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.
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