Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 30)

Boredom and Being in the Army

Boredom. Not the easiest thing to write about. Until the Tet Offensive of 1968, I was rarely truly bored after we got to Pleiku. I could always find something to do: ride down to the air force base and go to the library, walk or hitch or take a TriLambretta to the city, hang out on Le Loi Street, read, use the dark room at the 330th, BS with other people, get a drink in one of the outside cafes. One of those cafes, in particular, at the intersection of highways 19 and 14, was fairly special. That’s where I would take the local paper or a paperback book and sit down, drink a Coke, have kids come up to me and ask what I was reading. They were amazed that I could read Vietnamese, not that I could speak a little, but that I could read it.

I took photos of some of the prostitutes, too. They all wanted shots of themselves to give to their “long time” boy friends. Decent shots, not porn stuff, not much skin showing except legs and shoulders and arms. For some reason, they wanted the GIs they rented themselves to to have photos to remember them by. Photos to remember them by? That's kind of sad. I wonder if any of those now old men take one of those photos out and stare at it these days. I never charged them for the photos and never took what they had to offer, not even a short-time. They didn't seem terribly unhappy: they laughed when they talked to me, spoke in a kind of pidgin English or in my not very good Vietnamese. Perhaps it was just that they knew I was not buying what they had to sell.

Flashback: In the months after I got drafted, Anthony Sabatino, a college friend, and I drove to Florida and just about everywhere else in the country. After we left Florida, we drove back west, spending a week in New Orleans, always drinking and driving, sleeping in the car in the Fontainebleau (Font le blue, the natives called it) State Park across the lake from New Orleans and driving back in in the afternoons to drink in the Quarter and watch strip shows. I can still clearly remember a stripper named Linda Brigitte who bought me drinks when she found out I'd been drafted. She was the only stripper I met who seemed to enjoy her work; the rest did their bumps and grinds on the tops of bars, bored, tired, Kerouac would have called them beat, beat down almost all the way. Linda still looked young and, at least, pretended to be enthusiastic about her dancing. The rest of New Orleans remains hazy. The women in Pleiku who sold themselves always made me think of the older strippers on the tops of the bars on the wrong end of Bourbon Street. A very few were like Linda Brigette: young and still thinking there might be a way out…the next soldier, the next long-time GI.

After Tet, boredom set in big time. Eight hours of work, the EM and, after making E5, the NCO club, the PX where I bought electronic gear to ship home, the darkroom. I would occasionally put on my piss-pot, take my M-16, and head down to the AFB for another book. I know, I know. We still had it good compared to the grunts. We didn’t go on patrol. We didn’t stage night ambushes. We didn’t man listening posts. I even considered volunteering for an LP just to relieve the boredom but decided that would just be too GI for me and definitely too dangerous.

Toward the end of our tour, Allen did something, or something he had done earlier, came back to the 330th. The story belongs to Allen and I won’t attempt to tell it. Briefly though, he had written a letter, home I think, and the contents of the letter, suggesting that morale in the 330th was low, made its way high up in certain circles (perhaps because Allen had influential parents), high enough that the IG sent a message to the command structure of the 330th suggesting strongly that they investigate the poor morale of the 330th and that that investigation should probably begin with Specialist Hallmark.

After Allen was called in to be questioned by Captain America (a splendid physical specimen of an officer but dumb as a post, a laughing stock among the EMs), he told us what had happened. We learned enough from him (for example, ‘Captain America suggested that I looked like I wanted to hit him…and I said, No, Sir, I don’t want to hit anybody” and so on) that we got a bit afraid that some kind of accident might happen to him.

I don’t even know if Allen was aware that, until we DEROSed, one of us always kept an eye on him…even while he was filling thousands of useless sandbags. [I’m going to invite Allen to write a few paragraphs for this blog…about his adventures with Captain America and maybe correct anything I've said here that needs correcting. He’s a damned fine writer and was a photojournalist for the Medford, Oregon, newspaper after he finally found a firm sense of what he wanted to do.]

Eventually, all of us who had arrived, way back almost a year earlier with the 601st RR Detachment in Chu Lai, were flown to Nha Trang to be out-processed prior to going to Cam Ranh Bay to fly home.

Everyone except Allen. He wasn’t on our orders.