Description is sometimes elusive.
I can say: the top of Engineer Hill looked as if it had been scalped. The red dirt, like a Georgia farmscape, pervaded everything that summer only to be replaced in the winter with red mud. I can say: Engineer Hill was unlike anything I had ever seen, filled with huge machines used by the 555th Combat engineers, Vietnamese women in black pants running everywhere, noise, noise, noise. I know that as I got out of the deuce and a half, I could see Vietnamese women on one side of the compound washing fatigues in large aluminum pans. I saw a pillar of spiraling red dust slash across the hill and lift several of the pans into the sky as the women yelped and braced themselves, backs to the mini-tornado, and then closed my eyes as it swept across me, depositing fine red dust in my pockets, in the fine, barely-discernible at that time wrinkles on my face.
I can say all that and it would be true. But perhaps a larger truth is that we had made the hill the way it was, that we had scraped the hill bare of all vegetation, had defoliated the surrounding terrain, erected hootches and filled bags with red dirt to stack around them, were even then building more substantial long barracks with concrete floors that indicated some sense of permanence, of a war that would not end soon, that the women worked for us doing menial jobs because there was no real economy left in the country except the economy that supported war and that the major alternative seemed to be the prostitution that follows all armies at war and in peace time.
I was a young man then, mid-twenties, did not think so much of metaphor, did not plan to write about what I saw that first day. Metaphor. The vortex that whirled through the 330th Radio Research Company that day, that lifted the wash pans of the “indigenous female personnel” that day, that spiraled around and around, deposited dirt in my uniform and lined my face and hands that day did not seem to me then to be a metaphor. Today, though, it seems as if it could have been nothing else.
Sidebar: Sergeant Stoss was replaced immediately by Sergeant Smith, a buck sergeant who had been one of the “cadre” in Don Mohr’s platoon, another platoon in C-1-3 (our official designation that meant something like Charley Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Basic Training Regiment—I cannot believe I remember that nor that I remember that SDI Matos was not fond of Colonel Moses [the regimental commander] whom he considered to be a “candy-ass”). Why not? Because Moses sometimes felt that marching miles to the rifle range in sub-zero, snow-carpeted weather in the Ozarks was stupid and had us ride in big green buses.
Jesus, this memoir stuff does bring back some times and things much better forgotten, memories that I had thought long buried under accretions of new and sometimes better memories! Smith, a young three-stripe sergeant who had ambitions even if he did not have a lean and hungry look immediately removed the squad leader stripes from Allen’s and my shoulders and replaced them with his own chosen duo.
One of that twosome, or so Smith said at the time, was the East St. Louis gang-banger who had broken a guy’s jaw on the day of “firing for record.” Smith couldn’t give him the stripes because of that but decided to make a big show of the whole thing to, what?, instill some kind of platoon pride in those of us whose pride was mostly in things other than military fitness. Smith stood up in front of all of us and announced that he had intended to give that MFer M_____ the stripes but then that MFer had broken another MFer’s jaw and now he couldn’t give the MFing stripes to the MFing private and wasn't that just the most MFing thing he’d ever MFing heard of. I quote now, directly: “I should throw that MFing MFer out the MFing window!” At which point the MFing gangbanger himself stood up, held Smith’s wrist in his hand, stretched it above his head, almost lifting Smith from the floor and said, “We’ll see what MFer throws what MFing MFer out the MFing window, MFer.” Some uses of the language are so exquisite that one can hardly ever lose even the exact wording.
We all started laughing and Smith, by trying too hard to be tough, had lost his chance to ever win the backing of the platoon.
* * *
I am going to try to move a little faster but these early, somewhat basic, experiences with the Army pretty much marked my entire, undistinguished military career and what happened, or failed to happen, in Vietnam was a continuation of those early days.
We soon settled in to the boredom and to the blowing dust of life on the hill, to the sounds of big trucks from the engineer’s side of the hill waking us in the mornings, to the occasional alarms that sent us scurrying to the berm. A few times each month, we pulled perimeter guard and had to dress up as if we were grunts (helmets, ammo, M-16s, flak jackets) and head out to that part of the hill that faced out on the valley, shrub thickets, and, a few miles away, the huge Air Force base, visible at night when it was lit up as if it were a deliberate target for incoming rockets on a practice artillery range, and, somewhat farther away, the ought-to-be sleepy, but often tense, town of Pleiku.
I’ve written about how I spent my nights on guard duty before, singing, whispering poetry out into the valley to enlighten the Viet Cong and bring peace through poetry, and so on, so won’t repeat all that here. But I will say something I have never confessed before: that I pretty much enjoyed those evenings. They were among the few times I could be alone to think. Yes, there were always three of us there, but only one of us at a time was awake on the top of the bunker, manning the fifty caliber and the M-60, and the firing lines for the Claymores.
What I could see from the top of the bunker: Three (3) circles of concertina wire, razor sharp, with about thirty yards between each circle, the circles extending all the way around the encampment to a heavily guarded gate fronting onto Route 19; a line of Claymores that we had to arm each evening, facing (as the instruction plainly engraved on them said) toward the enemy); bare earth with sometimes clumps of grass trying valiantly to survive between each strand of concertina; pieces of cloth tied to the wire, so, I suppose, we could detect movement; tin cans and other possible noise-makers to alert us to anyone intrepid enough to manage to crawl through those rolls of concertina. All of this was brilliantly lit up by flood lights mounted on tall telephone-like poles, the lights ending in total blackness until our eyes had adjusted. Out beyond that light? The enemy always lurked. Well, that’s what we were told.
Some of those nights, I could see and hear rockets flying overhead, not our rockets, enemy rockets. The VC frequently rocketed the air force base and those rockets flew right over us. We could see them explode down in the valley. Never more than 4 or 5 of them, because Charley was sneaky and knew we would zero in on him. Ten or fifteen minutes later, an artillery unit on the hill would fire back at where the initial launch sites had been: somewhere between us and the Cambodian border. Other nights, I could hear the sounds of fire fights and then see red or green flares down in the valley, away from the air force base. That usually signaled that some of our guys, or some of the ARVN units, had made contact with the enemy and/or that HUEYs were inbound to pick them up. Green, I am told, signified a safe landing zone and red meant the landing zone was “hot.”
That was what I had of war for most of my stay in the usually cool, not-covered-with-jungle Central Highlands of what was then called South Vietnam.
My actual work-a-day or evening or midnight shift job was classified, but I’ll say what I can about that later. Just remember that I was a classic REMF (rear echelon and then the same MF used back in the story of Sergeant Smith) and was one of the nine men and sometimes women back at what passed for the “rear” who worked in support of the other one guy (never a woman in those days) at what passed for the “front.” Those singular guys (though they worked in groups) were what we called “grunts” and really did what most people consider the “fighting” (and some people call “wet work”) in our little war. I continue to have enormous respect and admiration for what they did while still being incredibly happy that that was not my job.
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