After 46 Years...a Trip Back in Time, Part 3

by Glenn N. Holliman

My memoir of Vietnam and a return almost half a century later continues.   
                    

March 6, 2015 Tokyo…Day 2            

                      

"My daughter, Grace, and cousins Jim and Karen Holliman,  flew over Siberia last night, crossing the International Date line and entering Russia.  A bit different than in 1969 when the Cold War was on.  This flight was late leaving Chicago, and we were late landing in Norita, the airport 25 miles from Tokyo.  So we missed our connection to Hanoi. 

 Just as well.  After 13 hours, time to stretch, shower and have a good Chinese meal courtesy of American Airlines.       

    Grace in a Japanese garden.                                         

The room is, well, early airport, hot water but Asian low beds and no temperature control.  But free wi fi, the way we connect in the 21^st Century!  Last time I was here, I mailed the family post cards!

Japanese last night at American Airlines very sweet, well organized.  We have a bare glimpse at the Japanese traffic congestion and culture from the shuttle bus.

Woke at 3:15 am after six hours sleep (napped often on the flight over) so body clock trying to right itself.  Grace was ready to get up, and doing exercises.  She is a physical fitness guru.  A bit different traveling with family this time, no forbidding thoughts of homesickness and war.

So time for breakfast.  The adventure continues with blue toast and black coffee.

 

Breakfast was wonderful…excellent coffee, with western or Asian choices of food…squid pickled (skipped second helping), brown rice drenched with peanut oil and tiny slender mushrooms. 

Later a walk in a neighboring chapel garden and a photo of pansies. I am wearing my yellow 'bumble bee' water proof jacket.                

 

My grand daughter, Holly's traveling whimsy chicken posed in a tree.

                                                                    

Shuttle to airport and check in on Viet Nam airlines….a 320 Airbus.  Service and food excellent; free wine in economy.  Amazing service; so unlike U.S. cattle cars.

  Already this trip is ‘freeing’ me from some frozen feelings, a thaw I suspect.  The world has moved on dramatically since 1969 but some of me has stayed locked in a time vault.  A new generation has grown up, and the American war is ancient history.  So be it, but so sad for those who died for so little.  Generations born since 1965 have no memory of how bitterly divided the nation was over the Vietnam War.

Handed a copy of the Viet Nam News upon boarding; all in English!  And read like a normal newspaper; lots of western news, mainly US foreign policies and economic reports.  This was our former enemy, turned capitalist?  Irony of ironies."

Flash back to late 1968, barracks mate Neil Norton at Ft. Hamilton, New York where I was stationed after a month at Ft. Dix from November 1968 to late January 1969.

Below: the then U.S. Army Chaplain's school at Ft. Hamilton, New York where I trained as a chaplain's assistant, located near the then new Verrazano Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island.   As senior citizens, my wife and I have sailed under the Bridge on the Queen Mary 2, and I always gaze to the west viewing the fort and think of those days.

Left, Felix Greene's 1966 book, Vietnam in Photographs and Text  which I have had for almost half a century.  It was probably the first major publication to carry photographs of the effects of U.S. military action in Vietnam.  It was in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam.  Later that spring the first Marines landed, and shortly there after the U.S. Army including my future division, the First Infantry.

Greene's work was the first to question and oppose the effort that would continue until 1973.  The photographs captured the early destructiveness and ugliness of the conflict and began to produce a narrative very different than the Administration  was conveying to the public.

Next post of my trip back in time, Hanoi, our enemy capital in the 1960s.

After 46 Years...a Trip Back in Time, Part 1

AFTER 46 YEARS….a Memoir of Youth and a War

by Glenn N. Holliman

August 1968, I was drafted into the U.S. Army at the reception station in Montgomery, Alabama.  Basic training was in Ft. Benning, Georgia, and later advanced training at Ft. Dix, New Jersey and Ft. Hamilton, New York.  The USA was in an uproar that year, two assassinations, a police riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and disturbances in most of American's central cities.

Reaction to the civil rights movement and increasing militant opposition to the Viet Nam War ate away at the social and legal fabric of the county.  Upon graduation from college, that spring, my draft board in Gadsden, Alabama called my number, and I was on my way to a war of which I did not approve...but I went. 

March 2015, 46 years later I went back to Viet Nam...here is the memoir, day by day of that trip. 

Day 1, March 5, 2015 

I am on board an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Tokyo.  Grace, my daughter and mother of two of my grandchildren, is with me.  We are en route to Hanoi, Viet Nam, traveling with my cousins, Karen and Jim Holliman.  Jim is a physician, going to speak to a medical conference in Ha Long. Karen and Jim reside in Pennsylvania as do I. Grace is from  Virginia.

 Grace with her daughters' traveling stuffed chicken en route over the Pacific.  The chicken proved to be a light hearted companion who added some whimsy to the trip of almost two weeks.

For me this is a return to my youth, a visit to a country where I served with the 1^st Infantry, 3^rd Brigade, in Lai Khe, 40 miles northwest of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.  From January 31, 1969 to January 30, 1970, as a 22 year old, I spent a year in an ill-gotten, tragic war.

 Now I am 68 years of age, heavy from a life time of good food, and listening carefully to Father Time number off my days.  Once I was a skinny fellow who left his young wife named Lynn and graduate school, drafted in August 1968, and a few months later joining another 548,000 American in a fruitless, unnecessary war. Now my career is over, my children have given me grandchildren; this is a trip of remembrance of recalling a stressful period of my life.   

Right, the barracks and drill sergeant and yours truly, the young private E-2 at Ft. Benning, Georgia, October 1968.  The barracks were World War II vintage at Sand Hill.  When I went back with my two children almost twenty years later, they were gone, replaced by red brick barracks.

I have not been back to Viet Nam and now it is time.   How will I feel seeing the Vietnamese, visiting their war museums, seeing my old base camp?   

 Sometimes I get emotional thinking of that time in my life, almost every day of that year 1969 embedded in my brain. Sometimes when I talk about it, I feel tears welling up.  An old man should not feel so attached to only such a small part of one’s life.  But I do, and I suspect millions of veterans share my feelings.

 Home for Christmas 1968 at the Nashville, Tennessee airport, met by my family and mother, now the late Geraldine Stansbery Holliman Feick (1923-2015).  Mother was only 45 years of age; I thought at the time she was ancient!

 

 Want to know about the late turbulent 1960s in America?  Nixonland by Rick Perlstein is an excellent, comprehensive review of the chaos and conflicting feelings and views of the day.  A good read, it will make one think today is all wine and roses in the USA.  

Next posting, more the war of my generation and my trip back to Asia.
 Have questions about Holliman family history? You are invited to join the Hollyman Email List at Hollyman-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com and the Hollyman Family Facebook Page located on Facebook at "Hollyman Family". Post your questions and perhaps one of the dozens Holyman cousins on the list will have an answer. For more information contact Tina Peddie at desabla1@yahoo.com, the list and Facebook manager for Hollyman (and all our various spellings!).

There is also a massive Ancestry.com Holyman and Associated Families Tree available for review.  For an invitation to this collection of over 20,000 individuals, please write glennhistory@gmail.com.  

Also one will find additional Holliman history at http://hollimanfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/ .

I also have a collection of associated family manuscripts and research collected by the late Walt Holliman, Cecil Holliman and Rhodes Holliman.  Happy to send these materials by email and to insure their research is available.  The surnames: Alexander, Baldwin, Barham, Bass, Beall, Blakeney,  Baker, Bond, Bostick, Brewer, Bryan, Bryant, Bullock, Calvert, Carter, Champion, Chew,Cofer, Cole, Crafford, Crockett, Curtis, Dale, Daniel, Davidson, Davies, De Mallpas, Douglas, Duckett, Edwards, Edgerton, Emerson, Fitzhugh, Fowlehurst, Fox, Gains, Garrison, Gonson, Graves, Gray, Guyton, Guins, Hall, Hamby, Hawkins,Hendrix, Hill, Hogg, Holliman, Holt, Howard, Jackson, Jones, Judkins, Love, Lucas, Maget, Mansfield, Manwaring, McBee, McComas, McCurdy, McNewsome, Nicholson, Norsworthy, Noyall, O'dell, Oliver, Pearce, Peerce, Pettigrew, Petway, Pitman, Plow, Plyler, Porten, Prather, Petite, Ridgely, Riggan, Roberts, Smith, Spencer, Sprigg, Standley, Stanyard, Swan, Strother, Thompson, Thornton, Thrope, Trelawney, Turpin, Underhill, Underwood, Wallace, Walters, Weedon, Whitherspoon, Whitten,Williams,Wilmot,Wilson, Whitaker and Yerby.  These are mainly Alabama families and their ancestors from the Carolinas and Virginia. Materials vary from one page to 200. - GNH at glennhistory@gmail.com.