Blue-Eyed Boy: A Memoir - Softcover

Timberg, Robert

3.76

166 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143127594 ISBN 13: 9780143127598

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2015

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Acclaimed journalist Robert Timberg’s extraordinary, long-awaited memoir of his struggle to reclaim his life and find his calling after being severely burned as a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam

In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go before he got to go back home to his wife in Southern California. That homecoming would eventually happen, but not in thirteen days, and not as the person he once was. The moment his vehicle struck a Vietcong land mine divided his life into before and after.

He survived, barely, with third-degree burns over his face and much of his body. It would have been easy to give up. Instead, Robert Timberg began an arduous and uncertain struggle back—not just to physical recovery, but to a life of meaning. Remarkable as his return to health was—he endured thirty-five operations, one without anesthesia—just as remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist and enter one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis.

By the 1980s, Timberg had moved into the upper ranks of his profession, having secured a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a job as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. Suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans, Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. Timberg’s coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale’s Song, a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows these three academy graduates and two others—John McCain and Jim Webb—from Annapolis through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy, Timberg relates how he came to know and develop a deep understanding of these five men, and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continued to haunt him, and the nation as a whole, as they still do even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion.

Like others of his generation, Robert Timberg had to travel an unexpectedly hard and at times bitter road. In facing his own life with the same tools of wisdom, human empathy, and storytelling grit he has always brought to his journalism, he has produced one of the most moving and important memoirs of our time.

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About the Author:

Robert Timberg is the author of The Nightingale’s Song, John McCain: An American Odyssey, and State of Grace: A Memoir of Twilight Time. A 1964 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he served with the First Marine Division in South Vietnam from March 1966 to January 1967. Timberg worked at The Baltimore Sun for more than three decades as a reporter, an editor, and a White House correspondent.

One

SHORT-TIMER

Da Nang TAOR, January 18, 1967

The previous evening, just before turning in, I wandered off by myself, stared into the distance, and murmured, “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t die tonight.”

I knew it was melodramatic, but I did it every night, without fail. In a way it was a message to a God in which I had long since stopped believing. Almost. If there was a God, I had concluded years earlier, He was at best an indifferent God, one just as likely to kill me during the night as He was to let me live through it. Depended on His mood. Did He have a good day or a bad day? Maybe it was an unprayer, a way of not praying to the God I didn’t believe in, so He wouldn’t notice me and decide to squash me for the hell of it.

I rolled off my cot that morning, pulled on my boots, and stumbled over to the contraption we used for shaving: a fence post driven into the ground, with a metal mirror nailed to it above a wooden ledge to hold a helmet filled with water. Marines, officers and enlisted, shaved in the morning when they could. Personal appearance counted, even in the field. It was a matter of discipline, and in a combat zone few things are more important.

“Almost ready, Lieutenant?” the Mighty Mite driver asked.

“Be there in a minute,” I replied, ducking back into my tent. I pulled on my utility blouse. (We slept in our trousers. The company Command Post was mortared regularly. No one fancied running for the bunkers in their skivvies.) Then I slipped on my flak jacket, grabbed my web belt, on which hung a .45 caliber pistol and my sheathed Ka-Bar, and snapped it around my waist.

“Thought you were going on R&R today, Sir,” said the Mighty Mite driver as we pulled out of the CP and onto the dirt road that led to Battalion Headquarters.

“Change of plans, Lance Corporal,” I replied.

“You’re one of the short guys, aren’t you, Lieutenant?” asked the driver.

“Can’t get much shorter, Lance Corporal.”

A brief ride to Battalion HQ. The vehicles that would form our small convoy were waiting, their engines running. I passed the bulky canvas bag I had just been given to a Marine already on top of one of the two Amtracs and climbed up to join him. Moments later the convoy began to rumble down the hill and onto the road where my future awaited me.

————

Ihad not expected to be sitting on top of an Amtrac that morning. For the past couple of months, and until about 2100 the previous evening, I planned to be in Okinawa, looking for a string of pearls for my wife and scouting out stereo equipment for our small apartment atop a two-car garage in the breezy California community of Laguna Beach. That’s what young Marine officers did as their Rotation Tour Date neared; take a few days of R&R in Tokyo or on Okinawa and load up on cut-rate, high-quality jewelry and electronic gear for the trip home. Tax-free and duty-free, too. My RTD, 1 February, was getting close. In thirteen days I would have been overseas for thirteen months, a standard tour for Marines and one month longer than the Army kept its troops in-country. The extra month never made sense to me, by the way, except as an exercise in one-upmanship on the part of the Corps, always paranoid, though not without reason, that it would be disbanded and its men and women scattered among the other services.

But there would be no shopping spree for me today, though at the moment I had almost enough money with me to buy out Mikimoto Pearls. Sadly, the money was legal tender only in South Vietnam. The dollar-bill-size notes, known as military payment certificates, came in various denominations and each carried, in the place of honor normally accorded to George Washington, Old Hickory, or Honest Abe, a woman who reminded me of Jackie Kennedy.

None of the money, which was stashed in the brown canvas bag I had clamped between my knees, was mine. It belonged to the five officers and eighty enlisted men of Bravo Company, First Antitank Battalion, First Marine Division (Rein), FMF, and thanks to me, and to the Leatherneck tradition that said Marines get paid every two weeks as long as they were not under hostile fire, they were about to enjoy another on-time payday. It didn’t matter that you could only spend MPCs at a PX or some other service facility like an enlisted men’s club, or that Bravo Company, especially its Second Platoon—a unit deep in the boonies and whose CP was the first stop on my paymaster rounds—was not likely to even smell a place like that anytime soon.

Bravo’s five officers were the company commander, the executive officer—that was me—and three platoon leaders. All of us except the skipper took turns serving as pay officer. The honor was mine today even though it wasn’t my turn. I had been dragooned into it because the platoon leader whose turn it was found himself otherwise occupied. This was, of course, a war. So the duty fell to me, and instead of R&R and methodically working my way through the PX at Futenma, trying to decide between a TEAC or a Sony tuner, then relaxing at the O Club with the popular gin-and-champagne concoction known as a French 75, I was scanning the sun-bleached terrain from atop an Amtrac as it bounced westward along a rutted, dusty trail toward the base camp of Bravo Company’s presumably cash-strapped Second Platoon.

A word about the vehicle on which I was riding, since it was anything but an innocent bystander in this tale. The LVTP-5A1 Amphibian Tractor, the Amtrac’s official designation, was designed to transport Marines from ship to shore as they assaulted enemy beaches, a primary mission of the Corps in World War II and, to a much lesser extent, during the Korean War (think Inchon, MacArthur’s masterstroke). Since there were no opposed landings in Vietnam up to that time (or later for that matter), Amtracs were deprived of their primary mission. Instead, the Marine Corps used them as substitutes for armored personnel carriers. The Corps had no APCs of its own.

The Army’s APCs resembled Amtracs; both were rectangular in shape and ran on tracks, like tanks. But there was one design feature that separated the Amtrac from the APC, and it would make all the difference in the world to me. Twelve fuel cells containing a total of 456 gallons of gasoline, with an octane rating of 80, lay between the hull and the deck plates of the Amtrac. This was not much of a problem when the vehicle was employed as intended, for churning through water on the way to a beach or crunching over a barrier reef; on land, though, should an Amtrac encounter a mine, it became a death trap, anyone inside instantly fricasseed. By this point in America’s great Southeast Asian adventure, no one rode inside an Amtrac; you sat on top or clung to the side. The fuel cells were where they always had been, though, and an Amtrac was still an Amtrac, and not an APC.

————

With thirteen days to go, I had long since qualified as a full-fledged short-timer. I had my handmade short-timer’s calendar: a drawing of my wife sitting on the edge of a bed, in a T-shirt hiked up to midthigh. At first I was going to draw her naked, then I decided there was too great a chance that one of my fellow Marines might stumble upon it. But I played with the drawing enough that with a little imagination it began to look like the cover of one of the pulp novels I obsessed over as a kid. Then I superimposed one hundred squares on the drawing. I had been filling in a box a day since October 10, one hundred days from my RTD. The one-hundredth box was where you’d expect it to be. There was nothing subtle about anyone’s short-timer’s calendar, certainly not mine.

There were more serious concerns as my days in-country grew short. Notably, what next? I was a Naval Academy graduate and a Marine first lieutenant about to be promoted to captain. In less than a year and a half, I could resign my commission and begin a civilian career. Did I want to stay in the Corps or see what else might be out there for me?

I already had my orders home. I was going to the Fifth Marine Division, a newly mobilized unit based at Camp Pendleton, on the California coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. That meant my wife and I could remain in Laguna Beach, where we had lived before my battalion mounted out and which we loved. But scuttlebutt already had drifted across the Pacific that the new 5th MarDiv would be deployed to Vietnam within six months, no doubt bringing me back with it.

Then there was the war. Since I was in it, I didn’t feel I could trust my judgment about whether it was a good war or a bad one. It didn’t matter, not then. All I knew was that I was ready to go home, the sooner the better. In truth, I had not had a horrible war.

The First Antitank Battalion was a curious unit, with an even more curious weapon, a lightly armored, tracked vehicle called the Ontos (officially the Rifle, Multiple 106 mm, Self-propelled, M50A1). Its main armament consisted of six 106 mm recoilless rifles. Ontos means “thing” in Greek. It looked like a roach squirting here and there with six gleaming cannons protruding from its carapace. It was originally built for the Army, but the Army decided it didn’t want it, so the Marines took it. Or so the story goes.

I was, as it happened, an infantry officer. To my mind, that designation made me a fish out of water in an antitank unit. But that, which I asked for and received upon graduating from Marine officers Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, did not guarantee me assignment to an infantry battalion, as I thought it would. I arrived at First Marine Division Headquarters at Camp Pendleton in December 1965 only to learn that I had been assigned to the First Antitank Battalion.

I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t set records at the Basic School, but I wasn’t a fuckup, either; what the hell happened? I hurried to the headquarters of First Antitanks and reported to the battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel.

“Sir,” I told him, “there’s been a big mistake. I don’t belong in this battalion.”

“And why is that, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“I’m an infantry officer, Colonel, not an Ontos guy. I’m supposed to be a rifle platoon leader.”

The colonel proceeded to explain to me, in a reasonably kind tone, that Ontos platoon leader, the position he had in mind for me, was an infantry officer’s billet, though he himself was a tank officer.

I begged, pleaded, importuned, beseeched, entreated. “Sir,” I cried, “please transfer me to an infantry battalion.”

“Lieutenant,” the colonel said, “the Marine Corps in its wisdom assigned you to this battalion for a reason. Not that I know what the hell it is. But you’re here and you’re gonna stay here.”

By then his voice had taken on an edge.

“Sir,” I said, “I’m from New York. I don’t know squat about vehicles. I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-three. I don’t know how to change the oil in my car. I don’t even know how to check the oil.”

“Lieutenant,” said the colonel, “the First Sergeant is sitting at a desk outside my office. I want you to go to him right now and get checked in. Welcome aboard.”

————

Idon’t know if we Americans were doing anything worthwhile in Vietnam. Seems like when I first got there I saw this old peasant ankle deep in a rice paddy, walking behind a plow pulled by a water buffalo. And I kept seeing him every couple of months, never in the same place, him and his water buffalo just plowing a rice paddy—a pair from central casting. He always had his back to me, so I never saw his face. In between sightings, though, my battalion engaged in search-and-destroy operations, convoy duty, resupply missions. And we’d get intelligence briefings that said the Vietcong were on the run, or lying in wait for us behind the next ridgeline.

Then I’d see the old guy again, him and his water buffalo, never giving any indication that a bunch of Marines armed to the teeth were half a football field away, or that anything we had done since I last saw him had had any impact on his life. I would have felt better if once, just once, he had taken off his wide-brimmed peasant hat and waved to us—or spit at us or given us the finger—but he never did. It was as if we weren’t even there.

But Vietnam would not be my problem much longer. When my plane took off for the States in thirteen days, the war would be behind me. More important, all the demons that had tormented me since childhood would be left to fend for themselves. My parents were good people, and talented ones. My mother was a magazine cover girl before she even reached her teens, then a featured dancer in Broadway musicals mounted by the legendary showman Florenz Ziegfeld. My father was a composer who wrote much of the background music for Fleischer Studios cartoons such as Popeye, Betty Boop, and Superman. His older brother, Herman, a comic, was the family headliner. He also wrote the Marx Brothers’ first vaudeville act. His sister, Hattie, managed their act. Dad led the band when Herman performed and was often pressed into service as Herman’s straight man. When Herman and the Marx Brothers worked together, Dad often roomed with the brothers on the road and they delighted in playing tricks on him.

Both my parents were in vaudeville, which is where they met. She was Irish Catholic; he was Jewish. That should have been a problem back then. It wasn’t, not for them—that is, if you don’t count my deeply religious maternal grandmother routinely feigning suicide by putting her head in the oven when she heard her daughter, the oldest of her seven kids, coming home from work or a date with my father.

But there were other issues, which led to divorce, and for my two younger sisters and me, a seemingly endless diaspora. We lived with people all over the city of New York, sometimes together, sometimes apart. By the time I reached high school I had attended a dozen schools, three in the same year twice.

By high school all three of us kids were living with my mother. By then, though, she was an alcoholic and life was often hellacious. My father was a timid man whose fears undermined his enormous talent and may have contributed to my mother’s alcoholism. I inherited his fearfulness; at least I believed I did.

I fought against it by constantly testing myself, doing things I never could imagine him doing. I boxed in the Police Athletic League, played football in high school and on the sandlots for a few years after that. I was a better baseball player, but I never even went out for my high school team. I didn’t want to be distracted from football by what I thought of as a pussy sport, at least when compared to the action on the gridiron. After high school, I went to the Naval Academy instead of a normal college, selected the Marine Corps over the Navy because it was tougher, then became an infantry officer because I couldn’t imagine anything tougher than that.

I was proud to be a Marine. Unlike many of my fellow Leathernecks, though, I wasn’t thrilled that a war had materialized to allow me to put my training to use. But as my tour in Vietnam drew to a close, I felt I had done my time in Hell and, to my mind, I was finished testing myself. I was ready for a life devoid of madness. Time to drop my pack and just be happy.

I was going home to a lot....

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