WAR COLLEGE--
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It's Complicated
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PROLOGUE
The best way to describe the Vietnam War to a younger generation is to say, “It’s complicated.”
It was complicated back then too, in addition to being frustrating, disheartening, confusing, rage inducing, and, in far too many cases, fatal for 58,220 American soldiers who died in that war. An additional 300,000 were hospitalized with injuries, and hundreds of thousands more are still suffering from what we now call PTSD.
The book you are holding is described as historical fiction in that it blends accurate historical facts with stuff I made up or embellished about a single year in my life between June of 1965 and June of 1966. My story is not intended to deal with that time period in a strict biographical or historical sense, but rather focuses on a sliver of time when the war overshadowed the lives of millions of young men and women and their families. More importantly, it forced an entire generation to realize our government had lied to us. This realization is still impacting American citizens to this day.
Our government and many of its leaders continue to lie to us almost every day. Maybe they lied to us before the Vietnam War, but it was during the 1960s and 1970s we finally caught them red-handed.
Some of the characters you will meet are not real people but rather an amalgam of the hundreds of people I met during my year at Hiram Scott College, a “for-profit” school in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, back in the 1960s.
Some of the events depicted in the book actually occurred; some not so much. But even the embellished ones are based on facts, as I remember them to be.
Historical fiction is both an oxymoron and literary genre. It also possesses the unique potential to offend the sensibilities of both those who demand precise historical accuracy in their reading material, while also disappointing fiction lovers looking for a solely creative storyline filled only with figments of an author’s vivid imagination. Yet, authors have relied on this genre for literally hundreds of years to tell fictional stories based on historical facts.
In the case of War College, I fell back on the axiom that one should write about what one knows. That’s why, in part, I have written about baseball in Last at Bat; friendship in Golden Reich; and based on my three years working on The Hill in Washington, DC, the political shenanigans I witnessed firsthand in Stats. Fat Girl was based on a neighbor who suffered from obesity, and Answer Man came from my love of The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling. War College, however, is as close to my heart and my life as any I have written.
While this is not an autobiography, there are important parallels between this book and my own life. I attended Hiram Scott College on a basketball scholarship back in the ’60s. Yes, the college was real and one of hundreds of “war colleges” that sprang up across the country during that time period—Google it.
Not all the students who attended these colleges did so to avoid the draft, but many, many did, if they could afford college. If they could not afford it, and they were healthy, they were likely to be drafted into military service and forced to fight (and kill) in a war many felt was illegal and immoral. In total, over fifteen million military college deferments were granted during the Vietnam War era.
Yet even the deferments students obtained from Hiram Scott, as well as thousands of other colleges and universities during that period, were in many cases only temporary reprieves from what I define as fate, but what could also be defined as luck, divine intervention, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The irony was many characters in my story would have been, in retrospect, safer going to Vietnam than pursuing a higher education in Western Nebraska. For them, timing was everything, and fate, it seems, will in the end have its way with all of us.
Like Jon, the protagonist in my story, I traveled back to Scottsbluff several years ago, looking for something. Closure? Also, like Jon, I found the town to be as picturesque and as welcoming as it was when I was there so many years ago. But my visit also conjured up devastating memories of lost friends and the idiocy of an insane war.
I also revisited a place where good times were had, lots of beer consumed, and my visit made me laugh out loud remembering things that can only occur when you are nineteen years old and living in a dorm with some crazy guys who had more money than common sense. Yeah, what could go wrong with that combination?
Clearly, the backdrop of my year in Nebraska was the Vietnam War. But for some reason, in that fleeting period of time of the mid-sixties, the war seemed to be farther away, as if we had escaped its grasp, or it had forgotten all about us living in the wilds of Nebraska while we drank beer, played basketball, and did what college students do. But that feeling was short-lived, and we all knew that the reality was we were deluding ourselves, and the war would eventually catch up with all of us, one way or the other. And it did.
We all knew other young men who went to Vietnam and never came back, and their headstones in our local cemeteries bear witness to that unarguable and inescapable fact. Many who did come home were permanently damaged physically, mentally, or emotionally, but all of us who lived during that period were, in one way or another, affected by a war that seems more and more senseless as the years pass.
It’s been almost fifty years since the Vietnam War ended, and for younger generations, it is nothing more than just another chapter in American history. So perhaps the best way to understand that era is to listen to some of the cool music that helped define those years and the generation who lived through it. Songs like Phil Ochs’ “What Are You Fighting For,” Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” Country Joe and the Fish’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die,” Marvin Gaye’s anthem “What’s Goin On,” or films like Platoon, Coming Home, Born on the Fourth of July, among so many others, all tell the story of that era far better than any history book.
From a personal perspective I NEEDED to write this book. Years of thinking back to those days are testament to the impact that year in Scottsbluff had on my life. In short, it was a story that had taken up residence in my brain since 1966. So, here it is.
For you strict historians, remember literary license is a real thing, and for you fiction lovers, you can try to figure out what is fact and what are my personal brain droppings.
I’ll never tell.
Mark Donahue
Copyright © 2024 Mark Donahue. All Rights Reserved