The Post of Christmas Past

For a week Nick and I had sworn we weren’t going to the show. It was dawn in the bunker overlooking rows of razor wire, trip flares, and land mines. Nick flicked on the radio already set on the only American station – AFVN, ”the voice of the American fighting man,” which crackled in over the hills that became mountains near Cambodia. Freddie Hart was singing ”Easy Lovin’ ” – a country song with a catchy pedal steel lick. We trudged away from the post with the rest of the guys and left it to the local militia.

We were not going down to Tan Son Nhut to see the Bob Hope show. No way. It would be hokey – part of the old and we thought dying America we had become alienated from and maybe even hostile to. Our tours were a little more than half over, and the recent education had rendered American traditions into distant, stale absurdities. Who better represented those mummeries than Bob Hope. At least that’s what Nick and I thought then.

”Aww, what the hell. Let’s go.”

”Yeah, okay. But it’ll be cornball.”

”I know, but what the hell. . . .”

We came up with sufficient justifications and excuses, but in retrospect I think we’d been eager to go all along. So we hopped on the back of a deuce-and-a-half for the two-hour or so trip south, crossed the Newport Bridge over the Saigon River, and it was on to Tan Son Nhut. The sprawling base was the command center of the war, but that day, Christmas Eve, it was where Bob Hope would put on his USO show for troops far from home. Over the decades our leaders gave him ample opportunities to perform it.

I wondered if my father had seen him on New Guinea during what he liked to call ”the recent unpleasantness.” He heard a Brit use the term after the war, apparently seriously, and used it ever since, not at all seriously. He later told me that he had not seen Bob Hope and that no one went to New Guinea who didn’t have to. But Bob did go there, in 1943, and was in fine form: ”What a beautiful swamp you have here. . . . It’s a top-secret base – even the snakes can’t find it. If you wanna hide from your draft board, this is the place to do it.”  Bob knew something about GIs feeling swindled and exiled.

Nick and I hopped off the truck and walked to the field next to MACV headquarters where crowds of GIs were milling around. APCs were strategically but probably pointlessly deployed around the field, and every now and then a Cobra gunship zoomed overhead – mainly to get a quick look, I thought. We found a great spot not too far from the stage but then saw Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker there. The Brahmin statesman sat there in a dapper seersucker suit, surrounded by a security detail of MPs in crisp khakis and a coterie of civilians sporting wraparound sunglasses. Being around them would be like being around the principal at a school dance. So we moved on and found a less inhibiting place, though it meant we had to stand.

Soon enough, Les Brown and His Band of Renown started up and out came Bob Hope. Yup, there was Bob – whom I had seen on TV since I was but a lad. He wore a khaki shirt with various unit insignia and probably held a golf club, but I can’t be sure. Bob launched into his routine.

”Things have changed a lot back in the states. . . . Some guys are dressing like girls.”

[A little laughter]

”Don’t laugh – if you’d have thought of it, you wouldn’t be here!”

No laugh track; real laughter. Acquaintance with three wars, limited though it was, had revealed to him that the cornerstone of soldiers’ minds was a firm belief that there had been a terrible mistake somewhere and they should all be back home. We knew it well and Bob played on it well.

Miss World came out to sing and dance a little and to exchange quips with Bob. The lines probably hadn’t changed too much since he toured with Rita Hayworth – and didn’t need to. Out came Redd Foxx, who was not well known then, at least not to white audiences, and his risqué jokes worked well. I wonder what Ellsworth Bunker thought of him. Then it was Lola Falana, who cooed and slinked to hoots and whistles. Man, we were in a WW2 newsreel. We should have had Luckies dangling from our lips, but I guess our Marlboros conveyed the same practiced swagger. Nick and I were having a pretty good time after all.

As the show wound down, Mrs Hope came out and invited us to accompany the troupe in ”Silent Night.” Les Brown knew his cue. Oh no, here was the Americana-hokum we had dreaded. Leggy roundeyes and off-color jokes were one thing, ”Silent Night” quite another. But she looked like our grandmothers so we sang along and looked straight at the stage lest someone see our eyes misting up and realize we weren’t quite as hardened as we thought.

We had to be home by dark, even though we had both turned nineteen since arriving in-country. So it was back up north for the two lads, and back to the tedium that Bob had broken more ably than we thought possible that morning.

As the sun went down, we returned to the post, relieving the local militia. The 155s on a nearby firebase that usually thumped out shells onto the continent and popped our ears with dissipated concussive forces, were silent that night. While the happy few trudged up to the wire with our rattling helmets and flak jackets and M-16s and bandoliers, we noticed that someone had placed a small Santa Claus doll atop one of the bunkers – a jarring sight in the tropic heat and cheerless surroundings.

Dudley was not the brightest guy to heft a rifle in that war, but for a brief moment that evening he was a genius. As he neared Santa he dimly sensed paradox and discontinuity. No one could have articulated what was whirring in each of our minds, but a song came up in Dudley’s and he started into it.

”It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. . . .”

We all broke into laughter, then into song.

”Everywhere I go. . . .”

Good cheer abounded, though laced with GI irony.

”Have you been a good little boy over here in Vietnam?”

”Oh yes, Santa!”

It was our own little joke, our own show. Too bad Bob wasn’t there to get in on the fun. He’d have gotten it, and so would troops in Iraq and Afghanistan today. It was like the mordant closing of Full Metal Jacket where they sing the Mickey Mouse Club song – a private joke filled with alienation, resentment, cynical detachment from youthful illusions, and for one glorious moment, rising out of the whole mess. And moments like that have more to to do with keeping up morale than a ton of cards and letters from the folks back home – few of whom could have understood us. It was all ours.

”It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere I go. . . .”

Into the bunker . . . lock and load. Click! Thwack! At the briefing the LT had noted increased activity despite a unilateral truce, but S-2 never got it right. Nick and I took turns catching a little sleep. Nothing happened that night, just the odd red tracer round and a brief, unrequested encore from Dudley a hundred yards or so away. At dawn Nick flicked on AFVN.

^©2009 Brian M. Downing

Dedicated to my good friend Perry “Nick” Novotny, 1953-2016.