Lost at Sea

Thin streams of Memphis sunshine scatter light throughout his oak-paneled office, illuminating evidence of his prolific writing career strewn about the cluttered room. The walls sag with the weight of shelves lined with his vibrant novels, alongside framed front pages of The L.A. Times with bylines boasting his name. Crumpled-up notebook pages litter his desk like shrapnel of broken ideas.

Dennis McDougal pays the state of his office no mind. As he nurses a lukewarm cup of coffee, he lets his eyes flutter closed, as storytellers often do, and begins to reminisce on his youth. Every success story has a less-than-glamorous first chapter. My grandpa’s is no different. He draws a breath and takes me back to the beginning – the angst-riddled 1960s, two flunked semesters of university, a navy ship off the coast of Vietnam, LSD from the CIA, and a surreal homecoming to a shell-shocked America which changed forever while he was entrenched in war eight thousand miles away.

Like most Baby Boomers, my grandpa’s post-World War childhood was unremarkably blue-collar, suburban, and colored by white-picket-fence sentiment. He was born in late 1947 and grew up in Lynwood, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, without much consequence. Here, the American Dream was alive and well. Only near the end of his high school years did the sunny skies of his L.A. childhood begin to darken with the very real promise of impending war. It was 1965, President Lyndon Johnson was on the cusp of sending scores of young troops to die for good ol’ fashioned American values in Vietnam, and happy, healthy teenage boys across the country were receiving their draft notices. Mothers and fathers watched stoically as their sons prepared to pack up their futures and ship off for war.

My grandpa graduated from high school during the outbreak of Vietnam fever, and decided to try his luck at UCLA, where he had been accepted on a scholarship. However, his dread of the draft, accompanied with garden-variety teen angst, turned out to be the perfect recipe for a less-than-stellar scholarly performance. I can feel the weight of hindsight in his voice as he sighs, “Things were looking pretty good.” Soon after high school, however, the tangible dread of Lyndon touched Lynwood. “Johnson’s administration started to draft more and more people, and all the media at the time suggested that it was only growing larger, encompassing all of Southeast Asia. Young men my age were spooked by that. So that, plus a broken romance, made me into something of an ‘I-don’t-care’ kind of person. I was not going to college, not going to class, didn’t care about anything; it was all futile. I was going to end up in the jungles of Vietnam anyway, no matter what I did.”

It didn’t take my now-award-winning journalist grandfather very long to flunk miserably out of UCLA, and then turn to junior college to earn back credits – but, he laughs, “I promptly flunked out of there, too.” Afterwards, he worked menial jobs around the South Bay – entry-level work at a jewelry shop, a sign manufacturing plant, even a McDonald’s. He knew these were far from permanent career choices, however. He was only biding his time flipping burgers until he was shipped off to what might’ve been his one-way ticket to being a name on a memorial.

His draft notice came, of course. In 1967, my 20-year-old papa joined the navy – “better chance of living to see another day in the navy, when they’re shooting at a whole boat, not at you,” he explains. He was pushed through basic training, and as soon as he was done, he watched the familiar lights of Long Beach recede into the horizon as the U.S.S. Annapolis set sail on its 2-year trajectory around the coasts of Vietnam, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia.

“My version of Vietnam was a lot different, I suppose, from the experience of most people,” he begins. First of all, the U.S.S. Annapolis never saw combat. “Our ship was a sophisticated spy ship, and what we were supposed to be doing was gathering information broadcast to us from the mainland, and we relayed that information to American headquarters in Hawaii. We never actually landed in Vietnam; we had drills all the time, but we never actually encountered combat,” he tells me. What he saw during his deployment was not the oft-reported bloodshed and bombs, but more subtle manifestations of psychological warfare. He gives me a sheaf of weathered letters he wrote from the U.S.S. Annapolis to Audrey Booth, his close “surrogate mom” back in Lynwood, in 1968. His letters teem with typical tales of ‘Nam-era naval men – prostitutes abroad, drinking on duty, disillusionment with Johnson and the draft and what have you – but between the lines of the letters lies something a little more introspective than hookers in Hong Kong. His hands shake with paranoia as he documents how his sense of self has somehow gotten lost at sea.

October 26, 1968: “Everything around which my life had revolved for so very long is ten thousand miles away and changing without my even seeing or feeling it let alone having any say so in its changing. To hell with it I guess. When there is nothing you can do about it I don’t suppose there is any reason for getting upset.”

September 27, 1968: “Dear Mrs. Booth – I feel more and more estranged from the old times and something more intangible maybe I can talk to you about. It seems as though I’ve almost lost my identity.”

September 11, 1968: “I wonder where I’m going to. But usually only momentarily.”

My grandpa, a born writer, documents his steady descent into full-fledged cabin fever onboard the ship. He wonders what has become of his family, his friends, and his schoolyard sweethearts. He is severed from any place he can call home anymore. He is disillusioned with American society and disgruntled that he’s powerless against it. Tired of drifting aimlessly at sea, yet petrified of the social landscape which awaits him on the shore, he writes on October 5, 1968 to Mrs. Booth, “We are…a lost generation that makes Hemingway’s lost generation look like kindergarteners. The ills of our society are coming through dimly but more and more clearly all the time and an apocalypse is coming soon. I’d like to run and hide some where, but I don’t think there is anyplace so, what ever happens, I’ll be here or there to see it.”

My grandpa was honorably discharged from the navy in 1969, bummed around back home for a while until he got used to being human again, and used the G.I. Bill to put himself through UCLA’s masters program in journalism – the beginning of a half-century career in journalism that won him a fellowship at Stanford and took him up the ranks of The L.A. Times, TV Guide, and CNN. He rose from the ashes, indeed. Evading death in Vietnam was the new lease on life he needed. Alas, despite his later success, his war-racked coming-of-age story continued to define him for decades after America pulled out of Indochina for good.

Even in the throes of existential depression, my grandpa was one of the fortunate ones. Even among his fellow U.S.S. Annapolis crewmen, deep government corruption and inhuman webs of military secrets were being woven into history.

It wasn’t until years after his stint in Vietnam that my grandpa decided to write a pseudo-biographical fiction novel on his experiences in the navy. His only work of fiction to date, The Candlestickmaker, touches on everything from macho-man culture in the military, to hatred for L.B.J., to general coming-of-age trials for its protagonists, a group of young men not unlike my grandpa, aboard a Vietnam-bound navy ship. However, one of the most shocking pieces of the novel is something not often addressed in discussions of Vietnam-era government corruption – the blatantly illegal, immoral MK Ultra scandal and similar follow-ups. During the 1950s and into the 70s, the C.I.A. and U.S. Department of Defense administered psychedelic drugs to military personnel, often without their knowledge or consent, to test their effects in hopes that the drugs could be used against enemy combatants. The U.S. government tried desperately to cover up the operations in the years following, to no avail.

More shocking than the fact that my grandpa immortalized the scandal in his book? The fact that he might have witnessed it firsthand aboard the U.S.S. Annapolis.

“I think I may have seen it a couple of times – ” he pauses hesitantly, “which kind of gave me the idea to use it in the book. Once in Hong Kong, and another time in Japan when I am pretty certain that, not myself, but somebody that I knew, may have been dosed with something like LSD. I don’t know what it was, but there was a lot of lost time and strange actions, strange things going on.” Maybe it’s just the late-afternoon sun outside shifting lower in the sky, but I can swear I see his sea-blue eyes gleam darker for a second.

To call the Vietnam War a mere “tragedy” is a disservice to everything it stood for, according to my grandpa. The draft, the deceitful actions of a once-trusted government, the unwarranted bloodshed – that’s not just a tragedy, it’s one of the most despicable things that America has ever been associated with. And, my grandpa warns solemnly, the lessons Vietnam had to teach have yet to be learned. “It happened before, and it’ll happen again, as long as there are ruthless men and women in positions of power who believe that the end justifies the means,” he laments. “Never, not once in our history, has the end ever justified the means.”

Works Cited

Falconer, Bruce. “Government Experiments on U.S. Soldiers: Shocking Claims Come to Light in New Court Case.” Alternet. Alternet, 23 May 2009. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

McDougal, Dennis E. The Candlestickmaker. Rosebud Publishing Co.: n.p., n.d. Print.

“Mind Control Documents & Links.” S.M.A.R.T.’s Ritual Abuse Pages. Ritual Abuse, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.