Bill Ehrhart - Poet Teacher Vietnam Marine War Veteran

[Music] Just for Laughs when I was 10 I thought that I would live forever I could kill whatever I pleased I was all it mattered how else can one explain the Firecracker stuff down throats of frogs and litte hop hop boom a lot of laughs once we found the plump snake sunning itself beside the creek sluggish in the early morning chill it only raised its head and turned to diamond black eyes to see four small boys with sticks it didn't understand until we started beating on its flanks that we were dangerous and it was trapped our sticks were too light and we too timid to inflict anything but fury so we started throwing stones small gashes ripped that snake's fat thrashing sides until it finally tired though it couldn't run and wouldn't die it only lay there heaving as the stones fell faster till a miracle of birth a miracle of birth began so strangely even we were brought up short and stood there for a moment dumbly watching out of those gasses crawled a dozen baby water snakes a dozen more small wriggling slivers of their mother's flesh some were bleeding some had broken backs and dragged limp tails sideways through the dust premature even the ones uninjured that we carried home and put in jars all died but it didn't matter we had frogs and painted turtles salamanders and a praying mantis years later I volunteered for war still oblivious to what I'd done or what I was about to do or why our guest today on military matters in still air horn so our heart is a Vietnam veteran he was in the Tet Offensive of 1968 fought in the battle of way he is probably one of America's most renowned poets on Vietnam he is also part of the Ken documentary of Vietnam and part of mark Bodines book he is also a teacher of history and English at the renowned school Harvard school and Philadelphia mainline your opening poem was very prolific that incident actually haunted me for years and I I tried to write about it a number of times and could never I never could make it work and for some reason who knows how this stuff happens when I connected it to joining the Marines then the poem worked and of course that's how it ends is years later I volunteered for war still oblivious to what I'd done or what I was about to do or why here's the thing that had idea of us for kids we were 10 years old if any of us had encountered that snake alone we would have gone whew that's a big snake and giving it a wide berth but the four of us together we each had to prove we're not afraid of this snake we're tough guys we peer pressure and of course it turns out that when I got in the middle of the war in Vietnam I discovered the same thing you you behave you you perform you do things in combat that you would never do if you were by yourself but the primary motivation of young men in battle is for me it certainly was I did not want my buddies to know how frightened I was I did not want my pals to see the real me who is a coward and so you do things so that they don't realize who you really are and of course many many years after the war I realized that all my buddies were doing exactly the same thing and that's what happens in that poem we would have left that snake alone if any of us would have encountered it one on one instead we killed him you joined the Marines at 17 how did you get in the Marines team and why did you join the Marines at 17 so how much time do we have here it's very complicated certainly you have to understand I grew up in a in a small town in Upper Bucks County Berkeley Pennsylvania very white very Republican no one well there were people in our town you saw bumper stickers that said better better dead than red it was the Cold War I remember the Hungarian revolt and the Russians crushing their attempted freedom I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis the Berlin wall Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the UN shouting we will bury you there was nothing in my life up to 1966 to suggest to me that the world might be somewhat different than what my nation what my government what my environment what my teachers what my community was telling me this is how the world is and here's you know here's Lyndon Johnson saying if we do not stop the Communists in Vietnam we will one day have to fight them on the sands of Waikiki sounded serious to me add to that that I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War I was I lived on a diet of John Wayne movies and Audie Murphy movies and William Holden and they were all heroes and and and now here's my chance I can be a hero I can fight in the war and of course it was always going to be the Marines because I'm a little guy the Marine Corps is full of little guys with chips on their shoulder nobody was ever going to beat me up again and besides you ever seen that dress blue uniform the Marines wear it's gorgeous I'd have girls hanging on my neck like succulent grapes and I would never be beat up again college could wait I was always going to go to college I grew up in a college oriented family by two older brothers were in college and that's another thing you think no matter what I did my older brothers had already done it get good grades be a varsity athlete well they were both in college I could join the Marines so it's a whole bunch of things that came together and my parents were not all that keen about me joining the Marine Corps and it wasn't that they were opposed to the war I I got my values from them but who what mother wants their kid to join a Marines in the middle of a war when he could go to college and my mother told me I remember a long heated discussion I don't remember this part but my mom told me years later that I ended the discussion when I said to her is this the way you raised me to let other mothers sons fight America's wars and my mom said what could I say to that not the way my parents raised me so they signed the papers I think my mother also knew that if she didn't sign those papers I would have spent the summer of 1966 making her life a living hell and I would have joined the Marines add a third 18 in September so there was also that going on but so there you go so hope you went to Vietnam eventually yet by the time we got to Vietnam I hardly got to see Saigon you know that one yeah well I never went to Saigon till 1985 when did you come to think differently about the American involvement in Vietnam no goodness I got my first dose of what's going on here about three days after I got to Vietnam got to my battalion 1st battalion 1st Marine Regiment I was I went down to the amphibious tractor park I was in the battalion intelligence section and I went down to the tractor park with a corporal Jimmy Sal he was the guy I was going to replace eventually salty old corporal of maybe 20 19 and we went down to pick up some Vietnamese detainees that were being sent in from one of the rifle companies detainees are not prisoners of war they're civilians who were detained for questioning and there were a set of rules that you were supposed to use how you treat them they're not prisoners of war well these two tractors pull into the park into the track park and before they even come to a stop Marines up on top start throwing these people down and finish tractors are big armored boxes that are about eight feet tall and they have a black flattop the Marines up there start throwing these people off they're bound hand and foot it's old men women children they have no way to break their fall they're tossing these people onto the ground and I and I know well we don't have a whole lot of time but I was shocked and I expressed my shock in corporal Sal told me to shut my freaking face and be done with it and but at that point I realized whoa something's going on here that not exactly what I was told it went downhill from there that was in February of 67 by June of 67 I was one of the Marines up on top of the tractors tossing people off by that point by the summer of 67 I could not think of any reason on earth why I was in Vietnam except to stay alive until March the 5th 1968 and then I could go home I didn't know what was going on there it made no sense at all by any yardstick I'd been given to measure with I just knew this is crazy I don't want to die here I want I want out and I managed to get the end of my tour came home still had 15 months to do in the Corps right up until May early early May of 1970 by this time I'm a freshman in college I keep trying to pretend this doesn't have anything to do with me I'm out of it I don't know what's going on over there but I'm I'm out I got all 10 fingers all 10 toes meanwhile I'm engaged in incredibly self-destructive behavior largely revolving around drinking and driving when they got to college I added marijuana to that I was profoundly unhappy and it was only when the murders at Kent State took place in May of 1970 when the Ohana guard murdered four kids and wounded nine others that I finally started thinking I got to understand what happened it was another year as I was reading and researching another year before I fully understood what had actually happened and that was when the Pentagon Papers started being published in June of 1971 and when I read those I ran out of any possible excuse for what the United States was doing in Vietnam so it was a very long drawn-out process you wanted to survive until 1968 however you had to get past the Tet Offensive of 1968 and in during the Tet Offensive you coincidentally ended up in what was probably the pivotal battle of Vietnam the turning point and the Battle of way what happened there well well I was interesting because I spent 12 months running around the rice fields looking for the Vietcong and you couldn't find him they absolutely controlled the battlefield if they wanted to engage you they engaged you in if they didn't want to engage you you couldn't find a period and then with one month to go Marine Corps did did 13 months everybody else did 12 months the Marines did 13 months in Vietnam want one of many reasons why we called jarheads I then spent my last month in this huge battle in an urban setting very very much like the battle for Seoul in the Korean War battle for Stalingrad all these urban fighting very very different from what I'd done for the first 12 months we didn't know what we were getting into but you know once you're in the middle of it there you go not much you can do about it but it was very different it was house-to-house fighting it was not just house-to-house it was a floor to floor room to room I think you mentioned mark Bowden's book I think he does a pretty good job of describing how that whole thing unfolded but it was it was ugly it was nasty it was I I certainly don't want to do it again the one thing it did provide was that for once for once in my entire tour there were guys who were over in that cross the street and they're over there going you want this building come and take it from us screw you whereas most of the time said our enemy was mines and booby traps we had dead Marines day in and day out for an entire year and no one to fight at no one to fight back at that's how things like the me live Massacre occur I never saw anything on that scale but after a while you just come to the conclusion they're all freaking VC which they probably were did get wounded I got hit with shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade one of those like bazooka type things you see on TV with the little pointy headed rocket at the end of it I was lucky in that I did Here I am I'm still alive but then when high-speed steel starts flying around here basically you're either lucky or you're dead or badly wounded I went through a window one pass between past my head in the window frame and blew up in the wall behind me and I was but I was hunched over in a very heavily padded chair this was like the mayor's house or governor somebody he'd left town but we took his house over so I'm in a heavily padded chair I'm wearing my body armor my helmet and flak jack and I'm hunched over firing out the window very little of my body was actually exposed I got some cuts on my right arm my right leg and my lower back a buddy of mine was across the room much further from the blast and I was he got hit much worse than me because he was not wearing body armor but you know it's it's like either either lucky or you're dead that that's that's what happened you came home to a nation in turmoil 1968 I had a hard time dealing with the United States in general for a lot of reasons I actually went I had 15 months to do in the Corps when I got back I had signed a three-year contract I was sent to North Carolina which is like a Yankee Marine in Eastern North Carolina it's like two strikes and you're out you don't have to wait for the third strike and I knew if I stayed there I was going to end up dead or in the brig I went back to Asia they sent me to Okinawa which is like picture picture the biggest smelliest rottenness armpit in the universe that's Okinawa I got stuck there for three months managed to get myself away from there and ended up in Japan and I spent my last seven months in the Corps going back and forth between Japan and the Philippines which was actually kind of cool I got back to the States got out of the Marines June of 69 within a few weeks I went over to England gonna hitchhike around looking at England but I ended up on a little Irish freighter a little ship going back and forth between Dublin and Liverpool for most of that summer but the thing is I avoided the United States as long as I possibly could I just didn't want to deal with it I was a mess I was actually a mess eventually in the fall of 69 I started college yes America was crazy I get I get home and a month after less than a month after I'm home King is killed Kennedy is killed of course I'm out of the country by early July but then in August I think it was early August you get that the police the police riots in in Detroit Chicago Namaskar the cops rioting product unbelievable display of American fascism by that time I'm out of the country back in back in Asia again but yeah it was a turbulent time and it stayed a turbulent time people people that I teach now and I teach the Haverford school I teach high school boys they will the main lawn you know they think they think wow the sixties the Beatles marijuana free love the sixties was a terrible time to be young it was a horrible unhappy unpleasant time it was not it's not a good time to be around well what is your relation with you know Sheehan Martin Sheen he did a documentary in 1985 that was about Vietnam War veterans and I found that and the narration included several of my poems I found out subsequently that he did that for free he did not get paid and I thought that was a nice gesture so I managed to get his address or at least his agents address from the Syracuse public TV station which had done this program and I sent him a copy of the book that the poems were in and about six months later I got a very nice letter back from him and I guess a little bit after that he called me up and said he was doing a film in New York and could I come up he'd like to meet me and sorry we're not exactly close pals but I've seen him a number of times over the years he he actually when he did that show though the West Wing he sent me this note saying come out and be the guest of the Acting President acting president and I my daughter had just started school at a new school for seventh grade I thought can't put my daughter out of school like a two weeks into the school year if you make it into a second season I'll come next year and I don't hear anything and then like June of the at that academic year I get this letter saying well we're going into season two are you coming so we actually went out and spent a week with him on the set of The West Wing which is a lot of fun he's an interesting man he's very politically progressive left-wing he's he's been arrested like 80 times protesting various lunatic American foreign policy stuff what's your relationship with Philip Caputo I was with a group of writers who went to Vietnam in 1990 which was my second of three post-war trips and phil was on that trip so I got to know him then there was actually something that happened that I I won't get into but Phil comported himself with great dignity and honor in the face of some of our traveling companions less-than-honorable behavior and it cemented my respect for him it's interesting phil was actually in the same battalion that i was in but two years before me he was a Marine officer your friend john baekje has this fabulous archival collection and one of the things I noticed in his collection was some paintings by an artist named Jane Eyre Irish and I thought it would ask you because it looks like there was something that you would find attractive to that because her work isn't just artistic but it's poetic at the same time am i right yes if fact you ought to do a show with Jane because she is a Philadelphia artist she is wonderful very very talented and she began she got fascinated with the Vietnam veterans against the war in the anti-war movement back in the late 90s and early 21st century and started doing artwork that it incorporates this elaborate beautiful French Rococo paintings into which she drops all this stuff about the Vietnam War and Vietnam Veterans Against the War and she she actually includes in a number of her paintings and artwork she puts the poetry in it there's poems of mine that are in her paintings which is like super cool she's also travelled back to Vietnam on on multiple occasions and she now incorporates visual artistry from contemporary Vietnam that she puts into her painting she's she's a wonderful artist you're part of Ken Burns Vietnam wow you were pretty outspoken in that well actually they left the best stuff on the cutting room floor which is I thought what you said was rather strong yeah well you they edited me in some places quite heavily and you need first of all I'm glad you asked this because it Ken Burns but in fact it's Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Novick is Novick contacted me in February of night of 2011 I worked with her for almost seven years on a regular basis I met Ken Byrne once in June of night of 2017 at a reception in New York shook hands with him he thanked me for being in the show that's all I ever did we with Ken Burns Lynn Novick is the one who did the grunt work her and up and her associate producer Sara Botstein now how I ended up on the show I've been around I've been doing talking about the war writing about the war for a long time if you start to study the Vietnam War at all I'm kind of hard to miss perfectly logical for for them to approach me I was skeptical I actually hadn't done a documentary film in 20 years because I don't like having other people edit me I can tell my own story perfectly well and I had had some bad experiences and I simply refused to do it again but I have to admit burns and Novick burns that gets your attention and Linda Novick when she contacted me knew who I was had read at least some of my work and could talk about it intelligently I actually had somebody from the military channel called me up and asked to interview me and they were doing programs about the battle for way and the siege of Khe Sanh and this woman didn't even know which of those two battles I'd been in and I told her go do some freaking homework and then call me back of course I never heard from her again nobody could take in some some effort to figure out who is this guy that got my attention so I did it but I was real I was I waited six years I was worried about what they do let me tell you some of the stuff that they didn't include we get we get Karl Marlantes the famous novelist who talks about how he was verbally assaulted by anti-war demonstrators as he was leaving Travis Air Force Base coming back from Vietnam the visual that burns in Novick show as he's saying that are a bunch of people standing there with signs they're clearly not saying anything they're certainly not angrily shouting dude is standing there quietly and that's that's being verbally assaulted by anti-war people I told him the story about how when I got back I went to buy a car with the money I'd saved in Vietnam my dad and I went down in western motors here in Fort Washington and I bought myself a brand-new beautiful red Volkswagen right off the showroom floor except I didn't buy that car I had to give the money to my father and he bought that car and the owners card was in his name for 18 months until I turned 21 and the next day I'm now back from Vietnam 48 hours I go to get insurance on my brand-new car and I am told by the insurance broker that as far as the state of Pennsylvania is concerned I am a child dependent upon my parents I must be carried on my parent's insurance policy as a dependent child I am a combat wounded Marine Corps sergeant just back from Vietnam and the state of Pennsylvania says we don't care you're a dependent child that's all you are to us you want to talk spit on that's being spit on and I begged Novick to put that in the documentary they didn't put it in there's there's there's a lot of stuff wrong with that documentary the only thing right about it is that it's opened up doors for me to be able to say what I've been saying for 50 years to an audience I not previously been able to reach I appreciate you're behind this is part of it but there's a lot of other places that because I'm in that documentary I get invited to speak and then I can say what I just said to you that burns and Novick wouldn't put in there film Mark Bowden follows the same pattern yeah he got along with more mark I'd like to get him on the show I'm apparently the last guy he interviewed he he had finished the manuscript basically and was down doing some additional research at the Johnson library in Austin Texas and there's a researcher down there and somebody works for the library who knows me and knows my writing and he said you really you should talk to this guy Earhart he lives right down the road from you Bowden you know there's a Kenneth square right and so mark called me up and we ended up having an interview and the parts of me that show up in the book he kind of jammed into the already finished manuscript yeah so that was kind of cool I read the form every day how can you not do you I know you're gonna be angry when I ask you this question but I'm gonna ask you anyway do you think you've lost any of your humanity in Vietnam well of course I did put it in its bluntest terms going off the war is not a very good thing it is it runs counter to everything most human beings are taught thou shalt not kill shows up in virtually every religion on the planet and so war is not a nice thing even it screws you up even when what you're doing is you know what if we don't fight it off Hitler what do you get but when you go into a situation like that and it turns out that it's for nothing or for worse than nothing for the wrong reason that's not easy to live with your father aren't you yes so I there are people in the world there are people there are people who never got the opportunity to be parents because of me not even figuratively quite literally people I killed when they were young and never got to have the experience of being married being a parent that's a hard thing to live with and when you realize that you did it for them for nothing for the wrong reasons that those people died because of the arrogance and ignorance of a bunch of proud people in Washington DC I mean is I live with it you know you learn to live with it but it doesn't go away and of course what's even worse is that you know you said do I think of Vietnam think about it every day how can I not think about it every day I pick up the papers and I read about what's going on in Afghanistan what's going on in Iraq I hear that I hear that one of our freakin drone missiles just killed like a bunch of school kids in Yemen it was fired by the Saudis but we gave them the damn weaponry and now there's a bunch of dead school kids like 30 or 40 of them that this bus they hit a bus you know you all read about that in the papers I know what that feels like I know what that smells like the smell of human guts and blood and bone you know this stuff doesn't go away and we we as a nation don't seem to have learned the right lessons from our experience in Vietnam as writing poetry been cathartic for you I bridle at the terms cathartic because I've spent a lifetime that's your word by the way working working at my art of becoming the best poet I can be it's not therapy you know it's like it's art it's something that takes a great deal of time and effort and energy but if I'm honest yeah I think in retrospect it was very therapeutic if you look now at manuals on mental health and you look at post-traumatic stress disorder the very first stage in treatment of PTSD is to talk about the wound talk about the traumatic stress that you underwent and of course that's what I'm doing when I write now it's also true that even when I was writing about the war most intensely I was writing about geese in the autumn and brokenhearted love poems and the Vietnam War has never been my only object and if you you know you read through this book that three-quarters of it has nothing to do with war but yes I think in retrospect it was helpful for me it actually taught me what I think you know we think that writing is a mechanical process you take what's in your brain and put it on paper by writing or typing in fact what you've got in your brain is a big bowl of alphabet soup all those letters are swirling around up there remember when you were a kid to eat an alphabet soup and you and you take the spoon and you'd spell your name you're like Jay I ll Jill that's what you're doing when you're writing is you're actually having to dip into your brain and figure out what's there and make some sense of it and I think writing about the war in when I was in college was a way to help me think about what had happened to me I remember working on a poem that was about like well you and I war people you know we are will you wouldn't have the right to do what you're doing if it weren't for me and my buddies who protected you're free and as I'm trying to write this I realize this is bullcrap that's not what I was doing in Jim hell we lost the Vietnam War and you can still worship at the Church of your choice how about that that had nothing to do with what I was doing in Vietnam and I remember crumbling that paper up and throwing it away because I thought this is nonsense I don't think did so writing helped me sort out my thoughts my feelings and yeah so I guess therapy in closing can I ask you to read a beautiful wreckage what if I didn't shoot the old lady running away from our Patrol or the old man in the back of the head or the boy in the marketplace or what if the boy but he didn't have a grenade and the woman in way didn't lie in the rain in a mortar pit with seven Marines just for food Daphne didn't get hit in the knee Ames didn't die in the river ski didn't die on a medevac chopper between Con Thien and Danang in Vietnamese Con Thien means play of angels what if it really was instead of the place of rotting sandbags incoming heavy artillery rats and mud what if the angel for Ames and ski were the lady the man and the boy and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud and healed his shattered knee what if none of it happened the way I said would it all be a lie with the wreckage be suddenly beautiful with the dead rise up and walk thank you you're welcome with no airport this is John Richard II mainline public television writer Studio 21 until next time I hope you found this informative and educational thank you [Music] you

Channel: John Ricciutti

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Length: 34min 6sec (2046 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 07 2020