When I left the DKE House in 1966 headed for grad school in Philadelphia, the Vietnam War was raging 9,000 miles away and on the TV news each evening. I didn’t think about it much because I had a student deferment that made me immune from the draft.
In late 1967, freshly married and out of school, things got serious. I joined the Navy and headed to Officer Candidate School in Newport, RI, and it was there that I got the bad news. My orders read “Public Affairs Officer, Naval Support Activity, DaNang, Republic of Vietnam.”
It was springtime in 1968 and the war was reaching its peak. The Tet Offensive came and went in January. At home, the war protests had grown loud and fierce. Not a good time for a kid whose only uniform was a madras shirt and a pair of Weejuns. Soon I’d be sporting jungle boots and a flak jacket.
In late summer, I found myself as a press escort officer in I Corps, the northern part of South Vietnam, carting correspondents around to cover the war. Accompanying reporters and network news teams took me to aircraft carriers, on swift boats, on river patrols, on helicopters to remote outposts, and into raucous bars where we tried to drink the war away singing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”
A kid straight out of the DKE House basement, I suddenly turned into a grownup and returned home changed forever. I’d seen and done things I never imagined. So, I decided to write a book about it. “Tales from Monkey Mountain: Stories of the Vietnam War” was the result.
I like to think it’s a different perspective on a war everyone hated, a war that reshaped our country in ways perhaps like no other. It’s a story of ironies, of heroes, of bravery and unbridled kindness. It tells of happiness, of terror, of men and women fighting not just for their country, but for each other.
“Tales from Monkey Mountain” is available on Amazon and from Barnes and Noble.
-Mike Hoyt ’66
