Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
As I mentioned in the first installment of this series, provided courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seemed to think I still had a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”
These sketches have been done on an ad hoc basis, although the format of this story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.
After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.
The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.
Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger.
Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this 1978 sketch had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind. Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched), others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, and as here some, many actually, wanted to mourn some comrade lost in the fog of memory. This is Rick Atwood’s story, or actually, Gerald (Jerry) Jenkins’ story. We know that it ends in some black marble tear-filled inscription down in Washington, D.C. but it didn’t start that way. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Jerry Jenkins’ sign was that of the “buddy’s war”:
Jerry and I had grown up in Steubenville, that’s in Ohio right along the Ohio River, okay. We lived over in the Five Points neighborhood near the river, not a bad place to grow up with plenty of stuff to do on the river where we went whenever we had a chance. We built rafts and stuff in summer and dreamed of going to the ocean one time except we got caught on a river bend snag and never did get all that far. Yes, Jerry and I were thick as thieves (including an occasional clip of stuff from Ben Franklin’s, the big store in town that had plenty of stuff we needed). From about third grade on at Anderson Elementary all the way through to high school at Baron Von Steuben High we were together. Guys we hung out with in front Of Molly’s Variety, our local corner hang out, used to kind of fag-bait us, nothing serious like with real fags but still it bothered us. People were surprised when we showed up at our high school prom with two the hottest honeys in our class, the class of 1966.
Neither Jerry nor I were really students so we figured we would go to work right out of high school over at London’s Tool and Die, the biggest employer around, make some money and head out west, or somewhere not Steubenville. We weren’t political or anything like that, hippies, but just wanted to get the dust of Steubenville off us. We really didn’t pay too much attention to what was going on in the world. Yah, we knew there was a war on in Vietnam, Christ who didn’t with it blasting the airwaves every night but it was like not something we thought about that much. Until Jerry got his draft notice in early1967. Then panic set in. Not about going or not going into the service but about what that would do to our plans for going west.
So here is how crazy we were. I figured being just slightly younger than Jerry that my draft notice would come pretty soon so we called up the lady at the draft board and asked if we could go in the Army together. She solemnly told us that this situation was the luck of the draw and that if we wanted to
insure that we could join together we would have to enlist and take part in the “buddy system” being offered by the Army as an inducement for enlistments. Of course, as you know, the draft meant two years but enlisting meant three. We talked it over for days and finally after figuring out that we could learn a skill, go to school later maybe on the G.I. Bill, and that anyway that war was likely to be over soon we decided to enlist. And so in early March 1967 we went the recruiting station and signed up.
Now I am not saying that the Army misled us, although they did, but we had signed up for mechanic’s school and that is what we thought we were going to be doing after we finished basic training at Fort Gordon (that’s in Georgia near Augusta where they have the Masters’ golf tournament every year). But see 1967 instead of the war being over was just heating up to a new level and the war was churning up guys and materials at a fast rate so we wound up as 11 Bravos, infantrymen, cannon fodder, training down in Fort McClellan in sweaty Alabama (near Anniston). So it will come as no surprise to anyone that once we finished that training and with a little time at home before we left we were heading for ‘Nam in October 1967.
Let me tell you, Jerry and I, I don’t know if it was liked being soldiers, but we were good at it. Jerry especially. We aced all the training stuff. We marched like crazy in all weathers laughing (although I hated the heat in Alabama and ‘Nam too) and were made training company platoon guides. They wanted Jerry to go to Office Candidate School (OCS) but he nixed that because I hadn’t passed the exam as well. What we also knew after seeing some of the lamos, misfits, court-enforced enlistees, and the like that we were very glad that we had joined up together. We knew we had each other’s back if anything happened.
And it did. We were assigned to a unit of the 25th Division in the Mekong Delta after we arrived in country in mid-October. This was just before, and maybe if my history is right, could have been part of the build-up to Tet, the famous offensive that the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese supporters put together in early 1968. Hell, all I know is that we had our hands full just trying to keep that supply line from the north, the Ho Chi Minh trail, bottled up.
One day, after a few weeks in the field, we were crossing a river, hell they called it a river on the map but compared to real rivers it was maybe a brook or creek, when we took some heavy fire. We started crossing like crazy to get out of the line of fire. Just as we reached the embankment Jerry took one, more than one I later found out, near the heart. He slumped down as I rushed over to him crying out like a mad man for a medic to help him. I could see thought that he was fading, fading fast. Before he passed though he whispered to me that somehow being near a river like when we were kids made things easier. Then he started to mention the raft…
[Rick, according to my notes, could not continue on with his story as he welled up with tears. A little later he mentioned to me that he was sorry that he could not complete the story, that it was still several years later too hard to fathom. He did say that was the last time he saw Jerry as the company had to move out in pursuit and the job of taking care of the dead and wounded fell to the medics left behind. He also told me that he only went home to Steubenville after his time was up once to throw a flower in the Ohio River for his old comrade and then left. Like he said it was just too hard. Sometime in late 1985 I was passing through Steubenville on my way to some conference down south and stopped at the city hall. Not far away was the inevitable memorial to those from Steubenville who had served in Vietnam all polished and pretty. There I saw the name Gerald F. Jenkins-1948-1967 and thought of Rick and that flower he tossed into the nearby Ohio River to his buddy.-JLB]
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