The Mess Hall at Buttons

This is a snapshot of the front face of the Mess Hall at Buttons.  The picture was taken in mid-afternoon so there was no food line forming yet.

The soldiers were likely dropping by for coffee.  One of the Vietnamese women appears to be pealing potatoes.  The other two were posing for the picture.  A large refrigerator is on the right side.

If you look closely, you can see how dirty the area is.  The feed line was coated with red dirt.  Everything in fact is coated with dirt.  In Vietnam, we all had other things to worry about.  No one cared about a little dirt in the food area.

If you had a permanent job on Buttons, this is where you received your three meals a day, every day, for a year.  Doesn't look like much does it?  Well, I would have given my eyeteeth for the privilege of working on Buttons full-time and eating here for a year.  If you had lived and worked in the jungle for two weeks at a time chasing Vietcong soldiers as I had, you would have made the same decision.

The Dump at Firebase Buttons

In May 1970, I was on Buttons to take a flight physical for a door gunner position.  I could not catch a Huey back to Ace High until late in the afternoon.  So with time to kill, I agreed to serve as an armed guard on a truck that carried garbage out to the dump the served Buttons.

The drive was uneventful until we approached the dump and began to slow down.  It was then that Vietnamese kids tried to climb into the back of the truck while it was still moving.  The driver, watching them in his rear view mirror, would speed up then slow down in the same way you would dangle a piece of yarn in front of a kitten.  Before we came to a complete stop, four or five kids were already in the truck picking through the trash.

Look at them.  Many are dressed in old Army shirts that they probably found in the trash.  They skillfully picked through what we dumped there like they had been doing it for most of there lives.  I would guess it was like shopping at the Supermarket for them.  They all had a shopping list in their head of what was good and what was not so good.  I'm sure their families ate what they found and brought home.

In the United States, the homeless do this kind of thing as well.  You hear now and then that someone was caught in a dumpster or you see someone with their head in a trash barrel on the side of a road.  But I don't believe the homeless have to do pick through trash for a meal.  There are enough programs out there where people can always get a meal at a shelter or a soup kitchen.

I made one trip to the dump during my year in Vietnam.  It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. The kids should have been in school, not picking through the trash at the dump for food.  South Vietnamese politicians let them down.

Lockheed C-130 Hercules

The largest Air Force plane I ever flew in when traveling between Firebase Buttons and Bien Hoa was the Lockheed C-130 Hercules.

Its primary purpose was to transport passengers and cargo all over Vietnam.  The rear of the plane had a drop-down door that allowed fork trucks to load and unload large pallets of equipment.  Powered by four turbo-prop engines, the plane had a capacity of fifteen tons.

The C-130 also had the ability to drop large pallets of equipment without landing (see picture below).  The crew would attach a drag parachute to the load.  At low altitude, the pilot would would drop the rear door,  the crew then would deploy the chute out the rear and the chute then would drag the load out of the plane and drop it on the ground.

They were even modified into Spectre gunships.  As a gunship, they were fitted with a night vision scope, infrared site, gattling guns, and twenty, forty milometer cannons.  With guns blazing, a Spectre would perform a pylon turn which allowed them to focus their firepower on a stationary target on the ground far below.

Riding in this plane was not smooth and quiet, it was rough and loud.  But then again, the plane was not designed for passenger comfort.  

Temptation at the Water Hole

The picture was taken at the river near Buttons where we had a water treatment truck that turned river water into drinking water.  Army truck drivers were there every day to pick up treated water and transport it back to Buttons.  Young Vietnamese girls were there every day as well.

I took the black death seriously.  That is the name of the venereal disease the Army said you would catch if you fraternized with Vietnamese girls.  Catch it, they said, and you would not go home when your tour was up.  I believed it but I know that others just did not care.

It was lucky in a way that I spent most of my time in the jungle.  There, I didn't have to deal with all of the temptations that those who worked full time on Buttons had to deal with.  And that includes dealing with hard drugs such as opium and heroin.  Get hooked on those drugs and you had to stay in Vietnam until you were dried out enough to go home.

This is another example of something sad about our stay in Vietnam.  Why did these girls feel the need to offer themselves to American soldiers?  Or maybe I am just a prude and always will be.

Saigon from a Bus

In July 1970 I left Vietnam behind and flew to Tokyo, Japan on my first week-long R & R.  We flew out from Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon.  To get to Tan Son Nhut, I had to catch a plane from Firebase Buttons to Bien Hoa Air Base and then take a bus.  This picture of a street in Saigon was taken from the bus.  The street is wet and the sky is dreary looking because it was rainy season in Vietnam.

We had just got off the highway that connected Bien hoa with Saigon.  Along the way, the bus driver and the guard played a game of stealing hats from unsuspecting Vietnamese citizens.  The guard would lean out the door of the bus while the driver pulled up behind a slow moving motor scooter and grab the person's hat!  They obviously had no respect for the Vietnamese people to do such a thing  It is amazing they never killed anyone.  At least I never heard that they did.

On the right, you can see a three-wheeled taxi that was called a Lampro I just learned.  It could hold up to ten passengers.  There was two benches in the back and two seats next to the driver up front.  The Italian motor scooter company Lambretta made them.  I learned that they were finally banned from the streets in 2004 because they were considered unsafe.  Further up the street you can see the back of a three-wheeled bicycle taxi called a Cyclo.  Cyclos are still used in Vietnam.

The sad highlight of the bus ride was not the guard stealing hats.  It was an old women squatting down on the side of the road and relieving herself as we passed by .  I'm sure it was common back then to do that in Saigon but not in my eyes.          

Not a Buddhist Temple

It was late January, 1970 when I took this picture of what I thought was a Buddhist Temple.  I had been in Vietnam for about two weeks at this point.  The Army had me pulling guard at Bien Hoa Air Base at night.  So during the day, there were times when I wandered around the village of Bien Hoa.  It was in Bien Hoa where I ran across this building.

 I was attracted to the strangeness of the architecture and the Vietnamese words over the door.  Cows were roaming close to the building for some reason.  A couple of Vietnamese soldiers in the doorway (it's hard to make them out) were shooing them away.

Recently I scribbled down the Vietnamese words over the door and googled them.  To my surprise, the building was not a Buddhist temple at all.  It was a temple in honor of Confucius.  Confucius brought three essential values to the Vietnamese as part of what is termed, Vietnamese folk religion.  They are respect for ones parents in life and to remember them in death, the care and concern for other human beings and the respect for ritual or the proper way of doing things.  The rituals focus on what is considered the great moments in life: birth, marriage and death.

It is a shame, but this particular building was likely destroyed between 1975 and 1979 when anti-religious fanatics destroyed most of the temples.  Beginning in 1985, the state realized the mistake that was made and began to rebuild.      

Filling Sandbags

I was in Bien Hoa, staying at the VIP Center on a sunny day in April 1970 when I took this snapshot.

There are four, young Vietnamese girls and a young boy in the picture filling sandbags.  Not much of a job but I'm sure the U.S. Army was paying good money to have it done.

Sandbags were a necessity in Vietnam.  As long as there was a sandbag between me and an incoming bullet or piece of shrapnel from a mortar round, I would be reasonably safe.  The idea was that the sand in the bag would catch the bullet or piece of shrapnel and prevent it from wounding or killing.
Sand bags were used in many areas in the rear.  At the VIP center, a wall of them surrounded the barracks where we slept.  Sandbags surrounded the beer hall, the outdoor movie theater, the shitters (bathrooms) and any other building where we spent any time.  On a firebase, sandbags protected the bunkers where we pulled guard and the hooches where we slept.  Of course, we did not always have sandbags to hide behind.  Out in the jungle for example, there were no sandbags.  But where it was possible to make use of them, we did.    

In Vietnam, it wasn't just the Vietnamese that filled sandbags either.  We all did it at some time or other.  It was just another one of those jobs that was unique to Vietnam like burning shit every morning.

By the way, if you look closely, it appears that the young boy is posing while grabbing the breast of the girl next to him.  I noticed it for the first time when I began work on the book.  Maybe he was trying to sell her services to me.  Well, it never went any further than the picture.    

Rubber Tree Plantation

In March 1970 we were out on patrol and walked into an abandoned rubber plantation.  The French must have left it behind during the First Indochina war in the early fifties.  There were no homes or remains of homes out there that I remember.

What did remain was rubber trees laid out in a very orderly rows.  Jungle plants were slowly but surely taking over.  I would bet in twenty years the plantation would be unrecognizable.

All of the trees were bleeding rubber to some extent.  Raw rubber doesn't look like what you might expect.  A sticky, sap-like substance similar to Elmer's Glue bled out through fissures in the bark.  It was so unusual, I gathered some of it into an envelope and send it home to the kids along with a letter.  I described what it was to my Mother and asked that she let the kids take it to school for a show-and-tell.  The raw rubber from those trees was the first souvenir I sent home from Vietnam.  Years later my Mother gave me the letter back with the samples of rubber inside.  I held on to it for a long time.

Recently I donated the letter, the samples of rubber and a number of other souvenirs to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.  I gave them chu loi leaflets found on the jungle floor, a piece of bamboo from the jungle that I had cut with a machete, a pair of ho chi min racing slicks that were removed from a Vietcong soldier who no longer needed them, parachutes left behind from white phosphorous flares, a jungle shirt, 1st Cavalry magazines, boonie hats, an example of the military money we used in Vietnam, and finally, a copy of my book 21 Months, 24 Days.  They were quite impressed.  I felt that if I didn't donate everything, it would all end up in a trash can when I died.

Maybe that is what the Smithsonian did with it when I stepped out the door.          

Looking Up from the Jungle Floor

Living in the jungle was a trying experience when we were out patrolling.  We had to stay out there for fifteen to twenty days at a time looking for the enemy.

We were constantly fighting off insects like leeches, termites, and mosquitoes.  Leaches were trying to get under my defenses all of the time during the rainy season.  When they beat you, I would feel a bite under my shirt, just over the top of my pants.  Then I would have to rip the bugger off my skin.  Termites would bite a hole through your air-mattress if you didn't spray for them properly and leave you lying directly on the jungle floor.  Mosquitoes were a constant annoyance.

There was no place to take a shower out in the jungle.  The only practical thing we could do with the amount of water we carried was brush your teeth and wash your face.  So after five days you noticed how bad you smelled.  The good news was after ten days the smell was no longer noticeable for some reason.


The food we ate out there in the jungle was no Sunday afternoon picnic.  We ate C-Rations for breakfast and lunch.  Breakfast might consist of a can of fruit cocktail and hot cocoa made in a canteen cup.  Lunch might be a cold can of beans & franks or ham slices.  A snack might be a can of crackers with cheese spread.  Supper was always a freeze-dried food packet that hot water revived into something edible.

I could always take a break from the life out there however by simply looking up.  The view was amazing.  There was the deep green from the foliage found in the jungle.  Between the greenery, you could see the blue sky above.  Sometimes the sky would be dappled with clouds.  Sometimes the sun would peak through.

It was peaceful looking up.  It took your mind off things like how weary I was or the anxiety I felt.  Looking up was a way to get a bit of my sanity back.

        

Cambodia Replacements

This snapshot was taken on a firebase in August, 1970.  There are five faces in this picture and the only name I know for sure is the guy on the right, Larry Hodge.  Larry was a ganja smoking buddy of mine.

The guy second in from the left is Michael Smith I believe.  I remember he was pulled into the Army soon after graduating from college.  He had been working as a teacher.  Mike was one of those older draftees.  Most of us were in our late teens or early twenties.  Mike had to be 25 or 26 years old; really old.  The names of the others I'm just not sure about.

What I do remember about all of them is they were replacements that joined us soon after the Cambodian Incursion.  We lost about half of our Company there.  When these guys arrived, I was one of the few remaining veterans in our platoon that had been through heavy fighting.  The rest were gone, either wounded, killed or had simply gone home because their tour was up.  Fighting had wound down to the point where it was almost non-existent.  And that is why in my eyes, I see an innocence in there faces that was long gone mine.

I was there squad leader and by the looks of them, we were getting ready to go out on patrol.  None of them have a pack on their back so we were not heading out overnight anywhere.  Those are smoke grenades strapped in front of Larry's waist.  We all carried smoke grenades to mark our location if necessary for helicopters, airplanes and jets.  Draped over both Larry and Mike's shoulders are 200 rounds of linked, M60 machine gun ammunition.  We all had to carry 200 rounds for the machine gunner.  Over the shoulders of the  two guys in the middle are bandoleers of M16 ammunition.  Everyone that carried an M16 had to carry twenty, eighteen round clips.

It was a sunny day and dry season had returned.  A good day for a walk in the jungle.

Baseball Equipment

Who would have thought that baseball equipment would be shipped to an infantry battalion that was located on a remote firebase in the Vietnam jungle.  No one.  Yet there it was and this snapshot is proof.

I don't remember how or why we ended up with the equipment. I'm sure it was a shipment gone bad.  Someone at Bien Hoa Air Force Base must have received the box of two-quart canteens that our supply sergeant was expecting and we received their baseball equipment.

As you can see, we took advantage.  That's my friend Rob pitching the ball.  Jerry, our machine gunner, is getting ready to  swing.  Not sure who that is playing catcher.  It was rainy season but the rain was holding off for us.  The ump said play ball, so we did.  Batting practice lasted about about twenty minutes then we put the equipment away.  Rain forced us off the field.  After that day, I never saw the equipment again.

While we were taking a break and playing a little baseball, serious business was going on around us.  The firebase was a few days old so there was lots of work to do filling sandbags and building bunkers.  A small bulldozer was still there clearing back vegetation and pushing up a dirt berm.    Other guys were on guard watching for enemy soldiers.  If Jerry had lofted one into the trees, I don't know who would have gone after it unless someone went with him with an M16 in hand.

Sometimes we had to let off a little steam by doing something irrational.  On that day, baseball was it.  

Bomb Crater from a Five-Hundred-Pounder

We were in Cambodia on patrol in early May 1970 and came across this bomb crater.  That's me standing near the bottom.  Considering that I'm 5'-8" tall, the hole had to be close to fifteen feet deep and maybe thirty-five feet across.  We all assumed that it was made by a five-hundred-pounder.

The official name for a five-hundred-pounder is the MK82 General Purpose Bomb.  The United States started building them in the fifties and General Dynamics still builds them today.  Then and now, they remain an unguided, dumb bomb that is controlled by gravity once released by an aircraft.

McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom jet fighters were used extensively in Cambodia back then to deliver five-hundred-pounders when needed.   What a site it was to watch one being dropped.  The jet would shriek by low to the jungle, release the bomb then climb as fast as it could to get out of range of the explosion.  To help delay the detonation, the bomb when released, would spin slowly, end-over-end, to slow its travel before hitting the ground .  Many times we were within five-hundred meters or a little more than one-quarter mile from the explosion.  The ground shook.  It felt like you were picked up an inch or two then dropped back down to earth.  Hot shrapnel from the bomb would rain down around us.  Of all the firepower I witnessed used on enemy soldiers, five-hundred-pounders had to be one of the worst.

Some might say that napalm was worse.  Napalm was less humane, delivering death that was slow and agonizing versus the instantaneous explosion of the bomb.  I thank God I never had to be on the receiving end of either of those weapons.  

First Book Signing

I had my first book signing yesterday and it was fun!  Why it took me this long to do one I have no idea.  No one pushing me hard enough to get off my duff I guess.

The chance to set one up came out of nowhere.  I was selling my first boat, a sixteen-foot fishing boat, and it wasn't going well.  So I decided to consign it with Bass Pro Shops in Foxboro, Massachusetts.  The Manager there commented about my Vietnam Veteran hat.  From there, one comment lead to another until he said, "Would you like to do a book signing?"  They were re-opening their in-store restaurant and he thought I should be part of the festivities.  I really had to think about it.  Two days later I called him and said I would.

I quickly had a sign made from an image of my book cover.  I ordered a bunch of books.  Using my laptop, I pulled together a slideshow of my Vietnam pictures.  I dug out my old poncho liner from forty-six years ago for a table cloth.  I was ready to go!

The fun part was talking to ordinary people about my experiences in Vietnam.  Some Vietnam Veterans dropped by and they welcomed me home.  I got to learn about there own Vietnam experiences.  It felt good comparing notes.  I spoke with a twenty-four year veteran of the police force about the parallels between their treatment now and our treatment then.  We formed a bond.  Some young kids shook my hand very solemnly with their parents encouragement.  All in all, the day was a success.  Not from a selling books point-of-view.  It was a beautiful day so it was a slow day at the store.  But I felt like a celebrity.  The restaurant gave me free lunch.  What more do you need?

I may just do another.  Especially if it lands in my lap like this one.          

M60 AVLB

One of the oddest sites ever for me in Vietnam was seeing this M60 AVLB.  I saw one for the first time while working with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment outside of Firebase Candy.  They were checking out roads in the area so we went along with them to provide support if they ran into enemy soldiers.  Have you figured out what it is yet?  Well the AVLB designation stands for Armored Vehicle Launched Bridge.

The base of the unit was an M60 Patton Tank.  What you see on top of the tank is a scissor-type bridge made of aluminum.  Unfolded and lying on the ground, the bridge was 63 feet long and 13 feet wide.  I read that a crew of two people operated the thing.  Its 12-cylinder diesel engine and 375 gallon fuel tank would take it 290 miles.  That's about 3/4 of a mile to a gallon.  It weighed over 50 tons but if needed, could do about 30 miles per hour.  I wouldn't want to cross the street in front of one if it was rumbling along at a quick pace.  Wouldn't want to test those brakes.

Even more amazing was watching the operator test the bridge.  The strength of those hydraulic pistons just blew me away.  In one fluid motion, the bridge lifted up and over from the rear while unfolding from the front until 60 feet of bridge was lying there on the ground fully extended and ready to use.  The whole operation was done in about two minutes.

We never actually used it as a bridge while with the 11th Armored Cav.  I never saw one again.  I've read that the Marines used them as well and still use them.  Not sure about the Army.  

        

M107, 175 mm Howitzer

Howitzer is an artillery piece that was used to bombard the enemy when something more powerful than rifle and machine gun fire was required.  Normally the smaller M102 Howitzer was used because of there convenience.  There were times however when more distance and power mattered.  Then the artillery battery would use the M107 Howitzer.

The M107, as you can see in the snapshot, was mounted on tank tracks so it could move itself around.  Even at this angle, the barrel looks long and it was.. 35 feet.  The bore was 175 mm or almost 7 inches.  It could shoot a 147 pound projectile about 25 miles.  The Army had a slightly larger 8 inch gun in its arsenal but it actually looked smaller than the M107 because the barrel was much shorter.  It took about six guys to load, aim and fire the weapon.  We affectionately called it a "one-seven-five".

This picture was taken on Firebase Candy, close to the Cambodian border.  The gun was used to soften up the enemy in Cambodia before we invaded in May 1970.  While I was on Candy, they pounded away with this gun day and night.  The bulldozer-like blade that you see driven into the ground at the rear, prevented the gun from being pushed backward when it recoiled.  The gun shook-the-earth every time it fired.  Sleeping was impossible if you were near the gun.  I was glad to leave the noise of it behind when we moved out into the jungle four days later.

How would you like to be on the receiving end of one of those projectiles you see in the foreground of the picture!  It always amazed me how enemy soldiers hung in there when blasted with all of the superior firepower we had.  All they had for weapons are what they carried.  No heavy artillery and no Air force.  How did they do it?  In the end, that's why they won the war.

Entrepreneurs

I spent a lot of time during my tour pulling guard at Firebase Buttons near Song Be.  Buttons was large enough that it required a dump area outside of the firebase to bury trash.
During the day, I would be assigned now and then to a dump detail.  The job was to take my M-16 rifle with me and guard the truck driver who was hauling trash to the dump.

At the dump, I would always see these young Vietnamese entrepreneurs like the two kids with the bike in the snapshot.  They always had something to sell.  There was nothing ever bashful about them.  They would be on you, like the other kid in the picture who is standing on the running board of the truck, asking for a sale as soon as you arrived.

We would pay them with the military money we all carried or with cigarettes.  Military money, by the way, had the look and feel of Monopoly money.  We were not allowed to carry or use American dollars in Vietnam.  It had something to do with the value of American dollars on the black market.  When I think about it, when I paid them with military money, what did they do with it?  How did they exchange it?  I have no idea.  When we paid with cigarettes, it was a very good deal because we could get packs of cigarettes for free.

The kids with the bike were selling cans of Coke.  If you look carefully, you can see they have a white foam cooler sitting just behind the seat.  I have no idea where they got the Coke or the ice.  What I can tell you is it was always freezing cold.  For me anyway, it was a rare event to have an ice cold Coke in Vietnam.  I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Coke from them, even though they charged a dollar a can.  That was a lot of money to pay for a coke back then.  Back in the States, you could buy it for a dime a can.  I didn't care,  It was that good!

Those two kids are probably worth a lot of money now.

Drinking Water

For many of us, we take it for granted that the water that comes out of the faucet at home is good quality.  It is good enough that you don't even think about it when you drink it.  Well that was not true in Vietnam, at least where I was stationed.

The first time I drank potable water, I gagged.  It was horrible.  Have you ever swallowed heavily chlorinated water from a swimming pool?  That is how our potable water tasted.  To drink the water, it had to be laced with a little Kool-Aid.  Everyone did it.  Just enough Kool-Aid to take the taste of chlorine away.  In the jungle, I carried a two quart canteen with Kool-Aid for drinking and used  other canteens with plain water for washing and cooking.

Late in my tour, I learned where the water was coming from.  The snapshot below will give you an idea of the quality of the water before it was treated.  It was chocolate brown in color and know one knew what living thing had pissed or shit in it recently.  So to make it drinkable, they used specialty trucks that contained a water treatment plant.  Back then I didn't know a damn thing about water treatment.  In my engineering career that followed the Army however, I learned enough to surmise what was going on.

The truck, in the picture above pumped water directly out of the river and into a settling chamber.  There, the larger solids that float or sink were removed.  The funnel-shaped tank on the right side was likely used for settling.  Then,  the water passed through a sand filter to remove the finer solids.   Water leaving the filter would have looked a hell of a lot better than where it was pumped from.  It would have been reasonably clear and look drinkable.  If you tried to drink the water however, you soon would be doubled over and puking from the bacteria that still thrived there.

So the final step was chlorination.  Chlorine bleach was metered into the water.  In the States where bleach is used for water purification, just enough is added to kill the bacteria and leave behind a very small residual for safety.  The residual is so small that you generally cannot taste it.  In Vietnam, they overdosed with chlorine because the system was not very sophisticated.  Better to be safe than sorry.

When my tour was up and I left Vietnam, I was thankful to leave behind a lot of nastiness and one of those nasty things was the drinking water.          

Fun In A War Zone

It didn't seem to matter to the South Vietnamese kids in this snapshot that their country was at war.  They were having fun even though their country was being ripped apart.  And that is how it should be.  Let kids be kids.

War should be something that adults alone worry about.  Why force children to dwell on war if they don't have to?  Let them have fun instead.  Kids were kids in South Vietnam.  Rich or poor, I found that kids were doing kid things for the most part.  Just like I did when I was a kid.

I expect that the lives of North Vietnamese kids were a lot different back then.  My impression was the Communist government of North Vietnam didn't allow their kids to have fun.  Instead, they were indoctrinated in the ways and beliefs of Communism starting at a very early age.  They turned kids into little soldiers.  The same thing is happening today in many Muslim countries.  Kids are immersed in religion at a very early age.  As part of their religious training, they are taught to hate.  I don't think anyone should be taught to hate.  Let kids find out about hate on their own if they must.

The world is a better place where kids can be kids.

Pet Monkey

The monkey that you see on my shoulder belonged to a guy who worked in artillery on Firebase Buttons.  He was able to keep a pet because he worked on a firebase full-time.  I was always on the move so I couldn't have a pet even if I wanted one.  I took these snapshots because it was rare to see a pet over there.

  What is it about human beings that drives at least some of us to want a pet?  With dogs, I can understand.  They consistently give back much more love and friendliness than they receive.  Cats are different.  As kittens, you can have fun with them by dangling a a piece of yarn in front of their nose .  Once older however, they just do their own thing.  I don't understand the attraction in owning a cat.


At the time, I thought it might be cool to own a pet monkey.  This one was young so it felt like I was holding a baby in a way.  It didn't mind at all being held.  It was playful.  I've read since that when monkey's are young, they are at their best from a human point-of-view.

The trouble starts when they are older.  Monkeys do not mature like human children do but remain permanent toddlers.  If unhappy, they can be very difficult to deal with.  And making them happy is not easy.  Monkeys need a lot of room to roam.  Allowing a monkey to roam your house however may not work because it will be into everything.  They need social interaction with other monkeys so one may not be enough.  They are not as clean as you might expect.  Monkeys cannot be toilet trained.  Worse, they have been known to pick up and toss their shit around and paint with their urine.  Monkeys have there own specialized diseases that can be passed on to humans.  Finally, you must keep in mind that monkeys cannot be domesticated.  They will grow up into a wild animal that can be very aggressive and bite.

Sounds pleasant.  I hope the owner didn't try to take the monkey home with him.

Catholic Church

Early in my tour, I was assigned to pull guard at night for a few weeks  at Bien Hoa Air Base .  During the day, I'd sleep in the morning and wander around the village of Bien Hoa in the afternoon.  On one of those days, I ran across a small Catholic Church.

I assumed it was Catholic because it had a statue of Mary on the property.  I wasn't sure though because the church had colored banners draped across the steeple and around the property.  I could not figure out what the banners signified.  I'd never seen banners like that on any catholic church at home.  The door to the church was locked and there was no one there to question.  What I can say for sure is the church was the first place in Vietnam where I felt a sense of peace.

Vietnam had me feeling uneasy so far.  I hadn't been there long enough to experience combat.  But I knew it was coming.  Fear of the unknown left a lump in my stomach that would not easily go away.  But standing in the presence of that little church calmed me.  It took my mind off things.  It didn't have that sense of awe that you feel when you are standing inside of a large cathedral.  But it was enough.

I wonder now who the church had served back then.  Was it the French?  Old french homes were in the area.  You can see one behind the church and another in the background behind the statue of Mary.  Or did the church serve the Vietnamese people?  I tried to find the church on the internet recently to see if it still existed.  No luck.    

Former French Homes

In the early 1900's when I suspect these French homes were built, the French colonial government was in full swing.  French high society lived in these homes.  They were either linked to the government or they owned a rubber plantations or maybe they owned paddy fields for growing rice.  World War II was the beginning of the end for them when the Japanese threw the French out of Vietnam during the war.  By 1970, when I arrived, the French were long gone.

You can see that the fences hadn't had paint in a long time.  That bird house in the snapshot below must have cost a fortune to build in its time.  It was wasting away.  I noticed that windows were open in a few places.  I believe that caretakers were living in the homes.

I checked on the internet and could not find any indication that these houses still exist.  It wouldn't surprise me if they were torn down by the communists from North Vietnam when they took over the South in 1975.  They wouldn't have liked them because they represented a former colonial power who in their mind lived high while the population suffered.  Besides, who could have afforded to fix them up and live in them again.

It amazes me how quickly a country can change as conquerors come and go.  What did this location look like before the French and what must it look like now.  Maybe some day I will get over there and see for myself.    

First Team Academy

The First Team Academy is where the First Cavalry Division sent recruits who had just arrived from the United States.  A busload of us  spent a week there training in the hot sun as a way to get used to the climate.

I like it there for a lot of reasons.  I felt like I was finally moving forward rather than hanging around waiting to be assigned to a unit.  The conditions were better.  We received three good meals a day and slept on a bed that felt reasonably clean.  We learned a lot more about how to fight in the villages and jungles of Vietnam.  The highlight of the place however, was the repelling tower that you can see in the snapshot below.

Repelling was the art of leaping from a hovering helicopter to the ground below by sliding down a rope using a D-Ring as a brake.  Instructors told us that we may have to repel from a helicopter if the pilot could not set down on the jungle floor for some reason.

To practice, they had us repel from the platform you can see at the top, down forty feet to the ground below.  We first learned how to belt ourselves into a body harness then connect a rope to the harness with a D-Ring.  To ensure that the training would be a hair-raising experience, instructors forced us to jump of the end of the platform with enough slack in the rope to free-fall about ten feet before being jerked to a stop.  Then we lowered ourselves to the ground using the D-Ring.

Throwing yourself of the platform rather than crawling over the edge was meant to be part confidence building, part sadistic.  The fear I felt before the leap quickly changed to a feeling of pride as I lowered myself to the ground.

Time went by quickly at First Team Academy because they kept us busy.  Much too soon, we received our orders for the next leg of our tour of Vietnam.  

Bien Hoa Air Base

The French built Bien Hoa Air Base in 1955 for the First Indonesian War.  The United States shared the Air Base with the South Vietnamese during the Vietnam War that followed.  So when I landed in a Freedom Bird at Bien Hoa Air Base in January 1970, the base had been in existence for fifteen years and it showed. (Freedom Bird was the name given to the commercial jets that carried American soldiers to Vietnam from the United States.)

I was shocked how large the base was and how ordinary it felt.  It could have been any other Air Base in the United States.  Stepping off the plane in Vietnam for the first time and then seeing that sign, left me feeling that maybe Vietnam was not going to be so bad after all.

During my tour in Vietnam, I returned to Bien Hoa Air Base many times.  Every few months we flew to Bien Hoa when traveling to in-country R&R (Rest & Recuperation) sites for a three-day break from the action.  When I went on a one-week R&R to Japan and then months later to Australia, I flew into Bien Hoa.  I took combat leadership training in the Bien Hoa area.  Bien Hoa was a destination for me that always meant that I would be out of the fighting for awhile.

That blurry snapshot to the right is Bien Hoa Air Base taken from the air.  I took the picture at the end of my tour.  I had been released from the First Cavalry Division and had my orders to return to the United States.  I waited three agonizing days to get a seat on a Freedom Bird.  They bused me and a plane-load of others to a set of stairs at Bien Hoa Air Base that lead up to the open door of the airplane.  I was lucky enough to to get a window seat.  We taxied to the runway, took off, and then banked right.  As we turned, I could see Bien Hoa Air Base below.  Leaning toward the window and looking down thorough my Instamatic Camera view finder, I snapped my last picture of Vietnam.  It felt like I had just closed a door.  I knew I would never have to come back again.  It felt so good to take that picture.

Jungle Landing Zone

Here we are approaching a landing zone in the jungle.  The military term for this kind of action was a Combat Assault.  Anxiety would normally be cranked up but not this time because we were second-in.  That is why I risked having my camera out.

The door gunner on my right has his M60 machine gun up and ready to use.  You never know what will happen when landing in the jungle.  Ammunition for the M60 was feed from the metal box you can see just below the gun.  See that red ring on the front of the box?  That is the top of a smoke grenade.  We used smoke grenades in colors like red, yellow, blue and green to mark landing areas in the jungle.

In the snapshot below you can see an officer and a sergeant having a discussion on the jungle floor.  They were on the first-in helicopter.    They are deciding how to set up the perimeter.  We always set up a perimeter around the landing zone to protect the helicopters that were still landing.    That is my knee in the lower right corner of the picture.

Approaching a landing zone in the jungle by helicopter was about the most dangerous thing we did.  We were like sitting ducks.  For the enemy, we were a clear and open shot.  We would fly slower and slower as we dropped in so we were an easy target to hit.  If they started firing at us, we couldn't accelerate out of there very quickly.  The reaction time of a Huey helicopter is slow.  If the pilot was hit, the helicopter could easily lose control and spin into the ground.  So with all of those possibilities, it was a tremendous relief when you jumped off, ran to the perimeter, got down on your knees, faced your M16 toward the jungle and waited for the remaining helicopters to land.

If the whole company was landing, there would be about three waves of five helicopters coming in one after another.  I can't imagine what the enemy thought if they were within a kilometer of a landing site.  All that noise disrupting their quiet space.  If I was them I would have have been tempted to run in another direction.  

Traveling By Huey

Two similar snapshots.  I'm sitting on the floor in the doorway of a Huey helicopter.  Across the way is another Huey flying along with us in formation.  Usually there were five of them flying together.

If you look closely at the other helicopter, you can see someone sitting in the same place I am sitting with his feet dangling in the breeze.  He is a lot closer to us than it looks.  I could almost yell hello to him over there if it wasn't for the noise from the helicopter's jet engine and the blades beating the air above.

 On my right, is an M60 machine gun.  It is held in place by a gun mount that allows it to be pointed in any direction.  Linked 7.62 mm ammunition with tracer rounds are fed into the side of the gun and ready to shoot.  The door gunner sits above and to my right on a webbed chair behind the gun.  He is relaxed and I am relaxed for the moment.  We are both looking out at the landscape below.  We cannot get in trouble when we are cruising along at 80 knots and 2,000 feet in the air.  Enemy soldiers are not going to shoot at us this high up.  They will wait until we drop lower where we are a much larger, slower, and easier target to hit.

When we traveled like this, we were either on the way in or on the way out of the jungle.  If on the way in, we would be enjoying the view while at the same time wondering what the landing zone in the jungle will be like.  Most times, the landing zone would not have enemy soldiers waiting there for us.  The reason was they had no idea what particular open spot in the jungle the helicopter would choose to drop us in.  They didn't have enough soldiers to cover every clearing out there so most times a landing in the jungle was uneventful.

If we had just been picked up from the jungle, we would be feeling relieved.  We knew we were heading to hot showers, hot meals and clean clothes on a firebase somewhere.  So we just sat back and enjoyed the ride.  Yes, we would have to pull guard in the evening on a firebase, but the days would be spent relaxing and reading for the most part.  We could wind down a bit.  As you might imagine, I enjoyed leaving the jungle a hell of a lot more than returning to it.    

Huey Helicopters

The Bell UH-1 Iroquois, widely known as a Huey by the Grunts in Vietnam, were primarily used when traveling to and from the jungle.  We traveled in them so much that we all earned Air Medals.

The Army had other uses for Huey's as well.  They used them as medivac helicopters,  They would swoop in and extract wounded soldiers from the jungle then deliver them to a hospital.   They installed all kinds of weaponry on them, such as mini-guns and rocket pods, then used them as attack helicopters.  They were used to supply us with food and water every three days while we were in the jungle.

It didn't surprise me when I read that the Army used over 7,000 of them in Vietnam.  What first impressed me about them was a Huey was powered by a turbojet engine.  Until I saw my first Huey, I thought jet engines were all used to push an aircraft like a rocket.

As a troop carrier, it was amazing how many guys they could transport.  The crew consisted of a pilot, co-pilot and two door gunners.  The door-gunners sat on each side toward the rear.  If you look closely at the picture above, you can make out the M60 machine gun they used.  There was an M60 on each side.  Behind the pilots was space for about eight soldiers, each with their own pack and weapons.  When you consider that a pack alone weighed about eighty pounds, it is hard to believe that a Huey could actually fly with all of that weight.

To help save weight and simplify getting in and out of a Huey, the doors were removed.  Everywhere we flew, we flew with no doors.  A prized place to sit was on the floor where the door would normally be with your feet dangling out over the struts.  We held on for dear life, believe me, but it was a rush.  You probably think that it was a scary experience flying like that.  When we would first take off, I would feel a flutter in my stomach as we passed low over the jungle.  But once we were up over a thousand feet, the flutter disappeared and I enjoyed looking down at all the greenery that passed below.




 

Having Some Fun

My book, "21 Months, 24 Days" has a whole chapter about these snapshots.  What you are looking at is the bottom of a Huey helicopter with three soldiers dangling from it.  I was one of those soldiers!  That day was maybe the craziest day of my life.

When we are young, a lot of us take risks on a dare or just for the thrill of it.  Some take a day and learn to parachute from an airplane.  Some climb rock walls hundreds of feet high.  Some take dangerous rafting trips on wild river rapids.  Others bungee jump from bridges.  In this case, I didn't get pushed into it on a dare.  Nor did I do it because of the thrill.  I did it because I thought I was going to die anyway over there so why not.

What you see in the picture was part of a fifteen minute thrill ride.  The ride began when we stepped into the harness.  The harness was formed into a simple loop that we tucked under our ass like a kids swing.  The helicopter was hovering one-hundred feet over our head, waiting for our signal.  When ready, with nothing more than a thumbs-up, the pilot began to rise straight up until we were about 750 feet in the air.  Then he tipped the main rotor forward while increasing the pitch of the blades and we found ourselves accelerating forward while continuing to rise.  Before you knew it, we were flying at an elevation of 1,500 feet and traveling forward at 80 knots.  Air resistance swung us back behind the helicopter so when you looked up, the helicopter was actually out in front of us.  In that position we cruised over the countryside.  Thankfully, we were out of range from enemy rifle fire below.  Too soon, we were back to where the ride began and then lowered to the ground.

Well that is enough about what we did.  You will have to read the book to learn why the ride was offered to us in the first place.  

South Vietnamese Soldiers

South Vietnamese soldiers always looked so perfectly dressed when I saw them, which was not often.  They had nice uniforms and were clean looking.  Those jungle pants you see in the snapshot have been tailored.  They were shortened and narrowed to remove the bulkiness.  Notice the colorful patches they wore?  We would never have those on our uniforms.  Too bright, too much of an eye-catcher.  You could get shot more easily by displaying flashy patches like they wore.

I always seemed to run into South Vietnamese soldiers on a large firebase.  Sometimes I would see them in Bien Hoa.  I never saw them on the small, temporary firebases that were built in the jungle.  I never saw them out in the jungle where we spent most of our time.  To be fair, they probably did fight for their country in the same places we fought.  I just didn't witness it..

If I sound resentful, you are right.  In my humble opinion, American soldiers did all of the heavy lifting in Vietnam.  When there was a tough job to do, we did it.  When there was heavy fighting going on, we were in the middle of it.  It seemed that our blood was being spilled more than theirs.  I always wondered why, with no clear answers.  Worse, I was never convinced that the South Vietnamese appreciated what we were doing for them.  I never felt it in my dealings with them.

In 1975 we left Vietnam.  Not long after the sound of the last helicopter faded away, the North Vietnamese Army swarmed into Saigon and it was over.  The South Vietnamese Army collapsed.  I saw a picture recently of what looked like hundreds of South Vietnamese Army boots scattered in the middle of a street.  They abandoned them so the North Vietnamese couldn't identify them as soldiers.  All that American money and blood and for what?  If you look at Afghanistan and Iraq today, the same thing happened.  We never seem to learn.          

Hooch

My last month in Vietnam, I no longer had to go on search & destroy missions in the jungle.  The reason was I was "short".  Being short was when you had very little time left on your one-year tour.  It was a time when your thoughts were on getting the hell out of Vietnam and not on the job at hand.  It was a time when you were paranoid that you would be wounded or killed after making it this far.  So Army brass assigned short people to a temporary rear job until their time was up.

I was assigned to a firebase where I was given the job of unloading and delivering supplies from helicopters.  It was heaven.  I had my own "hooch" to sleep in at night.  The snapshot you see is my hooch.

I can't tell where the name hooch came from but I can tell you what it consisted of.  A hooch in a structural sense was made from a piece of half-round steel culvert about eight feet long and six feet wide.  A layer of sand bags covered the steel for protection at night from mortar rounds.  The green material you see at the entrance is mosquito netting that I would drape down at night.  Just behind the netting is a poncho liner that was draped over the netting if it was raining outside.  Inside was a canvas cot that kept me above the rats and insects that wondered in at night.  Living in a hooch was similar I would imagine to living in a cave.

In the lower left corner of the entrance, you can see a black, plastic, jerrycan.  It held five gallons of water.  I would fill the can with water every morning after breakfast so the sun would heat it during the day.  In the evening, I used the hot water to fill a canvas shower bucket and take my shower.  Wow, it was great.  The wooden skid was my front porch.  I could sit on the edge of the cot, rest my feet on the skid and read a book or roll a joint.  Just inside the door was the rucksack I had used when I was heading out to the jungle.  Now it was sitting there almost empty and unused.  I still kept ammunition for my M16 rifle and a few frag grenades in it but that was about it.

You cannot imagine what a relief and a pleasure it was to get out of the jungle and have my own private hooch to live in.                

Firebase Entertainment

Here I am posing behind a rock-n-roll band made up of American soldiers.  You can see the audience sitting on the ground out in front of the band.

You are probably wondering how a band like this one was even formed.  After all, we were in a combat zone.  Well, musicians are very dedicated to their craft.  I know, ...my son is a professional musician.  Even in Vietnam, musicians found a way to get instruments and play.  I'm sure they were based in the rear somewhere, working for a support group.  Infantry soldiers could never have pulled this off.   I'll bet they started by getting together after work to jam.  What began as jamming sessions built into a reasonable repertoire of popular rock-n-roll tunes.  Others began to stop by and listen to them.  A few supply sergeants liked what they heard so found a way to get them the amplifiers, drum kit and keyboard they needed.  Before the group knew it, they had created for themselves a part-time job traveling between firebases playing for grunts.

I never did see Bob Hope while I was in Vietnam.  He played the big Air Force Bases and Navy Bases, ..not the small firebases where I spent some of my time.  So what we got was Vietnamese rock-n-roll bands when we were at the VIP Center in Bien Hoa.  This was the first and only time a band actually came to us.  It was nice!  I remember thinking though that they were like sitting-ducks up there on those storage boxes.  Vietcong soldiers could have easily hit them with rifle fire.  Well this time anyway, it didn't happen.

Sikorsky Skycrane

Whenever heavy lifting was required in the jungle, the Sikorsky Skycrane was there to get it done.  The Army's official name for the flying work horse was the CH-54 Tarhe.  We simply called it a Skycrane.

A Skycrane had a normal crew of three people; pilot, co-pilot and rear- facing observer.  It could pick up and transport 20,000 pounds.  That's  about the same weight as four Chevy Silverado 1500 pickup trucks.  The helicopter was 70 feet long, almost 19 feet tall and the six main rotors had an overall diameter of 72 feet.  To give you a sense of scale, the rotor blade diameter is about the same size as two tennis courts, side-by-side.  I heard they had a passenger compartment that could be fastened to its underside but I never saw one.  It had a range of about 200 miles on a full load of jet fuel which didn't seem very far.

Small bulldozers were used to build firebases in the jungle.  The only aircraft capable of picking one up and dropping it off was a Skycrane.  They carried even larger bulldozers sometimes, but in pieces.  Mechanics would remove the tracks from a bulldozer, transport them as a separate load then reassemble at the firebase.  I also saw Skycranes pick up and transport 155 mm howitzers to a firebase along with a load of ammunition.

It was an amazing site seeing a Skycrane land when there was a lot of weight under it.  During the dry season, an enormous cloud of dust would lift in the air as it slowed to a hover then began to touch down.  They wouldn't let us near the landing zone because the wash from the main rotors was so strong, you could get blown over or pelted with rocks and dust.  Once on the ground, they looked like a giant praying mantis.  They were totally vulnerable when landing if fired upon by the enemy.  They didn't have any firepower at all to fight back that I remember

It would have been neat to fly in one but I never had the chance.  

Kids from Song Be

 This snapshot was taken at Firebase Buttons near Song Be in April, 1970.  The kid on the left is holding a knife of some sort to the temple of the kid next to him.  He was trying to be funny though it didn't seem that funny to me.  Why was a kid that age carrying a knife; I don't know.  They are all wearing cast-off or stolen U.S. Army clothes to some extent.  The kid on the pointed end of the knife is wearing an Army jungle shirt that is too large for him and some old jungle boots.  All of them seem to be wearing Army hats.  You can see that their clothes are filthy.  I'm sure that what they were wearing is all they had.  If you look at their faces , you see that they are street-smart.  

I wonder why those kids were there in the middle of the day.  Why were they not in school?  It looks like they were filling sandbags.  At least that is what they are sitting on.  We used to pay the Vietnamese to fill sandbags.  Sandbags were used everywhere on a firebase for protection.  Better that a sandbag catches a bullet or piece of shrapnel than a US soldier.  

What a world of difference between these kids and those I saw earlier in Bien Hoa. In Bien Hoa, the kids were innocent looking, well groomed and respectful.  Not so with these kids.  Song Be was much closer to the fighting.  Maybe that was the difference.  I wonder what became of kids like them?  

Combat Veteran

This snapshot was taken at least five months into my tour in Vietnam.  I can tell because those are sergeant stripes on my left shoulder just below the 1st Cavalry patch.  I made sergeant in May, 1970.  You can just make out what is a silver, beaded chain around my neck.  The chain held my my dog-tags.  They were framed in plastic to keep them from rattling.  We had to be out in the jungle on patrol for at least ten days because my hair is plastered down from wearing my steel pot (helmet).  Out of site on the jungle floor below me are my pack, rifle, and steel pot.  We were resting.

The picture was taken by a friend with his Yashica, 35mm camera.  As you can see, he used black and white film.  What is most striking about the picture to me is the expression on my face.  This is not the face of an FNG (F-in New Guy).  Instead, what you see is a battle-hardened veteran.  I look sure of myself, as if I had seen it all out there.  I felt in control, determined, and unafraid.  I was about a month away from being wounded.  The shock of getting hit by shrapnel erased some of that confidence you see.

My grandson Nate, who is five years old, would tell you I have a boo-boo-face.  I show him this face now and then though it's not my intent.  It used to scare him because he thought maybe he had done something wrong.  I am not even aware that I do it or why.  But I do believe it is a remnant of  Vietnam that has stayed with me.
    
Behind me is a bamboo forest.  The bamboo is similar in size to four pieces I had cut with a machete and shipped home a month or two before.  I converted one piece into a pencil holder.  You can see the pens and pencils peaking out over the top.  If you look closely you can see the cut marks from the machete on top.  It was very easy to cut bamboo with a swipe of a machete back then because it was alive and saturated with water.  Now it is dead, dried out and hard-as-a-rock.

A Long Way from Home

After completing my first week in basic training, I felt like going AWOL and heading home but didn't.  In advanced infantry, I began to realize the trouble I was in as an infantry soldier and considered running, but didn't.  My second day at Oakland Army Base on my way to Vietnam, I thought about running to Canada, but didn't.  The idea of running away was never a serious consideration until I was already in Vietnam.  And then I saw this sign in Bien Hoa.

The sign drove home the point that even if I wanted to run away, I couldn't anymore.  Vietnam is a long way from the United States.  Vietnam in fact is almost half way around the world.  The only way I would get home again was to survive the next twelve months.  Just like the "Going Home" sign I told you about before, it hurt to look at this one as well.  The sign left an uneasy feeling in my gut that stayed with me for a while.      

I have seen many signs like this one since.  There is one in Maine that I am especially fond of.  You will find this sign in the town of Lynchville, on the corner where Route 5 meets Route 35.  Hundreds of years before this sign went up, the original founders of Maine had named their small towns after cities and countries found in Europe and beyond.  They did it for the fun of it.  You had to have a sense of humor to survive those Maine winters.  Lynchville's Chamber of Commerce kept the joke going by having a sign built with all of those unusual town names.  They set it in place over fifty years ago.  

Since then that sign in Maine has become famous.  Bus tours that pass through the area include a drive-by of the sign.  The sign was even kidnapped once and taken to Grand Central Station in New York.  If you look around, you may find other signs like it.  The state of Maine has more of them I know.  Yup, that sign is comical all right.

Though the builders of that sign in Bien Hoa were trying to have some fun in the same way they did with the sign in Maine, it wasn't very funny to me.