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.