A Bad Omen is Simply a Good Omen Turned Upside Down

The plane had just barely left the runway when the sound of the wheels being raised reinforced the idea that yes this was it. As we made ourselves comfortable in our seats, I was certainly aware of the risks involved in this journey, but I really wasn’t assessing the odds or worrying about them.

Only a few years earlier I had sat in Cumnock Hall as a Lowell Tech freshman and listened as the dean told us to, “Look to your left, look to your right. Two of you won’t be here next year.” I’ve always been a glass half full guy, so I felt sorry for those two other guys.

I wasn’t totally naïve but I certainly knew my odds of returning home would be better than one out of three. On the other hand, I also knew that the stakes would be higher.  

Unless this plane was different from every other plane that had been bringing troops to Vietnam for almost a decade, the one undeniable truth was that some of us would not be on the return flight in a year’s time. You could count on that like you could count on an in-flight meal back when you could count on an in-flight meal.

We were flying above the clouds when the stewardess addressed us for the first time. She welcomed us to Continental Airlines and told us how honored the crew was to be flying us to our destination today. Usually when you fly somewhere you hear stuff like, “Welcome to sunny Miami Beach” or “Welcome to the Big Easy, home of Mardi Gras” or “Hope you enjoy our flight to San Antonio, home of the Alamo.”  But our stewardess stuck with destination the whole flight. There was simply no good way to say, “Welcome to our flight to stinking hot Vietnam, where things are really jumping.” She didn’t want to spoil a perfectly good plane ride with a nasty word like Vietnam, and that was okay because none of us wanted to hear it. What she said next was not okay.

“The crew has some unfortunate news for you today,” she said.

Unfortunate news? What could it be? More unfortunate than the fact that the war was showing no signs of ending any time soon.  What could this unfortunate news be and could anything be done about it?

“We’ve checked through the whole galley and we’re sorry to have to announce that much of the food that was supposed to be on board somehow didn’t get loaded. We’re going to have to ration the food so that you all get some. Again, the crew would like to apologize for this error.”

There was some grumbling by a few of the soldiers but even that stopped quickly. While thoughts of dying may have been lingering in the air, I was pretty sure none of us were going to die of starvation on the flight over. At the worst, it might be a sign.

If this was a sign of something—and no one was saying it was—but more than a few of the passengers on that flight must have been thinking to himself that it could very likely be a sign of something and if it was, it would most certainly be a sign that this was a bad sign—a bad omen of something bad happening.

The sergeant sitting next to me was certainly going that route. He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit up and stared at the stewardess. He had already told me this was his third tour and he wasn’t expecting to come back—and that had been back on the runway when we were still taxiing and now he was listening to her tell him that there would be no last meal.

My thinking didn’t go past the thought that no food was just a crummy way to start things off. To my way of thinking, if no food was a sign of anything, it was a sign that I was going to be damn hungry when we landed in ten hours.

I was going over on my first tour as an information specialist, didn’t have a clue what I would be doing but was pretty sure it wouldn’t involve fighting. I hadn’t even held a rifle in my hands since boot camp. I didn’t have the experience or the common sense to know that this plane and everyone on it was just a big roll of the dice and no one knew whose number would come up.

I don’t remember anything else about the flight except that we got a little bit of food like the stewardess promised. An interesting point of fact is that what the stewardess and all of us considered to be a little bit of food was far more than the airlines would be offering just a few years down the road. It goes without saying that the guy sitting next to me chain-smoked one cigarette after another for the whole trip, something else you won’t find on an airline anymore.

We stopped in Anchorage but didn’t get out. In Tokyo we did get out—but for some reason couldn’t go inside the terminal. We all just sat against a wall on the tarmac in the dead of night, waiting to switch to another plane. As a sergeant major would tell me years later, “Nothing is too good for the American fighting man, and nothing is what they get.”

The next day—or was it the same day—or was it yesterday—crossing the dateline was a new experience for most of us and we didn’t really know how it worked. Not that it mattered. The only important day now would be the day we board our flight returning home. All the days in between were just that—days in between.

But at some point, after a very long flight, we landed at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam—hungry as dogs.

Prelude to Vietnam

On April 29, 1970 American and Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia for the purposes of destroying Viet Cong supply routes. Expanding the war to a second country—third if you count Laos, which already seemed to be on the fringe of the fighting—drew protest from around the world, not to mention the usual gang of suspects, students from American universities.

A little bit after noon, on Monday May 4, 1970 the Ohio National Guard fired on Kent State students who were protesting the invasion. Four students died and the picture of one girl’s feeling of helplessness and anguish as she knelt over a victim spread around the globe.

On May 21, 1970 in the Record Planet’s Recording Studio 3, Neil Young’s “Ohio” was recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and goes on to become an anthem of the protest movement.
 



   Looking back, this isn't much but being editor for a week
looked good on my resume when I arrived in Vietnam.

I had spent most of the eleven weeks of AIT training going out nightly with Charlie, a Marine PFC, as we visited the SNAFU Bar, located 25 feet off base, the Sugar Daddy Lounge, a mile up the road towards Indianapolis, where we'd listen to a local troubadour sing ballads like, "Have some Madeira, my dear."  On weekends we rented cars, thumbed or road busses—most notably Louisville on Derby Day, where Charlie, a native of South Carolina introduced me to Rebel Yell and Cincinnati on the day Hank Aaron got his 3000^th hit.


Despite of all this extramural activity, I somehow   managed, by June 8, to rank in the top three of our class and  awarded one of the three coveted editor positions for the school's final project—a  4-page mock-up newspapers.  Charlie, on the other hand, had parlayed eleven weeks of drinking and traveling into a dead last finish.

It wasn’t a big surprise when I made Charlie my first choice but it was pretty much thought to be the kiss of death. Even I began to have my doubts when the Sports Page—given to Charlie at his request, was nothing but a blank page on the eve of the day we were to submit our copy.

But Charlie had an ace up his sleeve that no one else was aware of, including me. On base, in another unit, was an All-American football player from Georgia. It wasn’t easy but Charlie arranged for what became a half-page interview. While the other two papers were doing stories about base baseball games and volleyball tournaments, Charlie had done an interview that could have been featured in the Indianapolis Star, and would have been if they knew the man was in town.

Wednesday June 17, 1970, Fort Benjamin Harrison saw the current class of the Department of Defense School of Journalism assembled to receive their final evaluation. Our paper, PentaStaff —get it?—was selected the best overall on the basis of best overall design, best news, best editorial and best Sports Page.

 

Best Sports Page was the real shocker as well as the real clincher.     

Due to the events mentioned earlier, the last month had been filled with a lot of anxiety and expectation about what our next assignments would be, especially within the ranks of the soldiers in the class. There were so many more options for the Army guys but always, the elephant in the room was Vietnam.

The previous class—the one I was supposed to be in before my orders got screwed up at boot camp—had sent all it’s Army graduates to Fort Hood, Texas. None of us knew anything about any of the stateside posts, but the general consensus was no one wanted to go there. It wasn’t Vietnam but was Texas.

In the week that the three teams were putting their mimeo-papers together the new assignments were posted and the whole class of Army personnel learned they were being assigned to Vietnam. One paper, The Quill, edited by Irwin Polls even included an article entitled “Nam Ain’t Bad,” which despite its title did everything to argue the case that while it might not be bad it sure as hell wasn’t good.

I took a lot of flack for picking Charlie and had my own serious doubts when the criticism appeared to be warranted but in the end I looked at it philosophically. A college degree didn't keep me out of the military, but that was mostly my fault. Boot camp didn't turn out exactly the way I had expected, but I had been warned it hardly ever did. I missed my intended class at AIT, the one that would have sent me to Texas, and made the next class, the one that sent me to Vietnam. 

 I decided I couldn't ever know for sure how something was going to turn out so I had better just get used to that. I had worked hard at AIT, but also managed to have some fun. Charley was a good friend and sticking by him was the right thing to do. It also turned out to be the smart thing to do. I decided that until something goes wrong, there is no harm in expecting everything to go right. Expecting good things to happen doesn't really hurt or change anything. That's the approach I took to my assignment to Vietnam.

This didn't mean I wouldn't have some explaining to do when I called home with news of my assignment. Just six months earlier my parents had watched me drive to the recruitment center to enlist in the Navy's nuclear submarine program only to learn when I got home that I had enlisted in the Army.

I'd tell them now that going to Vietnam as a journalist was the best of all possible worlds if one was going to that part of the world.

Both of them were well aware that my father had survived the invasion of North Africa only to be captured in his ancestral homeland of Sicily. So we all knew that you can never be too sure. But I was pretty sure everything was going to be okay. Hell, six months ago I didn't have a job. Now I was an information specialist—whatever that was.

 

Introduction



     Vietnam was different from all the other wars I had studied in school. The Revolutionary War was fought to gain our independence, the Civil War to save the union. Most people agree that the Spanish-American War was fought because Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hertz were fighting their own war and needed a place wage it—a place like Cuba.

World War I was fought to end all wars. A measure of its success is that an even bigger war, World War II, had to be fought just 20 years later. And then there was the Korean War, which was really more like an alumni reunion for some of the participants of WW II.

 

  All these wars had reasons for being fought, albeit some were better than others. And then came Vietnam—never an iron clad reason for being there and never a clear cut objective that would get us out of there. It seemed to go on for eternity by the nation watching it unfold each night on the evening news. Vietnam was the war everyone wanted to go away but wouldn’t.

 

 What made Vietnam different from a soldier’s point of view was that his participation in it was being timed as if he were riding a steer or bucking bronco in a rodeo. To win, he only had to ride till the buzzer sounded—and the buzzer would go off in exactly one year.
 

 

NOTE: These stories are a look back at my year in Vietnam, the events leading up to it and my time in San Pedro when I returned home. These stories should not be read as chapters in a novel. Better to think of them as a journal. Some of the stories might not seem like much and many of them probably aren’t much. But they all served a purpose—to fill in a year that had a lot of down time.

 

I welcome comments on these stories as well as any of your own stories. But remember this is not a collection of war stories. There are enough of them going around. These are simply accounts of what I did to kill time when I had a lot of time to kill.