Vietnam: The War I Went Looking For

I encourage you to watch the video, as there are many more photos and archival footage. Plus, it’s always wonderful to hear Armistead tell his stories in his own voice. For those of you who prefer the written version, here’s a transcript of the video. (Note: This is a long post and may be truncated by some email providers.)When I ended my first tour of duty, came home from Naples and Malta, I finally lost my virginity. It’s such a quaint, old-fashioned way to put it, but I had sex with a man for the first time, or something approaching sex. It happened on the Battery in Charleston, on the spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. I’ve spoken about that on another episode, something called, appropriately enough, “The Summer of ’69.” It felt monumental to me at the time. I guess it still does. Until you give yourself permission to enjoy your sexuality, your life hasn’t started.

In spite of that roll in the hay, I was still very much a frightened young conservative trying to please my father. And I think you can see something of that in this letter that I wrote home.

I wrote this from the Grand Harbor in Valletta, Malta actually:

“I have just finished reading The Caine Mutiny. The ensign who tells the story is RPS custodian and a comm officer, so I completely identified with his confusion. It is the most exciting book I have read in years, and yet, it depressed me too. I feel as if I have discovered the Second World War several decades late. All of the things that you used to tell me about Daddy, all of the stories about the YMS-195 and the South Pacific, seem so human and real now.

What depresses me is the realization that this war of mine is pretty much of a fraud as wars go. I don’t mean that there isn’t a communist threat—I just mean that I don’t feel that I’m doing much about it. I have the completely uncharacteristic urge to be shot at, or maybe just frightened a little. There were certain times last year at OCS when I felt a very solid sort of contentment. I felt that way because I was in a cold, barren place far away from home and my future was as uncertain as it had ever been in my life.

I guess that sounds pretty crazy, but I felt good about what I was doing. I used to take walks in the snow, in the evening during liberty hours, and look at the old temporary frame buildings and the drill field and the icy bay and feel comfortably desolate. I actually enjoyed the deprivation, because there was a direction to it and a funny sense of doing something that had been done before. So now I have to come to my war and it is all about “can-do” tenders and trumped-up church services and obligatory cocktail parties. I don’t pretend to hate all of it, but I won’t ever brag about it.

Back in Charleston, the news came that Captain Tidd had been assigned to work at the Navy headquarters in Saigon. And so I wrote him and asked him if I could come be with him. I liked him that much. I trusted him that much. And I guess I kind of figured he wouldn’t get me killed.

So I put in the request. And it wasn’t too long before I shipped out. “Shipped out” is probably the worst term for it. We left on a military charter on Braniff Airlines with stewardesses in hot pink Pucci dresses. What I remember about it was that a bunch of guys at Travis Air Force Base, before we took off, got s*******d. The problem with that was that at the same time there were people coming back from Vietnam who were filling everyone’s ears with how gruesome it had been. I remember them saying, “You f*****g have no f*****g idea, man. You have no idea.” And that rattled everybody and made them get drunker. And they were sobering up on this sixteen-hour flight to Saigon.

When we finally did set down in Saigon, the stewardesses had this melodramatic way of saying, “We hope we’ll be able to take all of you back a year from now,” which is really a morbid thing to say because obviously some of those people might not be taken back a year later.

The morbid tone continued when we took the bus ride into Saigon. The guy who was driving the bus, who must have been very bored with his job, told us that if we saw anybody on a bicycle throw anything onto the side of the bus, to please tear it off the bus and throw it away. Of course, all we saw were bicycles. They were everywhere. And the guy was having fun with us. We didn’t know. We were adjusting our feelings to every new thing that came along.

When we got into the Navy compound, it was surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags. It looked quite foreboding, but once you got inside, it had an almost bucolic feeling to it. There were banyan trees and banana trees, and it felt very peaceful. It felt like something out of a Bogart movie, especially the admiral’s quarters. The sight of it soothed me.

I ended up working on the second floor with a yeoman named Cloud. I remember his name still after fifty years because it was a very popular song by Judy Collins then:

“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow…”

He was not pleased with it, but I thought it was amusing.

Cloud and I were basically travel agents for the Navy. We booked people on flights, usually American dignitaries, both pro and against the war, to come and experience it firsthand, to see what was happening. And so that meant flying to all sorts of remote locations.

That was where I first got my glimpse of how other GIs and sailors were living. I’d be in some tiny outpost somewhere, and they’d be there in their faded greens and looking very much in tune with their surroundings. And I wanted that for myself. I wanted to wear the faded greens. I wanted to have the experience of being in that war in such a picturesque place. I didn’t want to get killed. I was not after that, and I didn’t want to kill anybody. But I loved the idea of being out in the boondocks.

Back in Saigon, my life consisted often of taking Mouza Zumwalt, the wife of Admiral Zumwalt, on shopping trips in Saigon. She lived in Manila, I think, but she came over for conjugal visits with her husband. She was a beautiful woman and very intelligent. And she kind of reminded me of Patricia Neal at the time, the actress Patricia Neal.

We went shopping at one point for those ceramic elephants, the big things that you sit a cocktail glass on or something. And there were all sorts of kinds of them available, so it was fun to look for them with her. She would send them to friends back in the States.

They were called BUFEs. She never knew why. I knew why they were called BUFEs, because it stood for “big, ugly f*****g elephant.” And I never had the heart to tell her, although she might have thought that was very funny. I don’t know.

Her husband, Admiral Zumwalt, was an imposing figure. He had these big, bristly dark eyebrows, and he wore sometimes some Filipino shirt through which you could see his black chest hair. He was a very kind man. He later went on to become Chief of Naval Operations in the States, where he was considered one of the more liberal of the military. I liked him a lot.

And, of course, I liked Admiral Tidd, who was working longer hours than I was, so I rarely saw him. Zumwalt’s name was Elmo R. Zumwalt, and so, you know, naturally they adopted a less dorky nickname for him, which was Bud. People who knew him called him Bud Zumwalt.

I met his son, Bud Jr. or was it Bud III? We went out and got drunk together several times. He was stationed out in the boonies, so I was glad to give him a little R&R in the city.

A lot of the guys on Admiral Z’s staff kept what they called short-timer’s calendars, which were basically Playboy Playmates or nude women of some sort whose parts you colored in as the days wore on. And at the end you would end up in the pubic region and then you’d leave the country. I never had anything like that.

My efforts at looking straight were much more clever than that. I went on one occasion with a friend to a place called Mimi’s Scientific Steam Bath. Mimi was legendary. She had all gold teeth and she gave b******s to the GIs, basically. I understand she was putting two daughters through the Sorbonne. She came into the cubicle with me and put up a valiant effort, poor thing. I ended up saying “beaucoup sai,” which means “very drunk,” excusing myself, and we left it at that.

On another occasion, I took a Tu Do Street tea girl to a Dracula movie, oddly enough. She’d never seen anything like it, and I tried to explain what Dracula was, but it disturbed her as much as anything, I think. But she ended up wanting me to buy her things, buy her a dress, as I recall. She reminded me of Liat from South Pacific, the native girl in that film. And I took a picture of the two of us together that I could send home to my family so that my father could, you know, get a chuckle out of it and think, “The boy’s doing well for himself over there.”

Everything I was doing with them at that point was for effect. And it embarrasses me to admit it now. I wish I could admit it to my father now. It’s been a long time since he’s been gone. But I was trying very hard to make the world think that I was straight because I wasn’t comfortable with myself yet. I was all about effect and subterfuge. I enjoyed being a fish out of water. I fancied myself as a bumbling lieutenant in a Jack Lemmon movie about the Navy. I could see myself playing that role.

I was beginning to wonder if that was the right movie for me at all because I had such a cushy life in Saigon. I was beginning to feel guilty about the war I had, which consisted of cocktail parties sometimes and being what they called a “staff puke.” There was a vast gulf between the life I was living in Saigon and the guys that I had seen out in the field in faded greens.

So I eventually appealed to Captain Tidd to send me to the boonies. He was reluctant because I think he knew that I was a total fish out of water. He knew I had not received any military training in the States or elsewhere that could put me into that kind of danger. And so I ended up being sent to some place called Danger University, which was a training ground for people who needed to know how to work on the front lines.

I was the only Navy man at Danger University when I went, which made me somewhat of a novelty. It was an Army installation, so I was mercilessly teased. And they called me “Navy.”

Which was something of a relief because I’d been called Army for a long time by people who thought it was a cute way to shorten my name. I hated it when people called me Army. I still hate it to this day. It’s not my favorite nickname.

But there I was with all these Army fellas, learning how to shoot an M16 and to wear a gas mask. Outside the walls of our little training camp, I could hear actual gunfire going on. The real war was just outside the place. I’d never heard it—never been that close to it before. It didn’t rattle me exactly, but I really became aware of the irony that I was pursuing something that was going to take me closer to that noise, the heat of war.

Around this time, I wrote to my parents to let them know that I was asking to be transferred to the field. And my mother, predictably, immediately became worried about that.

She said, “Teddy, you’ve always had a Lawrence of Arabia complex.”

And she didn’t know at the time that Lawrence of Arabia was queer, but it was the closest I ever got to a real description of who I was. My father pretended he was gruff about it, but I think was secretly proud that I was going to war finally.

There were several false starts before the Navy finally settled on the right post for me. One was a very tiny and remote place on the Cambodian border called Chi Lang. I had met a monkey there who was called Ass Breath by the people who cared for the monkey. And I posed with him for a great picture.

Another was a place called Moc Hoa, as I recall. And it became, in my mind, the place that I was going to. I didn’t end up going there, but Moc Hoa became symbolic to me of what I wanted out of the war.

Back in Saigon, I realized that I was going to have to set free my parrot. It was only one parrot now. I had originally had two parrots called Ong and Ba, meaning man and woman, but Ong had died while I was away on some sort of expedition. And my mama-san, who took care of the room, was so distressed about it—or she wanted proof, I guess, that I’d lost the parrot—so she wrapped it in tinfoil and set it on the air conditioner.

The other one was in a cage that I had built for her. It had to be metal because she had broken out of the bamboo cage that they sold me in the market. She wasn’t happy with the cage. She wasn’t happy with me. It was not a good marriage.

So I decided I would set her free. I went to the window and opened the window and kind of shooed her. She didn’t leave right away. But eventually she did, and I saw her take off into the night sky.

And I wrote my parents rather dramatically and said, “Even parrots have their Moc Hoas.” Which shows me more clearly than ever what a posturing little thing I was at the time. I was a total popinjay at that point. But I thought it was a dramatic thing because I was feeling my move that was about to come on.

I felt at that point like I was about to be freed from my cage in Saigon and that I was going to go to a place where I could experience the camaraderie of men and find freedom—real freedom—as strange as that sounds now. But I did, and I wrote about it. I’ll tell you about it the next time we meet, about my time in Chau Doc, Vietnam.

Thank you for coming along today, and I look forward to seeing you next time.

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