Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 4)

My Actual job (Sort of)

Sometimes my friends ask what I did in the war. When I tell them, they often say no, no…I mean the fighting. I’m always honest. I tell them I was not what people call a “warrior” but worked In support of the actual fighting people, the “warriors” who waged fierce individual battles against noble enemies. Well, no, they mostly didn’t do that (maybe a few fighter pilots in the North) and I don’t think anyone’s actually done that in centuries. But there is no denying that many people did, in fact, fight, put themselves in danger, against an enemy that tried their very best to kill them. I have a lot of respect for them, the grunts in our war. But I was not one of them. Forty-some years later, I’m still happy I wasn't.

I fought, if you can call it “fighting,” in an office environment. Granted, the office was a huge tent, but the tent did have wooden floors and had canvas walls you could roll up and tie so the breezes could drift in. I fought with typewriters and with language skills the Army had given me over a 52-week period at Fort Meade, Maryland. I fought with yawns and with dictionaries, not with M-16s and bayonets. I confess that it did not feel like fighting. In fact, it felt very academic, not significantly different from what I do now.

Probably the most interesting message we came across, one that never got classified (most of what we translated was fairly useless but we couldn’t know that until we had translated it), fell into the lap of my friend Allen Hallmark. He was puzzled by the message. And while it had little or no tactical or strategic interest, it did fill in some of the blanks on what the local VC had to cope with.

Essentially, the message said: “Comrade Long died last week. He is beginning to stink. Please advise.” Comrade Long and his comrade were evidently a part of some observation post spying on American or ARVN installations or convoys. The VC, hell, let's just say it: the man (we depersonalize our enemies much too much--I was reading Wikileaks after-action Air Force reports the other day and they kept referring to "mandresses"--marginally better than "ragheads," but aimed at ridiculing people who happen to be the current enemy)writing the message apparently did not have the equipment needed to bury Anh Long. More than likely, the two men were on one of the rocky hills in Kon-Tum Province or maybe even somewhere off Highway 19, perhaps near the Mang Yang Pass. The VC did that sort of thing: sent spies out to observe major roads American and ARVN convoys traveled down to signal ahead so other groups could set ambushes. Much like the old cowboy and Indian movies that were so popular in the fifties. They were often in the same place for weeks.

So, somehow, anyway, whatever, one day in the war a VC named Long had died. Perhaps having been killed by free fire artillery, perhaps having stepped on a two-step snake, whatever, for some unknown reason Long had died. He spied, he died. His epitaph. And his colleague in this two-man outpost sent a message back that never arrived. Why not? The message-carrier stumbled into and was killed by some American patrol. That’s how we got the message. We got most of the stuff we translated via radio, but a few things came in on paper, scavenged from dead men’s hands or from their backpacks. You can, by the way, purchase some of those “original VC packs” on e-Bay even today.

Allen translated the message first and didn’t really believe what he was translating. So, we all consulted on it. Richard Miller, “Big Minh,” told us it was what it was. Later in the war, the expression "There it is" would come into play, but it fits here. Long had somehow died, the other member of the two-man outpost couldn’t find a way to bury him, and, after a few days he had begun to smell. Life in the war. The war for life. The message got in our hands because the courier was killed. As far as I know the writer is still out there somewhere waiting for an answer in that string of deaths. Kind of like those Japanese soldiers found on remote islands years after WWII.

We’d go to work in the morning at 8 a.m. or on the swing shift at 4 p.m. or the midnight shift at 12 p.m. Always, there was at least one linguist on duty in case of an emergency that never came. I don’t mean to say that the work was unimportant. It was important. Among other things, we made MAC-V and the White House and the National Security Agency aware that there would be a Tet Offensive on the last evening of January in 1968. The fact that General Westmoreland and LBJ did not believe that is totally irrelevant to the value of the translations we did. Well, maybe not. How valuable is months of work if the work is not paid attention to? We did help prevent one ambush in the Mang Yang by alerting 4th Division HQ. We were, in short, all that we were allowed to be and we were damned good.

That was my day-to-day existence for the last eleven months of my time “in country,” that was how I fought the war. Except for a couple of weeks when Jim and I were sent to Dak To, but that was only for a couple of weeks. More about those weeks later.