CHAPTER 1 - Stan's Problems
Stan Bradley was an Army noncommissioned officer who had become a perplexity. He needed aid in straightening out his life after retirement. Assigned to Mister Bradley by the United States Army was a psychologist, John Hurst. As Mister Hurst stared out the window of his office, they discussed problems.
Mister Hurst was a civilian who had never seen active duty with the military; he appraised his patients with careful objectivity nonetheless. The first thing Stan Bradley came to see the psychologist for was a drinking problem. The Korean conflict and the war in Vietnam had taken their toll on him. Bradley was fifty-three years old. Physicians diagnosed him as having a heart condition, compounded by an ulcer.
As the two men sat, they spoke guardedly. Bradley in particular appeared as unyielding as the military cast that had surrounded him. Yet there were two strong forces working within him: love for his family, and a primal instinct for survival. An intuitive, somewhat gut-level, thinking process tied these things together. It seemed somehow, to Mister Hurst, that Stan was too smart to discuss what was bothering him, for fear of stirring up a strong sense of moral responsibility that lay beneath his attitude. Still, he felt the duty of prying into the sediment of agonized emotions that had been accumulating within Bradley for so many years.
"When did this drinking problem begin?" Mister Hurst asked, as a prelude to more thorough investigation.
"Well, it got substantially serious after two tours in Vietnam," Mister Bradley explained to the psychologist. "I was living with death and destruction. It began to overwhelm me. Drinking was a mean of escaping. Dealing with my men had become impossible after returning to the United States in '69. Half my soldiers turned into addicts after being in Vietnam. There were few people, like myself, who volunteered to be in the Army, among enlisted ranks."
Hurst moved items nervously about on top of his desk, shuffling papers, and yet feeling his professional interest stir as his patient continued.
"You have to remember this, Mister Hurst," Bradley went on. "Military life is frustrating as hell. Victory bases itself on premise that you function in a manner more cunning than your enemy does, in order to beat him at his own game. Competence in a military action is not easy when enemy and allies do not follow the same set of ground rules."
"Tell me what you mean by competence," instructed Mister Hurst. At this point in their discussion the civilian psychologist acted with pronounced professionalism, taking considerable interest in his patient's problem, but only a detached interest in the sergeant himself.
"The ability to get a job done," answered Stan. "In the military, accomplishment of your mission takes priority over welfare of your men. Commanders do not always take their men's welfare into account. A commander is responsible to his superiors for accomplishment of his assignment. Unlike you and me, he is soulless, sometimes, over how many lives it will cost, so long as his action gets a job done."
"Precedence of objectives has greater significance in war time circumstances," agreed John.
"Like any occupation, the military is a bureaucracy filled with unscrupulous people," Stan stated. "It simply cannot be democratic. You perished by the enemy's hand while you waited on a senseless throng of inane foot soldiers deciding the next evasive action."
"Why is that," asked Mister Hurst? With this query John found himself becoming less detached and taking on a personal interest in Sergeant Bradley. "When you talk about the enemy, who was it you were being antagonized by? Were you trying to defeat an opponent chain of command, or was it the soldiers in your own ranks who were rivalry? Do you think the average G.I. saved lives, cost lives, or was more trouble than the adversary?"
"You might think you can operate with a humanistic attitude in the United States military Mister Hurst," Sergeant Bradley continued discontentedly, "but in a sense, that is letting your country down. The communists didn't operate like that. If you lead your comrades into believing it, mister, you are a real bastard in my eyes. If you let men think for one minute that they do not have to take anything and everything you can dish out in way of simpleminded bantering, along with essential orders, you will lose control of them. If they do not carry out orders, to the letter, quickly and effectively, your command will fall apart beneath you. Brass will be on your back faster than jack rabbits fornicate."
"I see," Hurst encouraged. "What else do you feel about all this?"
"It is not possible for a military arm of our government to operate as a democracy," Stan explained. "Militarism's function is to support democracy. It must perform with the same tactics that adversaries base their logic on, if it is to successfully defend the government. Belligerence, combined with blind obedience in carrying out orders, no matter how meaningless or self-defeating they seem to be, is the only way men will successfully defeat an antagonist. At first it was Chinese and North Koreans I was fighting. Later on in Vietnam it was my own chain of command."
"I think what you need right now is some kind of diversion, Stan," indicated Mister Hurst. "Have you ever attempted painting, meditation, or prayer as a form of relaxing? I think it could help you. I am advising you that it has come to a point where your health could cost everything you worked all your life to accomplish. You need to slow down and sort things out."
"I suppose you're correct," the sergeant agreed. "There are a lot of things that have stymied me: waiting, for example. There have been times in my life when waiting became so unbearable that praying was all I could think of to do. One of the main doctrines of the military is to 'hurry up and wait.' Haste is the byword for all things, from parades to processing prisoners. Patience is always a virtue given to physically superior men in my memory. Continuity is important in war. Impeding forward momentum of battle may preclude not having to accept further losses, but it does nothing for your soldiers' attitude toward winning an entire conflict."
"Perhaps you should be a little more patient, more broadminded, Stan," Hurst counseled. "Don't you think that intolerant attitudes can be perilous to anyone in war time?"
"Maybe so, but you have to be ready to accept a percentage of losses along with winning of major victories or entire conflicts. Men that remain healthy are able to relax, then act quickly and effectively when called upon to do so; while weaker ones, who tend to let their own stamina deteriorate, waiting, experience fits of cowardice, frustration, and complete emotional breakdown when put into life and death situations. A man cannot spend all his life waiting. Neither can he spend all his life working. There are a thousand things that come into play during confrontation of military forces. Disposition and attitudes of men determine the most important factors in battle."
"Why is that," asked John?
"If leadership is effective but combatants have a poor attitude, they will lose in battle, no matter how numerically they outnumber their enemy or how superior their weapons are," replied Stan. "In my own mind the worst part of life is that fraction we spend expecting to take affirmative action. Holy men can spend all their lives in expectation; for men like myself it is not possible. To remain inactive is slow torture. Expectancy makes you think death is catching up to you. When you have led a life as shattering as mine, it is not a pleasant thought to contend with. To me, prolonged inactivity is intolerable!"
"What has been the most trying aspect of being a soldier you can remember?" The psychologist asked.
"Probably the war in Vietnam," Bradley replied. "I was entirely committed to doing my job. Nothing else mattered. My wife and children were eight thousand miles away in the United States. My one priority, aside from the task, was to live long enough to see them again. Even so, I completely forgot them at times and had become content to live in villages surrounding our air base at Bien Hoa just north of Saigon. At times I asked myself what I was doing sleeping with an Oriental woman while my wife was alone raising our family back in the United States. There were some dark nights in Vietnam when I convinced myself I was not going back to the States."
"Looking back, did you estimate your life to be normal before that war?" Hurst inquired.
"In Korea there was bitter cold to contend with," Bradley acknowledged, ignoring Hurst's question, "but that was before I had a family. I became drafted into that war as a private and came back, when it ended, as a buck sergeant. I got out of the Army for a few years, and then joined up again in '57. I stayed away from women in Korea because I thought they diminished my stamina. It took considerable perseverance to survive that bitter climate, six months out of the year. Women did not become my biggest vice until I reached my late thirties. I knew I had grown careless when I contracted venereal diseases a couple of times. Rather than letting this go on official record, I had my condition treated by Vietnamese doctors who were friends of my consort at the time."
"Tell me a little more about this consort," entreated the psychologist, noting that Stan seemed inclined to talk about women. "What was it, primarily, that prompted you to seek out women other than your wife?"
"Well, Mister Hurst," Sergeant Bradley continued, "I couldn't blame my own extramarital affairs on any neglect on Peggy's behalf. She is about the most attentive person a man could ask for in a wife. I think it was fear of dying in a foreign country that made me want to go on living for the moment. My girl friend's name was Su Ann Trang. Well, that's not exactly right. To Vietnamese her name was Trang Tuyen, because they all put their family name before the given name. Her first name was Tuyen, you see, which means 'gold thread,' but most of the soldiers including myself couldn't pronounce her first name very well, so we just called her Su Ann. That sounded a little like Tuyen, and she seemed to like the new name we gave her."
"Let's talk about her a little more," Hurst urged, mindful of his patient's rather disorganized commentary.
"It was during the Vietnam War in '71," Stan narrated. "She was a mistress, common to Southeast Asia, throughout the course of the war. Her captivating almond eyes and that elegant face ingrained themselves in my memory."
Ironing out wrinkles in the sergeant's character was a real problem to Hurst. As an American, Bradley seemed to the psychologist to epitomize everything that was overbearing in a human being. Originally, Stan came to John Hurst with his drinking problem. Later, his wife threatened to leave him. The sergeant went through ceilings in his efforts to keep her from suing him for a divorce on grounds of infidelity. Bradley's two children were young adults. One was a reckless blond youth in his late teens, the other an appealing young woman. Stan went back to work as a civilian employee, for the military, at Fort Benning, Georgia in '76.
As a psychologist, attempting to get a broad view of the man's problem, Mister Hurst decided to probe Bradley's chaotic past. "Why is it that you don't describe women as your biggest vice until the end of your military career?" John asked, trying to get at the heart of Stan's family problem.
"Mister Hurst, women have always been my biggest problem," Stan replied. "It just began to ruin my life after I met my wife. This was quite a few years after the police action ended in Korea. I was training recruits at Fort Ord in California. Living in Monterey, in '65, I would perpetually run into all sorts. I climbed the promotion ladder back to buck sergeant, then got promoted to staff sergeant. It was prior to our country's accelerating the war effort again. Peggy was a decent kind of person that I was not familiar in dealing with in those days. I had no tact. I did not know how to treat anyone with the respect they expected."
"What do you think prompted your antipathy," questioned the analyst?
"With the exception of officers in my own chain of command," Stan answered, "and women when I absolutely had to out of pure physical desire, I avoided starting close friendships all together. At the time my concern was making sure draftees learned enough to keep 'em alive first time in a combat zone."
"Tell me some more about the war in Vietnam," John prompted. "How did Peggy take it the first time you were there?"
