Play Hungry by Pete Rose

Author:Pete Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Vietnam

Late in the 1967 season, I got a call from someone who worked at the State Department.

“Would you be interested in going to Vietnam?” he asked me.

My first thought was: I already done my service in the Army, so no one’s drafting me to go fight in the jungle. I was twenty-six then. But I didn’t say nothing. I was curious what this fella from the State Department might want with me.

“I don’t know,” I told the man. “There’s a war going on over there.”

I wasn’t one to pay much attention to the news. I didn’t sit down and watch old Walter Cronkite on the TV or anything like that. But even if you were ignoring the war, you heard about it all the time and had a pretty good idea there were half a million young Americans fighting in Southeast Asia. Just what they were doing over there no one seemed to know, something about helping South Vietnam try to fight off communists from North Vietnam. What we did know was that a lot of them were coming home in body bags. Why in hell would I want to fly halfway around the globe to get closer to that war?

“Well,” the State Department man said, “Joe DiMaggio’s going.”

“I get to meet Joe?” I asked, and my voice might have cracked a little, I was so excited at the idea.

“Meet him?” the man said. “You’d get to live with him. You’d be over there for more than two weeks.”

I’d never met Joe DiMaggio. He was retired from the New York Yankees long before I came up, so our paths had never crossed. All I knew about Joe were two things: he had been married to Marilyn Monroe, making him the envy of about every man on the planet, and he hit in fifty-six straight games. Another thing I knew about Joe was he drank coffee—I guess that’s a third thing I knew. We all saw him in those ads for Mr. Coffee that seemed to be everywhere in those years.

I was going to fly all the way over to Vietnam to get to know Joe, one of the greatest ballplayers that ever lived! He was a great athlete, fun to watch, always consistent. He finished with 361 home runs in his career and had only 369 career strikeouts. In 1967, Joe was an executive vice president of the Oakland A’s—that was sixteen years after his last season with the Yankees in 1951—but he was still Joe DiMaggio.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about dropping into the middle of a war. I didn’t really like the idea of anyone shooting at me or launching mortars in my direction. We’d be traveling around South Vietnam trying to boost morale, and they’d even told me they’d suit me up in a colonel’s uniform. The idea was, if we were captured, we’d be treated as officers and not as spies.

The whole thing was set up by the USO, which used to bring Bob

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