Lies from Southeast Asia

When Howard Kalachman was a soldier on sandbag duty at a U.S. army base in Vietnam, he was struck by a 200-pound piece of steel flung from a helicopter propeller that could have decapitated him.
   
“I was actually dead, but was brought back,” said Kalachman, whose neck bears a scar from the accident.

A month after his hospital stay, Kalachman did the unusual: he told his parents the truth about the accident and his injury. “They wouldn’t believe me, no matter how many times I wrote to them about it, and figured I was injured in combat,” said the former infantryman who fought in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.

Now the 67-year-old past commander of the Long Beach American Legion is trying to turn a book he published about his war correspondence with his family into a movie.

While he mailed letters about the war’s harsh realities to his brother, Marvin, his letters to his parents stressed only the positives. Hence the book’s title: “Hi Mom, I’m O.K.! And Other Lies from Vietnam.”

“My mother was a worrier and my father had a heart condition, so I couldn’t tell them what was really going on,” he recalled. “So I fudged my letters to them a bit, just told them the good stuff, and was basically writing to my brother some of the facts about what was really going on.”

Published by Trafford Publishers, “Hi Mom” consists mostly of his letters to his parents and his brother, along with present-day commentary and several photographs. “Many have told me they had trouble putting it down,” Kalachman said.   

Despite readers’ praise, though, the self-published book has not sold well, but that hasn’t deterred the author from trying now to transform it into a movie script. Kalachman’s story consists of several brushes with serious injury or death, both in and out of combat, including his fall into an underground tunnel.

“Family members read it and told me they didn’t realize what I went through,” he said. “They cried when reading it.”

While in a war zone, he was ordered to destroy his letters from home after he read them to avoid having them fall into enemy hands. Near the end of his tour, he became a clerk and composed letters to the next of kin of dead soldiers.

Kalachman started writing his book about five years ago, after he retired as an educator and administrator in New York City’s public schools, just when he moved to Island Park after living in Long Beach for 26 years. “It was really very cathartic writing it, because I really had forgotten a lot of what had happened,” he said.

Kalachman was recently elected senior vice commander at the Long Beach VFW, and will again march in Long Beach’s Memorial Day parade and read the Prayer of POW/MIA at the post-parade ceremony. This year’s parade will honor Vietnam vets.

“We are the forgotten veterans,” he said. “That’s said about the Korean War vets, but they weren’t spat on when they came home.”