A poetic moment from Juris’s Viet Nam diary, written at the height of the rainy season in 1967: “A very civilized sound, the rain on the concrete walkways. But out past the buildings, on the other side of the perimeter and wires and snagging barbs, obscured by the thick downpour, the rain touches quietly to earth. Caught by the green flesh of the jungle it slides silently down the trunks and stalks and shoots onto the soft floor below.
“I don’t feel any more. I am cut off even from sensation. I am being absorbed.”

As readers of “Red Flags” know, Juris served on an small, extremely isolated base adjacent to a tiny town. The roads in and out were too dangerous to use for supply runs, so everything arrived — when it arrived at all — by air. This report comes from late September, 1967: “Running out of everything– soap, soda, sleep, but not sun, of course. The end of the month drought. And naturally everyone has been paid — already — and packing all sorts of money with no place to spend it, so it slides back and forth across gaming tables, boxes, bare ground. By tomorrow morning half the compound will have the other half’s money, but of course, with nothing to splurge on, the gods of odds will readjust the imbalance by the next dawn.”

Juris was in the Signal Corps, his job to relay information about VC traffic on the part of the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Phu Bon province. By Viet Nam standards, Team 31 was a tiny operation, “but even our little ‘shot’ keeps us busy with regular radio-telephone-teletype communication. One van with the radio hookup and modulating equipment, another full of backup equipment, one secret secret little van shelter for the crypto teletype operation, and a cement floor, wooden “hootch” housing the switchboard, our living room, office, and bar. Small, but open for business round the clock as we are, keeps the seven of us hopping. Hate to think how many nights we’ve spent coddling this red-eyed monster. And if it’s not the radio, it’s the generator, and if … endless tale of woe.”
Managing the equipment, Juris quickly abandoned “by-the-book operation” for “bailing wire, Viet Nam methods”:
“The generators went off so I took a jeep to jump them. Turned out to be the major’s. I’m acquiring the reputation of an easygoing funny joker with a twinge of wild.
“Back to the wires and batteries and beeps. Beep crackle crackle to you too, you electronic slave driver. You have to talk rough to the damn thing or it won’t work right.
“Have enough static stored in my ears to last me a lifetime. I doubt if I’ll be able to tolerate anything more electrical than a light bulb for quite a while. We all started out patient and conscientious but now everybody resorts to the RM at the slightest indication of trouble. (That’s Rubber Mallet.) Very effective I might add. Really amazing what a few well placed whacks will do for this sophisticated half million dollars’ worth of gadgetry.”

Toward what he assumed would be the end of his Viet Nam tour, Juris was plagued by the decision of whether or not to extend: stay longer in Viet Nam but serve a shorter total hitch in the army, or return to a stateside post but owe the army more of his life. Ultimately, the decision would be made for him by the Tet Offensive, which extended his tour involuntarily. But in the meantime, he wondered whether he could stand ‘real’ military life back home. As he wrote, “The Army really wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so military and so much like an army.” For the anti-authoritarian Juri, stateside duty sounded like hell.
“Hopped back to Phu Bon and resumed polishing for the general. A cute guy as generals go. Friendly too, even shook hands with me, but then I guess he couldn’t do much else—our salutes are much too embarrassingly unmilitary. Hardly remember how. Thank god I got stuck in the boondocks. Not too much protocol around here. It’d be really rough to take all this junk otherwise. Bad enough being here without having to put up with the finer aspects of military life. I don’t know if I can get used to the States again. Rolling socks and boots and formations and starch and polish. Will not be easy. The big outposts and the Army are getting worse and worse. It’s getting to be like stateside, really. In Pleiku and Da Nang you’d think you were back in a major post in Washington, DC or something. You can hardly tell it’s a war zone: inspections, formal guard mounts. We don’t have any here. People just sling a rifle over their shoulder and walk around with soft caps on, a magazine in their weapon. Oh, the States. How are you going to take this stuff seriously after standing next to some light bird colonel in the morning and watching him shave his feeble face in his drawers?”

Although perennially skeptical about war, Juris was deeply moved by acts of personal heroism he witnessed in Viet Nam: “If they had a medical emergency, Special Forces ignored everything. Any instinct you have for self-preservation, forget it: they would just put their casualty in a jeep, middle of the night, totally black, no stars, and drive him to our airstrip in Cheo Reo. And there’d be GIs standing there in the dark like the Statue of Liberty with their lit flares in hand, visible for miles – this is a place with no electric lights forever – in total darkness, totally vulnerable, guiding a helicopter in to get somebody out. You wouldn’t even know who it was. You couldn’t see their face – it would be averted from whatever was coming off the flare. They were amazing, these anonymous moments.”