The 519th MI Battalion

First Tour
With my Boston bag in hand, I got off the bus and walked through the gate of the 519th MI Battalion's headquarters. I was a bit surprised that there was no guard on the gate. In fact, there was no one around at all, at least that I could see. However, I quickly located a small sign that led me to the Admin Section.  There were a couple of enlisted men at the front and a lieutenant at a desk in the back of the room.

I introduced myself to the sergeant and gave him my orders. He suggested that I go over to the mess hall and have something to eat or I would go without until the next morning. The food was what I expected, the reason they call the mess hall the mess hall.

When I returned, the sergeant said that I would be staying in the NCO billets, which a bit farther out into the boondocks.  He lived there, too, and would give me a ride as soon as he finished up his work, maybe in half an hour. He suggested that I wander around the compound and familiarize myself with it because, if nothing else, I would be pulling guard duty here, and as sergeant of the guard, I would have to know the layout of the compound in detail. He also said it would be a day or two before I would get a duty assignment.

The sergeant drove me to the NCO billets in a jeep. It was truly much farther out into the countryside. It took us more than 15 minutes of fast driving to get there. The sarge told me that driving slow was dangerous because a VC (Viet Cong) operative could drop a hand grenade into the vehicle as we passed.

We finally pulled into a parking space in front of a three-story building. It was of the typical construction that I had seen on our drive from the headquarters compound. The floor plan was rectangular and the two long side were solid concrete without windows. However, the two short sides had no exterior walls at all. This was to allow the breeze to blow through the length of the building. The internal walls were all about 2.5 meters high with an empty space at least that high between the tops of the walls and the ceiling.

I was given a room with a bed, a fan, and a cabinet. The sergeant suggested that I get settled and then meet everyone on the third-floor balcony. I put my stuff away, a project that only took a couple of minutes since I had so little with me.

When I reached the balcony, I was given a can of beer and then introduced to the five or six other NCOs present. We sat there chatting for awhile and then one said that I was very lucky because tonight was 'show night'. They would not tell me what the show was going to be, saying I would have to wait and see for myself.

A few cans of beer later, someone said that the show was starting and pointed to a young woman starting a fire under a 55-gallon drum that was behind the building across the street. The excitement level seemed to rise and someone opened a bottle of whiskey and passed it around. After a little while, the woman came out again. She stirred the water with a stick and then stuck her hand in the barrel, obviously testing the temperature. It must have been okay because she put out the fire. Then suddenly she stripped down and started to wash herself with hot water from the barrel. Once well scrubbed, she turned toward us, waved, and climbed into the barrel for a soak.  We all stayed on the balcony until she had climbed out, dried off with a towel, and waving to us again entered the building. I was told that the building across the street was a bar and restaurant and that she was the waitress. She took a bath like this every other night when it did not rain and all the NCOs who were off duty sat on the balcony drinking beer while enjoying the show. A couple of the NCOs said that they had approached her for a date, really meaning sex, but that she had turned them down. However, she did not mind being leered at by the guys.