"Momma told me don't come ... "

14 October 1969:

Sai Gon was hot and quiet. The air was tense - jarring voices and dank smells pushed and jabbed. I walked into the night, not wanting to think about what would come next.

It was very late and we were tired from flying so long. The rest of the night passed in fitful sleep, troubled by unclear dreams.

The next day, weak sun pushed through the clouds filling the Viet Nam sky. It quickly became hot. We were sent to an empty building, where we were sorted and divided, and assigned to various units. I was being sent to the Americal Division[1] in I (Eye) Corps, the northern-most section of South Viet Nam. We spent the rest of that day filling sand bags, and other vital military tasks.

The following morning found me and a couple of dozen others on a C-130, flying 600 miles north to Chu Lai, Americal Division headquarters. The big prop-driven plane dropped down quickly through the low clouds and landed on an airbase surrounded by ragged buildings, fuel storage tanks, and sand. To the east, as we cut through the clouds, the South China Sea glittered. It was a clean, open counterpoint to Chu Lai.

For the next two weeks, we were at the "Americal Combat Center", where we were given additional training in fighting a war amidst rice paddies, water buffalo and Vietnamese peasants. I was lucky. As a newly-minted Sergeant, I received two weeks of training (and reprieve). Lower ranking enlisted men were only there for one week before being sent out to a combat unit.

Innocent faces look out from fading photographs.
How soon, how radically, our lives would change.

Halloween, 1969:

No trick-or-treating, no party. Four or five of us were sent to join “B” Company, 1st Battalion, 52nd Infantry[2], part of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade. The Company was out in the field, but they were returning the next day for stand down[3]. Halloween wasn’t much fun that year.

We were trucked over to the 1/52nd stand down area, where we waited for the Company to arrive. The day was cloudy and threatening rain. Monsoon season had arrived. In the late morning a couple of deuce-and-a-half trucks[4] pulled in.

Men spilled out. Loud, dirty, laughing, unwinding as they laughed, they lined up at a nearby shack to turn in their weapons. The first thing done when a Company came in for stand down was to lock up all the guns.

Looking at these wild, filthy men, I thought, “My god, these are the people I’m going to live with for the next year!” And, “Am I going to become like them?” How little I knew.

We tried to talk to these guys, introduce ourselves, but mostly they were interested in showers and cold beer. There was certainly little interest in spending valuable time talking with some newly-arrived “shake-and-bake” sergeant like me. They went off to take a shower and we were lead away to meet with the Company commander.

The next three days were an immersion course in the realities of the war (as opposed to things we’d been told back in the States, or the Combat Center, for that matter). It was also a quick lesson in the social structure, rules and mores of an infantry company.

One thing was pretty clear: we, just arrived, brand new fatigues, shiny boots, wide-eyed wonder, we were pretty much useless. “And figure it out quickly, without getting somebody killed.” Yeah.

The rain began in earnest as stand down ended. We were sent to guard a village that was part of the so-called “Pacified Village” program. The goal was to protect the Vietnamese peasants from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army by up-rooting them from their hamlets and villages, and collecting them in one place. American and South Vietnamese forces built bunkers and strung concertina wire, turning a cobbled-together village into a fortified point. The people were given some building materials (mostly corrugated steel panels for roofing), but otherwise were left pretty much to their own devices.

The village was the ages-old foundation of life in Viet Nam. Sixty years ago, 85% of the country’s population lived in the countryside. Twenty years later, many people had moved into the cities, primarily because of the wars afflicting Viet Nam, but the country was still overwhelmingly rural. Pacification, as it was also known, was very unpopular with the Vietnamese people. As a result, it probably drove a number of people to support the Viet Cong who might not have otherwise.

The village we were sent to protect was Ðai Lôc, in Quảng Ngãi Province. Vietnamese villages were spread out, generally consisting of several hamlets. If you looked at a map, you would see Ðai Lôc (1), Ðai Lôc (2), Ðai Lôc (3); each of them three or four kilometers apart. The families living in these hamlets had been gathered up and moved to a new location, not far from Ðai Lôc (3), that was thought (by the United States Army) to be more defensible. The “new” Ðai Lôc was twenty-five kilometers south of Chu Lai and six or seven kilometers west of the highway, QL-1.

Highway One, as we knew it, was the only paved road in our part of the province. It was also the umbilical cord that tied Sai Gon to Quảng Tri Province and the DMZ[5]. We didn’t drive to Ðai Lôc, of course. Helicopters picked us up in Chu Lai and dropped us just outside the village perimeter.

Low clouds muffled a landscape marked by leaden sheets of water. It was a sad-looking place, this improvised village. There were 80 or 90 houses, straggling around a small hill. Bamboo structures with thatched or corrugated steel roofs were set about in no apparent order. On the south slope of the hill were two structures, one larger than the other. They were built of bricks, covered in chipped white stucco, and looked like they had occupied that hill for a long time. The larger building appeared to be a pagoda or shrine. A tiled roof, turned up at the corners, was in two tiers. The smaller structure was a short distance away. It had an alcove, perhaps to leave offerings or burning incense. No one ever came to burn incense, though.

The village had been established only a month or so before we arrived. Not much had been done in the way of bunkers, wire and other defensive construction, so that was our first task. Corrugated steel culvert halves and a lot of empty sand bags were provided for the purpose.

Chickens and small children ran all around while we filled sand bags and strung wire. The smallest kids were barely clothed. All of them wanted to help, or at least beg something off us. Gum, cigarettes - almost anything had appeal. Some of these kids could just as easily steal C-Rations … or something more dangerous, like a hand grenade.

The village well was included in our perimeter, of course, and all the strung out houses. The villagers were busy, too, building enclosures for their animals (especially the water buffalo, who didn’t seem to like Americans very much), and preparing their homes for the rains. As I soon discovered, each family was also digging a bunker in the earth beneath their homes. They kept what valuables they had there. The families also slept there every night, seeking a little protection from potential danger.

We stayed in Ðai Lôc three and a half weeks. The days passed slowly. Rain fell ever more heavily as the days went by, filling the rice paddies, seeping into everything. In lower places, only a few dikes between fields were above water. We patrolled the surrounding area, but saw little of the VC we knew were nearby. They fired on us at night a couple of times. On patrols, we found tunnels and some booby traps, which we blew up.

We played with the village children, and gathered closely beneath shelters with their parents, trying to stay dry and warm. One evening a family in the village invited me to have dinner with them. The meal was mostly rice. On top of the rice were tiny fish that had been caught in weirs placed between rice paddies. They were crunchy, and very salty.

Toward the end of November we were moved to the Battalion firebase, LZ Stinson[6], while another Company took over defense of Ðai Lôc. The 1/52nd was responsible for a section of Quảng Ngãi Province bounded by two large rivers, 14 or 15 kilometers apart. Sông Trà Bong was on the north and Sông Trà Khúc on the south. Both flowed east into the South China Sea. An abandoned railroad line, four or five kilometers west of Highway One, was the eastern boundary. Eighteen kilometers or so west of the rail line lay mountains, some of which rose over 800 meters above the paddies and fields where we spent most of our time. Here we lived our lives, and tried to stay alive.

[1] Also known as the 23rd Infantry Division.
[2] B-1/52nd
[3] Stand Down was a three-day break from being in the field, and fighting the war. Our unit’s stand down area was alongside the beach, in Chu Lai.
[4] Two-and-a-half-ton trucks.
[5] Demilitarized Zone: the boundary between South Viet Nam and North Viet Nam.
[6] LZ: Landing Zone. This term was applied to a great many places that were not just landing places, but semi-permanent military bases. “Firebase” was interchangeable with LZ, meaning, as the name suggests, a place from which to fire (weapons, especially artillery).

Rancho Pequeño

It was December and the ground was frozen the first time we saw the house. Abandoned, was how it looked. Foreclosed-upon, was what it was. The front yard was a variety of weeds, the back was undisguised dirt, and the carport had an accumulation of old newspapers, beer cans and a drift of dead leaves. Shut down, drained of heat and water, it was as forlorn as a jilted lover.

Inside, though, it was light-filled and open. Damaged and neglected, but it had a good feeling in spite of that. It contained 1,030 square feet on one level, three bedrooms (one of which was quite tiny), and one small bathroom.

We left, to think about it for a while, and returned to our 1,870 square foot, two-storey, 1908 brick house, on a huge lot in The Trendy Neighborhood. Just before Christmas, over dinner with friends, we talked about the little house. We realized we’d become intrigued by it. Our friends thought we were joking.

Sitting in the old house a few days later, it occurred to me that for some 30 years, save a couple in a 1950’s apartment building, I’d been living in structures built before World War One. My personal architectural (and décor) tastes are modern. “Comfortable Modern”, I would call it, as opposed to the hard-edged, pared down aesthetic that deploys lots of concrete, steel and stone --- and not much wood, fabric or softness.

Either mode of modernism contrasts starkly with the sort of houses and other buildings I’d been living in. Like all architecture, buildings constructed in the 19th and early 20th centuries reflect well their times and the social milieu in which they were created.

Houses tend to be rather vertical (up-right, if not narrow) and have a limited amount of windows (don’t look inside). They also have a lot of single-purpose rooms (compartments) and doors in every doorway, which can be closed and locked (this one speaks for itself).

Because of this, and their formal floor plans, they tend to be rather dark. High ceilings don’t help much with this, but do create more cubic feet of air that need to be heated or moved around.

In the middle of January we returned to the 1955 ranch, in The Decidedly Untrendy Neighborhood, to have another look. It was colder this time, the ground covered in snow. While the snow camouflaged the weed-ridden ground, it made the house look more desolate. Neither foot prints through the snow nor tire tracks to the carport. It was not encouraging.

We went inside anyway. Daylight cascaded though the windows. Three weeks past the Winter Solstice, and the days were beginning to reach once more for Summer. The sky was clearing off into one of those stunning sunny days that happen here, making even 30 degrees seem warm.

It was not up to 30 degrees, however, and the house was not warm. It was dirty. Cheap, gray carpet covered the oak flooring in the living and dining areas. The place was owned by a bank in California, which had someone paint every ceiling and wall with stark white, semi-gloss paint. Not carefully. Over-spray marked the oak floor here and there. Perhaps they thought it would make the home seem brighter. It accentuated the cold.

Eventually, we decided to buy the house and sell our old home. I had thought about the new place (Rancho Pequeño) sufficiently to put down some ideas about renovation --- and how to accommodate my office. The price was good, the neighborhood reasonably middle class and the area was much quieter than The Trendy Neighborhood. The house also fit into our goal of shedding excess possessions and de-complicating our life.

In addition, it presented me with an opportunity to design and build something for us. Rather remarkably, I had never done this in the 26 years I’d had my own architectural practice. Well, once before, many years ago, but realization of that project floundered on a divorce.

The bank that owned the property, and their real estate agent, seemed thoroughly disinterested in selling it. There had been no “for sale” sign in the yard. This was a year or so before America was swamped by a foreclosure disaster. The bank, which probably stood to make little or no money on the sale, felt no sense of urgency whatsoever. Time drifted by (an offer made, a counter-offer awaited). Meanwhile, we laid plans for remaking of our lives.

Eventually, the sale went through. The first thing we did after the closing was rip out the nasty gray carpet. Meeko the Wonder Dog assisted, in her own special way.

During the long interval between offer and closing, I had designed the renovation of our new home, and an addition for my office. There was also time to research the history of the house and its designer.


A Brief Digression Regarding Cliff May

Rancho Pequeño is one of about 174 ranch style homes built on six double-length blocks and two adjacent half-blocks, in 1955 and 1956. All of the houses have board-and-batten siding and vaulted ceilings throughout. The builder, T. Mitchell Burns, was the developer of the area (Harvey Park, in southwest Denver) and was also a real estate agent.

The houses themselves were designed by Cliff May, with his partner, Chris Choate. May lived in Southern California, where he had been designing custom and tract homes since the 1930’s. Cliff May was already well known in California through publications which featured his work and helped popularize his designs. One of the most prominent of these was Sunset Magazine, for which he designed a headquarters building.

A native Californian, he was deeply influenced by the mild climate of Southern California and the heritage of its large Mexican ranches (ranchos). He was descended, on his mother’s side, from one of these rancheros. As he stated in 1946, “A ranch house, because of its name alone, borrows friendliness, implicitly, informality, and gaiety from the men and women who, in the past, found those pleasures in ranch-house living.” (Cliff May and the California Ranch House, a research paper by Laura Gallegos; available on the cliffmayrancho.com website)

Cliff and his architectural partner, Chris Choate, designed and patented a system of prefabricating wall panels that would speed the construction process and lower costs for both builder and home owner. Panels were 80” high and 64” or 32” wide. Atop the wall panels, on each long side of the house, was placed a continuous 4” x 8” redwood beam. The 2x6 roof structure rested on a 6” x 14” wood beam that ran down the center of the house, supported by two 4x4 redwood posts in the middle of the span.

This prefabrication system was franchised to builders around the country (the “Cliff May-Chris Choate Manufacturer-Distributor System”). They were licensed to build the parts and assemble the homes, within specific territories. T. Mitchell Burns, for example, had the distributorship for all of Colorado and New Mexico, and the eastern half of Wyoming.

Cliff May Homes provided sales literature, and some national advertising as well. Eight floor plans were available. Of these, Burns built three in his Harvey Park development. These were modified for local conditions by changing French doors to singles with an adjacent fixed door panel and adding a fireplace to each floor plan. The floor plan shown below is the one for our house.

Burns created variety in the layouts by flipping or reversing floor plans, and by varying the arrangement of the house and detached carport on the sites. Some houses are closer, some farther, from the street. Some have carports in front of their houses, some are to the side, and so forth. All this manipulation yielded a streetscape that is incredibly varied compared to the usual 1950’s subdivision. Of course, additions, renovations and alterations over the years have varied the mix even more.

For more information about Cliff May, check out this website:
http://www.cliffmayrancho.com/


Back to the Rancho

We were gripped by the realization that we had just taken on two home renovation projects at once: work to prepare The Trendy Victorian for sale; and work needed to make the Rancho habitable. Little did we realize that most of the next year would be spent working on one or the other of these two projects.


Demolition and Discovery

Like all renovation projects, ours began with demolition. Following the dreadful gray carpet out the door were the kitchen cabinets (original, heavily painted over, and otherwise unremarkable). This proved to be a larger task than anticipated, because of the countertops. A previous owner had installed white ceramic tile over the original turquoise plastic laminate (Formica) countertops. They were enormously heavy.

The original ell-shaped, half wall separating the kitchen from the living and dining areas had been removed in the 1960’s (we would have taken it out anyway). The kitchen floor was next to go. It followed the layering theme of the countertops. On top were black and white vinyl tiles, laid checkerboard fashion over sheet vinyl flooring. This in turn was glued to a layer of ¼” plywood, which had been nailed into the diagonally-laid wood subflooring. As soon became evident, the nails had been driven through a final layering of vinyl asbestos tiles over more ¼” plywood. The whole mess was filthy, it was heavy and it was a constant threat to our hands and feet.

A roll-off dumpster was ordered up, lest we become hemmed in by refuse. It (and another one like it) would be needed. The roof had original, rock wool insulation (nasty stuff), but the walls had nothing. Therefore, we decided to insulate them. This required removing all the drywall from all the exterior walls. Messy, and difficult. Burns had used foil-faced fiberglass reinforced gypsum board in his Cliff May houses. This was assuredly the hardest drywall I have ever had anything to do with. It was also pale pink. Many hundreds of pounds of it went into the dumpsters.

Because of the design of the exterior wall panels, which included an x-brace within, it was impossible leave the drywall, drill holes at 16” intervals, and blow in insulation. It was also not feasible to use typical fiberglass batt insulation in the walls, once the drywall was off. Besides, fiberglass is not terribly environment-friendly. Therefore, we opted to install blown-in cellulose. Much of the insulation was recycled paper product (some of it newspaper, from the look of it). It had the advantages of being “green”, lower cost and very insulating.

We also removed and replaced a couple of interior walls. The bathroom, as noted, was tiny and called for a little more space. At the north end of the house, we removed two closets, so we could join the two bedrooms into one and create new closets.

Rancho Pequeño was commencing its transformation! The succeeding stages of this transformation will be talked about in coming posts.

Thanks for reading.

The First Step

In about six weeks my life-partner and I will set forth on a trip to South-East Asia. We will be going to Lao and Viet Nam. This will be her first time in that part of the world. For me, to Viet Nam at least, it will be a return trip, after an absence of forty years.

The first time I traveled to Viet Nam was in October, 1969. We had just flown for what seemed like days across the Pacific, from Ft. Lewis, Washington, to Guam, to Viet Nam. The atmosphere on the flight was subdued, interrupted by occasional outbursts of bravado.

It was night when we arrived in Sai Gon. Hot dampness rose from the tarmac and enveloped us as the door opened and we stepped out into an unwelcome world. Some of us would leave again in 365 days. Others would leave sooner, though not in the seats.

My arrival in Viet Nam marked the beginning of my second year in the Army. 1968 had been a year of almost incomprehensible upheaval, in America and in Viet Nam. In January, the North Vietnamese Army, aided by Viet Cong guerrilla forces, launched a massive military offensive all across South Viet Nam. Many, many people died. Some cities, particularly the former imperial capital of Hue, suffered tremendous damage. The offensive was beaten back. However, as many have noted over the years, it was a political victory for North Viet Nam. Scenes of war played endlessly on television, putting the lie to military and government claims of success in Viet Nam.

This sort of visual connection with war had never happened before. Anyone with a television could see film of Americans slogging across flooded rice paddies, cutting their way through tangled jungle - fighting and dying. Previously, views of war had consisted mostly of black and white, still photographs, which froze the moment while creating some distance between the viewer and the action depicted. Television erased that distance in the late 1960’s.

In March, 1968, Lyndon Johnson went on national television to state that he would not seek, nor would he accept, his party’s nomination for a second presidential term. This set in motion an unanticipated political rush among other Democrats who believed they could lead the country through difficult times. And the times became more difficult.

As American efforts in Viet Nam unraveled, the civil rights movement at home gained momentum. On April 4th, the most prominent leader of that movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. American cities were devoured by rage and flames, as many Black Americans responded viscerally to Dr. King’s violent death. At my college in northern Texas, black students – with whom we had little contact - drifted across the campus in angry knots.

Two months later, in Los Angeles, Robert F. Kennedy won the California Democratic Primary for the presidency. He was shot dead that evening, just after his victory celebration, and new violence rose up.

The summer of 1968 came to a close in Chicago, as the Democratic Party met for their national convention. It stands (and I hope it continues to stand for a very long time) as the most contentious, divisive and bloodiest of American political conventions. As the whole world watched, Chicago cops beat anti-war protesters senseless while the Democratic Party imploded inside the convention hall. No one could be blamed for wondering if America was falling apart. I did.

The American dreams we had been taught growing up in the years after World War Two – freedom, justice, equality – were jaundiced and shattered. Cynical real politik collided with idealism. We really did believe those dreams! But, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, with the birth of a civil rights movement in the South and growing involvement in a far-off war, for obscure reasons (domino theory?), many people realized that our dreams, our self-image as Americans, were no longer accurate - and perhaps never had been. And people reacted to this realization in many different ways.

Within this tattered skein I was experiencing rising depression and sinking college grades. My life seemed without purpose or direction. And there was another layer to it. I was also idealistic and patriotic (and still am…in altered form). Despite all that had happened in the preceding nine or ten months, I felt Viet Nam was my generation’s war, just as my parents’ generation had to fight World War Two. Who was I, then - white child of privilege and college opportunity - to avoid this war when so many others had little or no choice in the matter?

That October, I left college and joined the United States Army. I was 21, and I wanted to change my life. In this, I was wildly successful – though in ways I could not foresee that Autumn. The first immediate success was in getting me out of Dallas. I was shipped off to Ft. Bliss, Texas, outside El Paso. An ill-named place, Ft. Bliss. There I had a number of first-time experiences: integration; regimentation; pre-dawn runs; verbal abuse; pneumonia.

The pneumonia was a result of the Drill Sergeants’ insistence on leaving windows open and the air conditioning system running, even though it was 35 – 40 degrees outside. By the 5th week of Basic Training I was very sick. By the 6th week, I was hospitalized. Mildly criminal behavior, of the “that which does not kill you makes you strong” school. No charges were filed, of course, but it did keep me from participating in the “final exam” of Basic Training: an obstacle course with a bit of live fire over your head to make sure you got the point.

No big surprise, I was graduated from Basic Training anyway. It ended just before Christmas, 1968. I went home with completely red eyes from all the coughing I had been doing. The red eyes and my new uniform gave me a rather forbidding appearance. Photographs from that Christmas show me wearing dark sunglasses, regardless of the time of day or night. In one photo, taken Christmas Day at my aunt and uncle’s farm, I am in uniform (with the dark sunglasses) and wearing a black armband. I told everyone it was in memory of those who had already died in the war.

Such a new soldier and already disenchanted.

After Christmas I reported to Ft. Ord, California, near Monterey. During the following eight weeks, I was filled with the distilled wisdom of an Army fighting an anti-guerrilla war in South-East Asia, amidst a culture almost completely unlike ours (save their humanity, which, far from being discussed, was simply denigrated).

We fired a lot of different weapons, marched through woods and over sand dunes, got filthy, wet and cold, ate mediocre food, and generally became at least a little familiar with how we would be living during our year in Viet Nam. Except for death, amputation, or emotional distress. Those things were not discussed.

Yet, they are among those things that people have a sense of, a kind of understanding without really knowing. The kind of things people don’t like to talk about very much. People are especially loath to talk about them when they are caught in an inescapable situation, confronting the almost daily possibility of death.

Emotional distress was probably the least understood of these. But that’s a story for another time.

Towards the end of my infantry training, in March, 1969, I had the opportunity to apply for Non-Commissioned Officer School (NCOS). I had no particular leadership aspirations. However, going through the NCOS program would delay my going to Viet Nam by several months.

Amidst the general social disarray, Richard Nixon had been elected President the previous November. So-called “Vietnamization” (turning the mess over to our South Vietnamese allies) was accelerated and Nixon had actually begun to withdraw some military units from South Viet Nam.

I leapt at the chance and was accepted. Nixon had a “secret plan” to end the war, and everyone hoped he would bring it to an early end.

What followed were several months at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and Ft. Polk, Louisiana. It was all really just an expanded version of infantry training, with some leadership classes added in. “Follow Me” was their motto. Not that anyone really wanted to follow anyone else to Viet Nam in 1969.

Nixon’s secret plan remained a secret and the last American troops did not leave Viet Nam until March, 1973. Instead, for me and a few thousand others, the war was just beginning. And, on the night of October 14th, 1969, in the dark heat of Sai Gon, it did begin.


October, 1969: An opinion poll indicates 71 percent of Americans approve of President Nixon’s Viet Nam policy.

October 15, 1969: The “Moratorium” peace demonstration is held in Washington and several U.S. cities. Demonstration organizers had received praises from North Vietnam's Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, who stated in a letter to them "...may your fall offensive succeed splendidly," marking the first time Hanoi publicly acknowledged the American anti-war movement. Dong's comments infuriate American conservatives including Vice President Spiro Agnew who lambastes the protesters as Communist "dupes" composed of "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."

Over the next few weeks I will write of my experiences in Viet Nam forty years ago, as well as other topics that interest me. In March and April I will be writing about my turas through Viet Nam and Lao.


Thanks for reading.