Roy Exum
It was no more than a postcard, printed on red paper, and probably posted “third class” back then. But it was the most ominous, horrifying document you could ever imagine. It said your “number” had been called and to put your affairs in order – you had been drafted. This was at the beginning of the most intense fighting in the Viet Nam war (forget “conflict,” friends were killed) and my personal notice came in December of 1967.
In the coldest language possible, I was “ordered” to report in February of 1968. The day my notice arrived, a pall fell over my family. My oldest brother, Kinch, was already in Viet Nam with the Marines and we’d gotten word that of 42 that set out in his platoon on one mission, just two got out of the jungle. One was Kinch.
My brother carried the dead body of his best friend for over four miles before he had to hide the corpse. He and the other survivor were being chased and hunted and Kinch never got over the fact he didn’t carry his pal out in what was a three-day escape. Truth of the matter is he never got over Viet Nam and, when he died in 2004, cancer was everywhere in his body. It was highly suspect it was from repeated dousing of “agent orange” in Viet Nam.
All of this came back vividly over the weekend when The Washington Post printed a magnificent story about a reunion being held this week, starting tomorrow. The stunning tribute, written by Michael Ruane, unfortunately will not mean as much to those like me who lived through it but Ruane masterfully awakens the demons people my age will never forget.
We’ll also never forget Viet Nam was unpopular, albeit unnecessary, yet that those in Marine Officers School, Class 5-67, were among the most valiant heroes this country has ever boasted. I remember that the average life span for a raw lieutenant in Viet Nam was less than 30 days. Of Class 5-67, a full 39 were killed – two on the very first day -- and many others were maimed, both physically and mentally. This week’s 50th Reunion is far more than just a gathering of old acquaintances.
In a way I hope my brother would expect of me, allow me to share an excerpt of Michael Ruane’s story that appeared in The Washington Post on April 29, 2017, because this capsule portrait stands as a vivid testament to the greatest sons and daughters the United States has ever known:
* * *
‘YOU WERE A DAMN GOOD SKIPPER, SIR!’
(An excerpt from the Washington Post, “The Lucky Ones,” written by Michael Ruane, April 29, 2017)
Second Lt. Paul Barents was setting up a night ambush south of the Vietnamese town Phu Bai when he got a radio call from his captain to be alert for an attack from across a river behind him.
He passed the warning to his front-line Marines, and in a crouch began making his way through the underbrush to warn men he had posted in the rear.
It was Dec. 7, 1967. Barents had been in Vietnam about 10 weeks and had yet to see much action.
He and Kathryn, then 22, had been a married only a short time.
They were both from Massachusetts, she via northern New Jersey. They had met while they were college students, working in the kitchen of a dining hall at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
They had hit it off, and were married June 17 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in South Orange, N.J. He wore his dress white uniform. She was in a white wedding gown.
He had joined the Marine Corps right out of college. He believed it was an outfit with purpose, and he went to Vietnam “thinking we were doing a noble thing,” he said. “I really did.” Doubt emerged mainly in hindsight, he said.
He had been hesitant about marriage because he knew he would be going to the war.
But Kathryn told him: “I’d rather be your wife for three months than not all.”
“Starting in 1965, ’66, we became more aware of the losses over there,” she said. “So by the time the class of ’67 went, we knew the fatalities were going to be pretty high.”
“I was prepared for that,” she said.
(Both of Paul’s roommates at the basic school and a fellow who lived across the hall were killed in action.)
The couple had lived in Woodbridge, Va., while he was at Quantico, and three months after their wedding they were saying goodbye at an airport in New York.
She drove their 1963 Pontiac back to her parents’ home in Andover, Mass., to await his return.
In Vietnam, he wrote Kathryn regularly and discussed, among other things, whether she should get her hair cut before they met in Hawaii when he had R&R.
“I wouldn’t mind if you cut your hair for Hawaii,” he wrote her nine days before he was wounded. “The only thing that has to be there is you.”
In another letter, he told her he had cut back on his smoking, and closed with, “Well, beautiful, I guess I better go.”
Now, as he crept back to his men in the darkness, a new Marine in the platoon mistook him for an enemy soldier and opened fire with an M-16 rifle. Barents had always trained his men to aim low at night, so as not to miss high, and the bullets ripped into his legs.
The slugs broke his right thigh bone, both bones in his lower left leg and lacerated critical arteries in both legs.
Barents collapsed, and hollered “Cease fire!” He asked his men to take off his boots, and someone gave him some shots of morphine.
Medevac was called. He was placed on a poncho and hoisted into the helicopter. Before it left, one of his men said, “You were a damn good skipper, sir, a damn good skipper.”
Barents was flown to Phu Bai, where he told a superior not to blame the man who shot him. “It was my fault,” he said. “I should have had some kind of better communications.”
On Dec. 18, his right leg was amputated above the knee, and on Dec. 29, his left leg was amputated below the knee. The left leg failed to heal and was later amputated above the knee.
Barents’s part of the war was over.
He regretted being unable to complete his tour and his service. Plus, he thought: “How the hell am I going to make a living?”
And he wondered how Kathryn would react. “I’m not the guy [she] married,” he said.
Back home, the commandant of the Marines had sent her a telegram reporting that Paul’s condition was “serious with his prognosis fair.”
“Okay,” she said she thought. “We knew this going in. . . . Just bring him home. We’ll be fine.”
But her young husband of a few months now had amputated legs.
“It was a game changer,” she said in a recent interview in their Maryland home. “It changed all our hopes and futures and plans and everything that we dreamed of.”
She wondered whether she would still be attracted to him. He was crippled. There would be no more dancing, no more walks on the beach, she said.
Some people said to her: Wouldn’t it be better if he had just been killed?
“No,” she replied. “I’m one of the lucky ones. He’s coming home.”
Paul was eventually moved to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where he would stay for 14 months. They were reunited there in early January 1968.
He was in bed when she walked in. She remembers that he weighed about 75 pounds.
He remembers that she looked terrific.
* * *
In 1967 and 1968, 28,300 Americans were killed in active combat in Viet Nam. This weekend, say a special prayer for Marine Officer Class 5-67. For those who came back, and for those who didn’t, because they were all “damn good skippers.”
royexum@aol.com