Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 13)

Our School Outside Pleiku

One of the more delightful things that happened during my tour of the beautiful southern part of Vietnam is that the commander of the Air Force base down in the valley heard that the 330th had linguists. Well, his hearing that was not delightful but what he did because of it was. You see, most of the Air Force linguists were not stationed in Vietnam. A number of them were friends of mine, had been to language school with us at Fort Meade: Larry Ferguson, Joe Newbold, Skip Keating and others. Instead of sending them to Vietnam, the air force sent them to Thailand and bases like U Dorn [SIC?]. So, the commanding general of the Air Force base didn’t have any linguists.

Nor, as it turned out, did he have enough “indigenous native personnel” who spoke English to fill certain jobs on the base. So, he called our commander and suggested that he might want to do the air force a favor and lend him enough linguists to train Pleiku folks who wanted to work at the air force base but whose English skills were not quite good enough. Our C.O. ordered us to volunteer to do so when we weren’t on one of our normal shifts. We were more than happy to do so.

What we thought was going to be our first crop of students for six full months was a hand-picked group of eight students, young men and women who were probably among the elite of Pleiku. They were, for the most part, well-dressed when they came to class and most of the young men had their own bicycles. They were quite eager to learn to speak and write the English language. I was curious about this and asked one of the students. For the young men, he said, working for the air force of the USA was a deferment from getting drafted into the ARVN. It paid better and they didn’t get shot at. That was probably true right up to the day when forces of North Vietnam marched into Pleiku and onto the air force base.

We taught five days each week but only if we were on the swing or midnight shift at the 330th. The Army, of course, came first.

It just occurred to me that I have not yet said that the work we were doing was, officially, in support of the 4th Infantry Division. We were not, I hasten to add, a part of the 4th, but were detached from the 3rd RR to support that division. When we were with the 601st RR Company, we were detached in support of the Americal Division but were not a part of that newly reformed division. That meant that our command structure was not through the commanding generals of those divisions but was through the 3rd and back up through the ASA chain of command to the civilian-controlled National Security Agency.

Nonetheless, the best part of my job in Vietnam was teaching English as a second language to young Vietnamese adults. Some years later, I wrote a Christmas poem, something much like an unrhymed sonnet, for those students:

The English class at Lake Bien Ho

laughs, shouts, sings Christmas carols

in broken English, sing-songy, tonal

inflections that do not somehow fit

in this warm, green land. A small boy

talks about the Buddha. Not long ago

a bonze kindled himself in Saigon, burned

with intensity, no screams, a desperate

song, silence fell on a noisy city.

At Lake Bien Ho the teachers

have brought a Christmas tree, presents

for their students: books, candles,

cakes and candy. They sit on the bank

and sing of shepherds and their flocks.

An old man on a water buffalo watches.

All good things do come to an end and our little school ended on January 29, 1968. We had already sent a message to MACV that the Tet Offensive was going to happen and our students already seemed to know about it. They were getting out of Dodge City as quickly as possible. We had a quick ceremony on the 29th and gave each student a certificate of completion. I can’t recall seeing them again after that day. I hope most of them got out of the country in 1975 when they would have been in their late twenties, but some probably got re-educated. That happened to a lot of former South Vietnamese citizens who worked for us.

The loss of the South and the reunification of the two parts of Vietnam is, I think, probably a good thing in the long run though I would have preferred that the southern region had won and established a true democracy in the country. A good thing? Mostly because the actual fighting, the killing and maiming, ended. In the long run that is a good thing. People will disagree with me and I simply don’t care one way or the other.

I do care, though, about the people I met there and the people I did not meet. We lost more than 50,000 American soldiers in that little country. The Vietnamese must have easily lost ten times that many. And that doesn’t really include everyone who died. Some died years later through suicide or illness caused by Agent Orange or some other reason related to our lost war. We lament our soldiers exposed to a chemical defoliant like Agent Orange but how much worse it must be for those who live there.

So, while I would have preferred a different outcome; I am pleased that there was an end…regardless of the outcome.