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Vet Richard Baker - Renaissance man

The questions are asked; there are no answers

Writer Richard Baker uses his experiences in Vietnam as a musician-turned-infantryman as a source for his writing. The photograph on the cover of the book is Baker. Photo credit: J.M. Simpson

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While in high school, Richard Baker made a vow to himself to do everything he could possibly do with his life.

It is safe to say the California native has fulfilled his self-promise.

"I feel pretty good about myself," Baker said as we sat outside a local café and drank coffee.

"I am the last Renaissance man - I'm a writer, photographer, musician and a very poor painter."

While traveling the highway of a largely self-taught life, Baker has been a soldier, band musician, long-haul trucker, Vietnam vet counselor, boxing manager, night school student, college graduate and part-time instructor at a local community college.

And then there is the need to write and photograph.

As such, he has published 14 books and picked up an Ernest Hemingway Award for short fiction, been recognized as a boxing writer of the year by the World Boxing Board, and been named one of the Northwest's best photographers by Seattle's Benham Art Gallery.

"Yeah, and I've also been rejected by the best," Baker added with a laugh in reminiscing about his past.

The past he speaks of and knows well coalesces around his musical talent, the Army and his subsequent writing.

Let's start with the brass instrument comprised of three valves, a flared bell and a penetrating tone.

"By the time I was in the seventh-grade, I was playing in a Dixieland band," the Tacoma resident explained.  "I was a very good trumpet player."

So good in fact that while in high school Baker was voted the best trumpeter in Washington state.

But he didn't finish high school - call his decision to leave two weeks before graduation one based on either join the Army or else.

The year was 1966, and there was a war on in Vietnam.

"I was a musician at the time, and I thought I would join the Army band, and I wouldn't have to go to Vietnam," Baker recalled.

"I thought I could outsmart them."

Or so he thought.

One month after basic training and assignment to the 4th Infantry Division Band, Baker and his band mates found themselves on the USS John Pope headed for Vietnam.

"We were on that boat for twenty-three days.  We had no access to our instruments," he said.  

"We were given weapons instead."

Baker's unit landed at Qui Nhon and on that first night found itself in the jungle with the task of setting up an ambush.

"A truck took us down to the head of a trail," he recalled.  "We got out, and the truck left. We didn't know what to do."

Adding to the already bad situation, several members of the band had not gone through basic training.

"Our leader didn't know how to read a map or compass," Baker continued.  "We wandered down the trail and figured out how to set up an ambush."

Locating a crate of Claymore mines, Baker and his cohorts set the mines.

"We set the ambush the best we could," he explained.  "We hooked up the wires and placed the mines."

Fortunately, the night passed quietly.  

"It wasn't until the next morning we discovered the words ‘Front Toward Enemy' that we realized we had pointed the writing on the mines at ourselves," Baker said with a small chuckle.

To overcome their lack of training, the group broke into a supply unit and stole some training manuals to teach themselves how to survive.

"We were musicians; we were relatively intelligent; we could and did teach ourselves," Baker continued.

He survived 18 combat patrols - this first trumpet turned point man, walking the tip of the spear.

Wounded twice, Baker received no Purple Hearts.

In Vietnam, five combat patrols qualified a soldier for a Bronze Star.  Baker received no Bronze Star.

"We gave each other the awards," Baker said with a smile.

Then there was Lady Luck, which seemed to be where Baker was.

On one mission, Baker tripped a wire connected to a booby trap.

"The pin pulled, but the explosive charge didn't go off."

On another occasion, Baker was sitting in a truck and had just leaned back into his seat when a bullet passed where he had just been.

"There is good - and bad - in life," he drily observed.

Baker returned from Vietnam in 1967.  There was no welcome home parade.  He mustered out of the Army in 1968.

He struggled with PTSD and the loneliness of not having others to talk to. The Veterans Outreach Center in Tacoma helped him get his life back together.

Then he started the hard work of building a career, a life.

"I played professionally all over the country; I was on the road a lot," he continued.

Baker said he played with greats such as Woody Herman and Mel Torme.

But such gigs didn't pay the bills, so he got a job working on a freight dock in Seattle while finishing his education.

"I finished my AA at Fort Steilacoom Community College in a year; and I then earned degrees in English and Philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University in a year," Baker related.

Like a high note played on the trumpet, the need to write still resonated with Baker.

Then he started to write.

Picking through the scrapbook of his memories of Vietnam, Baker has published a number of novels dealing with the war in Vietnam and its after-effects.  

One of his latest works is First A Torch, a novel about the defeat of the French army by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

His first non-fiction book will be published in several months.  He divides his time between Tacoma and Vietnam, where he is the first American to have a book published by Gioi Publishing, the oldest publisher in Hanoi.

He plans to return to Vietnam in July 2015.

Our interview over, Baker gave me some reading material.  I read it and then began to puzzle about how to write about this self-made writer and photographer.

Then it came to me.

Paraphrasing a line from one of Baker's articles on photography entitled, Vietnam:  An Alternate View, his writings serve as a question, not an answer.

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