14 | Currents
Now & THen: To the right is the only known photo of marv dunphy, 20, in Vietnam.
SERVE
on
the LINE
written by Mariella Rudi
{Photos By Chelsea Gest
—
It’s 1969 and Specialist 5th Class Marv
Dunphy, 20, watches for enemy movement
on the perimeter of the Long Binh Army
base in Vietnam.
He waits at an M-60 machine gun pointed out of a makeshift window of sandbags.
It’s dark, so the bad guys can’t see the machine gun. But Dunphy can’t see them either. He can’t see the 10 feet in front of him
that separates the base camp from the uncontrollable area. He can’t see what or who
is through the concertina wire. The wire is
the perimeter.
Dunphy watches periodic flares dance
over the Long Binh base and illuminate
the rice paddies. Without sleep and at high
stress levels, he starts to see things that aren’t really there.
He’d never used a gun before. He’d barely left Topanga Canyon before flying into
the Bien Hoa Air Base.
It’s his first week in-country, and he’s
just learned that the Vietnam War, for him,
takes place at night.
All hell breaks loose. For two nights in
a row the enemy fires rockets aimed at
the Bien Hoa base. Dunphy takes cover in
a hooch (soldier’s living quarters). Rockets
woosh-bang and throw shrapnel everywhere. Dunphy’s in-country training begins.
“Wow. Is it going to be like this my whole
time here?” Dunphy asks himself over and
over again. It won’t be. The rockets eventually hush.
When it’s safe, Dunphy walks outside
and picks up a piece of the rocket’s metal
shrapnel. He puts it in his pocket.
A few days later, Dunphy tosses it. Suddenly, he’s not into souvenirs. Dunphy
has adapted quickly. He picks up the acronym-laden military-speak. One of the first
words he learns: FNG, or f***ing new guy.
He soon distinguishes the sound of a
dangerous “WOOSH” (incoming) from a
friendly “PHBOOM” (outgoing). Dunphy
doesn’t go on search-and-destroy missions,
Currents | 15
or hump the boonies or fly in the Huey helicopters. He doesn’t have a combat role. He never
meets the bad guys.
But in a guerilla war, there is no definite enemy or conventional warfare. In Vietnam, every
base camp perimeter is a front line.
Fortunately for Specialist Dunphy, he only
has perimeter guard duty a few nights out of the
week.
{0}
“In Vietnam there was no line where the
good guys are here and the bad guys are here.
I found that out,” said Dunphy, who is today
the men’s volleyball head coach at Pepperdine.
“When I was there, I think it was still perceived
as, ‘this thing is winnable.’”
Dunphy served one tour of duty, one year, in
the Vietnam War in 1969. At the time, for Dunphy at least, it was still good versus bad. Dunphy doesn’t use Vietnam War-era jargon when
describing the war itself. To him, they were just
the bad guys. No Viet Cong. No Charlie.
All of this was another lifetime for Dunphy.
“There was no volleyball then.”
Dunphy retold his war stories back in his office above Firestone Fieldhouse. First-time visitors are quizzed on what historical figure of that
decade he’s posed with, the wall carpeted in
picture frames that document his coaching career achievements. It’s a wall of a lifetime.
Now in his 31st season as the Waves’ head
coach, Dunphy is a near-celebrity on campus
and in the volleyball world. His record boasts
four NCAA championships in four different decades, and 53 of his Pepperdine players have
gone on to become All-Americans. Off campus,
Dunphy was head coach of the USA National
Team that won a gold medal at the 1988 Olympics and has been on the coaching staff at five
other Olympics. In 1994 he was inducted into
the Volleyball Hall of Fame.
People rarely ask or know about Dunphy’s
military background.
What was he like back then? Before Vietnam?
“Boy, before Vietnam ... ” Dunphy said to
16 | Currents
himself.
For Dunphy, there really wasn’t anything before volleyball, not even a war.
Dunphy’s father, a Navy man from WWII,
owned bicycle shops in Venice and Santa Monica, and the family raised pigs in the rural enclave
that remains Topanga Canyon, Malibu’s hippie
cousin.
He graduated from Taft High School in
Woodland Hills and enrolled in the local junior
college, a “real medium in school, at best.” At 17
or 18, you could find him playing with pollywogs
and frogs in the creek.
In 1968, he volunteered for the draft in the
Vietnam War.
“I see kids that I recruit here, the 18 year olds.
They’re worldlier than I was. My world was kind
of small in Topanga Canyon, and I wasn’t very
sophisticated in how I viewed politics or the
Vietnam War,” Dunphy said.
Because sometimes when you’re thrown
into it, he said, you don’t see the big picture.
Nonetheless, he was honored to serve.
“My thinking at the time was that I’m part
of something that my country believes in and
therefore I was going along,” Dunphy said.
Do you remember that day you flew out to
Vietnam?
“Like it was yesterday.”
Did you go willingly?
“Very willing.”
{0}
It’s another night on perimeter guard duty,
and the OD (officer of the day) is making his
rounds to each bunker. He quizzes the soldiers
on their equipment and completes a weapons
check.
The OD notices that Specialist Dunphy’s uniforms are starting to rot.
“Where’d you get those fatigues?” the OD
asks.
Dunphy gives a cheeky answer, fully aware
of the proverbial shot to his foot.
The officer gives him another chance and
asks, “How do you use your rangefinder?”
Dunphy doesn’t know.
“Soldier, I haven’t found anything right with
you yet.”
The OD zeroes in on Dunphy. Something in
the OD’s next words will resonate for the rest
of Dunphy’s life.
“Whether you know it or not, whether you
like it or not, the habits you’re developing right
now, are going to be with you for the rest of
your life.”
The next day Dunphy is asleep under the
pounding sun. It’s the middle of the day, warm
and sticky.
He didn’t get much sleep the night before on
guard duty. In between the two-hour shifts, he
still isn’t used to sleeping in the dugout part of
the bunker. He’s always on edge, and the rats
running over him don’t help either. Dinner last
night was out of a small can.
He wakes up under sweat-soaked fatigues
and prepares a refreshing glass of Carnation Instant Breakfast to wash down “the big orange
pill” —
weekly quinine to protect against malaria.
“This stuff is the best,” he says to himself.
He remembers earlier into his tour when he
saw soldiers lying out in the sun and thought,
“Man, how can you sleep when it’s so hot in the
middle of the day? How icky is that?”
Now he knows: If you can steal sleep, you
grab it. Sandbags become your bed, and shade
is an Egyptian cotton sheet.
He’s tired a lot. Everyone is. There’s no communication, other than the occasional letter.
There’s no technology, other than the military’s.
Dunphy needs a new bar of soap, but there’s no
money either, so he uses military play money at
the Post Exchange.
After, Dunphy grabs an hour of sleep. He’s
back on the perimeter later that week.
{0}
Behind his desk, Dunphy took out his wallet
and fished for something.
“I don’t know why I have this,” he said and
took out a faded baby blue bill. It was a 10-cent
military payment certificate he found in a shoebox a year ago.
Originally this article was supposed to be
about what war taught Coach Marv Dunphy
about volleyball. That wasn’t the case. Instead,
it is about what volleyball taught Dunphy about
war.
He never had to ask himself the question:
How do I go on? He wasn’t a victim of the war.
He wasn’t a hero, either.
His tour was comparatively calm.
“It was a significant emotional event, in anybody’s life, mine included,” Dunphy said. “But
for me it wasn’t tragic.”
There was no readjustment problem.
“I keep thinking, I didn’t have it that rough,”
Dunphy said. “I’m not saying I’m any tougher
or any different than anybody … but it doesn’t
seem like I changed that much when I was
there.”
Dunphy doesn’t consider winning the gold
medal in 1988 the highlight of his life. Serving in
the Vietnam War wasn’t a watershed moment
for him, either. Once he was done, it was on to
the next phase in his life: discovering volleyball
at a park in Japan while on a cultural exchange.
Even if his trajectory wasn’t known at the
time, Dunphy didn’t let Vietnam decide.
All he can remember thinking is: “I’m in a situation that I have to be in, and going forward
I think I wanted to have a little more choice in
what I did with life.”
For him, that’s the best thing about coaching — being able to choose the people he goes
through life with.
Dunphy’s coaching methods, from a Pepperdine team to an Olympic team, are consistent.
He’s big on discipline and role clarity and lauded
for his focus on personal, even compassionate,
instruction.
A middle blocker rules the net. The blocker
is a warrior who can overload an opponent, surprise them and create chaos.
“Tactically, that’s kind of what you’d want to
do in volleyball and in war in the same way. You
wouldn’t want them to know what’s coming,”
Dunphy said.
“But I never wanted to bring any negativity
into a team because when I go to teach you, it’s
kind of like an implied criticism. If I’m correcting
you and you change, and if you didn’t like the
source of it, the feedback, you might develop
a dislike or a hatred for that source. I think as
a teacher/coach, you have to be aware of that
and … I never wanted to create any doubt in my
players.
“I know why the military did what they did,
the Army anyway. And some coaches coach
like that. But for me, one size doesn’t fit all. And
I think individuals never lose their desire to be
treated as individuals.”
For his doctorate of physical education at
Brigham Young University, Dunphy wrote his
dissertation on one of the most revered coaches ever, John Wooden.
“I wrote this thing on him,” Dunphy said as he
plucked a dictionary-sized book from the shelf
behind his desk. “This was about his philosophies. I asked him about discipline and he said,
‘I never wanted to bruise the dignity of the individual being disciplined.’ How many coaches
can say that?”
Out of all of Dunphy’s degrees and course
work, a real education came from sitting down
with Wooden for five days with 150 of his most
curious questions.
“I like to see how great coaches coach and
how leaders would lead and what works and
what doesn’t work. And I’m fascinated by that.”
{0}
Dunphy is on his fifth tour of duty as coaching
staff at the Olympics in Beijing, China, in 2008.
He’s on the bench as one of his former Pepperdine student-athletes, Sean Rooney, competes
on television. Later that night he checks his
email in the Olympic Village. There is a message
from an old friend who spotted him on TV.
“Hey, it’s Charlie van Leer. We were in Vietnam. How are you doing?”
the South Vietnamese on Nov. 11, 1972, marked
the end of direct U.S. involvement in the war.
Do you remember the day your service ended?
“Ya. It felt like it was yesterday.”
{0}
The war isn’t over when Dunphy boards the
Freedom Bird out of the Tan Son Nhut Air Base,
back to The World (back home). Dunphy is happy to head home, but it seems like he left some
friends behind. By the time he’s back, the war
protests are in full swing, and Vietnam War has
taken on an entirely new narrative.
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by the Animals plays in his head the whole ride home.
For a year Dunphy had lived in a world devoid of color. He steps into the Oakland Army
Terminal in December 1969 and his olive drab
world turns into Technicolor. He gets a physical,
some cash and trades his fatigues for a uniform.
He doesn’t take a chance on military standby and buys his own flight ticket home. Out of
the plane and into Rocket Rent A Car, he drives
back to Topanga Canyon.
{0}
It’s 5 a.m. and Coach Dunphy walks into the
Firestone Fieldhouse just as he does every day
for work. On the way Jeff from DPS asks him,
as people often ask Coach Dunphy this time of
year, how men’s volleyball is going to be this
year.
“We have no choice. We have to be good.”
{0}
Dunphy served in USARV (U.S. Army Vietnam) on the massive Long Binh Post, at one
point the largest U.S. Army base in the world.
The day the Long Binh base was handed over to
Currents | 17
© Copyright 2024 ExpyDoc
