Chapter 8 

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

At the first opportunity, I went to battalion headquarters and asked the adjutant, Lieutenant Hart, to show me where Bao Loc was on the map. It lay about 95 miles west-southwest from Dong Ba Thin and was situated on National Highway 20 in the central highlands, at about 2800 feet elevation. According to Hart, B company had about 40 men at Bao Loc to maintain the runway there.

Sergeant Greenley said I couldn't depart for Bao Loc until I had changed my stripes, so he sent me to supply, where I was provided with new name tags and PFC stripes that had all black letters and insignia against an OD green background. The black on olive drab didn't stand out like the patches we used in the U.S., and we weren't such good targets because of that. I also received for the first time my engineer and USARV shoulder patches, also in black on OD green. I managed to sew these on all my fatigue shirts over a period of several days.

On Monday afternoon, Sergeant Greenley helped me make final preparations for my expedition to the highlands. He introduced me to the "portable field file," which was a steel box about 30 inches long, 15 inches wide, and 14 inches high. Actually, the field file was a one drawer steel filing cabinet with metal drop handles on the center of each end. Portability was not the characteristic that immediately came to mind, however, since the file itself weighed about 50 pounds. After the pay records of the men stationed at Bao Loc had been put in, the file weighed about 80 pounds. Not only was it heavy, but the location of the carrying handles at the middle of each end made the file awkward to lift and carry. I picked it up from the desk and walked several yards before setting it down again. "Pretty nifty, huh?" Greenley asked.

"Oh, yeah, really great, Sarge," I said. "Boy, I'll be sweating like a pig if I have to go very far with this." All the time these preparations were being made, Steiger and Lew worked at their desks, keeping an eye on us. Their delight at not having to go into the field this month was obvious from the studied way in which they paid attention to, and at the same time ignored, the instructions I was receiving from Greenley. In addition to the pay records, a number of forms had to be taken in the file. Sancho Alvarez and others in the office came around one at a time, apparently to lend their support, but mostly to investigate what was going on. Barnett had prepared a set of orders authorizing my movement to and from Bao Loc, and I would need these to obtain transportation there and back. I would be flying on a "space available" basis only, which meant I could get to Bao Loc in an hour or in a week, according to Greenley. "Space available" was a low priority, putting me somewhere on the list after cargo.

On Tuesday morning, May 2, at 8 A.M., Ales drove me and my "box," as I called it, across the road to the airstrip that was located in the other half of the DBT compound, the half I had never been in. Presumably, by the time I arrived at my destination, the men stationed there would have been paid recently for last month, and any problems with their finances would be fresh in mind. Since I was toting the box, I hadn't brought any luggage. Instead, I had packed my shaving kit in the field file, which was only two-thirds full with records. Therefore, the clothes I had on constituted my entire wardrobe for however long I was gone. My mother was probably rolling over in her grave at the prospect of my being killed while wearing dirty underwear.

From what I could see, the airstrip portion of DBT consisted of a fairly long runway, several taxi ways, well over 50 aircraft parking pads, and numerous helipads. Several cargo planes were standing in another large parking area nearby. Ales dropped me and my files at the flight office door. Sergeant Greenley had insisted I take my M-14 with me, despite the obvious difficulty I would have carrying it, since I needed both hands for carrying the field file. "If you got killed because you were defenseless," he had said, "I'd never forgive myself." Consequently, I had to strap the rifle over my back with the sling. Every time I leaned over, the weapon shifted precariously to my side, as though it would fall off. Also, because my helmet kept tumbling off when I bent over to pick up the box, I had unstowed the chin strap and fastened it under my jaw, which made me look absurd. The chin strap was worn by most people only during actual combat.

I left the box on the hardstand outside and entered the flight office. After several minutes, a clerk behind the counter noticed me and said, "What's your status, PFC?" I gave him a copy of my orders, and he read the single page carefully, seeming to mull over the contents in his mind. After looking up at a scheduling board on the wall for a minute, he said, "Have a seat outside. I'll call you when something's available." I waited, perched on the box, for about an hour while various traffic, mostly small fixed-wing craft, came and went. Then a jeep pulled up, and the driver called out my name. After helping me load my box in the back seat, he took me to a helicopter about a quarter-mile away. It was a Huey, manned by a pilot, a co-pilot, and two crewmen. I was the only passenger, but there was a considerable amount of cargo in the main compartment. Mounted in the door on the right side of the aircraft was a machine gun, fully loaded. As the engine revved up and we lifted off, I was somewhat sorry to be leaving the relative safety of DBT.

I sat on a bench seat across the back of the passenger area, surrounded by cargo, which prevented me from getting close enough to the doors to see the landscape below. The crewman who was not the doorgunner sat on an opposite bench seat facing me. He smiled at me from time to time, but I couldn't talk to him because of the noise and because he wore a flight helmet that covered his ears completely. Actually, his headgear contained earphones and a small mouthpiece that extended out in front of his lips, and it was this apparatus that permitted him to communicate with the other crewmen once he was plugged in. Our flight to Bao Loc took forty-five minutes by my watch.

Once I deplaned, a crewman helped me carry the box off the landing pad to a nearby Quonset hut, where I asked directions to the operations of B company. Foolhardy though it proved to be, I set off on foot with my box and my M-14, believing my destination to be within easy reach, only a third of a mile down the road. The sky was very dark, and thick rain clouds hung down all around like tattered rags, obscuring the tops of the surrounding hills. The road was several inches deep in mud, and my feet disappeared up to my ankles, which made the going more arduous than I had anticipated. After several hundred yards, I began to sweat, and soon the sweat was dropping into my eyes. Not daring to set the file drawer down in the mud and water, and not wanting to walk into the grass at the side of the road for fear of land mines or bungy stakes, I struggled on with my load, beginning to feel slightly desperate. Fortunately, a jeep came up beside me and stopped, the driver asking if I needed a ride. "God, yes," I said, heaving a sigh. "I'm glad you came along." Thereafter, it was short work getting to B company. I thanked the driver profusely and watched him as he maneuvered past a two and a half ton truck with a trailer whose wheels had slid off the entranceway to the compound into the drainage ditch. The trailer was carrying a large rectangular tank that, fortunately, was strapped down firmly, preventing it from sliding off into the ditch. I could hardly see the bottom half of the trailer wheels, so hopelessly were they mired in the mud. The whole rig appeared to have been abandoned.

I carried my paraphernalia into the operations tent and sought out one Sergeant Huik, as instructed by Greenley. "Oh, there you are," he said. "We've been expecting you." It felt good to stand on the raised wooden floor in the tent and get my feet out of the mud.

"Is it always this sloppy here?" I asked.

"It will be for about six months," he replied. "It's the beginning of monsoon season." Sergeant Huik directed me to a desk where I could work and ordered a young Spec-4 to get the word out to the troops that I was available to answer pay questions. The tent was very busy, and I had the feeling I could easily get in the way, so I stayed in the background and didn't bother anyone. I noticed that everyone entering and leaving the tent carried a weapon and wore a helmet. Interestingly enough, no one, including the officers, displayed any insignia of rank on their helmets, a sure sign that danger was not far away. Snipers, I assumed, would aim for the highest ranking officers first. Maybe there was, after all, some advantage to being an enlisted man.

I overheard a first lieutenant telling an NCO about an incident that occurred that morning. A new runway paralleling the old one was under construction by the engineers. To indicate to pilots that the new runway was not to be used for landing, yellow barrels had been evenly spaced across the new surface at 100 yard intervals. The pilot on an incoming cargo plane had apparently not seen the barrels and had landed on the unfinished runway. "Barrels went flying all over the place," the lieutenant said, laughing and whacking his leg. "Fortunately, there was little damage to the plane or the runway." The NCO seemed to think this was hilarious also. No one came around to see me until after lunch, and between 1 P.M. and 4 P.M., only five men asked me to provide some form of pay service. Three men wanted to change the amount of the allotment being mailed by the finance center to their families. The other two wanted to cancel their series E savings bond purchases, which of course I did, though somewhat reluctantly. I had never thought to ask Sergeant Greenley whether I had any responsibility to dissuade these men from canceling their bonds. The army had put great emphasis on the savings bond campaign, and I knew that enrollees were hard to come by.

Before I had been drafted, the army apparently had coerced everyone, officers and enlisted alike, into buying bonds through monthly pay deductions. As a result of complaints, Congress had passed a law making it illegal to force soldiers to buy bonds. By the time I went into basic training in 1966, official pressure to purchase the series E had lessened considerably, according to the old timers. The pitch that had been given to me several times went like this: "We can't make you buy these bonds, but we sure can make you wish you had." Evidently, persuasion and coercion were separated by a very fine line. Wanting to avoid the endless fatherly chats by superiors on this issue, most of us had opted to have $6.25 per month deducted from our pay, with the result that every three months we received a $25.00 bond that was immediately turned in for $18.75 in cash. The two men whose bonds I had canceled today were paying only $6.25 per month for bonds. Certainly the army couldn't have expected me, as a PFC, to convince them to continue their series E purchases.

In any event, I thought it best just to process the requests for cancellation and to make no objections to the men themselves. I was very disinclined to thwart anyone's will because I detected a certain tension here in Bao Loc, particularly between the enlisted men and the officers. One of the men whose allotment I had changed earlier had become embroiled in an argument with an officer as he had left the tent, and some extremely nasty words were exchanged, although the substance of the argument struck me as negligible. The relative disregard of this event by everyone around me indicated that such tiffs must have been common.

At 4:30 P.M. Sergeant Huik walked me to a small tent near the rear of the compound and said I could sleep there for the night. He asked me to report back to field operations early the next morning. The tent was pitched on a slight upgrade, and around it was a ten inch deep drainage channel that ran downhill away from the entrance. As I approached the tent, I could see that the floor was bare earth, but it was dry. As I surveyed the dozen or so cots, looking for an empty one, the only other occupant was standing up and shaving in front of a mirror attached to one of the tent's center poles. Not turning from the mirror, he looked at me out of the corner of his eye for a moment. "You the guy from the pay section?" he asked.

"Yes, I am," I replied.

"Are you going to be with us for a few days?" he asked.

"Well, tonight at least," I said.

"We got mortared last night," he said, continuing to shave.

"Really?"

"Yeah, about twelve rounds, but only six fell inside the perimeter," he said. "They didn't hit anything though." This, to me, was very disturbing news.

"Do they ever do that two nights in a row?" I asked.

"Sometimes they do, but it's hard to say," he replied. He apparently could tell I didn't know which cot to use. "Take that one over there," he said, pointing with his razor. "That's Fuller's cot, but he won't be back for at least a week. He went home on emergency leave. His aunt died, you know, and he conned the company commander into believing that he was heart broken because he was great pals with his aunt. He told the CO he just had to go to the funeral."

"Lucky guy," I said.

"Oh, I don't know," he said, wiping shaving cream from his face with a towel. "I don't think I'd ever go home on emergency leave. Can you imagine what a bitch it would be to have to leave home again and come back here? God, I'd probably desert or something."

"Yeah, that's true," I said. "You've got a point there." When my new acquaintance put his shirt on, I could see that his last name was Bryce and that he was a Spec-5. He told me he worked in communications on the night shift, so he had to report for duty at 8 P.M. Before dinner, Bryce took me out to the entrance to the compound where I could see the actual town of Bao Loc. We walked through the mud to the road I had struggled up earlier, and then it occurred to me that this was the highway designated on the map as National Highway 20. The truck was still stuck in the mire at the entranceway, and dark clouds overhead threatened more rain. From where we stood, the road ran down a gentle slope for a couple miles and terminated in what appeared to be a small town, though it was difficult to judge its size from this distance. A very large house with a mansard roof stood at the edge of the town, directly in the middle, where the highway appeared to end.

"That big house belongs to the village chief," Bryce said. "He's the head guy--at least until the VC decide to do him in. There's a lot of turn over in that job, or so I've heard."

Directly across the road from us lay a large, empty field, to the right of which was a thick stand of tall trees about 40 feet high. Separating the field from the trees, a wire fence some 20 feet high topped with barbed wire flanges ran back from the road at least 500 feet. Large floodlights stood at intervals along the uppermost part of the fence, presumably to light the field for security at night. Barbed wire concertina on our side of the road stretched away in both directions from the entryway, and this barrier seemed to run completely around our encampment. Coming up the highway from Bao Loc, three native women in long skirts walked carefully along the road, stepping with their bare feet in the tire tracks laid out so distinctly in the mud. Dark skinned and quite tall by Vietnamese standards, each carried a basket on her head. "Montagnards," Bryce said in a low voice. "They're a hill people native to these parts." One of the women, apparently aware we were watching her, smiled at us.

"Why are her teeth so black?" I whispered.

"Betel nuts," he said. "They chew them all the time, and it stains their teeth." We watched after the Montagnards until they were well down the road, and then we walked to the mess hall for dinner. Before Bryce went on his shift, he took me around to B company's club so I would know where it was. The club was a building about 20 feet wide and 30 feet long with a pitched roof. Oddly enough, the walls were made completely of wooden siding with no screen, and two large windows on each side of the entrance had been boarded up to keep the light inside from escaping, probably for security reasons. A sign over the door read: "Last Chance Saloon."

Inside, the only light was provided by a bare incandescent bulb that hung down from the center of the roof. Two tables and a dozen or so chairs made up the full compliment of furniture, except for a five foot tall refrigerator that stood against one wall. Three men sat at one of the tables drinking beer, and they took little notice of us as we entered. Bryce explained that beer was purchased on the honor system by putting money in the can on top of the refrigerator. As a gesture of friendship, he bought me a beer before taking his leave. "I'll be asleep when you get up," he said. "If you stay long enough, I may see you in the afternoon."

"Thanks," I said, shaking his hand. "I appreciate your showing me around." After Bryce left, I pulled up a chair at the second table and pondered whether I should drink my beer in solitude or attempt to strike up a conversation with the other men. Before I could make a decision, another man entered the club and slammed the door behind him. He strode up to the other table and threw his helmet on the floor so hard that it crashed into the wall several feet away.

"Lieutenant Simmons...that bastard," he said in a loud voice. "I think we ought to frag his ass."

"What happened?" asked one of the men.

"He said one of the other officers saw me drinking a beer this afternoon, while I was still on duty. He said if I get caught drinking on duty again, he's going to report me for article 15."

"That really stinks," said another man.

"Yeah, you're Goddamn straight," said the first man. "We're in Vietnam for Christ's sake. Why don't they just leave us alone."

Since the mood at the other table had turned a little ugly, I decided not to introduce myself to the group. Besides, I knew these men would expect me to take their side in this matter, which to me was an unnecessary aggravation that would only make me feel uncomfortable. What became inescapably clear, however, was the difference in standards between Bao Loc and Dong Ba Thin. We drank beer in the morning and after lunch in the barracks, and no one said a word about it. Of course, these men worked construction, where drinking could cause an accidental death. For us, the worst thing might be jamming a finger between our typewriter keys. Certainly that was a big difference. The other inevitable conclusion I reached was that having the officers and the EM living and working so closely together was very destructive. There were a total of 40 men here, 3 officers and 37 enlisted. The two groups were around each other all day, morning and night. In DBT, we could go a whole day and not even encounter an officer. No wonder there was so much tension here.

I thought it best to avoid this local dispute, so I went back to my tent. Before leaving, however, I bought two more cans of beer and stuffed them into the front of my shirt so I wouldn't be conspicuous. There was very little light as I made my way back, and, once there, I discovered the tent was unlit, except for two kerosene lamps. God, I thought, how primitive. I sat on Fuller's cot, drinking my beer and musing about the prospect of waking to incoming mortars. Later, during the night, the only thing I heard was the sound of rain beating down on the tent. For all I knew, it may have rained all night.

The next day, the rattle of small arms fire could be heard continually in the distance, and howitzers nearby exploded in a steady rhythm from 8 A.M. onward, at times with ear shattering effect. By noon, no one else had come with any pay problems, so I approached Sergeant Huik about returning to DBT. I felt relieved when he decided I didn't need to stay another night. With my box and my M-14, I was soon on my way to the airfield for a return flight. According to reports coming in over the two-way radio, the Americans and the ARVN'S were skirmishing with the VC on the outskirts of our location, and someone--I couldn't make out who--was going to start firing artillery westward, over the airstrip. Despite my worst fears, the helicopter I was waiting for came in safely, which allowed us to depart without delay.

As usual, going back was much faster than coming up, but this time at least I could see out the door of the Huey and appreciate the lushness of the landscape. In the highlands, the land was verdant from all the rainfall, but as we approached the coastal lowlands where DBT lay, the earth's cover turned to sand and scrub. Nevertheless, I was happy to be back.