Not Enough Tears

© 2004 Dave Wright. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/14/2016

ISBN: 978-1-4184-3682-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4184-3683-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004093548

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CONTENTS

DEDICATION

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

- 1 - THE DRAFT/INDUCTION

- 2 - BASIC TRAINING

- 3 - AIT (ADVANCED INDIVIDUAL TRAINING)

- 4 - ANOTHER WARM BODY IN VIETNAM

- 5 - FIRST DAY IN THE FIELD

- 6 - A TRUE GRUNT

- 7- THE POINT MAN

- 8 - X-RAY VISION

- 9 - THE BRIDGE

- 10 - R&R

- 11 - THE SHAM

- 12 - WOLFMAN

- 13 - RED RAIN

- 14 - THE WATER WHEEL

- 15 - THE THIRD MAN

- 16 - HONG KONG

- 17 - A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR

- 18 - WALKING HEADS

- 19 - THE SPIDER HOLE

- 20 - TRIPWIRE

- 21 - WOOD TRUCKS

- 22 - THE TOWER

- 23 - HOME

- 24 - MY HELL/GOD’S GIFT

- POEM- I WAS THE POINT MAN

I’VE FOUND HELP FROM

AFTERTHOUGHTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEDICATION

A DETOUR IN LIFE

* * *

I’ve heard it said that life’s a journey. If that’s true, there’s a story I need to tell about one of those detours off the main highway of life. Though the story describes my experiences, they were written down for my wife, Janet, my son Jonathan and his friends. Each week, we read one story to capture the kid’s attention as part of a Bible study. Through each chapter, we saw God’s faithful work in a different light. It’s my hope that some of the examples of His unbounded grace get put on the back-shelf of your mind, where the Holy Spirit can grab and use them when the timing is right. Since recording these stories I’ve found peace and have no desire to search for a way back to the main road of life. After realizing, and seeing God’s repeated faithfulness, now I’m beginning to trust the pathway He’s laying out for me.

These stories were written with thirty years of hindsight. I returned home from Vietnam as a very cynical young man. For years, the experiences of that war clashed with my beliefs of what was right and fair. Though I’ve been a Christian from age eleven, these stories, and the last thirty years were filled with the struggle between my understanding and God’s. Most of those years were darkened by Post Traumatic Stress and consumed with anger, bitterness and frustration directed at myself and those around me. I became deeply depressed, feeling there may be no hope of change for myself or the world that created these attitudes.

I’ve recently found that God is changing things. He’s healing me! I believe He will heal as much as I can release to Him. It’s been a little more than ten years since I’ve been able to thank God for my year in Vietnam. Though the healing story continues, I want to let other Vets, their families, and any who are still curious, watch that year of hell turn into a day-by-day healing and blessing. These stories reveal a love that is more gracious and patient than I can imagine. It’s taken all this time to finally see and believe that when we let God, He can use all things, in all people, for our good. So, even now Lord, this is your story, and anything good that comes out of it, is for your glory alone.

Author’s note: The experiences in these stories are true to the best of my knowledge. * Names of individuals have been change to preserve their privacy.

PREFACE

There were not enough tears in the whole of Southeast Asia to wash away the guilt Dave felt for having survived the Vietnam War when so many good young men next to him did not. Tears were not shed for our soldiers by those who blamed them for fighting and killing instead of loving our enemies to peace. Tears couldn’t cleanse our government for not allowing those they sent to fight in Vietnam to win, but expected that we should merely stop the Communist from taking over the country until the South Vietnamese were strong enough to win the war for themselves. There were no tears that could possibly absolve our national embarrassment and shame that these same young soldiers couldn’t achieve the glory in Vietnam that past generations had brought home from the Good War, (WWII)

Some say healing comes in the process of understanding. The young men who fought the Vietnam War were perhaps the most misunderstood combatants in our nation’s history. Many veterans still cannot, or will not verbalize what they went through. Their lives changed forever, but they couldn’t understand or explain why or what happened during their tour that brought on so much frustration, anger and despair.

Not Enough Tears takes you on the roll-a-coaster ride of emotions felt by a young infantryman walking point in the steaming jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam.

It was like stepping into another reality. Everything Dave had learned growing up was challenged. Life was not sacred or precious, and it certainly wasn’t fair in that foreign culture ten thousand miles from home. New survival skills became intensely important; reactions had to be quick and without thought. Emotions became distractions that had to be suppressed, sleep was deadly and getting home was the hope he tried to cling to, but too often, present reality exploded and home felt like an unreachable fantasy.

Many did get home, some without a scratch like Dave, but he was no longer in tune with his fantasy. The American Dream somehow turned shallow and empty. What had changed so much? Why couldn’t he simply return to life as it was before the war?

As a young man, Dave admits he couldn’t commit 100% of himself to any one thing. Thirty years of hard lessons after the war drove him to seek all that’s good and true, and that hope finally rescued him from his most difficult times.

PROLOGUE

The jungle was as dense as I’d ever seen. Wait-a-minute bamboo, lush broad-leafed plants as tall as we were, tangles of vines, and huge trees reduced visibility to inches. About seventy-five yards into the mess, sunlight appeared through an opening in the canopy over the top of a bamboo thicket to my left. Bamboo might be easier to negotiate than the wall we were facing, so I broke my way through and popped into a tiny clearing in front of a termite mound at the edge of a bomb crater. Bamboo lay back around the crater at the angle of the explosion and another opening was just beyond this one, probably another crater. Skirting around the edge looked better than trying to work back into the twisted jungle. Slowly I walked up beside the termite mound, which was about four feet high and six feet across at the bottom, not really big compared to others I’d seen.

One more step put me on top of the soft dirt piled up at the rim of the empty cone. The walls were steep but stable enough to walk on. The air was still heavy with the smell of burnt powder from the explosion. My squad stacked up as we inched around the twenty foot diameter hole. Now lined up in a semicircle, we froze in unison, all eyes locked onto a two-foot diameter, turquoise dish at the beginning of the opening to the next crater. An electrical wire led through the space between clumps of bamboo to the next splash of sunlight.

The face of the large Chinese claymore pointing towards us was filled with bits of shrapnel that would be blasted into our bodies as soon as the detonator was pushed. The electrical wire meant it was command-detonated, and the VC were watching, waiting for the greatest number of us to walk into their kill zone. At any second the explosion would rip us apart.

As a group, my squad all turned around and ran back to the termite mound. I was left standing, still frozen. Why wasn’t I running with them? An invisible hand pushed me to the ground where I was. The claymore was no more than twelve feet to my left with nothing between its crushing blast and me. I tucked my hands under my throat, hoping my steel helmet would protect them, and my forearms would protect my shoulders. There was just enough time to think this is another really dumb thing to do, then everything exploded.

- 1 -

THE DRAFT/INDUCTION

A deep sucking breath filled my lungs with cool midmorning air. My eyes fixed on a crevice just a few feet ahead, and my breathing fell silent. Every muscle tensed, then I sprang to the next foothold in the newly cut rock face. My boots caught the narrow seam, but my body was tilting helplessly away from the near vertical slope. While in midair, the tip of my Philly rod struck a protruding boulder and glanced into open space threatening to carry me with it. Off balance alarms flashed in my mind, and my right hand sank a rock hammer into another crevice I’d selected earlier just for that purpose. Exhaling slowly, I eased myself back to an upright position.

Safe for the moment, my eyes searched for the survey crew a hundred and twenty feet below. Switching hands, I gently placed the tip of the rod into the same crack my toes clung to, then strained to hold it as vertical as possible while looking for directions from the instrument man. His flag waved to the left. I pulled the rod closer until the flag waved back and forth. Noting the spot, I placed the rod on the top of my boot and leaned it back against the abutment. With my free hand I grabbed a can of red spray paint from the tool bag on my belt and continued marking the diagonal line I’d begun an hour earlier at the base of the fill. The red painted line indicated the point of separation between a clay core and rock backfill as layer upon layer merged and climbed the mountain face just recently blasted and cut to form one side of the dam we were building.

I loved this job. At twenty-two, I got to do all the things the older members of the survey crew were too smart to do. I’d dropped out of the engineering program at Sacramento State a year and a half earlier. My grades and incentive to study had dipped to the point where continuing would only have led to flunking out. It felt like the right decision. Everything was going my way. I was having fun, making good money, taking care of myself, dating my girlfriend Janet Brown, and Mom still did my laundry and gave me CARE packages when I decided to bless her with a visit. Life was all about me and it was good.

College wasn’t that difficult, but I didn’t have and didn’t want to develop the self-discipline to do well. My circle of friends suffered a similar lack of commitment, and we always found something more interesting to do than homework. The final incentive – to please my parents, was also waning. It was becoming more important to satisfy myself. I even bought halfway into the universal excuse, I need to find out who I am and what I want to do with my life. I still don’t know what that means, other than it opens a door to an endless journey of self-pursuit.

The real problem was I needed to grow up. At the time, I couldn’t see that all these things were going to be used as pieces in the process of building my life. I didn’t understand how God worked with everything, even self-centeredness, to bring about what’s best when we let him. How much easier it would have been had I submitted to His love, mercy, and grace at that point. I didn’t, so He used the decisions I made and we went forward.

My decision to work instead of going to school meant I lost my student deferment and was now eligible for the upcoming lottery/draft. The Vietnam War was beginning to chew up a lot of young kids, which left vacancies Uncle Sam wanted filled immediately. I worried about the draft and the possibility it might disrupt my newly found independence and life of self-involved choices. My logic may have been different from some, but I didn’t want to spend more anxious months wondering when or if I would get my invitation from Uncle Sam. So, I went down to the post office to see where my name fell on the list; the W’s were coming up in just a few months. There wasn’t enough time to get back into college and I wasn’t ready to buckle down anyway.

It was hard to visualize giving up two full years of my life to the military. It wasn’t part of my career plan and seemed to be a total waste of time. My dad fortunately missed WWII because a horse had broken his foot, which never healed properly. My brother was three years older and married. None of my family had been in the military for generations. I had no one to talk with.

It seemed inevitable that the draft would pick me up shortly, so I decided to get it over with. The earlier I went in, the quicker I’d get out. Maybe my engineering training, three years of college, and volunteering for the draft would land me a better job than just waiting for my number to come up. Things brightened a little when a good friend, Chip Davis, decided to join me. At least we would go to basic training at the same place and might end up doing the same thing for our short military careers.

We rode with a whole busload of kids from Sacramento down to Oakland, California. This was the big city to us. The bus driver wove his way gracefully through the crowded streets and pulled up to a curb alongside the building where most of our lives would change forever. The Induction Center was an old, gray building sitting back about a hundred feet from the street. We stepped off the bus and looked for the main entrance. The lawn and trees were well kept, but it was difficult to see the surroundings or the front door with all the people milling about. For a brief moment I wondered if the large crowd had come to congratulate us for serving our country and wanted to see us off. As I have found many times since, my logic didn’t always line up with reality.

My eyes began to notice a lot of long hair and hippie garb when it dawned on me: we had arrived in the middle of a Vietnam War protest. I’d seen the demonstrations on the news but never thought I would end up in the middle of one, and the idea of becoming a focal point for our national conscience regarding this undeclared war was totally foreign. Demonstrators lined both sides of the sidewalk all the way to the main entrance, yelling and handing out antiwar literature.

Stand up for your rights, burn your draft card, refuse to go to Vietnam, don’t be a baby killer! It was easy enough for them to say; they’d already turned their back on everything normal. I wasn’t ready to give up my middle-class life style just yet. The thought of going to jail or leaving home and country to avoid Vietnam didn’t balance in my mind. I couldn’t quite see myself as a dropout with long hair, beads, and a tie-dyed T-shirt.

I had conflicting ideas about Vietnam and the war. I was afraid of being put into that ultimate situation of kill or be killed, but at the same time, like many young men, I was secretly curious to know how I’d measure up in the face of death. Would I be a hero or a coward?

Vietnam seemed small and far away. If the Communists did take over, it would probably pose little threat to my way of life in spite of the domino theory. From the little I knew about Communism, it seemed to allow an oppressive and maybe even brutal form of government whether in Russia, China, or North Vietnam. I’d seen news reports of atrocities committed by the Communists, but that foreign culture seemed to tolerate even those actions a little. I didn’t like what was shown on TV, but I didn’t want to kill anyone over it either.

I couldn’t say that our society was perfect, but in all our previous wars we were the good guys riding to the rescue. It appeared that North Vietnam was trying to take over the South, and maybe they did need some protection from their aggressive neighbor. We had already sent a couple hundred thousand kids over there to fight for freedom. I guessed if they could do it, I could do it.

Anyway, I did have my ace in the hole. If for some reason I did end up in Vietnam, they would certainly put me on a construction or survey crew. I had valuable experience and training, and was volunteering for the draft. The Army was going to treat me differently. Surely, they wouldn’t waste my talents by sending me to Vietnam as just another warm body to replace the ones they brought home in bags. Ah, my impeccable logic!

One of the best things the military does is create lines. Once through the gauntlet of protesters and inside the Induction Center, there were lines going everywhere. Chip and I handed our papers to the clerk at the front desk, who nodded for us to follow the other new arrivals into a classroom. A pencil and something resembling an aptitude test had already been placed on each desk. It quickly became apparent that our answers to the questions could result in extremely different placements within the multiple opportunities the Army had available. One went something like, Would you rather be marooned on a deserted island with adequate supplies for a year, or would you be more comfortable working in a very crowded city for a year. It was easy to tell where that was headed, but I decided to answer truthfully. I picked the desert island and hoped honesty would be better than trying to second-guess everything. They should have asked, Would you rather live in a steamy, bug-infested jungle where people you can’t see are trying everything they can to kill you, or would you rather be totally bored out of your skull for an entire year doing mountains of meaningless paperwork?

After completing the questions, we lined up behind the growing numbers following a red line painted on the floor. It zigzagged between desks, eventually joining other colored lines heading straight up a long stairway. The longhaired kid in front grabbed the handrail tightly and slowly ascended. At the top of the stairs he crumpled to the floor without warning. Two medics ran over to examine him. After checking his vital signs and asking a few questions they propped him up and pronounced him fit, as if it were an everyday occurrence, which it probably was! Flunking the physical meant you were classified 4-F and no longer subject to the draft. The stakes were high, and some figured this was an acceptable way to avoid the draft and stay out of jail at the same time. Some produced written excuses from doctors, one failed his eye test by hiding his glasses, another pretended aggressive hostility and insanity—all to get out of going to Vietnam. Most attempts were laughable and given the same treatment as the kid who had passed out. The excuses continued as we trudged around the building following the red line from station to station. My nerves were on edge, and I felt sick and a little frightened. This was an alien world, a place where familiar things like home, family and a good job were being stripped away.

Somehow, Chip flunked his physical without trying. He apologized as he picked up his paperwork and headed for the exit line. I knew he was sincere, but it didn’t alleviate my shock at being left alone. We were supposed to be together when things got tough, and now he was walking away. A knot formed in my stomach as I turned to shuffle along with the others still following the red line. Shortly after the old bend over physical, we were led to the doorway of a small office. Only six people could enter the office at a time. I was lost somewhere in the middle of a group, and when it was our turn, we entered and sat on a bench next to the wall.

My body slumped against the old wainscoted paneling while my mind tried to make sense of what was happening. In the middle of thousands of people, I felt abandoned. Alone. Everything seemed to be in chaos. There were countless people following red, blue, green, and yellow lines to unknown destinations, all set on their courses by indifferent people and an unfathomable system. Overwhelmed, I sensed a turning point in my life, but which direction would it turn? I’d passed the point of backing out weeks before. Committed now, I had to follow through. My little piece of reality began to crumble, and was replaced by growing anxiety. My future was not in my control.

The floor of the ten by ten office was covered in ancient brown linoleum, and everything else was painted green. The desk was green, the clerk’s uniform was green, the unit patches on his uniform were green with black insignias. He melted into a background of the nameless processing line. This must be how cattle feel as they’re herded through the chutes and pens in a stockyard. While moving closer and closer to their final destination, they have no control of whether they’ll end up at the slaughterhouse or in green pastures. The green clerk took the top six folders from a stack on his desk and opened the covers. His right hand picked up a stamp. Thump, thump, thump in rapid succession. A pause to change stamps. Thump, thump, thump! He handed our folders back with a large A or M stamped in red ink at the top of each. The M’s were supposed to follow the blue line, the A’s followed the