l am in my senior year in high school when my brother joins the Army. It is just before the draft, he's recently graduated college and he knows he's probably going to be selected. He is the only one in his group of friends to go. This rumpled and boisterous brood of buddies that came home with him on college weekends only to engage in intensively ferocious arguments about the War with our crew cut, conservative dad. Dad's severely broken left arm had rendered him '4F', a scarlet letter for any young man during the Second World War. He'd worked the war at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was a ferocious hawk. My brother's friends? I can't say that I know for sure. Deferments some, for others perhaps the luck of the draw. For one or two, conscientious objector status or a trip over the border.
In the summer of 1969, while on his second tour of duty in Vietnam, Paul Morgan was assigned to the Headquarters, Military Assistance Command in Saigon. His duties included briefing General Creighton Abrams and his staff on combat operations throughout Southeast Asia. He also conducted numerous debriefings of soldiers involved in some of the war's most clandestine missions. Like the top-secret incursions into the Parrot`s Beak--a chunk of Cambodia situated at the end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, less than 35 miles from Saigon.
During the war with France, the Viet Minh communist guerrillas built a sophisticated tunnel and cave complex impervious to aerial bombardment and artillery. The complex quartered thousands of soldiers and held tons of supplies and materiel. It was from this deadly labyrinth that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was launched, sending thousands of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars across the border in a failed attempt to capture the South Vietnamese capital.
And it was there, in the spring of 1970, where a story of heroism and brutal combat was about to unfold. Though some names, dates, and details have been changed to protect the identity of those involved, the incredible events in THE PARROT'S BEAK actually happened. The Parrot's Beak
But it wasn't as if my brother didn't have a choice in the matter. He did. I recall the family driving in stunned silence to drop him off at some army base upstate New York. Later that afternoon, he was home again: he'd failed his physical. He borrowed my mom's car and drove up to Westchester to see his fiance. Apparently, his future family pulled some strings and by the time I returned home from school the next day, he was in the Army again. Definitely going to Viet Nam. As a chaplain's assistant.
After that, we never talked about it.
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During the year and a half my brother was at War, both my mother's parents died. I was the one who wrote to tell him. The only letter I remember receiving from him was in response to the letter I wrote, a letter too painful for my mother to write, about the death of our grandfather. My darling Poppop, who had loved him more than any other person alive. Except for my mother, who loved them both more than I could ever dream of being loved. In his response, my brother expressed his honor for my bravery, his pride in my shouldering this burden for my mother.
My brother was in Southeast Asia when I started college, joined SDS and hung out with the hippies in Greenwich Village. Man walked on the moon. The Miracle Mets won the World Series. The Beatles broke up. There was Woodstock and Chappaquiddick and the first Earth Day. In upstate New York, the first automatic teller machine opened.
We didn't talk much at all about my brother while he was gone. He wrote infrequently. My dad took the Pan Am flight around the world to meet up with him for his R&R in Hong Kong. They had a wonderful time together, my dad said.
And when my brother came home, we sure didn't talk about what happened while he was gone, let alone how he felt coming home. No one asked if he was okay. If he needed to talk. Walk on the beach. Take a late night ride on the Staten Island Ferry. My mother probably suggested he take up golf again.
And while I don't remember the exact night he came home, I have no doubt that I was the one who set the table, placing the funky blue and white flowered faux china we'd picked up late one Thanksgiving Eve at E.J. Korvette's and the Dirilyte flatware on Nana's double-hem-stitched lace and linen tablecloth. Mom probably cooked roast beef with mashed potatoes and Le Jeur canned peas. Dessert was most likely a Seven Layer Cake, a favored selection from The Brownie Bakery.
My most piercing memory of this time is chancing on him sitting in the dark in the living room with my mother. It is well past midnight. She is curled, fetal-like, on the firm black sofa, silently crying; he sitting, leaning forward in a chair across the room, his hands folded across his mouth as though suppressing a scream, dressed only in his 'shorts.' Apparently, he'd told my mother earlier that he was moving into New York City to live with one of his buddies from college. He had only been home for a few weeks. She is devastated. Inconsolable. I remember her saying she would never feel the same about him if he left.
He was gone by the end of the week.
I have one other crystal clear memory of him before he got married. It is a cool Friday evening in April and I am driving down Melville Road with the top down on my black 1969 Firebird. I hear him call my name and what seems so strange is that I hear it at all because he says my name so softly, conversationally, as though I am strolling by rather than zooming past on the opposite side of the street at 40 miles per hour. I turn the car around and pull over. He is carrying a brown paper sack with my birthday present inside. After getting off the Long Island Railroad, he'd stopped off at Smiley's Candy Store on Main Street and picked up a tiny stuffed brown koala bear. Somehow, between the time he'd purchased it and met me as he walked home, he'd pasted a band aid on the right side of its head, just above its ear. Neither one of us mention the band aid.
Parrot’s Beak was the name given to a salient of Svay Rieng Province, southeast Cambodia that protrudes into Hậu Nghĩa and Kien Tuong Provinces, Vietnam, approximately 65 km northwest of Saigon.
During the Vietnam War the Parrot’s Beak was a base and rest area for the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong and one of the terminus points of the Ho Chi Minh Trail/Sihanouk Trail. The NVA established Base Areas 367 and 706 in the Parrot’s Beak.
On 30 April 1970, the Parrot’s Beak was attacked by US and ARVN forces during the Cambodian Incursion. Parrot's Beak: Facebook
I sometimes think that my older brother never really returned from Viet Nam. Not the brother I idolized growing up: the one I surreptitiously followed onto the school bus at age 3 and accompanied at 14 to see what college was like at Fordham. The person who introduced me to Marcuse, Plato, and Shopenhauer; Emerson, Hesse and Joyce; T.S. Eliot and Marcel Proust. The delicate soul who would knock on my bedroom door in the tender hours of the morning to sit in the chair beside my bed, tears streaming down his face, as he read me his latest poem or played some hauntingly beautiful new song on a small transistor radio clasped tight between our tortured ears.
It wasn't until a few years ago, when I was writing a book about Cambodian genocide that he recalled being in Cambodia, specifically participating in a top secret scouting operation in Parrot's Beak. It took 40 years for me to really try to talk war with my brother. To ask him why he chose to go when he had an option to stay. To ask him about his Viet Nam. He opened up some.
"I was so young," he said. "I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn't ready to get married. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do."
No, it didn't have anything to do with being afraid of dad, of feeling that failing to serve was not an option. He didn't recall war buddies. There were stories of missions deep in the Mekong Delta. How prevalent drug use was in his unit. But mostly, it was something he had just put behind him. It hadn't changed life for him. It was hard to believe it had even happened. The experience of Viet Nam had been, overall, a good one for him, he said.
But when I asked what it felt like to live with a family who never talked about it, he changed the subject.
I never even saw a picture - I don't believe one even exists - of him wearing an Army uniform. And so it remains still quite surreal, believing this whole story is true. And like I said, we never talked about it.
This guy is crazy," says an American who has known Lieut. General Do Cao Tri for several years. "Even when he wasn't a general he always got right into the fight." In ARVN's bad old days, his combativeness made him an exception. Now that the army is beginning to shape up, he is a symbol of its feisty new spirit. As commander of ARVN's Operation Total Victory, which has involved some of the deepest South Vietnamese air and armor thrusts into the Parrot's Beak and beyond, Tri has waded farther than ever into the shooting. A newsman who joined him on...Read more: http://www.time.com/...
I am sure there is a Parrot's Beak for most every soldier. That too many come home to silence.
For my brother and for you. A care package. To commemorate your Parrot's Beak. To let you know I am here now. And I have grown up to be a damn good listener.
Netroots For The Troops Blogathon: February 20-24, 2012
Netroots For The Troops® is holding a blogathon this week to raise funds to send Care Packages to our soldiers stationed overseas. For the first time this year, we will also be sending Care Packages domestically to troops rehabilitating at Veterans Administration Hospitals around the country.
We are asking all of you to support our efforts and to also make a contribution for this worthwhile cause.
We are honored and delighted that Senator John Kerry (D-MA); Democratic Candidate for the United States Senate from Massachusetts, Ms. Elizabeth Warren; and former Governor Howard Dean (D-VT) will be joining us through this week. Many Kossacks will also be contributing their thoughts, ideas, and support during the week.
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Over the years, many soldiers have sent letters to express their appreciation for these Care Packages and even posted thanks at Daily Kos
It was in the middle six months of my assignment in Afghanistan that the packages started arriving. I received an array of things from them… letters, candy, toothpaste, floss, baby wipes, razors, food, socks, books, dvd’s. The list could go on and on. It was amazing. Netroots for the Troops was always there... The packages were a reminder that our country knows about our fight. Every day, because of their support, I knew that if it was going to be my last day, I would be remembered and I would be honored.
Please make a donation HERE. Thank you from the entire 2012 NFTT Team.
Netroots For The Troops® is a project of Netroots for the Troops, Inc., a Virginia non-profit corporation. The organization raises money for the assembly, mailing and delivery of Care Packages to American military in war zones and to provide assistance to military families in the United States. Netroots For The Troops, Inc. is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.
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