Combat Leaders Course

In April 1970, we were out patrolling the jungle when I received a pleasant surprise.  I had been chosen to attend a ten-day Combat Leadership course in Bien Hoa.  The Army needed more NCOs (non commissioned officers) in Vietnam.  There were not enough sergeants to carry the workload.  I was flattered that they picked me.  After all, I was a new guy with just a few months experience in the jungle

The course was offered at the VIP Center.  A helicopter picked me in a clearing close by and took me to FSB Buttons.  Then, I boarded an Air Force plane for Bien Hoa AFB.  From there it was a bus ride over to the VIP Center.

The course began with a rehash of the military strategy and squad level tactics training I had received in Advanced Infantry.  One of the ways they taught us how to lead was learning about personality types and the best way to work with each of them.  They wanted to make sure we knew something about how to deal with people problems.  The rest of the time they worked on building up our confidence so we would be ready when leadership was thrust upon us.

I become a fire team leader when I returned to the field.  I was promoted to Sergeant soon after.  The most important thing about the ten-day course in my mind however was I slept on a bed, ate three hot meals a day and drank cold beer every night.

Vietnamese Civilians Getting By

In late January 1970, I was pulling guard at Bien Hoa AFB for a few weeks.  I worked at night and slept during the day.  When I had some time, I walked around the Village of Bien Hoa.  There, I took this snap shot of living conditions that at least some Vietnamese civilians had to endure.

As you can see, the houses were not much better than shacks.  The outside skin is nothing more than scraps of plywood found who knows where.  A barbwire fence kept the inhabitants from getting out or others from getting in; I was not quite sure which.

Their wash was hung out on a clothesline in the same way my mother would have done it back in the states.  To the right of the clothes you can see a wooden swing for two.  It seemed odd to find a swing in a yard that looked like this one.  If you look carefully, you can see a young women in a green top and white pants in the middle of the picture.  She is talking to a neighbor.

Each shack appears to have a television antenna.  Back then in Vietnam and now, when things are not going so well in your life, watching television is a way to temporarily escape from it all.

House Damaged in War

It may have been late March 1970 when I saw this closed-up, French-built home.  I took the snapshot because it was peppered with bullet holes.  It was like someone had aimed a machine gun at the house and then sprayed it like a water hose.  It made me wonder what happened.

I suspect the house was shot up during the Tet Offensive in January 1968, a little more than two years before I arrived in Vietnam.  Marauding North Vietnamese soldiers probably opened up on the house for spite on their way to a  Saigon target.

The Tet Offensive was one of the largest military operations performed by the North Vietnamese.  They hit more than 100 town and city targets all over the country simultaneously.  It rattled American and South Vietnamese forces who were taken by surprise.  They quickly recovered however and drove the North Vietnamese back.  The offensive ended up being a major defeat for the North Vietnamese.

 Well, whoever lived in the house during that onslaught in 1968, if that is what happened to the house,  did not want to spend another day there by the looks of the unkept grounds and the shuttered windows.

Gas Station in Saigon

I was in a bus on my way to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon when I snapped this picture of an Esso Gasoline Station. A bunch of us were heading out on an R&R trip to Tokyo, Japan.

One thing that caught my eye was all of the motor scooters that were there at the time.  Vietnam's transportation system back then was some version of a motor scooter.  Most were two-wheeled scooters like what you see in this gas station.  They also had trucks and buses that were built on a motor scooter base.  When I think about it, I really don't remember seeing many four-wheeled vehicles at all in Vietnam other than military vehicles.

Also, look at the arrangement of all of those gas pumps.  There are pumps out front that could serve larger vehicles but behind those pumps, close to the building are gas pumps that obviously were dedicated to motor scooters only.

In revisiting this picture, I realized that I haven't seen an Esso sign for a long time.  In New England anyway, they have been replaced with Exxon signs.  Finally, the "May May" sign on the building in the background translated into Vietnamese means "Sewing Machine".  Singer Sewing Machine, a French company, was big in Vietnam until the communist government swallowed them up in 1977.  Castro did a similar thing with private companies in Cuba.

And with that, I have run out of things to say about this gas station.