American Valor Quarterly Issue 1 - Winter 2007 | Page 28

Vietnam and Beyond:
The Importance of Story
By John M. Del Vecchio
This may sound odd, but I remember the cold in Viet Nam
more than the heat. Maybe it’s because I expected the heat,
expected those days when the hot air sucked the breath
from your lungs. But I had never been told about the cold,
up north in I Corps, about the chill effect of the northeast
monsoons from October to April—the opposite of most
of the country which was hit by the southwest monsoons
from April to October. The NE
monsoons were not like those
from the SW. The latter were
caused by prevailing winds
coming from the India Ocean
across the Gulf of Siam, rising
up the east side of the
Annamites, building all day until
mid-afternoon when it would
pour like crazy for three hours.
The NE monsoons came in from
the Pacific—cold, g ray,
oppressive. Once they began in
earnest, they didn’t stop. 197071 was a bad weather year in I Corps. By late October the
rain was continuous, every day all day, until late February.
Hue flooded. We ran rescue missions along with MedCaps.
The humidity was so thick—this was cold, dank humidity—
in the rear we threw away all the mattresses because they
were soggy, wouldn’t dry, became moldy. Every few weeks
there was a break lasting perhaps an hour. The roads of
Camp Eagle were linear morasses, nearly impassable redorange muck 12 to 24 inches deep. When the sun did break
through it would immediately dry the surface of the mud
down to about ¼ inch, and the wind would pick up the
dust and stick it to every exposed surface. If you look at
pictures of guys from that time, you’ll see everyone looks
orange—black guys, white guys, brown guys—all orange.
On Christmas Eve 1970 I was in a foxhole atop the steep
pinnacle of OP Checkmate. Cold, cold, cold—cold because
all we had were our jungle fatigues, jungle sweaters, jungle
boots soaking in the mud and slosh, and thin nylon poncho
liners. That night it snowed. Only brief flurries, but snow!
The good thing about the rains, when they were at their
heaviest, was the NVA couldn’t move. As you got away
from the coast, the deluge lessened but the fog thickened.

The mountains were socked in. In early October I spent
eight days on Firebase Whip at the edge of the A Shau. It
socked in the first afternoon. We couldn’t get in Medevacs
or resupply birds, and a C-130 aerial drop of food on the
fifth or sixth day missed the hill and was never found. On
the eighth day the sky broke—just long enough to withdraw
the tubes and evacuate all personnel.
I mention this cold because
everyone knows about the heat.
The heat is part of the “standard
nar rative,” the “mainstream
interpretation,” the “pressroom
boilerplate,” or in a term I prefer,
an element of the “ambient
cultural story.” The narrative,
the boilerplate, the cultural story
isn’t accurate—is always, at
best, only partially correct. And
this is a problem.
We have a media problem in this country. And it is not
simply media bias. It took me years to understand that there
was a problem, more years to get a grasp on definable
elements. I did not understand it in the fall of 1972 when I
wrote the first draft of The 13th Valley in an old farmhouse
in the woods of Maine. In early 1975 I was living in
California when South Viet Nam was falling. Locally, defunct
Hamilton Air Force Base was reopened to handle the influx
of refugees. Newspapers and news magazines carried daily
articles following the collapse, and for a year articles about
who we were as the American military in Southeast Asia. I
didn’t recognize the verbal pictures they painted. I didn’t
know the extent of the inaccuracies, but I knew they had it
all wrong if they were lumping the 101 st Airborne
(Airmobile) into their generalizations. From late 1976 to
mid-1979 I researched and wrote and rewrote the story of
The 13th Valley. I was out to set the record straight for the
One-Oh-One. I didn’t disbelieve the news I was seeing, I
simply thought they were describing others.
My education about the war and about Southeast Asia did
not truly begin until after that novel was published in 1982.

American Valor Quarterly - Winter, 2007/08 - 28