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.