My Father's Vietnam Page #2

You weren't going to see action.

I looked into the Army.

The Army had a program-

And I was about to be

drafted as far as I knew...

If you sign up for officer candidate

school, and at any point wash out,

you get the time you spent in training

subtracted from a two-year draft.

So my mind is cranking away

and I'm thinking to myself,

it takes a couple months for Basic, a couple

months for Advanced Individual Training,

however long I could

play out OCS,

and then if you, again,

throw in the towel-

If I played it right, I would

have either less than a year...

And at that point if you had less than

a year, they weren't shipping you out-

So I would come

pretty close to a year.

If I had done something other than go, my

father probably would have been disappointed.

But in terms of my family, I received

no input either to go or not to go,

whether it's a good idea

or bad idea.

I think he cared about his father's

impression of him, but I'm not sure...

but I also think he resented it.

[Peter] It would have been

an embarrassment probably,

because there was

a stigma attached.

Again, if you go back to

that era, in a neighborhood,

if somebody was evading, if somebody went to

Canada or something, the neighbors talked.

[Soren] Perhaps America's hindsight

perception of '60s counterculture, hippies,

and the sexual revolution

produces the illusion

of a greater protest

movement than actually existed.

As much as I can't imagine enlisting in

the military during the Vietnam era,

for my father and Ring Bailey,

evading, avoiding, dodging the draft,

or going to Canada

weren't really options.

When I contacted Ring Bailey's

widow Maris to request

an interview she respectfully

declined, stating,

"The years since Ring's

death have done little to soften

my heartache

and anger over his loss."

Maris put me in touch

with her brother Rik,

who invited me to his home

in Burlington, Vermont.

Rik's deaf in his left ear, so he received a

4F designation, meaning unfit for service,

upon completing his physical.

He told me the outcome of the physical

didn't matter. He wasn't going to Vietnam.

Does it look like me?

I would have gone to jail.

They sent draft resisters to a

Allenwood prison farm in Pennsylvania.

It's minimum security.

There's no barbed wire.

Ring became

my sister's boyfriend.

Ring was two years older than me

and he became a mentor.

He went to Trinity

College in Hartford.

He was really smart.

And I really liked him,

and here he was with my sister,

and we hung out together.

So that's how I met him, and he

eventually married my sister.

You know, that's Ring.

And by gosh, the telephone

call that I received

the night that he went

down to Fort Dix was,

"Hey, Dad, I'm in the infantry!"

Well, you take Rings glasses off and

he couldn't see a hundred yards,

and make out anything without

glasses, in a hundred yards.

But here he was in the infantry.

Well, okay. So, you'll

learn how to march.

Ring liked automobiles. He was

a real automobile enthusiast.

His father was

an automobile enthusiast.

His father had

a XK140 Jaguar coupe.

Most of them are roadsters, this

one was a coupe. It was swooping.

And I learned the appreciation

of these automobiles from Ring.

He drew cars, he knew race cars, he

had little die-cast miniature cars.

He collected them and now I do.

He had a Bugeye Sprite.

Before he went to Vietnam, he bought a Bugeye

Sprite, and I bought a 1600 Fiat roadster.

And in his time off before

he went to Vietnam,

we worked on these

two cars and we drove around.

Fun.

With a cloud over your head fun.

[Soren] My father met

Ring Bailey in 1969 at OCS,

Officer Candidate School,

in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

They were both aspiring writers, Hemingway

fans from small Southern New England towns.

And the seemingly insignificant common ground

they shared led to an alliance that almost

spared them both from service

outside the United States.

[Peter] He was gonna be a journalist.

He wanted to go into writing.

And he found a colonel who was looking

for people to write training manuals.

And the colonel said, "I need a

half-dozen or I need four writers."

And he got the job, and he said,

go down there, and he said, "We'll spend

the next year outside of Washington."

He was married,

I was about to get married.

He said, we'll spend...

either a year or a year-plus

writing training manuals

at Fort Belvoir

which is a suburb of

Washington DC with our spouses.

What could be better?

In any case I went down,

interviewed, got the job,

and in both cases our orders

for Vietnam got cut

before the orders

for the writing job.

[Soren] My father and Ring both

decided against finishing OCS

and were sent

to different bases.

They weren't gung ho by

any stretch of the imagination.

Neither were countless other Americans

who found themselves in Vietnam.

Selective service and self-preservation

were not as contradictory

then as they seem to be today.

When my father received word that he

would be shipping out in October of '69,

my parents had to move their wedding

up from September to August.

People in my mother's hometown, Wheeling, West

Virginia, were convinced she was pregnant.

The day that he left for Vietnam, my

parents didn't feel comfortable having me

drive him to the airport

because I was gonna be upset.

And so they arranged a bus trip

or a limo trip for him,

so the thing came

around the circle.

I remember vividly

saying goodbye to him

and opening that door and having

him walk and get in that car.

[Peter] It could have

been Air America,

but it was a commercial flight

with stewards and stewardesses,

although we were

wearing jungle fatigues.

We landed in Hawaii

and Guam for refueling,

but essentially other

than the fatigues...

I don't recall

an in-flight movie,

but we had meals and it was

like nothing was happening.

And on the way down, everybody was sort

of hanging onto their seat and concerned,

because we're in this commercial setting...

it was just a regular airplane flight,

and the next thing we knew, we were

at a 45-degree angle coming down.

When we landed, I asked one of the

stewardesses what the story was

and she said when we get to

Vietnam, we do military landings

to lessen the exposure

to enemy fire.

And on the way down, it was like we were looking

at each other like we're not gonna make it.

We're not even gonna land this plane, or

there's been a mechanical difficulty.

We saw the South China Sea, we saw

Vietnam, and the next thing we knew,

we were just...

seemingly crash-landing.

We hit the deck,

they open the door,

and once it was open it was like a blast

furnace, it went from an air conditioned cabin,

originating flight from

Fort Louis, Washington,

and the heat and humidity

was unbearable.

It was just very difficult

to communicate.

Within two hours I was on the perimeter of

Cam Ranh Bay stringing Concertina wire,

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