I Want It All

Anytime you can get all of something you’d be a fool not to go after it. Like the Hunt brothers in the 70’s when they tried to corner the world supply of silver. At the time they were possibly the richest family in America and it would have been easy for them to say, “Yeah, sure, we’ve got it made.” but they didn’t get rich resting on their laurels. They wanted more, which is pretty much how the rich eventually become the filthy rich. You have to want it all but even more importantly you have to go out and get it all.

Wanting more is what made this country great. Getting more is what made things complicated. The Hunt brothers certainly proved that. They succeeded in acquiring half the world’s supply of silver but in what could actually be the definition for complicated, they eventually had to declare bankruptcy declaring assets of $1.5 billion and liabilities of $2.5 billion. That’s complicated with a capital C, considering the average bankruptcy involves assets of $30,000 and debts of $47,000.

But this isn’t a story about bankruptcy or even the Hunt brothers. This is a story about cornering the market—any market but in this case the Carlings Black Label market.

One day Sam, the manager of the 1^st Aviation Brigade Headquarters Company Club affectionately named the Yellow Submarine, mentioned to Cecil and me that he had 50 cases of Carlings Black Label and he was willing to let them go at a good price if we were interested.

Were we! I dunno ‘bout Cecil, but it had been a lifelong dream of mine to have all of something, regardless of what that something was, so long as no one else had it. I was captivated with the idea of living large even if living large meant nothing more than having my own personal stock of beer in rusty old tin cans left over from the Korean War.

I’m just kidding. This was never a lifelong dream of mine but once the offer was made I did find the idea of having my own stock of beer in the fridge, all bought and paid for in advance, very appealing. As the newest writer on the HAWK magazine staff, it just seemed like something Kerouac might do, or Hemingway.

 “If you promise to always have some on ice, I’m in,” I said, smiling like a kid coming down the stairs on Christmas morning.

“Oh don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you guys,” he responded, smiling like that kid’s parent who knew something the kid did not.

For a while, everything was working pretty well. I had a cold beer with my name on it waiting for me whenever I walked into the Yellow Submarine. Between us we actually had 1200 cans with Mabel’s picture and our names on it—enough to take us almost all the way to the end of our tour if we played our cards right.

But playing cards and drinking is always an iffy proposition and it wasn’t long before things started to get a little crazy. I started to drink more, which I had allowed for but some other stuff caught me completely off guard.

Because I didn’t need to bring money with me, I stopped wearing pants, showing up at the Club in just my army boxers. In fact, I was walking around in my underwear so much that Lin, the barmaid, said I was looking more and more like a Vietnamese peasant every day.

I also began giving away more beer—often to guys I didn’t know and sometimes to guys not even assigned to our company, who’d heard rumors of the great Vietnam War Beer Giveaway. The consensus around the barracks was that it was nice to have a writer in the house.

I eventually arrived at the conclusion that something Kerouac or Hemingway might do, really wasn’t something I should be doing.

As it turned out our personal stock of beer didn’t even last until the end of the month. The good news was that with all the freeloaders gone you could now get a seat at the Yellow Submarine. That and I started wearing pants again.

 

 

 

 

Vietnam Rag

    Within minutes of walking into the club that was the other half of the transient barracks I once called home, I heard a song I had never heard before. I listened to the lyrics and instantly thought, my God, they must have read my mind, much like a teenage girl might have felt listening to “Baby Love” by the Supremes for the first time,

 

                    Come on all you big strong men,
                    Uncle Sam needs your help again.
                    He’s got himself in a terrible jam,
                    Way down yonder in Vietnam.
                    So put down your books and pick up a gun
                    We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.

 

    Was there ever a song, I wondered, that more perfectly described my situation? It wasn’t even a year since I had turned in my books and unable to find a job joined the Army.

    There were other songs that I liked, even liked a lot, but this was my song even though I had never heard it before entering the club and ordering a beer from Lin, our Vietnamese barmaid.

    The music was always playing in the club just like it was always playing in Vietnam. There was never a time when the music stopped just as there was never a time when you couldn’t hear a helicopter’s rotor blades turning somewhere if you listened hard enough—or a frog croaking somewhere during the rainy season.

    I flew in Huey gun ships at 2000 feet listening to Simon and Garfunkle sing the lines, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, as gunners emptied rounds from their M-60’s into peaceful tree lines bordering quiet rice fields. And I have to say, the song never sounded out of place—both mystical and mystifying as our airborne tank glided through the sky while I reached out to grab the clouds.

    Other wars had their songs but Vietnam was the first war with a score. The radio played round the clock and no GI in a support role got past his first two months in-country without purchasing a reel-to-reel tape recorder or at least a stereo system of some type. Still the song I remember most was this Vietnam Rag by Country Joe MacDonald and the Fish that they had sung the previous summer at Woodstock.

Sometimes, if the crowd were big enough and drunk enough, everyone would join in, the way we used to do at the frat house when someone played Shout on the jukebox. And other times, I would be alone in the bar except for Lin and her niece Rang and they would smile shyly and pretend to be embarrassed when the music stopped and the band admonished the crowd for not singing along loud enough. “How you gonna stop the war,” they asked the stoned crowd at Woodstock, “if you can’t raise your voices in protest?” It was an interesting question that I had never really considered and I’m sure none of the generals had either. 

 

              Come on generals, let’s move fast;

                   Your big chance has come at last.
                   Gotta go out and get those reds—
                   The only good commie is the one that’s dead
                   You know that peace can only be won
                   When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come.

 

I remember asking Lin early on where the song came from but she just shook her head and said she didn’t know. As many times as she had heard it she more than likely didn’t care where it came from and only wished that it would go away.

The Vietnam War wasn’t like World War II where war songs were a dime a dozen, listened to by both young and old, and were always positive and inspiring—and only played stateside because not every soldier carried a radio or tape deck around with him in the Big War.  Only the young listened to Vietnam War songs for the simple reason that they weren’t meant for adult consumption.

 

              Come on mothers throughout the land,

                   Pack your boys off to Vietnam       
                   Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,
                   Send your sons off before it’s too late.
                   You can be the first one on your block
                   To have your boy come home in a box.

                   And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
                   Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam.
                   And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates.
                   Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why,
                   Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.

 

I could have easily attended Woodstock had I not chose to remain in Lowell after graduation and continue working at the Peerless Wine Store. It was only a three hour drive but apparently delivering beer, wine and whiskey to shut-ins who couldn’t make it to their local bar, even though a bar in Lowell was never more than a block away was more important to me than attending the biggest cultural event of my generation.

Back home, Neil Young’s “Ohio” about the killings at Kent State had become sort of an unofficial anthem for those protesting the war but in Vietnam, the “Vietnam Rag” was becoming the unofficial theme song for those fighting the war. It wasn’t a protest song for the GI’s in Vietnam like some tried to make it into stateside and it certainly wasn’t a patriotic song.

It was just a song that told our story, a story we were all stuck in and couldn’t get out of—much the way a catchy tune about Alice in Wonderland would have told Alice’s story back when she was stuck in Wonderland.

Vietnam Rag became the theme song for the war that nobody wanted to have anything to do with but nobody seemed able to avoid. I think we accepted our fate with a clear understanding of the terrible jam we were in and how little control we had—and that was all anyone was really asking of us.

Of course, even in the middle of a war there will be songs that have nothing to do with war so out of curiosity I asked Lin one day what most Vietnamese songs were about.

“Rain,” she said. “All Vietnamese songs about rain.” 

Rain—of course—I should have known—the one thing they had even more of than war.

 

 

 

 

 

Going the mail route

Unless, as a young boy, someone wanted to be in the military when he grew up you can almost assume that if he finds himself in the military he probably screwed up somewhere along the way. So if you didn’t want to be there and you are there, it’s safe to say you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Of course, there are a lot of ways an individual can screw up. My way seemed to be never thinking far enough ahead. I now possessed, having completed basic and AIT, a new set of skills. Some, like shooting a rifle or hand-to-hand combat, I hoped I would never have to use and others, like writing a story or taking a poignant picture, I couldn’t wait to put to use.

But on many levels I was still the same screw-up who had switched majors three times and been unable to find a job back in the days when everyone coming out of college was finding a job. If there was one maxim that would have done me a world of good back then it would have been: Think man. Just think.

But I was having none of that—especially not in my social life.

There was a girl back in Boston* who I had pinned two years earlier who just wasn’t doing it for me any more—and I know she felt the same way—and her family even more so.

There was also a girl back in Rochester who I had known for about ten years but just began seeing again in the few weeks before I shipped over to Vietnam. She had to know I liked her because I was going over to her house every night to drink coffee with her and her mother. She knew about the girl in Boston but didn’t know I intended to break up with her. To make matters even more confusing the Carpenter’s hit song, Close to you, was getting a lot of airtime on the radio and as I prepared myself for my upcoming tour in Vietnam it seemed I wanted nothing more than to be close to her.

But I was keeping this desire to be close to her close to the vest because I had a plan—one I would later conclude was just one more in a long line of not-well-thought-out-plans but of course I didn’t see it at the time. I figured the safest way to deal with the situation this delicate would be to deal with it from afar—put everything down on paper to ensure there be no confusion—say what you mean and mean what you say but don’t take a chance of saying the wrong thing.  In other words, don’t say anything. Write it down.

* No names have been used to protect the innocent.

Getting My Feet Wet

     My first official assignment with the 1^st Aviation Brigade had me flying the central highland city of Pleiku. There wasn’t much going on at the 52^nd Combat Assault Battalion, home to the Flying Dragons, but they hadn’t been featured in the magazine for a while and they were due. My orders were to find a story if there was one but most importantly to come back with some quotes and do not, under any circumstances, come back with standard helicopter pictures.

I understood getting the quotes part of my assignment but didn’t exactly know what they meant by, "no standard helicopter pictures." To no one’s surprise I came back with only standard helicopter pictures. In my defense, they weren’t standard to me. This was only  my second helicopter ride—and this time I flying only a few hundred feet above treetops, to boot. I hadn't been in Vietnam that long but certainly long enough to know what those occasional flashes coming out of those trees were. Nevertheless, my rather ordinary fifty or so different shades of green  didn't  impress anyone.

Two rolls of film was the standard issue for these excursions and I had pretty much shot my wad on treetops. Coincidently, shot my wad is an old wartime expression, which pretty accurately describes what I had done.

Still, I was able to get my feet wet in the journalism business, which was probably the main reason I was sent to a place where there really wasn’t any story to begin with. For the few days I was with the 52^nd Combat Assault Battalion, I stayed off post in a house with four or five guys assigned to the Security Detachment. I was able to rise each day and walk through morning-dewed streets not unlike what I would have found in a rural town in Oregon or Oceanside village in New England.

We drove into town each day to visit what appeared to be nothing more than a private residence converted into a bar. It wasn’t like the Saigon bars where the object was to separate the GI from his money as quickly as possible while offering him as little in return as they could get away with. There was a lot of kidding around going on and what seemed to be normal conversation and joking between the GI’s and the tea girls. Looking back, this was the closest feeling to being back home  that I remember from Vietnam.

I knew this wasn’t representative of what was going on everywhere else in Vietnam, but it was comforting to know something like this was going on somewhere.  

I managed to string some unmemorable quotes into a story about the Battalion’s medical detachment and threw in a few tidbits about the Montagnards Gift Shop set up on the base to channel a little money to the locals. And that was that.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the trip was the ride back. A Warrant Officer from our office picked me up and we flew back in a Small Observation Helicopter (LOH). The primary mission of the LOH is to fly low and draw enemy fire. They work in tandem with Huey gunships poised to respond to anyone stupid enough to shoot at a helicopter.

But on this day we didn’t have a Huey accompanying us. My pilot decided the safest route back would be to fly as low and as fast as we could and stick as close to QL 14, (Quac Lo 14 or National Road 14). We flew the 150 or so miles back right down the middle of the highway at an elevation of about 100 feet. My kids kid me because I don’t like roller coasters but after that ride there was never a real need to ride a roller coaster.

My most satisfying memory about my first story was that I was able to salvage a magazine story with no usable photos by getting the brigade historian to paint a picture of a two-headed dragon. The story entitled Two Faces of the Dragon and accompanied by his painting told the story of a unit actively engaged in fighting the war but equally involved in serving the community.

I was back at Headquarters only a week or so before being sent on my next assignment to Dalat, a university town set in a peaceful valley and one of the few cities in Vietnam left untouched by the war.

I did some interviews at the university and took a lot of pictures in the local market place—one of a young boy and girl who reminded me of the countless pictures my sister and I were in back when we were the first of what would eventually grow to over two dozen grandchildren. That picture actually made it to the back cover of the magazine and is still one of my favorites.

    From there I visited the Command Airplane Company—a unit consisting of 21 fixed wing aircraft, whose mission was to carry visiting VIP’s around. I commented that they were like a little TWA, which was a reasonable analogy back when there was a big TWA and the commander agreed. Teeny Weeny Airline became the title for an otherwise uninspiring story that nevertheless led to a valuable journalistic lesson.

 

It was only after the issue containing the story was published that my First Sergeant pointed out that in a relatively short space of seven paragraphs I had used the word professionalism eleven times—including the last sentence, which read, “That is the mark of professionalism.” It was a most unprofessional sin for a budding journalist to commit but I learned my lesson and never again allowed the people I was interviewing to dictate the direction the story took.

    

     With these several stories behind me I was beginning at last to feel like the journalist I had spent eleven weeks at the DoD School of Journalism training to be. What I wasn’t feeling like was the Combat Correspondent that the patch on my arm indicated I was supposed to be. 

     But that was soon to change.

Babysan

     I wasn’t in the transient barracks more than a few days before I was assigned my permanent room and bunkmate. The lodgings I had been anxiously anticipating, for the last week, dare I say the last three or four weeks was a six by nine, two-bed, two-footlocker room with no windows and all the shelves you could use providing you could use 2x4 cross-studs for shelves.

My bunkmate was a kid from Oklahoma nicknamed Babysan by the mama sans because he looked like he was about fifteen years old. He was a crew chief who spent his days flying in a gunship and nights repairing bullet holes, all the time looking like a kid who should be goofing off in a middle school.

As hard as Tom Reardon had to work to separate himself from the likes of a hundred other men who were almost totally identical in every way—from drinking in the club every night, the backgrounds they shared, the jobs they performed and the uniforms they all wore; for Babysan, being one of a kind came easy.

Tom was smart and calculating and maybe just a bit conniving, in a good way but Babysan had something even better going for him. He was crazy.

The company had a stray dog that became attached to it like all companies and stray dogs eventually do. And like all crazy people, Babysan attached himself to the dog. The two of them were never out of sight of each other. The dog even flew with him, which means that his pilot who I didn’t know because he didn’t live in our enlisted men’s barracks, was probably just as crazy as Babysan—only at a higher pay scale and with a better club to come home to at the end of each day.

Snow—the name Babysan had given to the mutt on account of its white hair suggesting that not all crazy people are necessarily creative people—slept in our room at the foot of Babysan’s bed. To my knowledge the dog never spent a day in the transient barracks.

These things, in of themselves, wouldn’t have classified Babysan as being crazy. But his attachment to this mutt coupled with the fact that he slept with a knife stuck into the frame of his bed, preparing him to meet any challenge that might present itself in the middle of the night, would have certainly gone a long way to proving the point. But even that might not have been enough if there wasn’t just one more thing.

Babysan had an electric fan mounted to his bed—a fan that was mysteriously missing the safety guard on the front. Every night became a Punxsutawney Phil moment as I’d lie awake watching him sleep and waiting for when he would roll over and his arm would flop near the fan and he’d suddenly awake to the sound of chipchipchip of his fingers rubbing against the fan blades.

If it was me and I was awaken in this manner I would immediately go for the knife and start swinging but Babysan seemed to take to the startling interruption—the countless startling interruptions each night—the way one would react to a simple stiff neck or muscle cramp. His arm would fling back as if catapulted and he would turn over to a new position and go back to sleep.         

He never become agitated or grabbed for the knife in fear, although being suddenly awakened in the middle of the night had to be the only reason for the knife being there. To this day I don’t know why he never put the fan in a different location or found a guard for it or got a new fan.  But this was the world he lived in and he couldn’t be happier and because he was so content in this world he himself created, I decided he must be crazy. But being crazy, in and of itself, wouldn’t have made him a bad bunkmate.

What made him a bad bunkmate, and one I began looking to replace almost from the first day I moved in, was that each night before patting Snow good night and tucking himself in alongside his fan and knife, he would pop himself some popcorn, which he ate in bed.

In the middle of the night, when I wasn’t contending with the chipchipchip of his fingers falling into the fan I had one more problem to contend with. Against the soft humming of the fan motor I could hear the rustling of the rats above my head, as they would work their way into the room for their nightly snack of leftover popcorn pieces.

 

The funny thing is they didn’t bother me. Oh, they may have bothered me at first but once I knew their routine and realized they were not interested in me but only in Babysan’s popcorn, the rats and me got along fine.

I would hear them rustling and chirping the way rats like to do when they’re getting ready to feast on a salty snack, then they would jump on my chest to get to Babysan’s bunk, much like a gymnast might use a springboard to get to the vaulting horse or uneven bars.

Between the fan and the knife and the popcorn and the rats I knew I had to find another room and another bunkmate. But first I had something else to do. I had to fly to Pleiku on my first story. 

 

 

 

Lady Trades Drapes for Control Tower

     It began when Sgt. Fox called me to his desk and said he wanted to send me on an assignment. I had only been in-country for a few weeks and was anxious to go on a story, visit some of those cities our helicopters were flying to every day.  More importantly I wanted to know if I could write a real magazine story.

“Where am I going, Sarge?”

“You’re not really going anywhere for this one, Phil. There’s a female air traffic controller working at the Bien Hóa Airfield Air Field, the only one in Vietnam we think. There’s probably not that much to it but we thought it might make a good story that we can put in a press release.”

“A press release?”

“Yeah, a press release. You know what those are, don’t you?”

Well of course I knew what a press release was and we had covered the subject a little bit at Journalism school but for the past few weeks I had kind of grown attached to the idea of being a storywriter for a magazine—not a common run-of-the-mill news reporter.

But as every soldier in every war eventually learns, it’s almost always not about you.

“We’ve got an interview set up for tomorrow—shouldn’t take more than an hour. Someone will drive you over.”

Suddenly I remembered the kid in the recruiter’s office when I signed up to be an Information Specialist—the one that couldn’t become a truck driver because he didn’t have a license. I also didn’t have a military driving license. I was approved for shooting a rifle should the need ever arise and before my tour ended I would have interviewed everyone from privates to generals but I couldn’t drive myself five miles to the airfield.

“It will probably only be picked up in her hometown paper,” he reminded me, “so make sure you get her hometown.”

“Yeah sure.”

“No really. I mean it. Make sure you get her hometown.”

Transient Barracks

 

A transient barracks is like Purgatory. It’s not where you want to be, but it’s not the worst place to be while you’re waiting—and there a very real hope that things will get better.

 

 

My next stop was the transient barracks—something I was becoming pretty familiar with. I had slept in a transient barracks for a week at Fort Riley, Kansas, a cheap hotel in San Francisco that was probably no more than a step above a transient barracks, then more transient barracks at Fort Lewis and Cam Ranh Bay. 

 

The 1^st Aviation Brigade’s transient barrack was half of a building that also housed the company’s club, which was adjacent to the volleyball court. For the first time since joining the army I was in a permanent duty station and challenged with the task of making myself at home. The club was a natural place to do this, the volleyball court a less likely location but one never knows.

I met a clerk named Tom Reardon who quickly proved to be one of the more interesting characters I would meet in my year in Vietnam—and I hadn’t even been assigned a permanent bunk yet.

He was from Boston but fancied himself a kind of dandy for whom Boston was good but not good enough. He went the extra mile and fabricated as good an English accent as he could muster and continually made references to Leeds—home to a school he attended, wanted to attend or was going to attend someday. I was never entirely clear about what his relation was to Leeds but the important point to be gained from talking with Tom was that he was different from everyone else, including me.

That said, he was entirely likable and funny and interesting. And, it turns out; he was very influential in introducing me to the men I would be living and working with for the next year.

“If you want them to know who you are,” he coaxed me one day as we watched the volleyball match, beers in hand, “you’re going to have to put yourself in the game.”

“I don’t really play that well—just a few games in college with the fraternity and we were pretty drunk,” I replied, thinking there would be plenty of time to get to know the guys.

“Do these guys look sober to you?” he asked.

 

He had a point. “Next time someone comes out, tell them you want to go in and that you’re the new writer for the HAWK.”

1st Aviation Brigade

     Helicopters. Who would have thought? None of us had even given any thought to the idea that we might be assigned to a helicopter unit. We had all watched the news for the last five years and helicopters certainly played a big role in the war but we just hadn’t put two and two together, which might have explained why we were in the Army in a war in Vietnam in the first place.

In our defense, the three of us didn’t have more than a few months of journalism experience between us, so yes, we may have overlooked the obvious but only because we had other things on our minds. Nevertheless, the three of us held in our hands orders assigning us to the 1^st Aviation Brigade, headquartered in Long Binh—wherever the hell that was.

We were told to be ready to leave at a minutes notice but that we might not leave for a day or two, so hold on to our brooms. We’d be flying to the brigade’s headquarters to find out what our individual assignments might be.

“You know how many helicopters have been shot down in this war?” asked Irwin, implying that his worst fears were being realized.

“You know how many soldiers have been killed by a broom in this war, Irwin? Shut up,” I said implying that I had heard just about enough of fear mongering, woe-is-me, I’m gonna die bullshit.

The same day that we received our orders we were flying on our first helicopter ride from Cam Ranh Bay to Long Binh. We met the First Sergeant of Headquarters Company, who quickly walked us across the helipad to the brigade’s headquarters building. There we were introduced to the CO and First Sergeant of the 12^th Public Information Office Detachment, Captain Cominsky and Sergeant Fox, and SP4 Winer, the editor of HAWK magazine.

What a day. First we’re reminded that this is a helicopter war and now we learn that there are magazines in Vietnam and, as we would soon learn, lots of them.

The three of us were called in for interviews with the three men—for what job or jobs none of us knew. I didn’t know about Irwin or Gary but I had put the idea of job interviews out of my mind back in November of the last year when I signed up. I had not had any success in getting a job after college and frankly found the whole routine embarrassing and depressing. I thought by enlisting I had put those evil days behind me and I was happy to give the army authority to do with me what they wanted. All I asked in return was that they leave me out of the decision. I had agreed to sell my soul to them and wasn’t prepared for having to sell myself again—especially since I didn’t even know what the job was that I was interviewing for.

Still, as interviews go this was a pretty easy one. They asked me where I was from and what I did before the army. I told them I had an Industrial Management degree that had really impressed my recruiter but apparently no one else and had worked in a brewery, paper warehouse, and a liquor store while in college.

After the interviews the three of us sat outside the captain’s office while the three of them discussed our fates. We still didn’t know what the jobs in question were or if in fact there were three jobs. Irwin was convinced that there was only one job, whatever it might be, and that two of us would be reassigned somewhere else and that those two reassignments wouldn’t be good and that one of the remaining two would eventually be killed. Oh yeah, and he was pretty sure that soldier would be him. He was already making plans for his parents to hire a lawyer who would dig deeper into that guaranteed contract he had signed, a contract he was sure had been signed in invisible ink and which didn’t even exist anymore.

Gary was called in first, stayed in the room just a few minutes, then came out to tell us he had been assigned to a company operating out of Ban Mi Thuot. His responsibility would be putting out a weekly newsletter.

“I could have done that,” Irwin declared, sure that the one good job being handed out had been given to someone else.

He was called in next and after a few minutes walked out of the room with the biggest shit-eating grin I had ever seen by a man who five minutes earlier had been preparing him self to die.

“I’m going to the 145^th Combat Battalion at Bien Hoa just down the road. They said from there I could submit articles to the magazine. I’m sorry Phil but I think this one’s the golden egg. But at least it looks like all the jobs are in journalism. You’ll be okay, I’m sure. And you’ll be able to get in touch with me any time. I’ll be right at Battalion Headquarters Company. Good luck.”

“I’ll be sure to look you up when I’m in town,” I said, wondering to myself, just a little bit why they had given this plum to him. He must have put on his happy face for them. I didn’t even know he had one.

I went in the room to learn my fate and was a little surprised that the first thing they wanted to talk about was Irwin.

“Man, is that guy a downer,” was the first thing Winer said to me. “Was he like that the whole way over?”

“Hell, he was like that all the way through the school,” I told them.

“The guy had some good credentials. Did you know he had a journalism degree before he came into the army?”

I hadn’t and was a little surprised. But I was even happier I had whipped his ass in the final mini-paper competition back in Indiana, that sniveling killjoy.

 “But he would have been hard to work with on a day-to-day basis,” Winer continued. “That battalion job is a good one but he could have gotten a lot better if he’d just lightened up.”

“Or just shut up,” piped in Sgt. Fox.

“Yeah, that would have been better,” said Winer, who even though he was only Specialist Four rank, the same as me, was clearly running the show. “He would have sucked the life right out of us but that’s good news for you. By the way, we’re keeping you here to write for the magazine.”

I didn’t know what to think. When I had signed up I didn’t even know the army had magazines. I pretty much thought a newsletter would be the extent of my writing in the army—and I would have been happy with that.

When I left the room I discovered that Gary and Irwin were already gone—both headed to Bien Hoa where Gary would catch a helicopter to Ban Me Thuot and Irwin would sign in with the 145^th. I wouldn’t see either one of them again even though Bien Hoa was only five miles away and I would actually pull guard duty there once or twice a month.

I walked across the helipad again and checked out my bedding and more equipment and uniforms. It was just a little over a year since I had graduated from Lowell Tech in Massachusetts. In that year I had returned home to Rochester, enlisted in Buffalo, done my boot camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey, my AIT at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis, my climate acclimation training at Fort Riley, Kansas, drove to Fort Lewis outside Seattle to fly out of country with stops in San Francisco, Big Sur and Haight-Ashbury, and more stops in Anchorage and Tokyo only to wind up sweeping sidewalks in Cam Ranh Bay and now at last I was about to settle into the transient barracks of my new home, 1^st Aviation Brigade, Long Binh, Vietnam. 

Home at last

 

Cam Ranh Bay

     I didn’t know anyone on the flight except two fellow journalists from the DOD School of Journalism. I also don’t remember much about what happened when we landed and arrived at our temporary barracks. I assumed that those soldiers who knew where they were going went to those places. Those of us who didn’t fall into that category did what those of us out of the loop always do. We waited.

But we didn’t just sit on our bunks reading comic books. There was a war going on and we had to do our part until our orders came in. I just didn’t think my first job in Vietnam would be sweeping sand off a wooden sidewalk under the watchful eye of an old Vietnamese woman who I would soon come to know as a mama san.

She was armed with a broom like the kind witches often are portrayed carrying—a very short handle with about two feet of bundled straw attached to the end that required the user to stoop over awkwardly. She directed me to my area of responsibility but just so I would not make any mistakes she first showed me the correct manner of sweeping sand with a witch’s broom.

“See? Like this,” she screamed in a high pitched yell that carried with it a certain sense of urgency that I would become quite accustomed to hearing over the course of the next year.

I took the broom and mimicked her action but apparently not with the enthusiasm she desired and the job required. She grabbed the broom back and even more animatedly and with an ever increasingly shrieking voice she again scolded—  

 “Like this. Like this, you do,” and she handed me back the broom and shot me a look that seemed to cry out, what chance do we have of ever winning this war if they keep sending over boys who can’t even sweep sand off a walk. 

Realizing that this war was bigger than one inexperienced soldiers learning the finer secrets of sweeping with a witch’s broom and understanding that I represented not just myself or even the military but my whole country, I put a little more effort into the task at hand and she seemed pleased—both by my enthusiasm and by the apparent authority she seemed to wield over me. I looked around and there were GI’s in brand spanking new fatigues all over the compound—each one sweeping his own little piece of sidewalk, each one with his own proud mama san coaxing him on.

I did this for a day or two and when I wasn’t sweeping I was hanging around with Gary and Irwin, the only other two men I knew in Vietnam—each of us sharing only one concern. When would our orders arrive? Well, we also wondered why we didn’t have orders waiting for us when we landed.

The three of us were in the army on a rather common but little understood plan called the three-year guaranteed enlistment program. None of us had a real good idea of how it worked and the fact that we didn’t have orders waiting for us when we arrived only stoked the fires of doubt, confusion, suspicion, and anxiety.

We were all journalists, designated as such by our army MOS, 71Q20. But we all knew that once we completed the DOD School of Journalism training, the army had fulfilled its obligation. It wasn’t an ironclad guarantee by any means and in fact didn’t even pretend to be.

The whole situation reminded me of a used tire ad I had seen once on TV, where the price of the tires were so low that the announcer warned the listener to hurry up “because at these prices, these tires won’t last.” Maybe the three-year guaranteed enlistment program wasn’t all it was cracked up to be—and it wasn’t even cracked up to be much. As we were told at every stage, AIT training was the only guarantee.

The program worked like this. I signed up for three years and the army in turn guaranteed that I would receive training in my chosen MOS field, Information Specialist. If they didn’t complete their end of the bargain I could get out but if I got the training then they could assign me to any job they wished to.

     Now the unwritten assumption was that they wouldn’t train you for something if they didn’t intend to use you in that field but the other unwritten assumption was that soldiers were getting shot every day and they had to be replaced by someone—and it might just as well be a journalist.

Another unknown was that even if the army did use you as a journalist, what unit would you be assigned to? There is a big difference between infantry, airborne, transportation, medical, and motorized units. There was also a big difference between working at a company, battalion, division or brigade level. None of these unknowns were covered in the guaranteed contract I signed the previous November when I enlisted.

I was very much aware of the loose ends attached to the contract and was doing my best not to let the unknowns get the better of me. Nevertheless they would cross my mind about every hour or so because sweeping a wooden sidewalk on a sandy beach isn’t as distracting as one might think.

It seemed to Gary and me, though, that Irwin was doing everything he could to let these concerns get the better of him. He was convinced that we would never see a typewriter in Vietnam much less use one in our jobs. More so, he was convinced that the army knew this when they signed us up. The biggest thing he was sure of, and he was as certain of this as the third-tour sergeant I had sat next to on the plane, was that he was going to die in Vietnam.

“Irwin, I don’t even think the army wants us fighting over here,” I’d try to tell him. “We’ve got no training and I’m pretty sure they want fighters who know what they’re doing.”

“How many journalist do you think they need?” he’d reply. We were all aware that our whole graduating class at the school had received orders for Vietnam.

“Soldiers are being sent home every day,” I countered.

“In body bags.”

     There wasn’t much Gary or I could do. We had the same concerns as Irwin did but were doing our best to fight them. He wasn’t making it easy and the simple truth is that he was not much fun to be around and so we stayed away from him as much as possible. I don’t know how Gary handled the problem but I kept asking my mama san if there was anyplace else that needed sweeping. If I couldn’t be a journalist than I was prepared to be the best damn sidewalk sweeper the army could provide her with.