For Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

I'm putting some stories together under the working title, "War Doesn't Have to be Hell, It Doesn't Even Have to be War." It's about serving in support units far away from the actual fighting. Forging Across the Muddy River is one of the stories. The idea of actual battle lines were beginning to erode during the Vietnam War and don't really exist at all anymore. As a writer for the 1st Aviation Brigade's HAWK Magazine, I was asked to write a story about the success of Vietnamization. I didn't know how to approach the story because there were a lot of mixed opinions about whether Vietnamization was the answer to getting out of the war. But I knew from the beginning that Pete Seeger was going to be in the story somehow. This is the story about the story I wrote for HAWK.

 

Forging Across the Muddy River

 

Shock and awe.

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. 

 

It’s amazing how a war cry can get started and then suddenly takes on a life of its own. And sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a war cry but merely a policy decision or a strategy adjustment or merely an advertising gimmick. Anyway that’s the way it was when Vietnamization made its appearance into the Vietnam War:

Once Vietnamization was in, carpet-bombing suddenly went out the window.

Vietnamization entailed winning the hearts and minds of the very people we weren’t able to defeat any other way and represented our best chance of getting the hell out of Vietnam with our pants still on and our reputation in tack.

HAWK magazine was given the task by General Hemingway to write an article defending, explaining, and praising the policy of Vietnamization. It would be a hard sell because most of the GI’s didn’t see it happening. They didn’t see the war being won, the South Vietnamese military taking on a bigger role, or our involvement ever decreasing.

But whatever Hemingway wanted, Hemingway got and what he got was my complete cooperation as I listed all the accomplishments of Vietnamization that would lead to the eventual end of the Vietnam War just as any skeptic who also happened to be on the company payroll would do.

I put all the facts and figures together that would make for a perfectly accurate and typically boring military status report but the challenge was to also make it an interesting story. I wasn’t sure how that could be accomplished given the nature of the subject and was ready to concede there was no way to make Vietnamization entertaining—just as there was no way in hell to make Vietnamization work, when I got an idea. 

Before coming to Vietnam one of my favorite shows was the Smother’s Brothers and one of my favorite episodes was Pete Seeger performing a song he had written called “Waist deep in the Big Muddy.” Columbia Records had censored the song and CBS had tried to censor the song but the brother’s persisted and in early 1968 seven million people listened to Pete Seeger tell the story of the Captain trying to lead his platoon across the Big Muddy.

I thought the song was an appropriate intro for an article about how the United States might finally be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. So I opened the article with these words.

"In the Spring of 1968, Pete Seeger went on national television and sang a song entitled “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which literally depicted troops, but figuratively a nation, trudging across a dirty, muddy river with the deepest and most dangerous part still ahead."  

That muddy river was where we were at the time, I wrote, but Vietnamization, like a rowboat moored along the bank waiting for us to jump in, was going to safely bring us to the other side. I didn’t mention that there were numerous holes in the rowboat but rather concentrated on the advancements of the ARVN (Vietnamese Army), the hearts and minds we were winning in the towns and countryside, and the improvements in the Vietnamese governments at all levels. I closed with the following line—

"Vietnamization is in fact becoming the solution, which the nation was searching for in the Spring of 1968. The way to the other bank of that muddy river is becoming clearer every day."

As with the HAWK Honey episode, I was again called in to the General’s office where he tried to do what Columbia Records and CBS could not do.

“The article is good,” he said, “but that first part has to go.  Too negative. Un-American. I don’t like that Pete Seeger fella. Isn’t he a communist?”

“I think he’s just a folk singer, an American folk singer.”

“Well I want the article to be more positive.”

Now old Hemingway may have been a good general; or he may not have been. It really didn’t matter. But in this case he didn’t know what he was up against—namely an ex-physics major—albeit for a very short time until a little phenomenon known as the Schrödinger Equation snuck up out of nowhere and knocked me completely out of the science field into the brave new world of business administration. I knew what General Hemingway did not know.

The only way you get more positive is to move further away from the negative and the only way to move further away from the negative is to admit a negative in the first place. And believe me when I say, the United States in the Spring of 1968 in the war in Vietnam was in a very negative place. I explained it to him in layman’s terms.

“General, you can’t say were doing better at something unless you concede that we were doing worse at one point. If we weren’t doing so doggone bad back then we wouldn’t need to be writing articles telling the troops how doggone good we’re doing now.  And there’d be no need to explain something as mystifying and befuddling as Vietnamization to soldiers smack dab in the middle of it everyday.”

“As the publisher of this magazine you don’t have to use my story if you don’t want to,” I explained, wisely substituting magazine for the phrase self-promoting rag that I would have liked to have used, “but I’m not going to let you use my name on any story about Vietnamization that doesn’t include that first paragraph. That’s a muddy river you’re going to have cross by yourself if you want to write this story yourself.”

Well he wasn’t about to write the story himself and frankly no one else wanted to write it either so we reached an agreement. The story was published as I wrote it and just to stick it to him, I suggested the title be “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” I thought it made perfect sense. The war was the troubled water and Vietnamization was the bridge that would get us to the other side. Not only did the title fit but it was already being heard daily over the airways throughout the country. “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” had just been named record, album and song of the year.

My Sarge agreed but apparently there was some kind of clearing house for all of the in-country publications and there was a problem.

“We’re going to have to come up with a different title for your story, Phil,” he said one day as he tossed the manuscript on my desk. Seems the engineers over at”—and I don’t have a clue what the name was for their magazine but apparently some engineer unit got dibs on my title first.

I was disappointed because I thought my title was not only a literal description of my story but also possessed a certain literary quality not found in most military publications. “So what was their story—they build a bridge over a river?” I asked.

“You guessed it,” he said walking away.

Damn those engineers, I thought. We went on to title the story “Forging Across the Muddy River,” which will never pop up on a google search the way either “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” or “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” would have.

It was just a short five years later that the fruits of Vietnamization became evident to the whole world as the Viet Cong poured into Saigon and the last American helicopter frantically lifted off the roof of the American Embassy with former friends and allies hopelessly reaching for the skids as both banks of the Big Muddy collapsed into its waters.

The war was essentially over but not the way we had planned for it to end. Vietnamization dropped completely out of the vernacular of the day, replaced by a new term, boat people, which described those Vietnamese attempting to cross the now even bigger muddy ocean.