BOYS OF SUMMER

WALKING THE BOARDS along the Jersey Shore after a lifetime of experiences, jobs, travel, friends and accomplishments seems to bring my husband, Mike, to an old destination and time. His thoughts journey back to his summers as a lifeguard at Pier Beach, Spring Lake. He was strong and tan with zinc oxide on his nose. He spent his days surveying the horizon for anyone in need of help in the surf. That sense of being a protector has never left him. Summers as a lifeguard were followed by college graduation, the draft, OCS and commission as a Second Lieutenant in Uncle Sam’s Army.      

He wasn’t the only lifeguard to head for that troubled war. The boys of summer became the Vets of Vietnam—and their story of duty, camaraderie, values and service have rarely been told properly, simply overshadowed by stories of loss and self-destruction.

No longer a tanned, cocky hunk who scanned the surf for any swimmer in need, Mike is the man who was shaped by summers along the ocean. He is the man who faced death and fear in the jungles of a war neither he nor his fellow soldiers understood.

I’ve been fascinated at how much Mike has talked about escapades of his teenage years and about Vietnam since we moved back home to the Jersey Shore, to Brielle, New Jersey. As we drive to the grocery store, to dinner out with friends or for boardwalk beach walks, he points out places that were.

“That was Patty’s house,” or “the Carmody family lived there,” or “that gin mill used to be Crine’s where we went all the time.” After more than fifty years saying little, Mike also started talking about Vietnam regularly. He shows me pictures on Facebook posted by men of his company who live across the country and who are also remembering.

STORIES INSIDE RED, CLAY-STAINED ENVELOPES

I have boxes of a lifetime that I’ve moved from state to state. Recently, I decided it was time to take out Mike’s Vietnam letters and discover the stories that have made us who we are.

I’ve read more than a year’s worth of letters from Vietnam and now see clearly the man Mike became in the face of death. I’d forgotten that time and the color of fear he wrote about so vividly and the maturity he had to possess to lead others into firefights and search and destroy missions. In his neat Catholic school penmanship, on paper often stained by the red clay of Vietnam, he wrote in detail about what he was doing, his pride and his frustrations.

26 May 1969 (written 2 days after arriving in Vietnam)

“Around here there is no bullshit. You either do the job or go home in a plastic bag”.

“Tomorrow, I go out to Fire base Penny. Today Penny was attacked. Reality has struck home. Only the strong survive. It’s a fact…I seem to have a knot that is continually getting tighter in my stomach. I think fear is the prime emotion that keeps you alive”.

Most of the letters reflect the sheer drudgery of infantry life. Working and sleeping in the rain. Patrolling small areas over and over again. No front line. No clear idea of what a win is. Wet uniforms, wet socks, bad food, little sleep.

11 June ‘69

“It’s funny you get to know the area— you know the trails, the streams, even the habits of the animals. Then you leave.”

Mike quickly found, on the ground in Vietnam, the emptiness of the political arguments for a war the U.S. public didn’t support.

13 June ‘69

“The more time I spend in the country, the firmer my conviction grows that the U.S. should pack their bags and make it back to home soil. We made a mistake. Let’s admit to it…Thank God I know that the most time I can spend here is a year. Knowing that gives you that little added push that moves you ahead even when you are near collapse”.

ONE SOLDIER’S MISSION: HIS MEN

Mike didn’t write about drugs or personal tensions between soldiers or anti-war arguments that disrupted his focus. Mike led Ivy League grads, farmers and high school dropouts. Young men from all over the country. I could see his respect for them all and I discovered a young man of empathy and some humor determined to be a leader.

1 July ‘69

“I’ve given up the hope that I’ll ever again be clean. Still haven’t taken a shower— still haven’t changed my clothes. War is Hell!

To be a platoon leader is a lonely life. It’s bad, hard and yet it can be rewarding if you do the job well. To do the job well, comfort for yourself is out! You have to exist for your men. I’ve seen too many platoon leaders who don’t give a shit. They think that if they let their men get away with things—dope, booze etc., they are helping them. All this does is decrease the effectiveness of the platoon. It gives them a false sense of security and over here that’s exactly what you don’t need. A false sense of security gets people killed”.

I’ve found the story of Mike’s personal Vietnam leadership tests that seem central to his development as a man and as a lawyer turned professor. The lessons he embraced in the army are the ones he teaches to law and graduate students today. Most of the students he teaches are now in their twenties like he was when he became a leader of men.

12 July ‘69. 10 p.m.

“Here I sit at Wolly Bully expecting a ground and rocket attack. Earlier this evening we got word that Alpha Company 3rd/10th inf. had captured a prisoner who gave them the information. Tonight, I got word from the Commanding General that I was to employ my small organic 81mm mortar unexpectedly…If we get hit, it’s going to be one hell of a firefight. I’m praying that we don’t. If it’s a ground attack, we should be in good shape defensively. If rockets—my shit is flaky. There is no way you can defend against them...The tension around here tonight is high. I’m scared, and yet I don’t think I show it”.

He didn’t buy the mission or the strategy of the generals’ executing the Vietnam war. Yet, he led with his personal sense of duty toward his men. Keeping the men in his platoon alive was Mike’s mission.

JERSEY SHORE FRIENDSHIPS

I’ve also found some sweet moments of my husband’s youth and the story of Jersey Shore friendships that stretch from the beaches and bars of Spring Lake to beaches and bars in Vietnam.

I’ve discovered the bonds of friendship that shaped the optimistic man I’ve been married to for more than 50 years. Mike wasn’t just a soldier in Vietnam, he was also one of the boys of summer who faced fear and death and who looked out for each other. There were other Jersey Shore boys, other lifeguards in Vietnam at the same time and the country was small enough for them to find each other. There was Ray Schrader and Larry Devine.

I read Mike’s tales of meeting up with Larry when Ray; a helicopter pilot found them both and created a reunion of normalcy in the chaos of endless search and destroy missions.

8 July ‘69

“Got a call on the horn. ‘23(my call sign) There is a bird enroute to your location—a friend on board’.

I can’t believe it. Who the hell is coming out to see me. I wait, the bird lands—out steps Larry Devine and the pilot Ray Schrader, an idiot friend of mine. It was a great reunion. Managed to get some nice wine—it was quite a party. Larry was on his way back from Ben Het where he hooked up with Ray at Pleiku. They knew I was in the area and took off to find me. I’m sure glad they did”.

Ray Schrader was taller than both Larry and Mike and the kind of man who could make a dull evening one to remember. In his twenties, he had a perpetual dude’s smile that welcomed any newcomer to the group, and yet, he wore a surprising protective aura of maturity. Whether you jumped in his “bird” in Vietnam or his car in Manasquan for a pizza at Squan Tavern, you knew you were in safe hands. That protective personality made him a successful pilot in Vietnam. Everyone believed he would make it through the firefights and missile attacks.

Ray detoured to the hospital where Mike was treated after he was wounded in the field. Mike was dusted off with a severe wound from a punji stick—the deadly Vietnamese weapon of war. Ray didn’t trust that the field hospital would take care of Mike and so he paid a visit to check up on him. Mike wrote me after his delirium subsided and the threat of lethal poison was past: “Same old Ray. If you’re his friend he would travel to the ends of the earth to see you,” he wrote.

Ray came back to the Jersey Shore after Vietnam and built a company, Shrader Yacht Sales, in Point Pleasant. He created a powerful world with his smile and commitment to community and family. He died in 2014 before Mike and I moved back and had the chance to laugh with him.

Larry Devine is a different story. Mike and Larry sat next to each other on the long plane ride home from Vietnam. They were then assigned to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where they taught cadets some of the lessons of war that were fresh in their minds.

Larry met his wife Cassie at Mike’s welcome home party in Spring Lake when Mike introduced them. Larry knew that night he would marry her. Larry made Spring Lake Heights home and raised his growing family along the same ocean where he grew up. His four children also put down roots and built successful businesses along the Jersey shore. Larry’s grandchildren now number an even dozen.

LIFEGUARDS’ SENSE OF DUTY

Larry Devine and Mike think of themselves still as the guardians of Pier Beach in Spring Lake, strong enough to swim the waves and save kids pulled out to sea by the riptides.

That sense of duty, that ethic of a lifeguard to respond to someone in trouble without worrying about yourself, pulled them through one long, uncertain year in the army away from endless days of sun and carefree thoughts of tomorrow.

I’ve watched Larry and Mike sitting together at Spring Lake’s Memorial Day gathering for the past few years, both white haired now and proud. They are recognized and celebrated. They are older veterans in the town where they grew up and, in their minds, they are still the boys of the summer.

Yet, Vietnam has followed them both.

AGENT ORANGE:

THE VIETNAM LEGACY

Larry defies death today as he did in this 20s, leaving the hospital after three months in a coma from a case of Guillain-Barre’ Syndrome. His large family surrounded his bed throughout the long days of “sleep” and few thought Larry would ever walk out of the hospital. He did.

Larry spent a long career with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, first processing veterans’ claims. He later served as director of VA’s New York Office of Public Affairs coordinating internal and external information programs for veterans. No one in government wanted to focus on what these young men of the 1960s and 1970s faced in the jungles of Vietnam and what they brought home with them. The implications were too expensive. The realities are all too present now.

Mike too has had diagnoses that appear in augmented numbers of Vietnam veterans: prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes and other odd aches and pains. Despite it all, the two who partied carefree at the shore in their 20s and who rendezvoused in places like Nha Trang and Pleiku, Vietnam, can smile and laugh together at new hangouts along the shore these decades later. Mike and Larry spent the last few years ringing in the New Year together. Today, they are survivors in their 70s who defy their ailments and can snicker together that agent orange is the gift that keeps giving.

If both Mike and Larry have myriad medical issues that show up in higher numbers among veterans than in the general population, they also possess an attitude of strength and a deep reservoir of manhood that is their north star. They are not men who greedily grasp for themselves; they are men for the other. They led men in war, felt the bond of combat and were forever shaped by the experience of standing for an ideal of America they believed in.

They still believe in America—with all its warts. Vietnam and the beaches of New Jersey had a hand in shaping the men they are.

BY SUSAN KING