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.