Diane Crump by Mark Shrager

Author:Mark Shrager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2020-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

. . . AND NINE THOUSAND MILES AWAY: BERT CRUMP’S STORY

She was so young and cocky.

—DIANE’S BROTHER BERT CRUMP, RESPONDING TO A PICTURE OF A MUD-SPLATTERED BUT SMILING DIANE A FEW DAYS AFTER LISTENING TO HER KENTUCKY DERBY RIDE WITH HIS BUDDIES IN VIETNAM

DIANE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW IT AT THE TIME, BUT NEARLY NINE THOUSAND miles away, another Crump was following her exploits closely as she prepared to ride in the Kentucky Derby. Her younger brother Bert, who’d been drafted into the army and sent to the raging war in Vietnam a year or so earlier, had just returned from a stretch in the field. And as the Derby horses approached the starting gate . . .

But let’s get the story directly from Bert:

My twin brother Ben and I had gotten drafted, both of us together, and we went through boot camp, that whole process. At the end of boot camp, there was an induction ceremony, and as part of it, an officer would walk down the line of men and would assign them, on the spot, to either the army or the marines. “You’re in the army. You’re in the marines . . .” Just like that.

We weren’t sure which would be a better assignment, but for whatever reason, I was assigned to the army and my twin brother became a marine. We didn’t really care which of us received which assignment. Both of us were patriotic and were happy to serve our country.

We were sent home at the end of boot camp, and when our orders arrived I was assigned to Vietnam as an infantryman, and Ben was assigned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. We learned later that the military had a policy about brothers: Only one could be sent into a war zone. So Ben spent his years in the marines doing things like riot control when a war protest got out of hand. There was no shortage of war protests back in those days.

My first child was due in June, while I would still be in basic training. I requested a leave so I could be there for the birth, and after the military’s administrative wheels spun for a while somewhere, I was granted a seven-day emergency leave. When the seven days had passed, I returned to camp to complete my training, and very shortly afterward, shipped out to Vietnam.

I thought it was a very arbitrary ruling. I couldn’t get another deferral, so I didn’t see my firstborn for almost a year and a half. So many men went to Canada instead of serving, and almost nobody who avoided Vietnam paid any sort of penalty. I was just the sort of soldier the military was searching for—willing to fight in Vietnam, actually anxious to serve my country—but I couldn’t even get a deferral to help out with my first child. It just didn’t seem right.

When we landed in Vietnam I was assigned to a base camp in Tân An, in the Mekong Delta. We’d

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