Most anyone who spent time in Vietnam knows about the “Street Without Joy.” It is the name of a popular history book by the French war correspondent, Bernard B. Fall (1961), and it was also the name given to a particularly dangerous stretch of Highway 1, between Hue and Quang-Tri, along the coast of Central Vietnam. It had been so christened by earlier French soldiers, with the black humor proper to all soldiers, as “la rue sans joie,” or in English, the “Street Without Joy.”
It’s odd what triggers memories: a song on the radio, a snippet of conversation, a random smell (like the honeysuckles on her porch on a summer evening), even a walk or ride down a long-forgotten street – all can bring back memories of events and places lost in time, “like tears in rain,” to quote Rutger Hauer in 1982’s film, “Blade Runner.” For me, most recently and most vividly, it was the attempted assassination of former President Trump.
I tend to agree with those who wonder, “Why should he even bother?” – when with his accomplishments and his money he could be sitting on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean, enjoying the good life. I am thankful for those who are called to public service. On the other hand, one almost needs to have a “death wish” to run for the highest office in the land. Just look at our history. Of our 46 presidencies (45 presidents), four, Abraham Lincoln (1861), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963), have been assassinated; and no less than nine: Andrew Jackson (1835), William Howard Taft (1909), Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Herbert Hoover (1928), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933), Harry Truman (1947), Richard Nixon (1972), Gerald Ford (1975), and Ronald Reagan (1981), have had actual attempts or documented threats on their lives. I’m no mathematician, but that’s almost 29% of our presidents who have been killed in office or experienced assassination attempts. Even Las Vegas would question those odds. We are starting to look like the proverbial South American “banana republic.”
It’s almost as bad for famous war correspondents. Bernard Fall, the author of “Street Without Joy,” was killed in 1967 by a landmine while on patrol with U.S. Marines. One of my earliest memories is of looking through some photographs that my Daddy brought back from his participation in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. One showed the freshly dug grave of Ernie Pyle, probably the most famous war correspondent of World War II, who had been killed the night before by a Japanese sniper.
When I saw and read how an assassin’s bullet had missed killing President Trump by less than an inch, I immediately remembered how a shell fired from the Street Without Joy missed me by less than a foot but, unlike President Trump, who has declared that he will return to Butler, Pennsylvania, there’s no way I’m going back to Vietnam. You can run up every cliché you’ve ever heard about “lightning never strikes twice,” or a cat has nine lives, or “three strikes and you’re out,” but I’m not going. You can have my seat.
Shortly after the attempt on President Reagan’s life, I shared a platform with him in Long Beach, California. The occasion was the commissioning of the battleship, USS New Jersey (BB-62). When he came into office, Reagan vowed to rebuild the Navy which had been allowed to decline during the Jimmy Carter administration. I’ve written here, for example, that many of our ships in the Mediterranean literally ran out of fuel during his watch, and that my ship spent over a month in Barcelona, Spain, waiting for a fill-up. Luckily, we were tied up at the foot of Las Ramblas, the most famous street in Spain. Unfortunately, we all ran out of money after about a week.
President Reagan’s goal was a 600 ship Navy, and the New Jersey, a World War II-era battleship that had been decommissioned after that war, recommissioned for Korea, decommissioned, recommissioned for Vietnam, decommissioned again, and now recommissioned, was the centerpiece of his plan. It had impressive firepower, but in the “missile age, was a floating dinosaur. Now a museum ship in Philadelphia, it looks just like the USS Alabama, over in Mobile; in fact, the Alabama is BB-61 and the Jersey is BB-62. The Navy really didn’t want it as conservative estimates to operate it ran as high as $1 million dollars per day.
The plan called for the president to land in his helicopter at the end of the pier at Long Beach Naval Shipyard, get into his armored Cadillac, and be driven about 100 yards to the brow of the Jersey. He would then walk onto the ship; I would meet him, salute, and escort him up the ladder to the 01 level and show him to his seat. He was going to make a big policy speech, so all the major television networks were to be there. After I seated the president, I had to go to the podium, say an ecumenical prayer for the ship and the nation, and return to my seat.
This being the military, we, of course, had a full-dress rehearsal the night before. Everyone was there, including the Secret Service. Even that early, you could see their snipers setting up on top of the many warehouses facing the pier. After at least two walkthroughs, the chief Secret Service guy, the “Head Snoop,” as we called him behind his back, got everyone together and said
(These are his exact words as I remember them): “Tomorrow, when the President is up here on the stage, if anyone makes a sudden move, they will be shot!” The next morning, as I carried out my duties of meeting the president, saluting him, escorting him to his seat, walking to the podium and praying on nationwide television, I was also praying that I wouldn’t stumble or forgetfully scratch my nose and be shot full of holes. That was also the day I realized the absolute power of the United States government.
I much prefer to remember some more peaceful and benign “walks” that make up my history – where I had “epiphany” moments rather than abject fear. For example, the “Via Dolorosa” (“Sorrowful Way”) has long been one of my favorite destinations in Jerusalem. Obviously, it’s not that “peaceful” now. Less than 2,000 feet in length through the old part of the city, it represents the path that Jesus took, taunted by Roman soldiers, on his way to Calvary. Since the 18th century, it has been marked by 14 Stations of the Cross, also known as the “Way of Sorrows” (“Via Crucis”), which are a series of images depicting what happened along the way (6th Station: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, etc.).
These Stations of the Cross have been duplicated in Roman Catholic churches all over the world as an inspiration for meditation, worship, and prayer. They can be elaborate statuary, paintings, or plaques or a more minimalist and simpler cross with a number. Until midway through the 18th century, it was required that they be erected by a Franciscan priest. After that, this right was extended to bishops. Locally, my favorite is on the grounds of the former St. Augustine Seminary, alongside Highway 90 in Bay St. Louis. Now a Catholic retreat center, St. Augustine was founded in 1923 and operated until the 1980s by the Society of the Divine Word as the first Catholic seminary in the United States dedicated to training African American priests. Sadly, it was first located in Greenville, Mississippi, but was forced to move to the coast by the Klu Klux Klan.
As I think about it, two other roads and streets, both local, have been significant in my life: Mobile Street in Hattiesburg and Highway 11 from Lumberton to New Orleans. When I finished my enlisted hitch in the Navy, I enrolled in Mississippi Southern for a degree so I could be commissioned as a Naval officer. My uncle hooked me up with a job at a large livestock feed mill, owned by the Mississippi Federated Coop, which was then in Hattiesburg just off Mobile Street. I went to class in the morning and worked afternoons and nights loading 100-pound sacks of feed onto railroad box cars.
I’d ride the bus from Southern down Hardy Street; get off around the post office, walk down the hill to the elder Jack Bevon’s restaurant (“Little Jack” wasn’t on the scene yet) for a bite to eat, and then go on along Mobile Street to work. About 10 P.M., I’d catch the last bus back to school, and do it all again the next day. There were some haberdasheries on Mobile Street owned by Jewish gentlemen that carried clothing Elvis Presley would have been proud to wear on stage. Whenever I had the money, I would buy one of the less flamboyant shirts.
At the feed mill, where I worked for almost two years, I received probably the best compliment I’ve been given. I worked alongside a large Black man from Collins, known as the “Rock” because of his size and strength. One hot July night, as we were trying to keep up with the conveyor belt dumping feed sacks into the box car, reminiscent of Lucille Ball, Ethel, and their candy boxes, he turned to me and said, “You know, Benny, you are the hardest working white boy I’ve ever seen.”
About once each week, in the pitch-black darkness, we would climb into the tall silos containing the feed ingredients, milo, alfalfa, and corn, to dislodge what was stuck to the walls. We would hang on like ants, with a long pole in one hand, a flashlight in the other (where was the third hand?), knowing that if we fell, we would be suffocated in the dusty materials below. When we came out, we would be covered with the contents of the silo, and only the slits of our eyes and mouths made us look human. It’s amazing what we expect of people for minimum wage, which hasn’t been raised since 2009.
As for Highway 11, I walked alongside it for years going to school; it provided my first job at a gas station servicing the many cars and trucks that utilized it before the construction of Interstate 59; it charged my imagination, knowing that northward it ran all the way to the Canadian border; and when I was much younger, before my Daddy died, during his stint as an independent trucker, I accompanied him on his many trips to the French Market in New Orleans to deliver loads of watermelons and other produce. We would arrive about 3:00 A.M in the morning, sleep until dawn on the watermelons, and then sell our load to the iterant and mostly Italian peddlers who bought our melons wholesale and then sold them retail from horse drawn wagons throughout the city neighborhoods.
Sometimes, when the truck was empty, I would walk down the levee and ride the Algiers ferry back and forth across the Mississippi River, an early start to my later sea-going career. It was here that I learned my Daddy was a “romantic” as well as an alcoholic. This was about 1954 when I was 13. The country singer, Lefty Frizzell, had a hit song, “Always Late,” and Daddy traded some watermelons to a sign painter in the French Market who painted the song title on the bumper of his two-ton Chevrolet truck. This was the truck that got repossessed the next year by the Lumberton State Bank because Daddy couldn’t make the note.
Daddy would often wander off, and I would have to go find him. Because of his illness, I had to drive the truck back from New Orleans a few times by myself. Like many veterans, he never found himself after the war, and finally committed suicide. I loved him, but I always felt like we were alone together and that he was somewhere else. Be that as it may, I see him in my mind every time I ride down old Highway 11, headed South, hearing the wind rush past my window, and feeling the bumps in the ancient blacktop road.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
