Read an Excerpt
June 6, 1968
I thought that I had experienced heat and humidity, having spent the first twenty years of my life suffering through the hot, muggy summers back in Missouri. But as I stepped off the Pan Am 727 at Bien Hoa Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, it didn’t take me long to discover that heat—Asian style—was an entirely different animal. It was only 11:15 in the morning, but I was drenched with perspiration before I crossed the tarmac apron. Each breath sucked in more of the heavy, moisture-laden air, until I felt like I was a hundred pounds heavier. When I looked back across the runway at the rows of parked military aircraft, they seemed to be suspended in a layer of quivering, transparent gelatin. The heat in Nam was visible!
An NCO herded us across the flight line to a large, corrugated-steel terminal building that offered some protection from the sun’s rays but little relief from the heat. A large, round thermometer hanging on the interior wall of the building read 112.
Inside, we were checked off the flight manifest and then instructed to pick up our duffel bags and board one of the four brown, stub-nosed Isuzu buses parked in a row out along the front of the building.
I climbed aboard the second bus, grabbing a seat behind the civilian driver. He was the first Vietnamese that I had seen, and I was somewhat surprised at his short stature and wiry frame. He couldn’t have been much over five feet tall and one hundred pounds. He looked up at his rearview mirror and spotted me studying him. When he flashed me a big, toothy grin, I quickly looked away, embarrassed at having been caught. But my curiosity soon got the best of me. I slipped on a pair of sunglasses and resumed the quick study of my subject, this time scoping him out of the corner of my eye. He had thick, shiny, black hair, combed back over his head. The high cheekbones and close-set eyes gave him a kind of sinister look. The everpresent grin seemed almost artificial, a cover-up masking his true feelings about the loud, oversize American soldiers he would be transporting. So this is what the enemy looked like! My God, we were going to be fighting dwarfs!
A short, squatty staff sergeant climbed aboard the bus and announced that we would be taken to the 90th Replacement Center at Long Binh to be processed in country. His canned speech and indifferent attitude characterized a man who had been in Vietnam too long and had found his job boring and unfulfilling. It sure in the hell didn’t do much to enhance our enthusiasm.
The bus lurched away from the air base and into the heavy flow of traffic moving down a well-maintained, two-lane, asphalt highway. Traffic lights, center lines, and road signs were everywhere. I found it hard to believe I was in a foreign country. The scene around me could have been duplicated anywhere back in the States. I really had to concentrate to discover the differences.
Most of the traffic was civilian, a mixture of Lambrettas, cyclopeds, motor scooters, bicycles, old Citroën and Puegot automobiles, and an occasional late ’40s-vintage Dodge truck. Military vehicles, sometimes alone, sometimes in convoy, passed by every few minutes.
The South Vietnam countryside was flat to rolling. An occasional rice paddy and narrow rows of palm trees broke up the stark landscape. Here and there groves of rubber trees, standing in formation like soldiers at attention, stretched back away from the highway.
We passed through a series of small villages lining both sides of the highway. The differences began to manifest themselves. Crude shacks jammed each other in an urban planner’s nightmare. Little storefront shops and freestanding stalls were everywhere. Most were constructed of weathered planks, cardboard, plastic sheeting, corrugated tin, and flattened American beer cans.
The local population hustled about their business, generally ignoring us as we passed by. Young children and teenage girls dressed in ao dais seemed to dominate.
ARVN soldiers were everywhere. Most of them seemed to be engaged in lounging about the shacks, flirting with the passing girls, or bartering with the shop owners. They seemed totally unaware that a war was going on. Many of them were unarmed, but a few carried M-1 carbines over their shoulders. I understood why returning U.S. combat vets referred to them as cowboys. Most of them wore bright red or blue scarves around their necks, sported oversized American sunglasses, and wore wristwatches that were too big for their skinny arms. Their tailored fatigues looked like they had been painted on. They reminded me of a bunch of Boy Scouts trying to look cool.
I wondered why the bus’s open windows were covered with wire mesh. I thought they might also be used to transport prisoners. When I leaned forward and asked our driver the reason for the wire, he stammered for a moment, then answered in broken English, “VC numba ten. Trow grenades in bus. Cock-adau (kill) beaucoup GI.” I gulped and sat back in my seat, content to spend the remainder of the trip scanning the roadside for Vietcong saboteurs.
We arrived at the sprawling compound of the 90th Replacement Center around 1230 hours. We piled off the buses and formed-up in the center of a huge dirt parade ground. A pudgy but happy-looking butter-bar lieutenant strode across the dirt field and ascended the elevated wooden platform to our front. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Saylor and spent the next ten minutes officially welcoming us to Vietnam. His speech didn’t sound memorized, and he seemed to be sincere. He must have been almost as green as the rest of us.
He told us that our stay at the replacement center would last five to seven days. It would take that long to process us into the system and assign us to a unit. While we were there, we would have to observe a few rules. Attendance at the four formations each day was mandatory. Unit assignments and flight manifests were handed out at them. If we weren’t there when our names were called, the wrath of God, as administered by the U.S. Army, would be brought down upon us. He went on to tell us that duty rosters would be posted daily on a bulletin board at the edge of the parade ground. We would be assigned KP and other work details during our stay at the 90th. Ignoring these assignments would result in punishments much too terrible to mention. Permanent party personnel would, on occasion, wander through our ranks, selecting individuals at random to perform extracurricular duties of interesting and varying nature. Refusal to comply with their requests would result in discipline akin to capital punishment.
The large, aboveground swimming pool, visible in the distance, was to be off-limits to all transient personnel. We would be allowed to go to the PX; sit in on the outdoor movies each evening; visit the mobile snack trucks; attend religious services; and shit, shower, and shave. Everything else was officially off-limits. He informed us that this program had been designed to insure our safe and rapid acclimatization to life in the Republic of Vietnam, and had not been intended to be a form of harassment. All in all, it would behoove us to live by the rules and keep our young, vulnerable asses out of trouble until we reached our final duty stations. Amen!
The barracks around us were large, plywood affairs covered with sheet-metal roofs. Each housed forty-eight men in two rows of twelve bunk beds. The officer conducting the formation had cautioned us that, in case of a rocket or mortar attack, the individual occupying the lower bunk was to exit the bed on the right side while the soldier in the upper berth dismounted to the left. This would prevent the occupant of the upper bunk from imbedding his cleated jungle boots into the back of his bunkmate, causing him immeasurable pain and discomfort. It made a lot of sense at the time but, as we would discover later, no one remembered prior instructions after he had been blasted out of a sound sleep by 122mm rockets impacting one hundred meters away. The sound of one’s asshole slamming shut acted like a circuit breaker on the process of deductive reasoning and intelligent thought, forcing the body to operate on pure instinct and gravitational inertia. In other words, when the shit hit the fan, your ass moved for the nearest bunker over the shortest possible route, and screw anybody dumb enough to get in your way.
The lieutenant told us that once we cleared our bunks, we were to proceed in a swift but orderly manner to the underground, sandbagged bunkers located conveniently between the barracks. This, too, only worked in theory. Swift became indelibly stamped in our minds. Orderly just somehow or another failed to register at all.
We dropped our gear and headed to the mess hall for our first meal in Vietnam. The long line and the meager serving of warm baloney sandwiches, cold, greasy french fries, and stale crumb cake made the mobile snack truck a sure bet for my future meals. My stomach had not yet made the adjustment from home-cooked meals to the foil-packed, dehydrated, condensed, evaporated, canned, compressed, pressurized collection of raw materials for a turd-making machine, that the U.S. Army labeled as food.
After chow, all the new arrivals headed for the supply building to draw our basic issue of clothing, boots, and other regulation gear. Then it was back to the barracks we had been assigned to secure our areas prior to the evening formation.
