Memorial Day memories: Welcome to Vietnam
[cross posted at Daily Kos; complete diary posted at the noise of a marginal life]
something to mark the day...
ON THE WAY
The events surrounding my departure for Vietnam are as clear to me now, thirty-nine years later, as though they happened yesterday. As with most memories, they seem to come bunched in little packets, miniature vignettes that somehow capture the essence of the moment.
My mother and brother drove me to the Denver airport. I was excited because I was going to be flying on a TWA Boeing 707, the flagship of the new jet age. I was even more excited because it was coming from Zurich via Washington D.C. and on to San Francisco. I was going to be flying on an international airline onboard a plane that had just flown across the Atlantic Ocean!
The Oakland Army Base was little more than a giant warehouse where wet-behind-the-ears army boys, fresh from hugging their mothers and kissing their girlfriends, were stacked, awaiting the call to the bus that would take them to Travis Air Force Base and the flight to Vietnam. I located a friend from advanced training and, true to form, we somehow managed to collect enough dope to smoke a giant number rolled in toilet paper. From this drug-addled, surreal view of our surroundings, the following image was burned into my brain: two friends, sitting side-by-side on a bunk, one reading Bible verses to the other in an attempt to ease the fear of what was to come.
It was almost midnight when my group was called for the bus. Tired, tense, frightened, wired, and still high, I remember running across the tarmac at Travis at 2 a.m. under the moon and stars with a warm wind blowing, yelling and whooping, racing for the stairs of an Evergreen DC-8 that would take us to our fate. The plane was minus a first class section; only open seating, six across from front to back. Ironically, I noted that officers and senior enlisted men were already on board, seated up front. They could have been creatures from another planet as far as I was concerned. I dashed for and got a window seat.
• After re-fueling stops in Anchorage and Yokota Air Base, Japan, each equally and enticingly foreign in its own way, we crossed the coast of Vietnam in late afternoon. Everyone was jockeying for a view out the window. There it was, strange, mysterious, deadly, the stuff of Time Magazine and the evening news. What would befall me there? The plane descended from cruising altitude in steep circles that we speculated made it less of a target for anti-aircraft fire. Oh my god, I thought. I am landing in Vietnam!
LONG BINH
Long Binh Army Depot
Long Binh Army Depot was the major Vietnam arrival and departure point for Army personnel and supplies. I was completely unprepared for what met me there. I had fully expected to step off the plane and into knee-high mud where I would remain for twelve months. Imagine my surprise when I found myself in an honest-to-god city, replete with gift shops, snack bars, American television and radio programs, post offices, even laundries. Sure, you walked around on pallets of wood scrounged from under shipping containers to stay out of the mud and, sure, you stayed in barracks that had canvas walls instead of stucco and drywall and, sure, there were new and distinctly different smells and, sure, once in a while, off in the distance you could hear the sound of artillery fire and, sure, choppers shuttled back and forth overhead and, sure, at night you could watch flares dropping and, sure, everyone was wearing jungle fatigues. But it was still a far cry from what I had been led to believe. It was positively civilized!
The shit-burning detail was no doubt contrived to dispel any illusions new arrivals might have about finding themselves in “civilization.” The non-coms in charge took great delight in picking the newest of the new and informing them exactly how they would be passing the time while waiting to be assigned to a unit. They described it as a rite of passage and I suppose it was. I did not escape. My first morning in Vietnam was spent going from outhouse to outhouse, raising the hinged, wooden flap on the rear, dragging out a sawed-in-half fifty gallon drum full of human waste, pouring gasoline into it, and setting it on fire. When it had burned down to cinders, I carefully replaced each drum back under its cargo chute ready for another day’s business. The plumes of greasy, black smoke that rose each morning above every U.S. camp became the routine signs of another day in progress. Since I had no idea how long I was going to be at Long Binh, as soon as I had finished that morning’s job, I set off in search of something to take its place. The second morning in Vietnam, I handed out clean sheets from the supply room, a job considerably more to my liking.
After breakfast and the usual morning details of sweeping the barracks, burning shit, handing out sheets, picking up cigarette butts, etc., all new arrivals had to stand in formation for roll call followed by the reading of assignments. We all listened intently as foreboding names like 101st Airborne, 1st Infantry Division, 1st Air Cavalry, and 4th Signal Group were read off and sighed with deep relief when our names were not mentioned.
One morning, about the third day, my name came up. I was to be assigned to the 4th PO Group. What in the hell was the 4th PO Group? Post Office was all that came to mind. We were directed to a deuce-and-a-half (Army lingo for a 2 ½ ton truck) for transfer to our unit. As we climbed aboard and settled into the plank seats in the open rear, we discovered we were now members of something called the 4th Psychological Operations Group. How exotic! But my idea of exotic would quickly be stretched beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It started immediately on the drive down the Long Binh highway to Saigon. With one hand on the horn, the other banging loudly on the outside of the door, foot firmly pressing the accelerator to the floor, voice yelling hoarsely, “Get out of the way, you fucking gooks,” and the vehicle seemingly steering itself, our driver easily took us beyond the thrills of any amusement park ride, all the while forcing wide-eyed Vietnamese on foot, bicycle, and motor scooter to leap for the ditches on the side of the road. As if this wasn’t enough, I then came face-to-face with Saigon.
SAIGON
Saigon 1968
There are no words to describe my first impression of that city: the sights, the sounds, the people, and, oh yes, the smells. I used to tell friends in a feeble attempt to portray the flat-out assault on my senses, “All my meters redlined at once.” Thirty-seven years later, that is still the most apt description I can think of. At a stroke, my entrance into Saigon was the most foreign, overwhelming, intense experience I had ever had. If someone had taken a picture of me then, I am sure it would have shown a bewildered, gaunt (during the rigors of basic training, I had lost considerable weight), white boy, wearing glasses and jungle fatigues (still showing the creases of first wear), his jaw dropped, his eyes as big as dinner plates, nostrils flared, clearly and completely stunned at the chaos taking place around him.
A few days later, my level of astonishment reached new heights as I stood at a window in the 4th Psyop Group and watched the comings and goings at a community water tap out on the street. It was mostly women and children, hauling buckets of water back to their homes, doing laundry and dishes, bathing, and washing and preparing food. A woman with a green plastic tub filled with what looked like a large, round, long, pink chunk of meat spilling out over each side arrived at the tap and began carefully washing what was obviously going to be dinner. I watched with some fascination until it slowly dawned on me what I was witnessing. The big, pink piece of meat, the size of a small dog, was nothing other than a skinned rat. Leaping ahead more than three decades in slang and behind three decades in cinema, how fitting it would have been to say, “We certainly aren’t in Kansas any more, Toto!”
PLEIKU
Camp Schmidt and
Lake Bien Ho,
Pleiku, Vietnam
The rain was steady, not heavy, but not a drizzle either. The clouds were low and dark. Moisture hung in the air like a living thing. You could almost hear mold and fungus growing and the smell was thick and fetid. It was getting on toward dusk and I was putting things into my locker after eating a tasteless dinner at a drab little mess hall. I was feeling a million miles away from anything warm and familiar and the weight of the year to come hung on my shoulders. My barracks-mates, still strangers, trooped silently back from dinner and sat glumly on their bunks. Daylight faded but no one made a move to turn on the lights. There were occasional whispers of conversation up and down the row but they slowly drifted away until, except for the constant grumble of the electrical generator across the street, the silence became complete. I sat on my bunk too, watching the others look at their feet with empty gazes. “Hmmm,” I muttered to myself. “This is gonna be worse than I thought.” Suddenly a yell: “THERE GOES ONE!” followed by a loud thud. “YEAH, I SAW THE LITTLE BASTARD!” erupted from elsewhere followed by another thud. The after-dinner ritual, as I discovered, was to sit quietly until complete darkness took hold, wait for the rats to come out, and then try to bash them with 2x4’s as they ran by.
With the rat-bashing portion of the evening’s agenda complete, the lights came on, all types of music began to blare, beer, soda, and hard liquor appeared, care packages and snacks were opened and shared, the dopers adjourned to the back porch, and the pleasant sound of laughter rang out. Welcome to Company B! Never were the words of my deceased hero, Hunter Thompson, more fitting: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Watching the War
B-52 on a carpet-bombing mission
Cookouts at the company area were popular. There was never a shortage of good steaks, chicken, and ribs taken in trade from some mess hall sergeant for our “scrounge du jour.” Beer, hard booze, soda, and cigarettes were cheap and plentiful. The dope was cheap and outstanding. At night, the dopers (I joined their ranks almost right away) would gather on the upper stair landing of the second floor of the barracks, fondly known as the back porch, to get stoned and “watch the war.” For musical background, we had the cacophony of the night insects which, amplified by a nice high, became almost deafening. Our insect orchestra was augmented at regular intervals by the booming of out-going shells fired from Artillery Hill. The light show was provided by flares and tracer rounds. Since special entertainment, by its nature, was never announced in advance, when B-52’s began carpet-bombing on the other side of ridges 30-40 klicks away, the constant muted pounding of the explosions and the faint, ghostly yellow flashes were a source of many “oooh’s” and “ahhhh’s.” Equally impressive and almost hypnotic to watch was the display put on by the so-called “Spooky” gunship. Spooky was a converted two-engine military prop plane with silenced engines and blacked-out running lights, designed to fly over suspected enemy positions without attracting attention. It fired a mini-gun at several thousand rounds a minute. Since every 5th shell was a tracer, the effect was to produce a bright red, laser-like pencil of light that appeared from an inky black sky as if by magic. The pencil would swing this way and that, bathing its target in bullets, all the while emitting a hair-raising “brrrrrrrrrrrap” noise. The Spooky was my personal favorite.
Guard Duty
Guard post on the
Camp Schmidt perimeter,
Pleiku, Vietnam
Guard duty. Arrrrrgh! Picture this: beams of wood, treated with creosote, form the framework of a large cube. Thick plywood is laid across the beams as a makeshift roof. Sandbags are piled at least two deep all around and more on top. There is a narrow entrance. Small rectangles on each side serve as ports for viewing - or shooting. The burlap of the sandbags quickly mildews and rots in the high humidity. Many have split open and are spilling out their contents. The stench is not pleasant. Mingling with the smell of rotten fabric are the smells of rodent excrement and, wafting up from where guards relieve themselves night after night, stale urine. There are two or three unbelievably dirty GI-issue sleeping bags on top. They exude their own strong odor, a thick, muddy, locker-room musk. The bags are there to help stave off the chill that descends on Vietnam’s Central Highlands at night. Two guards are posted on top of each bunker from dusk to dawn. The bunkers aren’t the only guard posts. If the bunkers are Motel 6, the guard towers are the Ritz-Carlton. They have wood floors, chest-high corrugated tin walls and roofs, are high above the smells and vermin, and, compared to the bunkers, offer a night of relative luxury.
Molina
Firebase, Central Highlands,
Vietnam
There were a number of guys assigned to Company B we rarely saw. They worked on field teams that covered a large slice of the Central Highlands and they came into Pleiku only occasionally for admin reasons, to rest up for a few days, or to head to or from R & R. Some were assigned to firebases where they would broadcast propaganda by loudspeaker to unseen Vietcong in the jungle outside of the firebase perimeter or when they accompanied armed jungle patrols outside the perimeter. Others worked out of AV trucks that served the dual purpose of mobile Psyop operation and sleeping quarters. Hunting for something different to do one day, I volunteered to drive one of the field team members back to his assigned firebase, Dak To. I picked out one of the better three-quarter ton trucks, dusted off my helmet and flak jacket, scraped the mold off of my rifle, packed some snacks, and headed out. We were supposed to connect with a convoy leaving from Pleiku headed to Kontum and then on to Dak To but we missed its departure by about fifteen minutes. “No sweat,” said Molina, the field guy I was returning. “We can catch ‘em. I know the highway. We’ll haul ass.” Figuring Molina knew what he was talking about, we hit the road. Describing it as a “highway” was perhaps a tad generous. It was a wide, rutted, orange-brown slash of packed earth that, while it was obviously graded on a regular basis (the graders, to my astonishment, were left sitting, unmanned, along the side of the road), clearly showed the punishment it took from the trucks, tanks and other pieces of mobile equipment that passed up and down daily. All vegetation had been cleared up to a hundred yards on either side to prevent a possible ambush but, other than that, we were in the wide open spaces. Being the only vehicle in sight and feeling like we were nothing if not sitting ducks, I got really nervous really fast. Oddly, the cause for my anxiety was that I had suddenly remembered that we had no spare tire and, even if we had, no jack or tire iron to change it with. Molina, obviously immune to such trivial nonsense, rolled a joint, lit it, and took an enormous hit. “Hey, man,” he said, straining to talk while holding the smoke deep in his lungs. “Let’s enjoy the r-i-i-i-i-d-e!” He was right. I had soon forgotten about everything but the rush of the wind in my hair, the jungle flashing by on either side, the roar of the engine, and the thrill of piloting the truck over challenging terrain, not even minding that we didn’t manage to catch up with the convoy until Kontum.
Perks of Power
C-7A Caribou
Occasionally, brass would visit from Group headquarters in Saigon. They would typically arrive at Pleiku Air Base in the morning on the first flight and check in with me after being picked up and driven to the company area. More often than not, the first thing they did was inquire about any recent or expected attacks while they looked anxiously around, no doubt expecting a mortar to explode over their heads at any moment. If I had suddenly jumped up and screamed “BOOM!” at the top of my voice, I’m sure there would have been at least a few that would have gone into cardiac arrest. I was, however, regulation polite and deferential, standing and saluting, saying “Good morning, Sir, welcome to Company B,” blah, blah, etc. Ah, but power corrupts and, being a mere mortal, I couldn’t resist. The degree to which those courtesies were reciprocated, unbeknownst to the officer in question, would determine to a large extent the quality of said officer’s return trip because, you see, the second thing to issue from said officer’s mouth was most often a request for me to schedule his return flight for that very afternoon. God forbid they should have to spend a night in Pleiku. I had several options for arranging flights to Saigon, ranging from top end to what would have been known in an earlier era as steerage. Without a doubt, the prime choice was the Learjet courier that included cabin service and onboard refreshments. At the bottom of the heap was the milk run, a twin-engine C7A Caribou that lurched and swayed its way through six stops, turning the Learjet’s 45-minute run into a ghastly three hours and a half. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I meted out reward and punishment with the aplomb of a Roman emperor and the poor bastards never knew what hit ‘em.
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something to mark the day...
ON THE WAY
The events surrounding my departure for Vietnam are as clear to me now, thirty-nine years later, as though they happened yesterday. As with most memories, they seem to come bunched in little packets, miniature vignettes that somehow capture the essence of the moment.
My mother and brother drove me to the Denver airport. I was excited because I was going to be flying on a TWA Boeing 707, the flagship of the new jet age. I was even more excited because it was coming from Zurich via Washington D.C. and on to San Francisco. I was going to be flying on an international airline onboard a plane that had just flown across the Atlantic Ocean!
The Oakland Army Base was little more than a giant warehouse where wet-behind-the-ears army boys, fresh from hugging their mothers and kissing their girlfriends, were stacked, awaiting the call to the bus that would take them to Travis Air Force Base and the flight to Vietnam. I located a friend from advanced training and, true to form, we somehow managed to collect enough dope to smoke a giant number rolled in toilet paper. From this drug-addled, surreal view of our surroundings, the following image was burned into my brain: two friends, sitting side-by-side on a bunk, one reading Bible verses to the other in an attempt to ease the fear of what was to come.
It was almost midnight when my group was called for the bus. Tired, tense, frightened, wired, and still high, I remember running across the tarmac at Travis at 2 a.m. under the moon and stars with a warm wind blowing, yelling and whooping, racing for the stairs of an Evergreen DC-8 that would take us to our fate. The plane was minus a first class section; only open seating, six across from front to back. Ironically, I noted that officers and senior enlisted men were already on board, seated up front. They could have been creatures from another planet as far as I was concerned. I dashed for and got a window seat.
• After re-fueling stops in Anchorage and Yokota Air Base, Japan, each equally and enticingly foreign in its own way, we crossed the coast of Vietnam in late afternoon. Everyone was jockeying for a view out the window. There it was, strange, mysterious, deadly, the stuff of Time Magazine and the evening news. What would befall me there? The plane descended from cruising altitude in steep circles that we speculated made it less of a target for anti-aircraft fire. Oh my god, I thought. I am landing in Vietnam!
LONG BINH
Long Binh Army Depot
Long Binh Army Depot was the major Vietnam arrival and departure point for Army personnel and supplies. I was completely unprepared for what met me there. I had fully expected to step off the plane and into knee-high mud where I would remain for twelve months. Imagine my surprise when I found myself in an honest-to-god city, replete with gift shops, snack bars, American television and radio programs, post offices, even laundries. Sure, you walked around on pallets of wood scrounged from under shipping containers to stay out of the mud and, sure, you stayed in barracks that had canvas walls instead of stucco and drywall and, sure, there were new and distinctly different smells and, sure, once in a while, off in the distance you could hear the sound of artillery fire and, sure, choppers shuttled back and forth overhead and, sure, at night you could watch flares dropping and, sure, everyone was wearing jungle fatigues. But it was still a far cry from what I had been led to believe. It was positively civilized!
The shit-burning detail was no doubt contrived to dispel any illusions new arrivals might have about finding themselves in “civilization.” The non-coms in charge took great delight in picking the newest of the new and informing them exactly how they would be passing the time while waiting to be assigned to a unit. They described it as a rite of passage and I suppose it was. I did not escape. My first morning in Vietnam was spent going from outhouse to outhouse, raising the hinged, wooden flap on the rear, dragging out a sawed-in-half fifty gallon drum full of human waste, pouring gasoline into it, and setting it on fire. When it had burned down to cinders, I carefully replaced each drum back under its cargo chute ready for another day’s business. The plumes of greasy, black smoke that rose each morning above every U.S. camp became the routine signs of another day in progress. Since I had no idea how long I was going to be at Long Binh, as soon as I had finished that morning’s job, I set off in search of something to take its place. The second morning in Vietnam, I handed out clean sheets from the supply room, a job considerably more to my liking.
After breakfast and the usual morning details of sweeping the barracks, burning shit, handing out sheets, picking up cigarette butts, etc., all new arrivals had to stand in formation for roll call followed by the reading of assignments. We all listened intently as foreboding names like 101st Airborne, 1st Infantry Division, 1st Air Cavalry, and 4th Signal Group were read off and sighed with deep relief when our names were not mentioned.
One morning, about the third day, my name came up. I was to be assigned to the 4th PO Group. What in the hell was the 4th PO Group? Post Office was all that came to mind. We were directed to a deuce-and-a-half (Army lingo for a 2 ½ ton truck) for transfer to our unit. As we climbed aboard and settled into the plank seats in the open rear, we discovered we were now members of something called the 4th Psychological Operations Group. How exotic! But my idea of exotic would quickly be stretched beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It started immediately on the drive down the Long Binh highway to Saigon. With one hand on the horn, the other banging loudly on the outside of the door, foot firmly pressing the accelerator to the floor, voice yelling hoarsely, “Get out of the way, you fucking gooks,” and the vehicle seemingly steering itself, our driver easily took us beyond the thrills of any amusement park ride, all the while forcing wide-eyed Vietnamese on foot, bicycle, and motor scooter to leap for the ditches on the side of the road. As if this wasn’t enough, I then came face-to-face with Saigon.
SAIGON
Saigon 1968
There are no words to describe my first impression of that city: the sights, the sounds, the people, and, oh yes, the smells. I used to tell friends in a feeble attempt to portray the flat-out assault on my senses, “All my meters redlined at once.” Thirty-seven years later, that is still the most apt description I can think of. At a stroke, my entrance into Saigon was the most foreign, overwhelming, intense experience I had ever had. If someone had taken a picture of me then, I am sure it would have shown a bewildered, gaunt (during the rigors of basic training, I had lost considerable weight), white boy, wearing glasses and jungle fatigues (still showing the creases of first wear), his jaw dropped, his eyes as big as dinner plates, nostrils flared, clearly and completely stunned at the chaos taking place around him.
A few days later, my level of astonishment reached new heights as I stood at a window in the 4th Psyop Group and watched the comings and goings at a community water tap out on the street. It was mostly women and children, hauling buckets of water back to their homes, doing laundry and dishes, bathing, and washing and preparing food. A woman with a green plastic tub filled with what looked like a large, round, long, pink chunk of meat spilling out over each side arrived at the tap and began carefully washing what was obviously going to be dinner. I watched with some fascination until it slowly dawned on me what I was witnessing. The big, pink piece of meat, the size of a small dog, was nothing other than a skinned rat. Leaping ahead more than three decades in slang and behind three decades in cinema, how fitting it would have been to say, “We certainly aren’t in Kansas any more, Toto!”
PLEIKU
Camp Schmidt and
Lake Bien Ho,
Pleiku, Vietnam
The rain was steady, not heavy, but not a drizzle either. The clouds were low and dark. Moisture hung in the air like a living thing. You could almost hear mold and fungus growing and the smell was thick and fetid. It was getting on toward dusk and I was putting things into my locker after eating a tasteless dinner at a drab little mess hall. I was feeling a million miles away from anything warm and familiar and the weight of the year to come hung on my shoulders. My barracks-mates, still strangers, trooped silently back from dinner and sat glumly on their bunks. Daylight faded but no one made a move to turn on the lights. There were occasional whispers of conversation up and down the row but they slowly drifted away until, except for the constant grumble of the electrical generator across the street, the silence became complete. I sat on my bunk too, watching the others look at their feet with empty gazes. “Hmmm,” I muttered to myself. “This is gonna be worse than I thought.” Suddenly a yell: “THERE GOES ONE!” followed by a loud thud. “YEAH, I SAW THE LITTLE BASTARD!” erupted from elsewhere followed by another thud. The after-dinner ritual, as I discovered, was to sit quietly until complete darkness took hold, wait for the rats to come out, and then try to bash them with 2x4’s as they ran by.
With the rat-bashing portion of the evening’s agenda complete, the lights came on, all types of music began to blare, beer, soda, and hard liquor appeared, care packages and snacks were opened and shared, the dopers adjourned to the back porch, and the pleasant sound of laughter rang out. Welcome to Company B! Never were the words of my deceased hero, Hunter Thompson, more fitting: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Watching the War
B-52 on a carpet-bombing mission
Cookouts at the company area were popular. There was never a shortage of good steaks, chicken, and ribs taken in trade from some mess hall sergeant for our “scrounge du jour.” Beer, hard booze, soda, and cigarettes were cheap and plentiful. The dope was cheap and outstanding. At night, the dopers (I joined their ranks almost right away) would gather on the upper stair landing of the second floor of the barracks, fondly known as the back porch, to get stoned and “watch the war.” For musical background, we had the cacophony of the night insects which, amplified by a nice high, became almost deafening. Our insect orchestra was augmented at regular intervals by the booming of out-going shells fired from Artillery Hill. The light show was provided by flares and tracer rounds. Since special entertainment, by its nature, was never announced in advance, when B-52’s began carpet-bombing on the other side of ridges 30-40 klicks away, the constant muted pounding of the explosions and the faint, ghostly yellow flashes were a source of many “oooh’s” and “ahhhh’s.” Equally impressive and almost hypnotic to watch was the display put on by the so-called “Spooky” gunship. Spooky was a converted two-engine military prop plane with silenced engines and blacked-out running lights, designed to fly over suspected enemy positions without attracting attention. It fired a mini-gun at several thousand rounds a minute. Since every 5th shell was a tracer, the effect was to produce a bright red, laser-like pencil of light that appeared from an inky black sky as if by magic. The pencil would swing this way and that, bathing its target in bullets, all the while emitting a hair-raising “brrrrrrrrrrrap” noise. The Spooky was my personal favorite.
Guard Duty
Guard post on the
Camp Schmidt perimeter,
Pleiku, Vietnam
Guard duty. Arrrrrgh! Picture this: beams of wood, treated with creosote, form the framework of a large cube. Thick plywood is laid across the beams as a makeshift roof. Sandbags are piled at least two deep all around and more on top. There is a narrow entrance. Small rectangles on each side serve as ports for viewing - or shooting. The burlap of the sandbags quickly mildews and rots in the high humidity. Many have split open and are spilling out their contents. The stench is not pleasant. Mingling with the smell of rotten fabric are the smells of rodent excrement and, wafting up from where guards relieve themselves night after night, stale urine. There are two or three unbelievably dirty GI-issue sleeping bags on top. They exude their own strong odor, a thick, muddy, locker-room musk. The bags are there to help stave off the chill that descends on Vietnam’s Central Highlands at night. Two guards are posted on top of each bunker from dusk to dawn. The bunkers aren’t the only guard posts. If the bunkers are Motel 6, the guard towers are the Ritz-Carlton. They have wood floors, chest-high corrugated tin walls and roofs, are high above the smells and vermin, and, compared to the bunkers, offer a night of relative luxury.
Molina
Firebase, Central Highlands,
Vietnam
There were a number of guys assigned to Company B we rarely saw. They worked on field teams that covered a large slice of the Central Highlands and they came into Pleiku only occasionally for admin reasons, to rest up for a few days, or to head to or from R & R. Some were assigned to firebases where they would broadcast propaganda by loudspeaker to unseen Vietcong in the jungle outside of the firebase perimeter or when they accompanied armed jungle patrols outside the perimeter. Others worked out of AV trucks that served the dual purpose of mobile Psyop operation and sleeping quarters. Hunting for something different to do one day, I volunteered to drive one of the field team members back to his assigned firebase, Dak To. I picked out one of the better three-quarter ton trucks, dusted off my helmet and flak jacket, scraped the mold off of my rifle, packed some snacks, and headed out. We were supposed to connect with a convoy leaving from Pleiku headed to Kontum and then on to Dak To but we missed its departure by about fifteen minutes. “No sweat,” said Molina, the field guy I was returning. “We can catch ‘em. I know the highway. We’ll haul ass.” Figuring Molina knew what he was talking about, we hit the road. Describing it as a “highway” was perhaps a tad generous. It was a wide, rutted, orange-brown slash of packed earth that, while it was obviously graded on a regular basis (the graders, to my astonishment, were left sitting, unmanned, along the side of the road), clearly showed the punishment it took from the trucks, tanks and other pieces of mobile equipment that passed up and down daily. All vegetation had been cleared up to a hundred yards on either side to prevent a possible ambush but, other than that, we were in the wide open spaces. Being the only vehicle in sight and feeling like we were nothing if not sitting ducks, I got really nervous really fast. Oddly, the cause for my anxiety was that I had suddenly remembered that we had no spare tire and, even if we had, no jack or tire iron to change it with. Molina, obviously immune to such trivial nonsense, rolled a joint, lit it, and took an enormous hit. “Hey, man,” he said, straining to talk while holding the smoke deep in his lungs. “Let’s enjoy the r-i-i-i-i-d-e!” He was right. I had soon forgotten about everything but the rush of the wind in my hair, the jungle flashing by on either side, the roar of the engine, and the thrill of piloting the truck over challenging terrain, not even minding that we didn’t manage to catch up with the convoy until Kontum.
Perks of Power
C-7A Caribou
Occasionally, brass would visit from Group headquarters in Saigon. They would typically arrive at Pleiku Air Base in the morning on the first flight and check in with me after being picked up and driven to the company area. More often than not, the first thing they did was inquire about any recent or expected attacks while they looked anxiously around, no doubt expecting a mortar to explode over their heads at any moment. If I had suddenly jumped up and screamed “BOOM!” at the top of my voice, I’m sure there would have been at least a few that would have gone into cardiac arrest. I was, however, regulation polite and deferential, standing and saluting, saying “Good morning, Sir, welcome to Company B,” blah, blah, etc. Ah, but power corrupts and, being a mere mortal, I couldn’t resist. The degree to which those courtesies were reciprocated, unbeknownst to the officer in question, would determine to a large extent the quality of said officer’s return trip because, you see, the second thing to issue from said officer’s mouth was most often a request for me to schedule his return flight for that very afternoon. God forbid they should have to spend a night in Pleiku. I had several options for arranging flights to Saigon, ranging from top end to what would have been known in an earlier era as steerage. Without a doubt, the prime choice was the Learjet courier that included cabin service and onboard refreshments. At the bottom of the heap was the milk run, a twin-engine C7A Caribou that lurched and swayed its way through six stops, turning the Learjet’s 45-minute run into a ghastly three hours and a half. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I meted out reward and punishment with the aplomb of a Roman emperor and the poor bastards never knew what hit ‘em.
Labels: Memorial Day, Pleiku, Saigon, Vietnam
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posted by profmarcus at
5/28/2007
