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.