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Vietnam DiariesThe Recurring DreamBy Ken Anderberg
As he sat in the stands of the Georgia Tech football stadium, watching the Yellow Jackets play last fall, Charles "Duke" Doubleday heard the familiar sound of helicopters flying overhead. A decorated survivor of the Vietnam conflict, Doubleday did what most Vietnam veterans do when they hear the familiar whop-whop-whop of the chopper blades. He looked up to glimpse what was for him and millions of Americans a sign and sound that help was on the way.
"This kid from Georgia Tech, maybe 23 years old, was sitting in the row behind me," Doubleday recalls. "He saw me looking at the helicopters and reached over to ask me, 'Do you know what kind of helicopter that is.'
The Huey sound and profile was, of course, very familiar to the former Army captain and Silver Star winner, he told the young man. "You were in Vietnam?" the young man replied. "I want to shake your hand and say thanks."
"The feelings about Vietnam veterans has really turned around," Doubleday says today.
Today, Doubleday is a highly successful real estate broker and vice president of the commercial and industrial real estate firm of Bullock, Terrell & Mannelly in Atlanta. Hardly a day goes by, however, that Doubleday doesn't recall his Vietnam experience. Forgetting would be difficult for the bow-tied dapper Doubleday anyway, what with an office across from Perimeter Mall adorned with memorabilia and photographs serving as a constant reminder of his one-year tour of duty in the Republic of Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.
Doubleday wears his Vietnam service as openly and proudly as he did his lieutenant's bars during most of his difficult and dangerous time on the front lines. The reaction to his heroism and duty to country were not always like that day last year at the football game, however.
"After I was released from active duty at Oakland, I was waiting at the observation lounge at the San Francisco Airport," he remembers. "I sat all by myself, still had on my khakis with all that fruit salad (medals) on my chest. There were several hippie types at a nearby table talking among themselves. They weren't directing anything directly at me, but they were saying things like 'wonder how many babies he killed.'
"I just sat there, looked straight ahead and sipped on my beer. The first thing I knew, the waitress brought me another beer and said,'The bartender knows what's going on over there and there will be police here shortly to take care of those people.' And the bartender bought me a beer. And the next thing you know, I was home."
One of many
An Army "brat" who attended 13 different schools through the eighth grade as his father moved from one assignment to another, Doubleday finally settled down in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he would attend Tennessee Military Institute in preparation for appointment to West Point. "I was tired of the military by then," he says today, "so I turned down my West Point appointment and attended the University of Georgia. I worked my way through and was in the process of registering for Emory Law School when the Army decided I had had enough military deferment and sent me my draft notice."
He enlisted instead, and received his second lieutenant's commission after officer's candidate school at Fort Knox, N.J. It was then that he got his first taste of the public dissent so prevalent during the late 1960s.
"I commanded a platoon in Washington in 1968 during the anti-war demonstrations and the King assassination riots," he recalls. "We spent 14 days trying to quell the riots. Protesters spit on me and my platoon."
By July, Doubleday was commanding F Troop, 11th Armored Carrier Regiment in Vietnam, one of many Americans who volunteered for the war. "Most of the members of the AVVBA volunteered to go to Vietnam," he says in countering the popular notion that most Vietnam veterans were dragged to the unpopular conflict. Many of them started businesses when they came back, he adds, not because the war had made them psychologically unable to fit in America's corporate world, but because they were always "adventurous, risk-taking guys before, during and after Vietnam.
"Most of us excelled in high school sports. Hell, we were the adventurers in kindergarten class. Vietnam didn't make us more entrepreneurial. We were in the first place. It was just an extension of our personalities. We are action junkies. We will always be action junkies."
Real estate veteran
Married three times, Doubleday learned early after his return that war did change one aspect of his personality dramatically.
"I married my high school sweetheart a week after I got drafted," he says. "We were divorced three months after I came back, which I've learned wasn't all that an uncommon experience. I was a different person, changed. My experience in Vietnam made me less tolerant of the social, small-talk attitudes I was encountering. I had been making important decisions. I couldn't stand around and make idle chatter about panty raids in college.
"My business career peaked so early," he reflects now. "The maturity of making life-and-death decisions changed me. But had I not been there (Vietnam), had I not done what I did over there, chances are fewer people would have come home."
Doubleday almost was one of those. An enemy ambush in 1969 left shrapnel in his right leg and abdomen. "The choppers were on the horizon coming to get us when they hit." Two weeks later, he was back on the front lines, "bandaged up and limping along."
His Silver Star and Purple Heart adorn his office walls, along with three Bronze Stars, an Army Commendation Medal for Valor and two Air Medals. Side-by-side photos of the young lieutenant just arriving in Vietnam and the battle-hardened captain nine months later attest to dramatic changes.
"After about four months in country, I volunteered to lead the regimental recon team," Doubleday offers. "I was so fired up. I commanded a team of eight to 12 troops that were airlifted into enemy territory as reconnaissance and as bait to entice enemy action."
Dramatic memories
The second experience was even more harrowing. His command of eight armored personnel carriers was ambushed by a heavily dug in and fortified enemy. Four of the carriers were quickly knocked out of commission and most of the others were damaged. "It was pure pandemonium," he recalls. "We lost four dead and six wounded within the first five minutes."
Doubleday rallied his men into the four remaining carriers and retreated. "When we got back and I'm unloading the dead and wounded, I got so mad. I couldn't wait to get back in."
Col George Patton, son of the legendary World War II tank commander, was Doubleday's commanding officer. With about four months to go on his 12-month tour, Patton handed him his captain's bars and ordered him to the rear to serve as his battalion aide.
"Patton said, 'It's my God damn regiment and I'll have anything I want. And he handed me these captain's bars and ordered me to report to regimental headquarters the next day. I was very conflicted about leaving my unit. I had huge guilt. A friend of mine was named to take over my platoon. He's now the chairman of Enron Power Co., a $20 billion company. I felt I had abandoned my men."
That guilt remained with Doubleday for more than 20 years, causing what he prefers to call a recurring dream instead of flashbacks. "I'm in the bush on a mission and I have to take action," he explains of the dream. "All eyes are on me to perform. I go for the grenade, but it's not there. I aim my weapon and pull the trigger, but it's not loaded. I grab my radio and it's on the wrong frequency. I don't do the right thing.
"If I had done one other thing differently," he offers as explanation for the dream, "maybe Wade Butler would have come home with both legs instead of just one. Maybe someone else would have come home, period.
"It's a fairly quiet dream. I don't wake up with night sweats or all this other dramatic horse shit you hear about. It's just a quiet little dream. Survivor's guilt."
Throughout his business success in the 30 years since the highest level of U.S. troop deployment in Vietnam in 1969, Doubleday has also learned empathy for others whose problems perhaps don't quite stack up to his battlefield crises, but are nonetheless of significant importance to people around him. "At first, I was a cynical son of a bitch," about other people's problems. "But I learned to understand the impact to someone undergoing a divorce, losing a job. It's a real pain to them. Just because my experiences were far more dramatic didn't mean their hurt was any less important."
Doubleday also says Vietnam taught him the difference between problems and inconveniences, a lesson that comes in handy every day in the business world. "An inconvenience," he says, "is a divorce, or losing your job. A problem is turning around to see that your radio operator has lost both arms after a grenade explosion."
Today, Doubleday the real estate executive deals mostly with opportunities. The days of spitting protesters and hippie whispers are mostly gone.
"I've had kids walk up to me at the supermarket parking lot, college kids, after seeing the Purple Heart tag on my car," he says, "and shake my hand and in a couple of cases hugged me, and say,'Thanks for what you did.'"
Duke Doubleday - Personal File
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