The Vietnamese Air Force

 Meals were a problem and I often only ate twice a day. The Center had no mess hall and it was usually to hot to want to walk out and find a nearby Vietnamese restaurant or go over to some mess hall on the airbase. I often brought some sort of a snack that I had gotten when I had breakfast.

I ate breakfast, as well as supper, in one of the NCO clubs near the hotel where I was living. Usually, I ate breakfast at the same club because I had to meet the driver of the truck that took us to work. The evenings were a different story. I usually went to a different club every night because there were often USO shows. There was one club at the top of a seven story billets, a former hotel, that was quite nice. Because it was so high there was no threat of someone throwing a hand grenade or sniping at us. This meant that we could be outdoors. It was also high enough that there were no bugs.

I was standing at the fence that kept the drunken GIs from falling off. Below me was a wide street with four lanes of traffic and wide sidewalks. All of a sudden, to my utter shock, a single engine, propeller driven, Vietnamese Air Force fighter plane flew by below me. It did a barrel roll that just managed to avoid hitting any of the buildings or the trees that lined the sidewalks.

I later found out that the pilot had managed to shoot down some NVA plane and was celebrating before landing at Tan Son Nhut. I always wondered how much trouble he got into, since there was no way of hiding the extremely dangerous stunt.

Publishing reports

The main product of the American side of the Combined Intelligence Center was a set of additions to the standard military maps. The Center had a computer and it was used to make overlays that showed such things a every place on the map where enemy forces had been seen and every enemy position that had been discovered. These included things like bunkers, firing positions, and tunnel entrances. Probably the most useful overlay were the ones that showed the ease of movement. The analysts used things like the vegetation, soil type, slopes and more to determine the difficulty various types of units would have moving though an area. 

My main job was to put this material together and give it to the printers who would print and distribute the final product. In addition, the typist made final copies of other studies and reports and these were sent directly to the unit requesting them. I also edited the material correcting grammar and spelling and trying to find errors and omissions.

A Sgt from printing office came whenever we finished anything that need printing. The same guy came every time and almost always stayed for a cup of coffee and a chat. He said that he was born and raised in Hawaii and particularly like Hawaii sweets. One night he brought some sugared ginger, something that he had talked about but I had never had. As a true Yankee of that era, I have never eaten anything hot. I took a bite of the ginger and thought my head was going to explode.

Hospitalized

I was hospitalized for five days last week. I am okay and will start posting here again in a week or so. Please check back later.

A Korean Visitor

After going out for lunch one day, I walked back into my office and discovered someone sitting on my desk, that is on my desk, not at it. The man was wearing what looked like a Korean dress uniform but I had no idea who he was or what his rank was. There were all sorts of insignias and things attached to his uniform but while they looked impressive, I did not know what any of them meant. His uniform was definitely not inspection ready, being a bit wrinkled, and also he needed a shave.

As I walked in, he slid off my desk and asked it I was in charge. I said that I was and asked what he wanted. I knew that he was authorized to be there, otherwise, he would not have gotten into the building. He said that he needed some specific information about an area that the Koreans were operating in. I sent an order out into the research room and got a comment back that it would take at least half an hour to find the data and put it the data into a report.

I got a spare chair and offered the man a cup of coffee. He sat down and started chatting while we waited. He was very interested in American sports and told me that he had lived in the US for more than a year. Then he said that he was very much taken with American women and told me some raunchy stories about his experiences in American bars. With all the expletives deleted, there would have hardly been any story left.

The report was finally finished so he took it and left, after thanking me for the report, the coffee, and the conversation.

About 20 minutes later, a Lieutenant from our administrative unit came in asked me if I had seen
Br. Gen. Yi Byong-chool, the commander of the Korean 2nd Marine Division. I said that some enlisted guy had come in and told me dirty stories but I had not seen any general. The LT asked me to describe the guy. When I did, the LT said that was the General and went running out to patch up the protocol.

Sergeant of the Guard

First Tour

One of my occasional duties was to be Sargeant of the Guard at Battalion Headquarters. Most nights it was very boring but occasionally there was some excitement.

One night I was sitting with the Officer of the Day and an enlisted man who operated the telephones and the radio. Suddenly the phone rang with a call from one of the guard towers saying he could see movement in the no-go area.

Before going into what happened next, I guess I should describe the compound. There were 10-foot high concrete-block walls on three sides with the front gate in the middle wall.  A sandbagged bunker guarded the gate and there were three guard towers with sandbagged positions at the top, one on each of the remaining sides. On the left, a dirt road nestled against the wall and beyond that a field that contained nothing but old junk of all kinds. On the right was a lumber mill. I had been told that the owner of the mill paid off the VC not to attack his property and that he got the money from us so I did not have to worry about that side. The back of the compound was the most interesting. Our land ended at a 10-meter wide river and the no-go area was a large field on the far side. A boat dock with an old outhouse with a hole to deposit the goods in the river were the only structures on our side, except for a barbed-wire fence. The guard tower was in the middle of this side.

The Officer of the Day, a 2nd Lieutenant who looked like he was not old enough to shave, said that maybe we would come under attack and that we should do something about it. We started discussing what we should do when the phone rang again. The guard sounded panicky so the LT told me to go find out what was going on and report back to him. He mentioned something about the possibility of shooting and how as Officer of the Day he should stay in the protection of the guard force headquarters.

I took off for the guard post and quickly reached the bottom of the tower. Looking across the river, I could not see anything and decided that I should climb up to the top to get a better view. I have never climbed a ladder so fast.

At the top, the very nervous guard, a PFC, pointed out the area where he had seen the movement. I could not see anything definite but there did seem to be something there. It appeared to be about 100 meters away and moving extremely slowly with long stops between movements. Whatever it was had made no aggressive moves and had not gotten any closer.

I phoned the LT and he said to stay there until we determined what it was. About fifteen minutes later, it finally moved to a place where we could see it clearly. A farmer, who was staying in the shadows so that he would not get shot, was feeding his water buffalo on the lush grass. At least this time I did not damage my camera.

A Terrorist Attack?

First Tour

I missed the truck to go back to my billets because I was finishing up some work. I knew that, if I walked out to the main road into town and stuck out my thumb, someone would stop and pick me up probably taking me right to my door.

I happened to have my camera with me so I was taking some photos of the area. Suddenly, through the lens, I saw a bicycle coming towards me. I put the camera down so that I could check out the rider. There were reports of people on motor scooters and bicycles staging small-scale attacks on GIs. The most common was to shoot at the GI with a pistol and then to escape on the bike. There were also reports of such people throwing hand grenades at Americans.

The man who was approaching me had something in his hand. It was about the size of one of the cylindrical type grenades I had seen in Basic Training. So, I watched him very closely as he got nearer and nearer. Just as he passed me, his hand came up and the grenade arched through the air, coming right at me. Without thinking, I leaped over the low concrete fence on my right. As I went over it, I was aware of my camera hitting the fence. Flattening myself on the ground, I waited for the explosion.

After about half a minute, nothing had happened so I got up and looked over the fence. There was nothing there, except an empty coke can, the hand grenade.

I was very glad that no one had seen this and I did not tell any of my coworkers about the incident. However, I did have some difficulty explaining why the filter mount on my camera had a big dent.

A New Building for the Center

A couple of weeks into my tour, the Combined Intelligence Center was moved to a new building. It was newly made from reinforced concrete and was air conditioned so it was a great place to work. They said that the roof was mortar-proof, but I suspected that it was not. We were no longer on Tan Son Nhut Airbase but quite near. To get to the new building, we first passed the entrance to the South Vietnamese military's golf club, for officers only.  The gate was in the traditional Vietnamese style but it had been covered with sandbags and contained at least two machinegun nests and a squad of armed men. I could see the sand traps around the green on the 7th hole from my defensive position outside one of the rear doors to our building.

After the gate, we turned off the main road and followed a dirt road along the side of a soccer field. I never saw anyone play soccer there. Once passed the end of the stands, we entered a small graveyard. Sometimes there were people there putting offerings on grave sites or interring the newly deceased. The dirt lane then continued through a small copse before reaching the parking lot of the Center. Graveyards and copses, even without the R, were not particularly comforting when you were in a combat zone.

The building was one-story and surprisingly large. There was a hallway that ran all the way around the inside of the building, separating it into an inside and an outside. My workplace was inside. There were two large rooms. The one on the right containing the American analysists and the other the Vietnamese. There were two small rooms. The one next to the American side was for the CO and administrators. The other was where I worked.

The outside rooms contained the Center's staff, a computer, rooms for the Vietnamese staff and an arms room where we could check out .45 cal pistols or M-1 rifles if we had to travel.

I now headed the editorial section and had a staff of one under my command. It was the first time since I had entered the Army that I was actually in command of anyone. However, the E-4 typist was in the Air Force which meant he was only partially under my control. We worked 12 hours a day but only during the day shift. About a third of the analysists work at night so that the Center was in operation 24/7.