Category Archives: combat

One Never Forgets

It has been forty-six years since I fought in Vietnam, and watching two movies rebooted my PTSD interrupting my sleep pattern. For years, I usually wake at least once a night and listen. However, since watching the movies, I wake every hour and listen to the night sounds.

In Brothers, one of the two brothers, a captain in the US Marines, goes to Afghanistan on his fourth tour of duty and becomes a tortured and abused POW.  After he is liberated and his captors killed, he returns home suffering from severe PTSD trauma. Tobey Maguire plays Marine Captain Sam Cahill and does a convincing job playing a veteran that is severely damaged by PTSD symptoms.

Watching Maguire act his part reminded me of my first decade back from Vietnam when I drank too much and often woke once or twice and carried a loaded weapon around the house checking the doors and windows.  More than once, when overwhelmed by a burst of anger, I punched holes in walls with fists.

The anger comes fast—one moment you are calm as a rusty doorknob and an instant later an exploding fragmentation grenade.

In the Valley of Elah, Tommy Lee Jones plays a father, who was also a Vietnam combat veteran, searching for answers to explain his son’s death soon after returning from Iraq. In this film, we see how war strips young men of their humanity—that thin veneer that comes with so-called civilization.

From Brothers, I was reminded of the homeless Vietnam veteran I met in an alley in Pasadena, California one early morning. He had been a prisoner of war and similar to the character Tobey Maguire plays, was severely traumatized with PTSD symptoms.

The VA rated the homeless vet I met in that Pasadena alley as 100% disabled by PTSD possibly explaining why he was homeless—not because he could not afford an apartment.  The disability from the VA was more than enough to support him.  However, most of that money went for drugs and booze for him and his homeless buddies.

Then there was another vivid image of a Vietcong POW being tortured by South Korean troops during a field operation I was on.  The South Koreans hung that Vietnamese POW by his heels from a tree limb and pealed the skin off his body while he lived.

In the Valley of Elah reminded me of an ambush where a team of Marines I was a member of went out in a heavy rain at sunset and after an hour or so of slogging through the gloomy downpour, we stopped in a rice paddy with water to our necks and stayed there for more than an hour waiting for complete darkness before moving into position. We shared that rice paddy with a very large king cobra.

In the Marines, one does not question orders—we do or die—so we stayed in that paddy knowing a king cobra was in the water with us.

Both of these films are dramatic examples of what war does to young men and their families.

Some combat veterans avoid seeing films such as these two. However, I do not. I do not want to return to that time where I avoided talking and thinking of my part in the Vietnam War, because at night when we struggle to sleep there is no escape. We cannot hide from the monster that came home with us living inside our skin as if it were an unwanted parasite.

Discover A Prisoner of War for Life

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Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

The Blood Price – Part 4/4

Granted, World Wars I and II, and the Korean Conflict were unavoidable, and it could be argued that the War in Afghanistan was justified. However, we did not need to send American troops to Vietnam or Iraq and both of these wars were based on lies.

One reason for these needless wars may be linked to corporate profits while keeping unemployment down.

The Great Depression originated in the U.S. and had its start around September 4, 1929 and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (known as Black Tuesday).

The Great Depression devastated countries around the globe. In the United States, industrial production dropped by 46%; foreign trade dropped 70% and unemployment reached 25%—in some countries it was as high as 33%.

The wartime economic boom during World War II caused a dramatic increase in employment, which paralleled the expansion of industrial production. In 1944, unemployment dipped to 1.2 percent of the civilian labor force, a record low in American economic history.

In 1954, after the Korean Conflict unemployment in the United States went up to about 6%. Then the economy turned down in the summer of 1957 and reached a low point in the spring of 1958. Industrial production fell 14%, corporate profits dropped 25% and unemployment reached 7.5%

The US needed another war to stimulate the economy. The US had already unofficially been in Vietnam since 1953 and in 1964 the war became official with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

In 1960, unemployment in the US was 6.1%, but by 1964, unemployment dropped to 4.8% and then 3.4% by 1968. However, a year after the Vietnam War, unemployment was up again to 7.2%—a 212% increase since 1968.

It is now obvious that war is another option to keep Americans employed. Since the end of the Korean Conflict in 1953, the United States has been involved in thirty-two wars/conflicts. Source: List of wars involving the United States

I started to add up all the months and years US troops have been fighting somewhere in the world since 1953 and gave up—just Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan (three of the thirty-two conflicts) add up to more than forty years of combat.

In fact, before World War II, the allocation of resources to military purposes was typically no more than 1 percent of GNP, except during actual warfare, which occurred infrequently. Wartime and peacetime were distinct, and during peacetime—that is, almost all the time—the societal opportunity cost of “guns” was nearly nil.

However, following the Korean Conflict, military purchases reached an unprecedented level for “peacetime” and, despite some fluctuations, remained at or above this elevated level permanently. During 1948-86, military purchases cumulated to $6.316 Trillion, averaging about $162 billion per year, or 7.6 percent of GNP. Source: Cato Institute

In conclusion, after the Korean Conflict, the US capitalist consumer economy added war to its financial formula, and the price has been decades of spilled blood all over the world. The last question is, “Who benefits the most?”

Return to The The Blood Price – Part 3 or start with Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

The Blood Price – Part 3/4

The excuse for the wars in Southeast Asia was to protect Western democracy from the possible spread of Communism. To do this, the United States dropped over 7 million tons of bombs in Vietnam. In Laos, the US dropped 270 million cluster bombs and more than 20,000 Laotians have been killed by these bombs since the war.

In Cambodia, the US dropped 2.75 million tons of bombs.

For a comparison, in World War II a total of just over 2 million tons of bombs were dropped.

The Vietnam War lasted 19 years, 5 months, 4 weeks and 1 day. The number of military dead numbered in the millions. There is no way to count the number of civilian dead.

It is estimated that in Vietnam 411,000 – 2,000,000 civilians were killed; 20,000 – 200,000 in Laos, and 200,000 – 300,000 in Cambodia.


The United States is a peace loving nation!

What about government and religion in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia?

Vietnam has a Communist government. According to the CIA Factbook, 80.8% of the population belongs to no religion; 9.3% are Buddhists and 6.7% are Catholic (that’s almost seven times the ratio of Christians in Japan and we won that war).

In addition, Laos is still a Communist state. The predominant religion is Theravada Buddhism (67%). Animism is common among the mountain tribes. Buddhism and spirit worship coexist easily. There also are small numbers of Christians and Muslims—only 1.5% of the population is Christian.

Cambodia, however, is a multiparty democracy under a constitutional monarchy. It is no longer a Communist/Socialist state, and 96.4% of its population is Buddhist while 2.1% is Muslim. Despite the French colonization in the 19th century, Christianity made little impact in the country. There are around 20,000 Catholics in Cambodia which represents 0.15% of the total population and less than 2,000 Protestants.

If we use the result of America’s wars in Southeast Asia as an example of what is to come, what will the Middle East look like fifty years after the war in Afghanistan ends?

Continued on August 4, 2012 in The Blood Price – Part 4 or return to Part 2

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

The Blood Price – Part 2/4

For the United States to defeat Japan, the Japanese suffered tremendous loss of life. Before the two atomic bombs were dropped that ended the war in the Pacific, Osaka was hit hard suffering more than 10,000 civilian casualties in March, June, July and August 1945.

Total dead on both sides of World War II is estimated to be more than 73 million. The majority of deaths took place in the Soviet Union and China (about 85%). Japan lost more than two million troops and 500,000 – 1,000,000 civilians.

In comparison, the United States only lost 1,700 civilians.

The result today: The government of Japan is a constitutional monarchy where the power of the Emperor is limited, a ceremonial figurehead—a symbol of the state and the unity of the people. Power is held mostly by the Prime Minister of Japan and other elected members of the Diet (Japan’s parliament).  The Diet is made up of two legislative houses.

How about religion in Japan? Shinto (practiced by 83% of the population) and Buddhism (92 million Japanese identify themselves as Buddhists) are Japan’s two major religions. The Muslim population is about 115,000 – 125,000 and there are about 5,000 Hindus in the country along with 2,000 Jews.

About one to two million Japanese are Christians (1% of Japan’s population) and many live in Western Japan where Christian missionaries were active during the 16th century.

Then there is Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos where the United States failed to achieve its goals—maybe!

Continued on August 3, 2012 in The Blood Price – Part 3 or return to Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

The Blood Price – Part 1/4

This series of posts was inspired by Eric Pfeiffer, writing for Yahoo News, who reported, Air Force officer creates database of every U.S. bomb dropped since World War I. My goal is to make a point, which I will do in Part 4.

The project Pfeiffer writes about is called THOR: Theater History of Operations Reports. The officer compiling this database of every bomb dropped by the United States is Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson.

In World War I, the US came late to the carnage. The war started in July 1914 and ended November 1918. The number of troops involved was huge. The Allied Powers, which included the United States starting in 1917, had almost 43 million troops while the Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungry, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria—had more than 25 million.

Almost ten million troops were killed and more than twenty million wounded.

After the War, Germany was left to rot and that led to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party and World War II.

However, after World War II, the US stationed troops in Germany and Japan, and almost seventy years later, the US military is still there.

What did that achieve? Germany is a democratic, parliamentary republic known as the Federal Republic of Germany. It is not a clone of the United States political system. In fact, Germany’s legal system is being used as a model to build China’s modern legal system.

The Germans practice a number of religions: Christianity is the largest with more than 48 million adherents (divided between Protestants and Roman Catholic). Almost 4% are Muslim (2.3%, are of Turkish origin and less than a third have German citizenship). There are 166,000 Jehovah Witnesses and more than 37,000 Mormons. Two-hundred thousand Jews still live in Germany, but before the Nazi’s there were about 600,000.

How about Japan?

Continued on August 2, 2012 in The Blood Price – Part 2

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

It is Time – Relief for Victims of Lone-Wolf Killers such as James Holmes

What happened in that theater outside Denver, Colorado on July 25, 2012 or, for example, the terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, were acts of terrorism and/or combat no different from what happened on 9/11 or in America’s foreign wars such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, twelve days after 9/11, the US Congress enacted the September 11th Victim Compensation fund of 2001. This $6 billion program was intended to compensate any individual (or the personal representative of a deceased individual) who was physically injured or killed as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2011. Source: Homeland Security: 9/11 Victim Relief Funds

We already know what happens to America’s combat veterans in similar situations—and US troops are trained, armed and ready.

In July 2010, PBS News Hour reported, “Of the more than two million men and women who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s estimated one in five will come home with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD,” said health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser.

Bowser quoted U. S. President Barack Obama, who said, “I don’t think our troops on the battlefield should have to keep notes just in case they need to apply for a claim. And I have met enough veterans to know that you don’t have to engage in a firefight to endure the trauma of war.”

Before President Obama, the rules required veterans to document events like firefights or bomb explosions that could have caused PTSD. Such documentation was often time-consuming and difficult, and sometimes was impossible. … Under the new rules a veteran need show only that he or she served in a war and performed a job during which events could have happened that could cause the disorder.

But what about the innocent victims of combat in the United States?

I’m not talking about the homicide rate (which is in decline) or riots (which most people may avoid by staying away from the location of the riot). I’m talking about the victims of lone-wolf mass killings such as what happened recently near Denver, Colorado.


What Motivates “Lone-Wolf” Shooters – there are thousands hiding in public!

According to The Arizona Republic, “There has been no corresponding decline in mass murder—these sudden, stunning eruptions of violence with multiple victims, often perpetrated by gunmen who researchers refer to as ‘pseudo-commandos.’ Such a killer, clad in body armor and with a small arsenal of firearms, struck Friday in Aurora, Colo., leaving a dozen dead, 58 wounded and a nation horrified. …

“The United States experienced 645 mass-murder events—killings with at least four victims—from 1976 to 2010, according to Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. When graphed, these incidents show no obvious trend. The numbers go up and down and up again. The total body count: 2,949.”

The total number killed in the terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001 was 2,819.

If what happened in that Colorado Theater does not qualify as a home grown terrorist attack by a ‘pseudo-commando’, what does?

Lone-wolf acts of violence in the United States must be considered the same as any disaster and be included under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988. Under this act, the Federal share of the costs of such efforts is to be no less than 75 percent of the eligible costs. Total assistance under this Act for one emergency is to be limited to no more than $5,000,000, except when the President determines additional funds are needed. If additional funds are needed, the President must report to Congress on the extent of the additional need.

If what happened in Colorado is not covered under the Stafford Act, we need a new law that will. After all, it is the government’s responsibility to safeguard innocent, law abiding US citizens and in acts of lone-wolf violence, the government has failed 645 times since 1976.

It’s time to take care of our own in situations such as a lone-wolf mass-murder events. If the US Federal government can spend $49 billion for foreign aid in 2012, it must help the victims of acts of violence similar to what happened in Colorado in that Century Theater—the victims in such acts of violence should be treated the same as if they were 9/11 victims, wounded in combat or came home with PTSD from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Discover The Creative Writing Class at war with the Vietnam Vet

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Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

The PTSD Connection – help from friends, family, loved ones and maybe marijuana

On the walk home from the theater after seeing the film Savages (Oliver Stone directed the film), I thought of one of the characters played by Taylor Kitsch—Chon is a former Navy Seal that served combat tours in Iraq and then Afghanistan.

Near the beginning of the film, it is obvious that Chon has PTSD but by the end Ophelia and Ben will have it too. What these characters experience in the film was traumatic in the worst way without joining the military and serving in a war.

If you see the movie or read the novel by Don Winslow, pay attention to how Chon deals with danger. There is one film scene in a restaurant where a server drops a tray of dishes and Chon, in a flash, is under the table with pistol in hand. He also handles dangerous situations ruthlessly.

In the movie, Chon and Ben produce high-quality marijuana and sell it legally and illegally, and all three of the main characters smoke their own product, which may be explained away by a study conducted at Haifa University in Israel that found rats with PTSD treated with marijuana within 24 hours of a traumatic experience successfully avoided any PTSD symptoms (maybe the US military should include some marijuana in the rations of all combat troops in Afghanistan).

However, that would not have helped me. I’m allergic to marijuana smoke and cannot be in the same room where someone else is smoking weed.

Winslow, the author of Savages, was once a private detective in New York City. His career as an investigator would repeatedly bring him to California to look into arson cases, so maybe he has some PTSD from that experience.

It is a fact that anyone can have PTSD—it isn’t exclusive to combat veterans. After all, Ophelia and Ben never served in the military and were not combat veterans from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, but by the end of the movie the odds are they both will have PTSD.

It doesn’t hurt that Oliver Stone, the film’s director, enlisted in the United States Army, fought in Vietnam with the 25th Infantry Division, then with the First Calvary Division, earning a Bronze Star with Combat V, an Army Commendation Medal and a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster before his discharge.

After Stone’s experience in Vietnam, PTSD may have followed him home adding authenticity to the film.

However, if you have PTSD or you know someone with PTSD and you have severe allergic reactions to smoking marijuana, as I do, then you may have to look for support from family, loved ones and friends.

That brings us to Charlene Rubush’s Blog—Win Over PTSD.


This video has nothing to do with Rubush’s Blog but does focus on PTSD.

Rubush’s experience as a former wife of a Vietnam veteran with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder led to years of research on the subject, and she recently published a guest post by Ryan Rivera on How to Be the Partner of Someone with PTSD.

Rivera says, “One of the most important recovery tools for someone living with PTSD is social support. The more they know that they have real, true friends behind them, the better the outcome of their PTSD treatments. The problem is that PTSD can be hard to understand, and those in a relationship with someone living with PTSD often find that they are struggling with how to keep the relationship together.”

In Savages, Chon’s true friends are Ophelia and Ben. He knows he can count on them accepting him as he is, PTSD included—they are a family.

If you try the marijuana therapy, make sure to do it legally and if you don’t do it legally, don’t get caught. A term in prison may make the PTSD worse—a lot worse.

Discover Booze, the Veteran and coming home

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Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

From Memoir to Novel – the metamorphosis of a manuscript about war as hell – Part 3/3

According to Vietnam: Looking Back at the Facts: “About 5,000 men assigned to Vietnam deserted and just 249 of those deserted while in Vietnam.”

Then there were crimes other than rape. Near the end of my 1996 combat tour, the armorer of our gun company was caught selling weapons on the black market in Vietnam—weapons that ended in the hands of the Viet Cong soldiers that ambushed a Marine patrol—The Marines won that fight, and that’s how they discovered the weapons that led back to our armorer.

The armorer was sentenced twenty years to life in a federal prison.

“Fragging” and “Combat Refusals” in Vietnam were not unknown and some of these incidents have been documented. I recall one fragging in my unit. A lieutenant, considered an asshole by many, was taking his shower at night when his quarters were fragged. He survived because he wasn’t in the tent. The next day, he was a different person—a reformed asshole turned nice guy.

“The question of crimes such as ‘fragging’, ‘combat refusals’, desertion and AWOL within the Vietnam conflict is one which brings emotions to the fore. Many veterans deny that ‘fragging’ or ‘combat refusals’ occurred, whilst others feel desertion and AWOL was merely a means of resisting what was felt to be an unjust and illegal conflict.” Source: http://home.mweb.co.za/re/redcap/vietcrim.htm

Then there is the CIA’s role in moving drugs from the Golden Triangle to America where they were sold to fund illegal operations that the US Congress did not approve. To this day, the CIA denies doing this.

However, “The KMT exported their opium harvests usually by mule train across the mountains or by unmarked American C-47 transportation planes to Thailand for processing. Some was flown on to Taiwan. In 1950 the CIA purchased bankrupt Civil Air Transport (CAT) for $950,000 and used their fleet of planes to run weapons to KMT General Li Mi in Shan province, and the planes returned to Bangkok filled with opium.” Source: Dark Politricks.com

In addition, “Bob Kirkconnell, a retired Air Force chief master sergeant spent 27 years on active duty, and was involved in an investigation of heroin smuggling into the US using killed-in-action human remains out of Vietnam.” Source: http://www.wanttoknow.info/militarysmuggledheroin

For more information on drug smuggled into the US during the Vietnam War, I recommend reading The Cadaver Connection from History Net.

Then there was the Marine I met on the flight to Hong Kong from Vietnam. He asked me to share a hotel room with him—to double up because he was on his third tour in the combat zone (I was into my fifth month by then), and he had to have a white, round-eyed face wake him in the morning before any strange Asian, almond shaped eyed face (like the women or men that cleaned the hotel rooms in Hong Kong), came into the room while he was sleeping.

Note: the French left Vietnam in 1956, which is when the US sent advisers into Vietnam to start working with and training the South Vietnamese military. The National Liberation Front, known by us as the Viet Cong, wouldn’t be formed until 1960. The U.S. started using Agent Orange in 1962 and the Declaration of War by Congress would not become official until 1964.

The first time I crossed from my bed to his and shook his shoulder, he quickly rolled over, pulled a Colt forty-five from under his pillow, and centered the barrel between my eyes as he clicked off the safety.  He blinked to clear his vision and stared at me before he lowered the weapon.

He had a Chinese girlfriend in Hong Kong, and they had a child together.

After that first morning in Hong Kong, I didn’t see him for a while since he was staying with his Chinese girlfriend and child—that is until she got angry with him and threw him out.

At the time, no one had put a clinical, psychological name on PTSD and it wasn’t officially studied.  That wouldn’t happen for more than twenty years.  What’s ironic is that I now sleep with a .38 caliber loaded with hollow points and the first thing I do when I wake up each morning is to listen for any out of the ordinary sounds in the house before I get up and sweep the house to see if any of the windows and/or doors have been forced.  Once I’m satisfied the house is secure, I store my weapon in a safe place—not for me but for my family.

When my novel was completed to Miller’s satisfaction, she contacted a reputable agent to represent it. Several of the writers in the workshop were published thanks to Miller’s support. However, the agent for my work, which was originally called “Better a Dead Hero“, could not sell it. The publishers responded that the Vietnam War as a topic was not selling and they were not interested.  That was in the late 1980s.

The manuscript that is now  “Running With the Enemy” sat gathering dust for more than twenty-two years before I found it on a shelf in the garage, renamed it  and ran it through several edits and revisions. I expect the novel will be released in the next few months hopefully before the end of September 2012.

Return to From Memoir to Novel – the metamorphosis of a manuscript about war as hell – Part 2 or start with  Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

From Memoir to Novel – the metamorphosis of a manuscript about war as hell – Part 2/3

“Rape and the mutilation of women’s bodies are evidently part of the usual military fare in war. During the Vietnam war, rape was in fact an all too common occurrence …” Source: Karen Stuldreher, Political Science Department, University of Washington, Seattle

For example: “An August 1967 atrocity in which a 13-year-old Vietnamese child was raped by American MI interrogator of the Army’s 196th Infantry Brigade. The soldier was convicted only of indecent acts with a child and assault. He served seven months and sixteen days for his crime.” Source: George Mason University’s History News Network

In addition, there was a rape episode that I wrote about in a short story that was a runner up for the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. A Night at the Well of Purity was based on a real event that I witnessed.

General George S. Patton knew what he was talking about when he predicted during World War II, “there would unquestionably be some raping.” Rape and the mutilation of women’s bodies are evidently part of the usual military fare in war. Source: Karen Stuldreher, Political Science Department, University of Washington, Seattle

However, now that so many women serve in the US military, “Rape within the US military has become so widespread that it is estimated that a female solider in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.” Source: The Guardian

[youtube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHk4TGWx0ZM]
Some victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, maimed and mutilated.

Then there was falling in love. Several months into my 1966 tour in Vietnam, I went on R&R to Hong Kong, where one young Marine fell in love with the Chinese prostitute he paid to have sex with for the week and deserted to stay with her.

He did not return to Vietnam with us. I’m sure he was caught and spent time in the brig before being sent back to combat.

In fact, while I was in Hong Kong I met another Marine that did the same thing several years earlier, but he was caught and spent time in a federal prison back in the states. Once his prison sentence was served (he said two years), he was sent back to complete his combat tour in Vietnam.

These Marines were not the only ones to desert while serving in Vietnam.

Continued on June 22, 2012 in From Memoir to Novel – the metamorphosis of a manuscript about war as hell – Part 3 or return to Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

From Memoir to Novel – the metamorphosis of a manuscript about war as hell – Part 1/3

I started writing my next novel “Running With the Enemy” in 1981 as a memoir of an American Marine serving in Vietnam in 1966.

In 1981, I was working toward an MFA in 20th century American literature/writing at Cal Poly Pomona where I earned a teaching credential in 1975 – 76.

I never finished the memoir and only wrote about 200 pages. In fact, the first forty pages took several months to write. It was on page forty-one that I arrived in Chu Lai, Vietnam by climbing down a boarding net into a landing craft in one of the Marine Corps last major amphibious landings.

However, later in the 1980s, I brushed the dust off that unfinished manuscript and enrolled in UCLA’s extension-writing program. My workshop instructor was Marjorie Miller and she recruited a few of her students into her off-campus workshops held in a small room above an Italian restaurant in Westwood near the UCLA campus. For several years on Saturday mornings, I drove 135 miles round trip to attend Miller’s workshop

There was a big difference in the quantity and quality of writing among twenty or more students in a UCLA classroom and the five or six writers around that table in a rented room above an Italian restaurant—same instructor with fewer writers meant more time for each writer.

After I read the first chapter of my Vietnam memoir, Miller said it was not going to work and I should consider writing it as a novel.

Miller was a tough taskmaster with a short fuse. She was NOT an advocate of fluffing up a sense of false self-esteem with warm fuzzies and was not into, “Let’s all have fun and follow our dreams.”

She was a tough and sometimes harsh critic. Miller understood that for most individuals to stand a chance to achieve his or her dream would require dedication and discipline in addition to never stop learning the craft of writing.

I recall that I revised one chapter more than thirty times and Miller lost patience more than once with me for taking so long to fix the problems in that chapter.

Moreover, I wanted to include as much reality as possible in the novel, so I borrowed from my experiences in Vietnam, the experiences of my fellow Marines, and what I discovered about the war later.

For example, early in 1966, a Marine in my unit, a cook, murdered the father of a Vietnamese adolescent that he either raped or paid to have sex with him. The cook claimed that he found the girl working in a rice paddy and offered her fifty US dollars to have sex with him. He said she agreed and while they were in the act, the girl’s father caught them. Later, the girl would identify the cook as her father’s murderer in a lineup, and he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years to life in a federal prison. At least, that’s what we were told, and then the cook was gone—shipped out.

That cook wasn’t the only American soldier to rape and/or murder innocent Vietnamese citizens.

Continued on June 21, 2012 in From Memoir to Novel – the metamorphosis of a manuscript about war as hell – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

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