Lived History: Rutgers Alumnus Turns Uncle’s Vietnam War Letters into a Book
Inspired by a Rutgers history seminar, student partners with professor to bring 1960s history, policy to life
James Gilch’s letters home from the Vietnam War – tracing his trajectory from a young draftee to a disillusioned soldier – could have filled a book by the time he was killed in action in July 1966.
Today they are the backbone of a new book, Everyman in Vietnam: A Soldier’s Journey into the Quagmire, thanks to inspiration Gilch’s nephew found at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Joseph Gilch, born 23 years after his uncle died, grew up with his Uncle Jimmy as part of the background music of his life. His father and grandmother told Joe about the young man whose U.S. Army portrait hung in his grandmother’s home.
But it wasn’t until Joe, then an undergraduate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, took a Byrne Seminar on “War in the 20th Century” that he began to see his uncle as part of history, and history as relevant to his own life.
Gilch did a presentation about his uncle in the seminar, and then, as he approached graduation in 2011, wrote his senior thesis about Jimmy Gilch’s wartime experience. Joe Gilch partnered with the teacher of that seminar – Michael Adas, now Abraham Voorhees Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers-New Brunswick – to write the book that brings Jimmy’s history back to life.
Jimmy wrote over one hundred letters to his parents, siblings, and high school classmates during his tour of duty in Cu Chi, South Vietnam. They were full of ideas for what he wanted to do when he got out of the Army, regret for things he didn’t do before being drafted, observations of Army life and combat, and the war’s impact on the Vietnamese and his fellow soldiers.
“When we started, Michael said, ‘Let’s go through Jimmy’s letters and see what’s there,’” Joe remembered. “Well, everything was there – what it was like growing up in America the 1950s and 1960s, what it was like to be drafted, what it was like to go into combat.”
Gilch and Adas divided the book’s labor between the big picture and the personal, with Adas writing about diplomacy and military strategy and Gilch focusing on his uncle’s coming of age in New Jersey, his military training, and his shifting responses to the war. His experiences, as well as those of other soldiers on all sides, become a recurring constant that ties together the broader history of the conflict from high policy in Washington and Hanoi, Vietnamese independence struggles against the Chinese, French, Japanese and Americans, and a critique of the Cold War prism through which American government viewed those struggles.
For Adas, Jimmy’s story highlights the human cost of American hubris. “In its efforts to remake the world in its own image, the United States has often pictured itself as technologically, politically and morally superior to foreign, especially non-white and non-western people,” Adas said. “This has been devastating to those people, and tragic for thousands of families like the Gilches. We keep doing this, and it haunts me.”
For Joseph Gilch, the experience of studying and writing about the history that his uncle was part of led to more than just the book. This month, he started teaching American Studies at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South in West Windsor Township, New Jersey.