"Shadowman"

"Welcome to Vietnam."

Drafted in 1966, nineteen-year-old Phillip I. Elkins (better known today as Señor Felipe, host of "LA Sounds with Sr. Felipe" on Chico's KZFR.org) little knew what awaited him. Years later, living in Chico, flashbacks would haunt his life and become a relationship wrecking-ball.

Elkins is writing a series of autobiographies that capture the eras (and errors) of his life. In "Shadowman" ($20 in paperback from Sr. Felipe Press, srfelipe.weebly.com; also for Amazon Kindle), Elkins tells the story of his life in Chico.

This time he writes in the third person, using his best friend's name as the central character, mixing in excerpts from earlier books, memories from childhood (where Elkins was known as "Cookie") and his year in Vietnam. 

Elkins notes that "Shadowman" was written "when I was having a pretty rough time with things. I was going through my second divorce, and I was letting go of a successful business that I had for several years, and I couldn't seem to find a suitable job."

PTSD leaves him with a "terrible short-term memory, I was explosively angry, and I was constantly exhausted. I felt confused and disorganized…." So the story of "Eddie Pacheco" and his disintegrating marriage to Peaches is dark indeed, especially after Peaches is sexually assaulted by a stranger.

Eddie's anger is palpable. But who to be angry with—an unknown assailant, some higher ups who promoted a purposeless war? After Vietnam he is physically whole but mentally wounded. In one horrific incident, "Eddie throws up again and again. He wanders off, seeing fire burning, smelling oil, gas, flesh, clothing, and bone all burning together. He retches some more. He feels dizzy and weak, and he falls to the ground and lays there, grateful that he's still alive but somehow wishing he wasn't."

Depressed in Chico, thinking of jumping off a cliff in Upper Park, he meets a woman who is about to do the same thing. The two are saved by a ranger with a surprising childhood connection to Eddie. Something begins to change in him; "the shadows are fading," he realizes. 

And there's an old childhood memory, pushing back against the void: "Lookie, lookie, lookie—Here comes Cookie!"

"The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir"

"We had arrived in summer," writes Thi Bui, "so there was time to prepare for school in the fall." But as immigrants from Vietnam, her family needed time to adjust. You mean you choose classes? They don't just hand you your schedule?

Bui, a graphic artist now based in the Bay Area, as a youngster escaped with her family after the fall of South Vietnam, landing on American soil on June 28, 1978.

Later, as a graduate student, she wanted to capture her family's history. "My parents have been separated since I was nineteen," she writes, though they "remain friends." But what happened? Words were not enough, so in 2005 she learned "how to do comics." Pages of drawings accumulated.

Later, she and her husband and son moved from New York to California, where she taught at "an alternative public high school for immigrants in Oakland." Her book took shape as a graphic memoir, and in 2017 it was published as "The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir" ($19.99 in paperback from Abrams ComicArts; also for Amazon Kindle, with a helpful pronunciation guide at thebestwecoulddo.abrams.link).

It is fitting, at the start of a new school year, that Bui's own explorations of her past become part of the reader's experience as well. "The Best We Could Do" is the "Book In Common" for 2022-2023 for Butte College (butte.edu/bic) and Chico State (www.csuc.edu/bic) and other community groups.

Bui's parents and their growing family knew the ravages of war. In 1975 South Vietnam's president Duong Van Minh surrendered to the north. Bui's father, in talks with his daughter years later, wants to correct "the American version of this story … about a country not worth saving…. Communist forces entered Saigon without a fight, and no blood was shed. Perhaps Duong Van Minh's surrender saved my life."

But the Communist regime ushered in a propaganda campaign and confession sessions with neighbor spying on neighbor. "My parents," Bui writes, "began to talk of escape."

Filled with emotion, the book's images and dialog convey the complexity of the past--and the realization that one's very-flawed parents were trying to do the best they could.

"Coming Home Whole: A Draftee's Foretold Journey To And From Vietnam"

Don Graham retired from Chico State in 2007 as the university's Associate Vice President for Student Affairs (he and wife MaryAnne now live in Sonoma County) but his Chico State connection goes back decades.

 

In the summer of 1968, he writes in his well-crafted memoir, Chico State had accepted him into the master's program in psychology, and he and MaryAnne "would be renting a very small house at something-and-a-half Cherry Street" near campus.

 

Though his draft board had been hounding him even as the U.S. War in Vietnam raged he was confident he'd be safe. As MaryAnne continued packing at their Napa home, Graham drove north on Highway 99 toward his destiny. It did not go as planned.

 

The story is told in "Coming Home Whole: A Draftee's Foretold Journey To And From Vietnam" ($13.99 in paperback from Valley of the Moon Press). A car accident sends Graham back home; that same day he receives a draft notice. Alice at the draft board tells him: "'Don ... if the quota for Napa County next month is one person, you're it.'"

 

His choices are few. Canada was unappealing; he didn't have a history of conscientious objection (though years later he and MaryAnne would work in the peace movement); he didn't really want to maim himself to get 4F status; he didn't want to go to prison. So, he writes, he gave up, was drafted on election day in 1968, and promptly ushered into the Army.

 

What follows is not a gruesome tale of war but rather a series of meaningful "coincidences." Graham had sensed a kind of spirituality ("some immensely powerful force") watching over him, mediated by his mother, her spiritual mentor David (who had died), and a psychic who predicted he would return whole from the war.

 

He is assigned artillery duty in Vietnam, but he and his friends survive. R&R is in Hawaii where a kidney stone attack brings him to Tripler Hospital in Honolulu and a military job away from the war.

 

"How is this possible?" he asks himself in this story of a grateful young man amidst the twists and turns of life.

 

"Four Corners From LBJ"

Paradise writer Marty Beebe calls his novel "a saga of war and redemption." "Four Corners From LBJ" ($9.95 in paperback, self-published through CreateSpace; also for Amazon Kindle), begins in the summer of 1967 with Benson Baker, 19, enlisting in the US Army.

"He volunteered for active duty and soon became just another hired gun. Deployed to South Vietnam … he had been gung-ho and followed orders, but only for a short time. … Dealing with intolerable deportment, he turned against some of his superiors."

His actions at the "Long Bin US Military Supply Complex" land him in the mythical "LBJ ranch," named for Lyndon Baines Johnson, "the only 'in-country' US Military Stockade." The myth turns out to be reality, "a god-awful Military Stockade overflowing with Uncle Sam's best rejects … a place consumed in inconceivable wickedness."

Benson is one of twenty new inmates, the only Caucasian. The Lieutenant Commander makes things very clear: "Now you listen here, white boy. … Brothers don't like rabbits in the buildings. … Earlier this morning a white inmate died in billet number three. … Nobody ever sees anything whenever a rabbit dies, you dig. I'm talking to you, Private!"

Within moments Benson spouts off, earning a place in Silver City, a group of solitary confinement cells, hot beyond measure ("opening the cell door was akin to standing near a fired-up pizza oven"). The language throughout the book is crude and rude, and decidedly not politically correct. Racial tensions run high. There's a riot, but Benson survives. Eventually he is discharged, and his wanderings take him to the Four Corners area of Arizona.

There he meets Sau, an Apache, who takes Benson under his wings. Sau's son, Adam, is also in Vietnam, and Sau appreciates Benson's honesty. It is a healing time for Benson and Sau, but then, inexplicably, some of Benson's enemies from LBJ show up in the area and hijack a tour bus carrying proceeds from several national parks. The heist turns deadly.

The story's end includes suitable comeuppance, Christian conversion, and a naughty joke. In Benson Baker ("Bb"), Beebe has created a wounded warrior with huge flaws--who nevertheless shows the middle finger to injustice.

"Navy Daze: Coming Of Age In The 1960s Aboard A Navy Destroyer"

"I would not trade my Navy experience for anything," writes Michael Halldorson (now a board member of Chico's Janet Turner Print Museum). His memoir tells "the story of a young man from a small northern California town who, with no clear direction in life, joined the Navy and came of age aboard a destroyer during the Vietnam War."

The tale of Halldorson's two tours of duty aboard the USS Hopewell (which began in 1964) is written with honesty and self-deprecating good humor. "Navy Daze: Coming Of Age In The 1960s Aboard A Navy Destroyer" ($20.50 in paperback from Heritage Books, HeritageBooks.com) follows a "tin can sailor" with a little too much liberty, somewhat obsessed with "girls, cars, alcohol."

There are "vivid memories of having my nose broken in Japan and a tooth sheared off in the Philippines; both incidents took place in drinking establishments ashore." There are better memories, but also the daily routine, "hours-on-end spent inside a hot and humid five-inch gun mount while patrolling off the coast of South Vietnam."

The big guns would fire offshore to protect troops inland, but, at least during the first tour, "we did not know the effectiveness of our fire. … Our reality was the smell of gunpowder, the noise and violent shaking of the gunmount, and the acrid air inside the mount."

On leave, "one of the highlights of my visit to Chico was going out for a beer in my dress blues with a friend at a new restaurant, the Italian Cottage. The owners … furnished me a gratis pitcher of beer. I have never forgotten that act of kindness they bestowed upon me, especially with the way that the general public treated us."

And the ship's fate? "I found out my former destroyer was resting on the seafloor off San Clemente Island in southern California, sent to the bottom while serving as an unmanned target ship during a test of a new type missile."

Photographs, diagrams, and explanations of nautical terms help readers enter the life of a young sailor-artist on a journey of self-discovery (with stops at a few bars along the way).

“The Long Goodbye: Khe Sanh Revisited”

In a book published more than a decade ago, “A Patch Of Ground: Khe Sanh Remembered,” Michael Archer told the harrowing story of his part in “the most protracted, costly and consequential” battle of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

It is also the story of his best friend, Tom Mahoney. They both enlisted in the Marines in 1967, and on July 6, 1968, under strange circumstances, Mahoney was killed by the enemy after he apparently walked outside the perimeter of an outpost established on a hill near Khe Sanh. The area was being evacuated and his body was not recovered.

“The place had been wrested fifteen months earlier from an entrenched North Vietnamese battalion in a bloody four-day battle that resulted in scores of dead and wounded, and was held at great additional cost of life as the linchpin to Khe Sanh’s survival. As the rhythmic popping of the helicopter blades receded into that July night, the agony of Hill 881 South finally came to an end.”

But Archer’s own agony did not end. He had to know if Tom’s final resting place could be located and perhaps his remains repatriated. His book helped him make connections, both here and in Vietnam, and the quest was on. The story is told in “The Long Goodbye: Khe Sanh Revisited” ($21.95 in paperback from Hellgate Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

Archer (michaelarcher.net) lives in Reno; his brother, Brian, is a Chico State University grad and managed Madison Bear Garden for a time; and one of the central persons in the new book is Chico native Steve Busby, who signed up for the Marines in 1967 only to witness Tom’s death the next year.

Part battlefield account and part detective story, the book chronicles frustrations with official government efforts, connections with Mahoney’s family, work with a Vietnamese psychic who claimed to be in touch with Mahoney’s “wandering soul,” and meetings with former enemies who wanted to honor Archer’s friend. The riveting story is brilliantly told.

Tom’s fate is prised out of the fog of war and there comes for Archer “something that had been missing for the last forty years,” a measure of peace.