April 5, 1967: Eighteen year old Fred Leo Brown enters the U.S. Army Recruiting office and signs papers reading: Vietnam- Airborne Infantry – Volunteer. Though not a writer, he finds himself constantly sending diary-style letters to his mother. So much so, that the cumulative results represents a near daily diary from June 16, 1967 (day of induction), until October 31, 1968 a few days following him being severely wounded in combat.
During the war, Fred Leo Brown marched a certified 2,000 miles through terrain where each foot-drop could have been his last. He fought through the legendary 1968 Tet Offensive, Operation Burlington Trails and Tet Offensive II. Eleven longs months of combat left him with wounds that would eventually render him 100% disabled. Then instead of returning home hailed as one of the highest decorated soldiers of the Vietnam War, he was betrayed and denied twelve medals including the nations highest, the Congressional Medal of Honor.
An entry of his work was first published in New York’s Provincetown Review in 1968. A shortened version, Call Me No Name, would be published in 1973. Starting in the mid 1990, he started organizing his letters and connecting them with memoirs. Vietnam War Diary would be published in 1998. Includes original 800 words Grunt Vietnam War Dictionary.
Preface:
It is essentially a series of letters, mostly to his parents about that distant time and place that happened toAmericaand her children over a quarter of a century ago. It seems that no sooner has Brown arrived inVietnamthan the North Vietnamese Army started their costly and ill-fated 1968 Tet Offensive. It was a remarkable year “in-country” and in the nation. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated. The mood of non-participant young people erupts at the Democratic National Convention. The most remarkable thing about these letters is the mixture of the mundane and the moral. He wants a knife; he badgers for money, then losses it during a battle and asks them to cancel the checks. He thinks about coming back home incessantly. He mixes with his buddies, they get patches from the family franchise chicken business, but later he notes that after six months, he is the oldest and most alone. He keeps calling for Kool-Aid, as if that child never grew out of him, but after giving children balloons and playing with them, he finds that it is too painful to kill their fathers and brothers and play balloons with them. We see him casually grow into manhood. It is not a pleasant initiation to watch; letters are marked with little homilies, notes about his officers, familial events, responses to letters from his parents. But it changes. It ceases to be interesting, and grows serious. We watch the speed of change; things that take years to experience happen virtually overnight here. And the vacillation between moral points of view of what he is doing and what is happening at home seems to sweep like a great pendulum trying to find its moral resting place. At one minute he is sympathetic to the Vietnamese, and a day later, he feels the powerful urge of his Army training and the blood lust it instills.Americahas made a compromise about this war. What our movies, our mythos, have suggested to us, is that we should not have fought the war because our politicians let down our fighting men and women, never clearly defining a mission.
Thus the men and women come off in our popular culture as victims of corrupted policy makers. The Vietnamese War’s greatest effect might have been to poison our political system, so that in invadingIraq, President Bush has to say that we cleansed our nation of itsVietnamexcursion, that we somehow brought our honor back. But like all mythos, the truth is difficult to reconcile with it. Fred Leo Brown’s book has the ring of morality and compromise, the seeking of working class people who fought the war. We see little of it, and as scholars are beginning to try to understand the war, this kind of book, filled with mundane existence and moral questioning is going to be a most valuable resource. Of course, the act of autobiography itself is difficult to interpret. Here we have letters to his parents, and it is clear that he is censoring every line, wondering how much he can tell about his life and his feelings, about his actions. In a letter to his sister, we are brought up short by how much self-censorship there was, but we watch him give more extended glimpses of life at war as he writes through the nights on guard duty. The war changes him, as it changed the Vietnamese landscape. One can sense the deep scars our young men felt, why they turned to drugs and alcohol, the glimmers of the morals they grew up with challenged by the facts of their existence. How much should one tell? There is a story behind this one, messier, more painful. It is the story that soldiers are beginning to tell now, and Fred Leo Brown in publishing these letters has brought to light some of the challenges that the myth has left out. If ever a nation needs to get over something, our nation needs to get overVietnam. But we cannot get over it as long as we keep it wrapped in mythic paper. Fred Leo Brown’s letters strip some of the wrapping from the myth, and we are allowed glimpses into what happened in the lives of the men who went out on patrols, defended perimeters, and found no solace in their Rest and Rehabilitation. It is often a painful story, filtered through the eyes of a boy who came in relative innocence, but was delighted to escape with his life. But is also captures something of the nobility of people in a job that we had no right to ask them to undertake, and how they survived that moral chaos. - Gerald E. Forshey, Ph.D. Professor Humanities and Philosophy
Reviews:
Brown’s Diary the length and breadth needed to insure its permanent place in world history. – Dr. Scott Johnson, Professor of History
Fred Leo Brown’s Vietnam War Diary will serve as a testament about the life and times of a No Name soldier. A soldier who fought in a war where GOD was the first recruit and TRUTH the first casualty. Roxanna M. Brown, Vietnam War Combat Journalist
Fred Leo Brown is to be commended for putting the ravages of war and the torment it wreaks upon the human mind in a perspective which sears the soul with its realism and yet, through it all, reveals a healing process. One suspects that if President Clinton read Vietnam War Diary, he might better understand the refusal by many Americans to put aside the question of a politician’s military service during the Vietnam War. - JOHN CLARK PRATT, Author
I have conducted workshops on teaching the Vietnam War throughoutOklahoma. This book is one that I can recommend. – BILL McCLOUD, Teacher
History classes teach about places and happenings of war, but this book, Vietnam War Diary, gives an insight into the thoughts and everyday experiences you could never even imagine. – ANN CARROLL, granite etcher
A graphic depiction of war as good and evil gets blurred and spun around, losing their identities and leaving the reader wondering who’s good, who’s bad, who’s crazy, and who’s insane. – JOHN TYLK, Artist
Every American should read Vietnam War Diary, and experience not the will of generals, nor the wish of politicians, but the feeling of the average soldier. Mr. Brown is truly a champion of all fighting men when he writes. This book should be required reading for everyone from the president to the newborn. - JOHN L. MARCHELLO, Pres. Danmar Productions
Through a series of poems, personal experiences and experiences of others, Vietnam War Diary is a spellbinding, breath-taking saga of human emotions. - DAVE RECOB, Editor Americal Division Newsletter
If you dare to take the journey, Vietnam War Diary, will transport you to the rice fields and jungles ofVietnam. Once there, you’ll stand side-by-side with the grunts and watch first hand the destruction caused by booby traps, grenades, mortars, and bombs. – MARY K. FLIRLS, Book Reviewer
