27 Nov 2023
VIETNAM REFLECTIONS 1971-1972
Arrival in Nam...a beautiful country, I thought, gazing from the white sands and bright blue waters of Cam Ranh, my port of entry, toward the rugged green mountains in the distance...and I still thought so, winging southward in the lumbering C-130 toward Saigon until I noticed----
“What are all those round muddy little ponds, all so close together and perfectly symmetrical?”, I wondered.
And then , as it went on that way for miles, I knew. The precise artistry of our B-52s.
I would never forget that moonscape and my early vision of Vietnam’s beauty would be forever tainted.
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The stench---that's what I remember most about Cholon and the road from Tan Son Nhut, Saigon’s airfield. Human waste and wasted humans lining the streets in 3-sided hovels made of ammunition boxes and corrugated metal and anything else that could be carried “home”.
This was the wretched refuse - broken people - farmers and fishermen - who had left that beautiful countryside now moonscape.
Running...and not looking....back...
As they rush away, for fear of turning into ashes like their homes and perhaps their uncles and aunts, perhaps even their ...............
just not looking back.
But now from their fragile fetid dwellings in a noisy, confusing, and uneasy city they DO look back and they do remember the shimmering sunsets, the rice paddies, the family buffalo, the village shrine, the mangosteen tree.
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“V.C.” Vinh, we called her sometimes - with some ironic affection - because she never seemed to be at work when we had a rocket attack (her way of warning us?).
Vinh made my bed
and polished my boots
and washed and ironed my fatigues.........every day
and sometimes she’d bring me a funny fruit that tasted and felt like a big grape going down, only it had a hairy coconut shell outside and in turn enclosed a bitter seed. For what she did, I illegally gave her $5 in military scrip every month and so did 19 other officers for whom she performed the same services and sometimes others, I suspect. That meant Vinh made more money each month than the average Vietnamese farmer could make in a year.
There were thousands of Vinhs, I guess.
Where did their money go?
Who knows?...but it went into Vietnam, for sure.
We are all.......gone......now.
There are no beds to make or boots to polish or fatigues to wash.
Where are you little Vinh? How do you feed your baby-San today?
**************
I was the S-1 - the adjutant and personnel officer for the hard charging 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion flying in support of the Cav - just the 3rd Brigade of the Cav, actually. The bulk of the Army’s proud 1st Cav Division had long since gone back home, leaving the 3rd behind to form a perimeter defense around Saigon. All the territory, the nameless numbered hills won and lost, won and lost, and it had come down to this ---- Saigon.
The Cav was the last ground unit left to see much action and with its large fleet of a variety of choppers the 229th was usually right in the thick of it -- Hueys flying the grunts into and out of the action, Cobra (or “Snake”) gunships laying down protective fire, little one-man OH-s (“Loaches”) on recon patrols, trying to draw fire - often succeeding all too well - ungainly Boeing Vertol Chinooks (“Shithooks”) carrying or slinging in all the heavy stuff of “permanent” firebases - artillery pieces, generators, fuel, ammo, beer.....and taking it all out again when we pulled up stakes from that particular hillock of red earth.
My job as S-1 didn’t expose me overmuch to the risks our pilot and crews were taking, not to mention the grunts they transported. I was a REMF - a rear echelon mo fo.
But there was pain for me too. Nearly every day a new wound.
....There was the young lieutenant -- an OH-6 driver, an army brat, son of a bird colonel, bright eyed and excited -- new “in-country” and reporting to me for his unit assignment in the 229th. It could have been D Company, or H Troop. they both needed recon pilots, The El-Tee had no preference so I flipped a mental coin and sent him to Delta.
The next day sometime around sunset, I heard the news from Ops. The fresh faced looey had been shot down on his first mission, One day into his tour and dead.
I had flipped a coin that sent him down,. It could have been H Troop just as well. But I did it. I played God.
Logic eventually hardened me, I knew other young lieutenants got the good side of the coin from me. But I could never quite shake the feeling I was nudging fate.
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Another memory...
Captain Jim MacLachlan - also new to Vietnam - and already a friend - flying co-pilot in a Cobra, backing up a wiry swashbuckling Warrant - Ernie Rickenbacker, grand nephew of the WWI flying ace.
That morning the battalion was cranked up to evacuate Fire Base Pace. Pace was near the Parrots Beak - a bit of Cambodia that protruded into Vietnam (or maybe the other way around) about 100 miles north of Saigon. The grunts were surrounded by NVA - scared - and hanging out there on their own. They started refusing to go out on patrol. Somehow Walter Cronkite got wind of this and aired the story. The brass decided the best way to muzzle Walter was to shut down Pace - bring the boys in.
It all kicked off very early. I saw Ernie and Jim, hyped-up, full of piss and vinegar, just before they lifted off, flying their Cobra into battle.
The word came back soon enough...their “Snake” had gone down in flames a few klicks west of Pace. No expected survivors. Hell, it seemed I’d just seen them minutes ago - well it WAS minutes ago - not much more than an hour anyway. I still was feeling their thrill of it all - still shared their excitement in this mission.
They were dead. I presumed the worst and really expected no more than final confirmation.
But late that afternoon there was good news. With the enemy closing in around the crash site, MedEvac - the avenging angel - had swooped in and extracted Jim from the crash zone - escaping into the air just in time. He had bad burns they said, but would survive. Ernie, live or dead, was not in the copter when MedEvac went in. That made room for hope for him, but the chances would be slim.
Well, Ernie turned up the next day at a neighboring firebase. It was right out of “The Green Berets”. When the Snake was shot down, Ernie dragged Jim out of the seat and clear of the aircraft before it exploded, left Jim with his own .45, the only weapon to make it through the crash. Knowing he was only 3 or 4 kilometers from a friendly base and judging that there was too much enemy firepower in the area to allow MedEvac to touch down, Ernie headed toward the base to get help.
He was close to the base, but he was much closer to enemy forces - a whole goddamned NVA battalion. He had to apply everything he learned in jungle school to evade them and escape capture - hiding underwater (breathing through a reed), crawling inch-by-inch on his belly through the undergrowth, alert for all the nasty booby traps the VC liked to set in the patrol zones around our bases. Ernie even had to worry about our own perimeter protection - mines, tripwires, not to mention live sentinels. But Ernie made it to safety - not knowing his flying mate had been rescued hours before.
That’s not quite the end of the story for me. Jim was my friend and 4 or 5 days after the Pace operation, I learned that he was the hospital at Long Binh and would be evacuated very soon to the U.S. I wanted to say good-bye.
I had never been to that hospital before - rows and rows of OD (olive drab) Quonset huts - each with about 30 beds - connected at their centerpoints by wooden walkways. I didn't spend a lot of time looking around there. I was very focused on finding Jim and went straight to the hut where I was told he would be. I entered and walked from one end to the other looking for him - every bed was full - but no Jim. I stopped at the centerpoint, the nurses’ station, and asked: “Can you tell me where Captain MacLachlan is?”
Then a voice.....in the bed right next to me....“I’m right here, Nick, are you blind?”
I looked.
The voice was right but....the face was not Jim's... a swollen monster mask framed in gauze - not Jim - barely human. NOT JIM!!!!
But it WAS Jim - and I realized he didn't know he was wearing that mask, could not understand why I didn't see him right there a few feet away. The Jim I knew, the guy that had excitedly headed off in his Cobra with Ernie that morning a week before, was right there inches away and I had to pretend for him that he looked just the same and that somehow I had been blind, just standing there at the foot of his bed asking where he was.
“Silly me. How’ya doing Jimbo?”
And then he was gone - back to “the world” to get his burned body fixed. I never stayed in touch, never followed up. But I wonder a lot how he’s doing.
Does he look like Jim MacLachlan again?
****************
Sometime toward the end of my tour I was named to a Missing-in-Action Board - three officers appointed to review all available evidence and establish whether or not a missing soldier could be considered dead.
In this case it was another OH-6 pilot who’d done rather too good a job of drawing fire and had gone down in a fireball in the middle of enemy territory - at least it was enemy territory that day in the crazy war.
There was another “Loach” pilot nearby who bravely dove down to recon the impact zone. He got close enough to see what appeared to be the charred body of his comrade, still seated at the controls of his burning bird. But the whole area was too hot - too much enemy fire - no one could get in to verify the other Loach's observation, no chance of MedEvac.
When there was nothing left to do at ground level our usual answer was to call in the B-52s. No exception this time either.
After a day or so of the fury of aerial bombardment, there was nothing left of the little piece of Vietnam where the Loach went down. That hot zone was now stone cold - everything lifeless, compressed earth. All evidence of the fate of the missing pilot was removed by the US Air Force. Pulverized.
That was the story our MIA board had to reckon with. And in the end we could not say we were 100% sure that poor guy was really dead. We knew he was dead, but we couldn't say it for sure. Seems like a trivial matter? Not really. Keeping the pilot on the MIA list meant no insurance payout to his family - at least for several years. But much worse, our cowardly way out meant that his loved ones could still wonder - still have reason to hope.
How many years would it be before this young flyer could die at last - rescued from the purgatory in which the two other officers and I had consigned him?
It’s nearly 50 years now. The Vietnamese are showing pictures......directing teams to piles of bones. Maybe by now that life has finally ended.
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Long Binh: the end of it all.
Like everyone else going through the replacement station, I had made the requisite visit to the “Peehouse of the August Moon” to leave a urine sample so they’d know if I could be shipped home without detoxification.
While waiting to be manifested on a flight, I tried to reset in the steaming and roach infested hootch they called the Transient Officers Barracks. Too near to me was the hootchmaid’s locker where she stored her lunch, a little rice and some pungent nuoc mam - a fermented fish sauce.
She came to her locker and noticed me: “You go home, Captain?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s been a long time and I’ll be glad to see home again.”
Sighing, she looked out the door, over many miles and many years. What she saw I could only guess.
“You lucky, you GIs.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You stay here one year and go home. I here 17 years and maybe I never see my village or my mother again. Never.”
17 years...I did the math and knew then....DienBienPhu....the collapse of the French. And then it all came out. From the North, she was driven out by war, had married in the South, lost her husband to the new war and now worked at two jobs to support her three children.
“Most of all I miss the cool breezes...you like coke, Captain?”
“Sure.”
“It’s hot, I get you coke, Captain.” (And she meant she’d pay, too!)
I couldn’t let her pay so I got the coke and we shared it.
The next morning I was served bacon and eggs by a perky stewardess from Winnetka. In one moment, when the freedom bird broke away from Bien Hoa, Vietnam was behind me, in my rear view mirror. Or was it?
I’ll not soon forget that noble lady from the North........
waiting...to.go....home.