Chapter 16 

(© 1996 Michael J. Horton. All rights reserved.)

It was now the 7th of September, which left me only a week to work out the final details of the system to process the rotation. The starting point had to be the receipt at battalion headquarters of the reassignment orders that indicated each man's time of arrival at 22d replacement. Barnett and I put our heads together to coordinate the review of the incoming PCS orders and the scheduling of the men's' movement to DBT, for each person leaving Vietnam would transit our compound physically to pick up his personnel files, including the pay record. Under the system we worked out, the line companies would be notified of the date each man was to be present in DBT for processing and onward movement. Once I had the men in DBT, it would be easy for me to divide the bodies up into two groups, the men for the 8 A.M. processing and those for the 1 P.M. Barnett and I agreed the plan looked good on paper, and we hoped it would work as well in practice. Problems would arise if we couldn't get the men to DBT from the company areas on time. However, there was little likelihood that anyone would arrive late intentionally because he wanted to spend a few extra days in Vietnam.

There was almost a circus atmosphere in the compound now because so many men were on the verge of going home. Most of them were headed immediately for personal leaves of 15 to 30 days before reporting to their new units. People were yelling the word "short" constantly, and that proved a distraction for those of us who were not going home. "Short" stories abounded: one man was so short he had to use a ladder to climb onto his bed. Another was so short he could only button his shirt collar over his head, which he did often, a sight even I found amusing.

A changing of the guard was evident in the personnel section, as Bradley, Wagner, Penney, and the other replacements gradually assumed more responsibility for day- to-day operations. Also, a tacit understanding was in force at the office that Steiger, Lew, Alvarez, and the others who were leaving wouldn't have fun at the expense of those staying. Nevertheless, the air was charged with the positive energy that exuded from the men who were close to rotating. I even noticed on several occasions when talking to Barnett that his eyes betrayed the fact that his mind was a million miles away. I could only silently envy him and the other departees.

For the rest of us, life went on a usual, sometimes fostering behavior so stupid that it passed all understanding. After dinner one night, I returned to the barracks, only to find that someone had trashed the living area of Sergeant Wilkens, the quiet E-5 who had recently transferred into the 14th. Someone had dumped the contents of his duffel bag onto his cot, along with some trash, so that clothes, paper, and garbage were every where, littering his bed and the floor. All the personal items in his wall locker had also been strewn on the ground. I paused briefly to look at this disaster before going to my own area several cots away. As I thought about the hurt that would be inflicted on poor Wilkens when he found this mess, I became angrier by the minute because I recognized who was behind this senseless vandalism. Fortunately, I didn't have long to stew over the matter, since Altman strolled into the other end of the barracks about fifteen minutes later. I immediately went and confronted him. "Altman," I said, "you really piss me off."

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"I know that you and your pals trashed Wilkens' bed," I said.

"Not me," he insisted, trying to look innocent.

"Don't lie to me," I said. "I know you were involved somehow." When I said this, he simply smirked, giving me an evil, twisted little smile that made me want to slap him as hard as I could. I stuck my finger right in his face. "If you or your pals ever screw with Wilkens again, I'm going to kick your ass really bad. You got that?"

"Hey, I can't control everyone else," he said.

"You'd better," I said. "For your sake, you'd better talk to your pals and get them straightened out too. If anything like this happens again, I'm holding you personally responsible." He just stared at me stupidly. "You got that!" I shouted.

"Yeah, yeah...leave me alone," he said, turning away to put some distance between us. As I walked back up the aisle, I realized how short-tempered I was getting of late. No, that wasn't true at all. Here in Vietnam we were all like that most of the time.

Because there were five of us typing vouchers for the payrolls, we finished them ahead of schedule for the first time ever, and we had them deposited at 92d finance one day early, on the 14th of September. That was helpful because the first 20 men processed out of DBT the next day. Everyone who was supposed to arrive at battalion from the field was there on time, and our schedule proceeded without a hitch. Altman delivered two groups of men to 22d Replacement in due course.

Only four men in-processed that first day of rotation, one of whom was a recent graduate from Officers Candidate School, a 2d lieutenant named Morris. As I did his paperwork, he sat in a chair next to my filing cabinets and read a newspaper he had brought with him from the U.S. Whenever I asked him a question to elicit the information I needed for his travel voucher, there would be a long pause before he answered, as though he found it difficult to pull himself away from his reading. Obviously, I was just some peon E-4 who was taking up his precious time with a bunch of nonsense formalities. At one point during this struggle of wills, he lit a cigarette with his Zippo lighter, which he then placed atop the filing cabinet. At first, I thought nothing of this. Later, however, I glanced at the lighter as I waited for him to speak to me, and I saw engraved on the side of it the words "Kill Commies." Unable to contain myself for very long, I stood and made an excuse for leaving, telling him I had to go to the latrine. Once outside, I fell into a fit of laughter so violent that it brought tears to my eyes. The man was unbelievably weird. I didn't understand how such a cipher could ever become an officer. I had to walk around slowly for fifteen minutes or so before I could bring myself to return to my desk. His annoyance at the delay I had occasioned him was manifest from the frown on his pinched little face, but I pretended that nothing unusual had occurred, and I went about finishing his documents. At the end of the day, I told the others in the office about his absurd inscription.

As the rotation continued, we started receiving reports from the supply sergeant in C company about missing equipment. As the men in C company turned in their gear before leaving, this sergeant was keeping track of lost items, so the pay section could deduct the cost of this equipment from each man's pay. One man was missing a fork from his mess kit; cost to be deducted--75 cents. Another man was missing three items: canteen, shovel, and poncho--total cost $7.50. Of all reports received for one day, seven men had lost equipment totaling $23.25. None of us could believe this NCO was actually making such tallies and writing these reports. Didn't this guy have anything better to do with his time? Worse yet, it was costing the army more to have the reports typed than we could possibly collect, to say nothing of the additional time it would take the pay clerks to post the deductions and recalculate each man's voucher. None of the other companies were sending us these debit notices, which led me to believe this NCO was some kind of curmudgeon. I couldn't see how any soldier could be expected to spend a year in a war zone and not lose something. In the end, I told Lew, who was still doing the C company payroll, to throw the reports away. I felt safe doing this because I knew the supply sergeant had no way of finding out if we were making the deductions. Under different circumstances, I might have communicated with the man and suggested he stop wasting his time with these reports. Had I done so in this case, however, he probably would have complained to Greenley or Garvey, and either one of them might have felt a need to support a fellow NCO. If so, they would have ordered us to collect these paltry sums, something we simply did not have time to do. Everything considered, I thought it best to discard the reports.

On day four of the rotation, my name was posted for guard duty. As far as I was concerned, this couldn't have come at a worse time, for we were working 12 to 14 hour days in order to keep up with the movement of personnel and the payroll. Still, even if complaining about the guard assignment could have gotten me out of it, I wouldn't have done so. Nobody, including me, wanted to be perceived as failing to pull his own weight, especially in tough times like these. It occurred to me though that I could ask the duty officer to grant me an accommodation by posting me to one of the guard bunkers on the shoreline near the personnel office. That way, I could spend both of my four hour sleeping periods in the office doing work.

That evening, we had just finished guard inspection, and I was about to ask the duty officer for my special assignment, when the voice of the battalion commander came over the loudspeaker mounted nearby. Since public announcements were reserved for only the most important matters, we all fell silent and turned our gaze in the direction of the sound. As the CO spoke, his voice seemed solemn. "Men," he said, "it is with the deepest regret that I must inform you that today, at 1400 hours, Major General Clark B. Matheson was killed in the line of duty when his helicopter was shot down near Can Tho. That is all, thank you." After the switch on the speaker clicked off, there was a moment of complete silence. Then, a huge cheer went up from all the enlisted men around me, and knowing why they were celebrating, I joined in. We could hear men hooting and hollering all over the compound. The duty officer looked at us in horror, his mouth gaping wide. The other officers in the area must have been equally aghast at our spontaneous outburst. The truth was, we were all elated to know that it wasn't just the enlisted men who were dying in Vietnam. From time to time, it was nice to hear that the officers got killed also, especially the higher ranking ones. Death was, in that sense, a great leveler.

The duty officer was in such a state of shock that he acquiesced immediately to my request and assigned me to a bunker near personnel. I stood guard from 6 to 8 P.M., after which I went to work at the office. Everyone was still there except Greenley and Alvarez, though I could tell some others were ready to leave when I came in. By 9 P.M., only the pay section remained, and Steiger and Lew excused themselves to go to the club before it closed. Bradley, Wagner, and I continued our typing until we were interrupted by the adjutant, Lieutenant Hart, who dropped in to chat with us. I got that sinking feeling in my gut, and I wondered how much of our time Hart would waste tonight with his meaningless prattle. As was his wont, he perched on a desk nearby in order to hold a commanding position from which to lecture us.

This evening, his subject was to be the death of General Matheson. Clark Buford Matheson, according to Hart, was known to his friends as "Bud," and the lieutenant told us this fact as though he had been a personal friend of the General, a matter I doubted very much. Also, Lieutenant Hart had himself come close to being shot down in a helicopter on several occasions, the details of which we were not to be spared, apparently. Before long, however, Bradley interrupted Hart's story by asking him when he was rotating back to the United States.

"In about ten days," Hart replied. "Why do you ask?"

"I was just wondering which would come first," Bradley said, "our finishing these payrolls or your going home." Good for you, Bradley, I thought. Stung by this comment, the color rose in Hart's cheeks.

"I should...I do have some things to do," he stammered, rising to his feet. "I guess I should let you get on with your business."

When the lieutenant was out the door, Bradley cupped a hand to his mouth and said softly, "Come see us again soon." Bradley was a savage, no question about it. There was probably not a charitable bone in his body. In any event, he had accomplished the desired result, for which we were all thankful.

At 10 P.M. I told Bradley and Wagner to quit for the night, explaining to them that I was going to stay because I had to be back on guard duty at midnight. Bradley offered to work with me and keep me company, but I sent him on his way. Later, it occurred to me to ask myself whether Bradley's offer was as genuine as it sounded, or whether he knew I would be considerate enough to refuse his company. This was a question I had the rest of the night to ponder, as I did my guard stint from twelve to 2 P.M. and then worked in the office till dawn. In the end, I never did decide on Bradley's motive.

The next morning, Greenley ordered me to the barracks for a few hours sleep, and he sent Barnett to wake me at 10 A.M. When I finally ambled in to work about 30 minutes later, the place was abandoned, except for Greenley and Garvey. Everyone, I was told, had run to the motor pool in a moment of excitement. They all came back in a clump, pressing through the door and bubbling with conversation. The story was on everybody's lips. Wallace, alone in his truck on Q/L 1, had been attacked by the VC just north of the water point. The truck had taken six or seven rounds along its left side. "He's lucky to be alive," Alvarez said.

"Yeah, that was too close for comfort," Wagner added, looking a little apprehensive.

I would have gone to see the truck myself, but I found that unnecessary, given the deluge of details provided by the others. It was indeed a scary situation, for I had been on that stretch of road several times myself. I could understand how this event would upset the new men like Wagner who had just come in country. It certainly was not an auspicious beginning for them.

In the afternoon, I in-processed the new battalion doctor, whose name was Captain Diktakis. As I was doing his paperwork, he asked me politely if I would refrain from saluting him when we passed each other in the compound. The reason for this, he said, was that he wasn't used to being an officer--he had received only two weeks training since being drafted one month ago. According to him, training for MD's consisted of learning how to put the brass insignia on their uniforms right side up, so they wouldn't look foolish. The long and the short of it was that the doctor got embarrassed whenever someone saluted him, and that's why he had asked me not to do it. How refreshing, I thought, an officer with humility. I promised him I would keep his request in mind when I saw him in the future.

In the midst of the bone crushing work schedule occasioned by the rotation, a terrible reality overtook me, as one by one the men I had gotten to know over the last five months slipped away from me. On day seven of the rotation, Steiger and Lew departed for their respective homes. On day eight, it was Ales and Snuffy. Day nine saw Alvarez, Greenley, and O'Brien go. Barnett left on the tenth day.

I experienced several different emotions about these separations. First of all, no one, including me, could resist sharing with the men themselves the elation they felt at leaving Vietnam and going back to the United States. Back to the real world, as we called it. Also, with Steiger and Lew gone, I became the undisputed heavyweight of the pay section, which gave me a new sense of autonomy since they weren't around to look over my shoulder all the time. That was the good part. On the down side, I alone was left the task of training Bradley and Wagner in the lore of pay, a responsibility which, considering their youth, made me feel like a father figure, a role I was not particularly comfortable with.

At the same time, I was sad to say goodbye to those, my friends, whose companionship, though of short duration, had given me something to hang onto when I needed it most. With Barnett's departure, there finally settled upon me an overwhelming sense of loneliness that lasted for several days, despite my best attempts to shut the door on the past. After a while, I decided these personal loses were just so many wounds--to be healed with time. Added to all the other emotions was a slight melancholy precipitated by the knowledge that I, myself, wouldn't be going home for another six months.

Wallace, who had so heroically escaped death during his last days in Vietnam, returned home under unusual circumstances. Someone very clever had noticed that the bullet holes in his truck had powder burns all around them, a detail which arose, as he later admitted, from his own shooting of the truck at close range. Though at first surprised by this revelation, I soon came to accept it as consistent with his character, tragically blemished as it was in this case, since the offense of destruction of government property carried with it a guarantee of court-martial proceedings. He was arrested and escorted under guard to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was to be tried. Truly an inglorious end to an otherwise mediocre military career.

On the next to last day of the rotation, PFC Penney, Alvarez' replacement, approached my desk as though he wanted to say something to me. He seemed hesitant. "Excuse me, Specialist," he said. Before he could continue, I stopped him.

"Look, Penney," I said, "there's no need to be formal. Just say, `Hey, Horton,' like everybody else does. I know that may be hard at first, but once you find out what an insensitive creep I really am, it'll get easier. Now, what can I do for you?"

"I just thought you might like to know," he said, "we had a call from D company this morning. Some of their officers and men were doing a recon by helicopter on the road between Pleiku and Tuy Hoa. As they were landing near Cung Son, Lieutenant Morris--you know, your friend with the strange inscription on his Zippo--anyway, he decided to pull a John Wayne and jump out of the chopper before it was actually down on the ground. He miscalculated though and bailed out while they were still about 15 feet up in the air. They said he broke his leg." He looked at me to see how I would react to this news.

"Far out," I said. " That's really outstanding, Penney. You've just brightened my whole day. Remind me to buy you a beer at the club tonight, presuming I get out of here before 10 o'clock." He seemed pleased to have brought me such welcome news.

"I thought you'd like that," he said. After he left, I thought how regretful it was that Steiger and the others were no longer with me to share this karmic moment.

First Sergeant Johnson was one of the last of the original battalion to leave DBT. When he processed through personnel, he thanked me for my efforts in getting the 14th over the September "hump," as he called it. I told him I couldn't have done it properly without his help, and he seemed to appreciate that. There had been two instances I knew of when NCO's had been reprimanded publicly by the first sergeant for failing to report to the pay section as scheduled. Naturally, these examples hadn't gone unnoticed by the other men in the battalion. As Sergeant Johnson was saying goodbye to us, I realized how much I admired him for his dedication to his job and the loyalty he gave to the men who served under him. NCO's like Johnson were the sine qua non of the army.

We finished the rotation in fine style, and everyone who was supposed to go home did, and on time too. When it was over, I had a sense of anticlimax brought on by the shorter, ten hour work days and our slipping back into a more normal routine. With only the payrolls to do, we seemed to be coasting now, and the sense of urgency we had experienced was gone. Bradley and Wagner had made excellent progress in learning the basics of pay, so much so that I no longer doubted our ability to make the deadline on the 15th of every month. By now, evenings were the lonely part of my days, for I had lost my drinking buddies, and Bradley, Wagner, and the other new men were abstemious compared to the old crew. I wondered whether that would change as the days dragged on and the ugly reality of life in DBT slowly shredded the sensibilities of these pilgrims.

A continuing source of amusement now was the good battalion doctor, Captain Diktakis. Every time I saw him, I went out of my way--literally--to get near enough to his person to salute him, as did everyone else in the compound. Word of his phobia had spread quickly, and his consternation was a fountain of pleasure for all the enlisted men. In the beginning, he would turn red in the face and mumble pathetically when saluted. Over time, however, he mellowed, particularly when he realized that the men were putting him on and that their intentions were beneficent. As a result, he was brought closer in spirit to the enlisted ranks than any other battalion officer, a circumstance that naturally aided his practice of medicine.

In early October, as the pay section was blithely going about its business, Garvey conveyed some sobering news. We three in pay were to be attached immediately to the 92d Finance Detachment in Cam Ranh. "Does that mean we're going to live there?" Wagner asked, innocently.

"Live there, work there, eat there, and sleep there," Garvey replied. "You're still assigned to the 14th Engineers, but you're duty location will be Cam Ranh. That is, for the foreseeable future."

This news really rocked me. I hated the thought of breaking into a new unit, with all that that entailed--meeting new NCO's and co-workers, coping with new officers, learning a different milieu, and adjusting to a new routine. What a nightmare. My thought was: better the devil you know than the devil you don't. The aspect that counterbalanced all of this, however, was the prospect of being in a safer place than DBT. The five or six times I had been in Cam Ranh, I had felt secure and not vulnerable to enemy attack, a feeling shared by everyone I knew who had ever been there. In the end, I decided that staying alive was a benefit that far outweighed any hassles the move might entail.