impaling your wrist on one of the steel spikes gracing the gate outside your house (See? That outside stuff’ll get you); you ask General Westmoreland’s daughter Margaret, to go steady, and you get your class-consciousness raised ("Me?" she said; "With you?"); you sing altered-for-Vietnam versions of Christmas carols ("And a V.C. in a palm tree...."), which is kind of fun; and you finally and forever give up on Santa Claus on a 105-degree Christmas Eve while you take cookies outside to the soldiers guarding your house and listen to the shelling going on outside of the city; and you discover perplexing new feelings -- somehow scared, somehow sad -- when you see your mother one night sitting on the terrace, rocking, with a loaded .45 in her lap.
Finally, one March morning in 1965, the radio served my mother and siblings and me news of escalation (of the war) and evacuation (of us) with our breakfast; it seemed we were moving again, in a hurry. And so we packed, and the reporters descended to film us vacating our school and traipsing to the airport, and we rode the air currents up in to another plane and were gone.
Now, it’d be ludicrous for me to even so much as suggest that my schoolboyts experience in South Vietnam was hellish or horrific. More than that: that’d be an insult to those, and especially the children, for whom that and other wars have been those things, up-close-and-personal. No: I had a basically normal childhood under somewhat other-than-normal circumstances, and while in Vietnam I was guarded, protected, and even pampered. But it’d be making no false claim to say that I somehow changed while in Vietnam. Perhaps that change in me was merely the difference between eight and nine; I don’t know. But I do know that somehow, while in Saigon, I stepped over some invisible line of demarcation and stepped irrevocably outside of my childhood, or at least an early phase of innocent childhood. I feel that this happened as surely as Santa, while I was there, was consigned to my mental toy chest, put away as an idea I didn’t play with anymore. I don’t know when this event occurred: while the soldiers crunched over our heads at school, or while I dove for cover from imaginary snipers; or, perhaps, when the general’s daughter blew me off, or on that Christmas Eve when the sky was lit by cannon fire; but I know that the world became a less innocent place, and I became a less innocent boy, just for having perceived the change. And those feelings I had --somehow scared, somehow sad -- when I saw my mother with the gun in her lap, rocking, welled up because, I believe, I had sensed that I’d stepped outside of my innocence. That lap with the gun in it --I’d used to crawl in that lap, and now it was 1965, and I was nine, and I wanted to crawl in it again --maybe just for old time’s sake.