Chapter 18 

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

We had gotten ourselves squared away at the office, and our work had fallen into a decent routine, when one of the supervisory NCO's came to me with a request that seemed very unusual. He asked me to help in-process a group of twenty-five men who weren't going to the 14th Engineers. I did as he asked, of course, but this was the first inkling I had that our situation here was not what I had supposed it to be. When we had moved to Cam Ranh, I thought we would work only on the payrolls of our own battalion. Now I began to see the bigger picture: once they had us, the command at 92d Finance could make us to do anything they wanted us to do. Besides being an unpleasant surprise, this realization was also disconcerting because I wasn't sure how much additional work we could reasonably handle, without extending our normal ten hour day. Looking ahead, I also knew we had big rotations from the 14th to contend with--100 men going home in November, 115 in December, and 200 in January. I didn't say anything to Bradley and Wagner about my misgivings because I didn't want to alarm them unnecessarily. If we were expected to perform work beyond our own, they would find that out soon enough, without my predicting it.

Two days later at lunch time, I went to the PX to renew my supply of junk food, so I could avoid the slop at the mess hall. Before I left the PX, I did my usual spot check to see if any officers were outside dispensing delinquency reports, and, sure enough, there was now a group of three lieutenants milling about in front, DR pads in hand. Since the shine on my boots was not what it should have been, I waited patiently inside until I spotted five men who were leaving together. Judging by the mud all over their clothes and boots, I knew these troops had come into Cam Ranh from somewhere in the field. I fell in a safe distance behind these naive victims, and when they were accosted en masse by the officers, I slid effortlessly by, completely unnoticed.

After eating a cheeseburger at the USO, I returned to the bus stop by a different route than usual, and I came upon a small clapboard building bearing a sign that read: Mrs. Doan's Laundry. Puzzling over this, I went and looked in the front door. GI's were standing in a line to turn in their dirty clothes to Vietnamese women working behind a counter, and along the back wall on shelves were bundles of clean laundry waiting to be picked up. This establishment looked to me like an enterprise of the first water, so I determined in my mind to give it a try at my next opportunity. Perhaps Mrs. Doan was an honest woman, and I would get back as many pieces as I gave, or at least my things might disappear at a slower rate than they had been recently.

When I returned to the office, Bradley and Wagner were nowhere to be found, and I learned later that Wagner had been enlisted to help build a wooden sidewalk around the finance office and Bradley had been sent by a supervisor to handle the front desk in the in-processing section. Both were gone from their desks the entire afternoon. That night in the barracks Bradley complained about the extra work. "This really sucks," he said. "How do they expect us to get our own stuff done, if they keep pulling us away to do these extra duties?"

"How, indeed," I said. "That's a good question. Do you suppose if we throw a fit, they'll leave us alone?" Bradley looked at me for a moment, thinking about the question.

"Probably not," he said, somewhat resigned. Wagner, who was nearby taking this all in, simply shook his head.

"It looks to me like we just got screwed again," Wagner said. "That's what I think." I couldn't have agreed with him more.

The Chief came by our barracks later to go with us to the movie, which tonight was Funeral in Berlin. We all took our supply of beer, and found a place in the sand. I had come up on the roster for KP duty the whole next day, so I decided not to imbibe too much. The Chief wanted to know when I would be promoted to E-5 so I could purchase champagne for him, to which I replied, "Soon," even though I had no way of knowing anything about my future advancement.

The hero of the movie was a character named Harry Palmer, an Englishman who had been coerced into the service of his country as a spy in order to avoid prosecution for crimes against the state. I enjoyed the movie enormously because I identified so much with Palmer's situation: here was a guy doing a job he didn't want to do, and who, like me, never seemed to have a clue what the hell was going on or what to expect. Usually two steps behind everybody else, he always was the last person to find something out, which was the way I had felt my whole time in the army. Fortunately, by the end of the film he had figured everything out and saved the day for the good guys. Too bad that resolutions in real life weren't as easy as they were in the movies.

I went to bed at 10 P.M., right after the show, and I was up again at 4:45 A.M., so I could report to the mess hall fifteen minutes later. The mess sergeant chose me to be the dining room orderly in the officers' mess, an assignment far more enjoyable than trying to wash greasy pots the size of garbage cans, which I had done once in basic training. As the DRO, all I had to do was clean tables and make sure there were adequate supplies of beverages, implements, napkins, sugar, cream, ketchup, and other comestible accessories. After each meal service, I would also have to sweep and mop the floor.

The first thing to do was make the officers' coffee by pouring a twenty pound can of choice ground beans into a thirty gallon vat of steaming hot water. The coffee floated around on top of the water for a long time, but eventually sank to the bottom, making a fairly tasty brew, except for the last cups down low which would have the consistency of mud. About 20 minutes before the doors opened for service, an assistant cook who worked permanently in the mess hall came back to the officers' dining room to inspect my preparations. Apparently satisfied with everything else, he checked the pot of coffee last. "There," he said, spitting into the vat, "that'll add a little flavor." As he turned to go, he smiled at me and said, "I hate officers." Though I didn't tell him so, I knew this spitting trick was not original, and the man had probably learned it from reading Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.

The rest of the day was more of the same chaos, and I returned to the barracks about 8:30 P.M., completely exhausted and foot weary. I could only hope this KP duty didn't come up too often. Having consumed two beers in quick succession, I lay back on my bunk momentarily to think about going to the movie, only to find myself arising in the dark about 1 A.M. to take off my boots and go to bed properly.

The Chief was with us all the time now during our off hours, and we grew increasingly annoyed at people approaching us surreptitiously to ask who he was and whether he was truly an Indian. Seeing in this an opportunity to play upon people's gullibility, we began telling everyone who asked that he was an honest to God Indian, and, in fact, he was the Chief of the Ono Indians, an offshoot of the Pima tribe. Why else would we call him Chief? Next we would inquire of the poor dupes whether they wanted to learn how the Ono tribe had acquired its name. The story went like this.

Many years ago, before the coming of the white man, the Pima had prospered, and the tribe had swelled in numbers. The tribe's chief had grown to the ripe old age of 75, and the chief's son, a brave of 50, had waited many years for his father to die, so he could lead the people. The son abided patiently year after year, but the old chief lived on and would not die. Thinking he would never be chief and beginning to despair, the son finally resolved to take matters into his own hands. He formulated a plan and went among the tribe seeking those who would follow him. Then one day, he approached the old chief, now 95 years old, and said, "Father, though I love you dearly, I have become impatient waiting for my birthright. Since you will not die and leave me chief, I have decided to take half the people away with me and form my own tribe. What shall I call it? To which the old man, horrified, exclaimed, "Oh, no!"

And that's how the offshoot of the Pima tribe came to be known as the Ono Indians. Of course, we were unanimously berated for telling this corny tale, but the Chief, himself, seemed to enjoy it more than we, often saying it was funnier than the story of the Fugawee Indians, a yarn he always promised to tell us but never did.

Toward the end of October, Bradley, Wagner, and I were grouped together at the office with three pay clerks from the 6th Battalion, 71st Artillery to form what was called pay team #10, supervised by one Staff Sergeant Barker. The sergeant, about 40 years old, was unusually quiet, but he seemed very knowledgeable concerning pay matters. My impression was that he would be an easy man to work for. The three men from the 6th of the 71st were much like us, cutups and yahoos. Though innocent enough on its face, the formation of pay team #10 was, I suspected, another ploy to deprive the six of us of our identities as engineers and artillery men and to prepare us for having someone else's work foisted upon us. Oh, damn my prescience!

The following day, Sergeant Barker told us engineers that we were taking over the payroll of the 243d Aviation Company and that the records were somewhat in disarray, as he put it. The new payroll would give each of us 25 more records to contend with every month, plus the task of cleaning up the mess in these files caused by a half-year's prior negligent management. Our teammates, the cannoneers, were much amused at our distress, until Sergeant Barker piled on their shoulders the next day a bigger payroll than the one he had given us. By now, the moving hand had writ large upon the wall, in letters big enough for even Wagner to discern, and everyone was depressed at the thought of working more than ten hours a day. That, along with the sundry other nasty chores we faced daily, was almost more than we could bear.

Our moral grooming at the hands of Colonel Landry continued apace. Unfortunately, Wednesday had rolled around again, and this night's episode was more odious than the last because the Colonel was speaking to us as though we were a passel of retards. He recounted for us a relatively short, but seriously distorted, history of the world, the object of which was to justify the American presence in Vietnam. He told us that he could see the hand of the communists at work on the college campuses in the U.S., and he implied that all dissent at home to the war was inspired by the communists. To hear him tell it, these communists had been very busy beavers indeed. As this lesson unfolded, there were looks everywhere of skepticism and dissatisfaction, causing me to wonder when someone finally would complain about these harebrained speeches being inflicted upon a captive audience. Even the officers were showing signs of embarrassment. Fortunately for us, the Colonel was not as long-winded as he had been in the past, and we were able to escape in time to catch the beginning of tonight's movie, The Quiller Memorandum.

The next day during lunch, I went to get a haircut and to drop a package of trial laundry at Mrs. Doan's establishment. Ever since my father had cut my hair when I was a child and kept me in the chair for hours, my sole criterion for tonsorial excellence had become speed of execution. The Vietnamese barber I was using now in Cam Ranh suited me perfectly, for he charged only 35 cents, and he had me in and out of the chair in three minutes. Of course, this feat was accomplished largely by concentrating the work of the clippers around the sides and back of my head at the expense of the top, which left me looking like I had feathers growing up from my brain. Bradley was always pleased by this new target for derision.

After I left the barbershop, I walked to Mrs. Doan's to turn in some dirty clothes. I had decided to have only my socks and underwear done at first to see how clean the laundry came out and to discover, if I could, the expected rate of dissipation of the items. If a substantial percentage of these small things disappeared, I would know better than to entrust the larger elements of my wardrobe to Mrs. Doan. As I stood in line to make my deposit, I saw to one side an older Vietnamese woman dressed in an ao dai. She appeared to be about 40 years of age. She was strikingly attractive in a mature sort of way, and her bearing disclosed a sense of refinement I found wholly surprising. When I finished at the counter, I started to leave, but I was so fascinated by this woman that I quickly made up an excuse to speak with her. Suspecting who she was, I approached her and said, "Pardon me. Are you Mrs. Doan?"

"Yes, I am," she said. "Can I be of assistance?" Her English was so perfect, it left me almost speechless.

"I was wondering...that is to say, I was thinking about having an ao dai made for my wife," I said. "Do you know if I could have that done in Cam Ranh?"

"No," she said, "there are no tailors here who can do work of that quality. You must have it done in Nha Trang."

"Oh," I said. I must have looked disappointed because, after a slight pause, she continued.

"If you give me your wife's measurements, I can arrange to have one made for you in Nha Trang," she said. "I go there quite often."

"I'd really appreciate that," I said. "I don't have the measurements now, but I can write home and have them in about ten days." She smiled at me pleasantly. "I'll bring them to you as soon as I can. Thank you."

I left and walked to the USO to buy a cheeseburger, thinking to myself the whole time how remarkable it was to have met a Vietnamese woman who seemed so educated and refined. Maybe she came from an affluent family, or perhaps she was married to an English or American businessman. As I pondered this further, it struck me that I was being quite idiotic about the matter. There were probably thousands of accomplished Vietnamese women who I simply had never been exposed to. After all, I didn't exactly travel in Vietnam's highest social circles. I wasn't in the upper reaches of the army socially, so what could I expect? In fact, my station in life was so low, I couldn't inspire an iota of interest even from the donut dollies, for God's sake.

In any event, this chance meeting with Mrs. Doan had been both thought provoking and exhilarating, and I realized that I didn't want to discuss any aspect of the encounter with my friends at 92d Finance, since they would spoil the pleasure of the experience by grafting onto it their crude fantasies and suspicions. To speak to them of this marvelous woman would be like giving a sonnet to a baboon. The Chief might understand, but then, again, why take chances?

That night I skipped the movie and wrote my wife a letter, which said in part:

We are having to work more than before, primarily because of the new payroll for the 243d Aviation Co. which I told you about. Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, we had to stay at the office till 9:30 P.M. Also, the monsoons apparently have started, and it rains hideously for long periods at a time, making everything quite dreary.

On the bright side, I heard today that the personal training I complained so bitterly about has been changed from Wednesday evening after dinner to Thursday afternoon during work hours. Someone must have informed on the old Nazi. In any case, the change is extremely welcome.

I met a person today who can arrange to have an ao dai made for you in a nearby city, if you send me your measurements for a long sleeve blouse and pants. You know, the ao dai is the native garment I described a month or so ago. I think you would like the style. Anyway, it shouldn't cost too much, so please send me your measurements right away.

We bought a Sanyo electric refrigerator to put in our barracks. It is 1.5 cubic feet--just enough to hold a case of beer, though we will probably use it mostly for sodas. The cost was $51.00, which we will split four ways, ie., between Bradley, Wagner, the Chief, and me. I can't pay my share until payday since I'm broke, but we get paid in a few days.

I run into so many strange things over here, you know, unexpected things. Maybe I should take notes and write a book when I get back. On the other hand, I want so badly to be gone from here that when I get home, I'll probably just try to forget the whole experience. When I first came to Vietnam, I thought they might negotiate a peace while I was here. I no longer look for an end to this war. When it does come, I will have left Vietnam well before. I think we are in for a long time over here.

Chief told me to tell you hello the next time I wrote. He sends his best. Also, please tell your sister I will try not to be so hard on her in the future. I wouldn't want to crush her puny ego. Miss you. Love you. Write soon.

I had no more than finished sealing the envelope when the siren sounded for a red alert, the first to occur since we had come to Cam Ranh. Our instructions were to go the CONEX to secure our weapons and then to report for formation on the road in front of the barracks to await further instructions. The lights went out immediately, so I had to feel my way to the door. Outside, there was ample moonlight, and I ran to the CONEX, looking for Bradley, Wagner, or the Chief, none of whom I saw. By the time I arrived, the line for weapons was 200 people deep, so I fell in at the end. Everyone in the movie area and the closer barracks had made it to the storage facility ahead of me, which was a matter of concern because I didn't know if we were having a drill or if this was the real thing.

The line moved slowly, painfully so, and I became annoyed when I realized how inept the planning for this contingency had been. The army had taken our rifles from us so we wouldn't shoot one another accidentally or through anger and drunkenness, but what good would that do if we all died standing in line waiting to retrieve the only means of protection we had. At the rate we were going, it would be an hour before we all secured our M-14's.

I had earlier consumed exactly enough alcohol to put me in a surly mood, one of those nasty, semi-drunk, belligerent states of mind that makes one want to fight with everybody at hand. Naturally, a prime target soon presented itself when an E-7 lifer came trooping down the line, heading for the rear. "Great goddamn planning, Sergeant," I said, as he drew near. "Whoever decided we should store our rifles ought to have a bullet in his head. We'll all be dead by the time we get to the CONEX."

"Oh, shut up and stop bitching," he said. "Everyone will get his weapon."

"That's a laugh," I said. Those in line around me grumbled their assent, putting even more pressure on the NCO to defend the weapons policy.

"Look," he said, "every man in this line will be accommodated before the alert is over. I guarantee it." Others now took up the cause.

"Put that on my headstone," said a man several places behind me. Epithets directed at the sergeant and issued sotto voce by others in the line included "moron," "douche bag," and "zero." Of course, the sergeant was now equally testy, and he took up a position near the end of the queue to keep an eye on us. Time continued to drag, with little forward progress: twenty minutes later I was still 100 people away from the CONEX. When I turned around, I could see 50 more men behind me. Still spoiling for trouble, I left the line and walked toward the rear, as though I were headed for the barracks.

"Where do you think you're going," the sergeant screamed. "Get back in that line. You're not going anywhere."

"Excuse me, Sarge," I said, passing him, "I'm going to the end of the line. Just trying to be polite, you know, and let these other people in ahead of me. We're all going to get our rifles anyway, so what difference does it make?" He opened his mouth and huffed several times as though to speak, but he couldn't find anything to say. He watched me carefully to be sure I actually got in line at the end. As I stood there, studiously ignoring him, I could see he was staring at me hard. I knew he was absolutely beside himself with anger, and if he could have gotten away with it, he would have beaten me senseless. God, I did relish it so, seeing these lifers fume, unable to vent their rage. It was the only revenge we lowly peons could forge for ourselves. To make matters worse, the signal ending the red alert sounded five minutes later, with at least 130 of us still empty-handed. Wanting to ensure that the NCO would have no excuse to discipline me, I stayed on the queue even as others left it, until he told me to fall out and return to the barracks, which I did. I considered taunting the poor wretch with his failed prognostication but thought better of it.

The next day, Altman, who had learned to come through the back door, strode into the office, all smiles, offering to sell me the contents of an envelope he was waiving around over his head.

"What's that?" I asked. He dropped it on my desk, and I saw it had my name typed on it. Inside were carbon copies of a letter and a first endorsement, which was army lingo for a sub-letter attached to the first document. The letter, dated October 19, 1967, was from the commanding officer of the 14th Engineer Battalion to the personnel officer, Chief Walls. It said:

I wish to commend you and the personnel of your section for the outstanding performance of duty rendered to the battalion during the month of September 1967.

This month marked the first anniversary of the 14th Engineer Battalion in Vietnam and the rotation of 233 officers and men to the United States was accomplished while processing in 144 replacements. The impact of rotation and the extraordinary demands connected with such a mass movement of personnel was greatly alleviated by excellent planning and long, arduous hours of work on the part of you and the personnel section.

Please express to the personnel of your section my sincere appreciation for a difficult job well done.

It is always a pleasure to receive and transmit correspondence of this nature.

Your aggressiveness, professional ability and willingness to work long hours regardless of personal inconvenience in order to assure the proper rotating to CONUS during the month of September is commendable. I wish to add my congratulation and appreciation for an outstanding performance of duty. When I looked up from reading the correspondence, Bradley quickly snatched the papers away from me, saying, "What's this, what's this." After perusing the letters, he said, "Congratulations."

"Thank you," I said. He smiled at me.

"Did you know," he said, "with this letter and $2.00, you can get a cup of coffee almost anywhere in Cam Ranh."

"I was counting on it," I said. Wagner also picked up the documents and read them. Bradley's cynicism aside, I did feel good about receiving the letter of commendation because I had worked very hard organizing the battalion rotation in September, and it was gratifying to know that someone appreciated it enough to write a note of thanks. Beyond that, I was glad to find out finally how many men had actually come and gone that month, since I had never thought to keep track myself.

"By the way, Bradley," I said, "when I make E-5, I'm not buying you any Southern Comfort."

"Aw, come on," he said, "I was only kidding."