What We Did for Kicks at Pleiku Work, teaching at the English school, dodging small dust devils (red because they were commie dust devils), walking or hitching down to the small city that was the provincial capital of Pleiku Province, all that sounds like a lot, but mostly we were bored, bored to tears if not to distraction, especially on those days and sometimes weeks when we were not allowed off the Hill. So, we devised distractions.
Getting drunk or high by some other means was always good. As with many units, we had two major groups of people: those who drank to distract themselves and those who smoked grass. A small group of folks did neither. As far as I can recall, back in 1967 and the first half of 1968, hard drugs were not a part of military life in Vietnam. Nor was overt racism or the kind of militant white/black confrontations we see in many of the later novels and movies of the war. Perhaps that was just a peculiarity of the 330th but the only real “anti” feelings we seemed to have were directed at the officers and NCOs by the enlisted personnel. I mean you have to have someone to be against, haven’t you? We had a few gay men in the company but no one cared. They did their jobs, laughed and joked just like everyone else. I suspect the 330th was more likely than the combat engineers of the 555th to have gays and potheads and not to have any repercussions from that, but I don’t know that to be a fact.
The heads had a bunker of their own, right outside the linguists' barracks. It had all the requisite paraphernalia of the sixties: wine bottles with coats of dripped multicolored wax from the candles, beadwork here and there, posters, and the ever-present reek of both tobacco and grass smoke. The music there was much better than the music in the club where the drinkers hung out. The bunker had Joplin and Hendrix and the Stones and the Beatles and Grace Slick and more. The club had country western music. I suppose whether the music was better there or not was a matter of taste.
We had visiting musical groups, mostly from the Philippines, mostly rock bands with strippers. I don’t think we ever had a USO troupe visit the Hill, but we might have. I do recall that when Bob Hope and his merry band of entertainers visited Pleiku and we were allowed to go, no one from the 330th chose to do so. Not exactly a boycott. I can’t recall ever having seen a Donut Dolly on the Hill either. We did have two Vietnamese women working at the EM Club and both were named Xuan. One of the Xuans had long hair and was beautiful. The other Xuan was kind of short and chubby and was rumored to put out for a few hundred piasters. I never found out.By the way, the Vietnamese called their money “dong”: 500 dong could buy a lot: a fake onyx chess set that would bleed dye onto your fingers, a china vase to send home to mom, a jacket claiming that “Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will fear no evil, because I’m the meanest MFer in the valley," or maybe a short time with one of the local whores. For some reason we translated “dong” into “piaster.” Maybe because that’s what the French called the local currency back when they wee the colonial power in charge.
We were not, however, paid in dongs/piasters but in Military Payment Certificates (MPCs). The local indigenous personnel downtown would take MPCs and give change in dongs: a form of speculation in the U.S. currency. Vietnamese working for us were paid in dongs.piasters, not in MPCs. Periodically, the US. military would change the currency and the MPCs held by the locals would become worthless. We had to turn ours in for new forms of MPC so, in the weeks before the change, those in the know would frequently go into town, let the natives know about the coming currency change and purchase MPCs from them for about a nickel or quarter on the dollar and then turn the old MPCs in on change-over day. I called it "Screw the Vietnamese/Get Rich Day."
On the Hill, poker was always a good way to earn or lose money and to pass the time. “Pass the time!” Wonderful little sentence, no? Pass the time until you go home, until you die, until someone wastes you, until you buy the farm. “Hot damn, we’re all gonna die!” A character in Catch-22 spends much of his time trying to be bored. Why? Because time passes more slowly, in a relative kind of way, when you’re bored; ergo, bored people live longer. Most of us lived a few years for our one year in Vietnam.
We bet on almost everything. We had gross-out contests and, as Allen Hallmark suggested, the grossest thing anyone in camp could do, aside from doing the short, chunky Xuan (rumored to be a guaranteed quick trip to the mythical island where the military kept those with the black syphilis), was to lick the piss tubes. Let me explain: piss tubes were 6” tubes stuck in the ground, the open, above-ground end covered with a wire mesh, into which the men of the company would urinate. Over time, the wire mesh would grow slimy with bacteria and whatever. The drinkers and the heads would dare each other to lick the wire mesh. Some really drunken GI would always take the challenge. The things men do for fun! In trouble once for some reason, I was put on a detail to remove the old piss tubes and sink new ones into a different piece of ground. Wearing heavy gloves, those of us on the detail managed to wrench the old tubes from the ground and the red dirt of Pleiku bubbled and foamed for some minutes afterwards. We covered the bubbling earth with more red dirt and it finally subsided. It could not have been much worse than trying to bury nuclear waste materials. I assume that those who licked the tube are now all dead, but perhaps not. Have I mentioned that we were the most highly educated group of enlisted men in the Army yet? The brightest, by military IQ testing? That does not mean the highest level of common sense.
One evening, one of the analysts (I’ve forgotten his name) stayed off base late. No one was alarmed. And then he was spotted the next morning outside the fence facing our area of the perimeter: naked and with his M-16 pointed in at us. I wish I had a photograph! One of the sergeants drove out and around the perimeter and talked him out of the rifle and into the jeep. I heard later that the analyst was discharged with a Section 8. Rumors! Whatever, he left the Hill that week. Fun! Entertaining!
What I did, mostly, was read: those Thomas Hardy novels and poems, the books I took with me, local newspapers, magazines shipped over from home. I played some chess, some poker, gin rummy. listened to music, learned to use the darkroom, watched TV…and drank. I hardly ever have even a beer anymore. I came much too close to becoming an alcoholic when I got back from Vietnam.
And that is, for the most part, what I did in the war and what we, as a group, did in the war when we were not on duty.
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