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.     

Kids from Bien Hoa

My first few weeks in Vietnam, they had me pulling guard all night at Bien Hoa Air Force Base.  I had the days to myself.  That job was a lot better than I thought it was at the time.  I had to spend some time in the jungle hunting Vietcong soldiers for a while before I could appreciate those early weeks.  I would sleep in the morning and wander around the local town of Bien Hoa in the afternoon.  While wandering, I always seemed to run into kids along the way.

They were always well dressed, clean and healthy looking.  The war must have been treating their parents well.  They probably had good jobs working for the American military somewhere.  It would be much later in my tour when I would see kids that were not so well off.  They were in places much closer to the front lines.  Bien Hoa was far from the front lines, far from the fighting when I was there.  There was no sense of war there at all.

It always surprised me how friendly the kids were when compared with kids today.  They would readily allow me to take their picture.  They were not afraid at all of American soldiers. Now that I'm retired, I walk a lot in the early morning so I see kids waiting for the bus.   Say hello to a child today and they are likely to turn away from you or even run.  They are far from friendly.  It's not natural for a kid to act that way.  They must get it from their parents.  Parents teach them to avoid strangers because they fear for their children.  Maybe there is a good reason for it, I don't know.  I do know that when I grew up it wasn't like that.

Another thing about those kids in Bien Hoa is they didn't come across as street smart to me.  They didn't try to hustle you for something.  They were not beggars looking for food or a piece of chocolate.  They didn't have an attitude.  What stood about them was they were quiet and respectful.

You are probably wondering why I took their pictures in the first place.  One reason is they were Vietnamese and the Vietnamese were new to me.  More importantly though, I was looking for something less threatening in a strange world and found it in them.