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.

  

 

Skipper and Zeek in the Hole

Skipper and Zeak have something to smile about because this shot was taken out in the jungle in September 1970.  The Cambodian Incursion had been over for two to three months and the dry season was in full swing.  There was nothing at all to smile about while fighting in Cambodia during the rainy season.

They are standing in the hole.  Our squad had to dig one every night.  The hole was a remnant of trench warfare in World War I.  If we were attacked during the night, the hole is where the squad fought from.

We set up the M60 machine gun at the hole aiming toward the jungle.  All of  the claymore mine clackers were centralized there.  A clacker was the firing device that when squeezed would cause a claymore to explode toward the enemy.  Wire connected the clacker to a blasting cap that was set into the top of the claymore.

The hole was supposed to be large enough to hold a squad of eight to ten men.  By the looks of it, Skipper and Zeek would barely fit.  The hole was never big enough.  The reason was we all had to dig a layer and every layer that followed the first one somehow got smaller and smaller and smaller.  We were lucky that we never were attacked in the jungle where we had to defend ourselves from the hole.
Skipper and Zeak were Vietnam nicknames.  We all had them.  Skipper's real name is Henry Vanbrink and Zeek's real name is Ismeal Figeroa.  At our 2015 reunion, I learned that Henry was no longer with us.  He died in 2006.  It saddens me that Skipper lived in the next state over from me for 36 years and I never knew.  I would have dropped by to say hello.

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Delivering Water to the Jungle

When patrolling the jungle for typically two weeks at a time, every three days, we had food and water delivered.  The morning of the drop, we would look for a clearing in the jungle large enough for a Huey helicopter to settle down in.  This snapshot was taken during one of those deliveries.

In the background you can see standing bamboo.  In the lower right corner of the picture you can see bamboo lying on its side.  So on this particular day, we cut an opening in the bamboo forest large enough to drop in the helicopter.  There were no natural clearings close to our location.

Machetes were used for cutting bamboo and we made quick work of it.  We likely had the clearing opened up within an hour.  When a bamboo stalk is alive, it is soft and easy to cut with a swipe or two of a machete.  If it is dried out, it gets so hard, that the only practical way to cut it is with a power saw.

Leaning out of the helicopter with his foot on the strut is a door gunner.  There was another door gunner on the other side.  The door gunner is helping guide the pilot down by telling him how close he was to the ground.  The pilot is concentrating on staying away from the edge of the bamboo forest with his main rotor and tail rotor.  Those five gallon jerry cans you see on the floor of the helicopter are filled with water.

We had the entire drop zone surrounded with M16 rifles ready.  You can see how vulnerable that helicopter was if a Vietcong soldier could get close enough to shoot at the pilot or door gunner.  They may have lived in better quarters than we did but they paid for it when exposing themselves like this.      

Keeping My Wallet Dry

This snapshot of me was taken soon after I had walked through a stream.  I am wet from the waist down but still willing to smile for a picture.

When we had to move from point A to B in the jungle, if a stream or a swamp was in the way we simply walked through it.  There was no thought about what could be done to make the crossing a dry one.  The safer choice in fact was always taking the worst path.

Once on the other side I simply drip dried.  I would check for leaches to make sure one or more of them was not attached to my bare skin somewhere.  Our boots had breathing holes close to the sole so they self-drained the water captured there.

That is M60 machine gun ammunition wrapped around my waist.  Sometimes I carried it that way, sometimes I carried it across my shoulders and other times I simply carried the box the ammunition came in.  You can see a one-quart canteen of water fastened on my waist.  There was no thought about getting those things wet.

Wrapped in plastic in my right hand is my wallet.  The only concerns I had when trudging through water was keeping my wallet and M16 rifle dry.  If the water was over my waist, I would hold the wallet in my teeth while holding the rifle up and out of the water with both hands.

My wallet and rifle were the most important possessions I had out there so getting them wet was simply unacceptable.