THE BOYS OF BATTERY B – Introduction – Drafts from My Next Book Project
Charlie on the left, and Little Doc, our medic
To my mind imagination is the spice of life. There is nothing so uninteresting as a fact, for when you know it that is the end of it. Nelson Lloyd, The Last Ghost in Harmony
This is the story of Battery B, a collection of six cannons and a hundred or so guys, mostly teenagers, tromping around the Central Highlands of Vietnam. These are the experiences of the boys who were there, not the dusty facts in history books, but the red blooded adventures of everyday life in Vietnam.
We aren’t boys anymore by a long shot. Vietnam was so long ago that we do not recognize ourselves in the pictures we brought home. Is that me: so young, so vital, so forested with hair? Now when we meet a comrade for the first time since Vietnam we have only the image of the boy and cannot believe he is the elderly man before us.
Then the stories begin, knitting together again the bonds that held us close during that long ago war.
Andy Kach ribs Hank Parker, his old battery commander, for not sending him to the rear sooner for treatment of a wound to his jaw.
Captain Parker says in his defense, “I didn’t know you were that bad. During that time if you could pull a trigger you stayed.”
“I was leaking from my ear!” says Andy. ‘”If you knew that would you have sent me earlier?”
Parker laughs, “Probably not.”
One-story pulls forward another. The stories – born of chaos and confusion – now have structure, plots and punch lines, because memory is creative, it organizes the original mess into tidy dramas we love to tell and that we thrill to hear.
Everyone’s stories are true, even when they paint different pictures of the same event. That’s where the fun is, seeing how each of us rebuilds his past.
Parker tells anyone writing his memoir, “You write it as you remember it. Don’t change it for anybody, it’s your story.”
Most of us did not serve together. The enlisted guys were with the battery for a year, while officers moved every six months or so. But everybody overlaps with someone, forming a chain from the time the battery landed in Vietnam in 1965 to it’s deactivation in 1971. Linked together, our stories tell the story of battery B.
I start with a list of guys who served with the battery and begin to contact them. Some guys let out they don’t want to talk at all and I leave them be. Some tell me they will not talk about certain things, I get that. Others claim they don’t have much to offer and talk for an hour. A blessed few you can’t shut up.
My only tool is a digital recorder, a Tascam DR – 40, which I use so I don’t miss a syllable. I want to get the stories right and not let my memory of the conversation color the story, or worse, strip it of its raw, original telling.
We are scattered all over the country, like seed cast to the wind. I talk to guys by telephone, but I visit in person when I can, traveling to Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, Florida. They show me the treasures brought back from Vietnam: maps, pictures, cigarette lighters, journals.
Mike Lauricella drags out the box the Army sent home to his parents after declaring him missing in action. He shows me official orders, patches, services ribbons and a stack of picture albums. “After getting out of the hospital I don’t remember anything, and can’t make sense of half the stuff in this box.”
Even over the telephone emotions resonate.
John Crosby, admired for his leadership as battalion commander and now a retired three star general, talks as if the war were yesterday. “One thing I really was remiss about as a commander, and this is a confession, OK? I deeply regret that I did not get those guys that did really good work, and put them in for a Bronze Star or something like that to recognize the good work that they did. I went to Washington and I saw these guys getting’ these damn medals and everything for doin’ nothin’. I thought about the soldiers that we had that were out there every single day in the trenches, isolated and facing danger every day – and I didn’t take care of them.”
The veterans I see in my travels and encounter at the other end of the telephone line are never aging men on the downside of life. They are now young again and full of vinegar. They are the boys of Battery B.
These stories will eventually be published as a book, The Boys of Battery B. I will post the chapters on this blog as they come off my keyboard, in their first unedited state. I hope you enjoy the journey.
Conjuncti Stamus – We Stand Together - Motto of the 27th Field Artillery Regiment, home of Battery B
