The Mailman Went UA: A Vietnam Memoir
by David W. Mulldune
Memoir by a Marine who served in Vietnam with the 27th and 7th Marines, May 1968-June 1969. His book is not so much about the Vietnam War but about the experiences, horror, and tragedy of war, based on his experience, so that others will see the futility of it, unless there is absolutely no other way. He wants people to see it from the less privileged viewpoint and get a taste of real war. Strong language, racial and sexual references.
From the Author's Introduction
I started this work back in 1973, and it has been a very difficult process because I could actually feel the same emotions that I felt then as I wrote about them. Perhaps one of the most astonishing things I learned is that time does not diminish the edge of those extreme emotions. Just as you learn to bury certain emotions and feelings in war, you have to learn how to incorporate those extremes into some degree of “normalcy.” It has been both therapeutic and painful, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The pain helps me to appreciate life and to appreciate others as human beings. It’s just that I wish we could learn these things in a better way.
I thought about letting readers learn more about me, but one of my goals was to make the book apply to anyone in any war. I want readers to feel as if they are the ones experiencing and feeling life in combat.
I can only speak for myself as a Marine and of my experience. Overall, the Marines gave me confidence that I could do anything and never, ever quit. It’s ironic that the situation that they put you in has the power to destroy you, either in combat or later on in life, but because of their training, that situation also has the power to save you.
I have read Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone and Phil Caputo’s Rumor of War, and right away they and some other writers strike me as cerebral, whereas my story is considerably more visceral. Tim and Phil are educated, intellectual authors, and they use their words like chess pieces. They are at home at an elite level where I do not fit. I was uneducated, and my words are more like grenades. They are crude but equally effective. I feel like I am an observer with Tim’s and Phil’s writings (and others’), but my objective is to make readers feel that they are present in a story that is horrific, arbitrary, tragic, and boring, that is punctuated by the dread that your next breath could be your last.
The reality is that the number one goal in war is to stay alive and that the number two goal is to kill and destroy. That reality changes who you are forever. My book is not so much about the Vietnam War but about the experiences, horror, and tragedy of war, based on my experience, so that others will see the futility of it, unless there is absolutely no other way. I am hoping that what I have written will be the next best thing to actually being there. I hope it will give a taste of what it is like to go through it, and I hope it will change the way people look at war as a vi-able solution. This goal is why I wrote my manuscript the way that I did. I want people to see it from the less privileged viewpoint and get a taste of real war.
Unless one actually experiences the nuances of daily living in combat, it is difficult to comprehend how life in that arena becomes segmented, no matter how juvenile or serious events are. This segmentation occurs in order to preserve your sanity, and it helps you to let go of horrific events, because if you didn’t, you would lose complete touch with your own humanity. I have seen too many war veterans (not just from the Vietnam War) who have failed to segment events, and they still struggle with these issues in life. Sadly, I’ve seen some veterans who couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with their past combat experiences, and they ended their own lives.
Some readers will be upset by the use of racial references, some will be upset by the vulgar language, some by the stark brutality, some by the sexual references. I can sanitize my manuscript and give the reader a false sense of how war reduces the humanity of an individual. Not only that, but sanitizing the past distorts history and lulls a person into a nonchalant manner of behavior in determining courses of action. The end result is that I would defeat the purpose that compelled me to write my book in the first place. So what is the point? I hope that you understand what I am trying to achieve.
The title, The Mailman Went UA, came from our little song and dance routine that we performed when we didn’t receive any mail. It reflected the utter desolation of aloneness and heartbreak that extended beyond the lack of mail to who you were as a human being, and that impact is impossible to shake. The mail was our only touch with any degree of normalcy. It was more than a connection with the “World”. It was the essential element in preserving our sanity. We were surrounded by death and destruction and became unfazed by them, but we were always hit hard when we didn’t receive any mail.
From the Foreword by Professor Michael H. Hunt (Emerson Professor of History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
David Mulldune’s The Mailman Went UA is like any good memoir. It draws readers into a foreign world and holds them there. His achievement may seem a bit surprising. Mulldune is not a formally schooled writer, and he has wrestled with the events depicted here for so long - some four decades - that by now they should be thoroughly tangled in his mind. On the other hand, his few surviving letters from Vietnam are fluent and thoughtful and suggest that even as a teenager he was an unusually perceptive and introspective observer. Whatever his methods, Mulldune has managed to turn the material he has had to work with—surviving fragments of writing from the war years and the memories that have had him firmly in their grip—into this vivid account. He tells his story with a raw, painful honesty that conveys a sense of the war as he felt it at the time. This account with all its wistfulness, anger, despair, and confusion has an integrity that should help readers understand what war does to those who fight it. We see his youthful self step into the crucible, undergo its slow and inexorable effects, and come out transformed.
The title that Mulldune has given his memoir is revealing. The mail that made its way to Vietnam and back home served as a lifeline. Letters, packages, and photos provided a link to a normal civilian life far from the pervasive fear and exhaustion of men in combat units. Mail helped sustain valuable personal relationships with parents, wives, fiancés, and friends, but mail was also a constant reminder of the possibility of loss either through death or alienated affection. Finally, mail served as a private refuge where it was safe to vent feelings that could not be comfortably shared with comrades. At the same time soldier-correspondents had to monitor those feelings so that the letters did not hurt or alarm loved ones.
While readers will quickly recognize the fine qualities of this work, they may miss some of its broader historical significance. One is that Mulldune arrived in Vietnam at a pivotal point. By May 1968 when he stepped off the plane, the Tet offensive had shaken the U.S. military and the Johnson administration. The U.S. public was turning against the war. Opinion polls from fall 1967 revealed an electorate split down the middle on whether the war was a mistake, and by then protest had become mainstream, legitimate, and vocal. Discontent at home with this limited war was matched by soldiers’ complaints about political leaders who were having them fight “with one arm tied behind their back.” By the time Mulldune left Vietnam in June 1969, the new Nixon administration had formally made Vietnamization the basic U.S. strategy. As the troops knew all too well, withdrawing U.S. forces and putting the war in the hands of the Saigon government’s military was not likely to result in victory or even a stalemate. Mulldune’s contempt for his Vietnamese allies, indeed for most all Vietnamese, was widely shared and led to the unavoidable conclusion that the enemy would win, that the Vietnamese did not matter, and thus that any American sacrifices were part of a sick political game. This dispiriting realization coincided with the war’s most intense fighting. U.S. killed in action were moving toward their highest levels as Mulldune arrived in 1968, they peaked in 1969, the year he left. He captures this post-Tet period with its litany of casualties, its bubbling racial tensions, its feigned ambushes, its random brutality toward villagers, and its rising antagonism between anxious men and careless leaders.
The other perhaps even more notable feature of this account is its view from the ranks, a perspective not well represented in Vietnam War memoirs. Mulldune was one in a pool of nearly 27 million men who came of draft age during the Vietnam era (1964-1973). Like 10 percent of that pool, he ended up in Vietnam. Once there Mulldune made it into an even smaller group—the one in seven soldiers who actually served in combat as opposed to support. (He did not make it into the smallest group of all—the 1 percent from that pool of draft-eligible males who ended up wounded or dead.) Of those servicemen in Vietnam, Mulldune was nearly a perfect representative. He was young, white, and working class. A high school drop out in trouble with the law, the Marines offered him one of his few options. He was distinctly not one of the privileged who could turn to sympathetic draft boards operating under rules favorable to college students, who could use family influence to secure a safe slot in the reserves or national guard, and who even if they went to Vietnam were more likely to work in safety or serve on the frontlines for shorter periods than Mulldune’s mandatory thirteen interminable months. Like most of those alongside him, he was barely a man, still unformed and with limited experience. He enlisted at age eighteen, and turned nineteen in Vietnam. The young faces peering out from the many wartime photos provide an unsettling reminder of how heavily sacrifice rested on one especially vulnerable age group.
Finally, Mulldune takes us through with an anthropological precision the distinct seasons of soldiering familiar to virtually all Vietnam veterans. The process began with pre-induction and the hand wringing over whether to enlist or how to respond to a draft notice. In Mulldune’s case the arguments for serving were strong. He was drawn to a prestigious, manly organization fighting for a cause that seemed noble. Boot camp was the next stage. As well as anyone, Mulldune describes the trials that made raw recruits into tough, effective fighters with a pride in their organization. His arrival in-country began with the glimpse of the calm, verdant Vietnamese countryside from an airplane window. Stepping onto the tarmac turned the servicemen instantly into FNG’s—without a weapon, without a unit, and without a clue about what was ahead of them. The first weeks and months provided that clue in a steady round of patrols, ambushes, sniper attacks, mine explosions, and base camp mortar attacks. The remainder of the standard thirteen-month Marine assignment was devoted to coping with stress punctuated regularly by the loss of comrades and accentuated by obsessive thoughts of survival. This long grinding time was broken by R&R (Mulldune gives a wonderful account of his time in Hong Kong). For the lucky who survived unhurt to “get short,” the day would come for their recall from the field, the processing for return home (including the unsettling surrender of the soldier’s weapon), and the flight out aboard a plane of men cheering wildly over their escape back into “the World.” The soldier’s seasons formally ended with homecoming. But in coming home Mulldune realized that his experience would never leave him. As he puts it, he felt still a teenager and yet like someone who had lived more than a lifetime.
Mulldune’s concluding observations about war follow logically and powerfully from his account of his experiences. They reflect a kind of moral seriousness that is common to veterans and that should be part of the thinking of any leader who makes a decision for war. There must be a special circle deep in hell reserved for those who go to war insensitive to the terrible, inhumane forces they unleash. Readers may well close this account praying with a special fervency that that is exactly where thoughtless warlords end up.
Contents
- Introduction
- Foreword by Professor Michael H. Hunt
- Foreword by Professor Christopher Hamner
- Chapter 1: Bless Your Heart, Gomer Pyle
- Chapter 2: Shock Therapy
- Chapter 3: Democracy to the Rescue
- Chapter 4: The Fear of Not Knowing
- Chapter 5: Survival of the Fittest
- Chapter 6: Bless the DI
- Chapter 7: The Mailman Went UA
- Chapter 8: Valentine’s Day
- Chapter 9: No Khong Biec
- Chapter 10: Attitude Check
- Chapter 11: Payback is a Motherfucker
- Chapter 12: The Fear of Knowing
- Chapter 13: Reflections
- Glossary of Terms
- Epilogue
Specifications
- First edition (February 2009)
- 210 - 6 x 9 inch pages
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Paperback - #MM18-P (ISBN 978-0-557-02550-3) - $20.00
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Hardcover - #MM18-H (ISBN 978-0-557-02551-0) - $36.00
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PDF file on CD disk - #MM18-PDF - $10.00
- 18 photos
- Glossary