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.