Chapter 6 

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

Monday morning started with a bang. Around 3 A.M. the wailing of a siren pried its way into my dreams. I staved off reality for as long as I could, but I finally gained consciousness and opened my eyes to complete darkness inside the barracks. It was black as pitch. I heard a commotion all around me, and my body became rigid. As the siren continued to sound, I jumped up and started to dress. This was a red alert, no question about it. I stopped for a second and listened carefully for the sound of gunfire or explosions. Nothing yet, just the siren and the noise of people running through the barracks. As I sat down to tie my boots, there was a loud crash near the end of my cot, and a large object smashed into my arm, knocking me to the floor. Whatever hit me had careened across my cot and landed on the other side. At first I thought a shell had come through the roof. This notion was immediately dispelled, however, when the object that hit me began to move and yelled, "You stupid moron, you're running in the wrong direction. I think I broke my Goddamn leg."

Across the aisle, from somewhere near the floor, somebody screamed, "Why don't you stop complaining and go to hell. I forgot my Goddamn helmet, okay?" Continuing to curse at one another, both men stood up and ran off in different directions. A simple collision in the dark, that's all it had been, but, oh, did it sound like it hurt. That would be a good lesson for me.

I threw on my gear and made my way cautiously to the ammunition locker at the west end of the barracks, where I secured some loaded magazines. As I ran out the door and headed north, I inserted a magazine into my rifle. There was almost no moonlight, and all the camp lights had been extinguished. For someone running, this made each bump in the road potentially treacherous. As I approached the last barracks, a flare popped in the sky over the perimeter, and the area was instantly illuminated in a white, phosphorescent light. The men moving ahead of me became sharp silhouettes that cast long shadows behind them. Reaching the last cross road, I traversed it and threw myself into the ditch on the other side. I kept my head below ground level for a minute while I caught my breath. Not hearing any shooting, I poked my head up and looked toward the barbed wire on the perimeter. The flare was just sputtering out, but it gave enough light to see there were no enemy troops advancing toward us. I turned around and leaned my back against the side of the ditch. The men around me were motionless, and we all stayed that way for several minutes. Finally, someone came running along the ditch, stopping every ten feet or so. He halted near us and said to no one in particular, "Drill's over, men. Good job." There was scattered, angry muttering as the troops pulled themselves out of the ditch and headed toward the barracks. The generators were fired up again, and the lights returned to DBT.

The next morning at breakfast, everyone entering the mess hall was given a malaria pill. It was the size of a nickel and twice as thick. I didn't take mine immediately but waited to see whether the others were actually ingesting the things. With few exceptions, the medicine was taken. One man refused the pill, loudly exclaiming that he didn't want to have diarrhea all day. Forewarned of the consequences, I swallowed my pill, remembering as I did so a training film I had seen that depicted the agonized look of a frail, bedridden man who was suffering from malaria.

I worked all morning on my payroll, keeping an ear trained on the noises in my digestive tract. Just after 11:00 A.M., a thin figure about six feet tall swept into the tent, creating a great disturbance in front. The man was a specialist E-6, somewhat of a rarity in my experience. He high-fived Alvarez and then gave him some kind of complicated, jive handshake. After joking with Sancho for a minute, he bounded over to Greenley's area, where he hopped up and sat on the sergeant's desk. He spent about 30 seconds there, jabbering at Greenley. He then tossed some kind of remark at Captain Simpson and bolted away, going around the tent like a whirlwind, greeting everyone in turn. When he came to the pay section, Steiger only had time to introduce me as the new guy. Pumping my hand up and down with both of his, the Spec-6 said, "Hi, hi, hi, gotta go, gotta go." With that, he was off again, headed for the door.

When some semblance of calm had returned to the personnel office, Steiger informed me that I had just met Russell Nash, a Georgia boy and the battalion's legal clerk. "He eats a lot of speed," Steiger said. "As though you couldn't tell. He keeps a large bottle of Dexedrine under his cot in the NCO's hooch. Nobody bothers him though, not even the officers, because he gets us all our steaks--boxes full of them."

"Yeah," Lew said, "nobody quite understands it, but it involves trading pallets of fatigues, pallets of beer, repaired refrigerators, and boxes of steaks among the marines, the navy, and the Koreans. I have the feeling he makes a lot of money along the way."

After lunch, I was in the barracks taking an inventory of my clean clothes and I noticed I was dangerously low. When Ales wandered past, warm beer in hand, I asked him about the laundry situation. "Well," he said, "I suppose you could wash it on a rock. Most of us, though, have the Vietnamese do it."

"How do I arrange that?" I asked.

"Nothing to it," he said. He turned and yelled toward the other end of the barracks. "Hey, Wallace, take Horton down to C company and introduce him to mamasan."

Wallace and I walked past the mess hall toward the northern perimeter, where the C company barracks were. I was carrying my dirty laundry in a bundle made from one of my shirts. We turned between two of the barracks, and immediately I could see a setup consisting of large pots of boiling water, temporary clothes lines, and small tables for folding clothes. This enterprise was being run by three Vietnamese women and two children, one boy and one girl. The women all wore black rayon pants with no pockets and some type of cotton shirt or tank top. The little girl was similarly dressed, but the boy was wearing vastly too large fatigues that had been cut down to size for arm and leg length. All five wore sandals. The women were no taller than five feet, and they appeared to be about forty years old, except one who was perhaps only thirty. As we approached, one of the women came to us. "Hello, G.I.," she said. "You want laundry?"

"Yes," I said, "I do." As she reached for the bundle, I asked, "How much? How much you charge?"

"One dolla'," she said, tugging on the bundle. I relaxed my grip on the clothes and reached into my pocket for my military pay currency. I found the equivalent of one U.S. dollar in the colorful MPC and gave it to her. By now, another woman and the boy had approached us and were standing right next to the first woman. "You come back tomorrow," the first woman said. She turned and walked toward the steaming caldrons. The second woman faced me and gripped my left hand with her left hand. Somewhat startled, I tried to pull my hand away, but she held it now with both her hands.

"You numba' one, GI," she said. I saw Wallace out of the corner of my eye. He seemed amused at watching me squirm a little. "You have cigarette?" the woman asked, looking at the shirt pocket where I kept my cigarette pack. Obviously, the woman knew it was there.

"Yes, I do," I said. By now, since I was no longer trying to extricate my hand from hers, she had let go my left hand with her right hand, but still held my hand with her left. Her right hand was resting on my left forearm now, and she slowly ran her right hand up and down my arm, as though massaging it. I still felt mildly anxious because of this unaccustomed touching.

"You give me cigarette?" she asked.

"I guess I could," I said. Her eyes lit up, and she released her grip on my left hand so I could fish a cigarette out of the pack I had taken from my pocket. I dug into the almost empty package with my thumb and index finger.

"Two?" she asked. I stopped and looked at her momentarily, knowing I was being hustled. Oh well, what the hell, I thought. They only cost a few cents each. I looked into the pack and counted only five cigarettes left, so I handed her the whole pack. "Thank you," she said smiling. "You numba' one, GI." She spun around and dashed back toward her friends. The boy followed her.

On the way back to the barracks, Wallace said, "That's one advantage of not smoking. The gooks don't hassle you for smokes all the time." Like most of the other men, Wallace often used derogatory names when referring to the Vietnamese. Some other names--all used interchangeably--were slopes, dinks, and rice burners. "Did you notice how old those women looked?" Wallace asked. "The two older ones are probably in their late twenties," he said.

"Really? That's amazing," I said. "They look like they're in their forties."

"Yeah," he said, "they live pretty tough lives compared to Americans." As we walked, we passed one of the battalion officers, a young first lieutenant. Wallace and I both saluted, and the officer returned our salute, though somewhat perfunctorily. Immediately after the officer passed, Wallace spun around and gave him the bird with the middle finger of his right hand. Of course, the lieutenant couldn't see this gesture. "I hate officers," Wallace said in a hushed voice, as he turned around again. I didn't say anything, nor was I expected to. Most enlisted men just assumed that other enlisted men didn't like officers. For my part, I didn't particularly dislike officers as a class, though some of them could be especially obnoxious.

It was odd, but there was definitely a social chasm between the officers and the enlisted men. Many officers were either aloof toward the EM or treated them with disdain, probably because the EM were less educated and behaved ignorantly. Such condescension was probably less pronounced in our officers than in those of other units, however. My impression of the officers in the 14th was that they were engineers first and officers second. Nevertheless, the enlisted men didn't appreciate being treated with contempt, even though expressed only in small ways. And, they especially resented the special treatment the officers were given as a matter of policy. For example, the officers had heated showers in DBT and the EM didn't, though in other respects the showers were the same. That didn't sit well, even with me. How hard would it have been to install a water heater on the roof of the enlisted men's showers? Particularly for the engineers? No, one had the feeling that these perquisites for the officers were maintained very deliberately. This, of course, angered the enlisted men, and the army thereby drove a wedge between the two groups. No doubt some military theorist had created a justification for this--probably Caesar. On the other hand, it might just as easily have been Adam.

Late in the afternoon, a clerk from headquarters company brought a large manila envelope to Sergeant Greenley, and he in turn brought it to me. It contained a certified copy of a birth certificate that had been sent over from D company in the intra-battalion mail. "You need to do a BAQ form to increase this man's quarters allowance for the new dependent," Greenley said. "When you're finished, give the birth certificate back to me, and I'll return it to the father."

When I asked him, Steiger told me the BAQ forms were in a box on a table at the side of the tent. "This one?" I asked, putting my hand on the front of the box.

"That's the one," he assured me.

The sun was shining brightly on this side of the tent, and the canvas radiated the heat down on me from the bottom of the roof just above my head. Added to that, the air was very close here because there was little circulation. I began to sweat as I looked methodically through one group of forms after another. Since the box was about three feet long, it required about fifteen minutes to look through the entire box. Thinking I had missed the BAQ forms the first time through, I started again at the front. I went more slowly this time to make sure I found what I was looking for. As I was coming toward the end again without any success, I turned around to say something to Steiger. He was facing slightly away from me, and he had a smirk on his face. He looked like the cat that ate the canary. Suddenly, I realized the forms I wanted were not in this box, never had been, and Steiger knew it. I was overcome by anger, and I could feel the color rising in my neck. "Goddamn it, Steiger," I screamed. "I'm really tired of your crap. You're not doing anyone any good creating these problems for me." By now, I was beating my fist on his desk. "If you don't stop busting my ass, I'm going to smash your Goddamn head in."

Steiger seemed genuinely shocked at the rage he had unleashed, even though he was not afraid of me physically. Everybody in the tent had stopped work and was staring at me now, probably thinking I had gone beserk.

"What's the matter here?" Greenley asked solicitously, having rushed over from his desk. I was done with my tirade now, so I simply stood in front of my tormentor, steaming.

"Nothing, Sarge," Steiger said. "It was just a little misunderstanding. We're okay now." Greenley looked from me to Steiger and back to me, and when neither of us said anything further, he walked away, apparently satisfied that the problem, whatever it was, had been resolved. Steiger opened his lower desk drawer and pulled out a BAQ form which he handed to me. "Sorry about that, Horton," he said. "I guess I told you to look in the wrong place." I snatched the paper from his hand, glowering at him. As I returned to my desk, Lew was still staring at me, so I shot him a hostile glance as well. Intimidated, he dropped his eyes back to his typewriter.

Later, when I had an opportunity to think about what had happened, I realized that Steiger was punishing me because I had gone to pay school, and he hadn't. This made him jealous, or insecure, or both. What angered me was that I had done nothing to deserve his ill will. If I had bragged about my credentials or tried to lord it over him, that would be different. But I hadn't, not in any way. I still felt I had been unfairly used.

After dinner, I went to watch a movie, which happened to be The Chase with Marlon Brando. I carried several warm beers with me, and I had to confess I was becoming accustomed to drinking unchilled, carbonated beverages, both beer and soda. It was a good thing too, because there was no ice or refrigerators available to the EM, and none likely to be anytime soon. As a consequence, I had begun to keep a supply of beer and soda in the duffel bag under my cot. Of course, beer at the EM club was iced, but more and more I was doing my drinking elsewhere.

When the movie ended around 9:45 P.M., I returned to the barracks. I hadn't been there more than five minutes when Steiger opened the side door and asked me to join him and some others at the bunker, which was just outside the door. Almost every night I had heard people laughing and talking in the bunker, but I was never sure who they were since the area was unlit at night. I had never tried to insinuate myself into that group because, as far as I was concerned, it was just another place I probably wasn't wanted. Now, it seemed, I was being invited. As I walked toward the door, it occurred to me that Steiger's request that I join the party might be his way of apologizing for our little incident earlier in the day. If so, something told me this was probably the only apology I would ever get.

Besides Steiger, the others there were Lew, Ales, and someone I didn't know, who was introduced to me as Snuffy, from the motor pool. Snuffy was dwarfed standing next to Steiger, and he had a big smile but few teeth. "His real name is Abner Little," Steiger said, "but we call him Snuffy because he's from Virginia and looks like Snuffy Smith, the guy in the cartoon."

"Snuffy never owned two pair of shoes at the same time, until he joined the army," Ales said, slapping Snuffy on the back.

"That's right," Snuffy said, grinning. Lew started laughing.

"Do you remember that night Jackson got drunk and said he was going to kill us all?" Lew asked Steiger.

"Yeah, that was funny," Steiger said. "He came back here with his M-14 and threatened to shoot us. He had no more than chambered the first round, and Snuffy was gone. I never saw anyone move that fast in my life."

"Yeah," Ales agreed, "I was in the barracks that night. Not one second after I heard the bolt slam shut, there's Snuffy standing beside me panting--huhh...huhh...huhh."

"I may be dumb, but I ain't no fool," Snuffy said.

Steiger opened a can of beer and handed it to me without saying a word. Well, it seemed I had been accepted by these people, at least on some level, which was encouraging. Maybe this would set an example for others in the unit to drop their paranoia. More importantly, I hoped the situation in the pay section would be somewhat less strained than it had been. We drank beer and talked about nothing important for a half-hour or so, when Ales said to Steiger, "I'm hungry. Why don't you get some K-rations from your secret stash?" Steiger thought about this for a moment.

"Okay," he said. "C'mon, Snuffy, let's go get some chow." The two men left and turned south on the road, heading away from the mess hall. I made it a point not to ask any questions. As the rest of us waited, we caught sight of some jets taking off from the runway across the bay in Cam Ranh. I had glimpsed a few of the planes before, but tonight about ten of the jets left the ground, two at a time. We could even hear faintly the rush of the engines. Of course, the sound was delayed because of the distance. The planes themselves were not visible at night, but the bright orange flames from the afterburners were. When the jets reached a certain altitude after takeoff, the afterburners were shut down, and the color behind the engines changed to a smaller, white trail.

"I love watching that," Ales said, still staring across the bay.

"We'll have to take Horton over to the runway sometime," Lew added. "He'll get a kick out of that." I was going to ask Lew what he meant, but just then Steiger and Snuffy returned, carrying some small boxes. They handed one to each of us. All the others quickly tore open their boxes, so I did likewise. Inside I found plastic utensils, a napkin, a packet of crackers, a can of scrambled eggs with ham, a can of cheese, a candy bar, a pack of gum, a small pack of cigarettes, and a small can opener. I opened the canned foods and tasted each one.

"This is really good," I said.

"You can't beat this stuff," Ales said, between bites. "This is better than that mess hall slop anyday."

"I wish you guys would tell us where you get these K-rations," Lew said to Steiger.

"No way," Steiger replied. "That's our secret. Right, Snuffy?"

"You bet," Snuffy agreed.

We carried on till fairly late, talking and joking about one thing and another. The little can opener, I discovered, was called a P-38. It was quite effective, considering it consisted of only two pieces of metal about an inch and a half long. When I finally called it a night, I was half in the bag. However, I was in a much better frame of mind than I had been before today's turn of events.