Instead of Fear
by Jack Simons
I don’t believe I was really awake when General Douglas MacArthur gave his famous speech at West Point to accept the Sylvanus Thayer Award on July 12, 1962. I had graduated from high school 35 days earlier, and was more interested in girls, Fords and Chevies, college in the fall – enjoying life as a young man. A young man, who by the standards of Sri Lanka and like nations, was enormously wealthy and facing only opportunity.
But the spirit behind the general’s speech eventually penetrated my soul so deeply that I will begin by quoting selections of his words at some length:
“Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
“The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.
“But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.
“Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.
“Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps.
“I bid you farewell.”
I think I could have quoted the end of its penultimate line, but I would have misquoted it: “The Corps, The Corps, always The Corps.”
If asked, I might have told you that “Duty, Honor, Country” was a motto from the U.S. Marine Corps.
Yet, when I soldiered from 1964 to 1967, the phrase became part of my spiritual DNA.
Simons in front of the radio building, 5th Special Forces Signal Company street, at Nha-Trang, Vietnam, 1966. (photo courtesy of the writer.)
My father had joined the Army Air Corps in 1940 and served to the end of the war. I always assumed he joined the army early because Andy Templeton – his best friend from Seminole, Oklahoma – had been killed that year in the North Atlantic, while frantically tapping out SOS from the radio room of a torpedoed Canadian freighter. As boys, my father and Andy had learned Morse code together – but Andy died a dog’s death while still a boy; my father died in his own bed a few weeks before his 89th birthday.
It seems that all the young men I knew in childhood had served in World War II – Tom Brokaw calls these veterans ‘The Greatest Generation.’ And yet they raised my generation – one of the puzzles of cultural history. I propose no explanation, I can only report it as it happened.
When I was a sophomore at Lew Wallace high school, I hung out with the auditorium stage crew. A wonderfully large stage and auditorium built in 1932 along the lines developed by the Greeks, the 700-seat house rose two stories from the first row to the last. A member of the stage crew – who later became a Lutheran pastor – suggested we form a Nazi club. A silly thing to do, but we fooled around and did it – our leader snapping out Nazi salutes and providing each of us beautiful swastika-decorated identity cards – all this took place back stage outside the attention of any witnesses.
My father found my card. I seriously thought he was going to kill me – his eyes flashed fire, his muscles tensed, his shoulders hunched like he wanted to hit me – I never talked so fast or so directly to the point – “It was just a silly game. I’m so sorry . . .” – something like that. I had to talk a long time before he relaxed from that homicidal stance. Nothing more was said about it for the rest of his life, but I no longer joined in pseudo-Nazi celebrations, and the club soon died.
“Silliness,” I had said, but the silliness rooted itself in some deeper malady of our young spirits. It expressed itself in other ways, seemingly not fatally bad, but bad enough when you consider what my generation would do with its heritage – that my high school graduating class would lead the charge into the drug culture, the sexual revolution, the loss of all rigor in the education system, the abandonment of religious belief, the glaring hostility toward elders.
I couldn’t even sing The Star Spangled Banner without making up my own words – life was a joke and I knew all the punch lines.
But somehow the army, the Vietnam War, changed that. I really don’t remember a single sergeant or officer who mentioned ‘Duty, Honor, and Country’ during my enlistment, but the spirit of the statement became my governing life principle.
Life principles can be slippery concepts to come to grips with. I once fired a sports writer I had hired to cover basketball games. He didn’t cover them – he made them up. I looked into his eyes to see if I could see anything there – nothing – he was certainly sorry he had been caught – beyond that, nothing. I knew that I would die before doing such a thing. I guess that counts as a life principle.
When I dropped out of a major university to join the army at the age of twenty-one, it was a desperate act that defined my life as literally without options. In World War II my father had been a cryptographer. I joined the airborne, and prayed to be assigned to the infantry.
Desperation produces strange children – most strange in my case because I suffered from severe acrophobia – anything higher than six feet off the ground was too high for me. I still suffer from severe acrophobia. I overcame it in the airborne by not thinking about anything but performing the next task to the best of my ability – eventually confronting the task of exiting the door of an airplane flying approximately 1,100 feet above the ground, which I did thirteen times.
We all have experienced fear – when the biggest bully in school waited to ambush me at the school boundary I was afraid. I wanted to run away – but in my case – in my time – there was no choice. I had to face the bully and the fear.
And I found that fear disappeared the moment one touched its source. In a high school fight, the moment I received the first punch, fear disappeared. While in the airborne, when I saw my name on a jump roster, my insides always turned to jelly. To be so afraid made me angry. I argued with myself to quell my fear, but terror lives beyond the reach of an argument – so I refused to think about it. I kept a straight face, but any reminder caused me to grab the nearest anchored object – such as a wall or bedpost.
When I made my sixth jump, I was a member of Special Forces Training Group at Fort Bragg. One morning I found myself laden with a parachute and boarding a C-123 equipped with turbojet engines.
Fresh turmoil burbled through me. The army had switched airplanes. I had only jumped from C-119s, a piston-engine airplane popularly called the Flying Box Car.
My fear meter lived in the red zone. Then the pilot took off like he was driving a sport’s car. I sat straight up in my seat, trying to have a conversation with my companions, but most of them were asleep (a common response to fear). I craned my neck to look through the window. We arrived at the drop zone, and on command the stick made its ordered rush toward the door. I passed a soldier the jump master had grabbed from the line because he refused to jump – at the open door I stared out into emptiness. I looked down and saw that the toe of my right boot was already outside the plane. I jumped at a peak of terror.
Bill Schuster asleep in a C-123 on his way to the Normandy drop zone at Ft. Bragg, 1965. (photo by Jack Simons)
And then all fear vanished like it had never existed.
Isn’t that senseless? Now, I was in real danger – counting the seconds it takes for a parachute to open – watching my feet rise toward the stratosphere as the C-123 prop blast threw me upward in a short parabola, but I knew nothing except my total attention to monitoring the opening parachute.
Even crazier, I enjoyed the ride – it excited me to watch my feet rise above me while being blown upside down, and then, without fear, to dangle from the open parachute, enjoying the view of the horizon, the ground rushing closer.
Michel Montaigne, the French essayist, said “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself,” and Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted a paraphrase of the statement for his first inaugural address. Montaigne had something there.
When my name appeared on a jump manifest, I always experienced fear – fear always vanished as I passed through the door of the airplane. It was my duty to jump. The soldier who had to be jerked from the door, disappeared from the airborne by that afternoon – I will bet he never tells anyone – I’ll bet he tells himself he has incurable acrophobia – and I’ll bet he doesn’t believe it.
We have nothing to fear, but fear itself, and I always found that no matter how much fear dominated me, all I had to do was my duty.
So “Duty, Honor, country” fell on me like an invisible blanket. And I mentally wrote it that way. ‘Duty’ seemed to require a capital and so did ‘Honor’ – which the poor guy jerked from the door lost – but I had been raised by liberals, raised imbibing the poison fruit of the Nuremburg trials, so ‘country’ seemed a shadier concept.
Nonetheless, the ideas contained in the three words strung together tell us why soldiers do what they do. Duty is the key word – as in, “England expects that every man will do his duty,” the message Admiral Horatio Nelson signaled to his fleet before the battle of Trafalgar. Notice that ‘country’ has prominence as the subject and ‘duty’ is the object – ‘honor’ is the unspoken third term.
My eight-year-old granddaughter ran up to me during Christmas and asked me: “Granddad, how many men did you kill in the war?”
I looked at her with surprise and answered in good humor: “Now why would you ask a question like that?” It’s not her business to know such things – it’s not anyone’s business. All she needs to know – and the only legitimate question is: Grandfather, did you do your duty? – The answer is yes.
I served in a radio room in Vietnam’s Delta – Can Tho, the airport. We worked twelve-to fourteen-hour days – seven days a week – never a day off – swinging the shift around, and I forget how we did that, since there were only three of us – two transmitters, four receivers, and four teletype machines. We averaged more than 120 messages a day, many of them long situation reports, which had to be typed before sending and corrected when received. Twice a day there would be a lull – 2 a.m. and 2 p.m. – otherwise it was nonstop.
One morning at the 2 a.m. lull when the radio world had lapsed into complete silence, I put my nose to a blank space on the wall and stood there like a patient in an asylum and said to the wall that, “There isn’t a single thing in this country worth dying for.”
The NCO in charge certainly assumed I would die. He had placed large slab red phosphorous grenades on top of the cryptographic machines with instructions that the last person out of the radio room (me) should pull the pins if we were overrun – which I surely would have done, though actually getting out at that point would be unlikely at best.
So why was I willing to die?
At the time, I didn’t have an answer beyond the generalization ‘professionalism.’ We were professional soldiers and we would do a professional job – that was my answer.
The other way I pictured myself, and that meant everyone else I served with, was cold – cold like a coiled reptile whose body temperature equals the temperature of its environment as it goes about its cruel, emotionless business.
In the largest battle I experienced in the war, we weren’t overrun, but it seemed like everyone else was – a major battle raged nearby, and hundreds of soldiers, including all the Americans, had died before 8 a.m. The battle still raged, when I received an order on the SSB from Nha Trang to run to S4 (supply) and find out if we had adequate medical supplies for the wounded. I dashed from my post at the end of the radio room and opened the armored door. The hallway was piled with dead and dying Vietnamese soldiers. Without slowing a nanosecond, I performed the run – as though through the tires in a football drill – until I freed myself from the casualties by staying on the compound street – it was bodies all the way to S4. While returning the same way I came, I had fleeting thoughts concerning how blood dissipated in bandages turns pinkish.
After repeating the tire drill in the hallway before the Com door, I gave Nha Trang the answer that we had adequate supplies and worked eight or nine more hours until the war settled down. When I opened the door to leave the Com room, the bodies had disappeared.
I went to the mess hall for a late supper and went to sleep in my bunk. The closest I came to any other emotion than the strong desire to do my best was to wonder about blood becoming pink as it diffuses through a bandage. Cold, indeed.
The Mekong River, returning from operation near Cambodia, 1967. (photo by Jack Simons)
One day a young replacement from North Carolina showed up. He had a name, and I forget it, but his responses to questions were surly; he was incapable of looking another person in the eye. I imagined he was scared to death.
The kid took his first radio shift that midnight. I slept in a barracks room about fifty feet away from the radio room and something awakened me around 2 a.m. – don’t ask me what. The mystical in persuasion might say that God awakened me. If a mechanical explanation for the universe dominates, one could guess that I sensed the transmitters in distress. I just knew that I – a person who normally slept like he was in a coma – was fully awake and felt a great need to go to the radio room. I put on pants, found my flip-flops.
A disaster – the kid slept soundly in the operator’s chair with his mouth hanging open. Both transmitters were blasting unmodulated radio waves into the ether, which meant they were burning up. The single-side-band voice radio was a discordance of angry voices yelling non-stop for someone to answer.
I woke up the kid and stayed with him until everything was in full order – two messages going out, four coming in, and the SSB lapsed to polite silence. In good sergeant fashion I told the young man that this was not good, and to do his duty from now on. I returned to bed.
At 4 a.m. I awakened again from my coma – every detail exactly the same – burning transmitters, a mess of unprocessed traffic, a hysterical SSB radio, and a sleeping baby.
More roughly, I brought him to consciousness. Together we again restored order. The kid remained surly, did not explain his actions – actually the chaos was so complete that we did not have time to discuss his problem. At some point I decided he was some kind of North Carolina Christian, very far from home, who despite aptitude and training did not know how to handle the stress of a war zone.
I returned to bed. When I arrived for my shift at 8 a.m. the kid was gone. Our master sergeant had found him asleep at 6 a.m. and shipped him – which meant he was kicked out of Special Forces and dumped on some other outfit. The kid was on an airplane on his way to Saigon before I walked through the radio-room door.
We forgot about him, but the kid didn’t forget about me. Somehow, he tracked me down three years later with a person-to-person phone call that was one of those strange, halting, uncommunicative conversations where neither party knows what to say, so nothing is said either significant or banal. We just exchanged halting one-syllable words – a person with great need on one side, and a person filled with great repugnance on the other. I suppose he wanted absolution as though from a priest – I couldn’t give it; I couldn’t even visit it.
I felt sorry for the kid, but he had failed his duty. I hope the failure in the radio room was the worst thing that ever happened to him. It would please me to know that he has had a happy life. But I do know this – he has never gotten over it, and if he is still alive that failure haunts him every day.
A Japanese Samurai would cut out his stomach; a Roman would fall on his sword; I would die of pure shame.
If my granddaughter had asked me “How hard was the war, Granddad? I would have told her: “When I arrived in Saigon for assignment to 5th Special Forces, I weighed 165 pounds. When I left Saigon to return home ten months later I weighed 123 pounds. I never knew I had lost the weight.”
Simons looking slim, on base at Can Tho, Vietnam, 1967. (photo courtesy of the writer.)
My father nearly passed out when he saw me come off the airplane at O’Hare Airport in Chicago – and treated me like an invalid – I thought that was strange.
I still have the uniform jacket I wore home from the war – none of my teenage grandsons can get into it, and neither can my larger granddaughters. I had been mildly surprised when I received my going home uniform, because it looked awfully small.
It wasn’t the war that did me in. It was a pernicious Asian dysentery.
Diarrhea is the primary symptom of dysentery, but every soldier in the tropics has diarrhea – so I noticed no onset of symptoms. I have pictures of myself at various times in that year of my service, and they visibly show the progress of the disease – like serial pictures of meth addicts as they progress toward death. But my duties consumed me at the time, and I never noticed.
On that last day in Can Tho, I packed my duffel bag, put on my tiny uniform, said goodbye and trudged through the tunnel-like front gate – coming toward me from the airfield was my replacement.
He had been one of the most disappointing soldiers I had ever known. I had served with him in Panama, and despised him. Many types of men tried to enter Special Forces – most of them outstanding – but one type of soldier joined because he had seen a James Bond movie or something, and wanted to be a government-trained assassin – I suppose with a double zero designation just like the mythical Bond.
Special Forces went to great lengths to identify these individuals and see to it that they served elsewhere – this guy was a particularly pathetic version of the type, but escaped detection. He once showed me a long flexible wire he carried hidden in his leather belt so he would always have a garrote in case he had to strangle someone.
I called people like him ‘knife fighters,’ and in a perverse way they amused me since I adhered to the more common army doctrine. That is, the best way to end an enemy’s career was with heavy explosives delivered from some distance; immediately below that in usefulness were heavy machine guns adequately fortressed against counter fire, below that a trusty rifle, and if a soldier fell all the way down to pistols, knives, and garrotes, that soldier was in a place one should never stay – unless duty required it.
Anyway, here came the ‘knife fighter’ entering the world I was leaving. It was quite a spectacle. His face showed plainly that fear had overcome him – he was pale, he could barely walk, and he used his right arm against the wall to support himself. A sergeant on his left side held him up like he was supporting a wounded man. Another sergeant walked behind him carrying his gear. He didn’t see me, because he wasn’t seeing anything.
I know that particular seizure of fear eventually left him as he became used to his new surroundings, and it may be that when he arrived, a prophetic spirit caused terror to overcome him. I was happily leaving my place of service in one piece without any excessive exposure to danger, while he was arriving at a place that would be heavily attacked during the next season of Tet. Maybe he was the one who would have had to pull the pins on the phosphorous grenades. I want to believe that when the time came he would have done his duty.
As to ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and the flag I mocked in my youth – I changed.
In my war-matured mind, the flag is covered by the blood of comrades – people I shared life with, and people I didn’t, but we all did our duty in a war that didn’t merit the death of one man. Tears come to my eyes every time I stand to sing.
And – to paraphrase the general – at the end of my life my mind returns to the war, and I remember the most important lesson of a troubled time – Duty – Honor – Country.
