I was born in Seattle in 1942, but from second grade until graduation from high school I lived in Yakima. I attended first grade in Missoula. My father was a math teacher, and my mother was what folks used to call a homemaker. I lived at 1317 South 15th Ave in Yakima which was close enough to the field the Yakima Bears played in all summer that I remember falling asleep to the sound of baseball crowd noise throughout my boyhood. I never played baseball, but I still associate baseball with an innocent time in my life. I don't remember attending more than one or two baseball games. I certainly never was a fan or knew the names of any of the Yakima Bears.
I graduated from A.C. Davis High School in 1960 and attended W.S.U. for one year before transferring to the University of Washington. I received a B.A. in English in 1964 and an M.L.S. in 1970. I decided to be a writer very early on in college and was usually scribbling away on a short story about life in high school. The first thing I did deliberately to prepare myself to be a novelist was to go to Vietnam. I'd read a bunch of war novels and I thought I'd take a lot of notes, keep a journal, write a lot of letters and use them all as grist for the war novel mill when I returned to Seattle. It didn't quite work out that way, though.
I got interested in the blues when I was introduced to Falcon Kalin who had just returned from England by my eldest brother-in-law Gordon Woods. Falcon said that I was a fool if I didn't go buy every Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson record I could lay my hands on. So I did. I bought a half dozen records and brought them home and started listening to them. I'd never heard anything like them in my life. I like Robert Pete Williams the best of them all. Why? I saw him in person with the Georgia Sea Island Singers and was taking pictures of him with my Petri V-6. The noise of it pissed people off, but I've got some great pictures of Williams. I like his songs because of the pain and torment being right there on the surface. I like most other kinds of music except for big band and polkas. In Vietnam the Armed Forces Radio played separate programs of all different types of music except for blues. I liked the rock and roll and country and western programs the best. I still remember the first time I heard Merl Haggard singing I am a Hunted Fugitive. It chilled my blood.
I like Chuck Yeager's quote about Vietnam vets being fucked up before they served in Vietnam because without meaning to, Chuck admits that he is our spiritual father. He had the right stuff for everything but being a good father. Typical of the men raised in the Depression and finished off by WWII.
Vietnam was the paramount event of my generation. I knew it would be, and I didn't want to miss it. I was drafted late in 1965 and entered Basic Training at Fort Ord January of 1966. Vietnam was my war, and that's all that was special about it. I probably should have not served. I had been removed from ROTC in college due to near kidney failure because of bruising to my horseshoe kidney. I was told I could never be an officer in the military, that I would never be allowed to serve in any capacity. In basic training I kept expecting to die because my doctor told me that there was a good chance I would. I didn't, though. Once I got arch supports for my feet, I did fine. I felt better and better the more exercise I got. At first I had problems running to the rifle range and back. Steve Kirkman, the big brother of Boone "Boom-Boom" Kirkman the heavy weight boxer held me up with one hand until I got strong enough to make it by myself. He sometimes would carry both his rifle and mine. All the road work he'd done training with Boone had made him very strong and long on endurance. My pre-war life as a welfare caseworker had prepared me for sitting in a car and that's about it.
I did learn to type at Fort Ben Harrison, but my shorthand was never very good. I did pass the 60 word a minute tests legitimately, but even though my records say I passed the 90 too, I did not. I never had the jungle training my records said I had either. I slept through an old film on counter-insurgency. I arrived in Vietnam on the same dates that the REMF did and did everything else pretty much on the same dates that the REMF did. I typed short little letters for a bird colonel in the Inspector General's Office. After a while I not only typed them, I wrote them too. I kept the suspense file on the Presidential and Congressional investigations, making certain that we replied in time to keep those folks happy. I was in no danger in Vietnam and never felt that I was in danger, at least no more than I had in Indianapolis late at night near the bus station or on southside Chicago at the blues clubs. I did not feel that I was a sitting duck, and I had little or no sense of my mortality. I was young and dumb. Nobody I knew died when the occasional rocket came into the USARV compound at night and blew up a hooch. Somebody died, but not me or my buddies.
The biggest difference I see between REMFS and grunts is that REMFS were the biggest group of soldiers in Vietnam, the ratio being about 20 to 1, and the grunts were a tiny group, but it seems the other way around in popular culture. The ignorant are surprised when I give them the above facts. I've been called a liar and worse.
Most of the vets I know were grunts and most of them are currently writers. They are pleasant helpful people, and I enjoy their company. I don't have any friends who are veterans of earlier wars. I have a couple of friends who were involved in Desert Storm. One of them, Mark Baker, not the famous Mark Baker, has written a fine memoir of his tour of duty. He calls it Desert Storm Diary. I don't have much to say to vets of earlier wars. They were the ones who were unfriendly to me when I returned from Vietnam. They didn't spit on me, but they came close. The much maligned braless hippy chicks on the other hand were sweet and never did or said anything mean to me. Quite the contrary.
Vietnam War literature doesn't differ much from the literature of earlier wars. It should but it doesn't. There is much less service comedy than was produced by WWII writers. I think that WWII had a more literate group of participants than Vietnam, even though I've read otherwise. I can't think of anyone else I've met who went to Vietnam having already received a degree in English writing and intending to use the experience in a novel. Most of the guys I know who've written about their time in Vietnam arrived in-country as high school graduates or maybe college drop-outs.
Certainly most of my favorite Vietnam War writers arrived in Vietnam with little formal education in writing. Ernie Spencer, Rod Kane, Larry Heinemann, Bill Ehrhart, and Gus Hasford are the exceptional writers I keep coming back to, to read again, to savor. I never met Gus and I've only corresponded with Ernie, but Rod, Larry and Bill are great to be with, pleasant unassuming fellows. It's not only hard to compare their work, it's impossible to compare their work to mine. I've written as much as possible of the banality and boredom and trivial detail of the war. I found one copy of REMF Diary in a used bookstore in Tacoma with the title changed to REMF Diarrhea. I have come to terms with the reality that many people hate my REMF novels. They think it's obscene the he whines about soda pop when boys are dying in the bush. That the point of the books, but some readers don't seem to understand that the author intends that the reader feel that way.
To make certain that all the details of my war novels were exact, I kept journals in Vietnam, about ten pages a day. I had about 6,000 pages of notes and letters when I sat down to produce the REMF books. I found a publisher by accident. Jerry Gold was a guest reader at the first Vietnam War Writers' Symposium. I gave him a copy of my finished novel, REMF Diary, and he read it in a few days and called me with the news that Black Heron would publish it. Dumb luck.
I didn't think I was taking great risks in writing the REMF books the way I did. It was the only way I could write them. I tried every other way I knew and nothing worked out. All the war novels I'd read didn't help me. They didn't work as models. Their experience wasn't my experience, their form wasn't my form, their attitude wasn't my attitude. Nothing much happened to me in Vietnam, so nothing much happens to the REMF. I couldn't lie, I didn't know how. I tried and failed. So I just told the truth about what it was like to be in the rear in Vietnam. All my life I've bored and alienated and irritated whatever audience I had. The books I wrote were an extension of that experience.