First-time author Bill Van Zanten didn’t care for Hollywood’s
depiction of soldiers; offers his side with those who were ‘brave
and competent’
Gilroy – Bill Van Zanten saw Hollywood’s version of the story. Now, it’s his turn to tell his side.
The former Marine commander didn’t want his children believing his experiences during the Vietnam War were the images they saw in movies: Strung out soldiers in a drug-induced haze, unmotivated, ill-trained and with incompetent leaders.
“I became disturbed with the Hollywood version of Vietnam,” he said. “My experience as a young Marine officer couldn’t have been more different. That’s what gave me the motivation to write. I didn’t want my kids to believe that’s what I went through.”
So the first-time author began writing an account of his experience in the Marines. Hand scratched notes he wrote during business trips became pages in a book Random House publishing company picked up last year titled “Don’t Bunch Up.”
Van Zanten doesn’t deny that some soldiers in Vietnam were on drugs and had problems. He doesn’t believe his story should represent what happened to every Marine.
“It is historical, yet not a history book. It is my history. My truth,” he writes in the preface. “My year there was spent as part of a hard-fighting Marine infantry battalion … We did our jobs as well as we knew how. We got our butts shot off and blown to bits. We got scared beyond description. We took home scars that will never disappear … Yet in some very strange way those days represented the best of what we were and ever will be.”
Prior to his notes, Van Zanten never spoke to his family about his year in Vietnam in 1965. Many soldiers didn’t.
“Most of us just came back and took the uniforms off and went about our business,” he said. “All of us to a certain extent kind of put that experience behind us, or didn’t tell our kids … and that’s not healthy.”
Van Zanten joined the Marines with a forged birth certificate when he was 140-pound, 17-year-old weakling from Arizona. He was transformed that summer in 1957 and hasn’t looked back since.
The men he fought with in Vietnam take care of each other now – 40 years later. They were changed by their experiences there, he said.
They endured great losses together. They all saw ugly things – terrible things. But they also found humor in their situation, and that humor helped them get through it all.
Van Zanten writes of near miss accounts, when the enemy had them surrounded – but just didn’t know it.
“I just hoped it didn’t hurt too much,” he recalled. “I had some miraculously close calls. I never got hurt. It was just miracle after miracle.”
“Don’t Bunch Up,” was the command barked at soldiers to keep them spread apart across booby-trapped fields for safety, despite the human tendency to cluster when faced with danger.
It took five years from the time he scribbled his first notes to the time he sent out the manuscript. Within three days he was contacted by a publishing company back east who wanted to sign him. He saved the rejections he received from the others in a folder he still keeps.
“Don’t Bunch Up” was first published in 1993, but shortly after the company went under. Van Zanten’s book was picked up by Random House in 2005.
Van Zanten moved to Gilroy to raise his family after the war and was always bothered by the way the officers in Vietnam were depicted in movies such as “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon.”
“They were always depicted as inept,” he said. “They were incredibly brave and competent, everything you would have wanted … It’s not that I was pro war, it’s just that no movie had anything positive come out of it.”
He hopes his story will show people that there is another side to what happened in Vietnam.
“There’s nothing particularly unique about my story,” Van Zanten said. “The only thing unique is that I took the time to write it.”
Van Zanten will be signing copies of “Don’t Bunch Up” at 2pm, Sunday, March 12 at Barnes and Noble, at Gilroy Crossings shopping center.
