Daniel Rubin: Coping with war's toll through art

Three days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Lamont B. Steptoe walked into an Army recruitment office and asked what was the fastest way to go to Vietnam.

"I just had to get out of the country," Steptoe says.

As a Temple freshman in 1968, he had straddled many worlds: as a progressive and a patriot, a poet, and a member of ROTC.

Service was a family tradition. "My mama used to say, if the Army didn't want you, you weren't much of a man."

Steptoe had read the World War I poems of Wilfred Owen and of Hemingway's adventures driving ambulances in Italy. He memorized the Alan Seeger verse that begins "I have a rendezvous with Death."

War would test a young man's mettle.

A Vietnam vet whom Steptoe met while working at Strawbridge & Clothier tried to talk him out of going, even stripping off his shirt to show scars from seven bullets.

"That's not what's going to happen to me," Steptoe recalls replying. The man gave him one more warning:

"Vietnam's going to make you cry for your mother."

Steptoe, now 63, looks down and says softly, "That part is true."

He is sitting in the lobby of the United Way building, where he has been rehearsing a play called The Weight, based on the Vietnam experiences of himself and several other Philly vets. Next to him is playwright Sid Holmes. At 6 p.m. Thursday, they'll return to the building for a free reading to honor Veterans Day.

Steptoe is eager to talk about his war experience, which lasted for 16 months, until December 1970, and the weight he still bears.

He qualified for officer candidate school at Fort Benning, Ga., but after 18 weeks of training, he had second thoughts about the kind of person he was turning into, and wrote a letter of resignation.

The Army sent him straight to scout dog school, where he trained to walk point with a canine able to detect bombs, booby traps, and enemy tunnels.

"They were trying to kill me," Steptoe says.

He's 5-foot-3 and wiry, with a wolfish graying beard, an intense gaze, and an easy manner. His backpack is loaded with a sampling of his 14 volumes of poetry. The covers hold praise from such luminaries as James Baldwin, Dennis Brutus, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Steptoe wears a pin on his Vietnam Veterans cap to honor Butch, the Belgian shepherd that kept him alive for 11 months of patrols with the 25th Infantry. A "No. 1 Dad" button came from his daughter, Lamer, who is 26 and goes to school in Oregon.