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.