Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 20.5)

Thanksgiving, 1967

I am grateful that at this stage in the Vietnam War I remain fairly apolitical. This is the day of Thanksgiving dinner and the Army has good-sized portions of turkey with all the trimmings. The mess hall smells….great! A few of my more politically sensitive brethren boycott the meal. I am perplexed. I fail to see how not eating good food will bring the war to an end more quickly than devouring turkey will. I am either a rationalist or a hypocrite or...maybe, I'm just hungry.

Most of the truces in the war revolved around Christmas and Tet, but there was also a Thanksgiving Truce in the iconic war year of 1967-1968. The odd thing was that the dirty, godless commies pretty much stuck to that 1967 Thanksgiving Truce. Oh, there were a few shots here and there (possibly because the Viet Cong communications net didn’t quite reach everyone out in the boonies), but, generally, the truce held. That was also true the next month for the Christmas Truce. I assume the VC were trying to lull us into a sense of complacency: two truces, no major violations. Surely the upcoming Tet Truce would be similar, no? Well, no, Tet Truce, 1968, was violated everywhere.

But that Thanksgiving in 1967 was, yes, sweet. In the Central Highlands, up in the more civilized area of Engineer Hill (home of the 555th Combat Engineers), we kicked back and enjoyed a quiet evening. Well, relatively quiet, a few jokers fired the fifty calibers and even set off a Claymore, and the combat engineers shot a few rockets into the sky that night. Even the radio traffic was fairly quiet (both theirs and ours). Some of us sat on the VC side of our berm and drank wine and beer, smoked legal and illegal substances, and stared out into the dark, cool night that, to me, most represents the high hills of the province of Pleiku, Vietnam, now called (I think) Gia Dinh or Gia Lai Province.

Sometimes, evenings in the highlands of Vietnam were like that. You could lie down on the berm that surrounded the camp, 3 or 4 clicks from the giant air force base down in the valley, and see the same stars that lit up the sky over southeast Texas, and think of home. Some evenings, Orion, so clear and crisp as it rose above the guard posts, almost brought tears to my eyes. It was all just so damned peaceful! At other times, you could hear fighting off in another section of the valley and see rivers of red tracers piss down on the VC from our guys in what we called Puff the Magic Dragon (after the Peter, Paul and Mary song--we were not divorced from popular culture back home) and a few green tracers flying back up at them. On those nights, the sky was sometimes lit by bright, amber flares floating beneath small parachutes as we looked out into the same valley we enjoyed on this Thanksgiving evening.

Nothing worth reporting happened that day or night: the normal rounds of laughing and bitching, cool breezes, a crisp moonlit sky. Not really worth writing about: a day of relative peace in the middle of ten years of warfare. Hardly worth noting. Not at all.