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.