Chapter 17 

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

Within three days we were gone. Early in the morning Altman and Penney drove Bradley, Wagner, and me to an administrative unit in Cam Ranh, where we were to await billeting instructions. After dropping us off, Altman and Penney delivered all the 14th's pay records to the 92d Finance Detachment. We had taken all our gear with us on this move: duffel bags, sleeping bags, M-14's, and aluminum wash pans. Bradley and I left Wagner in front of the Quonset hut to guard our possessions while we went inside to get an assignment for quarters. The Spec-4 we talked to took our names, our originating unit, and the unit we were going to. Then, quite enigmatically, he told us to "stand by" outside, and he would get back to us. "These things take time," he said.

Bradley, of course, was outraged by the specialist's nonchalant handling of our affairs, and he offered to go back inside and punch the man out, a gesture I discouraged. We waited several hours without being called by anyone, and during that time we observed a bus coming by periodically to drop people off and pick others up in front of the Quonset hut. Inquiry made of a passerby revealed that what we had seen was a shuttle bus that went in a circle route with stops at 92d Finance, the Vietnamese village by the bay, the wharf area, the PX, and finally back to the Quonset hut. Half-starved by noon, we sniffed out a mess hall nearby and ate lunch. As the day wore on with no messages delivered to us about anything, Bradley explored a row of four abandoned tents no more than a thousand yards from where we sat. He returned with a favorable report, and toward evening, we dragged all our gear to the nearest tent to set up housekeeping for the night. A sign outside the tent told us we were residing in The Cam Ranh Bay Transient Bachelor Enlisted Quarters. There were no cots or other furniture, and the floor was bare sand, but dry. Because the sides of the tent were rolled up about four feet, we concluded that we would have enough ambient light from nearby sources to move about in the dark without crashing into one another. After dinner, we whiled away the evening on our sleeping bags speculating about what our new lives in Cam Ranh would be like. The next morning I inquired again at the administrative headquarters to determine our status, only to learn that our names had been misplaced. In due course, the information was written down anew by another clerk who seemed equally indifferent to our plight. Given his anti-authoritarian proclivities, Bradley was the first to conceive how poetic it would be if the army "lost" us. The notion that, by simply following our orders to "stand by" and await assignment to quarters, we could make ourselves disappear from the system and escape the control of a formal command structure became increasingly irresistible the more we talked about it. Both Bradley and Wagner reasoned that if we reported regularly to work every day, no one would question where we spent our nights. Therefore, we could live idyllically in our "tree house," as Bradley called the tent, and no one would be the wiser. Though I was skeptical that we would stay lost for long, given the totalitarian nature of the military machine, I was at least sufficiently intrigued by the concept to let matters run their course for a few days by way of experiment. Accordingly, we set out for the finance office on the shuttle bus, after carefully concealing our possessions behind a lowered tent flap. I was particularly concerned about the rifles being stolen, haunted as I was by the supply sergeant's warning about what would happen to "my butt" if I lost the M-14. Bradley was cavalier about the possibility of theft, reasoning that the army would have to send him home if all his gear was filched. Though I didn't tell him so, his logic suffered from the same wishful thinking that had launched O'Brien's failed stratagem of resigning voluntarily.

By bus, the finance center was only ten minutes away, but we had to motor up an enormous hill to get there, which made me glad we weren't walking. Of the three of us, I was the only one who had been there before, though never on the inside. We reported to the front desk in the waiting room, which clearly was the only public area of this immense building. After identifying ourselves to an officer there, we were shown into the main portion of the structure behind the service counters. The area we entered was approximately 150 feet by 150 feet, and, except for columns supporting the roof, this expanse was partitioned by nothing but row upon row of desks and filing cabinets. My immediate guess put the number of pay clerks working there at well over one hundred, the sight of which made us all stop and stare, except for our guide who went on without us, unaware that in our astonishment we had stopped following him.

A place had been made for us near the back corner of the building, where the boxes with our files had been stacked neatly on three desks. We immediately began to organize the files by company in the metal cabinets, and during this project, we were interrupted and introduced to, at different times, a sergeant E-7, a second lieutenant, and a captain, all of whom were somehow above us in a supervisory capacity. Everyone we met gave us a warm welcome, which led me to believe our stay in Cam Ranh would be pleasant and without undue stress.

I was thrilled to see that one of our three chairs actually had casters, and I instantly pulled rank and claimed it for myself, only to be crushed moments later when I realized that an expansion crack built into the concrete floor traversed all our desks directly through their centers, where we sat. Consequently, whenever I rolled more than a few inches to either side, one of the four wheels fell into the crack and became stuck. I kept the chair nevertheless, not wanting to cede such an obvious status symbol, imperfect though it was. I could tell by Bradley's supercilious smile that he thought me eccentric for wanting the chair despite the crack in the floor, but I ignored his holier-than-thou attitude.

Wagner's mind was much less incisive than Bradley's, and the irony of the situation with the chair seemed to escape him completely. Within an hour we had picked up our payroll work where we had left it before departing DBT. At day's end, we walked slowly back to our tree house rather than waiting for the shuttle bus. The trip by foot was twenty-five minutes, but it was mostly downhill. On the way, we discovered a USO facility where we could buy real cheeseburgers, an incredibly pleasant surprise.

We continued this routine for four more days before I began to tire of the experiment. We had no lights at night, and the shower was too far away to be convenient. Sleeping on the sand wasn't all that comfortable either. "This is crazy," I said to Bradley. "Sooner or later we'll turn up missing on somebody's roster, and they'll probably put us down as AWOL. That would really screw up your chance to become a general."

"Oh, no," he wailed. "Please, I don't want to go to a barracks. They'll never miss us, I promise." Despite Bradley's entreaties, I convinced Wagner it was time for us to become serious about our living accommodations, and the next morning we schlepped all our equipment to the bus stop. We didn't bother talking to the people at the administrative office again, since they were obviously out to lunch. Instead, we applied for quarters directly at the finance center, and we were assigned to a barracks about a quarter-mile away. All the EM who worked at the 92d bunked in a group of four buildings, all of which consisted of the usual half-wood, half-screen design, but which were two story buildings rather than a single level. At each end, wooden stairs ascended to the top floor, the level we were sent to.

I was surprised how well appointed this facility was. Jutting from each side wall was a row of evenly spaced metal bunk beds, between which stood metal wall lockers with doors exactly like the ones we had used in the U.S. At the foot of each bunk bed, in the aisle, were two wooden footlockers, back to back. "Thank God," I said to the others, "no more sleeping on wooden cots. Look, real sheets and blankets."

"Yeah," Bradley moaned, "I think we're back in basic training." It was obvious he longed for the solitude of the tree house.

Just inside the front door on the left was a small closed off room, whose door bore the names "Sgt. Greesel" and "Sgt. Slatz," the lifers in charge of the barracks no doubt. Immediately adjacent to this room was an empty bunk bed which Bradley and I took, him up above and me down below. Wagner chose the lower bed next to mine. Clearly, these quarters were tidier than those in Dong Ba Thin, a circumstance both good and bad. Good because they looked better, bad because of the regimen that implied. By the time we got our things squared away, it was almost lunch time, so we explored our surroundings.

Behind our barracks was the mess hall, the movie screen, a supply room, a latrine, and the shower. The shower was, in army parlance, a "one each, multiple personnel, cold water (undrinkable), gravity type," as evidenced by the tank on the roof sans heating element, stenciled with the words "Non-Potable." After an ill-tasting meal, we returned to the barracks, where we were accosted by Sergeant Greesel, who was a short, fat E-6, well into a state of complete baldness. We were sitting on our bunks talking when he approached from the rear of the building. He stopped abruptly as he was about to pass us, and he stared at Wagner's rifle, which was propped up against the wall. "What are you doing with that gun?" he asked Wagner.

"What do you mean," Wagner said, "that's my M-14. It was issued to me."

"And, anyway," Bradley said, "that's not a gun. That's a rifle. You, of all people, should know that, Sergeant." I could tell by Bradley's tone of voice that he hated Greesel instantly, and he looked at the man as though he were some kind of parasite.

"You're not allowed to keep that here," Greesel said, as disagreeably as possible. "All weapons have to be stored in the CONEX behind the first barracks. All of you take them down there this afternoon."

"Oh, that's really great," Bradley said. "What do we do if we get attacked? Stand in line?"

"That's right," Greesel said, turning and walking to his room. Before entering, he shot us a hateful look, which Wagner answered by flipping him off as soon as he disappeared through the door.

After turning in our rifles, we made our way along the dirt road which led to the office, roughly five minutes away on foot. To our left there sprawled a huge field of several acres, which was flat and completely empty, except for the presence of some twenty men who stood together in a clump about 300 feet from the road. They seemed to be standing in a dense cloud of smoke, and, indeed, they were. This cloud was manufactured by the men themselves as they puffed on and passed around marijuana joints. The three of us paused briefly to look at this spectacle. "That's very subtle," Bradley said sarcastically. In DBT the men smoked dope too, but I had never seen them do it. Here, the EM seemed more open about it, though I couldn't imagine it was officially condoned. Maybe the officers and NCO's simply looked the other way.

"You could probably get a great contact high just standing downwind," Wagner said.

"No doubt," I said.

After work, we ate dinner in the mess hall, and I noticed there was an unusually small turnout for the evening meal. The four barracks nearby must have housed 400 men, including the NCO's and officers, but there were no more than 60 people in the enlisted section of the mess hall and 20 or so officers in their separate section, which was walled off from ours. It was not surprising there were so few diners, for the food was terrible--again. The fare tonight was typical of army food: bread, milk, runny mashed potatoes with thin gravy, succotash, and wonder meat. We called it wonder meat because, as we perused it and turned it over with our forks, we always wondered what it was. Somehow the cooking process made beef, veal, pork, and lamb indistinguishable from one another and all equally tasteless.

When we returned to the barracks, it became apparent from the many men eating there that junk food from the PX had been substituted for the free food in the mess hall. A quick look at the items being consumed revealed a generous variety: corn chips, potato chips, popcorn, caramel corn, peanuts, cheese curls, and pretzels. I wondered if it were humanly possible to eat such substances on a continuous basis, two or three times a day. With enough beer and soda to wash these morsels down, life could probably be sustained indefinitely on such a menu.

As the men munched these snacks, they lay on their beds reading or listening to radios, one of which near me was playing a rock and roll song I had heard earlier in the day but couldn't identify. I didn't know who the group was singing the song, and I couldn't actually understand most of the lyrics, except for the word "satisfaction." Radios were more plentiful here than in DBT, and there were other appliances as well. At the far end of the barracks someone had a record player, while another man owned a small refrigerator measuring about two feet in each dimension. These last two devices had been totally unknown to the denizens of DBT. Of course, here, as there, wall outlets didn't exist, so everything electrical had to be run off an extension cord plugged into an adapter at the overhead lights.

Later that evening, Bradley, Wagner, and I went outside to watch the movie for the night, which happened to be The Reluctant Astronaut. As usual, the movie screen was made of boards mounted on telephone poles, and we sat on the ground to watch. About 15 minutes into the movie, Bradley and I ordered Wagner go back inside to get a blanket for us to sit on, since the ground was quite cold. Because it was almost mid-October, the sun was setting earlier, and the nights becoming cooler. No doubt we would have to wear our field jackets to these cinematic events in the near future.

Despite the cold, two EM sitting in front of us were sharing a bottle of Mumm's Cordon Rouge champagne. A helmet from which the liner had been removed sat on the ground between them, and it was filled with chipped ice and water to serve as their ice bucket. When I asked, they said they had procured the ice from a cooler behind the mess hall and the champagne from the liquor store near the officers' club. I, for one, was stunned to learn there was a liquor store in Cam Ranh about which I was uninformed. What was the world coming to? Alcoholics everywhere would be shocked justifiably at such an oversight on my part. Naturally, I kept these concerns to myself, since Bradley and Wagner were still in the early, low-alcohol-consumption phase of their year in Vietnam.

A few days later, I learned that we wouldn't have to stand any guard duty in Cam Ranh, a revelation that thrilled me to the quick because of the loathsomeness of that chore, to say nothing of the danger. I was told, however, there were occasional KP duties at the mess hall, even if one didn't eat there. To my chagrin, the EM who supplied me this information was, I discovered, one of six computer specialists who bunked at the other end of the barracks and who did shift work in a trailer housing a mainframe computer. These men pulled no extra duties at all, and the trailer they worked in was air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter to a constant temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Given my own crummy situation, I could have gone a long time without having to know the precise details of this man's employment. I thanked him anyway.

KP was a normal, if undesirable, aspect of army life, and I could have lived with that, but the other ordeal we were subjected to on our first Wednesday at the 92d was bizarre beyond all telling. Colonel Landry, the commanding officer of 92d Finance, required the EM and the officers to be present every Wednesday evening after dinner in the public area of the office for a brief session on personal guidance. I could tell that no one wanted to go to this meeting, including the officers, but all the finance people made the pilgrimage from the barracks to the office, so I concluded the Colonel took these occasions seriously. We stood in a circle in the waiting room, packed fairly closely together, with Colonel Landry occupying a small space in the center. Just behind him were several of the senior officers, all of them looking very solemn.

The Colonel began his session by telling us that, although war was an inherently brutish business and although God had seen fit to ring us about by prostitutes and other temptations of the flesh, we should strive to be pure in body, as well as in mind and spirit. After elaborating on this theme for several minutes, he read from a page marked in his Bible, saying:

"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness
thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.
For he hath founded it upon the seas, and
established it upon the floods.
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?
Or who shall stand in his holy place?
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart;
who hath not lifted up his soul unto
vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive the blessing from the Lord,
and righteousness from the God of his salvation."

"Blessed is the man that walketh not in the
counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the
way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of
the scornful.
But his delight is in the law of the Lord;
and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
And he shall be like a tree planted by the
rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit
in his season; his leaf also shall not wither;
and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff
which the wind driveth away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the
judgment, nor sinners in the congregation
of the righteous.
For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous:
but the way of the ungodly shall perish."

"O God, thou art my God; early will I seek
thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh
longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty
land, where no water is;
To see thy power and thy glory, so as I
have seen thee in the sanctuary.
Because thy loveing kindness is better
than life, my lips shall praise thee.
Thus will I bless thee while I live:
I will lift up my hands in thy name.
Because thou hast been my help, therefore
in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.
My soul followeth hard after thee:
thy right hand upholdeth me.
But those that seek my soul, to destroy it,
shall go into the lower parts of the earth.
They shall fall by the sword: they shall
be a portion for foxes.
But the king shall rejoice in God; every
one that sweareth by him shall glory:
but the mouth of them that speak lies
shall be stopped."

Once outside, the man who had spoken to me earlier introduced himself and walked with Bradley, Wagner, and me back to the barracks. His name was Dale Lesser, and he was obviously an American Indian, though he explained immediately without any inquiry from us that he was in fact only half Indian. His mother was a full-blooded Pima, and his father was German. "You can call me `Chief'," he said. "Everyone does." Chief went back to our barracks and talked to us for awhile. "I envy you guys," he said. "I wish I had been assigned to a real unit like the 14th Engineers, instead of the 92d Finance Detachment. I mean, how exciting is that? At least you got to see something other than the Cam Ranh peninsula. Me--I've been stuck here doing pay for the last 30 days, from the very day I came in country."

The Chief, who had grown up in Brooklyn, was a very bright guy, and we all liked him immediately, probably because of his sarcastic wit and his hatred of the army. He, too, was a draftee. Like me, the Chief was a drinker, and I encouraged him in subtle ways to hang out with us every evening so I would have someone to drink with, at least until Bradley and Wagner matured somewhat in their need to stay insensible through alcohol. In all likelihood, the Chief was drawn to me for the same reason.

After ten days, we were desperate for laundry service, so the Chief introduced us to one of the Vietnamese women who by day inhabited the yard between the barracks. The Chief didn't appear to know the woman's name, but he referred to her as "my little petunia," an appellation she seemed used to. The first time he called her that the day we met her, she cranked her finger around her right ear in the crazy sign and said, "Chief, he beaucoup dien cai dau." The woman agreed to do our laundry for $1.50 a week each, a price not unreasonably higher than that in DBT, I thought.

"That's not the bargain you think it is," the Chief said later. "You only get about 90% of your clothes back each week. You see, these zipperheads have this all figured out. They gradually keep stealing your wardrobe every week, and by the time you get ready to rotate back to the U.S., you only have two changes of clothes left. By then, you don't care, so no one complains. The scheme is simplicity itself." And, he was probably right, but then, who cared?

From time to time I watched the Vietnamese women from the screen behind my bunk to see if I could ever detect them concealing any stolen garments. I never saw them do it, though I did see them once or twice squat on the ground to pee, a practice I thought was savage until I realized there was probably no latrine they could have used without running the risk of being raped.

Altman was coming to the finance office from DBT two or three times a week now, bringing us promotion orders, morning reports, and requests for pay changes received from men in the field. On occasion he brought Chief Walls, the personnel officer, with him. Walls always took time to chat with Bradley, Wagner, and me to see how we were doing. I was never quite sure whether Walls was simply watching over us like a mother hen whose chics had wandered off or whether he was keeping a close eye on us to make sure we were still there, tending to his business.

At first, I was always excited to see Altman because he was a connection to the 14th Engineers, and a thread that led to my past. He usually brought with him stories of the men I still knew in headquarters company. As time went on and I met more people in Cam Ranh, however, I started becoming detached from the past and more focused on the future. Ours was a strange situation because the three of us in pay could be called back to the unit at any time. We never really had any idea how long we would remain attached to the 92d Finance Detachment. Despite being in this psychological limbo, I found myself feeling more and more at home in Cam Ranh, as though that was where I belonged. My sense of security was improving daily, and I no longer constantly had the expectation that I was going to be shot at. Now, when Altman left to drive back to DBT, the thought that went through my mind was: better you than me going back across the bridge to that place of uncertainty, that land of the midnight flare, where one held his breath in the dark of night to better hear the danger nearby, inside the perimeter. With God's will and any luck, those days might be gone forever.