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.

 

 

 

 

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.

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