The "Going Home" Sign

I arrived at Bien Hoa Air Force Base in Vietnam in mid January 1970.  I was dog-tired.  I had been flying in a packed airplane for the last twenty hours.  I was feeling uneasy about Vietnam and the mess I thought I was in.  

Outside the terminal, they packed us in buses and drove us over to a place called the 90th Replacement Battalion.  The 90th Replacement Battalion was where military personnel were processed-in as well as processed-out of Vietnam.  As I stepped down from the bus, someone pointed me in the direction of the administration building.  There, for the first time I saw the sign, GOING HOME?, REPORT HERE, USA BOUND.

The sign overwhelmed me with a mix of fear and homesickness.  I realized then that I was staring at a full year of Vietnam in front of me.  I would not be seeing family and friends for a year.  And there was a chance I would never see them again.  For other soldiers however, who were processing-out, they must have stared at that same sign and just knew there time was up.  They were heading home and I was not.  I envied them.  It was painful looking at that sign.

Well I made it out of the 90th Replacement Battalion in three days.  Then I spent a week in a training area with the 1st Cavalry Division.  They worked us in the hot sun so we would not collapse from the heat when we were transferred to our unit.  From there I pulled guard for a few weeks at the Air Force Base.  Finally, they shipped me to my unit where I began work as an infantry soldier.  With over four weeks under my belt, the thought of that sign was fading.  There was just too many other things to think about.

The year passed slowly in some ways and quickly in others.  The pain of the day-to-day slog of an infantry soldier made time drag.  Yet somehow, the year ticked away day by day, week by week and month by month.  That last month just crawled almost to a stop.  Then I was on a plane heading back to Bein Hoa Air Force Base for the last time.  From there I caught a bus over to the 90th Replacement Battalion.  This time I was processing out of Vietnam.  As I got off the bus, that same sign I had seen almost a  year before, hit me with a rush of warmth and happiness when I read again, GOING HOME?, REPORT HERE, USA BOUND.  How could one sign have such opposite emotions linked to it!

In 1975, the war ended and I'm sure that sign was torn down and burned by the communist North Vietnamese Army.  It's too bad.  I have been looking for a good reason to go back to Vietnam and I can't seem to come up with one.  Maybe if that sign still existed, I would go back to Vietnam just to see it again.