Note: This is a much-abbreviated version of remembrances during my service in the United States Army Medical Corps in the mid-1960s. Out of courtesy, I have omitted full names of the “dramatis personae”.
1. To the Outhouse[*]
With an host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear, and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end.
Methinks it is no journey.
Anonymous, Tom o’ Bedlam
It was July, 1965, when I received my summons to close ranks and join the “modern” U.S. Army. I had just graduated from Pasadena City College, and here, minding my own business, assiduously laboring away in the shoe department of J.C. Penney’s in Arcadia, California, to save up money before applying to a four-year college. Local Board 93, however, felt that neither my dedication to shodding the American public, nor my further academic education was in the immediate best interests of the nation.
There has been no draft in the United States since 1973 (officially 1976). In 1965, however, it was in full swing and executed by lottery. And wouldn’t you know it, this turned out to be the only time in my life that I ever won a lottery!
An officious envelope arrived from the Selective Service, also known at the time as the SS (not to be confused with the other SS, i.e., the Schutzstaffel), and inside was an invitation from none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson, the President of the United States of America, for me to muster up. Although there lay several details in fine print on that single page, the main text was terse and to the point:
GREETING: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States, and to report at L.A. Examining and Induction Station, 1033 S.Broadway,[2] Los Angeles, Calif. on JUL 28 1965 at 7:30 A.M.
I had been gathered into the fold.
In The Odyssey, Ulysses attempts to avoid the draft by feigning madness, harnessing an ass and an ox to his plow and sowing the seashore with salt. His clever ruse is discovered by an even cleverer recruiting sergeant, and Ulysses is shipped off to the Trojan War—nearly as senseless as the Vietnam War. I, alas, lacked his imagination and humbly reported for active duty without so much as a saltshaker in my pocket. Following the corresponding formalities of induction into military service (please bend over and cough; raise your right hand: do you solemnly swear to uphold… etc.), I was, in first class luxury (in a propeller-driven World War II DC6), transported by air to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, just outside of San Antonio, where I received basic and specialized training as a combat medic.
Besides forced marches, barracks cleanup, bivouac, KP (Kitchen Patrol), parades, and a dozen other fascinating (usually grueling) exercises of undetermined worth and purpose, we also became, at least theoretically, proficient in the art of sustaining human life. We practiced giving shots (to one another), bandaging wounds, preparing IVs, attending the bed-ridden, bearing stretchers, and other life-saving measures. Each day our instructors sadly shook their heads in despair and lighted candles for the soldiers who in only a few short weeks hence we were supposed to be pulling from the clutches of the Grim Reaper.
It should be noted, however, that it was not all work and no play. During basic and advanced training in 1965 at Fort Sam Houston, several of us also had the rare opportunity, thanks to the serendipitous discovery by one of our fellow recruits, to “crash” high society on our weekends and attend, free, dazzling musical performances at the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra conducted by famed Maestro Victor Alessandro.[3]
Once training terminated, the Army at that time had a very enlightened way of assigning its fresh charges to their duty posts. We each received a form where we were to note down our three choices—in order of preference—those countries where we would best like to serve the United States Armed Forces. Hey, this is great, I thought. I immediately noted down as first choice Germany, because Elvis had been stationed there and had never kicked about it, so far as I knew. Second and third choices I selected were Japan, because we were no longer at war there…and State-side.
Yeah, right.
As it turned out—surely due to some inadvertent mix-up of forms—I was sent not to Germany, nor to Japan, nor to the United States, but to South Vietnam…along with half of my entire company. The other half, who also had filled out their assignment preference cards for Germany, Japan and home duty, ended up in South Korea. I suppose I shouldn’t kvetch, because I did, in fact, get to Japan, albeit for a few hours, but the trip to Vietnam and subsequent rides within that country did not even begin to fit into my plans and aspirations. Somehow, I had missed President Johnson’s announcement to increase U.S. military strength in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 men.
We were cursorily and without mercy given over to a series of vaccinations that presaged potential, if not certain, death by pestilence even before bullets, to wit: malaria, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, yellow fever, typhus, polio, flu, plague, and hepatitis. Our normal name tags and insignias were exchanged for camouflaged versions, and our clothes were soaked in an insect repellent so vile smelling that to this day the scent remains embedded in my brain. I expect it will endure there even after I have forgotten my own name.
“Now boys,” our sergeant—a tear, believe it or not, in his eye—addressed us with fatherly concern upon our embarkation, “this isn’t a field trip you’re going on. So, take care, all of you!”
We’d pretty much figured that much out already. As we boarded several buses which would take us to the airport, we bade our final fair-wells to companions, many who’d become fast friends, realizing most of whom we would never see again, some who might never see home again. And we gazed one last time at Fort Sam Houston,[4] suddenly recognizing that from the perspective of where we were going, it hadn’t been such a bad place after all.
I don’t intend to convert this into lengthy and detailed war memoirs. All the same, a few incidents during this interval of my life seem noteworthy to include here which set for me personally the marrow of 1966 and, in their own more subtle way, perhaps the rest of my life.
You must realize first that being the lowly private (later upgraded by degrees to SP4)[5] of a powerful war machine does not always entitle you to first-hand information about what lies in store for you. I had been assigned to the First Cavalry Division at Camp Radcliff in the An Khê District of Gia Lai Province in the Central Highlands region of South Vietnam, but I barely knew that until after I had arrived. And once I did know, I still had little idea what a cavalry division was. I seemed to have read somewhere that cavalry had to do with horses. I hated horses. I had been induced to ride one once, and we both took an instant loathing to one another. What ensued was what I imagined a cocktail goes through inside a shaker. I knew that, First Cavalry Division or no, I would never mount another horse again. Of course, in modern warfare, a cavalry is an army component moving in motor vehicles and assigned to combat missions that require great mobility. At least, that is how the dictionary defines it. The First Cav was an airmobile division, which meant airplanes and helicopters—lots and lots of helicopters. Literally hundreds of them.
I was assigned to a medical clearing company supporting the Seventh Cavalry Regiment. The original Seventh Cavalry Regiment, I recalled, was George Armstrong Custer’s old outfit, and this could not but foreshadow in my mind ill omens. I had a presentiment that what the Sioux hadn’t finished with the Seventh back in 1876, the Viet Cong perhaps might in 1966.
In due course, I found myself flying in Huey and Chinook helicopters up and down South Vietnam, and a horse suddenly did not seem quite so nasty a beast as I’d previously cracked it up to be. Visions of being shot out of the sky and falling like a rock continually weighed on my mind, and I knew with all certainty that I must have had the whitest knuckles in all Southeast Asia. My outfit kept being set down in these inhospitable, rice-paddied, communist-infested traps, where I repeatedly imagined hearing Viet Cong portentously playing the faint musical strains of what I thought might be “Gary Owen” on fifes just beyond the perimeter where the jungle is thickest. And if we weren’t being besieged by our adversaries, then it was by local hucksters trying to make up for the current dearth of tourist trade. The entire year I spent in this otherwise beautiful country, my body, my mind, my very life seemed destined to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous travel conditions. Today, more than a half century later, whenever people learn of my participation in the Vietnam War, they suddenly turn commiserative. “Ah, that must have been pretty rough stuff over there, huh?” I, as befitting, turn glassy-eyed.
Surprisingly, though, the first part of the trip turned out to be pleasant. We were given preferential treatment aboard a Northwest Orient Airlines flight bound for Tokyo. I had an inch-thick novel (Harold Robbins’ blockbuster Hotel) to keep me entertained. We received first-class treatment, the meals served ever so delicious, which would, alas, turn out to be the only decent ones any of us would have for an entire year. Maybe Vietnam would not be so bad after all, I reckoned.
But of course, along the way I simply had to pick up a bug, one of those intestinal demons which would come to haunt me off and on for the rest of my life. A new word entered my vocabulary. Dysentery. In truth, a whole new panoply of words entered. But they all meant the same thing: galloping diarrhea. And I had it. Years later, long after Vietnam and living in Central America, a Costa Rican friend who saw me in the repeated throws of yet another round of dysentery, remarked, “Esteban, te van a sepultar en valdes” (i.e., Steve, they will bury you in buckets).
A word or two more here about diarrhea… Oh, by the way, if you are faint of heart (or gut) about the subject, you may skip the next three paragraphs (I have numbered them for your convenience), but I must say that they are the pith of this reminiscence, and no self-respecting travelogue would be complete without some mention of this essential hazard to journeys abroad. Ergo, you would do well to grit your teeth, take a deep breath (maybe even do a couple of deep knee-bends), and read on:
1) While travel and barfing are certainly undesirable enough companions, they nevertheless can be coped with…even if you wished you were dead. Ordinarily, a handy supply of plastic-lined paper bags or, if you are in a car, a lean out the window will do the trick. Travel and diarrhea are a whole different ball game. Only those who’ve suffered the dynamic duo can truly appreciate their distinctive agony. As a side note, my late father sagely stated that with advancing age, one’s favorite abode becomes the bathroom. I wholly empathize. To be traveling and not have access to a ready bathroom in times of dire need is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment.
2) And so it happened to me. From Japan, I was flown in a C-141 Starlifter (that’s a big Air Force jet), along with several dozen other soldiers, to Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base, outside of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). My bug had struck with all its perverse fury shortly before arrival, and there was no opportunity to make it to the head before landing. When we touched down, it was night, and having half frozen to death in the harsh Japanese winter only hours before, the shock of the heat here was nearly intolerable to my weakened system. As we scrambled from the plane, I could only think of finding a bathroom, on the double, to relieve myself. There was, however, a blackout alert and I could scarcely see where I was standing. But the war didn’t matter, being shot down by Viet Cong didn’t matter, orders to stay put didn’t matter. I was at the point of AWOLing to the nearest bathroom, come hell or high water, when our leader, a God-sent sergeant, mercifully told us to break ranks to relieve ourselves. I don’t know who this man was, but I silently raised a prayer, albeit an off-the-hip one, on his behalf.
It was here I discovered another thing about travel: not only do not have diarrhea without a bathroom at hand, but absolutely do not have diarrhea with a sixty-six-pound duffel bag to cart along. Somebody in the dark pointed me in the direction of the nearest latrines, and off I ran, or staggered, a monstrous canvas millstone hung round my sagging shoulders. Along with the intestinal cramps, suddenly I felt nauseous and dizzy, and I knew that if I didn’t reach the latrine in the next ten seconds I would pass out, as well as befoul myself from stem to stern (to borrow a naval term). But some hidden strength welled up inside me (possibly a peristaltic contraction), and I shot across the tarmac, uncaring of the possibility that I might be run over by a taxiing bomber (actually, almost hoping for it), until I ran headlong into the unlit latrine, nearly knocking myself cold. I let my duffel bag fall to the ground and yanked opened a door, at the same time unbuckling my belt, and unzipping my pants.
3) Now I must confess that, while prior to this moment I had on occasion freely peed into the desert, the forest, the prairie, even—yes, I confess—the Pacific Ocean, when the call of nature required it, my pampered upbringing had never prepared me for a Vietnamese squat latrine.
There was nothing to sit on! I groped about in the dark stall for a toilet seat, but I only felt air, and pretty dank air at that. Veritably thick dank, when you come right down to it. Much impressed, I finally risked lighting a match to see just how thick a dank I had actually involved myself, praying that the match’s flame would not set off a fulminating chain reaction, destroying all of Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base.
In the dim glow, I saw on the floor two slightly raised concrete plinths resembling Big Foot tracks, and between them a hole. Here I stood, at the point of fainting from the heat, the dank, and the bug, and no place to sit! It was almost more than I could handle. The match burnt my fingers and I was once again cast into gloom. Quickly I lowered my pants, and squatted. I know not why I’m recounting all of this. It’s humiliating, degrading. Certainly disgusting. But there I was, crouching over a pitch-black squat latrine for the first time in my life, dying of discomfort, hoping that what was about to fall (or spray) would not soil my trousers, my socks, my combat boots, me…when suddenly an appalling thought seized my fevered brain:
There was no toilet paper in this squalid latrine!
It was unthinkable, but in those brief seconds that my match was lit, I did not remember seeing anywhere a sign of any form of wipey. Not even a piece of newspaper, or a leaf, or… It was too much. What future sins were I to commit to deserve this? My mind cried out and my bowels bellowed, and goodness me, I was one miserable American soldier, even before the battle. As archaic as “woe is me!” may sound, I could not refrain myself from muttering it then. But what wise Roman was it who said that mater artium necessitas (i.e., necessity is the mother of invention)?
While I crouched in that unbecoming, semi-upright fetal position, wondering if, when all was said and done, we really ought to be involved in this conflict, in a totally uncharacteristic, brilliant flash of insight—which even today astounds me—I patted a pocket in my coat and suddenly knew why I had brought along with me that Harold Robbins paperback novel Hotel!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I chortled in my joy. I was saved!
Only the next morning did I discover to my utter chagrin that I’d inadvertently torn out the still-unread final pages of the novel rather than the first ones. Alas, I was never to know how Hotel ended!
2. War Is Hell
The following day, and in far better spirits, I was summarily bundled into a C-130 Hercules turbo-prop troop and cargo carrier, along with several battle-primed infantrymen and a couple of tethered jeeps, headed for a place called An Khê, and location of the base camp of the First Cavalry Division, where we would be assigned to our respective companies and duties. And off we flew… And, of course, it would be smack dab into the very worst airplane ride of my entire life. Scarcely off the ground, we ran smack-dab into a squall[6], where suddenly we found ourselves holding bucking jeeps at bay with our feet. The plane lurched from side to side, dropped abruptly, rose again, plunged, swooped, yawed, pitched. More hellish than a runaway amusement park roller coaster, my fellow travelers and I fast greening about the gills, wondering if there was to be any hand-to-hand combat in our future after all. All the same, the lot of us grinned good-naturedly (with clenched teeth) as we exchanged pleasant banter. After all, were we not all supposed to be pretty tough macho dudes (every last chicken-livered one of us)? I managed to sneak a few peeks out of one of the few tiny round windows available in the aircraft, but the “green hell” I had expected to see somewhere below kept popping up at peculiar right angles or almost overhead or would disappear altogether in the murk of thunderheads. The two jeeps in our midst leaped up and down with ever-increasing violence, and we knew that if we didn’t get through the storm soon, they would break loose from their moorings and we would all be crushed. That is, if we didn’t crash first.
About then, a fellow who might have been for all we knew the pilot, sauntered from the cockpit with a cheery grin on his face.
“Everything okay back here?” he shouted above the whine of the engines.
We nodded vigorously, thumbs up, shrugging one shoulder, then another, puckering our mouths into smiling sneers of disdain at such an absurd question. No sweat, man.
“That’s good, because it’s going to get a whole heck of a lot worse in a minute.”
He slammed the door again. We nodded at each other slowly, our sneers somehow slipping into thin, sickly grimaces. The C-130 suddenly dropped, banked, crabbed, shuddered, pitched one way, then another, climbed, and some of the soldiers, at last impressed, expressed their admiration by yelling “holy shit!” and a few other colorful epigrams which I cannot repeat here.
Then, as suddenly as we entered, we burst out of the squall, and all was smooth riding right to our destination—the First Cavalry Division at An Khê. We were so thankful to be alive that being shot at didn’t seem like such a bad deal after all. But what most amazed me was that I had been too plumb scared to puke.
We landed on a metal-webbed strip that reminded me of driving over a washboard road at lightning speed. That horrible dddddhhhhhrrrrr!! as we sped along nearly unglued me, for I thought for a few seconds that, after surviving the squall, we were now breaking apart in the landing. The trouble with military transport planes is that they are very frugal about placing windows for the passengers to see out of, and the windows they do have are usually spaced such wise that it is nearly impossible to see anything outside anyhow, except perhaps parts of the wing and sky. So, it wasn’t until we finally rolled to a stop and the rear door was lowered that the majority of us even knew where we were.
A blinding light greeted us as the door came down, and we warily worked our way around the stowed jeeps and made our way outside. And I was suddenly thrust into a world so bizarre from my humdrum life that it was like being on a tropical version of Forbidden Planet.[7] All these uniformed humans running or driving back and forth between their great flying machines amid an alien jungle—that green hell where some monstrous, invisible enemy lurked, something diabolical and facetiously nicknamed Charlie. I half-expected to see Walter Pidgeon coming out with his faithful robot Robby to welcome us. I only hoped that when he did come, Anne Francis would be close behind. Instead, a scruffy, mephitic corporal with a vile mouth materialized, packed several of us into a jeep, and off we rode over a bouncy, russet-colored dirt road to Camp Radcliff, base camp of the First Cavalry Division.
We were plopped unceremoniously, along with our gear, on a field patched with one-man tents, barbed wire, a few stripped trees, and huge, black rubber balloons the size of mining truck tires which held potable water. All around us, Bell UH-1D military “Huey” helicopters, and Boeing CH-47 heavy-lift “Chinook” helicopters, landing, taking off, churning up clouds of dust and turning us into sweating, red-mudded meatballs. To our north lay a foreboding mountain called Hon Cong, while before us stretched hundreds of acres of tent-infested, bulldozed land containing the might of a terrible war machine. And beyond, the relentless, never-ending jungle. Below and to our left was “The Golf Course,” a landing field pimpled with hundreds of helicopters, more than I had ever seen in my entire life.
A sergeant informed us that we were currently in a holding company and that we would remain here for a day until farmed out to our respective units. We stood around and gawked stupidly, wondering what awful things we had perpetrated or were to perpetrate to be so deserving of this reward.
Three days later I was assigned to Company C of the 15th Medical Battalion, one of the supporting units of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment. And, thank God, we saved many more lives than we lost. My commanding officer was, of all things, an OBGYN[8], albeit bereft, it would appear, of women to minister to. That said, once, when we were later encamped at Phù Cát, a sandy plain amidst surrounding rice paddies, a Vietnamese woman in labor was brought in for a difficult breech delivery, and our CO, delighted, was finally allowed to practice his noble calling. Shockingly, he even asked me to assist, which of course thereafter dampened all my confidence in the man’s judgment.
Fortunately, my meager expertise in first aid was rarely required, for the company had several capable doctors and senior medics with enough experience and common good sense to assign me instead to litter-bearing (I refer to carrying stretchers, not tending cat boxes), hospital procedure (i.e., bedpans, enemas, shots, bed-making, etc.), and the euphemistic “disposal of human waste” (this detail, however, described in terms by no means euphemistic by those who had to perform it), and to leave patient care to the experts. I heartily concurred, for I viewed with some certainty that anybody unlucky enough to receive medical attention from me at that point was presumably doomed to die, and I did not want this on my conscience as well. Being it “The New Action Army”, I learned instead carpentry, gardening, and painting, as well as such career-oriented enterprises as whitewashing, tent-pitching, cot-scrubbing, sandbag-filling, kitchen-patrolling, rock-compiling, garbage-collecting, floor-building, and trench-digging. It was also here that I learned the gentle art of landscape architecture, which seemed to consist of collecting rocket casings and airplane fuel pods and large rocks, painting them bright yellow and black with the distinctive First Cav insignia, and then lining them in an aesthetic arc along the entrance of our company area and interspersing them with local flora.
3. “Vhat You Do?”
Manning a cement mixer and pouring concrete turned out to be among my many new talents. Our Battalion Commander, a large, imposing lieutenant colonel with an odd eastern European inflection of undetermined albeit oft-speculated origin, had decided Company C’s home base at An Khê required more adequate facilities than just Army tents to house its patients. He did not seem at all optimistic about our hopes for zero casualties during the upcoming year and looked forward to filling our projected Quonset huts with the sick, maimed, and dying. We, of course, entertained the notion that this man was a demented Russian defector, for his accent and mien clearly sprang from somewhere a good deal further east than the Bronx. He looked astoundingly like a six-foot four Oscar Homolka[9] featured as a uniformed, former high officer of the KGB, and we knew by that low, raspy assassin’s voice of his that he was not to be trifled with. We were all terrified of him, but more than any of us, our Executive Officer, nicknamed Half-track,[10] who visibly wilted whenever the man paid us a visit. Our Company Commander, on the other hand, could care less, for he was not a career officer and fully intended to retire in a month’s time and return to his obstetrical practice. But the Executive Officer was Regular Army and had dreams of rising in the ranks, just so long as the Russian colonel did not in the meanwhile make shashlik out of him.
Our mission was to build two or three Quonset huts, where once dilapidated Army tents served as patient wards. The Battalion commander wanted the work done the day before yesterday and continually hounded our Executive Officer to get the floor laid: ASAP. One afternoon, he paid yet another surprise visit and, apprised of our lack of progress. Our Exec Officer and First Sergeant rushed from their respective quarters to meet him, stood at anxious attention, taking heed to ominous paroxytones spoken in thick, terrifying Cyrillic accents:
“Vhat you do?” asked the lieutenant colonel with that cold, quiet, gravelly voice of his that somehow insinuated certain death to non-compliance.
“Sir?” squeaked our E.O.
“Vhat you do, Captain? Vhere new Quonset huts? I see nuh-ting.”
“Sir, we’re doing everything possible. H-however, there has been some difficulty procuring cement…”
The Battalion Commander arched a bushy eyebrow.
“Captain, you like to be nice, crisp major someday, yes?”
“Yessir!”
“Good.” He turned to the First Sergeant. “Top.”
“Sir!”
“You like to be First Sergeant ‘round here come springtime, yes?”
“Oh, very much so, sir!”
“Excellent! Vee understand each other, dhen, yes? Vee see progress soon. Very soon.”
“Yes, Sir!”
There is nothing quite like the right stimulus to encourage the irresolute and weak of heart into action. The company worked the entire night through, and even our executive officer and first sergeant were on hand to help. The floors were laid, the Quonset huts erected in record time, and everyone saved their skins, although hearsay rumored that both our Executive Officer and First Sergeant had seriously contemplated putting in for transfer to a combat unit.
4. An Khê General Hospital
At one time early on, I was briefly assigned to work at a civilian hospital in nearby An Khê—not in a medical capacity, of course, but as the usual “detail orderly.”
Although in the mid-1960s a small town, An Khê in those days, besieged by thousands of off-duty American soldiers, maintained a fascination of its own, and certainly a relief from the daily drudgery of our normal work. I wrote about my Sunday tours in a letter to my parents:
You wander into town, and perhaps the first things you see will be mud huts with thatch or palm leaf roofs and water buffalo nibbling grass by the wayside. Or perhaps you will spy first very brightly painted stucco buildings with red brick shingles and emerald-colored shutters. As you continue your walk, you are suddenly circumvented by children of all ages, from three to twelve. Some ask for food or money, others want to give you a “number one” boot shine because your dusty boots happen to look like “number tens” to them, whether they look it or not. And the remaining children are content with just holding your hand and making the journey about town with you. You find yourself encircled by open-air vegetable stands and gift shops that carry utility items for the soldier as well as genuinely nice souvenirs to send home to your friends and relatives. You see a basin or a wallet you like, and you ask “bao nhiêu?” The proprietor, if he understands your abominable accent, might say “one hundred fifty P” (i.e. piasters, the monetary unit at the time, 125 piasters to one American dollar) or, if he speaks no English, he will write the figure in his palm. You shake your head and bargain with him or her, for bargaining is the accepted and respected thing to do. “One hundred,” you will quote. “One hundred twenty-five P.” “No, one hundred fifteen.” And so it will go. You leave the shop and continue up the street. There are bars all along the way and restaurants that say “very cheap prices,” but charge 40 cents for a Coke. You see the open market and smell the peculiar odors of the Orient rising from the tropical fruits and vegetables that are either green or rotting, depending upon how long they have been sitting in the sweltering sun, in the often futile attempt to be sold by poor farmers, farmers who have put every ounce of their sweat and work behind growing a good crop. The stink of fish from the meat market hits you, and as you look about, you see both flies and dogs flitting across the selling tables. A blind man, who is not so very blind, begs for money. A hundred babies laugh and cry. A woman sitting on the dirt suckles her child. A fat little pig dashes back and forth between buildings and moving feet. You walk and walk, savoring the sights and sounds and smells of shops and people. “Haircut?” “Shine, okay?” Venders wave, beckoning you to buy their handsome watches, or footlockers, or exquisite silk dresses of all colors and sizes. A girl cuddles up to you and asks, “You want boom-boom?” (i.e., sex in exchange for money). You accept and bargain, or decline and continue on your way. You see taxi carts hauled by exhausted horses no larger than Shetland ponies, and young men selling “Newsweek” and “Time”. You find a wondrous mass of humanity before you: people who are sick and undernourished, people who are comfortable, people who have suffered, people who make the best of their suffering. You see beautiful smiles, unhappy and empty expressions, frightened faces, mysterious frowns. You see all that is good and human, and all that is unclean and cruel and uncertain. And it is both so very exciting and at the same time so appalling that it nearly overwhelms you.
My assignment to the An Khê hospital seemed almost a reward after base camp cement-mixing activities. I had by then also become a proficient painter and was now entrusted by high command to whitewash the infirmary buildings. There were two doctors who ran the hospital, one Vietnamese and one American Army physician, assisted by two or three medics, a couple of Vietnamese Red Cross people, a midwife, an interpreter, and two fledgling cooks who were Vietnamese girls about twelve years old. There were also one or two guards, plus an assortment of civilian “handymen.” We were quite a menagerie. The primitive little hospital had been built during World War II by occupying Japanese forces. It included one treatment room, one reception room, one supply room, and one ward which housed all of four beds.
But it was the building behind the hospital where most of the treatment was ministered. For besides being the maternity ward, it also served as a VD (venereal disease) check station for most of An Khê’s 500 prostitutes, which, if you are statistically inclined, was over 550% of the “normal” amount for a town that size. This, of course, had nothing to do with overly promiscuous townspeople, rather with overly promiscuous American soldiers. Just outside town, there had been erected a sort of crude brothel mall fondly known as Sin City, and tacitly sanctioned by the Army (if you can call its construction by the Army Corps of Engineers tacit). Most of the town prostitutes “plied their trade” here, and then came over to the hospital for periodic and obligatory medical control and treatment. Often, these visiting professionals, after receiving their customary shots of Bicillin (aka Penicillin G benzathine), would wander over to survey my artistic talents and, seeing how much I enjoyed painting walls, would offer to take a hand at it themselves. They would tell me that they were “number one”, i.e., ace, painters around these parts, while I, on the other hand, was “number ten”—number ten, of course, being the very pits. So, I happily let them have a whirl at the brush. It reminded me of Tom Sawyer’s whitewashing ploy, certainly with a new twist. To my recollection, Tom had never been approached by a bevy of hookers to paint Aunt Polly’s board fence, although I seem to recall that he did sing “Buffalo Gals” while he worked.
5. A Clerk’s Day Is Never Done
My glory days at the hospital did not last, however. One day, the First Sergeant discovered to his delight, and to my despair, that I could type, and I forthwith was transferred to company headquarters (a field tent little bigger than my parents’ camping tent, though somewhat worse for wear) as yet another heroic orderly in Top’s ever-growing gaggle of company clerks. Top had this brilliant idea of company clerks working in shifts around the clock to churn out reams of paper to make Company C look as though it were winning the war single-handedly. I perhaps exaggerate. All the same, one time there were up to four of us consumed with eager devotion to papering our unit with orders and requests, recommendations, memos and passes. We were the Orderly Room A-Team. We delivered the mail, ran errands, manned the radio, typed out morning reports, Article 15s (non-judiciary punishment for soldiers who got into minor scrapes), duty rosters, personnel actions, and pay complaints, studied the legalities, procedures and technicalities of Army Regulations.
The ARs were fifteen volumes of what to do and what not to do in Army life, from how to write correspondence, all the way to mess hall etiquette. Nobody ever really knew what was going on at any time, due mainly because it seemed that every day something in the ARs changed. As such, these were all contained in loose-leaf binders so we could easily extract the obsolete regulations and replace them with the updated ones. I even became a reporter for the Recorder of a 208 Officers Board of Inquiry, whose job was to eliminate undesirables from the Army. My job included frantically writing down the proceedings of the trial. With the experience I had acquired up to then, I figured that once out of the Service I would be all ready to begin a career as a medical ditch-digging clerical lawyer.
5. War Heroes
Among our many worthy duties, we (the company clerks/aka orderlies) had also been assigned to write up lengthy recommendations for military decorations of personnel, for this looked good on our company records. It truly taxed our creativity to come up with acceptable reasons why the company should not have been stood up against a wall and shot instead, much less decorated. Although one of our former company medics did in fact become a highly decorated hero (and even made the cover of Life magazine), during my tour of duty only two of our company’s troops won Purple Hearts, but this was because they stupidly (and some say purposely) scratched themselves on enemy punji stakes while crossing a stream. The rest of us received Combat Medical Badges while falling under enemy attack more times that we especially cared for. When I say falling, I mean to say that we were jumping helter-skelter into whatever foxhole lay nearby. On one occasion, during a mortar attack of the air field at Phù Cát, I leaped into my own foxhole, only to discover that our mess sergeant, without my knowledge, had arrogated it as his official garbage pit, leaving me up to my knees in slop, and gagging…for the second time that day on the same meal. (More about that later.)
But not even the heady life of an orderly room clerk saved me from traveling. Even we were expendable. When I was not pouring over Army Regulations to hunt down unimpeachable (read swallowable) reasons by which our company richly deserved commendation for services rendered above and beyond the call of duty, I seemed to be continuously hopscotching all over the country together with most everybody else, from An Khê to Bồng Sơn to Phù Cát to Quy Nhơn to Pleiku to Plei Mrong to Tuy Hòa to Phan Thiết and back again, in trucks, jeeps, airplanes, mules,[11] and helicopters, ministering succor to the wounded and diseased, administering wounds and disease to military bureaucracy, drawing mortar and gunfire—both enemy and friendly—side-stepping and pirouetting our way around preposterous work details and their commissioned and non-commissioned agents provocateurs, trying to maintain some semblance of sanity, while no doubt adding to the reigning chaos.
6. Sweet Dreams
Our company suffered its fair share of lunatics, and I often wondered how they’d made their way into the hallowed domain of Florence Nightingale. A modest example: throwing venomous snakes, albeit dead ones, onto card game tables just to watch the troops scatter. You might say that some took particular umbrage, and pretty soon knives and bayonets (and perhaps a fork or two) began to flash, and it was all that the rest of us could do to bring decorum back to draw poker.
But this, of course, was mere horseplay. There were others who had lost touch with even the real unreality of our situation. When I first arrived, it was the “dead” of winter, so to speak. While down in the Saigon region the heat proved nearly unbearable even in December, the First Cav Division base camp, on the other hand, was located in the Central Highlands, where evenings there could often be nippy. Cozy cots did not seem to be in season, for I soon discovered that my UB-135 blanket, wool, olive drab, damp, did not cut the mustard for winter warmth (later I would be issued an additional one). I drew the blanket over my head, praying that my own hot breath would warm me up. Eventually I slept. But then something woke me, something hard poking at my shoulder. Pulling back my blanket, I looked up the barrel of an M-16 rifle. A soldier dressed in full battle regalia was pointing his weapon straight into my left pupil. He had a curious glazed look in his eye.
“Don’t ever do that,” he said in a low, quiet, deadly voice.
“Do what? Are you crazy or something?”
“Could’ve been Charlie. Sneaks into a bed, covers himself. Then he attacks. Slits throats. So, don’t ever cover your head.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m telling you to get the hell out of my sight right now or you’ll wish I was Charlie.” I said this as dangerously as I could, although truth be told I was shaking like a leaf. This nutty soldier on guard duty could very well have killed me in my sleep. They would have no doubt called it friendly fire. Fortunately, two weeks later, he was “rotated” back to the United States, none too soon for a kid who was at the point of cracking. I still had eleven months to go.
I don’t know how things were in other companies, but Company C had its fair share of screwballs. Not in the order of the above-mentioned fellow, of course, but rather the good-natured crazy humorousness that tended to make us laugh and not take ourselves so seriously. This served as something of a defense mechanism against our anxiety. We tried to find something ludicrous in even the most doleful situations.
7. The Rats! The Rats!
Speaking of which, rats were one object of our anxiety. They practically overran the area. A friend of mine from another outfit recounted that he and two companions had once been sent out on night guard duty in a particularly hazardous area. One of them had to relieve himself and disappeared into the brush. All was eerily silent for a few moments—not even the usual deafening buzz of cicadas—when of a sudden there burst forth a blood-curling scream, followed by a burst of rifle fire, followed by him hurtling toward them as fast as his legs would carry him. With hearts in throats, they readied grenades and aimed their rifles in preparation for an imminent onslaught of Viet Cong. The soldier finally reached the other two and threw himself into the foxhole, yelling hysterically.
“The rats! The rats!” he screamed.
They were about to explode into laughter when suddenly a horde of rats poured out of the jungle. Pretty soon all three of them were screaming. Only after emptying their M-16s into the raging torrent of rodents, did the three finally flee in an ignominious rout.
I knew what they felt. Our base camp had a huge nest of rats of its own which nested in a hollow tree next to the hooch[12] where I slept. Two of the sergeants had devised a competition to catch the beasts, and every morning their rat traps divulged grisly evidence of the vermin’s ubiquity. One night, I was awakened from a stifling nightmare to find a large rat sitting heavily on my chest, its beady eyes contemplating this once sleeping beauty beneath it. I let out a whoop, awakening the entire hooch, and for the next several minutes we were all shouting and shrieking from atop our cots as we hurled boots, canteens, mess kits, whatever we could find, at that agile, prancing rodent. In the end, it escaped unscathed. The next morning, however, we determined to put a stop to such “rodentic” impertinence once and for all. We armed ourselves with boots and baseball bats and other equally lethal weapons, surrounded the hollow tree, and began to pour a five-gallon drum of gasoline down an opening. We waited for a moment so that it could penetrate deep down into the interior of the tree and the network of tunnels.
“Okay, Pulley, it was your scumbag rat,” announced one of my comrades. “You get to do the honors.”
I was, of course, touched by this gesture and gratefully received from his hand a box of safety matches. I did not note that he and the others had retreated several steps behind me. I converged upon the tree, lit a match, and tossed it into the hollow. A second later I had neither eyebrows, eyelashes, nor the first inch of my scalp. What remained had taken on a peculiar curl not before seen on my head. The tree fairly exploded in my face, singeing most of my hair and burning my face to a bright, baby-butt pink.
“Get back! They’re coming!”
Soon, the few surviving rats of that holocaust came tumbling out of what remained of the tree, and the troops put them to the bat, the shovel, the frying pan. Somebody seeing my burns suggested that I receive a Purple Heart. I demurred. It was reward enough to be rid of those awful pests forever. The next morning, however, one of the Spec-5’s, a fellow nicknamed Lurch due to his striking resemblance to that cadaverous giant in the Addam’s Family, was bitten on the pinkie as he got out of bed by an obviously vengeful surviving rodent, and the man had to undergo the painful multi-shot treatment for rabies over the next two weeks. The battle we may have won, but not the war!
8. Off Hours, Staying Sane, Biding our Time
Drug abuse had not yet reared its ugly head, at least not that I was aware of, but much drinking existed in its stead. At base camp, evenings were often spent by imbibers intent on winning beer-guzzling records and making raucous noise at the local canteen. Some of the non-drinkers, however, were often no less boisterous, for there also existed a small contingent of the Pentecostal persuasion keen, on occasion, to experience what we uninitiates assumed The Rapture. Their own ebullitions of spiritual exaltation would occasionally draw the inebriates to determine, pardon the expression, what in hell was going on, and the ensuing encounter as a rule proved entertaining. I and another fellow in Company C, both of us its sole Bahá’ís, managed to conduct ourselves in a somewhat more low-key manner in our religious activities, without in any way venturing to pride ourselves somehow holier than thou. Meanwhile, in another quarter, there was normally a poker game going on, with much kibitzing and loud bluffing, while still elsewhere a boisterous game of Monopoly progressed toward Boardwalk or Pennsylvania Avenue. The more contemplative were hard put to find a quiet spot for reflection on these evenings except, perhaps, in the patient wards. Fortunately, there were a few talented jesters among us, and they kept our spirits as high as anyone could reasonably expect.
Among these was Herb, a remarkable chap from Michigan gifted with a zany sense of humor. He worked in A and D which, if memory serves me right, means Admissions and Dispatch. It was the section that officially received patients into the ward and dispatched them again when all we could do had been achieved. Herb was addicted to Camels, and I don’t mean dromedaries, but he was willing to sacrifice his habit in the interests of scientific research by switching to something of a more oriental character, as we were stationed, after all, in the Far East. By nature a generous soul, he expressed unwillingness to cash in on all the glory himself, and so he called upon me to share in his experiment. He then introduced me to IV-set saline solution hookah-smoking—a once-in-a-lifetime experience that cured me forever of any possible seduction into the glamorous world of yellow fingers, smelly hair, and nicotine fits. In a word, we both fell deathly ill from the experience. Who knew that the human body does not take kindly to tobacco smoke filtered through, well, basically…brine, sterile though it be? It even inspired me to give up my affectation of pipe smoking, which I had of late taken up for the ostensible purpose of presuming a certain sophisticated air. It did in effect presume a certain air about me when I smoked it, but whether it was regarded sophisticated in the context of a low-ranking Specialist E-4 such as I is open to debate. In any case, I bequeathed my lovely bruyère, along with pipe cleaners and cherry-blend tobacco, to a presumably sophisticated, higher-ranking, pipe-smoking platoon sergeant who had coveted it for his private collection. Herb, a true visionary, noting that our IV hookah experiment seemed to discourage the use of tobacco altogether, gave up further investigations, no doubt fearing the catastrophic repercussions this might have on the American tobacco industry, and thereafter returned to cigarettes.
Besides his smoking habit, which he finally gave up years later after by-pass surgery, Herb was also a compulsive card-shuffler. He didn’t play cards—I’m not even sure if he knew how to—he just shuffled them. Incessantly, day and night, night and day, all the while carrying on his brilliantly humorous and intelligent repartee. He could go through two decks of cards a week. It reminded me a bit of Will Rogers with his famous lariat, spinning that darn thing all over the place, lassoing cattle and politicians, while he would shoot off amusing banter about local, national, and world affairs. While I am sure there was a serious side to Herb, he was careful not to show it, as though he owed it to the rest of us to keep us laughing and not completely overwhelmed by the blood and gore we were not only obliged to deal with each day, but also to put broken soldiers back together into some semblance of human form. Other more morose troops dedicated themselves to drink and carousing to deaden the madness that swam sharklike around us constantly, but Herb was compassionately funny, and would even make patients smile at his droll humor.
And there were many others, of course. And such around-the-world names: Zabriskie, Poulakidas, Page, Turpin, Trahan, Florio, Dobrich, Erickson, Hertig, Kopczynski, Segundo, Whitlock, Hendershot, Wlodarczak, Applegate, Aschliman, Costanzo, Cusick, Framness, Hess, Garcia-Vasquez, Grijalva, Crone, Goller, Isles, Bolin, Raschel, Heissenbuttel, Schott, Pedersen, Reid, Jones, Kuhlman, Reynolds. Perhaps the most I got out of this experience was to meet so many different kinds of people, most of whom were generally decent human beings, trying to make the best out of an awful situation. I recall one fellow from Switzerland who, hoping to become an American citizen instead of being deported back to his native land where he was being eagerly awaited by police authorities (we knew not for what reasons), enlisted and served as a competent medic alongside us with distinction. Others, hoping (either seriously or facetiously) to cut short their stay in Vietnam, wondered whether or not they could be deported to Switzerland and would question our expatriate companion about the possibilities.
Still others counted the days when they would finally be rotated back to the United States, where sanity was reported, at least in some spots, to yet reign. This “countdown” was known as the art of “short-timing”. Soldiers arriving at the half-way mark of their time in Vietnam were known as short-timers. At this point they would commence to shout (or gloat) each successive day less by barking “I’m short!” and the number of days yet remaining in their “tour of duty” in Vietnam. Parties were informally organized toward the end, where the envious and the envied celebrated together the good fortune of the short-timer. When the last few days were upon any of us, a certain awful tension would grow, because the worst possible thing to happen would be to get killed a month, a week, a day before leaving. It was unthinkable, and yet it is what we all thought about when we got short. And although there were often attempts by commanding officers to ensure that the truly short short-timers were not sent out to the field again so close to rotation, sometimes one last trip was inevitable. And just sometimes, alas!, this one last trip could prove fatal.
9. Travels With my Uncle Sam
Trips for a medical clearing company were always inevitable. Our job was to support fighting regiments, to provide them with emergency medical care in the field, and that meant that we had to be as close-by to them as possible. And fighting units were continually on the move. We never seemed to remain in any one place for more than a month. The moves were hectic, sweaty affairs—breaking camp, packing gear, loading trucks, traveling up and down hills, over treacherous dirt or mud roads, watching for possible sniper attacks. And then setting up camp, unloading, pitching tents, digging trenches, fighting off malaria-laden mosquitoes, sloshing about in monsoon-besieged flood waters, and anxiously awaiting the arrival of souls shot, or stabbed, or mortared, or grenaded, or booby-trapped so we could perhaps save their precious lives.
On one of these field operations I was “volunteered” to man an advanced party of 15 medics to the northern part of the Bình Định Province, to an area called Bình Hoà, a few miles south of the town of Bồng Sơn in the Hoài Nhơn District, not more than ten miles from the coast of the South China Sea, and deep into Viet Cong-infiltrated territory. Our job was to install a medical support clearing station closer to the Seventh Cavalry Regiment fighting in that region. We were flown from our field camp in Phù Cát to Bình Hoà in a Chinook transport helicopter, a nasty, rattling, banana-shaped beast that seemed to miraculously defy its truly intended destiny of falling like a rock from the sky. We landed at night amidst artillery and mortar fire and flares flying from every direction. The sky flashed from the explosions like a dawn thunderstorm, and the cordite smell of spent ammunition fairly choked us. We set up our equipment and stayed over to the following day until our support company came to relieve us. In the meanwhile, we received casualties—ambushed soldiers, many of whose lives ended abruptly in rice paddy ditches, and whose now gray, broken bodies lay piled six feet high in a ditch next to our camp until Graves Registration could bring in a refrigerator truck to transfer their remains to Quy Nhơn, there to be shipped back to the United States.
I was placed on guard duty that night, and where before we had been overwhelmed with flares and explosions, suddenly everything turned very dark and very quiet. I could see nothing in any direction.
“Pulley, two hours on the perimeter,” I was told.
“Where’s the perimeter, Sarge?”
“Just follow the hedges.”
“What hedges? I can’t even see the end of my nose. Where are we, anyhow, in a paddy?”
“A dry field, thank God. Get moving. Somebody’ll relieve you at two a.m.”
I started out, almost totally blind, feeling my way along a narrow path. All I knew was that if I kept turning left at the hedge corners, I would not march into enemy territory, wherever that might be. It became very quiet then, and I thought how easy it would be for some nice oriental zealot to slip up on me and cut my throat. What was that? Did I hear something over there? A footstep? I stopped to listen, my heart in my throat. Prayer seemed like a prudent thing then. Suddenly a terrible, mind-blowing explosion burst out to my immediate right, scaring me almost senseless. I heard a rapid whew-whew-whew-whew sound whistle over my head, which soon faded into the night. A few seconds later I saw a distant flash in the hills far to my left, and several more seconds passed before I heard the mushy ka-phump of the explosion. It took me a moment to recover before I realized that our camp had been set up right next to an artillery unit, and then I was able to re-swallow my pounding heart and resume my now wobbly-legged perimeter meanderings. It seemed even more quiet than before, excepting the ringing in my ears.
We flew back to Phù Cát in the daytime, and then I was able to view some of the country. From the air I could behold thousands of rice paddies stretching mile after mile in a valley mixed with emerald and water. Each square was firmly drawn on the surface of the earth, mounds of dirt and mud lining the area as boundaries between paddies. I had never seen anything like it before. Often, the water-filled expanses had margins of hedge rows and coconut palms, and within some of the rice-paddy corner oases houses could be seen, some of mud and thatch and others of stucco. Jungle-choked hills rose out of the valley in gentle green slopes, with mist shrouding the hilltops, delicate as scenes from Japanese silk screen paintings. Rivers meandered between the hills like twisting serpents, and even flowing pretzels, and the blue sky and the billowing clouds were reflected off the water. And not far off, over the hills, was the mysterious South China Sea…or at least it seemed mysterious. It was all so beautiful, and thus so much more terrible to think that it was all being senselessly ripped apart.
At Phù Cát casualties poured in, both allies and enemies, civilians and soldiers, men, women, and children, the fear and the pain heartbreaking, awful to see. I held onto soldiers whose guts were spilling out or whose arms or legs were half torn off while doctors rushed to save their lives, and they would look fearfully into my eyes, as though asking whether they were going to make it or not.
A Vietnamese nurse was brought into our clearing station along with several other Vietnamese casualties. She had been injured in a skirmish between Americans and Viet Cong, and now her career, washed down the drain in an instant. Although we could patch up the others, her injury was permanent, and her right forearm had to be amputated. She wept each night after most of us had bedded down, for without an arm there was little a person could do in a country where manual labor remained nearly the sole work available. And she wept because she feared to be sent away, back to an area where terrorism reigned from day to day.
A Viet Cong sniper was brought in, an old, old man who had been shot out of a tree. His leg was shattered and would have to come off. Our surgeons did their job carefully and with compassion, for our responsibility and mission was to save lives, irrespective of sides. But for all our efforts to treat him, afterwards he was dragged off by the South Vietnamese Army, interrogated, and then summarily executed.
An American helicopter gunner was flown in. A huge hole the size of a softball ran all the way through his abdomen and out his back. A misfired rocket had caught him as he jumped from his chopper and had carried him thirty or forty feet before burrowing into the ground unexploded. And yet he still lived.
A family of Viet Cong was captured, and while a medic extracted pieces of shrapnel from the husband’s back, his frightened wife pleaded for a drink of water. Another Viet Cong, beyond help, died before our eyes, and we gaped and saw ourselves in his place.
Blood and gore abounded everywhere. Choppers set down filled with dead. The living, conscious or not in shock, cried out their pain, their fear, or swore mightily as doctors raced to stitch them back together before they bled to death.
Medevac helicopters swooshed in, and we would rush out patients on stretchers to be transported to hospitals. It was an appalling, terrible thing, and while broken humans were brought in one after another, we found no rest. And suddenly it would be over, and perhaps for days we might see no more wounded, only the ill, and we would return to the usual monotony of camp life, and thankful for it.
Soon orders arrived to move again.
The day prior to our entire company’s departure from Phù Cát north to the Bình Hoà/Bồng Sơn area, we were all bedded down for the evening when we began hearing explosions not far from our tents. At first we thought little about it, since artillery was often shot off at random times into the hills that separated our area from the sea. I had recently had a close-up experience with that. But the explosions took on a fast and furious pace that seemed a bit unusual.
Then in jumped a guard yelling, “Incoming mortars! Into your holes! We’re under attack!”
Naturally, most of us got out quickly and headed for our foxholes, though I recall a few of the more modest insisting on suitably dressing themselves first for the occasion. I left my boots behind in the mad rush and ran outside barefooted, leaping into an empty hole. At least I thought it was empty. When my toes touched bottom, I just kept right on going…down to my ankles in mud. Funky mud.
What I had jumped into in effect was a foxhole the mess hall had sequestered as a pit to dump its garbage. I managed to contain my disgust, for more urgent affairs were afoot, and I peeked over the mound of dirt that surrounded the hole. Not far away I could see mortar rounds exploding everywhere, though mostly targeted at where stood our helicopters. Pilots and gun crews scurried to start them up and into the air as fast as possible to keep them from being destroyed.
For a few moments, the mortars subsided, and we ran back to our tents to retrieve any additional equipment we might need in the event that the Viet Cong attackers should decide to attempt to overrun us. We then scooted back to the fox holes surrounding the clearing station in order to defend our patients and medical supplies. This time I found a hole that was dry. And then we waited. But not for long.
The attack renewed, mortar shells blasting all over, bullets and tracers whizzing over our heads. Suddenly we heard a roar and the distinctive flap-flap-flap of the Huey helicopter rocket and gunships over our heads as they made their sweeping turn to face the night-fighting Viet Cong. Crimson tracers poured out of the copter-mounted machine guns, spraying the hills backwards and forwards. It was as grim but spectacular a display of fireworks as I had ever seen. But even that seemed lame when the rockets began firing. At first, streaks of white light, sparks flying, followed seconds later by the tumult of screaming rockets. Then abruptly it became dark, save the ever-firing tracers, as the missiles spent their fuel. Then, in the hills, where Viet Cong were setting off their mortars, huge orange-yellow explosions spattered in every direction, lighting the sky. Time and again rockets sped out of their pods and streaked to their marks. It was hard to believe that this was really happening. Then I heard the zing of bullets just inches above my head, saw their tracers, after-images seemingly trailing more slowly behind, and decided that maybe it was real after all. Flares now soared into the sky, lighting the area ghostlike, then fell slowly by parachute back to the ground. In the red light, I saw soldiers darting about with rifles in shooting positions.
It was past midnight before it all had subsided, and we finally headed back to bed. I had entered my tent, but a sudden rally of protests obliged me to beat a hasty retreat.
“Phew! Pulley, that stench! Where have you been?”
I replied, “Oh, out testing some of Sergeant Turpin’s leftovers, is all.”
“Out! You ain’t stepping foot in here until you wash up.”
“Oh, come on, guys, a little soggy lettuce and ripe gravy never hurt anybody.”
Nevertheless, and under duress (and I also remembered that this wasn’t called the “armed” forces for nothing…virtually everybody had a weapon), I retreated outside and filled my helmet with water and washed off my rose-smelling feet and trouser legs as best I could. After that, I was reunited in the bosom of my overly sensitive comrades, though just barely.
And so the war went on for Company C the rest of the year. Travel, encampment, battles, decampment, the omnipresent victims. If it wasn’t battle victims, it was malaria victims, or VD victims, or psycho victims, or worm victims, or heat victims, or rash victims, or bite victims (by gnats, mosquitoes, spiders, rats, mice, dogs, snakes, scorpions, beetles, and so on).
And after the war, the memories remained…and remain. The funny, the sublime, the crazy…and the tragedy.
Most of all, the unspeakable tragedy.
Stephen W. Pulley©2020
Photos at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/swpulley/albums/72057594084402737
End Notes:
[*] With apologies to Virginia Woolf, i.e., the rubric of this piece skewing just an eensie bit the title of her novel, To the Lighthouse.
[2] Today an ambiguous conglomeration of offices and other entities.
[3]One evening, our buddy John attended, in uniform, a motion picture production of Puccini’s La Bohème. During an intermission, an elderly lady sitting next to him expressed her frank surprise that a soldier would be watching an Italian opera. Impressed by his devotion, she encouraged him to attend one of the live performances at the San Antonio Symphony. John expressed interest, but given the woeful scarcity of income provided by the United States Army, he would in all likelihood be unable to afford a ticket. She replied, “Young man, you won’t have to pay a dime if you play your cards right.” She proceeded to explain that many fans with resources bought extra season tickets, but for various reasons (e.g., no-shows of guests) often could not use them all. She said if he went to the main entrance, in uniform, just before the performance began, and stood there, appearing somewhat woeful, almost invariably someone with extra tickets would offer him one rather than have to throw it away unused. The next weekend evening off duty, John gave it a shot and, much to his amazement, ended up with a box seat. Later, he shared this extraordinary secret with some of the rest of us also interested in live music. We all subsequently became devotees of our wonderful benefactress, who, on one occasion, even invited us over to her home for tea.
[4] Not quite. After a year in South Vietnam, I was reassigned to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where I served out the rest of my active duty.
[5] SP4 (i.e. Specialist 4), one of the four junior enlisted ratings in the U.S. Army, above private first class and equivalent in pay grade to corporal. Unlike corporals, specialists were not considered junior non-commissioned officers (NCOs).
[6] Defined as a sudden violent wind, often accompanied by precipitation. Wise naval advice: “When it squalls, a prudent sailor reefs his sails.” Alas, we had no sails to reef.
[7] Forbidden Planet was a 1956 science fiction movie, in which a military star ship travels to the distant planet Altair IV to discover the fate of a group of scientists sent there decades earlier, only to find two survivors and a deadly secret that one of them has.
[8] Obstetrician and gynecologist. If memory serves me, however, I believe he did attend from time to time at a small hospital in the nearby city of An Khê that attended neonatal patients.
[9] A wonderful Austrian film and theatre actor of the 1920s through the ‘70s, who went on to work in Germany, Britain and America. Both his voice and his appearance fitted him for roles as a communist spy or Soviet official, for which he was in regular demand.
[10] Nicknames are legion in the Armed Forces and are usually acquired by some notable physical or behavioral trait or because of a man’s job. A “half-track” is a caterpillar tread that runs the rear driving wheels on certain military vehicles. The executive officer of our company when I first arrived was, along with the First Sergeant (“Top”), really who ran the show, not our commanding officer who, we were informed, though could not corroborate, spent a prodigious amount of time in his private quarters diligently penning a book on obstetrics.
[11] The Army mule was a springless, four-wheel drive/steering motorized platform for transporting loads, about the size of a sawed-off VW bug. Balloon tires provided the only cushion against road shocks. If by some miracle it did not tip over and crush the occupants, one’s kidneys were in any case nothing more than pâté de foie gras after riding on it for 10 minutes.
[12] Basically, a hut or simple dwelling, in this case a place where we slept, constructed mostly out of crate wood.
Uneasy Rider... travels & writings 
