Welcome back! As I promised in last week’s blog I was going to go back and talk some more about The Advisor series. One recurring theme, backpacking along a trail. In the original book, “The Advisor, Kien Bing, South Vietnam 1969 -1970” you meet Staff Sergeant Sammy Smalls.
While there’s not a lot of detailed discussion of the trails and backpacking in “The Advisor”, there is this initial discussion of the cathartic effect that a long distance hike along the Appalachian Trail had on Colonel Paul Tyler after the death of his beloved wife Katherine. At the very beginning of the story as we find him packing to leave Indiana and move to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia we find some comments regarding the hike that he and his friend Sammy took after the death of his wife.
“He and an old Army buddy, Sammy Smalls, had always talked about hiking the Appalachian Trail together someday. After Katherine died he bought the equipment he needed and flew to Atlanta, Georgia and he and Sammy spent almost nine months walking in the woods. It was cathartic. The longer they hiked the less he felt the pain of loss. They summitted Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the trail, in early September before the snows hit the mountain. He and Sammy, a retired Command Sergeant Major who had befriended him in Vietnam, took the train back to Washington D.C. where his son Robert picked him up and brought him home to Indianapolis, Indiana.”
Throughout the books, Paul’s friend, Sammy, had always had the desire to hike the Appalachian Trail from end to end, all 2,200 miles along the Eastern spine of the United States. While there isn’t a lot of detailed discussion in the first book there are still some hints of a future conquest.
In the second book in the series “The Province Senior Intelligence Advisor; Kien Song Province 1970-1971; a novel” you’ll find that backpacking is one of the backstory themes of the book. Rather than hiking the Appalachian Trail our two heroes are hiking along the Massanutten Mountain trail. This beautiful mountain splits the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in half. It begins in the South outside of Harrisonburg Virginia and goes North all the way to Front Royal. There are approximately 150 miles of hiking trails along that mountain. It’s a rugged hike, but it sets a nice backstory for the book, a way to tell stories about their time in Vietnam. As Paul and Sammy hiked the trail they have an opportunity to talk and reminisce. When they take their hourly breaks and sit down they discuss life in general. The hike makes for an excellent backstory.
As they hike along the trail they meet people, specifically two ROTC cadets from the local college who are on a break and decide to take a short trek themselves. The first night out near the south end of the mountain they run into Paul, trail named “Hardcharger”, and Sammy, trail named ”River Rat”, two retired military men, both Vietnam Veterans, with their stories to tell. These young men who will soon become officers in the United States Army eagerly soak up their tales from that long ago war as well as seek their professional and personal advice. The hike gives them an opportunity to share their stories in and out of camp as they hike. It also gives the reader another ‘backstory’.
A quick aside! About the ‘trail name’; the trail name is a moniker that seems to have been developed by long distance hikers in the east. It’s a descriptive term for a fellow hiker. These nicknames often describe a hiker or one of their personal traits. In Colonel Tyler’s case his trail name “Hardcharger” honors the men on the teams that he served with in Vietnam. It’s been my personal moniker throughout my entire military career. The trail name “River Rat” was derived from Sammy Small’s radio callsign ‘River Rat 1-1-2’ during his time in Vietnam.
The trail name has become a moniker that backpackers use to identify themselves to other hikers along the trail. It’s a sign of anonymity for some who are trying to escape their normal life to challenge, an often life changing ambition, to conquer something outside themselves. For some, these trails are a form of rebirth, an escape from their normal reality, ergo they need a new name.
“Hardcharger & Johnny B”
Some trail names are given to hikers by their fellow hikers. We always laugh about a guy we met along the trail with a trail name of “Ass Trumpet”. At one of the first town-stops along the trail he overdid the salad and fruit bar one night and for the rest of his time on the trail he was called “Ass Trumpet” after keeping his fellow hikers up all night with his ‘explosions’. Some trail names reflect a personal aspect of a hiker, color of hair, youthful appearance, profession, and a myriad of other aspects of a person.
A trail name sticks with you. It sometimes pops back up years after the hike is over. I was in a small outfitters shop a few years ago in Luray Virginia looking for a specific piece of hiking gear for my son’s Christmas present. A guy tapped me on the shoulder and in a questioning voice asked, “Hardcharger”?
I turned and sure enough it was “Red Dawn” a young man I had hiked with back in Tennessee many years before. To this day I doubt if either of us remembers their real name, but we recognized each other and chatted for a while catching up on our hiking experiences. In another incident, in a shelter in Connecticut, I ran into a young woman who told us her trail name. I had seen that name in a trail log in one of the shelters in Virginia. She was a member of a group of young women who were hiking the trail. They referred to themselves as the “Pack Divas”. I asked her what had happened to her group, and we had a wonderful time talking that night around the campfire.
Like Colonel Tyler’s hike after the death of his wife (as discussed in The Advisor), the treks in both the “Province Senior Intelligence Advisor” and “The Tuscarora Trail” is the beginning of Sammy’s attempt to reorder his life after the death of his wife, Terresa, to Covid-19. It’s now Paul’s responsibility to assist his friend, and hiking partner, to begin his grieving process. As they hike Paul retells stories of his second tour in Vietnam as the Province Senior Intelligence Advisor, the second book in the Advisor Series.
The final book in the series, “The Tuscarora Trail”, uses an extension of the hike that began in “The Province Senior Intelligence Advisor”, as Paul and Sammy continue their journey together.
Like Colonel Tyler, the hero of our book, I do have a hiking partner. His trail name is “Johnny B” and together we have hiked thousands of miles together. Now “Johnny B” isn’t a military man. He was one of the lucky guys who was in college and managed to complete his education and avoid the draft. But he has a very inquisitive mind. As we would hike together I would tell him war stories from my time in Vietnam. “Johnny B” would ask a multitude of questions. When I sat down to write the book it dawned on me that this had given me an excellent back story. I could talk about the Massanutten Mountain and Tuscarora Trails, the vistas, the difficulties, people we met, and the fun along the trail as I wove the Vietnam stories into the book.
So what was the background source that I used? I relied on my own trail journals that I’ve kept on all of my hikes. Each night along the trail I’d sit down with my journal and jot down notes about the day’s experiences. When I got back from my hikes I’d sit down with the maps and expand on the works recording the daily mileages, proper geographical names, names of people and places we had encountered, and include photos that I had taken. I’d type them up into a web file and store them away.
“Johnny B” and I have been hiking together for thirty years, and we’ve experienced a number of different types of adventures together. We’ve biked the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal trail a number of times, spent weeks hiking the trails on Massanutten Mountain in Virginia, hiked the entire Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, and hiked hundreds of miles of the Allegheny trail in West Virginia. We’ve canoed the South Branch of the Potomac River and spent days and nights in the woods. I’ve kept log books and journals of our adventures, and they make for a great ‘backstory’ for these books.
The ‘backstory’ gave me a great opportunity to have a ‘vehicle’ to tell the various war stories as if I am talking to an audience rather than just relating the stories in machinegun fashion. In the final book of the series, “The Tuscarora Trail”, I was able to use the hiking backstory to finish the series as well as to bring some degree of closure on the stories; what happened to so-and-so and to determine a satisfactory ending for the Advisor Series.
When I wrote my books I did not want them to just be a straight ‘Bang -Bang’- ‘shoot ‘em up’ war story. My intent was to have a ‘backstory’ that people could relate to. In some of the movies and stories about the Vietnam War there’s almost a heartlessness that permeates the story.
In the first book of the series “The Advisor”, I wanted to not only convey the military events that I participated in or observed or that happened during my time in Vietnam; I also wanted to portray this as a coming of age story, two young people far away from home that happened to meet and fall in love. I also wanted to portray the strict Catholic moral restrictions and values during that time period.
The vast majority of us who went to Vietnam were very young. We were thrust into a life-or-death situation almost immediately. We grew up to be gnarled old men much faster than we should have. I was a twenty-year-old Second Lieutenant when I got to Vietnam and an old-man when I left there nineteen-months later. According to the Veterans Administration the average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 22-years-old. We were still kids. While our non-veteran friends were going to college or establishing themselves in the business world we were practicing the art of staying alive.
So how does a writer convey those feelings; fear, loneliness, frustration, quick-learning, and still tell the story? Part of the ‘success’ is the backstory.
In the first book that I wrote, “The Advisor” I invented the love story as the backstory for the novel. It enabled me to tell the war stories and provide a reader with a different view of life on the small advisory team, but at the same time make the story a coming-of-age adventure. Throughout the story you find the letters that he would write to Kathy, and the letters that he would receive from her. Each highly anticipated offering was eagerly awaited. In actuality I received few letters from home; neither of my parents were great writers; I wasn’t married, and I didn’t have a girlfriend waiting at home.
For those of you who have experienced a long distance relationship receiving communications from your loved ones is important. During the Vietnam era we didn’t have access to electronic messaging that we have today. The letter that I would write and send home could take as long as two weeks to get there, and another two weeks to get a return message. So the anticipation of getting something in that bright orange mailbag was an important part of our life in Vietnam. Even letters that were sent in-country to other areas of Vietnam could take as long as a week to reach their destination.
When my son and his buddies were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan we had the ‘luxury’ of e-mails, photos, and an occasional satellite-phone call from him telling us how he was doing. We could send him various messages about the family and what was going on at home. This was a far cry from our experiences as Vietnam veterans.
My 99-year-old Mother-in-law tells us stories of how she and her girlfriends would write letters to ‘any GI’ and send them off during WWII to boost the morale of soldiers serving overseas. In Vietnam we received letters like those from women in the States. Many of them were writing “to any soldier” letters. Some of them actually led to longer term relationships. I describe how such a relationship developed between River Rat and his future bride, Terresa. The majority of letters were well-received by GIs who got them.
During the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan my JROTC cadets sent thousands of greeting cards during Christmas, Veterans Day, and Valentines Day to soldiers serving there. We received a number of letters from soldiers and Marines stationed there thanking us for our efforts.
So the ‘backstory’, be it the Appalachian or Tuscarora Trails, or an innocent love story is important to my writing. They provided an additional vehicle to tell other parts of the story to develop or maintain interest in the major theme of my books. The story-in-the-story is helpful because the ‘hero’ can show additional dimensions in their character that wouldn’t necessarily be observable in the standard telling of the tale; love in wartime, coming-of-age, adventurous hikes, feelings of grief and loss, and a myriad of other emotions that can be explored by the reader and the author alike.
If you’re enjoying these blogs please drop me a comment or if you have any questions that I might answer again submit a comment on the comment pages. Glad to hear from you. Again take a look at all of my books that I have listed, They can be purchased from Amazon.com with the click of a button directly from the website. Until next week, Have a good one.
Next week we’ll go back and talk about some additional aspects of the Vietnam Advisor series, exotic foods and drinks.
For more information visit my website: ptaylorvietnamadvisor.com
Peter A. Taylor's Home Page 
Leave a comment