A Well-Read Woman

She opened on the next page with, “This story really begins around May 1965. I was truly, completely and utterly exhausted, disillusioned, tired and fed up to the gills with Saigon.” She had been ready to quit, ready to throw away the empire she was building, because she could not tolerate the officers who supervised he

r, their mockery of her work, and the intolerable bureaucracy that festered indifference. “Without complaint, without bitterness,” she turned in her resignation. “Well, even the SSO [Special Services Officer] who wished me dead and the Admin O[fficer] who could care less were not prepared to cope with my resignation.” They made her an offer: a long vacation in the US, all-expenses-paid travel to the American Library Association conference, and the option to decide afterward whether she wanted to return. She one-upped them by bargaining for her own three-bedroom villa. In addition, when she returned she would have a new supervisor as part of an annual rotation of officers assigned to Vietnam.

In DC, Ruth asked the navy librarians about her new boss. They answered, in Ruth’s memory:

He’s very serious; very dedicated; a stickler for detail; almost but not quite a pedant. Yes, exceedingly interested in Special Services and the library program…a bit on the silent side; almost but not quite stuffy or pompous; very considerate and extremely helpful if he feels you’re doing your best. Gets very angry when you flub.2

Ruth was now almost looking forward to going back to Saigon. In her letter to Scott, she explained what happened upon her return:

I decided to go to the lion’s den and see for myself. The first thing that hit me was his asking, “may I call you Ruth?” …stuffy? Hardly […] temporarily I had forgotten …no overlooked the fact that he had been at the other [end] in Washington all these months and not only read all my reports and letters but had signed many of the answers. He too was asked what he thought of our “controversial librarian” [and] told the Exec and the CO “Why—I love” her already…This after having read the broomstick bit and a few other things….3

Inevitably, Ruth and Hank Ferguson worked long hours together, discussed library business, and went to the same parties.4 He escorted her home one night, but because of the curfew, they decided he would sleep over in her guest bedroom, “without managing to seduce me,” as she put it. The next morning he forgot his glasses at her house, and she nervously brought them in, “thinking, oh God, is he going to be so embarrassed about it all that he will now become difficult? Was all this interest in the program for just one purpose? Is he really just another Navy Casanova?”5 She found a friendly note on her desk: “Ruthie, forgot my glasses, will retrieve them from your office tomorrow.” Everything with Hank was easy, she explained: “Eventually he not only moved into my house, but also my heart, my bedroom, my thoughts et al. There was just one problem . . . there was a Mrs. Ferguson and 5 kids!”6

He wasn’t the first married man she had been with. She admitted in the letter that she had previously rationalized that in Vietnam things were different. The stress, the heat, and the exotic locale created a dreamlike mirage where boundaries were crossed. Hank quickly moved in with her; they had planned to use two spare bedrooms as private studies in the evenings but never actually used them. Like her other affairs that had expiration dates, she knew this one would be over when Hank’s term as admin officer was up the following June. But deep down Ruth knew this relationship was different: “He too acknowledged that never in all his life had he thought it possible to feel so completely at ease with another human being, to feel so free to discuss everything and anything[,] to just not worry but to say anything he felt or remembered.”7 Finally, she had found her true chaver:

We could spend hours talking about just anything, childhood memories and experiences, ideas, politics….and also we could just sit contentedly and quietly…sometimes we played chess… I suppose it was really the very first time since I had left Leipzig that I not only felt that another human being was truly concerned over me, but truly was. I cannot remember ever since to have been “first” with anybody…first in concern, first in just about everything except financial support…Even if it had to end, it was just a good feeling to have someone do for me, worry for me, be concerned, help me, take care of me, kind of… it was a strange & new experience to be able to stop always being the one who managed everything, finagled everything, took care of everything, to be able to get things and do things without being the sole instigator… is it surprising that I should have become so utterly dependent on this man???????8

Falling in love like this didn’t mean the same thing for Ruth that it did for other people. Her exhaustion from always being on her own for a full thirty years is palpable in this letter. Extended family, friends, boyfriends, coworkers—they had never been able to fill the void. She wanted to explain to Scott this wasn’t simply an affair. It was more.

During this same time, Archie Kuntze’s world was crumbling. Around Christmas, Hank was appointed acting commanding officer while Kuntze took some time off. This threatened to thwart Ruth and Hank’s upcoming romantic vacation to Bangkok, but Hank admitted to Kuntze that he had plans with Ruth, and Kuntze didn’t object. Their relationship had been an open secret, but now their efforts to hide it seemed pointless. After Bangkok, a trip Ruth described as nearly magical and Hank called his “first honeymoon,” everyone who knew them in Saigon knew they were a couple in the spring of 1966.

Things began to sour when Ruth planned another trip to Tokyo for the two of them and Hank had to leave early for Hawaii on orders. Ruth’s creeping anxiety that his sense of duty—both to his job and to his family—would pull him away from her would turn to suspicions and resentment. Feeling sorry for his financial difficulties from supporting a wife and five children, Ruth had been paying for their trips and other luxuries. From Hawaii, Hank went to DC for a few days and returned to Saigon, announcing to Ruth, “there was nothing left at home.” His children were fine, but his wife was apparently uncommunicative. On their last trip together, to Singapore, before he was to leave Vietnam for good, “he let slip the information that as soon as he returned home his wife was to be hospitalized for two operations.” She went on to describe what she thought he meant: “Perhaps naively I interpreted this not as a bid for sympathy or pity but as a message . . . please don’t push me.”9

Ruth seems to have admitted in the letter her dark thoughts about his wife’s possible death, but she typed a row of x’s over them; they were simply too appalling to admit on paper. She attempted to explain what she knew of Hank’s marriage, with a caveat: “I must state [my feelings] as I felt and viewed them at the time, not as I question them in retrospect.”10 She claimed that Hank explained that he had married his wife after a brief annulled marriage during the upheaval of World War II. They didn’t have much in common, because while he had “developed intellectually, educationally, socially,” according to Ruth, Hank’s wife had stuck to her prescribed role as “a good hausfrau.” She argued, “When the breakthrough finally came, there was a wonderment at what life had to offer . . . how good it was to talk and to communicate, to express and show ones feeling.”11 Ruth had made the choice years ago to devote her life to books, ideas, and a career. She may have been in her forties and, as so many have cruelly pointed out to me, “not very attractive,” but there is no doubt that Hank had fallen in love with Ruth’s sharp mind and her tumultuous, adventurous life.

Of this deep connection, Ruth continued, “I may be stupid and all sorts of other things, but Scott, after all this time I still cannot and will not accept the fact that this was all fake or pretense at that time.”12 This was the crux of Ruth’s mental breakdown: she simply refused to believe it had all been just in her own mind.

After Hank returned to Washington in 1966, Ruth threw herself into learning the ropes of the army, recruiting new librarians, and expanding the library system, but she spent her nights at home alone, weeping. The couple promised not to write to each other, but, of course, they did. Hank initially wrote of his plans for a divorce. He came back to Saigon months later, though, to tell her that would never happen, leaving her stunned and furious. But the letters and calls continued. She mailed him money and gifts when he mentioned he was struggling to buy Christmas presents. On another one of his trips to Saigon, she confronted him about the raw deal she was getting: when it all ended, he would have his family; she would have nothing and, for whatever reason, would never be considered wife material. Why was he dragging her through this pain, which would only leave her lonelier than before? She hated her villa now, “full of his ghost,” and hated that he could “have his cake and eat it”: “That way he could have a ‘happy home[,]’ a good middle-class existence in suburbia[,] and ‘love Ruthie’ way out in Saigon twice a year.”13

After she went to the ALA conference in 1967, they took a road trip through California and went from there to DC, where they met with colleagues and visited Annapolis together. Both Ruth and Hank were miserable and did not seem to care if anyone saw them together. Back alone in Saigon as the violence grew in the fall, she resented Hank’s passivity in helping her get a job with the navy in DC, where she ideally wanted to live. She started to panic when no letters arrived; panic turned to rage when the bills from the summer trip came in. She mailed receipts and photos from their trips to his wife. Knowing something dangerous was looming in Vietnam, in January 1968 she packed up her house, ordered the Saigon Library to close, and announced she was taking seventy days of leave. She got on a flight headed for DC, ready to find the truth once and for all or go down trying:

I knew this time I’d had it…after this experience I wouldn’t ever let anybody ever get close to me again. I’d gotten along alright in the past by being half a person…whether a librarian to one, a female to another, a German to some, an American to others, a Jewess to still others….but never all the little bits and pieces in front of anybody[,] and if this was the result…why bother? Exhausted, disillusioned, hopeless, alienated…that’s how I boarded the plane in Honolulu while smil

ing […] during that turbulence on the plane I simply knew that no matter what was to come or happen after I got there…no matter what the humiliation or consequences…I simply had to go.14

In a sleep-deprived haze at the Willard Hotel in downtown DC, Ruth called Hank’s office. He didn’t want to see her. All she wanted was an explanation of why it was over so she could move on. He met her in the lobby, refusing to go up to her room to talk. They went to a coffee shop instead. “He started in like an automaton . . . like a robot . . . in a dead monotone: You must accept reality . . . I’m a married man . . . things have changed . . . I cannot explain . . . there is nothing to explain.” Back in her room she took sleeping pills and slept some but woke up disoriented. She unsuccessfully called friends and, eventually, Hank at home. She spoke with his wife before he came on the line. “Beyond this time I was in a blind, blind rage . . .when he came to the phone I asked: Hank, are you coming to see me? Answer: no. Me: I’ve just taken a bunch of sleeping pills . . . do you want me to take some more & die? [A]nd then I slammed down the receiver. That is the last thing I remember doing.”15

A police report with the letter stated that a maid saw smoke in the hallway outside Ruth’s room: after she fell asleep again, her cigarette had lit the bed on fire. Rushed to the hospital, she had her stomach pumped. She called Hank again from the hospital later and was floored by his request: “Wouldn’t I call his wife and apologize . . . after all, we might yet all be friends and maybe he and his wife could come up and see me when I was better . . . Well Scott . . . at that point I was beginning to wonder which one of us was the sicker one.”16 She summed up the whole situation: “Maybe my behavior got so sick that he truly couldn’t cope any other way than he did. Oh, I’ve thought up lots of answers . . . but how does one find the truth? If there is such a thing? About oneself?”17

She didn’t know what to do next. She asked Scott, “Do I just vegetate here at $72.00 a day and passively wait for what’s to come? Do I sign myself out? If I do, where do I go? Whom do I see? Just pull a switch and say ‘Kiddo, you’ve been had . . .’ and go on?”18 In total, Ruth took nine months of medical leave.19 If she stayed in George Washington University’s psychiatric ward or another hospital for much longer after she wrote the letter to Scott, there is no record of it today. Reluctantly, in September she went back to Vietnam, where much had changed in her absence.

Chapter 29

When Ruth returned to Vietnam, the library administration offices had been moved to the army base at Long Binh. It was a huge base that had been flattened out of the jungle with napalm, killing all vegetation. Ruth now lived in an ugly trailer on the base and missed her villa and nights at the country club in Saigon. In her absence, younger librarians had stepped up to keep things running smoothly. Ruth clashed with them when she came back and let them know in no uncertain terms that she was in charge again.

Between 1965 and 1968, American troop levels in Vietnam surged from 184,000 to over 500,000 men. The army had trouble recruiting civilian women librarians, and there was no time to spend on training new men without library experience. Around 1967 Ruth ordered the staff that processed incoming troops at the Bien Hoa base to look for men with library experience in their personnel files who could work in the expanding branches and the field distribution center in Saigon. Bill Sittig, later Ruth’s colleague at the Library of Congress, had just graduated from library school when he was drafted in 1967. He choked up when explaining that Ruth had probably saved his life by recruiting him. Many of the men in his original unit were later killed at the Parrot’s Beak, a dangerous area on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.1

Francis Buckley, also a library school graduate, had been working as a librarian in Detroit when he was drafted. Although he was not referred to Ruth, he immediately went to the Saigon Library his first day in the country. He met Sittig there and asked how he got the job. Two weeks later Buckley was working at the field distribution center behind the Saigon Library.2 Peter Young, another fresh library school graduate and future Library of Congress employee, arrived in Vietnam in 1969. After briefly working to clean training films, his first lieutenant said, “I’m going to do something that the army never does. I’m going to give you a job that meets your qualifications.”3 He gave Young a job managing a trailer library at Cu Chi for one year.

Not all drafted librarians were so lucky. Gabe Horchler, who also later worked with Ruth at the Library of Congress, was eager to work in the library system as well when he was drafted in 1968 right out of library school. Despite interviewing with Ruth, he was not allowed to take the job, because more troops were needed at the front lines. He served in combat in the Mekong delta with the Ninth Infantry Division. His friend George Gibbs, also a librarian, ended up serving as a dog handler in Vietnam.4

To accommodate the demands of the increased troop levels, the field distribution center behind the Saigon Library grew rapidly. These books were purchased from a separate budget for “expendable” materials, meaning that they were not cataloged like the permanent collections and were not expected to be returned. The numbers of books shipped in the permanent libraries, field station libraries, and field delivery kits were planned according to a formula based on troop levels in each unit and area. Francis Buckley supervised about fifteen Vietnamese men who unloaded at least three Conex shipping containers each month, a job that had to be done in under twenty-four hours so the containers could be returned for other uses. The books and magazines had to then be rapidly sorted and shipped out.5 A massive amount of paperwork and correspondence was necessary to coordinate the ordering of so many books and magazine subscriptions (a contract with EBSCO, a company that managed subscriptions for libraries, in 1971 helped somewhat).6 The library system contracted with book leasing company McNaughton to provide a standard package of hardbound books, replenished every few months, for the permanent libraries.7 Peter Young remembered typing up lists and summaries of these new books, which were then passed around the Cu Chi base whenever a new shipment arrived. He received a Bronze Star for this work.8

At the war’s height in the late 1960s, the library system included thirty-eight libraries, five bookmobiles, and 280 field collections. A book budget of $4.5 million ($33.9 million in 2018 dollars) provided for about four million paperbacks and 200,000 magazine subscriptions for the field kits per year, plus another 120,000 hardbacks for the permanent libraries. From 1966 to 1969, the libraries were staffed by a total of 15–20 professional librarians, 107 full-time and 220 part-time soldier assistants, and approximately 100 Vietnamese employees.9 The vast majority of the American employees served for one-year tours, although some civilian women—including Ella Dora Bartlett, Nell Strickland, Ramona Durbin, and Syble Adams—stayed for several years.10 Each library was open seven days a week and late into the night, although Buckley recalled that the Vietnamese women employees at the Saigon Library often told patrons the library was closing early and then asked their supervisors if they could leave since no one was there.11

Moving books and magazines around Vietnam was a constant fight against nature, and each permanent library was required to have air-conditioning. Particularly during the months-long monsoon season, the staff had to go to great lengths to ensure that the books stayed clean and dry. Peter Young had to sweep clods of mud from the floor that had been tracked in by library users every day.12 Buckley and Sittig remembered that many books donated from other military bases were stored under a tarp in the unused swimming pool behind the Saigon Library. Buckley investigated and discovered the books were water damaged and molding, then decided they should be destroyed. After loading them onto a truck and sending them to be burned at the Long Binh base, an officer in a Jeep behind the truck asked where the books were going. When told they were to be burned, the officer insisted his men could use them and diverted the truck. He was probably in for a nasty surprise when he saw them up close, but the thought of burning books and wasting funds was unthinkable.13

In 1967 the ALA conference was held