Jason Fudge

The Snuffies Return to The World – The Wrap

Dale Dye returns from Vietnam.

Dale Dye returns from Vietnam.

By Dale Dye

It’s time to sober up and evaluate this thing. Back here in The World there’s a little elbow room, a little space that’s not filled with specters of an old and controversial war. There’s been a day or two to fight through the roiling brain mists that engulfed most of us on the return engagement to Vietnam, so there’s no balm in shirking.  What we need now are insights and inspirations, florid vocabulary that will instantly and accurately convey the nature and depth of strange, otherworldly sensations. What we need is a nuclear detonation of trenchant phrasing to describe the raw emotions we felt practically every waking moment during our return to ancient battlefields in a country long past the war that nearly destroyed it fifty years ago.

Indeed. But as Jon Fogarty fronting CCR reminds me, I ain’t no fortunate son. So we’re doomed to take it as it comes. And what comes first for those of us who last saw Vietnam as a war-ravaged third-world country is an instant realization that the societal worm has turned in Southeast Asia.  You can call it the triumph of capitalism, you can call it empirical evidence that communism is, was, and always will be a failed social model for everything except UN desk-pounding and May Day Parades. What you can’t deny – assuming even a modicum of objectivity – is that the Vietnamese are generally thriving and pounding down the road to a commerce-based meritocracy.

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By Jason Fudge, ago

Day Four: Snuffys’ Return to Vietnam

Dale Dye and Mike Stokey at RVN cemetery. Photo by John Riedy

Dale Dye and Mike Stokey at RVN cemetery. Photo by John Riedy

by Dale Dye

Day Four of The Great Ghost Chase gives me a case of the staggering willies even before the bus rolls out of Danang headed north on Vietnamese Highway 1. Our course runs through the once-infamous Hai Van Pass that meanders as it climbs toward the far north. Then – somewhere up around 1500 feet – it twists into a series of radical switchbacks. And it’s up there where the road contorts like Lawrence Welk’s old accordion (okay…google it…he used to be a popular polka music guy on early American TV) right up around that point is where the North Vietnamese Army used to ambush truck convoys from the jungle-covered high ground above the Hai Van Pass. The convoys were called Roughriders with machine gun-festooned gun trucks rolling at front and rear of the cargo haulers. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents hitchhiking rides up to infantry units in areas like Phu Bai, Hue, Quang Tri and other killing fields closer to the DMZ hated the Roughriders. Granted riding a Roughrider was easier than humping hills but those heavy machine guns doing recon-by-fire played hell with nap time.

Our bus has no machine guns but there is a bad-ass dragon amulet swinging from the rear view mirror, so we figure it’s OK to relax. And when that happens war stories come bubbling up like swamp gas. Nobody wants to talk about the blood and guts stuff. Or if they do nobody is going to listen very long. That’s the kind of thing that makes you wheeze, gag and moan with night-sweats. Better to focus on the funny stuff…like the tine you were stranded with a broken down six-by overnight at the Hai Van Pass with only a .45 pistol and a bent tire iron to fight off hordes of marauding enemy.  Yeah…well, maybe it wasn’t hordes. Maybe it was a couple of rock apes that scared the hell out of you and refused to retreat despite firing off every round of your pistol ammo and then grabbing the tire-iron from the panicky driver to do close-quarters battle with mountain specters. I’ve heard it all before, so it’s easy to tune out and contemplate some of the mysteries that confront us on this return to Vietnam after a half-decade of swearing we’d never return to the Land of the Lotus Eaters, The Nam where we all first learned to embrace the suck. (more…)

By Jason Fudge, ago

CCs head back to Vietnam

1st Division ISO Snuffies:(l-r) Eric Grimm, Richard Lavers, Robert Bayer, Michael Stokey, Frank Wiley, Dale Dye. (Or as Julia Dye knows them, Rafter Man, Rick, Ding, The ARVN, Lurch, and Daddy D.A.). Not shown is Steve Berntson. Photo by John Riedy.

1st Division ISO Snuffies:(l-r) Eric Grimm, Richard Lavers, Robert Bayer, Michael Stokey, Frank Wiley, Dale Dye. (Or as Julia Dye knows them, Rafter Man, Rick, Ding, The ARVN, Lurch, and Daddy D.A.). Not shown is Steve Berntson. Photo by John Riedy.

(Ed. Note:  Dale Dye and other CC “Snuffys” returned to Vietnam this week.  This is Dale’s first installment):

An emergency room physician circulated among the survivors. His diagnosis was quick and easy: Terminal culture shock. If the moment had been some jangled parsec in the psychedelic sixties he’d have called it a bad acid trip, but the Doc knew where and when he was even if the shocked Veterans kept claiming if couldn’t be Vietnam, the war-ravaged turbulent country they’d left behind nearly 50 years before.

It started the moment they began to unwind from 17 hours jammed inside a turbo-jet tin can that roared out of Los Angeles, through Hong Kong and into Danang, headquarters of their old 1st Marine Division where most of them served as Combat Correspondents in the bloody gut of the Vietnam War at various times ranging from 1965 to 1970. Giving them the bored bureaucrat stare at passport control were guys in familiar olive-green uniforms festooned with red collar tabs. The last place most of them had been so close to uniforms like that was up on the Demilitarized Zone—at places like Con Thien, The Rockpile, and Khe Sanh. Back then the uniformed Vietnamese were carrying AK-47s rather than rubber immigration stamps.

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By Jason Fudge, ago