Surprise!

First Tour

About a week after starting work, I arrived at the Center and found a number of armed soldiers moving around the area. As I turned a corner to enter the center, I saw an airplane a couple of hundred meters away. It was on fire, a complete wreck. A fire truck was there and its crew was working to extinguish the blaze.

I hurried into the Center to find out what happened and found that no one was working they were all standing around talking. It was change-of-shift time so everyone was there, standing around in little groups. I went over to my area and asked what was going on. Everyone started talking at once so it took me a while to get the story straight, but there had been an attack during the night.

A squad of VC had made their way into the airbase and had attacked in a number of places, using mostly two-man suicide teams. The plane had been blown up when I young man had run up to it and held a bomb against it until it exploded. Luckily the plane had not been armed or the shrapnel would have hit our Center. The Base Security Officer claimed that they had all been killed.

I noticed that there were some bullet holes in the wooden walls of our building and realized that I was very happy that I had not been there.