A Well-Read Woman

While searching the internet for anything about the libraries in Vietnam, I came across a blog comment on a post about the death of North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. This man wrote:

Oddly enough I developed my admiration for General Giap during my time as a rear area soldier in the Vietnamese War.

The woman who set up the Army libraries in Vietnam agreed to do it on condition that there was no censorship.

I learned more about the Vietnamese leaders and their programs reading in an American Army library in-country than I learned in two years of protesting against the war.

I went to a “liberal” university in a “liberal” city and I had no access to the literature about the Vietnamese efforts and policies.50

I assumed that “the woman who set up the Army libraries” was Ruth, even if he hadn’t met her or didn’t even know her name. After a few attempts, I discovered that this anonymous commenter was a man named Joe Hudson, who finally sent me an email. He had served at Qui Nhon from 1968 to 1969 and went to the library daily to search for books on Vietnam, as did many other men who were stationed there. After I explained my research on Ruth, he wrote to me:

That was without a doubt the absolutely best library that I have ever used . . . If I asked the librarians for a book, I got it. No ifs, ands or buts. I gave the librarians a thorough work out on locating books. I was probably reading two to five books a day. I was able to get translated books about the war from French, German and Soviet Russian authors . . . The general non-fiction books were extremely well balanced . . . I’ve probably dealt with over 40 libraries during my lifetime. That library would be my ideal of a library . . . Ms. Rappaport knew what a library and librarians should be, in an ideal world. She was real, real damn good. That library was the one bright spot in my eleven and a half months in the hell we Americans created in Vietnam.51

As the antiwar protests heated up in the United States, there was a concern that military censorship was blocking both the troops’ and the public’s access to news about what was really happening in Vietnam. But no books or materials were banned in the libraries, despite the efforts of a few library employees who tried to hide magazines with cover stories on the antiwar movement.52 Book lists available from the National Archives, although they were not comprehensive for the whole library system over the full span of the war, prove that troops had ready access—within the limits of what could physically be obtained at the time—to the current literature on the Vietnam War and its background. Some of the nonfiction and fiction titles available in 1971 included the following:

Vietnam: The Roots of Conflict by Chester A. Bain

Vietnam: A Political History by Joseph Buttinger

Southeast Asia Today and Tomorrow by Richard Butwell

Limited War and American Defense Policy by Seymour Deitchman

Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard B. Fall

Southeast Asia in U.S. Policy by Russell Fifield and Paul A. Varg

The Rise of Red China by Robert Goldston

Dimensions of Conflict in Southeast Asia by Bernard K. Gordon

One Very Hot Day by David Halberstam

The Struggle for Indochina by Ellen J. Hammer

Vietnam: Between Two Truces by Jean Lacouture

/>

Dateline: Vietnam by Jim G. Lucas

Background to Vietnam by Bernhard Newman

Vietnam in the Mud by James H. Pickerell

The Vietnam Reader by Marcus Raskin

US House and Senate Vietnam hearing transcripts

Ann Kelsey still has in her possession a bibliography on Vietnam—regularly updated and available at every military library during the war years—that was prepared by librarians.53 Clearly the troops had access to a wide array of opinions and research on the war, including books that exposed the corruption and lies of military leaders and politicians. Despite this, there were a few explicitly antiwar omissions, notably Mark Satin’s Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada—which was so popular in the US it was regularly stolen from libraries but obviously not helpful for troops once they were in Vietnam—and John Kerry’s The New Soldier (it might not have been released yet in 1971 when this list was created by the library system).

Although they had tried to distance themselves from this mass of antiwar media and sentiment, librarians could not ignore the reality of the war once they got there. Ann Kelsey was working at the Cam Ranh Bay library in 1970 when she was ordered to close an engineering library because the unit was headed to Cambodia. She was shocked because she had just heard Nixon on the radio announce that troops were not invading Cambodia. It was a turning point in her life; from then on she could never trust the American government again.54 Other librarians similarly left Vietnam with a very bitter feeling toward the military and their government.

The massive amount of money spent in Vietnam was increasingly embarrassing and difficult to justify. By 1970 the military was trying to end the building of permanent structures and divert resources to mobile trailers.55 Ruth continued to adapt and refine library service by installing trailer libraries at temporary bases and ordering new custom-made bookmobile trucks for the largest bases, in addition to the vans that were already used to move books around to permanent libraries. Some officers were baffled and jealous that the library system got such state-of-the-art trucks. Only two of the bookmobiles were used regularly, at Long Binh and An Khe.56

Floyd Zula, Ruth’s assistant in 1970, was there when she quit. He described his time working for her during her last year there:

In general we operated in crisis management mode. Ruth seemed to procrastinate on a whole array of issues until the seriousness of the matter dictated no more delay . . . My recollection is that Ruth was something of a micro-manager and that may explain why there were piles of paper everywhere. Now I remember that Ruth’s actual work space on her desk was about the size of a piece of typing paper. Around that one empty space there were Alpine heaps of paper, including her in-box. And her horizontal file cabinets were equally stuffed with more paper.