Then I walked to the west windows where I looked out toward the New York Times building and Broadway and the West Side Highway and the great black gash of the Hudson and the glittering stream of lights of New Jersey where Al Kroboth was awaiting my visit. Of all the interviews this was the one I feared most. Looking at my reflection in the massive window and the great spillage of man-made lights in the diamond-braceleted streets below, I knew that tomorrow I would face my hardest encounter with how I conducted myself during the Vietnam War.
AL KROBOTH MET ME AT the train station when I got off the second stop from New York City after Newark. We shook hands and took each other’s measure, then Al turned his truck toward home and began quizzing me. “Why are you writing this book, Conroy? No one wants to read about a losing team.”
“If that is true, it will have serious consequences in my career.”
“Americans love winners. They want to read about people like Michael Jordan.”
“I think Michael Jordan might like my book,” I said.
“Jordan’s the best basketball player that ever lived. By far.”
“I agree,” I said. “But I saw Michael Jordan play baseball. He understands losing. He understands coming up short physically.”
“Oh,” Al said. “I see.”
“Eventually, all of us play on a losing team. I’m trying to figure out if you learn more by losing than by winning.”
“You always were a little weird, Conroy,” Al said, smiling as he turned into his driveway.
On a clear fall day in Roselle, New Jersey, Al Kroboth, one of the best big men to line up at center for the Citadel Bulldogs, gave me everything he had taken out of the Vietnam War. He asked that his wife, Patty, be present, and she was. The interview took a long time because I would have to wait for Big Al or Patty to stop weeping. Finally, all three of us were weeping at the power of the emotions unloosed upon us by Al’s heart-stopping narrative. The story I tell now is the one Big Al told me in New Jersey as my face streamed with tears, the one told where we could not look at each other.
“Al,” I said, with Patty sitting beside him. “Tell me what happened to you in Vietnam. Not just the facts; I’d like you to tell me how it all felt. I want you to make me feel it. America needs to hear this story.”
“Just one thing,” Al said with severity. “I am not a hero, Conroy. Don’t you try to turn me into one.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked Patty.
“No, I don’t,” Patty replied.
“Tell me your story, Al,” I said. “I’ll let it speak for itself.”
“I’m not a hero, Conroy,” he said again and again. “I met guys who were, but I’m not one of them.”
“Just tell me,” I said, and here is the story he told:
On his seventh mission as Captain Leonard Robertson’s navigator in an A-6, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload as Robertson began to make his dive for the target area. Somewhere in that dive, the A-6 took on enemy fire and though Al has no memory of this, he punched out somewhere in the middle of this ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. Al does not know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days. As for Captain Leonard Robertson, his name is on the Wall in Washington, and Al wears a POW bracelet with Captain Robertson’s name engraved on it.
When Al awoke, a Vietcong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. Al had broken his neck and back as well as shattered his left scapula bone. When he was well enough to get to his feet, two armed Vietcong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. For three months Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained and he slept in bomb craters with his two Vietcong captors. Infections began to explode on his body as they moved north, his legs alive with leeches picked up in rice paddies.
At the very time of Al’s walk, I had a small role in organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that time it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my small group managed to attract a crowd of about a hundred and fifty to Beaufort’s waterfront. With my mother and my wife on either side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted Marines present that if they got to Vietnam, here’s how they could help end this war: roll a grenade under their officer’s bunk when he was asleep in his tent. Called fragging, he explained, it was becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who knew this war was bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion. At that very moment my father was asleep in Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of twenty-seven, I thought I was serving America’s interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia.
In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in the North, and the Vietcong traded him to the North Vietnamese soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his back at night, so he learned to sleep in the center of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets into the thin walls. After air raids, old women would come into huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks of his hair. Al Kroboth’s walk north was nightmarish, Dantesque, and courageous. It was a relief when his guards finally delivered him to the POW camp where they kept the prisoners captured in South Vietnam.
It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every meal he ate. An American doctor thought Al was the oldest soldier in the prison because his appearance was so gaunt and skeletal. But the extraordinary camaraderie that sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al in time to save his life.
When I was demonstrating against Nixon and the Christmas bombings, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands during the full fury of those bombings, singing “God Bless America.” It was those bombings that convinced Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs and my college teammate. When he told me about the C-141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al Kroboth said he felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw a giant American flag painted on the plane’s tail.
“The flag,” Al said, choking. “It had the biggest American flag on it I ever saw. To this day, I cry when I think of it. Seeing that flag, I started crying. I couldn’t see the plane, I just saw that flag. All the guys started cheering. But that flag . . . that flag.”
It took a full five minutes before I could see the page I was writing on again. Al and Patty held on to each other, weeping. It took another minute before Al could find his voice again.
“Candy-man, our Vietcong guard on the bus to the airport, said to me, ‘Come with your family and visit us after the war is over.’ I said, ‘I’d love to come back to your country. In an A-6. To drop a nuke on this whole place.’ There was no shaking hands, Conroy. No farewells. No teary eyes. When my name was called I walked in military fashion toward an Air Force colonel at the foot of the plane. I saluted him and said, ‘Lieutenant Alan Kroboth, reporting for duty, sir.’ He returned the salute and said, ‘Welcome home, son.’ I walked up the ramp and was met by the most beautiful Air Force nurses I had ever seen. They sat me down. Everyone was quiet, the POWs just sitting. When all our guys were on board, the doors closed. The ramp went up. The engines started. Still no sound from the POWs. The plane taxied. The pilot’s voice came on and he said, ‘Everyone sit down. We got low cloud cover but we’re getting out of here.’ Then we’re lifting off. That quiet continued. No emotion. No sighs of relief. It was eerie. Then the pilot’s voice comes on again. ‘Feet wet’—which means we are now flying over water. ‘Feet wet. We are out of North Vietnamese air space.’
“That’s when the cheering started, Conroy. The tears. The screaming. The yelling. That’s when I knew it was over. Finally over. The whole thing. Over.”<
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It took a minute or two for Al to be able to speak again. Then he told me that the POWs had no idea how America would react to their homecoming. Since their prison guards constantly told them that all Americans considered them to be war criminals, and it was well-known that the war was widely unpopular, Al and the other POWs were uncertain what awaited them at Clark Field in the Philippines. They were stunned to be met by an adoring crowd of ten thousand who gave them a hero’s welcome. Al was the last off the plane, and he saluted the commanding general of Clark Field, then marched between the surging crowd on a red carpet as people handed him flowers and reached out to touch him. A small girl leaned down from her father’s shoulders to hand Al a piece of paper, telling him she had made it for him. Al took it, but did not read it until his bus started moving toward the hospital. In a childish scrawl, the little girl had printed out these words: “Greater love than this hath no man.”
Five minutes passed before Al, Patty, or I could say a word. Then Al continued, “I still have that piece of paper. Got to the hospital. Marine guys separated from the Army and Air Force guys. Psychologists and psychiatrists were there for the guys with family problems. From the moment we got there they took care of us. Really were there for us. In every way possible. Took us to the mess hall. Every table and every tray and every plate was piled high with food. Lobster, steak, hams, turkeys, salads. For thirty guys. All of us piled it on our plates as high as we could, then sat down and ate two or three spoonfuls.
“People on the base kept bringing us pies and cakes and cookies. Night and day they came. On the second day they fitted us out in uniforms and I got a pair of glasses. Basic psych evaluations. Debriefing. Then an enlisted man said to me, ‘Someone on the first floor wants to see you.’ We were on the eighth floor and no one got up there. So I had to have an escort to go with me. When I got down there I see John Vaughan. You remember him, Conroy? Class of ’68?”
“Sure I do, Al. He was a cheerleader. He was one of the guys who led the Corps in cheering us, on the team I’m writing about.”
It had become common knowledge among the Citadel alumni stationed at Clark Field that the Vietcong had stolen Al’s Citadel ring, evidently when he was unconscious after being shot down. When Al came off the elevator on the first floor, Johnny Vaughan, an Air Force pilot, was waiting for him in the lobby. The two men shook hands, then embraced. Johnny began to remove his Citadel ring from his right hand. “Al, I’m not letting you go back to our country without wearing a Citadel ring. I’m not going to let you do that.”
“No, Johnny,” Al protested, “I can’t. I lost too much weight. I’m too skinny. I’ll lose it.”
“You didn’t hear me,” said Johnny Vaughan. “You’re not going back to our country without wearing the Citadel ring.” He then put his own ring on Al Kroboth’s finger.
As Al wept again, I thought about Johnny Vaughan, a young man I had not seen in thirty-two years, a man who, like me, was no longer young. I thought about the remarkable generosity of his grand gesture and I know of no other story that reveals the powerful forces that bind the entire Citadel family to the wearing of the ring. The ring was sacramental to us, the great enfolding circle of gold that was the coded, mysterious symbol of our singularity, which carries all the wonder and oneness of our fire-tested tribe. By removing his Citadel ring and placing it on the POW Al Kroboth’s finger, I believe Johnny Vaughan wrote his name into the history of my college.
The Vietnam War was never just theoretical with me. It is deeply personal. My father served two tours of duty there, and almost every Marine I knew growing up spent time doing battle against North Vietnam and the Vietcong insurgents. A number of those men returned to this country in body bags. Practically my entire class of 1967 left the graduation stage as a first step that would take them almost directly to the war in Vietnam. It was not until I started losing classmates that I began to grieve for boys that I knew well.
News of my classmates’ deaths began to reach me as I taught psychology and government at Beaufort High School the year after my graduation. Bruce Welge, who defended more boys accused of honor violations than any of my classmates, was killed while leading his own Army platoon. Dick O’Keefe, who stopped me in the gutter in front of the Citadel chapel our plebe year to tell me that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, died in a plane crash on his final mission before returning to the States. With Fred Carter I had played outfield on the freshman baseball team and was sick when I heard his plane disappeared from the radar screen while on an attack mission. There were many others, and I hold the memories of these boys sacred. I feel the brief flame of each of them when I finger the letterings of their names as I move along the black marble on the majestic and terrible Wall in Washington that bears witness to their sacrifice. Their names scream out this question to me: “Did you do right by your country, Conroy? Did you do right by it?”
There is one Vietnam veteran’s grave I will continue to visit until my death: Captain Joseph Wester Jones III, whose two daughters, Jessica and Melissa, I adopted when I married his widow, Barbara, in 1969. Throughout their childhood, I took the girls to visit their father’s grave in Beaufort and would explain what all the inscriptions on his tombstone meant.
“What’s the PH, Daddy?” Jessica would ask me.
“That means your father won the Purple Heart. Our country gives that to soldiers who get wounded defending their country.”
“What’s KIA, Daddy?” Melissa would ask.
“That’s the greatest honor that can be on the grave of any soldier, Melissa and Jessica. That means your father was killed in action while fighting for his country.”
On Memorial Day and Veterans Day, I make sure a rose is placed on West’s grave. Frequently, I talk with him and let him know how his daughters are doing and where they are living and that Melissa’s married the sweetest boy in the world and that his pretty granddaughter, Jessica’s daughter, Elise, is doing well in school. I let him know that his girls are beautiful women now and that he would be proud as hell of them.
I met West’s parents almost a year after Barbara and I married, and had no idea what to expect. Colonel Joe Jones was an Air Force pilot and his wife, Jean, was an exemplary military wife. Barbara’s mother and father, also Air Force people, had hated me on sight, neither of them ever forgiving me for my antiwar sympathies. If the Joneses had spit in my face and said I was unworthy to raise their son’s children, I would have understood perfectly. But the Joneses had a great surprise for me. With amazing generosity, they embraced me and folded me into their family. “Mom” and “Pap” Jones have been two of the most surprising and necessary friends of my adult life, and I admire them beyond all reckoning.
A few years ago, Mom and Pap spent a weekend with me at my home on Fripp Island. They insisted I take them on one of my “famous” tours of Beaufort. Showing off the incomparable beauty of Beaufort is one of the great joys of my life, and I do it with passion, quite well. But I got a surprise as I was ending my tour and took them to visit my mother’s grave in the Beaufort National Cemetery. I had noticed the Joneses becoming uncharacteristically tense walking back to my car and did not speak as I drove over to their son’s grave. Showing everyone where my girls’ daddy is buried is always the last stop of my tour.
I did not realize my mistake until I got out of the car and approached West’s grave. It never occurred to me that the death of their only son would be so unimaginably painful to the Joneses that they could never bring themselves to visit his gravesite. I had to catch Jean Jones as she leaned against my car, sobbing. Finally she said, “Thank you for knowing where our son’s grave is, Pat. We haven’t been back here since his burial.”
I turned and watched Joe Jones kneel by his son’s grave and clean some debris from the grass. Then Colonel Jones stood at rigid attention and brought his hand up to salute. Colonel Jones, the man I call Pap, completed that lovely salute and said in a clear, commanding voice: “Well done, son. Well done.”
&
nbsp; In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, I began to assess my role as citizen when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Vietcong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste, having come directly from the warrior culture of this country. But in the twenty-five years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism in the unspeakable twentieth century. From The Gulag Archipelago to the works of Simone Weil to accounts of the unimaginable goose-stepping of the Third Reich across the borders of Germany, I have read the histories and commentaries and eyewitness accounts of those soul-killing events. Curious by nature, I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, to a Croat whose father had entertained Goering on his honeymoon, to partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and to officers who had survived the disgraceful Bataan Death March. I read the newspaper reports during Pol Pot’s shameless assault against his own people in Cambodia, and the rise of Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi of Libya. I have watched the fall of Communism in Russia and have a picture of my father pushing against the Berlin Wall during the time it was being torn down. Many times I have quizzed journalists who reported on wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria—I have come to revere words like “democracy” and “freedom,” the right to vote, the incomprehensibly beautiful origins of my country, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I not see America’s flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart’s content, the same country that produced both me and Al Kroboth.