South Vietnamese Soldiers

South Vietnamese soldiers always looked so perfectly dressed when I saw them, which was not often.  They had nice uniforms and were clean looking.  Those jungle pants you see in the snapshot have been tailored.  They were shortened and narrowed to remove the bulkiness.  Notice the colorful patches they wore?  We would never have those on our uniforms.  Too bright, too much of an eye-catcher.  You could get shot more easily by displaying flashy patches like they wore.

I always seemed to run into South Vietnamese soldiers on a large firebase.  Sometimes I would see them in Bien Hoa.  I never saw them on the small, temporary firebases that were built in the jungle.  I never saw them out in the jungle where we spent most of our time.  To be fair, they probably did fight for their country in the same places we fought.  I just didn't witness it..

If I sound resentful, you are right.  In my humble opinion, American soldiers did all of the heavy lifting in Vietnam.  When there was a tough job to do, we did it.  When there was heavy fighting going on, we were in the middle of it.  It seemed that our blood was being spilled more than theirs.  I always wondered why, with no clear answers.  Worse, I was never convinced that the South Vietnamese appreciated what we were doing for them.  I never felt it in my dealings with them.

In 1975 we left Vietnam.  Not long after the sound of the last helicopter faded away, the North Vietnamese Army swarmed into Saigon and it was over.  The South Vietnamese Army collapsed.  I saw a picture recently of what looked like hundreds of South Vietnamese Army boots scattered in the middle of a street.  They abandoned them so the North Vietnamese couldn't identify them as soldiers.  All that American money and blood and for what?  If you look at Afghanistan and Iraq today, the same thing happened.  We never seem to learn.          

Hooch

My last month in Vietnam, I no longer had to go on search & destroy missions in the jungle.  The reason was I was "short".  Being short was when you had very little time left on your one-year tour.  It was a time when your thoughts were on getting the hell out of Vietnam and not on the job at hand.  It was a time when you were paranoid that you would be wounded or killed after making it this far.  So Army brass assigned short people to a temporary rear job until their time was up.

I was assigned to a firebase where I was given the job of unloading and delivering supplies from helicopters.  It was heaven.  I had my own "hooch" to sleep in at night.  The snapshot you see is my hooch.

I can't tell where the name hooch came from but I can tell you what it consisted of.  A hooch in a structural sense was made from a piece of half-round steel culvert about eight feet long and six feet wide.  A layer of sand bags covered the steel for protection at night from mortar rounds.  The green material you see at the entrance is mosquito netting that I would drape down at night.  Just behind the netting is a poncho liner that was draped over the netting if it was raining outside.  Inside was a canvas cot that kept me above the rats and insects that wondered in at night.  Living in a hooch was similar I would imagine to living in a cave.

In the lower left corner of the entrance, you can see a black, plastic, jerrycan.  It held five gallons of water.  I would fill the can with water every morning after breakfast so the sun would heat it during the day.  In the evening, I used the hot water to fill a canvas shower bucket and take my shower.  Wow, it was great.  The wooden skid was my front porch.  I could sit on the edge of the cot, rest my feet on the skid and read a book or roll a joint.  Just inside the door was the rucksack I had used when I was heading out to the jungle.  Now it was sitting there almost empty and unused.  I still kept ammunition for my M16 rifle and a few frag grenades in it but that was about it.

You cannot imagine what a relief and a pleasure it was to get out of the jungle and have my own private hooch to live in.                

Firebase Entertainment

Here I am posing behind a rock-n-roll band made up of American soldiers.  You can see the audience sitting on the ground out in front of the band.

You are probably wondering how a band like this one was even formed.  After all, we were in a combat zone.  Well, musicians are very dedicated to their craft.  I know, ...my son is a professional musician.  Even in Vietnam, musicians found a way to get instruments and play.  I'm sure they were based in the rear somewhere, working for a support group.  Infantry soldiers could never have pulled this off.   I'll bet they started by getting together after work to jam.  What began as jamming sessions built into a reasonable repertoire of popular rock-n-roll tunes.  Others began to stop by and listen to them.  A few supply sergeants liked what they heard so found a way to get them the amplifiers, drum kit and keyboard they needed.  Before the group knew it, they had created for themselves a part-time job traveling between firebases playing for grunts.

I never did see Bob Hope while I was in Vietnam.  He played the big Air Force Bases and Navy Bases, ..not the small firebases where I spent some of my time.  So what we got was Vietnamese rock-n-roll bands when we were at the VIP Center in Bien Hoa.  This was the first and only time a band actually came to us.  It was nice!  I remember thinking though that they were like sitting-ducks up there on those storage boxes.  Vietcong soldiers could have easily hit them with rifle fire.  Well this time anyway, it didn't happen.

Sikorsky Skycrane

Whenever heavy lifting was required in the jungle, the Sikorsky Skycrane was there to get it done.  The Army's official name for the flying work horse was the CH-54 Tarhe.  We simply called it a Skycrane.

A Skycrane had a normal crew of three people; pilot, co-pilot and rear- facing observer.  It could pick up and transport 20,000 pounds.  That's  about the same weight as four Chevy Silverado 1500 pickup trucks.  The helicopter was 70 feet long, almost 19 feet tall and the six main rotors had an overall diameter of 72 feet.  To give you a sense of scale, the rotor blade diameter is about the same size as two tennis courts, side-by-side.  I heard they had a passenger compartment that could be fastened to its underside but I never saw one.  It had a range of about 200 miles on a full load of jet fuel which didn't seem very far.

Small bulldozers were used to build firebases in the jungle.  The only aircraft capable of picking one up and dropping it off was a Skycrane.  They carried even larger bulldozers sometimes, but in pieces.  Mechanics would remove the tracks from a bulldozer, transport them as a separate load then reassemble at the firebase.  I also saw Skycranes pick up and transport 155 mm howitzers to a firebase along with a load of ammunition.

It was an amazing site seeing a Skycrane land when there was a lot of weight under it.  During the dry season, an enormous cloud of dust would lift in the air as it slowed to a hover then began to touch down.  They wouldn't let us near the landing zone because the wash from the main rotors was so strong, you could get blown over or pelted with rocks and dust.  Once on the ground, they looked like a giant praying mantis.  They were totally vulnerable when landing if fired upon by the enemy.  They didn't have any firepower at all to fight back that I remember

It would have been neat to fly in one but I never had the chance.  

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.