Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 2)

Sidebar: Had fun last night googlemapping the area of Pleiku we were in and using the satelite featire to look for the hill and the lake and the valley. If you want to do that, head west on Google maps to California and then due west to South Korea...turn south across China to Vietnam.

I am somewhat hazy about our arrival in Pleiku but have some recollection that when the cargo plane that transported us from Chu Lai came to a stop, we were shuffled into a deuce and a half and transported through the dusty capital city of what is now Gia Lai Province and was then Pleiku Province and on up the road to the small hill that would be our home for the next eleven months.

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Engineer Hill, a scalped hilltop not far from the city of Pleiku, had an excellent view of the high hills to the west. A quarry slashed across the face of one of the high hills facing us from that direction and Quoc Lo So Muoi Chin (Route # 19). Not too many kilometers west of that quarry was the boundary with Cambodia. As far as I can remember, there were no other military units between our hill and that international border that would become a major cause for street protests when the Nixon administration ignored the imaginary lines on the maps and sent troops into Cambodia several years later.

To the east, facing home sort of, that same road led down into the valley. Heavy traffic marked the highway from that point on as trucks, jeeps, APCs and other vehicles headed down to the Air Force Base and through the town to get to 4th Division Headquarters on what we all called Titty Mountain. Most of the Vietnamese traffic was TriLambretta taxis and bicycles. The road meandered on past there to An Khe and then through the Mang Yang Pass, where the French Group Mobilment 100 had been massacred during the first Indochina war, and on to the South China Sea and Qui Nhon. We frequently read reports of VC groups stationed around that area but, fortunately, never convoyed through the pass ourselves.

Sidebar: Sergeant Stoss, our platoon sergeant back in Basic had often said he would rather be in back in Vietnam than working with a miserable platoon like ours and under an asshole like Sergeant Matos, our SDI. Stoss had been in trouble with Matos from the beginning. Probably being in charge of a platoon like ours was a large part of the reason. We just really didn’t care about the Army. Our squad was mostly ASA and National Guard guys. About half of us were college graduates marking time until we decided what we wanted to be when we grew up. None of us thought, at that time, that we would be going to Vietnam. The people with NG serial numbers were right. The other half was a mixed bag. That bag included the big guy from East St. Louis and the much less than bright guy from wherever.

Stoss himself was, in his own way, very bright. He knew six or seven languages at the gutter level and his English was fairly broken but he could communicate what he wanted us to know. I suspect he knew too much of the world to buy into what Lieutenants Bray and Cheka, our C.O. and X.O., were doing in their relationship with the SDI. They pretty much cratered whenever he expressed an opinion. He was abrasive, chickenshit, and had it in for our platoon (in retrospect, I don’t blame him very much) in general and with Private N____ (the mildly retarded) in particular.

Stoss called Allen and me into his room one evening. The conversation went something like this: Matos wants to give N____ a dishonorable discharge for malingering [not his words]. That’s bullshit, N____ can’t cut it…not smart enough. My English isn’t good enough. I say what to write, you put it in good English. What Stoss wanted to do was to ensure that N_____ got a medical and not a dishonorable discharge. We worked for hours until we got the letter right. Stoss took it to the two lieutenants the next morning; the lieutenants talked with the SDI; Stoss was transferred out of the company and probably sent back to Vietnam. I don’t know. A pyrrhic victory: N_____ did not get a dishonorable but also didn’t get a medical. He had to take Basic Training all over.

Some years later, I wrote this for N____. It was among my first published poems (in a small magazine called Kimera) and some of you may have read it in Foreign and Domestic (Turning Point, 2008) or on the internet:


TRO: Failed Basic: Training Required Over)


You simply weren't cut out for it, snot nose
in the snow, shirt flopping out, entrenching
tool back inside the barracks as we stood
listening to the dogs bark. The SDI, in
your face, yelped, and sent us all, tails
between our legs back up three flights
to help you dress again, load your pack,
clean your M-14, wipe dried muck from your face.

Eight weeks later, we left for advanced schools
and Viet Nam. You stayed, TRO, a second time,
lived another cycle, joined another platoon, waited
for spring in the Ozarks. I have always wondered
why those of us so smart went and you remained
and, if, deep down inside, you laughed.


I thought of N_____ and Sergeant Stoss a year and a half later as that olive drab truck dumped us in the red dust of the hill, a small red dust devil snaking around the camp, and we reported in to Major Shaky Jake, C.O. of the 330th RRC HQ.

Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 1)

A few notes about Vietnam:
Who We Were and Why We Went There
and, oddly, who we became

When I finally made it to Pleiku after a brief stay with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade in Chu Lai on the coast of…well, no, let’s start before Chu Lai and move backwards to the beginning. The only thing connecting two points without variation is a straight line and I will not be one of those...

Our LSTs wobbled south down the coast from Da Nang Harbor where we had off-loaded from the USS Gordon in the summer of 1967. The four-week voyage across the Pacific from Oakland Bay stopped for a few days at Subic Bay in the Phillipines where we were restricted to a small beach area. We had been virtual prisoners since leaving Fort Hood on a, bless me, ma’am, yes, old-fashioned troop train. The train had stopped only once and we were not allowed out (a threat to the civilized peoples of West Texas and Arizona that we were) for those stops until the train chuffed out onto the docks of the bay (pacem: Otis Redding). We off-loaded there and formed ranks prior to marching onto the ship where we were restricted for the next two days…staring longingly at San Francisco across the bay where little cable cars... (pacem: Tony Bennett) for hours on end. There was something happening there…what it was wasn’t…well, a few days later, we started the long journey across the Pacific.

As we sailed down the coast of what was then South Vietnam in the belly of the LSTs, no light except from the frequent striking of cigarette lighters, the innards of the LST cavernous and echoing, we began to sing, mostly rousing renditions of Country Joe’s “Vietnam Rag.” “Hot damn, we’re all going to die!” In front of us lay Jean Dixon’s marvelous prediction that the VC would wipe out the coastal town of Chu Lai and our whole brigade. When the LSTs rolled onto the no longer pristine beach at Chu Lai and the giant, hinged door that was the “prow” of the ship banged onto the ground we rushed ashore, M-16s ready to fire, only to be greeted by a few hundred Seabees and thousands of Marines—all laughing at us. They had John Wayned the beaches several weeks before we got there.

Jean Dixon was wrong, of course, but we remained somewhat leery of the possibility for some time.


Months earlier, at an unnamed air force base located in San Angelo, Texas (OOOPS!), those of us who had been gifted with knowledge of the language of the small country wherein our LSTs would land, had learned how to operate various pieces of mysterious equipment, said equipment having accompanied us to Vietnam. We were ready to rock and roll, not to the song of the Valkyrie but to Hendrix and the Stones and almost any music we could find on the mysterious and not-to-be-named equipment we had been issued.

After we had made our little area of Chu Lai safe for democracy and impervious to approaching typhoons and VC hordes, a few of us found out we were being transferred out of the 601st Radio Research Unit to the much larger, and presumably safer, 330th Radio Research Company, Detached. Big airplanes without flight attendants (in those dark days, we still called them stewardesses) flew us from the balmy beaches of Chu Lai to the cool central highlands area of what is actually a very beautiful county. The beauty was hard to notice back when we were all afraid of dying or something worse.

And these are the linguists with whom I flew to Pleiku: Allen Hallmark, Jim Brow and Will Chapman. Our intrepid leader when we got there was a really good linguist named Richard Miller--"Big Minh" to all of us. The rest of them (the ones suspected of not being troublemakers) remained at Chu Lai: Sergeant Big Ben Chatham, my good friend Don Mohr, and a few others. I am speaking here only of the trained Vietnamese linguists and not of a wide assortment of cryppies, diddy-boppers, analysts, reporters, assorted useless officers, and the whole ragmatag group of misfits that makes up a small unit embedded with a larger unit.

Flashback to Basic Training: Allen and I are candy-stripers, fake corporals. I never understood why except that I had once been a Civil Air Patrol cadet and knew how to march and Allen might have been, but I don’t think so, in a marching band at one time. Anyway, because of our armband stripes, we share a two-man room instead of living in a large bay with eight other people. This lasts until we run into some trouble with the Senior Drill Instructor.

Trouble? We had two rather troublesome privates in our company: one was quite probably at least mildly retarded and the other was a bad-ass gang-banger from East St. Louis. I’m pleased to say that both became my friends. Allen and I are college gradu-aytes from Texas and are pretty GAF about this whole Army thang. I am caught by the SDI one night reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and when he starts barking at me, I explain that it’s a book about the Army. He says, that’s okay then, carry on, and leaves.

Sidebar: We are, in all ways that counted to the Army, the worst platoon in our basic training battalion and, furthermore, we are ridiculously proud of that. We candy-stripers decide, though, to show the Army that we can actually do military stuff but would, as Bartleby famously said, prefer not to. So, we decide to score high in the “firing for record” game. Our company winds up as “Battalion Best” on the rifle range.

That night as we amble back to our quarters after being dismissed, some idiot screams: First Platoon sucks!!!!!!! Our gang-banger from East St. Louis breaks his jaw with one punch. I am told that is not very easy to do.