R. Dalton Buster: 1948-2000

When, I first met Dalton, I was on the edge of 18. Having lead a pampered childhood, blessed by being born into a comfortable middle class family with both parents always there for me, I was beginning my college days which were for me and for many of my peers, an extension of adolescence free from the burdens and responsibilities of the real world. There could be no more extreme a contrast to my existence at that age than what my new neighbor Dalton Buster had experienced. By age 15 Dalton had lost his father, but despite the struggle to keep his family together Dalton managed to complete his high school life as an all-star athlete, dreaming of the major leagues. Those dreams would be forever shattered when his country called on him to go to Vietnam. Dalton was not drafted, being the only surviving son made him exempt. But his father was a career military man, a decorated hero and Buster felt it his duty to go and fight for his country, so he signed up as a volunteer. I never knew the boy who went to war, but the broken man who returned would become as dear a friend to me as any could be and would have a profound impact on my life.

Despite being his coffee break headquarters and sounding board during the early 80’s while Buster penned his Nam experience, and hearing each horrific tale recounted over and over as he went through the agonizing process of dredging up those memories to commit them to paper, I could not begin to fathom the atrocities which were an everyday part of his life at such a tender young age. The Walking Dead, as he called his book, referred to the First Marine Division to which he belonged. They were so dubbed for having the highest casualty rate during the war, representing nearly half of the total dead (made up 18% of the ground troops, took 1/3 of the dead and 42% of the wounded. Average Marine tour 2.8months, average age of death, 19years, 2months). Buster, as he was known then served as pointman, meaning he walked out ahead of his unit to “draw fire and uncover booby traps”, making their path through the jungle safe. Having completed a year and a half of college at Western Kentucky University before entering the Marines, at 20 years of age he was an “old salt” and quickly became a leader to his men and in his mind and theirs, a father figure. As with many artists, Dalton was a deeply sensitive man with an abiding respect and love for human life and he felt all the losses he witnessed very deeply. He would spend the rest of his life struggling to cleanse himself and atone for the terrible destruction that he both witnessed and took part in.

During the war, Dalton befriended a man named Cherry. The two friends fought side by side and slept back to back, vowing to always protect each other. On multiple occasions they each saved the others life. And together they took care of their men. When a young boy from Kentucky named Willie was killed, Dalton carried him through a river on his back, with Cherry pulling on him to keep the two of them from being swept away. Dalton later described seeing Christ in Willie’s eyes and made mention of this experience often in his last days. He and Cherry became inseparable friends despite how different they were, “Opposites make for a partnership; white/black, little/big, nonstop funnyman/Mister Quiet. …Never believed this big, quiet ‘n kind man could be killed. Cast forever changing; they come, they go — WE keep makin’ it. On ambush, the terrible dark, we sit back/toback—leanin’ on each other. WE went into that damn school together. IT IZ selfish, if he were alive—we could talk on the phone-get together once in awhile—that school would be a tad less ugly/haunting; I wouldn’t be forever staggerin’ forward w/Willie on my back and no one up front pullin’.” The death of his friend Cherry, which happened while Dalton was hospitalized from one of many battle injuries would haunt him for the rest of his life and would be central to what the VA called his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and his Survivor’s Guilt. He told me that the VA told him that it was not normal to be so effected by his memories, to which he wondered how could I be human and not be so effected by dead babies and children?. On several occasions, one in recent years, Dalton admitted himself to the psychiatric ward of the VA in an effort to deal with his ordeals. His anguish is described in his piece THE WALL named for the memorial, “The WALL I know about IZ the one you build to keep out the dead ‘n wounded and everyone else. At Cam Rahn, in the am—a bed, now empty, “Where’s so and so?” “Oh, we moved him to another ward.” Right, the one where they “tag it ‘n bag it’. The NAM—so strong ‘n vivid—world now is shadow—nothin’ matters. When pain is all you got, you learn to love the pain. THE WALL works for Vets that way—perhaps I’d best watch it—IT works for me that way. It’s for the families—perhaps some kind of ‘closure’. What maybe they don’t know, if he’da ‘come home’—drugs, alcohol, divorce, jail, no job—finalle suicide. One Cat shot himself at the WALL—a cop, wife ‘n 2 daughters—said it didn’t bother him. Hard Fact, Jack—he’s better off now…” Living at the VA ward never came easy, but at times he knew that he had to do something, it was getting out of control – and they were all he had to attempt to gain some sanity. He told me once that the VA celebrates every dead grunt because it’s one less they have to deal with. Having a background in social services, I expressed to him that when dealing with such awesome numbers an assembly line strategy was necessary and this often had the effect of making their caregiving feel dehumanized, though their intentions were good. But certainly his words rang true to his wife Nancy when she took him in suspecting pneumonia and learned that cancer in his lungs had spread throughout his body. To her horror she discovered that his records documented the discovery of a black spot on his lungs that was noticed two and a half years before and was never investigated.

A substantial amount of the book takes place post Vietnam and deals with his struggle to maintain sanity. Students learning about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome would be well served to read this first hand account of both the events leading up to the disorder and one man’s struggle to overcome it. For instance, it’s been postulated that a major contributing factor to the fact that more Vietnam Veterans suffer from the disorder than all other war veterans combined is the lack of delineation between “the good guys and the bad guys”. Dalton provided multiple references to the inner turmoil that insued from these descrepancy. On page 11, in a piece entitled IN LESS THAN A MONTH he says “I knew to look carefully at a woman with a baby—if it wasn’t breathing—it was full of explosives. The soda can have acid in’em. The ice cream shaved glass. Kids, dead or alive, are used to blow you up and some of these slant/eyed hookers had razor blades up their snatches.” In another account that played a pivotal role in his trauma he tells of a pleasant evening sharing rice with a villager he called Papasan – “We talked a bit and then he reached into the shadows and brought out a bottle of whiskey, about 60% full. He set 2 small rat cans on desk and poured—picked one up, bowed his head, gave it to me, bowed again. I bowed back, touched his can with mine, ‘Better days, Papasan.’…Quiet He cleared his throat and said he was going to fly the flag of The Republic of Vietnam. ‘Don’t do it, Papasan; you know what’ll happen.’…well, next day it was hangin’ from his window and the day after that I saw the bodies—all shot in the chest, all with feet pointed towards me. Wanted to find something and cover them but did not. Walkin’ away, I wanted to call a halt, go back and cover ‘em but didn’t..Still wish I had…Think on Papasan some every day—2 million dead Vietnamese—America didn’t care about us grunts and believe it, they were just 3 more dead gooks.”

At home though, Dalton knew his friends and we came from all walks of life. There was no one that he wouldn’t give a chance to know him. He enjoyed talking and sharing with people. As hard of a struggle as his life was, he always had something to give to a friend in need. Nancy recounted multiple times when he invited friends and their families down on their luck to come and stay with them. And once you were a friend, you were that for life. In sorting through his many notes and keepsakes she found letters from girls at college who wrote him during his tour overseas, and teachers he worked with when he taught children for Head Start in Florida right after the war – many with whom he still kept in contact. After he finished The Walking Dead, which was copyrighted in 1987 his demons had not yet been excorcised as he hoped they would be. In 1988 he met Nancy at Mr. C’s on 13th and college. She says that he proposed the first night. In a very short time she would take him up on the offer. Along with her 3 year old daughter Sarah, they would move to the country and take a shot at a new life. Life is rarely easy when you live in deeply rural Kentucky but after leaving Kentucky street, he found a deep beauty and simplicity in his life with his new family that for the first time provided a glimmer of possibility that life could be happy and peaceful. Jobs were scarce and winters were cold around the wood burning stove as they saved to buy insulation for the coming winters. Arguably his greatest moment came shortly when he experienced the rare joy of delivering his new baby girl Leah in the house that he and Nancy had constructed together. A classic Buster story, he proudly told all who would lend their ear that he raised the child to the moon in “Kunta Kinte” fashion after which Nancy gathered wood and made dinner. Soon after the dooting father would joke/brag that her first word was baseball. After a couple of moves the family settled on a 26 acre homestead in Metcalfe county. The pressures of attempting to provide for a family and battling his unrelenting demons sometimes got the best of him. But in recent years he felt he was coming to terms with his existence. He did a massive rewrite which he described as cleaning up the book for public consumption. Despite this censorship of some of the graphic language and images, the new version of The Walking Dead remains a piece of work riddled with harsh language and graphic depictions. Many will find it’s straight forward descriptions more reality than they can stomach. In September 1999, Dalton emerged as the Amplifier’s featured writer. With a new focus on marketing the book and a rebirth in his spiritual life, he was ready to pull it all together. Confident that his new relationship with God would enable him to take command of his life as well as help others like himself, Dalton began attempting to contact old buddies from his unit. Though many had fallen to crime, drug abuse and suicide, he was able to rebind some old ties as well as forge some new ones. As Dalton systematically dialed through New Hampshire Harwood’s one day, looking up a vet, he happened upon a Paul Schick, who had not change the phone listing from his wife’s maiden name yet. With a Ph.D. in Musicology from Yale, Schick had been watching Vietnam documentaries and reading war stories in an effort to create a rock opera about Vietnam, but lacking direction had decided to put the idea on hold just a few days before Dalton misdialed him on Veterans Day. Immediately intrigued, he ordered a copy. Within 6 weeks he had created a libretta based on Dalton’s book. He calls it The Pain Train and copyrighted it under both his and Dalton’s name. When asked what it was about Dalton’s words that inspired him, Schick said, “in addition to the bizarre serendipity, the honesty of the language and the particular religious sense he was able to make out of the chaos of war. … and his humor is just ongoing!” He said that in the many conversations he had with Dalton, he listened very carefully to the way Dalton spoke about his subject matter and noted an “… immediacy of the military mind, a clipped, angular, staccato rhythm that I wouldn’t have come up with”. Schick “chose crucial parts and used the language”, he wrote “ to accommodate a new form and give those words to different characters – but it remains essentially Dalton.”

Dalton’s love for Yumi, the demolition of the schoolhouse, the death of Papsan, the death of Cherry, his vision of Christ in Willie Lee, the inner war after his return stateside, his battles with alcohol, drugs, incarceration and ultimately his conversion, are all present in the libretta. Schick is extremely optimistic about the potential of his rock opera. He explained that on board were some of the most talented individuals of today – Composer Randy Woolf and performer Rinde Eckert. Some backers have been secured, and more are being solicited, with the production goal being slated for 2002. Lincoln Center has shown interest in the proposed work and a demo is being created for their use in considering it for the Lincoln Center Festival for that year. Through Randy’s association with a high end studio, there are also great expectations for a recording. Utilizing new DVD 5.1 technology Schick explained that five sources and a subwoofer could be used so that multiple voices could be deployed spacially. The show is a one man show featuring Rinde on electric guitar “working with mechanized blues forms” and prerecordings. He will do all the voices which come to him in flashbacks. Schick believes that “Vietnam has not been done in a way that is not politically naive – that alone will carry it.” Its composer also feels that “in cinema the story has been told but objectified. This is more about interior worlds and monologues. The language brokers the distance between where we are now and the abstract horror of the Vietnam war.” And indeed many qualities of this production will be unique according to Schick including “the reliance on recording, the extent tape and computerized manipulation will be relied on to back the performer and the unadorned candor of the subject matter for the operatic stage.” Though Paul Schick will not get the chance to meet his muse in person, he echoed Dalton’s comment in THE WALL saying that “the faith that he was able to convey, leads me to believe he is better off right now.”

Schick was not the first to notice Dalton’s qualities as a speaker. According to wife Nancy “When he spoke he was very riveting. He was a very eloquent speaker, I always enjoyed hearing his voice.” When his cancer struck it thwarted plans to go to Ft. Campbell and speak on this past Veteran’s Day. Nancy said “That excited him. He had something positive to give some young men.” Dalton had hoped to tour campuses and veterans organizations speaking about his experience. Nancy has tapes of some of his early notes for the book, but he was never able to create an audio book as he had intended. On his website which we began together at http://artists.ky.net/buster, Dalton’s description read: Public Speaker and author of The Walking Dead, first leg of a trilogy about Vietnam. A USMC grunt’s path of Darkness and loss, of seeking the LIGHT, finallee..and a knee/jerk funny/oblique take on things. “He wanted to write a happy book next” said Nancy. But the trilogy will not come to be. Though his dreams were modest (according to Nancy he often said “if I make it big I want a pitching machine”) Dalton won’t be with us to see the premier of the rock opera he inspired or the distribution of his book to the mass marketplace. Though he had begun appearing at author signings, his dreams of distribution had thus far been thwarted by publishers and local corporatly owned book stores who either wanted him to sign away his rights or finance distribution beyond his means. Already cut off from his disability checks for Post Traumatic Stress as well as the many painful bodily injuries he endured throughout his life, Nancy will have her hands full trying to carry on providing for their children, running the farm and securing her RN status for which she is currently studying. She plans to utilize some of his contacts to help keep his book alive, though it has never paid the bills, she says “that book needs to be out there. He told probably one of the best first hand accounts of that war or any war. That book told what a personal endeavor by a human being was.”

Dalton spent his last year as one of the most optimistic in his life, walking his dogs, skipping rocks in his creek, weaving baskets and meditating in what he called his power spot, a point between the family house and the cabin/study he had recently built where he could survey the beauty of his homestead and contemplate life. “He often slept there in the summertime” said Nancy. Every morning for the past five years he drove his girls to school, and in the afternoons the house echoed with a chorus of “Daddy let’s go play” to which Dalton always responded with his ball and glove in hand. “Dalton was a warrior, even down to the end.” Nancy described a moment when they were in the VA for one of the 8 radiation treatments he received and he didn’t like the way a Dr. was speaking disrespectfully to her, “he raised up and took command and it was the old Dalton again.” But after a few short weeks of the treatment, Dalton told her that he was too old to fight another battle and he wanted to go home to be with his family. He maintained his humor to the end, saying “I’m going to win a Pulitzer, they love to give those to dead guys.” Dalton’s women buried their warrior atop his “power spot” on the farm he loved in an “old fashioned Kentucky ceremony” on December 2, 2000. Many friends and veterans were present, and a flag was presented to his widow from our nation’s president. With him lay a copy of his book, his baseball glove and Cherry’s graduation invitation that he always carried in his wallet, his favorite baseball card was in his chest pocket. I am told his final words were “Jesus, Jesus, sweet Jesus.”

The Walking Dead – “lived, written, edited, typed and printed” by R. Dalton Buster with cover photo by David Earl Cherry, Jr., can be ordered by sending $15 plus $2 s&h c/o Nancy Buster 165 P. Dunham Rd. Edmonton, KY 42129.

Kim Mason is the Content Manager of the Amplifier which was founded by her in 1995. She serves as Executive Director for the BG International Festival and designs websites. www.kimmason.ky.net