Ernest Dempsey — Vietnam veteran, and now a writer, Donald Bodey gives a close picture of the physical and mental anguish a young soldier faced in Nam in his novel F.N.G. The hero of his story, Gabe Sauers, represents a generation of young American men many of whose lives took a sudden and drastic turn with being drafted into the army. The following interview with Donald Bodey catches some of the important sides of the impact the Nam war had on the author’s life.
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Ernest: Don, I feel your novel F.N.G. invites several interesting questions. But first of all, I couldn’t help notice that the book doesn’t show us the lead character Gabe Sauers’ life prior to his drafting for Nam. Why so?
Don: Frankly, I don’t know. I didn’t outline, or have any sense of the shape of the novel; hadn’t thought ahead of what I was writing; and by the time I came to know Gabe, his prior life wasn’t important, and an introduction to that would have altered the pace of the story drastically.
This story is a year long and, for the most part, that year is full. We do have some understanding of Gabe via his conversations, his daydreams, and letters. And there’s a little bit of Everyman here, an anonymity, so a reader can put his own face on the narrator.
In a way, I think my style of writing evolved partly because I was afraid to write, afraid to stray very far from using the simplest style possible. One thing that has always bothered me, although he died before the book, is that I never mention my dad. I thought I’d get to it in my next book. In a way, I did that in the new chapter, and that pleased me, satisfied me, even.
Ernest: Did drafting for war, as happened to you back then, hurt the true sense of patriotism?
Don: A couple things to clear up here. Being drafted into the army didn’t necessarily mean the draftee would be sent to war. Some went to Germany, some to Korea, and other places. By far, though, most went to Vietnam. I was 22 years old when I got drafted, and had used up four years of student deferment. I was, and still am, very much against war, and I tried very hard to keep from going. I considered going to Canada, like some of my friends did. As a last-ditch effort, I applied for and was accepted into VISTA, but was drafted the next day. I was plenty willing to serve in VISTA because I was raised to be a patriot, and I felt it was not unfair to serve this country; but combat wasn’t my first option. After training, I went A.W.O.L. long enough (30-some days) to be classified as a deserter, and I intended to flee the country. However, I was in two accidents within a week; so I turned myself in and reported on crutches. I was punished, spent some time in the brig, lost rank, and was shipped to Vietnam. My feelings of patriotism were plenty dubious by the time I got there. On the other hand, there were draftees who felt it was their duty, and never complained. Many, many men ended up in safe places; in terms of luck, mine wasn’t good to start with.
Ernest: Is the fear of death the worst thing a new recruit in a war like that of Nam suffers?
Don: What could be worse than death? Well, I used to fear it—every one of us did—but I was afraid of other things too, like stepping on a mine and losing my legs, of snakes, and, truthfully, of going crazy. One’s mental state under that kind of duress is fragile and sometimes it took everything I had to maintain. This isn’t something guys talk about among themselves; so it can isolate you and depress you to the point where you don’t care, about anything; so the fear of death even recedes. I think some combination of these states of mind is largely responsible for heroics. And, once you’ve SEEN death in combat, it’s a lot easier to be afraid of it; but what’re you going to do? You pretend not to be afraid, and it works for a while. I believe an FNG spends a great deal of time thinking about getting killed or maimed but after a while, those possibilities don’t occupy your thoughts, at least not all the time.
Ernest: That’s comprehensible! Okay, tell us, how does war alter our self-image or, speaking broadly, our identity?
Don: I have noticed that those friends of mine who were highly-trained as soldiers—Green Berets, for example—don’t seem to be as negatively influenced by the experience as were most of us who only had Basic and Infantry training. I’m not sure why, although I think it might have to do with them being given positive feedback during training, whereas we were always “pukes” or “pussies”. Personally, I went from being a college graduate with visions of a future to a “grunt” and that’s a long way down. I hated the army and hated being in the war. I’m a decorated veteran, but you can have all that. The experience changed me in quite a few ways. First of all, once you’ve been there, you’re forever separated from those who haven’t, and that was the thing I noticed when I got home. I didn’t have anything to talk about; my cronies had simply gone on with life for 2 years, and there is no linkable commonality. I was a mess, had absolutely no confidence, was (and forever will be) socially retarded, and made the mistake of marrying my sweetheart. It was a mistake because she only knew the pre-Nam me, and I never talked to her about it. The marriage ended partly because we were so much different and of course, I was the oddball. I began to become very existentialistic and distant. I didn’t fit in; I felt older than everybody; and I didn’t recognize help when it was offered. I figured I could “do it on my own” or, if that didn’t work, nothing mattered. Remember, I came home in 1970; the war was still going on and I couldn’t forget about it.
Ernest: Reading F.N.G., it was bit of mystery that all soldiers in the novel have a nickname except Gabe. How come?
Don: Nicknames seem to come with masculine activity—war, work, sports. As a writer, the nicknames in the book seemed to show up on their own, and it’s a sort of convenience to categorize guys that way. Gabe does get one, “Chu-Hoi”, but I barely use it, probably because it gives him a bit of omnipotence somehow. I mean, where he uses a nickname, then the first-person ‘I’ loses some of its impact. When I was there, I was two or three or four years older than most of the guys. There was a guy there, when I got there, who was a little older than me and everybody called him “Old Man”. I sort of inherited that one when he left. When I became a sergeant, I was sometimes called “Sarge”; but my last name sounds like a nickname, so mostly I was some version of that: Bodeman, Bodey-san, Bodes.
Ernest: Destruction of the “enemy” is central to a soldier’s life in the battlefield, or so we are made to think. But F.N.G. tells us that soldiers in war also turn on themselves; Peacock’s suicide attempt, for example. Is it a common thing to turn suicidal, in thought or action, while out as a soldier in the battlefield?
Don: Suicide? Homicide? Fratricide? You’ve got a rifle ALL THE TIME. Of course, you think of killing. That is all that gun is good for. There were a couple instances where a couple guys came close to settling some dumbass argument with their rifles; but there is always an underlying sense of responsibility and, dare I say, Duty. We weren’t all renegades all the time and I can remember a couple fights which came to the point of somebody having to disarm somebody else, but that’s because we are basically civilized; I don’t think anybody completely lost a sense of propriety. I believe I’ve already addressed the question of suicide. I didn’t see it over there, but I know a disproportionate number of returning vets have killed themselves. I can tell you this: those thoughts don’t come in a firefight; they come later, when you’re sitting around a circle of guys with thousand-meter stares on their face.
Ernest: Right. Now a related question here: does fighting as a soldier damage one’s general respect for life? Does it make one more or less sensitive to suffering and pan?
Don: It’s been more than 40 years since my war experience, and the kind of person I am quite logically has both something to do with having been a soldier, and something to do with the fact that that was forty years ago. But to say the war itself has anything to do with my respect for life seems anachronistic. I’ve never been too religious, but when I got home, I went to church with my mother. Once. It felt so weird, so unlike life as I knew it, that I told my mom I could never go again and she asked me why not. I told her I felt like a hypocrite, which was easier than explaining I’d been too angry at man to believe in God. My loss of faith and subsequent agnosticism/pantheism are truly related to the changes in my thinking that took place over there.
You’ve certainly hit it on the head when you say “witnessing the destruction of” life. That’s totally different, and affects a person more deeply than, say, a murder down the street. I think it makes one less sensitive to suffering and pain. We build up a kind of callus in our mind—maybe “been there, seen that” as an attitude. Frankly, though, I’m pretty sure the experience has something to do with my ignoring my OWN, which has cost me.
Ernest: What I’ve asked war vets before is how war affected their family life. What’s been your experience?
Don: The day I got back was my mother’s birthday, and my kid brother had been drafted and needed to report the next day. So, it wasn’t a very ordinary homecoming. A neighbor woman whom I’d known all my life came and as soon as she saw me—all 120 pounds, 40 less than when I left—she burst into tears and ran home. We made it through the day—my mom thereafter called it the hardest day of her life—and my brother left the next day, ignoring my advice to split, and was in Vietnam two months later. So that brother and I have a lot in common, even though he ended up an M.P. Another brother said years later that he could tell the difference between how it affected me and how it affected him, without knowing anything about our tours. My father had been pro-war when I left, he being a John Wayne guy, but by the time my brother got there, my dad had changed how he felt about the war, simply wanted another son to make it home. I left home when my mother would let me; she told me “you’re not going anywhere until I put some muscle on your bones,” and a couple months of eating her cooking did it.
I pissed my folks, and others, off when I got married without telling anybody except the brother who was in Nam, and we traveled a lot for two years. There were some instances, one of which happened in San Francisco where I felt a concussion from some work being done under the streets, and I hit the deck. I can still see the look on my wife’s face when she realized her husband had been low-crawling in broad daylight in the middle of a city. Of course she asked, “What is WRONG with you?”, and of course, I couldn’t tell her, and didn’t try. Twenty-five or 30 years later, I started thinking about something in my kitchen—dead guys—and started sobbing. My second wife was there, and she said, “What is WRONG with….” but caught herself and didn’t finish her sentence. I was the only vet among my kid’s friends’ parents. Sometimes he asked me why I wasn’t normal, until a friend of mine heard him ask me once, and dragged him outside to explain that “normal” is a word that advertising makes up, and that I was “different” because I was a vet. After my book came out, I dedicated a reading to my mom, “who taught me to read, and therefore to write,” and the hometown press asked her about that. She said, “Why, yes, I taught him to read and write, but not those words he uses in his book.” She wasn’t a fast reader, but she read the book twice.
Ernest: So would you share your opinion here on whether the war in the 21st century, like that in Iraq and Afghanistan, is different in its impact on the warriors?
Don: War is war. The soldiers overseas are going to have experiences similar to mine. One vast difference is the communication capabilities today. They can call home, can use email, facebook, twitter, whatever, and watch satellite TV sometimes. If anything, I think the military learned to send them in units, and bring them back in those same units. That’s huge, when it comes to fitting back in. Nam vets almost always came back alone. When I left the field, I left behind everybody I’d met and known there, never to see them again. Today’s vets have a slight advantage that way; but sooner or later, they’ll be alone with certain memories, and I suspect some of their maladies will be a lot like mine. They, too, will be pariahs, simply because there is only so much those of us who weren’t with them can understand, and that’s the bulk of people they’ll deal with.
Ernest: Let me tell you I really really loved the line in F.N.G. that reads, “writing on my hat and carving on a beech are acts of faith, of confidence.” How have writing and the written word helped you in your personal journey of recovery from war trauma?
Don: I’ve often wondered what it would be like to not be a writer, or specifically, what Don Bodey would be like. About a year, or so, after I got back, I lived in Daytona Beach. My wife was a bartender and I was a dish washer in a Chinese restaurant. I was tormented in my mind and began writing things like poems because I had time on my hands. The more I wrote, the more I liked writing. It was somewhere I could go. I had started graduate school but the only class I liked was Creative Writing. That teacher used the best stuff handed in to teach his next class, and it was always mine, probably because I spent more time writing than the others did. Eventually, I realized I was getting to be a better writer, which made me write more, and the more I wrote, the better I felt until I got published in the college newspaper in an anti-war issue. I’m pretty sure it had a lot to do with the fact that I also submitted some gruesome pictures I took in Nam, of some guys we killed one night, lying dead with the backs of their heads in a nearby shovel. I didn’t have much confidence, so I submitted it all anonymously. My writing teacher recognized it, though, and he told me the ending was too pat. I could not have asked for a better stimulus. So I quit. Quit school, quit writing, quit the Midwest, and moved to Florida to sell weed and wash dishes. When that began to pale, I applied to the University of Oregon’s MFA program and was honestly surprised to get accepted. We moved to Oregon and I started working as a carpenter (I grew up doing it) and going to school, and that is when I began thinking about writing a novel. Just THINKING about writing was good for my head, and when I began to have some success and got published some more, it re-enforced the desire.
One day, my wife had enough of me. I left Oregon and didn’t write for a couple of years. Ultimately, it was the same need that started me writing again, the need to deal with my losses—my dad and grandma and uncle and dog all died within three months, and I was reeling from my divorce. I subbed for a friend at Roosevelt College and then got a part-time gig teaching composition. Then I got another part timer at Columbia College, which has a good writing department, and I took some classes there too. I still had to work all the time, as a drywaller, and was writing at night and mudding daytimes. I had a two-man crew and they lived with me. One night, about 4:00 a.m., I woke them up because I had come to the end of my novel, and I knew it, and we started on a bottle of gin. Writing pretty much shaped my life then, for a couple years.
Nowadays it comes and goes. It still thrills me.
Ernest: In closing, what message or advice would you like to offer those young soldiers that are about to step into a war zone for the first time?
Don: Keep your head down.
Ernest: The right one, I must say! Don, thank you so very much for taking the time for this interview and sharing your thoughts!
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Learn more about Donald Bodey and his writing work at his website http://donbodey.com.