It's an interesting document, with lots of articles directly on-topic, an excerpt from Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried, and some articles less directly about the memorial.

One of the articles is by Lynda Van Devanter, who was a nurse at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku; these photographs, both of which were taken at the 71st, are among the illustrations. (This article, too, is a book excerpt, from Home Before Morning.)

My office phone rang. Since it was an external call, and I didn't recognize the number, odds were it was either a vendor or a wrong number. Nope; Lauren Morgan introduced herself as an editor with Boston Publishing, and she was working with Vietnam Veterans of America on a magazine issue. They'd found a couple of my pictures on Flickr, and wanted to use them to illustrate an article. I asked which photos they were planning to use, which she described, and I said sure. We talked about some details for a few minutes, and the conversation ended.

She called again last week, asking where to mail the complimentary copies. Those showed up yesterday. They're really quite beautiful; much higher quality than I anticipated. I do find it odd that she contacted me at work; while I've always known it was possible (I've had the same work phone number for 20 years, and it's available on the web), I'm reasonably certain it's easier to find my home number, which is where I usually field out-of-the-blue calls.

I bought my copy of The Things They Carried shortly after the book was first published, and heard Tim talk about the book this summer at Macalester's reunion. Delighted to share a magazine with him; certainly never expected it to happen. Haven't read Home Before Morning, but I've just added it to my Amazon wishlist.

We Signal folks frequented three NCO clubs while I was in Pleiku. The club in 71st Evac had decent food, occasional entertainment, and friends, but was too big and too ugly to spend an evening unless you were mainly planning to drink. Club 21 in the local MACV compound had a nightclub atmosphere and was more likely to have live entertainment; that's where I usually ate supper after the end-of-workday traffic rush ended. And the club at the Air Base I remember as a neighborhood bar, and as the only club open in the morning when our night shift ended. Sometimes that was valuable.

One morning, after thirteen hours at the DSTE and on the teletypes, we hit the airbase bar for breakfast and a few drinks, only to discover that the club was planning to run the (then) new Ned Kelly movie. So we stayed and watched, as did a handful of Aussies who were stationed in the vicinity.

Mick Jagger or no, the movie was boring, and would have been dull even had we understood the story. Interesting, in its way, but very slow. We got loud, the Aussies took offense, we went home to bed.

Thought about calling this entry "You're better off dead" (makes sense if you know the song). But I figured it wasn't a good idea.

Sargeant Solden explained: Ours was McNair's fourth cycle. Three times he'd gone through Basic at Fort Knox, and three times he'd vanished during the last week of training. Each time Uncle Sam had tracked him down, locked him in the brig for a time, and sent him back to training. This time, Charley Tucker promised, things would be different.

Yeah, sure. On even-numbered days McNair was the best soldier in the camp; on odd-numbered days he was the worst soldier in the camp. It wasn't an attitude thing, exactly--that was always bad, in a sullen sort of way--but it certainly was predictable. On practice day at the rifle range he missed a couple targets; a week later he hit a couple targets when the scores counted. I had the bad fortune to go up against him in Pugil Stick practice; he beat me to a pulp in 30 seconds. The stronger soldiers who followed me into the circle lasted a bit longer. The next day he failed the PT test.

But boy he looked fine while he failed. Good days and bad, the man was impeccable, in a BCT sort of way. His fatigues were always starched, his boots always had a perfect shine, his comportment was beyond reproach. Everything was done with a flair. Even the failures were stylish.

The point was clear enough. The Army had nothing to teach him, and he really wasn't interested in this stuff.

A week from cycle's end he went missing.

When I was stationed at Fort Huachuca, the post offered bus service to Tucson every weekend. I rode those busses several times. I stayed in an older hotel, and wandered around town until I had to catch the bus back to the fort. Most of my Tucson memories, frankly, are pretty vague; the object was more to get off the post than to see the sights. I do recall spending a lot of time on the University of Arizona campus, and spent enough money on clothes that I remember doing so. At least once I took along a camera, though I seem to have taken only one photograph. I've still got, and still use, a clipboard I purchased in the UA bookstore; it's unusually well designed, and now carries a lifetime's memories. A different story, though; perhaps I'll tell it another day.

There was a bookstore/candle shop/concert space just off the campus. The place doubled as a coffeehouse (only on weekends, I think), and the house band was a folky quartet--a girl singer, her husband on guitar and harmony, a bassist (I think), and a drummer. It was the first time I'd found a drummer in a folk group, and the first time I'd ever seen a girl play a conventional drum kit. The group's repertoire was pretty standard for a coffeehouse band, except they had an unaccountable affection for Tim Buckley. For me, the attraction (besides the drummer) was the opportunity to hear "my" music.

The bookstore's name may have been Back Pocket, but I'd not stake money on that recollection. The drummer was a pretty & tanned & lanky person who answered to Twink St. Ledger, at least in my memory. Doubtless someone with better memories will stop by this journal some day, and set things straight; I'll post an update at that time.

This recollection was triggered because iTunes found Buckley's Buzzin' Fly a few minutes ago.

I don't remember the trip, properly, though I do recall arriving in Tucson after dark. The last leg of the flight was via Apache Airlines on a plane (I hope not this one) which held a handful of passengers. I imagine there were Signal School classmates on the flight, but no longer remember those details. Since we arrived at Libby Field late in the evening, long after the staff had headed home, CQ put those of us who were new to the post into an empty office on the Old Fort and told us to get comfortable; someone would come for us in the morning. We stretched out on the hardwood floor and eventually caught some sleep.

Sunrise, and we discovered the Huachuca Mountains, like an unexpected island in the plains. Never--never--have I been so astonished by the morning.

This little reminiscence was provoked, of course, by my recent foray into Tombstone Territory.

My drill sergeant, Charley Tucker, discovered in late June of 1969 that he'd be shepherding a platoon whose members nearly all had a couple years of college, which made for an unusual cycle. We knew within minutes he had some respect for a college education, as he put the group's college grads in the platoon's leadership slots. But it was also pretty clear that Fort Knox wasn't going to be much like college. Fifth Platoon developed into something a little odd--bookish, well-disciplined, but not especially fit--and we learned to help each other through the training. My memories of the cycle were that it wasn't so much difficult as relentless; the pressure never let up, though the emphasis changed from week to week. It helped a lot that I was reasonably fit, and accustomed to long hikes. It didn't help that I was only barely competent with a rifle. It was clear to us that, at least from Charley, the pettiness and meanness were part of the course work, not part of the personality.

Two bad memories from that summer:

• Another drill sergeant inflicted a fifty-pushup punishment on me because I didn't recognize my name one morning. He'd twisted it badly out of shape, and it just plain slipped by me that he was trying to get my attention. Since arguing with drill sergeants about this sort of thing is pointless, I did the pushups. I trust Charley gave him hell later.
• I was one of the few people in the entire country who worked on July 20, 1969. Even most of Fort Knox got to watch the moon landing. I still haven't forgiven whoever decided I'd spend the day pretending to guard the post. I'm quite certain the real guards had access to televisions.

I read Sergeant Rob because he's thoughtful, says interesting things about his job, and says interesting things about the world. Rob's occasional cheap shot is more than made up for by the thoughtful commentary. That I don't always agree is, well, sort of the point.

The Army had trained more DSTE operators than there were empty slots, so we were TDPFO in the desert, waiting for the installation teams to build the places we'd work.  We had some notion of the pending construction, and we were being permitted to "bid" on specific stations.  (That worked like this:  As each installation was completed, the TDPFO GI who'd been longest at Huachuca was asked if he wanted to go there; they worked down the seniority list until the slots were filled.  If this method didn't fill the staff, the most senior folks "won" the assignment, regardless of preference.  Getting what you wanted had some risks, and involved balancing what you knew about construction progress with your actual wishes, but it worked out well for most of us.  In my case, London came up the day after I accepted an assignment to the San Francisco area.  I might have lived a different life.)  (No regrets, he wistfully claims.)

I spent three months at Huachuca, which was pretty typical.  Many of the folks I attended DSTE classes with ended up in either LA or Seattle, in the same command as my SF assignment, and several of us moved together to Pleiku at the end of the year.

For several weeks--this would be in late summer or fall of 1971--all I could get was Fresca, a drink that basically no-one liked.  The explanation we were offered involved a ship full of the stuff which had arrived at the port; suddenly there was nothing in the supply chain for the PXs except Fresca, so that's what they had available.

As explanations go, that raises more questions than it answers.  If you know a better explanation, please drop me a line.  Thanks.

The Army took this photograph.

I was drafted in late June, and reported to Detroit's Old Fort Wayne for induction on June 25. This photo was taken at Fort Knox a few days later to accompany a press release sent to my local newspaper. After sojourns at Forts Knox (Kentucky), Gordon (Georgia), Huachuca (Arizona), and Baker (California), I spent most of 1971 in Pleiku, RVN (several of these photos are mine).

Like most vets, I consider November 11 to be uniquely my holiday.  Blessings to all....

Discovered this essay while chasing links for today's note. Worth a look for anyone who served in the Signal Corps in Vietnam....

To understand this story, you need to know that DSTE's a computer terminal; in this context, it's basically a fast teletype. I'll tell you more about it some other day.

A typical workday at the Pleiku Army Communications Center

An Army headquarters has similarities to other offices: People spend the day doing whatever they do. At the end of the day, they clear off their desk and pass the day's work to the next desk. If that next desk was not in Pleiku, it landed in our CommCenter on its way around the world. As you might guess, we got busy around supper time, as both outgoing and incoming message traffic tended to pick up around 1530 Vietnam time; the rush would queue up, and would typically end (in both directions) several hours later.

The Day I Screwed Things Up

On the day after my twenty-second birthday, my Trick Chief (TC) left me in charge of the DSTE. Sometime that day, our sister operation in Nha Trang went down with equipment difficulties; since they were off line, the network transferred their traffic (which basically duplicated ours) to our station. (Our direct teletype connection with the Nha Trang CommCenter was the backup circuit for both stations.) This doubled the workload at the DSTE, and radically increased the relay workload in the teletype room. We adjusted assignments, and I spent several hours tearing paper tape and deciding whether it was for PKU, or NHA.

I'd been in-country a month, and this was the first day I'd worked DSTE alone. By the time the shift changed, I was exhausted. Shortly before shift change, things improved somewhat: Nha Trang's DSTE came back on-line. Since DSTE was far faster than the teletype line, we stopped the relay operation and someone returned the tapes to me. I slapped 'em in DSTE, & was finishing the cleanup just as the night trick arrived. I briefed my relief on the situation, went back to the barracks, and fell asleep.

TC woke me up, and chewed me out: Seems that as the traffic stopped, twenty-eight error messages came through. I'd forgotten that several of the messages originated on punch cards, not paper tape, and thus had improper headers and footers for paper tape transmission. The night TC noticed; he woke the Chief Warrant Officer to report it. The CWO woke my TC, who woke me. After some discussion, TC dragged me to the CommCenter, where I re-sent the messages with proper headers and footers. Then he bought me a drink at the NCO club and we returned to bed....

Truth told, neither the CWO nor my TC cared a lot about the errors, except they looked bad in our reports. Both superiors knew I'd made one error and repeated it fourteen times (the double-count was a reporting artifact). They also knew that it would show as 28 errors on the computerized reports, and (near as any of us could tell) those reports were the main method Saigon used to evaluate CommCenter operations. They issued performance rankings based on those counts....You need to understand my 28 errors. All messages were technically freeform (I'm ignoring some human-readable formatting), except that they had standard headers and footers. The header was formatted to fit a Hollerith card. The first 80 characters had to fit a specific format, and perhaps a dozen of those characters had to meet accuracy checks. End of Message was indicated by one or four "N's", depending on the medium used to create the message.

• My first error for each message was generated on the second character in the header: It was "C" (for CARD), but since I was using a TAPE drive to (re)send the message it should have been "T".
• I generated a second error on each message for an incorrect End of Message indicator: EOM for card-generated messages was a single "N", while tapes were expected to end "NNNN".

Side note: The system's programmers had actually anticipated this error. Since my messages were marked as flash (high) priority, they were delivered to NHA; the error messages were more like courtesy reminders than real errors. Didn't show that way on the reports, though.

At the end of every month, USARV HQ in Long Binh would send all the Vietnam CommCenters a report ranking them by error rate. Presumably, communications careers rode on these reports, as we received no other messages which compared the CommCenters.This was stupid. Basically, the brass was using the 80-character header as a proxy for the message, and judging the quality of our messages by the error rates of our message headers. This, of course, made checking the header a significant part of my job (32 years later I can still read Baudot code, though I can no longer do so quickly).

But that wasn't a good proxy. After traffic dropped off, night shift would spend a couple hours handling problem messages received from other CommCenters. These all had good headers. But it was clear that specific CommCenters couldn't get the freeform part of the message right. We saw no evidence that headquarters attempted to measure that part of our communications system.

The computer can count it. Why use a method which requires analysis of real messages?

It was a bad measure in another way. Except for one CommCenter, we all had error rates around one percent. On a bad month, someone would approach 1.5 percent. Except that Long Binh--headquarters, and by far the busiest message generator--was evidently exempt, and lived with a 3% error rate.

I'd have told this story anyway, but it's partially a response to a note by David Weinberger/Joho the Blog.

Beware what you measure.