May Girl
May Girl written by: Michael Dedrick - Sitting alone alone, half-drunk in front of a fireplace at the Vietnam Veterans...
Mike Dedrick
Michael Dedrick was born in 1944 in Alturas, California, and grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Michael moved with his family to Seattle, Washington in 1963 where he entered the University of Washington and worked in the building trades to support his college tuition. In March 1966, after losing his student draft deferment after flunking out of college, he was drafted into the US Army, sent to Fort Holabird, Baltimore, Maryland, for Intelligence Analyst and Interrogation training and then assigned to Fort Bliss, Texas (El Paso) for Vietnamese language school. Arriving in Vietnam he was sent to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, worked as an Interrogator-linguist with the Combined Military Interrogation Center in Cho Lon, Saigon, Vietnam in 1968. He was present in the Saigon-Cholon area for the Tet and massively destructive May offensives. After discharge from the Army, he returned to Seattle, finished his undergraduate degree in history at the University of Washington in 1971. Finding no work as a history graduate, he returned to the building trades and spent most of his working life as a remodeling contractor retiring in 2012. As an antiwar veteran, he has participated in and organized numerous public conferences, panels and other public discussion venues related to war, militarism, and peace. Married to librarian Mary Kay since 1983 he lives in Seattle and, when not traveling with his wife, cooks, gardens, works on the twenty years of deferred maintenance on his home.
